Making Farms In The African Bush

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31239, 10 December 1966, Page 13

Making Farms In The African Bush

Harty arrived at Mlale, near Songea, 50 miles east of Lake Malawi, in ApriL! 1964, to assume his duties as project manager of a farmsettlement scheme. The settlement project and a connected farmers’ training centre have been financed by Ireland at a cost of £150,000 as a contribution to the Freedom from Hunger Campaign of the Food and Agriculture Organisation. and the Tanzania Government has put up £150,000 for both projects. 20ft Bush In these early months he and a Government surveyor walked over the whole 10 square miles laying out what would one day be 250 20-acre farms. Part of the great brachystegia woodland of East Central Africa covers Tanzania, including the Ruvuma region where the project is located, and this had to be chopped away before the settlers could come in. The bush of 20ft trees covered an area pierced by 10 streams, all at the bottom of fairly deep ravines. Into these, and up over the hill on the other side, and then down again, walked Harty and his helper, marking out the farms along the contour of the hills. In his footsteps came three villages. Today, from his house, on top of the highest hill, Harty can just see through the bush the roofs of Mlale and Masango. Lindipindipu is out of sight behind the hills. 90 Houses Built The villages are composed of rows of mud houses which the husbands of the settled families built in the first few’ weeks after their arrival. Most of the families now also have neat brick houses with cement floors in front of the old houses. “Frames are up for all the houses,” said Harty, “and 90 houses are completed. I want to get them all done before I leave.” This urgency to get everything done before he leaves runs through all his conversation, for he is desperately afraid that without outside stimulation, the farmers will eventually abandon their new homes and the buildings will stand empty. “I’m afraid

ILLIAM John Harty, aged 39, an Irishman, lives in a big brick bungalow on a hill with his wife. Kaye, and his two small boys. He works a long day from 7.30 in the morning until 7.30 in the evening, seven days a 55 eek.

He has no electricity only hurricane lamps; his drinking-water has to be filtered and boiled for fear of amoebae and typhoid; his bath-water is heated in an oil drum built by himself into a brick chimney outside his house, ox er a wood fire it runs into his bathtub by gravity, and is light brown; he has not seen a film or a play for a year and the nearest city is 700 miles away, over the dense and almost trackless bush of south-w est Tanzania.

we’re about a year ahead of the farmers,” he said. “We should go more slowly, but we haven’t the time.” Vegetable Gardens In plots beside their houses, the settlers raise some maize, patches of cassava, beans, squash, groundnuts, sweet potatoes, spinach, cabbage and pigeon peas. Most of the families have one or two small banana trees, and some orange and grapefruit trees were provided under the settlement scheme. In front of one of the village houses, a young woman is pounding maize in a mortar. She pounds rhythmically, three strokes with one arm, three strokes with the other. A baby sleeps nearby, in a cot under a gauze screen, and a child’s toy wagon devised from tin can lids and bits of balsa wood lies nearby. Dark brown tobacco leaves threaded onto wire are hanging over one of

the roof supports of the! family’s new house. The frame and the roof of currugated aluminium are up, and the brick walls will soon be built. Clean Houses Meanwhile, the family sleeps in the mud-house behind. Inside, the hut is dark but neat and sweetsmelling. A name in flowing script under a large coloured photograph on the wall proclaims that this is the house of Joseph R. Moshi. His wife, who has finished pounding the maize outside, moves to a wood fire, and puts on a pot of water to cook pieces of chicken. A normal afternoon in the life of a Mlale settler’s wife, but this is an exceptional family. The clean house, the careful cooking, the mosquito net over the baby, all bespeak an enlightened approach. These are the kinds of settlers Harty hopes will stay at Mlale. There are 230 families now, but he expects that 100 or more will leave after the tobacco harvest, and after a subsidy from the Government and some food aid come to an end. Harty, who knows each settler by name and by capability, said the hardest workers of the present group would be the ones who will stay. The settler who is willing to work can, even under present circumstances, earn about £50 —more than twice the average for Tanzania— Harty reckons. Songea area produces about 200 pounds of tobacco an acre, but the average at Mlale could be 800 pounds. Prices Worry

