Long hailed as an exceptional success story in Africanist circles, Tanzania's nation-building project has been reassessed by an emergent body of scholarship over the last decade (Green Reference Green2011; Brennan Reference Brennen2012; Aminzade Reference Aminzade2013; Lal Reference Lal2015). In Building a Peaceful Nation, Paul Bjerk offers an important addition to this growing literature. Bjerk sets out to explain how and why, in spite of its relatively weak economic and military capacity, the post-colonial Tanzanian state was able, unlike many of its African counterparts, to both peacefully establish sovereign authority over its diverse national territory and boldly command a formidable presence in international relations during the pivotal years from 1960 to 1964. He primarily attributes these outcomes to the effectiveness of the discursive strategies employed by the regime of Julius Nyerere, which enabled the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) government to ‘navigat[e] the postcolonial landscape of the Cold War, creating new institutions and modifying old ones, in order to build a peaceful nation’ (5).

After charting in Section 1 the contours of Nyerere's formative years of intellectual development, highlighting his eclectic local and international influences, Bjerk shifts to examining the specific ways in which TANU's political leadership successfully endeavoured to create a new national consciousness, which emphasised the values of participatory democracy, equality and social justice, while, at the same time, marginalising the divisive politics of race, ethnicity and class. In Section 2, Bjerk traces the intellectual origins and outlines the central tenets of Nyerere's political philosophy, ujamaa, and its complementary project of socialist villagisation, before analysing some of the most serious threats to the country's sovereignty during this period (including labour unrest, popular calls for a racialist conception of citizenship and the army mutiny of 1964). In this section, Bjerk persuasively demonstrates that the TANU government supplemented its discursive emphasis on national cohesion with ‘[l]egislative innovation, political cunning, and crass intimidation’ (95) that sought to marginalise political opponents (i.e. incorporating all labour organisations into a government-run union and dismantling the institutional basis of indirect rule) and solidify the ruling party's monopolisation of political power and practice (through the introduction of the one-party state and the creation of organisations like the National Youth Service, or Jeshi la Kujenga). It is through such measures, Bjerk contends, that the TANU government was able to neutralize ‘the seeds [of the country's] division’ (95).

In the book's final section, Bjerk investigates the TANU government's efforts to consolidate the state's external sovereignty, arguing that Nyerere's cultivated international reputation as an eloquent and principled leader enabled him to pursue his twin goals of regional federation and southern African liberation with impressive effectiveness in a fraught, Cold War international environment. Specifically, Bjerk argues that ‘through the careful manipulation of the discourse that governed the tense competition between East and West’, Nyerere, in collaboration with Zanzibar's first President, Abdul Karume, was able to pre-empt both Western intervention and communist domination in the creation of the United Republic of Tanzania (207).

Bjerk's text has a number of impressive strengths. His analysis adroitly situates Tanzania's early efforts at post-colonial nation-state building within a nuanced geopolitical context, utilising archival sources from the USA and Europe, to elucidate the ways in which international factors foundationally shaped Nyerere's thinking and discursive strategies. Moreover, by incorporating a wealth of oral sources into his analysis, including interviews with many of the primary historical players, Bjerk is able to offer a treasure-trove of fresh empirical details into his account of this period. Finally, while not always entirely convincing, his efforts to highlight the ways in which local, indigenous thought and practice informed the construction of TANU's political project and ideology is laudable and, at times, illuminating.

One shortcoming, however, is that Bjerk's overemphasis on the importance of discourse to Tanzania's nation-building success story tends to obscure other, more salient explanatory factors. Specifically, Bjerk neglects the unique political-economic conditions and societal constraints that shaped Tanganyika's relatively open space of possibility for nation-building. At independence, Tanganyika lacked the entrenched ethnic and class divisions that marked the post-colonial experiences of neighbours such as Kenya, DRC and Uganda. In these latter countries, where ethno-regional tensions were more acutely politicised and where centralised post-colonial governments had to contend with, and accommodate, more powerful and entrenched local elites and international interests, it is highly unlikely that any leader, regardless of their political acumen, ideological vision or discursive strategies could have successfully implemented the kinds of far-reaching nation-building reforms that Nyerere was able to in Tanzania's more homogenous social environment. A more rigorous discussion of this social and political-economic context would have lent nuance and balance to Bjerk's central arguments. As a result of this omission, Bjerk's analysis, at times, comes off as overly voluntaristic and apolitical.

That said, there is no denying that this meticulously researched book represents an indispensable contribution to the growing historical literature on post-colonial Tanzanian nation-building and state formation.