In the 19th and early-20th century, the Nyamwezi were famous traders. Their participation in long-distance trade earned them a reputation that they would do anything for money. However, the construction of the central rail line from Dar es Salaam to Kigoma (1905–
1914) disrupted their trade. Many Nyamwezi settled along the coast and began labouring on colonial plantations. A large Nyamwezi community settled in Unguja, providing labour to clove plantations. The abolishment of the slave trade in Zanzibar (1873) created labour scarcity that was filled by the Nyamwezi (Abrahams, 1981; Rockel, 2000).
Unlike the Nyamwezi, the Chaga occupied the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. The rich volcanic soil and stable weather provided stable living conditions among this group. They had contact with the Kamba, long-distance traders on a northern route. However, the Chaga themselves did not travel much for trade. The arrival of missionaries and the colonial administration favoured the areas around Kilimanjaro because of their stable weather. The introduction of coffee farming and missionary schools provided the Chaga with literacy and capital. Today, the Chaga are the most-educated group and the most prominent business community in Tanzania (Gutmann, Drivdal, & Tucker, 2017; Iliffe, 1979; Myhre, 2018).
Therefore, the divisions that we see at the workshop, with the Nyamwezi being cookstove makers and the Chaga focusing on the scrap business and kiosks, in many ways reflects the longer history of these ethnic groups.
they do not work together in a romantic, peaceful gathering. Because of these conflicts, they have agreed to a rotating leadership among the master crafters.
When I met George for the first time, although we discovered our Tabora connections, he could not just accept me into the workshop to work with him. I had to explain my research again to everybody. The leadership had to agree. The leadership is also responsible for resolving internal misunderstandings, managing business affairs, and representing the workshop against outside threats. For example, the day that Dinho was taken to the police station, an incident I discuss in Chapter 8, the leaders had to discuss what to do; they went to the police and collected money to bail him out. At the start of my fieldwork, Dullah returned to the workshop after leaving for a job elsewhere. I was told that he had had a conflict with George before deciding to leave the workshop. Upon his request to return, Babu Samwel convened a meeting of all the master crafters. They had to discuss the matter, but first, they had to resolve the former conflict.
Dullah and George had attended the same class during primary school in Tabora.
George admitted that the old squabble no longer mattered and that he would be happy to have Dullah back. Everybody agreed. However, Babu Samwel wanted Dullah to pay masumule.
Masumule is a long-practised custom among the Nyamwezi, and is paid when one member of the community shows disrespect to another. Masumule can be a certain amount of crops, alcohol, or an animal like a goat (Abrahams, 1981).
To settle with Babu Samwel, Dullah bought a bottle of Konyagi, a favoured gin from Mangi’s shop. The bottle was shared by everyone at the workshop to show that the conflict had ended. One 1-litre bottle of Konyagi costs 12000 TZS (5USD). This customary way of solving conflicts holds the crafters together. Their shared customs and values are embedded in ways of organising work and resolving conflicts.
George, whom I followed the most, has developed several specialisations that earn him a bit more than others at the workshop. He has developed a system that integrates gas into his BBQ stoves. Using this design, instead of using charcoal, he turns them into the gas stoves needed by restaurants in the city centre. The gas stoves differentiate him from the rest of the workshop. Apart from producing the stoves, his clients need him in case of faults or repair. He is at the workshop in the mornings and afternoons. In between, he is busy travelling around the city to tend to his customers’ needs. He has trained and maintained his apprentices to the extent they have become skilled enough to produce the stoves without him. He simply discusses the designs with them, and they build the stoves from there. He dedicates the rest of his time to developing hybrid stoves.
To reduce conflicts that arise from competition, the master crafters have also adopted different types of cookstoves that distinguish them from one another. Mwanawane and his team make only small household cookstoves, not big BBQ stoves like George. ‘Tunatengeneza pekee majiko ya kina mama nyumbani’ (our stoves are for women at home), he explained. The demand for household stoves is high, production costs are low, and the work is less time consuming. In addition, Charles, Mwanawane’s brother, discovered the right mix of cement and clay to hold the clay pots. The combination helps the charcoal to start easier, burn more slowly, and keep the heat for longer. These three features make their stoves popular among their clients, who are predominantly women. He claimed proudly that women favour their
Figure 23 Some of the cookstoves produced at Mahakama Ya
cookstoves over those from any other crafter at the workshop. It is the reason their hammers never go silent.
George’s specialisation in large BBQs has to do with the customers he gets. George’s customers usually are retailers from different regions. They order products in bulk to sell in retail. In fulfilling these orders, George and his apprentice are occupied for months. At the same time, George gets individual orders from bars and restaurants. The transformation of his charcoal stoves to gas stoves is preferred mainly by restaurants in the city centre, where gas is preferred for cooking over expensive charcoal.
George’s best-selling stove is the french-fry fryer, which has a customized size according to the needs of the customer and is much cheaper than comparable brand new ones.
