December 8, 1961. Fifty years ago: Tanzanian Independence Day (it was actually still Tanganyika then, until the union with Zanzibar a few years later changed the country's name to Tanzania).1 But, of course, many countries in Africa were obtaining their independence from the British and French colonial states in those years. What set Tanzania apart in the 1960s, much as Ghana had been set apart in the 1950s by Kwame Nkrumah's ‘Black Star’ (as Basil Davidson once entitled a book chronicling Osagyefo's moment of ascendancy) was Nyerere's own star. For the latter was then, and however briefly, on its ascent, with Nyerere linked, by the late 1960s, to the moment of ujamaa – and to the possibility, even the promise, of a distinctive socialism in Africa that could be the touchstone for something beyond the kind of ‘neo-colonialism’ and ‘false decolonisation’ that great thinkers like Frantz Fanon have already identified as the sobering stigmata of the overall African decolonisation process. It is time, perhaps, to revisit that Nyerere moment, that ujamaa moment, and to evaluate it afresh.
Of course, one must pause at the outset at the very term ‘African socialism’. Perhaps the most notable further attempt to construct a meaningful socialism in Africa came in the early ‘socialist’ years of Mozambique's post-liberation emergence (which, as with the case of Tanzania, I had the opportunity of witnessing, off and on but at close hand, during much of its all too brief lifespan). But the Mozambican leaders I knew were actually very scornful of the concept of African socialism and indeed of Tanzania's own ‘socialist’ practices (which did not stop them from making many similar mistakes themselves, it should be emphasised). They (as they affirmed forcefully) were socialists in Africa, not ‘African socialists’.
Tanzanians are speaking for themselves on this subject, of course, as can be witnessed in such recent books as Chambi Chachage and Annar Cassam's edited volume Africa's liberation: the legacy of Nyerere (2010) and an illuminating special issue of the Dar es Salaam-based journal Chemchemi (Shivji et al. 2011). Indeed, I was myself honoured with an invitation to contribute to the latter Chemchemi symposium and it is from my essay there that I will principally draw many of the observations that appear in the present article, observations appropriate, I hope, to celebrate both the fiftieth anniversary of the independence moment that inspires them and the memory of the man, Nyerere, who personified that independence moment as well as the subsequent ujamaa experiment itself.
I also have the privilege of recalling all of this at first hand, if not precisely the moment of independence itself then of its immediate aftermath, the ‘ujamaa years’. For I had the opportunity to live and work in Dar es Salaam for seven exciting years in the 1960s and early 1970s, years which, to my good fortune, were, precisely, the years of the Arusha Declaration and of ujamaa in their fullest flower (see Cliffe and Saul 1972, 1973; Arrighi and Saul 1973, chapter 6). Indeed, it is the emotions of that time as well as my sober reflections over some 50 years regarding things Tanzanian that I bring to this article.
The ‘moment’ of ujamaa may have been brief but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Tanzania was certainly an exciting place to be. True, as we will see, the implications of what had been begun with the Arusha Declaration in 1968 were just too dangerous and too radical even for its initial champion, Julius Nyerere. Thus, while Horace Campbell (2010, p. 45) is correct to eulogise Nyerere himself as ‘a great human being who demonstrated his respect for the ordinary African and for the lives of all human beings’ (and Campbell then proceeds to compile a convincing list of Nyerere's many achievements), the continent will learn too little by not also registering the man's – and the ujamaa project's – weaknesses. As Firoz Manji explicitly notes in his own preface to Africa's liberation (2010), while we ‘should not be shy in celebrating his achievements … at the same time, he would be among the first to condemn any attempts to romanticise his period in office’.2 It is in this spirit that I offer the present article.
Thus Nyerere spoke of empowering the people and with Mwongozo – Tanzania African National Union (TANU) guidelines 1971 – seemed to have persuaded his fellow TANU leaders actually to embrace the notion of genuine control by the people from below. Yet when that same ‘people’ actually began to move – workers at the Mount Carmel Rubber Factory, peasants in Ruvuma, students at the university3 – Nyerere joined with the state and its bureaucrats, political and administrative, to slash back: to crush the workers; to smash the Ruvuma Development Association, and then forward ujamaa vijini only from on high and by means of a self-defeating policy of ‘enforced villagisation’; and to have student president Simon Akivaga whisked away from the campus and summarily dispatched back home to Kenya in a waiting plane (his crime, apparently, having been to invoke the Mwongozo directive, with its official encouragement of the exercise of power from below, in criticism of the university's hierarchy!).4 Tanzania: an exciting place, momentarily, to be, then, but ultimately and in many ways a sad and defeated one.
