| Freedom Railway
The unexpected successes of a Cold War
development project Jamie
Monson
8 When the local train pulls into Makambako station on
Tanzania’s TAZARA railway, porters scramble to load the heavy
bags of maize and baskets of vegetables stacked high on the platform.
The noise grows as traders shout and quarrel over the limited
space in the baggage wagons, which, like the passenger compartments,
seem always to be filled to capacity on these “ordinary trains”
running between Dar es Salaam and Mbeya, challenging the railway
authorities to keep order both at stations and at small stops
along the route. Passengers haggle with traders over prices through
the windows of the train, buying sacks of highland potatoes, onions,
and cabbages. Overstuffed gunnysacks are squeezed through windows,
and cash hurriedly changes hands as traders rush to unload their
goods before the train leaves the station. Children pace up and
down the platform selling roasted peanuts, fried snacks, and baskets
of sweet bananas.
At each station along
the way, this scene is repeated: the arrival of the ordinary train
transforms the railway platform into a thriving marketplace. The
planners of TAZARA were not expecting any such transformation when
they initiated the project in the late 1960s. They imagined a grand
national railway owned by the state that would be used for
large-scale regional shipments of copper and other goods from
Zambia—a project that would rival Egypt’s recently completed,
Soviet-funded Aswan Dam. Their primary goal was not to promote rural
economic development or improve the lives of rural producers by
connecting local markets. But that has been TAZARA’s real
impact. This is easy to miss.
Conventional assessments of TAZARA,
which rely on large-scale, international and transregional indicators
rather than small-scale, everyday traffic in goods and people, are
typically unfavorable. But local traders, farmers, and workers use
the railway in many ways to improve their lives, and an analysis of
these railway-platform markets suggests that the standard assessments
overlook something real and important. This is what I learned from
studying TAZARA with a team of researchers from 1998 to 2003. We
collected passenger-parcel receipts, interviewed passengers, and
observed daily life in the railway corridor. We found that TAZARA has
been an important resource for the development of a thriving
entrepreneurial economy along the route from Kilsoa to Mbeya, in
southern Tanzania. Today TAZARA connects local communities and
provides farmers with the physical, social, and economic mobility
they need to contend with rural Africa’s unpredictable economic
conditions. And its successes—though unanticipated and hard to
measure with any precision—may suggest some important lessons
for economic development elsewhere. * * * On an August afternoon
in 1969, the Chinese ocean liner Yao Ha steamed into the Tanzanian
harbor of Dar es Salaam. As Chinese military music blared from
loudspeakers, some 1,000 Chinese railway technicians disembarked, all
wearing identical gray cotton suits and balancing small blue
suitcases on their shoulders. Crowds of curious onlookers gathered,
some speculating that the strangers were soldiers or prisoners
sentenced to hard labor. After spending the night in camp at Kurasini
harbor, the workers were corralled onto the backs of large trucks and
transported south into Tanzania’s interior. There they would begin
construction on China’s largest development project in
Africa. Over the next five
years, 20,000 to 30,000 more
Chinese railway technicians would arrive in Dar es Salaam to
supervise and assist with TAZARA. They would spend months in remote
areas of the interior, blasting tunnels, building bridges, and laying
the track that would stretch across southern Tanzania to the Zambian
copper belt. Chinese support of TAZARA was essential. Tanzania was
then—as it is today—one of the world’s poorest countries. (In
an economy heavily dependent on agriculture, only four percent of the
land is suitable for farming.) The Chinese advisers and engineers
would eventually be joined by more than 40,000 Tanzanian and Zambian
workers, who were also training to become TAZARA’s future
technicians. The potential long-term economic impact was
enormous. During
TAZARA’s construction, Western
politicians and analysts criticized the project as politically
motivated, and most expected failure. Tanzania and Zambia were newly
independent, and Presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Kenneth
Kaunda of Zambia proposed a railway that would link the Zambian
copper belt to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam, thus ending
Zambia’s dependency on the colonial rail routes that passed through
settler-ruled Rhodesia. Nyerere and Kaunda first approached Western
