I arrived in Songea, as a newly appointed Cooperative Officer, in the same night
Winston Churchill was returned for a second time as prime minister of Britain.
Cooperative Officers were, at that time - October 1951 - a new kind of animal
in the Colonial Service: they were first recruited under the aegis of the previous
Labour government, whose Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, a pacifist
trade union leader, had been a strong supporter of the Cooperative movement.
It was therefore slightly ironic that my arrival in a remote up-country station in
south-west Tanganyika under these somewhat 'lefty' colours should coincide with
the start of a Conservative administration at home. And, indeed, there can be
no denying there was to be at times a somewhat 'edgy' relationship between
the established order in Songea and this ignorant young sprat (me) who would
be trying to teach his grandmother to suck eggs. My instructions, however,
had been clearly described in the letter of introduction to Denis Hill the District Commissioner: 'It will be his duty to assist Major Stevens in both his capacities,
i.e. Executive Officer, Songea Native Tobacco Board (Sontob), and Manager,
Ngoni Matengo Cooperative Marketing Union Limited (Ngomat), and eventually
to take over from him when he goes on leave...' Significantly, it concluded: 'It
is hoped ... that he will be given as much opportunity as possible of guiding
the primary societies in cooperative principles and practice, and eradicating the
shortcomings to which attention was recently drawn by the auditors'.
The set-up within which these 'shortcomings' occurred had by this time become
pretty well the standard form of organisation in Tanganyika for marketing a main
cash crop - tobacco in Songea, coffee in Moshi and Tukuyu, cotton in Mwanza. So
that, in Songea, the farmers' crop was collected in the field by primary cooperative
societies, of which they were members; then consigned to the Union of these
societies, Ngomat, which processed it in its factory; then 'shipped' the baled leaf
to markets in Liverpool and Kampala. Supervising all this activity was Sontob, a
statutory Board charged with controlling the whole industry. Simple enough to
say, but in a District twice the size of Wales, four hundred miles from the coast and
virtually cut off by road from the rest of the country for about half the year during
and after the rains, the logistical problems were immense. Just as well, you may
think, that the whole business was then being managed by a former KAR army
officer, whose main objective was simply to 'make the show work', and no fiddle
faddle nonsense about 'cooperative principles and practice'.
I met 'Steve' Stevens at breakfast that first morning, after not nearly enough
sleep: an amiable chap with an impressive handle-bar moustache (looking,
if anything, almost as overhung as I did, having celebrated Churchill's victory
into the small hours). After briefly introducing ourselves to each other over the
toast and marmalade, he drove me down to the factory on the outskirts of the
township. I was astounded: at the end of a bumpy, dusty old track, in an area of
scrubland and the odd shamba of maize or cassava, was a large, totally modern
factory. Built under the direction of Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners, it represented
the culmination of twenty years' development of the Songea dark-fired tobacco
industry, a period during which the original three tobacco marketing societies had
grown to twenty, and the crop had swelled from less than a hundred to nearly
a thousand tons. That's a lot of tobacco. What I did not know, as I gazed in
admiration at this impressive building, was that the industry had now outgrown its
capacity to handle it.
At the 'receiving' bay, where lorries piled high with tobacco were being unloaded,
I met the factory manager, a burly Southern Rhodesian, berating the society
committeemen for bringing in improperly graded leaf. At Steve explained,
societies had been accepting - and paying for - far too much tobacco as top
grade, when it was often of lower quality. Indeed, many society members were in
the habit of briefly dunking their baskets of leaf in the river on their way to the gulio
(receiving shed), in order to be credited with a few more kilos. Inside the factory,
where the leaf was piled into huge stacks, Steve described how wet tobacco
was causing leaf to heat up the bulk. Yet so much tobacco had been brought in from the previous, huge 1950 crop - still not fully regraded, conditioned, baled,
etc. - that there was, even in that large new warehouse, no space to turn the
bulks. Losses from charred leaf were apparently colossal. The Songea tobacco
industry was in fact approaching disaster, but no-one had yet appreciated just
how disastrous - certainly not the tobacco farmers out in the field, chortling over
the high 'advance' payments they had been receiving. My job, it seemed, was to
disillusion them, and take those smiles off their face - to be replaced, one hoped,
by sober determination to do things in future by the book.
