African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World 9781316221679, 9781107104525, 2015002307

Table of contents :
List of Figures and Maps page vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 A Postcolonial Project in the Cold War World 27
The Ujamaa Vision 30
Pan-Africanism and African Socialism 37
The Village in the 1960s World 45
Self-Reliance, Security, and Sovereignty 55
From the Arusha Declaration to Operation Vijiji 68
2 Militants, Mothers, and the National Family 78
Mobile Men, Militarized Men 81
Mothers, Wives, and Domestic Guardians 102
Representations and Realities of Familyhood 114
Kinship, Political Community, and the Tensions of
Nationalism 119
3 Uneven Development and the Region 129
Colonial Contexts 131
Ujamaa and the Cinderella Region 142
A National Periphery? 148
Managing Villagization, Planning Development 155
Beyond Villagization, beyond the Nation 168
4 Remembering Villagization 177
Experiences of Resettlement 179
Life in an Ujamaa Village 192
Popular Political Subjectivities 209
After Ujamaa 217
Conclusion 227
Bibliography 241
Index 257

Citation preview

African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania Between the Village and the World Drawing on a wide range of oral and written sources, this book tells the story of Tanzania’s socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 1967–75. Inaugurated shortly after independence, ujamaa (“familyhood” in Swahili) both invoked established socialist themes and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy, seeking to reorganize the Tanzanian countryside into communal villages to achieve national development. Priya Lal investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively envisioned ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, without affixing the project to a trajectory of inevitable failure. By forging an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of ujamaa, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania restores a sense of possibility and process to the early years of African independence, refines prevailing theories of nation building and development, and expands our understanding of the 1960s and 1970s world. Priya Lal is Assistant Professor of History at Boston College. Her work has been published in the Journal of African History, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, and Humanity.

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African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania Between the Village and the World

PRIYA LAL Boston College

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32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107104525  C Priya Lal 2015

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lal, Priya, author. African socialism in postcolonial Tanzania : between the village and the world / Priya Lal, Boston College. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-10452-5 1. Ujamaa villages – Tanzania. 2. Socialism – Tanzania. 3. Rural development – Tanzania. 4. Tanzania – History – 1964– I. Title. hx771.3.a3l35 2015 2015002307 307.7709678 09045–dc23 isbn 978-1-107-10452-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania Between the Village and the World Drawing on a wide range of oral and written sources, this book tells the story of Tanzania’s socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 1967–75. Inaugurated shortly after independence, ujamaa (“familyhood” in Swahili) both invoked established socialist themes and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy, seeking to reorganize the Tanzanian countryside into communal villages to achieve national development. Priya Lal investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively envisioned ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, without affixing the project to a trajectory of inevitable failure. By forging an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of ujamaa, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania restores a sense of possibility and process to the early years of African independence, refines prevailing theories of nation building and development, and expands our understanding of the 1960s and 1970s world. Priya Lal is Assistant Professor of History at Boston College. Her work has been published in the Journal of African History, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, and Humanity.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Pittsburgh, on 26 Feb 2020 at 14:02:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221679

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African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania Between the Village and the World

PRIYA LAL Boston College

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Pittsburgh, on 26 Feb 2020 at 14:02:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221679

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107104525  C Priya Lal 2015

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lal, Priya, author. African socialism in postcolonial Tanzania : between the village and the world / Priya Lal, Boston College. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-10452-5 1. Ujamaa villages – Tanzania. 2. Socialism – Tanzania. 3. Rural development – Tanzania. 4. Tanzania – History – 1964– I. Title. hx771.3.a3l35 2015 2015002307 307.7709678 09045–dc23 isbn 978-1-107-10452-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Pittsburgh, on 26 Feb 2020 at 14:02:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221679

African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania Between the Village and the World Drawing on a wide range of oral and written sources, this book tells the story of Tanzania’s socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 1967–75. Inaugurated shortly after independence, ujamaa (“familyhood” in Swahili) both invoked established socialist themes and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy, seeking to reorganize the Tanzanian countryside into communal villages to achieve national development. Priya Lal investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively envisioned ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, without affixing the project to a trajectory of inevitable failure. By forging an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of ujamaa, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania restores a sense of possibility and process to the early years of African independence, refines prevailing theories of nation building and development, and expands our understanding of the 1960s and 1970s world. Priya Lal is Assistant Professor of History at Boston College. Her work has been published in the Journal of African History, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, and Humanity.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Pittsburgh, on 26 Feb 2020 at 14:02:25, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221679

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African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania Between the Village and the World

PRIYA LAL Boston College

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Pittsburgh, on 26 Feb 2020 at 14:02:25, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221679

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107104525  C Priya Lal 2015

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lal, Priya, author. African socialism in postcolonial Tanzania : between the village and the world / Priya Lal, Boston College. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-10452-5 1. Ujamaa villages – Tanzania. 2. Socialism – Tanzania. 3. Rural development – Tanzania. 4. Tanzania – History – 1964– I. Title. hx771.3.a3l35 2015 2015002307 307.7709678 09045–dc23 isbn 978-1-107-10452-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Figures and Maps Acknowledgments

1

2

3

4

page vii ix

Introduction A Postcolonial Project in the Cold War World The Ujamaa Vision Pan-Africanism and African Socialism The Village in the 1960s World Self-Reliance, Security, and Sovereignty From the Arusha Declaration to Operation Vijiji Militants, Mothers, and the National Family Mobile Men, Militarized Men Mothers, Wives, and Domestic Guardians Representations and Realities of Familyhood Kinship, Political Community, and the Tensions of Nationalism Uneven Development and the Region Colonial Contexts Ujamaa and the Cinderella Region A National Periphery? Managing Villagization, Planning Development Beyond Villagization, beyond the Nation Remembering Villagization Experiences of Resettlement Life in an Ujamaa Village

1 27 30 37 45 55 68 78 81 102 114 119 129 131 142 148 155 168 177 179 192

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Contents

vi

Popular Political Subjectivities After Ujamaa

Conclusion Bibliography Index

209 217 227 241 257

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List of Figures and Maps

Figures 1. The Mtwara–Newala Road bisecting Nanguruwe Village, 2008. 2. Tanzanian officials and a foreign adviser on a National Service farm, undated photo (likely 1960s). 3. Chinese doctors at Mtwara Health Center, September 12, 1975. 4. Vice President Rashidi Kawawa with Chinese officials on the TAZARA, March 2, 1972. 5. TANU membership card from 1955, Nanguruwe Village, 2008. 6. Minister of National Service inspecting servicemen and servicewomen at National Service training at Ruvu, July 1974. 7. National Service members in a training camp, undated (likely late 1960s or early 1970s). 8. People’s Militia soldiers marching at the National Stadium to celebrate ten years of independence, December 9, 1971. 9. TANU Youth League members supervising the construction of houses in the ujamaa village of Mnopwe in Masasi District, Mtwara, 1972. 10. UWT chairwoman Sofia Kawawa (wife of Rashidi Kawawa) examining handicrafts made by local women on display in the Mtwara Town Parish Hall while opening a UWT branch for members of the Mtwara Domestic Science Centre, undated (likely from the late 1960s or early 1970s). 11. A development officer conducting a “better food” demonstration for women of Likonde Village, Mtwara

page 2 50 53 58 88

91 93 96

99

106

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viii

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

List of Figures and Maps District, during a ten-day seminar, undated (likely from the late 1960s). Women weaving baskets in Namenjele Village, Mtwara District, 1975. Young Makonde boys dancing a traditional dance called “Mwachilendenda,” June 1971. Residents of Mumbaka Village, Masasi District, Mtwara, working the maize plot of the village’s ujamaa farm alongside members of TANU’s Regional Council, 1975. A woman gathering water on the Makonde Plateau, undated (likely early to mid-1970s). Cashew production in Tanzania from 1945 to 1995. Plan for ujamaa village, Mtwara Region, 1968. Plans for two types of houses in Mtwara ujamaa villages: with thatched roofs and metal roofs, 1968. Residents of Mangaba Village, Mtwara District, sorting their cashew nuts for sale, 1977. House near the center of Rwelu Village, 2008. A neighborhood (mtaa) in Nanguruwe Village, 2008. Maili Kumi, Mdui Village, 2008.

108 110 154

158 161 162 166 167 172 193 195 200

Maps 1. Contemporary map of Tanzania. 2. Contemporary map of Mtwara Region. 3. Contemporary map of Mtwara District, locating the villages examined in this study – Nanguruwe, Mdui, and Rwelu – and the coastal city of Mtwara. 4. Cashew production in southeastern Tanzania, 1962.

xiii xiv

xv 139

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Acknowledgments

I first began work on this book – in its initial incarnation, as a dissertation proposal – in 2006. The nine years of research and writing that followed have been a true adventure, full of formative challenges, unexpected discoveries, and delightful rewards. As my project matured over the years, so did I, both personally and professionally. Those who have supported my scholarly development have also enriched me as a human being, and vice versa. It is with much gratitude that I acknowledge some of them here. In a broader sense, this project’s origins might be traced to a still earlier point – my time as an undergraduate at Columbia University. There Greg Mann introduced me to the excitement and potential of studying African history. With his encouragement, I entered a graduate program at New York University, where I encountered many influential teachers and peers. As my advisor, Fred Cooper was a steady and discerning intellectual guide. I owe more than I can measure to his thoughtfulness as a professor, reader, and mentor. Manu Goswami was an inspiration; she pushed me to think more expansively about the past and cultivate a comparative perspective in my work. Linda Gordon taught me how to think critically and creatively about gender. As my external readers, Greg Mann provided astute feedback and dependable support, and Jim Brennan deepened my understanding of the historical particulars of postcolonial Tanzania. In addition, the friendship and counsel of my brilliant and animated fellow students made graduate school stimulating and fun. I think especially of Abena Asare, Leslie Barnes, Maggie Clinton, Brandon County, Ezra Davidson, Anne Eller, Kendra Field, Bekah Friedman, Kiron Johnson, Rashauna Johnson, Seth Markle, Reynolds Richter, Naomi Schiller, Jenny Shaw, Franny Sullivan, Susan Valentine, and Qian Zhu. Many more senior scholars provided crucial advice at the outset of my dissertation research, including Felicitas Becker, James Giblin, Linda Helgesson, Andrew Ivaska, Stacey Langwick, Jaime Monson, and Leander Schneider. In Tanzania, the following people made my research experience – the ix Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Pittsburgh, on 26 Feb 2020 at 14:02:25, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221679

x

Acknowledgments

bulk of which took place between 2007 and 2008 – lively and productive: Billy Bludgus, Rajabu Chipila, Bre Grace, Josh Grace, Amy Jamison, Edith Lyimo, Samuel Mhajida, Andreana Prichard, Dominic Rwehumbiza and his family, Julie Weiskopf, and Nawanda Yahaya. I benefited from the assistance of archivists and librarians at the Tanzania National Archives in Dar es Salaam and Dodoma, the National Library of Tanzania, and the libraries of the Mwalimu Nyerere Academy and the University of Dar es Salaam. In Dar es Salaam, Amina Iddi’s translation skills proved to be an immense help in sorting through reams of source material. I could not have completed my fieldwork in southeastern Tanzania without Issa Chilindima, whose resourcefulness, gregariousness, and knowledge of Mtwara were a gift. I am, of course, indebted to the many residents of Mtwara – young and old, men and women, in the city and in the countryside – who entertained my questions and speculations about their lives and graciously shared their memories and reflections with me. As my dissertation evolved into a book manuscript, numerous colleagues and friends provided indispensable wisdom and community. Among others, Jeff Ahlman, Monique Bedasse, Emily Callaci, Dan Magaziner, and Meredith Terretta offered useful suggestions on everything from conference papers to book proposal drafts. Countless conversations with Dushko Petrovich helped sharpen my ideas and arguments. Yuka Suzuki and Wendy UrbanMead at Bard College and Fodei Batty, Grace Yukich, and Rob Werth at Quinnipiac University were supportive colleagues during a sometimes trying period of transition. Many of my fellow historians at Boston College – including Robin Fleming, Penny Ismay, Kevin Kenny, Dana Sajdi, and Ling Zhang – have made my current institutional home a wonderful place to work. Sana Aiyar and Kate Luongo have also been bright lights in the Boston area. Kendra Field, Shane Minkin, Katerina Seligmann, and Franny Sullivan have been my anchors in many ways; I have so appreciated their love, humor, and insight. A variety of institutional support and funding materially enabled my research and writing: a Henry MacCracken Fellowship, a MeriwetherSattwa Fellowship, and a Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship at New York University; the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship; and research grants from Quinnipiac University. Allison Hughes, Arun Ivatury, Nilu Vajpeyi, and Christian Lyons generously opened their homes to me during postdissertation research stints in College Park and London. Will Hammell initially saw the value of my project, and the editorial and production teams at Cambridge University Press have since shepherded this book through the publication process. Over the years, audiences, discussants, and fellow presenters at a range of venues have asked productive questions that prompted me to both widen and refine my analysis. These include the University of Dar es Salaam, New York University, Columbia University, the City University of New York Graduate

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Acknowledgments

xi

Center, George Washington University, Yale University, Emory University, and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as meetings of the African Studies Association, the Greater New York Area African Historians Workshop, the American Historical Association, and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. The observations and recommendations of editors, anonymous reviewers, and readers of my prior publications have also enhanced the content of this book. Portions of the following works appear in the pages that follow: “Militants, Mothers, and the National Family: Ujamaa, Gender, and Rural Development in Postcolonial Tanzania,” Journal of African History 51, 1 (2010) 1–20; “Self-Reliance and the State: The Multiple Meanings of Development in Early Post-Colonial Tanzania,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 82, 2 (2012) 212–34; “Maoism in Tanzania: Material Connections and Shared Imaginaries,” in Alexander Cook, ed., Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 96–116; and “African Socialism and the Limits of Global Familyhood: Tanzania and the New International Economic Order in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Humanity 6, 1 (2015) 17–31. Long before I entered graduate school, my parents, Shail and Rajesh Lal, prioritized my education; in doing so, they made it possible for me to pursue a career that has brought me so much joy and satisfaction. More recently, Elizabeth Brett and Cathy Loula have helped me learn invaluable new ways of thinking about myself and the world, which have made me a better scholar. Finally, the curiosity and passion of many students at New York University, Bard College, Quinnipiac University, and Boston College have reminded me how urgent and illuminating it can be to ask probing questions about Africa’s past. I hope that this book will do the same for its readers.

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Mkwiti Chini

CH ILAN- GALA

Mikumbl

Chekeleni

Mkwiti

Nanganga

Mtwara

Mikindami Mitengu

M PA P U R A

A M AY

L I N D I

ga on iw Ch

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0 0

Regional/District capital Major village Village

Mnavira

Mnavira

NAKOPI Division name Nopocho

Mkonona Mkonona

Ward name Tarmac road Loose surface track Other road Main river International boundary

Masuguru

Regional boundary District boundary

Masuguru

Division boundary Ward boundary

map 2. Contemporary map of Mtwara Region. xiv

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Kitope

Ndumbwe

Msangamkuu

Naumbu

Mbuo Changarawe Mwatehi Mnyundo

Hiyari

Ndumbwe Nanyani

Kabisera Mayanga

Pemba

Msijute

Miseti Mikindani

LINDI REGION Mnanji (LINDI DISTRICT)

MAYANGA

INDIAN OCEAN Sinde

Mtwara

Mitengo

Likonde Nangumi

Magomeni

Ufukeni

Mnete

Mbae Mwembetogwa Muungano

Mkwajuni

Rwelu

Likonde Godauni

Mangamba

Mnawene

MTWARA URBAN Mkangala

Ruvula

Mnete II Nalingu

Mtawanya

Mayanga

Lyowa

Mkubiru

Ligula

Msakala

Mkunwa Nanyati Manamawa

Dihimba

Mbawala Chini Maili Kumi Namayakata

Mdui Njumbuli

Madimba

Namindondi Madimba Mayaya

Hyuvi Mitambo

Ding’wida

ZIWANI Mihuru

Litembe

Mbawala

MOZAMBIQUE

Tangazo

Namayakata Barabarani Miuta

Mtendachi

Nachenjele

Nanguruwe Namanjele

Mngoji

Minyembe

Dihimba Mpondomo

Ziwani

Naliendele Moma

Kawawa Nyengedi

Chimbindu

Nanguruwe

Makome A

Magomeni Kilambo

Makome B Kihimika Kilombero Navikole

Chawi Maranje

Mahurunga Kitunguli

K I T A Y AMahurunga

0 0

Chawi

5

10 5

15 10

20

25 km 15 miles

map 3. Contemporary map of Mtwara District, locating the villages examined in this study – Nanguruwe, Mdui, and Rwelu – and the coastal city of Mtwara. xv

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Introduction

The unpaved road to the interior from the southeastern Tanzanian town of Mtwara, cleared in the early 1950s, remains today the main corridor connecting many rural settlements in the area to the regional capital on the coast. A contemporary traveler shares the road with villagers riding on rusty bicycles loaded with firewood, rural people trekking alone or in small groups on foot, minibuses laden with passengers and parcels, the occasional privately steered sedan or pickup truck, and conspicuously well-maintained SUVs carrying foreign development workers. A few miles out of town, the electricity cables lining the sides of the road disappear abruptly, yielding to the lush greenery of cashew and papaya trees, coconut palms, and small plots of cassava or maize. Periodically, the traveler passes through a village, marked by a concentration of mud houses with thatched roofs, makeshift marketplaces, chickens blundering about, and occasionally a school, church, mosque, or health center housed in a concrete structure with a tin roof. Any journey along this route – even for those driving gleaming new SUVs – is a fundamentally uncertain affair. The road’s uneven and sometimes treacherously muddy surface renders flat tires and stallings an inevitable fact of life for those fortunate enough to ride in private vehicles or on bicycles. For those traveling without such means, long distances and the unpredictability of local transport (minibuses pass infrequently and irregularly, often already filled to maximum capacity) make the trip a difficult one. In this respect, the experience of traversing the Mtwara–Newala transportation corridor embodies the profoundly insecure and contingent character of everyday life for many rural residents of southeastern Tanzania. The road – like the landscape of rural Tanzania more broadly – at once epitomizes the legacy of late colonial and early postcolonial development initiatives and reflects ensuing decades of state abandonment. It also continues to be remade by its local neighbors and transient commuters, for whom the Mtwara–Newala road is but one part of an intricate, though not immediately visible or easily 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Pittsburgh, on 26 Feb 2020 at 14:02:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221679.002

2

African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania

figure 1. The Mtwara–Newala Road bisecting Nanguruwe Village, 2008. Photograph by the author.

accessible, network of intersecting routes linking southeastern Tanzania’s farms, villages, and towns to each other and the world beyond (Figure 1). Because of its poverty and poor infrastructure, the region of Mtwara is conventionally thought of as a static, isolated, backward periphery – within Tanzania and the world as a whole. Yet Mtwara’s social, political, economic, and physical landscape has long been evolving in ways deeply connected to global events and processes. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European settlement in southern Africa, the Indian Ocean slave trade, and the expansion of German and British empire directly or indirectly shaped the region. Over a relatively short period of time, these dynamics brought warfare, forced labor, a money economy, and colonial institutions to this corner of East Africa, introducing new modes of living, working, and governing to its residents. After waves of decolonization started to sweep across sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the formation of the United Republic of Tanzania in 1964, a new chapter of Mtwara’s history opened. For the first time ever, Mtwara’s fate was tied to the decisions of an African-led national government. Yet the postcolonial Tanzanian state and the realities of life in Mtwara continued to be influenced by broader global forces – including

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Introduction

3

ongoing decolonization, the Cold War, and what one scholar evocatively calls the “great clanking gears” of the capitalist world economy.1 The initial period of Tanzanian independence began in the early 1960s as a heady time of high hopes and ended with widespread disappointment in the mid-1970s. The roughly fifteen years between these temporal bookends saw nothing less than a thorough transformation of the human geography of rural regions like Mtwara, just as they constituted an era of tremendous political upheaval across the globe. At the center of these changes in Tanzania, as in many other countries, was a project of state-led socialism. In February 1967, Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere announced his vision for Tanzanian development, outlining the ideological contours of a political program termed ujamaa (“familyhood” in Swahili). He explained that the implementation of ujamaa would begin with the immediate nationalization of banks, major industries, and natural resources by the one-party state, but the focus of ujamaa would be the longer-term undertaking of reorganizing the Tanzanian countryside into socialist villages. The ujamaa village would be defined by collective property ownership and communal agricultural organization; the hard work and united spirit of ujamaa villagers would fuel national development. Although villagization began as a voluntary effort, between 1973 and 1975, it morphed into a compulsory drive in which millions of peasants were forcibly relocated into concentrated settlements. At the end of this campaign, called Operation Vijiji (or “Villages”), officials abandoned the ujamaa project altogether, as the pressures and constraints imposed by Tanzania’s increasing indebtedness and poverty eclipsed the earlier goal of achieving substantive socialism. Although ujamaa was a Tanzanian initiative, it was part of a broader continental phenomenon of African Socialism – a blend of political concepts and strategies sourced from the diverse ideological field of the 1960s world. Ujamaa was easily the most ambitious version of African Socialism, and within Tanzania the seemingly sleepy region of Mtwara came to be the site where ujamaa was most thoroughly implemented. Official records, secondary studies, and anecdotal evidence all suggest that Mtwara became home to more ujamaa villages than any other region in the country and that almost every rural resident of Mtwara moved from dispersed settlements into dense, ordered villages – like those still lining the Mtwara–Newala road pictured earlier – between 1967 and 1975. Yet the lack of comprehensive documentation of how ujamaa was actually executed on the ground means that we continue to know little about how or why the people of Mtwara came to live in the villages that most of them still currently inhabit. By the same token, we know little about how such Tanzanians thought and talked 1

Michael Watts, “Development and Governmentality,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24, 1 (2003): 29.

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4

African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania

about ujamaa and about how ujamaa informed the everyday ways in which they lived their lives and anticipated their futures. In a sense, the uncertainty of any journey along the Mtwara–Newala road mirrors the indeterminacy and obstacle-ridden nature of the historian’s route to this episode of Mtwara’s – and Tanzania’s – past. The memories of rural Tanzanians and local officials are the most direct point of access to this historical period. However, these memories, like the landscape of rural Tanzania itself, are imprinted by the decades of economic hardship, political rupture, and social transformation that have followed the ujamaa era. On a larger scale, a number of conceptual challenges coincide with the logistical complications of uncovering a full picture of Tanzania’s socialist past. From the vantage point of the present, it is tempting to reduce the ujamaa experiment to a quixotic scheme and mere historical curiosity, at best, or to dismiss it as one of many examples of state authoritarianism confirming the generalized dysfunction of postcolonial African politics, at worst. Both perspectives define ujamaa not just by its ultimate failure to accomplish its intended goals but by the presumption that it was inherently doomed to fail from its very inception. Most studies of this episode of Tanzanian history have implicitly, if not explicitly, adopted this position, focusing on explaining what was wrong with Tanzanian socialism rather than asking the more primary question of what ujamaa was. A historical blind spot persists. Yet the stakes of understanding ujamaa are high, because its policies played a key role in the lives of Tanzanian citizens and because African Socialism was an important though overlooked part of twentieth-century world history. At the local level, even a casual contemporary observer of the Mtwara countryside can still find ample evidence of ujamaa villagization inscribed onto the area’s physical landscape and woven into the fabric of its residents’ daily practices. Many settlements appear to be organized according to a central grid bisected by a major road, with individual houses lined up along straight village streets. Every morning, it is common to see village residents – especially women – departing from their homes on long daily journeys to labor on their farms or collect water for their family’s use. Meanwhile, at the center of most settlements, young men often gather around the marketplace or village office to discuss the going price of charcoal in town or the results of the latest national election. Each element of these scenes betrays different aspects of ujamaa’s impact. During villagization, rural people moved – by choice or compulsion – into villages organized according to “modern” layouts, characterized by clean lines and neat symmetry, and located along roads designed to facilitate contact with the new Tanzanian state. Although ujamaa aimed to equalize gender relations by forging socialist community, it often reinforced distinct developmental roles for men and women. Thus, rural women today continue to bear most responsibility for domestic duties, which include providing food and water

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Introduction

5

for their children, while most men participate in petty wage labor or other informal economic activities. Because villagization did not succeed in abolishing private property and was often carried out without sufficient planning, many village residents maintain their original farms hours away from their post-ujamaa homes and walk substantial distances to collect water for ordinary use. Finally, although ujamaa emphasized socialist internationalism, it was also a nation-building project, cultivating an unprecedented engagement with national politics among average men and women in even the most far-flung corners of Tanzania. This engagement took many forms and endures today, manifesting in attitudes ranging from active investment in multiparty politics to bitter disillusionment with national leaders. Beyond the site of the individual Mtwara village, the afterlives of ujamaa (and African Socialism more broadly) are also still apparent, albeit in more subtle ways, in evolving transnational political and economic formations. In the wake of the Cold War, it has become common to speak of “postsocialism” and “neoliberalism” as overarching categories describing the decline of the welfare state, the erosion of socialist moral economies and political communities, and the ascendance of powerful new strains of unregulated market capitalism across the world.2 Such contemporary developments represent a striking shift from the leftist spirit of the 1960s, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in former socialist countries such as Russia, China, and Tanzania. Yet these recent ruptures often conceal or are concealed by continuities that facilitate the transition between socialist and postsocialist periods. Ujamaa-era idioms and practices live on in the present in reconfigured form – for example, in Tanzania’s extensive ties to China, a former socialist partner turned profit-seeking capitalist. Chinese officials invoke ujamaa-era discourses of Third World solidarity to legitimate their often exploitative current economic involvement in Tanzania, while many Tanzanian citizens use this same socialist lexicon to critique their Chinese employers.3 On the ground, Tanzanian farmers displaced from their rural homes by today’s large-scale land grabs draw on the same adaptive survival strategies that they used to cope with forced villagization in the 1970s. In some cases, Tanzanian leaders even justify such contemporary peasant displacement by invoking the welfarist logic of villagization, claiming that state action actually taken to satisfy corporations’ appetite for land is intended to benefit rural people according to the socialist principles of the past.4 2

3 4

Foundational works on these topics include C. M. Hann, ed., Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia (London: Routledge, 2002) and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Ching Kwan Lee, “Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers and the Politics of Casualization in Africa’s Chinese Enclaves,” China Quarterly 199 (2009): 647–66. Oakland Institute, Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa (Oakland, CA: The Oakland Institute, 2011); Oakland Institute, Understanding How Land Deals Contribute to Famine and Conflict in Africa (Oakland, CA: The Oakland Institute, 2011).

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African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania

With ujamaa’s continuing implications and resonances in mind, this book takes up the following question: what was ujamaa? To respond, I draw on written records from official and newspaper archives in Tanzania, the United States, and the United Kingdom; interviews with more than one hundred elderly villagers and former state officials in Mtwara; and a variety of secondary studies. I do not seek simply to document the effects of ujamaa on Tanzanian villagers or explain why the ujamaa project failed. Rather, my inquiry is at once a more open-ended and deeper one. I ask how people ranging from Julius Nyerere to cashew farmers in Mtwara imagined and understood the ujamaa vision in the first place; how they practiced, experienced, and sometimes contested policies like villagization; and how they ultimately shaped this political formation through their interactions with each other and the outside world. In the following pages, it will become clear that I do not intend to squeeze the story of ujamaa into the rigid container of a linear historical narrative or a monolithic developmental paradigm. The historical terrain of ujamaa is full of unexpected twists and turns, of tensions and contradictions that make it as difficult as it is rewarding to traverse. I highlight these ambiguities and inconsistencies, even while identifying coherent historical patterns and axes of causation, so as to present the history of ujamaa in its full complexity. Like the rural Mtwara road described earlier, this book establishes connections between places that once seemed remote or separate from one another, and it intersects with routes leading in different directions. This story is simultaneously about the southeastern corner of Tanzania and all of Tanzania; even more broadly, it is about Africa in the early days of independence. But in a fundamental sense the story of ujamaa is also about the larger world of the mid- to late twentieth century. During this time, turbulent struggles for decolonization and the intensifying dynamics of the Cold War converged, joining people and spaces in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas in unprecedented ways. These linkages were both symbolic and material, operating along new as well as older, reconfigured global circuits. Tanzania was a critical node in many of these networks – a focal point for anticolonial organizing, Cold War contests, leftist politics, and developmental exchange across the world. Nonetheless, Tanzania and Mtwara within it occupy a strikingly marginal position in most popular and scholarly mappings of the past. This book presents an alternative historical geography situating Tanzania and, more specifically, Mtwara at the center of the changing global landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. ∗ ∗ ∗ The British colony of Tanganyika, formerly part of German East Africa, gained independence on December 9, 1961.5 This transition, the culmination 5

More precisely, Tanganyika was a British League of Nations mandate between 1922 and 1946 and a British United Nations Trust Territory between 1946 and 1961. Tanganyika merged with Zanzibar (a former British protectorate) in 1964 to become the United Republic of Tanzania.

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Introduction

7

of years of advocacy and organizing by anticolonial activists, brought with it a tremendous sense of possibility. Yet independence also posed enormous challenges to both leaders and average citizens. Some of these merely represented continuations of older struggles – such as the long-standing daily battles of rural people to maintain a livelihood – whereas others were fresh arrivals to the scene, products of the unique political and economic circumstances of the 1960s world. Like its recently decolonized counterparts elsewhere on the African continent, Tanganyika emerged from decades of colonial rule with paltry financial resources, inadequate infrastructure, and a distorted economy. Although it achieved independence peacefully, the new country was surrounded by territories destabilized by unfolding or imminent civil wars or liberation conflicts. Throughout the early 1960s, civilian refugees from the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi streamed across borders onto Tanganyikan soil, accompanied by freedom fighters from Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa. A wave of army mutinies across East Africa in 1964, coinciding with a violent revolution in neighboring Zanzibar, intensified this climate of insecurity. Meanwhile, officials in the United States, Great Britain, and both East and West Germany anxiously eyed the region, applying subtle and overt forms of pressure on Nyerere, Tanganyika’s first president, to conduct his country’s affairs in ways that complied with their ideological doctrines and conformed to their geopolitical loyalties. Although this context imposed considerable constraints on government leaders and officials of what came to be the country’s ruling political party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the early days of independence also presented expansive, unprecedented opportunities.6 The spirit of political experimentation that attended decolonization, accompanied by a burgeoning agenda of radicalism generated by movements and states across the colonial and postcolonial worlds, enabled and sustained new transregional solidarities and local revolutions. As continental coalitions germinated and regional federations materialized, the Pan-Africanist vision of a united, free Africa seemed closer to becoming a reality than ever before. Moreover, a shared commitment to combating colonialism in all of its guises – both formal and informal – underwrote transnational political and economic relationships that stretched far beyond the African continent, often under the discursive umbrella of Third Worldism. In turn, these border-crossing material ties facilitated ideological cross-fertilization and thus fostered policy innovation at the national level. Much of this political ferment transcended the bipolar paradigms of the Cold War even while constantly confronting them. Ujamaa was produced by and responded to this global field. The Tanzanian project simultaneously drew on major themes of international 6

Frederick Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint: African Independence in Historical Perspective,” Journal of African History 49, 2 (2008): 167–96.

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African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania

socialism – by rejecting exploitation and inequality in favor of collective effort and welfare – and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy – by proposing a decentralized, pastoral version of socialist democracy. Rather than proclaiming ujamaa a fixed blueprint for revolutionary change, Tanzanian leaders styled it as a flexible, improvisational utopian project driven by a shifting dialectic between state-directed policy and popular subjective transformation. In his first explanation of the ujamaa concept, in 1962, Nyerere announced that “a socialist attitude of mind, and not the rigid adherence to a standard political pattern,” would distinguish Tanzanian socialism.7 Over time, this utopian attitude of mind took on an increasingly definite form in the official imagination, and by 1967, ujamaa had crystallized into a more precise set of policies. At the heart of these developmental prescriptions was an elevation of the communal village as both the embodiment of Tanzania’s socialist ideals and the tool by which to achieve them on a national scale. This village-centered political imaginary had many faces and precedents. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, intellectuals, activists, and leaders across the world forged and embraced programs for social and political reorganization that revolved around the site of the village (or the concentrated rural settlement).8 These visions and plans could have a variety of ideological motivations and associations, but they often conceived of the village temporally as well as spatially. One version viewed the village in nostalgic terms, encouraging deculturated city dwellers to return to rural communities so as to restore meaning and morality to their lives, building a new, radically decentralized political order while recovering an idealized past. Mohandas Gandhi’s vision of village republicanism, outlined during the Indian independence struggle of the 1930s and 1940s, represented such an endorsement of rural community.9 Conversely, another contemporaneous strand of political thought explicitly conceived of the village in terms of modernization and scientific progress. This approach manifested in attempts by the British colonial state during the 1940s and 1950s to relocate its African subject populations into concentrated rural settlements so as to combat medical threats such as sleeping sickness and environmental hazards such as soil erosion.10 From yet another perspective, the village was a technique of political control to be deployed in emergency, conflict situations. The US military’s “strategic hamlets” program in early 7

8 9 10

Julius Nyerere, “Ujamaa: The Basis of African Socialism,” in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1952–65 (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1966), 162. Nicole Sackley, “The Village as Cold War Site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction,” Journal of Global History 6, 3 (2011): 481–504. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Joseph Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010).

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Introduction

9

1960s Vietnam, for instance, drew on this logic, using fortified rural settlements and targeted welfare interventions to “contain” the spreading communist insurgency in the Vietnamese countryside.11 On the other side of the Cold War, Soviet policies in the 1930s configured the collective village as a fundamental unit of social transformation and socialist production. Collectivization reflected an understanding of older rural practices as backward and corrupt; it sought to restructure villages into cooperative sites where highly organized labor brigades would generate surplus food to enable rapid industrialization.12 Although Tanzanian officials consistently spoke of the ujamaa project as a socialist venture, they incorporated elements of all of the aforementioned political formations into what became the policy of ujamaa villagization. The ujamaa village was to reproduce a romanticized past and achieve a modern future, cultivate decentralized forms of community while enabling state intervention, and emerge organically from popular initiative but respond to coercive official policy. This amalgamation of ideologies and impulses was framed within the language of African Socialism, a loose political discourse assembled in the 1950s and 1960s by members of the first generation of postcolonial African leaders who espoused a form of socialism rooted in indigenous traditions and tailored to contemporary local realities. The key architects of African Socialism – such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s Ahmed S´ekou Tour´e – represented this vision as a common ethical orientation that produced divergent policy recommendations in distinct national settings.13 As the most comprehensive and sustained iteration of African Socialism, the Tanzanian ujamaa initiative exemplified many of the shared characteristics of this continent-wide formulation but also adopted its own priorities and followed its own trajectory. The agrarian focus of ujamaa – along with its emphasis on the three entwined, multivalent principles of familyhood, self-reliance, and security – set Tanzania apart from its continental counterparts. Moreover, the sheer scale of the villagization program distinguished the ujamaa project from not just other African Socialist ventures but other contemporaneous African development programs across the ideological spectrum.

11 12 13

Philip Catton, “Counter-Insurgency and Nation Building: The Strategic Hamlet Programme in South Vietnam, 1961–1963,” International History Review 21, 4 (1999): 918–40. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The only major volume on African Socialism remains William Friedland and Carl Rosberg, eds., African Socialism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964). A shorter, useful recent collection is Kelly Askew and M. Anne Pitcher’s special issue on “African Socialisms and Postsocialisms,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 76, 1 (2006). For a thoughtful comparative treatment of African Socialist discourse, see Chapter 3 of James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

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African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania

By the mid-1970s, however, Tanzania’s problems had begun to resemble those of postcolonial Africa more broadly, as the country lost its developmental momentum, abandoned its earlier political ideals, and sank into a cycle of economic dependency and indebtedness. Conventional scholarly wisdom holds that this transition from an early 1960s moment of possibility to a mid-1970s condition of crisis was precipitated by fundamental flaws in the ujamaa experiment itself. Most studies of ujamaa identify and seek to account for a tension between the way in which ujamaa was initially articulated – its stated utopian intentions – and the way in which it came to be implemented – in what is usually described as a top-down or haphazard style. This argument often implies that ujamaa ultimately reproduced a generic sort of authoritarianism apparently inherent in the concept of development itself or points to the dysfunctional character and artificial foundation of the modern state in Africa.14 These factors, it follows from this logic, are to blame for ujamaa’s failure and Tanzania’s ongoing underdevelopment. I take a different approach, identifying tensions within the ujamaa project – in both its imaginative form and the concrete ways in which it was applied. Instead of emphasizing a contradiction between theory and practice, in other words, I highlight the contradictions internal to both.15 As a political vision, ujamaa had many meanings; African Socialist ideology could 14

15

This is a large body of work; representative examples with revealing titles include Zaki Ergas, “Why Did the Ujamaa Village Policy Fail? Towards a Global Analysis,” Journal of Modern African Studies 18, 3 (1980): 387–410 and Leander Schneider, “Developmentalism and Its Failings: Why Rural Development Went Wrong in 1960s and 1970s Tanzania,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003. Recent versions of this approach have followed the example of James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Conditions to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). For a comprehensive bibliography on ujamaa, see Paul Bjerk, “Sovereignty and Socialism in Tanzania: The Historiography of an African State,” History in Africa 37 (2010): 275–319. Exceptions to the analytical tendencies I have identified include the following insightful works on the cultural politics of ujamaa in urban Tanzania: Kelly Askew, Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); James Brennan, “Blood Enemies: Exploitation and Urban Citizenship in the Nationalist Political Thought of Tanzania, 1958–1975,” Journal of African History 47, 3 (2006): 1–25; and Andrew Ivaska, Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). In this respect, I am particularly inspired by the example of two scholars of French colonialism. Monica van Beusekom, in examining the Office du Niger project, “focuses on both development ideology and practice” and “suggests, more generally, that considering practice, policy, or ideology in isolation would lead to an incomplete picture of development.” Van Beusekom, Negotiating Development: African Farmers and Colonial Experts at the Office du Niger, 1920–1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), xxi. Gary Wilder, in scrutinizing “colonial humanism,” eschews an emphasis on “contradictions between plans and implementation” and instead identifies “a deeper antinomy between universality and particularity” – a “constitutive contradiction” of the French imperial nation-state “expressed on multiple scales (national, colonial, imperial) and at various levels of abstraction (in policies, in political forms, in their underlying rationality).” Wilder, The French

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be remarkably creative and complex. This is evident in ujamaa’s configuration of the village but also in many other facets of ujamaa discourse. Likewise, as a set of policies in action, ujamaa took multiple forms – alternately empowering national leaders, local officials, village militias, and rural youths; reinforcing contrasting dynamics of settlement and mobility among residents of regions such as Mtwara; and creating and disrupting communities and modes of sociability across the country. At the level of individual lives and livelihoods, ujamaa brought successes as well as failures, opportunities as well as hardships. More broadly, ujamaa transcended many of the binaries inherent in conventional conceptions of development and nation building. The Tanzanian experiment was simultaneously utopian and pragmatic, antimodern and modernist, populist and statist. It contained opposing impulses toward centralization and decentralization and toward planning and improvisation. It manifested, buttressed, and challenged both a politics of technoscience and a politics of radical humanism. Rather than conforming to a single pattern of power and resistance or being apprehended according to a single set of political subjectivities, the changing interactions between and among rural Tanzanians and state officials between 1967 and 1975 mirrored the dialectical character of the political imaginary of ujamaa itself.16 I argue that these contradictions amount to more than ideological inconsistency and material chaos rooted in Tanzanian pathologies. On the contrary, they represent the dialectical friction at the heart of processes of state formation, socialism, and national development across postcolonial contexts – what we might call the tensions of national development (much as others have spoken of the “tensions of empire”).17 In addition to better explaining why such ventures fell short of their stated goals, elucidating these tensions brings to life an entirely new picture of Third World socialism. By altering how we see socialist development in the postcolonial world, moreover, carefully examining ujamaa can begin to change how we understand development in general.

16

17

Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5, 7, 10. Here I build on Ivaska, Cultured States. He describes the bifurcated nature of Tanzanian cultural policy, both in the ideological realm – in which “traditionalist and modernizationist imperatives often existed alongside one another and were mutually constitutive” (5) – and in the realm of practice, where “the seeming paradox of early postcolonial states’ simultaneous prominence and weakness” (211) is discernible. Christopher Lee similarly refers to the “tensions of postcoloniality” in “Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung,” in Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 27–9. For a classic colonial studies text, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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In addition to looking deeper within ujamaa, this book also departs from standard assessments by broadening its lens to situate Tanzania in a global context, showing that worldwide political and economic dynamics mutually informed ujamaa’s uneven local and national trajectories. Ultimately, international constraints as well as local conditions accounted for Tanzania’s more pronounced impoverishment and indebtedness in the late 1970s.18 The long-term handicaps of colonialism were one such obstacle to meaningful development, as was the very structure of the global economy. In Mtwara, for instance, British colonial policy from the 1920s through the 1950s had stifled industrialization and urbanization, instead promoting temporary wage labor and the cultivation of cash crops for export. These policies had enduring legacies, fueled by the lack of large-scale global economic reform in subsequent years, such that Mtwara’s economy today continues to be based on the export of unprocessed cash crops – mainly cashew nuts – and Mtwara residents must turn to local informal economies and social resources to survive precipitous fluctuations in world prices and problems with crop marketing. Cold War geopolitics also restricted Tanzania’s development in the ujamaa era, constantly threatening foreign violations of the new nation’s sovereignty and creating a volatile and insecure international climate that contributed to a militarized and undemocratic national political culture. Finally, the rise of a new international development economy in the 1960s and 1970s – in which largely Western development organizations took an increasingly active role in formulating national policy in poorer countries – weakened the appeal and potential of radical projects of statesupervised national development such as ujamaa. These global factors were inextricable from the local variables that caused ujamaa’s decline. ∗ ∗ ∗ Although this book is the first major historical study of Tanzania’s socialist experiment, ujamaa has long been a popular subject of inquiry. The Tanzanian case has tended to attract those in search of either an exceptional socialist alternative or a classic example of how state-led development initiatives – in postcolonial Africa or universally – ultimately go wrong. In 1967, months after Nyerere’s February declaration, Kenyan intellectual Ali Mazrui diagnosed a condition he called “Tanzaphilia,” which he explained as “the romantic spell that Tanzania casts on so many,” based on his observation that “Perhaps no African country has commanded greater affection outside its borders than has Tanzania.”19 Although Mazrui was alluding primarily (and rather cynically) to the popularity of the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) as an institutional base for foreign Marxists such as Giovanni Arrighi and Walter Rodney in the 1960s, to some extent his identification of ujamaa as a political experiment with tremendous appeal for 18 19

This indebtedness is detailed in Severine Rugumamu, Lethal Aid: The Illusion of Socialism and Self-Reliance in Tanzania (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1997). Ali Mazrui, “Tanzaphilia,” Transition 31 (1967): 24–5.

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leftist intellectuals still holds true today.20 Yet in the wake of the collapse of African Socialism as a viable developmental strategy in the 1970s, criticism of the Tanzanian project has easily exceeded earlier celebrations of ujamaa in both volume and intensity. Whereas since the 1960s, a number of African Marxists have excoriated ujamaa-era policy for being insufficiently radical,21 Western analysts began to catalog the fundamental problems of ujamaa starting in the late 1970s. Early on, these scholars lamented the Tanzanian state’s inability to “capture the peasantry,”22 but more recently, it has become common to identify ujamaa’s fatal flaw in the state’s very attempt to do so.23 This new consensus, forged after a long relative scholarly silence on ujamaa, grew out of a series of epistemological and methodological shifts that crept across the humanities and social sciences in the 1980s, variously labeled the “linguistic” or “cultural” or “poststructuralist” turn.24 In addition to reflexively insisting on the mediated nature of scholarly interpretation, some of the works associated with this turn began to suggest that power or historical agency resided in language and structures of representation rather than in autonomous human actors, economic systems, or political ventures. To many, accordingly, development became “development” – an oppressive construct instead of a possible process – and ujamaa became an example of sinister developmental ideology at work rather than a complex, contingent initiative conceptualized and engaged with by a variety of real people on the ground.25 In many cases, this new suspicion of “developmentalism” fused totalizing conceptions of discursive power with Foucault’s construction of governmentality.26 Although more nuanced versions of this argument simultaneously emerged, they retained an understanding of development as 20

21 22 23 24

25

26

For autobiographical reflections on the cosmopolitan 1960s–1970s Dar es Salaam intellectual scene, see Giovanni Arrighi, “The Winding Paths of Capital: Interview by David Harvey,” New Left Review 56 (2009): 61–94 and Walter Rodney, Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of a Black Intellectual (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990). These critics were often labeled advocates of “scientific” – or orthodox – socialism. See Issa Shivji, Class Struggles in Tanzania (London: Heinemann, 1976). Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Scott, Seeing Like a State. Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Judith Surkis, “When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy,” American Historical Review 117, 3 (2012): 700–22. A key text in this genre is Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Barbara Weinstein usefully describes this scholarly shift in “Developing Inequality,” American Historical Review 113, 1 (2008): 1–18. For other reflections on the state of the growing field of “development studies,” see Frederick Cooper, “Writing the History of Development,” Journal of Modern European History 8, 1 (2010): 5–23; Watts, “Development and Governmentality.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1977).

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a more or less singular, depoliticizing doctrine impelling “experts” around the world to stage similarly invasive and predictably disastrous schemes in the name of popular welfare and modernization.27 Following these trends, recent studies explain villagization simply as Tanzanian leaders’ attempt to “reorganize human communities in order to make them better objects of political control,”28 emphasize the Tanzanian state’s “dysfunctionality and authoritarian bent,”29 highlight official endeavors to “manage, control, and direct the efforts of the local populace,”30 and underscore the “furtive political motivations” of a state that “extended government control into the most intimate domains of daily life.”31 Because they locate the failings of ujamaa in “something generic about the projects of the modern developmentalist state,”32 such accounts remain limited and limiting in three important ways. First, apprehending “developmentalism” as a monolithic category leads ideology and historical context to disappear as significant variables affecting the process by which ujamaa came to be imagined, understood, implemented, and experienced. Second, this first assumption naturalizes a particular version of universalism positing Euro-American or colonial political models as original ones, inevitably 27

28

29

30 31 32

Prominent works in this category include James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, TechnoPolitics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Tania Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Whereas Scott, Seeing Like a State, examines imperial and national – that is, state-led – projects, these texts focus on development interventions staged by external agencies. Compared to Scott’s study, they pay far more attention to the actual life of such projects on the ground, exploring the intricacies of popular engagements with development plans. (Ferguson’s subsequent work, discussed later, usefully moves the discussion of development beyond the framework of the “anti-politics machine,” although the latter has arguably been his most influential analytical contribution.) Scott, Seeing Like a State, 224. Scott’s book set the stage for this type of analysis; it has been widely cited across the field of African Studies. (The works mentioned in the following notes provide a representative sample of Scott’s influence on recent studies of ujamaa villagization.) He argues that ujamaa, like all high-modernist schemes to improve the human condition, was defined by the state’s will to monitor, standardize, and control its population by spatially reorganizing it. Leander Schneider, Government of Development: Peasants and Politicians in Postcolonial Tanzania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 133. Although Schneider productively charges Scott with inattention to the practical limitations on the Tanzanian state’s power and rejects the term high modernist, he reproduces Scott’s argument by identifying the “developmentalist” logic of Tanzanian officials as the primary reason for ujamaa’s failure. Michael Jennings, “‘We Must Run While Others Walk’: Popular Participation and Development Crisis in Tanzania, 1961–9,” Journal of Modern African Studies 41 (2003): 185. Matthew Bender, “‘For More and Better Water, Choose Pipes!’ Building Water and Nation on Kilimanjaro, 1961–1985,” Journal of Southern African Studies 34, 4 (2008): 843. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 224.

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reducing Asian or African development projects to mere (and usually poor) copies or inheritances of Western forms. Third, the very label of “state project” as applied to initiatives like ujamaa often takes the historical centrality of a reified state as a point of departure, automatically precluding attention to the actual texture of popular experiences of development and ignoring the fractured internal constitution of the state as a dynamic process in its own right.33 When combined, these tendencies reinforce widely prevalent popular tropes that pathologize Africa as a site of endless crisis and dysfunction. In extending their diagnosis of consistently failed or impossible development well into the past, such narratives cannot help but suggest that this condition might stretch indefinitely into the future. This book stages three major interventions into this scholarly consensus. First, I take ujamaa seriously on its own terms, approaching the Tanzanian project from within the ideological framework it proposed, even while subjecting the terms of ujamaa discourse to careful scrutiny. Second, this move allows me to challenge the pervasive assumption that postcolonial African political thought and African approaches to development in general are fundamentally derivative of Western ideas and practices. Decades ago, in a famous critique of then-dominant theories of the nation form, Partha Chatterjee asked, “If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?”34 By so clearly exposing the political implications and analytical limitations of existing conceptions of nationalism as a Euro-American invention,35 Chatterjee opened up an ongoing debate about the nation form. Participating scholars argue that the nation should be understood as a single model exported across the world,36 a set of multiple and particular

33

34 35 36

Here I refer especially to Scott’s analysis. My position resonates with aspects of Tania Li’s reading of Seeing Like a State in Li, “Beyond ‘the State’ and Failed Schemes,” American Anthropologist 107, 3 (2005): 383–94. Li argues that “Scott’s binary categories ‘state– society,’ ‘state space–nonstate space,’ and ‘power–resistance’ provide insufficient analytical traction” (384). However, her critique – much like Schneider’s – ultimately confirms Scott’s suspicion of development as a generalized idea; she proposes an interrogation of what she calls “the will to improve” – a generic and flattening category (akin to the term developmentalism, although it draws on the notion of “trusteeship” introduced by M. P. Cowen and R. W. Shenton, Doctrines of Development [New York: Routledge, 1993]). See Li, Will to Improve. For a different approach to conceptualizing the state, which compellingly views the latter as an “ideological device,” see Stephen Pierce, “Looking like a State: Colonialism and the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, 4 (2006): 887–914. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, 5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). Ibid.

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indigenously generated forms unique to their historical sites,37 or something in between.38 It is striking that a parallel debate has not emerged with regard to the subject of development in the postcolonial world.39 To help stimulate such discussion, I ask the following questions: do all developmental endeavors necessarily conform to a single, universal model, pattern, or form? Is “development” simply a self-serving colonial invention that cannot extricate itself from the political function of its original usage? Are there other ways of explaining the dismal outcomes of national development initiatives in places like Tanzania besides labeling their origins tainted? In the Cold War world, when “development” supposedly became hegemonic on a global scale, did this phenomenon subsume socialist ventures alongside capitalist ones?40 Interpretations of ujamaa as an example of colonial-style governmentality or technocratic, top-down developmentalism configure decolonization as an incomplete process, pointing to pronounced institutional and ideological continuities between the late colonial state and its postcolonial counterpart. Even though new African states inaugurated a variety of projects and policies to achieve national development during the first decade of independence, this argument holds, these initiatives were always already doomed to reproduce the failures of British or French development schemes in the 1940s and 1950s.41 In the case of Tanzania, this would mean that Nyerere’s vision of ujamaa villagization merely mimicked 37 38

39

40

41

Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Manu Goswami, “Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Toward a Sociohistorical Conception of Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, 4 (2002): 770–99; Patrick Eisenlohr, “Creole Publics: Language, Cultural Citizenship, and the Spread of the Nation in Mauritius,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, 4 (2007): 968–96. Where scholars have explored alternative meanings of development (outside of the “developmentalist” framework), they have tended to do so via ethnographic studies of populations targeted by development projects. Such inquiries often leave intact the notion of a singular elite-authored and imposed developmentalist norm that subalterns appropriate and rework. See James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and James Howard Smith, Bewitching Development: Witchcraft and the Reinvention of Development in Neoliberal Kenya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard’s edited volume, International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), hints at some of these larger questions. In their introduction, Cooper and Packard identify a specific “form of the development idea that captured the imagination of many people across the world from the 1940s” (6) but insist that “it is too simple to assert the emergence of a singular development discourse, a single knowledge-power regime” (10). An especially clear statement of this position comes from a recent book on Asia, whose argument could easily be extended to Africa: “At the moment of their emancipation,” Nick Cullather argues, residents of former colonies “ceased to be colonial subjects only to become developmental subjects.” Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 8.

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the design of late colonial resettlement schemes42 or borrowed exclusively from World Bank prescriptions for agricultural modernization.43 Aside from this particular lineage, however, ujamaa had multiple imaginative genealogies – many of which did not lead directly to Europe or North America as a point of origin. I contest the putative universality and exclusive Western authorship of the development concept, showing that ujamaa arose out of a distinct network of developmental thought and practice extending across postcolonial sites in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. During this time, self-proclaimed socialist development programs in countries ranging from India and China to Ghana and Mali exhibited similar ideological tendencies and structural contradictions. Third World imaginaries borrowed from the ideologies of Euro-American modernization and Soviet communism yet possessed their own defining characteristics. Although many of these young countries followed policies of industrialization, worked around five-year plans, and pursued new agricultural technologies, they often simultaneously romanticized the older site of the village as a model for the ideal polity and celebrated traditional practices located in the realm of family life. Furthermore, they shared an anxiety about national security and an ambivalence about the role of the state in rural development, and they promoted selfreliance as a strategy and ambition. Rather than adopting a prepackaged, generic model of development, Tanzanian leaders actively drew from and contributed to this alternative ideological field. When the actual experiences of those who participated in the ujamaa project are considered, the “developmentalist” argument – with its connotations of totalizing or top-down power and inevitable failure – becomes even harder to sustain. The third contribution of my book is to document how Tanzanians actually practiced and experienced ujamaa, through a broad analysis of state institutions and a close-up examination of villagization in one Mtwara district. I show that although villagization entailed an extensive reordering of the Tanzanian countryside, this process hardly proceeded in a linear or uniform fashion and was never managed or controlled by an omnipotent, monolithic state. The latter in fact comprised a diverse cohort of local government officials, paramilitary groups such as the TANU Youth League (TYL) and People’s Militia, national Community Development and agricultural extension agents, and even foreign aid workers, among others. Many of the individuals lumped together under the umbrella of “the state” interpreted ujamaa differently from one another and had distinct

42 43

Discussed in Hodge, Triumph of the Expert; van Beusekom, Negotiating Development. Aldwin Roes, “World Bank Survey Missions and the Politics of Decolonization in British East Africa, 1957–1963,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 42, 1 (2009): 1–28.

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and even competing agendas.44 Similarly, despite Mtwara’s relative ethnic uniformity and lack of pronounced class or caste divisions,45 in the Southeast, as elsewhere, the putatively homogenous category of “the peasantry” was actually quite heterogeneous. Mtwara’s rural residents included young men and women seeking new access to land and authority, elders invested in older gerontocratic hierarchies, cashew farmers and migrant laborers, recent Catholic migrants from Mozambique and predominantly Muslim locals. These individuals, too, had a range of aspirations and concerns and exercised agency in varied ways toward varied ends. During and after villagization, they often circumvented mandated socialist procedures and drew on older survival strategies of diversification and flexibility to improve their livelihoods and social status. Ultimately, ujamaa reflected and intensified differentiation among such individuals and communities, instead of standardizing the landscape of rural Mtwara or Tanzania more broadly in social, political, or economic terms. During villagization, the supposed targets or objects of ujamaa development – rural men and women – were also some of its central participants. These actors shaped the overall material course of the Tanzanian development project even as it shaped them, just as ujamaa impacted the same global dynamics of the 1960s and 1970s world that brought about its emergence and conditioned its outcome. Incorporating individual life histories and local contexts into the story of Tanzania’s socialist experiment disrupts both intensely critical and overly idealized narratives of the ujamaa project, opening up a much more textured and nuanced historical landscape. ∗ ∗ ∗ As this book moves between Mtwara’s villages and the decolonizing Cold War world, and as it integrates the materialist and discursive methodologies of social and cultural history, it mediates among a variety of historical sources. Records from national archives in Tanzania, the United States, and the United Kingdom provide insight into global affairs, Tanzanian national politics, and regional dynamics within Mtwara.46 State- or party-owned Tanzanian national newspapers offer another window onto evolving official ideology and development issues, as do political pamphlets,

44

45 46

Here I build on Askew’s useful description of the Tanzanian state as “a disaggregated, multilayered bureaucracy fraught with competing internal units.” Askew, Performing the Nation, 286. Mtwara Region is dominated by the Makonde ethnic group. Specifically, records from the Tanzania National Archives include colonial and postcolonial documents in the Dar es Salaam branch and postcolonial records of the Prime Minister’s Office in the Dodoma branch. Records from the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland in the United States are drawn from State Department files. Records from the National Archives of the United Kingdom in London are drawn from the files of the Foreign Office, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Dominion Office.

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semiofficial reports, and unpublished studies by Tanzanian scholars.47 Particularly important among the latter is a set of reports penned in 1976 by students and faculty of Kivukoni College, the higher education institute in Dar es Salaam established by TANU in 1961.48 In the immediate wake of Operation Vijiji, small teams of Kivukoni students and faculty embarked on rural research trips throughout the country.49 In Mtwara, as elsewhere, these teams resided in a single village for one to two weeks and recorded their observations in great detail, cataloging basic historical and demographic information and commenting on the strengths and weaknesses of ujamaa in each site.50 This range of printed materials complements and contextualizes the oral sources that I collected in 2007 and 2008. In Mtwara, I completed interviews with more than one hundred villagers and former officials, with the help of a local research assistant. The three villages examined – Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe – were selected from nine regional settlements studied by the Kivukoni research teams because they embodied a variety of sizes, arrangements, and developmental levels (despite their relative proximity). In each village, I consulted men and women between the ages of fifty-five and ninety from diverse backgrounds; many of these exchanges took place in small groups, but some were conducted individually. The group context and informal nature of dialogue (I avoided fixed questionnaires in favor of more openended inquiry) allowed each encounter to unfold more as a conversation than an interrogation, bringing out some of “the local interpretive agents and practices which [more formal] interviews suppress.”51 The accounts of elected village officials and young villagers supplemented those of elders,

47

48

49

50 51

The Nationalist, the primary newspaper referenced here, was one of four daily newspapers in Tanzania until the press was fully nationalized in 1972 and the Nationalist ceded to the stateowned Daily News. The Nationalist, along with Uhuru, its Swahili-language counterpart, was owned and operated by TANU. Additional materials, including political pamphlets and secondary studies, were accessed in the National Library of Tanzania and the East Africana Collection at UDSM. Newspapers were accessed in the aforementioned locations as well as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. After ujamaa began, Kivukoni College trained students for service in the ruling party and served as an intellectual and institutional resource for TANU officials. Kivukoni College became Kivukoni Academy of Social Sciences after Tanzania became a multiparty state in 1992; today it still functions under the name of Mwalimu Nyerere Academy. These followed the 1975 Villages and Ujamaa Villages Act, which stipulated a minimum size and common governmental framework for all villages. The Villages Act also effectively represented an official abandonment of ujamaa as a concerted national project, because it acknowledged that since 1967, not a single village had yet achieved true ujamaa. Cited as Chuo cha TANU Kivukoni, “Taarifa ya Vijiji vya Mkoa ya Mtwara” (1976). Abdullahi Ibrahim, “The Birth of the Interview: The Thin and the Fat of It,” in Luise White, Stephan Miescher, and David Cohen, eds., African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 117.

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as did discussions with former state officials and agricultural experts in the nearby town of Mtwara.52 To tell the story of ujamaa without falling into the trap of teleology, this book eschews a rigid temporal sequence. Instead, the analysis that follows is ordered by spatial scale, divided into chapters that respectively consider ujamaa in relation to global, national, regional, and local fields. A recent “spatial turn” in the social sciences and humanities has demonstrated that space plays a major role in social, political, and economic processes, and it has underscored that the analytical categories through which we interpret space reciprocally shape our understanding of these same dynamics.53 Accordingly, scholars increasingly question the “supposed integrity of the local” and “an image of the global that encompasses local social processes,” seeking instead to illuminate how the global is “revealed and made through the local.”54 Similarly, methodological nationalism has come under scrutiny for reifying contingent national constructions and projecting a “conceptual order of the national geographic map” onto realities that regularly transcend or bypass national boundaries.55 In the early postcolonial era, Tanzanians themselves were also acutely aware of and preoccupied by many of these same issues. I organize my analysis spatially to reflect this politicization of space in the ujamaa context and to engage with scholarly debates about analytical scale rather than to naturalize distinctions between “self-enclosed political territor[ies]” and reproduce “nested hierarch[ies] of geographical arenas.”56 In doing so, I challenge the tendency of the existing literature on ujamaa villagization toward one of two extremes: the overly localized micro-level case study or the overly abstracted macro-level appraisal. Absent from such scholarship is not just a sense of connection between the micro and macro but an appreciation of the ways in which the local and the global – and a variety of intermediary spatial scales – are mutually embedded. By contrast, to borrow theoretical terminology from the discipline of sociology, I aim to bridge the gap 52

53

54 55 56

Most of these conversations took place in Swahili, although English was used for some, and Makonde – the local language – occasionally made an appearance in discussions with villagers. I transcribed and translated – with some help from my research assistant, Issa Chilindima – all interviews, and the tapes and transcripts of all conversations are in my possession. Translations from archival materials are also my own, though completed with some help from another research assistant, Amina Iddy. See Barney Warf and Santa Arias, eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2008). For a foundational text, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 55, 10. Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, 1 (1992): 26. Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones, and Gordon MacLeod, “Introduction: State/Space in Question,” in Brenner, Jessop, Jones, and MacLeod, eds., State/Space: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 1.

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Introduction

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between and recombine various spatial scales.57 As proponents of the Histoire Crois´ee school put it, “playing on different scales”58 provides “a change of focus to vary points of view on the past”59 as well as “an opportunity to understand what the system of relations is and how far it goes, which has no unique or unified answer.”60 My approach borrows from this focus on “intercrossings” and adopts what Achim von Oppen and Ulrike Freitag term a “translocal perspective.”61 Although I emphasize four spatial units in particular, I take “many different possible spatial orders as [my] starting point.”62 Chapter 1 begins with ujamaa’s complex global origins, sketching a rough genealogy of Nyerere’s political imaginary and exploring the relationship between Tanzanian foreign affairs and domestic politics. Among other things, Tanzanian socialism blended Pan-Africanist notions of African rural tradition, a Maoist penchant for cultural revolution, and elements of late colonial development policies, reflecting Tanzania’s geopolitical connections to southern African liberation movements, socialist regimes such as China, and a number of Western donors. Ujamaa shared a set of idioms and symbols with other iterations of African Socialism, which generated similar patterns and dynamics. The plural meanings of ujamaa’s conceptual anchors – self-reliance, familyhood, and security – registered its transnational roots and indexed the indeterminacy of national independence. Ujamaa implicitly emphasized ideological self-reliance – the refusal to blindly copy foreign developmental approaches – as much as it explicitly emphasized Tanzania’s economic self-reliance. Yet in both domains (ideology and economics), self-reliance entailed a strategy of diversification rather than one of complete self-sufficiency, prioritizing autonomy over autarky. In this sense, national policy resonated with rural people’s strategy of investing in multiple social networks to “keep their options open.”63 The ujamaa program endorsed an expansive, elastic model of the “traditional” African extended family, on the one hand, and celebrated the discrete social unit of the individual nuclear family, on the other. The concept of transnational socialist kinship underwrote Tanzanian leaders’ active 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

Monika Krause, “Recombining Micro/Macro: The Grammar of Theoretical Innovation,” European Journal of Social Theory 16, 2 (2013): 139–52. Lynn Hunt and Jacques Revel, “History: Past, Present, and Future,” Perspectives on History 50, 9 (December 2012): 69. Michael Werner and B´en´edicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Crois´ee and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45, 1 (2006): 42. Hunt and Revel, “History,” 69. Achim von Oppen and Ulrike Freitag, “Introduction: ‘Translocality’: An Approach to Connection and Transfer in Area Studies,” in von Oppen and Freitag, eds., Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1–21. Ibid., 12. Sara Berry, No Condition Is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in SubSaharan Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 14.

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engagement with global politics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when Tanzania provided a base for the Organization of African Unity’s (OAU) Liberation Committee, spearheaded the creation of a modified East African regional federation, and hosted meetings of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Within national borders, development politics came to center on a much narrower construction of normative familyhood characterized by fairly rigid gender distinctions. Chapter 2 explores how ujamaa evolved as a set of national policies and documents the rise of a Tanzanian Cold War political culture marked by growing popular militarization and a fixation on cultural conformity.64 During the ujamaa era, largely male semiautonomous paramilitary units – particularly the TYL – patrolled national borders and policed urban women’s dress in addition to initiating and later enforcing rural resettlement across the country. Meanwhile, officials of the state’s Community Development Division charged rural women with the maintenance of their families’ health and food security in new villages. These gendered developmental roles aligned with contrasting official conceptions of security, rendered alternately in terms of political stability (or the male-dominated arena of military security) and popular welfare (or the female-coded realm of social security). Although ujamaa appeared linked to a process of political centralization – supposedly bringing dispersed rural citizens under the control of the national government – it often reinforced decentralization by both empowering local militias to interpret and impose state policy in the countryside and forgoing the responsibilities of a welfare state in favor of rural self-reliance. This tension was especially apparent at the regional level, the subject of Chapter 3. In the late colonial era, Mtwara’s fluid political structures, inaccessibility from more well-connected areas to the north, and lack of industry earned it the nickname of Tanganyika’s “Cinderella” region.65 Mtwara’s reputation as an isolated periphery persisted into the early 1960s, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this same supposed backwater gained national attention for thoroughly implementing villagization. By 1969, the region alone was responsible for 333 of the 476 ujamaa villages throughout the 18 regions of mainland Tanzania,66 and by 1972, the number of villages in Mtwara had reportedly risen to more than 1,000.67 During these same years, Tanzania’s anticolonial politics came to focus on the Southeast, as refugees 64

65

66 67

My conception of a Cold War political culture draws on a large body of comparative work, predominantly on the United States. A key text is Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Mtwara’s colonial history is thoroughly detailed in Gus Liebenow, Colonial Rule and Political Development in Tanzania: The Case of the Makonde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971), which provides an important foundation for my analysis. “Mtwara’s Giant Step Forward,” Nationalist, January 11, 1971. Schneider, “Developmentalism and Its Failings,” 202.

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Introduction

23

from Mozambique – where the nationalist party Frente de Libertac¸ao ˜ de Moc¸ambique (FRELIMO) had begun a long and bloody liberation struggle against Portuguese rule – streamed across the Mtwara border, which Nyerere’s government encouraged local militants (trained by Chinese officers) to vigilantly police. Residents of the Southeast seemed to be compensating for their region’s undistinguished past by taking the principles and policies of ujamaa more seriously than any of their fellow Tanzanians. Mtwara’s tradition of smallholder agriculture and labor migration, relatively flexible political structures, and militarized border culture contributed to the effectiveness of resettlement drives in the region. Between 1967 and 1972, government and party officials along with TYL activists traveled throughout the Mtwara countryside, encouraging rural people residing in scattered settlements to live together. Local men and women both heeded and ignored this call; those who resettled usually did so at short distances from their original homes and private farms and built new houses in small villages (vijiji vidogo vidogo) comprising anywhere from ten to one hundred households. In other cases, officials merely recorded already existing settlements (vijiji vya zamani) as new ujamaa villages without asking residents to shift their homes at all. These two types of villages made varying degrees of progress toward communalism, but men and women in these sites continued to work on their older private farms – especially their permanent cashew plots. Later, between 1973 and 1975, TYL and People’s Militia members throughout Mtwara forcefully relocated those who had initially refused to move or who were living in small villages into large settlements of at least 250 households each, in compliance with the strict guidelines of Operation Vijiji. This massive population transfer and the upheaval that accompanied it immediately precipitated a drastic drop in cashew production – the region’s economic base. Moreover, ujamaa policy eventually exacerbated Mtwara’s disconnection from an increasingly fragmented national economy, instead strengthening its connections to European-based international development agencies. By the mid-1970s, Mtwara’s moment in the national spotlight had passed, and the region’s material underdevelopment had only intensified.68 At the local level, taken up in Chapter 4, rural people navigated this shifting developmental landscape in multiple ways. Some individuals approached villagization as a useful vehicle to advance themselves within new configurations of power. These included the TYL members who resettled their neighbors and sought positions in new village governments. In the words of a former local Community Development officer, these young 68

This trajectory is considered in Pekka Seppal ¨ a¨ and Bertha Koda, eds., The Making of a Periphery: Economic Development and Cultural Encounters in Southern Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 1998), which also provides an important foundation for my analysis.

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African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania

men were focused on “protecting their status” and “wanted to be feared.”69 Others remember villagization as a catastrophic new mode of engagement with a state that promised tangible rewards but delivered hardship. Ali Asman Kitenge of Rwelu Village was one of those who denounced ujamaa, labeling it “a new colonialism.” He was especially critical of how young militants “used force” during villagization and how the government offered “no assistance” to the recently resettled – even those who lost the cashew farms in which they had invested years of labor.70 Still others accustomed to frequent movement between households and settlements in pursuit of wages, land, or social capital experienced ujamaa policy as a continuation of rather than rupture with their existing lifestyles. Women like Hawa Salamu Nalidi of Nanguruwe Village fell into this category. Before the ujamaa era, she had already moved several times – over significant distances – and had been married multiple times. For her, moving during villagization was hardly a significant departure from previous practice; in fact, she preferred “joining together, being close together” with new neighbors in an ujamaa settlement.71 Overall, villagization disrupted the lives of many rural people but also created opportunities and constraints that they apprehended in terms of older patterns of crisis and change. Tanzanian citizens’ memories of ujamaa are often fractured and nonlinear, partly because they are heavily inflected by speakers’ experiences of the decades following ujamaa’s decline but also because they reciprocally inform speakers’ perceptions of the present.72 Tanzania’s postsocialist transition started in the early 1980s, coinciding with the beginning of the end of the Cold War and the eclipse of radical socialist projects by neoliberal political and economic formations across the world. The 1980s and 1990s in Tanzania, as elsewhere in Africa, were marked by the implementation of International Monetary Fund (IMF)– and World Bank–imposed austerity measures and the hasty liberalization of trade policy in the name of “good governance.” These measures, which severely curtailed the Tanzanian state’s role in promoting and regulating development, sought to correct a crumbling national economy that seemed in many ways to be “delinking by default” from the world system.73 By contrast, the early years of the twenty-first century are increasingly defined by the intensification of patterns of enclavebased foreign investment and extraction that definitively bind Tanzania and its neighbors to the global economy, albeit via circuits of capital that seem to bypass the national state altogether. Rather than concerning themselves 69 70 71 72 73

Interview with Mfaume Zaidi, Mtwara Town, February 2008. Interview with Ali Asman Kitenge, Rwelu Village, January 2008. Interview with Hawa Salamu Nalidi, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. My analysis of oral sources is indebted to White, Miescher, and Cohen, African Words, African Voices. Rugumamu, Lethal Aid, 278; Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (London: Zed Books, 1990).

