Hunger, Healing, and Citizenship in Central Tanzania

African Studies Review, Apr 2009 by Phillips, Kristin D

Abstract:

This article draws on newspaper commentary, Nyaturu hunger lore, and ethnographic research to describe how central Tanzanian villagers accessed food aid from the state during the East African food crisis of 2006. Through leveraging their political support and their participation in national development agendas, rural inhabitants claimed their rights. Yet it was through these exchanges that the state converted food aid into political power. The article argues that the highly ritualized gift of food aid naturalizes a contemporary political and economic order in which, counterintuitively, it is rural farmers who go hungry.

Editors' note: The following article was the winner of the 2008 graduate student essay prize of the African Studies Association.

Kocc Barma said if you want to kill a proud man, supply all his everyday needs, in the long run, you will make him a slave, dakngaydon, dak.... If a country is always taking aid from another people, that country, from its children, from generation to generation, will be able to say only one word... thank you! thank you! thank you!

From Giielwaar, written and directed by Ousmane Sembene (transcribed in Fofana 2005)

Introduction

In late 2005 and early 2006 drought and hunger spread across East Africa. In the Singida region of central Tanzania, villagers faced skyrocketing food prices, dwindling stores of grain and access to cash, and delayed promises from the state for relief food - what the Nyaturu refer to as ufoni, or the "healing" of their hunger. For several months villagers struggled to lay claim to state resources. But as aid trickled down through national and district bureaucracies, Singidans' right to food threatened to be "eaten" by officials, diverted to other communities, or funneled too narrowly only to the very poorest citizens. Tensions came to a climax when young men of Langilanga village went on strike, announcing that until sufficient food aid for all had arrived they would refuse to participate in village development projects. The construction of teacher housing, the repair of school latrines that had collapsed in the previous year's rains, the digging of a deep-water well - all of these projects would come to an abrupt halt without village labor and resources.

In this article I draw on newspaper commentary, Nyaturu hunger lore, and ethnographic research conducted in Singida between 2004 and 2007 to describe how Singidan villagers accessed food aid by leveraging their political support and their participation in national development agendas and by invoking a Tanzanian idiom of political critique that centers on metaphors of food and feeding. My analysis places theories of food scarcity and distribution (Cliggett 2005; Lipton 1975; Sen 1981; Thompson 1971) in conversation with the literatures on food and politics (Appadurai 1981; Bayart 1993; Schatzberg 2001) and on exchange and gifts (Mauss 1990; Graeber 2001; Piot 1999; Strathern 1988) to explore three questions. First, how do flows of food and the exchange relationships that govern them generate relationships of reciprocity, authority, and patronage among rural villagers and the Tanzanian state? Second, how do villagers' protests against the terms of these exchanges both articulate and obscure a broader critique of the contemporary system of producing and distributing food? And finally, what is the state's return on a system that watches the cheap and discreet export of food from Singida in a hunger year only to later reimport it with great ceremony, cost, and delay? I argue that through these exchanges, the state converts food aid into political power. I go on to demonstrate how the highly ritualized gift of food aid naturalizes a contemporary political and economic order in which, counterintuitively, it is "rural food producers who most often go hungry" (Shipton 1990:361).

Hunger and Healing in Rural Singida

"Ufoni uaja!" "The healing has arrived!" In March 2006 word traveled quickly from homestead to homestead, along cattle paths lined with tall young millet, across Langilanga village's forty square kilometers. Within hours, hundreds of villagers were milling around the village office and its surrounds. Groups of men rolled tobacco into old newspaper and exchanged news of the newly arrived government food aid. The young men who had been playing bao at the roadside when the grain arrived recounted the number of sacks they had hauled from the truck into the village office. Women, too, congregated, with ragged empty sacks bearing the faded blue emblem of the World Food Programme (WFP). Many nursed children after the long walk as they soberly exchanged guesses about the amount of food the leaders would distribute to each household. In a side room representatives of the village government - a council of elected men and women of various ages - gathered to "do the math." Days would pass before they issued any rations.

The mood was less celebratory than I had anticipated. The word on the path was that the food aid would not suffice for all those suffering in the village. As we sat in my room at the village office, Nyajuli, a mother of four in her forties, predicted that with the limited amount of aid, leaders would target only the hungriest of the hungry. "But hunger has now settled with every person!" she lamented. "We are all sick with hunger. That is why we say 'Old age is miserable. Famine is better.' At least for famine there's a cure." This seemingly indigenous medical model for understanding hunger, in which state therapy cures rural pathology, struck me as a rather odd euphemism for the situation in which Langilanga villagers found themselves.