Gregory H. Maddox

Mtunya : Famine in Central Tanzania, 1917–20

In the Dodoma Region of central Tanzania the people called Wagogo name a famine that struck between 1917 and 1920 the Mtunya —‘The Scramble’. This famine came after both German and British miliary requisitions had drained the arid region of men, cattle and food. The famine, which killed 30,000 of the regions 150,000 people, is more than just a good example of what John Iliffe has called ‘conjunctural poverty’. The Mtunya and the response to it by both the people of the region and the new colonial government also shaped the form of the interaction between local economy and society and the political economy of colonial Tanganyika. The Gogo, in their own interpretation of the famine, stress the ways in which this famine made them dependent on the colonial economy. For them, this famine represented a terrible loss of autonomy, a loss of the ability to control the reproduction of their own society.

Famine, Impoverishment and the Creation of a Labor Reserve in Central Tanzania

An often under-recognized response to drought by members of pastoral and mixed farming communities in Africa is semi-regular migration in search of wage employment. Among the Gogo of the Dodoma and Singida Regions of central Tanzania this strategy has increasingly, since the 1940s, been the response of individuals to a cycle of drought, loss of livestock, and impoverishment. Before World War II hardly any people left Ugogo for wage labor; by 1955 20 per cent of the population was estimated to be absent at any particular time, with the proportion rising sharply during years of drought. Today, local stereotypes depict the Wagogo as beggars and casual laborers throughout Tanzania. The transitional period between 1942 and 1955 was marked by four major famines in which thousands of people died of malnutrition and associated diseases. These famines also marked a dramatic change in the distribution of livestock ownership as wealthy cattle owners no longer used livestock to control the labor of food deficit households and individuals found themselves forced into migrant labor. Colonial policy during and after the war helped precipitate these changes through labor conscription and the demand for labor from the Groundnut Scheme in the Kongwa area of the region.

Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life-Stories from East/Central Africa

General Introduction - PART I: WOMEN IN PERIL - Prelude to p Texts & Contexts - Grandmother Narwimba - Msatulwa M wachitete - Chisi-Ndjurisiye-Sichyajunga - Mama Meli - PAR T II: HISTORY AT THE TURN - Justice, WOmen, and the Social Order - Bwanikwa - Tatu Mulondeyelwa Recollected - Biblio graphy