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Introduction

25

with domestic policies and institutions, discussions about development in present-day sub-Saharan Africa tend to concentrate on the new global face of Chinese capitalism and accelerating practices of land grabbing by foreign firms.74 This book concludes by surveying the postsocialist developmental landscape of contemporary Tanzania, outlining the shadows, remnants, and changing meanings of ujamaa in the present. On the ground, average Tanzanians cope with the dramatic transitions and material hardships of the postsocialist era by relying on the tactics of flexibility and diversification that they honed during villagization. Some villagers have returned to their pre-ujamaa homes, whereas others remain in growing settlements. Many rural people in Mtwara continue to scramble to make ends meet and often fall short; widespread hunger leads to alarmingly regular warnings of famine conditions in southeastern Tanzania, as in too many other regions.75 Popular political subjectivities reflect these harsh realities. As one elderly resident of Rwelu Village put it, “people have declining faith in the government” owing to the poor quality and inaccessibility of state services, the instability of farmers’ incomes, and the intense insecurity of everyday life.76 Although ujamaa ushered in the construction of numerous schools and health centers in new villages, many rural people lament the prohibitive cost of secondary education and medical care in recent years – the result of user fees instituted under structural adjustment. The high prices of farm inputs and lack of access to microcredit make it especially difficult for farmers to navigate a notoriously corrupt crop marketing system and environmental fluctuations. Finally, corporate entities engaged in concessionary arrangements across the country – for resource extraction or industrial-scale agricultural ventures – threaten to initiate new cycles of displacement among rural people unprotected by ineffectual post-ujamaa land tenure laws. In the context of such uncertainties and adversities, many Tanzanians today exhibit a profound nostalgia for the hopes and possibilities of the socialist past. This is especially true of those who saw ujamaa as linked to a benevolent welfare state and miss the sensation of pride in belonging to a meaningful national community. On dusty wooden benches outside mud-brick homes in Mtwara and in bustling bureaucratic offices in Dar 74

75

76

See, e.g., Ferguson, Global Shadows; Gillian Hart, Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Padraig Carmody, The New Scramble for Africa (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011); Richard Schroeder, Africa after Apartheid: South Africa, Race, and Nation in Tanzania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); and Lorenzo Cotula, The Great African Land Grab? Agricultural Investments and the Global Food System (New York: Zed Books, 2013). For a thoughtful study of food insecurity in a comparative regional case, see Kristin Phillips, “Hunger, Healing, and Citizenship in Central Tanzania,” African Studies Review 51, 1 (2009): 23–45. Interview with Hamedi Issa Muraja, Rwelu Village, February 2008.

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African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania

es Salaam, I spoke to numerous older Tanzanians who teared up when recalling the promising days of the early independence era, mourning the death of the value of mutual responsibility espoused by Nyerere. Similar sentiments of longing for the eclipsed ethics and expectations of the past have become common across much of the African continent and the postcolonial and postsocialist world more broadly.77 In the Tanzanian case, although such popular narratives productively depart from standard tropes of postcolonial authoritarianism, they sometimes run the risk of essentializing the early independence era in other ways. These accounts of Tanzania’s seemingly straightforward trajectory – from an inspiring period of radical state-led development in the 1960s to a present in which developmental responsibilities have been ceded to the phantom benefactor of “the market,” international organizations, and average citizens themselves – often belie the complexity of both the socialist and neoliberal chapters of the country’s history. Paying attention to the dialectical tensions of the ujamaa project heightens our sensitivity to the decidedly mixed nature of its ongoing material and subjective legacies. Doing so also reveals that not one but many roads connect Africa’s socialist past to its postsocialist present; these routes are circuitous, intersecting, and constantly evolving rather than linear, detached, and unchanging.

77

Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity.

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1 A Postcolonial Project in the Cold War World

A few months after Tanganyika’s independence, Nyerere introduced the concept of ujamaa at a conference on African Socialism held at Kivukoni College, overlooking the turquoise waters and itinerant ships of Dar es Salaam’s harbor. Without providing a detailed blueprint for action, Nyerere’s address, released in April 1962 as an official TANU pamphlet, outlined the thematic coordinates of the “socialist attitude of mind” most appropriate to the African context: a moral orientation entailing a commitment to hard work, community, and self-sufficiency and a rejection of laziness, dependency, and exploitation. In frank, persuasive terms, Nyerere rejected the central assumptions and priorities of capitalism but also dispensed with the historical logic of orthodox Marxism. Rather than advocating a path of long-term industrialization, he insisted that agricultural production was a sufficient and even desirable basis for postcolonial development. This inversion of Marxist teleology reflected Nyerere’s conception of ujamaa as a simultaneously transformative and restorative project; even though he admitted that Tanganyika was “not yet a socialist society,”1 he maintained that Africans had no “need of being ‘converted’ to socialism.”2 Precolonial African tradition, Nyerere pronounced, contained the key elements necessary for Africa’s postcolonial development. Organized around the extended family, it harmonized a spirit of mutual assistance with an ethos of individual responsibility and drew on available resources instead of seeking outside assistance. In a sense, this putatively traditional socialist attitude would at once be the starting point, means, and end of independent Tanganyika’s development. How are we to interpret this foundational statement of ujamaa thought? Were these, as cynics would have it, the words of an arrogant leader trying to 1

2

Julius Nyerere, “Arusha Declaration,” in Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1965–1967 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 233. This sentiment was expressed in less condensed form in the 1962 pamphlet. Nyerere, “Ujamaa,” 170.

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legitimate an authoritarian program of state intervention into the most intimate domains of its citizens’ lives? Alternatively, in a more sympathetic but still skeptical reading, was Nyerere’s political philosophy a mere imitation of either late colonial approaches to development or Soviet-style socialism, embellished with nativist rhetorical flourishes? Such interpretations – what I call the “dystopian” and “derivative” theses – lurk beneath the surface of numerous scholarly assessments but profoundly misread the specific content of the ujamaa vision and the particular historical context in which it emerged. In attempting to slot ujamaa into preexisting ideological categories or assumed political forms, narratives of this sort reduce the complex, changing discourse of ujamaa to an instrumental tactic or unoriginal copy. They also, by extension, sketch an overly simplistic picture of the world more generally during this time, since the Tanzanian version of African Socialism drew from and fed into a wider global field of developmental thought. Proceeding from a different premise – seeking to take ujamaa seriously on its own terms, without naturalizing Nyerere’s representation of African society – promises to yield a very different story. This chapter facilitates a more nuanced analysis of ujamaa’s implementation by carefully outlining the contours and contradictions of its ideological content. Doing so entails both challenging a limited functionalist conception of ideology as a second-order epiphenomenon in service of supposedly more primary material processes and moving beyond a narrow national framework to situate ujamaa in the global political context of its time. As a philosophy, and often as a set of practices, ujamaa was directed both inward and outward, frequently transcending or complicating the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs. Rather than amounting to a circumscribed exercise in nation building, the Tanzanian project significantly overlapped and intersected with larger global dynamics surrounding the end of empire and the attempted imposition of a bipolar world order. The Tanzanian case was not unique in this respect. Decolonization was a contingent process involving modes of political imagination, axes of activism, and contests for power that often bypassed as yet nonexistent – or nonentrenched – national structures. The Cold War was experienced by most of the non-Western world as a series of violations, not reinforcements, of national sovereignty. Yet African history during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s – the era of decolonization, at the height of the Cold War – is often presented as an assortment of distinct national histories isolated from broader global structures or events. Rewriting Pan-Africanism, the Third World movement, and Cold War contests for power into the Tanzanian national story opens up the latter in important ways, revealing the multiple fields of meaning indexed by ujamaa thought and helping to account for how the ujamaa project evolved over time. Moreover, since the relationship between national and international dynamics was one of mutual influence, such an endeavor illuminates how

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A Postcolonial Project in the Cold War World

29

ujamaa-era Tanzania was constitutive of and not merely impacted by the changing political terrain of the mid- to late-twentieth-century world. Approaching the Tanzanian case in this way also mandates an expansion or breaking apart of the analytical category of “development” used to describe state-led projects that seek to improve the social, political, and economic status of their citizens. Ujamaa was located within a wider and more fluid spectrum of developmental theory and practice than conventional labels such as “developmentalism” or inherited Cold War ideological binaries allow for. The Tanzanian emphasis on the village, preoccupation with family as a metaphor and basis for political community, promotion of self-reliance, and anxiety about security were all multivalent conceptual features that responded to changing domestic and international conditions, built on indigenous political thought, and drew from a range of outside sources. As Nyerere and other Tanzanian political elites borrowed ideas, they translated them; as they synthesized these disparate theories and symbols, they created something new.3 Thus, ujamaa was greater than the sum of its varied parts. Yet it was not uniquely so; ujamaa formed part of a larger ideological trend of Third World socialism (in which China featured prominently) and, more particularly, a distinctive transnational repertoire of African Socialism.4 Development programs in Ghana, Guinea, Mali, and Tanzania, among other countries, shared common discursive themes and institutional configurations and tended to generate and follow similar political patterns.5 Identifying this repertoire and exploring how it was spread and sustained are crucial to understanding ujamaa itself. Recognizing the constrained but nonetheless real imaginative agency of African Socialist leaders at the macro level also helps illuminate how ujamaa operated within national borders. Ultimately, just as colonial authorities and Cold War superpowers were unable to exercise a monopoly on the authorship of developmental 3

4

5

Here my argument especially resonates with Daniel Magaziner’s study of Black Consciousness activists in 1970s South Africa, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 48–9. Within the category of Third World socialism I include Egypt (and the United Arab Republic), India, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea, among others. For a broad but illuminating discussion of Third Worldism, see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007). In my analysis, I distinguish between “African Socialism” and “African socialism.” I use the latter to refer to regimes that understood themselves to be adherents of “scientific socialism” or Marxist–Leninist ideology (such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, and the Republic of the Congo). Paul Nugent labels such regimes Afro-Marxist in Chapters 5 and 6 of Nugent, Africa since Independence (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); see also Marina and David Ottaway, Afrocommunism (London: Africana, 1986). For the most part, though not entirely, a continental wave of African Socialism (1950s and 1960s) preceded a continental wave of African socialism (1970s). Although I recognize the broad ideological distinction between these two types of regimes, I nonetheless maintain that they have discursive, symbolic, and institutional tendencies in common.

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ideology in the 1960s world, neither were Tanzanian officials able – or even always inclined – to control the ways in which average citizens interpreted, adapted, and mobilized the complex ujamaa vision to fit their own circumstances and aims. The Ujamaa Vision Nyerere’s 1962 pamphlet introduced ujamaa as a fundamentally African “attitude of mind” based on values that supposedly inhered in the precolonial institution of the extended family. But how would this general ethical orientation translate into national policy? Because ujamaa philosophy identified itself as indigenous to Tanzania, it had to be cultivated and applied by a development program tailored to the actual conditions of Tanzanian society. Nyerere explained that ujamaa was “opposed to capitalism” and “equally opposed to doctrinaire socialism”; as an editorial in the Nationalist later put it, he was convinced “that there is no single road to socialism.”6 In practice, the Tanzanian road to socialism – or, more generally, to development – featured certain standard elements of Soviet-style communism, such as the nationalization of private land and the adoption of state economic planning. Yet ujamaa also diverged from established socialist paths in many ways – most notably by rejecting class conflict as an organizing principle and driving force of social, political, and economic transformation. Although colonialism had significantly impacted and distorted African society, Nyerere insisted, capitalism had not become sufficiently entrenched to create meaningful class identities among the general population. Colonialism had introduced the vice of greed and the practice of exploitation to Africa, he explained, but these were surface-level pollutants that corrupted susceptible individuals and groups, not historical forces that had wholly restructured collective subjectivities and the organization of social and economic relations. Accordingly, privileging proletarian consciousness made little sense where peasant identities remained dominant. More specifically, deferring equality among Tanzanians until an abstract future point threatened to compromise popular welfare and national unity in the short term, which could destabilize Tanzania sufficiently to undo the gains of independence. Thus, in theory, the only division acknowledged and permitted within Tanzanian society was that between exploiters and producers; ujamaa would be a struggle against exploitation (unyonyaji) in all of its forms. An ethos of self-reliance, rooted in the countryside, would be the primary instrument in this effort. In a sense, Nyerere’s emphasis on communal agriculture and collective hard work as the lever of national development was highly pragmatic. Given the predominantly rural character of Tanganyikan society (despite 6

Nyerere, “Ujamaa,” 170; “No Single Road,” Nationalist, April 13, 1967.

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A Postcolonial Project in the Cold War World

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high urban growth rates in the early 1960s), focusing on the figure of the peasant seemed to be a logical point of departure. At independence, the Tanzanian countryside exhibited considerable geographic, demographic, and developmental variation. Wealthier regions in the country’s north were characterized by dense settlement, established political hierarchies, and profitable cash crop production; underdeveloped areas to the west and south (such as Mtwara) shared a tendency toward scattered or temporary settlement, relatively fluid local power structures, and a mixed practice of labor migration and farming.7 Yet, excluding pastoralist groups and permanent urban workers, some degree of direct dependence on agriculture united this diverse population. Treating this common agrarian orientation as a resource rather than a handicap promised to preclude Tanzania’s dependence “upon gifts, loans, and investments from foreign countries and foreign companies” that would be necessary to initiate a program of industrialization but could compromise the country’s independence from bipolar contests for power.8 Foreign aid flowed abundantly in the Cold War world but was deeply politicized, and African leaders like Nyerere were acutely aware that the intense geopolitical competition among superpowers often located itself in newly decolonized countries. Forgoing a capital-intensive developmental program would mitigate Tanzania’s vulnerability to outside manipulation, ensuring that national self-determination amounted to more than mere “flag independence.” Ujamaa’s emphasis on communal agriculture and economic self-reliance was a practical response to Tanzania’s existing conditions, but such a developmental path was also extraordinarily ambitious. For the first several years after the publication of the 1962 pamphlet, official references to ujamaa remained sporadic and very general, betraying a lack of consensus as to how exactly the Tanzanian population should realize the lofty goal of agrarian socialism. In 1967, ujamaa was finally codified as a set of comprehensive policies. That February, Nyerere released the Arusha Declaration of Socialism and Self-Reliance, the first official document to systematically revisit the concept of ujamaa; although it largely avoided direct prescriptions, it laid the foundation for a number of major reforms undertaken in subsequent months. Immediately after TANU approved the declaration, the government embarked on a wave of nationalizations and began reconfiguring national policy in the areas of political leadership, education, cultural programming, domestic commerce and trade, and rural development to conform to Tanzania’s new socialist agenda. Later that year, Nyerere released several policy papers that clarified the logic of this restructuring. The most important of these, “Education for Self-Reliance” and “Socialism and Rural 7 8

For a historical overview of these regional differences, see John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Nyerere, “Arusha Declaration,” 240.

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Development,” appeared in March and September, respectively. The latter explained the villagization program at the heart of ujamaa, calling for the establishment of rural socialist communities throughout Tanzania and specifying that this goal should be accomplished “by persuasion not force.”9 National leaders had now outlined the shape that ujamaa should take, but they insisted that the responsibility for implementing villagization would lie with average Tanzanian citizens themselves. Although the Arusha Declaration spoke in the same clear, elegant, and accessible language as did the 1962 pamphlet, its apparent simplicity concealed the complexity of its message. Each of the three core concepts of Nyerere’s vision – familyhood, self-reliance, and security – could be understood in opposing ways and to opposing ends. Moreover, the three principles, though entwined in ujamaa discourse, existed in tension with one another. First, the term ujamaa referenced a romanticized version of the “traditional” extended family, yet the policy of villagization held up the “modern” unit of the nuclear family as the basis for the reorganization of rural life. According to Nyerere, “The foundation, and the objective, of African socialism is the extended family” – a position based on a “recognition of ‘society’ as an extension of the basic family unit.”10 The Tanzanian initiative even sought to further dilute the boundaries of “society,” deploying an expansive definition of socialist kinship that marked ujamaa as an internationalist, even transnational formation. Nyerere closed his 1962 pamphlet by declaring that African Socialism “can no longer confine the idea of the social family within the limits of the tribe, nor, indeed, of the nation. Our recognition of the family to which we all belong must be extended yet further – beyond the tribe, the community, the nation, or even the continent – to embrace the whole society of mankind.” This was, he claimed, “the only logical conclusion for true socialism.”11 In this sense, ujamaa registered a type of familyhood characterized by connection and fluidity at both the micro and macro levels. However, a very different model of familyhood vis-a-vis local practices was lodged within the spatial imaginary of ujamaa ` villagization, particularly in the form it came to assume in the 1970s. Villagization was ultimately organized according to the bounded social unit of the individual household rather than the extended kin group; under the terms of Operation Vijiji, state officials were to oversee the creation of ujamaa villages consisting of a minimum of 250 households (kaya) per village. Moreover, each settlement was to be divided into ten-cell units, each comprising ten kaya, whose representatives were to work alongside one another on the village’s communal farm. Many local officials organized new settlements according to a symmetrical grid in which the households making 9 10 11

Nyerere, “Socialism and Rural Development,” in Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, 335. Nyerere, “Ujamaa,” 11. Ibid., 12.

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up ten-cell units occupied identical houses along a single horizontal “street” (mtaa). Nothing could be less traditional than this map of the ideal rural village. The communitarian connotations of ujamaa, moreover, seemed incongruous with the imperative of self-reliance. In one sense, self-reliance was meant as a literal developmental strategy; the productivity of each individual Tanzanian was linked to national prosperity through a chain of self-reliance extending through the various political scales of ujamaa villagization. The Arusha Declaration traced the economic self-sufficiency of the nation-state directly to the agricultural labor of each rural Tanzanian, stating, “If every individual is self-reliant the ten-house cell will be self-reliant, if all the cells are self-reliant the whole ward will be self-reliant, and if the wards are selfreliant the District will be self-reliant. If the Districts are self-reliant, then the Region is self-reliant, and if the Regions are self-reliant, then the whole nation is self-reliant and this is our aim.”12 Yet Nyerere also took pains to point out the limits to self-reliance as a precept. Ujamaa held that selfreliance was critical as “both as an instrument and goal of development,” thus referring to a desired outcome and not just a prescribed mode of conduct – at the personal level, in the form of individual self-sufficiency, and at the national one, in the form of political and economic sovereignty.13 In this modified understanding, a shared commitment to the abstract ideal of selfreliance was to underpin deep interpersonal bonds at the local, national, and even transnational levels rather than end with crude individualism. In the realm of global affairs, national self-reliance suggested a policy of diversified engagement instead of isolationism. Within Tanzanian borders, a construction of national citizenship that emphasized the redistributive mechanism of a welfare state – and not just an injunction toward mutual responsibility and communitarian fellowship – motivated the policy of villagization. Nyerere’s call for the reorganization of the countryside into distinct but cognate ujamaa villages reflected a conception of Tanzanian rural space as parceled into cellular units that were universally linked through membership in the new nation. These villages would facilitate increased access between rural populations and state services in the form of schools, health facilities, and agricultural infrastructure in addition to encouraging economic cooperation and modes of sociability conforming to the spirit of socialist nationalism. In this sense, material self-sufficiency at the local or individual level would be significantly qualified by the dissemination of the institutional trappings of a modern welfare state throughout the countryside. The third principle of ujamaa was less explicitly foregrounded than familyhood and self-reliance but was nonetheless woven throughout the text of the Arusha Declaration and reiterated in subsequent articulations of ujamaa. 12 13

Nyerere, “Arusha Declaration,” 248. “Second Plan,” Nationalist, May 29, 1969.

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This concept, security, also had doubled meanings – it referred both to the policing of Tanzania’s geopolitical sovereignty and to the welfare of Tanzanian citizens. These definitions could be complementary, but they could also be contradictory or even opposed. Under ujamaa, national citizenship was to have an equalizing, even standardizing function of providing “to every individual the security that comes of belonging to a widely extended family.”14 Consolidating such a robust national community was aimed at achieving universal social security – food, shelter, and care for all – within Tanzanian borders, but it was also a defensive exigency in a more immediate sense. Tending to popular welfare would help reinforce Tanzania’s economic sovereignty, which was linked to the country’s military integrity that was so crucial to preserve in the face of the unfolding conflict and chaos in proximate territories. Yet Tanzanian policy often detached the concepts of social security and military security from each other, holding up the latter as an overriding priority. Through their appeals to popular militarization and fixation on unrooting sometimes ill-defined enemies of the state, TANU leaders intensified a domestic climate of vigilance and created a Cold War political culture that curtailed civil liberties and threatened to compromise the economic welfare of average citizens. Moreover, this militaristic emphasis accentuated distinctions between Tanzanian men and women – the former assigned the duty of preserving national security (configured as a “public” function) and the latter entrusted with maintaining the social security of their individual families (coded as a “private” responsibility). Accordingly, the mobilization of state resources and devotion of national attention to military security was often at odds with both an understanding of social security as a collective developmental imperative and the socialist principle of radical equality across gender lines. Where did this complicated ideology come from? A definitive answer to this question is elusive given that each of ujamaa’s primary conceptual elements was a relatively open signifier that accommodated divergent meanings. The impulse to assign a precise genealogy to ujamaa – and so to neatly synthesize its multiple moving parts – is tempting, but doing so is neither wholly possible in practical terms nor particularly productive in analytical terms. In this regard, the thinness of available historical evidence is one limiting factor, but so is the fact that ideas do not usually emerge and travel and influence does not always operate in such a straightforward, linear manner as to allow us to pinpoint definitive moments or axes of direct ideological transmission. For the Tanzanian case, the methodological argument against what Ann Stoler calls “a scholarly quest for origins” is rooted in the nature of the postcolonial African archive.15 A vast literature in the field of colonial 14 15

Nyerere, “Ujamaa,” 171. Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth,” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 185.

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studies has alerted us to the distortions inherent in colonial archives, to which many scholars have responded with creative exercises in reading “against the grain.”16 Yet, as Jean Allman explains, in many African contexts, the postcolonial archive “is not the easy and direct descendant of the colonial archive” and thus requires a different set of research tactics and interpretive strategies altogether. Lacking their colonial predecessors’ capacity and desire for “naming, preserving, categorizing, classifying,” many national states in Africa house official archives that are “dispersed, destroyed, fragmented, and accidental.”17 The poorly maintained and poorly funded Tanzania National Archives contains few accessible materials relating to the origins of ujamaa ideology or postcolonial foreign relations, and the former TANU party archives – now housed in the offices of the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (or “Party of the Revolution,” known as CCM) – are closed to most researchers.18 Foreign archives, print media, and oral narratives offer alternative windows onto the question of ujamaa’s origins but can be less than conclusive.19 Such sources often suggest general circuits of ideological influence or exchange, but they provide a scant basis for distinguishing between similarities that resulted from active borrowing and those that arose synchronously from separate but common histories and shared experiences. In this context, the colonial genealogy of ujamaa is most easily traced because of the extensive content, exhaustive organization, and relative accessibility of British colonial archives (as compared to materials documenting Third World or Pan-Africanist interactions, for instance). Yet another story is possible. There is a strong conceptual argument for taking this methodological challenge as an opportunity and not just an obstacle. Recent historiographical shifts have underscored that the distinction between imported and indigenous, between derived and coproduced, is not as clear as it may have seemed to a previous generation of social historians – especially in the postcolonial world. As historians learned from literary theory about the mythology of individual authorship, and as they participated in postcolonial theorists’ efforts to decenter world history, they began to question whether nationalist and racial thought always originated 16

17

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Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Jean Allman, “Phantoms of the Archive: Kwame Nkrumah, a Nazi Pilot Named Hanna, and the Contingencies of Postcolonial History Writing,” American Historical Review 118, 1 (2013): 126–7; 108. I was unable to obtain permission to access the party archives despite multiple attempts to do so. On the state archives, see Leander Schneider, “The Tanzania National Archives,” History in Africa 30 (2003): 447–54. On alternative sources available to historians of the postcolonial period, see Stephen Ellis, “Writing Histories of Contemporary Africa,” Journal of African History 43, 1 (2002): 1–26.

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in the West. Chatterjee’s inquiry into the roots of the Indian nationalist project inaugurated a series of alternative histories of the nation form in the postcolonial world; many of these only succeeded in disturbing the hold of a single, Euro-American genealogy by preserving a “seductive binary” of native versus imported, positing a purely indigenous cultural realm from which oppositional versions of the nation form supposedly emerged.20 In an illuminating study that challenged this framing with regard to a different political category, Jonathan Glassman strove to uncover “the role played by African thinkers in the construction of race” in twentieth-century Zanzibar, moving away from approaches that “depict African intellectuals as having either too little autonomy or too much: either dupes whose thinking was easily molded by British mentors or steadfast anti-imperialists who clung to an authentic subaltern consciousness.”21 Glassman called on historians to look instead to “circuits of discourse in which diverse intellectuals spoke to one another,” pointing out that ideas about race “were neither invented from whole cloth nor imported anew.”22 Applying this logic to the history of developmental thought in Tanzania shows that a more differentiated picture of ujamaa’s origins emerges when our we widen our analytical lens to encompass a larger global framework and loosen the distinction between “derivative” and “indigenous.” A multitude of political contexts and networks intersected at the historical conjuncture of ujamaa’s inception and fed into the creation, adoption, and reworking of the diverse discourses associated with the Tanzanian imaginary. Among the latter, colonial or Euro-American ideology featured prominently but not exclusively – and its persistence or mobilization operated in specific ways and at specific moments, alongside that of other influences, due in part to local factors that rendered these various models compelling or dominant. Blanket narratives of ideological hegemony and attempts to establish unwavering lines of ideological transfer obscure the complexity of this contingent process, which calls for more nuanced analytical strategies and attention to the ways in which borrowed discourses can be transformed as they are redeployed and recombined. To disentangle some of the sources and meanings of ujamaa thought, given the material limitations of the relevant historical evidence and the often indirect nature of influence itself, I locate the official discourse of ujamaa

20

21 22

Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought; quotation from Eve Trout Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 9. Jonathan Glassman, “Slower Than a Massacre: The Multiple Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial Africa,” American Historical Review 109, 3 (2004): 723, 732. Ibid., 734, 753. For another nuanced analysis of racial thought as an Afro-European coproduction, see Bruce Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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within four overlapping ideological fields (though not in sequential order).23 In highlighting these broad discursive arenas, I aim to explore affinities in a general comparative sense rather than decisively trace specific Tanzanian ideas to discrete points of origin. Likewise, I seek to “work through” – not resolve – the contradictions within and between the varied elements of ujamaa discourse, following Gary Wilder’s adaptation of psychoanalytic terminology.24 First, ujamaa contained numerous elements common to a continental repertoire of African Socialism and a global repertoire of Third World – or postcolonial – socialism. Second, it invoked themes central to colonial thought and policy. Third, the Tanzanian project echoed local political idioms rooted in the Swahili coast region and East Africa more broadly. Finally, ujamaa resonated with a wider international phenomenon of what I call the political culture of the Cold War. Although ujamaa may seem to be a random ideological “potpourri,”25 as one Western analyst claimed, or a “cocktail of ideas,”26 as the former Tanzanian national commissioner for ujamaa and cooperatives put it, its remarkable multivalence and changing character reflected its complicated history and aims as opposed to its incoherence or haphazard assembly. Ujamaa’s conceptual anchors were not infinitely open signifiers; they accommodated meanings that spoke to the particular historical conditions that Tanzanians faced in the 1960s. Pan-Africanism and African Socialism When Nyerere first officially introduced the ideology of ujamaa, Tanzania’s national borders were not yet fixed. This point is crucial to recognize because it disrupts narratives that hold ujamaa to be an exclusively national development project, revealing such assumptions to be an anachronistic projection for the early stages of its inception. Ujamaa originally aimed to extend the logic of socialist relations to not just the larger political community of what was then the Tanganyikan nation-state but possibly a transnational federation. This was not an idle statement. As decolonization began its staggered course across sub-Saharan Africa, numerous “alternative approaches for exiting colonial empire were still in play,” with a series of experiments with federation or confederation unfolding across the continent in the late 1950s and early 1960s.27 The dream of a unified Africa had been imaginatively fertilized throughout the first postwar decade by cultural and political 23 24 25 26 27

I use the term official broadly, to refer to the speech and actions of a variety of government and party leaders, workers, and representatives. Wilder, French Imperial Nation-State. W. M. Freund, “Class Conflict, Political Economy and the Struggle for Socialism in Tanzania,” African Affairs 80, 321 (1981): 492. Interview with Athanas Stephen Kauzeni, national commissioner for ujamaa and cooperatives between 1970 and 1975, Dar es Salaam, December 2007. Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint,” 169.

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exchanges among a generation of future African leaders studying in the United States and Europe.28 Nyerere was a member of this cohort, following his secondary education at Tabora Government School (in central Tanganyika) and a teaching certificate at Makerere University (in Uganda) with a master’s degree in economics and history at Edinburgh University obtained in 1952. After returning to Tanganyika to lead TANU’s independence struggle, Nyerere joined the Pan-Africanist effort through a push to establish a sovereign East African Federation uniting Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya.29 In June 1960, he offered to “postpone the celebration of Tanganyika’s independence,” which was then scheduled for the following year, to “celebrate East Africa’s independence in 1962 rather than take the risk of perpetuating the balkanization of East Africa.”30 This plan fell through, but talks for a postindependence federation continued, with Nyerere cautioning that “African nationalism is meaningless, is dangerous, and is anachronistic, if it is not at the same time Pan-Africanism.”31 In June 1963, East African leaders met in Nairobi and released a statement declaring, “We believe the time has come to consolidate our unity, and provide it with a constitutional basis.”32 Although they hoped to establish a federation by the end of the year, within two months, it had become clear that “major difficulties” (as one outside observer put it) had arisen, with debate centering on issues including the future site of the capital and the federation’s official language.33 Faced with the increasing intransigence of Uganda’s Milton Obote, Nyerere looked to the possibility of a Tanganyika–Kenya federation and even spoke of including Nyasaland, the Rhodesias, and Zanzibar in a new political unit.34 In December, however, Kenya became an independent nation-state, shattering the dream of federation. Just months later, Nyerere succeeded in achieving a 28 29

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31 32 33 34

See, e.g., Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain 1900–1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998). These three territories had been politically integrated as the unit of British East Africa under colonial administration, and in 1961, an East African Common Services Organisation and Common Market was established. See Joseph Nye, Pan-Africanism and East African Integration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). Julius Nyerere, “East African Federation,” in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, 96. The speech was published as a pamphlet by the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) after the organization approved the proposal for a federation at its October 1960 meeting in Uganda. Julius Nyerere, “A United States of Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 1, 1 (1963): 1–6, reprinted in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, 194. UK National Archives (UKNA), Foreign Office (FO), 371/167147. Kenya News: Press Office Handout No. 838, August 21, 1963. UKNA, FO, 371/167147. James Murray, British Embassy, Usumbura, Burundi to G. E. Millard, Foreign Office, August 15, 1963. Paul Bjerk, “Postcolonial Realism: Tanganyika’s Foreign Policy under Nyerere, 1960– 1963,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 44, 2 (2011): 215–47.

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much smaller-scale political merger between Tanganyika and Zanzibar. The loose union of Tanzania could tenuously claim to be “a small contribution to African unity,”35 although its borders would henceforth remain fixed.36 The movement for an East African Federation is often overlooked by historians because of its failed outcome, a position that is symptomatic of a broader scholarly tendency to ignore the genuine appeal and concrete implications of Pan-Africanism as a political ideology in the early 1960s. Where Pan-Africanism has been acknowledged, it has often been treated as an appendage of the “French imperial nation-state” instead of as a set of ideas and practices associated with “extra-metropolitan political modalities and alliances.”37 This general disregard has enabled an attendant analytical neglect of African Socialism as a continental phenomenon. In the early years of independence, Pan-Africanism and African Socialism were imbricated, mutually reinforcing imaginaries. Like Pan-Africanism, African Socialism was not a monolithic or standardized discourse but shared a set of foundational precepts and recurring themes. African Socialist discourses and policies in countries such as Ghana, Guinea, Mali, and Tanzania germinated in a matrix of Pan-Africanist networks that stretched across and beyond the African continent, incorporating the diaspora in Europe and the Americas.38 These circuits overlapped and intersected with international socialist networks in the 1940s and 1950s; for instance, Guinea’s Ahmed S´ekou Tour´e had close ties to the French Communist Party as a trade unionist and later leader of the Guinean wing of the Rassemblement D´emocratique Africain.39 During this era, many renditions of Pan-Africanism adopted an emphasis on economic equality and an aversion to the social alienation that they attributed to capitalism, despite foregrounding the salience of race over class. 35

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UKNA, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), 31/154. R. H. Hobden, British Interests Section, Canadian High Commission, Dar es Salaam to Commonwealth Office, May 30, 1968. Zanzibar would remain semi-autonomous within the new republic, maintaining its own president and parliament. The union has remained contested since its inception. See Issa Shivji, Pan-Africanism or Pragmatism? Lessons of the Tanganyika-Zanzibar Union (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2008). In 1967, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania came together to form the East African Community, which entailed a common market, a common customs tariff, and a shared range of public services. This effort lasted until 1977. Wilder, French Imperial Nation-State; Meredith Terretta, “Cameroonian Nationalists Go Global: From Forest Maquis to a Pan-African Accra,” Journal of African History 51, 2 (2010): 190. On the influence of diaspora thinkers, see Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). Elizabeth Schmidt, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946–1958 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).

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After 1963, when the OAU institutionalized the nation-state status as a condition of membership rather than dissolving national sovereignty within a continental polity or series of regional polities, Pan-Africanism did not merely disappear as a political force. Instead, it found new expression in the realm of anticolonial activism. Through continental connections linking left-leaning states in the broader struggle to achieve liberation for all of Africa, African Socialist ideology continued to both spread and grow deeper roots. This was especially true for Ghana, Guinea, and Tanganyika, with the borders of each national unit remaining relatively porous as it allied itself with the fight against colonialism and white minority rule in Portuguese and southern Africa, while simultaneously formulating programs for its own development. In 1962, through the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA), an organization similar to the contemporaneous West Africa–based Conference of Independent African States (CIAS) and All-African People’s Conference (AAPC), Tanganyika began supporting anticolonial and anti-apartheid movements in central and southern Africa.40 This solidarity work entailed housing and diplomatically advocating for associated parties; facilitating their militarization by running training camps; and acting as a conduit for arms and supplies provided by the Algerian, Cuban, Chinese, and Soviet regimes, among others.41 Over the next few years, Dar es Salaam became the headquarters of the OAU Liberation Committee, and FRELIMO, ANC, PAC, SWAPO, SWANU, ZANU, and ZAPU set up offices in Tanzania.42 These organizations were sustained by Liberation Committee funds from other African nations and covert aid from further abroad; they also benefited from local facilities and instruction.43 40

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That year, PAFMECA became the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East, Central, and Southern Africa or (PAFMECSA). This represented a reconfiguration of PAFMECA into an organization of sovereign governments that supported southern African liberation movements. On the CIAS and AAPC in Ghana, see Jeffrey Ahlman, “The Algerian Question in Nkrumah’s Ghana, 1958–1960: Debating ‘Violence’ and ‘Nonviolence’ in African Decolonization,” Africa Today 57, 2 (2010): 67–84. Shubi L. Ishemo, “‘A Symbol That Cannot Be Substituted’: The Role of Mwalimu J. K. Nyerere in the Liberation of Southern Africa, 1955–1990,” Review of African Political Economy 27, 83 (2000): 81–94. This support began with Mozambique. Tanganyika channeled Soviet aid to the Uniao Nacional de Moc¸ambique (UDENAMO), then ˜ Democratica ´ hosted Mozambique African National Union (MANU) activists in Dar es Salaam, and finally supported the unified FRELIMO, which was established in 1962. The African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) represented South Africa, the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) and South West Africa National Union (SWANU) represented Namibia, while the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) represented Rhodesia. Rivalries between groups competing for national representation abounded. Some funds came from the United States as well as socialist countries such as China, the USSR, Cuba, and Algeria; FRELIMO leader Eduardo Mondlane’s American wife, for instance, oversaw the operations of a school for Mozambican refugees in Dar es Salaam –

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The most ambitious African Socialist programs were implemented in those countries – like Tanzania – that also exhibited the deepest commitment to supporting ongoing liberation struggles.44 This common investment in anticolonial activism reflected and reinforced a shared commitment to the ideals of African Socialism. In this context, the ideologies of Pan-Africanism and African Socialism did not “float independently above the play of social forces”; nor were they “a mere instrument of social forces.”45 Rather, these discourses mutually informed concrete political conditions and practices at the continental and national levels. This point contradicts more functionalist interpretations that conceive of African Socialism as a “mythos” designed “to replace the outmoded unifying influence of anticolonialism” at the continental level – thus positing African Socialism as a mechanistic instrument of Pan-Africanist efforts to achieve transnational unity.46 It also challenges narratives that implicitly or explicitly categorize both African Socialism and Pan-Africanism as rhetorical instruments deployed in national politics, treating the former as “no more than a convenient doctrine which helps to explain, rationalize, and justify governmental involvement” – in other words, reducing it to mere legitimating rhetoric for authoritarian leaders attempting to consolidate power over their citizens.47 In many cases, the language of African Socialism did indeed fulfill this role; even the most conservative and capitalist of leaders across the continent took up African Socialist idioms. Such ideological dilution was on display, for instance, at the Colloquium on Policies of Development and African Approaches to Socialism held in Dakar in December 1962, which brought together a number of unlikely political figures from across the continent to discuss African Socialism.48

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the Mozambique Institute – that was largely funded by American supporters. See Michael Panzer, “Building a Revolutionary Constituency: Mozambican Refugees and the Development of the FRELIMO Proto-State, 1964–1968,” Social Dynamics 39, 1 (2013): 5–23. The Malian regime absorbed this spirit through its membership, alongside Guinea and Ghana, in the Union of African States (1960–63), although it was not actively involved in supporting liberation movements in neighboring territories. Zambia, which also developed its own program of African Socialism (albeit later than Tanzania and the West African states), was an important frontline state in southern African liberation struggles. Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 4. Feierman’s reflections on the relationship between political discourse and social dynamics are grounded in a very different case study, but his conclusions have wider theoretical applicability. William Friedland and Carl Rosberg, “Introduction: The Anatomy of African Socialism,” in Friedland and Rosberg, African Socialism, 4. Ibid., 7. Kelly Askew and M. Anne Pitcher note that between the 1950s and 1980s, “no fewer than thirty-five countries out of fifty-three proclaimed themselves ‘socialist’ at one or other point in their history.” Askew and Pitcher, “African Socialisms and Postsocialisms,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 76, 1 (2006): 1.

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However, for its primary proponents, African Socialism was far more than a tool for self-aggrandizement. In recent years, several scholars have conceded this point. For instance, Mike McGovern asserts that “Guinea’s modernist elites did not necessarily act with malice in applying their policies of social engineering,”49 and Leander Schneider maintains that ujamaa villagization was “a sincere attempt by the Tanzanian state to, in [James] Scott’s phrase, improve the human condition.”50 To account for the apparently unsuccessful outcomes of African Socialist policies – although they rarely situate these individual national projects as part of a broader continental phenomenon – such analysts usually turn, implicitly or explicitly, to the “derivative” thesis. Just as the “dystopian” or instrumental thesis denies the relative autonomy of ideology vis-a-vis the realm of material praxis, the ` “derivative” thesis denies the relative autonomy of African thinkers vis-a-vis ` the world.51 Though given the gloss of good intentions, these leaders’ policies are ultimately boiled down to a copy of colonial approaches; alternatively but similarily, they are not permitted to exist outside of an overarching category of generic developmentalism. Like all large-scale state-led development projects, the latter position holds, African Socialist initiatives were inextricably linked to authoritarian politics because they preserved each “state’s inebriation with its self-conception as the authoritative arbiter” of each country’s “path into a better/modern future.”52 Alternatives to the sinister “developmentalist” model were simply not possible, it seems, and this is why African Socialism failed. Against these interpretations, I propose conceiving of African Socialism as a utopian project, drawing on David Harvey’s understanding of the term. As a broad continental political imaginary, African Socialism was a distinctive vision making up what Harvey calls a utopianism of temporal process. Such “idealized versions of social processes,” he explains, “usually get expressed in purely temporal terms” and “have the habit of getting lost in the romanticism of endlessly open projects that never have to come to a point of closure (within space and place).”53 For this reason, they are often dismissed as empty or vague rhetoric. Despite its name, African Socialism did not ground itself in a specific site, invoking “Africa” more as a philosophical disposition 49 50 51 52

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Mike McGovern, Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 184. Leander Schneider, “High on Modernity? Explaining the Failings of Tanzanian Villagisation,” African Studies 66, 1 (2007): 11. On the “relative autonomy of ideology,” see Eley, A Crooked Line, 88. Schneider, “High on Modernity?,” 33. Schneider maintains that “connections to colonial times” were evident “in the frames of legitimation that underpinned the frequently authoritarian actions of the postindependence Tanzanian state,” such as “the persistent paternalism vis-a-vis their ‘subjects’ that characterized the political imagination of state elites.” Leander ` Schneider, “Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Authoritarianism in Tanzania: Connects and Disconnects,” African Studies Review 49, 1 (2006): 93. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 174.

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or identity than a geographical designation.54 As a utopianism of process, African Socialism was inherently flexible and open ended, explaining why, “For students who look for a hard, residual core in African Socialism, the search is difficult and somewhat frustrating.”55 As it took more definite shape in some national settings, this capacious imaginary became attached to utopianisms of spatial form – such as villagization – that entailed “imaginative spatial play to achieve specific social and moral goals.”56 Such spatial utopianisms tend to be opposed by thinkers such as Scott, who perceive them as oppressive and absolutist. However, Harvey seeks to rehabilitate the potential of “open experimentation with the possibilities of spatial forms” within such utopianisms, while acknowledging the underlying dilemma that “to materialize a space is to engage with closure (however temporary) which is an authoritarian act.” Utopianisms of process, he reminds us, have their limitations as well – when implemented, they “cannot escape the question of closure or the encrusted accumulations of traditions, institutional inertias, and the like, which they themselves produce.”57 The fact that all efforts at large-scale social transformation tend to confront and generate similar impasses does not mean that all such projects are premised on identical theoretical foundations or unfold in empirically equivalent ways. Recovering the specificity of individual utopianisms – not just as “disembodied intellectual traditions” but as ideas that emerged from and engaged with the messy material world in distinct ways – helps illuminate “the specificity of a time and place” and allows the analyst to better “probe different historical situations.”58 It is in this spirit of inquiry that I approach African Socialism as a utopian formation. What were the distinguishing features of this utopian ideology? The most obvious marker of African Socialist thought was its insistence on locating itself, albeit sometimes indirectly, in a heritage of something like “tribal socialism.” Nkrumah pointed to the “humanism of traditional African life,” and S´ekou Tour´e called for a return to the “grassroots of our culture”; later, Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda extolled the “humanistic” character of the African.59 Even relatively superficial gestures toward African Socialism started with this premise; in Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta referenced the “African 54

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On the racial–identitarian–conceptual (vs. geographical) dimensions of the category of “Africa,” see Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 239–73. Friedland and Rosberg, “Introduction: The Anatomy of African Socialism,” 1. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 182. Ibid., 182–3, 185. Michael Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, “Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time,” in Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash, eds., Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 4–5. Kwame Nkrumah, “African Socialism Revisited,” African Forum 1, 3 (1966): 3–9, reprinted in Wilfred Cartey and Martin Kilson, eds., The Africa Reader: Independent Africa (New York: Random House, 1970), 201; Ahmed S´ekou Tour´e, quoted in Osei Amoah, ed., A Political Dictionary of Black Quotations: Reflecting the Black Man’s Dreams, Hopes,

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family spirit,” and in Senegal, L´eopold Senghor spoke of the “wild stock of Negritude” that “is traditionally socialist in character.”60 The romanticized extended family was implicitly embedded at the core of this model of “tribal socialism” – both symbolically, in the racial claim underpinning the assertion of a shared African culture, and literally, as the social institution in which the putatively communal spirit of precolonial Africans was rooted. African Socialism held that this logic of extended familyhood should govern political behavior at both the micro and macro levels, thus driving efforts to create socialist community among individuals and nations alike. More specifically, for many, the idealized African extended family – the basis of socialist community – blurred into the unit of the village. Mali’s economic minister, Seydou Badian Kouyat´e, celebrated the “feeling of solidarity and fraternity that was the law of the village,” asserting that “teamwork, shared property, and mutual assistance were the pillars of the village community and will be the pillars of our future world.”61 Similarly, S´ekou Tour´e highlighted “social fraternity, the pre-eminence of group interests over personal interests, the sense of common responsibilities, [and] the practice of a formal democracy which rules and governs village life” as “the base of our society” and the cornerstone of his vision of communaucratie.62 In practice, few African Socialist initiatives assigned as much importance to the actual entity (rather than metaphorical configuration) of the village as did Tanzania; in early 1960s Ghana, for instance, Nkrumah directed more national energy toward large-scale industry and the construction of the Volta River Dam than toward rural development.63 Yet many African Socialist programs shared a focus on creating, organizing, and preserving village communities.

60

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Visions, 1850–1988 (London: Africa Book Centre, 1989), 23; Kenneth Kaunda, Humanism in Zambia and a Guide to Its Implementation (Lusaka: Zambia Information Services, 1968). Jomo Kenyatta, African Socialism and Its Application to Planning in Kenya (Nairobi: Republic of Kenya, 1965), 4; L´eopold S´edar Senghor, “African-Style Socialism,” West Africa, November 11, 1961, reprinted in Friedland and Rosberg, African Socialism, 265. US-RDA, “2’ Seminaire de l’Union Soudanaise-R.D.A” (Bamako: Editions Librairie Populaire, 1962), quoted in Gregory Mann, “One Party, Several Socialisms: Mali’s US-RDA,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, 2013 (cited with permission; the translation from French is my own). Tour´e, Texte des Interviews Accord´ees aux Repr´esentants de la Presse (Conakry: Imprimerie Nationale, 1959), 149–51, quoted in Charles Andrain, “Guinea and Senegal: Contrasting Types of African Socialism,” in Friedland and Rosberg, African Socialism, 170. For a discussion of S´ekou Tour´e’s “valorization of the prototypical rural village,” see Jay Straker, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 109. An ambitious and large-scale villagization program was also undertaken in the 1980s by Ethiopia’s self-proclaimed Marxist regime. See Wendy James, Donald Donham, Eisei Kurimoto, and Alessandro Triulzi, eds., Remapping Ethiopia: Socialism and After (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002). Villagization drives also occurred in Mozambique, addressed later in this chapter.

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The Village in the 1960s World In reality, ordered villages were hardly a ubiquitous feature of Africa’s precolonial landscape, so how do we account for the postcolonial primacy of the village idea? Many scholars explain this emphasis on the village, most apparent in the Tanzanian case, as a simple colonial inheritance.64 Although this is far from a sufficient interpretation, it is indisputable that in this respect and others, African Socialist projects such as ujamaa were somewhat “continuous with colonial policy” even while seeking to overcome such legacies.65 Colonial policy in much of Africa was organized around an ideology of indirect rule loosely founded on nineteenth-century British legal theorist Henry Maine’s belief in “native society as an apolitical, functional whole, held together by stable bonds of custom and structures of kinship.”66 Maine understood the historical trajectory of human society as proceeding from a starting point in status-based interpersonal kinship relations to an end point in the territorial basis and contractual logic of the modern nation-state. Whereas the Western world had successfully completed the transition to modernity, according to Maine, the Eastern (specifically, Indian) world was still mired in an indeterminate liminal stage in which the village remained the dominant form of political community.67 British colonial officials in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries formulated a strategy for governance based on Maine’s conviction that native society was “simultaneously intact and vulnerable” and thus needed to be rehabilitated or preserved – a premise that colonial anthropologists in Africa confirmed and elaborated on.68 Indirect rule, pioneered in Nigeria (and brought to Tanganyika in 1923), sought to minimize or mitigate the disruptive impact of the colonial civilizing mission by constructing an administrative apparatus around supposedly coherent and fixed native structures of authority – resulting in what Mahmood Mamdani calls a system of “decentralized despotism.”69 Rather than focusing exclusively on the village community as the anchor of traditional society, indirect rule in Africa took the tribe as the fundamental social unit – reifying a division between “native” and “nonnative” as well as between “traditional” and “modern.” Nonetheless, the space of 64

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A notable exception to this tendency is Viktoria Stoger-Eising, “‘Ujamaa’ Revisited: Indige¨ nous and European Influences in Nyerere’s Social and Political Thought,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 70, 1 (2000): 118–43. Stoger-Eising argues that ujamaa ¨ was a purely homegrown ideology, thus reifying the indigenous and naturalizing ujamaa’s own mode of discursive legitimation. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 224. Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 3. Although Maine was referring to India, his conclusions were generalized to fit other sites. Mantena, Alibis of Empire, 6. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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the village – signifying territorial rootedness and adherence to “customary” norms – figured prominently in colonial policy and praxis. In the Tanzanian case, ujamaa’s conception of the village resonated with yet departed from this logic of indirect rule. Although the latter identified the “tribe” (or ethnic affiliation) as the primary bond of native society in its village setting, Nyerere held ethnic parochialism to be antithetical to the spirit of what he nonetheless called “tribal socialism.”70 Instead of attempting to insinuate national state power into a static customary order, Nyerere sought to reform “native society” to preserve and enhance its ostensibly original spirit. Thus, as in Ghana and Guinea, national policy in Tanzania strove to abolish, not buttress, the hereditary power of chiefs and other local leaders empowered by colonial customary law. It also promoted Swahili as the national lingua franca through educational and administrative standardization, in part to minimize the divisive potential of linguistic diversity coinciding with putative ethnic boundaries.71 Whereas the architects of indirect rule understood kinship-based political community to be inherently adverse to “modern” contract-based political community within a sovereign nationstate, Nyerere dismantled this opposition, seeking to make the family – the most local, personal, and “traditional” unit – constitutive of the modern nation-state, and vice versa. Tanzania would become one large socialist family organized through individual villages rather than extinguishing or superseding small-scale kinship-based village societies; it would be an extension of the supposed values, principles, and bonds of these smaller communities instead of competing with or displacing them. And even while ujamaa sought to remake the nation-state as a macro-level version of the traditional village, it also sought to remake the village to conform to the modern imperatives of the new Tanzanian nation-state. The process of change would be mutual. In configuring the village as both a modern and traditional site, ujamaa manifested two dimensions or faces. Between 1962 and 1963, during the final push for regional federation, Nyerere’s regime began to experiment with two different models of villagization that reflected these competing constructions of the village. The first echoed a technocratic strand of colonial policy and a wider global movement toward scientifically calibrated development.72 From early on, colonial officials in Tanganyika sought to balance their desire to administer stable populations rooted in settled rural units with their need to mobilize labor and thus encourage migration. Throughout 70

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For this reason, Mamdani holds up Nyerere as an exemplar of a rare postcolonial leader who challenged and overcame the divisive legacy of indirect rule. Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). TANU removed the powers of chiefs shortly after independence; a major push to make Swahili the official national language began in early 1967. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert; Mitchell, Rule of Experts.

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the 1940s and 1950s, a push for welfare reforms designed to accommodate African urbanization conflicted with yet heightened colonial fears of “detribalization,” leading to constant drives to “repatriate” mobile or unemployed urban populations to the countryside. Simultaneously, the village became a site for modernization initiatives as well as a space for conservative policy. To combat environmental and health problems such as soil erosion and sleeping sickness, colonial authorities encouraged or mandated clustered settlement for many populations.73 In southeastern Tanganyika – then part of a larger Southern Province – such efforts at population concentration as well as the broader colonial policies of taxation and labor recruitment fueled a material dialectic between settlement and mobility among the region’s residents – a reality mirroring the ambivalent position of the village in the colonial imaginary. Illustrating this tension, many elderly residents of Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe recall the 1950s local policy of chalalo, which required large groups of people to farm contiguously in fixed village plots, at the same time that they insist on the contrasting contemporaneous prevalence of migration and relocation. During the decolonization era, numerous international development organizations also endorsed and adopted this construction of the village as a tool for modernization. In 1959–60, a World Bank survey mission visited East Africa, completing a report that recommended to the postcolonial Tanganyikan leadership an agricultural development policy based on the “improvement” and “transformation” approaches. The former sought to ameliorate existing agricultural practices through targeted interventions, whereas the latter sought to entirely remake popular modes of farming through selective resettlement schemes. On such sites, government managers would supervise volunteer recruits supposedly extracted from the limiting pressures of their prior social contexts, instructing them in the usage of mechanized agricultural equipment and familiarizing them with “efficient” farming methods. Beginning in 1963, Tanganyika’s government implemented approximately thirty pilot settlement programs throughout the country according to a logic resembling the World Bank’s “transformation” approach.74 Most schemes were unable to match the government’s high capital expenditure on equipment, inputs, and “expert” staff with anything approaching profitable production rates. Moreover, tensions among farmers and between farmers and managers emerged and escalated. These settlements, overseen by the Rural Settlement Commission (later the Village Settlement Agency, or VSA), were 73 74

An overview of the policies of this period, which many scholars refer to as “the second colonial occupation,” can be found in Chapter 14 of Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika. US National Archives (NARA), General Records of the Department of State, Record Group (RG) 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1963, Box 4219. Amembassy Dar es Salaam to Department of State, “Tanganyika Government Announces Establishment of Rural Settlement Commission,” May 23, 1963.

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widely thought to be failures and abandoned by 1966. However, they established a postcolonial precedent for conceiving of the village as a convenient space for state intervention into rural practices as opposed to an entity valued for a particular set of autonomous social relations. Conversely, a second model of villagization in early postcolonial Tanzania reflected a very different set of ideas and influences and significantly departed from colonial policy. Just before the Rural Settlement Commission introduced the highly capitalized, state-supervised village into national politics, the Tanganyikan government began encouraging more decentralized efforts at popular experimentation with cooperative farming, channeled through institutions such as the National Service and TYL. The National Service brought together Tanzanians between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to work on “nation-building” projects, and it emphasized voluntarism, popular initiative, and the role of youths in development. It was begun in August 1963 with 250 full-time and 500 part-time volunteer recruits, under the oversight of officials from Israel and Yugoslavia.75 National Service members participated in a variety of endeavors, including working on communal farms affixed to residential camps throughout the country. Additionally, TANU Youth Leaguers spearheaded a number of settlements distinguished from their VSA counterparts by their more local organization. The most well known of these was the Ruvuma Development Association (RDA), established by local TYL members in 1962 as an amalgamation of communal villages. (By 1967, the RDA had grown to include seventeen villages and more than four hundred families; from 1963 onward, it was advised by Ralph Ibbott, a British surveyor who had formerly worked at a large agricultural cooperative on a Southern Rhodesian Anglican mission station.)76 In promoting and praising such initiatives, Nyerere’s regime underscored the grassroots socialist potential of communal living and working instead of the modernizing potential of increasing access between rural populations and the state. In fact, these village schemes existed neither in a realm of purely autonomous grassroots initiative nor exclusively within the orbit of state control, but they were distinct from modernization-style villagization schemes.77 For them, the important thing about the village was agrarian community itself. 75 76 77

NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1963, Box 4219. Dar es Salaam to Secretary of State, August 2, 1963. Kjell Havnevik, Tanzania: The Limits to Development from Above (Uppsala, Sweden: Nordic Africa Institute, 1993), 198. A number of scholars have described the RDA as a purely grassroots organization springing from roots in Tanzanian soil, such as Schneider, Government of Development and Michael Jennings, Surrogates of the State: NGOs, Development, and Ujamaa in Tanzania (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2008). In doing so, they overlook the importance of Ibbott’s biography, which suggests that his vision of rural cooperation was significantly informed by Christian missionary models, as described by John Comaroff, “Images of Empires, Contests

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This second version of postcolonial villagization – reflecting another strand of African Socialism’s configuration of the village more generally – had much more in common with other contemporaneous socialist-inflected national development initiatives than with colonial policy. The rationale underpinning Nyerere’s call for decentralized experimentation with communal farming represented an adaptation of Marx’s notion of primitive communism; amid a wider global transition to capitalism, ujamaa held, this earlier form had not been extinguished in the African countryside. Accordingly, the original communal subjectivities supposedly still inherent in village communities would be a more appropriate lever of socialist revolution than an abstract historical logic that poorly fit the experiences of the predominantly rural postcolonial world. This ideological stance mirrored other appropriations and revisions of Marxist thought to fit postcolonial contexts and borrowed a spirit of flexibility from Fabian socialism (which Nyerere encountered during his study at Edinburgh). As noted, Tanganyika’s relations with Israel and Yugoslavia directly informed the conception and evolution of its communal villagization effort, through foreign oversight of the new National Service program (Figure 2). Initially, Israel’s model of liberal socialism, with its emphasis on the collective kibbutz, was a strong influence. Israel was a major donor of aid-in-kind to Tanzania during the early 1960s and was especially active in the field of youth service after dabbling in support for military training. Israelis supervised early communal farming ventures on National Service schemes after making a formal proposal to the Tanganyikan government in 1963 to initiate a system of cooperative farming based on the kibbutz or moshav model.78 (This aid quickly became politicized because of Tanzania’s already complicated relationship to the Arab and Muslim world following the Zanzibar Revolution, and after the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, the Israeli-Tanzanian relationship attenuated considerably.)79 Officials from Yugoslavia also worked on National Service

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of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa,” in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, 163–97. For more on Ibbott’s work in Southern Rhodesia, see the memoir of a fellow missionary: Patricia Chater, Hidden Treasure: A Memory (Harare: Weaver Press, 2012); for his work in Tanzania, see the memoir of an American volunteer who lived on the RDA: Kate Wenner, Shamba Letu: An American Girl’s Adventure in a Communal Village in Tanzania (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1970). NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1964–66, Box 1684. Dar es Salaam to Department of State, January 4, 1964. In 1961, Tanganyika’s minister of agriculture visited Israel, and later that year, a delegation of Tanganyikan farmers and trade union leaders visited Israel on a three-week study tour. In 1963, an Israeli advisor was invited to make recommendations on the “Organisational Framework for Villagization in Tanganyika.” Syracuse University Village Settlement Project Records, nos. 1–43, document 27: “An Organisation Framework for the Physical Planning Aspects of Rural Settlements in Tanganyika.” No date given (1965 or 1966). For an overview, see Joel Peters, Israel and Africa (London: British Academic Press, 1992).

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figure 2. Tanzanian officials and a foreign adviser on a National Service farm, undated photo (likely 1960s). Courtesy Tanzania Information Services.

schemes and were involved in a variety of sectors of Tanzanian development. Although Eastern European socialist states did not have as strong of a tradition of collective farming in rural units, they provided a reservoir of expertise on cooperative farming techniques and management to Tanzanians throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.80 Similar foreign influences shaped youth service institutions in other African Socialist countries from which Tanzanian officials also took inspiration. In 1957, the Ghanaian government founded the Builders Brigade, which put groups of young citizens to work on agricultural production schemes. Initially, the Builders Brigade (later called the Workers Brigade) drew on such examples as the Israeli Nahal, observed firsthand as part of a youth delegation’s visit to that country in 1957.81 In 1960, Israeli advisors traveled to Ghana to help reconfigure the mission of the brigade; that same 80 81

Other involved Eastern European states included Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. Jeffrey Ahlman, “A New Type of Citizen: Youth, Gender, and Generation in the Ghanaian Builders Brigade,” Journal of African History 53, 1 (2012): 87–106; Zach Levey, “The Rise and Decline of a Special Relationship: Israel and Ghana, 1957–1966,” African Studies Review 46, 1 (2003): 155–77.

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year, Derek Bryceson, Tanganyika’s minister of health and labor, began discussing “the possibility of a ‘National Service Act’ for Tanganyika, in order that labor brigades, such as have been used in Ghana, might be put to work in Tanganyika.”82 After studying the brigade in Accra, Bryceson explained “that he was even more enthusiastic over the use of ‘builders brigades’ in Tanganyika” and that he found “the situations in Ghana and Tanganyika very similar.” He added that he anticipated “the introduction of a national service act through which secondary school graduates will be required to serve a certain period of time in ‘builders brigades’ if not capable of continuing their education.” This idea, Bryceson reported, “had considerable backing among the leaders of TANU.”83 After 1964, the Ghanaian Convention People’s Party (CPP) commissioned East German officials to make recommendations for the further transformation of the brigade – a move that paralleled the Tanzanian embrace of Yugoslavian advisors. Although the Ghanaian brigade operated thirty-eight farms, by 1964, its scope increasingly included industrial and public works projects.84 In Mali, a similar national service institution focused more explicitly on communal agriculture. Mali’s Service Civique Rural began in 1960 by recruiting young men to work together on state farms for two-year periods; this experiment, too, was informed by the Israeli model, which Union Soudanaise–Rassemblement D´emocratique Africain (US-RDA) officials encountered on a 1958 visit to that country. Outside of the Service Civique, during the early 1960s, local governments in many parts of Mali encouraged smaller-scale efforts to establish collective gardens in villages and schools.85 Early 1960s connections between African Socialist regimes and other socialist powers – most notably the People’s Republic of China – further manifested and fed into a common ideological and policy emphasis on communal agricultural labor and – in Tanzania – the communal village in particular. The transnational circuits that sustained liberation movements in southern Africa and Portuguese colonies linked supportive sub-Saharan African states to North African radicals like Algeria as well as the Chinese, Soviet, and Cuban regimes. Early on, FRELIMO and ANC forces based in 82

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NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal File 1960–63, Box 2773. Amconsul Dar es Salaam to Department of State, “Some Recent Labor Developments in Tanganyika,” December 9, 1960. NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal File 1960–63, Box 2029. Amconsul Dar es Salaam to Department of State, “Tanganyika’s Minister of Labour Plans Use of ‘Builders Brigades,’” January 6, 1961. Ahlman, “A New Type of Citizen.” Baz Lecocq, “From Colonialism to Keita: Comparing Pre- and Post-Independence Regimes (1946–1968),” Mande Studies 5 (2003): 29–48; Catherine Bogosian, “The ‘Little Farming Soldiers’: The Evolution of a Labor Army in Post-Colonial Mali,” Mande Studies 5 (2003): 83–100; Monica van Beusekom, “Individualism, Community, and Cooperatives in the Development Thinking of the Union Soudanaise-RDA, 1946–1960,” African Studies Review 51, 2 (2008): 1–25.

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Tanzania trained in China and the Soviet Union in addition to Egypt, Ghana, and Algeria; within Tanzania, training camps for southern African freedom fighters were staffed by instructors from all of these countries.86 Chinese aid featured especially prominently in this area, and Tanzanian political discourse increasingly evinced an affinity for the Chinese socialist model. In 1964, China began training soldiers of Zanzibar’s People’s Liberation Army and the Tanzania People’s Defence Forces (TPDF) – many of whom would later go on to secure Tanzania’s southern border with Mozambique and train freedom fighters themselves – as well as providing instruction to southern African guerrillas at Moshi Police College and in designated camps.87 By 1970, the Chinese had become the largest supplier of weapons and training to Tanzania-based freedom fighters.88 Chinese contributions extended well beyond the sphere of anticolonial activism, however. Throughout the 1960s, Tanzania’s relationship with China was easily the most significant of its links to socialist states or foreign entities in general; this connection was also the deepest of China’s relationships with African countries at the time. A 1960 visit to Beijing by a Tanganyikan women’s delegation initiated diplomatic relations, and Chinese aid grew substantially over the next several years. In 1964 alone, China donated $45.5 million worth of aid to Tanzania – nearly half of its total annual aid to the African continent.89 This assistance included everything from books and broadcasting equipment to services provided by visiting rural medical teams (Figure 3); interest-free loans and investment in a labor-intensive textile mill, a joint shipping line, and state farms; and the design and construction of major transportation infrastructure. Such material connections were paralleled in the emergence of shared political imaginaries. During this period, Nyerere and his TANU colleagues repeatedly championed and drew on the Chinese model of alternative socialist development. Starting in the late 1950s, Maoists adopted a theory of permanent revolution, which held that “socialist ends could be attained only by socialist means.”90 More specifically, this position rejected orthodox Marxism–Leninism’s insistence on industrial capitalism as a necessary stage in socialist transition. Instead, it aimed to simultaneously create and act on conditions favorable to socialist development among the perceived revolutionary vanguard – the peasantry. Between 1958 and 1960, China’s

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See various files, NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1963, Box 4057. “Russians and Chinese Use Tanzania as Arms Centre,” Sunday Telegraph, March 21, 1965. UKNA, FCO, 31/690. East African Department, “Anglo-U.S. Talks on China. The Chinese in Tanzania,” Background Notes, November 1970. Tareq Ismael, “The People’s Republic of China and Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 9, 4 (1971): 515. Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic (New York: Free Press, 1999), 191.

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figure 3. Chinese doctors at Mtwara Health Center, September 12, 1975. Courtesy Daily News.

Great Leap Forward campaign sought to implement such a developmental strategy through the formation of agricultural communes and a program of rural industrialization. Although the Great Leap concluded with a period of ideological retrenchment preceding the Cultural Revolution’s inception in 1966, it consolidated the Chinese emphasis on the countryside – literally and metaphorically, at the micro and macro levels. During this interim period, Chinese officials began asserting that the “countryside of the world,” or developing countries, would overcome the “cities of the world,” or richer Euro-American nations, just as Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army had defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Republican forces.91 Tanzania’s focus on village communalism notably resembled this Maoist conception of agrarian socialism – in its actual configuration of domestic policy and its ideological rendering of global affairs. What came to be the policy of ujamaa villagization fused the VSA and National Service/TYL approaches of the early 1960s, selectively echoing and remaking elements of the conservative philosophy of indirect rule and the modernizing rationale of late colonial development policy but also reflecting a very different logic of Third World socialism. Nyerere sought to create 91

Defense minister Lin Biao initiated this discourse in 1965.

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modern villages to facilitate administrative contact with rural citizens and to augment the bonds of reciprocity and ethics of hard work supposedly rooted in traditional villages. Ujamaa villages would be functional communal units that – unlike VSA settlements – were not heavily subsidized by the Tanzanian state. They were to adopt a spirit of socialist self-reliance even while engaging with a welfare state designed to provide developmental services to and foster national subjectivities among its citizens. In 1965, after visiting Beijing on a widely publicized diplomatic mission, Nyerere condemned the “list of needs and requests for assistance” that he had encountered in VSA schemes and called for an ethos of discipline and austerity in rural settlements. The Chinese, he noted, “are a frugal people; they husband their resources very carefully indeed, and only spend money on things which are absolutely essential.” “This attitude we have to adopt too,” he continued, explaining, “The only way to defeat our present poverty is to accept the fact that it exists, to live as poor people.”92 This desired disposition of spartan resourcefulness in ujamaa villages did not only invoke the Chinese example and the colonial precedent of rural self-help schemes (which colonial officials used to legitimize uncompensated labor and low capital expenditure on local-level development).93 TANU officials also suggested that such a spirit of self-reliance inhered in the precolonial communal village and was thus an indigenous tradition, as opposed to the perceived profiteering and decadence of traders and consumers in cities framed as products of external cultural contamination. The latter viewpoint drew from local political idioms aligned with anticolonial ideology that had germinated within preindependence Tanganyika. In particular, one decades-old strain of Tanganyikan nationalism coded the rural village – sometimes conflated with the Christian mission station – as a site of authentic African culture and genuine production. By contrast, coastal cities were seen as repositories of foreignness and agents of economic exploitation, and they were often described in terms invoking bloodsucking or parasitism.94 In some ways, this narrative – which resulted in proposals such as African civil servant Martin Kayamba’s 1937 vision of a future society that was “rural, self-sufficient, and exclusively African” – was particular to East Africa; as James Brennan writes, it “inverted conventional discursive and social practices of Swahili culture that equate becoming civilized with adopting Islamic coastal customs and ideally intermarrying with Arabs.”95 92 93 94 95

“Union Being Cemented, Says Mwalimu: Union Making Great Progress,” Nationalist, April 27, 1965. Jennings, “We Must Run.” Emily Callaci, “‘Chief Village in a Nation of Villages’: History, Race and Authority in Tanzania’s Dodoma Plan,” Urban History (forthcoming). James Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 127–8. This discourse reflected the region’s history of coastal Arab hegemony and slave trading.

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Yet this discourse also indexed a broader inclination of anticolonial thought to locate indigenous culture – a crucial construction for sustaining nationalist movements – in spaces seen as unpolluted by the corrupting influence of colonial society. The romanticization of agrarian community in anticolonial or postcolonial political imaginaries was perhaps most apparent in Gandhi’s conception of the self-sufficient village republic, which shared much with Henry Maine’s thought but was not reducible to it. Generally, the nationalist movements of predominantly rural colonies emerged in urban settings among male elites educated in Western institutions – individuals themselves undeniably hybrid products of indigenous and colonial influences.96 In these situations, discursive invocations of the rural (and the village community, more specifically) and the domestic (and the female, more specifically) as vessels of purely indigenous tradition became widespread. Cultural trends corresponded with the political centrality of the village imaginary; the village novel became a staple of Egyptian nationalism, for instance, as did the village film in India.97 In part, the nostalgic celebration of rural community helped manage and compensate for the disruptions of territorial nationalism. It also held considerable popular appeal for underscoring the virtue and cultural purity of the countryside amid rapid urbanization and in the face of the widening reach of a capitalist wage labor economy. Like their counterparts in other colonial contexts, most rural Tanzanians had been brought into the orbit of these latter forces by the late colonial period, despite Nyerere’s characterization of the countryside as home to a largely intact version of precolonial society. This was certainly true in the Southeast, whose reputation as a primitive, isolated space belied its residents’ frequent contact – direct or indirect – with monetary transactions and urban lifestyles. Ultimately, ujamaa’s representation of the traditional village was a very modern phenomenon. Self-Reliance, Security, and Sovereignty Over the course of the 1960s, the concepts of self-reliance and security became prominent elements of Tanzanian political discourse, both in relation to the metaphorical and material institution of the village and in their own right. These principles, too, were strikingly multivalent but constituted a shared priority of a variety of political projects across the 1960s world. As with the focus on the village, such similarities partly resulted 96

97

See Andreas Eckert, “Julius Nyerere, Tanzanian Elites, and the Project of African Socialism,” in Jost Dulffer and Marc Frey, eds., Elites and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century ¨ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 216–40. Samah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880–1985 (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jyotika Virdi, The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

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from ideological transfers – active borrowing from foreign developmental models – but also grew more organically out of common structural conditions. For countries emerging from the shadow of colonial rule only to face the combined threats to hard-won sovereignty posed by Cold War politics and the capitalist world economy, self-reliance proved an appealing aspiration and strategy. Political autonomy from superpower competition – in the realm of domestic ideology and foreign affairs – became a priority for Third World countries seeking to determine their own developmental courses and formulate diplomatic relationships on their own terms. Nonalignment – or “positive neutralism,” as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser put it – sought to preserve such autonomy through equal-opportunity diversification in international relations, and it brought together countries in similar positions. Characteristically, Nyerere drew on local idioms to ground Tanzania’s embrace of this global platform. “We have a saying in East Africa: when elephants fight it is the grass which gets crushed,” he pronounced in Beijing in February 1965. “We have therefore determined to adopt a policy of non-alignment in relation to international conflicts which do not concern us,” he explained.98 The foreign relationships from which ujamaa took partial inspiration substantiated Tanzania’s commitment to transnational engagement, which ujamaa discourse described as part of an effort to practice kinship-inspired community at the international level. Yet many of these relationships – especially within larger coalitions such as the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization and the Non-Aligned Movement – were based on a collective commitment to maintaining individual national sovereignty or achieving national self-reliance.99 In this way, Tanzania’s foreign relations were often both premised on and limited by an emphasis on self-reliance. This ambivalence was mirrored in domestic affairs, in the configuration of the village as both an a priori self-sufficient local unit and a tool for facilitating state intervention to consolidate a self-sufficient Tanzanian nation in the future. A number of diplomatic disputes in the years following independence reinforced Tanzania’s discourse of national self-reliance. In late 1964, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) suspended diplomatic ties and aid to Tanzania after a German Democratic Republic (GDR) consulate opened on Zanzibari soil in violation of the Hallstein Doctrine. (Prior to 1970, the FRG refused to retain relations with any country that recognized the GDR; at this point, Egypt and Guinea were the only other African countries housing East German consulates.)100 The party-run Tanzanian press took the occasion to 98 99 100

“New Methods of Trying to Control Africa Will Fail,” full text of speech by President Nyerere at rally in Peking, China, Nationalist, February 22, 1965. Tanzania hosted meetings of AAPSO and the NAM Preparatory Committee in 1963 and 1970, respectively. Gareth Winrow, The Foreign Policy of the GDR in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). The full break lasted until 1966.

