Getting to Know Goima Anew// Tracing Change in a Tanzanian Village with a 25 Year Perspective
This exciting post was written by our colleagues Willie Ostberg and Joseph Mduma following their recent revisit to their study site, 25 years on from their original fieldwork. These are their initial insights into the changes in Goima.
We missed Chemba village. We have passed here many times and occasionally also had reason to stop in Chemba, yet this time we missed it. It was difficult to recognise places and landmarks as we travelled north from Dodoma towards Kondoa. This stretch of the Great North Road, initiated in the 1890s to connect Cape Town and Cairo, has always been a slow and tiring drive, at times impassable during the rains. Now it is in mess. It is finally to be tarmacked and we move along deviations and beside bridges under construction avoiding moving heavy machinery, and in this turmoil we pass Chemba without noticing the village.
Chemba village has recently become headquarters of a new district, Chemba district. We turn the car, return and visit the new smart office block, show our permits and leave the Cape-Cairo Road to take the old, much smaller and peaceful road to Goima village, where we are to revisit farms and families we studied in 1991-93.
Already along the road we have learnt that things are not the way we remember them, and more is to come. As we pass Mirambu village we meet a donkey cart and note that a new solar panel stands among sugarcanes and various odd things on the loading platform. This looks promising!
As the small road from Chemba joins the road coming from Kondoa town and that passes through Goima, we are in for many more and far more spectacular changes. The road itself is improved, wide and with a gravel surface. And there are buses! We remembered and old, battered and erratic bus passing through Goima in the morning on its way to Kiteto and returning in the afternoon. Now bus after bus pass, with connections to Arusha, Babati, Dar es Salaam, Dodoma, Tanga…
When we worked here 25 years ago the Burunge of Goima felt they were a forgotten part of Tanzania, and that development was for the central, highland parts of the Kondoa District, which they at that time were part of. They said that even their name was not known in the country. When they travelled outside the district people thought they came from Burundi. Few had heard of the Burunge hills. Now Goima is no longer forgotten backwater. That the village has entered a global world will soon become apparent to us.
As we reach Goima village we meet a new skyline. There is a high communication tower (yes, the village is now connected to the national electricity grid!), and there are many new permanent buildings with high-raised roofs covered with metal sheets.
So many new buildings! So many new shops. As we drive into the village we have Mzee Salim Suta Doo’s building and shop on our right. But no people move there in the shade of the veranda. This used to be a busy place. We are told that teachers at the new Secondary School (!) now live there and that Mzee Suta has built not less than three new shops in the village centre. One of them stocks spare parts for motorcycles, cement, and diesel. Such goods were not on sale in Goima in the early 1990s.
By the big Ficus tree in the middle of the village, where peddlers used to put out their selection of tomatoes, onions, dried fish, grains and beans, now a small fleet of motorcycles wait for people and goods to be shipped.
Motorcycles, mobile phones, buses. Goima has become connected. It not that there were no motorcycles 25 years ago. The Executive Officer of Goima Division had one, the Ward Forest Officer and the Agricultural Officer drove motorcycles as well as a handful of private people. Now there are more than 35 motorcycles in the village.[i] There was a car based at the Catholic Church and also a tractor. Today Goima village is the home of seven tractors.
25 years ago Goima was seen as a sleepy place where nothing much happened. It was the headquarters of Goima Division of Kondoa District and should have been in a position to attract development interventions. It did not. Goima was being by-passed by other lowland villages like Chandama, Jangalo, Mriyo, Songolo, Soya, and the then recently established settlements in the Burunge hills, like Madah. Those were the places that traders from Arusha visited to buy crops. There immigrants kept arriving to clear in the forests and sure enough they got bumper harvests from the virgin lands. New shops and canteens were opened, new schools started, churches and mosques were built while Goima remained dormant. This is no longer so. Goima is bursting with activity.
Here we are now: a team of five people. Three veterans of the Longterm Livelihood Change in Tanzania project, Olivia Howland, Cuthbert Mwanyika, Einhard Mwanyika and the two of us, attempting to document what made Goima wake up. Was it when the electricity arrived, the mobile tower, the road, the secondary school? Putting the question to the first focus group the researchers are told that the answer is education, farming and livestock. If so, did tractors cause this, or improved seeds, better market access, or what? We do not know but now we have the chance to find out. We come armed with interviews from the early 1990s made with 51 farmers that we are now to revisit to get production figures, assets, experiences. We shall collect statistics and talk to knowledgeable people here about what they think caused the changes we see.
