Introduction and background
Agriculture remains the major site of employment and livelihoods for most Tanzanians, and especially women. Seventy per cent (70%) of all Tanzanian economically active women are (self-)employed in agriculture, compared to 64% of men; in rural Tanzania, 89% women work in agriculture compared to 85% of men (URT 2015). Moreover, a substantial proportion of all food production is carried out by women (Mmasa 2013). Low productivity, low technology and the relatively small proportion of produce which is marketed are noted in mainstream discourse as universal characteristics of peasant production systems rather than the result of the structural adjustment counter-reform policies of the 1980s. In spite of decades of neglect and exclusion, small family producers have managed to sustain themselves by diversifying off-farm economic activities while maintaining their livelihood base as small producers on the land. Rural women are the central actors in sustaining this strategy at great costs to their health, income and well-being. At the same time, the growing dependence in rural areas on marketed food for domestic consumption signifies the crisis in self-sustainability, as well as the high rates of undernourishment of children and women, especially in rural areas. This is matched by the continued crisis in health care, especially maternal and infant health, as well as exclusion from quality education and safe clean water and sanitation.
This article explores patterns of continuity and change in agrarian struggles and primitive accumulation in Tanzania from a transformative feminist perspective. Such a framework combines gender and class, and questions of race and national sovereignty in its analysis of production and reproduction as significant components of feminist political economy (Kitunga and Mbilinyi 2009). I am particularly interested in the continuity between colonial efforts to destroy the self-sustaining nature of peasant production and reproduction and to promote settler and corporate agriculture and mining instead, and the present neoliberal focus on ‘transformation’. Although the commercial agro-industry discourse represents itself as an advocate for smallholder producers and food security, the reality, according to many critics, is the opposite (see Koopman 2012a, 2012b, Mushita and Thompson 2006, 2013; Thompson 2012, 2014a, 2014b).
My analysis here is based on a re-reading of earlier work including much of my own, together with reflection on the results of participatory action research carried out by the Tanzanian Gender Network Programme, TGNP-Mtandao,1 with grassroots activists in selected rural areas during the period from 2010 and 2014. Of particular significance is the joint emphasis given by grassroots women both to economic and social service issues.
Agrarian struggles have intensified worldwide since the 2008 global economic and fiscal crisis, associated with rising prices for food and oil/energy, and an aggressive search by global finance capital for new avenues for both primitive and capital accumulation. In Tanzania, as in neighbouring countries, small family producers are challenged by structures and policies which support the systematic marginalisation of small family production systems and the aggressive promotion of commercial agro-industry. The rural transformation, industrialisation and social welfare policies of the 1960s and 1970s have been swept aside and their achievements discounted and/or made invisible. These two sets of issues, land grabbing and the withdrawal of support for small family producers, reflect a particular version of the primitive accumulation process (see Bush 2010; Patnaik and Moyo 2011; Shivji 2009).
Classically, primitive accumulation was the process by which self-sufficient agricultural producers were over time transformed into wage labourers, allowing the accumulation of capital through the appropriation of surplus value by the owners of capital. Land grabbing, which encompasses the plunder of water, forests, genetic material, minerals, gas and oil, is the most visible aspect of primitive accumulation, and attracts the most attention from critics of the current phase of neoliberal globalisation. The wilful and systematic destruction of the capacity of small family producers to sustain themselves is less commented upon, and often portrayed by the agro-industry lobby as the fault of the producers themselves. Further, the destruction of a people’s capacity to reproduce themselves means that struggles over social services are an integral part of struggles between capital and labour, and need to be incorporated into our understanding of primitive accumulation.2
The government prioritises ‘big results now’ in favoured sectors, agro-ecological zones and enterprises, and has resurrected trickle-down concepts of development to justify land grabs, increased income inequality and rural–urban differentiation. Donors advocated and funded the policy shift during the 2000s and 2010s from poverty reduction to export-oriented growth, best symbolised in their ‘trade not aid’ slogan (TGNP Mtandao 2013). Of special significance is the way that women have, for pro-commercial agribusiness advocates, become the symbol of backward-hoe agriculture on the one hand, and of resistance in local struggles against globalisation and plunder on the other.
