Leander Schneider. Government of Development

Between 1968 and 1977 the Tanzanian government compelled some thirteen million citizens—about 75 percent of the population—to live in registered villages in a process known as ujamaa (socialist) villagization. Arguably “the most famous case of ambitious economic and social engineering in post-independence Africa” (14); Leander Schneider takes a fresh look at this well-analyzed historical moment that was a colossal failure, even though its goal was to improve the material well-being of rural people while fostering state development. Schneider’s Government of Development: Peasants and Politicians in Postcolonial Tanzania focuses on official thinking and modes of governance that evolved from an emphasis on freedom and voluntary peasant participation in the mid-1960s to coercion backed by police force by the early 1970s, when most farmers were forced to move. At the center of the story is Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s president from independence in 1962 until he stepped down in 1985, who developed the villagization framework, set the agenda, guided the process, and scrutinized his subordinates for compliance. Yet the main cast of characters are state and ruling Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) party officials, the “unquestionable and indispensable” (167) authorities who implemented villagization. This is not a social history, so the views of peasants forced to relocate rarely emerge. Schneider’s goal is to interrogate the motives of state officials as agents who carried out policies that they often knew to be ineffective. He does this by mustering empirical evidence from archives, interviewing some key players, and examining the discourses embedded in official newspapers and publications. Schneider dismisses the dominant interpretations of villagization from a generation ago, utilitarian rational-choice theory (especially Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa [2014]) and materialist analyses, which he lumps together as making the same basic claim: that villagization was about self-interested elites connected to government and the urban sector, a “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” that siphoned off rural surpluses for individual or class benefit. Schneider substitutes these “parsimonious” interpretations—meaning theoretically simplistic and ungrounded in evidence—with his own “thick” empirical evidence to demonstrate that, in fact, government officials did not benefit particularly from villagization, and the aims of bolstering the rural sector were genuine, if unsuccessful. For example, he disputes past critiques that coffee profits were channeled to the state through marketing boards, showing that, under circumstances of regulated international coffee marketing, Tanzanian policy in fact served growers’ interests. In such cases as this, the recollections of farmers would add to the argument, while disaggregating farmers into different kinds of producers would reveal competing interests and dramatically different circumstances.

Coercion (linguistics) · Corporate governance · Economic growth · Economics · Government (linguistics) · Independence (probability theory) · Management · Peasant · Political economy · Political science · Population · Sociology · State (computer science) · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · Law · Public Administration