Raw youth, school-leaver and the emergence of structural unemployment in late-colonial urban Tanganyika

Journal of African History

Volumn 47, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 363-387

  Burton, Andrew ^a  

^a British Institute in Eastern Africa   (Kenya)

Author keywords

Labour; Tanzania; Urban; Youth

Indexed keywords

COLONIALISM; LABOR MARKET; LABOR POLICY; TWENTIETH CENTURY; UNEMPLOYMENT; URBAN DEVELOPMENT; URBAN ECONOMY;

AFRICA; EAST AFRICA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA; TANZANIA;

EID: 33845266741     PISSN: 00218537     EISSN: 14695138     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853706002052     Document Type: Article

References (193)

1. John Iliffe, The African Poor: A History (Cambridge, 1987), 241. It should be noted that, partly due to shifting definitions of the term 'unemployment', such statistics are often unreliable.
2. In Dar es Salaam unemployment has grown from around 11 per cent at independence to an estimated 46 per cent in 2000-1 (Note on unemployment in Tanganyika, Labour Department, 24 Feb. 1960, Tanzania National Archive (TNA)/460/1049; Economic Survey 2002, www.tanzania.go.tz).
3. The accuracy of these figures is, of course, open to question. The 1960 figure was probably a considerable underestimate (see below), while the latter figure probably fails to account for (at least some) informal sector activity. For a recent regional discussion of unemployment, see Afrobarometer, 'Africa's Unemployment Crisis', www.afrobarometer.org.
4. Gavin Kitching, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite-Bourgeoisie (New Haven, 1980), 379.
5. Frederick Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven, 1987)
6. Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996).
7. Iliffe, African Poor, 171.
8. Ibid. Iliffe (utilising Gutton) outlines two forms of poverty that have emerged in the history of sub-Saharan Africa: Structural, long-term poverty arising from individuals' 'personal or social circumstances'; and conjunctural, 'temporary poverty into which ordinarily self-sufficient people may be thrown by crisis'. Thanks to 'increases in wealth, diversified sources of income, more effective government, better transport, wider markets, and improved hygiene and medicine', the latter has declined substantially over the past century. Structural poverty, on the other hand, has persisted if not deepened.
9. For associated phenomena in Kenya and Uganda, see A. G. Dalgleish, Survey of Unemployment (Nairobi, 1960)
10. Caroline Hutton, Reluctant Farmers? (Nairobi, 1973).
11. Around 30 per cent of those entering Form I each year between 1951 and 1953 did not complete Form IV. Education Annual Reports (ARs); Andrew Coulson, Tanzania: A Political Economy (Oxford, 1982), 91.
12. Comments on Youth Employment Committee, 31 July 1959, TNA/460/SS2/75/01.
13. For Kenya, see Kitching, Economic Change, 375-7.
14. See Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dares Salaam (Oxford, 2005), 53-4, 65-9, 153-63, 197-8. The role of the informal sector in the provision of livelihoods was largely unacknowledged up to its christening by Keith Hart in a paper originally presented in 1971, and the term's subsequent adoption by an International Labour Organization (ILO) team to Kenya.
15. See Keith Hart, 'Informal income opportunities and urban unemployment in Ghana', Journal of Modern African Studies, 11 (1973), 61-89
16. ILO, Employment, Incomes and Equality (Geneva, 1972).
17. For fragmentary, though tantalising, comments on shifting gender patterns of employment in Mwanza, see Mwanza labour reports 1956-60 (TNA/ 460/12/10/11), which record the 'sphere of employment open to [women] ... widening steadily' (at the same time as employment of children is decreasing).
18. See, e.g., Burton, African Underclass, 56.
19. For colonial wahuni ('the undesirables'), see ibid.;
20. for 'jobless corners' in the 1970s, Abel G. M. Ishumi, The Urban Jobless in East Africa: A Study of the Unemployed in the Growing Urban Centres, with Special Reference to Dar es Salaam (Uppsala, 1984)
21. and for wamachinga in contemporary Dar es Salaam, Eileen Moyer, 'In the shadow of the Sheraton: Imagining localities in global spaces in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania', Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam (2003).
22. Andrew M. Ivaska, 'In the age of minis: Women, work and masculinity downtown', in James R. Brennan, Andrew Burton and Yusufu Lawi (eds.), Dar es Salaam in the Twentieth Century: The History of an Emerging East African Metropolis (in prep.).
