GENDER, FAMILY, AND UJAMAA

Ujamaa meant, literally, familyhood,Footnote ¹ and legitimated itself by invoking an idealized construction of traditional African forms of kinship and extended family – one that emphasized reciprocity, collective effort, and an open version of community. On the one hand, ujamaa thus registered a type of familyhood characterized by connection and fluidity. In his first description of ujamaa, Nyerere explained that ‘tribal socialism’ was to form the basis of national development, since ‘the foundation, and the objective, of African socialism is the extended family’.Footnote ² On the other hand, a very different model of familyhood vis-à-vis local practices was embedded within the spatial imaginary of ujamaa villagization, particularly in the form that it came to assume in the 1970s. Although Nyerere appealed to a romanticized version of African tradition to guide Tanzanian development, ujamaa sought to transform rural forms of social organization, rather than merely restore them to a putatively original condition. While Nyerere's proposal began as an open-ended call for collective, voluntary experimentation with communal living and laboring, it morphed into a compulsory drive that solely emphasized the topographical reordering of the countryside, or resettlement.Footnote ³

In this later version, villagization came to be organized according to the bounded social unit of the individual household rather than the extended kin group; under the terms of Operation Vijiji, state officials were to oversee the creation of ujamaa villages consisting of a minimum of 250 households (kaya) per village. Communal agriculture was to operate through the division of villages into ten-cell units, each composed of ten kaya, whose representatives were to labor alongside one another on the village's communal farm. Although the exact details of the geographical regulations and layout of these villages were murky at the level of national policy, many local officials organized new settlements according to a symmetrical grid in which the households making up ten-cell units resided in identical structures along a single linear ‘street’. Nothing could be less traditional than this map of the standard ujamaa village.Footnote ⁴ The coexistence of two divergent models of familyhood within the ujamaa formulation was evidenced in the gulf between the ideal of a decentralized rural development project emphasizing socialist community rather than biological kinship and the reality of a state-directed policy premised on the contiguous grouping of discrete, rigidly organized nuclear families.

In forging this contradictory gendered developmental vision, Tanzanian officials drew upon colonial state approaches as well as responded to early postcolonial circumstances. The demographic category of young men particularly preoccupied both colonial and postcolonial officials in Tanzania. During and after the Second World War, a series of labor strikes throughout the continent demonstrated the disruptive potential of a floating, economically insecure, and politically marginalized male population, and British policy in Africa adapted to control this phenomenon. Guided by the new goal of ‘stabilization’, throughout the 1940s and 1950s state officials sought to improve working conditions, infrastructure, and services for employed men and their families in urban spaces.Footnote ⁵ Stabilization as a social ideal and political strategy was driven by a faith in the salutary effects of rooted, durable nuclear families in cities, as well as by a fear of the dissolution of ‘traditional’ kinship structures in the countryside. By providing an African urban male workforce with increased salaries and access to permanent housing and other services, colonial officials implicitly normalized a bourgeois, monogamous nuclear family structure. Within this formulation, employed men worked as the breadwinners for individual households, while women performed the reproductive labor of homemakers.Footnote ⁶

Thus, in the postwar era colonial policy shifted towards making the city a favorable home for ‘modern’ nuclear families. The colonial Department of Social Welfare opened a number of community centers throughout Tanganyika to assist with the re-integration of Second World War veterans into local life, and to organize classes and activities to structure the leisure time of idle young men.Footnote ⁷ Meanwhile, female Social Welfare officers and volunteer members of the Tanganyika Council of Women schooled women in domestic responsibilities.Footnote ⁸ Seminars and trainings based in community centers across the country (even in small towns such as Mtwara) offered instruction in home economics, and were organized according to the logic that women were the key developmental agents, since they were responsible for domestic maintenance and ‘higher standards of living depend[ed] on better conditions in the home’.Footnote ⁹

In a city such as Dar es Salaam, where a rapid influx of youth migration after 1940 led officials to fear imminent chaos, the corollary of state urban social welfare interventions in the name of stabilization was a series of regular attempts at ‘repatriating’ unemployed men to the countryside.Footnote ¹⁰ In the 1940s and 1950s, conflict between young men and their elders became particularly pronounced in Tanzania, as across much of Africa, as older economies of power articulated with the shifting political landscape of the capitalist colonial economy.Footnote ¹¹ Nationalist parties gaining momentum across the continent in the 1950s recognized that young men could either challenge the emerging authority of anti-colonial leaders and institutions or, if managed properly, become loyal revolutionaries. Unlike colonial officials, the leaders of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) had long acknowledged the productive as well as the destructive potential of young male restlessness. Like other nationalist parties elsewhere in Africa, TANU created a Youth League (the TANU Youth League, or TYL) whose role was to encourage and absorb young male political participation but also, and most significantly, to perform policing duties aimed at protecting the security of the party.Footnote ¹² This practice of harnessing young men towards the defense of TANU hegemony continued in the years after independence, during which the cause of national security became paramount.

