Tanzania is one of the few African countries to have gone through a socialist period, and thus the impact of recent globalisation and neo-liberal policies raises particularly interesting issues as well as providing material for important ideological debates. The country today is often praised by economists and multilateral agencies as a model African state. It has increased its per capita GNP and GDP, liberalised its economy, become a multiparty democracy in which presidents have served their terms and left office peacefully, welcomed foreign investment, and sought to tackle poverty through aid programmes. Such a representation of Tanzania and its recent history is also not uncommonly voiced by government officials in the country and even by some academics, both local and foreign, and is often contrasted with the earlier socialist period under Julius Nyerere. Such a version of recent history goes something like this: Tanzania went through a socialist period which did not work, and neo-liberal economic policies are now the only way forward. This view of the socialist past does not seek to understand why some things failed, while others succeeded,1 but is often followed by the frequently reiterated view that in recent years, as a result of the aforesaid liberalisation policies, Tanzania's re-structured economy has grown well and poverty has been reduced.2
For example, a recent communication to the ‘Tanzlist’ mail-based discussion group (affiliated to the US African Studies Association), was headed ‘Tanzania's current self-presentation’ and its author, Joel Samoff, quotes a special advertising supplement in the New York Times magazine:
Since its nearly two-decade-long social experiment ended with the resignation of the country's first independent government in 1985 … [progress has been made] …with one official reporting that there were people in his village who had tasted sugar for the first time since independence. Although reversing the tide of nearly two decades takes time.
The architect of Tanzania's socialist policies of the 1960s and 1970s, President Julius Nyerere, responded robustly to such views when, in 1998, he had the following conversation with the head of the World Bank and his staff in Washington.
‘Why have you (Tanzanians) made such a mess of things?’ he was asked by the Bank's experts who were alluding to the economic situation in Tanzania. Nyerere replied: ‘The British Empire left us a country with 85% illiteracy, two engineers and twelve doctors. When I left government, we had 9% illiteracy, and thousands of engineers and doctors. I left government 13 years ago. At that time our per capita income was double what it is today. [Now] We have a third of children who lack schooling, while health and public services are in ruins. During those 13 years, Tanzania did everything that World Bank and the IMF demanded of it.’ And Nyerere returned the question to the experts: ‘Why have you made such a mess of things? 3
As in many other parts of the world, the discourse of rights has become increasingly significant in Tanzania. It has largely replaced a socialist imaginary centred on terms such as ‘interest’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘redistribution’, all of which were highly developed in Tanzania in the 1960s and 1970s, notably in the writings of Julius Nyerere (e.g. 1966, 1968). Today, rather, we have an official discourse of ‘empowerment’, ‘development’, and ‘lifting people out of poverty’.
While people in poor rural areas have long utilised terms like ‘rights’ and ‘justice’ (synonymous in the Swahili term haki) and ‘development’ (maendeleo), in many other respects, their discourse is very different from the official one and it is the concern of this paper to examine how ordinary people in a rural and marginal area of Tanzania perceive the changes which have taken place, and their reasons for so doing. The view from Mafia Island in southern Tanzania, where I have been carrying out anthropological research since the 1960s,5 is that in the last decade or so, life has become increasingly difficult (maisha magumu is an oft-repeated phrase – see also Walley, 2004b). Another phrase heard frequently in discussions about recent changes is wengine wanapata, wengine hawapati (some get, others don't), suggesting that there are those who profit from the current situation, while others do not.
At the village level on Mafia, people make comparisons between themselves and selected others. They utilise a wide range of discourses, ranging from socialist to neo-liberal. But they also invoke notions of entitlement, implicitly or explicitly, to make judgements on both the past and the present, and as a way of articulating ideas about social justice and social differentiation – equality and inequality. They claim their status as citizens to criticise the government policies which many believe are responsible for their present plight. Some of these ways of talking may even be viewed as a form of resistance to a dominant discourse, such as the one currently articulated by the government in Tanzania.
This article, then, provides a largely historical and ethnographic account of developments in one area of Tanzania over the forty years I have worked there. It is a case study of how people make sense of the transition from an avowedly socialist society to one which is neo-liberal. Inevitably, how they view this depends on who they are and in this paper it is shown that there is a wide gap between the views of people at the bottom of the socio-economic heap – in this case villagers on Mafia Island Tanzania6 who by and large ‘do not get’– and other people such as government officials who talk about the lives of the former or make policies for them.7 Nonetheless, all of these people utilise memories of the past as a resource with which to compare the present – but which past and whose past? History is, needless to say, constantly re-written.