Against my memories of the excitement of the time two images pull me back to sobriety. One was the aforementioned Akivaga incident, seared in my mind by the cold wind of reality. Here I refer to the invasion of the campus of the University of Dar es Salaam by the Field Force Unit in 1970. Standing nearby, I saw my own student Simon Akivaga, the Kenyan leader of the University Student Council, who, having been summoned for a meeting with the principal, was being dragged, at gunpoint, down the cement stairs at the front of the administration building, tossed like a sack of old clothes into a waiting army vehicle and sped away to his aforementioned expulsion both from the university and from the country.
No more can I forget those (admittedly few) Tanzanian faculty members who had tended to side with the students at the time, for they were also to be disciplined (as were a number of non-Tanzanians, for we were very soon to find our contracts not renewed). Arnold Temu of the history department provides a particularly sobering case in point: thrown out of parliament for questioning the regime's handling of university matters and later sacked from the university itself, he was soon sent effectively into exile as an itinerant academic. Indeed, one of the most poignant moments of a research trip I took to Dar es Salaam in the summer of 2001 was my running into Arnold, our subsequent chat then bringing, unsolicited, a startling statement from him: he had sworn to himself not to return to live in Tanzania as long as Nyerere was alive. He thus offered a perspective on ‘Mwalimu’ and his ‘democratic sensibility’ that is, at the very least, worth pondering.5
Much else was happening, at least momentarily, of a far more positive nature of course. After all, this was the period when Fanon was writing eloquently of the dangers of a neocolonialism spearheaded by, precisely, the emergent African elite itself. And this potential problem was exactly what the Arusha Declaration and Mwongozo seemed, equally eloquently, to be about: the concrete attempt to control elitism within the ranks of the newly emergent nations. True, both declarations were more powerful in their mere statement than in the substance of their realisation. Yet I found some of the most forthright (and most Fanonist!) perspectives on the postcolonial reality to surface during the Arusha years – perhaps most strikingly in a newspaper account in The Nationalist of a public speech given by Nyerere at that time:
Nerere called on the people of Tanzania to have great confidence in themselves and to safeguard the nation's hard-won freedom. Mwalimu [Nyerere] warned that the people should not allow their freedom to be pawned as most of their leaders were purchasable. He warned further that in running the affairs of the nation the people should not look on their leaders as saints and prophets.
The President stated that the attainment of freedom in many cases resulted merely in the change of colours, white faces to black faces without ending exploitation and injustices, and above all without the betterment of the life of the masses. He said that while struggling for freedom the objective was clear but it was another thing to remove your own people from the position of exploiters. (Nationalist 1967)
This sounds good, but was a lot more of substance actually possible? Much of the scholarly debate of the time centred on this question. Tanzania was, after all, a small, economically backward country, with, it was argued, no really strong and coherent internal class forces pressing from below. There were also global constraints of course: neocolonial pressures and the like. Most strikingly, however, much of the country's radical project seemed to have been hatched in the sensibility of one man, a man (Nyerere) who had, as we know, his own limitations, both of possibility (vis-à-vis his own colleagues and vis-à-vis the external world), but also of vision. Of course, Nyerere did remain usefully suspicious of the congealing Western-dominated global system. Unfortunately, however, and despite his (entirely accurate) nervousness about the Soviet Union and its own ‘alternative’ model, he was not strengthened in his thinking by a reluctance to give any very clear Marxist resonance and analytical edge to his voice as a critic of imperialism and global capitalism.
