In the mid-2000s, in a small provincial town on the Tanzanian coast, a British businessman leased from the Tanzanian government one of the surviving German bomas, local government headquarters in ornate mock Arabic style, and turned it into a smart hotel. He was fairly up front about the fact that this scheme was part of a strategy to lower his tax bill to the British government. Next door to the hotel was a tiny backpackers’ lodge in a moldy coral stone building. The British owners, on friendly terms with the hotel manager, described their Tanzanian employees as participants in a hotel-business training program, rather than simply as cooks and waiters. Meanwhile, most of the half-dozen Europeans who regularly congregated at its bar were connected to an organization that ran a gap-year volunteering scheme in the town.Footnote 1
The participants were supposed to find out more about the marine environment of the harbor town, and to transmit this knowledge in some fashion to its inhabitants. In fact, the conversation at the bar often revolved around boat trips on the bay and the volunteers’ research efforts. One of these consisted of weighing the gonads of locally caught octopus in order to assess their fertility, and provided stuff for many jokes. Some of the jokers gave the impression of having joined the scheme mostly to collect such anecdotes, though other members of the volunteer group took their pedagogical work quite seriously.
Meanwhile, down the road, in another German-era building that was falling to pieces, half of its coral stone walls replaced with mud and wattle, an aging sheikh ran a Quran school. He employed a middle-aged man as teacher, who, unusually for Tanzanian Muslims, was competent in Kiajemi, the writing of Swahili in Arabic script. The school was well attended and appeared well run. The people teaching in it collected school fees, but the school was not their only (or, in all likelihood, main) source of income. Chickens scratched the ground in the sheikh’s backyard, since, like many people in this town, he doubled as a cultivator.
Judging by standard definitions of volunteering as the provision of unpaid working time to an organization with socially beneficial aims, the people at the backpackers’ hostel bar were volunteers, while those working at the fee-paying Quran school were not. Of course, though the connection between the volunteering scheme and the hotel was never quite explained to me, another description of what the volunteers did would be that they enjoyed an extended beach holiday with some do-goodery on the side, while acquiring lines in their CVs and apparently helping an expatriate run a successful tax avoidance scheme. Meanwhile, the people at the Quran school were providing a socially much more meaningful service. Their dedication was evident and their income from the school very limited, as the state of the sheikh’s home made clear. But since they charged fees, they were not volunteers.
The surfer-and-barfly types among these volunteers presented only one extreme in a spectrum of diverse motivations and attitudes among gap-year volunteers. Nevertheless, the contrast between them and the Quran teachers highlights the way the concept of “volunteering” contributes to the framing of social realities in societies receiving aid, making some activities visible and acceptable in the spheres of aid and government while obscuring others that may occupy quite similar spaces in peoples’ lives. In the process, it also sanctions the growth of particular institutions, especially those known as civil society organizations (CSOs) and self-help programs.Footnote 2
This article argues that the “volunteer” is part of a taxonomy of work and employment that systematically produces such highlighting and obscuring effects. The core concepts here are aid organizations and the experts they employ, who mutually confer legitimacy and status: organizations are expert because they employ experts, and experts are legitimate because they are employed by organizations. The somewhat marginal figure of the volunteer—alongside the intern and the trainee—has taken shape within this power structure, particularly as organizational forms have diversified with the erosion of state dominance in the aid sector (Ferguson 2006). Its salience, in other words, is bound up with the increased prominence of “nongovernmental” and “civil society” organizations in the aid sector, and programmatic thinking that emphasizes the supposed democratizing and accountability-enhancing effects of civic and private initiative in development (Amin Reference Amin2005; Green Reference Green2012). The focus of this article on “volunteering,” then, does not imply that it is the only concept at work in donors’ framing of social action. Rather, the notion serves as a lens through which to examine a complicated landscape.
Volunteering here denotes a formalized, but un- or underpaid employment status with marked idealistic overtones. In many ways, however, the context in which these projects and the participants are understood—for example, as purely altruistic efforts—has to be qualified or interrogated. From the point of view of sponsoring organizations, volunteers, as employees who are partly or even entirely unpaid, save funds. From the point of view of the volunteers themselves, the work is also a livelihood strategy. Even where they are entirely unpaid, they are looking for skills, contacts, experience, or lines on their CV. As Brown and Green (this issue) demonstrate, for Africans seeking a foothold in the aid industry, the formal status of volunteer can be an important step toward professionalization (see also Prince, this issue). In many ways the idealism that is assumed to underlie volunteering distracts attention not only from the necessities volunteers face, but also from the politics that shape the use or avoidance of the category.
At the same time, while “volunteering” is on the face of it a positive term, it is partly defined by what it is not—paid employment. The status of volunteer, in other words, also serves to make a distinction between the aspiring aid worker and the properly paid expert (and often expat) professional. In principle, of course, professionalism is not supposed to be a function of salary received, but of dedication and competence. Nevertheless, within the formal labor markets and corporate organizations of the aid world, professional identity is closely tied to the ability to earn a living from one’s expertise (Mosse Reference Mosse2011). In this sense, volunteer status is both enabling and limiting. As we will see below, it is also a category that has very little relevance in a context in which expertise and legitimacy are not necessarily equated with formal employment, such as that of Muslim ritual life and religious expertise.
In Tanzania, the complexities of the notion of the volunteer are even more acute because a labor market involving the exchange of time worked for monetary payments is a fairly recent development and coexists with other forms of labor organization. Even today, much labor is mobilized through family networks or deployed in the “informal sector” (Tripp Reference Tripp1997; Ponte Reference Ponte1999), and salaried work is scarce. However, this situation enhances, rather than challenges, the social value of paid employment. Salaried work is perhaps even more desirable for its scarcity, so that even people successfully pursuing much more varied livelihood strategies accept the terms of “First World” economies, in which contracted employment is a much more normalized way of life.
