It might or Might Not. Trip into the Wilds of Tanzania.

The Hanang Mountain from the Canadian wheat project in Tanzania, some 3,400metres of it

I broke my own rules over the weekend. I was not feeling that well, and despite the presence of our son Selby and his wife Maggie, including their cat Zeus, in name only,  I allowed myself to feel a bit down, lapsing into one of the deadly sins when combating illness. I think it was partly brought about by the reminder of the pain I suffered on my last consultation with the surgeon when he tried to increase the pressure of my ATOM on my urethra through the portal in my scrotum and failed. Although my focus at the weekend was not primarily on the past pain episode, it was more about whether he woul succeed this week or not. Luckily, that is past, and I am much more positive in thought about my visit to the hospital this week. I always turn to Rudyard Kipling's poem ‘If’ when I try to predict the unknown.

“IWhen you have a chronic desease you should focus on the positives of the day, not the ‘ifs’ of the future, espically the 'if buts'. Unfortunately, when you are ill, the human mind tends to focus on the negative rather than the positive when it comes to 'ifs.' ‘ Rid yourself of worrying about the ‘ifs.’ No buts.” - Peter McSporran 

At least I can openly discuss this with Rozanne, who ensures my return to the positive aspects of my life. I have so much to be thankful for. As she reminds me, the surgeon can revert to minor surgery if required, with him having an anaesthetist already on standby for my visit. Perhaps I can partly attribute my low mood to hearing that one of my old army buddies from my National Service days suffered a major heart attack following surgery and is now in a coma with little chance of recovery. I will not mention his name as his family wants privacy at present, but will when the outcome of his condition is known.

A postscript here, I have seen the surgeon and a change of plan, a minor surgery on the 23rd of December to relocate my pod for easier access. Removing the 'ifs' has given me much peace of mind.

Back to 2001. About mid-year, the Tanzanian government contacted me following my earlier exploratory visits to that country, asking if I could find any Zimbabwean commercial farmers to come and look at the old Canadian-sponsored wheat farms in Hanang, Manyara Region in central Tanzania. This project, similar to the Canadian-funded barley project in Northern Zambia, was meant to make the country self-sufficient in cereals following droughts in the early 1970s. 

The abandoned equipment on the Hanang project

“In Africa more agricultural projects fail due to lack of management than lack of money. Well run projects can normally find the money, badly managed projects will fail even with adequate funding.” - Peter Mcsporran

Funnily enough, at a much later date, I set up an enterprise on the Zambian site, growing seed potatoes, but that story is for later. The farms in Tanzania covered an area of some 24,000 hectares, and in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, Canada had sunk some $96 million ($500 million in today's money) into them. Just like the Canadia project in Zambia, and the British-funded groundnut scheme in Tanzania that cost the equivalent of $1 billion, in today's money,all had failed badly. I was not sure anyone would be interested, but to my surprise, Chris Thorn and Neville Baker showed interest as did Kevin Connor. Kevin did not want to invest but said he could possibly manage the project, and as he was one of Zimbabwe’s top farmers holding record wheat yields, we were happy to have him. We were all paying our own way while the Tanzanian government would supply transport from Dar es Salaam to Hanang, a road trip through the middle of the country on mostly dirt roads. Somehow, Nigel Philp, ever the entrepreneur, got involved and decided it was worth a look, so despite not being a farmer, but from farming stock, he came with us.

In early October, we set out for Tanzania and were put up in a rather dilapidated block of flats on about the 7th floor without a working lift and no bed linen in Dar-es-Salaam. We all had sleeping bags with us to use on the army-style beds and mattresses; we daren't guess who the previous users might have been. Funnily enough, it looked over the then ruined Kilanmanjoro Hotel, a place I had frequented in my time in the merchant navy in the nineteen sixties. Then it had been brand new and the premier hotel in the country, let alone Dar es Salaam. Now, it was a derelict ruin occupied by squatters in the lower floors. I would return some eight years later to find it transformed into once again the premium hotel in the city known as the Kampiski. You can measure your age by those transitions. We were treated to the usual cordial dinner as normal when a Government wants something and supplied with the required directions, and to be honest, surprisingly very limited paperwork. Following a day of preparation, we set off on a route on the advice of the agricultural officials, virtually directly up the centre of the country via Dodoma, which had recently been made the country's capital. It seems just because it was central as opposed to Dar es Salaam, the coast. It had nothing else going for it, and back then it was a really awful place, more like a giant squatter camp than capital city. On my later visits some ten years later it had improved little, being the political capital in name alone with all financial services, industry and governance remaining in Dar es Salaam. That night we tried in vain to find a hotel or in fact any hostelry with running water, let alone hot water and clean bedrooms.

