5 - Villagisation and the Pursuit of Market Access

Summary

As Chapter 4 showed, Tanzania’s villagers moved into the post-colonial period with new expectations and a host of old problems; in the case of the Southeast, centred around production for and access to global markets. Despite expressions of goodwill from industrialised countries, east and west, the new government did not have any dramatically new options for dealing with these.¹ Rather, throughout the 1960s, it followed a gradualist approach to rural development, focused on supporting so-called progressive farmers.² This gradualism went out of the window with the forced villagisation campaign of 1973–76. But I argue here that, newly-developed socialist rhetoric notwithstanding, villagisation had much in common with earlier phases in the history of development in Tanzania. In particular, it sought to address long-standing constraints on crop marketing, and it exhibited the already familiar tension between input-oriented and educational approaches.