True, he did continue to offer a usefully critical voice, remaining one of the sharpest commentators on the negative role of the international financial institutions until the very end of his life. Moreover, he committed both himself and Tanzania to the ongoing liberation of southern Africa – although here it was also unfortunate that he did not envisage any particularly democratic or expansively liberated future for the people of the countries of southern Africa so freed (as foreshadowed by Nyerere's taking the accused ‘leaders’ of the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) opposition into Tanzanian custody when the latter, seized by the Zambian army on behalf of Sam Nujoma and the SWAPO elite, threatened to seek their legal self-defence through the right to habeas corpus still available to them in Zambia – but not in Tanzania!) (Leys and Saul 1994). Yet Nyerere did counsel staying the course of the struggle in the southern part of the continent and it is also true that with regard to Frelimo in Mozambique, for example, he backed, against the strident opposition of some of his own ministers, the most committed of the movement's leaders in the internal struggle that followed the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane.
These latter incidents were important, of course. For, whatever their other implications, Nyerere's lack of democratic sensibility with reference both to the internal dynamics of the regional liberation struggle (in the SWAPO case if not the Mozambican one) as well as to Tanzania itself was troubling (see, more generally, Saul 2010a). Thus, for all his own suspicion of the Soviet Union, Nyerere embraced, for Tanzania itself, an all too similar vanguard party model to that which the Soviets exemplified – even if he sought to sweeten that system with an ingenious (too ingenious?) innovation of his own: ‘one-party democracy’. In short, Mwalimu as ‘teacher’ too often became, at best, the benign autocrat of the classroom and, at worst, a stern and officious headmaster – at great long-run cost, one fears, to the emergence of a strong and self-confident citizenry. Indeed, if one had not learned to be sufficiently suspicious of the vanguard party model from the experience of socialism in Eastern Europe, Tanzania and Mozambique would have been useful refresher courses as to the real price to be paid for choosing uncritically what was, in essence if not always in name, a vanguardist option.
Neither TANU nor Frelimo quite learned enough about the complex dynamics of rural development either. Suspicion of peasants – as of any genuinely democratic empowerment of the mass of the population from below – proved to run deep in Tanzania, and the same, for all their criticisms of Tanzania's own practice, was equally true of the Mozambican leadership. Thus, in spite of their many statements as to the crucial ‘class belonging’ (as workers and peasants!) of ‘the people’, such class descriptors were all too readily collapsed into merely populist categories – instead of their facilitating a view of such ‘classes’ as being potentially ‘empowerable’ in genuinely radical terms.
Leander Schneider (Schneider 2004, 2006) – one of the most careful and incisive of all scholars of the ujamaa vijijini initiative – suggests that in this central rural policy:
several of the most inspiring strands of Nyerere's politics flow together – in particular, an exemplary commitment to improving the condition of the poor, as well as his theorizing about the nexus of development, freedom, empowerment, and participation. However, it is also in the field of rural development that problematic dimensions of Nyerere's leadership become, perhaps, most starkly apparent. Not only did the policy of enforced ujamaa/villagization fail to improve the material conditions of Tanzania's rural population, but the adoption of coercive means to further it also points to the authoritarian side of Nyerere's rule.
In this connection I am forced to recall an all-too-acrimonious debate I had several decades ago with Pratt himself regarding the Tanzanian experience. Pratt professed to find in my then criticisms of Tanzania's politics a preference for an approach that was far more dangerously and self-righteously authoritarian, far too Marxist and Leninist, than anything that Nyerere was inclined towards. Indeed, for Pratt, Nyerere's political practice was essentially democratic, albeit a practice that sought assertively to guide from above the consolidation of democracy in such a way that the country could weather the very real threats to national consolidation that Pratt apparently thought to characterise the immediate post-independence years.
For my part, while rejecting Pratt's charge that I had favoured some extreme and overtly authoritarian approach (although I did later concede that I myself had erred in too uncritically sanctioning the embrace of ‘vanguardism’), I argued that Pratt had himself quite seriously underestimated both the authoritarian nature of Nyerere's own ‘democratic’ practice and the very high costs that the president's chosen methods (and that of TANU, the party he led) had inflicted upon the movement for progressive change in Tanzania. Accepting, at the time and with Pratt, the prevailing framework of the one-party state, I argued that Nyerere's polity could only hope to provide this as a framework for nurturing democracy if popular forces – workers, peasants, students, women – were empowered to act quite dramatically from below in order to ensure the safeguarding of their own interests and the maintenance of a socialist direction for the country.6 But this was not to be.