The mutiny of the Tanganyika Rifles and armed forces across East Africa in the wake of the Zanzibar Revolution in January 1964 led to a persistent official reluctance to permit the army a monopoly on force and defense, particularly given the very real threat of Western or imperialist infiltration.Footnote ¹³ The immediate state response was to form a new army (the Tanzania People's Defence Forces) later that year, composed mostly of TYL recruits and National Service volunteers – youth trained to organize ‘nation-building’ workFootnote ¹⁴ and serve as military reinforcements in the national volunteer corps established in 1963.Footnote ¹⁵ The following year, the Tanzanian government also created a new paramilitary force, the Jeshi la Mgambo, or People's Militia, which was, like the TYL, attached to TANU. Though meant to be a reserve army, the People's Militia, like other security institutions, attained an expanded role over the course of the 1960s. In particular, the Militia and the Youth League took on an especially visible developmental function in loosely coordinated policing campaigns throughout the country, and eventually in the villagization initiative that anchored ujamaa. Yet the developmental and defense dimensions of these paramilitary organizations were tightly connected in both theory and practice, just as rural development at the local level and Tanzanian security at the international level overlapped in the imagination and experience of TANU officials.

Though the Arusha Declaration highlighted agricultural labor as the foundation of national development, official statements just months after the Declaration revealed that the utility of young men as revolutionary vanguards lay as much in their capacity to police as in their ability to produce. At the 1967 meeting of the TYL General Council, Second Vice-President Rashidi Kawawa stressed the imminence of imperialist threats to Tanzanian sovereignty and the importance of a loyal volunteer reserve army, announcing that ‘the Government is to establish an armed TANU Youth League unit to strengthen the defence of the country’ and that ‘contingents of the youth's armed unit will be stationed in many parts of the country’. He explained that ‘Tanzania could not be defended by paid troops’ and maintained that therefore ‘members of TYL should participate actively in the defence of the country’ since ‘it is the youths who will bring socialism’.Footnote ¹⁶ At a youth rally in the National Stadium early in 1968, Nyerere proclaimed that ‘the youths in all the regions of the country must carry forward the nation's revolution. In this task you have two important weapons – the plough for better and higher production, and the gun for the defence of the nation.’Footnote ¹⁷ Late in 1973, after the announcement of Operation Vijiji, the state paper reported that:

The decentralization of security work led to a militarization of young Tanzanian men and thus gendered the implementation of a developmental formulation already saturated with a language and imaginary of war.Footnote ¹⁹ For while in theory under ujamaa every Tanzanian, male and female, was to be a ‘soldier’, in practice, policing, physical defense work, and the enforcement of Operation Vijiji were implicitly coded as male responsibilities. Though in its extreme form the official call for collective militarization included women, it was always clear that the true female soldier of ujamaa socialism was the devoted mother, both of her own children and by extension of the nation as a whole. The following 1972 editorial sums up the expectations of women within national development discourse:

The colonial understanding of women as custodians of social welfare also infused ujamaa discourse and policy; if, in the 1960s and early 1970s, young men were the guardians of Tanzanian national security, women were to be the guardians of the food security and well-being of their families. Developmental interventions targeting Tanzanian women across the country during the 1960s and early 1970s were overseen by the institutional equivalent of the colonial Social Welfare Department – the Community Development DivisionFootnote ²¹ – and the women's organization of TANU. Beginning in 1955, female participation in nationalist politics had largely been channeled through ‘Women's Sections’ in TANU branches across the country;Footnote ²² in 1962, TANU officials established an official women's wing of the party at the national level, the Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanganyika (UWT). Though the constitution of the UWT maintained many of the objectives of the Women's Sections, it also aspired to address ‘the problems and concerns of women as a group’.Footnote ²³ In reality, however, the UWT – its leadership composed of wives of prominent TANU officials – pursued a fundamentally conservative agenda that reflected the organization's embedded position within the patriarchal structure of the ruling party.

