Urban agriculture in Mwanza, Tanzania

Book cover image: Food, Culture, and Survival in an African City by Karen Coen Flynn, 2005

Urban agriculture in Mwanza, Tanzania
Published in Africa,  Fall, 2001  by Karen Coen Flynn

Karen Flynn is on the faculty of the Department of Classical Studies, Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Akron, Ohio. She received her doctorate in anthropology from Harvard in 1997 for a thesis on ‘Food Provisioning in Urban Mwanza’.

Abstract

Many people living in Mwanza, Tanzania, provision themselves through urban agriculture – the planting of crops and raising of animals in urban and peri-urban areas, as well as in the countryside. This article compares Mwanza’s urban farmers with those in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana. Like Zimbabwe’s urban agriculturalists, more and more of Mwanza’s are not among the poorest of the poor. Much like Ghana’s urban farmers, those in Mwanza are often middle and upper-class males with access to scarce land and inputs. Urban cultivators in Mwanza differ from those in Kenya and Zambia with regard to gender, socio-economic class and the factors motivating their farming activities.

These findings suggest that even though socio-economic differentiation is on the increase in Tanzania it has not reached the levels of divergence found in Kenya and Zambia. Many of Mwanza’s wealthier males continue to face enough job/income insecurity to choose to plant crops to support themselves and their household in lean times. They may also engage in urban agriculture because they are unable or unwilling to take advantage of more profitable investment opportunities outside the food market, or because they desire to spread risk across a number of different investments.

In the burgeoning municipality of Mwanza, Tanzania, people survive by eating foods purchased in the market places, offered as gifts by rural-based kin and other visitors, and distributed in the form of hand-outs to the destitute. Many people also depend on foods produced through urban agriculture, characterised by town residents’ cultivation of food crops and rearing of livestock in open spaces in urban areas, in periurban areas, and in the countryside. (1) In 1993-94 I surveyed seventy-one women in Mwanza and learned that nineteen of them were members of households that relied to varying degrees on growing their own foods (see Table 1). (2) In an attempt to build a better understanding of the variability of gender roles, income levels and motivations among Africa’s urban agriculturalists, these nineteen women’s detailed personal accounts are compared with the findings of recent studies carried out elsewhere in Tanzania, as well as in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana.

Mwanza municipality, (3) the second largest urban area in Tanzania after Dar es Salaam, is the industrial, commercial and administrative centre of north-western Tanzania. Located on the hilly southern shores of Lake Victoria, the municipality had an estimated 1992 population of 277,000 (4) and its present growth rate of 7.5 per cent per year leads government planners to expect that the population will exceed 1*3 million by the year 2011 (Mwanza Master Plan, 1992). Increasing birth rates, lengthening life spans and rural to urban immigration contribute to Mwanza’s growth. First or second-generation African arrivals, including many females who historically remained in the rural areas, comprise the majority of the multi-ethnic and polyglot population. The 1957 census, the last to differentiate town dwellers along racial lines, found that 77 per cent of the population were African, and that the rest were Asians (5) (18 per cent), Europeans (2 per cent), Arabs (1 per cent) or others (2 per cent). Since Independence in 1961 the proportion of Africans to others has grown, owing to increases in African immigration, decreases in Asian immigration and the emigration of European colonial administrators. The Africans living in Mwanza in 1993-94 largely included people who were affiliated with the regionally dominant Sukuma ethnic group but also those of the Nyamwezi, Jita, Ha, Haya, Kuria, Chagga, Swahili and Luguru groups. Some people originated from other countries, especially Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya and Zaire (Flynn, 1999).

Over the past three decades, other areas in Tanzania have been experiencing this same rapid urbanisation and a concurrent rise in demand for urban staple foods. Yet economic crisis and food shortages also have characterised this period. Many of the food shortages were caused by the nationalisation of urban grain mills into the amalgamated National Milling Corporation, pervasive transport problems, an over-valued Tanzanian shilling, and socialist party doctrine, which portrayed food wholesalers and retailers as `perpetrators of economic crisis’ (Bryceson, 1993: 31). During the past fifteen years the nation’s economy has suffered from the deterioration of international trade terms and the introduction of structural adjustment policies that have contributed to increased taxation, job lay-offs and widespread economic stagnation.

More recently the government’s economic liberalisation efforts have apparently eased food pressures in Tanzania’s urban areas by allowing private entrepreneurs to enter the formerly socialist economy. Many of these men and women have prospered as urban food wholesalers and retailers, selling produce imported from the surrounding region and neighbouring island communities, Shinyanga region, immediately to the south, Tanzania’s `Big Four’ maize-producing regions (6) and from international sources. In 1993-94 the majority of Mwanza’s residents were remarkably successful in purchasing food, in spite of the daily pressures they endured from a deteriorating system of public works, failing municipal utilities, rampant inflation, decaying slum housing and diseases such as malaria and HIV.

In 1993-94 many of Mwanza’s residents also grew their own food in and around the town, as well as on more distant farms. Juxtaposed concrete and food crops were a common sight around Mwanza. There were sweet potatoes, cassava, spinach, tomatoes, chilli peppers and onions growing not only in private yards and alongside public pathways and buildings but also in the low-lying areas that drain into the lake. Crops also could be found growing in the lizard-inhabited no man’s land between the towering clusters of granite monoliths that rose randomly throughout town. In some areas, if open land was not used as a walking path or garbage dump it was often planted with fruits or vegetables or was the home of free-roaming chickens, penned-in goats or pigs, or a tethered cow or two.

`Rural’ images such as these in Africa’s towns and cities evoke dismay in some observers because they seem incongruous with what is widely believed to distinguish urban from rural settlements. For many, agriculture is to the countryside what industry is to towns, and a `”city of farmers” is the last thing that African planners and policy makers would like to encourage’ (Macharia, 1992: 688). Yet others challenge both the ideological and the tangible segregation of agriculture and urbanisation. They not only recognise urban-based agricultural activities as an integral part of many towns and cities worldwide, but applaud those who engage in these activities for their valuable contribution to urban incomes and food supplies. (7)

The complete paper is on-line here on twenty-four web pages.