Introduction

Political Islamism and Islamic reform in East Africa have many strands, but their most salient forms can legitimately be described as populist since they position Muslims in East Africa as ‘little people’ marginalized by a Christian establishment and rhetorically use this opposition for political mobilization (Becker 2006; Loimeier 2011; Mudde 2017). It is also evident that history matters to these populists since they have much to say about historical events. It is harder to decide whether this form of populism should be seen as right-wing or left-wing since it combines calls for economic justice with pronounced gendered inequality and extols political emancipation while remaining vague on its desired political dispensation (Becker 2016; Kresse 2007; Willis and Gona 2013). Moreover, the collective of marginalized Muslim ‘little people’ is internally highly diverse in its religious practices, cultural affiliations, and political views.

This chapter uses a mixture of interviews, sermon recordings, informal conversations, and participant observation to explore how Islamists define a place for Muslims in East Africa's difficult present using claims about the past, historical change, and the future. It examines claims about past greatness and present decline, the dangers and promises of the afterlife, and the difficulty of making futures in this world. While a sense of present hardship and loss of direction is practically omnipresent in this discourse, it contains diverse and sometimes contradictory tropes that different adherents combine flexibly. A distinctive feature is the attention to the domestic realm and gender relations as a site of struggle to live a good life.

This case study, then, seeks to complicate the notion that the appeal of populism lies in its ability to simplify societal problems, which sometimes comes close to suggesting that populism appeals to the simple-minded. It chimes with studies that emphasize tensions and slippages in religious populists’ claims and strategies (Hadiz 2014, 2016, 2018; Baykan 2019; Peker 2019). Populists do strive to use simple oppositions, but since they operate in a messy world, their attempts to simplify tend to create their own complexities. More fundamentally, the tropes of populism work because they can mean different things to different people; because they are polysemous, an effect that has been observed long before the current wave of populist mobilization (Dubow 1995).

The tiny Swahili town of Mikindani, south of Lindi, receives a trickle of visitors, attracted by its connection to David Livingstone’s last journey and by the former German boma, which has been transformed into an upmarket hotel by a British businessman seeking to lower his taxes. Sometimes they are shown a market building with Arabising features, locally known by the tourist-friendly name of ‘old slave market’. It dates in fact from the German period, and was an attempt to strengthen the flow of agricultural produce from the hinterland to the town.1 Its environs had long delivered high-quality grains for export, some produced by slaves, and perhaps the erosion of planters’ control over their slave workforce in the German period had necessitated measures to encourage produce coming to market.2

This book has its origin in a number of questions that I found impossible to avoid while researching the impoverished colonial past of Southeast Tanzania, and in the process negotiating its impoverished present.1 To wit: why is it that rural poverty in this egion appears both easy to explain and mystifying, whether judging by historical sources or by everyday conversation? Why, in the early to mid-2000s when I did most of my fieldwork, was maendeleo, ‘development’, on everybody’s lips, when actual attempts at fostering development had been ephemeral and/or unpopular for decades? Why is it that some of the stratagems then being tried in development projects were near-identical to ones tried in the 1930s, yet being offered as something new? What kept the development show on the road? Moreover, why did many people who had very little means to improve their situation appear ready to hold their poverty against themselves? And why is it that the purveyors of development, officials and experts alike, appeared to balance so awkwardly between their often extensive knowledge of the region’s problems and a variety of more or less glib jargons used to describe putative ways to address it? This could be observed, mutatis mutandis, both in the colonial archive and in the public meetings focused on development then ongoing.

As Lal has shown, the reputation of the Southeast as a backwater crystallised during the transition to and the first decade of independence, notwithstanding occasional challenges to it.1 This is hardly surprising since, during this period, the notion of development gained currency, complexity, and political significance: it became more important as a criterion to assess places by. There is an extensive and sophisticated literature on the rise of the concept, practice, and institutional apparatus of development in the post-war world, both in Africa and beyond.2 Judgements differ as to its intellectual antecedents, the extent to which development was a product of Cold War strategising, a way to recast and reinvigorate colonial-era forms of dependency and control, and a means to put the putatively pre-modern, underdeveloped populations of the former colonies in their place; to culturally ‘other’ them.3

