In Mbande, a predominantly Muslim village on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the men and women who were fasting during the Ramadhan month had become accustomed to waking up in the morning hungry and thirsty and going through the day without food, water or chai. For household heads like Mzee Selemani,Footnote ¹ a fifty-six-year-old resident of Mbande, it was not the sweltering heat and sweat that bothered him, but, rather, his preoccupation with how to get enough food to feed himself and his family before the fast is traditionally broken. During the first week of Ramadhan, when I met with a group of village elders at the local baraza next to a small restaurant in the market place, and asked ‘Je, umefunga?’ (Are you all fasting?), they answered, in chorus, ‘Bado’ (Not yet). Their response surprised me because I had assumed that the elderly men, who spent a considerable amount of their time praying at the village mosque, would be among the first people to be fasting. Mzee Ali, my field assistant, quickly interpreted their response to mean that they would be more than happy if I offered to pay for their lunch at the restaurant. Later he said to me: ‘You have no idea what hunger can make people do. …’ His implication was that the stringent codes of religious fasting may be contravened when hunger is experienced frequently, if not on a daily basis.

Everyday life had become especially difficult for many people of Mbande. The cashew crop had failed for the second year, and most households were low on cash income and food supplies. Sickness and death during this time of the year only added to the misery of impoverished families. Scores of people in the village were in need of medical attention, but most of them did not have the money to pay for the much-needed healthcare.Footnote ² When two entrepreneurs from downtown Dar es Salaam inaugurated their maabara (a private, for-profit pharmacy and pathology laboratory) in the centre of the village, not a single customer showed up. This new private health facility, the first of its kind in a 12-mile radius, did not generate the level of enthusiasm in the village that the two entrepreneurs had anticipated. For the majority of the people of Mbande, the privatization and major restructuring of the health sector that had occurred in Tanzania over the last decade had not led to significant improvements in access to healthcare, or, for that matter, improved their sense of well-being.Footnote ³ Many elderly men and women in the village routinely expressed their disappointment by reminiscing to one another about the ‘good old days’ when the socialist government under the leadership of the late Julius Nyerere had provided households and individuals with free healthcare, subsidized food and social security. By reminiscing, these elderly people re-constructed and reaffirmed their shared experiences and cultural memoriesFootnote ⁴ – memories of the past that are socially reconstructed to make sense of and negotiate the present (see Becker Reference Becker1997; Garro Reference Garro2000; 2001; Quinn Reference Lockhart2005; Rubin Reference Ochs and Capps1996; Tonkin 1992). This kind of joint remembering, or reminiscing, further serves the special purpose of creating interpersonal bonds based on a sense of shared history (Fivush et al. 1996).

This article draws on participant observation and ethnographic data to show how, in the context of poverty and uncertainty, the residents of Mbande articulate their understandings of the effects of neo-liberal policies on their everyday lives. The article pays particular theoretical attention to people's narratives, often infused with both nostalgic remembrance of the socialist past and a melancholic view of the ongoing societal and economic changes.Footnote ⁵ I analyse excerpts from a sample of oral life-history interviews to highlight people's perceptions regarding the ways in which the neo-liberal market reforms implemented in the country since the mid-1980s have affected existing social support networks and concerns about health. I also discuss people's representations of the ways in which the transition from the Ujamaa (literally, ‘familyhood’) or African brand of socialism to privatization (ubinafsishaji) has led to the intensification of social and economic inequalities among households and feelings of deprivation among many members of the local community. I argue that expressions such as ‘This is not our culture!’ (Sio utamaduni wa sisi!), and its concomitant sentiment ‘Life is hard!’ (Maisha magumu!) have become formulaic pronouncements to indicate a loss of community values, respect and deference for elderly people in the post-socialist era that is inextricably bound up with the economic hardships engendered by neo-liberal economic policies, especially among the poor majority in contemporary Tanzania. Drawing upon excerpts from stories of particular individuals and situating them in the larger context of neo-liberal market reforms, I seek to show how, in present-day Tanzania, people articulate through narratives their cultural understandings of ‘life as it was then’ (kipindi cha nyuma), and ‘life as it is now’ (maisha ya sasa).

