African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World

Description

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 1967-1975. 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 70s world. 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