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underscore the importance of self-reliance as a political principle and affirm the high stakes of nonalignment. One March 1965 editorial, for instance, praised Nyerere’s response to the FRG’s decision as providing “an example that no African state should owe its independence and freedom of decision to any outside power however wealthy or mighty.”101 In late 1965, Tanzania broke relations with the United Kingdom after the British government refused to agree to OAU demands for economic sanctions against Rhodesia in the wake of the white minority regime’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence. By the following year, Tanzania was the only Commonwealth country without relations with Britain (a situation that lasted until 1968). This decision, too, was domestically discussed as confirmation that exclusive dependence on any one foreign party was incompatible with the practice of ethical diplomacy and the preservation of autonomy in the realm of international relations. Tanzania filled the gap in aid that these diplomatic breaks produced by cultivating a closer relationship with the Chinese, who took the opportunity to explicitly position themselves as aligned with Tanzania’s political agenda.102 The construction of the Chinese-funded TAZARA railway, which connected Dar es Salaam with the neighboring but distant Zambian capital of Lusaka, materialized these shared priorities. In 1967, a United Nations mission to the region called for “new supply and export routes for Zambia to reduce her economic dependence on Rhodesia.”103 As part of this proposed anticolonial effort to whittle down the economic base of the Rhodesian and South African regimes by reorganizing regional trade patterns, Tanzanian officials initially offered the southern port of Mtwara as a coastal outlet for landlocked Zambia. In the short term, the increased traffic through Mtwara had significant local implications for southeastern Tanzania, suddenly “making it a focal point of investment projects worth over sh.2,000,000” to bolster the infrastructure of and around the region’s seaport and airport.104 However, channeling Zambian trade to and from Mtwara via air transport merely served as a stopgap strategy in a larger effort to enhance regional economic integration. A more efficient and sustainable solution was ultimately found in the construction of the Uhuru, or “Freedom,” Railway.105 Preliminary discussions of the railway project began in 1965; the Chinese deal was formalized after the World Bank and other potential donors rejected 101 102 103 104 105

“Tanzania/Bonn Relations,” Nationalist, March 2, 1965. After the break with Israel following the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, Tanzania also turned to Canada as a major donor. “Plan to Mount New Airlift to Zambia: U.N. Experts Arrive in Dar,” Nationalist, February 17, 1967. “Mtwara Moving Fast,” Nationalist, January 24, 1968. Richard Hall and Hugh Peyman, The Great Uhuru Railway: China’s Showpiece in Africa (London: Gollancz, 1976); Jamie Monson, Africa’s Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

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figure 4. Vice President Rashidi Kawawa with Chinese officials on the TAZARA, March 2, 1972. Courtesy Daily News.

Tanzanian and Zambian requests for investment, and the TAZARA railway was built between 1969 and 1974 (Figure 4). Chinese support for this initiative – in the form of money, technology, and laborers – benefited the Tanzanian and Zambian economies, aided southern African liberation struggles, and bolstered China’s Third World credentials.

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Tanzania’s ties to China reinforced the primacy of self-reliance in ujamaa discourse – indirectly, by confirming the importance of a nonaligned stance, and directly, through the influence of Chinese development discourse. The close Sino-Tanzanian relationship inspired considerable suspicion and close monitoring by the United States and United Kingdom. In 1965, Nyerere remarked that “large sections of the Western Press and some Western politicians have been examining us through microscopes”; he laughed off scrutiny of his penchant for Mao-style suits, adding, “I gather that even the suits I wear have been adduced as evidence of pernicious Chinese influence.”106 In 1968, in the wake of the TAZARA agreement, TANU officials maintained, “A railway was a railway whether it was built by Chinese or Italians and it was not necessarily ‘Red.’”107 The domestic press even compared the TAZARA to Egypt’s construction of the Aswan Dam using funds from the nationalized Suez Canal.108 This modeling after the Egyptian symbol of self-reliance paralleled TANU’s embrace of China’s development discourse. After the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s, Chinese leaders began to promote a policy of economic self-reliance, which entailed diversifying trade partnerships and attempting to increase domestic production through the Great Leap Forward. This geopolitical reconfiguration within the socialist world aligned with Maoism’s ideological reconfiguration of the Cold War; in a new effort to reach out to African and Asian countries, Maoists proposed a modified theory of the Three Worlds.109 As Third World partners of China within this revised paradigm, TANU leaders repeatedly pointed to China as both a model of the correct path of self-reliance and an illustration of the concrete benefits of pursuing such a developmental course. After touring China as part of a TANU friendship delegation in 1967, party secretary Pius Msekwa pronounced, “China has set an excellent example for us in taking the road of self-reliance. . . . Tanzania must take this road too. It’s the only road to make our country strong and prosperous.”110 The examples of Egypt and China notwithstanding, economic autarky was an exceedingly difficult tactic and elusive goal for newly independent countries. Many African countries, in particular, were constrained by their small size, orientation toward the export of primary products, and lack of infrastructure. Tanzania’s major exports at independence, for instance, consisted of cotton, sisal, coffee, tea, and tobacco.111 A transnational federation promised to help peripheral economies practice internal trade and develop 106 107 108 109 110 111

“President Nyerere Speaks Out on Remaining Colonies: Bloodshed? It’s Up to West,” Nationalist, June 24, 1965. “Tan-Zam Railway Is Not ‘Red’ Says Nyerere,” Nationalist, October 20, 1968. “Aswan Dam,” Nationalist, January 15, 1968. The Cold War superpowers constituted the First World, and their satellites and allies constituted the Second World. The Third World comprised neutral or nonaligned countries. “TANU Team Flies to S. China,” Nationalist, December 22, 1967. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika.

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domestic productive capacities by pooling land and resources, but the eclipse of the Pan-Africanist project of territorial unification rendered such collective self-sufficiency a distant dream. The Arusha Declaration nevertheless cautioned against depending on foreign donations, loans, and investments that would inherently “endanger our independence.” Rather than prescribing complete abstinence from foreign economic assistance, the declaration issued an injunction against “choosing money – something we do not have – to be the major instrument of our development.”112 Very quickly, Tanzanian policy confirmed the supremacy of the political imperative of autonomy over the economic logic of autarky, with diversification instead of isolationism becoming the norm in matters of foreign trade and aid.113 Tanzania was not alone in this respect. Other African Socialist countries, too, emphasized self-reliance and an aversion to money, but, as S´ekou Tour´e put it, they “never excluded cooperation with capital” just because they “rejected capitalism” as an organizing mode of domestic development.114 Even so, the fact that Tanzania had come to be the recipient of more foreign aid than any other African country by the 1970s led many outside observers to comment on the apparent “paradox of self-reliance awash in a sea of aid” – a sentiment that subsequently intensified scholarly skepticism about the ujamaa project as a whole.115 This skepticism extends to the pronounced attention to national security in Tanzanian political discourse. Invocations of security – linked to the notion of national unity vis-a-vis domestic politics and national sovereignty ` vis-a-vis international politics – appeared early on, when the Tanganyikan ` government passed the Preventive Detention Act in June 1962. Both internal and external dynamics accounted for this event and the broader structural phenomena with which it was associated: the dismantling of Tanganyika’s independent labor movement and opposition parties and the increasing suspicion of foreign interference in national affairs. Within Tanganyikan borders, critiques of TANU’s moderate stance on the Africanization of the civil service had united the most viable opposition party, the African National

112 113

114 115

Nyerere, “Arusha Declaration,” 241. In an August 1967 speech, “The Purpose Is Man,” reprinted in Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, Nyerere clarified, “The doctrine of self-reliance does not imply isolationism, either politically or economically. . . . [It] is unlikely to reduce our participation in international trade, but it should, over time, change its character. . . . Tanzania has not said it does not want international assistance in its development” (321–2). This position can be best described as “insulationist” instead of isolationist, as Kiran Klaus Patel puts it for a comparative case in “The New Deal: A Global History,” paper presented at Boston College, October 2013 (cited with permission). ´ Ahmed S´ekou Tour´e, La Planification Economique (Conakry: Imprimerie Nationale, 1960), 95, quoted in Andrain, “Guinea and Senegal,” 162. Crawford Young, Ideology and Development in Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 111.

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Congress (ANC), and the Tanganyika Federation of Labor (TFL).116 In January 1962, amid acrimonious debate, Nyerere resigned as prime minister, devoting the rest of the year to touring the country and refining his ujamaa philosophy before taking up the elected post of president that December. Former TFL president Rashidi Kawawa adopted Nyerere’s duties for the interim period, during which time the government passed legislation gutting the power of autonomous unions and authorizing preventive detention.117 Shortly after assuming the presidency, Nyerere announced plans to introduce a one-party system. He reviewed the logic for this political arrangement as well as the growing use of the Preventive Detention Act in a speech made at the newly opened Dar es Salaam University College in August 1964. “Our Union has neither the long tradition of nationhood, nor the strong physical means of national security, which older countries take for granted,” he stated.118 Preventive detention could, in this understanding, help insulate Tanzania from both unwanted foreign intervention and domestic sedition. A single-party state structure would further bolster national unity, according to Nyerere, while still preserving the spirit of democratic representation through candidate elections. Such an approach had precedents in other African Socialist states. Ghana was one case in point. In late 1961, dozens of leading politicians – mostly belonging to the opposition – were arrested under Ghana’s Preventive Detention Act.119 The following year brought a reported bomb attempt on Nkrumah’s life, which further narrowed the country’s democratic space. In Guinea, as well, “S´ekou Tour´e began to clamp down on the possibilities of dissent in 1961, when the so-called Teacher’s Plot became the first major event in a long line of claims by the state to have discovered a ‘permanent plot’ to sabotage and overthrow the Guinean revolution.”120 In 1965, Nyerere sent Tanzanian foreign minister Oscar Kambona to Guinea on “a ‘special mission’ to study the structure of the party and government there,” since “the two countries had similar systems and much to learn from each

116

117

118 119 120

This dated to conflicting visions of national citizenship espoused by parties vying for power in the late 1950s. See James Brennan, “The Short History of Political Opposition and Multi-Party Democracy in Tanganyika, 1958–1964,” in Gregory Maddox and James Giblin, eds., In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), 250–76. Observers noted that this policy “seemed to be modeled after Ghana’s labor legislation – aiming to limit the number of unions and also to keep them under its control.” NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal File 1960–63, Box 2029. Amembassy Dar es Salaam to Department of State, “Tanganyika Preparing New Labor Legislation,” May 8, 1962. Nyerere, “Opening of the University College Campus,” in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, 312. Colin Legum, “Socialism in Ghana: A Political Interpretation,” in Friedland and Rosberg, African Socialism, 149. McGovern, Unmasking the State, 221.

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other.”121 Reported coup attempts in these parallel contexts – whether real or apocryphal, caused by the brittle structure of the one-party state, or vice versa – undoubtedly fueled the suspicions of the Tanzanian leadership.122 The example of the Congo was at the heart of this anxiety about the fragility of African national independence. Immediately after independence in 1960, the Congo devolved into an acute political crisis that began with a mutiny of the Congolese armed forces, escalated with the attempted secession of two mineral-rich provinces, and culminated in the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba after his failed bid for United Nations assistance. Belgian and American covert support for the secession movements and Lumumba’s killing sparked outrage across the continent and led to demonstrations across the world.123 It was clear that Cold War geopolitics combined ideological contests with competition for access to resources; ongoing processes of decolonization intensified the volatility of this mix. By late 1962, UN peacekeeping forces had succeeded in restoring relative order to the Congo, but the country continued to serve as a cautionary tale. In 1964, a leftist rural insurgency (the Simba rebellion) gained ground in the country’s eastern provinces; it was bolstered by Chinese and Soviet aid initially channeled through the self-declared socialist state of the Republic of the Congo and subsequently routed through Tanzania, which also helped shelter and transport a group of Cuban reinforcements led by Che Guevara. The Congolese government – once again supported by the US and Belgium – responded by hiring hundreds of white mercenaries from South Africa and Rhodesia to put down the insurgency. Joseph Mobutu concluded the prolonged period of turmoil by staging a military coup in late 1965, ushering in a decades-long era of autocratic, Western-backed rule.124 In 1962, Nyerere warned, “The events in the Congo have demonstrated that it is possible for a colonial power to leave by the front door, and the same or different external forces to come in by the back.” Continuing, he declared, “As we are emerging successfully from the first ‘Scramble for Africa,’ so we are entering a new phase, the phase of the Second Scramble for Africa.”125 121 122

123

124

125

NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1964–66, Box 2691. Amembassy Dar es Salaam to Secretary of State, Telegram Ref: Conakrys 238, November 15, 1965. The coups that eventually displaced Nkrumah (1966) and Mali’s Modibo Keita (1968) from power only reinforced TANU’s domestic security consciousness once ujamaa became official policy. Quinn Slobodian argues that the Congo protests were a key catalyst of the international student movement of the 1960s. Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). For a succinct overview of the Congo crisis as well as a thoughtful consideration of foreign involvement and intervention in Africa during the decolonization era, see Elizabeth Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Pamphlet titled “The Second Scramble” (based on a speech to the World Assembly of Youth Conference in Dar es Salaam, 1962), in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, 205.

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The Congo case further demonstrated that this “Second Scramble” fed off of domestic instability. It featured a particular combination of events and elements that the Tanzanian government – along with other African Socialist regimes – came to be highly vigilant against, individually and collectively: the mutiny of national armed forces, domestic political divisions, the heavy involvement of a former colonial power, Cold War intervention precipitated by links to socialist powers, hired aggression by southern Africans, and military coups. From the perspective of many TANU leaders, any one of these represented a grave threat to national stability and thus sovereignty, because each could potentially set off a chain reaction rapidly converting local contests for power into global ones, and vice versa. Tanzania’s proximity to the Congo, direct connection to the second chapter of the Congolese crisis, and sustained ties to socialist states magnified these perceived threats. Indeed, throughout the early 1960s, Tanzania attracted close surveillance by and frequent concern among American and Western European officials, and Tanzanian officials remained acutely conscious of this fact. This heightened awareness or anxiety led to the development of a Cold War political culture in Tanzania, which exhibited a preoccupation with national security and national autonomy (or self-reliance). This political culture was concretely informed by a series of events in 1964 and 1965 that jeopardized national security in immediate terms.126 January 1964 brought the tumultuous Zanzibar Revolution as well as an army mutiny in mainland Tanganyika over working conditions. The radical platform of the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) that came into power in independent Zanzibar and the racially inflected political violence that accompanied the revolution alarmed many mainland TANU officials and international observers. Amid reports that Zanzibar was “on the verge of becoming the Cuba of Africa,”127 the Zanzibari leadership recognized the GDR and the government of North Korea and began welcoming advisors from the USSR, GDR, and China. As Americans urged the British to intervene militarily in what they believed to be a region falling to communism,128 the extension of mainland army forces to quell the violence in Zanzibar catalyzed the mutiny of the TPDF. Along with Milton Obote and Jomo Kenyatta (soldiers had mutinied simultaneously in Uganda and Kenya), Nyerere was driven to ask for British forces to restore order. Within one week, more than three thousand British troops had arrived in East Africa and quelled the uprising, while

126

127

128

For an overview of the events detailed in this section, see Chapter 6 of Cranford Pratt, The Critical Phase in Tanzania, 1945–1968: Nyerere and the Emergence of a Socialist Strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). “Nationalism Is Viewed as Camouflage for Reds,” New York Times, January 19, 1964, quoted in Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa: 1959– 1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 59. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 58.

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Nyerere was briefly forced to go into hiding.129 TANU leaders subsequently described the incident as a moment of deep shame at the military’s lack of discipline and the country’s dependence on emergency aid from its former colonial ruler, although it was undoubtedly one of considerable fear as well, given the parallels to recent events in the Congo. In his New Year’s national address one year later, Nyerere stated, “The mutiny on the mainland was a great handicap to progress,” and “we learned from it that it is necessary for us to be vigilant in the protection of our freedom” – “that every citizen has a duty to protect the integrity and the dignity of our nation.”130 The immediate local consequences of the mutiny were an institutional reorganization of the Tanzanian security apparatus and the arrest of a number of citizens deemed insurrectionary threats.131 Yet the broader implication of the episode was, as Nyerere described, the intensification of a general political climate of security consciousness. Within the ujamaa context, the most common usage of “security” referred to the military integrity of the Tanzanian nation. Yet, as noted earlier, the concept of security (usalama or ulinzi) could be defined more expansively to encompass the social security provided to average citizens by socialist community and welfare state institutions. The term could also refer to economic security – entailing protection from predatory traders or landlords at the individual level and defense against exploitative international economic policy at the national level.132 Nyerere’s concern about security manifested throughout the Arusha Declaration in a language of development as conflict.133 Although ujamaa targeted lazy or exploitative individuals, the Arusha Declaration specified that its primary enemy was underdevelopment itself. Nyerere proclaimed, “TANU is involved in a war against poverty and oppression in our country; the struggle is aimed at moving the people of Tanzania (and the people of Africa as a whole) from a state of poverty to a state of prosperity.”134 Three years earlier, Lyndon Johnson had announced a “war on poverty” in the United States; the previous year, Nkrumah had done the same in Ghana. Tanzania’s conflation of development with conflict – of welfare with warfare – was emblematic of a larger global trend. 129 130 131 132

133 134

Timothy Parsons, The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003). “New Year Message to the Nation: President Applauds People’s Progress,” Nationalist, January 2, 1965. Including a number of labor activists represented as supporting the mutineers’ insistence on the immediate Africanization of the armed forces and civil service. Tanzania, alongside other Third World countries, advocated for the reform of such policy at the United Nations, most notably in the New International Economic Order movement of 1974. See Ali Mazrui, “Anti-Militarism and Political Militancy in Tanzania,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 12, 3 (1968): 269–84. Nyerere, “Arusha Declaration,” 235.

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Yet this security culture also reflected specifically regional dynamics. Tanzania’s growing anticolonial solidarity and simultaneously deepening national contours produced a tension between the impulse to attain national sovereignty for neighboring territories and the desire to preserve Tanzania’s own fragile national sovereignty. Support for armed struggle, the covert traffic of arms and guerrilla fighters, and escalating interventions in the Congo and Mozambique (which some officials called “the Vietnam of East Africa”) added up to a volatile mix. Security was extremely tight at all of the Tanzanian training camps for freedom fighters; an “Operation Refugee” in November 1964 even attempted to transfer liberation movements’ offices from Dar es Salaam to remote Mbeya to ensure greater secrecy and protection.135 The dangers inherent in hosting freedom fighters stemmed from both possible retaliation by hostile foreign regimes and the potential for internal destabilization represented by large numbers of young armed men within national borders. Official anxiety about political refugees was mirrored in the ambivalent reception of displaced foreign civilians who entered Tanzania from neighboring sites of conflict. Late in 1964, thousands of Makonde men and women began to cross the Ruvuma River into Tanzania from Mozambique. These refugees were transferred to two settlement camps at Rutamba (in what was then part of Mtwara Region), where they received support from a range of foreign humanitarian agencies.136 Other refugees housed elsewhere included ethnically Tutsi Rwandese (about three thousand of them had been airlifted from the Congo in late 1964 and 1965, adding to about ten thousand earlier arrivals) and those fleeing the eastern Congo conflict.137 On the one hand, Tanzanian leaders publicly welcomed these men and women. During a 1964 visit to a western border town, for instance, Nyerere applauded local citizens’ accommodation of Congolese refugees as a display of “real African Socialism.”138 On the other hand, many officials expressed

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UKNA, Dominion Office (DO), 213/123. British High Commission, Dar es Salaam to East Africa Political Department, November 2, 1964. Christian Williams describes firsthand experiences with this security culture in a training camp in “Living in Exile: Daily Life and International Relations at SWAPO’s Kongwa Camp,” Kronos 37, 1 (2011): 60–86. These included the World Food Program, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Oxfam, and Tanzania Christian Refugee Services. UKNA, DO, 213/123. R. H. Hobden, East Africa Political Department, Report: “Tanzania: Liberation Movements and Refugees,” January 1966. Refugees from Rwanda were fleeing ethnic violence in their young country; a second large wave of Rwandese refugees fleeing genocidal conditions entered Tanzania in the early 1990s. The fate of the earlier refugees in Tanzania remains deeply contested today, with the government taking steps to expel some of these individuals in recent years. The same is true for Tanzania-based communities of refugees from Burundi and the Congo. NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1964–66, Box 2694. Telegram from Dar es Salaam, October 6, 1964.

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doubts about the moral character and political intentions of refugees, which could compromise Tanzanian security in economic and political terms. In 1963, the Tabora regional commissioner publicly opposed efforts to relocate Rwandese refugees in Tanzania, drawing on widely circulated rhetoric concerning the danger of foreign saboteurs.139 The following year, the Kigoma regional commissioner announced locally that “anyone who meets a stranger from Congo should report him to the police.”140 In a sense, Tanzania’s cosmopolitan solidarity fed into a general climate of xenophobia in which foreignness was inherently suspect, and it created an overriding fear of nonsettled people among many officials and some rural residents. This aversion to mobility, in turn, reinforced and reflected the growing national focus on settlement in villages. Soon after FRELIMO initiated its liberation struggle, reports of possible Portuguese retaliation onto Tanzanian territory began to circulate. Most of the fighting in Mozambique occurred in the colony’s rural northern regions, bringing increasingly violent conflict to Tanzania’s back door. Beginning in 1962, Tanzanian authorities detained or deported a number of alleged Portuguese agents of foreign and local extraction,141 and by 1964, Zanzibari army units had been deployed to Tanzania’s southern border to police the area.142 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs prohibited diplomats from visiting Mtwara Region, and American intelligence reported “an atmosphere of defensive anxiety along the southern border” after documented leaflet raids and rumors of “Portuguese-planted bombs on village tracks.”143 The Zanzibari troops – some of whom had received political and military training in Cuba – were “manning road blocks around Mtwara and stopping passersby, to examine identity cards.”144 Tanzania’s involvement with the Congo also furthered such security concerns along the country’s western border. In Kigoma, as in Mtwara, village militias, along with “members of regular

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142 143 144

NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1964–66, Box 2688. Airgram from American Embassy Dar es Salaam Re: “Letters to the Editor Concerning Western Plot to Subvert Tanzania,” December 29, 1964. NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1964–66, Box 2693. Telegram from Dar es Salaam, July 3, 1964. NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1963, Box 4057. From Amembassy Dar es Salaam, “Tanganyika Government Acts against Alleged Portuguese Agent and Religious Dissident,” September 3, 1963. UKNA, FO, 371/176521. J. L. Taylor, British Embassy, Bonn to P.R.A. Mansfield, Foreign Office, October 29, 1964. UKNA, FCO, 31/169. R. H. Hobden, East and Southern Africa Department to W. G. Lamarque, Ministry of Overseas Development, January 1968. UKNA, FCO, 31/169. William Wilson, Canadian High Commission, British Interests Section, Dar es Salaam to R. H. Hobden, East Africa Department, Commonwealth Office, October 17, 1967.

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police, prison service, police field force, National Service, and TANU Youth League” who had undergone military training, patrolled the region.145 Tanzania’s Cold War political culture, with its fixation on the interlinked threats of foreign intervention and domestic destabilization, was not uniformly manifested among average citizens across the country. In Mtwara Region, rural residents selectively adopted elements of this political culture that resonated with their experiences and interests. In some cases, local men and women promoted and even exceeded official injunctions to vigilance, whereas in others, they remained largely indifferent to the reigning security furor. The villages of Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe were located at sufficient distance from the southern border that most of their elderly inhabitants now dismiss any suggestion that they had previously been under the threat of direct Portuguese attack. When discussing past security issues, they are more likely to highlight the dangers inherent in their relationship to the natural environment, such as the hazard of exposure to lions or the menace of crop disease. Nonetheless, after resettlement began in the area in 1967, each village established a militia largely composed of TYL members. Many of these young men had been trained as askari (soldiers) “to know how to protect themselves from their enemies,” even though “there were no enemies back then,” as Ismail Selema Mfaki, a former Youth Leaguer in Rwelu, put it.146 Whereas farmers in Mtwara and other regions remained preoccupied with more localized challenges to their immediate individual welfare, state officials foregrounded larger-scale threats to Tanzania’s collective political future. The emergent culture of vigilance spilled over into a number of nationwide political scandals, as in the uproar over two proclaimed “Western plots.” In November 1964, Kambona accused the United States of plotting to overthrow the Tanzanian government, submitting copies of two letters (including one allegedly from a South African mercenary) as evidence. Referencing recent events in the Congo, the Nationalist published an editorial warning that “mercenaries have been actively recruited in South Africa and Mozambique to penetrate the territory of the United Republic as under-cover spies and agents.” The paper specifically implicated “the calculated stampeding of refugees into United Republic territory from Mozambique.”147 A similar incident ensued in January 1965, when the Tanzanian government expelled two American diplomats accused of “plotting the armed overthrow” of the Zanzibari government. The TANU paper Uhuru once again claimed connections to the Congo, asserting that 145 146 147

UKNA, FCO, 31/169. British High Commission, Dar es Salaam to Leopoldville, July 21, 1965. Interview with Ismail Selema Mfaki, Rwelu Village, January 2008. “Plot Exposed,” Nationalist, November 11, 1964.

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one of the ousted diplomats had been “an ‘adviser of Tshombe’ in the plan of Lumumba’s death.”148 On both occasions, the Americans refuted the charges, blaming the radical ASP leadership for inventing the accusations. Ultimately, both conflicts were resolved in several weeks.149 In these cases and others, however, legitimate fears of Cold War intervention shaded into a bombastic political culture that only intensified over time. Over the next few years, as the Tanzanian regime fomented suspicion among and directed suspicion toward its own citizens, it repeatedly labeled domestic political opponents – such as Kambona, after 1965 – “Tshombes” and “political mercenaries.” The shadow of outside manipulation lurked behind most allegations of treason.150 The frequency with which these punitive charges were wielded seemed to indicate an arbitrarily draconian political culture, which is tempting to interpret as evidence of the paranoid or power-hungry character of the TANU leadership. Yet a very well-founded perception of vulnerability in a turbulent world underpinned ujamaa’s emphasis on self-reliance and security and contributed to the contraction of civil liberties and the militarized approach to national development that characterized African Socialism in practice. Tanzanian officials’ preoccupation with security, in particular, fostered undemocratic tendencies within national politics, but these cannot be projected onto the ujamaa project as a whole – as proponents of the “dystopian” thesis would have it. For as villagization entered the realm of concrete policy in action, the concepts of self-reliance and security retained their ambivalent meanings, alternately enabling political openings and creating closures for Tanzanian citizens. From the Arusha Declaration to Operation Vijiji By 1967, Tanzanian leaders had cultivated a distinctive developmental vision informed by the wide variety of ideological sources outlined earlier and consolidated through the country’s experience with the international political 148

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NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1964–66. From Dar es Salaam re: ConGen Zanzibar, “Memorandum of Facts on Developments, Friday January 15 to Monday January 18, 1965.” Moise Tshombe led the secessionist movement that brought chaos to the Congo and collaborated in Lumumba’s assassination. Although the mercenary charges may seem outlandish, hundreds of southern African mercenaries were in fact at large in the Congo at the time, eventually crossing into Rwanda after fomenting further unrest. UKNA, FCO, 31/159. Canadian High Commission, British Interests Section, Dar es Salaam to R. H. Hobden, East Africa Department, Commonwealth Office, July 27, 1967. Kambona left Tanzania in disgrace in 1967 after clashing with Nyerere. In 1970, Tanzania held its first treason trial, culminating in heavy sentences for Bibi Titi Mohammed (a key member of the independence movement), the former labour minister, and four army officers accused of plotting to overthrow the government in collaboration with Kambona. Mohammed received a presidential pardon in 1972.

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dynamics of the 1960s. In many ways, the conceptualization and implementation of ujamaa – and African Socialism more broadly – registered a locally inflected global Cold War political culture. A large body of scholarship has described the Cold War political culture of the postwar United States as marked by a persistent anxiety about foreign sabotage (blurring into xenophobia), a fixation with cultural conformity (especially regarding issues of gender and family), and state repression.151 Although similar phenomena were apparent on the African continent – especially in socialist settings – Africa has not been analytically incorporated into any systematic study of a wider global Cold War political culture. The particular concerns of former colonies often diverged from those of Euro-American countries, but across 1960s Africa, fears about outside intervention and domestic subversion reflected the uncertain nature of the same Cold War world. However, many scholars narrate this condition using a trope of postcolonial authoritarianism that implicitly attributes these political tendencies to an inherent African dysfunctionality, by bracketing their global context. The marginalization of Africa from Cold War history and the marginalization of the Cold War from postcolonial African history are due in part to a lingering assumption that the Cold War only affected states that explicitly aligned with superpowers or suffered direct military intervention – a conceptual framework that Heonik Kwon points out is itself an artifact of the Cold War. On the contrary, the Cold War shaped whole political cultures – imaginaries, institutions, and everyday practices – in Tanzania and a number of other African countries. African Socialism was very much a product of the “bipolar modernity” that it sought to transcend.152 African Socialist projects such as ujamaa were also generated by the colonial modernity that they strove to overcome. Postcolonial must be understood to be a relative term when applied to the African continent in the 1960s – not just substantively, because of the persistence of colonial legacies within individual national contexts, but temporally, because of the staggered chronology of decolonization in neighboring territories. Initially, the national container in which ujamaa came to be formed was strikingly contingent, owing to the pull of the Pan-Africanist project of transnational integration. Yet even after Tanzanian nationalism began to harden, geopolitical dynamics and economic structures continued to render Tanzania’s sovereignty tenuous – which only intensified the aggressive performance of nationalism. On mainland Tanzania, as TANU officials mobilized the ideology of African Socialism – originally anchored in Pan-Africanist thought – in 151

152

Kwon, Other Cold War, 140; Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War. On European Cold War cultures, see Annette Vowinckel, Marcus Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies (Oxford: Bergahn, 2012). Kwon, Other Cold War, 129.

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service of national development, the concept of socialist citizenship came to focus on territorial rootedness. However, a core paradox of villagization policy was that it sought to enforce sedentarization by mandating resettlement; in their effort to impose a mythological standard of fixed community grounded in rural homes, state officials often either uprooted stable populations or further stimulated the mobility of groups that migrated frequently. In this way, villagization was symptomatic of the era of decolonization out of which “the conceptual order of the ‘national geographic’ map” arose – a period in which the normalization of territorial belonging responded to but also precipitated human displacement on an unprecedented scale.153 Indeed, the emergence of the nation form – with its insistence on naturalizing “sedentarist assumptions about attachment to place” by combining familial claims with territorial ones – produced and politicized dislocation and movement across the postcolonial world.154 That state policies emphasizing resettlement as a mode of internally reconstituting national space became popularized at a time of widespread resettlement across national borders points to the importance of a broader dialectic between settlement and mobility in the political imaginaries of the decolonization and Cold War era. Such dialectical tensions were folded into the theoretical basis, discursive modeling, and actual practice of ujamaa villagization. The global conditions that informed the internal contradictions of ujamaa thought just cataloged are key to making sense of how the Arusha Declaration and its attendant policies were executed and experienced within Tanzanian borders. More specifically, they help account for the crooked course of the utopian vision of ujamaa as it encountered the inescapable structural constraints of the real world and eventually morphed from a voluntary socialist experiment into a compulsory resettlement operation. Between 1967 and 1973, the nature and extent of ujamaa’s implementation varied widely across the country, reflecting the multivalence of the ujamaa vision itself, the diverse circumstances of individual regions, and the practical limitations of the central state. Government records offer a muddled portrayal of events on the ground during this initial stage of ujamaa; official incentives to report successful villagization rates and a lack of clarity about the precise meanings of ujamaa terminology – for instance, about what counted as a legitimate village – could lead to inflated or misleading accounts of ujamaa’s impact. Skeptics noted the difficulty of distinguishing between so-called Potemkin villages and genuine villages, a problem compounded by the lack of documentation of land distribution in the largely unsurveyed countryside. Despite the opacity of many reports, the composite picture suggests that government and party officials as well as rural citizens interpreted the villagization mandate in different ways, often to best fit their personal situations or conform to the larger 153 154

Malkki, “National Geographic,” 28. Ibid., 33.

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regional environment that they inhabited. Villagization was “hardly a unitary entity,” characterized instead by its “essential heterogeneity,” as Donald Donham writes of Ethiopia’s 1970s and 1980s socialist revolution.155 In a report to the 1973 TANU national conference, Nyerere acknowledged this variation, although he mostly attributed it to colonial legacies of uneven development that had yielded different incentives and deterrences for rural people. “Nearly 15 percent of our total population is now living in ujamaa villages,” he observed, although “the development is naturally not taking place at a uniform speed throughout the country.” Citing Dodoma and Mtwara as regions “where more than half the people are living in ujamaa villages,” as compared to wealthier northern regions such as Kilimanjaro, West Lake, Mwanza, and Arusha, he explained, “This variation in the speed of progress is to be expected; it is a reflection of our past history more than of present efforts.” According to Nyerere, rural residents of wealthier regions had more to lose by moving, because “there is pressure on the land, or permanent crops cover most of the area, or individual cash crop production with selling through marketing co-operatives was well developed before the new policy was adopted.” By contrast, in an underdeveloped region such as Mtwara, there was “nothing to lose and a world to gain” by relocating to a new village.156 In one sense, this assessment was an astute one. After decades of living under harsh conditions in a colonial labor reserve, many rural people in Mtwara had grown accustomed to migration and resettlement as economic tactics and survival strategies, unlike their counterparts in the North who lived in relatively dense settlements with established political hierarchies and economic opportunities. As Nanguruwe elder Saloum Ayoub Mnatosa explained, in mid-century Mtwara, members of extended families often moved apart to live at considerable distances from one another, because “Each person looked for an area that was suitable for various crops or farming.”157 Others relocated in pursuit of wage labor; Mnatosa himself worked on local road construction projects for years after completing elementary school at a Catholic mission in the late 1940s. Many sought employment on sisal plantations, such as Mnatosa’s fellow Nanguruwe resident Mshamu Mohammed Mselemu, who migrated from the interior to the coast in the 1950s. Mselemu recalled how common it was that “you just left, a person like me and that man [pointing to his adjacent companion]: ‘Hello, let’s go there to do wage labor.’”158 Yet by the mid-1960s, a large number of Mtwara residents had permanent cashew farms to which

155 156 157 158

Donald Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 35. UKNA, DO, 185/73. President’s Report to the TANU Conference, September 1973. Interview with Saloum Ayoub Mnatosa, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Interview with Mshamu Mohammed Mselemu, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008.

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they had already devoted years of labor, much like those in the North had done for coffee or tobacco. In one Rwelu elder’s words, starting in the late colonial period, government officials told rural people, “In this region of Mtwara, the crop that gives us a lot of power is cashew,” and many local farmers “welcomed it with both hands.”159 The rise of cashew agriculture arrested human mobility in the region, given farmers’ new investment in their permanent farms. In part, then, the relatively high resettlement rates reported in areas such as Mtwara and Dodoma once villagization began reflected each region’s particular political culture and the specific ways in which its officials and rural residents construed ujamaa policy. In both regions, in different ways, an especially pronounced official emphasis on security helped account for the success rate of villagization before 1973. Some early villagization drives in tense border zones like southern Mtwara resembled counterinsurgency campaigns that had become widespread in the mid-century world. Elsewhere in East Africa, postcolonial villagization was often affixed to this counterinsurgency tradition; the colonial practice of assembling subjects in fortified settlements to contain antistate insurgency resurfaced in northern Kenya (during the shifta campaign of the late 1960s, which resembled the anti–Mau Mau concentrations of the 1950s) and Mozambique (where the Portuguese aldeamento campaigns of the 1960s were followed by FRELIMO’s civil war–era villagization drives).160 In southern Mtwara, after FRELIMO’s liberation movement began, armed paramilitary units affiliated with the TYL and National Service patrolled the area, and by 1967, local people between the ages of eighteen and fifty were reportedly being recruited to “be armed and trained to defend the border from attack by Portuguese troops.”161 These individuals mostly resided in what were known as “defense” villages (which some compared to the US-sponsored “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam);162 such villages would be organized like standard ujamaa settlements but assigned 159 160

161 162

Interview with Ismail Selema Mfaki, Rwelu Village, January 2008. Hannah Whitaker, “Forced Villagization during the Shifta Conflict in Kenya, c. 1963– 1968,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 45, 3 (2012): 343–64; Michael Mahoney, “Estado Novo, Homem Novo: Colonial and Anti-Colonial Development Ideologies in Mozambique, 1930–1977,” in David Engerman, Michael Latham, Mark Haefele, and Nils Gilman, eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 165–94. Kenya’s Operation Shifta targeted a pastoralist community and was reminiscent of sedentarization campaigns to combat Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali during the 1960s; see Baz Lecocq, Disputed Desert: Decolonisation, Competing Nationalisms and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Photo titled “Border Guards,” with caption, Standard, July 27, 1967. From UKNA, FCO, 31/169. NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1967–79, Box 669. Amembassy Dar es Salaam to Department of State, “Ujamaa Villages and Rural Development,” November 7, 1969. The individual quoted is Griff Cunningham, former principal of Kivukoni College.

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the added function of surveilling and securing the countryside from foreign threats. (Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe were not close enough to the border to earn this official status; their residents were not armed, but the villages’ youth militants nonetheless took seriously their role as local patrollers.) In Dodoma, a central region with poor farming conditions and a substantial population of pastoralists, the impact of the counterinsurgency model was less direct. There TANU initiated a campaign called Operation Dodoma in 1970, marking the first nationally sanctioned use of force to aggregate rural populations in dense settlements in a short period of time. The term operation registered the broader militarization of development politics in Tanzania. Resettlement campaigns were but one of an array of types of domestic developmental “operations” sponsored by the Tanzanian regime during the ujamaa era, all of which exhibited a sense of urgency and entailed some form of coercion. Most notably, Operation Vijana and Operation Dress-Up in 1968 focused on cultural policing, primarily in cities.163 Operation Dodoma was especially significant, however, for setting a precedent for Operation Vijiji.164 Operation Vijiji was announced in late 1973, extending the Dodoma approach to the national level. Nyerere’s justification for the shift to forced villagization was twofold. First, he acknowledged that substantive ujamaa – the creation of true communal villages – was much more difficult to achieve than had been originally conceded, and he admitted that no genuine ujamaa villages yet existed in the country. That is, even in the most successful sites of villagization, peasants continued to own private property and tend to private farms. Accordingly, Operation Vijiji deferred efforts to realize the utopian socialist potential of villagization to some ambiguous future point while more immediately pursuing a pared-down configuration of villagization as a means of ordering the countryside and facilitating state contact with rural citizens. “What is important is not the proportion between co-operative and private activity at any particular time,” Nyerere stated; “it is the movement over time towards co-operative production.”165 The second legitimation for compulsory villagization was a sense of temporal exigency underpinning the compressed time frame of the operation, which was scheduled for completion by 1976. This urgency – captured by Nyerere’s phrase “We must run

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More broadly, developmental operations abounded in other contemporaneous African contexts, socialist or otherwise. These ranged from Mali’s 1968 Operation Taxi to Kenya’s Operation Shifta. On Mozambique’s Operation Production in 1983, see M. Anne Pitcher, Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). An Operation Kigoma followed the year after Operation Dodoma. Kigoma, like Mtwara, was a poor labor reserve and tense border region where villagization was aggressively implemented. UKNA, DO, 185/73. President’s Report to the TANU conference, September 1973.

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while others walk” – stemmed from many factors.166 Tanzania was deeply in debt by 1973, having borrowed funds from many donors and experienced numerous failures in production since independence (both before and after ujamaa began in earnest; for instance, famine declarations and notices of food shortages appeared just weeks after the Arusha Declaration). These and other signs of the country’s ongoing developmental handicaps, in the context of larger global political and economic shifts, seemed to mandate an acceleration of national policy. Thus, Operation Vijiji entailed both a change in the method of implementing ujamaa – from encouragement to compulsion – and a transformation of the broader aim of villagization – from resettlement as a means of cultivating socialist relations and modes of production to resettlement as an end in and of itself. The turn to compulsory villagization, however, did not represent a complete rupture with previous versions of ujamaa, which had accommodated such impulses alongside others. Although the modernization-style configuration of the village as an administratively efficient unit ascended over the socialist construction of it as a space for realizing idealized community between 1967 and 1973, this trajectory was not a wholly linear one, and the internal tensions of ujamaa were preserved throughout this period. Moreover, in many earlier and supposedly voluntary villagization drives, the line between persuasion and force had been hazy, complicating the notion of an unprecedented switch to compulsion after 1973. As Chapter 4 details, elderly residents of Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe often use the word lazima (compulsion) to describe both early waves of villagization and the subsequent operation, underscoring that government recommendations and orders existed on a fluid spectrum in official practice and popular perception. From 1967 onward, many officials and citizens had responded to the call for villagization with apathy or moderate enthusiasm, but reports of farmers’ overt resistance to overzealous government workers also surfaced, as when, in 1971, a farmer in Iringa shot and killed former Mtwara regional commissioner Wilbert Klerruu in a dispute over villagization. Likewise, as the following chapter illustrates, a colonial-era tradition of the TYL’s excessive militancy, which the party leadership and government officials were often unable to control or contain, continued in Youth Leaguers’ sometimes overly aggressive efforts to promote villagization immediately following the Arusha Declaration. Nonetheless, a broad arc from persuasion to threatened and real violence was discernible in modes of enforcing villagization over time. This overall trajectory can be noted without eliding contradictory strands of political discourse and practice. Too often, post-1973 scenes of violence in the countryside – as armed militants burned down the homes of recalcitrant 166

Jennings, “We Must Run.”

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rural people who they forcefully loaded into trucks – are offered as evidence of ujamaa’s overarching “developmentalist” taint. So are the Tanzanian government’s decisions to unilaterally disband the RDA, the most prominent example of a successful rural cooperative community in the country, in 1969 and the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front (USARF), a radical student organization and vocal critic of the government based at UDSM, in 1971.167 Many scholars interpret these interactions and events as windows onto the true nature of ujamaa, which they distill to an authoritarian and “statist” essence. Excised from this narrative, however, are episodes that offer a contrasting view of Tanzanian development politics, such as TANU’s 1971 release of the Mwongozo, or “Guidelines.” Mwongozo revived an earlier utopian strain of ujamaa, openly inviting expanded popular involvement in not just the execution of national policy but the act of determining the very definition of ujamaa. The Guidelines were released to the public in small booklets to facilitate popular discussion and debate; Nyerere encouraged “workers and peasants to organise discussion groups for the purpose of interpreting the meaning and implementation of ujamaa to Tanzania.” He espoused an ideal of ideological self-reliance at the individual or community level, explaining that “workers and peasants should not look for a ‘bible’ in the task of building socialism in Tanzania” because “socialism had no apostles who knew everything.”168 The message of Mwongozo, in other words, was explicitly antihierarchical. Although TANU leaders ultimately imposed limits on the wave of participatory politics that the Guidelines generated (which was largely confined to urban centers like Dar es Salaam), Mwongozo cannot be simply dismissed as an empty rhetorical ploy.169 Rather, the 1971 Guidelines were consistent with a configuration of African Socialism as an open-ended, improvisational utopianism of social process – a model that persisted alongside a more restrictive vision of villagization as a narrower utopianism of spatial form. The more radically democratic aspirations of ujamaa thought came to be muted by the mid1970s, but they did not wholly disappear, instead continuing to inform a development project characterized above all by its internal dialectical friction. ∗ ∗ ∗ 167

168 169

For a firsthand account of the USARF experience, see Karim Hirji, ed., Cheche: Reminiscences of a Radical Magazine (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2010); other reflections on student activism at UDSM include Issa Shivji, Intellectuals at the Hill: Essays and Talks, 1969–1993 (Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam Press, 1993) and Ivaska, Cultured States. “There is No ‘Bible’ on Socialism – Nyerere,” Nationalist, June 15, 1971. Most notably, Mwongozo inspired a wave of wildcat factory strikes, but the government ultimately curtailed this labor unrest in 1973. Mwongozo did not generate comparable activism in rural areas such as the Mtwara countryside.

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Rewriting the decolonizing Cold War world into the history of early postcolonial Tanzania opens up new analytical space for disentangling ujamaa’s often contradictory aims and concerns. As a political discourse, ujamaa cannot be subsumed under the monolithic category of developmentalism, a term that curtails the plural meanings of development circulating in the 1960s world and obscures the dialectical ideological strands woven into individual developmental imaginaries in postcolonial contexts. Acknowledging the internal instabilities of ujamaa thought and recognizing them as a coproduction of a range of intellectual and material forces stemming from within and beyond Tanzanian borders helps expose and explain the tensions inherent in the on-the-ground practice of ujamaa. Much as this chapter has challenged the notion that Western thinkers exercised a “hegemon[y] of possible meanings” of development on a global scale, the following chapters illustrate that the Tanzanian state hardly possessed a monopoly on power as ujamaa unfolded within national borders.170 Indeed, the image of a unitary state applying a uniform policy breaks apart on closer examination of the actual institutions and individuals tasked with implementing ujamaa. The TYL and People’s Militia – which were delegated the duty of enforcing resettlement – and the government’s Community Development branch – which was charged with overseeing rural development interventions – are the subject of the following chapter. These institutions had roots in the late colonial period, and their evolution reflected older domestic limitations as well as the newer restrictions of Tanzania’s position in the Cold War world. As it was implemented, the utopian imaginary of ujamaa was filtered through such existing material realities, which partially determined why and how certain strands of ujamaa thought ascended over others. In challenging the “derivative” thesis outlined at the start of this chapter, I do not mean to suggest that ujamaa entirely broke free from colonial precedent as it took shape on the ground. On the contrary, in Tanzania, as elsewhere, “preexisting institutions and practices were woven into the very fabric of socialism.”171 This is true of development projects across the political spectrum. As Parvathi Raman and Harry West observe, “actually existing socialism and actually existing capitalism were never so distinct”; both were characterized by “adaptive and hybrid forms” in which “the past continued to shape the present.”172 Ujamaa, like other utopianisms, tended to corrupt itself in practice – because of both the concrete conditions with which it ultimately had to contend and the internal “fault lines” with which it was

170 171

172

Eley, A Crooked Line, 141. Parvathi Raman and Harry West, “Introduction: Poetries of the Past in a Socialist World Remade,” in Raman and West, eds., Enduring Socialism: Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), 5. Ibid.

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imbued.173 However, not all utopianisms operate in identical ways, and their eventual outcomes are not foregone conclusions. In the next chapter, I work toward a better understanding of ujamaa’s particular articulation with real world constraints and its own contradictions, more precisely pinpointing the mechanisms by which a normative construction of nuclear familyhood overcame an expansive interpretation of kinship, an austere prescription of individual self-reliance displaced a radical pursuit of collective autonomy, and a militarized conception of security submerged its welfarist counterpart. In doing so, I further delve into the discursive and material constitution of the national scale around which my analysis is organized.

173

Gordon, Tilley, and Prakash, “Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia,” 15.

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2 Militants, Mothers, and the National Family

As the abstract discourse of ujamaa entered the messy realm of praxis, its internal contradictions became strikingly apparent. This was especially true with respect to the principle of familyhood at the heart of Tanzania’s socialist imaginary. Even while ujamaa sought to eliminate differences and compress physical distances between Tanzanian citizens conceived of as equal members of an extended kin group, it differentiated between the developmental roles of men and women. Nyerere and other TANU leaders encouraged young male militants to spearhead a revolution in the countryside, charging them with defending the nation against foreign infiltration and domestic insurrection as well as enforcing villagization operations. Simultaneously, state officials exhorted rural women to police the domestic sphere and protect the welfare of the normative nuclear families that formed the foundational units of the demographic reordering sought by villagization. As militants and mothers, both men and women were implicated in contests for power on an international and national stage while they were tasked with carrying forward Tanzania’s developmental mission. In many ways, the ambivalent, gendered trajectory of ujamaa reflected the broader structural constraints of nationalist formations across time and space. Yet the specific contours of this process were shaped by Tanzania’s colonial history, embeddedness within international capitalist and developmental economies, and engagement with the larger global dynamics of the Cold War and decolonization. Moreover, the actual implementation of what was already a fractured developmental vision was complicated by the often divergent actions of rural Tanzanian men and women on the ground. The transnational repertoire of African Socialism featured common institutions and practices in addition to shared ideological foundations and discursive inclinations. Key among the former were the youth wings of socialist parties and paramilitary youth service organizations, which were largely composed of young men who mobilized or directed their fellow citizens to 78 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Pittsburgh, on 26 Feb 2020 at 14:02:25, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221679.004

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comply with national policy. Although many scholars present these institutions as embodiments of the “authoritarian” nature or “disciplinary” intentions of the African state, they simultaneously offer empirical evidence that significantly complicates this assessment. For instance, one analyst categorizes Guinea’s socialist project as an “authoritarian high-modernist intervention into people’s lives” yet points out that the actual implementation of state policy was “logistically overwhelming” and therefore “had to be an ‘inside job.’”1 Young, local “entrepreneurial men” were the insiders who enforced government policy in the countryside; such members of the ruling party’s youth wing often acted without much supervision.2 Another scholar asserts that the 1960s Zanzibari regime preserved and even intensified the “disciplinary project” of the colonial state in its youth labor camps (which resembled mainland Tanzania’s National Service camps).3 However, rather than describing sites that coercively molded youths into pliable national subjects, the oral sources he quotes remember the camps as “chaotic, with no discipline” and otherwise suggest that such youths did not seem to be under much centralized direction at all.4 In reality, young men in semiofficial organizations such as the TYL were neither a clear extension of “the state” – symbols of its wide reach and invasiveness – nor directly subordinated to “the state” as objects of its overarching control. In fact, they exercised considerable autonomy and embodied the tension between centralization and decentralization – and the consolidation and dispersal of state power – at the heart of African Socialist initiatives and processes of postcolonial national development more broadly. The gendered division of developmental labor is another common element of African Socialist projects, although this phenomenon and its implications have been underexamined.5 Scholars have observed that “debates on family structures and family idioms – both part of the nationalist discourse of the 1 2 3

4 5

McGovern, Unmasking the State, 165, 179. Ibid., 180. G. Thomas Burgess, “To Differentiate Rice from Grass: Youth Labor Camps in Revolutionary Zanzibar,” in Andrew Burton and H´el`ene Charton-Bigot, eds., Generations Past: Youth in East African History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 225. Here Burgess invokes Foucault’s prison and school. This construction of the “disciplinary project” shares some of the same problems of the term developmentalism or the developmental project. Ibid., 232. In the Tanzanian case, Askew’s investigation of the ujamaa-era politics of music and dance in Performing the Nation, Ivaska’s reconstruction of urban cultural policing campaigns in Cultured States, and James Brennan’s reflections on youth vigilantism in Dar es Salaam in “Youth, the TANU Youth League, and Managed Vigilantism in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania 1925–1973,” Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute 76, 2 (2006): 221–46 reveal debates about gender to be a key part of contests over power during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet these works do not move their analysis out of the geographic realm of Tanzania’s cities and into the thematic realm of villagization in particular and the political economy of national development more generally. Studies of gender in comparative African

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family – are an almost universal component of nationalism”; this ambivalent fixation on family was especially pronounced in programs that explicitly celebrated traditional African kinship formations yet struggled to build modern nations.6 Within ujamaa, the coexistence of two divergent models of familyhood was evidenced in the gulf between the ideal of a decentralized rural development project emphasizing socialist community rather than biological kinship and the reality of a state-directed policy premised on the contiguous grouping of discrete, rigidly organized nuclear families. Each configuration of familyhood, in turn, entailed contrasting approaches to gender, alternately minimizing distinctions based on sex, age, and sexuality, on the one hand, and outlining fixed roles for men and women that conformed to a particular social ordering of the individual household unit, on the other hand. Thus, national policy performed what Andrew Ivaska describes as “a double move” with regard to women’s affairs and family life – coding them as “a realm simultaneously to be protected as tradition, and to be carefully and selectively reformed.”7 The official impulse to regulate the domestic sphere and preserve or impose gender divisions might seem to indicate the “totalitarian aspirations” of a state striving to “dominate all domains of collective life,” as one scholar puts it for a comparative context.8 However, this preoccupation partially attested to the weakness of the postcolonial state, which lacked the resources to overcome tenacious colonial legacies and curtail the expanding influence of international developmental organizations (which actively promoted gendered approaches to development).9 Moreover, Tanzanian politics and policies were informed by and conformed to patterns of a wider global Cold War political culture, with its emphasis on policing gender and “containing” potentially subversive social forces in the “sphere of influence” of the home.10

6 7 8 9

10

Socialist contexts have tended to concentrate on generational tensions among men without adequately addressing women’s roles and experiences. Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 5. Ivaska, Cultured States, 173. Straker, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution, 177, 81. M. Anne Pitcher incisively notes the implications of this weak–strong state dialectic for the Mozambican case. She writes, “Conceptions of the Mozambican state embody the paradox that is evident in descriptions of other African states. Theoretical analyses often cast the state as ‘weak,’ ‘soft,’ ‘underdeveloped,’ and ‘dependent’ for its inability to pursue its stated goals or to avoid massive debt. Yet paradoxically, the Mozambican state has also been seen as ‘interventionist,’ ‘authoritarian,’ and ‘coercive’ for engaging in projects that belittled African customary practices, forcibly relocated people, or threatened the livelihoods of the peasantry.” Pitcher, Transforming Mozambique, 19. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1990); K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2004).

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This split construction of gender and family articulated with the multivalent principles of security and self-reliance to produce and reflect a situation in which matters ostensibly pertaining to the “private sphere” were inextricably entwined with political and economic processes in the “public sphere” of Tanzanian national development. Accordingly, this chapter contends that issues of gender and family should be analytically integrated into a broader investigation of ujamaa, not sidelined as a separate object of inquiry. These categories both offer an especially useful lens through which to apprehend ujamaa and underpin the very political and economic processes under examination. This is equally true in the realms of political imagination and praxis and at the local and national levels. In fact, the gendered contradictions of official policy, which wavered between promoting socialist extended familyhood and sedentary nuclear familyhood among rural citizens, were connected to the broader tension between inclusive and exclusive constructions of nationhood within the ujamaa formation. In some ways, ujamaa, grounded in a Pan-Africanist and even globalist impulse, adhered to an extraordinarily expansive definition of national familyhood; in other ways, it constricted around a model of the nation as a closed kinship group with definite borders. Mobile Men, Militarized Men Although the ujamaa vision significantly departed from colonial ideology, Tanzanian officials maintained certain aspects of colonial governance as they continued to grapple with its social, political, and economic legacies in the postcolonial era. Concerns about the organization and reproduction of African families were at the heart of late colonial development policy in Tanganyika, as across British Africa. Young Tanganyikans – especially mobile men without formal employment – constituted a demographic category that particularly preoccupied both colonial and postcolonial officials, especially beginning in the 1940s. At that time, in response to a series of labor strikes across the continent, British policy in Africa shifted markedly to mitigate the disruptive potential of a floating, economically insecure, and politically marginalized male population. Guided by the new goal of “stabilization” and drawing on funds provided by the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940, officials sought to improve working conditions and provide better infrastructure and services to employed men and their families in urban spaces.11 The colonial Department of Social Welfare also opened a number of community centers throughout Tanganyika to assist with the reintegration of World War II veterans into African life as well as organize classes and activities to structure the leisure time of idle 11

Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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young men.12 Dar es Salaam attracted more migrants than any other city in the colony and accordingly was the first to be targeted by these new welfare initiatives. Yet by the late 1940s, local officials were setting up community centers throughout the colony, most of which would become operative by the early 1950s, after sufficient staff had been trained and employed. In 1945, the Social Welfare Office in Dar es Salaam outlined the functions of the proposed welfare centers in a letter to the Southern Province’s commissioner, explaining that by providing “social amenities” in small towns and rural areas, officials hoped to “decrease the drift of individuals to the towns in search of pleasure.” Welfare stations would feature a variety of attractions: “a sports captain who will organize outdoor games for the more juvenile members and, it is hoped, scout groups”; “lectures and debates as well as cinema shows, theatrical performances and occasional dances”; “sewing and cookery classes”; “books, periodicals and simple indoor games”; and “night schools for adults.”13 New centers were staffed by Social Welfare employees such as Mfaume Zaidi, a loquacious man born and raised around Mtwara. In the mid-1950s, Zaidi began his career by working for several months for the Office of the District Commissioner in Mtwara Town. There he devoted most of his time to coordinating activities in the new community center, which consisted of “bringing society together, discussing, and teaching adult education, giving games: indoor games, outdoor games – sitting and discussing with those people there.”14 Zaidi then attended Arnautoglu Development College in Dar es Salaam, where he “studied the matter of social activities . . . the matter of society.” In his words, the curriculum emphasized “the way to organize people so they didn’t do destructive things, so that they weren’t going around aimlessly or in a disorderly way.”15 Throughout the colony, Social Welfare interventions in the name of stabilization were accompanied by a continuous effort to “repatriate” unemployed urban men to the countryside.16 In major cities like Dar es Salaam and smaller regional townships like Lindi and Mikindani in the Southeast, authorities expressed alarm about “large floating population[s]

12 13

14 15 16

Andreas Eckert, “Regulating the Social: Social Security, Social Welfare and the State in Late Colonial Tanzania,” Journal of African History 45, 3 (2004): 477. Tanzania National Archives (TNA) Dar es Salaam, Accession 16, 37-87: African Social Welfare Centres, Southern Province. Social Welfare Office, Dar es Salaam to the Provincial Commissioner, Lindi, October 1945. Interview with Mfaume Zaidi, Mtwara Town, February 2008. Ibid. Brennan, “Youth, the TANU Youth League, and Managed Vigilantism”; Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam (Oxford: James Currey, 2005) and “The Haven of Peace Purged: Tackling the Undesirable and Unproductive Poor in Dar es Salaam, ca. 1950s–1980s,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 40, 1 (2007): 119–51.

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of vagrants”17 apparently composed of “young African boys, from other Districts, without any visible means of support or occupation other than thieving.”18 To the colonial administration, these unrooted male youths presented a social ill that exceeded the capacity of Social Welfare programs in community centers. By transporting these “wahuni” (hooligans), “loiterers,” or “spivs” to their putative homes in rural areas, officials aimed to contain growing rates of petty urban crime and defuse potential political unrest stemming from cultural “detribalization.” In practice, repatriation exercises proved expensive, logistically complicated, and ultimately ineffective; as a district commissioner in the Southern Province wryly pointed out, “The type of person in respect of whom repatriation orders are made is usually one who will sooner or later make his way back to a township.”19 The persistence of migration to Tanzanian cities and towns, coupled with insufficient opportunities for formal urban employment, continued to inform official discourse and policy in similar ways throughout the 1960s. Before postcolonial development policy ideologically cohered under the umbrella of ujamaa villagization, TANU leaders frequently discussed VSA schemes as a strategy for transporting idle, potentially destabilizing groups of young urban men back to the countryside. In rural settlements, postcolonial officials argued, such men would become proper and productive Tanzanian citizens by returning to agricultural labor and distancing themselves from the corrupting influences of Western popular culture and urban anomie. This proposal resembled colonial approaches as well as socialist policies elsewhere in the postcolonial world – especially the Maoist hsia-fang rustication drives of the late 1950s and 1960s. In the Chinese case, young men and women were “sent down” to the countryside to learn from and work beside peasants; these “reeducation” initiatives were consistent with the rural orientation of Chinese socialism but also offered party leaders a convenient means of defusing unrest and managing unemployment in cities.20 In Tanzania, likewise, official policy wavered between configuring settlements as an opportunity for already productive rural citizens and as a technique for reforming delinquent urban youth. In the mid-1960s, a team of evaluators affiliated with Syracuse University observed this contradiction under the VSA program, noting, “Whereas it was first thought that only proven 17 18 19 20

TNA, Accession 16, 37-5: Repatriations and Removal of Undesirable Natives – Destitutes. District Commissioner, Lindi to the Provincial Commissioner, September 26, 1952. TNA, Accession 16, 37-5: Repatriations and Removal of Undesirable Natives – Destitutes. District Commissioner, Mikindani to the Provincial Commissioner, June 23, 1951. TNA, Accession 16, 37-5: Repatriations and Removal of Undesirable Natives – Destitutes. Kilwa District Commissioner to the Provincial Commissioner, May 24, 1941. Jan Prybyla, “Hsia-Fang: The Economics and Politics of Rustication in China,” Pacific Affairs 48, 2 (1975): 153–72; Meisner, Mao’s China and After. I refer to China as a postcolonial country not to naturalize Maoist Third Worldist rhetoric but to reflect China’s semicolonial past.

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farmers would gain admission to the schemes as reward for their industry, it is seen that at present, in some areas schemes are regarded as excellent repositories for unproductive people and groups,” with many officials viewing such settlements “as suitable for the removal of urban unemployed from the towns.”21 Even after the VSA had been disbanded and ujamaa became the structuring principle for nationwide villagization, this tendency to fixate on repatriating unemployed urban youths persisted.22 The question of whether ujamaa villages could accommodate an older impulse to prevent or curtail urban disorder by absorbing young male “loiterers” raised a still more fundamental question of whether villagization should be an organic and voluntary process or a top-down and compulsory one. In 1969, a group of delegates at the TANU national conference wrestled with this issue, commenting, “It has been strongly advocated that villages should be started on [a] voluntary basis. This decision indicates that there is danger for the unemployed townfolk to refuse to join these villages. Also, that the towns might attract more people from rural area[s] and thus discourage effort in Nation building.” In light of these concerns, the delegates recommended “that legislation should be enacted to allow creation of special villages for the idle and unemployed townfolk.”23 Although such national legislation never materialized, smallerscale repatriation drives continued on an ad hoc basis throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The term townfolk deployed by TANU delegates primarily referred to young men, but official anxieties also fixated on unmarried, mobile urban women, who were consistently rendered as prostitutes and incarnations of moral decay. However, although there tended to be little space for liberated young women within Tanzanian nationalist discourse, TANU had long acknowledged the productive as well as the destructive potential of young male aspirations for personal independence. In the 1940s and 1950s, generational tensions between young men and their elders became acute across much of colonial Africa, as older economies of power confronted the shifting political landscape of the capitalist colonial economy.24 The phenomenon of marginalized young male populations “floating” in cities like Dar es Salaam was linked to a larger process of transformation occurring throughout the countryside. In the Southeast, as elsewhere, wage labor altered the rural 21

22

23 24

Syracuse University Village Settlement Project Records, nos. 1–43. Document 23: “Transformation and Village Settlement: From Abstraction to Reality,” 7. No date given (1965 or 1966). As Burton notes in African Underclass. Tanzania was not unique in this regard; similar relocation policies were pursued by independent governments across East Africa, such as in Uganda under Idi Amin and Kenya under Kenyatta. TNA Dodoma, Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), RARD/UV/U24: Ujamaa Villages Research. “TANU National Conference,” May 30, 1969. Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint,” 193–4; Burton and Charton-Bigot, Generations Past.

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social order by providing young men a route to marriage that bypassed the authority of their elders. Earlier, the convention of bridewealth had underpinned the gerontocratic order, with young men depending on their elders for the resources necessary to marry and become an independent head of household (i.e., a full adult). “Back then, the parents decided who [their children] were going to be married to, whether they liked it or not,” recalled Esha Mohammed Namituli, a resident of Rwelu Village who was born in the late 1940s or early 1950s. She herself was married twice – first to a man from her home area of Dihimba and then in 1970 to a man living near Rwelu. “That is, the parents of the son’s side and the daughter’s side made an agreement, and the children had to respect it,” she continued. “Not like these days, when the young people decide themselves.”25 Ali Asman Kitenge, who was born in 1932 and raised outside of Mikindani, near his later home in Rwelu, echoed Namituli’s account, elaborating, “The son’s side decided to go to the daughter’s side to get the wife. The parents decided that now our son is a man, is mature enough to be married. The parents had the order. The father gave everything.” Now, by contrast, he observed, “The son marries himself, although occasionally the parents help.”26 Starting in the mid- to late colonial era, fathers and uncles no longer exercised exclusive control over productive activity and thus could no longer determine the terms of marriage for their juniors. Whereas bridewealth used to be paid in livestock, it increasingly became paid and accepted in monetary form. Young men who accumulated cash earnings could obtain the economic and political currency to marry earlier and establish control over their own lives, a pattern that eroded older forms of local authority. During the independence struggle of the 1950s, the political closures of the colonial state alienated youths who had begun to establish such new forms of autonomy from their elders. Nationalist parties gaining momentum across the continent at this time recognized that young men could either challenge the emerging authority of anticolonial leaders and institutions or, if managed properly, become useful and loyal revolutionaries. Accordingly, as James Brennan notes, “harnessing the dissatisfactions of potentially violent male youth had become a common strategy of emerging nationalist parties during the late 1940s and 1950s” through “the creation of ‘Youth Wings’ responsible for the more coercive activities of mass political mobilization.”27 TANU partook of this trend, creating the TYL in 1956, two years after the party’s formal consolidation. The functions of the TYL ranged from recruiting party members to policing party rallies and performing various duties in the name of stifling political opposition, largely in the form of the short-lived ANC. In its demographic composition, semiofficial character, and aura of 25 26 27

Interview with Esha Mohammed Namituli, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Interview with Ali Asman Kitenge, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Brennan, “Youth, the TANU Youth League, and Managed Vigilantism,” 222.

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authority, the TYL had a precedent in the Boy Scouts, which had a small but visible presence throughout British Africa. Scouting came to Tanganyika in the early years of British rule and tended to be associated with missions, schools, and welfare organizations; Nyerere himself became a Scout troop leader in the late 1930s, and by 1960, the Tanganyika Boy Scout Association “enjoyed widespread popularity and counted approximately ten thousand active Scouts in troops that were largely run by Africans.”28 In what became Mtwara Region, Boy Scouts marched alongside “parades of the police”29 on public holidays and held widely attended rallies.30 Timothy Parsons reports that Scouts “enjoyed considerable prestige for their uniforms, respectability, and mastery of Western culture,” and accordingly, it was not uncommon for “enterprising African[s]” who obtained uniforms to pose as Scouts or even “masquerade as policemen or government agents.”31 In this respect, the Boy Scouts’ appeal to young men overlapped with that of the TYL, although the political aims of the latter earned it wider support and lent it a more explicitly militaristic character. For instance, the former TYL chairman for Mtwara District recalls encouraging rural people to become TANU members – his major task in the late 1950s and early 1960s – by informing them that “the party is your weapon and the [membership] card your bullet.” In the early 1950s, Ali bin Ali worked in Mtwara Town as a mechanic in the colonial Railway Department, where he was engaged with repairs on the recently built Nachingwea–Mtwara railway. Eventually, he was fired from his job when he sought membership in TANU, after Nyerere visited the local capital of Mikindani in 1955. From that point on, he said, it was simple. “I didn’t work for anyone else again. Me and the party, the party and I.” The stakes of TANU involvement during this era were high. “Before independence, the big work was motivating people to join,” Ali explained, especially because “some argued it is impossible to gain independence.”32 Young men like this district leader who joined TANU at meetings organized in cities or rural centers often infused the TYL’s semiofficial status as party “volunteers” with a more stridently militant function. Rather than solely focusing on political organizing, they frequently concentrated on strengthening the party through its literal defense (usually from the threat to its power posed by opposition

28

29 30 31 32

Timothy Parsons, Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Central Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 179. This is in contrast to much smaller numbers for the Tanganyika Girl Guides, a more marginal institution. TNA, Accession 16, 37-87: African Social Welfare Centres, Southern Province. District Commissioner, Newala to the Provincial Commissioner, March 11, 1949. TNA, Accession 16, 37-87: African Social Welfare Centres, Southern Province. District Commissioner, Masasi to the Provincial Commissioner, April 11, 1949. Parsons, Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement, 141, 144, 136. Interview with Ali bin Ali, Mtwara Town, January 2008.

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parties). One former Youth Leaguer in Rwelu Village, who joined TANU around the same time that Ali did, recounted that Youth Leaguers took on the responsibility of “protecting the status of the party, first, protecting the party. Fighting for it to have power. Because at that time there was the party of TANU and Congress, before independence. Before independence, beginning in ’55, there was the work of various meetings [or rallies]. What they were doing was protecting TANU so it had power.”33 Although Youth Leaguers were supposed to be unarmed, they were provided with uniforms and endowed with a political status that many of them perceived as a means of advancing their social standing in their own communities.34 In some instances, the material accessories of TANU affiliation, such as membership cards, could literally translate into a kind of social and economic currency at the local level. “If you went on a journey and didn’t have the fare,” recalled Abdallah Hassan Nahembe, a Rwelu resident who became a TANU member in 1955, “if you got in the vehicle and showed your card, they would take you” (Figure 5).35 This enhanced status may partly explain why TYL “security” work continued even after TANU’s victory had been assured, mutating into a series of vigilante movements that extended far into the countryside by the time of independence.36 In 1959, the Southern Province Annual Report noted, “Some members of the TANU Youth League, especially in Lindi District, tried to take unto themselves Police duties.” Among those guilty included one young man who “was prosecuted for assault when he ‘arrested’ a person for a traffic offence” and a group of Youth Leaguers who “forcibly removed” the district commissioner of Masasi to the local police station after he attempted to disperse a TYL encampment.37 In a 1960 meeting of the Provincial Advisory Council just prior to independence, the provincial commissioner added, “It is admirable that citizens should wish to help to preserve law and order . . . but these people, who often say they are TANU Youth League or ‘askari wa TANU’ [soldiers of TANU], can only get themselves into trouble if they exceed their powers and unfortunately it has been necessary to prosecute a number of people for illegal arrests and holding illegal courts.”38 In thus exceeding their mandate, many Youth Leaguers mirrored the colonial police themselves, who officials also censured for abusing their power and terrorizing many of these same young African men – especially during urban 33 34

35 36 37 38

Interview with Ismail Selema Mfaki, Rwelu Village, January 2008. Peter Pels offers an account of this process in the eastern Uluguru mountains in Morogoro Region in “Creolisation in Secret: The Birth of Nationalism in Late Colonial Uluguru, Tanzania,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 72, 1 (2002): 1–28. Interview with Abdallah Hassan Nahembe, Rwelu Village, February 2008. TNA, 540/20/69. Omido to Kahama, July 21, 1961, quoted in Brennan, “Youth, the TANU Youth League, and Managed Vigilantism,” 229. TNA, Southern Province Annual Report 1959. TNA, Accession 16, 3-50: 1937–54. Southern Province News, November 1960.

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figure 5. TANU membership card from 1955, Nanguruwe Village, 2008. Photo by the author.

repatriation campaigns. In 1952, the Lindi Branch of the African Association complained to the Southern Province commissioner, “The Police Department is making many arrests nowadays of Natives suspecting that they are undesirables in the town.” The letter asserted that “Police Constables do not care to make any inquiries about the whereabouts or nativity of the men” and

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that “such arrested persons are being beaten in the charge office.”39 Despite a response from the assistant police commissioner for the province strongly condemning the police behavior, such complaints persisted.40 It is clear that the vigilantism of the TYL emerged out of a broader climate of aggressive policing – or at least the performance of it – by colonial officers, Boy Scout imposters, and TANU loyalists alike during a time of generational conflict and political uncertainty. The indeterminacy of the original function of TYL militancy and the lack of central control of young men claiming to act in the ruling party’s name led in subsequent years to the blurring of the line between legitimate security work and aggressive amateur policing of other citizens. Across the African continent, the role of party youth wings after independence varied according to the developmental priorities and political positions of the party in question. In Guinea, the Jeunesse du Rassemblement D´emocratique Africain (JRDA) participated in and supervised militant theater competitions across the countryside in the early 1960s, while in Malawi, the Congress Party’s Youth League responded to President Hastings Banda’s call for mounted surveillance on popular activity. In Ghana, the CPP Youth League reinforced Nkrumah’s self-proclaimed socialist regime, while in Kenya, the competing youth wings of the Kenya Africa National Union (KANU) and Kenya Africa Democratic Union (KADU) jockeyed for control of national politics.41 Between 1961 and 1967, Tanzanian Youth Leaguers – divested of their duty to protect TANU by suppressing opposition during the anticolonial struggle – directed their activities toward the somewhat hazy imperative of “building the nation.” Whereas some TYL members interpreted this task in a more literally constructive sense, establishing new communal settlements, many others simply continued their pursuit of sometimes ill-defined national enemies. Beginning in 1964, the Tanzanian government realigned the country’s defense forces and created a new official apparatus for security work, making the TYL one of several institutions with this function. The mutiny of the Tanganyika Rifles early that year fostered a persistent official suspicion of endowing the army with a monopoly on force and defense, particularly in light of the broader regional context described in the previous chapter. 39

40

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TNA, Accession 16, 37-5: Repatriations and Removal of Undesirable Natives – Destitutes. Secretary of the Lindi Branch of the African Association to the Provincial Commissioner, June 25, 1952. TNA, Accession 16, 37-5: Repatriations and Removal of Undesirable Natives – Destitutes. Assistant Commissioner of Police, Southern and Eastern Region to the Provincial Commissioner, September 29, 1952. Literature on party youth leagues in the postcolonial era is still thin. On Guinea, see Straker, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution; on Malawi, see Wiseman Chijere Chirwa, “Dancing towards Dictatorship: Political Songs and Popular Culture in Malawi,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 10, 1 (2001): 1–27.