Problems are not solved, but lived: like it or not, this is an apt comment on poverty and development in the Southeast. Having lived the region’s problems for about ninety years, Bibi Amina passed away in 2014, about five years after the completion of the all-weather road from Dar es Salaam to Lindi, and on to Masasi. During her last years, she would have observed a slight livening-up of trade in the town, owed not only to this road, but also to the intensification of contacts between Masasi and Mozambique.2 Before the Dar-Lindi road was completed, some people moved from Lindi to Masasi, claiming that the latter had become the livelier town. There was a supermarket in Masasi before one opened in Lindi.3 But for Bibi Amina, I am told, things continued much as they had been. She was too old to join the latest scramble for opportunity, and as the daughter and grandchildren who supported her were doing reasonably well, she did not have to. Perhaps she took some courage from the changes around her, but they are not likely to have stopped her musing about how her people were complicit in their poverty.

In early 1930, officials in Lindi town, then the capital of Tanganyika’s Southern Province, became aware of a famine going on in the remote rural district of Tunduru, about 200 miles further west.1 Over the next few months, it generated a fair amount of correspondence between offices in Tunduru, Lindi, and Dar es Salaam, and led the Provincial Commissioner, Mr Hallier, to institute a campaign of food distribution. Different official observers came to fundamentally different conclusions as to the causes of the famine and the means to prevent its recurrence. The limited oral record available on Tunduru, meanwhile, focuses for this period on labour migrancy and the aftermath of slavery, rather than hunger.2 As the famine passed, official interest in this remote district dropped off again rapidly. Nevertheless, the limited record of the events available to us repays study for several reasons.

Chapter 5 showed that villagisation passed with the problems surrounding market access unsolved, and with no discernible systemic changes to production beyond those necessitated by greater distances between cultivators and their crops. Likewise, cultivators’ expectation that the state support them in their efforts to reach markets remained urgent. By contrast, in terms of policy the failure of villagisation catalysed major changes. It coincided with a global shift in economic thought away from attributing governments a positive role, and opened the door for the replacement of the early post-colonial ‘statist’ approaches to development, with national governments at the centre, with different organisational forms that persist until now.1 These newer forms, dominant since the 1990s, are characterised by the increased influence of international donors on the design and implementation of programmes and projects, and by donors’ increasing reliance on an ever-expanding variety of so-called non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for the same purposes.2

As Chapter 4 showed, Tanzania’s villagers moved into the post-colonial period with new expectations and a host of old problems; in the case of the Southeast, centred around production for and access to global markets. Despite expressions of goodwill from industrialised countries, east and west, the new government did not have any dramatically new options for dealing with these.1 Rather, throughout the 1960s, it followed a gradualist approach to rural development, focused on supporting so-called progressive farmers.2 This gradualism went out of the window with the forced villagisation campaign of 1973–76. But I argue here that, newly-developed socialist rhetoric notwithstanding, villagisation had much in common with earlier phases in the history of development in Tanzania. In particular, it sought to address long-standing constraints on crop marketing, and it exhibited the already familiar tension between input-oriented and educational approaches.

In Chapter 6, I have characterised rural development projects as part of a fluid, multisided interaction that, notwithstanding its dependence on misleading claims, its unpredictable outcomes and its contributions to victim-blaming, had its uses for both provincial officials and villagers. It helped the former stay relevant, and formed an unpredictable but appreciated part of villagers’ pursuit of livelihoods and status. This concluding chapter seeks to show these interactions at work by focusing on one site and one development NGO around 2000, and the way it was remembered a decade later. Rather than opposing experts’ claims about the benefits of participatory development to its actual political effects, it seeks to trace diverse and ambiguous outcomes by putting RIPS’s interventions in the context of local politics beyond the development arena, and of large-scale economic shifts.

Chapter 1 illustrated the close imbrication of environmental, social, economic, and political factors in the history of one particular poverty crisis, a famine. This chapter seeks to broaden the perspective to the whole region, providing a baseline understanding of changes in the colonial period. This means covering a lot of ground: characterising the agricultural environment and strategies for its use, demographics, the region’s version of the colonial ‘cash crop revolution’, and its relations to the colonial centre. While a partly enumerative approach is unavoidable, the chapter aims to retain focus by giving particular attention to two issues that are especially important in relation to present-day discussions of causes of poverty and ways to counter it.