Drawing on a wide range of oral and written sources, this book tells the story of Tanzania's socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 1967-1975. Inaugurated shortly after independence, ujamaa ('familyhood' in Swahili) both invoked established socialist themes and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy, seeking to reorganize the Tanzanian countryside into communal villages to achieve national development. Priya Lal investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively envisioned ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, without affixing the project to a trajectory of inevitable failure. By forging an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of ujamaa, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania restores a sense of possibility and process to the early years of African independence, refines prevailing theories of nation building and development, and expands our understanding of the 1960s and 70s world.
Author(s): Priya Lal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2017
Pages: 265
City: Cambridge
Tags: Area Studies, African Studies, History, Politics and International Relations, African Government, Politics and Policy, African History
List of Figures and Maps page vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 A Postcolonial Project in the Cold War World 27
The Ujamaa Vision 30
Pan-Africanism and African Socialism 37
The Village in the 1960s World 45
Self-Reliance, Security, and Sovereignty 55
From the Arusha Declaration to Operation Vijiji 68
2 Militants, Mothers, and the National Family 78
Mobile Men, Militarized Men 81
Mothers, Wives, and Domestic Guardians 102
Representations and Realities of Familyhood 114
Kinship, Political Community, and the Tensions of
Nationalism 119
3 Uneven Development and the Region 129
Colonial Contexts 131
Ujamaa and the Cinderella Region 142
A National Periphery? 148
Managing Villagization, Planning Development 155
Beyond Villagization, beyond the Nation 168
4 Remembering Villagization 177
Experiences of Resettlement 179
Life in an Ujamaa Village 192
Popular Political Subjectivities 209
After Ujamaa 217
Conclusion 227
Bibliography 241
Index 257
