‘It used to be that if you bought a crate of beer, you'd get twenty-four different flavours. Now it all just tastes the same.’ So went a popular joke in Tanzania to describe the effect of South African Breweries’ 1993 takeover of the comically unreliable Tanzania Breweries, Ltd, which quickly transformed into an efficient if charmless private enterprise. The joke's ambiguous mixture of criticism and nostalgia sets the tone for Richard Schroeder's study of post-apartheid South Africa's economic penetration into Tanzania. The product of fieldwork carried out in 2005, Schroeder focuses on two sets of actors: mostly white South African investors, managers and professionals, who play important roles in the privatisation of state-owned industries and the growth of new aggressive corporate culture; and Tanzanian critics, who find themselves displaced and alienated from the Rainbow Nation's prickly new presence. This beautifully written book puts a new white face on the familiar story of liberalisation's unhappy disruptions.

The tip of the post-apartheid business spear aimed to pry open Tanzania's recently liberalised market shares that became freshly available to South African companies following the country's political rehabilitation after 1990. Schroeder ably narrates a story of corporate expansion that was never led by a single industry, but rather ranged across diverse sectors such as beer, soda, sugar, tourism, finance, mobile phone networks and, of course, mining. This expansion also led to the growing presence of white South African expatriates in Tanzania's commercial and social spaces. Schroeder is at his most persuasive when exploring the psychological workings of South African ‘whiteness’ in Tanzania – how, for example, they mythologise their superior ‘savoir-faire’ in navigating African countries compared with European and North American interlopers. This is not just an easily disproven conceit, but one whose true purpose is to boost self-esteem, which gets reinforced by targeted advertisements that celebrate South African ‘neo-colonial derring-do’ in the white expatriate haunts of Tanzania (p. 46). The book's final two chapters represent an outstanding ethnography of white South Africans who feel alienated from their country of birth; some successfully reinvent themselves in Tanzania, but more are plainly ill at ease beyond narrow expatriate enclaves.

Schroeder also devotes considerable space to channel the grievances of Tanzanians who view South African expansion in terms of economic exploitation and political betrayal. No doubt many Tanzanians share a sense of unpaid political debt from South Africa for Julius Nyerere's unwavering support throughout the decades of armed struggle against apartheid. Instead of recognition and support, they received high-profile political snubs, immigration restrictions, rapacious businessmen and arrogant managers. After surveying the numerous South African-led privatisation controversies across several industries, Schroeder contends that these episodes ‘had a searing impact on the Tanzanian national psyche’, not only for sharp business practices but also for their ‘denigration of Tanzanian national culture’ (p. 75). But precisely who feels this way goes unaddressed. Instead, Schroeder generalises the complaints of what seems to be one particular social stratum – writers and anonymised interlocutors who appear largely composed of middle-class, ujamaa-admiring professionals – as the view of ‘the nation’. Or at least that is this reader's impression, as there is little sociological characterisation in how the book presents its various Tanzanian voices. The book's most surprising omission is a full discussion of the Tanzanian political leaders who have not only allowed but actively solicited South African businesses, and whose subsequent admonitions against abusive business practices have been notably soft and ineffective. Instead, the author offers a tendentious dichotomy between righteous critics who maintain the legacy of the anti-apartheid struggle and ‘seek to uphold the moral legacies of Nyerere against those who have abandoned socialist precepts in the interests of pursuing private gain’ (p. 164), which does little to illuminate the political complexity of contemporary Tanzania.

The story of post-apartheid South Africa's northward expansion warrants further scholarly attention, and this eminently readable book provides an important national case study on which others will build. Yet the reader may also wonder just how representative or proportionally significant the story of South Africa is, compared with other prominent and disruptive foreign investors – particularly China, which has recently become Tanzania's largest trading partner and capital investor. How distinctive the South African expatriate experience and interaction with Tanzanians is from that of other swelling expatriate communities, and to what extent that experience continues to be defined by apartheid's burdensome legacy, remain fruitful questions for future research.