Notwithstanding the epistemological, theoretical and methodological limitations associated with validating subjective experiences of people as representative of ‘real world’ situations (cf. Crapanzano Reference Crapanzano1984; Kratz Reference Kratz, White, Cohen and Miescher2001; Tonkin 1992), in this article I assert that stories told by informants, especially those whose voices are rarely heard in socially occurring discourse, provide crucial insights into the cultural understandings of the ways in which neo-liberal policies have affected people's everyday lives. As Hill (2005: 159) points out, ‘discourse is the most important place where culture is both enacted and produced in the moment of interaction’. Discourse collected in life-history interviews and conversational narratives not only enables us to understand what is happening in people's everyday lives, but also brings to light the hierarchical relations of power at the community level, intra-community tensions and internal variations in perceptions of change.

The article begins with brief background information on the research setting and the methods I used to gather data, followed by an introduction to the ‘discourse of nostalgia’ (Hill Reference Hill, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998) produced by some residents of Mbande and a discussion of the cultural understandings of how ‘free market economy’ (soko huria) has become operationalized at the village-community level. I document people's perceptions of how customary reciprocal exchange and mutual assistance survival strategies have changed as a result of the social transformation and increased economic disparity. I also illustrate the effects of the diminished integrity of local safety nets on people's health concerns, patterns of healthcare seeking and general sense of well-being. Through case studies I specifically analyse how market reforms have influenced the ways in which ‘ordinary people’ in general and poor elderly people in particular interpret and deal with their changing health and social environment. The conclusion considers the extent to which the socio-cultural and economic lives of people in places like Mbande have been ‘structured’ mainly by the macro-economic ‘market forces’ and the extent to which they are the result of individual agency.

MBANDE – AN UJAMAA VILLAGE

Mbande, the village and surrounding hamlets where I conducted fieldwork, has a population of about 5,500 people and is located in the Chamazi ward on the periphery of Temeke District, Dar es Salaam.Footnote ⁶ This village came into being in 1974 as part of OperationVijijini (villagization).Footnote ⁷ As a state-designated registered Ujamaa village, Mbande's history is about three decades old. The people of this village share a common history with hundreds of other villages that were initiated during the Operation as an attempt to regroup households into larger aggregates. At the same time, however, oral histories do not suggest that coercion and distress on a scale documented by researchers in the 1970s (Boesen et al. 1977; McHenry Reference McHenry1979; von Freyhold Reference von Freyhold1979; Hyden Reference Hyden1980) and theorized by James Scott (1999) in his book Seeing like a State, was part of their resettlement and rehabilitation experience. This could be explained partly by the fact that in 1973–4 there were less than 150 people living in and around what is now Mbande village, and many still lived on their family shamba in the fertile valley nearby. One of the local leaders, who was a balozi or ten-house cell leader, used his influence with the government bureaucrats and worked hard to unite the local people to avoid being amalgamated with one of the already existing larger villages. The district authorities yielded to the villagers' perseverance to subsist as a separate entity. Thus the development of Mbande village began in earnest.

The pattern in which the original immigrants arrived or were brought by government agents into Mbande is still discernible. Clusters of houses in the village are locally referred to as the sehemu ya Wamakonde (the Wamakonde area), the Wamatumbi area, the Wamgindo area, and so forth. These clusters of houses refer to areas where households from certain ethnic groups (makabila) settled down together in the village during the Operation. The completion of an all-weather road in 1996 marked the beginning of a new wave of migrants into the village, mostly Sukuma and Nyamwezi youth from north-western Tanzania. They quickly built a reputation for being extremely hard-working and improved their economic situation in a very short period of time through the cultivation of okra and the profitable sale of their produce. The road facilitated the rapid transportation of people and goods between the village and the city. One of the important consequences of this increased accessibility has been growing demand for village land. Many people in Mbande are selling portions of their agricultural land to migrants from other parts of Tanzania – a trend that is intensified by the overall liberal political and economic changes. The increased commoditization of village land witnessed in Mbande is similar to what scholars have reported from other places in Tanzania (see Askew Reference Askew2006).