In the second section of the paper, there is a brief discussion of the socialist and postsocialist periods in Tanzania as a whole, while the third section focuses on what has happened on Mafia Island over the past 40 years. Section Four considers the uneven impact of various developments upon different categories of people, considering in particular older and younger people, and women and men. Section Five analyses local discourses about recent changes, and especially the way in which villagers on Mafia make use of comparisons to understand their own situation and to state the possibility that things could be different.
Socialism & Post-socialism in Tanzania
There were indeed important achievements in Tanzania during the socialist period, notably in education and health: 99 per cent of primary school age children were in school under UPE (Universal Primary Education) and there was a successful adult literacy campaign. There was also an increase in health facilities, especially in primary care such as the MCH (Mother and Child Health) clinics and in vaccination programmes, with a consequent decrease in infant mortality. Clinics and schools were built in many villages, and education and healthcare were free to users. Salary differentials in the public sector moved from a high of 1::71 immediately after independence to as low as 1::9 after the Arusha Declaration.
Nonetheless, many people at the time, including myself, were critical of the ways in which some of the government's policies were implemented (see for example Cliffe, 1969; Coulson, 1979, 1982; Hyden, 1980; Resnick, 1981; Rweyemamu, 1973; Shivji, 1973, 1975, 1982; Hyden, 1980; Resnick, 1981; Rweyemamu, 1973; Shivji, 1973, 1976, 1982; Hyden, 1980; Resnick, 1981; Rweyemamu, 1973; Shivji, 1973, 1975, 1982; Hyden, 1980; Resnick, 1981; Rweyemamu, 1973; Shivji, 1973, 1986; Tandon, 1973; Von Freyhold, 1977; Caplan, 1992). The growth of the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’ and the wabenzi (those who drive around in Mercedes-Benz cars), the neglect of the peasantry (no wonder they were resistant or, as Goran Hyden put it in 1980, ‘uncaptured’) and the imposition of forced villagisation were widely decried both in Tanzania and more widely as sitting ill with the rhetoric of ‘African socialism’ and undermining both the government's legitimacy and productive forces. Some have argued that in any case, Tanzania was only socialist in any sense for a short period before it moved to place an emphasis on ‘progressive farmers’ (Von Freyhold, 1979), others that it was never very socialist anyway, given that foreign investment was encouraged, World Bank advice followed, and the American consultants McKinsey brought in for advice (Resnick, 1981). In the 1970s and 1980s, Tanzania came to rely increasingly on foreign (particularly Scandinavian) donor aid, much of which was inappropriate: too capital-intensive and dependent on imports, too expensive. Yeager called Tanzanian socialism an ‘impossible dream’ (1989:99).
Yet when we discuss equality and inequality, we need to be aware of their manifestations in many ways, contexts and persons. Thus, for example, the Tanzanian ideology around ujamaa had little to say about equality in gender relations. Furthermore, in its romanticised view of a traditional African past, ujamaa failed to take account of important and long-standing forms of hierarchy, such as that based on ethnicity on the coast and islands, which still remains salient. As will be seen, the effects of post-socialism have been similarly contradictory.
For if the socialist era was deemed to have had its shortcomings, the post-socialist period in Tanzania, which took off in the mid-1980s, has certainly not strengthened social justice (see Chachage & Mbilinyi, 2003). Accommodation with the IMF meant massive increases in food prices, and user charges for health care and school fees,8 indeed, the state has largely withdrawn from large areas of social services, especially health, which is now stitched together by a plethora of donor agencies. Economic liberalisation and structural adjustment policies have led to privatisation on a grand scale (‘selling the country’ as it is often termed). In parallel with this there has been the collapse of markets for important cash crops, starting with sisal, then coffee and coconuts. Income differentials have sky-rocketed and there appears to have been a huge increase in corruption.
Further, the switch to a multiparty politics has been purely nominal (see Kelsall, 2003). Although there is supposed to be separation between party and government, in effect, certainly at the village level, they are more or less one and the same. Furthermore, top-down policies remain, even though the official rhetoric is that they are now supposed to go from the bottom upwards. There is still a wide gap between political theory and practice, and in the extent to which people can actually obtain their legal rights. Interestingly, even though everything is supposed to have changed, there remains a great continuity of rhetoric about ‘self-help’ as the answer to problems.
