As far as my experience of sugar mills goes, these are hot, dusty places with a strong smell of molasses. When the machinery is on, you can hardly hear yourself speaking, and in any case you’re better off closing your mouth otherwise fibres of bagasse will fly right in.
The TPC mill in North Tanzania, on the other hand, does not look like a mill at all. It looks like a golf course, and a tennis course, a five star resort in other words, surrounded with 8,000 hectares of sugar cane fields irrigated by sprinklers.
That’s because TPC is designed so that nobody needs, or wants, to leave the estate.
When you drive the 5 km separating you from the main road to the mill itself, driving through the cane fields, you’ll see various indications “TPC hospital”, “TPC school” etc. There are also many types of pretty houses where the staff, from cane cutters to directors, live. Probably better than any other small Tanzanian town, they have their own infrastructure, including their own police.
The mill, in reality, is the last thing you see. You are first drawn towards an open single-floored house which faces on to a wide stretch of beautiful green lawn. Yes, the restaurant/bar gives onto the golf club.
To make things even more interesting, the golf club was, at that moment, only occupied with young local boys. “We run several NGOs, TPC management tells us, and one of them sponsors these boys to become professional golf players”. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the next Tiger Woods came from a Tanzanian sugar estate?
We have to be dragged away from the golf course to meet a charming white South African who will take us for a tour of the mill.
The rainy season has just started and the mill stopped crushing a few days prior, he tells us, disappointed for us. In reality, we didn’t mind, it meant that for once we could hear all the explanations.
A part of the mill was brand new with machinery imported from India. Every minute the mill is not crushing represents an $8,000 loss, and we were told of an incident when a simple switched that had been pushed by accident by one of the engineers have caused the mill to halt for 12 hours. They had a huge fight after as to who would be the one explaining what happened to the top management.
We spent the rest of the day going round, admiring the estate. “I don’t even bother going into town anymore, someone from Logistics told us, the bar is subsidised, they have delicious pork ribs and swimming pools. What else could I possibly want?”
After the morning mill visit, we spent the afternoon eating fries on the restaurant terrace, trying to spot the world’s next golf genius.
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