23. In the 1967 census, in the six main towns of mainland Tanzania, 3,500 women over 15 (2-8 per cent) identified themselves as unemployed: United Republic of Tanzania, 1967 Population Census Vol. II: Statistics for Urban Areas (Dar es Salaam, 1970)
24. Juhani Koponen, People and Production in Late Precolonial Tanzania: History and Structures (Helsinki, 1988), 60, 292-5, 301-4.
25. In the case of the Nyamwezi, through whose country the slave and ivory routes passed, trading activity actually resulted in early engagement in waged labour. Nyamwezi porters' 'marching songs ridiculed those who preferred to stay at home "to be idle with the women"': Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth, NH, 1994), 59, quoting Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari. Nevertheless, on arrival at coastal destinations such as Bagamoyo or Pangani, they usually spent several months unoccupied waiting for an opportunity to join a caravan bound upcountry.
26. On Nyamwezi labour see Stephen J. Rockel, 'A nation of porters: The Nyamwezi and the labour market in nineteenth-century Tanzania', JAH 41, 2 (2000), 173-95.
27. For porterage and wage-labour in nineteenth-century sub-Saharan Africa, see John Iliffe, The Emergence of African Capitalism (London, 1983), 14-17.
28. John Iliffe notes a significant extension of migratory labour from around 1908, which continued under British rule: A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, 1979), 151-63, 305-11.
29. Thaddeus Sunseri likewise observes several hundred thousand labourers engaged on plantations, as porters, or in other capacities by 1910 - though, significantly, he emphasises a prevailing context of labour scarcity: Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH, 2002), esp. xxi.
30. Burton, African Underclass, 197-8.
31. Moreover, sporadic demand for labour in rural communities may well have influenced migrants' response to urban economies dominated by various forms of casual work.
32. R. and C. Sofer, 'Report on a possible sociological survey of Dar es Salaam', 2 April 1951 TNA/18950/Vol. III, 48. The same was true of colonial Mombasa.
33. See Justin Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford, 1993), 163
34. and especially Cooper, African Waterfront.
35. E.g. Dar es Salaam District Annual Report (Dsm DAR) 1922, 8; 1928, 17, TNA/54; Frederick Kaijage, 'Alternative history and discourses from below: Social history in urban Tanga', University of Dar es Salaam, Department of History seminar paper, 30 Nov. 2000.
36. E.g. Dsm DAR 1921. It was paralleled in other African territories, see Iliffe, African Poor, 170.
37. Dsm DAR 1931, 2.
38. 1932 Eastern Province Annual Report (EPAR), 9.
39. Tanga DAR 1931, 4. For depression-related unemployment elsewhere in Africa, see Iliffe, African Poor, 15 5-6.
40. Burton, African Underclass, 68.
41. Tanga Province Annual Report (PAR) 1939, 94
42. 'Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into the disturbances which occurred in the port of Tanga, August 1939', para. 13, Public Records Office (PRO)/CO/691/179/42191/13.
43. A. H. Pike, 'Report on native affairs in Dsm', 5 June 1939, TNA/18950/ Vol.II; notes on McLeery Report by n.n., c. 1940, TNA/26177.
44. Burton, African Underclass, 214-18.
45. John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge, 1995), 238-42. While declining death rates were probably the dominant factor behind population growth, Iliffe observes that the phenomenon had diverse causes.
46. For accelerating urbanisation in Eastern Africa from 1940, see Andrew Burton, 'Urbanisation in Eastern Africa: An historical overview, c. 1750-2000', Introduction to Burton (ed.), The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa, c. 1750-2000 (Nairobi, 2002), 1-28.
47. C. J. Martin, 'Estimates of population growth in East Africa, with special reference to Tanganyika and Zanzibar', in K. M. Barbour and R. M. Prothero, Essays on African Population (London, 1961), 49-61.
48. In the late-precolonial and early-colonial periods the population is thought to have declineA: Juhani Koponen, 'Population: a dependent variable', in Gregory Maddox, James Giblin and Isaria N. Kimambo (eds.), Custodians of the Land: Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania (London, 1996) 19-37.
49. Ibid. 36.
50. Burton, African Underclass, 84, 194.
51. Even before the Second World War, Iliffe observes, 'the need for cash - for tax, bridewealth, school fees, imported goods - was the essential stimulus to migration.' John Iliffe, 'Wage labour and urbanisation', in M. H. Y. Kaniki (ed.), Tanzania Under Colonial Rule (London, 1979), 284.