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Although it intensified the TANU leadership’s existing fears of youth insubordination, the mutiny prompted a further militarization of young men. The government immediately assembled a new Tanzania People’s Defence Force composed of TYL recruits and several hundred young men from Zanzibar. In addition, the TPDF recruited volunteers from the recently established National Service corps led by Lawi Sijaona (a mission-educated former wakili, or local official, from Newala, Mtwara) and other officers of the Ministry for National Culture and Youth.42 In 1965, the Reserve Forces Act also created a new paramilitary force as part of an explicit strategy to decentralize defense duties. The Jeshi la Mgambo (People’s Militia) was, like the TYL, a volunteer unit attached to TANU, although the militia was configured as a reserve army to bolster the Tanzanian security apparatus and reinforce TANU’s authority.43 Tanzania was not the only African country to adopt such an array of paramilitary and youth service institutions. Early on, Ghana’s Builders Brigade was designed “to reduce unemployment, mobilize labor for rural development, and provide ‘patriotic’ training for the nation’s youth.”44 Initially, membership was voluntary but restricted to males under the age of forty-five, although female membership was eventually permitted.45 In 1960, the Ghanaian government also created an organization called the Young Pioneers to cultivate a spirit of nation building among schoolchildren, in a program that many participants “perceived as preparation for a career in the military.”46 Other African countries followed Ghana’s example – both self-proclaimed socialist states such as Guinea and Mali and decidedly nonsocialist states such as Malawi and Kenya.47 These paramilitary and service units drew on colonial-era traditions such as the Scout movement as well as socialist models such as the Soviet Young Pioneers and the Chinese hsia-fang and Red Guard movements; many were also advised by Israelis and Eastern Europeans.48 Despite such outside influences, these institutions 42

43 44 45

46 47

48

National Service could entail agricultural work or other types of physical labor in addition to military work; e.g., in Africa’s Freedom Railway, Monson writes of National Service members working on the construction of the Uhuru Railway. There were parallel institutions in Ghana (created in 1973), Mali (the Service Civique), and Kenya (the National Youth Service, created in 1964), among other countries. Parsons, 1964 Army Mutinies, 168. Parsons, Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement, 258. Heidi Frontani and Lauren Taylor, “Development through Civic Service: The Peace Corps and National Service Programmes in Ghana,” Progress in Development Studies 9, 2 (2009): 87–99; Ahlman, “A New Type of Citizen.” Ahlman, “A New Type of Citizen,” 101. On Guinea, see Straker, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution; on Mali, see Bogosian, “Little Farming Soldiers” and Gregory Mann, “Violence, Dignity, and Mali’s New Model Army, 1960–1968,” Mande Studies 5 (2003): 65–82. Young Pioneer movements were a socialist institution in the USSR as well as pre–Cultural Revolution China. Young Pioneers organizations – by that name – appeared in Mali, Niger,

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figure 6. Minister of National Service inspecting servicemen and servicewomen at National Service training at Ruvu, July 1974. Courtesy Tanzania Information Services.

came to assume a particularly African form and fed into a broader continentwide political culture in which security consciousness played a prominent role (Figure 6). More generally, paramilitary youth institutions represented and reinforced the ambiguous status of young men within the postcolonial state. Tanzania’s Cold War political culture blurred the line between geopolitical vigilance and domestic power politics; by this logic, challenges to national security could easily originate from the very young male demographic whose energies TANU was attempting to marshal. For instance, when, in 1966, two years of National Service were made compulsory for all Tanzanian citizens (including university and secondary-school graduates), a large contingent of angry UDSM students reacted by staging a march across the city. Like the mutiny, the protest was quickly suppressed; Zanzibar (G. Thomas Burgess, “The Young Pioneers and the Rituals of Citizenship in Revolutionary Zanzibar,” Africa Today 51, 3 [2005]: 3–29), and Malawi (A. W. Wood, “Training Malawi’s Youth: The Work of the Malawi Young Pioneers,” Community Development Journal 5, 3 [1970]: 130–8).

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officials expelled participating students from the university and sent them to the countryside to fulfill their service.49 Yet this episode, alongside the ongoing excesses of TYL militants, underscored the potential danger of young men contesting the patriarchal foundations of TANU rule, even as state leaders encouraged youth autonomy in the realm of enforcing national security.50 Simultaneously, experiments with rural settlement across the Tanzanian countryside revealed another incarnation of young men – as independent self-starters who spearheaded the creation of and movement to new villages. Between 1961 and 1967, TYL members initiated and maintained a number of autonomous settlements in addition to living and working on VSA schemes. The theme of self-reliance anchoring national development policy from 1967 onward had a particular resonance for this demographic. Moving to ujamaa villages, whose anticipated productivity and self-sufficiency were to help make Tanzania a self-reliant nation in the world, could greatly benefit young men seeking to become independent adults capable of establishing themselves as heads of their own households. TANU leaders likely recognized this motivation as they celebrated young men as farmers whose agricultural labor would propel national development, even while emphasizing their militaristic role as revolutionaries (Figure 7). In 1967, at a TYL camp, Vice President Rashidi Kawawa – a former employee of the colonial Department of Social Welfare from Songea, known for his fierce loyalty to Nyerere – announced, “TANU Youth League camps were established to teach the youths the spirit of ‘self-reliance’ so that they could serve the nation effectively” because “youths were the bulwarks and builders of the nation and as such they needed good training.”51 At a youth rally at the National Stadium in early 1968, Nyerere held up the jembe, or hoe, alongside the gun as the symbol of young Tanzanian manhood, invoking a pairing common in African Socialist discourse.52 “The youths in all the regions of the country,” he said, “must carry forward the nation’s revolution. In this task you have two important weapons – the plough for better and higher production, and the gun for the defence of the nation.”53 In practice, young militants were unevenly armed, and their duties of policing and producing overlapped. Particularly along Tanzania’s southern 49 50

51 52 53

Andrew Ivaska, “Of Students, ‘Nizers,’ and a Struggle over Youth: Tanzania’s 1966 National Service Crisis,” Africa Today 51, 3 (2005): 83–107. Scholars have described ujamaa politics using terms related to “patriarchy,” such as patrimonialism (Brennan, “Youth, the TANU Youth League, and Managed Vigilantism,” 221) and paternalism (Schneider, “High on Modernity?”). “Kawawa Reveals T.Y.L. Future Plans: Youths – Bulwarks of Nation,” Nationalist, February 3, 1967. Such as the daba and gun in Mali. Thanks to Gregory Mann for pointing out this symbolic overlap. “Plough and Gun Your Weapons, Mwalimu Tells Youths,” Nationalist, February 6, 1968.

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figure 7. National Service members in a training camp, undated (likely late 1960s or early 1970s). Aside from the five women in the front row, the room appears to be filled with young men. Courtesy Tanzania Information Services.

border with Mozambique, “defense” was theoretically built into the structure of many ujamaa villages, and villagization was officially described as the creation of vijiji vya ujamaa na ulinzi – ujamaa and defense villages. Tanzania’s active support for liberation movements in proximate territories and the large traffic of refugees from neighboring areas heightened official concerns about the integrity of national borders precisely by showing how permeable they were. Therefore, as the minister of defence and national service explained, “The Government’s aim in the southern regions and elsewhere, was to establish defence ujamaa villages along all the country’s borders, which would be able to stand by themselves and only ask for assistance when necessary.”54 Such villages would help make rural citizens self-reliant in defense; they would ostensibly both protect peasants and enable peasants to protect the nation. Several Portuguese incursions onto Tanzanian territory across the southern border intensified the official perception of imminent foreign aggression in Mtwara. Visiting a site where land mines had claimed two Tanzanian victims in April 1967, Kawawa “urged people 54

“Stronger Defence Planned: Forces to Get Better Weapons – Sokoine,” Daily News, June 29, 1972.

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living on the border to be vigilant and co-operate with security forces and the army reserves in tracking down the enemy and safeguarding the integrity of the nation” by “reporting suspicious and unknown persons appearing in the area.”55 On subsequent visits to the border, he reiterated that “the duty of defending the nation was the responsibility of every individual”56 and that “our main task is defence and development.”57 Mtwara’s regional commissioners – initially John Nzunda (1964–67) and then Wilbert Klerruu (1967–71) – were especially inclined toward this militaristic culture, which went hand in hand with their tendency to aggressively promote ujamaa policy from early on. In 1962, Nzunda, then deputy secretary general of TANU and an avid Boy Scout, was appointed commissioner for the Southern Province. He was relieved of his duties after being convicted of armed assault but went on to advocate for the creation of an armed volunteer reserve and serve as the national administrative secretary of the TYL, even leading a 1965 delegation to Beijing.58 Nzunda’s term as Mtwara regional commissioner, which began in 1964, reportedly came to an end after his apathetic response to a 1967 famine in the area.59 Klerruu was considerably more educated, holding a PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, but he was similarly reputed to be “one of the most extreme members of the TANU radical faction.” In the mid-1960s, he held the posts of TANU’s publicity secretary and then national executive secretary.60 Based on his positive record in Mtwara, he was transfered to Iringa in 1971, where he posthumously made national news the following year after being assassinated by an angry farmer who subsequently became a symbol of peasant resistance to villagization. In 1968, Klerruu’s office published a manual providing “Guidelines and Rules for the Implementation of the Arusha Declaration in Mtwara Region,” which read, “All citizens of Mtwara region should keep their eyes on the Portuguese enemies as well as foreign puppets with evil intentions of destroying this nation, and they should be ready to protect this region and the nation when necessary to do so.” Moreover, it explained, “Every village that has begun Militia plans is supposed to have its own security force so that it can be very self-reliant

55 56 57 58

59 60

“Be Vigilant, Look Out for Infiltrators,” Nationalist, April 14, 1967. “Be Vigilant, Border Peasants Warned,” Nationalist, October 5, 1970. “We Must Double Our Vigilance – Kawawa,” Nationalist, January 5, 1971. By 1967, Nzunda was replaced in this capacity by Lawi Sijaona, who also hailed from Mtwara Region. NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1964–66, Box 2640. From Dar-es-Salaam, Embassy Telegram 803, October 20, 1964; Central Decimal File 1960–63, Box 2020. Amembassy Dar es Salaam to Washington, DC, “Biographic Sketches of Newly Appointed Regional Commissioners,” March 2, 1962. NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1967–69, Box 2513. Amembassy Dar es Salaam to Department of State, “This Week in Tanzania, May 29–June 4, 1967,” June 6, 1967. NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1964–66, Box 2690. Amembassy Dar es Salaam to Department of State, “Prominent Tanzanian Radical Appointed TANU National Executive Secretary,” April 9, 1965.

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in the matter of defense.” The result would be that “each town and village will have a People’s Militia whose soldiers, to say truly, are all the adult citizens who live in that village or town.”61 Villagization in Mtwara Region, therefore, was theoretically a means of enabling all rural citizens to become soldiers for the nationalist cause, by concentrating peasants in settlements where they could set up twenty-four-hour patrols and receive training by militia officials. In practice, such ceaseless patrolling was neither possible nor consistently prioritized; nonetheless, a spirit of militarization was alive and well in the southeastern countryside. Recruitment for the militia became a particular focus of national attention after the passage of the 1971 Mwongozo. In 1970, Portuguese forces invaded the Guinean capital of Conakry in an unsuccessful but disquieting attempt to overthrow S´ekou Tour´e and capture Amilcar Cabral, the leader of Guinea-Bissau’s liberation movement.62 The following year, Idi Amin staged a coup (with the cooperation of Israeli officials) that removed Obote from power in Uganda. Responding to concern about Tanzania’s own stability in the wake of these events and drawing on the example of Guinea’s active popular militia, Mwongozo sought to distribute security work more widely among the Tanzanian population.63 In accordance with this new policy, militia recruitment across the country increased (Figure 8). TPDF instructors offered training in a course that was “designed to produce an equivalent of a private soldier in the army in military skills” but also incorporated “some instruction into police and security activities.”64 Officials campaigned widely to encourage participation in the trainings; at a 1973 parade in Dar es Salaam, Kawawa declared, “Every Tanzanian should feel his life is not complete without militia training.”65 The previous year, he had insisted, “Every one of us is a soldier.”66 In reality, however, such security work was implicitly gendered as a specifically male responsibility. 61

62

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65 66

TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Maongozi na Utaratibu wa Kutekeleza Azimio la Arusha Katika Mkoa wa Mtwara (Ndanda Press, March 1968). The Guinean regime supported the Partido Africano da Independˆencia da Guin´e e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), Cabral’s party, in the same way that Tanzania supported FRELIMO and other southern African liberation movements. In 1969, Eduardo Mondlane was assassinated in Dar es Salaam by a Portuguese-planted mail bomb, raising concerns among Tanzanian officials. Issa Shivji, “Nationalism and Pan-Africanism: Decisive Moments in Nyerere’s Intellectual and Political Thought,” Review of African Political Economy 39, 131 (2012): 109. Colonel F. S. Swai, “The Politicisation of the Tanzania Defence Forces,” in Jeanette Hartmann, ed., Re-Thinking the Arusha Declaration (Copenhagen: Centre for Development Research, 1991), 96. Comment, Daily News, November 26, 1973. “Everyone Is a Soldier,” Daily News, June 29, 1972. In 1972, the country’s security consciousness further intensified, prompted by a series of bomb blasts in Dar es Salaam reportedly orchestrated by South Africans; anxieties were exacerbated by large waves of Hutu refugees streaming across the northwestern border after the Burundi revolution. That same year, Tanzania also sponsored a failed countercoup against the Amin regime.

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figure 8. People’s Militia soldiers marching at the National Stadium to celebrate ten years of independence, December 9, 1971. Courtesy Tanzania Information Services.

The memories of former Youth Leaguers in Mtwara provide a window onto the actual experiences of young male militants in the countryside (which Chapter 4 further explores). Musa Sefu Chimbando, a Mdui resident who joined the TYL in 1956 at around the age of eighteen, described receiving training (“like for soldiers,” or askari) at the local police station, including instruction in weapons usage. Although Chimbando and his fellow Youth Leaguers were not given arms of their own, they put their new knowledge and status to use in informal local policing campaigns. “For example, if someone stole and the police followed them but failed, they pressured us to search for the thief for even one month until we caught him,” he recalled. Later, between 1966 and 1968, Chimbando completed his National Service. He was stationed in Nachingwea initially, then at Ruvu camp in Dar es Salaam with hundreds of other youths from across the country. There he received instruction in “weaponry and other trainings like that” as well as in the principles of ujamaa. “We learned that when we return [from National Service], we should cooperate with our kin in the house or society,” he elaborated. “Youths should live together in the whole country.” Afterward, Chimbando became one of the pioneer settlers of the ujamaa village of Mdui. “We joined this village because of the influence [muito] of the Father of the

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Nation [Nyerere],” he said. “After hearing this call, we” – the TYL – “had to be the first people to come here. Then we were followed by our whole family, our parents.” Over the next several years, Chimbando also spent a short time stationed near the Ruvuma River along with TPDF soldiers, “to protect our border.”67 Another Mdui elder, Mohammed Suleiman Yusuf, explained that he joined the TYL in 1960, also at the age of eighteen, “to build our nation.” “The Father of the Nation called for an army for the security of citizens living together,” he recounted. “To do what? TANU Youth Leaguers must have their TANU card and be reliable, and they should cooperate in the security [usalama] effort of collecting citizens from the forest and bringing them to houses.” Before villagization, Yusuf clarified, “our work was this: if there was a thug or destructive person [mharifu], the diwani [local official] told us that someone there has been beating a man or has used a knife. So we caught him and took him to the police station.” In his ward, he noted, he was one of at least several dozen TYL members engaged in this kind of work, which he summed up as being “to protect and maintain security.” Subsequently, Yusuf followed the course of many of his fellow Youth Leaguers in attending one of a variety of national training camps. He trained at Jeshi la Kujenga Taifa (JKT, or National Service) Mgulani in Dar es Salaam for six months sometime in the 1960s; there, he said, “we were taught to strengthen Tanzania with intelligence” and “to carry weapons. We learned about politics and weapons. National politics.” “After returning,” he continued, he was given the responsibility of training new TYL members in “parade.” Parade meant “straightening limbs to strengthen them,” and there were many such marches in Mtwara back then. “We taught those people to have good limbs,” he affirmed.68 Yusuf’s anecdote about “parade” reflects a broader nationwide emphasis on marching or walking as a key element of Tanzania’s socialist political culture. In the months following the Arusha Declaration, the national press began reporting on the phenomenon of small groups of Tanzanian citizens – especially TYL members and students – embarking on long-distance treks in support of the new ujamaa program. By August, foreign observers commented, “This pedestrian method of demonstrating support for the President ha[d] reached almost epidemic proportions.”69 That September, Nyerere undertook a widely reported 133-mile walk from his birthplace in Butiama to the northern city of Mwanza, where the first TANU Assembly after the Arusha Declaration was scheduled to take place. He was accompanied by the 67 68 69

Interview with Musa Sefu Chimbando, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Mohammed Suleiman Yusuf, Mdui Village, January 2008. Yusuf used the English word for “parade.” UKNA, FCO, 31/155. Canadian High Commission, British Interests Section, Dar es Salaam to R. H. Hobden, East Africa Department, Commonwealth Office, August 21, 1967.

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defense chief and joined at intervals by some of his cabinet ministers and the army brass band. This event was “presented in the press and on the radio as a revolutionary march in celebration of the Arusha Declaration.”70 In Mtwara District, likely around the same time, local officials enjoined rural people to walk long distances from their homes to the capital on the coast, “depending on themselves,” to commemorate the Arusha Declaration.71 Remembering this occasion, Yusuf explained, “The meaning of the Arusha Declaration has to do with Julius K. Nyerere leaving on his feet to go to Arusha. Its meaning is that . . . by walking you can travel more than ten miles.”72 These longdistance marches – associated with what Yusuf called “parade” – seemed intended simultaneously as a tactic to gain popular support for the president’s new policies, as a mode of cultivating – through collective physical exertion – an appreciation of the rugged spirit necessary to traverse what Nyerere called “the long road to socialism,” and as a symbolic representation to the broader public of the nation’s militant revolutionary culture.73 The national press and TANU leaders repeatedly referenced long-distance walking or marching as an ideal, holding up the Chinese Long March as a model of physical endurance and political commitment74 and even approvingly describing an early ujamaa village in Mtwara as “a booming collection of 352 houses immaculately lined as if they were soldiers at a parade.”75 Young men who developed a security consciousness through National Service and the TYL, such as Musa Sefu Chimbando and Mohammed Suleiman Yusuf, eventually went on to enforce national development policy by urging or coercing peasants to move into ujamaa villages across the country (Figure 9). Even before villagization became compulsory, Youth Leaguers in places like Mtwara complied with local officials’ orders to decisively push villagization, often eager to seize the initiative in interpreting and administering national development policy, just as they were accustomed to taking matters of national security and policing into their own hands. As a result, the task of enforcing resettlement – both before and after 1973 – was characterized by a constant tension between maintaining state control over the deployment of force and the popularization of militarism among the 70

71 72 73

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UKNA, FCO, 31/152. Office of the High Commissioner for Canada, Dar es Salaam to Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Ottawa, “Authoritarianism and Stability in Tanzania,” April 30, 1968. Interview with Albano Shiteva Nanguo, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Mohammed Suleiman Yusuf, Mdui Village, January 2008. A number of other villagers offered a similar definition of the Arusha Declaration. UKNA, FCO, 31/156. Duncan Stuart, Canadian High Commission, British Interests Section, Dar es Salaam to R. H. Hobden, East Africa Department, Commonwealth Office, September 9, 1967. “We Admire People of Tanzania – Chou,” Nationalist, June 5, 1965. “Ujamaa Villages Take Shape,” Nationalist, Mtwara Region Supplement, November 16, 1968.

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figure 9. TANU Youth League members supervising the construction of houses in the ujamaa village of Mnopwe in Masasi District, Mtwara, 1972. Courtesy Daily News.

young men implementing state policy. Remembering the work of resettling his fellow Southeasterners, Yusuf insisted, “We in the TANU Youth League didn’t use force; we used politics.”76 However, other Youth Leaguers, such as Chimbando, admitted to threatening recalcitrant individuals with arrest and, after 1973, using a motor vehicle to “take them with their things to put in the village.”77 Many villagers today recall TYL or militia members setting fire to the houses of those who resisted moving during the operation. In taking such actions, Youth Leaguers may have merely complied with the instructions of local officials, but it is also likely that they at least occasionally disregarded injunctions against the use of aggression and physical force. Mfaume Zaidi, the former Social Welfare officer profiled earlier, explained that after resettlement became mandatory, “The Youth League did work.” He and many of his colleagues were dismayed at the scenes of compulsion unfolding before their eyes in the countryside. “Truly, it wasn’t good. 76 77

Interview with Mohammed Suleiman Yusuf, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Musa Sefu Chimbando, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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We people of Social Welfare, of Community Development [as the Social Welfare department became known after independence], we told those Youth Leaguers, ‘Don’t use a lot of force,’” he recounted. “‘Talk with them; if they don’t want [to move], leave them alone, but let us improve better services in the new villages. They will see for themselves and decide to come.’” Along with Community Development officers – who “knew how to handle a person well,” he explained – agricultural extension workers expressed similar concerns, yet both groups of government workers were ultimately “without a say” in such affairs. Zaidi claimed that such authority was reserved for TANU leaders (“politicians”) and the TYL, who “were one thing.”78 Many rural people, conversely, conflated TANU institutions with the government as a whole, believing that, in one woman’s words, “TANU Youth League are people of the government. You must be afraid of the government.”79 According to Zaidi, young men sought in the TYL a route to power that bypassed the authority of their elders. This generational tension at the micro level lent a marked ambivalence to the words of one former Youth Leaguer from Rwelu, who recalled learning “how to protect our nation from enemies as if it were our father” during his National Service stint in 1970.80 At the macro level, too, some young militants rebelled against or contested – directly or indirectly – the authority of their TANU elders. In encouraging youths to exercise self-reliance as part of an active effort to decentralize military power, these leaders opened up a space for young men to assert themselves in new and sometimes unsettling ways. One of the dangers of delegating power to loosely organized young men lay in the ill-defined nature of the enemies that they were charged with eradicating. In the absence of clear criteria for determining what precisely constituted anti-ujamaa behavior, young men frequently assumed the power of judgment along with the ability to enforce it. Whereas the targets of militant power and sometimes violence during Operation Vijiji were peasants who refused to comply with villagization policy, on other occasions, those persecuted included South Asian shopkeepers accused of black market profiteering, wealthy landowners, or even farmers deemed lazy. These apparently arbitrary attacks sparked public complaints, such as a 1973 letter to the editor of the Daily News decrying the actions of young militants in rural Mbeya. “TANU Youth League to every peasant there means fear!” the writer protested. “When TYL Members come to anyone, he is sure of being beaten severely, forced to run long distances and pay a large sum of money!”81 78 79 80 81

Interview with Mfaume Zaidi, Mtwara Town, February 2008. Interview with Esha Kombo, Hadija Hassan Michenge, and Esha Issa, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Ismail Suleiman Mfaki, Rwelu Village, January 2008. Protas Mwalyambi, Sumbawanga, “Terrorising People in the Name of TYL,” letter to the editor, Daily News, August 21, 1973.

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The definition of ujamaa morality deployed by these youths came to take on not just economic and political but cultural dimensions; any citizen who strayed from what TYL or militia forces determined to be appropriately traditional African dress or comportment was deemed a threat to national development meriting forceful interception. In 1968, TANU launched Operation Vijana (Youth), an initiative to eliminate signs of “cultural enslavement” among Dar es Salaam residents; it particularly targeted women wearing miniskirts, wigs, tight pants, and cosmetics.82 Operation Vijana drew on Maoist symbolism, with officials and press reports referring to the Tanzanian drive as a “Cultural Revolution” and TYL militants as the “Green Guards.”83 In this respect, Operation Vijana paralleled roughly contemporaneous cultural policing campaigns in other African Socialist states, including Ghana, Mali, Guinea, and Zambia. Yet in its overall tenor and trajectory, TANU’s fixation on cultural policing reflected a broader continental political culture, with presidential directives in neighboring Uganda and Kenya, among other countries, also imposing bans on “indecent” clothing at around the same time.84 The focus of Operation Vijana was the miniskirt, which TANU leaders labeled a symbol of imperialist infiltration from the decadent West. In a deeper sense, however, the aesthetic styles and material objects under attack by Youth Leaguers seemed so threatening because they disrupted the larger gendered economy that TANU encouraged young men to enforce. As Andrew Ivaska has pointed out, “the mini-skirt came to be seen by young, male supporters of the ban not only as a sign of female accumulation, consumption, mobility and autonomy, but as a catalyst for socio-economic ‘exploitation’ of men by women.”85 Women wearing short skirts, makeup, and wigs were depicted as greedy temptresses and became a category easily 82 83

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Comment, Daily News, May 31, 1972. On Operation Vijana, see Ivaska, Cultured States; on the Chinese influence on Zanzibari youth militants, see G. Thomas Burgess, “Mao in Zanzibar: Nationalism, Discipline, and the (De)construction of Afro-Asian Solidarities,” in Lee, Making a World after Empire, 196–234. See, e.g., Straker, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution. On a related move in Ethiopia, see James Ellison, “The Intimate Violence of Political and Economic Change in Southern Ethiopia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 1 (2012): 35–64. For a broader meditation on the topic of clothing and African politics, see Jean Allman and Patrick McNaughton, eds., Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). In Tanzania, such cultural campaigns continued well into the early 1970s, when they were met by criticism voiced in the national press. See P. Ngumbullu, Dar es Salaam, “Covering of Bodies Is No Revolution,” letter to the editor, Daily News, September 20, 1973; “Critic,” Dar es Salaam, “I Agree But . . . ,” letter to the editor, Daily News, September 24, 1973. Andrew Ivaska, “In the ‘Age of Minis’: Women, Work and Masculinity Downtown,” in James Brennan, Andrew Burton, and Yusuf Lawi, eds., Dar es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota and the British Institute in Eastern Africa, 2007), 217.

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conflated with another object of both colonial and postcolonial state anxiety: the urban prostitute.86 Official discourse throughout the 1960s and early 1970s excoriated prostitutes as the antithesis of ujamaa ideals, representing such mobile, independent, usually urban women as parasites preying on and draining the wealth of productive men. Yet such women were also a threat to the nationalist vision in a more fundamental sense, simply because they were not rooted in stable families and were thus flouting both their duties as custodians of Tanzanian national culture and African “tradition,” on the one hand, and their obligations as guardians of their own children and husbands, on the other. Mothers, Wives, and Domestic Guardians Throughout the ujamaa era, whereas youth militancy was usually only implicitly coded as a male responsibility, the gendered specificity of women’s developmental roles was more explicitly delineated. Although the official call for collective militarization implicated women in one sense, in another sense, it configured the correct identity of the true female soldier of ujamaa socialism as that of a devoted mother – both of her own children and by extension of the nation as a whole. A 1972 Daily News editorial summed up this position, stating, “The women of this country are both nation builders and mothers. As nation builders, they must work shoulder to shoulder with their menfolk in building the new Tanzania to which all of us aspire. As mothers, they must take care of the nation.”87 Official attempts to regulate women’s gender roles during the ujamaa era often recalled the same colonial development initiatives of the 1940s and 1950s that sought to control mobile young men. Stabilization as a social ideal and political strategy was driven by a faith in the salutary effects of rooted, durable nuclear families in urban spaces paired with a fear of the dissolution of putatively traditional kinship structures in the countryside.88 By providing an African urban male workforce with increased salaries and access to permanent housing and other services, colonial officials implicitly normalized a monogamous nuclear family structure in which employed men acted as the breadwinners for individual households while women performed the reproductive labor of homemakers.89 In the postwar era, as

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In a related measure, TANU’s central committee banned beauty pageants in August 1968. “TANU Bans Beauty Competitions,” Nationalist, August 29, 1968. Comment, Daily News, May 31, 1972. For some literature on stabilization in Africa, see Frederick Cooper, ed., Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1983); Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). On stabilization in Tanzania, see Burton, African Underclass. On the “breadwinner” concept, see Lisa Lindsay, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).

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colonial policy shifted to make the city a favorable home for nuclear families, employees of the Department of Social Welfare schooled women in their domestic duties. Whereas male officers focused on rehabilitating veterans and unemployed young men through conversation and games, female Social Welfare officers – along with volunteer members of the Tanganyika Council of Women, a society for the wives of colonial officials – attempted to turn African women into proper mothers and wives. Seminars and trainings run out of community centers across the country, even in small towns such as Mtwara, offered instruction in the field of home economics and were organized according to the following logic: “Higher standards of living depend on better conditions in the home. Hence it is to the women that an approach must be made to improve social conditions, for it is the women who prepare the food, clothe and bring up the children, and generally establish the pattern of domestic health, cleanliness and behaviour.”90 The concept of social security at the heart of late colonial social welfare policy thus rested on both the appropriate provision of wages and services to working men and the cultivation of modern households anchored by women’s domestic labor. This understanding of women as custodians of social welfare likewise infused ujamaa discourse and policy. In the 1960s and early 1970s, if young men were the guardians of Tanzanian national security, women were to be the guardians of the food security and well-being of their families. Although Operation Vijana underscored that Tanzanian women embodied national culture and should therefore adhere to “African tradition” in dress and comportment, many postcolonial state officials promoted methods of training rural women as proper homemakers that echoed a distinctly colonial and missionary approach. Developmental interventions targeting women across Tanzania during the ujamaa era were overseen by the Community Development Division (initially embedded within the Ministry of Community Development and National Culture and, after 1967, within the Ministry of Regional Administration and Rural Development, or Maendeleo) and the women’s organization of TANU. In theory, the TYL admitted both male and female members, but in practice, the organization often excluded women. Beginning in 1955, female participation in nationalist politics was largely channeled through Women’s Sections that emerged in TANU branches across the country.91 In 1962, TANU officials established an official women’s wing of the party at the national level, known as the Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanganyika (Women’s Union of Tanganyika, or UWT). Although the constitution of the UWT maintained many of the Women’s Sections’ objectives, it also expressed a commitment to 90

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TNA, 5/S.D.47/30: Social Development Department. Memorandum on UNICEF Aid for the Development of the Women’s Club Movement in Tanganyika, December 1957, quoted in Eckert, “Regulating the Social,” 479. Susan Geiger, TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–1965 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997).

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addressing “the problems and concerns of women as a group.”92 However, in reality, the UWT’s mission remained a fundamentally conservative one that reflected the organization’s subordinate position within the patriarchal structure of the ruling party; the UWT administration, composed of wives of prominent TANU officials, was openly appointed by the party’s male leadership after 1967.93 In its circumscribed autonomy and limited function, the UWT resembled women’s wings of a number of other African political parties. Yet Tanzania’s self-proclaimed socialist mission seemed especially incongruous with this arrangement.94 During the ujamaa era, before the UWT adopted a new constitution that “added the ‘liberation of women’ to its objectives of advancing socialism and self-reliance,”95 the organization combined the progressive politicization of the nationalist struggle with the normative developmental approach of older social welfare policies. Working closely with Community Development officers (CDOs), the UWT sponsored a number of adult education programs at community centers throughout the country, which were designed to improve women’s literacy and basic political awareness as well as inculcate participants in modern methods of childcare and housekeeping.96 The UWT’s first such seminar, held in Dar es Salaam in 1964, schooled married women in topics such as Home and Baby Care + Nutrition, Budgeting Our Incomes, and Health Problems in the City. UWT leaders also supervised discussions among unmarried women in matters such as Our Leisure Time and How to Use It.97 A UWT Development Plan authored the following year revealed the conservatism of the organization’s mission. One of its “chief architects” clarified, “This plan is not conceived as a revolutionary means of changing 92 93

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Susan Geiger, “Umoja wa Wanawake and the Needs of the Rural Poor,” African Studies Review 25, 2/3 (1982): 49. “Discard Illusions of Glamour – Nyerere,” Nationalist, September 13, 1967. Many women in the organization contested their marginalization; see “UWT for Minis,” Nationalist, October 14, 1968; “UWT Take Youth League to Task,” Nationalist, October 7, 1968. At the level of national political representation, women were strikingly underrepresented; in 1970, for instance, just 4 percent of parliamentary members (7 out of 179) were women. Ivaska, Cultured States, 186. For insightful feminist reflections on women’s positions in African political parties more broadly, see Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Women and Nationalism in South Africa,” Transition 51 (1991): 104–23; Aili Mari Tripp, “Women’s Movements and Challenges to Neopatrimonial Rule: Preliminary Observations from Africa,” Development and Change 32, 1 (2001): 33–54. Geiger, “Umoja,” 50. This change took place in the late 1970s. Literacy trainings were part of a nationwide program of adult education after independence, which targeted both men and women. See Chapter 7 of Martin Carnoy and Joel Samoff, Education and Social Transition in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). TNA, PMO, CD/CD.U.4/8 (18): UWT Seminar 2. Bernadette N. Kunambi, Secretary of the Committee, UWT, to Mr. Msuya, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Community Development and National Culture, Dar es Salaam, July 22, 1964.

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the status of women. It is designed to enable women to play their fullest part as wives and mothers both at home and as part of the extended family.”98 To this end, the plan proposed a range of projects, including seminars and trainings in home economics; day care centers; and collectively run women’s petty commercial groups engaged in activities such as sewing, cooking, vegetable cultivation, and livestock management. The latter were not designed to bolster women’s self-reliance by affording them economic independence from their husbands. Rather, the monetary fruits of women’s productive labor were to be reinvested into their reproductive labor to “improve the family’s general standard of living” and thus “increase the contribution of women to nation-building.” Such initiatives would be overseen by the “first advance squads of UWT women,” who would receive training by the central organization and subsequently disperse themselves throughout the country to become “the pioneer field troops to put the plan into operation” (Figure 10).99 These “squads” included UWT officials and volunteers as well as female CDOs (known as mama maendeleo or bibi maendeleo) who had previously been involved with adult education work in towns. After the Arusha Declaration, UWT and Community Development interventions began to incorporate education in the politics of ujamaa and selfreliance into their trainings, yet the prioritization and content of the home economics approach persisted. The accounts of elderly female villagers and three former CDOs in Mtwara Region illustrate how this approach took shape in the southeastern Tanzanian countryside. Some older rural women deny encountering any instruction at all in home economics, simply remarking that “their parents taught them.”100 However, many others remember receiving lessons from female officials during the late colonial and early postcolonial periods in “how to cook, how to take care of family, and other women’s work.” In their telling, family duties meant the obligation to “raise your children well, live together with your husband,”101 and women’s work meant “taking care of the house, washing utensils, preparing drying racks, bathing children, sweeping,”102 among other things. Whereas some elderly female villagers seemed indifferent to the utility of these lessons, others found such training to be “important,” such as Fatou Ismaili Nampembe of Mdui, who grew up in the nearby settlement of Diwani but did not know her age. She recalled learning “to cook, to clean the home, to farm” from government 98 99 100 101 102

“UWT’s Plans for National Development: Putting Tanzanian Women in Picture,” Nationalist, March 2, 1965. Ibid. Interview with Hadija Ami Saloum, Esha Ambali Kulipatanga, and Somoya Dadi Kandolechi, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Interview with Somoya Issa Mbaruku, Esha Abdallah Luhumbe, Esha Issa Mtama, Somoya Saloum Issa Ulende, and Fatou Saidi Ngome, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Asha Mohammed Dadi, Fatoum Saloum Mandota, and Somoya Manzi Abdallah, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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figure 10. UWT chairwoman Sofia Kawawa (wife of Rashidi Kawawa) examining handicrafts made by local women on display in the Mtwara Town Parish Hall while opening a UWT branch for members of the Mtwara Domestic Science Centre, undated (likely from the late 1960s or early 1970s). Courtesy Tanzania Information Services.

workers and pointed out that local women carried out such tasks assiduously, adding, “We do it until now.”103 Yet Nampembe, like most elderly female villagers who received Community Development instruction, did not clarify whether the value of the latter inhered in its introduction of new information and values or its reinforcement of already well-established local knowledge and principles. Women like Nampembe were taught by CDOs such as Blandina Geugeu, Dorcas Nyangata, and Mariam Mmoya. Geugeu was born in 1940 and completed her secondary education at the Catholic mission station of Ndanda in Newala District. She briefly served as a TANU branch secretary in Mtwara before entering the second cohort of students at Kivukoni College in 1963, where she studied history, politics, sociology, and other subjects for one year. Although her class included both young men and young women from across Tanzania, she was the only student in her cohort from Mtwara. Between 1964 and 1968, Geugeu worked as a CDO in Mtwara (one of 103

Interview with Fatou Ismaili Nampembe, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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several per district), receiving additional training from the Rungemba College for women in Iringa. She subsequently worked as the administrative assistant of local and party officials before becoming a TANU ward and then divisional secretary. Nyangata was born in 1936, completed her primary education in Masasi, took a course in obstetrics in Newala with “wazungu” (foreign) missionaries, and then worked for a time as a local nurse. She was a CDO from 1960 to 1973 and then served as the regional chair of the UWT from 1973 to 1985, during which time she continued to work in Community Development and visit ujamaa villages. Along the way, she took courses at Kivukoni College; Rungemba College; Tengeru Institute, in Arusha; Ukerewe Institute, in Mwanza; and the Buhare Home Economics Institute. Mmoya, born in rural Lindi several years later than Geugeu and Nyangata, also studied at Ndanda, then volunteered as an adult education teacher between 1962 and 1964 in and around Mtwara Town. Afterward, she took a three-month introductory course at Rungemba, and she eventually spent a year at the Buhare Home Economics Center sometime around 1970. She worked in Community Development from 1972 to 1973 and then became the UWT regional secretary from 1973 until sometime in the 1980s. Subsequently, she served as an assistant secretary of CCM for Mtwara District for about ten years. As CDOs, these women worked together with the UWT, which “encouraged us,” Geugeu said. Their work, as she put it, consisted of teaching rural women home economics, mostly in seminars conducted in villages (Figure 11). “We would stay for the week – for the whole week we would stay there,” she explained. “Teaching them. And they themselves did practice lessons there. So that when you left there, you were certain that they would do what you taught them.” Topics covered included “how to cook better food,” “how to care for and bring up children,” and how to “make their house clean.”104 Nyangata added that there was an emphasis on “health activities,” such as advising women to visit the hospital if they or their children had medical problems, and “cleanliness in sum,” which often translated to urging women to plaster the floors of houses and bathe children according to a particular regimen. CDOs also encouraged women to plant vegetable gardens and care for livestock in addition to schooling them in sewing techniques.105 These encounters could be challenging for educated urban government employees, who sought to transcend what was in some ways a considerable cultural and social divide between themselves and largely illiterate villagers. Most rural women spent their days not only caring for their children and completing necessary housework but out in the fields farming or walking long distances to collect water for domestic use. Their daily struggles to make ends meet and navigate shifting family arrangements were 104 105

Interview with Blandina Geugeu, Mtwara Town, January 2008. Interview with Dorcas Nyangata, Mtwara Town, January 2008.

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figure 11. A development officer conducting a “better food” demonstration for women of Likonde Village, Mtwara District, during a ten-day seminar, undated (likely from the late 1960s). Courtesy Tanzania Information Services.

at the forefront of many of their minds, whereas CDOs sought to impart the importance of more refined and “modern” domestic habits to the villagers’ overall quality of life. To accomplish this goal, female Maendeleo workers drew on their formal training at government institutes. Mmoya recalled that at Rungemba, “we were learning first to approach – how you talk to people when you go to the village.” For example, she said, “Maybe when you go there, you change yourself so that you are similar to them – so you are the same as them. Not that you leave maybe wearing strange clothing so when you arrive in the village, people are surprised by you. Therefore, you should know the way to reach them – the people in the village.” At Buhare, Mmoya supplemented this type of strategic anthropological study, but at both institutions, she insists, “There were no political matters. There we were just learning craftsmanship, home management, household budgeting, sewing.”106 Her colleagues who attended other institutes had slightly different experiences. For instance, Nyangata countered, “We learned about ujamaa – like, for example, in 106

Interview with Mariam Mmoya, Mtwara Town, January 2008.

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Kivukoni, we learned about politics and ujamaa and also in Ukerewe, the same. Because at that time, we were in the time of ujamaa – you had to know it.”107 Nonetheless, the primary focus of female CDOs’ study was confined to the realm of home economics. Whereas these former officers’ accounts are representative of the overall approach of the Tanzanian state in many ways, in other ways, they are exceptional. Although villagization was expected to increase the impact of women’s development initiatives by facilitating access to rural women, and despite frequent reports quantitatively cataloging the successes of the Community Development Division and the UWT, ujamaa-era women’s development work was actually crippled by a lack of organization, funding, and education. On a visit to Mtwara Region in 1966, one Community Development evaluator commented, “It is doubtful however that the Women Community Development Assistant really knows so much more than the women themselves to be able to ‘teach them’” and “the expertise of the CD [Community Development] staff is obviously too little.” He noted that “a lot of CD staff in the Region have had no training in CD at all” and that “those who have admit to being no better off after it,” suggesting that the government look into the possibility of training bibi maendeleos at the nearby mission station of Ndanda. His report further argued that throughout the country, “the understanding of CD staff of the role of CD in the National plan is not concrete and specific enough,” specifying that “this is particularly urgent in the case of the male CD workers whose role in the field is very ambiguous.”108 The prescribed duties of the male CDO – or bwana maendeleo – often entailed supervising “traditional self-help projects” such as “construction of school buildings, dispensaries, wells and roads” – areas in which he was often superseded by TYL members, particularly after the start of ujamaa villagization.109 One male CDO who worked in Songea and the Coast Region between 1969 and 1971 before ultimately becoming a district commissioner in Mtwara explained his work as dealing with “adult education, health; we trained them to make things and we organized them to do things in a group.” Often, he clarified, these were small groups for income generation that engaged in activities such as carpentry or animal husbandry. However, he continued, women didn’t receive such training. “It was just [that] women didn’t participate in this,” he explained. “Because they were living in the same area, they had the same problems, but when we went to train, women were just training for householding, and men were trained for production. You see? Therefore, women had no chance of getting anything or finding the way to get money.” Women, he continued, “were not getting 107 108 109

Interview with Dorcas Nyangata, Mtwara Town, January 2008. TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development. “Safari Notes, Mtwara Region” from B. J. Renju, November 11, 1966. Ibid.

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figure 12. Women weaving baskets in Namenjele Village, Mtwara District, 1975. Courtesy Daily News.

their rights. Because they didn’t get this training, which . . . could give them funds” (Figure 12).110 In contrast to their male counterparts, female Maendeleo employees had a more clearly delineated function – to teach women to maintain self-reliant families. Training for female CDOs, however, was scarce; a 1970 inquiry found that of the 560 women employed by Maendeleo, about half had not received any kind of training, about 400 had not received any training in home economics, and only 70 had secondary school certificates.111 The Tanzanian government dealt with this problem by co-opting mission schools around the country and requesting assistance from international donors. In 1963, responding to one such solicitation, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, using Freedom from Hunger Campaign funds donated by the Swedish International Development Corporation and equipment provided by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), funded the construction of the Buhare 110 111

Interview with Makaburi Babtist Phili, Mtwara Town, February 2008. TNA, PMO, RD/E6/1: FAO Home Economics General. “Request to UN/FAO Assistance to Establish a Diploma Course at Buhare H.E. Training Centre,” from Maendeleo, October 12, 1971.

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Home Economics Centre in the northern region of Mara. After an initial period of Swedish supervision, the Tanzanian government gained operational control over the center, which offered courses (ranging from two years to two weeks in length) in Rural Home Economics and Day Care Center Assistantship to Maendeleo extension workers and villagers. Courses in home economics were also run out of stations such as Ndanda and at Rural Training Centers throughout the country. Beginning in 1968, students at Buhare – like Mariam Mmoya and Dorcas Nyangata – visited nearby ujamaa villages, conducting sample trainings and using surveys to collect information on village life. This activity was intended both to provide the center with resources to adapt its curriculum in accordance with rural needs and to equip students with the experience necessary to stage successful developmental interventions in the countryside. In 1972, soliciting assistance from the FAO’s family planning organization (the Program for Better Family Living), one Maendeleo official remarked, “We are at a stage of developing home economics material that suits the rural family and developing communication means that are effective to transfer this knowledge to the families.”112 Yet in reality, the material limitations of the Tanzanian state resulted in significant continuities between such postcolonial developmental training and older colonial interventions into the realm of the family. They also accentuated the influence of contemporaneous Western donors on domestic curricula. These institutional outcomes blocked a more ambitious strain of ujamaa that aimed to craft a radical new approach to rural development tailored to a socialist agenda and the goal of national self-reliance. The Arusha Declaration coincided with a new moment in Third World developmental strategizing, as the welfarist promises of early waves of independence crumbled in the face of the humiliating inability of postcolonial nation-states like India to provide adequate food for their citizens. A severe drought led to massive food shortages throughout India in 1967, prompting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to request aid in kind from countries such as the United States. This assistance came with what the Nationalist’s editors called “strange conditions” (such as mandating a ban on trade with Cuba and North Vietnam), and the Indian example accordingly demonstrated to Tanzanian leaders how food aid could be linked to the Cold War expansion of “neo-colonialist spheres of influence.”113 Concern about the multiple hazards that food vulnerabilities posed to newly independent Third World countries reached across sub-Saharan Africa. At the 1968 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting, Mali’s food minister, Louis Negre, called for a new international food distribution agency to “promote 112 113

TNA, PMO, UV/U4: Ujamaa Villages General. “A PBFL Orientation to Maendeleo Programs” by I. B. Lomayani, for Commissioner for Rural Development, January 21, 1972. “Food and National Prestige,” Nationalist, January 24, 1967.

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the rational distribution of food and other farming surpluses in rich countries” and warned that food aid had become a “plaything of politics – a means of exerting pressure, even intimidation.”114 In Tanzania, national food security was seen as critical in existential terms. A 1968 editorial in the Nationalist proclaimed, “Dependence on food aid from outside cannot be a way of life and if it is forced that way, it can only be a poor way of life carrying with it all the connotations of humiliated existence.” “Increased food productivity,” it insisted, “is the only way towards alleviating the problem of food shortage.”115 Yet home economics focused on the consumption rather than production of food, and its place in the national development plan was confined to encouraging “the proper utilization of resources.”116 The very material shortages and structural limitations that TANU leaders so feared rendered Nyerere’s exhortation to Tanzanians to “grow more food” incapable of tackling the conditions underlying the population’s vulnerability to food shortages – namely, connections to a global economy that positioned Tanzania as a peripheral exporter of primary products, farmers’ limited access to agricultural inputs, and poor infrastructure that led to repeated instances of crop wastage.117 The onus of maintaining food security fell on women, and problems of scarcities of food or access to food were reconfigured as deficiencies in nutritional knowledge and techniques of domestic food storage, rationing, and preparation – all of which could theoretically be cured by exposing women to the “science” of modern home economics.118 114 115 116

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“Plea for UN Food Distributing Agency,” Nationalist, February 15, 1968. “Food Shortage,” Nationalist, January 10, 1968. TNA, PMO, RD/E6/1 FAO: Home Economics General. I. B. Lomayani, Principal Secretary, Prime Minister’s Office to assorted ministries: “Evaluation of the Home Economics Programme in Tanzania,” April 14, 1972. For more on Tanzanian agricultural policy – particularly in relation to food security – see Stefano Ponte, Farmers and Markets in Tanzania: How Policy Reforms Affect Rural Livelihoods in Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002); Philip Raikes, Modernising Hunger: Famine, Food Surplus and Farm Policy in the EEC and Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998). On food security as a concept, see Philip McMichael, “Food Security and Social Reproduction: Issues and Contradictions,” in Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill, eds., Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 169–89. This approach persisted in Tanzanian national development policy for decades. A 1992 national report reflected this: “As the key to both aggregate and household food security, women are the targets of many socio-economic support actions, especially nutrition, income generation and production-oriented activities and policies, including credit, although they are not the only intended beneficiaries.” Comprehensive Food Security Programme: Volume I Main Report (Dar es Salaam: United Republic of Tanzania, Ministry of Agriculture, 1992). Richard Schroeder addresses this phenomenon in policy and literature on women and development, writing of a tendency to naturalize a trope of “maternal altruism” challenged by a group of “new household theorists” who reexamine intrahousehold dynamics in development processes. Richard Schroeder, Shady Practices: Agroforestry and Gender Politics in the Gambia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). A growing body

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To make matters worse, women’s trainings were frequently not integrated into national and regional rural development planning, and they remained disconnected from other developmental interventions at the site of the individual ujamaa village, such as those overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture. The 1966 observations of one national Maendeleo official in Mtwara that “The development of women’s programmes still appear to be considered separately from the overall CD programmes in the districts and are consequently usually unrelated and mutually exclusive” were repeated in official correspondence into the 1970s.119 Another common complaint identified “one of the areas which has weakened the extension work” as the “inability to know where all the workers are, what they are doing,” due to poor infrastructure and a lack of supervisory staff.120 A general lack of resources to invest into women’s development work meant that the curricula of Rural Training Centres and other educational institutions continued to be littered with subject matter far removed from the material realities of the Tanzanian countryside. At institutions such as Buhare, topics like Home Improvement dealt extensively with the cosmetic maintenance of the home; although the curriculum sought to emphasize domestic hygiene and order for salubrious purposes – to protect the health of the family – it sometimes seemed to fixate exclusively on aesthetics. Thus, women learned proper techniques for sweeping, plastering floors and walls, arranging furniture, and decorating rooms with the products of their own handiwork. In this context, a superficial focus on accumulating the accoutrements of domesticity came to stand in for the more substantive goal of achieving real social security for individual families. The staffing of educational centers with foreign, frequently European teachers and the external control of institutions such as Buhare fueled the gap between ostensible developmental priorities and actual rural needs. Thus, Tanzanian development policy during the ujamaa era exhibited a marked tension between progressive aspirations toward achieving gender equality and tackling rural poverty, on the one hand, and conservative inclinations that hindered this effort to attain true parity and national selfreliance, on the other. In a sense, the gendered limitations of national policy

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of literature has also highlighted the gendered implications of development policy in Tanzania and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, revealing the undue burden placed on women who are held accountable for their family’s food security and health even while they juggle agricultural, wage, and reproductive labor. See Claude Mung’ong’o, Market Liberalization in Tanzania: A Review in Relation to Food Security and Sustainable Livelihoods (Dar es Salaam: UDSM IDS, Rural Food Security Group, 2000); Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Giovanna F. Dalla Costa, eds., Paying the Price: Women and the Politics of International Economic Strategy (London: Zed Books, 1995). TNA, PMO, UV/U4: Ujamaa Villages General. “A PBFL Orientation to Maendeleo Programs” by I. B. Lomayani, for Commissioner for Rural Development, January 21, 1972. Ibid.

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were consistent with the marginalization of women from policy making and political office more generally. Reflecting on her career, Mariam Mmoya recalled that in the UWT, “we were yelling, ‘We women should get governmental responsibilities, and we should have certain things, and all should have power.’ What we were fighting for in the UWT – there were women who had opportunities, but they were few. Thus, we said that women are capable, they should be given a chance.”121 Moreover, a lack of resources and access to education contributed to a reliance on the ideologies and practices embedded in developmental institutions inherited from the colonial state. It also enabled the influence and management of a growing group of international – but largely Western-run – state and nongovernmental development institutions. These organizations, if not forming a singular, monolithic development regime, tended to represent their common developmental model as a universal one.122 In particular, their approaches were characterized by a depoliticization of poverty; a reification of the nuclear family as a normal, necessary, and coherent unit; and the naturalization of a trope of maternal altruism, “premised on the dubious notion that women possess inherent capacities for nurturing and self-sacrifice.”123 This assumption pervaded Tanzanian development work even though many CDOs and TANU leaders openly acknowledged that in the Tanzanian countryside, women performed the majority of agricultural and not just reproductive labor.124 The Arusha Declaration itself recognized this double burden in unambiguous terms, stating, “In the villages the women work very hard. At times they work for 12 or 14 hours a day. They even work on Sundays and public holidays. Women who live in the villages work harder than anybody else in Tanzania.”125 Representations and Realities of Familyhood Far away from cities like Arusha and Dar es Salaam, women’s productive responsibilities were indeed a fact of life in rural communities for decades before ujamaa was launched. In Mtwara, this configuration of women’s labor had longer roots in local traditions but also resulted from a colonial political economy that turned many rural men into mobile wage laborers. Frequent migration, combined with endemic material hardship, “administrative caprice,” and a lack of basic social security, also led rural people to 121 122

123 124 125

Interview with Mariam Mmoya, Mtwara Town, January 2008. Michael Jennings explores the relationship between Oxfam and Tanzanian policy in Surrogates of the State. For a thoughtful consideration of a comparative context, see Subir Sinha, “Lineages of the Developmentalist State: Transnationality and Village India, 1900–1965,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 501, 1 (2008): 57–90. Schroeder, Shady Practices, 8. See also Ferguson, Anti-Politics Machine. Interviews with Blandina Geugeu and Dorcas Nyangata, Mtwara Town, January 2008; “Stop This Practice,” Nationalist, September 9, 1967. Nyerere, “Arusha Declaration,” 245.

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approach family in an extremely flexible manner.126 In this context, many men and women treated marriage as a temporary survival strategy rather than an enduring, inviolable institution.127 Colonial officials noted high rates of divorce and adultery in Mtwara from the 1930s onward with considerable concern. In Newala District, for instance, the Southern Province’s commissioner remarked in 1932, “I have noted in most areas that adultery cases are on the increase – or at least that such matters are being more frequently brought before the Native Courts.” To account for this, he pointed to “the absences of the man of the house, selling his produce or seeking work to pay his tax,” and the “opening of trading centres and the freedom in travelling such as was unknown in pre-Government days,” which he claimed attracted “a number of strangers and local youths who have either no relatives in the District or who wander from village to village and have been cast off by their relatives.”128 Some twenty years later, after stabilization policies had been widely established, a colony-wide provincial commissioners’ conference recorded the persistent phenomenon of the “‘casual and simple’ dissolution” of “native” marriages with dismay.129 Official anxiety about rural families stemmed from a still more fundamental problem. What exactly qualified as a taxable household, in a basic sense, was unclear. In 1952, the Mikindani district commissioner drew attention to the incompatibility of the rigid social categories of the existing census form with the fluid, provisional nature of most rural households, which failed to correspond to the model of a permanently settled nuclear family unit. In a letter to the provincial commissioner, he complained, “The very question of deciding who is a ‘Head’ and who is not is most complicated at times. Say, for instance, a man and his wife and their son and his wife live in the same house. Many enumerators would say there is only one head in this family, while others, again, would put down two. There are many relatively complex questions of this kind.” He also insisted that “‘Usual residence’ should be clarified. A man who comes from Masasi and who has worked in the District for 18 months is ‘usually resident’ where?” Furthermore, he continued, “‘Usual number in family’ is also a misleading question. It would be better to ask, ‘Is anyone who usually lives in this 126 127

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Liebenow, Colonial Rule, 334. J. A. R. Wembah-Rashid’s fieldwork elsewhere in the region also emphasizes the elasticity of familial bonds; see “Socio-Political Development and Economic Viability in a Rural Community: The Case of Nakarara Village, Mtwara Region, Tanzania,” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983. TNA, Accession 16, 1-100: Adultery Cases in Native Courts 1933–45. Provincial Commissioner, Southern Province to the Chief Secretary to the Government, Dar es Salaam, September 15, 1932. TNA, Accession 188, NA-3-4-7: Native Affairs, Welfare and Administration, Native Marriages. Provincial Commissioners’ Conference, Memorandum no. 16 on Native Christian Marriages, July 12–14, 1951.

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house away on safari [travel]?’”130 Another complication arose with regard to polygamous arrangements. The overwhelmingly Muslim character of the Makonde population in coastal Mtwara meant that polygamy had been practiced throughout the area for generations, although material limitations prevented many men from marrying more than one wife at a time. The frequency of separation or termination of formal (involving the exchange of bridewealth) or informal marriages during the late colonial period further blurred the boundaries of households.131 Although official diagnoses of detribalization and moral decay were premised on a reified conception of “tradition,” the late colonial and early postcolonial periods were in fact a time of transition for rural people’s social practices and family structures. These changes rarely conformed to government attempts to standardize social norms, instead often clashing with the latter. In the Southeast, guidelines for sexual relationships had been incorporated into older mechanisms for marking the passage to maturity for young men and women – the initiation ceremonies of jando (for boys) and unyago (for girls). The age of marriage for most rural people varied depending on the age at which they completed jando or unyago as well as according to young men’s financial abilities, but in general, women married at a younger age than men. Although initiation remained an important social institution in the Mtwara countryside into the postwar era, young men’s participation in the growing capitalist economy increasingly allowed them to bypass the control of their elders in deciding when and how to marry. Simultaneously, the spread of Islam precipitated further changes stemming from the erosion of matrilineal norms among the Makonde community. Village elders unanimously agree that matrilocal marriages – previously the norm – had already become a thing of the past by the 1950s. Young women would generally move to their husbands’ areas after marriage, rather than the reverse. However, even this arrangement was flexible, depending on the context.132 So did unions themselves vary, ebb, and flow in relation to changing constraints and opportunities surrounding people’s constant struggle to meet their basic needs. 130

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TNA, Accession 188, POP-18-1: Population Census, etc. District Commissioner, Mikindani to the Chief Secretary, Dar es Salaam and Senior Provincial Officer, Southern Province, April 8, 1952. A rich older literature on the problem of defining family in colonial Africa includes Megan Vaughan, “Which Family? Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic and Cultural Unit,” Journal of African History 24, 2 (1983): 275–83 and Meredith McKittrick, “Reinventing the Family: Kinship, Marriage, and Famine in Northern Namibia, 1948–1954,” Social Science History 21, 3 (1997): 265–95. For a more recent investigation, see Rachel Jean-Baptiste, “‘The Option of the Judicial Path’: Disputes over Marriage, Divorce, and Extra-Marital Sex in Colonial Courts in Libreville, Gabon (1939–1959),” Cahiers d’´etudes africaines 187–8 (2007): 643–70. Interview with Saidi Mohammed Ali Mkwewe, Rwelu Village, January 2008.

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Rural Southeasterners initiated and terminated marital relationships to maximize their own self-reliance and livelihood security. In general, these multiple marriages occurred sequentially, not simultaneously within polygamous family structures; marrying more than one woman at a time could be expensive, requiring resources for bridewealth that many rural men in the area simply did not possess. Older men and women alike insist on their agency in decisions regarding marital unions. An exemplary case is that of Somoya Nandule, who was married eight times. Nandule couldn’t remember the year of her birth or initiation but was raised in Mtwara District and moved multiple times within the area throughout her life. To explain her frequent divorces and remarriages, she offered, “This husband – if you don’t speak well of each other, you will demand talaq to leave, you will leave, you will go to another if you see that the situation isn’t good.” Divorce procedures could vary depending on whether marriages had been formally sanctioned or were more casual. Nandule reported that to separate, “You just say, ‘I quit, I quit, I have failed,’ he just writes talaq, and you go to your home.”133 Conflicts over marital separations would be taken to the local shehe, who in theory could insist on the return of bridewealth (although it is unclear how frequently this actually occurred).134 Children of these unions would often remain with their mother, but they could also move on with their father or relocate to live with other members of their extended family – an uncle, an aunt, or a grandparent. (It was reportedly rare for unmarried women to set up their own households, although this practice seems to have become more common in more recent times.)135 After independence, and especially after the inauguration of ujamaa, official and public debates about ambiguities in the state’s regulation of families continued, despite the fact that actual practices of familyhood continued to exceed such efforts at control. These discussions revealed that institutional continuities with late colonial norms muted but never extinguished the contradictory aspirations and priorities of ujamaa ideology. Drawing on classic welfare state approaches to the support of female reproductive labor or more radical socialist efforts to socialize such work,136 some 133 134 135 136

Interview with Somoya Nandule, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. In Islamic law, talaq is a mechanism by which men can obtain a divorce. Shehe is the local vernacular for the Arabic word sheikh; it refers to a Muslim man of high status who has the hybrid function of local teacher, leader, and judge. Interview with Somoya Nandule, Somoya Bure, and Hawa Salamu Nalidi, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. There is a rich literature on this subject in comparative socialist cases, which often had similarly contradictory outcomes. On Romania, see Kathryn Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); on China, see Wang Zheng, “State Feminism? Gender and Socialist State Formation in Maoist China,” Feminist Studies 31, 3 (2005): 519–51 and Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); on Yugoslavia, see Sabrina Ramet, ed., Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and

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officials and citizens advocated – at times successfully – for laws mandating paid maternity leave137 and the establishment of day care centers across the country.138 Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, TANU leaders, UWT members, and urban citizens argued for and against the exemption of married women from National Service,139 the expulsion of unmarried pregnant women from schools or civil service employment,140 the formal legalization of polygamy, the abolition of bridewealth as a condition for marriage, legal mechanisms for regulating the distribution of domestic finances, and the standardization of divorce procedures.141 In particular, efforts to legally reform the institution of marriage to improve the status of women – paralleled in other African Socialist contexts, most notably Guinea – became lightning rods for discussion.142 This was especially true of the 1971 United Law of Marriage that sought to standardize national law regarding marriage (which had previously fallen under customary law) and was ostensibly intended to promote gender equality.143 Similar legal reforms and attendant debates unfolded contemporaneously in neighboring countries. For instance, as Kenda Mutongi chronicles, Kenya’s 1972 Law of Succession Bill – which was ostensibly intended to aid widows by enabling them to inherit their deceased husbands’ property – provoked heated disputes because of its failure to address numerous “legal ambiguities” stemming from the plurality and flexibility of actual practices of family.144 Across much of the continent, just as the composition and organization of families in the city and

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Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States (University Park: Penn State Press, 1999); on Cuba, see Johanna I. Moya Fabregas, “The Cuban Woman’s Revolutionary ´ Experience: Patriarchal Culture and the State’s Gender Ideology, 1950–1976,” Journal of Women’s History 22, 1 (2010): 61–84. In July 1969, the central government passed a law mandating that married female employees of the central government, local authorities, and parastatal organisations receive paid maternity leave. “New Deal for Maternity Women from July 1,” Nationalist, June 6, 1969. Numerous day care centers were established but were criticized for being inadequately staffed and serviced. “Mainly for Women: Women’s Wishes for 1969,” Nationalist, January 4, 1969. Married women were exempted from National Service until November 1969. Afterward, women continued to be marginal participants in the larger national security apparatus, although a series of letters to the press expressed outrage on behalf of the female “victims of National Service” (J. P. Mkenda, Morogoro, “The National Service Act Must Be Stable,” letter to the editor, Daily News, November 2, 1972) and “the expectant mothers and other mothers who panicked into the camps” (Affected, Dar es Salaam, “The Position of Women in National Service Camps Needs Review,” letter to the editor, Daily News, October 6, 1972). “Tanzania Women Workers and Their Conditions of Service,” Nationalist, June 10, 1968; “Shs. 300m for Rural Areas,” Nationalist, July 15, 1967. See, e.g., “UWT Condemns Polygamy,” Nationalist, September 6, 1969. On Guinea, see McGovern, Unmasking the State, 185–91. Ivaska has thoughtfully outlined the White Paper debates in Cultured States. Kenda Mutongi, Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 183.

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countryside remained in flux, so did official policy and popular politics ultimately retain a substantial degree of ambivalence toward matters of gender and family. Such a historical context does not uphold rigid analytical distinctions between the “private sphere” and “public sphere.” As such, it challenges scholarly narratives of authoritarianism and resistance that represent the individual rural family as a self-contained site of opposition to an invasive Tanzanian state located in a reified “public sphere.” James Giblin takes this approach, contending that during the ujamaa era, rural residents of one district in southwestern Tanzania “created a space that stood separate from the state” and thus “prevented nationalism from becoming hegemonic.” This separate space is the realm of the family, and Giblin describes his subjects’ family life in terms of their “taking refuge from nation in the private sphere.”145 In differentiating between “analytical” histories of the state and “affective” histories of family, Giblin recalls Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theorization of History 1 (signifying Western capitalist modernity) as distinct from History 2 (referencing the alternative space of subaltern life-worlds).146 By explaining the marginalization of Njombe residents as a condition of exclusion – the severing of ties with the state and History 1 – he mistakenly implies that underdevelopment is not an active process inherently connected to the actions of the state and the workings of global capitalism. Moreover, his argument participates in what James Ferguson calls the naturalization of a “vertical topography of power,” which follows “Hegel’s famous conception of civil society as, in Mahmood Mamdani’s phrase, ‘sandwiched between the patriarchal family and the universal state.’”147 Instead of being separate from or located below the Tanzanian state, rural families were figuratively and concretely entangled with what was in fact the diffuse and fractured entity of the state. It is in part because of these myriad connections between the “private” and “public” spheres that local practices and official representations of family alike exhibited such striking tensions. Kinship, Political Community, and the Tensions of Nationalism The ujamaa project did not follow a contradictory, gendered course simply because of the inherent shortcomings of its leaders or the incoherent nature of its political vision. The uneven trajectory of Tanzanian socialism reflected enduring colonial legacies, the impact of contemporaneous global 145 146 147

James Giblin, A History of the Excluded: Making Family a Refuge from State in TwentiethCentury Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 7, 263. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Ferguson, Global Shadows, 92. Quotation from Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 14.

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economic and political forces, and a broader tendency of nationalist formations to invoke and construct family according to opposing logics. Scholars interrogating nationalism across time and space have described the affinity of nationalist discourses for metaphors of kinship, which facilitate the naturalization of the nation as an eternal demographic unit and cultural community.148 Constructions of the indigenous – usually articulated via the category of “tradition” and located in the “private sphere” – play a key role in this process of national self-authentication. At the same time, however, developmental interventions staged by national states often seek to reconfigure actual traditional practices of gender and family, altering the very site at which national culture is putatively grounded. Thus, in Tanzania, there was an irresolvable tension between the aim of cultural policing in cities – which enlisted young men to purge African culture of foreign influences – and the work of CDOs in the ujamaa villages of the countryside – which used tactics to mold rural women into proper homemakers that often derived from a distinctly colonial approach. In other words, the Tanzanian state attempted to transform the fluid institution of the rural African family into the standardized model of the generic nuclear family, even while it sought to restore a very different ideal of “tradition” in cities by policing gender norms according to an emphasis on indigeneity. This apparent contradiction of state policy was linked to a fundamental tension between expansive and exclusionary notions of kinship deployed by ujamaa discourse, which was, in turn, connected to the broader dialectic between universalism and particularism inherent in Tanzanian nationalism.149 The symbolic configuration of nation-as-family at the heart of ujamaa discourse reflected a type of political imagination particular to the nation form. To legitimate itself, nationalism operates through both the subsumption of local understandings of family and the celebration of a more abstracted version of kinship as an adhesive binding diffuse populations into a national unit. Etienne Balibar explains that “as lineal kinship, solidarity between generations and the economic functions of the extended family dissolve, what takes their place is neither a natural micro-society nor a purely ‘individualistic’ contractual relation, but a nationalization of the family, which has as its counterpart the identification of the national community with a symbolic kinship, circumscribed by rules of pseudo-endogamy, and with a tendency not so much to project itself into a sense of having common 148 149

Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997). I use the term dialectic here to highlight that a nationalist consciousness did not merely emerge in reflexive opposition to a transnational (in particular, a Pan-Africanist) one. Rather, the two were “bound in a strong symbiotic embrace,” to borrow from Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tin´e, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 1 (2012): 67. Stolte and Fischer-Tin´e offer an illuminating comparative study of the relationship between PanAsianism and Indian nationalism during an earlier part of the twentieth century.

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antecedents as a feeling of having common descendants.”150 Although Balibar’s analysis is grounded in the example of Western Europe, it illuminates a more widespread inclination of nationalisms to combat or conceal the historical arbitrariness of their existence by grounding themselves in metaphors of familyhood. In the Tanzanian case, the content of this metaphor indexed a particular set of local understandings of kinship, but the fact that the ujamaa formulation drew on African “tradition” is itself consistent with a basic discursive strategy of all nationalist projects – to configure themselves as uniquely authentic by conjuring a distinct common national past and culture. Buried at the heart of the metaphor of nation-as-family, with its implied mythology of shared descent, is always a reference to a racial essence.151 This racializing or nativist impulse was apparent even in the Tanzanian case, despite ujamaa’s foundation on a philosophy of socialist humanism and Pan-Africanism. Referencing the frequent correlation of episodes of political breakdown in postcolonial Africa with the ethnic fracturing of nation-states, a common scholarly narrative assigns ujamaa an exceptionally favorable status among nationalist projects for its ethnic inclusiveness.152 Such applause is often premised on the rather functionalist assumption that ideology directly determines political practices. It also internalizes the terms of Tanzanian political discourse, which hold up Swahili – itself the product of a long history of cross-cultural and interethnic exchange – as a unifying linguistic force in the postcolonial polity, thus apparently configuring national culture as “supra-tribal.” Furthermore, this argument alleges, whereas other incarnations of African Socialism were grounded in more explicit assertions of racial essences, ujamaa relied on an articulation of African tradition that was ostensibly dislocated from identitarian politics. Closer analysis, however, shows that the formulation of African tradition underpinning the ujamaa imaginary could and did contract along ethnic and racial lines when deployed by various historical actors. In part, this reflected one trajectory of Tanzanian nationalist thought. During the colonial period, as James Brennan points out, the Swahili word taifa (nation) was initially fused to local concepts of race, as opposed to the term nchi (country), which emphasized territory over identity. Over time, even after it was harnessed by TANU leaders who rejected narrow racial formulas, taifa often retained some of its original grounding in “idiom[s] of

150

151 152

Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991), 102. Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 37–68. Askew further addresses this trope in Performing the Nation. See Mamdani, Define and Rule for one such example.