Nevertheless, the obscuring effects of the use of the category “volunteer” are not merely a cultural misunderstanding. In both African and European settings, the framing of certain work practices and institutional relationships as “volunteering” highlights a formal contractual relationship over the livelihood and self-legitimizing aspects that are also at play. In other words, in both contexts, not only in Africa, the term “volunteer” serves to create the appearance of clearly defined roles and motivations where they may be much more composite and complicated in practice. To elaborate these points, the article first examines tensions around unpaid formal employment in the recent history of workplace relations in Europe. It then moves on to interactions between Muslim activism and the organizational practices of Western donors, officials, and aid organizations in Tanzania, of which volunteering typically forms part.
In the donor-sanctioned view, volunteers occupy a liminal place between idealism and professionalization, promoting their idealistic goals and values while cooperating with professional organizations as part of civil society. Yet the organizational structures involved in Islamic religious and social practices do not involve this kind of employer, do not make the connection between salaried employment and professionalism, and tacitly assume very different forms of legitimization and livelihood. While some Muslim activists have succeeded in becoming “visible” to donors as plausible volunteers and grantees, formal employment and contact with government in some situations delegitimizes rather than legitimizes Muslim religious actors. The notion of the volunteer is thus implicated in both conflict and rapprochement between Muslim social action and the aid world.
Volunteering, Changing Labor Markets, and the Casualization of Labor in the West
In Europe, as in Africa, the notion of volunteering covers a multitude of practical arrangements, from short-term full-time roles to intermittent, part-time, and long-term commitments. Conversely, there is a good deal of unpaid labor that does not fall into this category (including most domestic labor), and a good deal of paid labor that shares the idealistic, community-oriented character associated with volunteering. Moreover, volunteering may have effects that the standard account of volunteer idealism tacitly overlooks—in particular, the devaluation of the salaried counterpart to the work provided by volunteers. Thus if “volunteering” can legitimize aims that may be less than lofty among volunteers (Stebbins Reference Stebbins1996), employing volunteers also helps employers obfuscate the unequal character of labor relations. As employees without salary or benefits, volunteers contribute to the erosion of job security in developed-world economies.
In this vein, in Germany, there has been much talk of the Generation Praktikum, or internship generation—the youths who find themselves accepting short-term and marginal posts due to difficulties establishing themselves in the “proper” labor market. One also hears the term Prekariat (the precariate), meaning those who get stuck in such marginal forms of employment (Sueddeutsche Zeitung 2012a, 2012b). Conversely, in Britain, unpaid internships in banking and politics often appear on the CVs of privileged students and university graduates precisely because they have the social connections to obtain such valuable positions and the financial resources that allow them to work temporarily without pay (The Guardian 2011, 2012). Here, internships provide the entrance into highly competitive fields that are open only to the few, although their contribution to the process of “casualization” of the workforce has also been noted (Perlin Reference Perlin2012). It appears, then, that the concept of volunteering is implicated in a genuinely global process of the subdivision and stratification of formal employment.
These taxonomies of employment matter a great deal, for however differently livelihoods may be structured in different places, individuals are inevitably defined, to a significant extent, by what they do with their time and how they make a living. At the same time, the way work and sources of livelihood combine to define a person is conditioned by the overall structure of the economy and society in which the person operates. For example, internships in Germany and in Britain tend to be evaluated differently partly because of difference in the patterns of stratification and of wealth transfer between generations. In Germany, the proliferation of unpaid internships not only contrasts with a history of well-paid apprentice-level opportunities, but also clashes with the expectations of a broad middle class strongly defined by comfortable incomes (Goebel, Gornig, & Haeussermann Reference Goebel, Gornig and Haeusserman2010). In Britain, where the upper reaches of the middle class are defined partly by wealth and social connections, as distinct from income, the ability to obtain and afford unpaid internships in prestigious organizations appears instead as a continuation of old privileges (Savage et al. Reference Savage2013; Williams et al. Reference Williams2013).
Nevertheless, in Britain, too, unpaid and low-paid precarious workers increasingly struggle to survive, hoping for eventual professionalization, ever more elusive in a stagnant economy (Perlin Reference Perlin2012). To them, “trustafarians” who can afford to pursue a line of work that does not feed them are likely by definition “pseudo.” Conversely, for those who use unpaid internships as a means to add earning power to an already secure livelihood, a close connection between salary and professional status may seem a hint “plebeian.” This slippage in the status connotations of unpaid work between “posh” and precarious highlights how context-dependent and unstable the status of the unpaid worker can be, and how much is elided in its framing as “volunteering.” This is no less the case in Tanzania.
The Institutional Context of Volunteering in Tanzania: The “Aid Milieu” and Its Muslim “Others”
The meaning of volunteer work in Tanzania has changed significantly since independence in 1961. Broadly speaking, the “volunteer” has gone from being a lay supporter of the state’s quest for development to a professional manqué within organizations now conceived of as a counterweight to the state. In a somewhat Orwellian fashion, kazi ya kujitolea, “voluntary work,” in the early postindependence period often was a continuation of practices of forced labor in the colonial period. Where formerly colonial district officers recruited porters or road builders as a service from colonial chiefs or from tax defaulters, postcolonial party representatives called on supporters of the independence movement to perform quite similar tasks in the name of collective progress (see Brown & Green and Hunter, this issue).
This phenomenon reached its greatest efflorescence in the villagization campaign, when plots to be worked bega kwa bega (shoulder to shoulder) were part of the layout of fields in newly founded villages. While some resettled villagers initially joined in with enthusiasm, often the obligation to work these fields was passed around like a hot potato and contributed to the establishment of hierarchies in recently enlarged villages (von Freyhold Reference Von Freyhold1979). In the long run, the work requirements were unenforceable and, given the lack of economic reward, unjustifiable (Hyden Reference Hyden1981; Schneider Reference Schneider2014). Today the practice of recruiting free labor nevertheless continues on the part of government officials, for instance, for brickmaking for public buildings. While nationalism and development continue to be invoked in this context, this rhetoric is no longer as optimistic as it once was.
