Tanzanian Coastal and Marine Resources: Some Examples Illustrating Questions of Sustainable Use

This is Chapter 4 of the book Lessons Learned: Case Studies in Sustainable Use. The coast of Tanzania is characterised by a wide diversity of biotopes and species, typical of the tropical Indowest Pacific oceans, and the peoples living there utilise a variety of its natural resources. Because of the extent of the diversity and variety, several different examples are used by this study to elucidate the complexity of issues and multiplicity of management responses related to use of coastal and marine resources. It emerges that coastal management requires an integrated cross-sectoral approach to address the wide array of inter related issues involved.The study describes the status of selected resources from the principal biotopes (coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds and beaches) as well as fish stocks, and it examines various forms of their utilisation. Some special cases of endangered species are also examined. The study attempts to analyse questions of sustainable use in relation to ecosystem dynamics, socio-economic processes, institutions and policies. The characteristics for what we consider as approaching a state of sustainable use are proposed, and the requirements considered necessary for ensuring sustainability are outlined. Past experience and the current status of coastal and marine resource uses are summarised through the examples chosen in order to explain the main constraints to the attainment of sustainability. Cross cutting issues related to the breakdown of traditional management systems for common property resources in the face of increasing commercialisation, privatisation, and external interventions appear to pose general problems. The general experiences of community projects, legislation, and mitigation measures are assessed from the examples we have chosen

Dar es Salaam as a 'Harbour of Peace' in East Africa: Tracing the Role of Creolized Urban Ethnicity in Nation-State Formation

Dar es Salaam is exceptional in East Africa for having a record of relatively little ethnic tension, and remaining tranquil and true to its name, the ‘harbour of peace’. This paper explores the interface between ethnic and national identities in Tanzania’s capital city, focusing on its ethnic foundations and their malleability with regard to nationalism, asking how nationalist identities were negotiated vis-à-vis existing local ethnic identities. How willing were ethnic groups that were indigenous to the locality to ‘share’ the city, its land, and amenities with newcomer compatriots, given that the city was almost as new as the nation-state? How did their modus operandi affect nation-building?nation-state, Tanzania, nationalism, urbanization

Beyond the artisanal mining site: migration, housing capital accumulation and indirect urbanization in East Africa

During the past 30 years, Tanzania has experienced successive precious mineral rushes led by artisanal miners. Their settlement, livelihood and housing strategies have evolved amidst high mobility in pursuit of mineral wealth. Cumulatively, the spatial movement of artisanal miners and an associated following of economically motivated migrant service providers have catalysed large-scale “direct urbanization” at artisanal mine sites-cum-small towns. These settlements have been generally characterized by relatively makeshift accommodation, which may mask accumulated savings of in situ earnings for housing investment elsewhere. In this article, in addition to documenting the mine-led direct urbanization process, we draw attention to a subsequent “indirect urbanization” phenomenon, whereby many successful artisanal miners and other entrepreneurial mining settlement residents make strategic house building investments in larger towns and cities. In anticipation of declining mineral yields and retirement from days of “roughing it” in mining sites, they endeavour to channel savings into housing in more urbanized locations, aiming to diversify into profitable business activities, living a life with better physical and social amenities. Their second-wave onward migration from mine sites encompasses more diverse destinations, particularly regional towns and cities, which accommodate their work and family life cycle needs and lifestyle preferences. Such mine-led direct and indirect urbanization processes arise from sequential migration decision-making of participants in Tanzania’s artisanal mining sector. In this article, we interrogate mining settlement residents’ locational choices on the basis of fieldwork survey findings from four artisanal gold and diamond mining settlements in Tanzania’s mineral-rich regions of Geita, Mwanza and Shinyanga, and from in-depth interviews with miners-cum-entrepreneurs residing in Mwanza, Tanzania’s second largest city, situated in the heart of Tanzania’s gold fields

Prostitution or partnership? Wifestyles in Tanzanian artisanal gold-mining settlements

Tanzania, along with several other African countries, is experiencing a national mining boom, which has prompted hundreds of thousands of men and women to migrate to mineral-rich locations. At these sites, relationships between the sexes defy the sexual norms of the surrounding countryside to embrace new relational amalgams of polygamy, monogamy and promiscuity. This article challenges the assumption that female prostitution is widespread. Using interview data with women migrants, we delineate six ‘wifestyles’, namely sexual-cum-conjugal relationships between men and women that vary in their degree of sexual and material commitment. In contrast to bridewealth payments, which involved elders formalising marriages through negotiations over reproductive access to women, sexual negotiations and relations in mining settlements involve men and women making liaisons and co-habitation arrangements directly between each other without third-party intervention. Economic interdependence may evolve thereafter with the possibility of women, as well as men, offering material support to their sex partners

Youth in Tanzania's urbanizing mining settlements: Prospecting a mineralized future

Over the last fifteen years many African countries have experienced a mining take-off. Mining activities have bifurcated into two sectors: large-scale, capital-intensive production generating the bulk of the exported minerals, and small-scale, labour-intensive artisanal mining, which, at present, is catalyzing far greater immediate primary, secondary and tertiary employment opportunities for unskilled African labourers. Youth residing in mining settlements, have a large vested interest in the current and future development of mining. Focusing on Tanzania as typical of the emerging new mineralizing Africa, this paper, examines youth's role in mining based on recent fieldwork in the country's northwestern gold fields. Youth's current involvement in mining as full-fledged, as opposed to part-time, miners is distinguished. The attitudes of secondary school students towards mining as a form of employment and its impact on economic and social life in mining communities are discussed within the context of the uneasy transitions from an agrarian to a mining-based country, from rural to urban lifestyles, and the growing scope and power of foreign-directed, capital-intensive, corporate mining relative to local labour-intensive artisanal mining

For richer, for poorer: marriage and casualized sex in East African artisanal mining settlements

Migrants to Tanzania's artisanal gold mining sites seek mineral wealth, which is accompanied by high risks of occupational hazards, economic failure, AIDS and social censure from their home communities. Male miners in these settlements compete to attract newly arrived young women who are perceived to be diverting male material support from older women and children's economic survival. This article explores the dynamics of monogamy, polygamy and promiscuity in the context of rapid occupational change. It shows how a wide spectrum of productive and welfare outcomes is generated through sexual experimentation, which calls into question conventional concepts of prostitution, marriage and gender power relations

Eureka and beyond: mining's impact on African urbanisation

This collection brings separate literatures on mining and urbanisation together at a time when both artisanal and large-scale mining are expanding in many African economies. While much has been written about contestation over land and mineral rights, the impact of mining on settlement, notably its catalytic and fluctuating effects on migration and urban growth, has been largely ignored. African nation-states’ urbanisation trends have shown considerable variation over the past half century. The current surge in ‘new’ mining countries and the slow-down in ‘old’ mining countries are generating some remarkable settlement patterns and welfare outcomes. Presently, the African continent is a laboratory of national mining experiences. This special issue on African mining and urbanisation encompasses a wide cross-section of country case studies: beginning with the historical experiences of mining in Southern Africa (South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe), followed by more recent mineralizing trends in comparatively new mineral-producing countries (Tanzania) and an established West African gold producer (Ghana), before turning to the influence of conflict minerals (Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone)