tion suggests:
“When I was in school, I was taught that
there were four kinds of terraces. Since then
the required kind of terrace has been chang-
ing, so we farmers are afraid that in ten or
twenty years we will find that our work
was wasted and we’ll have to build yet
another kind of terrace.”
The authoritarian style of the
Tanzanian government in the 1970s
and 80s continues to shape current
land use decisions because those
decades of arbitrary policy-making and
coercive implementation have
entrenched distrust and skepticism
deep in North Pare’s political culture.^12
Agricultural extensionists and develop-
ment agency facilitators often
described their task as modernizing
traditional agricultural practices, and
they therefore rejected indigenous soil
conservation measures. For example,
the pre-colonial stone-lined terraces of
North Pare did not satisfy the experts:
The farmers in [village name withheld] are
afraid of terraces because they think that if
they bring an agricultural expert to their
farm, this man is going to measure things
and tell him to get rid of the indigenous ter-
races that he got from his father, and is his
inheritance. It’s better to refuse any involve-
ment with those people and not risk losing
what you already have. These experts
should come to advise us how to improve
the indigenous terraces rather than advocat-
ing new ones.
Given that TFAP had identified one of the
major constraints on North Pare’s agriculture
as the disappearance of traditional knowl-
edge,^14 it is surprising that the agents of
development were undermining indigenous
techniques rather than building upon them.
Whenever I heard the participants in plan-
ning meetings ask if indigenous terraces ful-
filled TFAP requirements, the answer was
always the same: “only if they are measured
and approved by the experts.” Although
most indigenous soil conservation structures
are close to level, few have the precision
that agricultural extensionists demanded.
This single-minded technocratic approach to(supposedly) participatory development
planning led to doubt and resentment.The second problem with terracing in North
Pare was the social disorder that this sort of
agricultural intensification created. A web of
social relationships frames landholding in
North Pare, and terracing disturbed the sta-
bility of this web. Pare farmers currently cat-
egorise landholding into borrowed land, trib-
utary land, clan land, and government land,
and the latter are usually un-arable areas.
Borrowing land involves an informal agree-
ment to cultivate an annual crop for one or
two seasons. Most of these arrangements
are made between women from different vil-
lages concerning small plots of beans,
maize, and sweet potatoes. Women will not
invest their labor in terracing a borrowed
plot, and the women who lend land (or
arrange the loan with a male kinsman) do
not want to build terraces because thisConservation aas ccultural aand ppolitical ppractice
Figure 2. Indigenous stone-lined terraces in North Pare,
June 2004 (Courtesy Michael Sheridan)