The generation of volunteers now working in the aid sector in Tanzania instead belongs to an age in which civil society organizations are considered guarantors of a level of efficiency and accountability in social service provision that the nation state has failed to deliver (Semboja & Therkildsen, Reference Semboja and Therkildsen1996; Ferguson 2006). Their employers are now often termed “Civil Society Organisations” (CSOs) and “Faith-Based Organisations” (FBOs), and are considered a necessary counterweight to the state (see Abrahamsen Reference Abrahamsen2000; Mercer Reference Mercer2003; Green Reference Green2012). Research has shown, though, that they are at least as likely to come into being in response to donor initiatives to support and empower them as they are to pre-exist these efforts (Green, Mercer, & Mesaki Reference Green, Mercer and Mesaki2010). In other words, aid organizations’ institutional framing of the social world they seek to influence encourages the emergence of particular institutional arrangements (Hulme & Edwards Reference Hulme and Edwards1996; Igoe & Kelsall Reference Igoe and Kelsall2005).
It could be said that in their quest for local partners to support, aid organizations confront a fluid social world and divide it up into distinguishable, supportable entities. The Christian Social Services Commission (CSSC) has been particularly successful in arranging and providing the institutional structures for cooperative ventures between long-established Christian denominations and government and international donors (Leurs, Tumaini-Mungu, & Mvungi Reference Leurs, Tumaini-Mungu and Mvungi2011). Less institutionalized Christian congregations, especially among the newer Pentecostal churches, do not participate in these circuits to anything like the same extent (see Dilger Reference Dilger2005). Muslim congregations, meanwhile, remain largely invisible to the FBO-seeking gaze of international donors, as their informal, networked structures are hard to frame in donors’ categories.
This outcome forms part of a broader pattern. While Christian churches since the beginning of colonialism tended to be “surrogates of the state” (Jennings Reference Jennings2008) in terms of service provision, Muslim congregations remained opaque to both colonial and postcolonial officials. Muslim clerics have never been organized into or employed by formal churches; they traditionally depend on donations motivated by respect for their religious role, payment for specific religious services such as weddings or judgments under religious law, or entirely nonreligious enterprises such as trading (Lapidus 2009).Footnote 3 Such a bundle of livelihood strategies sits awkwardly with the distinction between “working for income” and “working (unpaid) for the common good” implied by volunteering. It also means that the most important religious “professional” may not be one who draws a salary for this religious role.
The institutional structures of Muslim charity and education have also been less intelligible to the Tanzanian state than Christian ones. Early on, the German colonial government investigated Muslim charitable foundations (awqaf) as tax avoidance schemes (TNA G 9/39:7), and the postcolonial government shut down the East African Muslim Welfare Society on charges that it lacked nationalist commitment (Nimtz 1981).Footnote 4 Although Sufi sheikhs have long worked as teachers and healers, and Sufi chapters double as informal support networks and burial societies, neither colonial officials nor postcolonial ones treated them as potential partners in service provision. In the Muslim community, Quranic education was closely related to the colonial rise and postcolonial decline of Sufism, which posited an esoteric relationship between teachers and disciples and thrived on loosely knit networks of scholars, very different from the formal contract-based labor market. Recently, reformist Muslim organizations that sought to constitute themselves on more formal lines have faced mistrust over their suspected political agendas (Loimeier Reference Loimeier, Otayek and Soares2007; Becker Reference Becker2008).
This state of affairs affects a great number of people. Although religious affiliation is not covered in censuses, it is clear that Muslims form, at the least, a very large minority in Tanzania (Westerlund Reference Westerlund1981; Ludwig Reference Ludwig1999). Due to the close association between Christian missions and secondary education, they are consistently underrepresented in secondary and higher education, and by extension in the higher levels of state administration. This marginalization not only deepens divisions between Muslim and Christian constituencies, but also complicates interactions between Muslim organizations and Western donors, which in turn become more nervous about Islamic radicalism (Loimeier Reference Loimeier, Otayek and Soares2007; Becker Reference Becker2008). Overall, then, Muslims’ relationship to the “aid sector” is therefore weaker and more fraught than that of Christian constituencies.
Nevertheless, younger Muslim activists today find it easier to position themselves with reference to donor-compatible taxonomies of social activity—partly, but not only, because Anglophone donors are no longer the only ones in town. Moreover, there are groups of Muslims who invoke a different social identity—such as that of “village women”—rather than emphasizing religion. For them, in some instances the concept of volunteering can help validate and “make visible,” in the universe of aid donors, shared social practices that feed into both livelihood and professionalization strategies. They have thus been able to work with dominant notions of employment and volunteering. The following sections examine different cases of Muslims working without pay and interacting with the aid industry. They all highlight the tensions between the current notion of volunteering and the longer-standing concerns around livelihood, social cooperation, and religious legitimacy that inform Muslim social practice and charity.
The History of Sufi Madrasa: “Student Volunteers”
The history of Quran schools (madrasa) in Tanzania provides a study in the routinized provision of unpaid labor for a shared cause that is not construed as “volunteering” in the current sense.Footnote 5 Early in the twentieth century, the practice was enormously important in conferring identity—albeit a religious, not a professional, one—on the volunteers. Old men who studied in madrasas in coastal Tanzanian provincial towns in the 1930s or ’40s recall laboring in fields owned by the shehe (sheikhs) who ran their schools. At that time, this was a common pattern: especially impecunious boys from the countryside who sought to study in town were put up in very basic accommodations and earned their keep and instruction by working in the shehes’ fields (interviews with Mzee Bin Juma, Mingoyo, Reference Bin Juma and Mingoyo2000; Fadhil Zubeiri, Lindi-Mikumbi, Reference Zubeiri2000; Bushiri Lipyoga, Rwangwa, Reference Lipyoga2004; Mwalimu Mfaume, Kilwa-Pande, Reference Mfaume2004). Typically, former students recall this time without bitterness; they stress the intrinsic value of the education they obtained, rather than construing themselves as an exploited labor force (interview with Mzee Bin Juma, Mingoyo, Reference Bin Juma and Mingoyo2000).