The organization's activities, often conducted jointly with Community Development officers, tended to reinforce the normative developmentalism of late colonial social welfare policies. The UWT sponsored adult education programs at community centers throughout the country, designed to improve women's literacy and political awareness but also to inculcate them in ‘modern’ methods of childcare and housekeeping. The UWT's first such seminar, held in Dar es Salaam in July 1964, sought to school married women in topics such as ‘Home and baby care+nutrition’ and ‘Health problems in the city’.Footnote ²⁴ The first comprehensive, nationwide UWT Development Plan (introduced in 1965) was, according to one of its chief architects, ‘not conceived as a revolutionary means of changing the status of women’. Instead, it was ‘designed to enable women to play their fullest part as wives and mothers’ and therefore ‘to improve the family's general standard of living’.Footnote ²⁵ To this end, the plan proposed a range of projects, including seminars and trainings in home economics, the establishment of daycare centers, and the initiation of collectively run women's petty commercial groups engaged in activities such as sewing, cooking, vegetable cultivation, and livestock management. Such ventures would be overseen by the ‘first advance squads of UWT women’ who were to receive training by the organization and subsequently spread out throughout the country to become ‘the pioneer field troops to put the plan into operation’.Footnote ²⁶ In practice, the UWT frequently expanded by unilaterally absorbing local women's organizations and particularly mission groups into the national organization, according to the centralizing logic that all women's initiatives ‘must join efforts and work together on the same programme’ since ‘it is essential that the women's efforts be united to bring maximum contribution to the overall development of our Nation’.Footnote ²⁷

After the Arusha Declaration, UWT and Community Development interventions began to incorporate education in the politics of ujamaa and self-reliance into their training sessions, but the prioritization and content of the home economics approach persisted, as resettlement facilitated access to rural women by state officials. That in practice ujamaa reinforced rather than dissolved gendered distinctions consistent with an emergent politics of nationalist patriarchy was also apparent in urban spaces from 1968 onwards. Before Operation Vijiji, young male militants in cities across the country participated in Operation Vijana, a national campaign to eliminate the wearing and consumption of ‘decadent’ or ‘indecent’ Western fashions and beauty products. The operation especially targeted young, mobile women, whom TYL members and other male vigilantes attacked or arrested for wearing miniskirts, makeup, and wigs. The older male leadership of TANU often represented the unmarried women persecuted by younger men as prostitutes, a discourse that reflected generic male anxieties about economic exploitation, as well as a fear of women who were not rooted in male-dominated households where they performed domestic labor.Footnote ²⁸

The campaign drew upon a common nationalist trope in underscoring that Tanzanian women literally embodied national culture and thus could protect the integrity of the national family by adhering to ‘tradition’ in dress and comportment. Operation Vijana linked a particularly narrow understanding of tradition to national security by aligning its ‘relentless war against all foreign dehumanising practices’Footnote ²⁹ with the broader struggle against imperialism. However, there was a tension between the aim of cultural policing in cities – which sought to purge African culture of foreign influences – and the work of state officials in the ujamaa villages of the countryside – who used technologies to mold rural women into homemakers that echoed a distinctly colonial and specifically Christian approach. The Tanzanian state deployed rural development initiatives to transform the fluid institution of the African family into the standardized model of a generic nuclear family, even while it sought to restore a very different model of ‘tradition’ in cities by policing gender norms according to an emphasis on indigeneity.

What accounts for this peculiar combination? Operation Vijana marked the new prominence of a nativist politics that affixed ujamaa developmentalism to an exclusionary nationalist project. However, rural development programs targeting women recalled a colonial version of patriarchy; a lack of resources and training among the Africanized Tanzanian civil service resulted in a persistent reliance on the ideologies and practices embedded in developmental institutions inherited from the colonial state. Ujamaa-era women's development interventions also reflected the increasing ideological influence and management of a growing group of international (but largely Western-run) state and non-governmental development institutions that, if not forming a singular, monolithic development regime, tended to represent their common developmental model as a universal one.Footnote ³⁰ In particular, their approaches were characterized by a reification of the nuclear family as a normal, necessary, and coherent unit, and the naturalization of a trope of maternal altruism, ‘premised on the dubious notion that women possess inherent capacities for nurturing and self-sacrifice’.Footnote ³¹

