CONTEXTUALIZING OFFICIAL DISCOURSE

The concept of ujamaa first entered Tanzanian political discourse in 1962, shortly after mainland Tanganyika's independence. Sketching the founding principles of ujamaa philosophy, President Julius Nyerere explained that ‘in a socialist society it is the socialist attitude of mind, and not the rigid adherence to a standard political pattern, which is needed’ (Nyerere Reference Nyerere1966: 162). This foundational ‘attitude of mind’ was to be simultaneously rooted in indigenous tradition and a humanistic universalism; Nyerere's idealized construction of the harmonious African extended family would provide a model for a politics of national, and even transnational socialist kinship. In 1967, Nyerere's Arusha Declaration further clarified the contours of this socialist attitude by affixing the communitarian impulse of ujamaa to the ethical and strategic imperative of self-reliance, outlining a code of conduct for Tanzanian life at the micro-political and macro-political levels.

In one sense, the term self-reliance (kujitegemea) had a literal meaning – the productivity of each individual Tanzanian was linked to national prosperity by a chain of self-sufficiency extending through the various political scales of the spatial imaginary at the heart of ujamaa villagization. Villages were to be organized according to the established structure of TANU; each individual would be incorporated into a household (kaya) which would be collected into a unit with nine other kaya. An aggregation of these ten-cell units comprised a village, a cluster of villages comprised a ward, a grouping of wards comprised a district, and a combination of districts comprised a region. According to the Arusha Declaration, ‘if every individual is self-reliant the ten-house cell will be self-reliant, if all the cells are self-reliant the whole ward will be self-reliant, and if the wards are self-reliant the District will be self-reliant. If the Districts are self-reliant, then the Region is self-reliant, and if the Regions are self-reliant, then the whole nation is self-reliant and this is our aim’ (Nyerere Reference Nyerere1968: 248). Yet Nyerere also pointed out the limits to self-reliance as an absolute precept. Ujamaa held that self-reliance was critical ‘both as an instrument and goal of development’,Footnote ³ thus comprising a desired outcome and not just a prescribed mode of conduct – at the personal level, in the sense of individual self-sufficiency, and at the national one, in the sense of political and economic sovereignty.

On the one hand, the principle of self-reliance was woven together with the Arusha Declaration's call for socialist community – at the levels of each ujamaa village, the Tanzanian nation, the African continent, and even the Third World broadly conceived. Nyerere's celebration of the romanticized model of the traditional African extended family indicated that a shared commitment to the ideal of self-reliance was to form a basis for deep interpersonal bonds at the local and national level, rather than end with crude individualism. Furthermore, a common preoccupation with the threats to ideological and geopolitical autonomy inherent in the global structures of the Cold War and the capitalist world economy linked the Tanzanian national community to other Non-Aligned or Third World nations; the metaphor of socialist kinship and the collective aspiration of self-reliance discursively grounded experiments with transnational federation, regionalism, and internationalism extending well beyond Tanzanian and even African borders.Footnote ⁴

On the other hand, a construction of national citizenship that emphasized the redistributive, modernizing mechanism of a welfare state, and not simply an injunction towards communitarian fellowship, motivated the policy of villagization at the heart of the ujamaa project. Nyerere's call for a reorganization of the countryside into distinct but cognate ujamaa villages reflected a conception of Tanzanian rural space as parcelled into cellular units that were nonetheless universally linked through membership in the new nation; these villages would facilitate increased access between rural populations and state services in the form of schools, health facilities and agricultural infrastructure, as well as encourage economic cooperation and modes of sociability conforming to the spirit of socialist nationalism. In this sense, material self-sufficiency at the local or individual level would be qualified by the dissemination of the institutional trappings of a modern welfare state throughout the countryside.

The elastic field of ujamaa discourse was characterized by a layering of developmental referents rather than deriving from a single ideological essence. First, the official maxim of self-reliance resonated with local idioms stigmatizing dependency as a form of exploitation. In the wake of the Arusha Declaration, political leaders and public voices throughout the country spoke a language grounded in indigenous metaphors of parasitism to describe anti-ujamaa behaviour both within and beyond Tanzanian borders, equally targeting laziness and capitalist activity (Brennan Reference Brennan2006; Hunter Reference Hunter2008; Ivaska Reference Ivaska2011). An editorial in The Nationalist published early in 1967 announced: ‘the war is on against the spirit of dependence in our society’.Footnote ⁵ Months later, the President's Office pronounced that ‘the policy of self-reliance teaches that it is undesirable, indeed shameful for a healthy adult to be fed and looked after by others without himself working for his own welfare. … A person of this kind is an enemy of the country's development.’Footnote ⁶ At the regional level, officials echoed the national position; in Mtwara, the Regional Commissioner insisted in 1968 that ‘in order to stop exploitation in the region, every adult person should work and live by their own sweat’ and avoid ‘being like a parasite’.Footnote ⁷