52. D. A. Low and Alison Smith (eds.), History of East Africa, Vol III (London, 1976), appendix III, table 14.
53. Expansion of cash-crops may have provided additional rural sources of income; however, prices were volatile and large parts of Tanganyika were unsuitable for cash-crop production. Moreover, land shortage arose in some areas where commercial agriculture flourished: Iliffe, Modern History, 347-8.
54. A 1950s shift in policy that aimed to nurture a class of prosperous 'Yeoman' farmers came too late to have any fundamental influence on the rural economy. Suzanne Mueller, 'The historical origins of Tanzania's ruling class', Canadian Journal of African Studies, 15, 3 (1981), 475, 481.
55. See ibid. 84-6, 194-6.
56. J. F. R. Hill and J. P. Moffett, Tanganyika (Dar es Salaam, 1955), 283.
57. Burton, African Underclass, 67-8, 91-5, 219-20.
58. Andrew Burton, 'Urchins, loafers and the cult of the cowboy: urbanisation and delinquency in Dar es Salaam, 1919-61', JAH 42 (2001), 199-216.
59. Coulson, Tanzania, 88.
60. As outlined in United Kingdom, Education Policy in British Tropical Africa (London, 1925).
61. Lene Buchert, Education in the Development of Tanzania, 1919-1990 (London, 1994), 20. The quote is from a 1925 Colonial Office education report.
62. Coulson, Tanzania, 86.
63. Iliffe, Modern History, 339.
64. Kwetu, 18 Sept. 1942, 3.
65. Note on the Education and Training of Africans, 8 Sept. 1945, TNA/450/ 404.
66. For example, N. Langford-Smith complained in 1946 that the 'present educational system ... is producing a class of "black-coated workers"' upon which "'[n]o sound national economy has ever been based .... Black-coated workers don't produce wealth, they exhaust it"': 'The education of African rural communities', Tanganyika Notes and Records, 22 (1946), 3-4, quoting the Governor of Uganda.
67. See also Burton, 'Urchins', 204-5.
68. See Buchert, Education, ch. 4.
69. Tanganyika Report to the United Nations,
70. quoted in ibid. 58.
71. Ibid.
72. Frederick Cooper notes more broadly of British imperial policy that, through its adoption of 'human capital theory', it 'turned attention to the productionist side of the development-welfare nexus': 'Modernizing bureaucrats, backward Africans, and the development concept', in Cooper and Randall Packard (eds.), International Development and the Social Sciences (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1997), 68.
73. Ibid. 22, 24-5, 62, 64-5.
74. Iliffe, Modern History, 444-5.
75. One demand of a 1952 TANU delegation to the UN was the abolition of a new agricultural syllabus introduced in 1952: David Morrison, Education and Politics in Africa: The Tanzanian Case (London, 1976), 84-5.
76. According to Tom Cadogan, the association of schooling with urban centres was actually exacerbated by the introduction of compulsory primary education in towns from 1947: 'Students and schools in the Southern Highlands: Education in Tanzania, 1890s to the present', Ph.D. thesis, University of London (forthcoming), 164-6.
77. In 1961 secondary schools received just 7.18 per cent of the departmental budget: Tanganyika, Annual Report of Ministry of Education 1961, (Dar es Salaam, 1962), Statistics, vii. Thanks to Tom Cadogan for providing this figure.
78. See Cooper, Decolonization.
79. See Nicholas Westcott, 'The impact of WWII on Tanganyika', Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University (1982).
80. See John Iliffe, 'A history of dockworkers of Dar es Salaam', Tanzania Notes and Records, 71 (1970), 119-48
81. James R. Brennan, 'Nation, race and urbanization in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 1916-1976', Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University (2002), ch. 3
82. Burton, African Underclass, ch. 4.
83. By 1948, there were five unions registered in Dar es Salaam: Brennan, 'Nation', 202.
84. Iliffe, 'Dockworkers', 134.
85. Labour Office AR, Dar es Salaam, 1953, 2, TNA/61/503/111.
86. Burton, African Underclass, chs. 4 and 11.
87. See ibid. 226-35
88. and for British/French Africa, Cooper, Decolonization.
89. copy of the Report of the Manpower Committee is in PRO/CO/859/403.