This article argues that, indeed, women who are small family producers remain a significant barrier to agro-industry’s efforts to monopolise land, water, and other natural resources in Tanzania, and the neighbouring countries of eastern and southern Africa, and to extract labour from local rural communities (Mbilinyi 2012). Moreover, peasant women provide the leadership and the base for a mass movement to challenge both patriarchy and globalisation from below.
The next part of this article reviews the history of struggles around agriculture and land in the colonial era, highlighting the role and importance in them of women. In the third section, developments in the post-colonial era are reviewed, focusing on the role of women especially in the Ujamaa period. The fourth part considers the effects on the position of women in the context first, of the abandonment of Ujamaa and the adoption of structural adjustment, and second, in the face of the new green revolution spearheaded by the international agricultural corporations, with accompanying land grabs and gender mainstreaming, countered by the development of women’s resistance. The fifth section presents more detail concerning the activities of TGNP Mtandao in building a transformative feminism movement to support family farming and resist these threats to their livelihoods. The final section concludes.
Struggles over agriculture and labour in the colonial era
The colonial state of Tanganyika, as well as Kenya, Rhodesia, other African colonies, and apartheid South Africa, adopted deliberate policies to extract labour from otherwise self-sustaining local peasant economies, including forced taxation of males, which demanded cash payment (Shivji 1986). Labour reserves were established directly and indirectly to provide plantations and mines with cheap migrant labour, largely male. Women were expected to remain ‘behind’ to maintain the local peasant economy, under the supervision of elderly male patriarchs. Of course many women resisted and ‘ran away’, in some cases finding employment on settler-owned mixed farms and agro-processing firms in both rural and urban areas (Mbilinyi 1988).
The unholy alliance of, mostly, male African colonial chiefs and European colonial officers created a macho vision of ‘native’ custom and tradition which was embodied in colonial law, and used to ‘create’ and sustain patriarchal systems of marriage, divorce, inheritance and property ownership. Indirect rule depended on maintaining some semblance of authority of local chiefs. Decision making over matters of domesticity became one of their last remaining powers (Fields 1985). The efforts by chiefs, fathers, husbands, district officers and corporate managers to keep women locked in patriarchal structures in the native reserves reached enormous heights, as shown by the many studies of ‘runaway’ wives in Tanzania and elsewhere in southern Africa (Mbilinyi 1988).
Changes in local gender divisions of labour emerged as a result of the broader socio-economic transformations taking place as well as the internal gender struggle. Women’s and men’s responses (including resistances and struggle as well as accommodation) also helped to shape the trajectory of the broader transformations. Men were increasingly forced to withdraw their labour from subsistence production systems to engage in market-oriented production. Women had to take up the slack, and became the major producers of food for local consumption in many societies – but not because of any transhistorical and unchanging traditional gender division of labour. Together they were responding to the changes taking place in the political economy at community, ‘territorial’ and regional level while trying to defend the integrity of their communities and ‘nations’, kingdoms, clans.
The colonial state then, as the post-colonial state today, was complicit in efforts to sustain patriarchal structures of power which underlay the local peasant economy. Patriarchy supported the migrant labour system, and acted as a significant part of indirect rule. The colonial system benefited from the changing patriarchal relations within the local farming system, but it also let loose the social forces which would steadily undermine patriarchal power and set women and young people ‘free’.
The paradox today is that people increasingly turn to patriarchal structures of production and reproduction following the withdrawal of state support after the imposition of structural adjustment and neoliberal macroeconomic policy. One result is the resurgence of ‘backward’ ways of being, such as female genital mutilation (FGM), early childhood marriage of girls and even boys, polygamy (formal and informal, for example, nyumba ndogo 3) and ‘witchcraft’.
The post-colonial period: decolonisation and Ujamaa vijijini
Steps were taken by post-colonial African governments to wrest control of the economy away from the colonisers and to orient it towards the provision of goods and services which met the needs of the people. Tanzania was in the forefront in this struggle through its socialism and self-reliance policy. Collective or Ujamaa villages were the central strategy for rural transformation.4 As a result of the combination of policies incorporated within the overall Ujamaa policy, the majority of African people in rural and urban areas of Tanzania acquired access for the first time to basic economic, health, education and water services. This was in stark contrast to the exclusionary racist policies of the colonial government, which led to major inequalities between European, Asian, Arab and African communities. Crop development schemes, agricultural extension services and farm input subsidies supported the steady expansion of African small-scale production of both food and cash crops, especially in the former labour reserves of the Southern Highlands.