Their experience provides another reminder that the close identification of “work” with “employment,” either salaried (and thus professional) or unpaid (and thus voluntary and idealistic), is historically specific. The exchange of labor for knowledge and blessings that occurred in madrasas had no connection to the notion that work is validated (in particular, recognized as professional) through pay. Rather, it formed part of a web of nonmonetary engagements and exchanges. The case has been made that these madrasas played a crucial role in the transformation of former slaves and other newcomers to the towns into a Muslim citizenry (see Glassman 1996; Becker Reference Becker2008). The process involved a revaluation of values: formerly, the relationship between owners of fields and their field hands in this area had been that of master and slave; now it was the relationship between a saintly patron and his student-client, between the Sufi khalifa and his murid (interview with Bi Kombe Hamisi, Lindi-Ndoro, 2003; Mohamed Mwichande, Kilwa-Masoko, Reference Mwichande2004). It was, in other words, much more broadly construed and more spiritually significant than the notion of an exchange of labor for educational services would suggest.
Inasmuch as the schools helped marginal townspeople and villagers become Muslims with a recognized stake in the affairs of their home areas, they carried the seeds of their own destruction. Their importance declined as ex-slaves put down roots. Nevertheless, it is not quite clear why the Sufi madrasas of the early twentieth century disintegrated soon after independence, and it is quite likely that large-scale political and economic factors played a major role (see Nimtz 1981; Becker Reference Becker2008).
First, the cash-crop economy of the coast went through difficult adjustments. Cotton cultivation ran into trouble with pests and monopolist buyers; coconut plantations did not need much labor but also brought in little cash (Ahmed 2006). The decline of sisal in the 1960s due to competition from other fibers depressed the coastal economy as a whole. As it faltered, it appears that the major Sufi sheikhs “operated with a deficit” and sold off plots: their ziara festivities, the annual celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday and of the lives of the orders’ founders, were expensive, and their descendants today have little land (interview with Fadhil Zubeiri, Lindi-Mikumbi, Reference Zubeiri2000). Meanwhile, the importance of formal employment and government contacts as routes to advancement in the postcolonial state devalued Muslim education relative to its Christian or secular counterpart. Moreover, the Tanzanian “leadership code,” enacted after the Arusha Declaration of 1967, likely created problems for those sheikhs who doubled as officials of the ruling party, since it prohibited them from owning rental properties and running businesses besides their party activities (Tripp Reference Tripp1997).
The problem was also political: at a time when commitment to the national project was supposed to supersede all others, the voluntary, unsalaried office of sheikh was rarely visible to officialdom, and when it was, it could raise suspicions. The leadership of the most widely known Sufi madrasa, based at Kilwa Kisiwani’s Shadhili zawiya (Sufi center), ran into trouble due to its transnational connections. The founder’s son and heir apparent, Nuruddin Hussein, was imprisoned because of contacts with Mozambican adherents of his order, who were accused of collaboration with the Portuguese colonial government (Becker Reference Becker2008). Subsequently he was obliged to live in northern Tanzania until finally being allowed to take up residence in Dar es Salaam. His disciples managed to sustain a number of miradi (income-generating schemes) for some years, including a transport business and trade in fish, but Nuruddin’s absence and official suspicion weakened the order (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2008). Today his former home in the capital serves as a zawiya especially for younger members of the order, but the Shadhilis largely avoid political engagement and interaction with the aid sector.
Similarly, in another coastal town, Lindi, Hassan Mbwana Maalim, a sheikh who fled Zanzibar during the 1964 revolution, struggled to build a congregation of his own because of his tacitly critical attitude toward some of the ritual practices pursued by the town’s Sufis (interview with Hassan Mbwana Maalim, Lindi-Ndoro, Reference Mbwana Maalim2000). Apparently unable to survive on his reputation and religious services, he ran a shop for some years and even, as he recalled with some bitterness and his supporters recalled with sympathy, at one time worked as a night watchman. He has seen his profile rise in his last few years as attitudes critical of Sufism have spread among a new generation, though his economic situation remains difficult.
By standard definitions of volunteering, this man at one time was a “volunteer sheikh”: he derived his income from salaried employment and was a religious leader in his “spare time.” But of course, this is not how he or his followers construed the situation. For a sheikh, deriving income from charity or from separate economic activities does not, in the common understanding of Muslims, impinge on his status as a sheikh. Moreover, from the mid-1970s on, as the postcolonial economy slid into crisis in Tanzania as in many African countries, diversified livelihood strategies became the norm, even among people with regular salaried income (Tripp Reference Tripp1997; Seppaelae Reference Seppaelae1998). In a sense, the sequence by which students provided voluntary labor in the colonial period, followed by the spread of these diversified livelihood strategies in the postcolonial period, has ensured that Tanzanian sheikhs do not need to seek a professional employment status. At the same time, their postcolonial experience highlights the fact that understandings of what constitutes work and professional life exist, willingly or not, in a political force field. This becomes even clearer if we examine present-day religious activists participating in government efforts to provide “faith-based” services” for HIV-positive people.
The Institutional Framework of AIDS Activism: PEPFAR, Bakwata and TACAIDS
As stated above, the elaboration of a “voluntary sector” in Tanzania is closely linked with the idea of civil society organizations as a potential answer to Africa’s institutional weaknesses and democracy deficits. In the following paragraphs, it will be examined in particular in relation to Muslims’ participation, or lack of it, in the “faith-based” provision of AIDS education, counseling, and testing: an area of activity in which the participation of volunteer “lay counselors” and “trainers of trainers” is built into the plans (PEPFAR 2010).
