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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research from sugar plantations in Tanzania and Malawi, this paper examines plantation infrastructure as a material form of development, and how the built environments of production enclaves shape everyday life, social hierarchies, and mobility within and beyond the estate.

Paper long abstract

Across Eastern and Southern Africa, large-scale plantation agriculture has catalysed the creation of rural production enclaves, where infrastructure, materiality, and development are co-constituted. Plantations have been theorised as ‘total systems’, defined by a built environment engineered to deliver the production of a commodity, but also, the social reproduction of a labour force. The construction of roads, electrification, worker housing, canals, schools, clinics, and recreational facilities, are deemed necessary to attract and maintain often thousands of workers and their families, in remote areas far from urban centres. In this way, large-scale agro-industrial estates have been imagined as rural outposts of development and modernity; mini ‘colonies’ of global production, built in the name of rural development. These planned enclaves sit in contrast to the informal settlements on an estate’s borders; defined not by corporate planning, but by the distributive politics of opportunity and precarity, on the margins of a production stronghold. This paper explores the materialities of large-scale agro-industrial estates and plantation infrastructure in the context of Africa’s sugar industry, comparing the lived experience of large-scale sugar plantations in Tanzania and Malawi. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research, the paper will explore how the materialities and infrastructure of global production are lived, experienced, and contested, and how rank-based housing allocations, racialised and gendered labour hierarchies, and the embodied rhythms of field and factory work, structure how people inhabit and move through spaces of production, both inside and outside the estate.