Though self-reliance as a cornerstone of ujamaa policy drew upon popular conceptions of exploitation previously directed towards colonial power, it also recalled the very ideological vision of the late-colonial state itself. Particularly evident was the overlap between British officials' promotion of ‘self-help’ in rural development (Jennings Reference Jennings2003) in the 1950s and Nyerere's endorsement of self-reliance at the local level in the wake of the Arusha Declaration. The former echoed a missionary ethic of voluntarism-as-uplift, but also served a practical purpose of legitimizing uncompensated labour and low state capital expenditure on local-level development – especially in the construction and maintenance of infrastructure. In the years following independence, ‘self-help schemes’ – increasingly dubbed ‘nation-building schemes’ to signal their reconfigured objectives – continued to form a staple of official rural improvement strategies as administered by the state's Community Development arm. Nyerere explained their logic in 1965, stating that since ‘work is money’, ‘people give to the nation their hands and brains instead of money, and the result is that we have roads, classrooms and so on, which we would not otherwise be able to afford’.Footnote ⁸

In 1967, the Minister for Local Government and Rural Development applauded the presumed success of this self-help strategy, announcing that ‘the people's own efforts’ over the previous five years had saved the government a huge sum of money during that period.Footnote ⁹ Yet the following year the President passed an order ‘empower[ing] Village Development Committees to impose traditional sentences on idlers who do not participate in national “endeavours for self-reliance” agreed upon by the people’.Footnote ¹⁰ The Presidential Circular noted that ‘for a community, self-reliance means that the people will use the resources and the skills they jointly possess for their own welfare and their own development’ without taking ‘the attitude that the Government, or the Local Council, or anyone else must come and do this or that before they can make any progress’. Furthermore, the Circular naturalized community self-help work – the building of ‘new roads, drains, wells, schools, dispensaries, etc.’ as an ‘example of the way in which our traditional life is being adapted to modern needs’.Footnote ¹¹

Thus national citizenship appeared to be enacted and claimed precisely through rural communities' lack of material engagement with, or independence from, the Tanzanian state, rather than comprising a position affording substantive rights to resources from the state. However, in practice, self-help policies entailed considerable qualification of the principle of absolute local self-sufficiency. Early on, for instance, a national Self-Help (or ‘Nation-Building’) Fund was established in response to the discovery that ‘some of the projects undertaken called for materials not available in villages such as cement, iron sheets, nails etc. … but essentially needed’; it was intended to ‘supplement people's efforts when they have contributed, to the maximum, their efforts, energies, initiative and resources’.Footnote ¹²

In the early 1960s Tanzanian national officials, like their counterparts in neighbouring countries such as Kenya and Zambia, experimented with and eventually abandoned a number of state-sponsored settlement schemes. In Tanzania, the infusion of villagization with a socialist ethos beginning in 1967 lent new force to official censure of rural dependence on government assistance that had seemingly caused earlier capital-intensive pilot schemes to fail. A 1970 editorial in The Nationalist commented that ‘in the past we sometimes spent huge sums of money on establishing a settlement, and supplying it with modern equipment, and social services, as well as often providing it with a management hierarchy’. The piece cautioned against ‘speeches putting out such material promises as inducements to ujamaa village settlement’, encouraging officials to advertise instead ‘the way of life in an ujamaa community, the dignity and freedom which this brings about, and the benefits of cooperative production’.Footnote ¹³

Such admonitions, however, hardly resolved widespread equivocation over the proposed nature of rural Tanzanians' relationship to the national state based in Dar es Salaam, in terms of popular rights to the developmental staples of a modernizing welfare state. This internal tension of the ujamaa project resonated with another developmental field that emerged in and across post-colonial sites on a global scale in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. During this time, development programmes in countries ranging from India and Cuba to Ghana and Mali exhibited similar ideological tendencies and structural contradictions; these patterns arose from common historical trajectories but also grew out of new forms of transnational engagement (Prashad Reference Prashad2007). Third World imaginaries overlapped with and borrowed from the ideologies of Euro-American modernization and Soviet communism, yet exhibited their own defining characteristics. Though many of these young countries followed policies of industrialization, worked around five-year plans, and pursued new agricultural technologies, they often simultaneously romanticized the older site of the village as a model for the ideal polity, and celebrated traditional practices located in the realm of family life. Furthermore, they shared an anxiety about national sovereignty and an ambivalence about the role of the state in rural development, and promoted self-reliance as a strategy and ambition.

In particular, the conflicting impulses of the political logic of self-reliance in Tanzania paralleled the internal tensions characterizing development discourse and policy in the People's Republic of China during the Maoist era. The Chinese link with Tanzania was the strongest of its numerous relationships with African countries at the time; in 1964 alone China provided $45.5 million in aid to Tanzania, comprising nearly half of its total annual aid on the African continent (Ismael Reference Ismael1971: 515; Monson Reference Monson2009). In subsequent years this economic assistance would expand, while diplomatic, cultural and ideological exchanges between the two countries deepened the relationship. In addition to selectively incorporating Maoist revolutionary symbolism into Tanzanian political life, TANU leaders repeatedly pointed to China as both a model of the correct path of self-reliance and an illustration of the concrete benefits of following such a developmental path.

