Relative to many a country in Africa, Tanzania has received considerable scholarly attention, especially with regard to the study of its – by most accounts successful – nation-building process. Surrounded on all sides by countries beset by ethnic, religious or other forms of politicized violence, the Tanzanian mainland (former Tanganyika) constitutes by contrast a ‘Haven of Peace’, as its commercial capital Dar es Salaam is named. The triumphal narrative touted by both state and sympathetic observers attributes its success to a variety of fortuitous factors: the charismatic and incorruptible first president Julius Nyerere; an ethnic landscape not dominated by one or two numerically preponderant groups; a lingua franca (Kiswahili) that – owing to its geographic breadth and ethnic ambivalence – serves well as a national language; and an unorthodox version of socialism configured to resonate with widespread cultural values. Two recent works, however, interrogate this widely accepted depiction of Tanzania. James Brennan's Taifa: making nation and race in urban Tanzania (2012) and Ronald Aminzade's Race, Nation, and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Africa: the case of Tanzania (2013) delve into the oft-overlooked junctures in Tanzania's history where conflict, not consensus, and exclusionary, not inclusionary, forces threatened to produce a very different outcome. Through close examination of archival materials and interviews and an intensive review of period newspapers, these authors complement each other in revealing a highly contingent, and by no means determined, process of state formation. They cover some of the same ground and exhibit different strengths, but nonetheless both make important contributions to Tanzanian historiography and, more generally, to scholarship on multi-ethnic or multiracial societies, nationalism, state–market relations and race relations in Africa.

Nyerere's insistence on a race-blind, ethnicity-blind and religion-blind nation met frequent challenge, as both Brennan and Aminzade show. Whereas Brennan focuses his attention on the British colonial and early postcolonial periods ending with the nationalization of urban housing in 1971, Aminzade tackles a more ambitious time frame, from German colonialism into British colonialism, then socialism and neoliberalism, ending with a spate of corruption scandals in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Both authors offer narratives that fall at an uncomfortable angle relative to conventional Tanzanian historiography. Focusing not on successes and outcomes, they train our attention on the frequently fraught negotiations over national identity and belonging that occurred both within the ruling party of CCM (Chama cha Mapinduzi or Party of the Revolution) and in the public sphere. Opposition to Nyerere's non-racialism took various forms, from internal CCM factionalism to labour union protests, from student movements to newspaper critiques, and evoked varied responses from the neutralizing of opposing factions, the disciplining of students and newspaper editors, the seizure and redistribution of assets deemed national, and the removal (either via imprisonment or forced exile) of perceived enemies of the nation. Brennan and Aminzade share a particular focus on race, especially concerning the position and competing rhetorics about South Asian communities in the emergent Tanzanian nation state.

In analysing ‘the growth and intensification of racial and national thought in the context of colonial and postcolonial urbanization’ (p. 3), Brennan, a historian, highlights continuities across time and political periods. British colonial administrators discouraged urban migration out of a racialized world view that reserved urban residence as the privilege of ‘non-natives', meaning Europeans, Asians and Arabs. They declared rural areas, by contrast, to be the domain of ‘natives' whose land might be stolen by cunning foreigners in the absence of pre-emptive policies. Asians who had invested in rural agriculture were forced to abandon their rural holdings and relocate to towns, where they joined other Asians in investing heavily in urban housing. After independence, Brennan explains, the rhetoric shifted away from racialized discourse but the goal of relegating Africans to rural areas and minimizing urban migration remained constant. Cast now as a commitment to building the new nation, agricultural labour by Africans was elevated to patriotic duty. Yet although Africans were pressured in multiple ways to remain rural, each year saw the population in urban areas rise, and with it a concomitant demand for housing.

Refusal by government leaders to address the growing presence of rural migrants and their need for urban housing meant that the market was left to solve the problem. As the predominant owners of urban land, Asians emerged as the landlord class, extracting high rents from poor and mostly uneducated and underemployed African migrants. This fuelled intellectual and political debates over national belonging argued in highly moral terms: did ‘unscrupulous profiteers' (p. 18) who exploited disadvantaged others merit citizenship in a nation that was trying to disentangle itself from international relations of exploitation? This is the broader tale that Brennan explores through the lens of evolving identity positions and community formations in Tanganyika/Tanzania and in Dar es Salaam more specifically. He begins with the consequences of colonial ‘native’/‘non-native’ designations (Chapter 1) to wenye mji (owners of the town) versus newcomers in the 1930s (Chapter 2), and to productively employed and thus legitimate town residents versus wahuni (hooligans) who were subject to repatriation to rural areas in the 1950s (Chapter 3). Brennan then shifts registers from the exclusionary politics undergirding ‘urban entitlement’ to the intellectual formations of racial nationalisms. His first stop is the public sphere of newspapers and literature (Chapter 4), in which mostly male writers of the early nationalist period championed race as a mode of belonging and advocated ustaarabu (civilization), maendeleo (development) and a highly gendered sense of pride and honour for the new taifa. ‘This race-centered identity paradigm satisfied desires of male African intellectuals to assert economic control over trade, political control over the government, and social control over African women and their children’ (p. 158).