90. Tanganyika Standard (TS), 6 Sept. 1952, 4.
91. Reported in TS, 12 June 1954, 12.
92. I. G. Shivji, Law, State and the Working Class in Tanzania (London, 1986), 182.
93. William H. Friedland, Vuta Kamba. The Development of Trade Unions in Tanganyika (Stanford, CA, 1969), 21.
94. Coulson, Tanzania, 107.
95. Moreover, strikers, more often than not, made gains as a result of their action. For the outcome of strikes by wharf labourers, quarry workers and municipality employees see Sunday News (SN), 16 Oct. 1955, 1
96. Secret despatch by Labour Commissioner, 24 January 1957 (LC Despatch), PRO/CO/822/1625.
97. EPAR, 42.
98. Supportive action organised by the Domestic and Hotel Workers' Union resulted in approximately 40 per cent of urban domestics, amounting to some 2,400 individuals, and 450 hotel employees striking in December 1956. Sympathy strikes, resulting from what the TFL regarded as unfair Labour Department intervention, called by the Commercial and Industrial Workers' Union and the Eastern Province Building and Construction Workers Union were 'well supported', resulting in a peak of around 10,000 workers out of an approximate urban workforce of 37,000 joining the strike. Further action was threatened by the Transport and Allied Workers' Union and the Dockworkers and Stevedores Union.
99. EPAR.
100. LC Despatch; Friedland, Vuta Kamba, 22
101. Governor Twining to Colonial Office, 11 Dec. 1956, PRO/CO/822/1129
102. Coulson, Tanzania, 116.
103. An earlier minimum wage had been set, for Government workers only, from 1940. Its value was rapidly eroded by inflation. See Burton, African Underclass, 92-3.
104. Labour activism stretching back to 1939 undoubtedly played a part in its introduction. However, a Minimum Wages Board had been appointed by Government the previous May to set a suitable rate, and it seems TFL intervention may, at most, have expedited its introduction and/or led to the adoption of a higher rate: Tanganyika Intelligence Summary, January 1957, PRO/CO/822/1625.
105. They did recognise a growing problem of joblessness - see below - but, unsurprisingly perhaps, apparently failed to connect it to rising wages.
106. Nevertheless, many employers ignored the order.
107. In some cases staff were now shared - employers of night watchmen, for example, banded together to employ a single guard instead of appointing one for each premises: 1957 AR of Senior Labour Officer (SLO), Dsm, TNA/ 460/1051; Mins., Labour Department Conference, Dodoma, 5-7 June 1957, 4, PRO/CO/822/1625.
108. Down from 36,000 in 1952: Burton, African Underclass, 216.
109. AR of SLO, TNA/460/1049; 1959 EPAR, 49.
110. '[O]ne of the most valuable results of the minimum wage', observed John A. K. Leslie shortly after its introduction, 'was that it drove a number of unnecessary men out of employment - a harsh human fact but economically speaking a tonic to both worker and employer, forcing the latter to prune staffs, consider schedules, tighten up supervision and begin to make a real effort to get value for money; where this happened the moral effect on remaining workers of having enough to do was equally advantageous': Leslie, Survey of Dar es Salaam (Oxford, 1963), 134.
111. For unionists' complaints, see extract from LO's report, January 1957, TNA/460/1049.
112. TS, 9 July 1957.
113. When asked to assess the unemployment rate, Leslie, who had recently completed fieldwork for his social survey, estimated it at 16 per cent, which worked out at around 5,000: SLO to Labour Commissioner (LC), 30 May 1957, TNA/460/1049.
114. E.g. 1958 Labour AR, para. 32; LC., K. L. Sanders, to Permanent Secretary, Minister of Education and Labour (PS, MEL), 18 Nov. 1959; 'Note on unemployment in Tanganyika', Labour Department HQs, 24 Feb. 1960, TNA/460/1049. Labour Department underestimates were no doubt influenced by the conviction that a large proportion of urban workers were voluntarily under-employed, preferring to work only intermittently (e.g., Sanders to Humanities, Dar es Salaam, 21 Aug. 1958, TNA/460/ 1049). In a 1961 minute, one official estimated the unemployed at about 4,500 and the underemployed at 8,000-12,000.
115. AR, SLO, Dsm, 31 Dec. 1958, TNA/460/1049.
116. Min. by? to EL(1), 24 Nov. 1959, TNA/460/SS2/75/01. Officials viewed the situation as not so much an urban problem as a rural one - those without work were increasingly deemed as having no legal place in the town. In both 1957 and 1958 over 2,000 'undesirables' were removed to 'their 'villages'. Unemployment was a key trait of those repatriated. See Burton, African Underclass, esp. ch. 12.