VILLAGIZATION, GENDER, AND FAMILY ON THE GROUND

Literature on ‘alternative modernities’ in the postcolonial world tends to align an asserted distinction between a singular Western capitalist modernity and a corpus of indigenous tradition with a separation between the public and private spheres.Footnote ³² James Giblin takes this approach in examining the relationship between the historically marginalized residents of rural Njombe and the state in Tanzania, suggesting that during the ujamaa period, as in prior decades, ‘Njombe's excluded subalterns created a space that stood separate from the state’ and thus ‘prevented nationalism from becoming hegemonic’.Footnote ³³ This separate sphere was the realm of the family, and Giblin describes Njombe residents as ‘taking refuge from nation in the private sphere’.Footnote ³⁴ While allowing for the recording of rich local histories, this argument runs into several problems. Most significantly, in distinguishing between the private and state spheres, Giblin participates in the naturalization of what James Ferguson calls a ‘vertical topography of power’,Footnote ³⁵ which locates the site of the family below the overarching, higher space of the state. Such an understanding distorts the complexities of spatial production and allows for a compartmentalization of the history of the private sphere of individual families as distinct from a national history of the Tanzanian state. Moreover, as the preceding analysis indicates, the marginalized people of Njombe were not alone in fixating on languages and practices of family; the Tanzanian state did so as well, albeit to different ends.

Thus, the reality of sustained colonial and postcolonial state attempts to remake families and mold gender roles is difficult to reconcile with a mythology of the rural family as an autonomous, indigenous site. The notion of an authentically African type of ‘tribal socialism’ animating Nyerere's original formulation of ujamaa was premised on a separation between the public and private spheres that had already proven untenable. In postcolonial Tanzania, likewise, ‘the modern family circle is quite the opposite of an autonomous sphere at the frontiers of which the structures of the state would halt’.Footnote ³⁶ TANU officials' symbolic configuration of the nation as a kinship group – an extended, socialist family – translated into policies assigning young men the role of militant defenders of national security and women the work of guarding families, figuratively and concretely implicating the ‘private sphere’ in larger, ‘public’ historical processes.

Yet, though a particular – if contradictory – version of familyhood became lodged in the Tanzanian state's developmental vision in the 1960s, officials could not control the actual meanings of gender and family on the ground, just as they could not determine how people interpreted and used the concepts of self-reliance and security locally. As villagization unfolded in Mtwara, rural men and women apprehended the new political formation of ujamaa according to their own circumstances and a longer history of development in the region. Interviews with over one hundred elderly residents of three villages in Mtwara Rural District in early 2008 confirm this.Footnote ³⁷ Read in conjunction with a series of reports composed in 1976 by students of Kivukoni College (the TANU training institute) on these same villages,Footnote ³⁸ these oral accounts provide a picture of villagization that both conforms to and strikingly departs from the orderly development project sought by national officials.

What came to be the dominant official version of villagization, which viewed resettlement as an end in and of itself, was premised partly on a conception of the countryside as a static space populated by individuals living in parochial ethnic or kinship units that had little contact with each other or the forces of modernity. Mtwara, however, had historically been a space of mobility, intermixing, and connection to larger global political and economic processes.Footnote ³⁹ By the coast, the countryside was dotted with a variety of living arrangements before the ujamaa era. Many people lived in extended family groups of several households in clusters among their farms, but others lived in fairly large settlements, usually situated alongside transportation corridors, that eventually became known as vijiji vya zamani (original villages). A few elders describe their pre-villagization homes as a constellation of relatives residing in anywhere from three to ten houses organized in a circular formation,Footnote ⁴⁰ but others remember a less formal arrangement of living kiukoo (with members of their clan, or extended family) in a few houses scattered near each other.Footnote ⁴¹ Many elders recall living amid mosques and madrasas, mission stations, small stores, and schools in vijiji vya zamani (such as Nanyamba or Dihimba), with some combination of their spouses, children, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. In these settings, they were surrounded by other farmers, South Asian traders, missionaries, or sheikhs, and wage laborers from within the region or from neighboring Mozambique.Footnote ⁴²

