more roles than those they were intended for. For example, a remnant of a colonial railway is a central tool for the crafters. The rail was not intended to be used by crafters at the workshop but has been acquired to perform roles beyond enabling locomotives to travel on it. The second set of tools are those made by the workers to execute specific tasks. This category comprises tools made at the workshop, including the bender—an imitation of an industrial tool that has been made by crafters using scrap materials. The last set of tools are the modern, industrial electric tools, like the circular saw and the loudspeaker, that workers have bought. These tools are acquired, bought, converted, or made depending on the needs of crafters and their affordability.
economic, and political problems to the colonies. The railway lubricated ‘contaminated diversity’, whereby humans and more-than-humans travelled from one area to another to create
‘alien’ ecologies (Natura Urbana, 2020; Tsing, 2015b). It accelerated the exploitation of resources, drained forced and cheap labour, and decimated natural resources (land, forests, and minerals) in the colonies (Burton, 2014). Railways also sped up global overheating, that is, health and environmental problems (Eriksen, 2016), and eventually decayed when empire’s direct colonisation project ended (Gordillo, 2014).
Like all colonies, Tanzania (then Tanganyika) was not spared the railway. As colonisation happened, the rails came. The railways connected the cities to the hinterlands where minerals and fertile soils had been untapped and integrated cheap labour into capitalism.
The metropoles needed cheap raw materials and a market for the goods. Rail lines were veins, and they changed the land. The land was reshaped: forests cleared, hills lowered, and valleys
Figure 31. Colonial rail at Mahakama Ya Friji
erased. Iron lines climbed hills, went down into valleys, and connected one body of water to another. The railways changed time and speed.
In the colonies, rail lines were pivotal to exploiting raw materials. The rail lines were carefully constructed to connect to areas that produced goods needed for manufacturing in Europe. Maps of colonial railways show how strategically the construction connected resource-rich areas to harbour towns. Areas with insufficient resources either happened to be on planned routes by chance or were simply ignored.
A letter written by John B. George of the East African Railways and Harbours Administration on November 29, 1954, to Mr Walter S. Rogers of the Institute of Current World Affairs explains the role of the railways in East Africa: to provide access to agricultural areas and mineral operations. Rail lines brought capital equipment and import goods, serving as an economic integrator and allowing for regional agricultural specialisation. Purposefully, communities were not supposed to be fully self-sufficient in food grain production so that they would provide cheap labour for the colonial plantations and industries that depended on
Figure 32. Crafters working on the rail
African personnel. The railway would facilitate labour mobility and the cheap transportation of exportable produce—sisal, cotton, coffee, and soda ash—to the coast (George, 1954). At this point, even the most remote areas of East Africa were connected to Berlin and London. It was a transnational network of trade, goods, and people.
Some 120 years after the first railway tracks were laid down in Tanganyika, the railway is deteriorating and has been left to rot. The tracks have disappeared, and the locomotives are slowly being swallowed by nature. To explore ruination, Anne Stoler (2008) proposes, ‘is to trace the fragile and durable substance and signs, the visible and visceral senses in which the effects reactivated and remain’ (Stoler, 2008, p. 196). Ruination is more than a process of decay. It is a political project that produces ‘waste’ people, places, relations, and things. Ruins and rubble have afterlives. All that is needed is to stretch our imagination to find and see their afterlives—the way that ruins relate to others in the vicinity, how they connect and disconnect to the rhythms of life. Vividly, they are not just remnants. Ruins are reappropriated and strategically positioned within current politics (Stoler, 2008). The railway is a connector in a network and in relations with others, even when its initial purpose has passed. The railway refuses to show the humility of ruins, to disappear. Instead, its formidableness is beyond the relations that we can see in its vicinity.
The literature on railways in Tanzania (Brennan et al., 2007; Iliffe, 1979; Monson, 2009) has not given the rail itself proper consideration. The same is true of the literature on railways elsewhere, which has ignored the agency of the ‘rail’ beyond the nostalgia for former modernity, imperial exploitation, and violence (Cooper, 1996; Deane, 1961; Lindsay, 1999;
Ritchie, 1846; Thiranagama, 2012).
Even though the colonial railways in Tanzania are currently in ruin or ruination and can no longer aid the exploitation of hinterland resources, as ‘imperial rubble’, they exert the tyranny of ruins to persist in shaping lives and affecting the ecology. The effects are not
monotonous everywhere; they are localised. Small and significant changes that came with the railways are central to discussions about our damaged planet (Tsing, Swanson, Gan, &
Bubandt, 2017).