Mafia Island 1965-2004
The 1960s: Independence & Optimism
Tanzania in 1965 was newly independent, and had achieved this status without the conflict and bloodshed which marked other nationalist struggles. Yet there was little unanimity about the way forward.9 Nonetheless, it was undoubtedly the era of TANU (Tanganyika African National Union), which on the whole commanded great political legitimacy – TANU TANU yajenga nchi (TANU builds the country) was a song heard on every conceivable occasion.
This was a period of considerable optimism and excitement over independence, when people expected that life would improve: children would be educated and health facilities would be extended. Kujitegemea (self-reliance) and kujitolea (doing things for oneself) were the methods by which development was to be achieved and people were urged to participate in communal labour to build classrooms, clinics and houses for medics and teachers.
On Mafia Island, as had been the case since German times, coconut trees were the main form of wealth, although a few men owned other forms of capital such as fishing boats. Here, as elsewhere, it was also the era of state-run cooperatives, and on the island people turned their main cash crop – coconuts – into copra which was sold through the state-run coops, rather than, as previously, to Indian traders. Mafia was then a part cash, part subsistence economy. In the north of the island, people grew enough food to feed themselves for about half of the year, while using their cash crops to purchase food for the remainder. In the south, where there was less cultivable land and more coconut trees, people were more dependent on the sale of crops to buy food.
There were, of course, some ‘rich people’ (matajiri), and at that time on Mafia they were mainly Indian traders in the district capital, Kilindoni, a handful of European and Indian plantation owners, as well as a few Arab shopkeepers in the villages. The socio-economic hierarchy of the colonial period, particularly salient on the coast, was still relevant: Europeans (Wazungu) at the top, followed by Indians (Wahindi), then Arabs (Waarabu), freeborn Africans (waungwana), and lastly descendants of slaves (watumwa) – but this hierarchy was not uncontested as had already become clear in the bloody Revolution and its aftermath in Zanzibar in 1964.10
The 1970s: Villagisation & Bitterness
By the middle of 1976, the whole country had just gone through the upheaval of villagisation11 and, at village meetings, people berated visiting government officials about their forced move, and complained about the distance of their new house sites from their fields and plantations. In private people were even more bitter about what had happened, especially those who had lost their houses.
There were also complaints about price rises and shortages of basic foods like sugar. Locals also disliked the fact that in order to export their coconuts to the mainland (by this time the coops had more or less collapsed), they needed a permit. They were also under pressure to clear the land around their coconut trees, and to cultivate cassava. In many respects, then, the colonial tradition of decrees and threats continued in what some commentators have termed ‘socialism from above’ (Boesen, Madsen & Moody, 1977 Havenick, 1993; Caplan, 1992). On the positive side, however, many more children were in school by then, and the Adult Literacy Campaign had clearly been extremely successful.
The 1980s: Economic Crisis – What Crisis?
In the 1980s, there was an economic crisis in Tanzania which had been induced by a number of factors, including the rise in oil prices, increasingly unequal exchange relations, drought and the war with Uganda.12 Most of what was available in shops in Dar es Salaam was in the form of plastic ‘luxury’ goods imported from the Gulf, while more basic urban ‘necessities’, like packets of soup or light bulbs, were prohibitively expensive. Senior civil servants and academics in Dar started ‘projects’ (miradi) to make ends meet as the value of their salaries plummeted: setting up a farm on the outskirts of the city, keeping cattle or chickens in the backyards of their houses to be able to sell milk or eggs. Paradoxically, it was this period of economic difficulty in the late 1970s and early 1980s which allowed some women new opportunities, as wages in the formal sector declined in real value and households had to engage in projects to obtain second incomes (Swantz & Tripp, 1996; Tripp, 1997).
Nonetheless, people had benefited from the previous decades of state investment in primary schools and primary health care. In the village where I did much of my work, people were happy that the primary school now offered up to Standard 7, instead of being restricted to only four standards, and virtually all the children of school age were attending, including the girls. The village clinic now had a staff of two midwives and two paramedics. In effect, this was the period in which state intervention in education and health had made a considerable difference to people's lives.