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, men and women in these arrangements frequently traveled in and out of their area of residence and the unit of the individual household itself. The largely Makonde population of the south-east had practiced a mixture of subsistence and cash-crop agriculture and wage labor throughout the period of British rule and into the postcolonial era. Poor farming conditions (including cyclical drought, soil infertility, and – in some cases – land shortages) and colonial tax policy drove many Makonde to movement in pursuit of new territory for farming or opportunities for paid work. Men circulated throughout the region to work at sisal plantations in Mikindani and what became the town of Mtwara on the coast, on smaller private farms in the interior as hired laborers, or on infrastructure projects catalyzed by the Groundnut Scheme of the late 1940s.Footnote ⁴³ Individuals and families also sometimes shifted their homes in search of more fertile or plentiful land, though after the rise of cashew cultivation in the 1950s this movement became increasingly circumscribed.Footnote ⁴⁴

During this time, rural south-easterners relied upon multiple, flexible social partnerships in addition to economic diversification and physical mobility. In the context of endemic material hardship, ‘administrative caprice’,Footnote ⁴⁵ and a lack of basic social security, men and women often treated marriage as a temporary survival strategy rather than an enduring, inviolable institution.Footnote ⁴⁶ Mtwara elders report divorce and multiple marriages as a common occurrence even in their parents' generation;Footnote ⁴⁷ in their own lifetimes, they describe marrying up to eight or nine times.Footnote ⁴⁸ This frequency of marriage applied equally to men and women, and could entail resettlement or relocation between houses over long distances or within a small area; it reflected high divorce or separation rates as well as low life expectancy rates. The overwhelmingly Muslim character of the Makonde population in coastal Mtwara meant that polygamy had been practiced throughout the area for generations, although material constraints prevented many men from marrying more than one wife at a time.Footnote ⁴⁹ The influx of Makonde from northern Mozambique as Manamba recruited for sisal plantation labor by colonial authorities,Footnote ⁵⁰ or as refugees from conflict between FRELIMO and Portuguese soldiers beginning in the 1960s,Footnote ⁵¹ brought a monogamous Christian population into the area. These immigrants, too, remained mobile, intermarrying with local Makonde, migrating throughout Mtwara and to locations to the north such as Dar es Salaam and Tanga, and even returning permanently or periodically to northern Mozambique.

In other words, family structures and residential patterns in Mtwara in the years leading up to ujamaa were far from uniform or stable, and hardly conformed to official expectations of either ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’ norms. It was into this context that the Tanzanian villagization initiative inserted itself, and it was these conditions that shaped the way villagization unfolded on the ground in Mtwara. Young men seeking political capital as a means of gaining their own social and economic autonomy (or self-reliance) and stability (or security) had joined local branches of the TYL in the decade before the Arusha Declaration. During the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s, Youth League members encouraged rural people to join TANU by explaining that ‘the party is your weapon and the card your bullet’,Footnote ⁵² and acted as askaris (guards or soldiers) by ‘protecting the party, defending the party, giving it power’.Footnote ⁵³ The militarization of young men in the region continued into the early postcolonial period, when Youth Leaguers worked as unsupervised rural police who ‘protected the peace’ of the countryside by patrolling the area for petty criminals.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the latter half of the 1960s, young men from the south-east joined other Youth Leaguers throughout Tanzania for training sessions in National Service and Militia camps, and eventually returned to their homes to take on a new role as enforcers of compulsory villagization in the early 1970s. Between 1973 and 1975, TYL members throughout the Mtwara countryside forcefully resettled rural people into large settlements of at least 250 households each, in compliance with the strict guidelines of the nationwide Operation Vijiji.

Official figures reported Mtwara as the site where villagization was most thoroughly implemented in the wake of the Arusha Declaration: by 1969 this region alone was responsible for 333 of the 476 villages throughout the 18 regions in mainland Tanzania.Footnote ⁵⁵ In a meeting late in 1970, Kawawa proclaimed: ‘the people of Mtwara are leading in the upsurge of the nation's ujamaa movement’.Footnote ⁵⁶ By 1970, the number of villages in the region had reportedly risen to 700 (with 300,000 inhabitants);Footnote ⁵⁷ by 1972, the figure exceeded 1,000.Footnote ⁵⁸ The enormous number of villages recorded in the region prior to the start of forced resettlement reflected a significant reordering of the countryside, but hardly accorded with the ideals set forth by national policy. In a 1970 report, the principal Regional Development Officer in Mtwara followed a numerical cataloguing of villages by conceding that ‘in truth none of these villages have yet received any ujamaa training’. Of the villagers, he commented, ‘they love ujamaa but they don't understand what to do’.Footnote ⁵⁹ This observation acknowledged the lack of state control over the transformation of social, political, and economic life in rural Mtwara, and hinted at the gulf between official discourse and actual local interpretations of national policy.

