The Colonial Epoch in Africa by Gregory Maddox

Author:Gregory Maddox [Maddox, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815313892
Goodreads: 4595352
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1993-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

III

The people of Dodoma have a prosaic description of the end of the Mtunya. According to a story repeated throughout the area, and even in other areas struck by famine at the same time, the people planted their crops in December of 1919.90 Mzee Msaka remembered:

Many did not cultivate, but there came very heavy rains. Then, after the time for the new crops, the millet began to grow. Now the grass also grew, and when they returned, the millet was growing. Although they did not cultivate, all the cattle had died. They could not eat the grass because many had eaten the cattle as food. Many people had been going around searching for a living. When they returned home, they had fields stuffed with millet.91

The contrast of this legend with the story of the people and the flood, recounted earlier, is instructive. The story of the bridge and the flood indicates the results of the destruction of the social relationships that promoted survival in the arid region. It also clearly identifies who the destroyers were. For the people of Ugogo, this story has become a metaphor for their relationship both to the colonial state and the outside world in general. The story of the ‘miracle harvest ’ marks the return to a secure and normal life in Ugogo. The famine ended when people were able to return to their homes. They attempted to recreate the social relationships that made orderly society, and survival, possible in the harsh lands of Ugogo.

Reconstruction after the famine did not restore, in its entirety, society as it had been. Individuals such as the Mtemi of Mvumi, Mazengo, came out of the famine able to control more labour than previously. Such men were able to use this labour in the years after the war to greatly expand production of grain and groundnuts. In contrast, those households left without cattle after the famine became increasingly dependent upon working for their wealthier neighbours to earn the access to cattle needed in order to fulfil a variety of social obligations, including bridewealth, and to ensure survival during dry years. Hignell promoted these arrangements, as opposed to either migrant labour or increased market production for poorer families, arguing that any lost income to the colony from people working for their neighbours would be made up in reduced expenditures on famine relief. Although his policies were not always appreciated in Dar es Salaam, food shortages never approached the severity of the Mtunya between 1920 and 1941. However, a change of policy in the mid-1930s, after the departure of Hignell, stressing the direct exploitation of each household, produced a decade and a half of killing famines starting in 1941.92 This effectively completed the process of the structural impoverishment of most of the people in Ugogo begun during the Mtunya.93

The Mtunya was a man-made famine. It was caused by the theft of food, cattle, and men from local communities by Europeans and their agents. The Gogo of today recall with horror the results on their society of these pressures.

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