Groundnut scheme

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The Groundnut Scheme was an unsuccessful British colonial development project designed to grow groundnuts (more commonly called peanuts) by large-scale mechanized agriculture in a small town of Kongwa in central Tanganyika. Kongwa became a flourishing English town with an English school, electricity and tarmac roads at the time when most other rural districts had none. It was also unofficially called New London. A railroad connecting Kongwa to the main central line was built to facilitate transportation of produce. The remnants of these roads and the railroad are vividly present today. Kongwa also boasted of a longer airstrip, still in operation today, and a better equipped hospital than the nearby colonial district of Mpwapwa.Tanganyika during 1947 to 1949. Ironically, the train station at Kongwa became the barracks of the freedom fighters from Mozambique, South Africa and Southwest Africa, now Namibia. Rather than being a post for colonial economic interests, Kongwa became the home for anticolonial fighters.

Initiated and funded by Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government after a proposal from a subsidiary of Unilever, the plan was to create vast groundnut plantations. This was both to supply Unilever with inexpensive vegetable oil to make soap and margarine, and to help rural Africans become self-sufficient, thereby reducing the growing indigent population in the cities.

Ground clearance of the tough scrub proved far more difficult than expected, and the soil and climate turned out to be completely unsuitable for growing peanuts. Ideas of articifial clouds for rain were also explored. Furthermore, a lack of leadership - no-one with decision-making powers was situated at the project full-time - meant that the project could not adapt to these difficulties.

By the second year of the project, only 45,000 acres (182 km²) had been cleared, when the forecast had been 150,000 acres (607 km²) per year with a target of 3.5 million acres (14,000 km²) in cultivation. Of those 45,000 acres, half was on a dry lakebed that required little clearing and preparation, and a quarter was land that was never properly cleared. Only 2,000 tons of peanuts were harvested from the more than 4,000 tons of seed purchased. The entire £49 million investment was a loss.