Abstract: The 1960s stand out in the national imagination about sisal in Tanzania. Sisal was the gold of Tanzania until the late 1960s. The dying industry gradually became the “dead” industry for many of its participants as well as outsiders. In three short decades, sisal production plummeted. How could such a powerful industry within a matter of few decades be brought to its heals? And more pertinently for the purposes of this paper, how could sisal – a foreign floral species from the Yucatan variably described as the “tree of wonder” and “an ugly but precious plant”– master the regional landscape of Tanga within the span of a few years and become the mainstay of the national economy for almost a century? In this paper I argue the death of sisal sector during the 1960s and 1970s have to be located within a much longer historical trajectory that helps explicate the contradictory narratives of glory and death that engulfed sisal plantations since their inception in the 1890s.