Prices are one of Harty’s major worries. At present, all tobacco is bought by a local co-operative, the NgoniMatengo Co-operative Union, which, in turn, sells to only

one broker in Britain. Prices must be adequate to ensure the future of the project “But the present price for No. 4 tobacco, the lowest of four grades, is only 42 (U.S.) cents for 30 kilograms,” said Harty. Maize could also one day become a cash crop, Harty thinks, with a real possibility of a profit of $2B (U.S.) a year per crop, per farmer. One of the advantages to the farmers of living on the settlement site is that land is ploughed and harrowed communally, using the scheme’s heavy equipment. “This way each farmer can handle two acres of maize and two of tobacco comfortably, where only one acre was possible outside,” said Harty. “But with the current tobacco prices they can never earn very much.” Remarkable Feat Still, with all its problems, the settlement has made good progress in two-and-a-half years—remarkable, in fact, according to Dr. W. Y. Yang, farm management specialist at F.A.O. headquarters in Rome. Most settlement schemes take years to get under way—but a year-and-a half after Mlale was started, the bush was pushed back, houses were being lived in, crops were being sown, and farmers realising incomes. At Mlale, there is a village square, a dispensary, at cooperative store—with no goods yet—a market, a school, a mill shed and workshops, tobacco barns for grading and curing, a community centre with a library and reading room, a Government office, a machine storehouse and — most popular of all—a football field. There are spaces —at present covered with the shaggy grey brachystegias—for retail stores, a garage, and a cemetery. Harty wants to

put up a few temporary stalls for the market, and he says there is already a little market activity on Sundays after church. Adult education is another vital activity. A Peace Corps worker, Sigurd Midlefort, is teaching at Mlale, helped by some of the literate settlers. The adults learn to read and write in three months, and Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere, came to the site last year, to present 55 literacy certificates. Sewing, Cooking A woman community development assistant is stationed at Mlale to deal with women’s adult literacy classes, and to teach sewing and cookery. Football, dancing and singing and drama groups are all in various states of development, and Harty hopes later to get a film projector. Harty’s staff now includes, Yoram Porter Muchindo, a big, calm Zambian, who for 12 years was manager of farm settlement schemes at Urambo, near Tabora, and Lupatingatinga near Mbeya, in Tanzania. He is a tobacco expert, and will take over when Harty leaves next June. Granville Langley-Smith, a Voluntary Service Organisation worker from the United Kingdom, helps in the scheme. Sunday Clothes Harty’s total involvement in his job becomes clear as he drives over the incredibly bumpy road of the settlement. Lurching along, he is totally oblivious of anything except the buildings, the tobacco, the farm families, the water supply, the maize. He talks incessantly and effortlessly about these things. Passing through the two

outlying villages, we stop for a moment Immediately a man in a shirt which is nothing more than holes held together by myriad threads, runs to the car to ask for an advance to get his sick wife to a doctor. Little boys in short frayed trousers, small girls in dresses that have been worn non-stop for who knows how long. Many have hoarse coughs, and sore eyes, runny noses and scabby feet. All are covered, even to their eyelashes, with the powdery dust of Mlale which eventually reduces everything to the same red-ochre hue. “But you ought to see them on Sunday when they’re dressed up for church,” said Harty proudly. Forest Project The list of projects he wants to finish up before his contract ends is a long one. “I want to start a forest nursery of eucalypts to replace the bush we are clearing. Water is needed for only three months of the year; other times the water can be used to irrigate the tree nursery, and eventually I want to establish irrigated plots for each settler, so they can grow vegetables or whatever they want. Chinese technicians are surveying for an iron mine 25 miles away, and there may be a big market there for vegetables.” He also wants to build a storage shed in the middle of the tobacco seed-bed, for insecticides, hose, fertilisers and so on. Farm Training Another of his biggest concerns is the adjacent farmers’ training centre, whose buildings are all up and where the

first class was started last March. The prinicpal, Pius Mhoma, was trained in the United States, Denmark and Israel, and there are two extension workers to help him. There is living accommodation for 30 students, and more than £25,000 of the Irish contribution has gone to build the centre. The first class is settlers. They are studing tobacco, maize, vegetable and poultry raising. Having the centre and the settlement scheme side-by-side will benefit both, says Harty. Courses will last one to two weeks, and will comprise both men and women. There are many discourage-

ments—settlers who have no will to work or to be independent of outside aid; passivity and deep-rooted prejudices against better methods, the difficulties of marketing tobacco; the loneliness; the very variety of daily tasks to be faced—and all with the deadline of next June. Illness, Poverty Looking at the settlers of Mlale, one wonders why these people do not instantly take advantage of the benefits the settlement scheme has brought them, and become diligent farmers. It takes them years to get going, and

as Harty has pointed out, he is already a year or two ahead of their possibilities of keeping up. Then one realises that they are racked with every parasite imaginable; with malaria, with chiggers and all other “dudus” or in-

sects; with chonic malnutrition, and most of all, with poverty which chains them to this life. It is the effort to break one of the links of this chain that keeps Harty going from Monday to Friday and then Saturday and Sunday as well.