117. Min. by EL(1) to PS (Labour), 23 Nov. 1959, TNA/460/SS2/75/01.
118. In 1959 this included a Bata shoe factory, three knitwear factories, and razor blade, cigarette and cement-bagging factories.
119. Mins. of Second Meeting of the Dar es Salaam Youth Employment Committee (YEC), 31 July 1959, TNA/460/1049; Sanders to MEL, 14 July 1959, TNA/460/ SS2/75/01; SLO Report, December 1959, TNA/460/1051.
120. SN, 15 April 1958.
121. Ibid.
122. One advertisement for 16 drivers holding 'C class licenses' (a rare qualification) offering three days' employment 'produced 70 suitable applicants in a matter of hours'.
123. Work was in fact unavailable, as all labour requirements were met prior to commencement through the Employment Exchange.
124. SLO Report, Dar es Salaam, Dec. 1959, April 1960; Oct. 1960, TNA/460/ 1051.
125. Departmental Conference Mins., 5-7 June 1957, TNA/460/1049.
126. LO Monthly Report, Tabora, January 1957; 1957 AR, LO Tanga. See also reports from LOs in Lindi, Iringa, Mbeya and Korogwe: TNA/460/1051.
127. Extract from Monthly Report, January 1957, TNA/460/1051.
128. Comments on second YEC, 31 July 1959, TNA/460/SS2/75/01. Twenty years on, a survey of unemployed youth numbered those with a secondary education also at 10 percent: A. G. M. Ishumi, The Urban Jobless in Eastern Africa (Uppsala, 1984), 48.
129. The following account is based on SLO's Annual Reports for 1956-60, TNA/ 460/12/10/11.
130. Excluding the territorial Postal and Railway strikes, 31,130 man-days were lost in the course of 25 notified strikes (though there were considerably more strikes for which figures were not obtained), compared with 18,008 man-days in 1959: 1960 Lake Province AR.
131. reported 'drive to increase output per man and to make increased wages above a certain level dependent upon skill or output rather than upon length of service as has been the case in the past' was 'not welcomed either by the Unions or the workers'.
132. Labour turnover at Williamsons Ltd., a diamond mining company operating in Lake Province, dropped from around 200 per month in 1958 to 30 per month in 1960, at which point they had 'a waiting list of over 200 men seeking to bring their families to the mine rather than leave them at home to till the land'.
133. The following is based on monthly reports by the SLO, Tanga, TNA/460/9/2.
134. Workers - from western and southern Tanganyika in particular - had been recruited in place of local labour, which was notoriously reluctant to work on the plantations; preferring to market-garden, or work in Tanga town.
135. Lack of work in the town may have deterred individuals from the sisal-growing areas from entering Tanga. Even urban labour showed signs of a change of heart towards plantation work, the May 1961 report on the urban Employment Exchange recording' 72 unskilled placed to a sisal estate, which is quite unusual' - though the estate had requested more than this, and many workseekers continued to prefer to take their chances in town.
136. The sisal agreement stipulated cutters' 'tasks' be raised to ninety bundles of thirty leaves. Unhappy workers evaded the new requirements by producing ninety bundles containing fewer than thirty leaves. In response, the Growers Association commissioned a survey to explore further mechanisation in the industry.
137. In Eastern Province, where the other main plantations were located, similar patterns were observed in the wake of the sisal agreement: 'normal labour wastage without corresponding recruitment' with turnover reducing and signs that 'the new terms have laid the foundation of a more stable labour force in the industry': 1960 EPAR, VIII, 3. Copy in TNA research room.
138. The day after the survey ended another large crowd arrived and was turned away, leading the DC to conclude that it was 'possible that several thousand more may be unemployed'. Tanga SLO's monthly reports for Feb., April and June 1961, TNA/460/9/2
139. extracts from LO's reports, Moshi, Feb. 1961
140. and Mwanza, Dec. and Jan. 1960, TNA/460/1051
141. TS, 13 Feb. 1961.
142. E.g. Colonial Secretary (CS) to W. A. C. Mathieson, Colonial Office (CO), 11 Nov. 1957, PRO/CO/822/1795.
143. Overstretched urban services, (Africans') economic irrationality and/or rising crime rates were instead raised to justify the raids.
