Working in the slaughterhouse: Tanganyika Packers Ltd., from colonialism to collapse, 1947–2014

Abstract

Between 1947 and 1975, Tanganyika Packers Ltd (TPL) was Tanzania’s only export-oriented slaughterhouse and beef-canning factory, a branch of UK-based Liebig’s Extract of Meat Corporation (Lemco), which originated in 1860s Uruguay. Until shortly before TPL was nationalized in 1974, it was a profitable parastatal, employing some 1200 workers, anchoring a working-class community, and providing an outlet for indigenous Tanzanian cattle from open rangelands. While nationalization aimed to capture the full value of TPL profits and expand exports into the European Economic Community, it instead severed TPL from the world market when Lemco withdrew its marketing license. Worker layoffs followed, and TPL became primarily a domestic supplier of military rations, creating precarious working conditions, until the factory was shuttered in 1993. Although technically TPL still exists, this article contends that, far from being a victim of a post-cold war neo-liberal transition, as is usually asserted, TPL’s fate is properly located in the period between 1967 and 1974, when state socialism in Tanzania created pressures on the parastatal and its workers to contribute to nation building, particularly by supplying fresh beef to the local butcher trade. This was coupled with a political ecology of disease and corruption, at a time of drought, villagization, and agro-pastoral resistance to market pressures, which prevented TPL from acquiring sufficient numbers of cattle in Africa’s third largest cattle country to take advantage of international beef scarcities in the early 1970s. Global pressures, especially disease controls and the OPEC oil embargo, frustrated TPL beef exports as the world economy moved from beef scarcity to a sudden glut by 1974.