The diversification of Georges stoves has arisen, as I have mentioned, from many years of making stoves, but also from new markets. A good example is the french-fry fryer, which he developed due to the growing fast-food consumer culture among urban dwellers and street-food sellers.
Even with these specialisations, however, the crafters share a common trait: material consciousness. Material consciousness makes objects interesting, arousing and allowing the crafter to turn their thoughts to reality (Sennett, 2009). Material consciousness manifests as a two-way traffic among my informants. On the one hand, a crafter thinks about an object that he wants to craft, then he thinks of suitable materials. On the other, after seeing materials, he begins inventing how and into what these materials can be shaped. This particular creative process happens when collectors return to the workshop in the afternoon. Crafters salvage what the collectors have scavenged, either by searching for specific materials they want to use or by looking at the available materials to spark their minds in terms of what they might be turned into.
However, material consciousness alone cannot transform crafters’ thoughts into material objects. The crafters need to have skills including measuring, cutting, stitching, and composing materials. These skills do not evolve from mere intuition; crafting is a vocation (Weber, 1958). George and the others have worked on making things for years. Skill is a trained practice as opposed to coup de foudre or mere inspiration (Sennett, 2009).
To develop mastery, the master crafters all started as apprentices early in their teen years. George’s inventions, which include gas systems and stoves made out of refrigerators, are not just an intuitive thing. This work involves skills that must be developed for years, imagination, and the proper tools. The ability to diversify a product’s production into many designs comes from a consciousness and sense of the material a crafter works with, together with skills sharpened over the years. However, material consciousness is not enough to invent and build, collect and gather, or dismantle the scraps. The workshop is also an assemblage of different types of tools need to perform this labour, as I discuss in Chapter 7.
Scrap dealers and scrap collectors relate to each other in several ways. There are no junk places, and scrap does not reach the landfill. Most scraps are collected from households and businesses. This can happen in two ways. First, buying from owners, which can be households or businesses, or getting scrap for free, especially from wealthy neighbourhoods.
There is no assurance of getting scrap for free. Therefore, scrap collectors need to have money to buy scrap in case they do not find it for free. For this reason, a scrap dealer to whom a scrap collector is attached has to give the collector a daily start-up loan.
A kianzio (daily start-up loan) is money that a scrap dealer gives to a collector, which the collector then uses to buy scraps. Upon returning to the workshop, the collector will sell whatever they have collected to repairers, crafters and the scrap dealer. The collector will first return the start-up loan that he received in the morning.
On top of the daily start-up loans, scrap collectors do not own their carts. Economically, it does not make sense to own one. Therefore, each collector must rent a cart from a scrap dealer every morning. The logic behind not owning the carts is that it is an expensive investment. Even though collectors like Salum can afford to own a cart, they regard collecting jobs as temporary; therefore, there is no need to invest in them. The charge for renting a cart is 5000 TZS (2USD). At the end of the day, this amount is also deducted on top of the start-up loan. A new cart can cost up to 100,000 TZS (43USD). The cost is a considerable investment for a job that everyone knows no one aspires to do for very long.
Scrap collectors do not enter into formal contracts with collectors, which makes it challenging to formalise collectors’ labour. A verbal contract arises in the morning when the collectors rent carts and take start-up money. They are obliged to return after their sales. As I also mentioned in Chapter 4, the amount and worth of scrap materials collected vary daily, depending on the day and where the collector went. Some redundancy can happen. A trusted collector might not pay for his cart if he had a bad day. However, start-up money must always be returned in full. To supervise the start-up money’s return, one of the scrap dealers or an employee is always present at the workshop in the afternoons when collectors return.
Collectors have vast networks of suppliers. The same applies to the scrap dealers; each collector has their network and is connected to a dealer. At the same time, repairers and crafters are connected back to the dealers. Devices are gathered at low cost by the collectors, who know the approximate actual value and how to negotiate better prices. When objects arrive at the workshop, crafters scavenge what they need, repairers pluck functional materials, and the rest stays with the dealer. Formal recycling models, like collecting for free (as happens in most developed countries) or buying from users, would fail in Tanzania. First, users know that they can make money out of their waste, so they won’t give things away for free. And even if recycling companies decide to buy these items, they lack the skills for knowing their value or
for negotiating. If companies arrive with fixed prices for specific devices, informal collectors will easily out-market them, and the companies won’t be able to determine the value. In this way, I argue that they would end up losing, and that formal recycling would not be able to compete.
The kinds of material recovery and valorisation that happen at the workshop can rarely be found in formal recycling companies. As Tong and Wang (2012) observe in China,
‘informal recyclers usually bargain with the users directly, and transport using a tricycle, in my case trolleys, thus reducing overhead cost’. They go further to argue that the final output of informal recycling essentially goes to refurbishing (repurposing) instead of objects being disassembled and shredded for material recovery (p.180). In the Tanzanian setting, formal companies cannot reproduce the workshop assemblages that I have discussed so far in this chapter. Rather, they emerge as parallel actors by buying certain materials from informal labourers.