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patrilineal descent”153 – despite the pull of alternative conceptions of transnational political community and the passage of an inclusive citizenship bill on the eve of Tanganyikan independence.154 In the 1960s and early 1970s, some state officials, youth militants, and average men and women mobilized the moral language of ujamaa to delegitimize those judged external to the Tanzanian national family. Groups targeted by exclusionary nationalism were usually deemed insufficiently socialist. For instance, state officials explicitly sought to eliminate visible markers of Maasai culture beginning in 1967 and continuing into the early 1970s, in a movement called Operation Dress-Up.155 Enforced alongside Operation Vijana by TYL members, Operation Dress-Up prohibited the wearing of Maasai clothing and adornment and aimed to reform the bodily practices of Maasai Tanzanians to comply with the norms of “socialist modernity.”156 It categorized Maasai culture as primitive, unhygienic, and inconsistent with the Tanzanian national development project, and it authorized sometimes violent assaults by cultural policers on Maasai throughout the country.157 Though not organized into a concerted campaign, officially sanctioned rhetorical and physical attacks on South Asians in the name of ujamaa similarly called into question Nyerere’s insistence that “socialism and racialism are incompatible.”158 Asian Tanzanians – predominantly petty traders and small businessmen – were particularly vulnerable to accusations of capitalist exploitation and parasitism. Descriptions of putative Asian attempts at economic sabotage and plots of imperialist collaboration littered newspapers throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, often using coded language referring to a “network of blood-suckers,” “political gnats,” and “the tentacles of businessmen mostly of foreign origin.”159 In the same week that the Arusha Declaration was announced, a police sweep across major Tanzanian cities resulted in the widespread harassment of Asians, ostensibly to weed out those with improper entry permits – an effort indiscriminately directed at both recent immigrants and members of families that had lived in Tanzania for generations. The “intensive door-to-door check,” spearheaded 153 154 155 156 157

158 159

Brennan, Taifa, 118. Ron Aminzade, “From Race to Citizenship: The Indigenization Debate in Post-Socialist Tanzania,” Studies in Comparative International Development 38, 1 (2003): 43–63. Leander Schneider, “The Maasai’s New Clothes: A Developmentalist Modernity and Its Exclusions,” Africa Today 53, 1 (2006): 100–31. For more on the category of socialist national culture, see Askew, Performing the Nation. Similar campaigns took place in Ethiopia in the 1960s; see Ellison, “Intimate Violence.” For a rich study of Maasai tensions with the Tanzanian state in historical perspective, see Dorothy Hodgson, Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). Julius Nyerere, “Socialism Is Not Racialism,” in Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, 258. “Food Distribution Sabotage: Police Alerted,” Nationalist, December 7, 1968; “Tanzanian” in Dar es Salaam, “Expelled Aliens,” letter to the editor, Nationalist, February 2, 1967.

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by the minister of home affairs, Lawi Sijaona, culminated in the expulsion of more than 160 traders.160 Those who were spared deportation nonetheless continued to be stigmatized as “paper citizens” – citizens in name but not substance.161 Anti-Asian racism was certainly not unique to the Tanzanian nationalist project, building momentum in the late 1960s as a broader East African regional dynamic that culminated in Idi Amin’s dramatic expulsion of Asian Ugandans in 1972. Yet its escalation in the Tanzanian context at the precise moment of ujamaa’s emergence as national policy is especially conspicuous. Many scholars have interpreted the synchronism of these two political forces – a nativist impulse and a national policy of agrarian socialism – as a natural outgrowth of ujamaa’s anti-urban bias, which would account for both intensified anti-Asian sentiment and the simultaneous rise of cultural policing campaigns targeting city dwellers. Operation Dress-Up has also been situated as part of the “culture wars” that accompanied the official project of attempting to consolidate a coherent national identity out of diverse constituent traditions. Yet scholars have not analytically linked these urban and cultural political disputes to another type of xenophobia apparent in the noticeably ambivalent official and popular reception of refugees on Tanzanian soil. Throughout the 1960s, even in rural areas, these African neighbors were at once welcomed in the spirit of transnational socialist kinship and maligned for being foreign and unrooted. Suspicion or resentment of refugees indexed a strand of ujamaa thought that stigmatized mobility in and of itself, both for diverging from the path of settled agriculture that was to fuel national development and for entailing an administrative illegibility that was threatening in a context of heightened public anxiety about national security. Precisely the same ideological emphasis on long-term settlement implicitly or explicitly underwrote attacks on South Asian traders, pastoralist Maasai, and unmarried young men and women in cities.162 It is not a coincidence that each of these groups was perceived as mobile and deterritorialized; their uneasy position within the Tanzanian nation was consistent with a political imaginary that based a vision of inclusive, fluid political community on the metaphor of the settled village. Within ujamaa ideology, the village anchored both a utopianism of social process and a utopianism of spatial form; the aversion to itinerant citizenship arose where the symbolic focus on the village as a desirable model of human community ceded to a literal 160

161

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UKNA, FCO, 31/152. Canadian High Commission, British Interests Section, Dar es Salaam to M. Scott, East and Southern African Department, Commonwealth Office, January 5, 1968; “35 Dar Traders Ordered to Go,” Nationalist, January 24, 1967. Phrase used by Mustapha Songambele, regional commissioner for Dar es Salaam and the Coast. NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1967–69, Box 2513. Amembassy Dar es Salaam to Department of State, “This Week in Tanzania, July 7–13,” July 15, 1967. The mobility of high-level political elites, however, was often exempted from such sanction.

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fixation with the village as a site of long-term sedentarization. That analogous dynamics of exclusionary nationalism were concurrently discernible in most other African countries also attests to the wider continental impact of a Cold War political culture, in which a politics of xenophobia was married to a politics of patriarchy at the national scale. Finally, the refugee issue, in particular, registered the intensifying friction between Pan-Africanism and nationalism as the latter hardened into a fixed political structure. This trajectory reflected a broader global shift from an early 1960s moment in which what Lisa Maalki calls “the national order of things” was far from set in stone – or even a foreseeable inevitability – to a late 1960s moment in which the nation form had become fairly entrenched across the world.163 Tanzanian officials both celebrated hosting refugees from neighboring sites of conflict as an enactment of “real African Socialism” and frowned on this practice as a potential strain on national resources. Denunciations of refugees, like attacks on Asians, were rarely overtly articulated as such; rather, they were filtered through ujamaa idioms promoting self-reliance and agricultural work. “Uhuru na Kazi” (Independence and Work) was a popular political slogan of the early independence period, commanding Tanzanians to demonstrate their commitment to collective development – and their citizenship itself – through physical labor. In addition to its obvious emphasis on farming, national policy called on rural people to donate manual labor to a variety of local development initiatives or “nation-building” activities. In this respect, ujamaa resembled other national development programs that institutionalized African Socialism’s conception of the social obligation to work through policies encouraging or mandating popular contributions to public works projects. Mali’s investissement humain (human investment) policy took after programs in neighboring Guinea;164 even in Kenya, the harambee (working together) policy similarly conjoined the individual ethic of self-help with the notion of communal obligation.165 “Work is money,” Nyerere explained in 1965, outlining the logic of rural nation-building projects. “This is how the nation-building schemes operate; people give to the nation their hands and brains instead of money, and the result is that we have roads, classrooms and so on, which we would not otherwise be able to afford.”166 Initially, participation in such schemes was deemed voluntary, but in 1968, the president passed an order “empower[ing] Village Development Committees to impose traditional sentences on idlers who do not participate in national ‘endeavours for self-reliance’ agreed upon 163 164 165 166

Malkki, “National Geographic.” Kenneth Grundy, “Mali: The Prospects of ‘Planned Socialism,’” in Friedland and Rosberg, African Socialism, 189. Philip M. Mbithi and Rasmus Rasmusson, eds., Self Reliance in Kenya: The Case of Harambee (Uppsala, Sweden: Nordic Africa Institute, 1977). “New Year Message to the Nation: President Applauds People’s Progress,” Nationalist, January 2, 1965.

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by the people.”167 In such a context, those deemed idle – because they did not contribute to communal labor projects or practice settled agriculture – were perceived as enemies of Tanzanian socialism and by extension of the Tanzanian nation. Refugees could easily slide into this category. Nyerere’s regime graciously referred to them as “resident guests” (wageni wakazi), yet some officials invoked an old Swahili proverb to insinuate that they might be taking advantage of Tanzanian hospitality: “Treat your guest as a guest for two days; on the third day, give him a hoe.”168 When Nzunda spoke to thousands of Rwandese refugees in the West Lake region in 1963, he stressed the economic burden that they placed on the Tanganyikan government and instructed them to become self-reliant as soon as possible.169 In a 1967 speech to the National Assembly announcing the opening of new refugee settlements in central Tanzania, Kawawa insisted that refugees show a “willingness to work towards the road of self-sufficiency within a short period” and decried those who did not “work hard.”170 In Mtwara, with its large concentration of Mozambican migrants, micro-level interactions between refugees and local populations took on a similarly contradictory character – alternately exhibiting an easy cosmopolitan sociability and a narrower xenophobia. Popular sentiments of Pan-African solidarity mirroring the TANU regime’s larger emphasis on anticolonial internationalism were cultivated through institutions such as

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169 170

“Power to Peasants: Village Dev. Committees to Punish Idlers,” Nationalist, October 16, 1968; TNA, PMO, Part VIII: Self-Help Crash Dev. Plan. Presidential Circular no. 2 of 1968, August 24, 1968. Although the ambivalent position of refugees has not yet been systematically documented in historical literature on Tanzania, studies of the experience of refugees from Rwanda and Burundi in the 1990s are instructive: Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Marc Sommers, Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001); Simon Turner, “Under the Gaze of the ‘Big Nations’: Refugees, Rumours and the International Community in Tanzania,” African Affairs 103, 411 (2004): 227–47; Beth Elise Whitaker, “Refugees in Western Tanzania: The Distribution of Burdens and Benefits among Local Hosts,” Journal of Refugee Studies 15, 4 (2002): 339–58. A historically minded exception is a case study of western Tanzania: Patricia Daley, “From the Kipande to the Kibali: The Incorporation of Refugees and Labour Migrants in Western Tanzania, 1900–87,” in Richard Black and Vaughan Robinson, eds., Geography and Refugees: Patterns and Processes of Change (London: Belhaven Press, 1993), 17–32. Western and southeastern Tanzania have historically been considered marginal peripheries within Tanganyika, characterized by relatively sparse settlement and smallholder farming. In Western Tanzania, Daley reports that “the myth of traditional hospitality can be used as a euphemism for the exploitation of refugee labour” (25). NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1963, Box 4056. “Mr. Nzunda Visits Refugees,” March 9, 1963. UKNA, FCO, 31/159. “Speech of the Second Vice-President (Concerning Refugees) When He Gave His Ministry’s Estimates for the Financial Year 1967/8.”

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the TYL, National Service, and People’s Militia; in the Southeast, as across Tanzania, schoolchildren learned liberation songs with lyrics praising violent struggle against white South Africans, and villagers donated proceeds from their collective harvest to the Mozambican freedom struggle.171 Such displays of solidarity seemed consistent with the fact that, as the following chapter shows, the distinction between southeastern Tanzanians and northern Mozambicans was a historically fluid one. Both areas were dominated by the Makonde ethnic group, kinship networks often straddled the border, and northern Mozambicans had been temporarily or permanently migrating to Tanzania for decades. Today, rural Mozambican immigrants speak appreciatively of postcolonial Tanzania’s “open door” policy; for instance, Albano Shiteva Nanguo of Mdui, who immigrated to Tanzania in 1964, took care to insist that local people “welcomed them [Mozambicans] well.”172 However, other sources suggest points of friction between local Tanzanian communities and migrants or immigrants. After independence, many Southeasterners continued to recycle older colonial tropes that labeled Mozambican Makonde, in one Rwelu elder’s words, “very strong in travelling.”173 Filtered through ujamaa’s stigmatization of mobility, this seemingly neutral remark easily took on a judgmental character. Discrimination against refugees was visibly inscribed into the layout of some rural settlements; during villagization, Mozambican Makonde often settled in distinct sections of new villages. Ismail Suleiman Mfaki, the aforementioned Rwelu man, confirmed that there was “a separation” between the groups, because each community had “its own traditions.”174 Also in Rwelu, one older woman pointed with distaste to a putative Mozambican practice of “eating different animals, like rats or wild pigs” to explain this segregation.175 Given that Tanzanians were on the move within their own country at the same time that refugees were on the move across borders, antirefugee sentiment in ujamaa villages operated alongside the broader rise of a micropolitics of autochthony, which valorized the status of first-comer at the local level.176

171 172 173 174 175 176

On anti–South African sentiment, see Schroeder, Africa after Apartheid; the 1976 Kivukoni reports and oral sources confirm village donations to FRELIMO. Interview with Albano Shiteva Nanguo, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Ismail Selema Mfaki, Rwelu Village, January 2008. Ibid. Interview with Somoya Bakari, Rwelu Village, February 2008. For recent literature on political uses of the autochthony concept in Africa, see Bambi Ceuppens and Peter Geschiere, “Autochthony: Local or Global? New Modes in the Struggle over Citizenship and Belonging in Africa and Europe,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 385–407; Peter Geschiere and Stephen Jackson, “Autochthony and the Crisis of Citizenship: Democratization, Decentralization, and the Politics of Belonging,” African Studies Review 49, 2 (2006): 1–7; Piet Konings, “Autochthony and Ethnic Cleansing in the Post-Colony: The 1966 Tombel Disturbances in Cameroon,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 41, 2 (2008): 203–22.

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In general, inclusive attitudes of rural people and state officials aligned with an expansive version of socialist familyhood and a Pan-Africanist disposition. Conversely, expressions of parochialism aligned with a sensibility of narrow nationalism, phrased in local vernacular or the language of ujamaa socialism. These contrasting modes of conceptualizing political community at the micro and macro levels were fundamentally linked to the theme of family within the nationalist imaginary. The tension between porous and finite definitions of family marked Tanzanian nationalism throughout the 1960s and 1970s, alternately underpinning an agenda of anticolonial internationalism and enabling a politics of identitarianism. This contradiction was common to Third World nationalisms oriented toward anticolonial solidarity or transnational unity, which Vijay Prashad labels “internationalist nationalism[s].”177 Such nationalisms in the postcolonial world may have diverged from older Western forms in many ways, but they ultimately succumbed to many of the same structural constraints, evident in their deployment of metaphors of kinship to signify the gendered and racial contours of the national community. ∗ ∗ ∗ During the ujamaa era, Tanzanian development politics normalized distinct gender roles and celebrated a generic model of the nuclear family at the same time that they were premised on an idealization of socialist extended familyhood. In particular, two broad dynamics contributed to the gendering of development politics within the ujamaa project. First was a set of structural constraints related to the weak position of a primary product-exporting state in the world, which was tied to the relative precariousness of official power within domestic borders.178 These entwined factors – Tanzania’s linkages to the fundamentally unequal, uneven global capitalist economy and the tenuousness of local political authority – were exacerbated by the Cold War context of the 1960s, in which the policing of national security took on a particular urgency. Second, postcolonial policy was shaped by the institutions and ideologies deployed by the British colonial state to modernize African families. These were, in turn, reinforced by the increasing influence of an emerging constellation of international development organizations whose approach to issues of gender and family frequently echoed colonial policy. Although the evolving implementation of ujamaa reflected the project’s articulation with these specific historical realities, it was also substantially connected to the closures inherent in the nation form itself. 177 178

Prashad, Darker Nations, 22. Frederick Cooper uses the concept of the “gatekeeper state” to describe this phenomenon in Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). J. F. Bayart uses the concept of “extraversion” to describe the links between domestic political power and access to external political economies in a longue dure´e framework in The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (New York: Longman, 1993).

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As they promoted sedentarized nuclear familyhood, TANU leaders and Tanzanian government institutions rendered domestic security a female responsibility and public security a male duty. Contradictory strands of ujamaa thought tempered these impulses, as did the internally fractured and materially limited character of the Tanzanian state itself. As a result, in the countryside, popular practices of gender and family were neither wholly removed from state policy (constituting “an autonomous sphere at the frontiers of which the structures of the state would halt”) nor entirely subsumed under its weight.179 The implementation of ujamaa was inflected by existing interactions between men, women, and their kin in rural areas, but national policy also contributed to transformations in these local practices. More broadly, the ambivalent trajectory of villagization among average people in regions such as Mtwara was influenced by the internal tensions of ujamaa ideology and the external pressures of the decolonizing Cold War world, which this chapter and the preceding one have outlined. As the following chapter shows, the uneven production of national space – a colonial legacy that deepened in the postcolonial period – was another dynamic that mutually informed the course of ujamaa as it engaged with the complex human geography of Tanzania’s rural landscape.

179

Balibar, “Nation Form,” 101.

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3 Uneven Development and the Region

The political imaginary of ujamaa configured the settled communal village as the anchor of Tanzanian socialism. Yet the subnational region was also a key spatial category in the implementation of ujamaa and has since continued to shape how development is understood and practiced in Tanzania. In the case of the Southeast, as elsewhere in the country, the administrative designation of the area as a circumscribed region had a quality of historical arbitrariness; flows of people, goods, and ideas prior to and throughout the ujamaa period emphatically transgressed and transcended Mtwara’s boundaries. However, it was in part through these very processes that the regional designation hardened and Mtwara came to be experienced as a concrete and particular entity by those living within it.1 Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, popular and official debates about the position of Mtwara within Tanzania exposed many of the contradictions and dilemmas at the heart of the conceptualization and application of ujamaa. The question of resource allocation and the condition of transportation infrastructure occupied a central place in such discussions. To many residents of Mtwara, the lack of functional roads between the Southeast and Dar es Salaam and within the region itself symbolized a broader lack of access to state funds and developmental capital. Mtwara appeared to be an isolated periphery that defaulted to a condition of regional selfreliance. In reality, however, the region was quite integrated into the outside world – its development as dependent on direct connections to the global capitalist economy as on linkages to the national state. These connections dated to the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean trade but were reconfigured in the 1930s, when British officials designated Mtwara as a labor reserve for the rest of the colony and a major exporter of raw cashew nuts to foreign 1

As Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen put it, “bounded identities of place or region and related senses of belonging are often fuelled by increased mobility of people and transfers of goods, values and discourses.” Freitag and von Oppen, “Introduction: ‘Translocality,’” 9.

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buyers. Circuits of capital extending beyond the regional and national scales had produced a long history of rural mobility and economic diversification within Mtwara, although between the 1940s and 1960s the region’s exportbased cashew economy also yielded a pattern of sedentary settlement among Mtwara’s cashew farmers. This material dialectic between movement and rootedness played a critical role in the constitution of rural space throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, just as the discursive dialectic between isolation and integration underwrote representations of the region during this same period. Ultimately, villagization enforced mobility in the name of settlement. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, rural people throughout the region voluntarily relocated or were forcibly pushed into concentrated rural settlements to comply with ujamaa’s vision of agrarian community. Resettlement proceeded in more than one phase for many and culminated in a situation – which persists today – in which many rural people made long daily journeys from their new place of residence to their older private farms in widespread contravention of ujamaa policy. Although ujamaa sought to create selfreliant rural settlements based on agricultural production, villagization in Mtwara also reinforced patterns of individual migration for wage labor leading out of villages and even the region itself. One by-product of these shifts was a drastic drop in cashew production among the region’s farmers, which accompanied and intensified a rapid decline in primary production across the country, bringing Tanzania’s indebtedness to untenable levels by the mid-1970s. Furthermore, in the 1970s, ujamaa policy exacerbated Mtwara’s peripheral status in empirical and felt terms by directly attaching regional development to foreign agents of a new international development economy under the Rural Integrated Development Programme (RIDEP) policy. This move marked the dissolution of official efforts toward meaningful national integration and grew out of the friction between versions of ujamaa that alternately emphasized decentralized, organic, popularly rooted development efforts and planned, managed, applied development policy. It also highlighted the tension between a conception of self-reliance as a viable developmental strategy and a conviction that self-reliance more realistically signified a developmental goal for southeastern Tanzanians and the country as a whole. Tanzania was not the only African case in which a national project of socialist development was more or most actively implemented in a peripheral region. Scholars have documented similar phenomena in the Maale area of southern Ethiopia and Guinea’s southeastern forest region, for instance.2 In these sites, as in Mtwara, the pronounced impact of national policy cannot simply be explained in terms of the greater vulnerability of an impoverished 2

Donham, Marxist Modern; Straker, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution; McGovern, Unmasking the State.

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and thus supposedly weak population to an aggressive central state. On the contrary, because these state efforts at large-scale social transformation were to a considerable extent “inside jobs,” as Mike McGovern puts it, their effectiveness must be understood at least in part as a reflection of local initiative or responsiveness. Ujamaa was also not the only example of an attempt to consolidate national unity that ended up accentuating rather than diminishing the distinctiveness of constituent regional units. Regional fractures in African countries such as Nigeria and Senegal have often been explained in terms of ethnic division or political favoritism. However, most contemporary instances of geographically organized intranational tension result from a more complex process by which identities and landscapes articulate with economic patterns and administrative structures to produce unevenly developed political subjectivities and material spaces.3 At the moment of independence, the internal asymmetries of national development were both a motive for and obstacle to the cultivation of broader Pan-African unity. As the postcolonial period progressed, subnational regionalism and nationalism remained alternately mutually constitutive and oppositional forces. While this chapter traces the ways in which ujamaa villagization both challenged and deepened Mtwara’s regional distinctiveness, it also illuminates local experiences of Tanzanian socialism and enhances our understanding of uneven development as an enduring problem of postcolonial development more generally. Colonial Contexts Despite its reputation as a static, geographically and culturally isolated periphery, southeastern Tanzania has a long history of connection to the rest of East Africa and the world.4 For at least the past two hundred years, the most persistent feature of this history has been change itself – the frequent 3

4

E.g., Sarah Hardin’s research on Senegal shows that a postcolonial state effort to develop the Southeast through cotton production actually played a major role in accentuating the marginality of the Cassamance. Hardin, “Developing the Periphery: Cotton Production, Pesticide, and the Marginalization of the Fulbe of Southeastern Senegal over the Twentieth Century,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2013. On Nigeria, see Michael Watts, “Resource Curse? Governmentality, Oil and Power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria,” Geopolitics 9, 1 (2004): 50–80. Henri Lefebvre’s foundational definition of the production of space refers to a dialectical interplay between worldly praxis, discursive representation, and affective perception. Lefebvre, Production of Space. On this dynamic generally and uneven development more specifically, see also David Harvey, “Space as a Key Word,” in Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (New York: Verso, 2006); Michael Watts, “Space for Everything (a Commentary),” Cultural Anthropology 7, 1 (1992): 115–29; and Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond Culture: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7, 1 (1992): 6–23. Pekka Seppal ¨ a, ¨ introduction to Seppal ¨ a¨ and Koda, Making of a Periphery, 15; Felicitas Becker, “Vernacular Ethnic Stereotypes: Their Persistence and Change in Southeast Tanzania,

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transformation of the social, economic, political, and physical coordinates of the region, creating and reflecting a fairly constant lack of long-term stability and personal security for the area’s inhabitants. Residents of the Southeast have navigated this context of uncertainty and hardship through the twin strategies of flexibility and diversification, investing in multiple human networks and economic options in an attempt to maximize their welfare and insulate themselves from the often unpredictable consequences of their region’s ties to the outside world.5 In many ways, this overall trajectory mirrors that of other parts of former Tanganyika. Yet the decentralized character of local political configurations in the Southeast, coupled with the area’s proximity to the Mozambican border and sudden shift to a rooted permanent crop economy in the mid-twentieth century, set Mtwara apart from other regions. This particular history shaped Mtwara’s later experience with ujamaa villagization, which similarly paralleled and departed from the course of this initiative elsewhere in the country. By the nineteenth century, the coastal South had already experienced decades of Arab influence in settlements linked to the rest of East Africa’s Swahili coast “by a common language and culture, well-developed commercial networks, and sporadic political alliances and rivalries.”6 Beginning in the eighteenth century, the southeastern interior became heavily trafficked by caravans transporting slaves to coastal outlets. Attacks by southern African raiders in the late nineteenth century triggered further waves of migration from the west, which were matched by a steady stream of communities fleeing famine conditions to the south. The shifting local political economy and relatively scattered and mobile population of the Southeast favored “big men” whose authority derived from their access to external commodities, mobilization of followers through kinship and patronage networks, and ability to temporarily control small areas of land for agriculture and settlement.7 By all accounts, this was a time of great human insecurity. The same can be said of the early twentieth century, preceded by the centralization of coastal rule under the Omani Sultanate and subsequently German colonization. German colonial policies such as the imposition of taxes and forced labor brought new forms of hardship for Southeasterners, which reflected

5

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ca. 1890–2003,” in Alexander Keese, ed., Ethnicity and the Long-Term Perspective: The African Experience (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 93–122. For an insightful study of these strategies in a more recent context, see Pekka Seppal ¨ a, ¨ Diversification and Accumulation in Rural Tanzania: Anthropological Perspectives on Village Economics (Uppsala, Sweden: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1998). Jonathan Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry and Rebellion on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), 29. Felicitas Becker, “‘Bad Governance’ and the Persistence of Alternative Political Arenas: A Study of a Tanzanian Region,” in Giorgio Blundo and Pierre-Yves Le Meur, eds., The Governance of Everyday Life in Africa: Ethnographic Explorations of Public and Collective Services (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 78–9.

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the broader transformation of the region’s economic and political orientation. As German and, after 1917, British colonialism became entrenched in Tanganyika, the hegemony of coastal Arab elites declined, and Indian traders began to establish outposts in the southeastern interior. With the exception of a few sisal plantations near the coastal towns of Mikindani and Lindi (and what would later become the port of Mtwara) and aborted attempts at compulsory cotton cultivation, agricultural production during the German period was reserved for the small-scale cultivation of crops such as rice, sesame, and millet. With the onset of British rule, the dominance of these agricultural staples gradually ceded to that of cassava, still the major food crop in the region today. During the early colonial period, the changing nature of commerce, the spread of Christianity and Islam, and widespread migration influenced and mirrored local configurations of power. Apart from the heavy concentration of Makonde residents along the coast and on the eponymous Makonde Plateau,8 the Southeast was characterized by ethnolinguistic pluralism. Yao-, Makua-, and Mwera-speaking communities lived interspersed with Makonde speakers; ethnic categories indexed past occupational niches and migration trajectories but remained relatively fluid even under successive colonial regimes notorious for relying on the reified notion of “tribe.” Although Islam had been practiced on the region’s coast for centuries, between 1900 and 1950, it rapidly gained adherents in the interior (a process meticulously detailed by Felicitas Becker).9 Simultaneously, large numbers of Southeastern peasants converted to Christianity.10 The diffusion of these religions accompanied that of new types of rural education – in the form of Quranic training for young men in madrasas led by prominent local Islamic scholars known as shehe and mission schools for young men and women. These pedagogical options, in turn, linked up to new sources of power in emerging – and overlapping – political economies.11 Among the Makonde, however, older modes of education in the form of jando and unyago (initiation) persisted, ensuring the continued influence of spiritually authorized elders within older traditional frameworks. The significance of these 8 9 10

11

Also known as the Newala Plateau in contemporary Tanzania and the Mueda Plateau in contemporary Mozambique. Felicitas Becker, Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania, 1890–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). European missionaries arrived in the Southeast as early as the mid-nineteenth century but became especially active in the early 1900s. The two key Christian institutions were the Anglican Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) headquarters in Masasi (founded in 1876) and the Catholic Mission Benedictine’s base at Ndanda in Newala (founded in 1906). See Liebenow, Colonial Rule; Becker, Becoming Muslim, 132–4. Muslim and Christian schooling provided rural Southeasterners with a body of knowledge and rituals common to a wider Indian Ocean world and the skill of literacy that opened up the possibility of playing an active role in the colonial apparatus, respectively.

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institutions is evidenced by the fact that most rural elders today who came of age in the colonial era do not know the year of their birth but easily recall the year of their initiation. The multiplicity of ethnic and kinship affiliations, along with the historical frequency of human resettlement and availability of land in the area, had rendered political structures in the Southeast strikingly decentralized and fluid in relation to more stable and hierarchical systems in regions to the north. Even in areas dominated by the Makonde, rural society was remarkably polycentric. Gus Liebenow writes that “the Makonde recognized the pull of two competing basic units of membership” – first, a matrilineal kin group (litawa) generally dominated by elders, and second, a loosely territorially based political group (chirambo, plural virambo) led by a mkulungwa (plural wakulungwa). The “constant fragmentation of existing virambo, with immigrants hiving off to form new communities,” combined with the recurrence of “flight and resettlement” and shifting cultivation practices, reinforced this polycentrism,12 leading to a pluralization of “overlapping and conflicting obligations of community” and modes of belonging.13 The predominance of Islam along the coast a led to a gradual decline of matrilineal norms, although the imposition of German rule preserved the fairly fragmented character of rural political forms.14 In 1927, British officials brought indirect rule policy to the Southern Province, appointing local wakulungwa to act as chiefs within an adapted Native Authority structure. Their duties ranged from enforcing soil conservation or road construction measures to overseeing local conflict resolution and tax collection. Ultimately, wakulungwa proved to lack both control over their subjects and accountability to their supervisors; the entire system was abandoned by the Second World War and reconfigured under the similarly tenuous authority of subdistrict officials known as liwali. In accordance with the contradictions and instabilities of this evolving system, rural elders remember the colonial state in its various iterations as a simultaneously distant and invasive entity. The flexible, changing nature of social organization was apparent in rural settlement patterns. Villagers’ contemporary descriptions of their older living arrangements vary, indicating a spectrum of possible configurations alternately described as markedly distinct from the structure of ujamaa villages and largely consistent with postvillagization norms. Most rural people recall living in small, scattered settlements comprised of a few houses accommodating members of a larger extended family group, or ukoo (clan). In this 12 13 14

Liebenow, Colonial Rule, 41–2. Ibid., 70. German rule authorized individuals known as akida or liwali (ostensibly derived from precolonial political models of the southern Swahili coast) to supervise tax collection and labor mobilization; they were to be assisted by wajumbe (headmen), court clerks, and messengers.

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setup, houses were either simply built “one by one”15 or organized “in a circle with a space in the middle [for elders] to discuss their family matters in the evening.”16 Musa Mayunga, who was born during the First World War and grew up in what is now Mtwara District, reminisced, “In the past, we were using the clan. With someone with his children staying in some area. Like houses, like here. Five, ten houses: their children living with them there. That is a clan.”17 The number of households present in such settlements “could be just one, or two, or five, or ten; it depended on the reproduction of the clan,” explained Hamisi Hassan Shaba, who was born in the 1920s. “But each person with their farm,” he stressed, contrasting this earlier form of clustered settlement with the denser contemporary organization of his village, Rwelu.18 Some elders more explicitly distinguish living arrangements in this earlier period from those that followed villagization. “We didn’t live ujamaa-style,” stated Hassan Ismail of Mdui, who was born in the 1930s. “Me and my child and my brothers and uncle. We farmed there.”19 Yet in “original villages” like Dihimba or Nanguruwe, elders remember somewhere around fifty households from different clans concentrated in settlements that were “just a town.”20 For the most part, villagers agree that even the most isolated of living situations would not entail distances of more than fifteen minutes by foot between households. Farms were located at similar distances from homes. Each household worked its own plot, although “every three years they would move somewhere else” to farm.21 Eventually, shifting agriculture gave way to an increase in permanent farms, which gradually circumscribed the availability of unclaimed land. The rise of labor migration and cashew cultivation had competing effects on the human geography of the region. Whereas labor migration encouraged unrooted mobility and tended to reward individuals with short-term temporal horizons, cashew cultivation depended on long-term investment in fixed trees and permanent settlement. Accordingly, some oral accounts refer to the decades preceding ujamaa as characterized by an increasing stabilization of residential and agricultural practices, although many others describe the mid- to late colonial era as a period of regular movement and resettlement. A recurring point of aggravation in elders’ memories of these years is the colonial hut and poll tax, which both limited and propelled rural mobility. (Such local taxes were officially abolished and replaced by income taxes in

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Interview with Ali Ibrahim Msevi, Rwelu Village, January 2008. Interview with Ismail Selema Mfaki, Rwelu Village, January 2008. Interview with Musa Mayunga, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Hamisi Hassan Shaba, Rwelu Village, January 2008. Interview with Hassan Ismail, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Mohammed Hamisi Namnomba, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Ibid.

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1969.)22 Some elders recall regularly fleeing their homes to evade tax collectors; however, many bemoan the constraints on their movement imposed during the colonial period. “Life was difficult, bad,” one Nanguruwe resident declared. “Why? Because there was the matter of tax, tax – and we were not moving about easily.”23 To meet tax payments, Southeasterners increasingly pursued short- and long-term work opportunities at sisal plantations in the area or in more distant sites like Tanga or Morogoro.24 Some worked in different sectors elsewhere in Tanganyika – on railroad construction and maintenance, for instance – whereas others pursued skilled labor closer to home, as tailors or shop assistants. Given the relative underdevelopment of the Southeast, officials recognized its primary function as that of a labor reserve for the rest of the colony.25 Yet this reserve also drew heavily on migrant laborers from northern Mozambique – known locally (and pejoratively) as mawia (meaning “terrible” or “fierce” in Makonde) – who traveled north in small groups and were recruited in large numbers (recruits were known as manamba, or “numbers”).26 Those who pursued sisal labor could work as 22

23

24

25

26

NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File 1967–69, Box 2517. Amembassy Dar es Salaam to Department of State, “Nyerere Pardons Local Tax Defaulters,” September 26, 1969. Interview with Mohammed Hassan Mpaka, Hassan Abdallah Chinkaweni, Saloum Ayoub Mnatosa, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Becker reports widespread popular recollections of colonial officials “extracting taxes by many forceful means” even though “the administrative record is full of the maneouvres whereby villagers evaded paying tax” – often enabled by “the far-reaching kinship networks and spatial mobility of local people.” Becker, “Bad Governance,” 79. This evasiveness likely had roots in the German period, when, according to Thaddeus Sunseri, “Throughout southeastern Tanzania householders left regions of colonial control to hide in forests and bush so as to escape the exactions of the colonial state” – what one German bishop explained as “pembeni, living ‘in the corners,’ of the land.” Sunseri, Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 127. Hanan Sabea, “The Limits of Law in the Mandated Territories: Becoming Manamba and the Struggles of Sisal Plantation Workers in Tanganyika,” African Studies 68, 1 (2009): 135– 61 and “Mastering the Landscape? Sisal Plantations, Land, and Labor in Tanga Region, 1893–1980s,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 41, 3 (2008): 411– 34. Matteo Rizzo, “What Was Left of the Groundnut Scheme? Development Disaster and Labour Market in Southern Tanganyika, 1946–1952,” Journal of Agrarian Change 6, 2 (2006): 219; TNA, Accession 16, 13-25: Annual Labour Reports 1934–52. Southern Province Labour Report, 1943. Liebenow, Colonial Rule, 30. On the labor economy of southeastern sisal plantations, see ibid., 157–8; Rizzo, “What Was Left,” and Wembah-Rashid, “Socio-Political Development,” 60. Many of these migrants were pushed out of Portuguese territory by colonial pressures – especially an intensification of forced cotton production in the late 1930s – and attracted by the opportunities in southern Tanganyika. Edward Alpers, “‘To Seek a Better Life’: The Implications of Migration from Mozambique to Tanganyika for Class Formation and Political Behavior,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 18, 2 (1984): 367–88.

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manamba under longer-term contracts, independent laborers under shortterm contracts, or informal day laborers; others merely took up farming in the Mtwara countryside. Although wage labor fostered new types of sociability among and between diverse migrants and local people, it did not eliminate their livelihood insecurity. Plantations offered relatively low wages, minimal to no food rations, poor housing and medical care, and little job security.27 After 1940, a major shift in British policy led to the creation of a new system of marketing boards and cooperatives to mediate between farmers and global markets, and European experts began to devise schemes to bring local farming practices in line with efficient, modern, scientifically approved agricultural standards.28 One of the hallmarks of this new technocratic approach to development was its self-understanding as external to a supposedly backward rural African space. This late colonial developmental mythology reached its apogee in the ambitious and ill-conceived Groundnut Scheme of 1946–51, which was meant to awaken the supposedly slumbering Southeast with a massive program of groundnut cultivation.29 Despite its ultimate failure, the scheme indelibly transformed the landscape of the area – altering material infrastructure, micro- and macro-political economies, social relationships, and circuits of human movement.30 The town of Mtwara morphed from a lone sisal plantation into an administrative center; laborers cleared transportation corridors to the town from the interior, and the new port eclipsed the older colonial capital and trading center of Mikindani in importance. Furthermore, the construction of the railroad and harbor mobilized wage labor from across the Southeast, intensifying human and capital circulation. Rural people often came across other temporary sources of income linked to the larger changes occurring in the region, such as laboring on roads – especially the new artery from Newala to Mtwara Town – or on construction in Mtwara Town. Such work created the conditions necessary for the pronounced reorientation of the region’s economy over the next decade. Whereas the railroad and port had been intended to channel groundnuts to foreign markets, the function of the new harbor rapidly became tied to the export of a new commodity – cashew nuts – and offered opportunities for some farmers to avoid wage labor while drawing 27 28

29

30

TNA, Accession 16, 13-25: Annual Labour Reports 1934–52. Southern Province Annual Report, 1945 and Southern Province Annual Report, 1946. This setup replaced the old system of South Asian traders as economic intermediaries; see Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept,” in Cooper and Packard, International Development, 64–92. Alan Wood, The Groundnut Affair (London: Bodley Wood, 1950); J. S. Hogendorn and K. M. Scott, “The East African Groundnut Scheme: Lessons of a Large-Scale Agricultural Failure,” African Economic History 10 (1981): 81–115; A. T. P. Seabrook, “The Groundnut Scheme in Retrospect,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 47/8 (1957): 89–91. Rizzo, “What Was Left.”

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others into it. Cashew cultivation became quite profitable and in some ways reinforced generational tensions and turnover by allowing young people to gain income independently by starting their own farms. However, because kin and social networks had to be mobilized to provide the extra manpower required to clear a plot of land for cultivation, young men also continued to turn to wage labor for cash. British authorities began discussing plans to initiate a cashew export trade from Tanganyika around 1933, following the Portuguese example in Mozambique, although cashews had been grown throughout much of the southern coast for decades previously.31 (“Even our parents planted them,” several elders in Rwelu pointed out.)32 Trees required an investment of four to five years to become productive and about eight years to reach full productivity, but rural people who practiced shifting agriculture often interspersed their annual crops with cashew trees, which they neglected after relocating to new farmland. As a group of women who grew up in the minor settlement of Nanguruwe explained, earlier cashew cultivation was for informal, private consumption of the cashew apple, or fruit. “We had just begun cashews a little,” they remembered. “We were just planting to nibble. Not to sell.”33 The fruit of the cashew tree was also brewed into a popular spirit known as ulaka; in the early 1930s, colonial authorities debated the merits of promoting a crop with such potentially threatening secondary uses.34 They ultimately decided to stimulate production by distributing cashew seedlings grown in government nurseries and implementing informal local production quotas. Ali Asman Kitenge of Rwelu recalled, “In the past, the time of colonialism before the English had left, there was a mzungu [European] bwana shamba [agricultural officer] and his assistants who came” and “began to start cashew.” Previously, “each house might have one or two cashew trees, just for personal consumption. But after the year 1940, we started cashews as a cash crop,” he continued. “The bwana shamba came and encouraged us, ‘Plant cashew.’”35 Cashews were first exported from Tanganyika (by Asian traders) in 1938 from the port of Mtwara, but it was not until after the Second World War 31

32 33 34

35

As recorded in TNA, Accession 116, 15-52: Southern Province Cashew Nuts 1933–47. On Mozambique, see M. D. D. Newitt, A History of Mozambique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 460–1. Interview with Musa Mohammed Mpote, Ismail Selema Mfaki, and Ali Ibrahim Msevi, Rwelu Village, January 2008. Interview with Hadija Ami Saloum, Esha Ambali Kulipatanga, and Somoya Dadi Kandolechi, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. TNA, Accession 116, 15-52: Southern Province Cashew Nuts 1933–47. Mr. Allnutt, District Agricultural Officer, to the Senior Agricultural Officer, Lindi, “Report on the Cashew Nut Industry in Portuguese East Africa,” January 8, 1935; TNA, Accession 116, 15-52: Southern Province Cashew Nuts 1933–47. Senior Agricultural Officer to the Provincial Commissioner, undated 1934. There was also some brief discussion of whether cashew trees would foster the spread of tsetse flies, but this was quickly dismissed. Interview with Ali Asman Kitenge, Rwelu Village, February 2008.

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map 4. Cashew production in southeastern Tanzania, 1962. The circles on the map indicate the main cashew markets, situated in larger producing areas.36

and particularly after the failure of the groundnut crop that the Southern Province’s cashew boom began in earnest. 37 Between 1950 and 1955, the volume of cashew exports from Tanganyika almost doubled, and by 1960, cashews had become the colony’s fourth most valuable export commodity (Map 4).38 As in Mozambique, the nuts were exported in raw form to India; although a small-scale processing plant was established in Mtwara in 1950, it quickly fell out of use.39 The traffic of commodities in the region became increasingly streamlined – from the interior to the port of Mtwara and on across the Indian Ocean. Colonial officials perceived this newly intensified 36 37

38

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Map reproduced from P. J. Northwood, “Cashew Production in the Southern Province of Tanganyika,” East African Agricultural and Forestry Journal 28 (1962): 36. P. J. Northwood and H. Y. Kayumbo, “Cashew Production in Tanzania,” World Crops 22 (1970): 88–91; P. J. Martin, C. P. Topper, R. A. Bashiru, F. Boma, D. De Waal, H. C. Harries, L. J. Kasuga, N. Katanila, L. P. Kikoka, R. Lamboll, A. C. Maddison, A. E. Majule, P. A. Masawe, K. J. Millanzi, N. Q. Nathaniels, S. H. Shomari, M. E. Sijaona, and T. Stathers, “Cashew Nut Production in Tanzania: Constraints and Progress through Integrated Crop Management,” Crop Protection 16, 1 (1997): 5. The overwhelming majority of Tanzanian cashew exports were from the Southeast. Cashew production in 1949 was 3,609 tons; in 1952, it had reached 11,691 tons; in 1955, it was at 18,495 tons; by 1957, it was 34,192 tons. Northwood and Kayumbo, “Cashew Production.” Shamte H. Shomari and Clive P. Topper, “The Importance of Cashew in Tanzania and the Role of Supporting Organisations,” in Clive P. Topper and Louis J. Kasuga, eds., Knowledge

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connection to the global economy as both a positive force and a threat to farmers’ welfare. They approved of cashew cultivation for its lucrativeness but also for its “stabilizing influence,” because as a permanent crop cashew broke up patterns of shifting agriculture (which were seen as ecologically harmful and socially threatening) and counteracted the unregulated movement of migrant laborers.40 However, the mass cultivation of cashews also raised questions about sustainability and food security.41 Farmers’ incomes were contingent on world demand and the proper functioning of the bureaucratic and transportation infrastructure – cooperatives, marketing boards, and roads – that mediated their access to the market. Throughout Mtwara in the years leading up to villagization, cashew became the only tree crop to be grown for large-scale export. Various sources indicate that although farming arrangements varied, individual cashew plots usually covered less than four acres, and trees were often mixed with food crops such as cassava.42 Previously, territorial ownership had been largely irrelevant in areas without land shortages.43 Peasants growing annual crops could utilize unoccupied land after clearing wild vegetation, or they could farm the unused land of their neighbors. Ownership of cashew plots, conversely, was critical; the productivity of mature trees depended on the uncompensated investment of labor during the first few years of the trees’ growth. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, many elders or heads of family units owned cashew plots that they could distribute to their children when they reached adulthood. Cashew smallholders mobilized agricultural labor from within family units but also practiced an older form of cooperative labor known as mkumi. In this system, farmers could invite neighbors to work on their land, compensating them with a hearty meal at the end of the day.44 “That time, we were using mkumi a lot, or cooperation,” confirmed Danisi Hamisi of Nanguruwe, originally from Newala. “Like three or four people, even five. We cooperated with each other; we farmed together.” He

40

41 42 43

44

Transfer for Sustainable Tree Crop Development: A Case History of the Tanzanian Integrated Cashew Management Programme (Reading, UK: BioHybrids Agrisystems, 2003), 51. TNA, Accession 116, 15-110: Cashew Nuts Industry, Southern Province. Provincial Commissioner to the Member for Agriculture and Natural Resources, Dar es Salaam, August 1952. See Rizzo, “What Was Left,” 222 for official concerns about food security. See for instance A. Tsakiris, “Cashew Nut Production in the Southern Region of Tanzania,” East African Agricultural and Forestry Journal 32, 1 (1967): 446. In this respect, the Southeast presented a marked contrast to the densely populated agricultural regions of northern Tanzania, such as Kilimanjaro, Bukoba, and Moshi, where the permanent crops of tea and coffee were grown. However, some land pressure existed as early as the 1950s in parts of Mtwara Region, particularly in what is now Newala District (the Makonde Plateau). Bertha Koda, “Changing Land Tenure Systems in the Contemporary Matrilineal Social System: The Gendered Dimension,” in Seppal ¨ a¨ and Koda, Making of a Periphery, 210;

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clarified, “If you failed in a certain area . . . you made pombe [local brew], I don’t know, you all prepared ugali [cornmeal porridge], I don’t know which drinks there, you called, going to work the farms.”45 The buying and selling of cashew farms and labor also occurred, albeit less frequently.46 In some cases, local entrepreneurs who had amassed substantial sums of capital during the Groundnut Scheme acquired large pieces of land for cultivation by hired laborers from surrounding areas.47 However, elders emphasize that this system was not formalized, and in Mtwara District, large farmholding was quite rare. In mkumi, rural Southeasterners had a tradition of collective agriculture that local officials and villagers themselves would later invoke to validate ujamaa policy.48 In the 1950s, colonial officials also introduced a policy known as chalalo, which promoted contiguous agriculture by groups of men and women in fenced-off farms to protect crops from wild animals such as pigs (nanguruwe in Swahili; the settlement of Nanguruwe reportedly took its name from the large number of pigs in the area).49 Later, some rural elders would conflate chalalo with ujamaa agricultural mandates. For the most part, though, aside from the Groundnut Scheme, British colonial agricultural policy in the Southeast remained less directly invasive than in other parts of Tanganyika, and it was thinly enforced. The area saw but one short-lived (1941–45) experiment with residential concentration for sleeping sickness at Madaba in Nachingwea District, and the few schemes for agricultural concentration closer to the coast in the 1930s were often as unsuccessful and unevenly implemented as chalalo policy was in the 1950s. Headmen usually had limited practical authority over the populations they represented, and many rural people dismissed “self-help” projects such as mandatory crop production and contiguous cultivation.50 However, these schemes for

45 46 47

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Nathaniel A. Katinila, Anna G. Mfilinge, Richard Lamboli, and Clive P. Topper, “SocioEconomic Studies Undertaken in Relation to Cashew Growing Households,” in Topper and Kasuga, Knowledge Transfer, 71. Interview with Hamisi Hassan Mponda, Danisi Hamisi, and Selemani Usi Nandapa, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. For context, see Koda, “Changing Land Tenure Systems.” Matteo Rizzo, “The Groundnut Scheme Revisited: Colonial Disaster and African Accumulation in Nachingwea District, South-Eastern Tanzania, 1946–67.” PhD diss., University of London, 2004. Other regions had similar traditions; some refer to it as ujima. Wild animals had been a problem locally for decades; Sunseri writes of wild pig-hunting campaigns in the Southeast around the turn of the century. Sunseri, Vilimani, 78. Chau Kelly writes of a rat infestation in Nanguruwe in the 1930s. Kelly, “A Tale of Two Cities, Mikindani and Mtwara: Consuming Development in Southeastern Tanganyika, 1910–19,” PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2010, 182–8. Lions were also reported in the area. Such self-help projects were designed to protect crops and people from pests and to assist with famine relief. Compulsory farming initiatives among tax defaulters also had a demonstrative purpose – to introduce new agricultural techniques to other farmers.

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aggregate farming occurred during or after famine periods, which indirectly resulted from colonial policies promoting cash crop production and labor migration – and whose effects were exacerbated by the poor quality and small quantity of roads in the region. Ujamaa and the Cinderella Region The development paradigm of postwar colonialism configured the Southern Province as a distinctly undeveloped region within Tanganyika and led many officials to represent the area as dormant, static, and isolated. Just as in the case of Zambia’s North-West Province, administrative reports frequently referred to Tanganyika’s Southern Province as the “Cinderella province.”51 This phrase implied that the feminized, passive Southeast would be saved by the agentive prince of scientific development and colonial capitalism – a narrative that accompanied a demographic pathologization of the Makonde as an intrinsically primitive and lazy people who suffered from “inertia.”52 In the same way that this spatial imaginary naturalized the arbitrary administrative designation of the Southern Province as a distinct developmental unit, the demographic pathologization of the region was premised on an untenable delineation of the Makonde as a bounded ethnic group. In fact, the Makonde community extended well across the Ruvuma River into Mozambique, straddling the regional and imperial border and intermixing with other ethnic groups. Despite its shaky foundations, the “Cinderella” discourse persisted after independence. Although Mtwara remained directly tied to the global economy and linked to the south and north by migration networks, for many Tanzanians both inside and outside of the region, it retained the status of an isolated periphery. Transportation infrastructure, in particular, became a critical determinant and broader symbol of Mtwara’s position within the imagined and materialized space of the Tanzanian nation-state. Most notably, the lack of a paved road from Mtwara to the north meant that the region was largely disconnected from the capital and the rest of the country for the six months of the year when existing roads were impassable due to seasonal rains. Although a regional airport built during the Groundnut Scheme was expanded in 1970, it only serviced political elites and businessmen, and sea traffic to Dar es Salaam was minimal. Within the region, rural roads were

51

52

See, e.g., TNA, “A Review of Development Plans in the Southern Province, 1953,” Government of Tanganyika, 1953. Achim von Oppen notes that British officials also termed the North-West Province of Zambia a Cinderella province during the late colonial period in “Cinderella Province: Discourses of Locality and Nation State in a Zambian Periphery (1950s to 1990s),” Sociologus 52, 1 (2002): 11–45. TNA, Accession 16, 13-25: Annual Labour Reports 1934–52. Southern Province Annual Report, 1947. See also Rizzo, “What Was Left,” 234.

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often in dismal condition, making efficient travel and transportation of goods impossible. Mtwara’s assumed marginality was complicated by ujamaa’s inauguration. As a utopian formulation, ujamaa challenged arbitrary divisions between people and places, envisioning development as emerging organically from a collective spirit of self-reliance. Yet the bureaucratic apparatus that presided over the translation of ujamaa’s ideals into practice inevitably encountered entrenched patterns of intranational spatial division and differentiation. Although the movement of people and commodities continued to transcend Mtwara’s administrative boundaries, the implementation of ujamaa came to emphasize the particularity of Mtwara as a spatial unit. Throughout the ujamaa era, peasants, TANU officials, scholars, and development workers both reinforced and contested the region’s peripheral status. Depending on the measure, Mtwara was either a tremendous developmental success or a disastrous case of underdevelopment. These opposing assessments were tied to different modes of spatial understanding and ways of interpreting ujamaa itself. In addition to capturing national attention because of its proximity to Mozambique, Mtwara gained prestige for what seemed to be its exceptionally effective execution of ujamaa development policy. By any quantitative measure (and most measures of ujamaa’s progress were quantitative), Mtwara far surpassed any other region in rapidly and extensively implementing villagization. Between 1967 and 1971, national reports indicated that the number of ujamaa villages in Mtwara was increasing exponentially. In a meeting late in 1970, Kawawa proclaimed, “The people of Mtwara are leading in the upsurge of the nation’s ujamaa movement.”53 By then, the number of villages in the region had reportedly risen to seven hundred (with three hundred thousand inhabitants);54 that figure continued to climb substantially.55 Government and party officials promoted villagization in Mtwara according to the standard tenets of ujamaa discourse, relating the proposed reordering of the countryside to the national imperative of self-reliance. In a 1968 document outlining guidelines for the implementation of the Arusha Declaration in Mtwara, Regional Commissioner Klerruu underlined the importance of individual self-reliance for regional progress. “In order to stop exploitation in the region, every adult person should work and live by their own sweat,” he instructed. “Every adult in Mtwara Region must fulfill their responsibilities by working hard. In our Region, no one should go stay with 53 54

55

“TANU Plans to Boost Mtwara Ujamaa Villages,” Nationalist, October 12, 1970. “Mtwara’s Giant Step Forward,” Nationalist, January 11, 1971. Note that the state archives offer a different number – 601. TNA, PMO, RD/12/14/1 (V): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Taarifa ya Kazi za Maendeleo Tangu Mwezi Oktoba Hadi Novemba 1970, December 28, 1970. Schneider, “Developmentalism and Its Failings,” 202.

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their ndugu [relative]56 for a long time without working, because they will be like a parasite depending on the ndugu,” he continued. “Moreover, no one should be allowed to roam around the city or village without doing work to make themselves self-reliant without depending on their wadugu [relatives].” Klerruu criticized existing practices in the region, commenting, “We cannot say from our heart that our region has already implemented pure politics properly” because “we have a certain number of adults in the village and in town who are not depending on themselves.” This group “does not work, does not cultivate, but depends on others by begging, stealing, and so on,” like a collection of “parasites.”57 Such language indexed a moral order that valorized not merely the space of the countryside but the condition of rootedness in the site of the village. Articulated as such, the principle of self-reliance took on a fundamentally gendered dimension by naturalizing individual membership in a stable nuclear household. It also implicitly stigmatized rural mobility in and of itself. This celebration of permanent settlement had contradictory implications for the population of Mtwara, with its long history of demographic movement and relatively elastic landscape. Liebenow notes that “Often the most creative response of traditional Makonde to a natural or a human challenge to survival was to move on to a more hospitable location”; anthropologist John Wembah-Rashid similarly observes that periodic resettlement had long been the norm rather than the exception in the Southeast.58 Prior to the cashew era, land tenure was loosely determined by the fact of residence and cultivation. Social units were incorporative, not exclusive, as investing in human networks helped consolidate a key resource for personal security that could be activated in times of crisis.59 Thus, rural people in Mtwara frequently shifted between settlements and familial arrangements, just as they straddled older local and newer capitalist economies. During the cashew explosion of the 1950s, Mtwara’s connections to the global economy induced more permanent settlement within the region. Villagization therefore doubly disturbed the space of Mtwara by emphasizing permanent settlement and agricultural rootedness as well as encouraging farmers to move away from their established cashew plots and into concentrated villages to achieve ujamaa’s objectives. Official reports concealed this disruption. Mtwara became renowned as a developmental success not only because of the region’s astonishing progress in administering villagization policy but also because of the challenging conditions under which it had done so. Although the region appeared to be 56 57

58 59

Ndugu literally translates as “sibling” or “relative” but can mean “fellow citizen” or “comrade.” Wadugu is the plural form of this word. TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Maongozi na Utaratibu wa Kutekeleza Azimio la Arusha Katika Mkoa wa Mtwara (Ndanda Press, March 1968). The passage quoted is directly adapted from Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration. Liebenow, Colonial Rule, 13; Wembah-Rashid, “Socio-Political Development,” 76–7. Wembah-Rashid, “Socio-Political Development,” 44.

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a developmental miracle, it was nonetheless characterized by a lack of basic material resources, human capital, and overall investment from the central government. Various parties interpreted this as a sign of Mtwara’s marginalization and neglect by national officials or as another factor confirming the Southeast as a virtuous paragon of ujamaa development. Did the principle of self-reliance mean that subnational regions should literally forgo resources from Dar es Salaam? If so, then according to the government’s sometimes circular logic, Mtwara’s peripheral status could in fact make it a developmental success. Yet from another perspective, this same status contradicted the ujamaa principle of socialist equality and represented an obstacle to meaningful regional development and broader national unity. The periphery question exposed a larger tension internal to the ujamaa project with regard to the concept of self-reliance. If ujamaa celebrated extended kinship and community, why did official policy emphasize the self-reliance of individuals and individual households? At its core, was villagization motivated by a desire to create entirely self-reliant settlements or a desire to increase rural people’s access to government resources and services? In 1968, Klerruu announced, “The meaning of the politics of self-reliance is that development in the region will be brought about by people’s effort, especially in agriculture, without depending on money from outside the region or from foreign countries.” Adapting the Arusha Declaration’s position on national self-reliance to a regional scale, he stated, “It is a big mistake to choose money, something we don’t have, to be a major part of our development plan. We have made a mistake to believe that we will get money from outside this region, and we are forgetting to work hard by ourselves.” Yet Klerruu acknowledged that some of the major problems facing the region stemmed from a lack of resources that agricultural self-reliance alone could not resolve. In fact, access to basic external goods and services seemed to be a fundamental precondition for agricultural self-reliance. Klerruu maintained that the Mtwara economy, like the national economy, “will depend on agriculture” but simultaneously noted that food shortages threatened parts of the region. He insisted that agricultural development was contingent on the acquisition of necessary knowledge or skills by farmers, which was as essential as hard work. “Effort without knowledge cannot be as fruitful as effort combined with skill,” he asserted. “Using big hoes instead of small hoes, using fertilizer instead of just the existing soil, using pesticides to kill pests, knowing which crops are suitable for cultivating and which are not, choosing good seeds before planting, knowing the proper times for planting and weeding, etc. – these are the skills that will enable efforts to produce more crops.”60

60

TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Maongozi na Utaratibu wa Kutekeleza Azimio la Arusha Katika Mkoa wa Mtwara (Ndanda Press, March 1968).

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Although ujamaa rejected money as a condition for progress, in practice, state officials recognized that domestic agriculture would benefit from the use of modern implements and inputs. The impact of the Green Revolution on Tanzanian political elites’ thinking manifested in official statements calling for the use of new seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and plowing equipment throughout the country.61 A 1972 meeting of the TANU National Executive Council culminated in the endorsement of a policy paper underlining the need for “modernisation of Tanzania’s agriculture” and “the application of modern agricultural techniques” throughout the countryside.62 This translated into “a special call to the peasants to use good seeds, to plant early, to weed in time, to use fertilisers, manure and insecticide,”63 as otherwise “the land will be a wasted resource.”64 In line with this approach, the Mtwara regional commissioner maintained that the correct implementation of ujamaa in the region depended on the use of tools and supplies that were notably absent from the region. These considerations significantly compromised the utility of the tactic of self-reliance for regional development. Furthermore, by Klerruu’s – and TANU’s – own definition, the popular adoption of proper farming techniques required access to experts who could instruct farmers in modern methods of crop spacing, weeding, and the use of inputs. Accordingly, TANU’s 1972 policy paper also instructed leaders to “make it possible for agricultural extension officers to go to villages during [the] appropriate time to help in the education of peasants”65 and to “put top priority on teaching peasants agricultural techniques and how to use implements.”66 However, even when funds allowed for the enlistment of such extension workers, their pedagogical interventions were rendered irrelevant in areas experiencing extreme water shortages or impossible where transportation infrastructure was inadequate. Indeed, official reports in the wake of the Arusha Declaration persistently identified water shortages and poor transportation infrastructure as sizable obstacles to regional development. In 1968, the Mtwara regional development officer stated, “The major developmental tasks of Mtwara Region, which has begun to awaken developmentally, especially after leaving colonialism behind, are building transportation infrastructure (that is, roads and

61

62 63 64 65 66

See Ponte, Farmers and Markets. On the implications of the Green Revolution for Third World agriculture, see Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Comment, Daily News, May 16, 1972. “Learn Modern Agriculture, Peasants Told: NEC Urges Use of Ox-Carts,” Daily News, May 20, 1972. “TANU Must Tackle Agriculture Now, Says Mwalimu,” Daily News, May 16, 1972. “Learn Modern Agriculture, Peasants Told: NEC Urges Use of Ox-Carts,” Daily News, May 20, 1972. “TANU Must Tackle Agriculture Now, Says Mwalimu,” Daily News, May 16, 1972.

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bridges) and water infrastructure (wells or agricultural dams).”67 His assessment echoed that of the Mtwara Development Committee a year earlier, whose members proclaimed that the “water requirement in the Region was of paramount importance” and observed that “Because of poor feeder roads in the Region crops could not be sent to market which resulted in substantial loss of revenue and discouragement to farmers.”68 In 1970, the complaints had not changed. One report noted, “Although the Regional Development Committee has tried hard to begin various plans according to the people, the obstacles to success are: a) the lack of water, b) the lack of cars and means of transportation.” The document, authored by the regional development officer, went on to plead, “I hope help will arrive quickly. Meaning there are many ujamaa villages that need these important services.”69 Officials recognized that water shortages negatively impacted agricultural progress, livestock rearing, and human health in the countryside, but they perceived the lack of transportation infrastructure as an overarching impediment to all aspects of development. A shortage of vehicles and passable roads in the district represented an extreme crisis in both practical and symbolic terms. In 1968, Klerruu remarked, “In order for us to be able to develop agriculture for the benefit of people, we must have roads sufficient for the transportation of crops to markets in this country or other countries.” He thus concluded that “these two developments, agriculture and transportation, necessarily go hand in hand.”70 At a deeper level, the transportation problem signified a more serious dilemma vis-a-vis the project ` of villagization. Despite the centrality of the principle of self-reliance to national development, an increasingly dominant version of ujamaa discourse explained villagization as a means of facilitating peasant contact with government services (and vice versa). This logic centered on physical access, which presumed the availability of resources to construct, maintain, and traverse functional rural roads. In addition to negating villagization’s developmental potential by precluding the efficient provision of services and supplies to ujamaa villages, poor regional transportation infrastructure led to enormous administrative problems by preventing the tasks of planning, 67

68

69

70

TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Afisa Maendeleo wa Mkoa, Mtwara to Kamishna wa Maendeleo, Dar es Salaam, Taarifa ya Shughuli za Maendeleo Mkoa wa Mtwara, December 1968, January 1, 1969. TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Minutes of an Extraordinary Meeting of the Mtwara Regional Development Committee held at Mtwara, July 31, 1967. TNA, PMO, RD/12/14/1 (V): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Afisa ya Maendeleo Mkoani to Katibu Mkuu, Wizara ya Tawala za Mikoa na Maendeleo Vijijini, Taarifa ya Kazi Zote za Regional Development Funds Mkoa wa Mtwara, October 14, 1970. TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Maongozi na Utaratibu wa Kutekeleza Azimio la Arusha Katika Mkoa wa Mtwara (Ndanda Press, March 1968).

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surveying, and assessing developmental progress from being approached in any systematic way. A National Periphery? Complaints about transportation infrastructure repeatedly extended beyond the boundaries of the region and raised questions about Mtwara’s position within the larger national space of Tanzania. Looming over all debates about regional development was the reality of the Southeast’s infrastructural disconnection from Dar es Salaam and most of the country to the north of Mtwara. State officials had fixated on the lack of an all-weather road from Dar es Salaam to Mtwara since the early 1950s; the difficulty of regional access was one of the central elements of the colonial Cinderella trope.71 In 1959, when “neither the consultant to the World Bank Survey Mission nor the new Minister for Urban Local Government and Works was impressed with the economic importance of an all-weather road to Dar es Salaam,” noted the Southern Province’s annual report, “the Provincial Advisory Council protested strongly.”72 This concern persisted after independence. In late 1961, for instance, the Lindi District Team “asked that the Lindi/Rufiji road should be brought up to an ‘all weather’ standard,” commenting on the need of “a stimulus to the static population of the Southern Province to hasten its development.”73 Just as one version of ujamaa thought conceived of the countryside as a primitive and distant zone to be “captured” or “penetrated” by the Tanzanian state, debates about an all-weather Mtwara–Dar es Salaam corridor often evoked a simplistic spatial imaginary that fed into the mythology of Mtwara as a stagnant backwater. At its worst, the fusion of the arbitrary administrative construction of the region with the assumptions of the colonial developmental paradigm threatened to exacerbate Mtwara’s impoverished distinctiveness. As Barbara Weinstein demonstrates, “the discursive construction of regional identities” not only reveals perceptions of material disparities but also performs the work of “lubricat[ing]” these deepening inequalities.74 That is, such representations do more than simply mirror official, scholarly, or popular thinking about developmental difference; they may actively abet “a process of economic divergence, with its attendant spatial inequalities” by dehistoricizing or naturalizing it.75

71 72 73

74 75

TNA, “A Review of Development Plans in the Southern Province, 1953.” TNA, Southern Province Annual Report, 1959. TNA, REA.2/1: Dar es Salaam District Development Committee. “Lindi District Team Plans District’s Future,” October 27, 1961. This point was reiterated in TNA, Accession 16, 3-50: 1937–54. “Southern Province News,” published by the Information Officer, Mtwara on the authority of the Southern Province Commissioner, December 1961. Weinstein, “Developing Inequality,” 11, 14. Ibid., 14.

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In another sense, however, the discursive positioning of Mtwara as a periphery registered a deeply felt sense of exclusion among residents of the region, offering them a means of expressing developmental aspirations and providing them with a tool for contesting their region’s marginalization. Weinstein’s argument is commited to exposing real inequalities even while deconstructing cultural and political mappings of them, and it seeks to sustain the historical possibility of development even while questioning the assumptions of dominant theoretical frameworks for understanding this process. Analyzing the history of postcolonial Mtwara in this spirit entails critiquing the linear model of the colonial developmental paradigm but simultaneously acknowledging the importance of this singular narrative of development – and its attendant conception of space – to local people’s imaginations and experiences. James Ferguson writes, “a culturalized and relativized notion of modernity tends to allow the material and social inequalities that have long been at the heart of African aspirations of modernity to drop out of the picture”; the same point rings true with regard to the concept of development in the case of Mtwara.76 For many impoverished residents of the region, the experience of being left out of the new nationstate in terms of spatial integration was inextricable from a sense of being left behind the rest of the world in developmental terms. Mtwara’s exclusion could be seen as a starting point or an outcome; highlighting Mtwara’s peripheral status could convey faith in a future of inclusion or indignation at a reality of neglect. To many inhabitants of the region, the postcolonial period seemed to betray the promise of developmental awakening embedded within the Cinderella myth, notwithstanding official reports and national assessments that celebrated Mtwara as a success story. For these individuals, the discursive framing of Mtwara’s marginality became a strategic move to contest optimistic narratives of the region’s development and integration and, in doing so, to claim a bigger piece of the proverbial national cake.77 As early as 1965, national officials began insisting that Mtwara was progressing and overcoming its developmental handicaps. At a meeting that year in Nachingwea, Kawawa “said that although Mtwara Region was referred to as the ‘Cinderella province,’ this was no longer true.”78 In 1968, a supplement on 76 77

78

Ferguson, Global Shadows, 34. Von Oppen, “Cinderella Province,” notes that in the parallel case of the North-Western Province (NWP) of Zambia, both the fact of the region’s marginality and representations of it persisted into the postcolonial period, as local intellectuals revived the colonial Cinderella trope for political ends. Their objective, von Oppen observes, was “to ‘make’ NWP as a distinct Zambian periphery and, at the same time, to unmake its peripheral position and to turn it, together with other remote provinces, into a more recognized constituency of the nation state” (13). “Government Determined, Nachingwea Rally Told: On to Self-Reliance – Nyerere,” Nationalist, July 26, 1965.

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the region in the Nationalist admitted that in the past, Mtwara “was deemed backward, devoid of development potential and from the point of view of salaried employees a ‘hardship’ region.”79 However, the piece pronounced, “Mtwara Region is a fast developing region. . . . The region has been opened up and is confident of its future.”80 Throughout the 1960s, cashew production in Mtwara continued to increase steadily, and in 1970, the government opened a cashew processing plant in the region. Using language borrowed from the Chinese, the press described this event as a hallmark of self-reliant development, “marking a ‘leap forward’ in the peasants’ sustained efforts for better increased production.”81 A similar account one year later noted that “the cashew crop in Mtwara Region has increased from 1,500 tons to 75,000 tons in the past 23 years,” lauding farmers in the region’s numerous ujamaa villages for their hard work.82 Such glowing assessments were complemented by a pair of letters to the editor of the state newspaper published in 1972. These opinion pieces, supposedly written independently by petty government officials, read as heavy-handed propaganda. The first attempted to debunk “the flimsy excuse that Mtwara is remote.” The writer suggested that “Mtwara is just like any other big town in Tanzania” and asserted, “Transport facilities within the region are as good as in any other part of the country except, perhaps, Dar es Salaam.” He ended by insisting, “Life there is superb.”83 The following letter took a more measured tone, as its author conceded, “I am not suggesting Mtwara is a heaven.” He noted the existence of occasional shortages of food and essential goods in the area but nonetheless sought to promote a rosier picture of the region’s development. “Some people” – meaning civil servants – “believe that being transferred to the south is a punishment,” he wrote. “If one goes there on first appointment people ask: ‘What sin did you commit?’ This type of attitude towards the south stems from fallacious ideas people have about the south.” Continuing, he cataloged the connections between Mtwara and the outside world, contesting the region’s putative isolation. “Communicationswise, you can contact almost anywhere in the world from Mtwara,” he proclaimed, arguing, “It is imperative, therefore, to change people’s attitudes towards the south.”84 79

80 81 82 83 84

During the colonial era, civil servants referred to “punishment” regions – remote, undesirable postings reserved for employees who had fallen out of favor with the central administration. This was a kind of official “rustication” that reportedly continued in the postcolonial era. “Mtwara Region Supplement: Intro,” Nationalist, November 16, 1968. “Newala Peasants ‘Leap Forward,’” Nationalist, September 3, 1970. “Mtwara’s Giant Step Forward,” Nationalist, January 11, 1971. Abdallah Ali Saidi, Dar es Salaam, “Mtwara Is a Nice Place,” letter to the editor, Daily News, July 26, 1972. Saleko Assey, J. J., Mtwara, “Mtwara Is Victim of Negative Publicity,” letter to the editor, Daily News, August 7, 1972.

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Days later, however, another letter struck a contentious tone of disagreement. A government worker who had been transferred to Mtwara the prior year set out to “refute allegations” in the previous letter, which he described as a characterized by a “pack of lies and a monstrous imagination.” The author declared, “The fact that many a person has been transferred to Mtwara as a punishment is indisputable. I am one of them.” After detailing the woes of life in Mtwara, he concluded, darkly, “I tend to think that Mtwara will remain a ‘Cinderella Region’ for decades to come.”85 Although his account mentioned the shortages or high prices of basic goods and the lack of industry in the Southeast, it centered on the problem of transportation. He noted that a single firm operated inadequate bus services to Dar es Salaam during the dry season and commented that the MS Mtwara, an ocean vessel that had begun service between Mtwara and Dar es Salaam the previous year, was “more of a cargo ship than a passenger vessel.”86 In a series of contemporaneous letters to the editor, a chorus of voices from the region echoed this critique, protesting the Southeast’s peripheral position within Tanzania. The first letter, written by a resident of Mtwara Town, articulated the problem in clear, poignant terms. “We southern people seem to be apart from other people in our beloved, socialist country especially those in the Northern areas,” it began. “The following questions should be answered by those concerned,” the writer demanded. “Is this country really a socialist one and yet is in two parts? Why do the northern people enjoy the fruits of this country? Why are the southern people ignored?” The letter ended by stating, “All the people are equal according to this country’s socialism. We expect to get better roads, industries etc.”87 Many of the missives that followed, echoing this indignant tone, focused almost exclusively on the topic of roads. One contended that “[the] lack of good all-weather roads is a major handicap in economic and social development” and bemoaned the dismantling of the regional railway constructed during the Groundnut Scheme. The writer pointed out the threat that poor transportation infrastructure posed to the viability of Mtwara’s cashew economy, noting, “Now cashewnut is taking the place of groundnut but is anything being done to facilitate its transportation?” This poor infrastructure, the letter continued, “is an economic setback to the peasants, the government and the nation as a whole.”88 The public complaints of southeastern Tanzanians and their advocates often contrasted the central government’s apparent eagerness to invest in 85 86 87 88

Samy Bernard, Mtwara, “Come to Mtwara and See Things Yourself,” letter to the editor, Daily News, August 14, 1972. Ibid. Azizi A. Muhibu, Mtwara, “A Look at Southern Tanzania,” letter to the editor, Daily News, August 3, 1972. Namembe N. B., “When Will South Receive Her Share of Development?,” letter to the editor, Daily News, August 31, 1972.