donors and multilateral agencies for support in TAZARA’s
construction. But one donor after another—including the United
States, Great Britain, Japan, the World Bank, and the United
Nations—turned them down, citing negative evaluations by
development economists. The Soviet Union was also uninterested, and
the Chinese seized the opportunity. Throughout the 1960s,
China had been actively supporting African liberation movements and
claiming to be the only world power truly in solidarity with those in
the Third World who were fighting against colonialism. At the time of
TAZARA’s completion in 1975, a North China News Agency broadcast
criticized the Soviet Union for claiming to be socialist and
revolutionary when it was in reality imperialist and European and
criticized the United States for “[spreading] fallacies that ‘it
is too costly and is not worth the while to build railways in
Africa,’ and that ‘Africans are too backward to master
technology.’ ” The broadcast continued, “But these lies,
slanders and maneuvers of the enemy were laid bare by the African
people with deeds.” TAZARA promised to raise China’s profile in
African development, and the project’s success would gain China
recognition as a superpower. China also sought to reward Tanzania for
its leadership in the international movement for non-alignment and
for supporting China in international affairs, particularly at the
United Nations. After China
agreed in 1969 to fund the $400
million project with a 30-year interest-free loan, surveying and
construction began. When the project was completed in 1975, two years
ahead of schedule, Chinese, Tanzanian, and Zambian leaders celebrated
TAZARA as an example of what could be accomplished through
international solidarity and hard work. Less enthusiastic observers
deridingly called TAZARA not the Freedom Railway but the “bamboo
railway”; roads, not rails, were the keys to transportation
infrastructure and rural economic development in post-colonial
Africa, Western economists argued. The TAZARA project was sure to
quickly become irrelevant. The critics had reason to doubt
the project. TAZARA was, as they said, of political and strategic
value to the Chinese, who did not make any direct economic gains from
the railway’s construction. Moreover, the railway suffered a series
of setbacks during its first decade of operation, many of them
technological failures. The politics of the railway project were
behind at least some of these problems: in their haste to build the
railway ahead of schedule and to show the world what they could
accomplish, the Chinese did not achieve their goal of training and
supervising enough African technicians to take over the management of
TAZARA after their departure. Indeed, the railway authority continues
to rely on a team of Chinese experts. The railway was
plagued early on by frequent landslides and washouts, especially
during the severe rainy season of 1979. Repairs were made relatively
quickly with Chinese assistance. Other problems were more
intractable. The Chinese-built engines and wagons were continually
breaking down, and they languished in workshops rather than being
repaired and sent back out on the track. The diesel hydraulic
locomotives first sent by China were ill-suited to the task of
hauling heavy loads up the steep escarpment between Mlimba and
Makambako. Transshipment and offloading times were slow at Kidatu in
Tanzania and Kapiri Moshi in Zambia; there were inefficiencies and
corruption at the port of Dar es Salaam; and there were seasonal
bottlenecks all along the line when maize and fertilizer were shipped
in large quantities during planting and harvest times. By the end of
1978, as many as half of the railway’s locomotives were stranded in
workshops. In the early
1980s, the railway’s performance
looked bleak indeed. Two million tons of cargo were meant to have
been shipped daily on the railway, but the actual rate was only
865,000 tons a day. Passenger traffic filled only two trains per week
rather than the projected six. Then, in the mid-1980s, two important
events took place that would change TAZARA’s performance, at least
for a time. The first was a decision by the Tanzanian government to
liberalize the economy, which resulted in a first-time agreement with
the International Monetary Fund in 1986. The second event was a
gathering of international donors in Arusha in 1985, where an aid
package for TAZARA’s recovery was adopted, funded by seven European
countries. China also gave additional aid to TAZARA at this
time. Between 1987 and 1993
the TAZARA recovery package
would provide around $150 million for the rehabilitation of
everything from the track to the wagon fleet. Passenger-train
performance began to climb, increasing steadily into the 1990s.
