Responding to Tanzania's activist state, scholars have produced a rich literature on its government and society, carrying insights that travel well beyond its borders. Leander Schneider's compact new book carries this tradition forward honorably. His study not only helps us understand the lessons of Tanzania's disappointing villagization strategy, but also provides a useful methodology for the analysis of political process.
Villagization was a keystone policy for Tanzania's visionary first president, Julius Nyerere, who firmly believed that the country's peasant farmers were his most important constituency and the key to economic growth. Incorporating World Bank recommendations on rural transformation into his philosophy of African socialism, or Ujamaa, Nyerere sought to modernize rural production through communal farming made possible by gathering peasants into compact villages, initially voluntarily, and then forcibly. Villages were to serve as nodes of production and governance. Reflecting prominent modernization theory at its inception, while providing a case study for critiques of ‘development’ in its depressing demise in the 1980s, Tanzanian villagization spawned a rich analytical literature that is practically a scholarly field unto itself.
Schneider concludes his study with a devastating critique of the assumptions about economic incentives characterizing ‘materialist-utilitarian analysis’ of both the left-leaning school of thought that made the University of Dar es Salaam a scholarly hub in the 1970s, and the updated analysis of ‘new political economy’, characterized by Robert Bates. Both assume that Tanzanian policy was driven by a group of elite policymakers pursuing their own benefit. Schneider's analysis reveals a more complex field of activity in which individual actors were motivated by varying interpretations of ideology, bureaucratic competition, and cultural and institutional expectations that easily led to personal animosities.
Schneider does not dismiss the pressures of institutional and class loyalties, but argues that individuals do not disappear within them, and individual interests are not enslaved to structural forces. Instead, he draws on theories of discourse to explain how individuals retain agency within fields of perception that shape their ‘agentic possibilities’. His analysis does not spend much time elaborating the sources of Tanzanian discourse; he simply gestures toward local norms of authority and patriarchy, colonial paternalism, modernization theory, and Nyerere's powerful articulation of ideology. What Schneider demonstrates in impressive detail, however, is precisely how individuals made the decisions that shaped villagization policy.
By focusing on individuals with influence over institutional policies, Schneider is able to upset the conclusions of two prominent voices on development policy, James Scott and James Ferguson, who tend to dismiss the influence of everyday politics in favor of overarching theories that grant enormous agency to the discourses of global elites. Schneider undercuts James Scott's thesis, in Seeing Like a State, that villagization was the imposition of a hegemonic vision of Eurocentric ‘high modernism’. Schneider's work grows more directly from James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine, but he nevertheless questions whether a paternalist belief in technocratic ‘developmentalism’ is sufficient to nullify the politics inherent in decisions affecting communities that are the targets of development policy. Schneider's differences with these authors are less than convincing, as, together with Goran Hyden and Mahmood Mamdani, they prepared the analytical ground upon which he stands.
Schneider moves beyond these earlier approaches by suggesting that Nyerere's one-party state was a fairly successful strategy to obfuscate political and ideological differences behind a façade of party unity. Through intensive and revealing research in several Tanzanian archives, Schneider illuminates the individual decisions shaping these policies. He shows that macro-level theories are not sufficient to explain how a group of seemingly honest administrators of state policy could come to such inexplicable decisions regarding a policy meant to encourage and involve peasants volunteering in a new vision for the rural economy.
The book opens with an authoritative account of how the grassroots Ruvuma Development Association went from being a model for Ujamaa to being a target of jealousy among top-level bureaucrats who praised the efforts of its communal village farms even as they destroyed the organization. Schneider goes on to illustrate how the RDA's confident local ambition could not be replicated by state-directed policy, and how the incentives driving state administrators distorted the policy's implementation. In some regards, Schneider's detailed anecdotes affirm defenders of villagization, who claim that it was undone by poor administration. But his attention to discourse shows how intra-party disputes amplified villagization's excesses precisely because it so ably bore a whole ‘ecology’ of conflicting discourses that made the policy's attractive ideals impossible to achieve.
