In this section, I will successively upload the status on my literature research. It’s work in progress, so please feel free to comment!
Please find my current bibliography for download here .
History of electricity in Africa
„Electricity in Africa has been very little studied. Bibliographical material is nearly non-existent. Works that treat the history of urban electricity are rare.”[1] The conclusion of a literature review on the history of electricity in Africa by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch in 2003 is sobering. Fortunately, to the topic academic attention has increased since then, as a recent cursory overview in the internet blog of Iván Cuesta shows. The most systematic overview at present is provided in a recent article by Kate Showers on the (environmental) history of African electricity generation at a continental scale.[2] Showers deserves not only merit for her comprehensive compilation of literature and data on the topic but also for her plea to bring in the environmental dimension into the debate, proposing a “holistic earth-centred environmental history” as research framework. At a number of cases she illustrates the fundamental environmental interactions, dependencies and consequences associated with electricity, particularly with water cycles. A similar overview with a stronger focus on inter-relations between electricity grids and human societies in Africa remains to be done.
A paragraph reviewing national histories of electricity in South Africa and other African countries will follow soon. Meanwhile refer to the literature overviews of Cuesta and Showers.
History of electricity in Tanzania
For Tanzania, only some aspects of its history of electricity have studied by academics. In particular, electricity generation with large dams has raised the attention of historians in the field of environment, as well as technology and science. Based on interviews and archival sources from international donor organizations, and development agencies, primarily the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and some private archives of experts, May-Britt Öhman has investigated Swedish hydropower constructions in Tanzania in the era of development Assistance between the 1960s-1990s.[3] Her work focusses on the Great Ruaha power project, Tanzanias and until today biggest large-scale hydropower station, which paved the way for the countries entrance into the big dam era. Martin Walsh has studied the ecological impacts of the projects, the continuing drying-up of the Great Ruaha, leading to power shortages from the early 1990ies on and culminating in the mass expulsion livestock keepers and their cattle in 2006-07.[4] Another study on hydropower dams was written by Heather Hoag who looks into the controversy around the proposed damming of the Rufiji River at Stiegler’s Gorge, which has been promoted by international organizations since 1967 but was never built.[5] Both cases illustrate how both international and local actors shaped the debate about the transfer of large-scale hydropower projects to postcolonial Tanzania.
While providing interesting insights on power relations, discourses and paradigms that shaped electricity generation in Tanzania, these studies mainly reflect the perpective of international organizations and local technical and governmental elites. They reveal relatively little about the distribution and scarcely anything about the consumption of electricity. This is not least due to the lack of written sources on these aspects (a methodological problem which will be discussed separately in a later chapter).
They require other methodological approaches based on oral sources, as I have tested them in my masters thesis on the history of the electrification at the example of one district in Tanzania. These approaches can draw inspiration from a school of anthropologists that have set out to do “innovative, culture-sensitive energy research“ in recent years.[6] Fortunately, one of the poineering studies of this school has been written on Tanzania. Based on field research over a period of ten years Tanja Winther has written an instructive ethnography of the impact of electricity in a rural community in Zanzibar. The dissertation also includes a chapter on the history of electricity in Zanzibar before its arrival at the area under investigation. This history however has to be treated separately from those of mainland Tanzania for the time before the installation of an undersea cable in 1979-80 connecting Zanzibar to the national grid.[7]
Remarkably, the only attempt of an integrated history of electricity in Tanzania on national scale has been made by Rebecca Ghanadan, a political scientist.[8] In her dissertation on the power sector reforms in Tanzania starting in the early 1990ies, she has included a chapter on history of electricity services across colonial, post independence, and reform periods. The chapter is written with a clear interest in situating reforms in a “layered history of political choices and programs”[9]. Ghanadan considers “history [as] a powerful way revealing the continuities and shifts that underlie energy sectors – and it is these terms of negotiated change that are needed to better understand and reveal the changes with reforms in Tanzania”.[10] Though following a somewhat monolithic definition of history at some points her study provides an excellent starting point for further research into the multifaceted history of electricity generation, transmission and consumption in Tanzania.
[1] Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Electricity Networks in Africa: A Comparative Study, or How to Write Social History from Economic Sources, in: Toyin Falola/ Christian Jennings (Hg.), Sources and Methods in African History, 346-360, 346.
[2] Kate B. Showers, Electrifying Africa: an environmental, history with policy implications’, in: Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 93,3 (2011), 193–221.
[3] May-Britt Öhman, Taming Exotic Beauties: Swedish Hydropower Constructions in Tanzania in the Era of Development Assistance, 1960s – 1990s. Unpublished Dissertation, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, 2007; Heather J. Hoag/ May-Britt Öhman, Turning water into power. Debates over the development of Tanzania’s Rufiji River basin, 1945–1985, in: Technology and Culture 49,3 2008, 624–651.
[4] Martin Walsh, The not-so-Great Ruaha and hidden histories of an environmental panic in Tanzania, in: Journal of Eastern African Studies 6,2 (2012), 303–335.
[5] Heather J. Hoag, Transplanting the TVA? International Contributions to Postwar River Development in Tanzania, in: Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 4 3 (2006), 247–267.
[6] Tanja Winther, The Impact of Electricity: Development, Desires and Dilemmas. New York [u.a.] 2008, 2-3. See also: Harold Wilhite, Why energy needs anthropology, in: anthropology today 21/3 (2005), 1.
[7] Winther, Impact of Electricity, 22-48.
[8] Rebecca Ghanadan, Public Service or Commodity Goods? Electricity Reforms, Access, and the Politics of Development in Tanzania. Unpublished Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, USA 2008, 44-76.
[9] Ibid, 41.
[10] Ibid, 46.
History of Electricity in Tanzania 