Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:55:27.787Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘We are not farmers’: Dilemmas and prospects of residential suburban cultivators in contemporary Dar es Salaam, Tanzania*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Geoffrey Ross Owens
Geoffrey Ross Owens*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Wright State University, 3640 Colonel Glenn Highway, Dayton OH 45435, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Today, a majority of citizens of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, participate in suburban and exurban growth and development much like urbanites throughout the world. Unlike the garden suburbs of North America or Europe, Dar es Salaam's suburban residents often engage in multiple income-generating activities, the most common and conspicuous of which are cultivation and animal husbandry. The presence of urban farming has suggested that Dar es Salaam's residents represent peasants incrementally transitioning to urban life. This article however, contends that everything from the varieties of cultivation, access to land and water, to the definition of what it means to be a farmer is shaped by decentralised private interests controlling access to land and resources in suburban neighbourhoods. The varieties of cultivation and animal husbandry instead reflect socioeconomic class distinctions emerging from a new suburban political economy, enabling a clearer perspective on the prospects of cultivators as these suburban districts transform.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 443 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology, and the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania for their kind permission and assistance with my research in 1998, 1999 and 2010. Research was made possible through a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Post-Ph.D. Research Grant. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Mary Kilawe, undergraduate research assistant at the University of Dar es Salaam, Drs Chigon Kim and Marlese Durr, and the anonymous reviewers.

References

REFERENCES

Bowie, K. 1992. ‘Unravelling the myth of the subsistence economy: textile production in the nineteenth-century Northern Thailand’, Journal of Asian Studies 51, 4: 797–823.Google Scholar
Briggs, J. & Mwafupe, D.. 2000. ‘Peri-urban development in an era of structural adjustment in Africa: the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’, Urban Studies 37, 4: 797–809.Google Scholar
Bryceson, D. 1987. ‘A century of food supply in Dar es Salaam’, in Guyer, J., ed. Feeding African Cities: studies in regional social history. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 154–202.Google Scholar
Drechsel, P. & Dongus, S.. 2009. ‘Dynamics and sustainability of urban agriculture: examples from Sub-Saharan Africa’, Sustainability Science 5, 1: 69–78.Google Scholar
Fishman, R. 1987. Bourgeois Utopias: the rise and fall of suburbia. New York, NY: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Halloran, A. & Magid, J.. 2013. ‘Planning the unplanned: incorporating agriculture as an urban land use into the Dar es Salaam Master Plan and beyond’, Environment and Urbanization 25, 2: 541–58.Google Scholar
Jacobi, P., Amend, J. & Kiango, S.. 2000. ‘Urban agriculture in Dar es Salaam: providing an indispensable part of the diet’, in Bakker, N., Dubbeling, M., Gundel, S., Sabel-Koschella, U. & de Zeeuw, H., eds. Growing Cities, Growing Food: urban agriculture on policy agenda. Feldafing: Food and Agriculture Development Centre, 257–83.Google Scholar
Jamal, V. & Weeks, J.. 1988. ‘The vanishing rural-urban gap in Sub-Saharan Africa’, International Labour Review, 127, 3: 271–92.Google Scholar
James, R.W. 1971. Land Tenure and Policy in Tanzania. Dar es Salaam: East African Literature Bureau.Google Scholar
Kombe, W. 2010. ‘Land acquisition for public use: emerging conflicts and their socio-political implications’, International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development 2, 1–2: 45–63.Google Scholar
Lewinson, A. 2007. ‘Viewing postcolonial Dar es Salaam, Tanzania through civic spaces: a question of class’, African Identities 5, 5: 199–215.Google Scholar
Mabin, A. 2013. ‘Suburbanisms in Africa?’, in Keil, R., ed. Suburban Constellations: governance, land and infrastructure in the 21st century. Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 154–60.Google Scholar
McLees, L. 2011. ‘Access to land for urban farming in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: histories, benefits and insecure tenure’, Journal of Modern African Studies 49, 4: 601–24.Google Scholar
Mlozi, M. 1997. ‘Impacts of urban agriculture in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’, The Environmentalist, 17: 115–24.Google Scholar
Mortimore, M.J. 1975. ‘Peri urban pressures’, in Moss, R.P. & Rathbone, J.A.R., eds. The Populations Factor in African Studies. London: University of London Press, 188–97.Google Scholar
Nkwambe, M. & Totolo, O.. 2005. ‘Customary land tenure saves the best arable agricultural land in the peri-urban zones of an African city: Gaborone, Botswana’, Applied Geography 25, 1: 29–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oliver, J.E. 2001. Democracy in Suburbia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Owens, G. 2010. ‘Post-colonial migration: virtual culture, urban farming and new peri-urban growth in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 1975–2000’, Africa 80, 2: 249–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Owens, G. 2014. ‘From collective villages to private ownership: Ujamaa, Tamaa, and the postsocialist transformation of Dar es Salaam's peri-urban fringe 1970–1990’, Journal of Anthropological Research 70, 2: 207–31.Google Scholar
Peil, M. 1981. Cities and Suburbs: urban life in West Africa. New York, NY: African Publishing.Google Scholar
Sawio, C. 1994. ‘Who are the farmers of Dar es Salaam?’, in Egziabher, A., Lee-Smith, D., Maxwell, D., Memon, P., Mougeot, L. & Sawio, C., eds. Cities Feeding People: an examination of urban agriculture in East Africa. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 25–46.Google Scholar
Schmidt, S. 2012. ‘Getting the policy right: urban agriculture in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’, International Development Planning Review 34, 2: 129–45.Google Scholar
Shivji, I. 1981. Not Yet Democracy: reforming land tenure in Tanzania. Dar es Salaam International Institute for Environment and Development/HAKIARDHI.Google Scholar
Simon, D., McGregor, D. & Nsiah-Gyabaah, K.. 2004. ‘The changing urban-rural interface of African cities: definitional issues and an application to Kumasi, Ghana’, Environment and Urbanization 16, 2: 235–47.Google Scholar
Southall, A. and Gutkind, P.. 1957. Townsmen in the Making: Kampala and its suburbs. Kampala: East African Institute of Social Research.Google Scholar
Spear, T. 1989. ‘Return to the Land’, Africa Report 34, 2: 45–7.Google Scholar
Tanzania, United Republic of. 1999. The Land Act no. 4 of 1999. <http://faolex.fao.org/docs/pdf/tan23795.pdf> accessed 26.3.2016.+accessed+26.3.2016.>Google Scholar
Tanzania, United Republic of. 2004. 2002 Population and Housing Census, Vol. IV, Part 37 (district profile: Kinondoni). Dar es Salaam: National Bureau of Statistics.Google Scholar
Tripp, A. 1997. Changing the Rules: the politics of liberalization and the urban informal economy in Tanzania. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
UNESCO. 2010. Tanzania: country report on the Millennium Development Goals 2010. <http://planipolis.iiep.unesco.org/upload/Tanzania%20UR/Tanzania_MDG_Country_Report_2010.pdf>, accessed 28.1.2014.,+accessed+28.1.2014.>Google Scholar
World Bank. 2013. Urban Agriculture: findings from four city case studies. Washington, DC: World Bank Urban Development and Resilience Unit. <http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/07/18165126/urban-agriculture-findings-four-city-case-studies>, accessed 31.3.2016.,+accessed+31.3.2016.>Google Scholar