A coherent industrialisation policy was adopted, with concrete efforts to create multiple growth poles so as to expand employment and development opportunities beyond Dar es Salaam, the commercial centre. There was a rapid expansion of wage employment in both public and private sectors providing many women with job opportunities in public social services as teachers and nurses, for example.
Peak output levels were achieved in most key cash crops during the 1970s and 1980s, as measured by separate data on exports, including cotton, cashew and coffee, largely on the basis of small family production, as well as plantation and estate crops, higher than ever achieved in the colonial era by settler farmers and agribusiness (Mbilinyi 1994). Critics continue to claim the failure of post-independence agriculture policy, not only during but particularly after, Ujamaa, using aggregate output levels which combine plantation and peasant crops, including the corporate crop of sisal. Sisal output definitely dropped radically in the 1970s following a global market crisis with falling prices. It is dishonest however to generalise about agricultural performance based on such aggregates, and ignore the successful trends in other crops (Mbilinyi 1991, 1994; see Raikes 1986 for an especially nuanced analysis).
The rapid development of smallholder agriculture and economic diversification in the former labour reserves led to a major labour crisis in the sugar cane and sisal plantations by 1980. Their pool of surplus labour for migrant labour had dried up. Young men, the majority of migrant workers, found better livelihood alternatives in their transformed villages.
This account in no way ignores the contradictions which underlay Ujamaa villagisation policies as implemented in most places. The author, together with many other observers, was actively involved in the critical analysis of the top-down nature of change, the bias towards cash crops and neglect of food crops consumed locally, the male bias at all levels of policy and politics, and the way that class and gender relations interlinked with agrarian and education reform policies. Of particular significance and shame is the history of forced villagisation in many but not all locations. Top-down decision making also persisted in spite of calls for participatory leadership styles.5
Government dependence on external finance to support many of the positive developments was especially problematic. For example, the World Bank was highly involved in funding agricultural policy and strategy in Tanzania even before independence, and must assume responsibility for the outcomes along with other donor partners. The global economic crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s, combined with high debt and donor dependency, provided global capitalist forces with the opportunity they needed to roll back socialism and decolonisation in Tanzania in the 1980s.
Tanzanian women took advantage of new opportunities that were created during the Ujamaa period. They were actively involved in collective farms, often by their own volition, not forced by male household heads as many researchers then assumed. Women had access to land in their own right, and/or to the product of their labour, in many Ujamaa villages throughout the country, including former labour reserve areas as well as the Northern highlands. They created women’s cooperative farms, shops, maize mills and beer halls which provided employment, income, and access to productive property as well as to scarce goods during the economic crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s (Koda et al.1987; Mbilinyi 1991; Odgaard 1986). As village ‘citizens’, women were foremost in denouncing poor leadership and corruption at village and ward level. As leaders and members of cooperatives, they also resisted efforts by male village government leaders to hijack their successful economic enterprises (Koda et al. 1987).
At the national level, women acquired more access to wage employment in both formal and informal sectors of the economy, especially in public social services, as teachers, nurses, agriculture extension agents and so on. True, sex discrimination in education and employment meant that gender inequalities persisted at all levels. Women were usually found at the bottom of the occupational ladder, and organised themselves to defend their rights as women workers – for example in the cashew nut industry in the 1970s (Mbilinyi 1991).
Nevertheless, in comparison to the colonial system, the majority of women, and men, especially those in poor and marginalised rural areas of Tanzania, benefited from Ujamaa policy and maintained their support for the government during the seven-year stand-off with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and the economic crisis of the 1980s (Geiger 1997).
Structural adjustment, the new green revolution, land grabbing, and women’s resistance
The World Bank and IMF imposed structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) on Tanzania, along with other debtor countries, in the mid 1980s, in exchange for continued donor support. All the major achievements of the Ujamaa era were rolled back by the SAPs, including free universal primary education and primary health care. User fees were imposed; delivery of education, health and water was liberalised and privatised. This led to an abrupt drop in utilisation of health care facilities in the mid 1980s, and growing inequality in access to all the social services.