The U.S.-funded President’s Emergency Fund for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), which was established by the George Bush administration under the direct influence of American Christian organizations (Dietrichs Reference Dietrichs2007), forms a node in the web of organizations promoting the involvement of CSOs and FBOs in AIDS service provision. In Tanzania, where Christian churches have played a well-established role in health infrastructure going back to the “medical missions” of the colonial period, these facilities have readily fallen in line with this approach (interview with Mihayo Mageni Bupamba, AMREF office, Dar es Salaam, Reference Mageni Bupamba2005; Hashim Kalinga, TACAIDS, Dar es Salaam, Reference Kalinga2008). By contrast, involving Muslim organizations in AIDS education, prevention, and testing has proven difficult. In part, this is a matter of political history: the institutionally strongest Muslim welfare organization in the region, the East African Muslim Welfare Society (EAMWS), was shut down on government orders in 1967. This was in keeping with the pronounced “statism” of Tanzania’s government at the time, but also was plausibly connected to the strength of South Asian participation in EAMWS, which fell foul of the racial nationalism then current in the country (Westerlund Reference Westerlund1981; Brennan 2013).
The government sought to replace and extend the functions of EAMWS with the founding of the Central Council of Tanzanian Muslims (Baraza kuu la Waislam Tanzania, or Bakwata). But, as has been repeatedly observed (e.g., Nimtz 1981; Leurs et al. 2010), the legitimacy of Bakwata as representative of Tanzania’s Muslims has consistently remained in doubt. Moreover, its organizational structures and finances are considerably weaker than those of Christian churches, which operate in cooperation with the government through the Christian Social Services Commission (CSSC) (Ludwig Reference Ludwig1999; interview with Hashim Kalinga, Dar es Salaam, Reference Kalinga2012). In addition, with the expansion of denominational pluralism among Tanzanian Muslims from the 1980s on and an extended phase of widespread dissension among Muslims in the 1990s and 2000s, Bakwata became a focus of criticism by reformist, often Middle Eastern–influenced, Muslim groups, colloquially often loosely summarized under the term Ansuari (for Ansaar Sunna, the companions of the way [of the Prophet]; see Becker Reference Becker2008).
In this context, attempts by the African Medical Research Foundation (AMREF), an important Tanzanian PEPFAR partner, to include Muslim intermediaries in the distribution of PEPFAR funds initially encountered little success (interview with Mihayo Mageni Bupamba, Dar es Salaam, Reference Mageni Bupamba2005). While health facilities with Muslim sponsors have become a part of the Tanzanian cityscape (Dilger Reference Dilger2014), Muslims not aligned with Bakwata express concerns at the possibility of government interference with funding flows and remain distant from official AIDS policy. As for Bakwata, its efforts have remained limited to its established role as an umbrella organization for mosques and schools rather than health facilities (interview with Hashim Kalinga, Dar es Salaam, Reference Kalinga2012; interview with Muhammad Hamisi Saidi, Dar es Salaam, Reference Saidi2012). Most Muslim groups object to what they see as the sexual permissiveness implied in official AIDS education, ironically falling in line with conservative Catholic groups (Becker & Geissler Reference Becker and Geissler2009; Dilger & Luig Reference Dilger and Luig2010). Although the official “ABC” (abstinence, be faithful, use condoms) formula does commend sexual restraint, they feel that there is insufficient emphasis on the need for marriage to legitimize sexual relations. Moreover, the mere use of sexual content in AIDS education is seen as encouraging the inappropriate publicizing of sexual appetites and exploits.
Since 2008, the Tanzanian government’s commission on AIDS (TACAIDS) has nevertheless sought to encourage religious constituencies, both locally and transdenominationally, to develop what they call “mechanisms” for the use of funds for AIDS control efforts (interviews with Hashim Kalinga, Dar es Salaam, Reference Kalinga2008, Reference Kalinga2012). It cooperates with the Christian CSSC and works closely with a Muslim umbrella organization founded in response to its calls, the Tanzanian Muslim Welfare Network (TMWN). Meanwhile, Muslim groups distant from the government have also elaborated their stances on AIDS. The result is an uneven institutional landscape where there is a good deal of voluntary (unpaid, conviction-directed, idealistic) activity. Nevertheless, many of the workers do not self-identify as volunteers, especially among those not aligned with Bakwata. The reasons for this deserve closer examination.
Bakwata, BakAIDS and Their Critics: Paid Religious Labor as Delegitimizing
The uneasy relations between Bakwata and its critics in the Muslim community are played out also on the field of Muslim AIDS activism. Here, the distinction between altruistic (“voluntary”) and self-seeking behavior comes into the conversation by way of invective, as the opposed camps question each other’s motives and practices. In these circumstances participation in the employment practices of the aid world can be used to delegitimize opponents. The legal category of the volunteer, normalized within the aid world, here becomes repoliticized.
With encouragement from TACAIDS, Bakwata itself has by now initiated its own program on AIDS, known as BakAIDS, or Bakwata AIDS project. It operates in Kilwa, Dar es Salaam, Tanga, and Mtwara among other places, and in some cases involves volunteers. Nevertheless, Bakwata continues to define its role regarding AIDS mostly as advisory. The organization has issued a Mwongozo, or “guidance document,” laying out its stance on AIDS (Bakwata 2011). In the introduction, Bakwata reiterates its understanding of itself as the organization for all Muslims in Tanzania. Overall, the document focuses on the need to live properly religious lives to stay safe. Condoms are not mentioned. Nevertheless, it includes language clearly influenced by standard AIDS policy: “voluntary testing and counseling,” “combating stigma,” “living with hope” and so on. Moreover, in keeping with official policy, the Mwongozo refers to AIDS as a janga, or “disaster/emergency.”