Of the 95 per cent of the local residents who are Muslim, 40 per cent identify themselves as Zaramo, the original inhabitants of Dar es Salaam (Swantz Reference Swantz1995; Tripp Reference Tripp1997). Subsistence-oriented farming is the economic base for the majority of the local people, while a small proportion of villagers engage in petty business ventures such as the selling of chapatis, tea, fruits and vegetables in the marketplace. For most, cash income is scarce – the average per capita /per month cash income in the village is approximately Tsh1,475 (less than US$2). The local health arena is pluralistic as villagers have access to ‘traditional’ Swahili medicine, biomedicine and pharmaceuticals. Located five minutes away from the main marketplace is a municipal dispensary (zahanati) staffed by an experienced medical officer, three nurses (two of whom are Mother and Child Health specialists), and an auxiliary trainee nurse. Mbande also has three privately owned pharmacies (duka la dawa), all of which are operated by unqualified pharmacists. These pharmacies offer a range of medications, including antibiotics, over the counter. There are four known traditional healers (waganga) who reside in the village, in addition to nine Trained Birth Attendants (TBAs) who offer midwifery services.

REMEMBERING THE PAST

The anthropological literature suggests that remembering the past is a jointly social and cultural process as well as a cognitive one; it is best understood as a process that typically is reconstructive rather than simply reproductive (cf. Garro Reference Garro2000; Kratz Reference Kratz, White, Cohen and Miescher2001). In this regard, Garro and Mattingly (2000: 72) have noted that ‘as persons talk about their experiences, past events are reconstructed in a manner congruent with current understanding; the present is explained with reference to the reconstructed past; and both are used to generate expectations about the future.’ During the first few weeks of my fieldwork in Mbande I interacted mainly with the elderly people, interviewing them on a range of topics.Footnote ⁸ As I asked them how they saw their everyday lives today as compared to the Ujamaa days, key informants were led to a broader discussion of their knowledge of the structural transformations (mageuzi) associated with economic and political liberalization in the country since the mid-1980s. I elicited narratives about how these elderly people in particular felt about the changes that were unfolding. Partly due to my own research orientation, the most common themes to emerge in the discussion were those of health and well-being. It was also true, however, that the majority of the elderly people were eager to recount the troubles caused by their precarious economic existence, social exclusion, and sickness. They commonly stated that they refrained from visiting a government health facility – even when they were very sick – out of fear that they would be asked to pay money for medicines and other services. The following comment from Mzee Kilihindi, a 70-year-old Zaramo native of Mbande, was typical:

Several of the elderly people I interviewed produced nostalgic discourses about the social solidarity of Tanzania's socialist past, speaking of a time when they had access to free healthcare. They referred to this period as a time when the government ‘genuinely’ cared for its people. Mzee Ngwale, whose case study is presented below, was one such elderly resident of Mbande who detailed his misfortunes to make sense of his illness and suffering in the context of the rapidly shifting economic, political and moral terrain.

WANTING TO LIVE; WAITING TO DIE

Mzee Ngwale, a Mgindo man in his late seventies, was born in Kuranga District. As a teenager, he had accompanied his parents and moved into what is now a hamlet on Mbande's periphery. In his youth, he had served as a truck driver in the British Army during the Second World War, ultimately retiring in Mbande. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, he believed he was soon going to die. I interviewed him on three separate occasions, each time exploring different themes. In spite of his poor health, eyesight and hearing, he was very articulate and elaborate in his explanations. In the following segment excerpted from one of his narratives, he strongly emphasizes his health problems:

