An excellent account of this hair-brained scheme which became a metaphor for all colonialism’s failures in the tropics.

A former employee of Decca visited Tanganyika 1946, met the local Director of Agriculture and their discussion produced a memo: the start of Groundnut Scheme.

After a few tests, they decided on a place inland called Kongwa - at the suggestion of a pig farmer - having ignored the fact that the proposed area lay inside the under 25 inch rainfall zone.

The final decision to go ahead was taken on the 8.15 train from Euston to Colwyn Bay, 27 Sep 1946, by the new Minister of Food, who had only read the summary of the report.

Clear to author by now that greatest curse of the groundnut scheme was the grasshopper administration - management spent all their time flying between different sites and London, not spending time at each, wasting the time of the men on the ground.

The scheme was dogged with problems from the start. Thus, equipment failures: the caterpillar vehicles were not strong enough to pull the root cutter blades through the soil. The abrasiveness of the soil at Kongwa - gritty at up to 80% quartz sand - plus compaction, made it in the dry season as hard as concrete. No wonder the Africans only worked in the wet season and appeared to do nothing the rest of the year!!

But the list of errors is almost without end. Perhaps, in the end, post-war enthusiasm was to blame - the idea of utilising the mechanised might of the war in the service of development. There were 100,000 volunteers for the 'groundnut army'. A remarkable feature of the whole story is the enthusiasm and commitment of men on the ground despite all the problems.

Undoubtedly the lack of preparation/planning was the key. "Plunging in" rather than, like Montgomery, carefully planning the assault. Thereafter it was all go, go, go. But, on the other hand, there was no other way - you couldn't prepare without knowing the problems involved first. It was trial and error. In that sense, there was nothing new under the sun – and concerning failures in schemes for colonial development

(fuller notes avilabel on request)