After visiting Beijing and southern China as part of a Tanzanian friendship delegation in 1967, the Executive Secretary of TANU pronounced that ‘China has set an excellent example for us in taking the road of self-reliance … Tanzania must take this road too. It's the only road to make our country strong and prosperous.’Footnote ¹⁴ Two years earlier, Nyerere contrasted a Chinese ethos of discipline and austerity with the ‘list of needs and requests for assistance’ he had encountered in pre-ujamaa rural settlement schemes, noting that the Chinese ‘husband their resources very carefully indeed, and only spend money on things which are absolutely essential’. ‘This attitude we have to adopt too,’ he insisted.Footnote ¹⁵ To reinforce this call and boost diplomatic relations, TANU leaders often referred to ‘the similar past experience’ and ‘common fighting tasks’Footnote ¹⁶ of the two countries – a narrative also cultivated by Chinese officials to substantiate Mao's Three Worlds theoryFootnote ¹⁷ in the wake of the Soviet–Sino split. At the start of 1967, Nyerere invoked China's independence struggle by embarking on a ‘Long March’ across the Tanzanian countryside – a six-week tour of half of the regions in the country, which culminated in a series of long-distance walks by Nyerere, TANU Youth League members,Footnote ¹⁸ and other young people in support of the Arusha Declaration later that year.Footnote ¹⁹ The symbolism was clear: in ujamaa's ‘war on poverty’, the Chinese revolutionary spirit of self-reliance, exemplified by the physical endurance evident in ‘the Long March which the beleaguered Red Army undertook in 1934/5’,Footnote ²⁰ would comprise the most effective weapon in the Tanzanian arsenal.

Despite China and Tanzania's mutual commitment to self-reliance as a developmental strategy for their rural populations, however, their very relationship was premised upon a recognition that national self-reliance could only realistically comprise a developmental goal for a poor country like Tanzania. Faced with the disadvantages of its colonial history and threatened by ‘the great clanking gears’ (Watts Reference Watts2003: 29) of global capitalism, independent Tanzania – like its African Socialist counterparts – hardly followed a course of absolute autarky and self-sufficiency during the ujamaa era. In the realm of foreign policy and trade relations, self-reliance constituted an aspiration rather than a prescription for a literal course of action; instead of rejecting all international aid, Tanzania practised strategic diversification by borrowing heavily from a multitude of donors (Rugumamu Reference Rugumamu1997).

SELF-RELIANCE ON THE GROUND

How did these contradictory conceptions of self-reliance translate into development policy and practice among officials and rural citizens on the ground? Elders' memories of ujamaa in three villages in Mtwara, considered alongside first-hand reports on these same villages completed by students of TANU's Kivukoni College in 1976,Footnote ²¹ indicate that the trajectory of political, economic and social change during the ujamaa era was quite varied at the local level.Footnote ²² Interviews with village residents born roughly between 1920 and 1950 were conducted by this author and a research assistant in 2008; such conversations took place in individual and group settings, in a mix of Kiswahili and Kimakonde. Just as the three villages selected encompass a range of sizes and levels of access to state services, the men and women interviewed represent the spectrum of social, political and economic status within each settlement. Reflecting the demographic composition of the surrounding area, the elders consulted share a Makonde, largely Muslim background,Footnote ²³ and derive their livelihood from smallholder agriculture supplemented by temporary or informal wage labour. Their narratives index a great diversity of expectations, experiences and evaluations of villagization, paralleling the plurality of political visions motivating Tanzanian development policy in both kind and scope.

During the late-colonial period and the early years of independence, Mtwara had earned a reputation in official circles and local communities as a backward periphery within the larger colony of Tanganyika and national space of Tanzania. Nonetheless, despite its impoverishment, lack of infrastructure, and relatively decentralized rural political structures (Liebenow Reference Liebenow1971; Seppälä and Koda Reference B.1998; Becker Reference Becker2008), Mtwara ultimately came to be celebrated as the site where villagization was most thoroughly implemented in the wake of the Arusha Declaration. By 1969 the region alone was responsible for 333 of the 476 villages throughout the 18 regions of mainland Tanzania;Footnote ²⁴ by 1972 the number of villages in the region had reportedly risen to over 1,000 (Schneider Reference Schneider2003: 213). These figures reflected a significant reordering of the countryside, but of a type that hardly accorded with the ideals set forth by national policy.