There can be multiple readings of this excerpt from Mzee Ngwale's narrative as it highlights the multi-dimensional physical and social nature of his health problem. In his narrative, Mzee Ngwale is ordering his experience, constructing a reality as he sees it and thereby addressing the difficulties of accessing medical care without having to pay for it and expressing his feelings of neglect from his son and relatives. Unlike a typical fully developed illness narrative, in which the narrator seeks to address the fundamental question ‘why me?’ (cf. Hill Reference Hill and Quinn2005; Labov and Waletzky Reference Labov, Waletzky and Helm1967), Mzee Ngwale's narrative begins with the generalization of his own problem of not having money to pay for his own healthcare to encompass most people in the village. His other key statement that ‘no one really helps me’ epitomizes again the sentiments of several elderly people in the village who lament the loss of caring and compassion from relatives and loved ones, a clear indication of loss of social cohesion. Finally, in the coda (statement of resolution), Mzee Ngwale nostalgically anticipates that, if his family members cannot or will not, the government should care for him, just as it apparently did during the Ujamaa period. For Mzee Ngwale, then, it is his family's obligation to look after him during his old age – just as they would have during the Ujamaa era. In the past, if family care had not been possible, the government would have stepped in by facilitating his rehabilitation in a home for the aged. Through his narrative, Mzee Ngwale shifts the locus of his misfortune away from himself, and onto his family and the government.

Mzee Ngwale's own social position in Mbande needs to be further contextualized. The village chairman had appointed him as the caretaker of one of the bore wells located near the main mosque. This brought him in regular contact with scores of people who came to fetch water from the well and who paid him a token fee in return for his services. People knew that he was sick, but they pointed out that it was partly his own fault. Mzee Ngwale once owned a sizeable plot of agricultural land in a neighbouring hamlet, which he had sold against the wishes of his wife (deceased), his son and his relatives. Over the years, he had depleted all of his resources. Thus, his son and relatives, who had little to look forward to in terms of inheritance, neglected him. Mzee Ngwale was hopeful that, if his relatives did not take care of him, at least the government would. Nostalgic about the days when the government was genuinely concerned about the welfare of its citizens, his discourse on his feelings of familial neglect was more a commentary on how they or the government would have taken care of him if living conditions had not changed so much. As Tonkin (1992: 9) notes:

In Mzee Ngwale's case, ‘the personal past must also be read as a cultural past’ (Garro Reference Garro, Mathews and Moore2001). His longing for and remembrance of a socialist past was equally tied to current and future concerns. In Mbande, this discourse of nostalgia was produced mainly by poor and marginalized people, especially the elderly who had lived through the Ujamaa years and the idealism of that period (cf. Nyerere Reference Nyerere1968; 1977; Hood Reference Hood1988). Most of the poor elderly informants were nostalgic about the Ujamaa era when everything used to be cheap. In short, food and transportation were subsidized and access to healthcare at public health facilities was free-of-cost.⁹

COUNTERDISCOURSES

Clearly there were exceptions to what I have characterized in the foregoing paragraphs as a highly shared cultural model about the ‘good old days’ and the hardships that people, and in particular the elderly, have become accustomed to in the post-socialist era. For example, Mzee Kingwandala, the 60-year-old village chairman, provided a counterdiscourse to the idea that ‘life is hard’ in the post-socialist context. An energetic and prosperous person, he had this to say:

In exemplifying himself as a hard-working person, Mzee Kingwandala suggests that facing adversity is the key to overcoming hardship in life. Moreover, he suggests that, if he can do it, others can do it too. Thus, in his justificatory discourse, the speaker at once legitimizes the idea of becoming prosperous through hard work in addition to granting himself superior status by suggesting his own self-worth. Though a ‘counterdiscourse’, the structure of Mzee Kingwandala's narrative is similar to the narratives of the speakers quoted earlier in its emphasis on before/after life world distinctions to highlight not only the qualitative differences between temporal domains but also the personal transformations brought about by the government-induced structural transformation of the larger social and economic world. In highlighting the qualitative differences between these domains, Mzee Kingwandala's narrative provides a structural inversion of the narratives of his mostly impoverished and dissatisfied elderly counterparts such as Mzee Ngwale. Put simply, while Mzee Ngwale attributed his misfortune to familial neglect and the government's unresponsiveness to his age and health status, Mzee Kingwandala conversely credited his successful life to his own hard work and resilience. In principle most people in the village would concur with Mzee Kingwandala's commentary on the subject of ‘life is hard’. However, they would also confront him with the fact that, unlike the vast majority of the local people, he belonged to a relatively privileged background. Mzee Kingwandala owned more than 20 acres of agricultural land and he had the biggest house in the village. Moreover, he had held, and still continues to hold, a primary political position in the village.