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transportation or construction projects in other regions with its disregard of the South. Of particular concern in 1972 was the TANU leadership’s sudden announcement of a plan to move the nation’s capital from Dar es Salaam to the small town of Dodoma more than four hundred kilometers to the interior. This decision – entailing, essentially, the building of a new city – was justified as a measure to improve official security. Many letters pointed out the fallacy of this logic as well as the lopsided priorities that it revealed. “A capital as it does not constitute neither development nor security to a nation [sic],” one Dar es Salaam resident wrote. “It will be sinful if the Regional TANU Executive Committees in the South support the proposal.” The letter pointed out, “The transport problem in the South is acute,” and asked, “If there is enough money, why can’t the Government use it to minimise the problem?”89 Another note queried, “Why can’t we use this money for developing rural areas?” The capital transfer, the writer insisted, represented “another attempt to bring about more development to the northern part of Tanzania and a continuation of ignoring the South.” The letter concluded by emphasizing the need for “accelerated and uniform development” throughout the country.90 Yet most letters focused on the issue of transportation with regard to the region’s overall spatial marginality, concretized by the absence of an all-weather road to Dar es Salaam. In the late 1960s, the central government announced plans to construct a paved road along the three hundred miles of coast from Mtwara to the capital. In 1969, the Nationalist reported that the minister for economic and development planning had avowed to the National Assembly that final surveying work on the road would begin shortly and had “discarded allegations by some members that the Government did not want to develop the southern parts of the country.”91 The following year, with the assistance of the Japanese government, the Tanzanian government performed a feasibility study that determined that “the project was practical and achievable.”92 However, by 1972, construction had not yet begun. That same year, after considerable protest, a number of citizens from the Southeast took it on themselves to launch a fund-raising campaign to raise money for the “self-reliant” construction of the road, given the perceived lack of a genuine government commitment.93 One letter observed, “The campaign is important in that it depicts the seriousness of a people 89 90 91 92 93

Mbesile Chemanyika, Dar es Salaam, “Development First Then Prestige,” letter to the editor, Daily News, October 19, 1972. Cletus Illonie Ponella, “Utopian Thoughts,” letter to the editor, Daily News, November 11, 1972. “New Road Link to Mtwara,” Nationalist, June 17, 1969. S. Mesaki and J. Mwankusye, “The Saga of the Lindi–Kibiti Road: Political Ramifications,” in Seppal ¨ a¨ and Koda, Making of a Periphery, 60. Concerned Southerner, Dar es Salaam, “Development: Southern Regions Are Neglected,” letter to the editor, Daily News, August 8, 1972.

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who are terribly in need of the vital road link.” The writer asserted that “the time for its construction is verily long overdue” and that the inordinate delays “only help to implant the we-are-a-forgotten-people attitude” and “help to deepen the prejudices of the people who don’t come from that area.”94 Public debates about the Southern Link road demonstrated how spatial remoteness and developmental backwardness overlapped in strategic as well as stereotypical representations of Mtwara. In such accounts, the deficiency of transportation infrastructure was either a cause or manifestation of Mtwara’s peripheral status – or both. Even while occasionally invoking the Cinderella metaphor, with its promise of a brighter future, these epistolary disputes disclosed a widespread sentiment of bitter frustration with what appeared to be Mtwara’s literal and symbolic exclusion from substantive national membership. Southeasterners outlined the conditions of this exclusion for the purpose of gaining more national resources for regional development, and they drew on the ujamaa principles of national unity and socialist equality rather than self-reliance to do so. In calling for the construction of a Southern Link road, these citizens simultaneously portrayed the region as a discrete unit worthy of investment and called for the erosion of its separateness. In doing so, they illuminated a series of broader questions that captured some of the inherent contradictions of citizenship and development in socialist Tanzania. Was Mtwara’s relative disconnection from the rest of the country what defined it as a distinct, coherent entity? What was the relationship between its identities as a spatial periphery and a developmental one? Furthermore, was Mtwara’s marginal status natural or artificial – was the broader space of Tanzania an intrinsically meaningful unit or one that needed to be created? That is, was underdevelopment an original state or a produced condition? Accordingly, was regional self-reliance a legitimate avenue to development? At different points and among different people, these questions yielded different answers. As Weinstein points out, the representational dimension of regional underdevelopment is dialectically related to its material character, and thus the ways in which these questions were discussed were not incidental to the concrete developmental dynamics that they referenced. In the case of Mtwara, as in many other sites across the African continent, regional underdevelopment was neither solely internally produced nor necessarily a threat to the viability of nationalist narratives; it had a “Janus-faced” character.95 During the ujamaa era, the spatial mapping of Mtwara’s remoteness from the national center was entwined with a 94 95

Mombo P. Mlaponi, “An All-Weather Road to South Is Vital,” letter to the editor, Daily News, November 13, 1972. Straker, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution, 177.

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figure 13. Young Makonde boys dancing a traditional dance called “Mwachilendenda,” June 1971. Courtesy Tanzania Information Services.

demographic mapping of southeastern Tanzanians and particularly the Makonde as culturally backward. However, although popular discourse stigmatized the Makonde as wild, dirty, and even cannibalistic, and official reports complained of Makonde stubbornness and laziness, nationalist constructions selectively claimed Makonde “primitiveness” to exemplify and authenticate Tanzania’s cultural heritage.96 Though a progressive developmental vision, ujamaa looked backward in time to root the country’s proposed socialist reorganization in older indigenous social practices. In line with this mission, the Tanzanian state mobilized “folk” cultural production from across the country to visually and musically represent African tradition, ujamaa, and the nation to Tanzanian citizens and the world (Figure 13).97 In the late 1960s, the National Development Corporation began to sponsor the creation of Makonde sculpture, which became renowned as a unique genre of “primitive” art. Press reports celebrated “the world famous Makonde 96 97

Zachary Kingdon, A Host of Devils: The History and Context of the Making of Makonde Spirit Sculpture (New York: Routledge, 2002). Askew, Performing the Nation.

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wood carvings,” boasting, “There is a big demand for Makonde wood carvings in Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Swaziland, Botswana, the United Kingdom and Greece.”98 Fashioned from African blackwood and adopted from older forms of spiritual artifacts, Makonde carvings depicted human figures intertwined in fluid spirals that officials labeled embodiments of traditional African cooperation and familyhood, or ujamaa.99 Managing Villagization, Planning Development Thus, state officials in Dar es Salaam sought to incorporate the Southeast into nationalist narratives by underscoring Mtwara’s fundamental alterity from the rest of Tanzania.100 This seemingly paradoxical situation was further complicated by the fact that the dynamics of regional differentiation – in empirical, representational, and felt terms – were reproduced within the apparatus of the Tanzanian state itself. Official reports from Mtwara throughout the ujamaa period often paralleled popular sentiment in the Southeast, denouncing the paucity of resources from and lack of regular contact with the central government. Yet many government workers in Mtwara simultaneously sought increased regional administrative autonomy in the realm of decision making, resenting their subordination to inattentive superiors based in Dar es Salaam and Dodoma. The Mtwara Regional Development Committee voiced its perception of the region’s neglect in a 1967 meeting with representatives of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Development Planning in Dar es Salaam, scheduled to discuss preparations for the Five Year Development Plan of 1970– 75. According to the minutes, “Members felt that most of the Mtwara Regional development projects in the present Five Year Development Plan were either not funded or perhaps [had] not received due priority among other Regions’ projects.” The committee’s chairman reported, “Most of this Region’s projects have not been implemented so far.” Members also complained that “the Regional Development Committee had no executive powers and that it was only advisory.” The committee pointed out, “One of the bottlenecks in the present plan is an administrative one; there being so many stages before a project was agreed upon or because of this factor the funds were received too late for a certain project to be implemented.” Related to this was its observation that “there has been no effective co-ordination 98

99 100

“Fast Developing Region,” Nationalist, Mtwara Region Supplement, November 16, 1968. The promotion of “traditional” handicraft production also raises questions about the peculiar place of the tourism industry in the national development plan. Tore Saetersdal, “Makonde Carvings: Cultural and Symbolic Aspects,” in Seppal ¨ a¨ and Koda, Making of a Periphery, 285–308. For more on national representations of the Southeast, see Stacey Langwick, Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).

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between the Ministries and Regions alike” and that “in fact communication has been one way from the Regions to the Ministry alone.”101 These comments reflected frustration with Mtwara’s particular condition but also hinted at more general tensions that emerged within the ujamaa project as the ambitious call for grassroots socialism was filtered through a hierarchical bureaucracy. How was a region like Mtwara supposed to be selfreliant in development if it had inadequate resources and decision-making powers? Was ujamaa to proceed organically from rural people’s collective self-transformation or be calibrated and managed by the government? Was mass rural resettlement alone confirmation of ujamaa’s successful implementation? If not, how was progress toward true ujamaa to be assessed? At their heart, these questions, like debates over Mtwara’s peripheral status, centered on the problem of how to define ujamaa development itself. In the years following the Arusha Declaration, official reports in Mtwara – as throughout Tanzania – were littered with quantitative evaluations of developmental progress, although the shortcomings of this approach were obvious. These documents cataloged figures ranging from the number of wells constructed, adult education courses conducted, and rural women trained in home economics seminars to the kilograms of cashews harvested and number of health stations operating in various districts. Over time, the most important data of all came to be the number of ujamaa villages established in the region. This genre of development assessment prioritized the superficial in the interest of efficiency; at its worst, it seemed to foreground the practice of counting for its own sake, without illuminating the deeper, less easily quantifiable details of rural people’s lives and processes of social, political, and economic reorganization in the region. Ujamaa-era development reports had an immediate heritage in the late colonial and early postcolonial tradition of calculating the value of rural self-help schemes (later reconfigured as “nation-building” schemes) in terms of the precise monetary worth of such activities to the state. More broadly, however, the convention of quantitative reporting reflected the overarching difficulty of coordinating a developmental revolution in the countryside with limited resources and within a limited time frame. In 1968, the Mtwara regional development officer confessed, “Many projects are not inspected because of the lack of transportation; therefore, even their reports are often made from just guessing.”102 Many such assessments openly admitted their own inaccuracy in this regard. Although 101

102

TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Minutes of an Extraordinary Meeting of the Mtwara Regional Development Committee held at Mtwara, July 31, 1967. TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Afisa Maendeleo wa Mkoa, Mtwara to Kamishna wa Maendeleo, Dar es Salaam, Taarifa ya Shughuli za Maendeleo Mkoa wa Mtwara, December 1968, January 1, 1969.

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Mtwara reported record numbers of new villages, from early on, officials acknowledged the fallacy of these figures. Also in 1968, the regional commissioner stated, “At the moment we cannot be proud that our region of Mtwara has ujamaa villages, because the villages we currently have are not ujamaa villages, and we still have a large number of individuals who are living alone without staying together in the villages.”103 A few years later, the Regional Commissioner’s Office offered, more euphemistically, “It is true that a number of our ujamaa villages are in the initial stages of ujamaa development both economically and socially.”104 More starkly, a 1970 regional development report followed a numerical cataloging of villages by conceding, “In truth, none of these villages have yet received any ujamaa training. Therefore, it is necessary to teach all our staff the matter of ujamaa politics and also to explain economic plans in all these villages to help encourage people to agree to these economic plans.” Of the villagers, the regional development officer commented, “They love ujamaa, but they don’t understand what to do.”105 Although Nyerere published a presidential paper in 1967 outlining guidelines for Tanzania’s rural development, the principle of decentralized, openended development animating ujamaa meant that national policy was not initially codified into a precise, consistent set of instructions for how officials should handle the call for ujamaa villagization. In effect, regional commissioners and district officials across the country were delegated the task of determining how to implement ujamaa at the local level. In Mtwara, as in many other regions, the regional commissioner’s interpretation of ujamaa exchanged the utopian emphasis on immediate and collective socialist self-transformation for a prioritization of the officially orchestrated spatial reorganization of the countryside. Resettlement itself – or the creation of concentrated rural settlements – became the first and most important step in the ujamaa process; the gradual replacement of private cultivation with communal agriculture was to follow. The transition to true communal agriculture was to be spread out over two broad phases (Figure 14). First, farmers would cultivate a large piece of village land parceled into private plots. This type of contiguous private farming by individual households, known as “shoulder-to-shoulder” (begakwa-bega) cultivation, would eventually be supplanted by actual communal farming, when private plots would be abolished and villagers would work 103

104

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TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Maongozi na Utaratibu wa Kutekeleza Azimio la Arusha Katika Mkoa wa Mtwara (Ndanda Press, March 1968). TNA, PMO, PM/UV/V.10: Mtwara Region Ujamaa Villages. Administrative Secretary, Office of Regional Commissioner, Mtwara to Director of Statistics, Dar es Salaam, 1971. TNA, PMO, RD/12/14/1 (V): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Taarifa ya Kazi za Maendeleo Tangu Mwezi Oktoba Hadi Novemba 1970–Desemba 28, 1970, January 1971.

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figure 14. Residents of Mumbaka Village, Masasi District, Mtwara, working the maize plot of the village’s ujamaa farm alongside members of TANU’s Regional Council, 1975. Courtesy Tanzania Information Services.

together on a single collectively owned piece of land. “Mtwara Region has original villages,” Klerruu explained. “These original villages have already implemented one rule of ujamaa villages. That rule is to build houses close together and live together. The main work remaining is that of establishing ujamaa cultivation,” he continued. “The people of these original villages will keep their private farms, but at the same time, they will have to establish cooperative farms and bega-kwa-bega farming as the first step of building an ujamaa agricultural style. Cooperative farms will be an addition, instead of everyone trying to expand their own farms.” Ideally, once farmers took this first step, they would be able to “move to the second step without any discord and continue thus, from step to step, until they reach the last step of true ujamaa agriculture.”106 106

TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development. Maongozi na Utaratibu wa Kutekeleza Azimio la Arusha Katika Mkoa wa Mtwara (Ndanda Press, March 1968). Nyerere had outlined this broad approach in his 1967 paper, suggesting that “each community should start with a mixture of private and co-operative living if the former has been the custom of the people, gradually increasing the level of co-operative working as the members sort out the problems which occur and find a method of organizing their

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Given the shortage of resources, staff, and training opportunities, regional and district officials in Mtwara spent the late 1960s and early 1970s focusing on moving as many rural people as possible into concentrated settlements and encouraging those who already lived together to attempt bega-kwa-bega farming. Official documents acknowledged the existence of a variety of village types at different stages of ujamaa development. One 1971 report identified “a) ujamaa and defense villages near the border with Mozambique, b) original/traditional villages that are becoming ujamaa, c) new ujamaa villages.”107 Yet in these categories, the term ujamaa served to obfuscate rather than illuminate on-the-ground realities; assessments of rural development were operating on two entirely different registers. In its utopian socialist incarnation, ujamaa entailed nothing less than complete social, political, and economic transformation. Understood as attached to a more conventional modernization project, however, ujamaa as a descriptive term referred to concentrated settlement alone, with a gesture toward bega-kwa-bega cultivation – which ultimately represented an extension of farming for private profit. Administrative confusion about the meaning of the ujamaa label was amplified by the proliferation of scholarly literature that sought to (often critically) assess developmental progress in different regions but continued to rely on the figures provided in official documents. In retrospect, some scholars have correctly suggested that reports of high numbers of ujamaa villages betray a degree of conscious official instrumentalism.108 Given the peripheral status of their region, Mtwara officials stood to gain individually as well as collectively by elevating their region in the eyes of the central government through excellent developmental performance. By demonstrating Mtwara’s self-reliance in creating putatively self-reliant ujamaa villages, local and regional officials could paradoxically gain the external resources necessary to undo the area’s marginalization. Yet villagization was occurring on the ground throughout Mtwara. Before 1973, TANU and government officials and TYL members frequently encouraged people living near “original villages” – formerly described as “minor settlements” – to relocate to these sites. In other cases, local officials and youth militants instructed individuals living in various configurations of extended family units spread throughout a given area to move to a new, previously unsettled location so as to reside contiguously. The resultant villages could contain as few as twenty or as many as hundreds of residents. In some ways, the prior prevalence of migration and voluntary resettlement

107

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communal activities which best suits them.” Nyerere, “Socialism and Rural Development,” 358. TNA, PMO, RD/12/14/1 (V): Mtwara Region Rural Development. A.H.S. Mwakapesa, Regional Rural Development Officer, Mtwara to Kamishna wa Maendeleo, Dar es Salaam, Taarifa ya Kazi za Maendeleo Vijijini Katika Mkoa wa Mtwara Tangu August Hadi October, 1971, November 12, 1971. See, e.g., Chapter 5 of Schneider, Government of Development.

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as survival tactics, combined with popular familiarity with “administrative caprice,”109 made this first villagization drive “no new thing” to rural people in Mtwara.110 At this stage, some rural people even viewed resettlement in compliance with ujamaa policy as they had perceived relocation in the past – as a strategy for potential upward social, political, and economic mobility. Although migration and resettlement had remained common throughout the 1950s and 1960s, however, they were increasingly restricted by the exigencies of cashew farming. As a result, many rural Southeasterners experienced ujamaa-era resettlement as stimulating mobility, even though villagization was partly undertaken in the name of a developmental imaginary that celebrated rootedness. This mobility refers not only to the act of relocation itself but to the fact that rural people resettled under pre- and post-1973 villagization initiatives almost always retained their private cashew farms near their original homes. Afterward, many villagers seeking to maintain these plots were forced to walk long distances to do so. Following the inauguration of Operation Vijiji, Mtwara officials and youth militants forced a second wave of resettlement throughout the countryside, from smaller villages into bigger ones. Few of the numerous studies conducted about the course of ujamaa in the countryside during this time systematically recorded the actual impact of this policy on the ground.111 In this regard, the 1976 village reports penned by Kivukoni College students and faculty were exceptional. Completed mere months after the conclusion of villagization drives throughout the region, these detailed studies almost unanimously concluded that new settlements lacked functioning communal ujamaa farms. At the same time, they lamented that because many peasants found their new homes located at great distances – up to several miles – from their permanent farms, overall agricultural production was suffering. Most farmers attempted to maintain their distant plots, but others had abandoned their older farms altogether. The visitors suggested that private agricultural activities were also hindered by the poor nutrition of farmers, the small size of the hoes that they used, and their “primitive” cultural practices (Figure 15). Cashew cultivation was apparently suffering the most from neglect in the wake of the territorial shift. According to the Kivukoni teams, farmers in new villages failed to regularly weed their older plots or otherwise care for their trees, resulting in cashew farms that were not well kept (safi) or healthy. Production languished accordingly; official statistics registered a sudden and enormous drop in regional cashew production during the 109 110 111

Liebenow, Colonial Rule, 334. Wembah-Rashid, “Socio-Political Development,” 182. There are, of course, a number of exceptions; notable examples include Michaela von Freyhold, Ujamaa Villages in Tanzania: Analysis of a Social Experiment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979) and a number of case studies held in the East Africana Collection at UDSM.

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figure 15. A woman gathering water on the Makonde Plateau, undated (likely early to mid-1970s). Courtesy Tanzania Information Services.

1974–75 season, after decades of uninterrupted and rapid increase.112 Between 1961 and 1973, cashew production had risen from 40,603 to 145,080 tons per year. In 1974, production dropped to 115,864 tons; the following year, the recorded output had further decreased to 96,021 tons. By 1979, production had fallen back to 1961 levels, at 40,550 tons.113 Subsequent years recorded a striking overall decline in cashew production that persisted until the early 1990s (Figure 16). Various ecological factors likely contributed to this slump, including the age of cashew trees and the possible appearance of fungal disease. In addition, fluctuations in crop prices during the mid-1970s global recession and problems with marketing systems may have disincentivized cashew farming.114 Both rural elders and former government workers such as Mohammed Ali Sefu, one of five accountants in the regional office of the Mtwara Cooperative Union from 1969 112 113 114

Martin et al., “Cashew Nut Production,” 5; Shomari and Topper, “The Importance of Cashew,” 48. Northwood and Kayumbo, “Cashew Production.” Martin et al., “Cashew Nut Production,” 8; Shomari and Topper, “The Importance of Cashew,” 48–9.

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figure 16. Cashew production in Tanzania from 1945 to 1995 (in tons).115

onward, reported relatively regular occurrences of graft among cooperative union workers charged with collecting and selling cash crops at the village and regional levels. 116 Despite these additional factors, however, multiple sources – including the oral and written accounts of a former bwana shamba based out of the Ministry of Agriculture’s nearby Training Institute and an agronomist specializing in cashews based out of the neighboring Agricultural Research Institute at Naliendele – indicate that the causal link between villagization itself and the cashew crisis is uncontestable.117 By the mid-1970s, the alarming trajectory of Mtwara’s collapsing cashew economy paralleled the fate of the Tanzanian national economy as a whole. The global economic downturn associated with the 1973 oil shocks starkly exposed the relationship between capitalism and underdevelopment across the African continent, exacerbating the relative and absolute impoverishment of most primary product exporting former colonies. Across Tanzania, the recession, poor environmental conditions, and the manifold disruptions of villagization converged to trigger a slump in cash crop and food crop production. “Cotton, coffee, sisal production all dropped between 1974 and 115 116 117

Data from Northwood and Kayumbo, “Cashew Production” and Naliendele Agricultural Research Institute, Ministry of Agriculture, Government of Tanzania, 2008. Interview with Mohammed Ali Sefu, Mtwara Town, February 2008. Martin et al., “Cashew Nut Production,” 8; interviews with Aputa Matei Mtukwe, agricultural officer at the Ministry of Agriculture Training Institute in Naliendele, Mtwara from 1976–83, Naliendele, January 2008, and Louis Kasuga, agronomist/cashew specialist at the Ministry of Agriculture Research Institute in Naliendele from the late 1970s–present, Naliendele, February 2008.

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1977, but cashew production dropped most significantly by far,” William Freund documents, and “In the drought years of 1974–75, food imports for the first time began to consume a major part of Tanzania’s foreign exchange earnings.”118 By late 1973, food shortages had already cropped up in the Southeast, necessitating shipments of basic foodstuffs like maize flour, rice, and sugar from Dar es Salaam to Mtwara by ferry. TANU officials in Mtwara attempted to mitigate reports of critical food shortages; the Daily News related that “the Mtwara TANU District Working Committee has refuted press reports of food shortage in the district” and that the committee claimed, “this did not mean that people in Mtwara were dying of hunger.”119 Shortly thereafter, the national junior minister for agriculture contended, “The shortage of food which has occurred in several places in the country should not be taken to mean that there is widespread famine in Tanzania.” To be blamed for those scarcities that did exist, he explained, was “the poor rainfall in the 1973–74 season” as well as the generally poor condition of transportation infrastructure, including “the inadequate number of railway wagons, the poor state of the roads and incompetence of various people responsible for the transportation of foodstuffs to various parts of the country.”120 Weeks later, the press announced that “An acute shortage of various essential food items has hit Dar es Salaam,” resulting in long queues and calls for rationing.121 The president was reduced to “assur[ing] the nation that nobody would die of hunger due to the shortage of food which he described as a worldwide phenomenon,” although he conceded that “the present shortage of food [is] the largest ever experienced since we achieved our independence twelve years ago.”122 As the vulnerability of the national economy grew increasingly apparent and the utopian content of ujamaa became more and more diluted in the 1970s, Tanzanian policy began to conform to the implicit standards of a new global economy of development assistance. Amid Cold War contests over foreign aid in the 1950s and 1960s, there arose a cohort of international donors that represented themselves as politically neutral and dedicated to the cause of developing the Third World. Included in this category were a number of United Nations agencies (including UNICEF and the FAO) as well as aid departments of Canadian and Northern European countries and a host of other Western-based nongovernmental organizations, such as Oxfam.123 Though loosely organized and far from monolithic, this new 118 119 120 121 122 123

Freund, “Class Conflict,” 498. “Ship Ferries Food to Mtwara,” Daily News, January 5, 1974. “No Famine in Tanzania – Minister,” Daily News, January 14, 1974. “Dar Hit by Acute Food Shortages,” Daily News, January 29, 1974. “Nobody Will Die of Hunger – Mwalimu,” Daily News, April 7, 1974; “Tanzania Has Food: No Need for Alarm,” Daily News, February 9, 1974. Some of these organizations, including UN agencies such as UNICEF, had already been operating in Tanzania since the late colonial period.

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international development community largely shared a set of basic assumptions about what development meant and how it might be achieved.124 Even while many of these donors genuinely embraced the principles of grassroots, decentralized development underlying ujamaa, they simultaneously practiced a technocratic and even corporate form of developmental intervention. Their style was technocratic in that they believed that development could be calibrated according to scientific formulas; it was corporate in that they mobilized concepts from the business world to organize and assess the investment of their money. In this regard, standardized planning and reporting procedures were fundamental to the operation of this new international development economy. The practice of planning occupied an ambiguous position within the Tanzanian development project throughout the ujamaa period. Articulated as a utopian vision, ujamaa staged a sharp break with existing approaches to national development by positioning itself as open-ended, improvisational, and experimental. When filtered through the matrix of the Tanzanian government and translated into policy, however, ujamaa accrued blueprints, deadlines, and sometimes rigid developmental scripts. Official policy relied on planning at both the national level, in the form of the cyclical generation of five-year plans, and the local level, in the form of detailed maps for ujamaa villages, among other things. Regional officials in Mtwara perceived planning as essential for government staff, while local extension workers believed it necessary for villagers themselves. This tendency was rooted in the inherited institutional habitus of many arms of the administration.125 In 1963, the southern provincial commissioner informed Community Development workers, “People must plan what they want to do before starting the actual work.” He clarified that “planning was always done on paper and in order to make the plans practical it was necessary to have personnel capable of interpreting them and that the officers in the field now were the people for the job.” The worth of this activity, he elaborated, lay in the fact that “it was through planning [that] a people can know of their achievements and short falls on completing a given job at a given time.”126 Seven years later, in the midst of the ujamaa period, the principal rural development officer of Mtwara wrote in a publication for local officers, “We must have a plan.” He continued, “If you have a reasonable plan you will work on one thing at a time and when that is done you will look at your plan and see what the next steps are.” In his eyes, this was true for rural people as well as the 124

125 126

See Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard’s introduction to Cooper and Packard, International Development and the Social Sciences, 1–43; Ferguson, Anti-Politics Machine. On Oxfam in particular, see Jennings, Surrogates of the State. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). TNA, REA/1/11: Regional Commissioner Mtwara (Southern Province). Press release issued by Tanganyika Information Services, Dar es Salaam, “Planning First,” September 16, 1963.

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officials facilitating their self-reliant development, because “no community can develop itself successfully without first getting all the facts.”127 In his 1968 outline of the guidelines for implementing ujamaa in Mtwara, Klerruu provided not only a blueprint of the ideal ujamaa village (Figure 17) but also detailed designs for the construction of individual houses within these settlements (Figure 18). In practice, villages did not follow this exact layout, but they did feature gridded spatial orders with houses built “in clean lines,” as Ali bin Ali, the former head of the Mtwara District TYL branch introduced in Chapter 2, put it. “Those who were resettled and brought there – we changed their environment,” he explained of ujamaa villagers. “Because we wanted to show them a modern environment.”128 In reality, even though officials embraced planning, they simultaneously feared it.129 Excessive planning could be counter to the spirit of ujamaa, potentially inducing bureaucratic sluggishness that would stifle the grassroots initiative intended to drive development. In 1969, following the example of the Mtwara regional commissioner, who denounced the “undue tendency for experts repeatedly to survey and resurvey approached projects,” the editors of the Nationalist commented, “The need for co-ordinated projects in itself is a powerful argument for planned development. Yet development requires more than feasibility studies.” In fact, they noted, “We must guard against the danger of studies being a disincentive to development initiative at the local level.”130 Moreover, officials and the press pointed to another problem of overemphasizing planning – the lack of trained Tanzanian “experts” to complete such skilled labor. Public discussions about the national shortage of human capital acknowledged both the necessity and perils of importing developmental expertise. “There is no doubt that any developing country needs the assistance of some foreign experts,” a 1967 editorial affirmed.131 Three years later, the deputy secretary to the Treasury argued that “skilled manpower was the major bottleneck to implementing development projects,” observing that “the number of vacant positions 127

128 129

130 131

TNA, PMO, RD/12/14/1 (IV): Mtwara Region Rural Development Quarterly Pamphlet: “A Study Course on Rural Development for Our Rural Development Workers/Trainers,” by P. Givson Mwakambonja, Principal Rural Development Officer, Mtwara, May 1970. Interview with Ali bin Ali, Mtwara Town, January 2008. For a critical take on rural development planning from within the administration, see TNA, PMO, UV/U4: Ujamaa Villages General. Study on Physical Planning Aspects of Ujamaa Villages by Town Planning Division, Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, August 1971. Many scholars, however, have suggested that planning reflected either an authoritarian impulse or an inherent “developmentalist” hubris on behalf of the Tanzanian state. Leander Schneider, for instance, writes that “planning, vacuous and ineffectual as it was,” was “a ritualistic practice through which the state enacted and actualized its authority as the arbiter of Tanzanians’ journey between past and future.” Schneider, “High on Modernity?,” 31. “Local Plans,” Nationalist, March 18, 1969. “Local Experts,” Nationalist, August 17, 1967.

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figure 17. Plan for ujamaa village, Mtwara Region, 1968.132 132

TNA, PMO, CDR/12/14/4 (IV) Mtwara Region Rural Development: Maongozi na Utaratibu wa Kutekeleza Azimio la Arusha Katika Mkoa wa Mtwara (Ndanda Press, March 1968).

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figure 18. Plans for two types of houses in Mtwara ujamaa villages: with thatched roofs and metal roofs, 1968.133

for professional personnel remained high.” 134 At the outset of compulsory villagization, Kawawa announced, “The main rural development problems facing Tanzania include proper planning of new villages and servicing of agricultural machinery.” “We do not have enough planners to do all the planning in the rural areas,” he emphasized.135 Concerns like these motivated the Tanzanian government’s 1971 decision to hire the US-based management consulting firm of McKinsey and Company to study the country’s administrative structure and recommend strategies for streamlining the state bureaucracy. Many scholars have discerned that TANU’s decision to implement the McKinsey proposals for “decentralization” the subsequent year ended up abolishing the autonomy and accountability of local government, and they take this to mean that the 1972 policy was a calculated move toward centralization by power-hungry national officials.136 However, the more specific and immediate meaning of 133 134 135 136

Ibid. “Shortage of Experts Main Problem,” Nationalist, January 23, 1970. “Shortage of Planners a Problem,” Daily News, December 10, 1973. E.g., see Jennings, “A Very Real War,” 92. This observation is linked to a tendency in some literature to reduce ujamaa to a project of political centralization. Kelly Askew, for instance, suggests that “socialism was a language employed by both Nyerere and Karume

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the administrative restructuring was that it devolved power to the regions, and in doing so – restructuring the development process according to Western corporate standards – it opened new doors to large-scale investment by international development institutions.137 Beyond Villagization, beyond the Nation Rather than solely being marked by the centralization of “developmentalist” state power in Dar es Salaam, the later years of ujamaa policy were characterized as much by an unraveling of the Tanzanian state’s very ability to preside over national development. From 1972 onward, administrative and decision-making powers in all sectors of development were concentrated at the regional level instead of dispersed among national ministries and filtered through popularly elected local government institutions. Regional Development Committees were appointed by and accountable to the central government but exercised considerable autonomy in planning and executing development policy.138 This reorganization simultaneously facilitated managerial coordination of developmental activity through “integrated” planning within each regional unit and increased the likelihood of procuring external funds to implement these plans. In accordance with the new RIDEP paradigm, the Tanzanian government invited foreign development agents to pair up with individual regions to prepare (and eventually fund) five-year plans for those units. The link between planning and funding was clear: plans authored by foreign experts were more likely to be funded by foreign agencies, and demarcating the region as a circumscribed unit increased the perceived feasibility of such developmental intervention for donors. One year earlier, the central government had altered the boundaries of Mtwara Region, dividing one of the largest regions in the country into two.139 Mtwara, Masasi, and Newala Districts remained part of Mtwara, while the northern districts of Lindi, Nachingwea, and Kilwa constituted the new region of Lindi. From 1972 onward, both Mtwara and Lindi Regions were linked to the government of Finland within the newly fragmented and

137

138 139

to achieve centralization of economic, political and cultural resources.” (Zanzibari leader Abeid Karume shared the position of Tanzanian vice president with Kawawa.) Askew, “Sung and Unsung: Musical Reflections on Tanzanian Postsocialisms,” Africa 76, 1 (2006): 39. The Tanzanian state’s reliance on foreign aid increased over the course of the ujamaa period; by the late 1970s, well over half of the country’s development budget came from foreign sources. See Schneider, “Developmentalism,” 16n25, for an overview of the literature on foreign aid and Tanzanian development. Separate Regional Development Funds had existed since 1967 but were considerably expanded after 1972. Mtwara had been the second largest region in the country (after the Lake Region) in terms of population and the third largest in terms of area. “Facts and Figures,” Nationalist, Mtwara Development Supplement, November 16, 1968.

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internationalized structure of national development; other pairings included Yugoslavia with the Ruvuma Region, West Germany with Tanga, Canada with Dar es Salaam and the Coast, and the Netherlands with Morogoro.140 Finland had provided developmental assistance to the Tanzanian government since 1962, constructing a number of training centers throughout the country as part of a joint Nordic initiative (with the governments of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark). Beginning in 1968, Finnish experts began independently participating in developmental interventions in the fields of water management and construction, and from this period onward, Tanzania became the greatest foreign recipient of Finnish developmental assistance. After 1972, this aid was targeted almost exclusively toward Mtwara and Lindi. In 1972, Finnish surveyors initiated a master rural water plan in the area, and in 1974, “two teams of Finnish planners arrived in these regions, one team to each region. Their task was to prepare integrated development plans for the two regions for the Third Tanzanian Five Yearplanning period, 1975/76–1979/80.”141 Complete funding for that particular planning cycle fell through. However, over the next two decades, the Tanzanian government successfully commissioned FINNIDA (the Finnish International Development Agency) and British consultants to prepare and ultimately fund Rural Integrated Development Programmes in Mtwara, in congruence with similar initiatives in other regions. Thus, the first half of the 1970s inaugurated a new chapter in the history of Mtwara as a region. Mtwara’s identity became tied not only to its status as an isolated periphery or developmental success vis-a-vis the Tanzanian ` nation-state but to its direct production as a developmental target by the government of Finland. Even as Mtwara’s connections to the capitalist global economy attenuated as a result of significantly decreased cashew exports following Operation Vijiji, new linkages between Mtwara and the world emerged in the realm of the international development economy. In pursuit of material and technical resources, the Tanzanian government adopted the then fashionable model of “integrated development” on a regional scale – but only at the expense of actual national integration.142 Although “these regional plans were intended to form the building blocks for an aggregated national plan” by providing “technical assistance to strengthen the 140 141 142

Development Planning Study (Mzumbe: Institute of Development Management, 1975), 24. Timo Voipio, “Poverty Reduction in Mtwara-Lindi 1972–1995: A History of Paradigm Shifts,” in Seppal ¨ a¨ and Koda, Making of a Periphery, 83. For more on “integrated development,” see ibid., 95; L. Kleemeier, “Integrated Rural Development in Tanzania,” Public Administration and Development 8, 1 (1988): 61–73; D. G. R. Belshaw, “An Evaluation of Foreign Planning Assistance to Tanzania’s Decentralized Regional Planning Programme, 1972–81,” Applied Geography 2 (1982): 291– 302; Louis Picard, “Socialism and the Field Administrator: Decentralization in Tanzania,” Comparative Politics 12, 4 (1980): 439–57.

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existing regional planning capacity,” a former lecturer in geography at UDSM observed more than a decade later, “RIDEPs soon expanded beyond this auxiliary role to become, effectively, autonomous exercises undertaken on the initiative of donor agencies, planned and administered by experts.”143 As a result, he asserted, “Tanzania’s 20 regions have been effectively subdivided into planning ‘spheres of influence’ in which particular donors and their expert teams hold sway, essentially pre-empting the choices which should be made by Tanzanians.”144 The rise of the RIDEP model heralded a novel mode of global engagement for Tanzania, both compromising the spatial integrity of the nation-state and challenging its sovereignty by exporting developmental governance to individual foreign donors.145 It also signaled the evaporation of ujamaa as a national developmental ideal and a discourse within which residents of impoverished regions such as Mtwara could frame claims for resources. The 1980s and 1990s brought further modifications to Mtwara’s position within the Tanzanian nation-state and the world. The British government replaced the government of Finland in authoring and funding the Mtwara RIDEP for the Fourth Five-Year Development Plan (1981–86), but Finland returned as the region’s primary developmental patron in the late 1980s. In the meantime, beginning in 1986, the central government itself submitted to the austerity measures and liberalization regimen imposed by the International Monetary Fund. Structural adjustment policies temporarily rekindled the scalar importance of the nation, albeit with the effect of intensifying the underdevelopment and marginality of Tanzania as a whole through an effective dismantling of the state’s developmental capacities. Even in the era of neoliberal reform, however, the production of regional distinctiveness continued, through the World Bank’s insistence on promoting development in Mtwara by investing in cashew production.146 During the post-1986 period of Finnish involvement, which lasted for almost two decades, a new model for regional development was popularized, coined “participatory integrated rural development.” Although the ostensible goal of the resultant Finnish Rural Integrated Project Support (RIPS) program was to return to the ujamaa principles of decentralized, improvisational, autonomous local development, it instead generated a highly bureaucratic method of developmental intervention managed by foreign experts schooled in an inaccessible 143 144 145 146

A. Armstrong, “Tanzania’s Expert-Led Planning: An Assessment,” Public Administration and Development 7 (1987): 263. Ibid., 269. However, the central state continued to negotiate the terms of these development agreements. The World Bank had been involved with Tanzania since the late colonial period. It funded a number of projects in Tanzania during the ujamaa period but consistently maintained a focus on cash crop agriculture. For an overview, see von Freyhold, Ujamaa Villages, 108–15 and Ponte, Farmers and Markets.

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technical language of “participatory” development.147 Eventually, this approach, too, was abandoned, and the RIPS project closed. Throughout this entire process and into the present, Mtwara has continued to be produced as an underdeveloped site vis-a-vis the world economy, ` and it has retained its discursive and materialized status as a periphery in relation to the Tanzania nation-state. Yet the region’s marginality has resulted from and in connections and movement more than isolation and stasis. The early 1970s parceling of the country into regional developmental units contributed to the ongoing failure of the Tanzanian government to construct a viable all-weather road from Mtwara to Dar es Salaam.148 In at least one way, however, this apparent disconnection of Mtwara from the rest of the country actually helped catalyze new linkages between the region and areas to the north. Beginning in the 1980s, young men began migrating en masse from the Southeast to more northern cities, particularly Dar es Salaam, where they worked – and continue to work – as petty traders in market areas, in between cyclical returns to their homes. Mtwara youths explain that this migration is for “business.”149 Such traders, known as wamachinga, represent the new identity of the Makonde within a reconfigured national official and popular imagination. Their perceived backwardness is confirmed by their mobility.150 The wamachinga phenomenon has obvious roots in the region’s poverty and, more specifically, in the lack of food security and livelihood options for young people in Mtwara. Over the past several decades, the region’s almost complete lack of industrialization (cashew processing plants constructed in the 1970s have remained largely dysfunctional up to the present) and lack of transportation infrastructure (a shortage of all-weather roads persists today) have maintained Mtwara’s primary function as a direct supplier of raw cashews to the world economy via the Indian Ocean trade (Figure 19). In light of the numerous problems with cashew production and marketing since the villagization era, this economic orientation has served more as a liability than an asset to regional development. The production crisis precipitated by farmers’ physical separation from their cashew plots during villagization was exacerbated by a number of ecological and economic factors in the following decades. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, cashew trees throughout the region were suffering from pests and diseases – most 147

148 149 150

For a highly critical account, see Rashidi Shariff, “A History of Development and Poverty Alleviation in Tanzania: A Case Study of Finnish Aid in Lindi and Mtwara Regions,” MA thesis, University of Dar es Salaam, 2000. The road remains unfinished today; the Lindi–Dar es Salaam road was completed only in the past few years. See Mesaki and Mwankusye, “Saga of the Lindi–Kibiti Road.” Interview with village youths: Saidi Mabruki, Rashidi Musa, and Saidi Mohammed Chituta, Mdui Village, January 2008. See E. P. Mihanjo and N. N. Luanda, “The South-East Economic Backwater and the Urban Floating Wamachinga,” in Seppal ¨ a¨ and Koda, Making of a Periphery, 222–32.

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figure 19. Residents of Mangaba Village, Mtwara District, sorting their cashew nuts for sale, 1977. Courtesy Tanzania Information Services.

notably, powdery mildew disease (PMD) – that further damaged production. Although researchers commissioned by the Tanzanian Ministry of Agriculture, the World Bank, and various international development organizations began to develop new PMD-resistant clones and disease control techniques in the 1980s, the region’s impoverished farmers have had little access to improved seeds and technologies.151 A lack of investment in farmer training and the misguided character of some extension schemes have magnified the impact of PMD and cashew farm neglect.152 The sandy quality of the region’s soil makes many parts of Mtwara inhospitable to food crop production, yet many farmers have not had financial or physical access to fertilizers. In a tragic twist, the sulfur dust developed by researchers as an antidote to PMD has been found to render soil infertile for food crop production, thus heightening farmers’ inability to feed themselves in those cases where they have actually obtained such resources. Farmers in Mtwara complain bitterly about the conditions of cashew cultivation in recent years. “We poorer farmers – we experience hardship. 151 152

Interview with Iddi Nandala Mrefu, instructor at the Ministry of Agriculture Training Institute, Naliendele since 1983, Naliendele, February 2008. Ibid.; Shomari and Topper, “The Importance of Cashew,” 52–3; Clive P. Topper and Louis J. Kasuga, “Reasons for the Development of the Integrated Cashew Management Programme,” in Topper and Kasuga, Knowledge Transfer, 90–5.

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Especially farming cashews,” lamented Mshamu Mohammed Mselemu of Nanguruwe, a native of the interior town of Madaba who migrated to the coast in the 1940s. “Cashew is a worrisome crop. Farming, spraying [sulfur dust]. When you harvest crops and are going to sell, you have the same worries.”153 Mselemu and many of his fellow villagers express nostalgia for the simplicity of cashew farming in the past and condemn the high prices of sulfur dust (known locally as “medicine”) and fertilizer as well as the dishonesty and lack of transparency characterizing the contemporary marketing process. “Back then, we were farming cashews,” recalled a group of older women in Nanguruwe during a conversation about contemporary adversities. “No medicine. We were just farming cashews; we planted without worries. And cashews were growing without medicine. But now there’s a big cost,” they continued. “Medicine, eh, we buy it. We use it. But some fail, meaning in getting money. There is no money.”154 Another pair of men – Hamisi Hassan Shaba and Bakari Hassan Nahembe of Rwelu – concurred that “the quality of cashews in the past was very good,” before “the medicine, medicine.” Even after using “the expertise of medicine, medicine,” they decried, “recently these cashews aren’t good at all.” Ultimately, they concluded, “What is medicine? You just see deceit.”155 As for selling the harvest to traders, Hassan Hassan Mawila Mohammed of Nanguruwe explained, “Now it is dirty. Meaning the measurement isn’t honest.” Villagers blame the traders (“those rich people – they are cheats”) but also the government workers overseeing the system.156 Because, as rural elders confirm, “There is no one who doesn’t have cashews now,” these problems have significantly diminished local capacities for economic self-reliance.157 “We don’t farm enough food,” many admit.158 The resultant condition of food insecurity in Mtwara has only been compounded by structural adjustment policies subjecting basic services across Tanzania to cost-sharing rules. Land shortages in parts of the region (particularly Newala District) limiting new generations’ access to permanent farmland and conflicts over land tenure stemming from confused national policy in villagization’s aftermath have also played a critical role in pushing young men out of the Mtwara countryside.159 In a sense, the wamachinga partake of a long Southeastern tradition of migration in pursuit of wage labor, 153 154 155 156 157 158 159

Interview with Mshamu Mohammed Mselemu, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Interview with Somoya Mohammed Mpendemuka, Esha Mohammed Nantende, and Fatou Mohammed Nyonde, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Interview with Hamisi Hassan Shaba and Bakari Hassan Nahembe, Rwelu Village, January 2008. Interview with Hassan Mawila Mohammed, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Interview with Abdehrahman Hassan Chihumbwi, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Ibid. On confused state policy toward land tenure and the problem of land conflict in Tanzania in recent years, see Koda, “Changing Land Tenure Systems”; Issa Shivji, Not Yet Democracy: Reforming Land Tenure in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: IIED, 1998); and Kelly Askew, Faustin Maganga, and Rie Odgaard, “Of Land and Legitimacy: A Tale of Two Lawsuits,”

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social connections, and personal autonomy. Like generations of migrants before them, they are often threatened with displacement from the urban centers where they congregate (such as Dar es Salaam’s crowded Kariakoo market) by government authorities seeking to regulate urban space. Within the region of Mtwara itself, despite the multiple changes brought by villagization, local people’s persistent vulnerability in the decades since ujamaa’s eclipse has ensured their continued reliance on older survival tactics.160 Traffic across the Mozambique border remains steady; years of civil war in independent Mozambique propelled new influxes of displaced refugees to the region, but people on both sides of the Ruvuma River still participate in economic transactions that transcend the national divide, buying and selling utensils, livestock, or fish on a regular basis to earn a livelihood.161 Closer to home, southeastern Tanzanians remain extraordinarily adaptive, diversifying their economic activities and investing in multiple human networks – familial, religious, and political – to maximize their individual security. ∗ ∗ ∗ As the architecture of the welfare state crumbled around the residents of southeastern Tanzania in ujamaa’s wake, many spatial practices within the region continued to adhere to patterns and principles that predate the Tanzanian state itself. Although Mtwara has largely retained its appearance as an eternally undeveloped periphery since the colonial era, this naturalization has occurred through a history marked by rupture and modulation – entailing the radical transformation of the area’s economic base and the rapid emergence and eclipse of a series of development paradigms. The perpetuation of this representation has been an active as well as passive process in which both the authors and the targets of regional development policies have participated. Similarly, Mtwara’s actual underdevelopment has been produced by connections to the wider world – within the African continent, across the Indian Ocean, and into Europe and the Americas – that have been characterized by unevenness and fracture as much as endurance and intensity and that have implicated local farmers in addition to international experts.

160

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Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 83, 1 (2013): 120–41. Extensive problems with the cashew marketing system have also driven migration from the region; see Mihanjo and Luanda, “South-East Economic Backwater,” and interviews with Aputa Matei Mtukwe, Naliendele, January 2008 and Iddi Nandala Mrefu, Naliendele, February 2008. On the persistence or revival of older precolonial patterns of political economy and social practice in the postcolonial era, see Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) and Bayart, State in Africa. Interview with village youths: Saidi Mabruki, Rashidi Musa, and Saidi Mohammed Chituta, Mdui Village, January 2008; interview with Albano Shiteva Nanguo, Mdui Village, January 2008; interview with village youth: Juma Abdhallah Mnaide, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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Officials and citizens in southeastern Tanzania interpreted and experienced ujamaa – and, more specifically, its primary values of security and self-reliance – in relation to their perceived and actual status as residents of an undeveloped or underdeveloped periphery. This condition both grew out of and impacted Mtwara’s marginalization vis-a-vis shifting global capital` ist and development economies. Materially, the blocked implementation of ujamaa policy culminated in the unraveling of the early postcolonial framework of national development. By engaging in macro-level economic diversification in pursuit of external resources during the early 1970s, Tanzanian leaders solidified international partnerships that bypassed the national state and cordoned off the region as a discrete developmental unit. Discursively, the ujamaa project magnified Mtwara’s particularity precisely because it promised to erase it. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw numerous official and popular debates presenting Mtwara as either an exceptional developmental success or uniquely excluded from national progress. These competing narratives, often articulated in terms of the colonial Cinderella metaphor, framed local experiences of villagization as much as the cashew economy, the unevenness of regional infrastructure, and the larger administrative structure of the Tanzanian state did.162 Decades later, their ongoing salience and the enduring legacies of regional differentiation continue to manifest in dramatic ways – such as in 2013’s gas pipeline protests, discussed in this book’s conclusion. The public expressions of Mtwara’s distinctiveness and popular demands for state investment cataloged in this chapter merit serious consideration, but they should not be reduced to evidence of either exploitation or neglect by a central governmental core, on the one hand, or resistance to this dynamic by citizens of a regional periphery, on the other. The categories of “core” and “periphery” must themselves be disaggregated when deployed in an intranational context, just as they should be when used in macro-level analyses of the world system. Doing so exposes their internal unevenness and reveals that these spatial distinctions – and the power relations that they imply – cannot be mapped onto a simple division between the Tanzanian state and its citizens. In fact, the Tanzanian state was internally differentiated along spatial lines as well as divided among constituent units, and semiofficial institutions and organizations both within and outside of the country played a major role in formulating and implementing development policy at the regional and local levels. To point this out is to nuance our understanding, not deny the 162

The letters to the editor by Mtwara residents cited in this chapter were undoubtedly authored by urban, relatively well-educated citizens (who were by necessity literate in English). Although these printed accounts therefore do not directly represent the voices of rural Southeasterners, they are suggestive of broader public conversations about Mtwara’s development that many villagers would certainly have encountered in oral form during their movement through the region.

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existence, of the multifaceted process of uneven development that negatively impacted the welfare of many Mtwara residents before, during, and after the ujamaa era. The following chapter takes a similar approach in disentangling the various actors and practices so often subsumed under the labels of “the citizenry” or “the peasantry” at the local level, while it remains attentive to the overarching asymmetries of power that characterized or resulted from villagization.

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4 Remembering Villagization

The winds of change that swept across the red dirt roads and lush green farms of southeastern Tanzania during the ujamaa era altered the local landscape and impacted the lives of rural individuals in a variety of sometimes opposing ways. The story of villagization at the local level is multiple and divided, reflecting the heterogeneity of the area’s population, the internal tensions of the ujamaa imaginary, and the broader dialectics of social, political, and economic change in the Tanzanian countryside throughout the twentieth century. Some people experienced villagization as a form of dislocation and loss, such as elders with declining authority and cashew farmers reluctant to move away from the permanent farms in which they had invested years of labor. Others seized it as an opportunity for accumulating status, wealth, and personal security, such as young men who became village leaders and women who found respite from the exposure to wild animals that they had previously feared in isolated settlements. Still others understood ujamaa neutrally, as an unexceptional episode in a lifetime of fairly constant change. For many rural people, villagization simultaneously represented all of the above. Regardless of their personal stance on ujamaa, all of these individuals drew on older traditions of flexibility and diversification to adapt to the new contours of life in ujamaa villages and to cope with the ongoing hardships of life in a region that remained poor and marginalized long after villagization ended. The complexity of popular experiences of ujamaa in the Mtwara countryside stands in stark contrast to standard representations of the project as a destructive power grab by an invasive state. Such accounts, which tell us little about the local mechanics of villagization and merely speculate about popular perceptions, often suffer from a lack of historical context but also reveal the very real limitations of archival material from this time period. By contrast, oral accounts bypass the superficial quantitative measurements and imprecise terminology of official reports and studies, and they highlight human initiative rather than the agency of abstract structures. Close readings 177 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Pittsburgh, on 26 Feb 2020 at 14:02:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221679.006

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of rural people’s narratives expose the centrality of what would otherwise be invisible variables, such as gender and generation, to local political and economic transformations. They also illuminate changing social and political subjectivities during a period in which forms of community, modes of citizenship, norms of property ownership, and approaches to agriculture were in flux. Moreover, oral sources open up the affective or emotional landscape of the past, contained within individual and collective stories of aspiration and frustration, enthusiasm and apprehension, satisfaction and anger during moments of good fortune, catastrophe, and everything in between, as the human geography in and around the three settlements of Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe shifted between 1967 and 1975. Although oral sources bring such considerable benefits to the study of ujamaa, they also come with their own challenges. Recovering a coherent narrative of villagization from the memories of close to one hundred elderly villagers is far from a straightforward task; synthesizing their accounts produces a disjointed composite or a patchy mosaic instead of a clear, seamless portrait of the past. The fractured quality of this set of stories partly stems from the plurality of positions and voices within the category of “rural Southeasterners” and the variety of outcomes of a villagization process that was implemented in a strikingly decentralized fashion. Yet this narrative fragmentation also appears within individual accounts, reflecting both the nature of memory itself – which comprises discontinuous images or anecdotes that jostle with and overlay one another – and the entangled, constantly evolving relationship between discourse and experience. Just as the unit of an individual household and the space of an individual village cannot be wholly separated from larger regional, national, and global scales, villagers’ memories of the ujamaa era cannot be neatly bracketed from their perceptions of the present. In the short term, ujamaa produced new types of governance, economic engagement, and sociability at the local level. In the long term, rural people’s contemporary conceptions of political belonging, livelihood security, and interpersonal relations have shaped their interpretations of this earlier shift as much as they have been shaped by it. Whereas some elders insist on a narrative of overarching progress in their lives, many now remember the ujamaa era nostalgically, as a time in which the promise of a more robust form of citizenship had not yet been foreclosed. Although such nostalgia is usually an unconscious projection, villagers sometimes more intentionally censor or exaggerate their memories in the context of the research interview so as to impress listeners, insulate themselves from the local risks of representing their neighbors in a negative light, or potentially profit from exchange with a privileged outsider. Despite and even because of their distortions, mutations, and inconsistencies, oral sources are especially revealing of the complex nature of the larger historical dynamics and structures of power at work during the ujamaa era. Assumed hierarchical divisions between the micro-historical and the macro-historical partially dissolve when individual voices – including Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Pittsburgh, on 26 Feb 2020 at 14:02:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221679.006

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those contained in the government reports and newspaper accounts presented in previous chapters – are situated in their dialogical or intertextual context. As they speak about their experiences, rural elders mobilize but also challenge official ideologies; as they adopt elements of ujamaa discourse, they imbue them with their own meanings. In its utopian form, the ujamaa project encouraged precisely such highly personal engagement with official ideology, in keeping with the spirit of truly democratic revolutionary transformation. Yet in other ways, ujamaa policy sought to enforce particular versions of key concepts such as self-reliance, security, and familyhood. When elderly rural speakers contradict themselves in describing the past, they disclose the fragile and mercurial nature of memory, their struggle to reconcile dominant or received interpretations of ujamaa with their own sometimes contrary experiences, the complicated way in which villagization unfolded, and/or simply the internal tensions of ujamaa thought itself. Such narratives also capture some of the breathtaking reversals and ruptures associated with postsocialist transition in Tanzania and other comparable African countries, as the 1960s era of radical politics ceded to the neoliberal realities of more recent decades. Experiences of Resettlement The villages of Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe were formed in different ways, although all three expanded through successive waves of migration and stages of reconfiguration. According to the Kivukoni scholars’ 1976 report, Mdui, located in a flat area twelve miles from Mtwara Town on the main road to Newala, was established in 1969 as a small ujamaa village – what was known locally as a kijiji kidogo kidogo. After the Villages Act of 1975, this settlement was combined with two small neighboring settlements (vijiji vidogo vidogo) to be registered as a single larger village made up of 170 households. Additional residents transferred to Mdui from their older homes in the surrounding forest (porini) after villagization became compulsory.1 Rwelu, located twelve miles from Mtwara Town along the colonial-era road from Mikindani to Newala, was also formed through the aggregation of several proximate small settlements. In 1969, according to the report, residents of two “original” settlements – mostly consisting of loose clusters of members of a clan (ukoo) – relocated to a third, creating the kijiji kidogo of Rwelu. During Operation Vijiji, residents of nearby vijiji vidogo vidogo and those who had refused to move during the earlier phase of voluntary resettlement relocated to Rwelu, bringing the total number of households in the village to 256.2 By contrast, Nanguruwe, located twenty miles southeast of Mtwara Town at the junction of the Mtwara–Newala road and a road leading south to the border, had been a functional village 1 2

Chuo cha TANU Kivukoni, “Taarifa ya Vijiji vya Mkoa ya Mtwara”: Mdui (1976). Chuo cha TANU Kivukoni, “Taarifa ya Vijiji vya Mkoa ya Mtwara”: Rwelu (1976).

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of substantial size long before the ujamaa era, appearing in colonial reports as early as the 1930s. The population of Nanguruwe increased over time through a regular stream of new arrivals, many of whom were attracted by the convenient location and relatively ample amenities of the settlement. In 1974, a large influx of villagers during Operation Vijiji brought the total number of Nanguruwe residents to twenty-five hundred.3 Depending on when, why, and how they moved to these three settlements, local people experienced villagization somewhere on a spectrum from minimally disruptive to extremely dramatic. A resident of the area could end up living in an ujamaa village in a variety of ways. Those who moved to Nanguruwe during the late colonial period or in the years before ujamaa may have had to reconstruct their house to conform with the new imperative of “building in lines”4 after it became official policy, but they but did not have far to go once ujamaa was declared. Similarly, individuals who responded to the late 1960s call for voluntary villagization by moving to vijiji vidogo vidogo on the sites of what would eventually become the larger ujamaa villages of Mdui and Rwelu were not significantly affected during compulsory resettlement. Rural people who relocated during Operation Vijiji, in turn, fell into two groups: those who had resisted moving all along and because of their often ongoing reluctance to abandon their homes faced the most aggressive displays of force by teams of local officials and youth militants, and those who had already resettled into inconveniently located small settlements during voluntary villagization and were thus made to move twice in a short period of time. Although they vary accordingly, elders’ accounts of villagization in all three sites include recurring content, shared discursive strategies, and common themes. Taken together, these memories suggest broader patterns in the micro-historical trajectories of individual men and women and the areas that they inhabited during the mid-to-late twentieth century. The stories that rural people told in 2008 both overlap with and diverge from the reports made by Kivukoni scholars in 1976. Neither the oral nor the written accounts are absolutely conclusive. However, the form and substance of each type of source – inclusive of its silences and distortions – reveal much about what it meant to be a TANU affiliate visiting ujamaa villages in 1976 and what it meant to be an elderly person in the Mtwara countryside more than thirty years later. They also hint at how these positions articulate with the history of ujamaa villagization presented. 3

4

Unfortunately, the number of households was not provided for Nanguruwe, and the number of individuals was not provided for Mdui or Rwelu. Chuo cha TANU Kivukoni, “Taarifa ya Vijiji vya Mkoa ya Mtwara”: Nanguruwe (1976). Reports will subsequently be abbreviated as Kivukoni: [village name], 1976. This vernacular was also used in rural Kenya to describe colonial-era mission settlements, as Mutongi writes in Chapter 5 of Worries of the Heart.

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A number of elders describe villagization as either an invasive government order or a more organic process stemming from individual or collective initiative. These interpretations usually, though not always, coincide with the distinction between those who moved only after the inauguration of Operation Vijiji and those who moved during the earlier phase of voluntary villagization. Often, however, oral accounts occupy a middle ground between these two extremes, depicting resettlement as a compulsory initiative in which villagers nonetheless exercised agency and choice. An illustrative example of the first type of narrative, which renders villagization as a violent, even traumatic event, is that of Esha Mohammed Namituli of Rwelu. Namituli remembered undergoing unyago in 1962, which would have placed her in her mid-teens when the Arusha Declaration occurred and in her late teens or early twenties when Operation Vijiji swept the area. In her youth, Namituli lived close to the nearby minor settlement of Dihimba, which was, she asserted, “already a town [mji mji]” at that time. She studied until the fourth standard at a primary school in Dihimba and then married a local man who she later divorced. Around 1970, she married again, moving closer to the coast. Before ujamaa, she explained, many residents of the area lived in small clusters by their farms (mashambani). “Each person where they built and their farm, there with their children,” she clarified, distinguishing this older system from the present, when “we have all joined together. We have all come here in the nation [taifani], and the farm is there by itself.” After her second marriage, Namituli lived in a kijiji kidogo called Milingwe. “We were there on the road, by the big tree. We had built the nation [taifa] there.” There were about fifteen houses in Milingwe; she emphasized that it was “the start of beginning taifa.” Then came Operation Vijiji. “We were destroyed [tulibomoleshwa]!” she exclaimed. “Destroyed, where we were living, there! Two homes were burned. Three homes were burned. Yes, it happened here.” Namituli concurred with a number of other Rwelu elders in identifying two officials named Wangongo (the district council chairman) and Hassan Hassan Newate (the division secretary) along with “their soldiers [askari, meaning TYL or militia members]” as the people who enforced resettlement at this stage. “They took you in the car, coming, dumping you out here in your plot,” she recounted. “And you slept there with your children. And here you did the work of building.” Namituli continued, “If you had stayed and they met you, they burned with fire. Fire! All your belongings were taken and put outside. Children put outside. So we came here.” The same process happened in nearby settlements, she added. “People of Mkakala, who lived in Mkakala, they gathered them up to throw them down here. People of Ngolokwa, the same.”5 In Esha Namituli’s account, forced villagization was a shocking, even painful experience. Prior to Operation Vijiji, she had already had moved 5

Interview with Esha Mohammed Namituli, Rwelu Village, February 2008.

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multiple times in her short lifetime, but this did not prepare her for what happened in 1974. Her family near Dihimba had relocated between homes in the forest (porini), and she herself relocated over a longer distance when she remarried as a young adult. Yet being ordered to resettle in a larger village – especially after already inhabiting a smaller ujamaa village, whose distinctive purpose and character Namituli denoted by using the term nation – was different from these previous moves. In particular, she highlighted the indignity of rural people’s treatment by the militants enforcing resettlement. This included having teams of young men remove one’s possessions and young children from one’s home and being physically gathered into a vehicle and “dumped” (kukumimina) onto an assigned plot in a new village; it also extended to not being given time to build a new home and therefore having to sleep on the ground after moving. Others echo Namituli’s story in this respect. “You went to the farm, you came back and just saw your property outside, and TANU Youth League is telling you that you have to move,” remembered one Rwelu man, underscoring the suddenness and lack of anticipation of or preparation for this event.6 “They didn’t consult us,” another woman in Nanguruwe decried, remembering how she woke up one morning to see “people, those police, what. And weapons one by one, and vehicles. Taking all your implements and putting them in the vehicle. And going to dump them like this in the field.”7 A particularly sharp critique came from Ali Asman Kitenge of Rwelu (quoted in this book’s introduction), who was born in 1932 near Mikindani, attended madrasa as a young man, and later supplemented his work as a farmer with wage labor in Mikindani and at the Mtwara port. He referred to Operation Vijiji as heralding a period of “new colonialism.” “After independence, yes, we had independence,” he stated, “but after about five, six, seven years passed, a new colonialism returned.” When asked to elaborate, he explained, “When the destruction of villages came, or the destruction of the area of people’s homes, they used force. That is one mistake. They used force. The militia came here, they set fire to the house, they destroyed the walls, they loaded wood, they took them to put them in the village.” He continued, “Another thing? They didn’t help you with your house when you left there; they weren’t building here, you built yourself. Each thing, no assistance. You just went to put it there.”8 Despite the frequent mention of burning houses, “force” was a relative term. Rural people had previously been alerted through meetings and announcements about the villagization program. Moreover, when pressed, many elders clarify that they responded to explicit threats of arrest or the use of fire rather than directly experiencing such aggression. One man in Mdui recalled that TYL members “came and we were told we had 6 7 8

Interview with Kayisi Mohammed Janike, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Interview with Esha Mohammed Nantende, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Interview with Ali Asman Kitenge, Rwelu Village, January 2008.

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to move . . . to live there in ujamaa.” They said, “You won’t be punished unless you delay and continue to stay here. Then you will be locked up.” His property wasn’t actually destroyed, he acknowledged. “We were just told this, and we were afraid. Each person took care that eh! Here I will be destroyed. Better that I build there.”9 Some Rwelu elders describe seeing smoke rising in the distance from a cluster of burning homes and deciding to move accordingly. Such qualifications uphold the insistence of some Youth Leaguers, like Mohammed Suleiman Yusuf of Mdui (introduced in Chapter 2), that they did not use physical force during Operation Vijiji but adjusted their verbal tactics depending on the situation. “We approached them by requesting,” Yusuf maintained. “We used intelligence. If they said, ‘Why should we come there?’ we made them. Made them come to join the village here and leave where they were staying. We pulled them with politics. With our tongues, only, we showed them the way.”10 Other older men with strong ties to CCM or TANU also disagree with accounts that underscored the use of force, although they likely do so out of a reluctance to cast the ruling party in such an unsympathetic role. Some of them also justify the double resettlement that many others found especially troublesome and arbitrary – to vijiji vidogo vidogo and then just shortly afterward to larger ujamaa villages – by pronouncing that the former were “lessons” (mafunzo) in ujamaa and therefore a logical stage preparing residents for life in bigger villages.11 These more positive accounts, whether attributable to a sincere belief in ujamaa policy or a politically motivated desire to adhere to the CCM/TANU party line, do little to address the fact that force – even if verbal or symbolic rather than physical – was applied in numerous cases during Operation Vijiji. Among the reasons that this compulsion was necessary were that many rural people did not understand the policy of ujamaa and therefore the reason for moving but, more significantly, that most of them were reluctant to leave the farms – especially of their tree crops – in which they had invested time, money, and labor.12 Esha Namituli, like many others, commented that those who refused to move (walibaki) wanted to remain near their farms to take care of their cashew, coconut, and orange trees. After moving to Rwelu during the operation, she noted, “We went back to service our farms. We lived here; we would go there and come back to sleep here. We all had 9 10 11 12

Interview with Saidi Aibu, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Mohammed Suleiman Yusuf, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interviews with Salamu Hassan Liwunje and Saidi Mohammed Ali Mkwewe, Rwelu Village, January 2008 and Suleiman Ali Jamali, Mdui Village, January 2008. In some parts of Tanzania, spiritual attachments to place informed rural people’s reluctance to resettle, although these were less pronounced in Mtwara. See Yusufu Lawi, “Tanzania’s Operation Vijiji and Local Ecological Consciousness: The Case of Eastern Iraqwland, 1974– 1976,” Journal of African History 48, 1 (2007): 69–93.

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cashews back then.”13 Such journeys could take up to two hours each way and would understandably be resented by those compelled to undertake them. On the whole, those who moved during Operation Vijiji use words such as amri (government order), vuruga (disturbance), and lazima (compulsory) to explain villagization; they often choose the verb kubomolesha (to be demolished or destroyed) to narrate their experience with those enforcing resettlement. By contrast, elders who responded to earlier calls for villagization select terms such as hiari (choice, preference, or free will) to recount their move. Many of them were attracted to new settlements by the promise of government services, the possibility of finding more fertile farmland, or the prospect of establishing themselves as independent adults and achieving status in the new local power structures of village governments. They were motivated by a blend of genuine conviction in villagization’s ability to achieve collective betterment and the less lofty desire to advance themselves as individuals. Rural people who fell into this category were often relatively young men and women who had not yet established permanent farms or individuals who had developed a robust nationalist consciousness through TANU membership and involvement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They had little to lose and much to gain from villagization. A significant proportion of the pioneers of new vijiji vidogo vidogo during the first wave of resettlement were TYL members. Among them was Mohammed Suleiman Yusuf, quoted earlier as the man who remembered enforcing resettlement “with our tongues.” He identified himself as one of the early settlers of what became the village of Mdui (along with Musa Sefu Chimbando, also profiled in Chapter 2).14 “We took the lead, my family and I,” Yusuf pronounced. In doing so, he followed the instructions of John Nzunda, the Mtwara regional commissioner, who – according to Yusuf – told Youth Leaguers, “Since you have been chosen as the defenders of Tanzania, you should come to live in the villages early.”15 That Yusuf specifically cited Nzunda by name suggests that this initial move occurred not long after the Arusha Declaration, because Nzunda was replaced by Wilbert Klerruu as regional commissioner in mid-1967. In Rwelu, a group of Youth Leaguers also claimed to have been at the forefront of the first wave of resettlement. Ismail Selema Mfaki was one of these men and went on to become the chairman of the kijiji kidogo that he helped establish. Mfaki was born in 1937 and studied in madrasa as a young man. In 1956, he recounted proudly, he became “one of the first people [in the area] to receive and join TANU.” Three years later, he married his first of three wives. 13 14 15

Interview with Esha Mohammed Namituli, Rwelu Village, February 2008. The story of Mdui as an early settlement predominantly populated by Youth Leaguers was confirmed in an interview with Hassan Ismail, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Mohammed Suleiman Yusuf, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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Then, in 1967, he recalled, “leaders from the district, ward” held meetings to announce that “we should build ujamaa villages, we should move into these small settlements.” “The meaning of building these villages was that we chose ourselves,” he clarified. “People agreed and were happy and went themselves to move.” The reason that he cited was that “it attracted us, that longing for town – because there were some villages that had already taken the lead. Like Nyendegi. Nyengedi went up very quickly.” He offered an anecdote illustrating how he learned about this early nearby settlement. “I left with this man” – he pointed to his friend, sitting next to him – “to go to Nyengedi.” “The day they opened the village of Nyengedi,” he explained, there was a celebration, and “the leader of the district came to open that village.” As Youth Leaguers, Mfaki and his companion were assigned the duty of “protecting” the ceremony. Upon returning, he and his companions reflected on how the founders of Nyengedi had responded to “the encouragement of the government party. At once, they agreed. And here in our place, we hadn’t yet agreed; we were fighting with each other.”16 As a result, they began to mobilize their neighbors to build a small village together. Ismail Mfaki’s initiative was rewarded by his chairmanship of the new village and his subsequent election (after he attended National Service training in 1970) to the district political committee, on which he then served for fifteen years. Ahmad Suleiman of Mdui, though not a member of the TYL, also advanced to a position of power within the new village that he moved to early and voluntarily. He was born in 1940, putting him at around the same age as Ismail Mfaki (late twenties to early thirties) when the Arusha Declaration was announced. Villagization, he stated, “was the order from the honorable President Nyerere. That is to say, the government of the wazungu [Europeans] only wanted taxes; they were in the forest saying, ‘Bring the tax money, bring the tax money.’ So the honorable Nyerere saw that ah! Those wazungu have very little humanity.” For context, Suleiman added, “There were many problems then. You could leave your children and one could die in the forest right there. But afterward,” he explained – meaning after people had moved into concentrated ujamaa settlements by the road – “a car could come take the sick children – quickly, quickly – to the hospital. You could get medical care quickly.” He decided to “join the plan of the villages” to take advantage of such services and contribute to efforts to attain “positive and collective development [maendeleo].” “I thought, ah! Which village should I go to near my farm? Together with my father [mzee] at that time. But I was already an adult; I could make plans to follow my own development that would help me, together with my children. I decided, it’s best for me to go to this village here and for me to join here. I began to come, carry wood, look for a plot. I got it. So I brought wood, I built, I left that place.” Suleiman insisted that he didn’t move “by force. Like I said, after 16

Interview with Ismail Suleiman Mfaki, Rwelu Village, January 2008.

