Resettling Buha: a social history of resettled communities in Kigoma Region, Tanzania, 1933-1975.

Abstract

Residents of lowland Buha, in western Tanzania’s Kigoma Region, faced statesponsored, forced resettlement campaigns in both the colonial and postcolonial periods. In the 1930s, British colonial officials compelled those living in the easternmost areas to resettle closer to the roadway as a public health intervention in response to epidemic sleeping sickness. In the 1970s, Tanzanian officials forced everyone in the region to resettle again, this time in African socialist, or ujamaa, villages. This dissertation examines these schemes as part of a long-term history of resettlement in Buha, demonstrating how resettlement was a decades-long, unfolding process for both Ha people and government officials. In particular, I examine the interplay between the moral visions that different government officials and Ha people had for resettled areas and the material constraints in which they operated. Neither group could unilaterally implement their priorities but instead had to work within a series of limitations. For Ha people, this involved managing the forms of interference that government settlement and natural resource policies placed on their choice of domicile and use of resources. For state officials, they not only had to contend with competing Ha priorities, but also with resource limitations, internal divisions within their bureaucracies, and their own ideological commitments to western science and economic development. In the end, resettled communities created in the wake of removal were not the results of the transformative power of state planning, but instead formed at the intersection of Ha and governmental desires to replicate, adjust, or revolutionize Ha lives and livelihoods.