Although Mzee Kingwandala's counterdiscourse may be an exception to the dominant discourse about ‘life is hard’ due to his privileged socio-economic position, other counterdiscourses also stood out during the course of my fieldwork. These discourses emerged mainly from the younger informants, especially those who were self-employed. In particular, these young men and women had much to gain from the political and economic opportunities afforded by the government's decision to ease its commitment to a socialist ideology (cf. Bagachwa and Mbelle Reference Bagachwa, Mbelle, Bagachwa and Mbelle1993; Baregu Reference Baregu and Widner1994; Bennell Reference Bennell1997; Bigsten and Danielson Reference Bigsten and Danielson2001), and therefore had reason to contradict the ‘nostalgic’ sentiments of the poor elderly villagers. For example, with regard to the quality of health services before and after privatization, Rehema, a twenty-seven-year-old Zaramo mother of two, and a native of Mbande, had this to say:

Self-employed young mothers who participated in focus group discussions on the subject of privatization of the health sector and its impact on treatment seeking for childhood illnesses corroborated Rehema's sentiment. Counterdiscourses in Mbande, then, were produced mainly by those who were economically self-sufficient. In their discourse they commonly presented a ‘neo-liberal’ world-view in which those who worked hard and earned money received better healthcare than those who did not. Thus healthcare now had to be ‘earned’ rather than provided as a ‘right’, as during the socialist period.

The nature and content of the discourse varied with the context of the discussion and the type of question addressed. The fact that discourses of nostalgia in Mbande are mostly produced by elderly people who are poor and socially excluded, and that counterdiscourses are produced mostly by prosperous elderly people and younger people who are relatively well-off, underscores the importance of giving credence to the variance in discourse produced by the particular historical and political context in which studies of discourses of nostalgia are conducted (see Hill Reference Hill, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998). As Bissell (2005: 216) notes, ‘nostalgia is shaped by specific cultural concerns and struggles; and as with other forms of memory practice, it can only be understood in particular historical and spatial contexts’. The present case speaks to the uniqueness not only of individuals but also of a nation's economic, political and cultural history. Tanzania's unique history of Ujamaa -based socialism was heavily steeped in the ideals of the Arusha Declaration of 1967, which promised free healthcare among other basic human rights (see Nyerere Reference Nyerere1977; Stoger-Eising 2000).

THIS IS NOT OUR CULTURE!

The discourse of nostalgia, with ‘longing for the past’ as one of its characteristic features, typically involved a discussion of ‘culture’ (utamaduni, mila na desturi) and how life had changed since the mid-1980s. No matter what the topic of the conversation was, one of the constant subtexts of my elderly key informants' conversations was ‘life is hard’, maisha magumu, in present-day Tanzania. Informants lamented their impoverishment often by expressing their inability to buy a cup of tea, let alone afford medicines when they became sick. They framed their discontent in generic terms such as maisha magumu, hali ya gumu (living conditions are tough), sina pesa (I have no money), mimi ni maskini (I'm poor), tunahangaika na maisha (we are just struggling with life) and tuta kufa tu (we'll all just die). Significantly, while discourses of nostalgia were produced mostly by poor elderly people, the use of expressions such as maisha magumu was not necessarily age-related. Many younger people who were economically disadvantaged, particularly young unemployed men and unmarried single mothers, also spoke about their hardships. A predictable response continued to resurface – that the increasing number of new private health facilities did not matter, because as end users they were required to pay more money than before for medicines and other services. This was regardless of whether they went to one of the local private pharmacies, the municipal dispensary, the district hospital or the Muhimbili national hospital (see also Wyss et al. 2001). In everyday conversations about the ‘human condition’ (hali ya binadamu) and development (maendelo) projects in Tanzania, the common refrain was: ‘Hela, hela, hela tu; kila mahali hela!’ (‘Money, money, money; any place you go, it's all about money!’) Mama Mdambwe, a Zaramo in her late fifties and a long-term resident of Mbande, expressed her sentiments with this illustrative example:

