paper prepared for a workshop on Equalities and Inequalities in Tanzania: Past and Present, Darwin

College, University of Cambridge, 9 June 2006

The production of knowledge and reproduction of ignorance

about Usangu, Mbarali District, Tanzania
Martin Walsh
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge

Development discourse and academic discourse

In the introduction to my doctoral dissertation (1984: 2-3), I divided the literature on

the political economy of Usangu in (what was then) Mbeya District into two broad
categories: “historical” and “development-oriented”. Under the latter heading I listed
a small number of socio-economic studies based on academic and applied research
that had been undertaken in the 1970s (Chale 1973; Jespersen 1973; Mwakipesile
1976; Pipping 1976; Hazlewood & Livingstone 1978a; 1982b). Elsewhere in the
thesis I referred to a couple of other works that I might have added to this list,
including a consultancy report written by my research supervisor, Ray Abrahams
(1979). Indeed it was his own experience there that had led him to recommend
Usangu to me as a potentially interesting place for intensive anthropological research.

A similar list today would run to more items than could be reasonably included in the
bibliography of a paper like this. In the quarter of a century since I began fieldwork
in 1980 an ever-increasing number of theses, papers, reports, and other forms of
communication about the development of Usangu have been produced by academics,
development consultants, journalists and others. The greater part of this production of
knowledge about Usangu has taken place in the context of or as a consequence of
development programmes and projects. This is not a phenomenon unique to Usangu:
many other places in Tanzania and the wider ‘developing’ world have been the
subject of similar explosions of information associated with the growth of the
development industry and its various enterprises, including those that feed on modern
varieties of environmentalism.

Critical accounts of development discourse suggest that it constructs its own object,
distorting social realities and misrepresenting equalities and inequalities in the process
(e.g. Apthorpe 1985; Ferguson 1990: 25-73; Escobar 1995: 106-153; Mosse 2003).
This argument is generally made with reference to the policy and other documents
generated by development agencies, including the reports, reviews and memos that
are churned out by consultants working in the field (Stirrat 2000: 41-43), and which
sometimes seem to refer more to each other than they do to the real world (Hobart
1995; Quarles van Ufford et al. 2003: 8; Giri & Quarles van Ufford 2003: 270).
Academic discourse about development is usually excluded from critical analysis of
this kind, except when pre-Foucauldian approaches are being criticised (e.g. Escobar
1991). Ferguson, for example, makes this exclusion explicit, though he recognises that
academic writing suffers from “its own ideological and institutional constraints”
(1990: 29).

1
As a contributor to both academic and development discourse about Usangu, I find it
both impossible and undesirable to maintain a strict separation between the two,
though I can identify with Stirrat’s self-description as “a somewhat schizophrenic
development consultant” (1993: 294). The biographies and bibliographies of other
writers about Usangu also suggest that the two domains are intimately connected, and
that the production of knowledge and ignorance about equalities and inequalities is
common to both. In the following pages I will outline some of the ways in which this
discursive relationship has developed, and discuss what I think some of its
consequences are. I make no excuse for basing part of this on my own experiences
and prejudices, but offer these as a contribution to the ethnography of development
and its wider social and economic contexts.

Debating differentiation and planning development

The socialist “experiment” in Tanzania fostered a sizeable literature about ujamaa,

some of it adulatory and some critical (Abrahams 1985: 2). The University of Dar es
Salaam was at the cutting edge of radical debate about political economy and it was
difficult to do academic research in Tanzania at this time without engaging at some
level with the neo-Marxist theorising that seemed to permeate “The Hill” or campus
in Dar. I can still hear the excited voices of colleagues - a sociologist and an
anthropologist - arguing at what I thought was unreasonable length about the nature of
the Russian (not Tanzanian) “kulaks”. Class formation was, of course, a hot topic at
the time (e.g. Tandon 1982), and uncovering social and economic differentiation a
staple of the critical literature about ujamaa (Caplan 1992: 104).

