Global Genealogies, Continental Circuits, and Local Inflections: African Socialism in 1960s Tanzania

This paper interrogates the genesis and early implementation of the Tanzanian ujamaa project with special attention to the global and regional contexts from which it emerged and to which it responded. Perhaps the most ambitious and sustained version of African socialism, ujamaa sought to organize the Tanzanian countryside into communal villages and build a self-reliant national economy upon a foundation of collective hard work and rural cooperation. Begun as a voluntary call for socialist villagization in 1967 issued by the country’s ruling party, the project morphed into a compulsory drive for rural resettlement in 1973, and was abandoned by the late 1970s. Whereas the existing literature on ujamaa highlights the colonial lineages of this development policy and emphasizes the national container in which it unfolded, my paper situates and explores ujamaa within a broader transnational field. The central tenets of the Tanzanian initiative – a simultaneous embrace of community and self-reliance, a dual focus on the restoration and revolution of social and economic relations, a privileging of the site of the village alongside the maintenance of urban primacy – resonated with self-identified socialist imaginaries in newly independent countries such as Guinea, Mali, and Ghana. In forging the ujamaa project, Tanzanian officials drew upon early 1960s developmental discourses and symbols in these countries, and inspired similar programs in sites such as Mozambique in the 1970s and Ethiopia in the 1980s. The commonalities between such disparate political formations reflect several decades of material connections between these former colonies and other Third World partners in pursuit of the twin causes of pan-African integration and complete decolonization. My paper examines some of these geopolitical linkages and ideological overlaps, working towards a fuller periodization of African Socialism in conjunction with a temporally and conceptually expanded historicization of decolonization on the continent and beyond.