The imagery embedded in Mama Mdambwe's narrative, her sentiments about the supposedly more respectful ‘olden days’ in contrast to the present life of hardship, her feelings about the loss of traditional values and her commentary on the village youth being rude and disrespectful of status relations were all common rhetorical themes echoed by several other elderly informants in their life-history interviews and narratives. As Mattingly and Garro (1994) note, ‘it is through narratives that people try to understand who they are becoming by reference to where they have been’. Certainly, narratives are versions of reality; they are embodiments of one or more points of view rather than objective, omniscient accounts (Ochs and Capps Reference Ochs and Capps1996). In narrating her encounter with the shopkeeper, Mama Mdambwe clearly wanted to moralize the event and sought to convince me, as an empathetic listener, to see some part of her ‘world reality’ in a particular way. During the ‘good old days’ she was kwetu, a beloved person in the community. Now she is only a bibi, a random grandmother who must fend for herself. Thus, Mama Mdambwe's comments juxtapose a degenerated present to a celebrated past. In the process she directs moral censure towards people in the village, especially towards the youth who are disrespectful of her. In doing so, she simultaneously constructs and contrasts social and personal life worlds – the ‘before economic liberalization world’ in which people were respectful of members of their community and the ‘after economic liberalization world’ in which the elderly are socially abandoned and no longer respected.

However, not all elderly residents articulated a fatalistic viewpoint and negative outlook towards the present situation. Mzee Mlanzi was one exception. An Ndengereko, he is an elderly person in his early sixties and a long-term resident of Mbande. He downplayed the ‘perennial complaints’ of the people of Mbande, though he spent most of the year impoverished. Vexed with the people who were idealizing and romanticizing the Ujamaa era, and constantly complaining that life is hard, he asserted during a one-on-one interview:

Mzee Mlanzi went on to recall how in the mid-1980s the people of Tanzania had to endure unprecedented hardship and live on meagre food rations. The real ‘saviour of the people’, he emphasized, was not Julius Nyerere but his successor Ali Hassan Mwinyi (also known as Mzee Ruksa or Mr Permissiveness).Footnote ¹⁰ In this regard Mzee Mlanzi was an exception among the poor people in Mbande in his production of a counterdiscourse. It is possible, however, that the nature of his counterdiscourse expressed in a one-on-one interview differed from the kind of discourse he would have voiced in a more public setting. As Tonkin (1992) notes, the context of the interview and the narrators and audience do affect the content and direction of oral narratives.

Still, the fact remains that a strong majority of elderly informants expressed public discontent with the political and economic system at large, mainly concerning the ways in which privatization had specifically affected their local social and moral boundaries. For example, they were seriously concerned with the recent exploitation of the sand mines (machimbo) in Mbande's fringes by ‘outsiders’ (wageni). The villagers claimed that the mining business had ruined the lives of so many people in the village. In everyday discourse, people often conflated otherness, immorality and unbridled economic exploitation with these ‘outsiders’. On the one hand, the mining businesses had brought benefits to a small number of already powerful people, who owned and leased their land to sand mine contractors, and in addition to temporary labourers. On the other hand, the mining activity also brought misery, sickness and anxiety. The villagers especially referred to young girls and their parents.¹¹