Between 1967 and 1972, local officials travelled throughout the Mtwara countryside, encouraging rural people to live together. Rural people both heeded and ignored this call; those who resettled usually did so at short distances from their original homes and private farms, and built new houses in small villages (vijiji vidogo vidogo) comprised of anywhere from ten to a hundred households. In other cases, officials merely recorded already existing settlements (vijiji vya zamani) as new ujamaa villages, without asking residents to shift their homes at all. These two types of villages made varying degrees of progress towards the practice of true ujamaa, but men and women throughout the south-eastern countryside continued to work on their older private farms – especially their permanent cashew plots.Footnote ²⁵ Later, between 1973 and 1975, TANU Youth League and People's Militia members throughout Mtwara forcefully resettled those who had initially refused to move, or who were living in small villages, into large settlements of at least 250 kaya each, in compliance with the strict guidelines of Operation Vijiji (the compulsory villagization programme). In each of the three villages surveyed this process occurred differently, and in each village ujamaa policy yielded different results.

The pluralistic and sometimes contradictory quality of local interpretations of the official principle of self-reliance captures the diverse and ambivalent character of rural experiences of villagization and ujamaa policy as a whole. One recurring definition of self-reliance (kujitegemea) among elderly villagers is highly literal, implying an almost complete sense of detachment from the Tanzanian nation state. Some villagers accordingly explain self-reliance as ‘depending on yourself, for agriculture … for yourself along with your children’,Footnote ²⁶ ‘having enough food to feed yourself’,Footnote ²⁷ and ‘doing your own work’.Footnote ²⁸ In perhaps the clearest articulation of this position, one group of women in their sixties and seventies – an approximation based on the year of their initiation (unyago) rather than birthdates they could not recall – responded to my inquiry about the definition of self-reliance with the matter-of-fact statement that ‘we rely upon ourselves’ (tunajitegemea). One of them added, as if to humour an outsider's ignorance of the realities of life in rural Mtwara: ‘Self-reliance is this: you farm, you grow cassava, you take it inside, you eat it.’Footnote ²⁹

Such narratives often depict self-reliance as a fundamental component of local tradition, rather than emphasizing its function within state policy. ‘That is our tradition, that when you are mature after you get married you live your own life independently,’ said one man, describing the process by which he became an adult and moved out of his parents' household – a personal transition that coincided with his experience of villagization. ‘It was self-reliance,’ he clarified; ‘I preferred living apart.’Footnote ³⁰ For men like him, in their late teens and twenties during the ujamaa era, the enduring connotation of the concept of kujitegemea was the promise of social independence that came with marriage, rather than a status associated with political citizenship. Women, too, emphasized the local roots of self-reliance, albeit as a collective condition. ‘No one came to tell us. We just rely on ourselves,’ insisted one of a group of women who laughed off further questions about the official language of ujamaa. ‘We're surprised,’ they responded. ‘We don't know!’Footnote ³¹ Yet these apparently vernacular configurations of self-sufficiency often betray the imprint of official discourse. Some elders, for instance, specify the unit of self-reliance as the patriarchal nuclear family, rather than the individual or the extended kin group. One man, who served on a village committee in the 1970s but was otherwise not especially active in TANU or local government politics, offered: ‘The meaning of self-reliance is to live with your family – like three or four people, together with yourself. You rely on yourself to direct them, care for them, etc.’Footnote ³² This description reflects the fact that ujamaa – the Kiswahili term for ‘familyhood’, in the broadest sense – usually reached rural populations through a set of policies that, paradoxically, normalized the nuclear family as a foundational developmental entity (Lal Reference Lal2010).

Though such strict definitions of self-reliance as a de facto condition of ‘using one's own sweat’Footnote ³³ suggest a kind of social atomization at the village level, at least with regard to matters of economic sustenance and food security, elders also insist that ‘ujamaa is cooperation, not considering where the person is from’.Footnote ³⁴ When explaining the meaning of ujamaa, many villagers highlight a local understanding of community without attaching it to a larger national one. This move is particularly common among female elders, such as one woman who could not recall her birth year or much about her early life, conceding that ‘sometimes I don't remember. Because I was a small child.’ She was nonetheless able to confidently explain that ‘ujamaa is like in a village like here, meaning here is your brother, your ndugu (comrade), all necessarily cooperating. If there is any problem at night they will help you, even if your house catches fire.’Footnote ³⁵ During the late-colonial period, given the primacy of male migration for wage labour within the region – to work on sisal plantations or construction projects in order to meet tax payments – many women would live without their husbands for prolonged periods. Concerns about their own safety and the safety of their children litter their memories of life by their farms (mashambani) before villagization; conversely, gratitude about the security offered by residential proximity accordingly permeates their accounts of post-villagization life. ‘If you lived in the forest (porini) you were alone,’ a woman in another village pointed out, while her other female companions agreed: ‘but here if you had a problem – like if a thief came to steal something, you'd shout – and everyone came to help.’Footnote ³⁶ This type of narrative suggests that ujamaa merely entailed a spirit of mutual assistance at the village level, even though many villagers remember learning about ujamaa from government officials before or after they moved into concentrated settlements, and thus also associate it with ‘nation building’.

