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| Title: | Rice and cotton, ritual and resistance: cash cropping in southern Tanganyika in the 1930s |
| Author: | Monson, Jamie |
| Book title: | Cotton, colonialism, and social history in sub-Saharan Africa / ed. by Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts. - Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann |
| Year: | 1995 |
| Pages: | 268-284 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Tanzania Great Britain |
| Subjects: | colonialism subsistence economy rice cotton |
| Abstract: | In 1932, in a small settlement area in the Kilombero valley of southcentral Tanganyika (Tanzania), a mechanized cotton ginnery was erected. The farmers in the region were less than enthusiastic about entering into cotton production. Despite administrative pressures, most farmers in the Kilombero valley were reluctant to commit their land and labour to a product that had a history in Tanganyika of unreliable yields and fluctuating returns. Farmers in Kiberege and surrounding areas had been successfully growing and marketing rice surpluses for years. Yet Kilombero farmers did not unilaterally reject cotton as a supplemental cash crop. The author argues that the Kilombero farmers continually made choices between cotton and rice on the basis of a multiplicity of interconnected social, cultural and ecological variables. Central to this argument is a reevaluation of the position of cotton and rice in the rural economies of colonial Tanganyika in the 1930s. Cotton growing in the Kilombero valley conflicted with a wide array of dry-season agricultural and ritual activities, which revolved around rice as a socially and culturally symbolic product. Rice was not simply a subsistence grain crop, but was the central thread in the social and cultural fabric of everyday life. Notes, ref. |