WE ARE JUST LIKE A FLAG FLUTTERING IN THE WIND

The 1991 decision of the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), to liberalize the economy and subsequently institutionalize multi-partyism (vyama vingi) in the country was made with little or no consultation (such as a referendum) with the masses (see for details Askew Reference Askew2006; Dzimbiri et al. 2000; Hyden Reference Hyden1999; McHenry Reference McHenry1994; Ngware Reference Dzimbiri, Ngware and Ocharo2000; Nyang'oro Reference Nyang'oro, Mengisteab and Daddieh1995; Snyder Reference Snyder2001; Tripp Reference Tripp1997). Thus, when asked in what ways the restructuring of the economy and the polity had affected their everyday lives during the last ten to fifteen years, the vast majority of the ordinary people in Mbande reported very few positive changes. Long-term residents of the village (wenyeji wa hapa) in particular stated that their overall living conditions had indeed worsened. One speaker summed up his feeling by saying, ‘Sisi ni bendera kufuata upepo’ – literally, ‘we are just like a flag fluttering in the wind's direction’. In essence, this metaphor illustrates a mentality that when ‘the government decides, the citizens simply follow orders’. During conversations about privatization of the health sector and the introduction of multi-party democracy, the common remark was hatuna maamuzi – ‘we have no say in the matter’. In other words, they believed that they have less choice in an era of economic liberalization and multi-party democracy, than they did when the country was under one-party rule with a socialist manifesto.

Notwithstanding the discursive rendering of unhappiness and frustrations, many of the local residents, far from being merely passive recipients, absorbed, manipulated, or even rejected the ‘top-down’ government initiatives. Their resistance was manifested in many different ways. Most strikingly, while Mbande has traditionally been a stronghold of the ruling CCM party, during the year 2000 elections, much to the chagrin of the local leaders, villagers elected a candidate representing one of the opposition parties – the Civic United Front (CUF). In the arena of healthcare, villagers who believed that the local municipal dispensary was being inefficiently run pressured the local leadership to exchange the dispensary medical officer for another officer who they believed was more efficient and caring. Moreover, when the exploitative practices and excessive profiteering of one of the private pharmacists in the village became public knowledge, the villagers simply decided to boycott his facility. Within three months, this pharmacist lost his clientele and had to shut down his practice. Desperate for money, the pharmacist took to felling trees, making charcoal and selling it to peddlers – an activity that the Zaramo people consider to be ‘lowly’ and a resort of absolute desperation.

In spontaneous conversations, people alluded to more tactile aspects of their living conditions to make comparisons about their life ‘before and after’ the implementation of neo-liberal policies. They frequently referred to the type of house that one was living in as one of the most common indices of economic status, a measure of one's prosperity and a self-assessment of the ‘progress’ (maendeleo) that one had made in life. Accordingly, if one was still living in a rented house, or in a house made of udongo (mud-sticks-fronds with a thatched roof), one had not made any progress in life. As one unhappy-sounding informant stated in a rhetorical tone, ‘How has my life changed? Nothing has changed for me! I'm still living in this udongo house. I have to fix the roof every year, and the insects are eating the walls and floor of my house.' In contrast, if one has moved from an udongo house to a matofali house (a stronger structure made of permanent bricks with corrugated iron sheets), then one has definitely advanced in life.