The polyethnic farming villages of Usangu were ripe for studies of the kind that
Isimani Division in Iringa District was famous for (Feldman 1973; 1974; 1975; 1983;
Awiti 1975a; 1975b; Nindi 1988). Indeed there were a number of similarities
between Usangu and Isimani, not least the fact that both had significant populations of
immigrant farmers who had come to take advantage of the relative abundance of
cultivable land. In some ways Usangu presented an even more interesting case
because of its national importance as a rice-growing area. The potential there for
large-scale irrigation had first been recognised by a close-knit community of Baluchi
traders in the 1930s, and then taken up by the British authorities in the 1950s (Walsh
1984: 59-62). The Baluchis of Usangu were much better candidates for the title of
incipient rural capitalists than the rich maize-farmers of Isimani, who by the mid-
1970s were in the process of being marginalised by a combination of villagisation and
declining soil fertility (Booth et al. 1993: 34).

Nonetheless, only one study in Usangu aspired to the kind of analysis that emerged
from work in Isimani, a student dissertation entitled Emergent large farmers and the
problems of implementation of Ujamaa Vijijini policy in Usangu (Chale 1973). This
focused on the position of Nyakyusa and other African farmers who had benefited
from the efforts of the party (TANU) and the co-operative movement to restrict
Baluchi control of agricultural trade and marketing, and it concluded that although
these successful farmers did not comprise a social class, they were blocking the
implementation of ujamaa. Although Chale and other researchers (e.g. Mwakipesile
1976; n.d.) drew attention to the role of the Baluchis in the local economy and

2
provided some basic information about this, they did not pursue this question much
further.

Looking back on the ujamaa years, it is easy to exaggerate the dominance of the
socialist and neo-Marxist modes of intellectual production. While this may have
applied to a lot of academic writing, especially work emanating from certain
university departments in Dar, it was not everywhere the case. Most of the studies of
Usangu that I mentioned in my first paragraph were written for or otherwise grounded
in development work, and for this and other reasons generally eschewed the
vocabulary that was used by radical political economists and critics of ujamaa.
Instead they were largely couched in the (seemingly) innocuous language of
development discourse that its critics now identify with the theory and ongoing
“project” of modernisation (cf. Banuri 1990).

The studies by Jespersen (1973) and Pipping (1976), for example, both stemmed from
Nordic assistance to the Ministry of Agriculture Research and Training Institute
(MARTI) in Mbeya. Jespersen’s farm management survey was undertaken for
MARTI, and Pipping’s survey of land holding developed out of earlier work for the
same project. In the process Pipping attempted to address issues raised in
contemporary debates about social and economic differentiation, but did so in terms
that sociologists working in the structural-functionalist tradition would be quite
comfortable with. Unfortunately his village comparison proved extremely
uninformative, but he published his survey results in the hope that students and future
researchers might find them useful (1976: 7-8, 97-101).

By far the most comprehensive and widely used study from this period was a three-
volume report on The development potential of the Usangu Plains of Tanzania
(Hazlewood and Livingstone 1978a). This was commissioned by the Commonwealth
Fund for Technical Co-operation (CFTC) following a request by the Tanzanian
government. The government had expressed “its interest in the development of
Usangu as a food-supply area for the urban population which would result from the
growth of Mbeya as an industrial centre, and as a contributor to filling the national
deficits in sugar and rice”. It had also indicated that “the development of Usangu
should be envisaged as an integrated rural development effort, so that the study would
need to produce what might be called an integrated sub-regional rural development
plan” (1978a: I, 1.2).

In the resulting report the authors divided Usangu into three main economic zones: “a
Northern Zone, occupying roughly half the total area, of sparse population and low
economic potential, a Central Grazing Zone around the Great Ruaha River [i.e. the
wetlands at the heart of Usangu], and a Cultivation Zone along the southern and
eastern edges of the area” (1978a: I:, 2.1). Their policy recommendations focused on
the need to increase both state-managed and smallholder rice production in the last
and most populous of these three zones; these included the proposal that further
immigration into this area should be actively facilitated in order to provide the labour
force required for the full exploitation of its irrigation potential (1978a: III, 3.9).

