The British scheme to grow groundnuts on an industrial scale in Tanganyika Territory in the years after World War II has become a paradigmatic example of the failure of postwar colonial developmentalism. This article looks at how the scheme was facilitated by the repurposing of wartime technologies for a new “war on nature”; a process of “bricolage” and improvisation which created new machines designed to bend the soil, vegetation, and climate of Tanganyika to the will of the colonial agriculturalists.