Meanwhile, Muslim organizations distant from Bakwata have also elaborated their stances on AIDS. At one of the larger Dar es Salaam religious centers unaffiliated with Bakwata, the Masjid Sheikhat Issa in Magomeni, the center’s msimamizi (manager), Bakari Ali, indirectly challenged Bakwata on its definition of AIDS as a janga. Moreover, he connected Bakwata’s inability to advise or speak for Tanzanian Muslims at large to its dependence on state funding, in contrast to the Masjid Sheikat’s ability to survive on voluntary contributions from believers. Explicitly referring to Bakwata’s use of the term janga in his comments, he challenged the organization’s policies, implying that they reflect the beliefs of a partisan minority who pay insufficient attention to the Quran. Without denying the value of antiretroviral treatment—he asserted, in fact, that HIV-positive believers at his mosque were encouraged to seek it and that it had helped in the recovery of many—he insisted that
Muslims believe, according to their book . . . that there is no illness for which there is no medicine. . . . They disagree with the explanation given elsewhere that AIDS has no cure. . . . AIDS has a cure. What is its cure? It is to avoid those dirty matters that the Almighty God has prohibited. . . . [Only] if you have left the Prophet and God’s teachings[,] . . . now you will see AIDS as a disaster. . . . Ninety-nine percent of Muslims understand that AIDS is not a disaster. . . . They consider it an illness . . . but an illness with a cure; its cure is the teachings we have in our book. (Interview, Dar es Salaam, 2012)
Not unlike Bakwata, though, he limited the Masjid’s role to providing advice; the “experts,” wataalamu, who provide tests, counseling, and treatment, were to be found elsewhere. But Ali asserted that Bakwata could not claim to speak for the Muslim community on AIDS because their leaders were economically self-seeking, including in response to this health crisis.
They have received [the plans for faith-based provision of AIDS services] as a means to put their lives in order. If you bring them such means, they sort out their own lives. . . . I don’t think they can provide good leadership. . . . They are not trustworthy. . . . They were the first Islamic organization [in Tanzania]. They could have provided an example . . . as concerns provision of charity . . . but you will find that they imitate us. . . . [Among Muslims,] if someone has wealth, he will donate some of it, for fear of God—if you have three cars, you give one over to the mosque. . . . Bakwata had houses that were given as waqf [a charitable contribution], eighty of them, here in the city. . . . If you ask now, they don’t have even five. . . . Where did they go? . . . They are given everything by the government . . . because they are a department that the government built in order to control us others out here. (Interview, Dar es Salaam, 2012)
The uneasy relations between Bakwata and its critics in the Muslim community are thus played out over issues of funding as well as the role of paid versus volunteer officials. Bakwata acknowledges that it does have miradi, or income-generating schemes, including real estate, although the organization is somewhat vague about its finances.Footnote 6 As for the financing of the Sheikhat Issa Islamic Centre, Bakari Ali was open about the fact that it owed its existence, in its present form, to a generous patroness in Abu Dhabi, although the day-to-day running of the center depended on voluntary work, “because it is a question of faith.”
He explained that the school run by the mosque could be considered an income-generating activity because the students pay school fees that are used to maintain the school building and also other parts of the complex. Yet he emphasized that while menial employees, such as the building caretaker and night watchman, were paid, many of the people involved in its core religious and educational activities, including himself, did not draw salaries.
The night watchmen and caretakers are all employed. . . . As for the question of voluntary work, that is the leadership. There is no leader here who draws a salary. . . . Except that the prayer leaders (imamu) draw salaries. . . . I have decided to work here voluntarily, but I have my livelihood elsewhere. (Interview, Dar es Salaam, 2012)
Quite unlike the Christian model of the cleric, then, this man did not want to have his or his peers’ religious activities identified with their livelihoods. Drawing an implicit contrast with Bakwata, which he effectively dismissed as an organization of government employees, Ali insisted that his professionalism was based precisely on his not having financial interests in his religious pursuits. The link between being able to “live on” a particular line of work and taking pride in it, which appears crucial to labor market–based notions of professionalism, is irrelevant here. Bakwata’s vagueness regarding its own finances suggests that critics like Bakari Ali are winning the public argument: financial independence from government enhances the legitimacy of Muslim organizations in present-day Tanzania.
More widely, an exemplary religious leader, in this line of reasoning, is one who depends on a mixture of charity that is a direct response to the leadership he provides, and his this-worldly livelihood strategies are kept separate from religious interests. This view is not limited to reformist Muslim groups explicitly critical of Bakwata, like Bakari Ali’s. The Sufi center at the former residence of the Shadhili Sheikh Nuruddin, now deceased, is supported by a tiny shop run by his widow, selling little more than tea leaves and sugar, out of a shed backing onto his courtyard. His young followers proudly assert that they run the Sufi order, both its day-to-day activities and the annual festivals of mawlid and ziara, on a mixture of miradi (such as this shop and transport of vegetables to urban markets) and contributions from the faithful (interview with Omari Mkwawa, Dar es Salaam, Reference Mkwawa2012).
Government-Brokered Rapprochement between the Aid Industry and Muslim Organizations: TACAIDS and TMWN
Not all Muslim activists seek to keep their distance from the aid world to the same extent as the Sheikhat Issa mosque. In response to the initial call for the establishment of a funding-deployment mechanism among Muslims, a variety of Muslim groups other than Bakwata met in Dar es Salaam in October 2008 at a hotel owned and run by Muslims in the Kariakoo neighborhood. I was invited to attend as an observer. The participants were concerned about the recognition of Muslim networks and organizations as equal players with the institutionally stronger Christian ones, and more broadly with Muslim history as an integral part of Tanzania’s history. Yet while some participants were ready to sacrifice inclusion in the TACAIDS orbit to the assertion of these political stances, others pragmatically accepted the need to learn “donor speak” and interact with the aid world.
Attendance at this conference was mixed. Some attendees were religious activists with uncertain professional status, very committed to their voluntary work whether or not it supported their livelihoods. Others were professionals who combined their religious orientation with specialized knowledge in law, education, or social work. The former organized their lives partly on the model of the independent sheikh described above; for them, nonreligious economic activity was compatible with their status as religious community leaders. For the latter, their status as committed Muslims in a sense added value to their professional profile and enhanced their professional options. For example, Sheikh Issa Othman, currently on the central committee of the Tanzania Muslim Welfare Network (TMWN), has worked as a consultant for Western aid organizations on the development of educational material on AIDS for use among Muslims (interview with Issa Othman, Dar es Salaam, Reference Othman2008). This second group was also more readily accepting of the need to speak donors’ language, both literally (in that they were more likely to speak English well) and metaphorically (by adapting jargons, dress styles, and manners familiar to donors).