As for the rest of Usangu, and in particular the central zone, Hazlewood and
Livingstone suggested a series of measures designed to rationalise livestock
production as well as help impoverished cultivators in these areas. They were

3
particularly concerned by the influx of Sukuma and other pastoral and agropastoral
groups into Usangu, noting that dry season grazing resources were being put under
increasing pressure and that conflicts with settled cultivators were also on the increase
(1978a: I, 11.20-11.21). They recommended that further immigration should be
restricted, that this should be done with the help of the existing population, and that
the growing problem of herder-farmer conflict should be tackled without delay
(1978a: III, 3.18, 3.20).

The findings of the CFTC study were subsequently used as the basis for several
academic papers (Livingstone & Hazlewood 1978; Hazlewood & Livingstone 1978b;
1982a), and to illustrate a little-read technical study entitled Irrigation economics in
poor countries (Hazlewood & Livingstone 1982b). In their original report Hazlewood
and Livingstone (1978a: I, 2.1) traced recognition of the agricultural development
potential of Usangu back to an earlier study of the Rufiji Basin (of which Usangu is a
part) (FAO 1961). They might well have traced it back further. Like most other
researchers and consultants writing about the development of Usangu in the socialist
period they were working within a much older tradition.

Projects and the production of knowledge

In the years following Hazlewood and Livingstone’s work an increasing number of

technical reports were written about Usangu, many of them about the state and
smallholder irrigation schemes that were developed in the wake of their
recommendations. There was relatively little academic research, the most notable
exception being Charnley’s study of pastoral production and relations between
different livestock-keeping groups in the heart of Usangu (1994). In this section I
want to look at how considerably more knowledge has been produced in the past
decade, and at the role played by development projects in this process. I will also
offer some preliminary thoughts on the significance in this context of changing
practices in both the development industry and academia .

Let me begin with a brief account of my own part in these events. After more than a
decade working elsewhere in East Africa, I returned to Usangu in early 1997 in charge
of a project design mission for the British government’s Overseas Development
Administration (ODA). Our job was “to design a project for parallel-funding by ODA
within the framework of the Government of Tanzania / World Bank River Basin
Management and Smallholder Irrigation Improvement Project (RBMSIIP)” (Walsh et
al. 1997a: 12). RBMSIIP was about to start work in the Pangani and Rufiji River
Basins and ODA had provisionally agreed to fund a smaller but complementary
initiative in one or more of the sub-catchments of the Rufiji Basin.

Usangu was one of the areas under consideration and the one that we decided to focus
our attention on. The reason for this was that Usangu and its catchment had become
the site of increasingly serious conflicts over the use and management of natural
resources - of a kind and to a degree that the 1978 CFCT report had not anticipated.
Indeed the expansion of irrigated rice cultivation that Hazlewood & Livingstone had
recommended appeared to be the root cause of many of these problems. Since 1993
the Great Ruaha River downstream of Usangu had ceased flowing for varying periods
during each dry season, and had in effect become a seasonal river. The reduced flows
in the Great Ruaha were of growing concern to downstream users, in particular the

4
managers of Ruaha National Park (TANAPA, Tanzania National Parks), and the
managers of the hydroelectric schemes at Mtera and Kidatu (TANESCO, the
Tanzania Electric Supply Company). In 1994 water levels in Mtera Reservoir had
dropped to such a low level that TANESCO was forced to ration electricity supplies
to Dar, Zanzibar and other places on the national grid.

TANESCO and TANAPA in turn blamed upstream users for their problems, arguing
that immigrant livestock keepers in particular were responsible for the ecological
degradation of the Usangu wetland and so the seasonal desiccation of the Great
Ruaha. This was a view held by most interested parties. Researchers at the Institute of
Resource Assessment (IRA) in Dar provided unwitting support for this scapegoating
of the cattle herders in Usangu (Kikula et al. 1996: 11-13, 21-22). When we met with
the Mbeya Regional Commissioner, Basil Mramba, in February 1997, he was keen to
explain his proposals for the “Botswanisation” of livestock production in the region,
which included plans for destocking in Usangu, by force if necessary. These were far
stronger measures than those recommended in the 1978 CFTC report, a copy of which
was on his shelves and still being used as a baseline document (Walsh et al. 1997b:
90-99).

