Making Southern Province Palatable

Abstract:

From the 1940s to the mid-1950s, colonial administrators in South-ern Province (SP), located in Tanganyika Territory, pursued a labor stabilization policy that focused on commercial employers implementing food rations. The emergence of a developmental approach to governance, along with SP’s increas-ing labor demands, led southern administrators to believe that food rations would induce African men to work at southern industries and enhance their productivity. Southern administrators promoted the policy despite being aware of the province’s unstable food economy. Most sisal estates, however, decided against offering laborers food rations, opting instead to pursue more practical labor procurement strategies. Frustrated with the sisal industry’s response, southern administrators blamed employers for labor shortages, arguing that they were dismissive of laborers’ welfare. Drawing on administrative reports and correspondence between various administrators and commercial employers, this article focuses on the sisal industry to understand why southern administrators pursued implementing food rations amid precarious food conditions and why their efforts failed. The article draws and builds on the insights of scholars who have shown that the constraints of governing an underdeveloped province led southern administrators to pursue impractical policies and blame humans rather than non-human factors when the policies failed. The article also contributes to understandings of the African colonial state as being heterogeneous and fissured.