Passenger traffic along the length of the line, which had lingered
below 500,000 in the early 1980s, reached 988,000 by 1990.
Local-goods traffic in Tanzania also rose almost 50 percent between
1985 and 1988, according to TAZARA reports. In conjunction with the
improvement of TAZARA’s services, the changes in economic policy
stimulated new patterns of rural settlement and exchange. When the
railway was completed in the mid-1970s, rural residents of the TAZARA
corridor (as elsewhere in Tanzania) were resettled into centralized
“ujamaa” villages. Here agricultural marketing was organized
through village cooperatives and, later, government-controlled
marketing boards. The mid-1980s liberalization of Tanzania’s
economy reached the agricultural sector in 1991. As markets for
agricultural products were opened up, grain and other farm produce
that had formerly been sold to government cooperatives could now be
exchanged in local and regional markets. This in turn provided new
opportunities for small-scale traders to transport these products
using TAZARA. But at the same time, employment and wages in other
parts of the Tanzanian economy were falling. As a result, more and
more people were relying on informal trade to make a living, again
using TAZARA to transport themselves and their goods. In the
highland maize-growing areas surrounding the TAZARA corridor,
liberalization was having a different kind of impact on rural
livelihoods. Land shortages in Iringa and Njombe had already pushed
many families onto farms that were only marginally productive. As
rising prices pushed fertilizers and other supplies out of their
reach, these farmers opted out of the highland maize economy and used
TAZARA to migrate into the railway corridor. In the fertile soils of
the Kilombero valley they could grow not only maize but rice and
other food crops without significant capital investment. As Stefano
Ponte has recently shown, farmers were making shifts throughout
Tanzania in the post-liberalization economy from “slow” crops and
crops requiring heavy investment to “fast” crops that move
quickly from field to market. This was the case along TAZARA, where
farmers moved from maize and other low-price, high-input crops to
“fast” crops like market vegetables and low-investment crops like
wetland rice. While the
improvements in TAZARA’s
performance were not long-lasting (in 2001 Tanzania’s
transportation minister acknowledged that TAZARA was suffering once
again from unsatisfactory traffic, precarious finances, and declining
customer confidence), nevertheless by the late 1990s the railway had
become an important resource for traders, farmers, fishermen, and
others who were now living in the railway corridor. In particular the
section of the TAZARA railway between the towns of Mbeya and Kidatu
became an attractive destination for migrants, both those from urban
areas and those from the surrounding highlands, where rural economic
conditions had faltered. TAZARA officials now call this section that
passes through the Kilombero valley the “passenger
belt.” * * * Farmers and traders in East Africa must contend
with economic conditions that are continually shifting in response to
government policies, international markets, climate change, and other
factors that are largely out of their control. To survive and succeed
in this context of uncertainty, rural people must have the
flexibility to draw on several sources of revenue; as with investment
portfolios, diversification insures against risk. Farmers may
diversify by changing the crops they grow, the kinds of products they
trade, or the places they live. For these shifts to be effective,
rural producers need timely and accurate information about markets
and harvests so they can make the best choices. The railway
has made it possible for traders to switch among products by linking
different types of settlements, markets, and production zones.
Between Kidatu and Makambako the train passes through a succession of
distinct ecosystems that differ according to altitude, soil type,
water availability, and other variables. For example, rice is grown
on a large scale in the low-lying floodplain of the Kilombero river
valley, and fish are harvested from the Kilombero River and its
numerous tributaries. In the highlands to the west, on the other
hand, the main agricultural products are maize, millet (valued for
brewing local beer), dried beans, potatoes, and a variety of
cool-climate vegetables including onions and cabbages. Makambako,
located in the western highlands, exports maize, millet, beans, and
vegetables to stations at lower altitudes. The well-populated
floodplain settlement of Ifakara receives many of these shipments,
sending back sacks of rice and dried fish (along with the empty
baskets or “cages” that are used to transport vegetables) to
Makambako. Meanwhile, Ifakara traders are shipping large quantities
of rice to Dar es Salaam, the main urban market for the valley’s
rice harvest. The smaller settlements between the highlands and the
floodplain each have their own distinctive product specializations.