“Titles do not make cities great; business enterprise does.”- Peter McSporran

The next day things only got worse as on leaving the so-called city we found the road quickly changed into a gravel track which we would have to travel on for the next 350 kilometres. With air-con not working in the old Land Cruisers, our vehicles became dust traps. Despite this, the trip was interesting as the landscape transformed from arid to vegetative back to arid. We even saw wild dogs and at one time held our breath as we were overtaken by a speeding Land Cruiser full of a ragtag group of armed men hanging on to it as they like to do. Goodies or baddies? Finally after travelling the first two hundred and fifty kilometres, we arrived in Singida, a tiny place after 10pm that night. As Africa often does surprise you, it had a small hotel with clean rooms, hot running water and a good meal.

Our lodgings in Singida

Something the so-called capital could not provide. The next day we headed to the farms, which proved to be huge cleared areas of black vertisol clay soils. The fertility of these soils was said to be partly due to dust from the long dormant volcanoes that abound in that area of the country. It was hard to see where all the money had been spent (wasted) despite the extensive land clearing, first world buildings, a plant breeding program there with all the required laboratories, while the land preparation and harvesting equipment was now only worth scrap value. The sheer size of the cleared area was our first impression quickly followed by our awe in the amount of erosion. The erosion we saw put our communal farms back home to shame. We had never seen anything so bad. In clearing the land and preparing it for broadacre wheat production they had treated the land as if they were farming in the USA or Europe without thought or knowledge of the damage Africa deluges could do. There were no contours or waterways despite the obvious slopes and hollows. Cleared lands went uphill and down dale, oblivious of natural waterways. The last crop grown could be seen to have been Salflower, a thistle looking low yielding oilseed, new to all of us. On asking the Government caretakers how it had yielded, they said virtually nothing as a plague of mice had eaten most of the grain before harvest. It must have been a very poor crop or a vast plague of mice to have eaten such a large area.

The sign at the entry to the project was a good indication of the state of the project

Despite this, Chris and Kevin, the expert row crop farmers, thought that minimum tillage, low-input maize could be produced successfully there. We could see maize being grown up on the road into the farms, or rather the remnants of the previous crops. It was also agreed that some of the tractors could be overhauled to run again, but not the harvesting equipment, although some combines had recently been used. All very interesting and a busy day studying as much as we could. One of the challenges to us would be the two rainy seasons: the short and the long. The length of about five months should be fine for growing maize, but the harvest would coincide with the three-month short rains. A challenge, no doubt. Temperatures were fairly constant, rarely exceeding 35°C, while rainfall was between 700 and 900mm per annum.

For supper that night we purchased a young goat and roasted it on the fire. Luckily, we brought a couple of beers with us to wash it down. After a further morning on the farm, we headed back to Dar es Salaam via Arusha, this time, which added about 250 kilometres to the trip but reduced the time on poor dirt roads. It was a wonderful drive along an escarpment studded with dormant volcanoes looking down onto an area world-renowned for its wildlife, which we did not stop to view, on our way to Arusha. On return to Dar es Salaam after a night in a scruffy hotel with bedroom walls no better than thick cardboard, we moved into the New Africa Hotel for a good night's rest. I can still clearly see Chris Thorne rolling in a hot bath with a whiskey in one hand, a cigarette in the other and his feet out the end. Single rooms on our budget were not an option. That day, we spent putting a draft business plan together; unbeknownst to me, Chris was very capable at building cash flow models on a computer, which he was able to do while I drafted a written outline of our proposal on my brand new HP laptop, my first. Chris went out and bought a printer, especially to enable us to hand over a proposal in print to the Ministry of Agriculture before we left the next day. They may have liked it as they asked us back again, unfortunately, I could not go as I was becoming more involved in Zambia by the day on our own start-up farming operation and the preparation of the agreements for our proposed tobacco scheme. Did I sleep a lot during those days? No, but the desperation of our situation stimulated my activity both for my own and others ' in search of opportunities. 

An example of the erosion on the project.

On the second trip, Heinrich von Petzold took my place with Chris, along with Neville and Nigel, returning this time by light aircraft. Perhaps, with hindsight, luckily, shortly after this trip, we were told our proposal had been rejected, and a group of East African Asians had been offered the land. Perhaps it was just as well, as they were better funded than we were, and despite this, they failed to make a success of the farms as did various operators following them, mostly on fragmented sections of the project. I do not think anyone has succeeded to date although there is an outfit there using a small area. This fact, its isolation, and therefore the cost of operations so far from inputs and markets, along with ongoing land disputes with the local tribesmen, suggest we were lucky not to have got involved. We were not told about the land disputes; they would have been an unpleasant surprise once we were on the ground. 

“In life you can but try. Give it your best, but sometimes things are just not meant to be. In farming the knowledge of good or bad fortune only comes to light years later. More than once I have said to myself in later years, wow that was a lucky escape. The Hanang wheat land project was one such project.” - Peter McSporran

Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.