Furthermore, contrary to the situation in Dar, many people in northern Mafia in the mid-1980s were doing rather well economically, because the shortage of foreign exchange had precluded the import of cooking oil into the country; as a result, the price of coconuts had gone up dramatically as city-dwellers turned to them to obtain oil for cooking. Men spent more time planting coconut trees and much less time on food crops, which had important implications for the extent to which households were self-sufficient in food. Where they could afford to do so, they employed immigrant labourers to assist in their task, and some men married additional wives.
Paradoxically, then, even as most of Tanzania suffered from the economic situation, Mafians were relatively well off economically as their main product (coconuts) was in demand. People in the village where I resided were raising funds to buy their own bus or lorry. Considering the sums which men contributed in public meetings, the extent to which the economy had become monetised was clearly evident, even if this process had not benefited all Mafians equally. Thus women were suffering from increased workloads, as men spent more time on cash crops than food crops, and they themselves received less food to eat, as the increased cash income (mainly in the hands of men) was not necessarily used to buy staples (Caplan, 1989a, b).
The 1990s: Life Gets Harder
In the Dar es Salaam of the mid-1990s, one could not help but be struck by the visible evidence of increasing social differentiation. This was perhaps scarcely surprising, given that once Nyerere had left office, his successor had lost no time in signing a deal with the IMF for a structural adjustment programme, while privatisation and cuts in social welfare were in full swing. On the outskirts of the city were huge villas, protected by high walls, while in the centre were street children and beggars. Tanzania was gearing up for the introduction of a multi-party system, about which there was considerable lack of enthusiasm among Mafians.
The economy on Mafia had slumped back, as economic liberalisation meant that cooking oil was being imported again, and there was less demand for coconuts for cooking. However, fishing had continued to expand, particularly for lobsters, which young men (who were capable of the deep diving required) could sell for relatively high prices to middlemen who took them for sale to Dar es Salaam and beyond.
There were clear signs that the state's input into health and education had declined. In one village, the primary school had fallen down and a new one was being built, as usual with ‘voluntary’ labour, with sanctions of large fines for men who did not attend for the regulation three-day stretches. The village clinic lacked sufficient medicines, and the district hospital, built in the 1970s, was beginning to be very rundown. Mafia had however finally acquired a secondary school, although it only had room for a small proportion of the primary school leavers on the island.
2002 & 2004: New Enterprises but Few Local Benefits
Eight years later, Dar es Salaam had the appearance of booming – new buildings going up (including more huge villas), a vast increase in traffic, and new supermarkets and shopping malls offering every kind of item for those who had the money. At the same time the streets were filled with unemployed young men hawking a few shirts or other goods to passers-by.
On Mafia most people were struggling even more than before with rising food prices and declining commodity prices. Three major innovations which were supposed to bring development to the island were producing very uneven results (Caplan, 2003). First of all, the southern part of the island had been designated a Marine Park with funding from the WWF (formerly World Wildlife Fund), NORAD (The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation), DFID (Department for International Development) and others (see Walley, 2004a, b). Although this was supposed to be a participatory venture with local communities, there had been conflict over restrictions on fishing in the name of conservation. There was also considerable resentment that most of the jobs generated by the creation of the Park had gone to non-Mafians.
Second, the small Greek-owned fish-processing factory in Kilindoni had been taken over by a large Kenyan Asian company, and was being rebuilt to process not only finfish, but also the prawns which were expected to come from their newly planned prawn farm in northern Mafia. Local people resented the land which had been taken for this and worried about the effects of prawn farming on their environment. While the processing factory offered some employment, it was poorly paid and people were only hired when needed.
Third, the tourist sector in Utende in the south-east corner of the island had increased from a single, government-owned hotel to four small but up-market hotels, all foreign-owned. Although these also offered some employment, with between 25 and 30 staff in each, local people usually only obtained low-ranking jobs such as gardeners.13 A similar situation obtained in government offices in the District Capital: most of the civil servants there, as well as teachers and health workers in the villages came from other parts of Tanzania.
In some of the villages, the land abutting beaches had been sold to foreign developers for hotels. Many people had only agreed to sell because they were desperate for cash as the price of coconuts had dropped still further. However, they feared the consequences of a tourist industry in their midst, not least the prospect of losing access to the beaches (‘our workshops’ – viwanda vyetu) and the undesirable influence of tourists behaving or dressing badly (ovyo). A few thought that hotels might bring work, but most were pessimistic: ‘They will want educated people, not people like us’.