Mlimba, the last stop in the valley before the steep escarpment
climbs up to the west, is known for sweet oranges that are grown in
the nearby foothills of Masagati. Further to the east, the stations
between Mngeta and Idete are known for prime cooking bananas, the
result of both ecological and ethno-cultural
circumstances. Peddlers
hawking consumer items such as
plastic buckets, used clothing, and aluminum cooking pots frequent
the smallest stations and most isolated villages. They acquire their
goods on consignment from wholesale merchants in the larger towns,
then carry them on the train into the countryside. Here the peddlers
bicycle from settlement to settlement, their goods dangling from the
back of their bicycles to attract attention. Sometimes they set up
makeshift stalls or lay out gunnysacks on the ground adjacent to
village markets. When they have sold enough to repay the wholesaler
and keep something for themselves, they take the train back to
town. These itinerant traders
are known in Tanzania as wamachinga,
and they are found in both rural and urban settings. Each time a
small-scale trader boards the TAZARA railway with a “parcel,” it
is stored in a compartment and a receipt is generated that records
the name of the passenger (and frequently that person’s sex), the
station of origin, and the passenger’s destination. The parcel
receipt also lists the goods that are being carried, their quantity
(in numbers of bags, for example), and their weight in kilograms. The
original copy of this receipt is given to the passenger so the goods
can be retrieved. The carbon copies left at stations of origin paint
a comprehensive picture of small-scale trade along the railway.
Because the records are not preserved in a consistent way from
station to station, there are gaps in the data for some stations and
some months. Nevertheless, it has been possible to gain a sense of
the volume and pattern of small-scale trade in the TAZARA
corridor. We collected parcel
receipts from five stations along the
TAZARA corridor. The receipts show that consumer goods and bicycles
are transported regularly from the large market towns of Mang’ula,
Ifakara, and Makambako out to the smaller villages. Aboard the train,
a young man named Anua Mtengela explained to us how he sells his
goods near the small halt station of Ikule. Starting from the
station, Anua rides his bicycle up the road to a training camp
operated by the national army. There is a settled population at the
camp living a considerable distance from town, thus providing Anua
with a ready market. On Sundays he rides in the opposite direction to
the town of Mngeta, where there is an active market. “The good
place to sell [on Sundays] right now is at Mngeta,” he said. “At
Mngeta there is a place near the market where many people bring their
goods and spread them out along the ground, selling to people who are
coming out of church, going to town.” On Mondays he and his fellow
traders stay on in Mngeta, selling in the neighborhoods. Even in
towns where there are shops and markets, Anua reports, the wamachinga
get many customers because they can offer cheaper prices than
shopkeepers. Anua has been
successful enough to accumulate a
small profit over time, which he has invested in rice farming. He
recently bought a small plot of land from a local village; he now
farms two acres of grain and has built himself a small house. His
goal is eventually to become settled here, to marry and to raise a
family. He will probably continue both the farming and the
small-scale trading as a hedge against adversity. The
railway has been an important resource for Anua Mtengela, helping him
to accumulate a small amount of savings as an itinerant trader that
he then invested in a farm plot. TAZARA provides the connection that
links Anua’s farm with the different markets where he does
business. Several other traders described following a similar
strategy of combining farming and trading in the TAZARA corridor.
They referred to farming as their economic foundation, or msingi,
illustrating their sense that agriculture—and ownership of a plot
of land—is a source of security in an uncertain economic
world. In recent years wage
workers living along the TAZARA route
have also sought to move into farming, not only after retirement but
also during their years of employment. One of the largest employers
in the railway corridor is the Kilombero Sugar Company, a large-scale
enterprise built in the 1960s that has extensive sugar-cane
plantations, several outgrower schemes, and a large processing
factory. For many decades the Kilombero Sugar Company was run as a
government enterprise, with guaranteed worker protections and other
benefits. Since liberalization, however, the company has been taken
over by private investors who have reduced the size of the labor
force as well as the short- and long-term security of those who
remain employed. Some 3,000 of the company’s workers were laid off
following the plant’s acquisition by South African investors and a
bitter labor dispute in June 2000. In response to these layoffs and
other changes in worker security, both former and current workers are
moving into the farming sector. Unfortunately, though, much of the
arable land around the company is already taken up by company cane plantations
and sugar-cane outgrower schemes. Newcomers must therefore acquire
land for farming some distance away, and here again TAZARA plays an
important role. Workers maintain their residences at or near the
Kilombero Sugar Company (depending on their status), while using the
railway to travel to their more distant farm plots. Frequently
families are divided during the planting and harvesting seasons, as
some members remain close to the factory while others live some
distance away on the farm. The rural producers who have
farmed for years as outgrowers for the Kilombero Sugar Company have
also used the railway to travel to outlying farm plots since the
1980s. The land these outgrowers cultivate near the company is
planted almost entirely with sugar cane, so most families must plant
supplemental rice and maize farms in other parts of the railway
corridor. The grain they harvest there provides them with food for
subsistence and also for accumulation, forming an important
supplement to the income they earn by selling cane under contract to
the company. Thus, by the
late 1990s, casual and temporary workers,
laid-off workers, and sugar-cane outgrowers all viewed agriculture as
an important form of livelihood security. As available land around
the sugar company dwindled, these farmers used TAZARA to travel to
plots in other parts of the Kilombero valley where fertile land was
still available. Some of these farms were quite a long way from the
sugar company—as far away as Chita and Mlimba—causing families to
separate on a seasonal basis. TAZARA provided an important resource
for these farming families, as a link between farm and
workplace. TAZARA has also
linked cultural and linguistic
communities. When new migrants come into the railway corridor to
settle, they seek out places that feel like home—places where they
can grow their favorite staple foods in a landscape that is familiar.
As new settlements grow up they develop into linguistic and cultural
communities that in turn attract new migrants and commerce.
Nyakyusa-speaking families from the highlands of Mbeya, for example,
have settled in large numbers around Mngeta and Mbingu, where they
cultivate bananas and maize in the foothills and fish in the Kihansi
river. Travelers who pass through this area on the train know that it
is the best place to purchase cooking bananas, which are sold at the
lively banana market at the stations. Suleiman Nyumile, a trader,
says he prefers to trade at Mngeta because “the people here who are
good farmers are not local people—they are from the southern
highlands, so it makes it very easy for me to do business because we
understand one another’s language. They come from Mbeya and Iringa.
It is easier to do business with people who speak the same language.
It makes me feel like a local person, not like a
stranger.” For younger
or first-time traders, these
settlements that retain a connection to home are places where they
may find a relative or other mentor who can help them to get started
with connections in the marketplace or even some limited capital.
