Charles G. Thomas tells a rare story in the historiography of twentieth-century Africa. Ujamaa’s Army describes how an independent military could be made from an old colonial one – and break the mould. It is also about a nation-building process that succeeded at creating a unified national identity, which makes it uncommon too. Thomas is a subtle historian, and this account of Tanzania’s durability comes with plenty of caveats. Nonetheless, he gives much of the credit for Tanzania’s success to its military, and doing so requires dismantling some clichés about African militaries. The first is that independent countries such as Tanzania only lightly renovated the armies they had inherited from Europe. In military organization, as in everything else, the first few years of independence were a time of creativity and experimentation. Julius Nyerere even flirted with the utopian idea that Tanzania might not need a military at all (events in neighbouring Uganda disabused him of this notion). The Tanzanian People’s Defence Force (TPDF) rejected the colonial tradition of recruiting from ‘martial races’ in favour of a recruitment strategy that tried to make the army a true reflection of Tanzanian society, and it experimented with recruiting women. These were significant breaks with the colonial way of doing things.

Nyerere stripped the colonial armed forces down to the studs. What he then built looked very different from what had been there before. The TPDF was to be a force for national liberation in other parts of Africa and an engine of ideological transformation at home. In Thomas’s account, this was not just rhetoric; the TPDF really was those things, even if not always successfully. Thomas is agnostic about the ideas behind the creation of the TPDF, but his book is useful as a lesson in how a new political ideology – in this case the socialist transformation called ujamaa – can be spread through an old colonial institution. Armies are rigid in their organization, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re rigid in their thought.

The book also considers Tanzania’s international relations, and it does so in two registers. One is regional, telling the story of the TPDF’s relations with its friends (including Frelimo in Mozambique) and its enemies (Idi Amin in Uganda, for example). The other is global, told mostly through an analysis of military aid rendered to Tanzania by powers from both sides of the Cold War. Foreign advisers shaped how African militaries evolved, but we shouldn’t assume that Tanzania marched to any one tune. In Tanzania, Chinese and Canadian advisers are the main players, although others play bit parts. Messages get garbled, lessons are half-learned, and cadets pick up on things their trainers don’t want them to. A notable example of this relates to small arms training. Tanzanian soldiers were trained on Chinese weapons that came with no English-language manuals. Their Canadian military advisers, whose presence was the result of a nudge by the USA and the UK, solved this problem by translating the manuals from Chinese themselves, and then training them as best they could. This is not the kind of arrangement one might expect, but the Cold War is full of subtleties like this that a more doctrinaire interpretation would not be able to see.

The TPDF’s finest hour was the Kagera War, which began with the Ugandan invasion of Tanzania in 1979. A fast, efficient mobilization followed, and the TPDF not only pushed the invaders back, but pursued them all the way to Kampala and deposed Idi Amin. This was a major victory for the TPDF, but it was also the beginning of its decline. It was a costly war for a country that had little to begin with, and victory was followed not by more defence spending, but by a reckoning with how much a strong military was worth. Tanzania’s leaders came to some surprising decisions about what to do with their expanded military, and Thomas tells the story of how they reached those decisions well. Ujamaa’s Army is an original, well-executed interpretation of postcolonial militarism, and it deserves a wide audience in African history.