In reality, many south-easterners had indeed shifted their residence beginning in 1967, but this move was rarely to a functional communal village. Between 1967 and 1972, local officials traveled throughout the countryside, encouraging rural people to ‘live together’ and sometimes promising material rewards from the state for those who did so. Rural people both heeded and ignored this call; those who resettled usually did so close to their original homes and private farms, and built new houses in what elders recall as vijiji vidogo vidogo (small villages) comprising anywhere from ten to one hundred households.Footnote ⁶⁰ In other cases, officials merely recorded vijiji vya zamani – settlements that had already existed for years – as new ujamaa villages, without asking residents to shift their homes at all.Footnote ⁶¹ These vijiji vidogo vidogo and vijiji vya zamani made varying degrees of progress towards the practice of true ujamaa; some settlements developed village farms where residents farmed contiguous private plots as encouraged by the Mtwara Regional Commissioner.Footnote ⁶² Yet men and women throughout the south-eastern countryside continued to work on their older farms (particularly their permanent cashew plots) after this first wave of voluntary villagization.Footnote ⁶³

The young men whom TANU officials enlisted to enforce the second wave of villagization belonged to the same demographic that had led much of the first wave of villagization in Mtwara. The theme of self-reliance underpinning national development policy had a particular resonance for many of these youths: moving to ujamaa villages, whose anticipated productivity and self-sufficiency were to help make Tanzania a self-reliant nation in the world, could greatly benefit young men seeking to become independent adults capable of establishing themselves as heads of their own households. Resettlement in the name of ujamaa represented less an existential rupture than another opportunity to maximize their own security, in social and economic terms, according to older local practices of flexibility and mobility. For some, this meant moving away from their extended family in search of new land for farming and possibly opportunities for power within the political economy of new villages. Often, extended family groups – each loosely defined as an ukoo – split during both stages of villagization, in its voluntary and forced incarnations. One elderly man who left his extended family during villagization simply observed that ‘within an ukoo, each person agreed to go to the area they wanted’.Footnote ⁶⁴ While his clan spread out over fairly long distances, other clans merely divided between neighboring villages. Though many extended family groups separated so that individuals could go ‘where their heart wanted’,Footnote ⁶⁵ others settled together in new villages. In particular, those who had already invested years of labor in productive cashew plots tried to stay close to their cashew farms. This was especially true of areas further inland from the coast in Mtwara, where land shortages constrained the ability of farmers to select unclaimed territory for cultivation.

In practice, the implementation of Operation Vijiji proceeded in a fairly decentralized fashion, with the TYL performing the majority of the work of coercing and supervising resettlement in Mtwara, as in other regions. In this respect, the distinction between the Tanzanian state and the larger population was blurred, as young male militants often enforced resettlement among the communities they themselves hailed from. Former Youth Leaguers recall traveling throughout the Mtwara countryside in small groups, with a local official such as the ward chairman, to instruct people to relocate into larger settlements. Subsequently, TYL militants would forcibly transport those who had initially refused to move by loading them into a vehicle and threatening to burn or destroy their homes and property.Footnote ⁶⁶ Villagers recall the event differently, depending on the terms under which they ultimately complied with the Operation. Those who waited to relocate until compelled to do so describe Operation Vijiji as an episode of disturbanceFootnote ⁶⁷ or destruction,Footnote ⁶⁸ in which Youth Leaguers ‘set homes on fire’,Footnote ⁶⁹ while others merely recall a benign orderFootnote ⁷⁰ to relocate. Some elders refer to moving into concentrated villages as moving into nations (taifa), or beginning to live nationally (kitaifa),Footnote ⁷¹ reflecting the widespread confusion among rural people about the exact meaning of ujamaa and the national political structure presiding over it.