Yet in spite of TACAIDS’s technocratic, inclusive, and apolitical language, its relations with religious groups were shot through with politics. When TMWN was set up in 2009, its general secretary was a former Bakwata official. Today, TMWNs leadership combines ex-Bakwata personnel with people from the younger, more Anglophone and donor-friendly generation. For the younger Muslim professionals, opting into TMWN was not simply a “charitable” choice but also a political one: an attempt to build a linkage with officialdom separate from Bakwata. The loose “network” structure means that local groups with fairly diverse doctrinal stances can opt into or out of it, and by 2012 TMWN had grown into a countrywide organization. Nevertheless, TACAIDS has complained of tensions caused by the tendency of individual Muslim leaders to question the motives of TACAIDS as well as one another, and to demand funding directly for their constituency (interview with Hashim Kalinga, Dar es Salaam, Reference Kalinga2012; see also TMWN 2012). Here, the accusation of kutafuta maslahi, seeking a livelihood (through participation in TACAIDS-sponsored activities), came into play.
TMWN’s AIDS-related activities, moreover, remain largely subsidiary to its core programs, the running of mosques and schools. In “donor speak,” AIDS education and counseling is “mainstreamed” into general pastoral and educational activities. Muslim involvement in anti-AIDS measures does not extend to the hosting of test centers or counseling services of the kind once hoped for by AMREF (interview with Mihayo Mageni Bupamba, Dar es Salaam, Reference Mageni Bupamba2005). AIDS education in this context continues to exist in a gray area where “voluntary” unpaid religious activism forms part of a bundle of livelihood strategies, without necessarily being conceptualized as volunteering. For some religious activists, affiliation with TMWN is part of professionalization strategies that enhance their visibility in the aid world, while for others it probably bolsters their standing in more inward-looking networks of religious notables. These personal agendas have combined with the more explicit political stances of Muslim groups outside Bakwata to both enable and constrain the interaction between TACAIDS and Muslim constituencies. The dynamics of Muslims’ engagement with TACAIDS escape the standard donors’ accounts of civil society and volunteering.
The Rapid Funding Envelope (RFE) for HIV/AIDS in Tanzania and the “Framing” of Local Actors as “Volunteers”
Somewhat ironically, given that TMWN came about partly in response to a call by TACAIDS to provide ways of deploying financial resources through Muslim agencies, TACAIDS officials, reflecting the impact of the post-2008 funding crush on the Tanzanian as well as other governments, now discourage Muslim organizations from seeking funding directly from them. Instead, they position themselves as facilitators for bids for funding from other organizations, largely through participation (along with the Zanzibar AIDS Commission [ZAC], TACAIDS’s counterpart in Zanzibar) in the so-called Rapid Funding Envelope for HIV/AIDS (RFE), which is financed by nine bilaterial donors (from the U.S. and northern Europe) and one Dutch private foundation.Footnote 7
The RFE constitutes a new departure in the management of anti-AIDS campaigns. The financial oversight is provided by the management consultancy Deloitte-Touche, whose logo (unlike those of the donors involved) features prominently on the website (www.rapidfundingenvelope.org), and the involvement of TACAIDS and ZAC is mediated through an U.S.-based charity called Management Sciences for Health. The donors in question thus appear to have handed a significant degree of control over their contributions to a combination of private and Tanzanian government interests, though presumably the fact that they provide, and could withhold, the funds safeguards their influence. The steering committee, in its turn, transmits much of the responsibility for planning activities to the nongovernmental and civil society organizations bidding for funds. In effect, rather than the government or its donors drawing up plans, the organizations seeking funds provide plans for the funders to pick and choose from.
The RFE’s choice of projects to fund once again highlights the way activities that may be construed as “volunteering” form part of diversified livelihood strategies that go well beyond the provision of social services. The recipients of RFE grants for activities related to AIDS education, stigma reduction, and care for AIDS sufferers and orphans have included both Catholic and Lutheran dioceses, a department of the University of Dar es Salaam, and one of the Muhimbili national hospital. The list of RFE’s beneficiaries also indicates that some Muslims are now successful at accessing funds as volunteers—but not necessarily based on their identity as Muslims. One chapter of BakAIDS based in the Muslim coastal town of Kilwa obtained funding for a project to train “trainers of trainers”—a typical category of civil society volunteers in the aid industry—against stigma.
Another recipient, the Masasi Women’s Development Association (MAWODEA), is an even clearer example of the ability of applicants to frame their activities in accordance with donor demands. Based in the provincial town of Masasi, a religiously mixed former mission settlement in a poor, predominantly Muslim region (see Ranger Reference Ranger1979), this organization presents its overall aim as one of “combating poverty” and its activities as providing training on financial management, business development, and entrepreneurship, including the construction of thirty-six solar driers for fruit and vegetables, and the training of 1683 women in their use (see RFE 2006–14). Its AIDS-related program is described as one of nutritional education and care for people living with HIV/AIDS, including the “training of trainers” through workshops and the production of printed information material. From the information provided, it was not clear whether the solar drier trainees were self-identified as people living with HIV/AIDS, although given the prevailing climate of secrecy around AIDS it is unlikely that this number of people would come forward under this rubric. Evidently, then, the “voluntary” activity of providing nutrition education for people living with HIV/AIDS was allied with more entrepreneurial and profit-driven activities. Workshops in themselves typically provide income in the form of a per diem.