User fees have functioned, intentionally or not, the same way as ‘money taxation’ in the colonial days to force women as well as men to intensify their labour in marketed production. Evidence suggests that women have become the main providers of user fees for basic reproduction services. Land tenure systems were liberalised in response to steady demands from donor agencies as well as banking institutions and the organised commercial private sector as a whole, led by the mining sector in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 2000s and 2010s, there has been a steady growth of export enclaves as existed in the colonial economic structure, with a return to monocrop plantation culture.
Commercial agro-industry has faced major barriers to the expansion of trade in their genetically modified organism (GMO) products and services in Europe, and has now turned to Africa as ‘the last frontier’ – note the imperial discourse. They represent themselves as advocates for the development of small-scale farmers and livestock-keepers. In response to the resistance of peasant women to land grabbing and marginalisation, and resulting criticism by feminist advocates in both the North and the South, they have also begun to employ gender mainstreaming, with funding support for ‘gender and agriculture’ and ‘women’ farmers and agriculture researchers.
The ‘New Green Revolution’, embodied in the spread of GMOs, has met substantive resistance in Africa because of fears of dependence on transnational agribusiness for seeds and other farm inputs, and markets, producer debt and GMO effects on ecology and health (Koopman 2012a, 2012b; Mushita and Thompson 2013; Thompson 2012, 2014a, 2014b).
In Tanzania, the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA) and the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor (SAGCOT) argue that the green revolution is intended to enhance the productivity, efficiency and output of smallholder peasant farmers; however, Green Revolution advocates are working hand in hand with huge agribusiness corporations like Monsanto, Unilever and others who are the major producers and traders, globally, of GMOs. Multinational corporations are emboldened by weak government systems in Africa which have little or no accountability to the people, weak or non-existent regulatory mechanisms and a growing fiscal crisis. Moreover, well-funded GMO agriculture packages look increasingly attractive to government leaders given the overall decline in external funding in the 2010s.
The power of the agro-industry lobby is enormous and the G8's launch of the Global Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition is the most recent example of the powerful forces behind the promotion of agro-industry in Africa. They include the support of several major donor agencies, particularly the World Bank and the African Development Bank, in addition to AGRA and SAGCOT.6
The peasant economy has been severely undermined by the SAPs and later liberalisation and privatisation policies promoted by these agencies. Farm support systems and producer subsidies were dropped, and the entire research and extension service system was dismantled. Many smallholder producers stopped growing export cash crops in the late 1980s and 1990s because of their inability to afford and/or access improved farm inputs and credit. Others tried to extract more unpaid labour from wives and children in place of casual farm workers in order to reduce production costs. They were often unsuccessful, given family members’ resistance to what they called ‘slavery’. Men as well as women were forced to seek alternative sources of income outside of the household economy for survival, thereby depriving peasant agriculture, including pastoralism, of vital sources of labour (Mbilinyi 1991, 1994).
The resulting combination of worsening health care, falling employment and incomes, migration, urbanisation and the expansion of sex work, together with growing food insecurity and high rates of malnutrition among children and adults alike created the ideal conditions for the HIV pandemic – not only in Tanzania, but throughout eastern and southern Africa. The HIV and AIDS pandemic symbolises the steady erosion of the capacity of the African people to reproduce themselves as a result of neoliberal economic policies and similar policies in health, education, water, agriculture and other sectors (Baylies and Bujra 2000; Bujra 2004).
Nevertheless, women peasants and their communities remain a major barrier to the wholesale plunder of seeds as well as of land, water and forests by big capital as agribusiness and biofuel interests (LARRI 2011), and compete with them for land, labour, water and markets. In spite of decades of government and donor neglect, and the denial of basic resources such as producer subsidies, research and extension advice, and market advice and support, resulting from the liberalisation policies of the 1980s onwards, women producers continue to feed not only their families and communities but, indeed, almost the entire nation. Their claim to the land and to their livelihoods as peasant producers and reproducers is powerful, even though it is bound by patriarchal structures and norms (Tsikata and Wilks 2009, Tsikata 2009, 2011).
