Tanzania fifty years on (1961–2011): rethinking ujamaa, Nyerere and socialism in Africa

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Notes

On 28 November 2011 I presented the paper which served as draft of the present article at an Oxford seminar. I also draw here on a related paper I have recently published in an issue of Tanzanian journal Chemchemi (Shivji et al. 2001), an issue that was prepared, quite specifically, ‘in celebration of 50 years of Tanzanian independence’.

As Annar Cassam also adds in her introduction to this volume (Chachage and Cassam 2010): ‘The words “living memory” acquire a deeper meaning when one considers the place that Mwalimu Julius Nyerere occupies in the minds, hearts, lives, consciousness and subconscious of those who knew him and those who did not, those who live in Tanzania and those who do not, those who pay attention to Africa and those who judge it, from near and afar’.

On the workers see, inter alia, Mihyo (1974) and Mapolu (1976), on the peasants in Ruvuma, Schneider (2003, 2004), and on the students at the university, Saul (2009) and Borbonniere (2007).

As seen above (pp. 122–123), Borbonniere (2007) concludes that the manner of ‘resolution’ of the Akigava crisis should be seen as a particularly grim portent.

I draw here on my account of the Akivaga and Temu cases to be found in Saul (2005). Nor can I, as further evidence of the texture of the approach of the Tanzanian state under Nyerere both to ‘Mwongozo’ and to ‘academic freedom’, ignore the first-hand accounts of other witnesses who, a few years later (1978), recorded the way in which protesting students were savagely beaten by security forces as they marched in protest down the Morogoro Road to town.

Here again – in writing on the views of both Pratt and Nyerere in these paragraphs – I draw on some of my own formulations in ‘Julius Nyerere's socialism’ (Saul 2005) where my perspective on such matters is advanced more extensively.

In this regard one notes the importance, shortly after independence, of the dramatic disempowering and rapid neutralisation, by Nyerere and the new Tanganyikan state, of the various traditional authorities previously at work in Tanganyika. This initiative is an important aspect of the Tanzanian story not well covered in the literature on the country to my knowledge (although when in Oxford to present an earlier version of this essay I learned of a recent doctoral dissertation there by Festo Mkenda on this subject which I have not yet read).

I have cited Amin's concept of ‘delinking’ in preparing the essay ‘The empire of capital, recolonization and resistance: rethinking the political economy of development in the Global South’ for its inclusion in my Revolutionary traveller (2009), pp. 354–367, and I have here only mildly recrafted that argument for present purposes. Delinking is defined by (Amin 1990) as ‘the submission of external relations [to internal requirements], the opposite of the internal adjustment of the peripheries to the demands of the polarizing worldwide expansion of capital’ and seen as being ‘the only realistic alternative [since] reform of the [present] world system is utopian’. In his view, ‘history shows us that it is impossible to “catch up” within the framework of world capitalism’; in fact, ‘only a very long transition’ (with a self-conscious choice for delinking from the world of capitalist globalisation as an essential first step) beyond the present global polarisation will suffice (Amin 1990, p. x).

I first sounded the rudiments of this argument in Saul (1985) but have since managed to present it with somewhat greater clarity – thanks to the writings of Thomas (1974) and Luttrell (1986) – as, here, in complementing my use of Amin's concept of ‘delinking’; see also my Revolutionary Traveller (ibid., pp. 353–367) and Saul (2010b).

This position is also spelled out at greater length in Saul (2010b).