Paper presented at EAHN 2024,
School of Architecture, Athens, Greece,
June 19-23, 2024.
School of Architecture, Athens, Greece,
June 19-23, 2024.
In the early spring of 1968, a Nordic Agriculture Mission arrived in Tanzania to prepare a joint Nordic-Tanzanian development project proposal. This was not the first Nordic venture in Tanzania: Kibaha Educational Centre, established three years earlier, combined schools, health centres, Rural Development Units and Farmers’ Training College and was hailed as an overwhelming success. Now, the “Nordic spirit” was to materialise in a Mbeya agricultural research centre intended to expand the productivity of Tanzanian farming and husbandry. The project consisted of state-of-the-art agricultural laboratories and testing grounds and summoned Nordic agronomists, commercial pasture specialists, plant breeders, soil chemists, livestock officers and agricultural economists to conduct elaborate tests on soil types, crop genetics, insecticides and fertilisers. Tanzanian cows, pigs and hens roamed in luxurious “livestock centres” while Norwegian specialists searched for bottlenecks that prevented local farmers “from adopting improved farming techniques.” Unsurprisingly, the project’s lofty expectations hardly lived up to the reality—not least due to the limited understanding of the on-the-ground realities of Tanzanian farming. The militarised language of the agricultural “offensive” revealed the antagonistic nature of the imposed Nordic techno-scientific modernity, reflected in the project’s sleek modernist architecture and the technological approach to grains and crop farming.
The paper explores the Mbeya project as a site of encounter between different agricultural paradigms and knowledge regimes. It is particularly interested in the granular details of frictions and debates between those working on the ground and those with “technical expertise” between local governmental elites and bureaucrats of the international development agencies. By reading the previously unstudied project’s archive “against the grain,” the paper aims to bring forth Tanzanian perspectives and insight, often left as silences and gaps in the official documents. These re-constructed contested perspectives provide a different contextualisation for nascent 1970s Nordic environmental debates.