Short Abstract

Focusing on coastal southern Tanzania, particularly Mtwara and Lindi regions, the panel explores how infrastructures, political economies, histories, and everyday practices simultaneously produce both connection and marginality, rethinking center-periphery dynamics in Africanist scholarship.

Long Abstract

Why does a region deeply embedded in regional and global networks continue to be understood as peripheral? Southern Tanzania - more specifically Mtwara and Lindi region - is both locally and in scholarly literature framed through idioms of remoteness and underdevelopment. It is often perceived as ‘sleepy’, distant from national centres of power, and overshadowed by other regions. Yet, such framings obscure the region’s dense histories of mobility, extraction, religious and political life, environmental transformation, and translocal connections.

Rather than treating periphery as a fixed geographical condition, this panel approaches it as an analytical prism to examine how marginality is produced, inhabited, and at times undone. Bringing together research from different disciplines on south-eastern Tanzania and bordering regions (including northern Mozambique, due to historical border connections), the panel asks how people, institutions, infrastructures, and landscapes come to be positioned as peripheral and with what effects. How have roads, borders, media, environmental conservation regimes, extractive processes, markets, development projects and policies, medical facilities, religious practices, and memories of violence or neglect shaped experiences of distance and connection? How are southern Tanzanian communities linked to wider regional, national, and global processes, even when represented as remote? And how do actors themselves mobilise, refuse, or reinterpret the language of marginality?

We consider southern Tanzania as a site from which to rethink centre–periphery relations in Africanist scholarship, showing how “the periphery” is un/made (cf. Seppäla and Koda 1998), while unsettling assumptions about where history, politics, and theory are thought to happen.

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