144. Officials did occasionally express concern over the social welfare of urban populations, nevertheless it was the social order of urban Africans that was uppermost.
145. See, e.g., Provincers' responses to the proposal to extend the application of 'Removal of Undesirables' legislation to towns throughout Tanganyika (10 Sept. 1952) in TNA/21616/Vol. III
146. See Burton, African Underclass.
147. Draft memo for ExecCo by CS, 25 April 1955, TNA/460/SS2/7/011.
148. CS to W. A. C. Mathieson, 11 Nov. 1957, PRO/CO/822/1795.
149. Mins. Second YEC.
150. Letters to TS, 16 July 1957 and 19 Aug. 1958. Mnkangaa's letter, in which mass unemployment was described as 'not an epidemic of one town only ... [but] for the whole of the territory', produced a flurry of activity in the Labour Department in order to assess the existence or non-existence of 'mass' unemployment.
151. Resolutions of General Council, Tanga, 4-6 July 1957, TNA/460/1049
152. see also TAGWU General Secretary Kajunjumele's 'Comments on Second YEC', 31 July 1959, TNA/460/SS2/75/01.
153. Extract from CoM mins., 3 Nov. 1960, TNA/460/HL2/29/031.
154. The Working Party was a peculiar product of the interstitial twilight of colonial Tanganyika, comprised solely of British officials (including Leslie and Sanders) now reacting to a political agenda largely set by their new African masters.
155. Notes for Working Party on Unemployment, 25 Nov. 1960, TNA/460/1051/11. Groups throughout the country, mobilised by the TANU Youth League, often responded positively to this propaganda. From late 1960, over 500 'spontaneous farming schemes' were initiated by young men moving from urban centres. Few survived beyond a year, however. One of those to do so developed into the Ruvuma Development Association: Leander Schneider, 'Developmentalism and its failings: Why rural development went wrong in 1960s and 1970s Tanzania', Ph.D., Columbia University (2003), 141
156. Referred to in Sanders to PS, MHL, 23 Nov. 1960, TNA/460/1049.
157. Immigrant labourers purportedly accepted lower wages and poorer conditions and were described as 'a menace to the economic development of this country'. Official hostility to the presence of non-Tanzanians at a time of high unemployment has persisted to the present, as evidenced by periodic purges of foreign workers (notably Malawians) from Dar es Salaam.
158. Resolutions of General Council, Tanga, 4-6 July 1957, TNA/460/1049. With the onset of 'responsible' government, TFL demands remained largely unchanged, e.g., 'Proposals for reducing unemployment', J. D. Namfua, Secretary, TFL, to Chief Minister, 30 Nov. 1960, TNA/460/1051/11.
159. Mwafrika, 3 and 17 Sept. 1960. References to newspapers here and below are extracted from translations in Summary of the Vernacular Press, TNA/ 460/931/4.
160. For a discussion of metaphors of vampirism and economic exploitation in Tanganyika/Tanzania, see James Brennan, 'Blood Enemies: Exploitation and Urban Citizenship in the Nationalist Political Thought of Tanzania, 1958-1975', JAH 47, 3 (2006), 389-413.
161. Smith and Somji refer to the European and Indian communities: Ngurumo, 30 Sept. and 1 Nov. 1960.
162. Mwafrika, 29 Oct. 1960
163. Ngurumo, 27 Oct. 1960. Uhuru na hazi had been adopted in 1959 partly at the urging of the British, to check what colonial officials - and increasingly their TANU successors - viewed as a widespread perception of independence as representing a free-for-all in which colonial taxes and laws were abandoned and colonial wealth was redistributed among the long-suffering African population.
164. Sanders to Leslie, 23 Nov. 1960; Leslie to Secretary, Federation of Tanganyika Employers, 5 Dec. 1960, TNA/460/1051/11.
165. These included the utilisation of more manual labour on existing road-building schemes and on soil tests for the site of the proposed university: Working Party on Unemployment Mins., Second meeting, 25 Nov. 1960, TNA/460/1051/11.
166. It was sited in the vicinity of a cooperative settlement established by TANU in 1959. The Kilombero valley lies southwest of Morogoro, several hundred miles from Dar es Salaam. Unless otherwise indicated, information in this paragraph is from' Alleviation of urban unemployment: Contribution by the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperative Development', Nov. 1959, TNA/460/HL2/29/031.