To the two of us the change in Goima is spectacular, at least at first sight. Our colleagues are less impressed. Does this not look just like any Tanzanian village? What is so special with some shops, a communication tower, buses, a secondary school, and a new spacious mosque? They are of course right. Goima looks just like most other villages in Tanzania. But we happen to see it through a 25 year old lens, and to us, Goima is like a new place. Might it tell a wider story of radically transformed rural livelihood conditions in Tanzania? This is an exciting challenge, not least in the light of the rapid growth of the national economy (a yearly average growth of about seven per cent since 2000) which has remained concentrated to Dar es Salaam, the mining and tourist sectors. Very little has reportedly reached the rural areas.[ii] If Goima is just like any Tanzanian village, could it then be that the gloomy picture of rural change in Tanzania is misconceived?
Driving out of Goima along the road to Kondoa after the first brief visit we still have one major surprise awaiting us. We pass the bridge over the river, dry now during the dry season, that passes through the village and we look out over the valley to the west and we see – water! A large water body shimmering in the sunset. It is beautiful and totally unexpected.
Water is the all important issue in Goima. The rivers are ephemeral and it is difficult to find surface water for most of the year. In the early 1990s at least one member of each household was often on the move drawing water from wells dug deep into dry riverbeds situated kilometres away from home. Any discussion about farming and livelihoods started and ended with the comment “if only it rains”.
Goima area has a semi-arid climate with an average annual precipitation of below 550 mm. The rain falls between November and May with the rest of the year being very dry. Rainfall is both scarce and unpredictable.
In the early 1990s we concluded that it was the lack of water that held back developments. What can you do when there is not water for people, crops, livestock? We documented all water projects we could find evidence of, from the colonial period up to the time of our stay in Goima. It became a catalogue of good intentions, plans, attempts, and failures. We learned about dams, boreholes, wells, rain ceremonies, prayers. It seemed everything had been tried. Yet there still was not water in Goima. And now we see this large water expanse surrounded by low hills.
When we return the following day we start inquiring. The only conclusive answer we get is that neither the government nor an NGO were involved. Instead:
It occurred naturally during the last rains.
It is God’s work.
The water raised up from below.
Water has always remained standing in that area for some time after the rains, and this time it remained and is still there now at the end of the dry season.
People decided to lead run off into that area so that a lot of water accumulated. People worked together on this and others came with food to those who dug.
A rich man hired a grader from the roads people and had an embankment built which forced water to move towards the natural dam.
It must be that one of the streams changed its watercourse so that water became trapped there.
After more than half a century’s attempts to get water in Goima it is now there, and the dominating opinion among people – as far as we yet know – is that it occurred naturally. The lake is very shallow and two or three consecutive dry years will, people fear, make it dry up again. But for the moment there is water reasonably close to Goima, and it looks like a miracle.
High up on our agenda now is to interview the man who is said to have hired the grader, to talk to the Ward Agricultural Officer, to try to understand how run off collects in this area, why water did not percolate the way it had done previous years, and to find out to what extent the new dam is a community initiative. Did Nature finally address the problem that has haunted Goima as long as there have been people here?
It is thrilling to be here together with not less than three colleagues, having the intriguing question of how water arrived to Goima, and many more enigmas, to work with.
[i] Figure from 2014, files in the office of Goima ward.
[ii] Poverty increased between 1992 and 2000 but has been drastically reduced since then. The proportion of Tanzanians living in poverty fell from 84% to 43% in the period 2000-2012. Yet, the number of Tanzanians living in poverty was larger in 2012 than in 1992, according to World Bank figures summarised 2016 in M. McGillivray, D. Carpenter, O. Morrisey, J. Thaarup, “Swedish Development Cooperation with Tanzania. Has it helped the poor?” (Available free of charge at www.eba.se.). Since over 75% of the population live in rural areas, and links between the agricultural and other sectors are weak, doubts have been raised that the country’s rapid economic growth more than marginally has benefitted the rural areas.
