Issue

Vol. 13 No. 1 (2024)

The Indigenization of Tobacco Farming and Its Challenges in Iringa District: 1960s–1980s

https://doi.org/10.56279.13.1.3
Emmanuel John Kihongo
Dar es Salaam University Education of Education(DUCE)

Corresponding Author(s) : Emmanuel John Kihongo

kihongoe3@gmail.com

Journal of Humanities & Social Science (JHSS), Vol. 13 No. 1 (2024)

Abstract

This paper is about the politics of indigenizing tobacco farming and the challenges
associated with it during the post-colonial era. It examines the initiatives of
government in facilitating the process, and how the bodies entrusted to ensure its
implementation failed to achieve the intended goal. Tobacco farming in Africa and
Tanzania has a complex history. Since this crop is essentially labour- and capital-
intensive, its beginning in colonial Tanganyika, and Iringa in particular, was dominated
by settler farmers. The paper progressively narrates this history, especially on how it
became a popular crop among indigenous smallholders in Iringa from 1961. It traces
the practice during the colonial time when policies allowed only Greek settlers in
Iringa to be involved in tobacco farming, while the indigenous were prohibited from
growing it on some grounds, including the fear of competition. The article describes
the transformation: how Africans indigenized the crop, while also battling the
turbulence of prices, labour issues and changing times in colonial and post-colonial
Tanganyika. Based on archival, oral accounts, and documentary sources the paper
unravels the institutions that supported the production and marketing of tobacco in
Iringa. By engaging the question of the indigenization of tobacco in Iringa, it
interrogates the nexus between the processes of Africanizing tobacco growing within
the complex capitalist economy of pricing and national economic priorities. The paper
concludes by asserting that although the government supported and financed
indigenous smallholders in Iringa in tobacco farming, the bodies entrusted to foresee
its operation failed to fulfil the goal as anticipated by farmers.

Keywords

tobacco, Greek settler farmers, indigenous smallholders, indigenize, Iringa district.
The Indigenization of Tobacco Farming and Its Challenges in Iringa District: 1960s–1980s. (2024). Journal of Humanities & Social Science (JHSS), 13(1). https://doi.org/10.56279.13.1.3
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The Indigenization of Tobacco Farming and Its Challenges in Iringa District: 1960s–1980s. (2024). Journal of Humanities & Social Science (JHSS), 13(1). https://doi.org/10.56279.13.1.3
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