This book offers a detailed analysis of Tanzania's internal and external politics. Scholarship on East African politics has been booming in the past decade, but George Roberts makes readers feel like we are in the bars, tea houses and streets of Dar es Salaam, fighting Tanzania's anti-imperialist struggle. In chapter 7, a key contradiction of postcolonial politics is analysed: those who fought for liberation from empire were often also the ones who came to supress liberty at home. To explain this Roberts scrutinises the political dynamics of what he calls the ‘Cold War City’ of Dar es Salaam, where fear of Cold War intrusion dominated the political scene (p. 3). The leaders who were sitting in state houses after independence had been sitting in bars in revolutionary cities, like Dar, only a few years earlier. They knew how opposition could emerge and grow: ‘By the 1970s (…) any kind of internal challenge [was presented] as an imperialist conspiracy’ (p. 284). This book offers a deep – almost anthropological – analysis of the political dynamics that kept Julius Nyerere in power. Nyerere played a pivotal part in the liberation of Southern Africa and maintained a non-aligned position in the Cold War while executing an African Socialist policy at home.

Roberts’ definition of the Cold War, however, remains murky. Roberts, like his actors, tends to use the Cold War as a stand-in for Global North diplomatic interests even though the diplomacy of European empires had little to do with the struggle between Capitalism and Communism. He suggests the fear of Cold War intrusion gradually became replaced by a vague fear of imperialist encroachment. Whereas ‘ideological and geopolitical world views’ are understood ‘as part of the mental landscape of the global Cold War’ at the start of the book, by the end of the book it is ‘an alternative hemispheric geography of “North” and “South”’(pp. 19, 281) that is important. That turning point and the Cold War's precise influence, however, remains opaque. The Arusha Declaration, for instance, is described as ‘among the Third World's most powerful ripostes to the Cold War order’ even though the Cold War superpowers cared little about Tanzania (p. 281). The Declaration can just as easily be seen as an update of the African Socialist visions that Leopold Senghor and Kwame Nkrumah had developed in the 1960s. The presence of Cold War powers, I have argued elsewhere, does not necessarily mean we are dealing with a Cold War story. The competition between East and West Germany, described in chapter 3, was only one of many ideological struggles that took place in Dar where Algerians, Ghanaians and other activists from the Frontline States were also spreading their ideas.

The book's chapters are permeated by this Cold War ambiguity that characterised Tanzania's politics. Chapter 1 explores Nyerere's foreign policy which was built on a non-aligned position. Roberts argues Nyerere ‘hoped the union with Zanzibar would insulate the new country against Cold War threats’ and pays less attention to how a union was the outcome of Nyerere's deeply held pan-African beliefs (p. 43). In chapter 2, Roberts revisits the Arusha Declaration as a moment of political contestation that is resolved by the ‘irruption of Cold War crises over the course of 1964-65’ which ‘convinced Nyerere that genuine political sovereignty required economic decolonisation’ (p. 99). Chapter 3 zooms in on how the struggle for recognition between East and West Germany made Nyerere's non-aligned position unsustainable. The second half of the book focuses more on Tanzania's Third World politics. In chapter 4, Roberts explores how the assassination of Eduardo Mondale altered the relationship between the state and the liberation movements that had become enmeshed in Dar's public sphere. Chapters 5 and 6 explore how the state used the student protests of 1968 and its media to further legitimise the Nyerere regime. Chapter 7 zooms in on the little studied Mwongozo statement of 1971, the new TANU Guidelines and a successor to the Arusha declaration, which had to breathe new life into Tanzania's African Socialism.

This book is an archival feat because Tanzania's national and diplomatic archives in Dodoma and Dar-es-salaam are impossible to access. Even though Roberts spent a lot of time in Tanzania, he still had to work around this limitation by visiting archives that hold Tanzanian paper, like the archives of Amir Jamal housed at Makerere University in Kampala. He also focused on how others state officials understood Tanzania by working with documents from Australia, Belgium, Ethiopia, Germany, France, India, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Uganda, the United States and the United Kingdom.

In short, this book is an excellent study of the internal and external politics of Tanzania in the 1960s and 1970s rooted in an incredible amount of work that deserves to be widely read by anyone interested in Third World politics.