Women smallholder producers and their communities are a threat to the agro-industrial conquest in several ways. First, their traditional and near spiritual claim to usufruct rights to the land in order to produce food for the family/community makes it politically difficult for agro-industry to appropriate as much land as they would wish. Second, their resistance to giving up smallholder farming completely, thus becoming autonomous unfree labour, in relationship to capital and thus not available as a fulltime source of cheap casual labour, results in (relatively) high wage costs in agro-industry. Third, their continued production of foodstuffs for local consumption and local markets reduces the size of the market for food that would otherwise be available for large-scale producers (TGNP Mtandao 2012a).
In order to resolve this dilemma, agro-industrial forces have adopted a variety of gender mainstreaming strategies. For example, as I have directly observed, they have endeavoured to develop strategic partnerships with local women’s non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and even to finance campaigns for ‘women and agriculture’ or ‘gender and agriculture’ in collaboration with local women’s rights groups. Gender mainstreaming accompanies the message projected by agro-industry projects that their ultimate objective is to improve smallholder production in order to reduce poverty.
The struggles over land and labour in agriculture and biofuel production are increasingly politicised, and the corporate and agency forces noted above have sought to drown out alternative voices. These latter argue for support for the organic transformation of local small-scale producers, and criticise the economic viability and environmental sustainability of petrochemical-based irrigated agriculture. The evidence for their arguments is compelling. There is no need to travel far; the famous Groundnut Scheme in colonial Tanganyika will suffice.7 Recent empirical research by Jeanne Koopman (2012a, 2012b) documented the negative outcomes of similar green revolution farm packages in Senegal in the past. Fent (2011) has explored AGRA project documents and financial allocations, and documented the gap between stated intentions and actual implementation, especially with respect to the benefits for small women farmers. Mushita and Thompson (2006, 2013) and Thompson (2012, 2014a) go even further in documenting the way that the current ‘green revolution’ technology is being used by multinational corporations to take monopoly control over genetic material in African countries, as well as land, water, and other resources. The outcome is expected to be the displacement of African small family producers from their livelihoods, thereby providing the multinationals with the land they desire, and the cheap labour that would become available.
Within this context, women have been in the forefront of community protest and grassroots activism against the increasing plunder of natural resources, including land, water, forests, minerals and wildlife. Peasant women’s determined stand against this form of primitive accumulation seeks to protect and defend the basis of their employment and livelihoods as small-scale peasant producers and traders, as well as to defend the integrity of their community and cultural identity, as shown below. In this struggle, women must balance their solidarity with men in their class/community with a simultaneous struggle against different forms of patriarchal oppression and exploitation at home and in the community, as well as in the workplace and the public sphere.
However, as noted by Thompson (2014b), policy makers and practitioners – as well as activists – need evidence that an alternative approach to modernisation of smallholder agriculture is possible, when combined with further economic diversification of the rural areas transformation. The policies and strategies adopted in Thailand and other Asian countries to promote inclusive rural transformation on the basis of small-scale peasant production provide significant evidence that it is possible.
TGNP Mtandao and the Intensive Movement Building Cycle
One organisation that advocates for gender equity and women's empowerment in rural transformation and formulates policies that support women in raising agricultural productivity is TGNP Mtandao. A dynamic activist organisation based in Dar es Salaam, TGNP Mtandao embraces transformative feminism and animation philosophy/methodology to support the building of a grassroots-based transformative feminist movement in Tanzania, Africa and beyond. From its beginning in 1993, the organisation has used a combination of analysis and research, multimedia communications and publications, organising and networking, and training to challenge both patriarchy and neoliberal globalisation (Kitunga and Mbilinyi 2009).
The Intensive Movement Building Cycle (IMBC) has been the most successful strategy thus far to link grassroots activists with national and regional organisations, and to enhance understanding of the linkages between immediate and practical needs at the micro level to strategic issues at the macro level of policy and budget. Begun in Kisarawe Rural District in Pwani Region in 2010, the organisation’s staff and non-staff ‘animator researchers’ had, by 2015, worked together with community animators and activist groups in rural districts across a number of regions: Morogoro, Mbeya, Shinyanga, Mara and Dar es Salaam (Mbilinyi 2015; Mbilinyi and Shechambo 2015; TGNP Mtandao 2012b, 2013, 2014).