In other words, the new economic enterprises had given little opportunity to locals to improve their economic position and there was little optimism that they would do so, particularly as long as education on Mafia continues to remain a problem. While the island now has some 24 primary schools, there is an acute shortage of teachers, classrooms and basic equipment. Scarcely surprising then that the drop-out rate is high, indeed in an interview with the District Education Officer in 2002, he gave a figure of 38 per cent in 2000-2001, but thought it had improved somewhat to 27 per cent a year later. Although only a small minority of children who complete Standard 7 passes well enough to go to the single secondary school, here too the drop out rate is high, especially for girls, who are already outnumbered by boys.14
Local people constantly complain that there is no work available locally (kazi hakuna) and that there is also very little money circulating because there is no market for coconuts (soko hakuna). Whereas in the 1960s through the 1980s, villagers obtained cash through the sale of coconuts, today their incomes have shrunk, with two major results. One is that there is little work available locally – people do not hire others to help them with jobs. The other is that food security has become an increasingly serious problem, with steep rises in the price of bought food on which villagers depend to supplement what they can grow for themselves (Caplan, 2006).
Differential Effects: Old & Young, Women & Men
So who has benefited from the social changes which have taken place during this 40year period, and who has lost out? In this section I consider briefly the shifts which have taken place in relations between first of all, older and younger people and then between women and men.
In the newly independent period of the 1960s, older people on Mafia tended to have more wealth than younger ones – they had inherited coconut trees or planted them, and they could command the labour of younger people. In the recent past, such a situation has changed, or at least is seen to be different (Caplan, 1998). For example, young men not only have the option of leaving the village and going to Dar (which they have done for a long time) but there are new local economic activities such as lobster fishing which command relatively high incomes. There are also new forms of consumption on which such income can be spent: bicycles, watches, radios, video shows and clothes which are more attractive than giving money to one's parents for household expenses. The change in the distribution of assets has led, according to older people, to the lack of respect they now receive from the young, who are seen to be ‘going with the times’ (kwenda na wakati – see Saleh, 2004). For some young men,15 then, there are increased (albeit limited) opportunities for making a living through fishing, while for older people, economic opportunities for acquiring wealth through coconuts has decreased.
Turning to gender, during the 1960s and 1970s gender relations on Mafia could be characterised as being based on relative equality, with women having a good deal of sexual autonomy and playing a major role in production and in certain rituals (Caplan, 1976, 1982). The sphere of mila (custom) gave women significant roles and social importance. Even so, because of Islamic inheritance laws, women owned much less property than men, and had fewer rights in relation to divorce. Furthermore, no women held public office in any of the villages in which I conducted research, although this was the period when the Ummoja wa Wanawake wa Tanzania (The Women's Union – UWT) was active on Mafia.16
Gender relations on Mafia changed somewhat in the 1980s.17 While there had long been a pattern of girls' and women's entitlement to food being less than that of men, this factor was of relatively little importance when food was plentiful, but had become more significant with increased food insecurity in the 1980s (Caplan, 1999). This was an important reason why female children died in larger numbers than male. Even positive steps were sometimes limited: for example, while contraception had been introduced, women did not have access to it at village, only at district level, involving a long and expensive journey, and they had to have written permission from their husbands first (Caplan, 1995).
By 1994 women were playing a greater role in public life, a trend which continued. In the village I know best, for example, five out of 18 councillors were women by 2002. Women felt that life for them had improved in some respects: more girls were at school, including secondary school, women had a clinic in which to give birth, contraception was now available at the village clinics, more husbands were likely to agree to their wives playing public roles and attending training courses.
Nonetheless, in other respects, women argued, they still remained worse off than men: they worked much harder; many girls married too early, sometimes to men not of their choosing, and so their education was cut short; some girls who had passed the examination to go to secondary school were refused permission to do so by their parents; many husbands still preferred their wives not to get involved in public activities. Finally, because economic circumstances had worsened, few men could support their wives even to the minimum extent that had been the norm in the 1960s – women had to rely increasingly on themselves to obtain clothes, and often had tocontribute cash to the household for the purchase of food and other necessities, thus adding to their already considerable workloads (Caplan, 1995a). Increasing numbers of divorced or widowed women were choosing to remain unmarried (Caplan, 1995b).
