At the height of Tanzania’s Ujamaa policy (1976-1985) under the founding father of the nation Julius Nyerere, whole communities were relocated to communal villages. Rufiji in the south became the first district where Ujamaa was put into practice because the government thought the Rufiji delta, one of Africa’s largest, was ideal for farming.

“The government thought it would be easier this way to promote agriculture and provide water, food and shelter and other social amenities like schools and hospitals, but the people were never consulted,” said Simon Mwansasu, a Dar es Salaam-based university lecturer and researcher with the Institute of Research for Development (IRD).

“The government did not do any research about the places people were being relocated to – whether they were suitable or not for agriculture. If it had done research, the government would have realised that the people had lived in the areas they did for generations because they knew how to manage the land,” said Mwansasu.

The government policy got it wrong on the Rufiji delta since its insisted on relocating the people to higher ground, yet the farmers preferred the floodplains. “The people knew that the highlands were not productive but that the delta was,” says Mwansasu.

“Floods are the engines of deltas,” explained Dr Stephanie Duvail of IRD during the first pan-African scientific conference on African deltas, dubbed Afrideltas, in Dar es Salaam earlier in the year. “Deltas depend on the floods to replenish them.”

Floods recharge deltas and create floodplains that indigenous people knew how to exploit for cultivation without destroying them. All the great civilizations of the world took root in deltas — the Nile, the Euphrates-Tigris and the Brahmaputra, to name a few.

“The Rufiji River is the major river that feeds the delta. At the time of the Ujamaa Village Programme, the river was flowing south into the delta and created favourable conditions for rice cultivation. The sudden impact of so many people being relocated into the delta and the massive clearing of mangroves created havoc on the southern side creating conditions for the river’s course to change.

Ironically, rice production during Ujamaa dropped drastically in the Rufiji delta when in 1978, the river changed course creating ideal conditions for rice cultivation to the north of the delta, making rice growing in the south impossible.

“The people in the south began to move north and to other places along the Rufiji River,” says Mwansasu. “People from other parts of the country also started relocating to the delta’s northern area to start rice farming, a trend which still continues to date.”

Rice farming in the delta is lucrative because it is not as labour intensive and expensive as outside the delta.

Inside the delta, there is no need for weeding because weeds are naturally controlled by the fresh and saline water. Abandoning the southern part of the delta proved to be ecologically positive. The mangroves in the delta are making a comeback and farmers are planting rice outside the delta, in the floodplains.

But on the north side, there’s a tug of war between the forest department and the rice farmers as farmers continue to clear swathes of mangrove. In 1990, mangroves covered an area of 53,255 hectares. By 2000 only 49,000 hectares of mangrove remained in the delta — a loss of just under 10 per cent in a decade.

“The mangroves are growing back on the delta’s southern side,” said Mwansasu. “In the north, the current environmental issues have nothing to do with Ujamaa. What is needed now is for the government to come up with carefully thought-out policies otherwise it will have to deal with environmental consequences not foreseen. Just like Ujamaa.”

Mwansasu said the future of the delta lies in its being managed as a conservation area with a multipurpose land use where people acknowledge that they will not destroy mangroves and formalise the land-use plan so that people do not live in fear of being evicted but see the resource as belonging to them and use it sustainably.