Individuals of any age and either sex who find themselves far from
home may rely heavily on members of an extended family or cultural
community for assistance. A middle-aged man named Lazaro Mbilinyi,
for example, used TAZARA to help him regain his footing after his
small tailor shop in Iringa was looted and all his possessions
stolen. Lazaro used the railway to visit a friend living in Ifakara,
who helped him to start a new life as a market trader. Once
Lazaro’s personal life and economic circumstances were stabilized,
relatives began to send their children to stay with him when they
found themselves in difficult circumstances. The train made it
possible for many relatives to send their children to stay with
Lazaro, whose household is now swollen with dependent nieces and
nephews. The railway also
makes it possible for family
members to return to their homes of origin when they are needed
during an illness or for a funeral, wedding, or other occasion. The
railway has been especially important for single women, who are
frequently expected to attend these types of events and fulfill other
family obligations. A young mother in the Mngeta market, for example,
uses TAZARA to return to her extended family at Mbeya when there are
family obligations there. She follows in the footsteps of her own
mother, who was also a vegetable trader in the Mngeta marketplace as
a young single mother a generation before her. In Ifakara, a market
trader who sells beans and groundnuts, uses TAZARA to visit her
in-laws back in Mbeya. She has been raising her children alone since
the death of her husband several years ago but prefers to live in
Ifakara and support herself rather than live as a dependent in the
home of her husband’s parents. She is able to fill her
responsibilities to visit them by using TAZARA, often combining a
business trip with a family visit while living an independent life in
Ifakara. The railway is the
connective tissue of this rural
world. It makes socio-cultural connections possible as well as
economic ones. Indeed, many economic decisions and circumstances in
rural Tanzania are linked to family, ethnicity, and origins. In the
TAZARA corridor, a trader like Suleiman Nyumile can feel like a local
rather than a stranger in Mngeta, even while he is several miles from
his home in the Nyakyusa-speaking heartland around
Mbeya. * * * National governments generally evaluate railroads and
other large-scale projects in terms of their capacity to generate
revenue or at least pay for themselves. They don’t normally look at
the societal effects on a local level, at the way people have used
the resource and lobbied to make it meet their own needs. In the case
of TAZARA, much more extensive study at the local level is needed.
The changes it brought to the way of life in the railway corridor
suggest a real benefit for micro-scale economic
diversification. But whether
this kind of small-scale
diversity can eventually lead to the stabilization of an entire
national economy—Tanzania’s or that of other African nations in
the region—remains to be seen. Moreover, since the late 1990s
TAZARA’s performance has once again become unreliable. There has
been ongoing speculation about the future privatization of the
railway, and a climate of uncertainty and allegations of corruption
have clouded the railway’s future. For the rural people who live in
the TAZARA corridor, performance problems are felt most often as a
reduction of services for passengers and small-scale traders,
particularly for the ordinary train and for the small shuttle train,
or kipisi, that runs several times a week in the passenger belt.
Community leaders have brought complaints to their district officials
and their parliamentary representatives, but these have not so far
resulted in improved service. The environmental impact of
expanding settlement in the TAZARA corridor is also a growing cause
for concern. In the most densely settled sections of the region
between the Udzungwa Mountains National Park and the Selous Game
Reserve, there is little land left for cultivation. Several types of
vegetation have been drastically reduced in this area, and one
grassland ecotype has all but disappeared. As farmers use the railway
to gain access to the remaining areas of productive land in the
Kilombero valley, environmental resources will continue to be
affected. For rural development to be productive and sustainable in
the long term, some kind of land-use planning will be needed. Thus
while the TAZARA railway may look like a development success story in
the short term, it is unclear what the longer-term prospects may be
in terms of sustainability, either for the services of the railway or
for the natural environment.
For TAZARA to continue to be a
resource for sustainable development at the local
level, and for
this development to include the long-term
accumulation and livelihood
security that comes with farming and agriculture, two kinds of
interventions are necessary. The first would be an
effort to further
document and support the services the railway provides at the
local level, in particular the ordinary train and the
Kipisi shuttle
train; this closer accounting is bound to reveal benefits (and
perhaps costs) that the government does not now see. The second
would be a comprehensive land-use plan for the railway corridor
that would allow for controlled rural settlement and
cultivation
while at the same time protecting the natural resources of the
Kilombero valley and its surrounding foothills. With
interventions
on these two fronts, the TAZARA railway could well
become a stable
resource for the people living along the railway
corridor, enhancing
their physical, economic, and cultural mobility in a
world whose
only certainty is its continuing uncertainty.<
Jamie Monson is
an associate professor of African history at Carleton College
and a 2004-2005 fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin. She
was a 2001 Carnegie Scholar.
Originally published in the December
2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review |
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