Even among this latter group, though, popular mappings of the ‘nation’ vary greatly. Elders whose political subjectivities revolve around the event of villagization rather than the process of decolonization refer to moving into villages as moving into nations (mataifa), or beginning to live nationally (kitaifa) – conflating their village with the nation, or defining the nation as their village. In a revealing example of this tendency, one woman who grew up in the interior district of Newala stated – in a mix of Kiswahili and Kimakonde – that ‘the matter of the nation is about Nyerere’, but then went on to describe nation building simply as ‘participating in ngoma (ceremonial drumming)’. Of villagization, she commented that ‘the operation was hard, they forced us [to move] whether you liked or not’. Perhaps because of this negative experience, she admitted that she ‘did not build the nation. I was lazy, others were active.’Footnote ³⁷ Others echo her strikingly parochial construction of national citizenship. Another woman with more neutral memories of resettlement defined nation building as ‘helping if someone dies, you attend their funeral’,Footnote ³⁸ and agreed with the aforementioned woman from Newala, who identified ‘farming, mkumi, you help someone farm’ as another aspect of nation building.Footnote ³⁹ Cooperative farming – a key component of ujamaa policy – could therefore resonate with the older local practice of mkumi, in which groups of rural people offered their agricultural labour to an individual or family in exchange for food and drink.

In general, elders with a deeper personal history of participation in TANU's independence struggle in the late 1950s identify ujamaa as explicitly attached to a condition of national citizenship distinct from older rural practices and local social formations. Those who signed TANU cards or joined the TANU Youth League in the years before villagization demonstrate a particular commitment and sense of belonging to the Tanzanian national family – understood as a translocal, historically grounded community, rather than an arbitrary concentration of individuals into a rural settlement. In turn, the Youth League as an institution appears frequently in the accounts of villagers less invested in TANU prior to the ujamaa era, since, despite an abundance of detailed spatial plans and procedural regulations generated by the central government and regional administrations, it was ultimately a handful of local officials and young militants who presided over the actual implementation of villagization across the countryside. Although some of the narratives cited above highlight the complete absence of the Tanzanian state from rural people's lives, and some refer to it as a discrete political unit associated with specific local officials or Nyerere himself, others present a story in which ‘the state’ was inextricable from ‘the people’ in the Mtwara countryside.

More broadly, the diversity of villagers' conceptualizations of the state, or government (serikali), reflects the range of their expectations of villagization and corresponds to the multivalence of the developmental principle of self-reliance itself. Understood as a policy introduced to – or imposed upon – the Mtwara countryside, ujamaa could be taken either to mandate a kind of austere, pre-modern practice of self-sufficiency, or to represent the efforts of a benevolent state seeking to provide material goods and services to rural populations. The first interpretation is most apparent in a common explanation of the Arusha Declaration, which centres upon the physical act of Nyerere's long-distance march of 1967. One man accustomed to travelling extensively in his youth – he left his home in northern Mozambique in the early 1960s as a manamba recruit to work for several years on a sisal plantation in Tanga before moving to Mtwara – affirmed that he ‘had heard of’ the Arusha Declaration. It referred, he claimed, to the act of ‘leaving here and walking on foot until Mtwara [town, over 10 kilometres away], and returning here to our place, depending on oneself’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In a separate conversation, another resident of his village – a native of the region who was an active member of the TANU Youth League during the ujamaa years – declared: ‘The meaning of the Arusha Declaration is due to Julius K. Nyerere leaving on his feet to go to Arusha. Its meaning is that … by walking you can travel more than ten miles.’Footnote ⁴¹ It seems, therefore, that the Arusha Declaration – the first articulation of the national policy of ujamaa and self-reliance – reached rural people in this corner of Mtwara through local officials' instructions that peasants follow the example of their President's ‘Long March’ and walk on foot from their homes to the regional capital. The policy of self-reliance, in this respect, was entirely divorced from national citizenship as a condition entailing certain material rights; instead, rural people were called upon – using the symbolism of Chinese struggle – to endure physical hardship to strengthen themselves and thus ‘build’ an abstract entity called ‘the nation’.

Yet a number of elders also identify the policy of ujamaa as attached to a more robust version of national citizenship entailing concrete rewards from the Tanzanian serikali. Though national officials cautioned local officials against inducing rural people to resettle into concentrated settlements in exchange for goods and services from the state, it is common for elders to recall villagization as proceeding exactly along those lines. One former Youth League member, who boasted of taking part in the first wave of voluntary resettlement to his current village, recalled: ‘when we lived in the countryside, we listened in the meetings, and heard the news from the radio’. In such meetings with local officials, he continued, ‘they said you shouldn't live by yourself in the forest; it's better for you to join the nations. To stay together so that when there is some msaada (assistance, or services), you will all be assisted together.’ He then went on to detail the Youth League's initiative in seizing this opportunity, proudly remarking that ‘after hearing this call, we had to be the first people to come here, then we were followed by our whole family, our parents’.Footnote ⁴² Another man who had been a card-carrying TANU member since 1955, and voluntarily resettled into a kijiji kidogo (small village) during the first wave of villagization, confirmed: ‘if we were brought msaada, we would receive it together; if you stayed alone you would miss it … there were schools, health centres, likewise water’.Footnote ⁴³