In new settlements, Youth Leaguers and local officials organized the construction of new homes according to a particular styleFootnote ⁷² – in orderly lines parallel or perpendicular to roads bisecting the settlement, each approximately thirty paces apart.Footnote ⁷³ The former district leader for the TYL in Mtwara explained that villagers were instructed to build in ‘clean lines’, in the style of Mtwara town, in order to create a ‘modern environment’Footnote ⁷⁴ in the countryside. Yet, even in this putatively organized atmosphere, complications resulted when new arrivals to villages built their homes next to coconut or papaya trees belonging to an older resident;Footnote ⁷⁵ land disputes arising from such situations still remain salient throughout rural Tanzania today.Footnote ⁷⁶ Moreover, for polygamous families the boundaries of a single household were hazy, and few guidelines existed for how the construction of standardized houses for discrete nuclear families should proceed in such cases.

SECURITY, SELF-RELIANCE, AND THE PROBLEMS OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The discursive and literal militarization of TYL askaris in Operation Vijiji was consistent with a larger emphasis on defense and security that had pervaded official conceptions of villagization and discussions of development in Tanzania from their earliest stages. Particularly along Tanzania's southern border with Mozambique, ‘defense’ was built into the structure of ujamaa villages beginning in 1967, and villagization was officially described as the creation of vijiji vya ujamaa na ulinzi – ujamaa and defense villages.Footnote ⁷⁷ The internationalist orientation of ujamaa that manifested itself in support for movements for self-determination across the world – particularly in Mozambique and southern Africa – rendered Tanzanian sovereignty vulnerable to imperialist retaliation; therefore, as the Minister of Defence and National Service explained, ‘the Government's aim in the southern regions and elsewhere, was to establish defence ujamaa villages along all the country's borders, which would be able to stand by themselves and only ask for assistance when necessary’.Footnote ⁷⁸Ujamaa and defense villages were to be founded on the same principles as ujamaa villages, yet were distinct in their added function of making rural citizens self-reliant in defense.

A series of Portuguese incursions into Tanzanian territory in 1967 intensified the climate of rural security consciousness in the south-east. After land mines killed two Tanzanians, Kawawa visited the site of the blasts and ‘urged people living on the border to be vigilant and cooperate with security forces and the army reserves in tracking down the enemy and safeguarding the integrity of the nation’.Footnote ⁷⁹ In 1970, on another visit to the border, Kawawa ‘reiterated his call upon all people living in border villages’ and instructed villagers that ‘the duty of defending the nation was the responsibility of every individual’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Villagization in Mtwara region, therefore, theoretically served as a means to enable rural citizens to become soldiers for the nationalist cause, by concentrating peasants in settlements where they could set up patrols and receive training by Militia officials. The Mtwara Regional Commissioner insisted that each village ‘is supposed to have its own security force so that it can be very self-reliant in the matter of defense’ and that ‘it will be necessary for each adult to participate in trainings in weapons usage, and training in important exercises’.Footnote ⁸¹ TYL members and other young men attended training camps across the country, where they received instruction in weapons usage and ‘parade’ (marching), and ‘learned how to defend their nation from enemies as if it was their father’.Footnote ⁸² Yet, paradoxically, even as leaders encouraged youth self-reliance in matters of national security, the increased independence of young men threatened to challenge the patriarchal foundations of TANU rule. Speaking at a TYL camp in 1967, Kawawa announced that ‘TANU Youth League camps were established to teach the youths the spirit of “self-reliance” so that they could serve the nation effectively’, since ‘youths were the bulwarks and builders of the nation and as such they needed good training’.Footnote ⁸³ However, the evolving attitude of the older generation of TANU leaders also reflected an overriding concern about managing young men,Footnote ⁸⁴ and the deep tension between the logics of centralization and decentralization that characterized ujamaa rural development policy more broadly partially emerged from this anxiety.

While the militarization of young men during the ujamaa era effectively blurred the lines between the Tanzanian state and its rural citizens, the simultaneous enlistment of women as guardians of families reflected a significant gulf between rural Tanzanian populations and the official realm of policy-making. Though TANU rhetoric encouraged individual self-reliance among male militants, the UWT and Department of Community Development trained rural women to care properly for self-reliant families, according to an approach that elided both the dynamics that occurred within households and the reality that the rural household itself was a fluid entity. Furthermore, the configuration of women as domestic homemakers echoed a bourgeois conception of family in which men performed productive labor outside of the home, which deeply contradicted the reality, often recognized by TANU leaders, that women in Mtwara (as throughout Tanzania) performed the majority of agricultural, as well as reproductive, labor.Footnote ⁸⁵