The iron in the heart of the empire
At the Berlin Conference of 1885, Tanzania, then Tanganyika, was given to Germany as its colony. Right after the conference, Germany began to build rail projects. In 1893, the Dutch East Africa company started constructing a rail line from the port city of Tanga to the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. The line slowly advanced inland, climbing through the highlands of the Usambara mountains and running to the plains of Upare before climbing again to Moshi town. On October 4, 1911, the 351.4 km-long railway was completed. After Germany lost
Figure 33. Charles making a cookstove on the rail
WWI, the British extended the railway to Arusha. As a result, coffee was introduced on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, where the climate is suitable for production. Sisal was introduced on the plains between Usambara and the Kilimanjaro mountains, and tea was introduced on the slopes of Usambara.
The German government built the Mittellandbahn (central line), 965 km long and running from Dar es Salaam, the main harbour for the colonial administration, through to the capital, Dodoma. It reached Tabora in 1912 before arriving at the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1914. A port was established at Kigoma, and the German government brought the first engine ship, MV Liemba, to connect to the other side of the Belgian Congo. The line was built along the routes of earlier Nyamwezi and Arab long-distance traders. After WWI, Tanganyika was given to Britain as a protectorate. Two more lines were attached to the central line from Tabora.
In 1928, a line of 378 km to the city of Mwanza on the shores of Lake Victoria was completed, and another line of 380 km, southwest of Tabora, aimed to reach Lake Rukwa.
However, the project stopped at Mpanda town. A few smaller railway projects were initiated before being abandoned as not economically viable. The ground line was planned to connect to the southern part of the country, where a groundnut project was to be implemented to supplement a shortage of vegetable oils and fats. The groundnut schemes failed miserably, hence the abandonment of the rail project. The project’s vision to connect the central and Usambara lines also failed. These early failures were the beginning of railway ruination in Tanzania.
After independence, the railway company was taken over by the Tanzanian state.
Tabora and other regions on the west side of the country were poorly connected to each other and to the coast. Rail was the only reliable means of transport for people and agricultural products. Austerity measures proposed by the Bretton Woods structural adjustment program
(SAP) led to underfunding of the railways. Slowly, the number of accidents increased while the number of functioning trains and routes decreased. The construction of tarmacked roads led to faster and more reliable transportation.
The changes in the means of transportation, where roads overtook the railway, along with poor maintenance and unreliability of the whole railway system, forced its abandonment.
Of all the colonial railways, the central line has persisted the longest. Continuing to the present day, there have been efforts to revitalise its use. Now and then, the government has repaired the system and attempted to resume haulage. In April 2017, a project to build a new standard-gauge railway parallel to the colonial system started. Time will tell if the colonial rail will finally be abandoned for good.
Figure 35 Pre-colonial trade routes in Tanganyika during the 18th Century. Source: Ecolebooks.com
Figure 34 Red lines are colonial railways. One can see the construction followed the 18th Century trade routes.
Tabora is the centre on both maps. Source
http://sharemap.org/jkan/railway/Railways%20in%20Tanzania
Lubricating movements
Radical changes occurred in the hinterlands of Tanzania at the beginning of the 20th century. Previously isolated societies and ecologies were now directly connected to the metropole by iron lines. Places that it had taken months to reach were now reachable in a matter of days. When Germany took over Tanganyika after the 1885 Berlin conference, Tabora (which was called Kazeh by the Germans), as explained in Chapter 5, was a strategic area for full control of the colony and a significant link to the Great Lakes region. As in all colonial territories, infrastructures were crucial for proper control and exploitation. As the most prominent inland trade centre, Tabora was not spared—the rail line passed through the town.
The arrival of the rail in 1912 and the two additional lines built from Tabora to Mwanza and Mpanda changed everything. Not only did the railway replace local socioeconomic structures, but it was also the beginning of mass acceleration. Tabora became the largest train station in East Africa. The once-mighty Nyamwezi were relegated to wage labour in the colonial groundnut and tobacco farms introduced to serve demand in Europe.
Once the famous long-distance trade with the coast was interrupted, cheap manufactured goods replaced the local iron smith industry (Gillman, 1927; Iliffe, 1979). One of the consequences of the railways was a slow disappearance of iron smithery and craftmanship among the nyungu ya mawe (gods of stones). The rail came with ready-made iron products like hand hoes and machetes, products that were highly sought after by the Nyamwezi and other farming groups (Iliffe, 1979).
My walimu at Mahakama Ya Friji possess the little knowledge that is left from the rich skills and knowledgeable practices of their forefathers. Here, we see how capital turns relations around to keep accumulating more. The rail systematically wiped out local skills and ingenuity to provide a market for mass-produced goods from the metropole. Now, the same skills and