In practice, he admitted to disappointment with the msaada offered by the government after the second wave of compulsory villagization. For example, he pointed out, ‘they brought fertilizer here, that's it’. This aid was of little practical utility, since ‘when we were put here we didn't understand the matter of fertilizer’. Likewise, while most rural people remember being promised government assistance in new villages, many of them do not remember receiving anything substantial. In an illustrative discussion, one group of women expounded: ‘The meaning of ujamaa is this: if I have a problem, they call my kin, they call my family, they call the government.’ When questioned about what assistance the government had provided, they countered: ‘they have not yet helped us, because … we ourselves, we can practise self-reliance ourselves’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Rather than explaining the state's failure to deliver material assistance in terms of the policy of self-reliance, alternatively, other elders blame their peers in the village government for appropriating such goods for themselves. ‘Our leaders were thieves,’Footnote ⁴⁵ some stated sharply; others mentioned more elliptically that after ujamaa, ‘some were full’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In one settlement, a separationist movement even developed after a few local leaders were accused of stealing money from the village fund in the mid-1970s.

Villagers' memories of the national policy of ujamaa and self-reliance are thus influenced by the respective positions they occupied within shifting local configurations of power between the late 1950s and late 1970s. Rural people's contemporary assessments of ujamaa are also heavily inflected by their prior experiences of colonial rule and subsequent experiences of life under structural adjustment policies since the 1980s. In particular, the latter have an impact on popular evaluations of the quality and availability of state services in the countryside since resettlement. While some villages possess schools, health centres and water infrastructure, others are several miles away from such amenities. Throughout the region, roads are unpaved and difficult – even impossible – to navigate during the rainy season, and motor transportation is infrequent and, for many, expensive. Even those who live in settlements with schools and dispensaries lament the prohibitive cost of secondary education and medical care in recent years. When asked about the local level of development, one representatively disillusioned man sighed, ‘Development? There is no development.’Footnote ⁴⁷ In a conversation among a small group of outspoken elders comparing the ujamaa-era serikali to its present-day counterpart, another man scoffed, ‘the government of back then and the government of now? Now it has failed. We have a government in name. Meaning we don't really have a government.’Footnote ⁴⁸

In the present, thus, national citizenship has come to indicate to many a negative condition of material self-reliance – albeit within a village community – and an absent state. Accordingly, nostalgia often pervades elders' assessments of the government of the ujamaa era, especially among those who saw ujamaa as linked to a benevolent state and felt that they belonged to a meaningful national community (Kamat Reference Kamat2008). Two close friends, former Youth League members whose spirited dispositions belied their old age, remembered the early period of uhuru (independence) fondly and with great emotion. ‘Nyerere taught us politics (siasa) – to have the politics of citizenship (raia) in our TANU,’ one of them ruminated, while his companion confided: ‘Even now when I hear his speeches on the radio, I just want to cry.’Footnote ⁴⁹

However, others who experienced villagization as a violent disruption of their lives identify a fundamental continuity between the colonial state and the post-colonial Tanzanian state in general, and dismiss the ‘politics’ of ujamaa as another example of both state invasiveness and neglect. These elders, many of whom were forcibly relocated – losing property and access to their permanent farms in the process – lament that moving to the village ‘made us poor; our plans and expectations were destroyed’,Footnote ⁵⁰ and describe villagization as an episode of destruction (kubomolesha). One especially critical man even spoke of a ‘new colonialism’ characterized by a frequent ‘changing of the discussion (mazungumzo)’ – or a kind of political arbitrariness perhaps exemplified by local officials' alternating between various versions of national development policy. Though his frustration was clearly informed by his more recent experiences as a cashew farmer – local problems with cashew marketing have led to widespread denunciations of the current Tanzanian government's failure to protect vulnerable peasants from predatory traders – he specifically targeted the ujamaa period. ‘After independence, yes, we had independence … but after about five, six, seven years passed, a new colonialism returned,’ he contended. ‘When the destruction of the villages came, or the destruction of the area of people's settlements, they used force,’ he elaborated. ‘That was a mistake.’Footnote ⁵¹

For many rural people, nonetheless, villagization was an episode of government by force as well as government by politics – a time of hardship as well as opportunity. Villagers routinely proclaim that ujamaa persists into the present, and that they continue to benefit from the spirit of community and ‘living together, cooperating in our work’,Footnote ⁵² even while sometimes criticizing the policy of resettlement in the past. A long tradition of rural diversification and flexibility in the decades before independence helps contextualize these assessments and the ability of some elders to elegantly resolve any apparent discrepancies between a policy of self-reliance and a policy of cooperation and assistance. ‘Self-reliance has its levels,’ pronounced one man whose close ties to TANU and its successor, CCM – which still dominates local politics throughout much of the Tanzanian countryside – lent him an authoritative manner as he spoke.Footnote ⁵³ ‘You can be self-reliant in food but there is no medicine. But it's not that when you say self-reliance, it means that your friends leave you. They give you more strength.’Footnote ⁵⁴

