主讲人：Jamie Monson教授
美国Macalester College历史学教授
题目：中非论题著作讨论--《非洲的自由铁路》（坦赞铁路）
讲座和讨论语言：英语
时间：2011年9月29日周四下午14:00-16:00
地点：民族所3楼327会议室
About the book
The book is a unique and revealing social biography of the TAZARA or Tan Zan Tie Lu (坦赞铁路) as it was well known to the Chinese in the 1960s-70s. Familiar stories of the resolute strategy of “poor-helping-poor” socialist solidarity among the three countries against the Cold War, and of the dedicated hard work of tens and thousands of workers and technicians from China, Tanzania and Zambia, who built the railway, are vividly told here in frank affirmation, though not without indicating distance within bond. While the accounts of colonial railway plans and area development visions for East Africa from the 19th century link the project with memories much prior to the Railway’s actual commencement, the chapters here informs us, above all, of what has happened to the TAZARA since it came into being for over 30 years, and, in particular, of how this gigantic China-aided development project in East Africa impacted on the lives of local people where the train passes through.
The book zoomed in on one section, in southern Tanzania, of the 1860-km long TAZARA, and brings out a complicated yet colorful uneven course of livelihood changes experienced by local people there. Much in reality was unexpected by the original master design of the railway plan - the impact of the state implemented villagization along the railway and the duties obliged onto the residents in the 1970-80s; and then the country’s socioeconomic transition, by imposed structural adjustment, towards market economy in the 1990s-2000s when train services declined. In spite, the local people took their initiatives and optimized opportunities made available via the slow “ordinary train” to improve lives for themselves and for their families – by parcel trading, or creating income generation occasions (and spinoff ones) around the railway resources, or picking up farming along the corridor to settle in agriculture for eventual livelihood security. By dint of their active efforts and belief in reciprocity, the local people obtained access to a level of freedom in socioeconomic mobility by the TAZARA, along the national independence and liberation that the railway enables for the two African countries.
About the author
Jamie Monson is Professor of History and specialist in African studies, currently teaching at the Macalester College, USA. In addition to this work, she also co-edited two books, Women as Food Producers in Developing Countries (1985) and The Maji Maji War: National History and Local Memory (2010). She is a past President of the Tanzania Studies Association.
Professor Monson began 32 years ago to work in East Africa when she was a Peace Corps Agricultural Development Volunteer in Kenya from 1979 to 1981, working with rural women’s groups. Her Ph.D. was based upon a 18-month field research in Tanzania 1989-90 and she continued to do research there through the 1990s on the Maji Maji War and on Environment and Development History. In 1998, Jamie began to work on the history of the TAZARA railway to present how the railway affected the lives of southern Tanzanians. Fluent in Swahili and experienced with interacting with local people, Jamie conducted 97 in-person interviews with people living along the railway and workers who participated in building the railway, examined volumes of train-station trading receipts records, travelled herself on the TAZARA train, and applied both conventional archive/desk study and new method of satellite image comparison to achieve this book. Recently she again visited Tanzania and China to further pursue the understanding of the making of human history where railways are laid.
Africa’s Freedom Railway is now being translated into Chinese by the Democracy Press (民主出版社) to be available in 2012.