Denis believed that safaris were good for young officers. So some days later
found me seated by the driver of an empty tobacco lorry on an easy one-way
trip out to Gumbiro, which had a society only 25 miles or so from Songea, on the
Njombe road, with my newly recruited cook, Rashidi, and a young (government)
Cooperative Inspector, Peter Moyo, plus all my recently acquired safari gear from
Messrs Griffiths McAllister in the back. When we got there Gumbiro proved to be
a dismal clearing surrounded by four or five grass-thatched huts with mud walls
and a small collection of sun-dried brick buildings, only one of which was wholly
built, with a rusty corrugated iron roof and partly surrounded by an old bamboo
stockade. Beside it, dirty and unswept, was a crumbling courthouse: this was the
baraza of Nkosi Zulu, one of the two Ngoni paramount chiefs. The place had an
air of desolation and neglect - not a soul to be seen, just a few cooking pots, and
the usual scrawny chickens scratching about in a litter of maize husks, to suggest
human habitation. Having expected to see a bustling rural tobacco market, this
was disappointing. Where was everybody? Peter led me through the trees to
another clearing, with a mud building similar to the baraza but if anything even
more dilapidated, its thatch slipping off to leave gaping holes in the roof. This,
apparently, was the Gumbiro Cooperative Marketing Society Limited.
Gumbiro, as it happened, was not typical of Songea's tobacco marketing societies,
but it exhibited (when Peter had managed to assemble a few of its officials and
assorted members) many of the characteristics common to all of them: chiefly,
a complete lack of understanding on the part of members of what their chama
(society) stood for. They did not realise (because discussion with farmers had been
largely in the form of instruction rather than explanation) that paying themselves
over the odds for low grade tobacco merely reduced the second payment when
that tobacco came eventually to be sold for its true value. And in due course,
these chickens obviously did come home to roost. The District-wide discontent
occasioned by the delay in clearing and then, eventually, making an exceptionally
small final payment on the 1950 crop was the catalyst for what subsequently
transpired, and was sufficiently vociferous to disturb the great ones of Sontob
in Lindi (then the seat of the Provincial Commissioner, Andy Pike, who was the
Board chairman) and, more especially, Dar es Salaam, where the Commissioner
for Cooperative Development, Robin Malcolm, scion of a Scottish lairdship and a
great wit, had long kept a finger on the pulse in Songea.
At a memorable meeting of the Board it was decided, after much previous high-level
confabulation, to make a clean sweep of a system that had for many years served the industry well, but had now ceased to be a force for development, and
had indeed become a brake on it. The cooperative societies' legislation stated
that 'the control of the affairs of a registered society shall be vested in the general
meeting', which elects a committee that 'shall exercise all the powers necessary
for the full and proper administration of the society'. In Songea these powers
were not being exercised. The committee of the Union was virtually ignored; it
did not occur to Steve, the Manager, that he was in any way subordinate to it;
committee members of the societies were treated by the Board staff more like
common labourers than having any authority at all. This state of affairs - of the
Board, via its Executive Office, virtually running the growers' business with only
the most perfunctory consultation - was what I had been briefed, had to change;
and which now the Board did change.
It is difficult to convey to the present-day reader the atmosphere at that time, but
looking back now at a distance of nearly sixty years, I see very clearly that the
turmoil of events in Songea was typical of the 'wind of change blowing through
Africa' that Harold Macmillan spoke of in a famous speech a few years after the dust
of them was settling in our remote upcountry district. The Board's radical decision
to sack all the European staff save one was a dreadful shock, not only to those
who lost their jobs, and to their families, but to the whole close-knit community
of expatriates on the station. For me, who was now ex-officio Secretary of the
Board, it was especially wretched. No matter how much I might have disagreed
with my colleagues' professional attitude, we had been friendly with each other;
they had introduced me kindly to my new life and I had experienced the warmth of
their hospitality. Now they had lost their jobs; and yet, in spite of my sympathy for
them, I could not feel other than that the decision to remove them had been right.
It was not the end of the story, of course. I was to remain in Songea for an
exceptional three tours, and witnessed the Union's disastrous appointment of its
first African Manager, a politically motivated primary school teacher, who toured
the District dispensing patronage with such abandon that he eventually aroused
the hostility of those who had not been favoured, to the extent that the committee,
to my great relief, at last screwed themselves up to the disagreeable decision in
turn to sack him. He however had merely been a nuisance: the major problem now
facing the Union was, as a result of the 1950 crop experience, a serious decline
in tobacco cultivation throughout the District. From being overwhelmed with too
much poorly presented leaf, the magnificent new factory was now handling crops
too small to cover its overhead costs. Much effort was therefore expended in
trying to explain to irascible general meetings the whys and wherefores of their
tobacco marketing account; and serious attempts were made to get the crop
properly graded, so that the price of top quality was not lowered by adulteration.
Simple lessons, and so much depended on their being learned; but it was always
an uphill task when so much now depended also on self-discipline.
I am not qualified to write of Tanzania's experience of Cooperatives after
Independence, other than to note that over a period of fifty years they have gone
through an almost continual process of restructuring and reorganisation, with frequent legislative amendment designed to improve what a 2000 Presidential
Committee described as their 'poor performance' due to 'lack or non-functioning
of internal controls'. The Government's latest initiative is The Cooperative Reform
and Modernization Program (note the spelling), known as 'CRMP: 2005 - 2015'.
They are not going to give up on Cooperation yet.
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