The project design that we drafted for ODA (soon to become DFID, the Department
for International Development) was intended to address the problems of resource
conflict in Usangu, including the obvious misconceptions that we identified during
our mission. Employing contemporary “devspeak” we called it SMUWC, Sustainable
Management of the Usangu Wetland and its Catchment (Walsh et al. 1997a), and
following further consultations a second draft of the project memorandum was
approved in February 1998 (GOT & DFID 1998). Whereas ODA had originally
proposed “detailed environmental, socio-economic and hydrological studies in the
Great Ruaha river basin” (Walsh et al. 1997a: 18), SMUWC was conceived as a
project that would actively engage with people and institutions in order “to promote
the development of participatory resource management strategies” in and around
Usangu (Walsh et al.1997b: 1).

As recent debates about the rhetoric of participation have made clear (Cooke &
Kothari 2001; Hickey & Mohan 2004), achieving this kind of result is easier said than
done. Unfortunately SMUWC was deflected from this lofty purpose before it had
even begun. The completed project memorandum was used as the basis for a
competitive tendering exercise conducted in the first half of 1998. Consultancy
companies were invited to bid for the management of SMUWC: four consortia led by
UK-based firms were short-listed and submitted detailed plans for project
implementation. In order to prepare these they had to conduct their own consultations
in Tanzania and write up comprehensive proposals for different aspects of project
management and operation. The final bid documents were similar in length to the
project memorandum that they used as a guide and modified for their own purposes.

In my view the results were disappointing: none of the bids had fully taken on board
our original intentions for SMUWC. The proposals looked too much like recipes for
orthodox technical interventions with the emphasis on formal research and the
provision of expert advice. This reflected the skills, capacities, and past experience of
the major companies involved, all of whom seem to have approached SWMUWC
with relatively prescriptive models of river basin planning and management in mind

5
(cf. Saha & Barrow 1981). Although DFID staff were in a position to reject all of the
bids or insist that one or more of them be modified, the strongest of the four proposals
was selected without further ado. That this had been done somewhat hastily became
evident when it proved necessary to reduce the initial project period from three to two
and a half years in order to accommodate the winning consortium’s inflated budget.

SMUWC started in Rujewa, headquarters of the new Mbarali District, in September

1998. Once the project was up and running it launched straight into a programme of
research “intended to investigate the causes of recent changes in water and other
natural resource availability in the project area” (SMUWC 1999: 1). While activities
in subsequent years of project implementation were scheduled to be “orientated more
towards capacity building and strategy formulation” (SMUWC 1999: 7.4), the
research agenda and top-down technical approach continued to dominate, and the
Baluchi-owned project houses in Rujewa came to resemble hotels for development
tourists. This alienated many observers, including government staff who were asked
to collaborate with the project and its consultants.

The upshot of this was that when the project finally got round to presenting its (still
provisional) conclusions about the reasons for the drying up of the Great Ruaha, most
people working in the district and region refused to accept them. I have described
these events elsewhere (Walsh 2004), and will not repeat that account here. As a
result of the work of SMUWC and later projects, the Usangu wetland is now one of
the most intensively studied in the world. The precise combination of reasons for
recent changes in the Great Ruaha is still being debated, though dry season
abstractions of water in Usangu for irrigation are generally agreed by researchers to be
the principal cause (Lankford et al. 2004; Baur 2005). These scientific arguments are
lost on many people, and immigrant herders continue to be blamed in official
discourses for the ecological degradation of the wetland and the reduced river flows
downstream.

SMUWC’s extension or second phase was truncated and the project came to an end in
2002 as a result of policy changes in DFID (the shift to direct support for Tanzania’s
donor-imposed Poverty Reduction Strategy). The project generated a mass of
documentation including a large number of workshop papers and consultancy reports.
For example, the first phase of SMUWC culminated in a workshop held in Mbeya in
March 2001 in which participants were presented with a glossy four-volume report
(Talking about Usangu), a CD-ROM of supporting reports and information, and were
shown a video film with the same title. One of the four printed volumes was a hefty
annex of baseline information and maps; the CD-ROM, the contents of which were
later posted on the web, included 23 technical reports written by project consultants.
These summarised findings on a wide range of topics from biodiversity to rural
livelihoods and the activities of the project’s community engagement programme.