Talking about Inequality & Social Justice: Memories, Comparisons & Entitlements
On Mafia today, government officials, few of whom are local or even coastal people, often argue that ‘Formerly people were just receivers of hand-outs, now they have to rely on themselves', phrases often repeated by officers from the ruling CCM party (Chama cha Mapinduzi – ‘Party of the Revolution’). A senior government official on Mafia (a Christian mainlander) told me ‘[Local] culture is a real problem. It's ya Kiarabu (Arab-style), Inshallah (God willing)’. Another, from a similar background, who was head of a department, said ‘People here are ignorant, uneducated, they just wait for the government or the NGOs to do things’.
But villagers see things differently: neo-liberalisation, with its sokio huria (free market), wawekezaji (investors), and ubinafsaji (privatisation) has affected all aspects of their lives, including food, health, education, and land rights. For many people, these changes have not been for the better. They say things like:
Government policies keep changing;
No one explains things properly to us and we are not consulted;
The government is just for the people at the top (watu wa juu juu);
There is no work or market for our goods;
The government and civil servants only look after themselves;
The government is selling the country.
Nor do they consider that the plethora of NGOs and wafadhili (donors) can replace the role of the state in its responsibility for the welfare of citizens. In one interview after another with villagers in 2002 and 2004, the importance of the role of government was stressed:
Extract 1 from interview with a woman in her thirties
You see the state of things here. There is no one who has even a couple of lakhs in their house. Poverty has really entered [our lives] …
Q. And whose responsibility is that?
The main responsibility is that of the government.
Q. So how do you think your taxes are spent?
We are told it is spent on the villages! But we only get bits and pieces!
Q. Do leaders come here to the village?
Yes, they do and they see what's going on but they don't actually DO anything.
Extract 2 from interview with a middle-aged woman
Q. And how does the government come in to all of this (development)?
The government has to come in. For example people were having to pay T.Sh. 2,000 fees p.a. for primary school, now they've stopped the payment of fees (as a result of protests, the drop in numbers of children in school and the debt relief granted to Tanzania), so that shows the government can act.
Extract 3 from interview with middle-aged man
Q. What do you think of free market policies?
The government should be like a kind of father who has to feel pity for his children [and look after them]. If you just leave it to others, they'll do whatever they like. So I don't like the current policies.
As was seen from the exchange between Nyerere and the World Bank cited earlier, one of the ways in which people everywhere make sense of the world is in terms of comparison and Mafians are no exception. People on Mafia Island contrast the lives they lead with those they hoped to lead, especially in the euphoric period after independence; they contrast their own lives with those of which they catch glimpses in tourist hotels and on TV when they visit the city. They argue that recent developments on the island such as the establishment of a Marine Park, prawn farming and tourism will only result in greater inequalities in their lives, as they lose former entitlements to land and access to areas of the sea, beaches and other resources, while the poor educational facilities on the island mean that they are unable to compete for jobs in these new sectors. They also bemoan the decrease in moral values which they perceive in political life and in the role of the state, even among kin and neighbours.
They compare their lot to that of mainlanders and their island to places which they have visited, particularly Dar es Salaam. They see Mafia as backward, remote, and underdeveloped.18 Many Mafians have also visited Zanzibar, indeed, in the 1960s, it was common for young men to migrate to Zanzibar (Unguja and Pemba) for the clove-picking season. A number of Mafians settled in Zanzibar Town, especially in Ng'ambo, although visits to Zanzibar became less common in the years immediately after the 1964 Revolution there. For Mafians, as for other coastal and Muslim Tanzanians, Zanzibar constitutes an important reference point, a centre of ustaarabu (civilisation). They are aware that in Zanzibar, people have electricity and have long had television, that there are motorable roads and plenty of secondary schools, unlike Mafia.
People in the villages of Mafia also make comparisons between their life and that available in the District Capital, Kilindoni. Here there are thought to be more rich people (matajiri) and there are such facilities as electricity, a bank, post office, shops, secondary school and government offices, all conspicuously lacking elsewhere on the island.