The cycle consists of the following seven core elements. First the animation teams come together for interactive training and planning workshops. This is followed by participatory action research at village and ward levels, working closely with members of one core grassroots activist group every day for six days, and also visiting other activist groups in the same ward. Then grassroots and TGNP Mtandao animators undertake joint analysis of initial research findings, by focusing on the priority issues raised. Ward and district feedback workshops with local government officials and members of the core activist group follow, in which key issues are presented and demands for specific concrete action are made by local activists to local government officials. The fifth part of the cycle involves the establishment of local knowledge centres associated with one of the activist groups/networks in each site. These centres provide space for information sharing, networking, and follow-up campaign work, linking all the activist groups together at ward level. Finally, local press clubs are trained in investigative journalism of the key issues raised by participants in the participatory action research, and linked with local activist groups through the knowledge centres. The cycle is completed with reports by leaders of the animation teams, incorporating the results of the initial field research, knowledge centre activities, and investigative journalism.
The combination of participatory action research, knowledge centre organising and investigative journalism gives grassroots activists real power to demand and get change, as will be seen below. At the same time, their active participation in analysis of ‘findings’, presentation of outcomes and demands to local government authorities at feedback workshops, media engagement during and after the investigative journalism phase, and follow-up actions, has led to more critical analysis. Added to which there is an enhanced capacity to link micro and macro issues in policy and budget analysis, together with stronger organising and networking – thus contributing to building the foundation of a grassroots-based transformative feminist movement.
Every year, in every location, local activists prioritised their struggles over corporate ‘investment’ and land grabbing, lack of access to timely and quality farm inputs, lack of viable markets (mentioned in every location, every year), denial of credit, or lack of viable transport to send crops to the market, or a combination of these. Here, I present some cases involving these issues.
In 2013 local women activists in Mshewe (Mbeya Rural District) presented a press release to the media which denounced the uwekezaji (investment) policy, and demanded a return of their land which had been sold to a large-scale farmer. Investment policy (uwekezaji) is the term used by local activists to refer to corporate capitalist enterprises, land grabbing, and the overall process of primitive accumulation.
In Mondo (Shinyanga Region) in 2014, outraged villagers – women and men – stopped the motorcade of the Minister of Water in protest against the failure of his ministry to provide them with water for years, wielding handmade posters demanding water rights and government accountability. Their peaceful demonstration was successful, in the short run: the Minister wisely agreed to stop and listen to the villagers’ demands and discuss what needed to be done to improve the situation with local government authorities. Their demonstration included a demand that the local Member of Parliament come and talk to his constituency, and the following month he complied (TGNP Mtandao 2014).
In every location, local producers were forced to depend on traders who purchased their crops at ridiculously low prices, often while those crops were still lying unharvested in the fields. People also criticised the high cost of fertiliser and other farm inputs, as well as the government’s failure to ensure that farm inputs arrived on time. At the district feedback workshop I attended in Morogoro in 2012, the district agricultural officer asserted that local farmers were now benefiting from a special farm inputs programme. The grassroots animator immediately corrected him, asking: Why is it that the improved seeds you brought us do not grow? And is it not true that we received expired fertiliser this year? This was a pivotal moment in the workshop; later he and several other local government officials began to speak openly about concrete obstacles they faced, and joined in constructive planning for how to overcome the issues raised.
As noted above, these two sets of issues, land grabbing and withdrawal of support for small peasant producers, reflect the primitive accumulation process whereby the government is encouraging large-scale investment in agriculture and other economic activities at the expense of small-scale peasant producers, but at the same time has reneged on its responsibilities to provide support for the latter. Local and central governments subsidise the large-scale producers through access to large amounts of land at low rent, preferential treatment in access to water, favourable tax and tariff structures, and liberal trade policies that allow farmers to export their commodities directly to buyers overseas without paying full tariffs.
All of the above issues were linked directly with the oppressive and exploitative nature of gender relations. Key findings were that women carried out nearly all aspects of crop production alone or with their husbands and/or other male household heads, but did not control the proceeds, and often did not benefit directly. Women headloads were relied upon by family, community, and nation, to carry harvests to the market, as well as water and fuel to the home. Men took the proceeds of crop production and spent them on transactional sex with girlfriends and prostitutes, as well as setting up new wives (nyumba ndogo).