How, and to what extent, Asians would be included within this national framing generated considerable debate on both sides of the African–Asian societal divide. The economic gap between Asians and the majority of Dar es Salaam residents bred growing resentment, as did the emergence of new social categories that challenged racial, class or racial–class divides. These included both chotara (mixed race Afro-Asian children) and naizi (wealthy and exploitative Africans). (Although Brennan does not discuss them, poor Asians also existed and presumably constituted a third liminal category.) Yet despite these groups, the widespread conflation of race with economic differentiation and persisting anti-Asian sentiment among the general public led the ruling party TANU (Tanganyika African National Union) to take legislative action in 1971 via the nationalization of urban housing (Chapter 5). A thinly disguised attack on Asian wealth, it provoked an exodus of Asians and/or their assets out of the country. Some, however, remained and took Tanzanian citizenship, though many were subjected to public criticism for not performing citizenly duties. Brennan ends his elegant and insightful analysis by re-emphasizing the enduring influence of colonially inscribed identity categories in the present, and by crediting TANU/CCM with the ‘ability to deliver a primarily “African” nation while maintaining order over racial and religious resentments' (p. 199).

It is this last issue that Aminzade takes up in his book. For Aminzade, a sociologist who has written previously on ‘contentious politics' in France, there is a fundamental conflict of interest and continual balancing act that occurs within states between ideology (the purview of party politics) and practice (the purview of governance). Party politicians serve as the public mouthpiece of ideology, and, being elected to office, are dependent on public support. Government bureaucrats, by contrast, are generally appointed to their positions and it is to them that the day-to-day responsibilities for government administration fall. In Tanzania, argues Aminzade, this fragile compromise is always battling both ends of the political spectrum: capitalist financiers and/or foreign experts who want a minimal state versus anti-capitalist students, newspaper editors and trade unions who want a very proactive state.

Aminzade also focuses on the issue of race and how it exposes the contentiousness of Tanzanian politics. He shares a common focus with Brennan but differs in theoretical orientation. Party politicians, he explains, take a stridently nationalist position to curry favour with their populist base. They thus rejected foreign management of the economy in the immediate post-independence period and again during the externally imposed 1980s structural adjustment programme, and they rejected the foreign takeover of national industries during the 1990s privatization process. Government bureaucrats, by contrast, seek efficiency and thus as a group tended to support the hiring of foreign managers when internal capacities were low, they were in favour of structural adjustment, and they were supportive of privatization. He draws a number of important conclusions: (1) Tanzanian nation building and governance have both been characterized by exclusionary politics, with race and class (and their overlap) exploited as key signifiers; (2) political parties constitute a public sphere for claims making by both ordinary people and officials about the rights and obligations of national citizenship; (3) path dependency arguments are teleological, as revealed by an analysis of contentious politics and the contingency of historical outcomes; (4) poor states face a critical contradiction between the need for capital accumulation and the need to retain political legitimacy, which necessarily breeds contention and contest (for example, over citizenship and belonging); and (5) the balance between economic development and national sovereignty requires tempering and placing limits on the demands of the neoliberal global economy.

The book is organized into three sections on colonialism, socialism and neoliberalism in Tanzania that are each divided into three chapters: one a general historical overview of the period under discussion; the second on the contentious politics of that period, especially regarding the rights of foreigners; and the third on the opposing demands of economic development and political legitimacy. While the historical chapters cover ground well trodden by others (John Iliffe, Andrew Coulson, Dean McHenry Jr, Susan Geiger, James Giblin, Andrew Ivaska, James Brennan and myself, among others), adding little that is new, Aminzade presents us with the first thorough analysis of post-structural adjustment Tanzania, detailing the rise of predatory capitalism and cancerous corruption. Aminzade's ultimate conclusion – that nationalism serves as a necessary countervailing force to neoliberalism's demands – is well argued and a persuasive rejoinder to those who have been theorizing the irrelevance of states in our globalized world.

Thus these two volumes both make important contributions in spite of the overlap in some of their arguments, and in Aminzade's case overlap with prior scholarship. No work can cover everything, so be forewarned that both authors ground their analyses in urban sites and pay scant attention to rural politics and debates. Moreover, Zanzibar is mostly excluded from their discussions even though it constitutes part of the United Republic of Tanzania. Aminzade devotes a brief discussion to the historical issues there but race engenders different meanings than on the mainland, as Jonathan Glassman has explored in depth, so perhaps both authors felt Zanzibar's racial formations and debates have been suitably covered. Finally, neither author expands the concept of ‘race’ in Tanzania beyond the inherited tripartite colonial model (African, Asian/Arab, European) despite existing racial distinctions within Tanzania's African communities (such as ‘Nilotic’ or ‘Cushitic’ versus majority ‘Bantu’ populations) that underscore current human rights violations and exclusionary rhetoric levelled against Maasai and other non-Bantu pastoralist communities. But these are minor complaints and should not dissuade scholars of East Africa, of state formation and of multiracial societies from seeking out these books post-haste to benefit from their richly textured analyses.