167. Leslie recalled this as an attempt 'to harness political enthusiasm by shipping lorryloads [sic] off to open up the pori [bush], singing party songs': Personal communication, 4 Oct. 2000; LO Makukita, Kilosa, to LC, 3 Feb. 1961, TNA/460/HL2/29/031.
168. It was estimated that initial work by the 500 recruits from Dar es Salaam would only clear land for fifty pioneer settlers, while considerable further expenditure might provide space for a further thirty to sixty over the following year.
169. Working Party on Unemployment, mins. of Second meeting, 25 Nov. 1960, TNA/460/1051/11.
170. When S. R. M. Makukita, Labour Officer for Kilosa, visited Sonjo in late January 1961, workers bemoaned the poor rations received, lack of amenities and recreational facilities, alongside the fact they hadn't acquired cleared land for their personal use as anticipated. Others complained they were treated like convicts: Makukita to LC, 3 Feb. 1961, TNA/460/HL2/29/031.
171. Despite spiralling joblessness such outbreaks have remained infrequent in post-colonial Dar es Salaam, the rioting and looting that occurred in the wake of the army mutiny in 1964 representing a rare counterexample.
172. survey of urban 'self-employed' in 1971 found 55 per cent had never had waged employment; and a slender majority were earning more than the minimum wage. Of those surveyed, 43 per cent had arrived in town before 1961, and a further 19 per cent before 1968: Martin Bienefeld, 'The self-employed of urban Tanzania', ERB Paper, University of Dar es Salaam.
173. See Burton, African Underclass, 65-7, 158-63.
174. Shivji, Law, State & Working Class, 204.
175. Its recommendations were not implemented until 1963. See the Report of the Territorial Minimum Wage Board, Dar es Salaam (1962).
176. Monthly Report by SLO, Tanga, Feb. 1960, TNA/460/9/2.
177. Mwafrika, 7 Nov. 1960.
178. 417,000 man-days were lost in 1963 alone. Time lost was also high by international standards: In 1960 total man-hours lost stood at 1.29 per cent compared to a British figure of 0.2 per cent: Mueller, 'Historical origins', 487
179. Colin Leys, ' Tanganyika: The realities of independence', in Lionel Cliffe and John S. Saul, Socialism in Tanzania, Vol. I, Dar es Salaam (1972), 195 (fn.).
180. TS, 25 June 1962.
181. Quoted in Shivji, Law, State & Working Class, 227.
182. Bienefeld observes 'it was the increasing incompatibility of calculations based on private interest [including that of capital and workers], and the Government's notion of what was needed to serve the public interest, which led to the policy shift embodied in the Arusha Declaration': 'Trade unions and perTpheral capitalism: the case of Tanzania' (copy in University of Dar es Salaam library), 25.
183. For the unions and their relations with the state, see also Friedland, Vuta Kamba;
184. Coulson, Tanzania;
185. Dudley Jackson, 'The disappearance of strikes in Tanzania: Incomes, policy and industrial democracy', Journal of Modern African Studies, 17, 2 (1979), 219-52.
186. There are interesting parallels with other parts of Africa. In Francophone West Africa, for example, Cooper notes that unions before independence had articulated 'an ideology that subordinated "class struggle" to "national liberation"', thereby denying 'the labour movement an autonomous space from which to question labor leaders/labor ministers'. 'Out of power', observes Cooper, 'this was a call for anti-colonial solidarity; in power, it was a rationale for repression': Cooper, Decolonization, 416.
187. See Andrew Burton, 'The Haven of Peace purged: Tackling the "undesirable" and "unproductive" poor in late-colonial and postcolonial Dar es Salaam' (forthcoming).
188. Hill and Moffett, Tanganyika, 270.
189. This phrase is taken from a criminological literature that identifies the heightened expectations of ordinary citizens (for televisions or video recorders as everyday items, for example) as one cause of crime.
190. Colonial employment trends persisted into the post-independence period. Between 1960 and 1965, while wages increased by 80 per cent (65 per cent in real terms), employment decreased on average by 3 per cent annually: ILO report on 'Wages, incomes and prices policy', Govt Paper no. 3, 1967, 4
191. A. Van de Laar, 'Growth and income distribution in Tanzania since independence', in Cliffe and Saul, Socialism, 107.
192. For similar phenomena elsewhere in Africa, see Cooper, Decolonization, 458-9.
193. Strikingly, the Labour Force Survey of Tanzania, 1965 (Dar es Salaam, 1966) found that Tanzania's urban unemployed population had on average more education than those in employment.