In addition to material like this, a number of former SMUWC consultants, many of

whom are also academics, have gone on to publish papers in professional journals
based on the work that they did for the project. The SMUWC Field Manager was and
is a lecturer in the University of Bradford’s Centre for International Development, and
when working in Rujewa during the first phase of the project recruited a number of
colleagues to work as consultants and researchers in Usangu. They have since
produced a number of conference papers and published articles based on their

6
research in Usangu and the wider issues that it raises (e.g. Cleaver 2001; 2002; 2003;
2005; Cleaver & Franks 2003; Franks 2004; Lankford & Franks 2000). The SMUWC
case has also been used in papers written for the DFID-funded research project
Goodbye to projects? The institutional impacts of a livelihood approach on
development interventions (e.g. Franks 2002; 2003; Maganga 2002).

One of the most significant outcomes of a collaboration begun during SWUMC was
the development of a follow-on project funded by DFID: Raising Irrigation
Productivity And Releasing Water for Intersectoral Needs, or RIPARWIN for short.
This project began in 2001 and is being implemented by the Soil-Water Management
Research Group (SWMRG) in Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), the Africa
Regional Office of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in South
Africa, and the Overseas Development Group (ODG) in the University of East
Anglia.

The project website states that “RIPARWIN looks more closely at water management,
irrigation productivity and intersectoral water allocation, and in particular examines
the theory that if irrigation productivity can be raised then water can be released to
meet downstream and intra/intersectoral needs. The overall aim is to work with all
stakeholders to develop a coherent and integrated water resource management
strategy” (RIPARWIN 2006). RIPARWIN is funded and managed as a research
project; as might be expected it has also generated a lot of information in a relatively
short period of time. The website lists a large number of project reports and other
research outputs, many available for downloading. The list of journal papers, for
example, includes eight that were published between 2002 and 2004 (Franks et al.
2004; Kashaigili et al. 2003; Lankford 2003; 2004a; 2004b; Lankford & van Koppen
2002; Lankford et al. 2004; Sokile et al. 2003).

This quick sketch should give some idea of the volume of technical information
generated by SMUWC and RIPARWIN and the contexts in which it has been
produced. Usangu has also had other projects large and small, including ongoing
initiatives funded by the WWF and (separately) DANIDA (the Danish International
Development Agency) that are conducting their own research. University-based
researchers working independently of these and other development projects also
continue to study and write about Usangu, though nowhere near as prolifically. And
history suggests that most academics with a long-term research interest in the area
will end up working as consultants at some point in their careers.

In 1997, when leading ODA’s Rufiji Basin project design mission, I pressed for this
to focus on the problems affecting Usangu. Later, despite my misgivings about the
approach taken by SMUWC, I was pleased to have helped direct development
resources to the area in which I’d done my doctoral research. As a member of the
SMUWC Project Steering Committee and one of those development tourists in
Rujewa, I was impressed by the amount of information emerging from research and
always keen to hear and discuss the latest hypotheses about the drying up of the Great
Ruaha. In other words I had my own agenda for project intervention in Usangu and
my own interest in the knowledge that SMUWC produced.

Although not in a position to reconstruct the intentions of other actors involved in

these events, I think that we can see some of the general structural factors at work in

7
the recent production of knowledge about Usangu. Natural resources are, of course,
especially suited for investigation by natural scientists, and this is a relatively
conservative sector with a long tradition of prescriptive project management (cf.
Cusworth & Franks 1993). Consultancy companies with an eye to profits are likely to
take the least line of resistance; and employing large numbers of consultants allows
them to retain higher overheads. Well-packaged research outputs also make a project
look good, and they are much easier to measure than other forms of engagement.
Increasing numbers of university teachers, meanwhile, are encouraged by their
institutions to undertake consultancy work, or develop applied research projects
funded by development agencies. And the “audit cultures” (Strathern 2000) of both
academia and consultancy provide rewards for the production of appropriate kinds of
written product.

