Browsing by Author "Mogha, Anelwike"

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    Dynamics of labour migration in the British colonial period and its legacies in the post- colonial period: a case of Ileje district, 1920s -1990s
    (University of Dar es Salaam, 2017) Mogha, Anelwike
    This study examines the dynamics of labour migration in Ileje district during the British colonial period and its legacies in the post-colonial period. Based on oral, archival and secondary sources, analysed within the framework of castle’s agency theory, the dissertation has traced the changing nature and dimensions of the process whereby people from Ileje sought wage employment within and outside Tanganyika in the colonial and post-colonial periods. This study has established that labour migration in Ileje district was a response to global and local political and economic forces. The trend began with the opening of the Lupa goldfields and the coastal sisal plantations from the 1920s. After World War II, many people from Ileje undertook cross-border migrations to work in to the mines and settler farms of South African and the Rhodesias. From the 1950s, as employment opportunities in the traditional long-distance destinations diminished, people from Ileje increasingly undertook short-distance migrations to work on the farms of neighbouring Mbozi and Mbarali districts. Another finding is that, despite the banning of labour migration to South Africa and Southern Rhodesia by the post-independence Tanzania government in 1961, a few Ileje migrants continued to go to Southern Africa illegally by camouflaging themselves as Malawians. From the 1990s many people shifted from dependence on labour migration to petty trade in bamboo products as a new source of livelihood. The trade in bamboo products, also a long-distance undertaking, essentially developed as a result of the decline of labour migration. The main conclusion from these findings is that the people of Ileje exercised their agency in their livelihood strategies.