REGIONAL REFRACTIONS

Rather than describing their experiences of ujamaa in language that one would expect from either the disciplined subjects of national ‘developmentalist’ governmentality (Foucault Reference Foucault2008) or resistant, ‘uncaptured’ rural traditionalists (Hyden Reference Hyden1980), Mtwara elders exhibit a wide range of attitudes towards matters of national citizenship and development. Upon cursory examination, therefore, the undifferentiated category of ‘the peasantry’ lurking in the shadows of so many analyses of ujamaa breaks down into a plurality of subjectivities and positions – just as the category of the ‘developmentalist state’ behind this policy also reveals its internal heterogeneity. Indeed, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the internal tensions of ujamaa policy outlined above led some south-easterners to use official discourse to question the priorities of decision makers in Dar es Salaam, and particularly to expose the uneven production of national space and the uneven constitution of the national state itself. In doing so, government officials and citizens in regions like Mtwara often deployed competing versions of ujamaa and self-reliance within public or administrative channels to make claims on national resources.

The administrative unit of the region occupied an ambiguous place within the larger entity of the Tanzanian nation during the ujamaa era. On the one hand, during this time the Tanzanian nation itself was a work in progress. Nyerere intended the policy of self-reliance to consolidate Tanzania as a self-sufficient, autonomous and sovereign political unit vis-à-vis the international stage, but also to eradicate exploitation and inequality within Tanzanian borders, and therefore eliminate the uneven development of national space inflicted by decades of colonial rule. On the other hand, the policy of ujamaa sanctioned a decentralization of the national polity by calling for sub-levels of the Tanzanian nation to practise self-reliance as a developmental strategy – a tactic that threatened to intensify developmental fragmentation rather than build a coherent, durable nation.

In 1968, interpreting the Arusha Declaration for citizens of south-eastern Tanzania, the Mtwara Regional Commissioner announced that ‘the meaning of the politics of self-reliance is that development in the region will be brought about by people's effort, especially in agriculture, without depending on money from outside the region or from foreign countries’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet the cause of regional self-reliance collapsed when confronted with the overall lack of funds and functional infrastructure in Mtwara. In the context of Mtwara's historical underdevelopment, the need for central support for the region seemed especially pressing, but local officials consistently complained that the national government ignored this imperative. In a 1967 meeting with representatives from the national Ministry of Economic Affairs and Development Planning, the Mtwara Regional Development Committee asserted that ‘most of the Mtwara Regional development projects in the present Five Year Development Plan were either not funded or perhaps not received due priority among other Regions' projects’. The chairman declared that the region had largely been excluded from the existing Five Year Plan since ‘most of this Region's projects have not been implemented so far’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Regional reports in the wake of the Arusha Declaration persistently identified poor transportation infrastructure as one of Mtwara's main developmental priorities. In 1968, the Mtwara Regional Development Officer noted that ‘the major developmental tasks of Mtwara Region, which has begun to awaken developmentally especially after leaving colonialism behind, are building transportation infrastructure (that is, roads and bridges) and water infrastructure (wells or agricultural dams)’.Footnote ⁵⁷ His assessment echoed that of the Mtwara Development Committee a year earlier,Footnote ⁵⁸ and by 1970 the complaints had not changed; in a report that year the Regional Development Officer decried ‘the lack of cars and means of transportation’ and pleaded, ‘I hope help will arrive quickly. Meaning there are many ujamaa villages that need these important services.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, the transportation problem comprised a fundamental dilemma vis-à-vis the project of villagization. If an increasingly dominant version of ujamaa discourse explained villagization as a means of facilitating peasant contact with government services by concentrating rural people in accessible settlements, then regional development would in fact centre upon the availability of resources to construct, maintain and traverse functional rural roads. However, roads to and within Mtwara remained few and largely impassable during the lengthy rainy season.

In one sense, therefore, regional deficiencies in funds and infrastructure marked Mtwara as developmentally stunted. Conversely, others viewed this condition as confirming the south-east as a virtuous example of ujamaa development. If the formulation of self-reliance meant that regions should literally not depend on resources from Dar es Salaam, the state's somewhat circular logic rendered the peripheral or marginalized status of Mtwara as a factor contributing to its development. In other words, Mtwara could become renowned as a developmental success not only because of the region's astonishing progress in implementing villagization (according to quantitative measurements), but also because of the challenging conditions under which it had achieved such rapid and extensive resettlement.