There are those who still argue at this point that Nyerere was merely blocked in his own high-minded intentions by the global realities of power and by recalcitrant politicians and bureaucrats in his own camp. There is some truth in this, of course, but not, I would argue, nearly enough to cover all the data nor to explain all the contradictions in the ujamaa project. Not that anyone would wish to argue that Nyerere's intentions were anything but benign. Nor would one suggest that ‘Tanzanian socialism’ could ever merely have sprung ‘spontaneously’ from the Tanzanian populace. No, leadership, clearly explaining costs and benefits and the complexities of seeking to realise progressive outcomes while helping to ‘raise popular consciousness’, would inevitably have to have been part of any revolutionary political equation. And no doubt much of Nyerere's political practice squares with such a model. Yet surely twentieth-century history has taught us, if nothing else, the extreme dangers of any such ‘leadership’, even at its most benign, slipping the leash of popular control and doing what it perceives by its own lights to be ‘best’ for its ostensibly ‘backward’ wards. And just as surely one might legitimately fear that Nyerere drifted much too close to the authoritarian horn of this dilemma on numerous occasions for one to be entirely confident of his own good judgment in each case.
Additional support for Nyerere's political project is also offered by scholars precisely along the same lines originally hinted at by Pratt. Even if acknowledging (albeit somewhat sotto voce) that Nyerere may well have blunted the assertions of workers and peasants in Tanzania, it is claimed that in enacting a ‘guided democracy’ he nonetheless derailed any overly regionalist or tribalist' political projects and this was in the long-term interests of a unified and pacific Tanzania.7 A tempting argument if one compares developments in Tanzania with those elsewhere on the continent. Yet one also recalls that it was often stated in the early days how fortunate Tanzania was both in the multiplicity of its diverse ethnicities (without any one being too overbearing numerically to be considered a particular threat by others) and in having Swahili as a national lingua franca. Some points may nonetheless be granted to TANU for its politics of self-consciously downgrading and transcending ‘tribalism’ by means of ‘one-partyism’ and the like, but, as noted, this was surely at the expense of any very radical form of ‘class struggle’ – with the price of downplaying the latter being very high in terms of the realisation of a possible socialist outcome.
Moreover, any genuinely rural tilt in the country's macroeconomic strategies was lost too. After all, economists like Samir Amin, in his own voluminous writings, have argued that only an ever more radical decolonisation of Africa from central capitalist control – in Amin's dramatic word, in an actual ‘delinking’ of the economies of the Global South from the Empire of Capital that otherwise holds the South in its sway – could actually be developmental in any meaningful sense.8 Yet, as Amin readily admits, there is no realistic haven of ‘autarky’ that one can look to, no way of avoiding some involvement in the broader market (as opportunity, though not, he argues, as seduction). What must occur, however, is the substitution of the present political economy of recolonisation with an alternative that tilts effectively towards delinking as a national goal – invoking an autocentric socio-economic alternative that is at once effective, efficient and productive. What would the programme of a national strategy erected on the premise of a strong tilt towards radical delinking from the presently existent and profoundly cancerous global capitalist system look like? The answer to this question could only begin to be found in a new project of genuine socialist planning – established on a national or regional scale – that sought to smash, precisely, the crippling (il)logic of present ‘market limitations’ upon development.
This, in turn, suggests the need for a programme that (following the formulations of Clive Thomas, the Guyanese economist who also taught in Tanzania) would embody ‘the progressive convergence of the demand structure of the community and the needs of the population’9 – this being the very reverse of the market fundamentalist's global orthodoxy. One could then ground a ‘socialism of expanded reproduction’ (in the name of the presumed imperatives of accumulation), one that refuses the dilemma that has heretofore undermined the promise of the many ‘socialisms’ which have then proven prone to falling into the Stalinist trap of ‘violently repressing mass consumption’. For, far from accumulation and mass consumption being warring opposites, the premise would then be that accumulation could be driven forward precisely by finding outlets for production in meeting the growing requirements, the needs, of the mass of the population!
