“Go Back To Where You Came From!”: Moral Economy of Land and the Politics of Belonging in Coastal Tanzania☆

Abstract

This article examines how the threat of eviction by a transnational land deal in coastal Tanzania shaped competing narratives with which longtime residents and migrants defended and legitimated the moral economy of land: a widely shared customary norm that land belonged to those who cleared, occupied, and used it continuously for their daily provisioning, with or without title deeds. To counter the state's claim that all villagers were “invaders,” long-term residents appealed to their ethnic and ancestral connections to the land, while migrants invoked a broader idiom of agrarian citizenship that placed land entitlements at the heart of rural people's relationship with the state. Despite this divergence, nervousness similarly pervaded both group's narratives, due in part to the instability of the notion of ethnicity and autochthony in coastal Tanzania and people's historically informed sense of foreboding about state-sanctioned dispossession. The article draws on the analytic of assemblage to advance a more relational and dynamic understanding of the co-construction and performance of moral economy and rural identity. Analyzing how villagers imagine and articulate their identities, and how discourses of exclusion and belonging get deployed in conjunctures of displacement is critical to understanding the socio-material realities of rural life in Tanzania today.