Popular voices and official statements articulated both positions using the language of ujamaa. In 1968, a supplement on the region in The Nationalist declared that though Mtwara ‘used to be called the “Cinderella” province’ and ‘was deemed backward, devoid of development potential’, it was now ‘a fast developing region’. The report proclaimed that ‘agricultural production is increasing by leaps and bounds, and [Mtwara's] contribution to the nation's economic development is increasing. The region has been opened up and is confident of its future.’ The factors given to account for ‘this rapid advance’ were ‘the people's hard work at production’ and ‘their cooperative spirit’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Throughout the 1960s, cashew production in Mtwara continued to increase steadily every year, and in 1970 the government opened a short-lived cashew processing plant in the region. The press described this event as a hallmark of self-reliant development, ‘marking a “leap forward” in the peasants’ sustained efforts for better increased production’.Footnote ⁶¹

Yet in a series of contemporaneous letters to the editor, a chorus of voices from within the region challenged these glowing assessments, protesting that the south-east's neglect by national officials violated the principles of the socialist production of national space envisioned by ujamaa. The first letter asserted that ‘in Tanzania, there are two groups of people. Those in northern and central regions are the ones who enjoy the country's fruits of independence and those in southern regions are left behind without any progress.’ The letter concluded by asking, ‘Is this country really a socialist one and yet is in two parts? Why do the northern people enjoy the fruits of this country? Why are the southern people ignored?’Footnote ⁶² Many of the accounts that followed, echoing this indignant tone, focused especially on the matter of investment in roads. One letter noted that the ‘lack of good all-weather roads is a major handicap in economic and social development’,Footnote ⁶³ while another ‘Concerned Southerner’ reiterated that the ‘southern part of Tanzania needs permanent roads like any other part of this country, but to one's dismay, the roads to that part are really in a very poor condition’. The latter also critiqued the central government's disproportionate investment in infrastructure in other regions, inquiring: ‘Is the right way of distributing the national wealth to the equal members?’Footnote ⁶⁴

Thus, to some the de facto condition of material self-reliance in Mtwara during the late 1960s and early 1970s implied a contradiction of the ujamaa principle of socialist equality and constituted an obstacle to true development within the region – as well as to national unity more broadly. The issue of regional peripherality, in turn, linked up to larger questions about citizenship and development across the country. If ujamaa celebrated national kinship and community, why did official policy often emphasize the self-reliance of individuals, households and local political units as ends in and of themselves? How could villagization be motivated by both a drive to consolidate local self-sufficiency and a desire to increase rural people's access to government resources and services? Could hard work and popular initiative alone be effective without sufficient state investment?

These questions remained unresolved, but became increasingly irrelevant in the early 1970s as Tanzanian leaders simultaneously rejected a utopian interpretation of ujamaa in favour of a narrower formula of forced resettlement, and acquiesced in the fragmentation of national space in economic and political terms. Rather than being marked by the centralization of ‘developmentalist’ state power in Dar es Salaam, the later years of ujamaa policy seem to be characterized as much by an unravelling of the state's ability to preside effectively over national development itself. In economic terms this was evidenced by the pernicious financial flows that had persisted below the discursive surface of ujamaa since 1967 – in the form of continued colonial-era export patterns, and increasing rates of food imports as a result of repeated local crop failures. The vulnerability of the Tanzanian national economy became apparent in the early 1970s, moreover, as national indebtedness to foreign donors grew while domestic production in many domains contracted. It was precisely this dissolution of economic self-reliance as a condition and a possibility that contributed to the entanglement of regions like Mtwara with foreign actors on the stage of a new global developmental economy.

After hiring a US-based management consulting firm to review the country's administrative structure in 1971, the Tanzanian government completed an internal reorganization in the name of decentralization. From 1972 onwards, administrative and decision-making powers in all sectors of development became concentrated at the regional level rather than dispersed among national ministries and filtered through popularly elected local government institutions. Under the new Rural Integrated Development Plan (RIDEP) model, the Tanzanian government invited foreign donors to pair up with individual regions to prepare (and, ideally, fund) five-year plans for those units. From 1972 onwards, both Mtwara and Lindi regionsFootnote ⁶⁵ were linked to the government of Finland under the new structure for national development; other pairings included Yugoslavia with the Ruvuma Region, Germany with Tanga, and the Netherlands with Morogoro (Belshaw Reference Belshaw1982). In 1974 teams of Finnish experts arrived in the south-east to prepare integrated development plans (IRDPs) for the Third Tanzanian Five Year Plan (Voipio Reference Voipio, Seppäl and Koda1998). Though complete funding for this planning cycle fell through, over the next two decades the Tanzanian government commissioned British consultants and FINNIDA (the Finnish International Development Agency) to prepare and ultimately fund IRDPs in Mtwara, in congruence with similar initiatives in other regions. In the meantime, the central government itself submitted to the austerity measures and liberalization regimen imposed by the International Monetary Fund beginning in 1986.

In search of material and technical resources, the Tanzanian government adopted the newly fashionable model of ‘integrated development’ on a regional scale, but only at the expense of actual national integration. This move marked the ascendance of a new model of global engagement for Tanzania, both compromising the internal integrity of the nation state as a spatial unit and challenging its sovereignty by increasingly exporting developmental governance to individual foreign donors (Armstrong Reference Armstrong1987). It also signalled the evaporation of ujamaa as a national development ideal and a discourse within which claims for state resources could be framed by people within regions like Mtwara.