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Introduction:
West-Usambara is located in present-day northeastern Tanzania. This densely populated highland has a relatively cool climate, and a high rainfall. It belongs to the so-called "Islands of intensive agriculture" of pre-colonial eastern Africa.1 Although a visitor today, traveling from surrounding lowland into the mountains would still recognize WestUsambara as such, fundamental changes have taken place in the agrarian economy and ecology of this area. While the population, most Washambaa, in this area increased from approximately 86,000 to 290,000 between 1890 and 1980, there no further intensification of agrarian practices occurred, as Boserup's model postulates.2 Rather, a reverse process seems to have occurred. What we see in the mid-nineteenth century is a kind of sedentary agriculture, based on irrigated banana plantations. These were at the core of the agrarian economy and, depending on the region, covered 50 to 80 percent of the cultivated area. In the 1980s rain-fed cultivation comprised almost 70 percent of the total cultivated area in the mountains. Only 3.5 percent was covered with bananas, and 4.9 percent with bananas intercropped with coffee.3 So the question is how to explain this change in agricultural practices?
Before I can deal with this question a short visit to the historiography of agricultural change is necessary to highlight the importance of a focus on the early (German) colonial era. Agricultural change started as a separate theme in East African history in the early 1970s with a pamphlet of Ranger.4 His attempt to direct the research in the direction of the African initiative was however soon overrun by a return to imperialism to explore the causes of underdevelopment and dependency,5 directly followed by a focus on African peasantries and the roots of rural poverty.6
Especially in Tanzania, studies on peasantries developed in the tense political climate of the failing Ujamaa-vijijine program of the mid-1970s. To understand the obstructing forces against (socialist) development within rural society, Hydencontributing to the general discussion on the relations between the state and social classes7-postulated in 1980 his concept of the "uncaptured peasantry."8 Because the general idea was that peasantries and the crisis in agriculture had its roots in the 1920s and 1930s,9 relatively limited attention has been paid to colonial and African agency and environmental and agrarian change during the preceding...