The grant to MAWODEA thus again highlights the ability of diverse social groupings to “frame” their activities in accordance with the specifications of donors. This is not the same as saying that such groups “mislead” their sponsors, any more than the sponsors dictate their terms to the grantees. Rather, what takes place is probably best understood as a form of negotiation. The civil society group undertakes to provide voluntary activities in terms desirable to the donor, and the donor quietly accepts the likelihood of further unstated agendas being involved. For the small-town women who obtained funding through MAWODEA, the distinction between “volunteer” and “professional” runs up against a social world of “self-employed” cultivators for whom cooperation is an essential part of survival. The line between disinterested, altruistic, or voluntary work and self-interested economic activity here becomes more of a gray area.
It is worth elaborating briefly on the way I use the term framing here. As with Mitchell’s (Reference Mitchell1988) original use, it is intended to highlight “ways of looking at” a social world: the implicit perceptions that operate in conjunction with explicit discourses. According to Mitchell, these ways of seeing spread within institutional frameworks and among individual actors, and influence what they accept as real, valid, and relevant. But while Mitchell sees framing as the work of powerful strangers on the Egyptian scene, in the present case the process of framing helps manage a particular mixture of strength and weakness. While donors dictate the English-language terms and hold the purse strings, they also need results; thus they need acceptable intermediaries. They are under pressure to demonstrate effectiveness, and they have to get along with state authorities. In the case of RFE, the practical and discursive “framing” of aid practice and African aid recipients in terms of “civil society organizations,” including “volunteers,” allows the different aims and interests of petitioners, administrators, and donors to converge in terms that look clear on paper, whatever the indeterminacies on the ground. Thus all sides compromise, and all get something out of the exchange (Green Reference Green2012; Reference Green2014).Footnote 8
Conclusions
The interactive process just outlined highlights the necessity for caution when examining how neoliberal ideology and interventions work themselves out in Africa (Ferguson 2006). “Neoliberalism” is not always a giant bestriding contemporary Africa, imposing a narrow yet destructive agenda for state rollback and so-called free markets (Harvey Reference Harvey2007). Rather, it is likely that some of the European donors involved in an operation like the RFE have priorities in sympathy with European notions of social democracy. And even if civil society initiatives are conceived of as an alternative to state provision, TACAIDS’s role shows that the government remains closely involved. In the case of MAWODEA, neither donors nor the central government had direct oversight of the group’s actual activities, and the women involved had some choice, both in whether to get involved and how to do so. The framing of the operation as a civil society/volunteer venture provided a rationale for the provision of funds, whose enabling effects may well have outweighed any constraints imposed by the “CSO” label. Moreover, given the religious diversity of the region—not only comprising Muslims and Christians, but also a mixture of Sufi traditionalists and reformists, Anglicans and Catholics—the women sidestepped a lot of politics by not highlighting religious identity. In this sense, the category of CSO was quite useful to them.
Thus we find at the interface of Muslim networks on one hand, and donors and funders on the other, a variety of configurations of professionalism and voluntary work, activism, self-interest, and service. Sheikh Issa Othman, fluent in English, well-connected in the aid “scene,” but also credible as a Muslim activist, could be described as the well-paid, professionalized avatar of the kind of volunteer that schemes such as RFE implicitly posit. Meanwhile, Bakari Ali, the volunteer-manager, an activist but not a religious specialist, at Masjid Sheikhat Issa, is perhaps best understood as working his way toward the status of elder in his chosen Muslim community: a patron in the making. In contrast to Issa Othman, his strategy depends on his keeping a distance from “Western” funding streams and models of organization; his voluntary work remains invisible to donors in the Anglophone aid scene. These two figures also confirm the salience of Brown and Green’s observation (this issue) that volunteers move between representing a community to the aid world and helping to manage it from a vantage point within that world. They are intermediaries that have to actively manage their credibility with their constituencies.
This involves taking stances, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, on a plethora of ethical, social, and political issues, from condom use to the political status of Muslims in today’s Tanzania. These ramifications of their positions make clear how much is elided by the concept of the volunteer when it is posited as denoting a plucky member of civil society, doing his or her bit for accountable service delivery. The issue is not that people like Othman don’t contribute to both civic involvement and service delivery as donors understand them; they may well do so (though this is not to be taken for granted). But they do so within a force field of religious, social, and political divisions, as well as personal aims, convictions, and needs. Personal legitimation, political partisanship, and livelihoods are all in play.
The question, then, is why we should care if the discursive framings used by aid organizations elide these forces. One answer is that acknowledging these undercurrents helps “de-normalize” donor speak, identifying it as a specific political and ideological practice, rather than a neutral description of African realities and humanitarian desiderata. In other words, the discursive framings, willingly or not, contribute to the process of state-making in Africa. Observed carefully, they allow us to see that the constituencies involved in and responding to this process are more diverse than narrowly focused political accounts of African states would suggest (see Abrahamsen Reference Abrahamsen2000). Moreover, the “working misunderstandings” surrounding volunteering form part of a long tradition of Africans’ adopting particular public personas so as to link up to foreigners with resources and power. They establish a faint yet suggestive resemblance between today’s aid officials and colonial administrators of yore, ever seeking to identify legitimate leaders (then, of “tribes,” as now of “civil society”) (see Pels Reference Pels1996).
These elisions, then, also point us toward the question of the extent and limits of aid organizations’ executive power and their need to engage with their “targets.” Both the powers (sometimes unwitting) of donors and their limits become evident when one examines the interaction between Muslim networks and AIDS-related funders seeking channels of faith-based provision. Bakwata’s and TMWN’s documents on AIDS and the institutional structures supported by the RFE all show the effort to engage with and become acceptable within donors’ “framing” of Tanzanian society, “civil society” activism, and aid provision. But there are limits to this adaptability, as is evident, for instance, in the silence of all these publications and organizations on condom use. Donors’ framings, in other words, have real effects on institutional practice, but they cannot simply override the religious or ideological commitments of the Tanzanian actors involved. While donors in many ways dictate the terms of the engagement with their Tanzanian constituencies, they also have to make themselves complicit in their redeployments of them. Donors’ power here seems peculiarly unstable.
