Roberts’ Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam offers detailed insight into Nyerere’s socialist state-building project in Tanzania and its complex interactions with regional and global politics in the 1960s. The value of Roberts’ work lies in developing a narrative that goes beyond a simplistic, instrumentalist and liberal explanation of Tanzania’s role in global politics. Focusing on Dar es Salaam as an anchor to explore the local and global dynamics of a so-called ‘Cold War city’, it demonstrates how the doctrine of non-alignment, the support for liberation movements and the Pan-Africanist ideology represented an important state-building strategy despite day-to-day political difficulties living by such ideological principles. Methodologically, Roberts outstandingly demonstrates why urban history has a lot to say about transnational and international politics, and why the local–global nexus should be further explored to understand state-building trajectories.
The praxis of ideology matters, argues Roberts, and each chapter represents an excellent example of this. The author’s focus on elites and his top-down approach to state making in Tanzania represent an untrendy though valuable analytical perspective at the opposite end of narratives focusing almost exclusively on ujamaa or villagization. Moreover, contra a growing trend to adopt a ‘follow the money’ approach to African politics, Roberts takes elites’ ideas and aspirations seriously, even though they sometimes shatter against material realities, and shows how postcolonial debates in the so-called periphery influenced national and international politics beyond East–West Cold War rivalries.
The first two chapters do not add much to the existing literature on postcolonial Tanzanian politics and will be of limited interest to scholars familiar with the political history of Tanzania, except for the many empirical – almost ethnographic – details emerging out of impressive multi-sited archival research. These chapters nevertheless provide readers with an introduction to Tanzania’s domestic politics and to the realities of the Cold War, showing how ‘Dar es Salaam’s political life [became] embedded in superpower rivalry and Third World revolution’ (p. 64). Chapter 2, focusing on the 1967 Arusha Declaration, usefully explains why ‘Tanzanian politics did not fit into the left–right Cold War grids favoured by foreign diplomats’ (p. 113), a crucial element to understanding subsequent political debates in Tanzania.
Chapters 3 to 7 are dedicated to empirically illustrating the complex interplay between Nyerere’s ideology of non-alignment, transnational liberation movements and international politics. Each chapter analyses the global politics of Dar es Salaam from a different angle, offering many examples of how the local, national and global interacted with one another and how complex it was for Tanzanian elites to maintain a coherent foreign policy.
Chapter 3, focusing on rivalry between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany in Tanzania, particularly stands out. It first demonstrates how the rigid ‘Cold War’ lens and the Marxist–Leninist framework used by GDR officials to analyse political events led to serious miscalculations. Roberts shows how ‘the ideological readings of East German diplomats led them to cooperate with politicians whose influence waned after Arusha’ (p. 111). Second, it perfectly illustrates the praxis of non-alignment, which was more than simply playing big powers against one another. Tanzania, in need of foreign aid, indeed developed stronger relations with West Germany despite the GDR’s socialist commitment to anti-colonial struggles.
Chapter 4 scrutinizes liberation movements and their entanglements with local and global affairs by focusing on the assassination of FRELIMO’s president Eduardo Mondlane in Dar es Salaam. Chapter 5 focuses on global youth politics, specifically events of the year 1968, and its implications for Tanzania. This chapter represents Roberts’ first attempt to link Nyerere’s authoritarian turn with both global politics and Tanzania’s foreign policy; it therefore, together with Chapter 7, comes the closest to fulfilling the book’s promise to explore the connection between state making and the projection of ideologies onto world politics. Chapter 6 dives into the many debates on the role of the media in postcolonial settings. Roberts demonstrates why ‘freedom of the press’ is a shallow analytical tool and shows how the monopolization of the media in Tanzania was ‘more than a classic case of an authoritarian regime shutting down the possibilities for dissent’ (p. 236). Chapter 7 tells the story of the lesser-known politics of the 1971 Mwongozo wa TANU – a strategic party document laying down major policies for the political and economic development of Tanzania – representing an authoritarian, practical and ideological consolidation of power led by TANU’s radical fringe.
Roberts’ Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam demonstrates how ideas, practices, political elites and their entanglement with global politics matter to understanding Tanzania’s state-building trajectory. While the book has many different angles that might confuse the non-specialist reader, it represents an excellent analysis of how the local–global nexus can give birth to an authoritarian turn. To that extent, the book will be of interest to scholars focusing on Tanzania, but also to political scientists studying authoritarianism and the impact of foreign policy on domestic politics.
