Nyerere’s Tanzania

The mainland of Tanzania became independent in 1961, under the leadership of a politician and philosopher called Julius Nyerere. This book is about the events leading up to this and what followed in the first twenty years of Independence. There were many paradoxes, not least that a country whose slogan was ‘Socialism and Self-Reliance’ should be so attractive to Western governments that it became one of the main recipients of financial support on concessionary terms on the African continent. Economically, there were many failures, especially from the mid-1970s onwards, and many debates and controversies about the nature of socialism, in Africa and elsewhere, and about the economic strategies that should be adopted by a ruling class that had emerged from seventy years of colonialism.

Environmental planning · Geography · Tanzania · African history and culture studies