A second reference point is memory of the past. Most people on Mafia old enough to do so view the present more negatively than the past. They tend to be highly critical of the present regime and blame government policies for their present plight. Some of their complaints are about mundane matters which affect their daily lives: why is cooking oil being imported and competing with their coconuts? Why do they have to pay dues when they take their coconuts to market in Dar es Salaam? Why do they have to pay for medical treatment, when this is supposed to be covered by taxes? But other complaints relate to the differences they perceive between people at the top (watu wa juu) and themselves: how come MPs get such high salaries and pensions? How could Tanzania, which often vaunts itself as being a poor country, afford an air defence system or a second presidential plane?19
In such conversations, especially with older people, there is a nostalgia for the past when politicians were viewed as being more honest, there was less corruption, food was cheaper, life was more manageable. In short, then, Mafians feel that they are now less equal than they were, less equal than they were promised, and less equal than they want to be. People practise resistance to the way things are and the harshness of their lives by complaining, by remembering how it used to be, by talking about how it should be, in other words, they say that things are different elsewhere and could and should be different on Mafia.
Many people look to the future with fear. ‘We will eat grass’ is how one man (actually a civil servant) put it, after lamenting the sale of national assets to foreigners. I asked many people what they thought the lives of their grandchildren would be like: ‘Perhaps good, but more likely harder. They will have to scrabble for a living’ and ‘We are finished, we will die’ (Tumekwisha, mama, tutakufa) were fairly typical replies. In short, the past was better, the present is worse, and the future will be worse still. This is not just a romanticisation of the past as a golden age, rather it is a view of the present and future which sees people like themselves as having been consigned to the scrap-heap. In this respect, they articulate a view not dissimilar to those scholar-activists such as Chachage and Mbilinyi who have also been highly critical of the move to neo-liberalism (Chachage and Mbilinyi, 2003).
Many of them can articulate a very clear analysis of what is happening and why, and who is benefiting. But such knowledge is of little use, given their constraints of poverty and powerlessness.
Conclusion
So what is the meaning of ‘equality’ or social justice in this complex scenario? In Tanzania there have been obvious changes which have resulted from the transition from a socialist to a post-socialist economy, and these have had major impacts on villagers on Mafia Island. Most notable are changes wrought by national policies such as the rising price of bought food and the need to find money for medical treatment and schooling. Other changes have emerged from transformations in the global economy: the decline in the demand for and price of coconuts and the acquisition of land and other rights by foreign companies such as tourist hotels or prawn farms. Overall on Mafia, life has become harder. This suggests that the kind of national statistics frequently used to measure development often hide as much as they reveal and may camouflage differences between and within localities, so it is important to focus on the local as well as the national. Further, the presentation of statistics may not always be very accurate and may even be ‘massaged’ to present a particular view.
Globalisation and liberalisation present both threats and opportunities, and their effects are extremely uneven in terms of locality and even within small areas. First, some local impacts may differ substantially from those of the wider society, as happened in the 1980s when Mafia enjoyed a coconut boom. For this reason, local specificities must always be considered. Second, wider developments do not impact uniformly on the elderly, or young people, or women. Some young men have benefited economically from the increased fishing opportunities, while older ones have lost out because their main capital asset – coconut trees – is worth much less than before. While women still carry much heavier workloads than men, are less likely to have attended secondary school, own less property, and enjoy fewer economic opportunities, at the same time they have benefited from great access to contraception, more education (at least at primary level) and entry into the political arena. Nonetheless, as shown above, existing social relations are being changed and challenged in various ways in different contexts.
This article also shows that there can be an important disjuncture between the dominant and official discourses (the ‘view from above’), which are primarily positive, and local ones (the ‘view from below’), which tend to be much more negative. But we also need to consider how positionality, memory and sense of entitlement determine what is said. Along with changes in the national political economy, we find that certain official discourses also change. An emphasis on equality is replaced by ‘empowerment’ and ‘lifting people out of poverty, ‘selfreliance’ becomes less a community than an individual value, and the state withdraws from certain responsibilities in favour of private enterprise, investors, donors and NGOs. Ordinary people, however, like those on Mafia, persist in perceiving their rights vis a vis government in the same way as before and expect it to be responsible for their well-being. They contrast their lot unfavourably with that of others, with the past as they remember it, and with their expectations. Scarcely surprising then that their evaluation of changes in their lives is so different from that of the dominant discourse.