'This is an Unforgettable Business': Colonial State Intervention in Urban Tanzania

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Book chapter

Title:	'This is an Unforgettable Business': Colonial State Intervention in Urban Tanzania
Author:	Mbilinyi, Marjorie J.
Book title:	Women and the State in Africa
Year:	1989
Pages:	111-129
Language:	English
Geographic terms:	Tanzania United Kingdom
Subjects:	colonialism labour law women Historical/Biographical Labor and Employment economics Politics and Government Sex Roles
Abstract:	An analysis of British colonial discourse in Tanzania (1919-1961) reveals a particular imagery of 'city' and 'countryside' developed in the context of State struggles to control women and to block their movement off the farm into towns and other centres of wage employment. Two phases are discernible in this colonial discourse. In the early labour-short phase of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the State adopted repressive means to extract labour from the peasant economy through a migrant labour system. In the second phase, capital and the State aimed to stabilize the labour force in the context of a major capitalization drive during the second half of the 1950s. During both phases, struggles emerged over State efforts to restrict people's movements to town and to regulate and even ban off-the-book activities, sometimes even accumulation-oriented economic activities. An example is the struggle over beer brewing in Dar es Salaam in the 1930s, which led to a confrontation between women beer brewers and the colonial government. Notes, ref.