Tanzania’s rural villagization program (1969–1976) constitutes the single most-studied programmatic “rural development policy” in all of postcolonial Africa. Almost 9 of Tanzania’s 13 million citizens were regrouped into thousands of state-registered, nucleated villages in a government effort to intensify agricultural production and deliver social services—schools, clinics, electricity, water—to the people. Villagization was the brainchild of President Julius Nyerere, “father of the nation,” who believed that this massive social engineering project would turn Tanzania into a suitably hardworking self-reliant country built on the indigenous African values of Ujamaa (hard work, family, equalitarianism). The Ujamaa villagization program was widely viewed in the development studies and African politics literatures at the time as overly ambitious but essentially a well-intended and worthwhile effort to jump-start development in a country that was very large (almost twice the size of France), very poor, sparsely-populated, and overwhelmingly rural (with 90 percent of the population in the rural areas in the 1960s). International aid inflows, including World Bank loans, supported much of the undertaking.
Today, there is wide agreement that Tanzania’s villagization project was a disastrous failure. It was implemented through coercion and often violent abuse of rural populations, including extensive destruction of existing homes, existing rural settlement, and agricultural production systems. Food aid was required for years to prevent famine. It helped to send Tanzania down a fast slope to a homegrown variety of authoritarian rule and almost total economic collapse by the early 1980s.
In Government of Development, Leander Schneider takes a new look at the empirical record to answer questions about how and why villagization was pursued. He identifies several puzzles or paradoxes that make these questions especially interesting, and offers answers that undercut received wisdom. Schneider explains that the case is puzzling because President Nyerere himself was anti-authoritarian and sought to avoid some of the programming pitfalls—such as the use of coercion against peasants—that helped to doom the project (p. 70 inter alia). The case is paradoxical because the Tanzanian rural transformation project, in Schneider’s examination, is pretty much the exact opposite of the “urban bias” archetype that Robert Bates paints it to be in his short and influential Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Cambridge, 1981). After the late 1980s, U.S. political science takes Bates’ model of Africa’s elites as self-interested actors seeking only to retain power and use it in their own interests very literally, as a default model of “the African state.” Many political scientists also relied upon a very expansive idea of “urban bias” (i.e., cities rule, the countryside is exploited and ignored) as a taken-for-granted truth about Africa. Together, these ideas worked to foreclose sustained inquiry into the political economy of rural Africa for the next couple of decades. (Yet even today, rural populations are 60–70 percent of the total, on average, for African countries and—also startling—Africa’s rural population is expected to increase by half over the next 25 years.)
Schneider offers an analysis of “governmentality” in postcolonial Tanzania that challenges the caricature of Tanzania as driven by self-interested elites imposing “urban bias” policies to advance their own interests. His answers hinge on an analysis of the discourse and practice of rural development.
Looking at how villagization was imposed, the author shows that the effort required state investment in a vast rural undertaking that was very consciously aimed at reversing the primacy of the cities. Although the settlements never achieved the “high modernist rationality” that James Scott, in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998), later identifies as the cause of their failure (Schneider shows that in fact, an almost complete absence of real planning is closer to the truth), a large share of state resources and bureaucratic capacity was aimed at this task. The original vision, inspired by a homegrown self-help project from the early 1960s, the Ruvuma Development Association, was progressive, pro-peasantry, and locally empowering (Chapter 2).
Examining why villagization happened, especially why it happened through such coercive and authoritarian practices, Schneider takes us into the constructivist domain of political discourse and the performative aspects of state authority. The core of the book aims at demonstrating the very great extent to which Tanzania officials, led by Nyerere, saw themselves as responsible for forcing backward, incompetent farmers and pastoralists down the path of modernization, led by enlightened state agents confident in their master vision (Chapter 3). “Planning” (Chapter 4), such as it was, was often highly ritualistic, was seemly undertaken to impose the authority of state agents on resistant citizens. Sometimes state agents imposed irrational demands on local people just to prove that they could do so. Forced villagization created a state-society divide and rubbed villagers’ faces in it. Yet even with all this, Schneider’s view of Tanzanian state agents and above all, of Nyerere, is mostly sympathetic. They were just really convinced of the superiority of their vision, of the urgency of the task of modernization, and of the stubbornness of rural folk believed to be stuck in the dark ages. Those who tried to criticize or stand in the way were traitors (Chapter 5).
In a final chapter (Chapter 6), Schneider asks why Robert Bates’ in States and Markets could have gotten the Tanzanian case so wrong, portraying it as a case of urban bias promoted by self-interested elites when there is plenty of evidence to support the opposite interpretation. His answer is that Bates’ theory and method, in which “revealed” motives produce rational choices (policies) that serve the decision-makers interests, created a closed-loop logic in which the analyst never really had to ask about state agents’ motives—these were revealed in policy outcomes. In effect, we have the same variable (“policy outcome”) on both sides of what looks like an explanatory equation, but is actually a self-referential axiom. Schneider argues that this reasoning forecloses serious analysis of why African governments pursue the policies they do in rural Africa. It also provided a scholarly political rationale for the radically anti-state and anti-urban policies imposed by the international financial institutions in Africa in the late 1980s and 1990s. For Schneider, more empirical analysis and in particular, more attention to intent, discourse, and the praxis of state-making in rural Africa are antidotes to these analytic and policy errors.
Of Government of Development’s many valuable theoretical and empirical contributions, there are two I would like to highlight. First, Schneider’s broad argument about the weaknesses of the empirical bases upon which many well-worn generalizations about African politics have been drawn, including in the American political science literature on Africa, is well taken. The result often has been a strange detachment from reality that would not be considered acceptable in domains of political science (e.g., fields of American politics) in which more readers and reviewers had more knowledge. Second, in my reading, Schneider’s analysis of discourse and practice deepens (and makes more correct) the Batesian vision, but does not really undermine it. Schneider shows that Tanzanian officials wanted to achieve modernization by changing the peasantry and making rural people work more, harder, and for the state (“for their own good”), and he reveals a sense of entitlement and arrogance (and close-mindedness) among some of those making and implementing policy that we do not see in Bates’ 1981 book. It does seem like Bates’ model could accommodate an analysis that shows that government policy worked to create and maintain a state-society divide in which state agents’ superiority could not be questioned. If this is correct, then perhaps Schneider’s analysis is more potent and timely for much of rural Africa today than he takes it to be. Neoliberalism and multipartism may have produced more open economies and more competition for control of the countryside, but rulers’ sense that “these people should be working for us” (or even, “we want this land; perhaps we should take it”) has not disappeared.