As was the case with young male militarization, however, the official imposition of a version of familyhood that emphasized female domesticity arose from the weakness of the Tanzanian state rather than from its excessive power. Despite frequent reports throughout the 1960s recording the successes of the Community Development Division and the UWT in terms of quantitative accomplishments, women's development work was actually crippled by a lack of organization, funding, and education. On a visit to Mtwara Region in 1966, for instance, one official commented that ‘it is doubtful however that the Women Community Development Assistant really knows so much more than the women themselves to be able to “teach them”’ and that ‘a lot of CD staff in the Region have had no training in CD at all’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Training for female development officers was indeed scarce: a study conducted in 1970 found that of the 560 women employed by Maendeleo,Footnote ⁸⁷ about half had had no training of any kind, about 400 had had no training in home economics, and that only 70 had secondary school certificates.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Tanzanian government dealt with this problem by absorbing private schools around the country to serve as training centers, and by requesting assistance from international donors.

In 1964, responding to one such solicitation, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, using Freedom from Hunger Campaign funds donated by the Swedish International Development Corporation and equipment provided by UNICEF, funded the construction of the Buhare Home Economics Centre located in Musoma, the capital of the northern Mara region. After an initial period of Swedish supervision, the Tanzanian government gained operational control over the Centre, which offered courses in rural home economics and day care centre assistantship (ranging from two years to two weeks in length) to Maendeleo extension workers, as well as to villagers. Courses in home economics were also conducted at mission stations and Rural Training Centres throughout the country.

In a letter to the FAO's Programme for Better Family Living in 1972, one Buhare official optimistically remarked that ‘we are at a stage of developing home economics material that suits the rural family and developing communication means that are effective to transfer this knowledge to the families’.Footnote ⁸⁹ In reality, however, the curricula of Buhare and Rural Training Centres continued to emphasize subject matter that took little account of the material realities of the Tanzanian countryside, and instead reflected the ideological assumptions of international donors and a tendency to ignore existing local developmental knowledge. Far from comprising the coherent institution of either the ‘traditional’ African extended family or the ‘modern’ nuclear family sought by the state's home economics approach, family in Mtwara had in fact remained an often temporary and malleable entity throughout the villagization process. As the socialist harmony envisioned by the utopian version of ujamaa and substantive state investment (in the form of developmental infrastructure and services) failed to materialize, rural people continued to rely on older survival strategies. These included, quite frequently, forming multiple temporary marriage alliances, engaging in migration and other forms of petty wage labor, and maintaining a degree of flexibility that official policy failed to accommodate.Footnote ⁹⁰

In theory, the activities of UWT and Community Development extension workers corresponded to a state project that prioritized a substantive understanding of development, seeking first to achieve concrete improvements in the quality of life of its citizens. According to ujamaa discourse, food security was as critical to Tanzanian development as was military security; ensuring the material self-sufficiency of families and villages promised to guard the nation from dependence on foreign aid. An editorial in The Nationalist at the start of 1967 registered the importance of agricultural self-reliance in the face of encroaching ‘neo-colonialist spheres of influence’, noting that ‘throughout his tours of the regions, Mwalimu [Nyerere] has been putting across this message: “A nation that has enough to eat through its own efforts is a dignified and proud nation.”’Footnote ⁹¹ In practice, however, ensuring the food security of individual households by regulating domestic practices became the primary means to achieve this larger goal of protecting national self-reliance and dignity.

Women's trainings were frequently not integrated into rural development planning at the national and regional levels, and remained disconnected from other developmental interventions – such as those overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture – at the site of the ujamaa village. The observations of a national official in Mtwara in 1966, that ‘the development of women's programmes still appear to be considered separately from the overall CD programmes in the districts and are consequently usually unrelated and mutually exclusive’, were repeated in official correspondence into the 1970s. Home economics focused on the consumption rather than production of food, and its place in the national development plan was confined to encouraging ‘the proper utilization of resources’.Footnote ⁹² Problems of real material scarcities of food or access to food became reconfigured as deficiencies in nutritional knowledge and techniques of domestic food storage, rationing, and preparation, all of which could theoretically be cured by exposing women to the science of ‘modern’ home economics.Footnote ⁹³ In Mtwara, as elsewhere, national development policy ultimately did little to tackle the structural conditions creating a population vulnerable to food shortages,Footnote ⁹⁴ diluting and even negating the developmental utility of women's interventions.