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getting independence and politics and having meetings with politics, it was enough to make us understand the matter.”17 In Mdui, Suleiman went on to become the chair of the village’s finances and planning committee. The accounts of Ismail Mfaki and Ahmad Suleiman suggest that resettling in new villages had an immediate practical value for both individuals, since they were able to advance to new positions of power in village government and even – in one case – leverage the latter as a pathway to higher district-level political involvement. Yet to project these outcomes onto the original motivations of these young men and therefore define their move as a purely instrumental one is to ignore the multidimensional affective layers of their experience. The specific language that these elders used hints at this more complex realm of sentiment. Both men exhibit a sense of nationalist conviction or party loyalty, looking up to their leaders and taking seriously their role in the larger apparatus of TANU and the new political community of the Tanzanian nation. Ismail Mfaki prided himself on being one of the first in the area to join TANU in the 1950s, admired the people of Nyengedi for so quickly acting on TANU’s recommendation to form villages, and held his militaristic work as a Youth Leaguer – even in symbolically policing a village ceremony – in particular regard. Ahmad Suleiman singled out Nyerere when introducing ujamaa, using the term “honorable” (mtu kufu) when speaking his name and explicitly contrasting him with the inhumane European colonial administrations that preceded him. These comments and linguistic choices suggest that the nationalist conviction or party loyalty of these young men – even if shaded by nostalgia or amplified for an outsider in the interview context – significantly informed their early decision to participate in villagization. To them, ujamaa held much of the same excitement, novelty, and sense of possibility that TANU’s independence struggle did, and the party’s success in achieving Tanzanian independence had inspired their faith in the country’s postcolonial leaders. However, not everyone who moved to villages voluntarily was prompted by political loyalties or a commitment to nation building. Ismail Mfaki’s statement that he and his peers were “attracted” by the “longing [tamaa] for town” points to another widely prevalent motivation for moving to new villages. The word tamaa can be translated as “ambition,” but it can also connote longing, lust, or envy. Rural people’s most common explication of the logic of villagization centers on the government’s ability to provide services for its citizens in concentrated settlements; many of those who relocated voluntarily expected to benefit from better health care, schooling, and agricultural aid. Yet many were also likely enticed by the less tangible sense of vibrancy and gratification of life in a village – often labeled somewhat exaggeratedly as a “town” (mji). This word choice indicates that for many young people in 1960s Mtwara, concentrated rural settlements 17

Interview with Ahmad Suleiman, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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promised many of the same amenities present in bona fide cities – opportunities for consumption, income, socializing, and leisure activities – on a smaller scale. Those villages located adjacent to well-trafficked roads also offered increased ease of access to the city of Mtwara itself. New rural settlements became lively settings for cultural activities ranging from traditional musical festivals (ngoma) – which featured drumming, dancing, and feasting to commemorate events such as initiation – to Western-style dance halls, such as the “ngoma for pleasure” called “bumping” observed by Kivukoni scholars in Nanguruwe in 1976.18 Residents of new villages could buy items such as food, soap, cloth, and pombe (local brew) just steps away from their houses. (Kivukoni scholars disapprovingly noted that village men and women enjoyed drinking pombe regularly.) Inhabitants of some settlements – such as Rwelu – built mosques directly in their villages, facilitating worship as well as cultivating more intimate forms of religious community. For those who were not invested in the older gerontocratic hierarchies reproduced within extended family structures – which the village setting promised to threaten, by splitting up clans and fostering new structures of power – or attached to their farms – which moving to villages would separate them from – villages held considerable appeal. In this respect, voluntary moves during villagization were consistent with a pattern of mobility that predated the ujamaa era and the postcolonial period more generally. Remembering earlier individual decisions to resettle in rural “towns” significantly tempers scholarly narratives that represent villagization as a total disruption of prior local lifestyles. Among the three villages under consideration, Nanguruwe, as an original minor settlement, attracted many settlers during the late colonial period. This was especially true in the wake of the regional changes brought by the Groundnut Scheme. After the Mtwara–Newala road was cleared, many contemporary residents of Nanguruwe reportedly moved to the village “to follow the road” and “the ease of transportation.”19 Those who relocated to minor settlements during the colonial period also recount being impelled or drawn by other factors, ranging from “being tired” of wage labor elsewhere to “following miradi [plans or desires]” in and around villages.20 Some who moved to Nanguruwe as children rationalize their parents’ logic for resettlement similarly, pointing out that village amenities (“many mosques”) and fertile soil (so that “when 18

19

20

Kivukoni: Nanguruwe, 1967. For more on the spread of dance hall leisure throughout mid-century Tanganyika, see Emily Callaci, “Dancehall Politics: Mobility, Sexuality, and Spectacles of Racial Respectability in Late Colonial Tanganyika, 1930s–1961,” Journal of African History 52, 3 (2011): 365–84. Interview with Hassan Hassan Mawila Mohammed, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. The original minor settlement of Nanguruwe was in fact moved as a whole to be closer to the road after the latter was built. Interview with Hamisi Hassan Mponda, Danisi Hamisi, and Selemani Usi Nandapa, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008.

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you farm you get food to eat”) attracted those who sought to “pursue their basic needs [riziki].”21 Such stories help contextualize the third method of describing villagization, which is to acknowledge that resettlement eventually became compulsory but nonetheless highlight the agency of those who actively determined the terms of their move under these circumstances. Villagers who relate such narratives emphasize their dignity rather than their humiliation or abuse at the hands of local officials and youth militants. Despite conceding that they were “pressured” by the government, they insist that they were not victims of physical force.22 Samri Athman of Mdui, for instance, was emphatic on this point, avowing that after “our President Nyerere, TANU, TANU Youth League” told rural people to move during Operation Vijiji, he was “absolutely ready. After the word was given to me like that, I absolutely accepted to leave. I came by myself. After hearing the statement like that, I came here absolutely by myself. Those who were forced – maybe they refused.”23 Others focus more on the choice of deciding where to move than on the act of agreeing to resettle. Rural people in the area, whether relocating before or after the operation, had the option of selecting from a number of relatively nearby settlements to which to move. They could choose between joining nascent ujamaa villages like Mdui or larger “original villages” like Nanguruwe. (Some also ended up abandoning their agricultural bases altogether to move to the towns of Mtwara or Mikindani, against the logic of ujamaa.) Youth Leaguers who enforced resettlement confirm that they afforded even those least willing to move the option of selecting the rural site to which they would be transported.24 This decision provided rural people with space to consider their own personal plans (miradi) and make an active choice about their future as individuals, which helps explain why extended family groups – each loosely defined as an ukoo – often split during both stages of villagization. At the outset of the ujamaa era, despite the fluidity of many households, authority within extended family units and in small settlements still tended to reside with members of an older generation, according to the norms of an 21 22 23 24

Ibid. In one man’s words, “there were few who were forced, but the government pressured many.” Interview with Hassan Ali Mkaula, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Samri Athman, Mdui Village, January 2008. This mirrors the personal choice exercised by others subjected to compulsory postcolonial resettlement schemes for national development, such as the Ghanaian citizens displaced by Nkrumah’s Volta River Dam scheme. One scholar writes, “People also attempted to make their own arrangements for the future. They preferred certain resettlement sites that the VRA [Volta River Association] disapproved of, and showed initiative in searching out and even beginning to establish sites of their own.” Jordan Shapiro, “Settling Refugees, Unsettling the Nation: Ghana’s Volta River Project Resettlement Scheme and the Ambiguities of Development Planning, 1952–1970,” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2003, 30.

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older local political economy. In previous decades, instead of acquiescing in subordination to their elders, many young men had pursued wage labor opportunities or TYL membership to bolster their own self-reliance and achieve adulthood on their own terms. Women had fewer options out of the patriarchal order but also sought higher social standing and increased autonomy through migration and social diversification. During villagization, some young people took advantage of resettlement by selecting their own destination independent of their larger extended families, in part as a continuation of these practices. In this way, the splitting of clans was informed by generational tensions engendered by the rise of a colonial capitalist economy, but it also reflected the newer increase in options available to rural people represented by the mushrooming of rural settlements. Most people accepted this division of the extended family as a neutral and natural occurrence, because many extended family groups had already been physically separated for decades. In such cases, clan members would often retain social ties to one another – if only as an informal insurance policy – by periodically visiting one another in their new homes. Conversely, some elders mourned the breakup of kinship units and their attendant loss of authority. Still other families resettled in new villages together, sometimes coming to reside in adjacent homes and even constitute their own ten-cell units. One Nanguruwe man succinctly captured the attitude of young men who perceived the resettlement process as a route to independence from their larger extended families. Musa Musa Mfaume was born in 1938 near the minor settlement of Dihimba. He briefly attended government school as well as madrasa. Mfaume became involved with TANU shortly after the nationalist movement broke out in the region (when he was in his late teens) and sat on a local TANU council after independence. When the operation began, he decided to move to Nanguruwe rather than the adjacent village of Dihimba so as to obtain some distance from the elders in his extended family, to whom he referred as those “those cruel ones [wakali] – the witchcraft ones.” He clarified, “There is a thing called witchcraft [uchawi]. They loved to bewitch [kuloga] youths like that.” Mfaume pointed to the lame leg of his companion, another older man who related a similar story, as an example of the type of harm that such witchcraft could cause. To account for the animosity of his older male relatives, Mfaume said, “They had a hatred of youths. First, youths had power – they farmed big farms and harvested a lot. They hated it. Second, those youths – they were loved a lot. Then they thought that those youths – they will take our wives. So they hated them.”25 Mfaume’s comments, delivered with gravity but concluded with a playful laugh, both reveal how frequent marriage and divorce rates may have intersected with generational tensions between men and place this friction within the context of local spiritual beliefs about witchcraft (and, 25

Interview with Musa Musa Mfaume, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008.

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more generally, human manipulation of the natural equilibrium between good and evil).26 After villagization, he remarked, young men like him had “independence. We weren’t exploited. Meaning wazee [elders] didn’t exploit youths, and youths didn’t exploit wazee.”27 Another man, about ten years younger than Mfaume, spoke in fairly nuanced terms about his experience of resettlement, depicting villagization as a time of both compulsion and opportunity. Ismaili Sefu Choyo was born in 1949 near his eventual home of Mdui. The process of “resettlement [kuhama hama],” Choyo began, “arrived here a short period into the time of Nyerere’s government – at the beginning of that time. After he saw this work in the village of an elder building with his grandchildren and nephews, he said, ‘You should move to congregate and build together.’” Although he identified Nyerere as the architect of ujamaa, Choyo highlighted the role of local militants in enforcing this policy. “We were told by those TANU Youth Leaguers, who were given the responsibility of passing through and destroying people there in farming villages. Now, those who were saying ‘I will move tomorrow, I will move the day after tomorrow’ were gathered up like chickens in a pen. But not those who prepared early; they had left after being told, they had moved.”28 Through this metaphor, Choyo succinctly captured the humiliation of those who refused immediate compliance with Operation Vijiji, using language that other rural elders deployed to describe the invasive violence of tax collection during the colonial era. By contrasting his own experience during villagization with this image of other people’s dehumanization at the hands of zealous Youth Leaguers, Choyo also implicitly underscored his own dignity and agency in the process of resettlement. He insisted that individuals like him went “where they chose.” Using the contemporary trend of wamachinga migration from southeastern Tanzania to more developed areas to the north as a point of comparison, he continued, “Like these days, here, you can choose – someone, you go to Dar es Salaam, not to Zanzibar. They looked for life and a procedure for staying well in a place.” He decided on Mdui, he recounted in general but matter-of-fact terms, “to be satisfied with [his] own matters, the way they were in this town-place here.” Choyo explained the logic of the splitting of clans similarly. “In that unit” – meaning the ukoo – “together, you know, there are differences. Spirit [moyo] – each person and their spirit. Therefore, some could be all together, but some preferred another village.”29 Others justify their decisions to relocate to particular villages – even if it meant separating from their larger extended family group – by invoking ujamaa

26 27 28 29

On witchcraft beliefs in southeastern Tanzania, see Langwick, Bodies, Politics, and African Healing. Interview with Musa Musa Mfaume, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Interview with Ismaili Sefu Choyo, Mdui Village, January 2008. Ibid.

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concepts, such as by stating, “It was self-reliance, so I preferred living apart.”30 More specific reasons given to account for the appeal of particular settlements echo those provided to explain movement during the colonial era, such as the availability of land, soil quality, the presence of mosques or schools, or access to roads. Yet many people, including some youths, also selected villages for a new reason – based on their proximity to private cashew farms. Choyo’s invocation of wamachinga migrant labor is telling, however, for it situates villagization within a longer pattern of mobility and resettlement to achieve personal security (or welfare) and self-reliance (or independence) that spans much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The typology of villagization accounts just outlined is a loose one. Stories of violent compulsion, popular initiative, and constrained agency in the act of resettling feature a number of common narrative structures and linguistic choices, even though they are marked by differences in content or tone. Many rural elders acknowledge – implicitly or explicitly – that the word “compulsory” (lazima) was relative, having different meanings at different times. They identify and define the Tanzanian state that exercised this compulsion in various ways. Most agree that Youth Leaguers played the key role in the physical implementation of Operation Vijiji and also spearheaded many early voluntary villagization drives. Those elders who moved during the operation also cite local officials – such as Hassan Hassan Newate and Wangongo, along with ward executives named Haule and Lwimbo – as prominent figures in their experiences of villagization. For instance, one woman referred to moving to Nanguruwe during the operation as the arrival of “the nation of Haule”;31 another woman in Rwelu declared, “Each person went by compulsion – the compulsion of Wangongo.”32 Some Youth Leaguers, such as Mohammed Suleiman Yusuf, name the regional commissioner (John Nzunda) as the leader responsible for announcing the call for villagization, while many others refer to Nyerere when discussing ujamaa. At different moments, elderly speakers employ three different modes of narration (as elucidated by oral historian Alessandro Portelli) to describe their experiences of resettlement.33 First, when adopting a political register, they invoke Nyerere’s name or use words such as nation (taifa) or party (chama). Second, when selecting a collective register, they speak of villagization as a group dynamic. Third, when taking up a personal register, they relate anecdotes that highlight their individual experiences and emotions. Political and collective modes of narration are more common than the personal mode. Although these 30 31 32 33

Interview with Hassan Ali Mkaula, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Somoya Nandule, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Interview with Somoya Hamisi, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).

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more abstracted styles of speaking more closely conform to the official discourse of ujamaa, which emphasized national politics and communal sociability over individual identity, rural people reconfigure official idioms and terminology when speaking on such registers to more accurately capture their personal experiences. Life in an Ujamaa Village Narratives of resettlement inevitably bleed into discussions of life in ujamaa villages. Upon leaving their older homes and arriving in concentrated settlements, rural people immediately faced the task of building houses for themselves. In vijiji vidogo vidogo, the small size of settlements and the gradual nature of voluntary relocation meant that residents were able to construct new houses before abandoning their previous ones and that they exercised relative freedom in determining how and where to erect these dwellings. In larger villages consolidated after Operation Vijiji, by contrast, those who were moved by militants in vehicles had to build in a hurry. Moreover, as settlements grew, so did the emphasis on correct spatial layout and uniform construction style. Youth Leaguers (along with local officials and leaders of village governments) supervised the process of land allocation and construction during the operation. “They came there,” recalled Musa Sefu Chimbando – referring to those who moved during the operation – “and we [meaning Youth Leaguers like himself] handed them plots and started to cut trees to build.” In distributing plots, he said, “It was we ourselves who took the lead; we knew this area . . . It was us and those people who arrived. We put them in their house. We cooperated. Like, some failed, and we were helping them to cut wood.” This statement contradicts other sources that suggest that new arrivals received no assistance in building their homes; nonetheless, it is clear that Chimbando and his peers played a major role in determining the location of these structures. New construction was completed according to the style that he said he was taught in the National Service. “We encouraged them to build following lines. For example, here, along the road. We decided to follow a line, like if there is a road here, here, here,” he explained, gesturing to indicate a series of parallel lines perpendicular to a central artery. “They taught us there [at National Service training]: the steps were thirty by thirty [footsteps between houses].”34 This approach to building seems to have been fairly common in the region and nationwide, with Chimbando’s description both matching current layouts of former core sections of ujamaa villages and resonating with the descriptions of his fellow Youth Leaguers and average citizens (Figure 20). This gridlike layout and symmetrical organization were such prominent features of ujamaa villages that some elders even use the phrase “line by line” (in lines) interchangeably 34

Interview with Musa Sefu Chimbando, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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figure 20. House near the center of Rwelu Village, 2008. Photo by the author.

with kitaifa (national) to distinguish postoperation villages from their less tightly organized predecessors. The fact that villagization occurred in stages often had significant and lasting social and spatial consequences for new or reconfigured settlements. In cases where ujamaa villages expanded on land that was already utilized by previous tenants, managing the transfer of and compensation for property could prove complicated. Esha Mohammed Namituli, quoted earlier describing the violence of Operation Vijiji, recalled that the village government settled such issues with those who had permanent crops on land distributed during forced villagization. “The government here told the farm owners that the village was going to be established here, but even if someone builds on this land, you’ll still own that coconut tree, so you’ll own it until you negotiate with that new person. If you don’t negotiate, then you’ll continue to own that coconut tree,” she said. “So up until now, there are some nearby coconut trees by other people’s houses that are owned by the man in this house,” she continued, pointing to a nearby dwelling.35 Yet disputes easily arose from such arrangements (in which it was difficult for the owners of fruit-bearing trees to monitor their yield) and from competing claims to the farms and cleared plots that rural people had left behind when 35

Interview with Esha Mohammed Namituli, Rwelu Village, February 2008.

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resettling. In the Southeast, as in most of the country, rural land was rarely surveyed, and a lack of documentation of land or tree ownership fueled conflicts over property that persist into the present. These realities also fed into a growing local preoccupation with autochthony (or first-comer status). Patterns of residential segregation emerged in numerous villages, often reflecting the staggered waves of resettlement and corresponding to social and political hierarchies within aggregate settlements.36 In 1976, the visiting Kivukoni scholars observed that although Mdui was technically a single administrative unit, the three vijiji vidogo vidogo out of which it had been constituted were still geographically distinct and known individually. As they put it, “Now if you ask for the village, you ask for the separate ones, not Mdui.”37 Within the Rwelu community, the Kivukoni scholars pointed out, there seemed to exist three different groups. First were the “original villagers,” who identified more strongly with the village and seemed more committed to cooperative work. Second were those who had relocated to Rwelu in 1974, who “still think that the activities of the village are just an attempt” and were “more involved in private” activities.38 Third were the approximately fifty households of Mozambican immigrants. Because of the stigma attached to the perceived personal habits (such as consuming wild pigs and keeping dogs as pets)39 of the almost uniformly Catholic Mozambican residents, they seemed removed from their Tanzanian counterparts in the village. Nanguruwe, according to the visiting scholars, had technically been divided into two villages after 1975 because of its large size, although it was still known as a single settlement. Three “streets” (mitaa) or neighborhoods were clustered on one side of the Mtwara–Newala road, with two “streets” on the other.40 Some elders recall conflict or tension between groups based on order of arrival or residence in former vijiji vidogo vidogo, which often mirrored the residential segregation just described (Figure 21). Broadly speaking, those who had lived in vijiji vidogo vidogo prior to moving again after 1973 had already grown accustomed to the general structure of an ujamaa village, albeit on a small scale. Many of these early villages had ujamaa farms, ujamaa stores, and basic village governments. Most ujamaa farms were cultivated according to the bega-kwa-bega style, with a handful of short-lived attempts at truly collective farming. Some former vijiji vidogo vidogo residents report receiving fertilizer and seeds as well as hoes and axes from local officials. Others claim that they did not obtain anything at all from the government in these small villages. Depending on 36 37 38 39 40

Wembah-Rashid describes a similar phenomenon in his case study, “Socio-Political Development.” Kivukoni: Mdui, 1976. Kivukoni: Rwelu, 1976. Both are taboos in local Islamic culture. Kivukoni: Nanguruwe, 1976.

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figure 21. A neighborhood (mtaa) in Nanguruwe Village, 2008. Photo by the author.

their motivations for moving and their experiences once they settled in vijiji vidogo vidogo, elders identify these earlier experiments with communal living as somewhat continuous with or mostly distinct from their subsequent life in larger postoperation ujamaa villages. In vijiji vidogo vidogo, rural people had already been introduced to the overall quality of living kitaifa (nationally) and the main institutions of ujamaa village life, but in postoperation settlements, they encountered new opportunities and challenges. Such villages featured gridded layouts and larger sizes and also tended to situate their residents at much longer distances from their private farms. Moreover, the 1975 Villages Act mandated a more elaborate government structure for later settlements, with each village required to have a chairman, secretary, TANU branch, and five committees dedicated to everything from production and sales to defense and safety. A key feature of all ujamaa villages was their organization into ten-cell units. Every ten households would elect a mbalozi, or ten-cell leader, who was to mediate between average residents and village-level government and party structures, thus helping to accomplish the decentralization of state power and ensure the effective mobilization of collective labor. One former mbalozi in Mdui described his responsibilities as very straightforward: “If there was something to announce, they told us and we had to go tell them at

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each house.”41 Other former wabalozi offered, “If there was volunteer work, we went to people to tell them.”42 This “volunteer” work encompassed such activities as collective farming, school construction, road maintenance, and well digging. In particular, on designated days of the week, wabalozi were to direct members of the ten households under their supervision to work on the village’s ujamaa farm. District leaders had drawn up detailed work plans for villagers, based in part on models provided by the regional commissioner that specified days of the week and times of cultivation as well as crop cycles. In fact, many villagers disregarded these instructions. In Mdui, on a sample day in 1976, only thirty-one individuals out of the sixty assigned actually went to work on the village farm (twenty-one of these being women). The presence of the Kivukoni scholars likely accounted for an even larger turnout than usual; in their absence, it seems very possible that turnout rates would have been even lower. The visitors to Mdui noted that for the years 1976–77, the village prediction was to have 85 acres of bega-kwa-bega farmland and 340 acres of private farms; they concluded, “Therefore, more importance is placed upon private farming.”43 In other villages, the visiting teams observed a similar indifference toward village ujamaa farms and commented that residents devoted much more of their energy and attention to their private farms outside of the village. This apparent lack of motivation seemed to result from two overarching factors. First, the Kivukoni scholars pointed to limited political awareness or lack of conscientization among villagers. In many cases, attendance at village meetings was low, party membership was low, and a number of villagers seemed unfamiliar with the basic concepts of ujamaa. Second, poor leadership – at the ward level and higher but also within villages themselves – seemed partially to blame for residents’ demonstrated lack of commitment to ujamaa. The visiting scholars chided officials at the district, division, and ward levels for being out of touch with village residents. Such officials seemed simultaneously not involved enough and overly involved in village life. In Mdui, the report called for “more experts, like the one who organized adult education, and ujamaa and cooperative officers to visit the village sometimes to solve various problems.”44 Yet in the case of Rwelu, the scholars recommended, “The decisions and plans about the village should be left to the villagers themselves to plan and decide, and if they need an expert, the District should give expertise and advice only to the place where it is needed.” Moreover, they argued, “The leaders of the District/Division/Ward should not make promises that they cannot fulfill.” Rwelu residents complained 41 42 43 44

Interview with Hassan Saloum Nampungila, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Mwanya Mohammed Hassan and Dadi Manzi Abdallah, Mdui Village, January 2008. Kivukoni: Mdui, 1976. Ibid.

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that district officials did not visit the village to “listen to their problems”; they lamented that leaders promised state investment – such as a tractor to cultivate their ujamaa farm and improvements to the local road – that they then failed to deliver.45 District officials generated and assigned village plans without popular consultation or input, and villagers were sometimes arbitrarily ordered to deduct from the Rwelu fund to pay for activities such as local TYL members’ travel to national meetings. At the village level, the visiting scholars stressed that leaders needed to receive proper training to make sure that their fellow residents “kept cooperative work in mind.”46 Reports of mismanagement or outright graft and corruption abounded. Record keeping was poor and sometimes appeared to be intentionally so. In Rwelu, for instance, although village papers claimed that the ujamaa farm covered 250 acres, Kivukoni scholars detected that the true size fell considerably short of that figure. Moreover, the fate of village farm yields was often murky. In theory, harvests would be divided into two portions – one to be distributed equally among villagers for personal consumption and the other to be sold, with the resulting profits deposited into the village fund (which was earmarked for building projects and other collective initiatives.) Although the previous year’s total maize yield from the Rwelu village farm was documented as 450 bags, residents provided varying figures for their personal yield (in their own bega-kwa-bega plots) that ranged from five bags to none at all. The visiting scholars wrote, “There is no procedure for keeping records of their attendance that could later be taken as a base or measure for dividing the products fairly.”47 Similar problems arose with ujamaa stores. Each village had at least one ujamaa store, established with capital from the village fund. The parastatal Regional Trading Company (RTC) was supposed to stock all ujamaa stores with basic goods, but in Mdui and Rwelu, some essential supplies – such as salt and flour – were missing at the time of the Kivukoni scholars’ visit. Rwelu’s lack of access to a main road meant that the RTC bypassed the village altogether. (The store was stocked by supplies transported by villagers on bicycle.) The Mdui store was founded in 1970 in the kijiji kidogo kidogo of the same name, which perhaps lent the residents of that small village a proprietary sentiment over the store. In Rwelu, the first group to settle in the village (prior to the operation) started a store, and those who followed established their own store; after the village was registered in 1975, the two stores were merged. In 1976, many Rwelu villagers complained that “the profits of the store are used by some leaders of the store for their own use” and that “they are swindled by those selling using an improper scale.”48 45 46 47 48

Kivukoni: Rwelu, 1976. Kivukoni: Nanguruwe, 1976. Kivukoni: Rwelu, 1976. Ibid.

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In Nanguruwe, by contrast, there were two ujamaa stores corresponding to the two sections of the village; there had initially been only one common store, but due to tensions among villagers, a second store was established after 1975. This initiative grew out of a broader effort to split the village into two to increase accountability. The Kivukoni scholars reported that the local bwana shamba had stayed in Nanguruwe to help with the organization of the ujamaa farm, but an intravillage divide had developed in which those living on one side of the Mtwara–Newala road insisted on clearing a separate ujamaa farm for themselves. “Top leaders” from the district and division levels had intervened to the resolve the conflict, but in 1976, villagers’ commitment to ujamaa farming – even under this new arrangement – seemed as low as in Rwelu and Mdui. Saloum Ayoub Mnatosa recounted how the Nanguruwe conflict came about. He grew up in a small settlement near Nanguruwe, where he underwent jando in 1949. As a child, he spent a few years studying in a mission school and madrasa; in the early 1950s, he found work as a laborer on the Mtwara–Newala road – an occupation that he pursued to supplement his income as a farmer. He moved to Nanguruwe after the operation began, although he asserted that he came willingly. “Honestly, I don’t know exactly how it happened,” he remarked of villagization, “except that we had been told we should gather together. That is, if a person was living by himself there, two houses here – well, they had to join together. The matter of living in the forest wasn’t good.” Part of the reason for moving, he elaborated, was that “if there was any assistance, they [the government] could bring it to us there”; proximate residence would also enable villagers to “cooperate” in farming and other activities. Yet Mnatosa revealed that these cooperative ventures had quickly run into trouble. Initially, he stated, Nanguruwe “was one. But then why was it necessary to separate it?” He answered his own question. “If you all cultivate your crops there, it is possible to keep track of how many people have put in how much effort [on the farm]. And what has been harvested.” To clarify, he added, “The people of that street [mtaa] had put in a certain amount of work and here a certain amount.” In other words, his comments indicate that there had been disputes about distributing crops harvested from the village farm among residents who suspected others of working fewer hours; re-creating the standard institutions of ujamaa and village government on a smaller scale promised to increase accountability and transparency. Even after the division of the village, though, he conceded that mismanagement of the ujamaa farm and store persisted. “Those leaders weren’t supervising well. They were uselessly eating [kula] that money without regulation. It was made, so they acted like it was theirs. They ate, and therefore things just went backward instead of growing.”49

49

Interview with Saloum Ayoub Mnatosa, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008.

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In Mdui, too, accusations of graft and corruption emerged with regard to the management of village funds. A number of elders remember the origins of such charges in great detail. Ahmad Suleiman, profiled earlier as an early and eager settler of Mdui, became the chair of the village finances committee for Mdui for the years 1975–76. His responsibilities were overseeing “financial plans, weighing cashew.” He recalled, “Out of all crops, a percentage went to the village fund.” At the godown, he said, the harvest would be weighed and a percentage cut for the village. Although Suleiman praised this former system, his story darkened when it came to the actual fate of the village money. In 1976 (presumably shortly after the Kivukoni scholars’ visit), he pronounced, all of the village money was stolen from the Mdui account in a Mtwara bank. In his telling, the committee secretary and two representatives (wajumbe) withdrew the village money from the bank by signing his name. The villagers had originally planned to buy a vehicle for common use with the funds, after observing their counterparts in the nearby village of Maranje doing so with roughly the same amount of money. Yet, Suleiman recounted, when he went to the bank to take out the cash, he discovered that it was all gone. “They took it all. I saw their signatures. That’s all,” he remembered angrily. Although other villagers knew that this had happened, he said, “They were just quiet.” He resigned from his position. He did not know how the guilty parties spent the money. “I just can’t say. Thieves – I don’t know their uses. . . . Here, I don’t know, I see some people have a house, some have made tin roofs. I just don’t know.”50 Often, but not always, reports such as Suleiman’s align with a separatist sentiment in Maili Kumi, whose residents claim that they were “exploited” by Mdui leaders – the gravest possible violation of ujamaa’s moral code (Figure 22). One man who reluctantly resettled in Maili Kumi during Operation Vijiji recollected, “We gave the village money ourselves to those involved. . . . With that money, we bought a tin roof for the [village TANU] office.” Of the ujamaa store, however, he said, “We made it and it died; they ate the money.” Like others, he explained that Maili Kumi residents eventually opened their own store “because we saw our fellow villagers over there [in Mdui] were benefiting. We [Maili Kumi residents] weren’t benefiting.”51 However, the Maili Kumi store only lasted for about two years, he remembered. This was, ironically, because the same pattern of graft resurfaced within Maili Kumi itself. “We profited [from the village farm], we built the Mdui store, it was eaten,” remembered Albano Shiteva Nanguo, another Maili Kumi resident. “We built another store here [in Maili Kumi]; it was all eaten.” Both stores failed, he said, because people “ate the money.”52 50 51 52

Interview with Ahmad Suleiman, Mdui Village, January 2008. Houses with tin (rather than thatched) roofs are a sign of wealth in the village. Interview with Saidi Aibu, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Albano Shiteva Nanguo, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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figure 22. Maili Kumi, Mdui Village, 2008. Photo by the author.

Although it is difficult to ascertain whether such episodes of graft resulted from a lack of popular investment in village ujamaa activities, or vice versa, it seems that both explanations applied. Ahmad Suleiman’s trajectory – from an optimistic early respondent to the call for villagization, to the chairman of a village committee, to a bitter resignee – indicates that for at least some rural people, the experience of working together with others in a sincere attempt at cooperation could be deeply disillusioning. For Suleiman, the moment that he discovered that the hard work and planning of his fellow villagers had been negated by the dishonesty of a handful of their representatives was a turning point. For others who had been less enthusiastic about villagization to begin with, either because they had a poor understanding of ujamaa or because they were skeptical of or apathetic toward the Tanzanian socialist project, the illicit appropriation of village funds came as less of a shock or disappointment. Many elders admit that ujamaa farms had not been successful, but some see this as a relatively logical outcome of a lack of collective effort because “A person wants to farm where they want to themselves.”53 Saloum Mnatosa delivered his story of conflict and graft in Nanguruwe in a matter-of-fact style, punctuating his 53

Interview with Ali Asman Kitenge, Rwelu Village, February 2008.

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narrative with laughter that seemed to betray a wry, dark humor, not indignation. Mnatosa believed that “it wasn’t that the government’s plan was bad – it was very good. The problems occurred among us people, those who took those actions.”54 Because he did not claim to have a clear comprehension of the official logic and process of villagization to begin with, it does not appear that his experience with village corruption came as a major disappointment that contradicted deeply ingrained socialist ideals. Village governments were often guilty of abuses of authority but also manifested a dearth rather than excess of power when it came to implementing ujamaa policy. Many residents openly disregarded the political mandates and detailed work plans that were to structure life during ujamaa, instead continuing to prioritize their personal commitments. Even while many elders lament that their leaders stole from the village fund, some admit to misappropriating resources as well – albeit on a smaller scale – by taking donated government supplies (such as seeds) intended for the ujamaa farm to use on their private farms. The weakness of village governments and the impunity with which many residents ignored ujamaa policies was well documented in the Kivukoni scholars’ reports. In Rwelu, they noted that the chairman’s leadership was “not given weight by many villagers.” The village committees, they argued, existed “in name only. They don’t do their work as they are supposed to. This is apparent in their frequent failure to meet, the lack of past or future plans, the absence of a village constitution, and the nonexistence of proper steps to follow for those seeking to join the village. Furthermore, they don’t understand their responsibilities.” Of tencell leaders, the report stated, “They don’t have control over their people. People do their private work and join ujamaa work when they themselves want to and don’t follow the work procedures given.”55 In Nanguruwe, the situation appeared to be slightly better, but aside from the defense and safety committee, the village committees seemed mostly ineffectual. In some ways, the weakness of many village governments reflected the limitations of higher-level governments, which lacked the resources or organization to adequately prepare rural people to carry out and follow ujamaa policies at the local level. These logistical shortcomings and rural people’s shrewd selective engagement with such uneven governmental authority recalled patterns and practices of the colonial period. For instance, official attempts to enforce the 1950s policy of chalalo farming were also constrained by limited resources and poor access to rural settlements; they thus similarly met with widespread evasion as much as if not more than straightforward compliance.56 54 55 56

Interview with Saloum Ayoub Mnatosa, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Kivukoni: Rwelu, 1976. This conclusion is based on numerous interviews with villagers as well as the early 1950s notes of the Mtwara district commissioner, located in TNA, Accession 188, 15-1-4: Communications Roads . . . Maintenance of Roads.

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The ambivalent commitment to collective (or semicollective) farming among residents of the three villages must also be considered in the context of the broader material obstacles that they faced in the realms of agriculture and overall welfare. In Mdui, the Kivukoni scholars observed, “In looking at the economic level of the village, one gets the idea that it is still pretty low.”57 The report for Nanguruwe noted, “The agriculture until now is not well developed, and many families don’t have sufficient food”;58 for Rwelu, it stated, “The villagers don’t yet use a modern style of agriculture” but relied on “the usual hoe and machete for slashing.”59 Even private cultivation was hampered by the long distance of villagers’ farms from their homes; the crude nature of their equipment (small hoes, with little use of fertilizer); environmental factors such as poor irrigation; the prevalence of hungry wild animals such as pigs, monkeys, and lions; and poor nutrition. Cashew farming, in particular, was suffering, with some villagers neglecting to weed around their trees and likely failing to treat or manage the crop diseases outlined in the previous chapter. The dense forestation around many villages magnified the impact of the lack of proper implements, making it onerous for farmers to clear areas for private cultivation as mandated by older traditions of shifting agriculture. Poor soil fertility and the heat limited production in already active farms. Because of the low level of agricultural output, most villagers lacked sufficient money to buy essentials such as clothes and pens for their school-going children. More crucially, one report remarked, “There is not enough food for many children, and even adults often pass the whole day without eating any food of substance.” As a result, people were “weak,” which partly accounted for the fact that “there is very little work done” on the village farm.60 Everyday life was difficult for many rural people in Mtwara during the ujamaa era, as it had been in previous decades. Yet although resettlement increased hardships for such individuals by placing them at a burdensome distance from their farms, ujamaa villages also offered opportunities for their residents to earn additional income and improve their quality of life in other ways. Collectively organized small-scale industries provided additional petty income to many men and women; some villagers produced and sold hoes, knives, and axes, whereas others made utensils or household implements, such as beds and drinking vessels, as well as drums, jewelry, and bags. Under the auspices of the UWT, some village women worked their own group farm and operated food stalls. Depending on their location, rural people were also able to benefit from the government services promised in villages. Nanguruwe offered the most amenities to its residents. The dispensary there (opened by Catholic missionaries during the colonial 57 58 59 60

Kivukoni: Mdui, 1976. Kivukoni: Nanguruwe, 1976. Kivukoni: Rwelu, 1976. Kivukoni: Mdui, 1976.

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era and absorbed by the Tanzanian government in 1970) serviced forty-two thousand residents of nearby divisions with clinics and twenty-six beds; it was equipped with a well-stocked lab, and every morning, station workers conducted open seminars in matters such as sanitation and nutrition. The village housed an expert from the Ministry of Health as well as an irrigation expert; residents had easy access to water from nearby wells, boreholes, and taps. There were two schools in the settlement, which had been constructed by volunteer work and government assistance. Nanguruwe also had its own bus depot, which had apparently “caused many people to live [there].”61 In Mdui and Rwelu, such services were much more limited. Mdui lacked a school – the nearest primary school was several miles away – and a dispensary – the nearest health station was eight miles away, in Nanguruwe. Although the village was located along the main Mtwara–Newala road, transport only stopped there intermittingly. For water, villagers relied on a well located more than a mile away. The condition of water infrastructure in and around Rwelu was especially poor; its residents (usually women) had to walk almost five miles to Mikindani to collect water for their basic needs. The road passing through Rwelu was only traversable by car during the dry season, yet even then, no regular vehicular transportation was available. The nearest dispensary was in Mikindani, and the Kivukoni scholars pointed out, “This kind of problem is also the problem of the district; of the 89 villages registered in Mtwara District, there are only 24 dispensaries, but only 11 are used. There are two health stations.”62 A primary school housing two classrooms was built in Rwelu in 1974–75 using local and hired labor, with supplies provided by the District Office. Although many villagers retrospectively express gratitude for better educational access during the ujamaa era – in relation to both the colonial period that preceded it and the era of structural adjustment that followed it – the Kivukoni reports documented that school attendance in 1976 was in fact relatively low in Rwelu and Nanguruwe, with many children attending madrasa instead. (Each of the settlements also had its own mosque.) The popularity of madrasa as an alternative to government schooling indicated the continued importance of Islam to rural societies in the area after villagization. The reluctance of some parents to enroll their children in village schools may have stemmed from the lingering effects of older fears of sending children to colonial or mission schools where conversion to Christianity was implicitly or explicitly promoted. “We could study at those schools,” one Nanguruwe woman recalled of her childhood during the early 1940s, “but our elders said, ‘Don’t go to school. Don’t be made to write. . . . You will eat pork there [in violation of Islamic tenets].’”63 Many parents also relied on older children for farm or household labor, which precluded the 61 62 63

Kivukoni: Nanguruwe, 1976. Kivukoni: Rwelu, 1976. Interview with Fatou Mohammed Nyonde, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008.

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latter’s regular attendance at schools. In addition to many villagers’ limited financial ability to provide proper clothing and school supplies for their children, the spotty nature of instruction may have been a contributing factor in limiting primary school attendance, as it was for adult education programs run out of all three villages. In Rwelu, 320 students (200 men and 120 women) were supposedly enrolled in adult education classes that met three times per week, yet only 40 students passed an exam held in 1975, and the school was closed for the two weeks of the Kivukoni scholars’ visit. “The teachers do not get paid,” the visitors observed, “so fail to get motivation to teach.”64 In Nanguruwe, too, none of the scheduled adult education classes met during the Kivukoni scholars’ visit. The report recorded rumors that “attendance was very low; thus, the teacher finds himself alone with the blackboard in front of him – a situation that destroys his desire to work.”65 Many elders in all three villages remember attending adult education classes but “learning nothing”; whether this was due to their lack of investment or their teachers’ is unclear, although a combination of the two seems most likely. Despite the problems plaguing village farms, stores, and schooling, both the 1976 reports and elders’ accounts in 2008 demonstrate that residents of ujamaa villages threw themselves into other communal activities with gusto. The dramatic scaling back of the Tanzanian welfare state during the 1980s and 1990s, which revived average citizens’ dependence on one another for services and support that the government could no longer provide, has likely amplified some rural people’s contemporary emphasis on cooperation in the realm of everyday sociability as a key benefit and legacy of villagization. Yet in the postvillagization Mtwara countryside, many rural people did indeed continue to focus on the traditional rituals and leisure activities that enabled them to maintain the social networks that sustained them in times of need. The Kivukoni scholars frowned on the energy and time that rural people devoted to these practices, but it was in this sphere of life that villagers most fully developed the forms of community that ujamaa ideology encouraged. In all three settlements, the reports stated that villagers “cooperate with each other, especially with weddings and funerals”66 as well as in initiation ceremonies, but they argued that “this issue of jando and unyago is a problem because it wastes a lot of time”67 due to the pursuit of “prestige” (fahari).68 The visitors’ comments deeming local cultural activities backward illustrate both the contradictory nature of ujamaa thought, which simultaneously 64 65 66 67 68

Kivukoni: Rwelu, 1976. Kivukoni: Nanguruwe, 1976. Kivukoni: Mdui, 1976. Ibid. Kivukoni: Rwelu, 1976. The scholars also criticized the length of initiation, which could range from days to several months.

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idealized and rejected rural tradition, and the broader paternalism animating national attitudes toward Mtwara. Regardless of these outsiders’ perceptions, it is clear from their reports as well as the memories of rural people themselves that in some ways, villagization – meant in part as a modernizing exercise in nation building – sustained rather than diminished the popular salience of many Makonde traditions. This was true despite the fact that villagization often intensified the fragmentation of extended family units and introduced new local forms of government authority that could bypass older systems of power. Rituals marking major life transitions – such as initiation, marriage, and death – had formerly been commemorated in smaller groups, usually among members of a single ukoo. Older forms of authority within extended family units were reproduced through such events, which afforded elders opportunities to exercise their ritual status and demonstrate – and thus enhance – their wealth in people, through the display of commodities (such as cloth) and the provision of food and drink.69 Despite the challenges to this traditional order posed by the late colonial period, these older practices and elements of the social hierarchies that they represented survived into the independence era. In ujamaa villages, perhaps partly as a response to the disruptions brought by resettlement, Makonde rituals continued to occupy the attention of many rural people, with participation in these activities expanding to include not just isolated extended family units but all residents of a village. This larger scale of many ritual commemorations and celebrations lent them a new appeal and may have accounted for a renewed focus on “prestige,” as the Kivukoni scholars put it. Broadly speaking, women and men tended to experience these and other changes and continuities within new villages in different ways. The Kivukoni reports implicitly held up the gendered developmental norms typical of national policy, condemning the fluid nature of marital alliances apparent on the ground, although this reflected a generations-old dynamic in the region. The Nanguruwe team stigmatized rural women for this practice, commenting, “The habits of women marrying and divorcing carelessly cause conflict in the family, and children do not get good care because the care of the mother and stepmother is different.” The proposed solution was “to educate villagers on the importance of having a family that stays together” and to urge young women to absorb Community Development lessons about “discipline, cleanliness, how to take care of children, cooking, etc.”70 Even as 69

70

The concept of “wealth in people,” central in African Studies, refers to an older, indigenous political economy in which wealth (or status) is measured in dependents and clients, as opposed to a capitalist economy in which wealth (or status) is measured in money or material possessions. See Jane Guyer, “Wealth in People, Wealth in Things,” Journal of African History 36, 1 (1995): 83–90. Kivukoni: Nanguruwe, 1976.

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they insisted on women’s increased vigilance vis-a-vis their domestic roles in ` the family, the visiting scholars argued that women’s public roles should be augmented. The UWT branch of each village was largely inactive; in Rwelu, the scholars remarked that the branch “exists only in name,” with the wife of the village chairman serving as the branch’s unelected chair (mirroring a tendency apparent in the organization on a national scale).71 “In many meetings,” the Mdui visitors noted, referring to general village assemblies, “not a single woman is present.” However, the report stated matter-of-factly that women “do more work than men.”72 Although the visiting scholars unequivocally insisted that women’s participation in village politics needed to be increased to achieve true local democracy, they were less certain about whether the cause of the problem was women’s lack of education, apathy, other time commitments, or active oppression and marginalization by village men. Elders’ contemporary accounts also suggest that women’s participation in the political life of ujamaa villages was significantly lower than that of many men and imply that a combination of the aforementioned factors – in addition to the gender bias inherent in government developmental trainings themselves – was to blame. Villagers do not indicate the past existence of any female wabolozi or village officials. They agree that it was rare for single women to live alone as heads of their own households. Most women confirm that they performed the majority of domestic and agricultural labor, although men were responsible for physically challenging tasks such as clearing farmland. In general, elderly women are more likely to speak Makonde or a mixed version of Swahili and Makonde than men, hinting at their lower educational level; they also use political terminology more loosely (women are more likely to refer to ujamaa villages as “nations,” for instance), which implies lower formal political awareness or exposure. Fewer women report having attended school as children (with none enrolled in male-only madrasas); rural females also married earlier than males, which may partly account for their lower school attendance rates. It is clear that in the realm of village governance, women were underrepresented, perhaps mirroring the norms of popular religious life in which women did not hold leadership positions (with the spread of Islam weakening Makonde matrilineal tradition). Rural men, in turn, were hardly an undifferentiated category when it came to social and political status and involvement. The Kivukoni reports condemned village youths – undoubtedly coded as male – as aimless, lazy drifters “not seen participating in ujamaa work”73 who “use their time

71 72 73

Kivukoni: Rwelu, 1976. Kivukoni: Mdui, 1976. Kivukoni: Rwelu, 1976.

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loitering around.”74 The exception to this observed tendency was a number of young men committed to village-level TYL activities, which included coordinating the cutting and selling of firewood, teaching some villagers how to read and write, and policing the area. The Nanguruwe TYL branch, which was particularly robust, assembled a village militia in conjunction with the village defense and safety committee; in one reported incident, the village chairman handed over a young man who had stolen a chicken to be punished by the militia “after the ten-cell leaders failed to solve the problem.”75 In addition to confirming the local impact of the national emphasis on youth militancy, this anecdote reveals that Youth Leaguers still remained politically active after Operation Vijiji and that in many rural contexts, TANU and the government were closely conflated. Other young men, who the Kivukoni teams perceived to be aimlessly loitering, were likely in between stints of wage labor migration during the visitors’ stay. They may have felt alienated from or apathetic toward village politics because they were often away for work on the Kabisela sisal plantation or in Mtwara Town. For those who were less mobile, residential proximity in ujamaa villages generated new forms of community as well as new types of anxiety or suspicion in the domain of everyday life. Living among “strangers,” especially for older people or those who found the resettlement process harrowing, could be frightening in some respects – because of concerns about witchcraft as well as more mundane worries about personal property and safety. Musa Musa Mfaume, the Nanguruwe man who accused his older male relatives of cursing him, conceded that witchcraft persisted in ujamaa villages. “It wasn’t left behind. Each place with people has poison [sumu],” he said.76 Without broaching the topic of witchcraft, two Nanguruwe women described their fears about their neighbors’ character in ways that also hinted at the impact of generational tensions across gender lines. Both Fatou Mohammed Nyonde and Somoya Mohammed Mpendemuka underwent initiation in 1941 (“the year of Hitler,” as Nyonde put it), placing them in their early to mid-forties by the time they moved to Nanguruwe. Nyonde grew up near the minor settlement of Kitaya and moved to Nanguruwe only after the operation began. Initially, she said, village life was difficult. “We were experiencing the punishment of having to walk to our distant farms after we had moved.” Moreover, she added, “When we came here, evil emerged. Youths were present. If you left your house to go somewhere, when you returned, your tools might be missing. If you had a kitamba [cloth], it may have been stolen!” Her distress was visible as she spoke. Mpendemuka, in conversation with Nyonde, agreed with the latter’s

74 75 76

Kivukoni: Nanguruwe, 1976. Ibid. Interview with Musa Musa Mfaume, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008.

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assessment. She hailed from north of Mikindani but grew up in a small settlement in the interior after her parents separated. She, too, moved to Nanguruwe during the operation – which she referred to as the “movement [hama hama] of Nyerere” – and struggled to adjust to the new village setting. “Just thieves, youths, youths!” she decried. “People trouble you – that is the evil of these villages. Meaning we have met each other here, each person and their heart – good, bad, that’s it. The work is just this.”77 It is impossible to measure the extent of rural petty crime in the wake of villagization and to disentangle the official emphasis on policing and security (and ujamaa’s stigmatization of mobile youths) from elders’ perceptions of actual realities in the Mtwara countryside. Yet it is indisputable that for a number of rural men and women, living in close proximity to strangers did not always take the shape of the idyllic harmony envisioned by ujamaa discourse. However, along with suspicion of fellow villagers – whether of leaders’ “exploitative” motives or neighbors’ bad intentions – came gratitude for the new types of sociability and social security offered by dense settlement. Esha Mohammed Namituli, whose highly critical account opened this chapter, pointed out that after villagization, “If you had a problem, like if a thief came to steal something, you’d shout and everyone came to help.”78 This remark, repeated by others, provides a converse perspective on the question of petty theft, demonstrating that living among many could provide relief from relative isolation and foster a spirit of mutual assistance. This was particularly true for numerous women. During the late colonial period, given the primacy of male migration for wage labor within the region, rural women would often live without their husbands for prolonged periods. Concerns about their own safety and that of their children litter their memories of life by their farms (mashambani) before villagization, and appreciation for the security offered by residential proximity accordingly permeates their accounts of postvillagization life. For men and women alike, shelter from the dangerous wild animals to which they had been exposed in the mashambani was a particular benefit of living with large numbers of people. “When were in the forest, we were very afraid, and now we are not afraid,” explained one Mdui man. “Then, there were many lions in the forest . . . and now there are none.”79 To these practical benefits of living in a densely populated settlement were added the small pleasures of having ready company to chat or drink pombe with and neighbors to share in one’s major life events – the initiation of a child or the death of a family member. Ultimately, amid the disruptions brought by resettlement, rural people continued to rely on

77 78 79

Interview with Fatou Mohammed Nyonde and Somoya Mohammed Mpendemuka, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Interview with Esha Mohammed Namituli, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Interview with Hamisi Sadiki Mkumbange, Saloum Yusufu Chembeya, Hassan Saloum Nampungila, and Mohammed Saloum Malenga, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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one another to face the material and emotional challenges of life in the impoverished Mtwara countryside. Popular Political Subjectivities The 1976 Kivukoni studies and the regional archival records surveyed in the previous chapter claim that most rural people in Mtwara had an inadequate or distorted understanding of ujamaa, even while regional and national reports often celebrated the Southeast as a paragon of ujamaa development. As analyses of ujamaa multiplied in the aftermath of Tanzania’s socialist experiment, few commentators who established a critical distance from their subject entertained the notion that rural people may have philosophically grappled with ujamaa ideology in a meaningful way during and after the villagization process. Although recent scholarship on urban experiences of ujamaa thoughtfully emphasizes the creative engagement of cosmopolitan city dwellers with nationalist idioms and state power, it leaves intact older, more simplistic constructions of rural Tanzanians’ actions and attitudes during this same period. Citizens of the Tanzanian countryside have frequently been depicted as passive objects, resistant opponents, or wily manipulators of national policy – historical roles that suggest equally crude political subjectivities. In the immediate wake of the Arusha Declaration, Nyerere warned local officials not to represent villagization merely as a means of accessing government aid, underscoring the principle of self-reliance to prevent rural people from approaching villagization solely as an instrument for their personal gain. During and after Operation Vijiji, critics equated the state’s use of force to implement resettlement with colonial compulsion, portraying rural people as helpless victims or defiant adversaries of a brutal regime. In reality, Mtwara villagers’ conceptions of their relationship to the Tanzanian government and evaluations of the ujamaa project were – and are – complex, sophisticated, and profoundly ambivalent. Rural perceptions of ujamaa villagization and the changes that it heralded were more than simply the product of a bounded locality or narrowly parochial interests. Local political subjectivities – like the site of “the local” itself – were not disconnected from or reflexively opposed to national or transnational perspectives or forces. Neither were these micro-level conceptions submerged or displaced by such macro-level formulations, which are commonly but incorrectly reified as external to the space of the village. Instead, most elderly residents of Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe held what Meredith Terretta calls a “hybridized village nationalism,” resulting from the articulation of TANU ideology with village-level politics and a range of discourses and material processes at mixed subnational and supranational levels.80 These included debates about Mtwara’s regional distinctiveness, 80

Meredith Terretta, “‘God of Independence, God of Peace’: Village Politics and Nationalism in the Maquis of Cameroon, 1957–71,” Journal of African History 46, 1 (2005): 77.

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global economies of trade and agricultural expertise associated with cashew farming, Islamic networks spanning the Swahili coast and beyond, and circuits of migration within and across Tanzanian borders. The embeddedness of local lives and spaces within such overlapping and intersecting social, political, and economic fields fed into the flexibility of rural people’s material practices in terms of patterns of settlement, social formations, and livelihood pursuits, but it also lent them a versatility in the subjective realm in terms of spiritual cosmologies and political outlooks. Hence, in recounting their individual and collective pasts, Mtwara elders do not usually reproduce the official discourse of ujamaa in an unequivocal or straightforward manner. Neither do they wholly reject the national language of Tanzanian socialism, replacing it with their own alternative discursive frameworks rooted in an autonomous realm of subaltern experience. Rather, they mediate between local and national idioms and attitudes, reworking both in the process. Making sense of the resultant personal narratives requires as much sensitivity as does evaluating political discourse at the national and international levels. The impulse to disentangle “received interpretation[s]” of villagization from “the actual lived experience” of ujamaa in the countryside must be balanced with an appreciation of the dialectical nature of official representations of ujamaa; an awareness of the multiple techniques by which state ideologies can be creatively adopted, reconfigured, and wrestled with by broader publics; and an understanding of the mixed material realities of villagization in the Mtwara countryside.81 Here juxtaposing macro-level with micro-level analysis again proves illuminating. Chapter 1 showed that the Tanzanian leaders who conceived of ujamaa drew from a range of developmental idioms, concepts, and symbols circulating throughout the midtwentieth-century world, revising and recombining these borrowed elements into a distinctive vision instead of mimicking existing ideologies wholesale or inventing a new political philosophy from entirely indigenous sources. Similarly, within 1960s and 1970s Tanzania, a variety of versions of ujamaa thought were available to average citizens, who could select strands of official discourse to modify and weave together with their own political idioms and beliefs to express their specific experiences with national policy. These subjectivities and sentiments were and are often lodged within people’s linguistic choices and styles rather than explicitly articulated. Labels such as “interpellated” or “uncaptured” do not accurately describe the liminal political positions of the rural speakers in question; neither do concepts such as “counterdiscourse” fit the types of hybrid narratives they deploy. Looking beyond such totalizing categories to perceive the nuanced, ambivalent relationship between peasant discourse and state ideology is essential to grasping

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˜ Mar´ıa’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham, Daniel James, Dona NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 271.

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how the broader material relationships of power at work within national development processes transcend simplistic paradigms of domination and resistance. The political imaginary of ujamaa was riddled with ideological fault lines that rural elders’ accounts often expose. Chief among these was the question of whether ujamaa villagization was intended to facilitate rural citizens’ contact with a redistributive welfare state or designed to enable villagers to work among themselves to achieve local self-reliance. In line with these contrasting conceptions of ujamaa development, elders alternately offer a definition of national citizenship distinguished by access to state services in ujamaa villages and one simply characterized by communitarian fellowship among citizens in the same setting. Both positions accommodate multiple configurations of the terms ujamaa and self-reliance. The most common definition of self-reliance (kujitegemea) among elderly villagers is highly literal, implying an almost complete sense of detachment from the Tanzanian nation-state. In this vein, some villagers explain self-reliance as “depending on yourself for agriculture . . . for yourself, along with your children”82 and “having enough food to feed yourself.”83 As a socialist project, ujamaa stigmatized individual capitalist accumulation and prioritized collective agricultural production, yet in reality, ujamaa policy sanctioned the private farming of cash crops alongside the communal cultivation of food crops. “Self-reliance” as an individual condition could thus be understood as the ability to provide for one’s basic needs through subsistence agriculture or through money earned by other means. According to a group of Mdui women in their sixties and seventies, “Self-reliance is this: you farm, you grow cassava, you take it inside, you eat it.”84 By contrast, an elderly Nanguruwe man imparted a more expansive definition of the term, identifying self-reliance with labor more generally. “Self-reliance is doing private work. Self-reliance is when you get food or you get money; you rely on yourself,” he offered. “Self-reliance is doing work.”85 These two interpretations are colored by the gendered positions of their speakers; rural women usually performed more agricultural work than men and were less likely to engage in the type of wage labor that was so common among males. Such narratives often depict self-reliance as a fundamental component of local tradition rather than emphasizing its function within state policy. Among some men who were in their late teens and twenties during the ujamaa era, for whom a personal transition to adulthood coincided with the 82 83 84 85

Interview with Seonani Chiupa, Hadija Binti Saloum, and Somoya Rashidi Chiupa, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Albano Shitevo Nanguo, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Somoya Issa Mbaruku, Esha Abdallah Luhumbe, Esha Issa Mtama, Somoya Saloum Issa Ulende, and Fatou Saidi Ngome, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Mohammed Hassan Mpaka, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008.

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broader national project of villagization, the enduring connotation of the concept of kujitegemea was the promise of social independence that came with marriage, not a status associated with political citizenship. Many women, too, naturalize self-reliance as an inherent part of rural life, albeit more often as a collective instead of individual condition. “No one came to tell us. We just rely on ourselves,” insisted one Mdui woman.86 Yet these apparently vernacular configurations of self-sufficiency sometimes betray the imprint of official discourse. Some elders, for instance, specify the unit of selfreliance as the patriarchal nuclear family rather than the individual or the extended kin group. Ahmad Suleiman, whose early move to Mdui and participation in village government went hand in hand with a relatively high level of exposure to and investment in official ideology, most clearly manifested this tendency. “The meaning of self-reliance is to live with your family – like three or four people, together with yourself,” he said. “You rely on yourself to direct them, care for them, etc.”87 This statement reflects the fact that ujamaa usually reached rural populations through a set of policies that normalized the nuclear family as a primary developmental entity, even though it theoretically invoked rural traditions of extended familyhood. Strict definitions of self-reliance as a de facto condition of “using one’s own sweat” suggest a kind of social atomization at the village level (at least with regard to matters of economic sustenance and food security) and thus seem at odds with the concept of community at the heart of the ujamaa formulation.88 Yet villagers also recognize the limitations of individual selfreliance and acknowledge the social or interpersonal dimensions of personal welfare. When defining ujamaa, many villagers highlight a local understanding of community without attaching it to a larger national one. This move is particularly common among female elders, such as Fatou Nampembe of Mdui. Nampembe could not recall her birth year or much about her early life, conceding, “Sometimes I don’t remember. Because I was a small child.” She was nonetheless able to confidently explain, “Ujamaa is like in a village, like here, meaning here is your brother, your ndugu, all necessarily cooperating. If there is any problem at night, they will help you, even if your house catches on fire.”89 This description implies that ujamaa merely entailed a spirit of mutual assistance at the village level, even though many villagers remember learning about ujamaa from government officials before or after moving into concentrated settlements and thus also associate it with “nation building.” Such localized conceptions of ujamaa frequently coincide with extremely parochial mappings of the term nation. 86 87 88 89

Interview with Lukia Rilanga, Lukia Mkenerere, and Zeynabu Amri, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Ahmad Suleiman, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Mohammed Suleiman Yusufu, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Fatou Nampembe, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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Elders whose political subjectivities revolve around the event of villagization instead of the process of decolonization refer to moving into villages as moving into nations (mataifa) or beginning to live nationally (kitaifa) – conflating their village with the nation or defining the nation as their village. In a revealing example of this inclination, Somoya Issa Ismaili, who was born in the early 1940s in Newala and relocated to Mdui during Operation Vijiji, declared that “the matter of the nation is about Nyerere” but then went on to describe nation building simply as “participating in ngoma [social or cultural events featuring musical performances].” Of villagization, she commented, “The operation was hard; they forced us [to move] whether you liked it or not.” Perhaps because of this negative experience, she admitted that she “did not build the nation. I was lazy; others were active.”90 Fatou Nampembe, similarly, identified “mkumi, helping someone farm,”91 as another aspect of nation building, while others mentioned “helping if someone dies, attending their funeral.”92 Nampembe’s remark intimates that cooperative farming – a key component of ujamaa policy – resonated with the older local practice of mkumi, in which groups of rural people offered their agricultural labor to an individual or family in exchange for food and drink. More broadly, these definitions of nation building as pertaining to the realm of traditional cultural activities and modes of interpersonal assistance are entirely consistent with a scalar configuration equating the nation with one’s village. This vernacular usage is illuminating for several reasons. First, it serves as a useful reminder that Tanzanian citizens across the country, especially in peripheral regions like Mtwara, were in the midst of a linguistic transition during the ujamaa era. Although Swahili had been spoken along the Mtwara coast since the nineteenth century, most of the largely Makonde population of the southeastern interior still spoke Makonde among themselves throughout the colonial era. A key aspect of ujamaa policy was its emphasis on cultivating a supraethnic national identity through the diffusion of Swahili; rural people without an education or political experience (often women) learned Swahili in new villages through adult education programs or more informally. Many who fell into this category would not have regularly encountered the word taifa before villagization and thus came to associate it with the site of its emergence in their lives. Second, this parochial version of nationalism suggests a collapse of the sequential events of national independence in 1961 and villagization beginning in 1967 – what Portelli calls a “horizontal chronological shift.”93 The misremembering or conflation of dates may reflect a poor understanding of the events involved, which could be the case for some speakers, or it may be an active 90 91 92 93

Interview with Somoya Issa Ismaili, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Fatou Nampembe, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Hawa Amisi Chilimi, Mdui Village, January 2008. Portelli, Death of Luigi Trastulli, 21.

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but unconscious memory technique. Although even the least educated of rural people clearly recall TANU’s nationalist campaign of the 1950s, most villagers who were not involved with TANU or the government explicitly or implicitly indicate that aside from the elimination of the aggressive pursuit of colonial taxes, independence brought no immediate, substantial changes to their everyday lives. To account for this apparently anticlimactic conclusion to Tanganyika’s liberation movement, rural people may misremember the past by attaching national independence to the ujamaa project. Third, the primacy of the local scale in peasants’ political imaginations reflects the reality of a hazy distinction between the Tanzanian state and its rural citizenry in sites such as Mtwara. In contrast to these narrowly local interpretations of self-reliance, ujamaa, and the nation, elders with a deeper personal history of participation in TANU’s late 1950s independence struggle tend to identify the policy of ujamaa and self-reliance as explicitly attached to a condition of national citizenship distinct from older rural practices and local social formations. Those who signed TANU cards or joined the TYL in the years before villagization demonstrate a particular commitment and sense of belonging to the Tanzanian national family – understood as a translocal, historically grounded community rather than an arbitrary concentration of people into a rural settlement. Such individuals perceive self-reliance as having a more collectively meaningful function in the ujamaa era, entailing active sacrifice as a contribution to Tanzania’s national development. This interpretation is especially apparent in the most common explanation of the Arusha Declaration (described in Chapter 2), which centers on the physical act of walking long distances. It seems that the Arusha Declaration – the first articulation of the national policy of ujamaa and self-reliance – reached rural people in this corner of Mtwara through local officials’ instructions that peasants follow the example of their president’s “Long March” and walk on foot from their homes to the regional capital. The policy of self-reliance, in this respect, was entirely divorced from a construction of national citizenship as a status entailing material rights. Instead, rural people were called on to endure physical hardship to strengthen themselves and thus their nation. Yet many elders view the policy of ujamaa in relation to a more robust version of national citizenship affording concrete rewards from and not just mandating personal sacrifice for the Tanzanian state (serikali). Although national leaders cautioned local officials against inducing rural people to resettle into concentrated settlements in exchange for governmentdistributed goods and services, it is common for elders to recall villagization as proceeding exactly along those lines. For instance, Abdallah Hassan Nahembe of Rwelu, who was born in the early 1930s and became a cardcarrying TANU member in 1955, explained that he voluntarily resettled in a kijiji kidogo during the first wave of villagization because “if we were brought assistance [msaada], we would receive it together; if you stayed

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alone, you would miss it. . . . There were schools, health centers, likewise water.” However, he admitted to disappointment with the actual services offered by the government after the second wave of compulsory villagization. “They brought fertilizer here; that’s it,” he grumbled, pointing out that this aid was of little practical utility because “when we were put here, we didn’t understand the matter of fertilizer.”94 His comments reveal a gulf between popular expectations of the Tanzanian state and the reality of the spotty provision of state services in the Mtwara countryside – a gap that rural people still struggle to account for. Although most villagers remember being promised government assistance after resettlement, many of them – including some of the most avid TANU supporters – do not remember receiving anything substantial. Some explain the state’s failure to deliver material assistance within the discursive framework of ujamaa ideology, by citing the policy of self-reliance. In an illustrative discussion, one group of Mdui women proclaimed, “The meaning of ujamaa is this: if I have a problem, they call my kin, they call my family, they call the government.” When questioned about what assistance the government had provided, they countered, “They have not yet helped us, because . . . we ourselves, we can practice self-reliance ourselves.”95 Alternatively, others blame their peers in village government for appropriating such goods for themselves. “Our leaders were thieves [warongo],” one man stated sharply;96 another mentioned, more elliptically, that after ujamaa, “some were full.”97 Overall, rural people’s diverse experiences with villagization produced and reflected a spectrum of creative engagements with ujamaa thought. The ambivalence of popular definitions of terms such as ujamaa, selfreliance, and nation mutually registers the mixed material trajectory of resettlement and the uneven, changing implications of villagization. The local story of villagization certainly contains moments when state-authorized militants overwhelmed unwilling rural people through the exercise of sheer physical force. Similarly, in the immediate wake of Operation Vijiji, some recent arrivals to ujamaa villages overtly rejected national policy by abandoning the new settlements and returning to their older homes in the mashambani. For the most part, however, ujamaa took shape in between these extremes of submission and flight. Comparative studies of average citizens’ experiences with African socialist projects suggest that similar dynamics were in effect elsewhere. Straker finds that popular oral accounts in Guinea “advanc[e] richly textured, often ambivalent observations on the local workings of 94 95 96 97

Interview with Abdallah Hassan Nahembe, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Interview with Somoya Issa Mbaruku, Esha Abdallah Luhumbe, Esha Issa Mtama, Somoya Saloum Issa Ulende, and Fatou Saidi Ngome, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Hamedi Issa Muraja, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Interview with Samri Athman, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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state power,”98 and Donham concludes that the Ethiopian revolution was “for some people unthinkably dreadful, for others milliennially hopeful.”99 Nonetheless, scholars have yet to fully digest the implications of such findings, which significantly temper the descriptive utility of the term authoritarian in considerations of actual power relations in these cases. Further research on villagization as an element of postcolonial development policy – in both its socialist and nonsocialist versions – will determine whether resettlement and concentration initiatives across the continent followed similarly nuanced courses.100 In its colonial application, at least, villagization demonstrated the “intrusive but not hegemonic” character of state power;101 as van Beusekom writes of the Office du Niger Scheme, “extending the reach of government services did not inevitably translate into greater government power.”102 Given this broad precedent, in the Tanzanian case (and likely in many others), the most significant continuity between colonial and postcolonial governance as villagization and other socialist policies were enacted involved the relatively consistent precariousness of state power, not a durable legacy of absolute control. A long tradition of flexibility in their interactions with the colonial state informed Mtwara residents’ attitudes and responses to life in postcolonial ujamaa villages. This spirit of adaptability operated in the ideological realm as well, helping rural people navigate the tensions between ujamaa’s promotion of self-reliance, encouragement of local cooperation, and promises of government assistance. Ultimately, whatever their conceptions of ujamaa, citizenship, and the state, Mtwara villagers recognized that the villagization project unfolded in a larger world that extended beyond the Tanzanian nation. The global consciousness of rural elders and their associated transnational or internationalist political subjectivities can be difficult to discern precisely because this worldliness was and is a fundamental dimension of everyday life. Yet it is clear that rural people’s global outlooks were neither wholly molded by nor entirely independent of Tanzanian official discourse, instead intersecting and diverging from official constructions, much like their definitions of national development and citizenship do and did. When relating their life stories, numerous elders speak matter-of-factly of their locality’s historical embeddedness within and connections to broader Indian Ocean trade networks, imperial spaces, world wars, and anticolonial circuits. Despite their 98 99 100

101 102

Straker, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution, 9. Donham, Marxist Modern, 35. It is likely that in cases where villagization was used in the context of military conflict as a counterinsurgency mechanism, such as in Kenya or Mozambique, or targeted pastoralist communities, such as the Maasai in northern Tanzania, its enforcement and repercussions left less room for popular mobility and maneuvering. Berry, No Condition is Permanent, paraphrased in van Beusekom, Negotiating Development, xxxiii. Van Beusekom, Negotiating Development, 191.

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location near the Mozambican border, few average people on the ground uncritically internalized their country’s larger ujamaa-era Cold War political culture and official rhetoric about foreign sabotage. They felt solidarity with FRELIMO’s struggle, but their daily life entailed fewer fears of Portuguese attacks and more concerns about meeting their basic needs or protecting themselves and their crops from wild animals. That is, anxieties about social security and food security loomed much larger in popular mentalities than did concerns about Tanzania’s military security. Several elders more closely involved with TANU display a relative fluency with ujamaa’s internationalist orientation, comparing Nyerere to Mao or decrying colonialism in southern Africa.103 When asked more pointedly about global affairs, however, they repeat a common refrain: “We are not educated,” and thus, “We don’t know.” Yet rural elders do know much about the world, if only to be acutely conscious of the kinds of global inequalities manifested in their exchange with a privileged young American researcher like myself. Such inequities have become increasingly pronounced in more recent decades but have roots in older economic and geopolitical structures. Despite its multifaceted and shifting character, the international system has imposed fairly constant pressures and constraints on Tanzania since independence. The survival tactics that worked well for rural people at the micro level – in particular, social and economic diversification – did not operate as successfully at the macro level – in the form of nonaligned political and trade relationships. The larger global forces that deepened Tanzania’s peripheral position in the world economy (although rural people may not have understood them as such) indirectly shaped local receptions of nationalist ideology as much as they directly informed the uneven trajectory and fairly rapid decline of the ujamaa project. After Ujamaa In the wake of Operation Vijiji, the physical landscape of the Mtwara countryside has continued to change in conspicuous and less visible ways connected to overlapping local, regional, national, and global dynamics. Although ujamaa was not officially abandoned as national policy until CCM released the Zanzibar Declaration of 1991 and not informally acknowleged to have been diluted beyond recognition until the mid-1980s (when Nyerere’s successor, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, assumed the presidency), signs of the deterioration of Tanzania’s socialist project were evident years earlier.104 103 104

Interview with Suleiman Ali Jamali, Mdui Village, January 2008. On 1980s Tanzania, see Aili Mari Tripp, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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Many scholars highlight intranational dynamics when identifying key events triggering and signaling ujamaa’s degeneration, such as Nyerere’s disbanding of the Ruvuma Development Association in 1969 and TANU’s turn to forced resettlement in 1970’s Operation Dodoma. However, major shifts in Tanzania’s political and economic engagement with the wider world, such as the adoption of the 1972 RIDEP policy and the 1973–5 global recession, were equally if not more significant barometers of and catalysts for the attenuation of ujamaa’s utopian potential. In general, the mid- to late 1970s was a time of disappointment for sub-Saharan Africa and the Third World.105 As the threat of Cold War aggression began to fade from the global stage, inherited patterns of uneven development became increasingly entrenched within the world economy, and new, frequently devastating types of foreign intervention into domestic political and economic affairs – under the guise of benevolent “structural adjustment” – emerged on the horizon. By the late 1980s, in accordance with these changes, Tanzanian farmers’ incomes dropped, the Southeast’s remaining sisal plantations closed, and the distribution of government services and resources to Mtwara’s ujamaa villages slowed to a trickle. In their place emerged an assortment of well-intentioned but largely ineffective Finnish development workers (Nanguruwe became the site of an unsuccessful RIPS livestock loan program in the 1990s, for instance), new systems for growing and marketing cashews (often to farmers’ detriment), and multiparty elections (starting in 1995). In an important concession to the obvious demise of the ujamaa project, the Tanzanian government officially announced in the 1980s that citizens living in ujamaa villages were authorized to return to their original previllagization homes. At the local level, this occasion was greeted with relief as well as confusion, launching both a series of reclamations of older farms and reconstructions of houses in the mashambani and an accompanying intensification of conflict over land ownership. Those who remained in existing villages – a majority of those in the region – also had to contend with the rapid and unplanned expansion of such settlements along with other new tensions and insecurities caused by growing population density. The affective landscape of rural citizens’ subjectivities also continued to morph and adapt to the material circumstances and political ruptures that followed ujamaa. Owing to the impact of these intervening years, it is impossible to recover a frozen capsule of memories in which direct experiences of ujamaa are preserved in people’s consciousness. Oral accounts attempt to reckon with the contradictions of postsocialist transition as much as the inherently messy nature of ujamaa itself. This partly explains why elderly 105

Of course, there are important exceptions – such as the disbanding of Portugal’s empire in 1974–5. This brought a successful conclusion to FRELIMO’s liberation struggle, although Mozambique subsequently fell into a prolonged civil war, cutting short the promise of independence.

