ABSTRACT
This chapter explores new explanations for twentieth-century demographic change in Africa to see how they can help to reconcile population growth with deteriorating health in British-ruled Tanzania. In Africa there are no national demographic data for the precolonial period, and people do not know the size of the population of Tanzania before 1900. Conventional wisdom holds that current high population growth rates are consistent with traditional high rates of fertility among African women. The new mode of production also increased demands for child labor, providing monogamous couples with incentives for larger families. The sole verifiable fact is that after 1925 the population of Tanzania, by then under British rule, was growing. The East African slave trade, which reached its height in the 1850s and 1860s, with the export of perhaps 65,000 persons per decade, disrupted settlement patterns in the interior.