An effective industrialisation strategy would thus base its ‘expanded reproduction’ on ever-increasing exchanges between city and country, between industry and agriculture, with food and raw materials moving to the cities and with consumer goods and producer goods (with the latter defined to include centrally such modest items as scythes, iron ploughs, hoes, axes, fertilisers and the like) moving to the countryside. Collective saving geared to investment could then be seen as being drawn essentially, if not exclusively, from an expanding economic pool. Note that such a socialism of expanded reproduction makes the betterment of the people's lot a short-term rather than a long-term project and thus promises a much sounder basis for an effective (rather than merely rhetorical) alliance of workers, peasants and others – on a democratic road to revolutionary socialism.10
But this is, of course, precisely an emphasis that Nyerere and company turned their backs on. Thus Bill Luttrell (1986), writing quite explicitly within the framework established by Thomas, demonstrates the almost complete failure of the ‘bureaucratic class’ in Tanzania to do so, their continued subservience to the logic of global capitalism, and thus ensuring their long-term failure to actually develop the country. He then spells out an alternative track that might have been taken had the elite really wanted to pursue transformation. Moreover, while Luttrell says little about Nyerere himself, another crucial missing link – industrial strategy (to be added to silences about democracy and failures of imagination in the rural sector) – in Nyerere's presumed socialist strategy here stands starkly exposed.
There are other fronts upon which to locate such a critical perspective. Thus, as noted earlier, Borbonniere (2007, p. 146), in discussing students as a ‘social category’ of potentially radical provenance, concludes her account of the early years at the university by suggesting that ‘the Akivaga crisis, which was seen as a failure to follow through on the promise of Mwongozo at the university, was the first indication of a gap between Nyerere's political theory and practice’. And what of women, the entire sphere of struggle for gender emancipation and gender equality? This was a front of ‘liberation’ little discussed at the time in Tanzania, and, indeed, the record was not an encouraging one. For example, Bibi Titi, admittedly no great socialist but a prominent TANU leader in the early days, underscored some years ago the starkness of the male sense of entitlement that marked TANU in those years, the vital role of women militants in the liberation struggle itself soon being more or less depassed, passed over.
When power was transferred to the nationalist government … the story changed. Women's experience was no longer relevant to the postcolonial struggles against neo-colonialism, imperialism and the management of the start apparatus. In [our] discussion Bibi Titi ironically said, ‘I started smelling fish’ when the first cabinet was named. (Meena 2003, p. 148)
Strengths and weaknesses, then. But the question remains: should not Tanzania's socialist moment constitute a very real learning experience for a continent that has still not fully confronted the threat of continuing subordination by global capital (including in its present-day Chinese form)? A lot depends, of course, on what you wish to learn. But in a very real sense one is tempted to say that nothing has been learned – or, if something has indeed been ‘learned’, it has been entirely the wrong thing. Thus, in South Africa, to take one example, the latter is precisely the case. There, the cases of Tanzania and Mozambique have been viewed, particularly by that country's black elite, entirely one-sidedly and quite opportunistically – as having been, quite simply, case studies of misguided policies, case studies of, precisely, what not to do.
In short: not to attempt to realise socialism but instead to settle for a virtual recolonisation by global capital! For, the truth is that the lesson actually taken has been not to dare: not to dare to challenge such capital, not to dare to challenge local hierarchies, not to dare to critique fundamentally the presumed logic of the market place. But is this really what Africa should learn from Tanzania? No, I would suggest the lesson could be quite a different one: the very real costs of not to have dared enough. Indeed, with respect to this issue posed in this way the jury is surely still out. The deeper problems and challenges that existed in the 1960s and 1970s continue to confront Africa today. They had begun to be sketched by Nyerere and the early TANU leadership, as they had been earlier by Nkrumah (for all the weaknesses of his own project), by Cabral and Fanon, and later by the likes of Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel.
Yet the fact also remains that in Tanzania there still reside many of the poorest of the continent's (and the world's) poor, the failed promise of the Arusha years long since a distant memory but mocking the present nonetheless. In consequence, the experience of Nyerere, the Mwalimu, continues–warts and all – to have much to teach us: in its aspirations and its praxis, for better and for worse. Whether, either in Tanzania or elsewhere on the continent, Africans can or will choose – any more effectively than the rest of us around the world have done in parallel situations of unfulfilled dreams and unrealised possibilities – to learn from such experience, to take up with ever greater effectiveness the struggle, and to confront successfully a sobering postcolonial legacy in order to overcome it, these remain open questions.