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villagers offer both positive and negative assessments of ujamaa policy, with individual speakers sometimes combining the two. When a rural woman who recalls Operation Vijiji as a violent, disruptive event simultaneously claims that ujamaa was a positive force in her life, she is not necessarily demonstrating a false consciousness or betraying a rote internalization of official discourse. Her comments likely correspond to the actual ambivalence of her experience, in which she was able to benefit from aspects of life in ujamaa villages even though her initial move was traumatic. They likely also reflect the unconscious exertion of memory, which works toward the preservation of individual dignity and evolves with the passage of time and the ongoing accumulation of experience. Villagers’ memories are influenced by the respective positions that they occupied within shifting local economies of power between the late 1950s and late 1970s, but they are also inflected by their prior experiences of colonial rule and subsequent experiences of life under structural adjustment policies. In particular, the latter significantly color popular evaluations of the quality and availability of state services in the countryside since resettlement. Whereas some villages possess schools, health centers, and water infrastructure, others are several miles away from such amenities. Throughout the region, roads are unpaved and difficult – even impossible – to navigate during the rainy season, and motor transportation is infrequent and, for many, expensive. Even those who live in settlements with schools and dispensaries lament the prohibitive cost of secondary education and medical care in recent years – the result of user fees instituted under the austerity programs of the 1980s and 1990s. One such critic, Selemani Usi Nandapa, was born in 1943 near the interior minor settlement of Nanyamba, attended Catholic school, and moved to the area around Nanguruwe in 1957 because “my father had moved to come here. I followed him here,” he said. Around that time, Nandapa joined the TYL, and later, when the Tanzania–Uganda War was breaking out in 1976, he was briefly recruited into the national People’s Militia, although he never saw combat. Nandapa’s description of the early independence era and villagization was relatively positive; he approved of how “the country’s condition changed” after independence to be “completely peaceful,” rationalized ujamaa farming as a means of protecting crops from wild animals, and even excused village officials responsible for the failure of ujamaa stores by saying, “Those businesspeople weren’t experts.” When it came to discussing more contemporary realities in the area, however, Nandapa became incensed. “If you go right now, here, go to the hospital there,” he cried, pointing to Nanguruwe’s health center. “If it was me, ya Allah, God, I don’t have even ten cents, and the children have a fever. If I don’t have cents there – I, well, I will die.”106 Others echo this assessment. “It doesn’t help us,” one group of women said about the government. “If you go to the hospital, you have to 106

Interview with Selemani Usi Nandapa, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008.

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pay.”107 Villagers express similar frustrations about the cost of secondary education. “There is no development,” was a representatively bitter answer to queries about perceptions of contemporary development in the area.108 In a conversation among a small group of outspoken elders comparing the ujamaa-era government to its present-day counterpart, one Rwelu man in his eighties succinctly captured the way in which national citizenship after Tanzania’s neoliberal transition has come to indicate to many a negative condition of material self-reliance – albeit within a village community – and an absent state. “The government of back then and the government of now? Now it has failed,” he scoffed. “We have a government in name. Meaning we don’t really have a government.”109 Given such widespread disappointment with contemporary affairs, nostalgia pervades many older villagers’ assessments of the ujamaa-era government, especially among those who saw ujamaa as linked to a benevolent state and a feeling of membership in a meaningful national community. In Nanguruwe, two former TYL members (quoted earlier) reminisced about the early period of independence (uhuru) fondly and with great emotion. “Nyerere taught us politics [siasa] – to have the politics of citizenship [raia] in our TANU,” Musa Musa Mfaume ruminated, while his companion, Hassan Hassan Mawila Mohammed, confided, “Even now, when I hear his speeches on the radio, I just want to cry.”110 Even Esha Namituli, whose description of villagization (presented at the start of this chapter) was overwhelmingly negative, conceded, “Nyerere was a person of politics. Those things were political [kisiasa].”111 In her telling, this statement reflected well on the ujamaa-era government, which implemented villagization as part of an ambitious national development project rather than merely deploying force (ghadabu) for self-enrichment like the colonial regime or neglecting rural people altogether like the present-day government. Sentiments like Namituli’s are best understood as what Charles Piot calls “nostalgia for the future” embedded in the ujamaa era instead of more straightforward longing for the materialized past.112 Contemporary realities inform critical judgments of the early independence-era government in addition to more positive or forgiving portraits of ujamaa. Ali Asman Kitenge, quoted earlier as speaking of a “new colonialism” that coincided with ujamaa’s inception, focused his critique on what he 107 108 109 110 111 112

Interview with Fatou Ismaili Nampembe, Hawa Amisi Chilimi, and Somoya Issa Ismaili, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Suleiman Abdallaha, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Interview with Salimu Husseni Chinankwili, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Interview with Hassan Hassan Mawila Mohammed and Musa Musa Mfaume, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. Interview with Esha Mohammed Namituli, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Charles Piot, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

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called the frequent “changing of the discussion [mazungumzo].” Although this arbitrariness could be interpreted as referring to local officials’ alternating between various versions of ujamaa policy, Kitenge’s frustration was undoubtedly influenced by his more recent experiences as a cashew farmer. He captured farmers’ uncertainties under the highly unstable current cashew marketing system in an impassioned monologue. “The day before yesterday, we were told to farm cashews in large quantities, spray them well, clean the farms well. So that what? We raise ourselves up. But you have returned again; you have said the cashews aren’t suitable. Aren’t suitable in what sense?” He continued, addressing an imaginary cashew trader. “Tomorrow, you come, you say, ‘We will buy the cashew for six hundred shillings.’ The day after tomorrow, you come, you say, ‘We will buy it; sell it to us for two hundred shillings.’ The same cashews. Whoever has changed it, we don’t know. This is the new colonialism.”113 His account reveals the sense of vulnerability and helplessness that many villagers feel toward predatory traders who grade and price nuts at their whim, and it conflates dishonest cashew traders with the government that has shown itself unable or unwilling to regulate them. A lack of transparency and consistency define this “new colonialism” in Kitenge’s eyes. In their old age, most elders in Mtwara villages have not found much respite from the material hardships and radical political and economic shifts that have been relative constants throughout their lifetimes. More urgent than their discontent with poor access to social services or grievances about cashew marketing are their concerns about food security. “We have doubts. There is no food,” one group of women stated. “We have doubts about food.”114 “Things are expensive, but there is nothing to sell. The soil has gone; it has become tired,” sighed another man.115 Now that the youths of the 1960s have themselves become elders, they adopt some of the same attitudes that their parents did in an earlier time. One woman’s complaint that generational authority “is decreasing” was representative. “Now it follows leaders,” she said. “The whole order of nationalism [kitaifa]. Now all power is in the government. Elders have no power now.”116 In addition to dissatisfaction with their apparently lowered status among younger villagers, some elders express disappointment with a more general loss of community linked to privatization – or the rise of “ownership, ownership [umwenye]” – in the 1990s.117 Disputes over land ownership, in particular, have opened numerous conflicts among villagers, and without any coherent 113 114 115 116 117

Interview with Ali Asman Kitenge, Rwelu Village, January 2008. Interview with Fatou Ismaili Nampembe, Hawa Amisi Chilimi, and Somoya Issa Ismaili, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Hassan Likuni, Mdui Village, January 2008. Interview with Esha Mohammed Namituli, Rwelu Village, February 2008. Interview with Mohammed Suleiman Yusufu, Mdui Village, January 2008.

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legal framework for resolving competing land claims, it seems likely that such battles will continue well into the future.118 In Mtwara and Tanzania more broadly, it has become common for average citizens and state officials to redeploy ujamaa-era idioms to make sense of, legitimate, or censure often harsh postsocialist realities. This practice mirrors similar processes unfolding simultaneously in other former African Socialist countries.119 On a global scale, scholars have come to speak of a broad postsocialist formation – a category with claims to universal representation but which often seems grounded only in the particular cases of the former Soviet Union and, increasingly, China. As such, one of the problems with the term postsocialism in its current usage is its tendency to preserve Cold War ideological bipolarities by presuming a homogeneous classification of socialism (reflexively opposed to capitalism, similarly crudely constructed), thus eliding the distinctive shape and substance of Third World socialist projects and African Socialist projects in particular.120 Nonetheless, even if has not adequately grappled with its own spatial scope, much literature on postsocialism has usefully interrogated its own temporal construction, illustrating the indeterminacy of the post- prefix and the supposedly uniform or linear transition that it implies. Such analysis has revealed the myriad ways in which presocialist and socialist pasts articulate with the present to produce sometimes surprising or apparently incongruous social, political, and economic formations, including the discursive shifts and subjective reconfigurations that attend them. Given the specificity of the political repertoire of African Socialism and African countries’ postcolonial trajectories, it is increasingly possible to discern what may be called a transnational African repertoire of postsocialist discourse and praxis. The material elements of this repertoire include the dissolution of the structure of the welfare state, manifested in the gutting of social services and across-the-board privatization and deregulation; an uneasy move toward reforming the political architecture of the oneparty state, with ruling parties often reluctant to relinquish control; growing domestic economic disparities; new forms of exploitative concessionary 118

119

120

Elected members of village land councils, which have attempted to mediate such disputes for decades, confirm that the number of cases brought before them has increased over time. Interview with Mohammed Dadi Akaribata and Asha Mohammed, Rwelu Village, February 2008. See Shivji, Not Yet Democracy. Here and in the remainder of this section, I am referring to both African Socialism and African socialism, although I use the former designation. See Askew and Pitcher, “African Socialisms and Postsocialisms.” In an illuminating essay, Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery attempt to complicate the category of “postsocialism” by examining the relationship between postsocialism and postcolonialism, mentioning the need for further work on “peripheral communist movements.” Chari and Verdery, “Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 1 (2008): 6–34.

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agreements with foreign parties – often former partners in Third World solidarity, such as China and India – entailing land or resource grabs; and threats to food sovereignty represented in the aggressive importation of Green Revolution technologies. Also evident in this postsocialist repertoire are growing signs of resistance to these emerging realities, in the form of labor unrest and popular protest. Moreover, discursive maneuvering – undertaken by diverse groups – to suture or expose the fissures or continuities represented by such political and economic shifts makes up an equally significant feature of Africa’s postsocialist repertoire. Although the Tanzanian regime has dispensed with the broad vision and specific policies of African Socialism, CCM officials still strategically invoke ujamaa idioms and symbols to capitalize on the party’s legacy as anticolonial liberator and socialist provider. This political currency is increasingly valuable as opposition parties gain support, weakening the ruling party’s once firm grasp on power. Former government and party officials respond to this contemporary situation in varied ways – by highlighting the hybrid nature of current formations, exhibiting an unquestioned faith in ujamaa’s persistence, or cynically portraying ujamaa as a misguided endeavor of the past. Citing burgeoning popular sentiments of unease with the increasing force of South African and Chinese capital in Tanzania, the former national commissioner of ujamaa and cooperatives asserted that although the actual policy of ujamaa has ended, it survives as a residual ideal. “We are in a mixed state right now,” he said. “There are people who still talk about ujamaa and lament it. Others say, ‘Let’s move to the other side, capitalism and so forth.’ But the truth of the matter is that the majority still appreciate the ujamaa policy, although it’s not in force as it used to be.”121 By contrast, others more explicitly maintain that ujamaa is an ongoing reality and aspiration. Such a position usually defines Tanzanian socialism as an enduring set of interpersonal values rather than a specific political and economic model. According to former Mtwara Community Development officer Blandina Geugeu, “Ujamaa is not finished; it is a matter of how you tackle it.” She clarified, “The idea of ujamaa gave us Tanzanians the ability to leave behind the idea of individualism” – a tradition that she insisted lives on in norms of hospitality. For her, the developmental ideals of ujamaa were open-ended, much like the process of development itself. “People changed and they continue to change, because it is not a matter of one period; it takes time. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, still Tanzania continues to change. We have no end,” she philosophized.122 Others take up these problems in a more censorious manner, arguing that ujamaa “stopped on the way.”123

121 122 123

Interview with Athanas Stephen Kauzeni, Dar es Salaam, December 2007. Interview with Blandina Geugeu, Mtwara Town, January 2008. Interview with Mohammed Ali Sefu, Mtwara Town, January 2008.

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Makaburi Babtist Phili, a former Community Development officer whose disaffection with the government recently drove him to found a Mtwarabased peasant advocacy organization, contended that ujamaa was a failure. “Villages were supposed to have water, dispensary, roads, schools, all social services – and now when you go, you see it is not there,” he pointed out. “I think the plan was wrong itself. Because they were not careful when they were planning to organize this.”124 A similar spectrum of attitudes is apparent among villagers as they reflect on ujamaa’s legacy. Despite their sometimes biting criticism of the government and bitter frustration with local underdevelopment, many rural elders claim that even amid the difficulties and transformations of the present, ujamaa “hasn’t died yet; we still have it.”125 In this configuration, ujamaa is taken to refer to village residence and the forms of sociability and mutual assistance that it engendered, and it has little to do with more empirically measurable developmental criteria such as food security. Other elders and most younger villagers, however, are less ready to overlook immediate hardships and overt injustices to celebrate an abstract sense of local or national community. In particular, the children and grandchildren of those who moved to ujamaa villages decades ago have looser personal connections to the older imaginative and discursive framework of ujamaa, even though the world that they inhabit continues to be shaped by it. These men and women take village life for granted. Above all, they are preoccupied by the precariousness of their livelihoods and the uncertainties of their futures. Poor economic conditions in the countryside – including a shortage of microcredit for farmers – push many young men into informal migratory labor, although they are often treated harshly by authorities who still stigmatize mobility. Young women are no longer targeted by gendered developmental interventions explicitly seeking to inscribe them into domestic spaces, but they remain marginalized in other ways, as their government devotes little effort to protecting female land rights or investing in maternal health care. As a result of these and other escalating adversities, village youths are much more likely than their parents to openly express dissatisfaction with the existing Tanzanian regime.126 In this local context, the generational memory of villagization is profoundly indeterminate. At the national and international levels, too, the legacy of Tanzania’s socialist experiment remains open to contest, and the concept of ujamaa itself continues to be available for redefinition, revival, and appropriation by everyone from peasants to policy makers. ∗ ∗ ∗ 124 125 126

Interview with Makaburi Babtist Phili, Mtwara Town, February 2008. Interview with Hamisi Sadiki Mkumbange, Saloum Yusufu Chembeya, Hassan Saloum Nampungila, and Mohammed Saloum Malenga, Mdui Village, January 2008. These observations are based on interviews with youths (aged approximately seventeen to thirty years) in the three villages under study.

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At first glance, this chapter may not seem to offer much in the way of a coherent local historical narrative of ujamaa. Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe were formed in distinct ways entailing, respectively, consecutive waves of voluntary and then forced resettlement, followed by intense intravillage tensions; mass movement into smaller villages that were then aggregated into a single larger settlement; and the growth and reconfiguration of a much older rural settlement into a very large village referred to by some as a “town.” When internally disaggregated, moreover, each of these disparate case studies yields a multitude of individual memories, experiences, and judgments concerning villagization – dealing with relationships within families, between rural communities, and to a postcolonial state that was itself unevenly constituted. This heterogeneity is further complicated by the fact that rural people’s recollections of the decades preceding villagization are also full of diverse and sometimes conflicting narrative signposts. Nonetheless, when viewed through an analytical lens that is sensitive to the particular linguistic texture and empirical nuances of each oral account as well as the patterns formed by recurring details and points of emphasis in the larger collection of stories, the sources presented in this chapter start to yield a distinct historical portrait. This bigger picture, however, is defined by its complexity and ambivalence. Just as the political imaginary of ujamaa exhibited striking internal tensions – between opposing constructions of national citizenship; definitions of development; and conceptions of self-reliance, security, and familyhood – so, too, was the Tanzanian project implemented and experienced by rural people on the ground in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways. Instead of uniformly representing an authoritarian nightmare for peasants helplessly succumbing to or heroically resisting a monolithic state initiative, villagization provided opportunities to and imposed hardships on rural Southeasterners. The former included increased proximity to state services, augmented forms of mutual assistance and sociability, access to power within the political economy of newly reconfigured settlements, and novel types of independence from older generational hierarchies. The latter comprised long distances from private farms, conflict and corruption in new villages, loss of status for some elders, and disputes about land ownership that multiplied over time. Even those elders who describe villagization as an episode of destruction and loss exercised considerable agency in responding to the mandate of forced resettlement, whether in selecting their new villages or deciding if they would comply with poorly enforced village ujamaa policies after relocating. In this respect, the villagization process exhibited continuities with as much as ruptures from the longer life histories of elderly men and women in the Mtwara countryside, which were marked by repeated adjustments to both gradual and sudden changes throughout the region. When placed in the context of these previous instances of social, political, and economic turnover, villagization hardly appears to be an unprecedented Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Pittsburgh, on 26 Feb 2020 at 14:02:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316221679.006

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modern disruption thrust onto a static or traditional rural space. Faced with the constant variable of livelihood insecurity, throughout the earlier decades of the twentieth century, southeastern Tanzanians had become adept at maximizing their personal security through investment in multiple social networks and economic outlets. For many rural people, such survival mechanisms entailed elective migration or resettlement, although others involved with the region’s emerging cashew economy pursued increasing residential stabilization as an avenue to economic advancement. In both cases, men and women often treated marriage as a provisional partnership and family as an elastic entity. During and after villagization, rural people continued to adopt such strategies, generally maintaining a heretofore unacknowledged degree of flexibility in adapting – and adapting to – official policy and coping with material hardships following the fragmentation of Tanzania’s national development project. This versatility and resourcefulness operated in the cerebral and affective realms in addition to the concrete world of physical action. As it has homed in on Mtwara’s villages, this book has not left the world behind; likewise, as it has moved from the initial stages of ujamaa’s inception to the later stages of its implementation, it has not followed a linear trajectory leading from the creative envisioning of ujamaa to its mindless enactment. In fact, my analysis has shown that ujamaa was imagined anew as it was practiced and continues to be reimagined in its wake. Over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, the utopian vision of Tanzanian socialism was actively reinvented in diverse ways by illiterate farmers in Mtwara as much as by government leaders in Dar es Salaam. Recognizing this dialectic between the discursive construction and material application of ujamaa – between ideology and action – helps us see the connections between the theory and practice of ujamaa as myriad and mutually influential, not defined by a single overarching contradiction between two supposedly distinct poles: theory at the start and practice at the finish.

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Conclusion

The early twenty-first century marks the end of the first fifty years of political independence for the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. Starting with Ghana’s golden jubilee festivities in 2007, official anniversary celebrations have skipped across the continent in a staggered rhythm reflecting the sequential timeline of decolonization. Like all anniversaries, these events share a somewhat arbitrary quality, privileging the half-century mark over other potentially more meaningful measures of change. Yet it may be precisely because many of these national birthday parties do not coincide with any tangible, visible milestones in their citizens’ everyday lives that they have provided an exceptionally poignant opportunity for collective reflection and reckoning for people across sub-Saharan Africa. In 2008, the international press reported that the slogan “Fifty Years of Poverty” had been taken up by many residents of Guinea’s capital, Conakry, as a check on the spirit of pride and enthusiasm suffusing official assessments of the country’s five decades of independence from French rule.1 In 2010, car bombs set off in the midst of independence anniversary celebrations killed a dozen people in Nigeria’s capital; a militant organization from the country’s oil-rich but underdeveloped southeastern region claimed responsibility for the attacks, asserting that there is “nothing worth celebrating after fifty years of failure.”2 Though coupled with equally strong expressions of patriotism and gratification in these same national contexts, such statements convey an undeniable sentiment of resentment, frustration, and pessimism clouding popular evaluations of the postcolonial past. “What precisely has changed in sub-Saharan Africa since decolonization?” these voices ask. What has become of the promise of independence? 1 2

“Guineans Mark ‘50 Years of Poverty,’” BBC World News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ africa/7647962.stm. “Nigeria Marks 50 Years of Freedom,” BBC World News, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-africa-11450734.

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Tanzania, too, has seen a recent explosion in public debate about the trajectory of postcolonial development, precipitated by the country’s fifty-year anniversary as well as the emergence of new political and economic forms in this corner of East Africa. Starting in 2012, residents of Mtwara positioned themselves at the forefront of this often acrimonious dialogue, once again catapulting the seemingly marginal region into a central position in national politics. That year, following the discovery of natural gas reserves in Mtwara and during a desperate nationwide electricity shortage, the Tanzanian government announced that it would construct a pipeline to funnel the gas to Dar es Salaam. Officials justified the pipeline, funded by a Chinese loan, by arguing that Dar es Salaam – unlike the Southeast – already had the appropriate facilities to convert the gas to electricity and upload it to the national power grid. The fact that Mtwara was to receive a meager 0.3 percent of the total income generated by the project was harder to explain. In reaction, thousands of protesters from the Southeast staged a claim of resource sovereignty against their own government, with a delegation calling themselves the Mtwara Elders traveling to the national capital to publicly demand that the gas be processed and converted within Mtwara. Simultaneous rallies and riots in Mtwara exposed a rawer strain of popular rage and met with an aggressive show of official force when the army used live ammunition against protesters, leading to several citizen deaths. Ultimately, despite some minor concessions and in the face of harsh criticism by opposition parties, the CCM-led government insisted on moving forward with the pipeline’s construction. Nonetheless, the Mtwara protests, coinciding as they did with a wider global surge of popular direct action against governments felt to have betrayed their citizens, captured national and international attention because of their apparent spontaneity and intensity. Though very much the product of a particular twenty-firstcentury moment and ostensibly concerned with the specific issue of resource extraction, the turmoil in Mtwara brought older and deeper questions about citizenship and development to the surface of national politics in ways that both suppressed and revived the historical dynamics outlined in this book. Residents of Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe were likely among the angry crowds amassing in the streets of the regional capital in 2013. Evidence of the gas rush and the imminent shift of Mtwara’s position in overlapping national and global political economies that it entailed were apparent at the time of my research several years earlier. Amid regular power outages and ongoing complaints about the poor condition of regional roads, changes were brewing in the residential enclave at the edge of Mtwara Town, on its Shangani peninsula. The settlement – containing spacious homes, gardens, and a swimming pool – formerly housed employees of the Finnish RIPS project. In 2008, dusty framed posters of idyllic Scandinavian landscapes were still hanging on the walls of the cobweb-filled clubhouse, but employees of a Canadian company engaged in natural gas extraction off the coast

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were bringing Shangani to life again by taking up residence in the homes abandoned by RIPS development workers. Just outside of town, reports of teams of Chinese technicians searching for gas deposits circulated. In Nanguruwe, several elderly villagers complained that a group of Chinese men had appeared in the area the previous year “to research oil.” In doing so, they protested, the surveyors trampled or destroyed a number of local people’s cassava plots, “creating disorder.” Affected farmers were to receive compensation for the damage – even filling out paperwork to do so – but had not yet obtained the money. “They have eaten! But we haven’t eaten anything,” the farmers decried.3 The stark vernacular phrasing of their accusation registers the injustice represented by the encounter and captures the sense of moral outrage inherent in regional dissent against the gas pipeline project that followed. Though rooted in contemporary conditions, such local expressions of indignation recall older currents of frustration with Tanzania’s uneven development and contain traces of ujamaa’s emphasis on mutual obligation and aversion to exploitation.4 The political and economic shifts associated with the Mtwara gas rush are not unique within or to Tanzania. They accompany a broader set of neoliberal transformations across the continent, which are alternately mobilized as evidence of developmental success or proof of developmental failure within their respective national contexts. Many African governments engage in selling land and minerals to foreign parties under poorly regulated arrangements; proponents celebrate such foreign investment as a boon to national economic growth, whereas critics argue that these deals amount to a return to late-nineteenth-century concessionary colonialism.5 Much like other regimes implicated in these types of transactions, the Tanzanian government has invoked the welfarist logic of early postcolonial policy to defend the displacement of rural people by land grabs, and it has resurrected 1960s discourses of Afro-Asian solidarity to legitimize connections to foreign investors that increasingly hail from the former Third World. Popular reception of these phenomena likewise tends to involve older socialist-era idioms and attitudes. For instance, a substantial postapartheid influx of white South African capital to Tanzania has provoked a surge of anti–South African sentiment by citizens who vividly recall their country’s investment in

3 4

5

Interview with Hamisi Hassan Mponda, Danisi Hamisi, and Selemani Usi Nandapa, Nanguruwe Village, February 2008. A number of massive corruption scandals among elected national officials have also inspired nostalgic invocations of the Arusha Declaration’s strict leadership code. On corruption involving the electricity sector, see Michael Degani, “Emergency Power: Time, Ethics, and Electricity in Postsocialist Tanzania,” in Sarah Strauss, Stephanie Rupp, and Thomas Love, eds., Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013), 177–92. For an eloquent statement of the latter position, see Ferguson, Global Shadows, 207.

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the prolonged anti-apartheid struggle.6 During my fieldwork in Mtwara, this trend manifested in the form of local rumors about the malicious ambitions of the new South African owner of Mikindani’s former Kabisela sisal plantation, which ceased operation in the late 1990s. Recently, he had erected an electric fence around the perimeter of the enormous compound after clashing with and eventually evicting farmers living on the outskirts of the otherwise deserted estate. In fact, my research assistant and I discovered that the owner was an Italian expatriate seeking to convert the property into a game reserve for wealthy tourists. The strength of popular suspicion about his South African origin, in this context, revealed the power of older anticolonial ideologies to shape subjective responses to the neoliberal formations of the present. Echoes of ujamaa discourse are also discernible in new policy initiatives. The most notable of these is the Tanzanian government’s drive to promote agricultural modernization through Green Revolution technologies and private enterprise. Announced in 2009 by President Jakaya Kikwete, this national development campaign is called Kilimo Kwanza (“Farming First”) in an obvious nod to the agrarian focus of ujamaa. Kilimo Kwanza’s numerous opponents contend that it is exclusively oriented toward the shortterm commercial interests of middle- and large-scale agrobusiness and that it threatens the livelihoods of smallholder farmers by ignoring their desperate need for microcredit, damaging the environment, and encouraging land grabbing. Historically sensitive critiques stress the superficiality of the government’s rhetorical nod to ujamaa ideology, pointing out that a campaign called Wakulima Kwanza (“Farmers First”) would be more consistent with Nyerere’s humanistic outlook and commitment to popular welfare. Ujamaa discourse has also resurfaced in a similarly selective manner in relation to the multinational Mtwara Development Corridor. Inaugurated in 2004, this initiative links four neighboring countries in a stated commitment to joint investment in infrastructure, conservation, and economic integration within the impoverished, contiguous areas of northern Malawi and Mozambique, northeastern Zambia, and southern Tanzania. Although Tanzanian officials often describe the corridor in terms that evoke the Cinderella metaphor – as an initiative that will “open up” isolated hinterlands – they also package it in older Pan-Africanist idioms. “Our people along this corridor, in all the four countries, are in reality one people, an African people, separated only by colonial borders that we inherited,” then Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa announced on the project’s inception.7 However, many argue that the corridor seeks transnational integration on terms 6 7

Schroeder, Africa after Apartheid. “Statement by His Excellency Benjamin William Mkapa, President of the United Republic of Tanzania, at the Mtwara Development Corridor Summer (Lilongwe, Malawi, December 15, 2004),” 2011, http://www.tanzania.go.tz.

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favorable to outside parties and warn that it will only facilitate more efficient and exploitative resource extraction – ultimately linking southeastern Tanzania to neighboring territories on the basis of a common, deepening underdevelopment. ∗ ∗ ∗ The events and policies just described have stimulated lively, sometimes raucous discussion about the recent past among African citizens. For historians of Africa, likewise, the present moment is an especially generative symbolic juncture, associated with the new availability of the postcolonial period as a legitimate field of historical inquiry and a series of theoretical and methodological shifts in the wake of the “cultural” or “linguistic” turn. In this situation, historians confronted with incipient public narratives about the success or failure of young African nation-states face the challenge of registering the contemporary salience of this polarized debate without becoming intellectually imprisoned within it. Although the topic of national development has preoccupied Africanist social scientists for the past several decades, scholarly comprehension of the multiple social, political, and economic processes associated with postcolonial African development remains remarkably limited by this binary impulse. This is especially true of the Tanzanian case, which has inspired an extensive literature that has sought to catalog the achievements and shortcomings of the ujamaa project without first adequately grasping its underlying nature. By revisiting ujamaa using novel conceptual and methodological approaches, I have aimed in this book to reframe and enhance our understanding of the politics of national development in Tanzania – and in Africa and the postcolonial world more broadly. In particular, I have highlighted three axes of connection between different dimensions or sites of ujamaa that are often treated as distinct from or collapsed into one another: political imagination and practice, the individual village and the wider world, and the early postcolonial past and the twenty-first-century present. These analytical linkages are not linear conduits for causal forces flowing in a single direction from one point to another. Rather, such categorical, spatial, and temporal connections are multiple and reciprocal. Recognizing this has allowed me to bridge the gap between ideology and action, the micro and the macro, the historical and the contemporary. It has also enabled me to recombine these putatively discrete realms into a synthetic picture that captures the dialectical dynamics internal to the ujamaa project – and how we approach it – as a whole.8 The first innovation of this book has been to interrogate, not indiscriminately adopt, the analytical categories that are conventionally used to describe or make sense of ujamaa. The term developmentalism – perhaps the most ubiquitous label currently applied to the ujamaa project – carries with 8

Krause, “Recombining Micro/Macro.”

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it a host of assumptions and connotations that do not fit the complex realities of the Tanzanian case and thus obscure more than they illuminate. In common usage, developmentalism posits a generic equivalence or congruence among all state-led efforts to transform the existing social order to improve people’s lives, implying that they are uniformly top-down, technocratic, and doomed to failure. The term also intimates that all such initiatives are fundamentally derivative of Western or colonial models. Accordingly, premising an investigation of Tanzanian socialism on its “developmentalist” nature entails projecting ujamaa’s ultimate outcomes onto its origins and evolution as well as grafting a set of simplistic conceptions about ideology and power onto the varied actors who participated in the ujamaa venture. By contrast, I have endeavored to root my analysis in the realities of 1960s and early-1970s Tanzania itself. This approach has revealed a historical landscape defined by interlinked ideological and material contradictions that transcend fixed distinctions between imported and indigenous political thought, state control and grassroots initiative, and the centralization and decentralization of power. Rewriting a decentered account of the larger decolonizing, Cold War world back into the story of ujamaa – and vice versa – also demonstrates that ujamaa is best understood beyond the binary of socialism and capitalism. Recent scholarship on postsocialism has begun to question the received assumptions and conceptual artifacts of the Cold War that still structure much intellectual inquiry, showing that in actual practice, socialism and capitalism were overlapping, not mutually exclusive, political forms.9 I have further argued that philosophies of development in the 1960s world did not simply break down along the lines of Cold War geopolitical divisions. My purpose in doing so has not been to dissolve all distinctions between various approaches to development within a single overarching genre of “developmentalism” but, conversely, to restore the plural and sometimes indeterminate meanings of development, especially in the postcolonial or Third World. Many different channels of developmental thought converged in the loose continental formation of African Socialism, which provided a repertoire from which leaders such as Nyerere drew (and into which they fed) in assembling their own national development projects. At their core, African Socialist initiatives like ujamaa were flexible and hybrid, much like the local social formations that they sought to reshape. Acknowledging the protean but distinctive character of African Socialism involves taking Tanzanian political thought seriously. Rather than reading instrumentalism into ujamaa discourse, I have found creativity, pragmatism, and the imprint of the colonial past as well as a larger Cold War political culture; instead of perceiving ideological incoherence, I have discerned complexity. This position does not entail denying or attempting to 9

Raman and West, “Poetries of the Past,” 5.

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resolve ujamaa’s inconsistencies. On the contrary, it fully acknowledges and even highlights these internal tensions but establishes a relative logic and order to them. In other words, my analysis lends a coherence to ujamaa’s contradictions and interprets the latter as illustrative of the patterns of ideological friction internal to national development projects across the postcolonial world. These tensions of national development include (but are not limited to) competing tendencies toward restoring and reforming tradition, promoting transnational solidarity and celebrating nationalist identity, consolidating and dispersing state power, prioritizing militarism and emphasizing social welfare, practicing ideological and material diversification and claiming self-sufficiency, fearing and embracing technocratic bureaucracy, and positing human equality and reinforcing gender divisions. In Tanzania, these tensions were organized around the conceptual anchors of ujamaa – self-reliance, security, and familyhood – that accommodated diverse meanings in theory and generated opposing impulses in practice. Among other things, self-reliance could be understood as a strategy or goal, an individual or collective principle, and a call for local austerity or solidarity. Security could signify military integrity or social welfare, which broke down into either universal or gendered responsibilities. Familyhood alternately connoted discrete nuclear family units and an expansive network of extended kinship, the closed form of the nation and a fluid type of transnational political community. These contradictions and others were apparent in the multiple ways in which state officials, youth militants, and rural people engaged with the ujamaa vision through their interactions with outside parties and one another during villagization. Such relations reflected an uneven distribution of power and thus did not add up to a neutral postcolonial encounter between the Tanzanian state and its rural citizens.10 Neither can they be summarized according to tropes of authoritarianism or popular resistance. Much like its colonial predecessor, the postcolonial Tanzanian state was characterized by limited resources, internal fractures, and mixed motives. Moreover, popular experiences of villagization were distinguished by their diversity. Power in the ujamaa context was relational and shifting, shaped by a range of interpersonal encounters as well as larger structural factors rather than invisibly located in some totalizing ideological regime or, conversely, wielded by petty official tyrants or oppositional subaltern heroes. As ujamaa evolved, certain versions or elements of the project ascended over others. Thus, it is possible to discern a broad arc from what was initially an expansive and multifaceted imaginary to what eventually became a more restrictive and rigid endeavor. However, despite this overall trend, a 10

As van Beusekom writes of the Office du Niger project, “The participants in these crosscutting negotiations were not on equal footing.” Van Beusekom, Negotiating Development, xxx.

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fundamental ambivalence – a dialectical friction between opposing strands of ujamaa – persisted; earlier utopian impulses were not entirely extinguished. Instead of identifying a rift between the theory and practice of ujamaa, I have found persistent tensions internal to both. Given this, it is hardly surprising that both scholars searching for generic developmental tendencies and those pursuing radical alternatives have so readily found what they seek in ujamaa. My aim has been not to wholly reinforce or diminish the insights of either the developmentalist or exceptionalist argument but to integrate them with the opposing positions and their supporting evidence. By highlighting these contrasting threads and braiding them back into my inquiry, I have sought to capture the knotty realities of ujamaa as well as illuminate the tensions of national development in general. The second conceptual intervention of my book has been to take up an explicit inquiry of space as it relates to ujamaa. I have focused on four different spatial scales to better reflect on, not reify, each: the global, the national, the regional, and the local. None of these frames assumes precedence over the others, and all of them are inherently contingent. As Jacques Revel asserts, there is no “absolute vision of what is micro and what is macro”; “these are relative notions, and what is interesting is what is in between.”11 Although each spatial unit bleeds into the others, highlighting individual realms allows for the excavation of different perspectives on ujamaa. This type of analysis, in turn, requires and facilitates “a greater flexibility by the researcher and a greater openness for a variety of methods,” including mediation among a range of written and oral sources and between the cultural historian’s attention to discourse and the social historian’s focus on empirical process.12 What kinds of insights does such examination yield? Situating the Tanzanian case in the global context of the 1960s and early 1970s exposes the interplay between foreign and domestic forces that inspired the ujamaa vision and determined its uneven course and outcomes. Attention to decolonization struggles, Pan-Africanist activism, Cold War threats, changing global economic conditions, and emerging international developmental coalitions denaturalizes the national as an exclusive explanatory variable. Comparative analysis across national boundaries renders visible a heretofore largely unrecognized continental repertoire of African Socialism, and directly interrogating the Tanzanian national unit reveals a tension between inclusive and exclusionary dynamics in early postcolonial politics. Taking up the subnational region as an object of inquiry sheds light on continuities and ruptures in Mtwara’s production as an underdeveloped periphery, showing how ujamaa both interrupted and deepened this pattern of marginalization. This regional frame also foregrounds a dialectic between popular mobility 11 12

Revel, “History: Past, Present, and Future,” 69. Von Oppen and Freitag, “Translocality,” 19.

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(via migration and relocation) and settlement (corresponding to the rise of a cashew export economy) throughout the Mtwara countryside. Further grounding the global and national forces so often treated as abstract within the space of the local challenges an understanding of the bounded locality as a world apart, while registering the intricacy of social, political, and economic networks within and around each ujamaa village. From the vantage point of a Mtwara village, the Tanzanian state and socialist policy itself did not seem stable, unitary, and hegemonic. As the multivalent ujamaa project landed on the ground, it was refracted through the matrix of local formations and bent into new forms by rural people. Whereas James Scott claims that villagization “destroyed existing spatial arrangements and introduced new ones,” as Tania Li puts it, the gridded layouts and implied power structures of ujamaa villages came to overlap and mix with, not displace, earlier spatial orders, which were themselves multilayered and defined by ambivalence.13 Neither did connections to the national state or global capitalist and development economies sever existing social ties to produce thoroughly interpellated subjects of novel discursive regimes, as scholars wielding theories of governmentality might suggest. Local social structures and subjectivities were flexible enough to accommodate multiple logics, even though new points of friction or closure emerged through this interaction. Synthesizing the aforementioned scales or spaces elucidates developmental dynamics common to ujamaa as a whole. Ideological and material diversification – an active effort to maximize connections as resources to draw on in times of need – manifests as a strategy of both the Tanzanian state (broadly conceived) and individual rural people. Each adopted this approach to combat real and sometimes perceived vulnerability, although economic diversification turned out to be crippling for the state and enabling for its citizens – largely because of the former’s inability to “subject external relations to the logic of an internal development that is independent of them,” as Samir Amin puts it.14 An ambivalent embrace of settlement and mobility is equally apparent in the political imaginary of ujamaa and the concrete actions of average citizens in the southeastern Tanzanian countryside. At both levels, too, the oft-presumed separation between the “private sphere” of domestic and family life and the “public sphere” of political life decisively collapses. Noting this inextricability of the private from the public further dismantles the image of an omniscient state hovering above its citizens at a high altitude, manipulating those located below. The Tanzanian state and its citizens are better understood as made through and blurring into one another. Similarly, decentralization and centralization are dialectically entwined impulses rather than antithetical processes. Finally, the local and global, internal and external dynamics that shaped ujamaa are more or less 13 14

Li, “Beyond ‘the State,’” 387. Amin, Delinking, 66.

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mutually embedded. Recognizing this helps clarify the relationship between the village and the world in the years since ujamaa’s decline. Conceptions of globalization in the neoliberal or postsocialist era that depict “outside” global forces intruding on individual states or citizens “inside” nations are less instructive than approaches that perceive the interaction between spatial fields to be historically rooted, actively mediated, and relatively constant.15 Although the nature and results of these linkages vary according to time and place, the fact of their existence does not. This leads to the third intervention of my book, which has been to expand the temporal framework in which we situate ujamaa. I have pushed the scope of my analysis further back and further forward in time than have most other studies of ujamaa, exploring consistencies across and changes between the colonial, early postcolonial, and postsocialist periods. Connecting these multiple pasts to multiple presents need not entail projecting the realities of the latter onto the possibilities of the former, thus endorsing teleological explanations of fluctuating processes that lead in many different directions. Nor should it involve naturalizing uninterrupted continuities between eras, therefore discounting human agency and historical contingency while ignoring the ways in which substantial social, political, or economic changes can disguise themselves. Likewise, positing absolute ruptures between the past and the present runs the risk of oversimplification and conceals ongoing legacies that manifest in new and sometimes surprisingly reconfigured forms. Ujamaa’s outcomes were both contingent and structurally informed, influenced by colonial precedents and early postcolonial realities. They were not reducible to a narrative of failure. Despite the dramatic political and economic shifts of recent years, traces of the Tanzanian socialist experiment are still discernible in the present. In enlarging the temporal scope of my inquiry, I have sought to move beyond understanding time neutrally – “as a simple and immutable container within which social processes occur,” as David Harvey has written about conventional treatments of space.16 Instead, one of the driving questions of this book asks how the conditions and mythologies of particular presents determine how the past is materially accessed and subjectively conceived. Too little contemporary scholarship on ujamaa, African Socialism, and postcolonial development in Africa turns its analytical gaze inward to consider how the methodologies through which it approaches the past and the conclusions that it uses them to reinforce might themselves be products of specific historical forces and reflections of broader political moments. Although critiques of ujamaa as derivative, incoherent, or destructive are as old as the project itself, in an earlier era – the 1960s and 1970s – such analyses had to contend with more positive, forgiving, or at least measured 15 16

Von Oppen and Freitag, “Translocality.” Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 77.

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evaluations, and they were often imbued with a spirit of genuine political engagement. That is, many scholars aimed to understand how the Tanzanian socialist experiment functioned so as to determine how it might have been improved – or at least as part of a meaningful effort to establish a workable developmental path forward for Africa’s young nations. After a long relative silence on this topic, a new wave of scholarship emerged in the 1990s and gathered momentum in the early years of this century, taking a very different tone. Most recent assessments of ujamaa villagization seek to detail how the Tanzanian state conceived of and acted on its citizens in a technocratic, aggressive, or foolhardy manner, in ways that resemble the worst elements of colonial development policy. It is not a coincidence that in the intervening period between these two phases of scholarship – the 1980s – structural adjustment policies gutted the capacities of African states, deepened the impoverishment of populations across the continent, and reduced the early independence era’s optimistic expectations of progress to a distant and seemingly irrelevant memory. During this time, the notion of substantive African development in the future increasingly took on the appearance of unrealistic fantasy, as did the idea of possible alternatives located in the past. The impact of this shift on recent studies of ujamaa and similar projects is apparent in three ways. First, the sense of hopelessness generated by the dismal outcomes of early postcolonial development efforts permeates newer scholarship, which is characterized by an air of decided detachment. This manifests as both a lack of self-consciousness about the simplicity of identifying political errors in hindsight and a reluctance to propose more productive developmental approaches in the future. Judging from the current consensus, such approaches might well be impossible. Second, the ascendance of what James Ferguson calls “scientific capitalism” – which renders complex issues of poverty and inequality abstract by confronting them in an “economistic, technicizing style” – has been indirectly registered in scholarship about development in Africa and in general.17 In identifying this depoliticizing logic everywhere and eliminating a space for imagining development outside of “developmentalism,” many scholars have themselves effectively abandoned the political as well. They have also, in universally condemning large-scale state-led development initiatives for adhering to a totalizing, simplifying “developmentalist” logic, fallen victim to a tendency toward overgeneralization and the flattening of contradiction in their own analyses. Finally, much recent scholarship has reproduced – though perhaps unconsciously – a neoliberal narrative of the state as villain, even if it looks not to a reified notion of the market but to an often equally romanticized conception of localized grassroots initiative as an alternative. There are, of course, notable exceptions to these trends – Ferguson’s writing about African Socialism 17

Ferguson, Global Shadows, 71.

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being one prominent example – but for the most part, this mode of disengaged and disapproving critique has definitively limited how ujamaa has come to be studied. By contrast, scholarship on both an earlier and more recent period – in the fields of colonial and postsocialist studies – has adopted more nuanced and reflexive methods of inquiry and thus might serve as a useful model for analysts of early postcolonial development in several ways. Many historians who returned to an investigation of colonialism in Africa in the 1990s began by pointing out the blind spots of an earlier tradition of nationalist historiography that arose in the 1960s and 1970s. This previous generation of scholars, they showed, had overemphasized the extent of colonial power and oversimplified the nature of colonial ideology, partly to sustain a narrative of heroic anticolonialism so as to bolster contemporaneous efforts at nation building. Although these aims were worthy, the resulting accounts were often distorted. By revisiting this history from a greater distance and with an eye to complexity, much of the newer literature found colonialism to be a fractured, contradictory, and uneven formation that varied across time and space, rather than a stable, consistent system of absolute exploitation and control. Similarly, the best anthropological literature on postsocialism frankly interrogates contemporary mythologies about the coherence of past socialist orders, which also promote a caricatured view of the present. In sites such as the former USSR, narratives of capitalist triumphalism and nostalgic loss assign different value judgments to socialism to legitimize their current outlooks. However, both positions essentialize prior social, political, and economic realities and overstate the extent to which the postsocialist present stages a clean break from what preceded it. Scholars of postsocialism have accordingly begun to excavate “economic and political practices that unsettle easy categorization of discrete socialist or capitalist political economies” and question notions of “linear transitions within which the landscape is made afresh,” complicating both the post- and the socialism within the term postsocialism.18 If we, too, historically contextualize contemporary scholarly assumptions about “developmentalism,” we are better able to dismantle and move beyond them to obtain a clearer view of the past. Discarding such overly abstracted models of ideology and power enhances our ability to perceive and make sense of the deep tensions internal to early postcolonial development projects like ujamaa. Doing so also help us discern the contradictory character of past and ongoing transitions from colonial to socialist to postsocialist eras. Highlighting the dialectical tensions of ujamaa is not the same as uncritically endorsing the project or acting as an apologist for TANU and its defenders. On the contrary, as Frederick Cooper writes, “preserving the 18

Raman and West, “Poetries of the Past,” 14.

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sense of ambiguity and ambivalence” in past political formations helps us recognize, “in the present as much as the past, the possibility of alternative political goals and strategies.”19 As a utopian project, ujamaa had to contend with the inevitable dilemmas of any attempt to fundamentally restructure the existing social, political, and economic order. These include the durability of preexisting institutions and practices and the impossibility of coordinating large-scale democratic transformation without creating or reproducing certain types of hierarchy. For these reasons, all radical political visions “are inherently dangerous.”20 Yet should this lead us to dismiss the “will to improve” on a large scale altogether? To take such a position, I maintain, is to admit defeat in the face of other, often more pernicious forces, such as the increasingly extractive forms of capitalism taking root in contemporary Africa. As the villagers of Mtwara know all too well, the problem of underdevelopment remains as urgent today as ever before, but it cannot be effectively tackled without a willingness to imagine alternatives and countenance working through the institutions of the state, however flawed. In this spirit, this book is intended not merely as a cautionary tale but as a contribution to current and future development interventions in places like Tanzania. I have written it out of a conviction that understanding the prior possibilities, problems, and implications of national development conditions our ability to make sense of and respond to the challenges of the present.

19 20

Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint,” 195. Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash, “Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia,” 13.

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Index

African National Congress (ANC) (South Africa), 40, 51 African National Congress (ANC) (Tanganyika), 60–1, 85, 87 African Socialism aftermath of, 5, 13, 223 conferences/meetings, 27, 41 in contemporary scholarship, 42, 236, 237 definition/significance of, 3, 4, 9 and gender, 79–80 and nationalism, 69, 121 and Pan-Africanism, 39, 41 and refugees, 65, 124 Tanzanian version of, 32, 68 transnational repertoire of, 21, 29, 37, 43–4, 78, 222, 232, 234 as utopianism, 42–3, 75 and the village, 44, 49 and the world, 28, 69 Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), 22, 56 Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), 63, 68 agricultural extension (see also bwana shamba, Ministry of Agriculture), 17, 100, 146, 172 Algeria, 40, 51–2 All-African People’s Conference (AAPC), 40 Amin, Idi, 84, 95, 123 Arab(s), 49, 54, 132–3 Arab–Israeli War (1967), 49, 57 archives, 6, 18, 34–5, 177, 209 Arnautoglu Development College, 82 Arrighi, Giovanni, 12 Arusha, 71, 98, 107, 114

Arusha Declaration in global context, 111 ideological content of, 31–3, 60, 64, 114 implementation of (in Mtwara), 94, 98, 143, 145, 146, 214 implementation of (nationally), 70, 74, 97–8, 105, 122, 209 and postsocialist nostalgia, 229 in villagers’ oral accounts/personal histories, 98, 181, 184, 185 Banda, Hastings, 89 bega-kwa-bega (“shoulder-to-shoulder”) farming, 157–9, 194, 196, 197 Belgium, 62, 155 bibi maendeleo (see also Community Development), 105, 109 Boy Scouts, 82, 86, 89, 90, 94 British Empire/colonialism, see Great Britain/United Kingdom Bryceson, Derek, 51 Buhare Home Economics Institute, 107, 108, 111, 113 Builders Brigade, 50–1, 90 Bukoba, 140 Burundi, 7, 65, 95, 125 Butiama, 97 bwana maendeleo (see also Community Development), 109 bwana shamba (see also agricultural extension), 138, 162, 198 Cabral, Amilcar, 95 Canada, 57, 163, 169, 228

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Index

cashews cultivation and marketing before ujamaa, 71–2, 129, 137–41 cultivation and marketing since the late 1970s, 1, 12, 170, 171–3, 218, 221 drop in production after villagization, 23, 130, 160–3, 169 farming/farmers in the historiography of ujamaa, 6, 18, 175, 210 and patterns of settlement and mobility, 72, 130, 135, 140, 144, 160, 226, 235 pre-ujamaa farms and villagization, 23, 24, 160, 177, 183–4, 191, 202 production and developmental assessments, 150, 156 transportation of, 151 and ujamaa village funds, 199 chalalo, 47, 141, 201 Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), 35, 107, 183, 217, 223, 228 Chiang Kai-shek, 53 China (People’s Republic of) (see also Maoism) aid to/training of Africans, 23, 40, 51–2, 62 diplomatic relations with Zanzibar, 63 gender and socialism, 117 ideological/symbolic influence on ujamaa, 21, 52–4, 59, 83, 90, 98, 101, 150 postsocialist-era, 5, 25, 222, 223, 228, 229 TAZARA, 57–9 and Third World socialism, 17, 29 Christianity (see also Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, Ndanda mission station) Catholicism among Mozambican migrants, 18, 194 and medical care, 202 mission stations, 48–9, 54, 86, 109, 180 schools/education, 71, 90, 103, 107, 110, 133, 198, 203, 219 “Cinderella” trope, 22, 142, 148–9, 151, 153, 175, 230 Coast Region, 109, 123, 169 Cold War aftermath of, 5, 24 and analytical/ideological bipolarities/binaries, 7, 16, 29, 69, 222, 232 Cold War political culture, 22, 34, 37, 63, 67–9, 80, 91, 124, 217, 232 and communism, 9 and the Congo, 62 and foreign aid, 31, 111, 163

influence on/importance for Tanzanian history, 3, 6, 12, 18, 28, 69, 76, 78, 128, 232, 234 in Maoist thought, 59 and national security, 68, 127, 218 and national sovereignty/self-reliance, 28, 56 and settlement-mobility dialectic in political imaginaries, 70 Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1940), 81 Commonwealth (British), 57 Community Development (see also bibi maendeleo, bwana maendeleo, Ministry of Rural Development) Division of (national), 17, 22, 76, 103, 104, 105, 109–10, 113, 114, 120 oral accounts/personal histories of Community Development Officers (CDOs), 23–4, 99–100, 106–9, 114, 223–4 in the Southeast/Mtwara, 105–6, 109, 164, 205 Conference of Independent African States (CIAS), 40 Congo, 7, 62–3, 64, 65–6, 67–8 Congress Party (Malawi) Youth League, 89 Convention People’s Party (CPP), 51 Convention People’s Party (CPP) Youth League, 89 cooperatives (agricultural), 48, 137, 140, 161–2, 196 Cuba, 29, 40, 51, 62, 63, 66, 111, 118 cultural turn, 13, 231 Cunningham, Griff, 72 Czechoslovakia, 50 Dar es Salaam (see also University of Dar es Salaam) archives and records, 18, 19 cosmopolitan intellectual scene, 13 and cultural policing, 101 Dar es Salaam University College, 61 as host of liberation movements, 40, 65 infrastructural connections to the Southeast (see also Southern Link road), 129, 142, 148, 151, 152, 171, 228 and Kivukoni College, 19, 27 as national center, 145, 150, 152, 155, 163, 168, 226 and National Service, 96, 97 and participatory politics, 75

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Index and Rural Integrated Development Programmes, 169 rural migrants, 82, 84, 171, 174, 190 and security consciousness, 95 and the TAZARA, 57 and women’s development initiatives, 104, 114 and youth vigilantism, 79 Denmark, 155, 169 developmentalism, 13–7, 29, 42, 75, 76, 79, 165, 168, 231–2, 234, 237–8 Dodoma (see also Operation Dodoma), 18, 71, 72, 73, 152, 155 East African Common Market, 38 East African Common Services Organisation, 38 East African Community, 39 East African Federation, 38–9 Egypt, 29, 52, 55, 56, 59 Ethiopia, 29, 44, 71, 101, 122, 130, 216 Fabian socialism, 49 Finland (see also Rural Integrated Project Support, or RIPS), 168–70, 218, 228 food security/insecurity, 22, 103, 112–3, 140, 171, 212, 217, 221, 224 France/French Empire, 10, 16, 39, 227 Freedom From Hunger Campaign (1963), 110 Frente de Libertac¸ao ˜ de Moc¸ambique (FRELIMO) liberation struggle, 22–3, 66, 95, 218 and socialist villagization, 72 Tanzanian solidarity with, 40, 51, 126, 217 Gandhi, Indira, 111 Gandhi, Mohandas, 8, 55 German colonialism (in Tanganyika), 2, 6, 132–4, 136 Germany, East (German Democratic Republic, or GDR), 7, 50, 56, 63 Germany, West (Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG), 7, 56–7, 155, 169 Ghana African Socialism in, 9, 17, 29, 39–40, 64 anticolonial activism, 40, 41, 52 cultural policing, 101 national development policy, 44, 46, 188 paramilitary/youth service institutions, 50–1, 89, 90 postsocialist-era, 227

259

preventive detention/labor relations/ democratic space, 61 governmentality, 13, 16, 235 Great Britain/United Kingdom (see also Commonwealth) archives, 6, 35 army mutiny in East Africa (1964), 63 British colonialism in Africa (see also Indirect Rule), 8, 16–7, 35–6, 45–6, 79, 81, 86 British colonialism/colonial era in Mtwara, 12, 22, 47, 71–2, 82, 84–5, 86–7, 105, 114–7, 129, 133–42 British colonialism/colonial era in Tanganyika (see also Indirect Rule), 6, 21, 46–7, 53–4, 81–9, 102–3, 127, 137, 138, 150, 156, 216 British East Africa, 38 British Empire, 2, 45 Cold War-era diplomatic relations/geopolitics, 7, 57, 59 developmental aid to Tanzania, 169–70 Green Revolution, 146, 223, 230 Groundnut Scheme, 137, 141, 142, 151, 187 Guevara, Che, 62 Guinea African Socialism in, 9, 29, 39, 40, 42, 79, 118, 130, 215 anticolonialism, 40, 41, 95 Cold War-era diplomatic relations, 56 cultural policing, 101 democratic space/Teacher’s Plot, 61 national development policy, 46, 124 paramilitary/youth service institutions, 89, 90, 95 postsocialist-era, 227 Guinea-Bissau, 95 Hallstein Doctrine, 56 high modernism, 14, 79 Histoire Crois´ee, 21 home economics, 103–5, 107–13, 156 Hungary, 50 Ibbott, Ralph, 48–9 India (see also South Asians) cashew imports, 139 food insecurity, 111 Indian traders, 133, 138 nationalism, 36, 120 postsocialist-era, 223

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Index

India (cont.) and Third World socialism, 17, 29 and the village as political model, 8, 45, 55 Indian Ocean, 2, 129, 133, 139, 171, 174, 216 Indirect Rule, 45–6, 53, 134 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 24, 170 Iringa, 74, 94, 107 Islam madrasa, 133, 182, 184, 189, 198, 203, 206 mosques, 1, 187, 191, 203 Muslim world, 49 shehe (sheikh), 117, 133 in the Southeast, 18, 116, 133, 134, 194, 206, 210 and Swahili culture, 54 talaq (divorce), 117 Israel, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57, 90, 95 Italy, 59, 230 jando (male initiation) (see also Makonde culture), 116, 133, 198, 204 Jeunesse du Rassemblement D´emocratique Africain (JRDA), 79, 89 Johnson, Lyndon, 64 Kabisela sisal plantation, 207, 230 Kambona, Oscar, 61, 67, 68 Karume, Abeid, 167–8 Kaunda, Kenneth, 43 Kawawa, Rashidi and Mtwara’s development, 143, 149 and national development, 167 and refugees, 125 and the TAZARA, 58 as temporary president of Tanganyika, 61 and youth militants/national security, 92, 93, 95 Kawawa, Sofia, 106 Kayamba, Martin, 54 Keita, Modibo, 62 Kenya and African Socialism, 43 army mutiny (1964), 63 cultural policing, 101 intellectuals, 12 Law of Succession Bill (1972), 118 national development policy, 84, 124 Operation Shifta, 72, 73, 216 paramilitary/youth service organizations, 90

and regional integration, 38–9 rural vernacular, 180 Kenya Africa Democratic Union (KADU), 89 Kenya Africa National Union (KANU), 89 Kenyatta, Jomo, 43, 63, 84 Kigoma (see also Operation Kigoma), 66 Kikwete, Jakaya, 230 Kilimanjaro, 71, 140 Kilimo Kwanza, 230 Kivukoni College 1976 village studies, 19, 126, 160, 179–80, 187, 194, 196–9, 201–7, 209 as a college, 19, 27, 72, 106, 107, 109 Klerruu, Wilbert biography, 94 in Iringa, 74 as Mtwara regional commissioner, 143–4, 145, 146, 147, 158, 165, 184 Kouyat´e, Seydou Badian, 44 Lake Region, 168 land grabbing, 5, 25, 229, 230 League of Nations, 6 Lin Biao, 53 Lindi District/Region, 87, 88, 107, 148, 168, 169 Town, 82, 133 linguistic turn, 13, 231 Lumumba, Patrice, 62, 68 Maasai, 122, 123, 216 Maine, Henry, 45, 55 Makerere University, 38 Makonde culture and social practices, 116, 133, 134, 144, 154–5, 205, 206 ethnic group, 18, 65, 116, 126, 142, 171 language, 20, 133, 136, 206, 213 Makonde Plateau, 140, 161 Makua, 133 Malawi (see also Nyasaland), 89, 90, 91, 230 Mali African Socialism in, 17, 29, 39, 41, 44, 92 coup, 62 cultural policing, 101 food aid, 111–2 national development policy, 124 Operation Taxi, 73 paramilitary/youth service organizations, 51, 90 Tuareg conflict, 72 manamba, 136–7

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Index Mao Zedong, 53, 59, 217 Maoism (see also China), 21, 52–3, 59, 83, 101 Mara, 111 Marxism/Marxists, 12, 13, 27, 29, 44, 49 Marxism–Leninism, 29, 52 Masasi, 87, 99, 107, 115, 133, 158, 168 Mazrui, Ali, 12 mbalozi/wabalozi, 195–6 Mbeya, 65, 100 McKinsey and Company, 167 Mgulani (National Service camp), 97 Mikindani colonial-era, 82, 115, 133, 137, 179 postcolonial-era, 188, 203, 230 in villagers’ oral accounts/personal histories, 85, 86, 182, 208 Ministry of Agriculture, 113, 162, 163, 172 Ministry of Rural Development (Maendeleo), 103, 108, 110–1, 113 Mkapa, Benjamin, 230 mkumi, 140–1, 213 Mobutu, Joseph, 62 Mohammed, Bibi Titi, 68 Mondlane, Eduardo, 40, 95 Morogoro, 87, 136, 169 Moshi Police College, 140 Mozambique border with Tanzania, 52, 66–7, 93, 132, 143, 159, 174, 217 cashew production, 138, 139 civil war, 174, 218 liberation struggle, 7, 22–3, 52, 65–6 Mozambican Makonde, 126, 142 Mozambicans in Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe, 126, 194 Mozambique Institute, 40–1 and the Mtwara Development Corridor, 230 Mueda Plateau, 133 refugees and migrants, 18, 22–3, 65, 67, 125, 136, 174 socialism in, 29, 73, 80 villagization in, 44, 72, 216 Mozambique African National Union (MANU), 40 Msekwa, Pius, 59 Mtwara Development Corridor, 230 Mtwara–Newala road, 1, 2, 3, 4, 137, 179, 187, 194, 198, 203 Mtwara Town (see also Mtwara–Newala road)

261

colonial-era, 133, 137, 138–9 in government workers’ oral accounts/personal histories, 82, 107 postcolonial-era, 1, 20, 53, 57, 106, 151, 179, 187, 188, 207, 228–9 in villagers’ oral accounts/personal histories, 86, 182, 199 Mwalimu Nyerere Academy (see also Kivukoni College), 19 Mwanza, 71, 97, 107 Mwera, 133 Mwinyi, Ali Hassan, 217 Mwongozo, 75, 95 Nachingwea, 86, 96, 141, 149, 168 Nasser, Gamel Abdel, 56 “nation-building” schemes, 48, 124, 156 National Development Corporation, 154 National Service (Jeshi la Kujenga Taifa) and gender, 93, 118 and militarism/national security, 67, 72, 90–1, 126 and nation building, 90 origins of, 48, 49–51 and state power, 79 and ujamaa villagization, 53 in villagers’ oral accounts/personal histories, 96, 97, 98, 100, 185, 192 Native Authority, 134 Ndanda mission station/school, 106, 107, 109, 111, 133 Negre, Louis, 111 neoliberalism, 5, 24, 26, 170, 179, 220, 229, 230, 236, 237 Netherlands, 169 New International Economic Order, see United Nations Newala (see also Mtwara–Newala road) colonial-era, 115, 133, 179 in government workers’ oral accounts/personal histories, 106, 107 land pressure in, 140, 173 Newala Plateau, 133 postcolonial-era, 168 state officials from, 90 in villagers’ oral accounts/personal histories, 141, 213 Niger, 90 Nigeria, 45, 131, 227 Njombe, 119 Nkrumah, Kwame, 9, 43, 44, 61, 64, 89, 188 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 22, 56

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262

Index

North Korea, 29, 63 Northern Rhodesia, 38 Norway, 169 Nyasaland, 38 Nyerere, Julius 1962 pamphlet on ujamaa, 8, 27, 30, 32 and anticolonial solidarity/refugees, 65, 125 and the Arusha Declaration, 31, 33, 64 and China, 52, 54, 59 diplomatic relations, 7, 31, 56, 57 educational/personal/political biography, 38, 49, 61, 86, 97, 217 and ethnic/racial politics, 46, 122 and food security, 112 implementation of ujamaa, 46, 48, 49, 53–4, 60, 71, 157–9, 209 legacies/interpretations of, 26, 46, 167, 218, 230 and Mwongozo, 75 and nation building, 124 and national security, 23, 63–4 and the one-party state, 61, 68 and Operation Vijiji, 73–4 and Pan-Africanism, 38 in villagers’ oral accounts/personal histories, 86, 97, 98, 185, 186, 188, 190, 191, 208, 213, 217, 220 vision of ujamaa, 3, 6, 16, 21, 28, 29, 37, 46, 52, 55, 232 and youth militants, 78, 92, 98 Nzunda, John, 94, 125, 184, 191 Obote, Milton, 38, 63, 95 Office du Niger, 10, 216, 233 Omani Sultanate, 132 Operation Dodoma, 73, 218 Operation Dress-Up, 73, 122, 123 Operation Kigoma, 73 Operation Refugee, 65 Operation Shifta, see Kenya Operation Vijana, 73, 101, 103, 122 Operation Vijiji aftermath of, 19, 169, 215, 217 enforcement of, 100, 160 interpretations of, 209, 219 in Mdui, Rwelu, and Nanguruwe, 179–84, 188, 190–3, 199, 207, 213 purpose/logic of, 3, 23, 32, 73–4 Organization of African Unity (OAU), 22, 40 Oxfam, 65, 114, 163

Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA), 40 Pan-African Freedom Movement of East, Central, and Southern Africa (PAFMECSA), 40 Pan-Africanism and anticolonialism, 39–40, 125 contemporary invocations of, 230 general vision, 7 historiographical interpretations of, 28, 35, 39, 41, 234 and nationalism, 120, 124, 127 and regional federation, 38 and ujamaa, 21, 60, 69, 81, 121 and uneven development, 131 Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), 40 Pan-Asianism, 120 Partido Africano da Independˆencia da Guin´e e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), 95 People’s Militia (Jeshi la Mgambo) and anticolonialism, 126 and cultural policing, 101 origins/purpose of, 90, 94–6 and the state, 17 in villagers’ oral accounts/personal histories, 99, 181, 182, 219 and villagization, 23, 76 postsocialism as an anthropological/historiographical concept, 5, 222–3, 232, 236, 238 as a historical transition, 5, 24–6, 179, 218, 222–3 Portuguese colonialism in Africa, 40, 51, 218 invasion of Guinea (1970), 95 in Mozambique, 23, 72, 136, 138 and Tanzanian national security, 66, 67, 93, 95, 217 powdery mildew disease (PMD), 172 Preventive Detention Act, 60–1 Program for Better Family Living, 111 Rassemblement D´emocratique Africain, 39 refugees and the decolonization era, 70, 124 from Mozambique, 22–3, 40, 65, 67, 125–6, 174 in Tanzania, 7, 65–6, 93, 95, 123–6 Regional Trading Company (RTC), 197 Republic of the Congo, 29, 62 Reserve Forces Act (1965), 90

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Index Rhodesia post-1965, 7, 57, 62 Southern Rhodesia (pre-1965), 38, 48–9 Rodney, Walter, 12 Rufiji, 148 Rungemba College, 107, 108 Rural Integrated Development Programme (RIDEP), 130, 168–70, 218 Rural Integrated Project Support (RIPS), 170–1, 218, 228–9 Rural Settlement Commission (see also Village Settlement Agency), 47, 48 Rutamba, 65 Ruvu (National Service camp), 91, 96 Ruvuma, 169 Ruvuma Development Association (RDA), 48, 75, 218 Ruvuma River, 65, 97, 142, 174 Rwanda, 7, 65–6, 68, 125 S´ekou Tour´e, Ahmed, 9, 39, 43, 44, 60, 61, 95 “self-help” projects, 54, 109, 124, 141, 156 Senegal, 44, 131 Senghor, L´eopold S´edar, 44 Service Civique Rural, 51, 90 Sijaona, Lawi, 90, 94, 123 Simba rebellion, 62 Social Welfare (Department of), 81–3, 92, 99–100, 103–4 Songambele, Mustapha, 123 Songea, 92, 109 South Africa liberation struggle, 7, 29 mercenaries, 62, 67 postapartheid, 223, 229–30 and Tanzanian national security, 95 Tanzanian solidarity with, 40, 57, 126 South Asians (see also India), 100, 122–3, 137 South West African National Union (SWANU), 40 South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), 40 Southern Link (Mtwara–Dar es Salaam) road, 142, 148, 152–3, 171 Southern Province, 47, 82, 83, 87, 88, 94, 115, 134, 139, 142, 148 Southern Rhodesia, see Rhodesia Soviet Union (USSR) aid to Tanzania, 40, 51–2, 62 communist-era, 9, 17, 28, 30, 90

263

diplomatic relations, 59, 63 postsocialist-era, 5, 222, 238 spatial turn, 20 structural adjustment (see also International Monetary Fund, World Bank), 24–5, 170, 173, 203, 218, 219, 237 Swahili coast region, 37, 132, 134, 210 culture, 54, 121, 125 language, 20, 46, 206, 213 Sweden, 110–1, 169 Syracuse University, 83–4 Tabora, 38, 66 Tanga, 136, 169 Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and 1972 decentralization policy, 167 and Africanization, 60 and anticolonial internationalism, 125 archives, 35 and the Arusha Declaration, 31 background, 7 and chiefs, 46 and China, 52, 59 and cultural policing, 102 and food security, 112, 163 ideology at the village level, 209 leadership, 38, 94 legacy of, 238 meetings/conferences, 71, 84, 97, 146 membership cards, 87, 88 and Mwongozo, 75 and national development, 69, 146, 159 and national security, 62, 63–5 and National Service, 51 officials in ujamaa villages, 158, 180 and Operation Dodoma, 73, 218 in oral accounts/personal histories of government workers, 100, 106–7 in oral accounts/personal histories of villagers, 183, 184, 188, 189, 199, 214, 215, 217 in oral accounts/personal histories of Youth Leaguers, 86–7, 183, 184, 186, 220 pamphlets/publications, 27 perceived relationship to government in rural contexts, 207 and race, 121 and regionalism, 143, 152 and Tanzania’s political culture, 34, 68, 98, 128

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Index

Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) (cont.) and the Tanzanian press, 19, 67 and the village model, 54 and women, 102, 103, 104, 114, 118 and young men/militants, 78, 83–4, 85, 89, 90–2, 100 Tanganyika Council of Women, 103 Tanganyika Federation of Labor (TFL), 61 Tanganyika Rifles, 89 TANU Youth League and anticolonial sentiment, 126 and border security, 67, 72 colonial-era activities, 85–6, 87–9 and cultural policing, 101, 122 as enforcers of villagization, 23, 98–9, 159, 192 and excessive militancy, 74, 87, 89, 92, 98–100 and female members, 103 general ujamaa-era activities, 22, 76, 109 leadership, 94 in oral accounts/personal histories of government workers, 100 in oral accounts/personal histories of villagers, 181, 182, 188, 190 in oral accounts/personal histories of Youth Leaguers, 86–7, 96–9, 165, 184–5, 219, 220 as pioneers of village settlements, 48, 53, 92 and self-reliance, 92, 214 and the state, 17, 79 and the Tanzania People’s Defence Forces, 90 village activities, 67, 197, 207 Tanzania Christian Refugee Services, 65 Tanzania People’s Defence Force (TPDF), 52, 63, 64, 90, 95, 97 taxes colonial-era, 47, 115, 132, 134, 135–6, 141 and the postcolonial era, 214 in villagers’ oral accounts/personal histories, 185, 190 TAZARA (Tanzania–Zambia/Uhuru) Railway, 57–9, 90 ten-cell units, 32–3, 189, 195, 201, 207 Tengeru Institute, 107 Third World and 1970s disappointment, 218 and autonomy, 56 and China, 58, 59

and developmental thought, 232 engagement in the neoliberal era, 5, 7, 223, 229 and food production/aid, 111, 146 as a global movement, 7, 28, 35, 64 and international development organizations, 163 nationalisms, 127 socialism, 11, 17, 29, 37, 53, 222 Tshombe, Moise, 68 Tuareg, 72 Uganda, 38–9, 63, 84, 95, 101, 123, 219 Ukerewe Institute, 107, 109 Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanganyika (UWT), 103–7, 109, 114, 118, 202, 206 Uniao Nacional de ˜ Democratica ´ Moc¸ambique (UDENAMO), 40 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (1965) (see also Rhodesia), 57 Union of African States, 41 Union Soudanaise–Rassemblement D´emocratique African (US-RDA), 51 United Arab Republic, see Egypt United Kingdom, see Great Britain United Law of Marriage (1971), 118 United Nations (UN) and anticolonialism in southern Africa, 57 and the Congo crisis, 62 Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), 110, 111, 163 and the New International Economic Order, 64 and Third World development, 163 Trust Territory (Tanganyika), 6 United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), 110, 163 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 111 United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), 65 United States and African students, 38 aid to Third World, 111 anticolonial aid, 40–1 archives, 6, 18 author’s identity, 217 Cold War-era diplomatic relations/geopolitics, 7, 59, 62, 63, 66, 67–8 Cold War political culture, 22

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Index Vietnam war, 8–9, 72 volunteers in Tanzania, 49 War on Poverty, 64 Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), 133 University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), 12, 19, 75, 91, 160, 169 University of Edinburgh, 38, 49 University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF), 75 unyago (female initiation) (see also Makonde culture), 116, 133, 181, 204, 207 Vietnam, 9, 29, 65, 72, 111 Village Settlement Agency (VSA) (see also Rural Settlement Commission), 47–8, 53–4, 83, 84, 92 Villages and Ujamaa Villages Act (1975), 19, 179, 195 Volta River Dam, 44, 188 wamachinga, 171, 173–4, 190–1 wealth in people, 205 West Lake, 71, 125 witchcraft (uchawi), 189–90, 207 World Bank, 17, 24, 47, 57, 148, 170, 172 World Food Program, 65

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World War I, 135, 216 World War II, 81, 134, 138, 216 Yao, 133 Young Pioneers, 90–1 Yugoslavia, 48, 49, 51, 117, 169 Zambia (see also Northern Rhodesia), 41, 43, 57–8, 101, 142, 149, 230 Zanzibar diplomatic relations, 56, 63, 67 People’s Liberation Army, 52, 66 and race, 36 Revolution, 7, 49, 63 and the Tanzania People’s Defence Force, 90 union with Tanganyika, 6, 38–9 in villagers’ oral accounts/personal histories, 190 youth labor camps, 79 youth militants, 91, 101 Zanzibar Declaration, 217 Zimbabwe, see Rhodesia Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), 40 Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), 40

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