The reproduction of ignorance about inequalities

If this was a longer paper I would look in detail at the kinds of knowledge that
projects and their consultants have produced about Usangu, focusing on the
understanding of inequalities. “Poverty reduction”, “sustainable livelihoods”, and
other contemporary mantras of development are standard targets for deconstruction
(e.g. Stirrat 2004), and the literature on Usangu is well stocked with them. Instead I
have chosen in this final section to highlight one subject that current development and
academic discourse about Usangu largely ignores. This is not indigenous knowledge,
though it is true that this is also conspicuous by its absence from most of the literature
(cf. Hobart 1993). Rather it is a subject that will take us back to our earlier discussion
about political economy.

First, let me go back to our project design mission in early 1997. Most people we met
in and around Usangu believed that immigrant livestock keepers with large herds of
cattle were responsible for the degradation of the wetland at the heart of Usangu. In
addition to the Regional Commissioner’s “Botswanisation”, he and other government
officials had another solution to this problem. This was to protect the core wetland by
gazetting it as a game reserve from which cattle herders and other resource users
could be excluded. This proposal originated from the Regional Game Officer in
Mbeya and was also supported by the managers of Ruaha National Park. In the
SMUWC project document we noted that it might have been better if a more flexible
arrangement had been sought. But it was too late for anything to be done about this,
and the new Usangu Game Reserve was gazetted in 1998.

Following the creation of the reserve all of the people living within its boundaries
were moved out. A number of operations were conducted to drive Sukuma and other
livestock keepers from the area, as well as fishermen who fished in the permanent
swamps and had done so for as long as anyone could remember. SMUWC staff
reported that at least one person had been killed when herders were burned out of their
homes. Unfortunately SMUWC had little influence over the game officers and
assistants who were doing this. Although we recommended in 1997 that SMUWC be
actively involved in the management of the game reserve, and that this should include
benefit-sharing with local communities, these proposals had been dropped by the time
the project started. Policing the reserve remains a problem; and pastoralists are still
being forcibly evicted.

8
The main beneficiaries of this have been the Baluchi family who own the tourist
hunting company, Usangu Safaris Limited, that operates in the reserve. Before the
Usangu Game Reserve was gazetted they had to share hunting rights in this area with
resident hunters from Mbeya, and were in bitter conflict with them. Resident hunting
is not permitted in game reserves, and so when the Baluchis were granted the new
Usangu concession they could enjoy exclusive access. Not surprisingly they were
rumoured to have been behind the Mbeya Regional Game Officer’s original proposal
for a reserve. The political and economic power of this company can be measured by
the fact that in 1998 they purchased the former parastatal TAWICO, the Tanzania
Wildlife Company, giving them a number of other hunting blocks in the country
(Usangu Safaris Limited 2006). Later they also succeeded in getting the boundaries
of the Usangu Game Reserve extended, taking over rich hunting grounds that had
previously been managed by villagers in Iringa District with the support of a DFID-
funded community wildlife management project (Walsh 2000: 12-14; MBOMIPA
2006).

This is just one of a number of large-scale enterprises operated by members of the

Baluchi community from Usangu. I have already suggested that in the 1970s they had
a better claim to be considered incipient rural capitalists than the “kulaks” of Isimani.
Commenting on the relevance of earlier studies of Isimani, a later team of researchers
observed that “a contemporary view of wealth and poverty in the surrounding district
as a whole would underline the vastly greater inequalities separating the largest
entrepreneurs, usually straddling the urban economy and the ‘commercial’ (i.e. former
settler) farming sector, and the totality of the village-resident population” (Booth et al.
1993: 34). This description might also be extended to include Usangu.

These and related aspects of the political economy in Usangu are rarely tackled in
project reports and the academic literature that project interventions have spawned.
Will talking about them upset anyone? Are they relevant to the understanding and
measurement of livelihood assets and poverty? Or are we missing something in our
development-oriented constructions of inequality? The intellectual climate prevalent
in the ujamaa period at least encouraged the search for structural inequalities. But
most writing was unimaginative, thin on “thick description” (Geertz 1973), and
neglected aspects of social differentiation that fit awkwardly with contemporary
dogmas. Sounds familiar?

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Ray Abrahams for “thick description”, Jessica Johnson for “hyperreality”,
Celia Nyamweru for constructive criticism, and Richard Sherrington for encouragement and
of course the invitation.

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