Priya Lal. African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania

Ujamaa—the political philosophy developed by Julius Nyerere to guide the East African nation of Tanzania along a socialist path in the 1960s and 1970s—has long divided scholars into roughly two camps. Ujamaa (which means familyhood in Kiswahili, the Tanzanian national language) emphasized rural development over urbanization, nationalization of the economy, and self-reliance (kujitegemea). It eventually resulted in a massive effort to concentrate rural populations into large villages, sometimes by force. One school, most famously exemplified by the analysis in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998), perceives the era of nationalization and villagization as essentially developmentalist, an authoritarian and neocolonial effort to modernize a very poor country coming out of eighty years of colonial rule. The other interprets it as a populist movement guided by Julius Nyerere’s thought that strove to create a more just economic system and a unified nation out of a multitude of different communities. Much of the contemporary literature of the 1960s and 1970s upheld this view, as do more recent scholars such as James R. Brennan. In Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (2012), Brennan explores the darker exclusionist side of Tanzanian nationalism. In this view, ujamaa’s emphasis on battling exploitation is identified as both a common goal and a specific enemy that should be defeated.

Adversary · Authoritarianism · Colonialism · Communism · Democracy · Development economics · Economic growth · Ethnology · Multitude · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Socialism · Sociology · Tanzania · Urbanization · African history and culture studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Law