Passageways of Cooperation: Mutuality in Post-Socialist Tanzania

Abstract

The paper enquires into the practices of cooperation and mutuality that are reproduced in contemporary mutual help groups of post-socialist Tanzania. Diverse associations of cooperative work and mutual security are on the rise in globalizing African communities. Local institutions of mutual assistance are becoming increasingly important in regulating access to resources and redefining socialities in environments of persistent instability. Mutual help groups among Kuria people have emerged as institutions for facilitating exchange through relationally oriented expansion that enables the rise of new economic niches and social identities. A complex intermingling of diverse organizational features has enabled the associations to engage novel types of resources and categories of participants. The paper examines hybrid and haphazard elements of formalization that occur with the regularizing of work reciprocities and the increasing use of monetary loans and savings. Exploring culturally relevant metaphors of life-sustaining flows and passageways, indispensable for individual and social growth, the article investigates the value conversions mediated by the groups and their impacts on wider public spaces in Tanzanian communities.

Scripting development through formalization: accounting for the diffusion of village savings and loans associations in Tanzania

“…Ideas about money and desire influence ideas about development as a project of improvement realized in better housing, the kinds of work one does, and the levels of education of one's family, which can be perceived as conflicting with one's responsibility to attend to other people's needs. Savings associations appeal here because they enable the alignment of personal aspirations for furthering one's own projects with development through collective mechanisms (Rodima‐Taylor ). Participation in newly created savings groups becomes a public performance of social and developmental responsibility.…”

“…The partial autonomy of ritual comes into play here as a device through which diverse social orderings can be enacted and, through repetition, re‐enacted (Handleman : 13). Savings associations which exploit ritual forms exhibit similar potentialities (Rodima‐Taylor : 570). As institutional devices which enable the temporary separation and delineation of relations both between persons and money and between other people, they complement the frame making and abstraction of accounting instruments, structuring action audits as performative practice.…”

‘Women Use their Strength in the House’: Savings Clubs in an Mpumalanga Village

“…22 This new culture of celebration indicates that such clubs are on the increase, as they are in Africa more generally. 23 Those I found in Impalahoek were mostly founded in, or since, the 1990s. Some clubs were oriented to burial and related expenses of members and their relatives, others to paying school fees or buying 'big ticket items' at year-end, and yet others to money-making activities, such as the purchase of items on wholesale for resale.…”

Habits of contributing citizenship

“…It has been argued that President Nyerere's philosophy failed from an economic perspective (Ibhawoh & Dibua 2003) and, at times, the noble political ideals were implemented through forced resettlements (Rodima-Taylor 2014) and/or the imposition of obligatory participation (Schneider 2004). Nonetheless, the legacy of his policies can be seen in the maintenance of political stability and the achievement of a substantial degree of harmony between the country's ethnic groups, which number more than a hundred (Ibhawoh & Dibua 2003;Rodima-Taylor 2014), as well as in the prevailing contemporary discourse of development, self-reliance and citizens' participation (Nguyahambi et al, this volume). More recent development policies in Tanzania have emphasizedat least in rhetoricthe significance of groups and the need to allocate them public funding through local government authorities (LGAs), especially groups of women, people with disabilities and youth.…”