There have also been struggles over other issues related less directly to production. Women activists prioritised health issues in every location, including those related to childbearing, as well as general care and treatment. Skits were used to dramatise the inhumane treatment patients received from health workers, as well as corrupt demands for cash payments or bribes. The lack of drugs and medicine, trained health personnel, and appropriate maternity services was highlighted in every location. For example, in 2010, the Maneromango health centre in Kisarawe had no toilet, no sterilising facility, no water, and no labour wards for women. After the investigative journalists, using electronic and print media, gave nationwide exposure to this situation, the district authorities took notice: a public toilet was built, a proper sterilising cooker was bought, water was supplied to the centre, and labour wards were built. Local community members also succeeded in getting resources for their secondary school after the investigative journalism team confronted the Kisarawe District executive director. Solar energy was supplied to the school, teaching materials and laboratories were set up, and a water well was built. In effect, a spiral effect occurred in Maneromango following the participatory action research and investigative journalism, leading to more support for building water wells by other actors, including international NGOs.
In Mshewe in 2013, local activists prioritised health issues as well as that of land grabbing/investment. They exposed the high level of corruption and incompetence among health workers, in one dispensary in particular, including accusations of demanding sex from patients in exchange for treatment. After investigative journalists followed this up, the district removed all of the health workers at this one dispensary and replaced them with a new team.
This brings us to the other paramount problem that arose in every location: the undemocratic nature of power relations between local government officials and ordinary women and men villagers. Accusations of corruption were widespread. Local authorities were accused of protecting the interests of large-scale investors, both local and foreign, at the expense of local villagers; this was also associated with bribing practices by the investors. The lack of accountability to local residents and poor performance in service delivery have already been mentioned. At the same time, the combination of participatory action research, knowledge centre organising, and investigative journalism enabled local activists in several locations to get a positive response from local authorities. In other cases, they collectively decided to vote corrupt and/or incompetent village leaders out of office and replaced them with new leadership.
Grassroots animators have also participated in gender budget review processes at district and national levels. This provides them with the opportunity to query to what extent their priorities have received adequate resources from the government and follow up on how these resources have been allocated and used at the local and national level. Going public with the results of these reviews is especially contentious at the local government level, where pompous authorities are not used to being questioned by ordinary villagers, especially women. A backlash has been inevitable, something which had been anticipated but not properly planned for. In 2012 in Mbeya and Morogoro, grassroots animators who were members of local government committees were threatened with expulsion. Authorities in Ijombe, Mbeya Region, and Mkambarani, Morogoro Region, were particularly incensed by the way in which information was shared in the public feedback workshops, especially the district one, and with the media. In the case of Ijombe, a grassroots activist and long-time partner in TGNP activities was falsely framed for fraud by the local ward executive officer and imprisoned in retaliation. Eventually she was released, but only after supportive action by another activist organisation, Human Defenders, and local legal aid workers (TGNP 2012b).
Concluding remarks
The combined attack on the sustainability of subsistence peasant agriculture, together with the plunder of natural resources, is steadily eroding the viability of peasant agriculture. The outcome will not only be the loss of livelihoods for the majority of peasants, women and men, it will be the destruction of any potential for food self-sufficiency on the African continent.
How do we challenge ‘the new green revolution’ publicity machine? I believe one way is to go back and analyse the history/herstory of earlier ‘green revolution’ developments that occurred in Africa, as in Asia, and analyse the outcomes (Koopman 2012a, 2012b). The latter were associated with growing class and gender differentiation, and growing impoverishment, along with the steady integration of small-scale producer communities into the global capitalist system. This story could be used to challenge the promises being made for the ‘new green revolution’. We also need to analyse and learn from the resistance and accommodation strategies adopted by small-scale producers, especially women, in the past, as well as the present, and clarify what their needs and demands are, publicising these as widely as possible. Finally, I strongly believe we need to shift attention in growth and development discourse away from the present focus on agriculture, which is isolated from the rural economy, and to talk about rural transformation in the context of the development of autonomous, self-sustaining national and regional economies and societies.8