Analysing the history of agrarian struggles in Tanzania from a feminist perspective

Agriculture remains the major site of employment and livelihoods for most Tanzanians, and especially women. This article explores patterns of continuity and change in agrarian struggles and primitive accumulation in Tanzania from a transformative feminist perspective. Such a framework combines gender and class, and questions of race and national sovereignty in its analysis of production and reproduction as significant components of feminist political economy. It pursues the author’s particular interest in the continuity between colonial efforts to destroy the self-sustaining nature of peasant production and reproduction and to promote settler and corporate agriculture and mining instead, and the present neoliberal focus on ‘transformation’. The analysis here is based on a re-reading of earlier work, including much of the author’s own, together with reflection on the results of participatory action research carried out by the Tanzanian Gender Networking Programme with grassroots activists in selected rural areas during the period from 2010 to 2014. Of particular significance is the joint emphasis given by grassroots women both to economic and social service issues.