EROSION OF SOCIAL COHESION

The philosophy of Ujamaa emphasized self-reliance (kujitegemea), social cohesion, social consideration, and the sharing of communal resources in the spirit of reciprocity (see Hyden Reference Hyden1980; Stoger-Eising 2000). In actual practice, however, the Ujamaa movement was fraught with contradictions, controversies and failures on a grand scale (see Scott Reference Scott1999). By contrast, the introduction of neo-liberalism with its emphasis on a competition-driven market model has promoted individualism as the way forward. In this regard, there were notable variations in people's representations about the availability of social support (masaada) during the Ujamaa era as compared to the contemporary context. The majority of the people in the village emphatically stated that access to social support had diminished over the years, though many also believed that the level of social support has remained largely unchanged (sawa sawa tu). Only a small number said that social support had in fact increased in the past ten years. Nearly everyone I conversed with said that in the last ten years or so people have become less trustworthy (imani imepungua; masaada hamna). People commonly expressed dejection at the declining levels of trust between friends and neighbours and the unhealthy competition for resources within one's social network. In short, there has been an ‘erosion of social cohesion’ (cf. Bissell Reference Bissell2005: 222; Pfeiffer Reference Pfeiffer2002: 177) for the people of Mbande. The basic social arrangements that have ‘structured’ individual ‘life worlds’ have undergone significant transformation as local people become increasingly concerned with their own survival. One point in particular bears emphasis: as with maisha magumu, the increasing importance of cash for survival has become a constant theme in everyday conversations. People highlighted the intensification of economic hardship (hali ngumu ya kiuchumi) and the increase of economic and social inequality as the main reasons why people have lost faith and mutual trust in each other. Money has become central to survival while family and community reciprocity, mutual aid and gratitude are significantly less available. People believe that their friends and neighbours are becoming increasingly selfish.

Additionally, participant observation in households and narrative interviews with recently divorced women on the subject of marriage, divorce and polygyny yield evidence to suggest that conflicts at the site of the household have intensified in an environment of growing economic hardship, disparity and social competition. Wedding ceremonies in the village have become rare. Scores of mothers in Mbande are single mothers; most of them are young and unmarried women who are left to fend for themselves and their children in an environment that is both economically and socially challenging. In many cases, young men provide the young women with basic necessities for short periods of time, promise to marry them, and then simply disappear from the scene. Further, stable marriages among young couples are rare. This trend is a good indication of the extent to which the structurally induced changes have penetrated and destabilized the private and social lives of the people of Mbande as elsewhere in Africa (cf. Campbell et al. 1995; Lockhart Reference Lockhart2005; Manjate et al. 2000; Pfeiffer Reference Pfeiffer2002; Seppala Reference Seppala1998).

LOCAL DISCOURSES ON THE PRIVATIZATION OF THE HEALTH SECTOR

In local discourses specifically surrounding the changes (mabadiliko) that were taking place in the health sector, not one person in the village said that healthcare had become any cheaper. This observation is significant as local sentiments and experiences run counter to the classic neo-liberal economic argument that, left to market forces, competition will improve the quality of goods and services and also automatically bring down their prices for consumers (cf. Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006; Pfeiffer Reference Pfeiffer2005). Ever since the government introduced user fees, the truly indigent patients have remained sick and without care. The poor were unable to treat their illnesses because they did not have the money required to cover the cost of treatment. In this regard, informants mentioned the names of people – including family members, friends, neighbours, or relatives living in Mbande – who were unable to get timely, adequate professional medical help and/or buy medicines to treat their illnesses due to poverty. Illness narrative interviews with a small sample of people who were suffering from excruciatingly painful skin conditions revealed that these people had delayed seeking treatment for their condition for over two to three weeks. Suffering was prolonged primarily due to their inability to pay for medical consultation. However, in making sense of their suffering, these narrators focused less on their bodily pain and provided instead a meta-commentary on the hardships of their daily lives. Thus, their illness narratives hinged on their bodily experience of the socio-economic realities and the everyday tensions and structural transformations occurring in the country.

Overall, informants' responses were imbued with elements of temporality and vacillation. Responses generally varied depending on the season during which the conversation was held. For the most part, interviews conducted during the annual hungry months (from November to April), when people's food stocks were depleted, were more gloomy in their tone and content compared to the interviews that were conducted during the harvest and festivities season (July to October). Further, the narrative context – such as the presence or absence of audiences during the recording of the interview – also affected the tone of the discourse. Some of those who publicly lamented the current expectation of them to pay for healthcare often mentioned during one-on-one interviews that their problem was not directly related to the government's decision to privatize the health sector and to introduce fees-for-service at health facilities, but to the fact that the government was not doing anything to provide ordinary people with opportunities for employment. People were left without any alternative options to increase their cash income in order to buy goods and services that were ironically in good supply. In addition, they were no longer being offered services free-of-cost or at subsidized rates due to the erosion of state patronage.