Engendering Villagization: Women, Kinship Networks, and Citizenship in Socialist Lindi, Tanzania

In an attempt to cultivate citizenship and diminish Tanzanians’ accustomed practices of organizing their lives around household units and kinship relations, the nascent Tanzanian government (Tanganyikan African National Union—TANU) embarked on a countrywide rural resettlement project in the mid-1970s to establish communally organized villages. However, examining this policy of “Socialism and Rural Development,” known as Ujamaa Vijijini, from the perspective of rural women in Lindi district (located in the south-east region of Lindi) reveals that women strategically used mandatory resettlement to strengthen their existing kinship relations by deliberately relocating to villages where their kin already resided or were also relocating. Due to the pressures wage labor placed on rural marriages and households in the post-World War II period, women utilized their kinship networks as protective measures during times of uncertainty and difficulty, particularly after divorce and in between marriages. The TANU leadership’s decision to resettle its rural population in villages incidentally and unintentionally provided women with an opportunity to solidify their kinship networks in unimaginable ways. In so doing, women’s actions altered the government’s projected goals of crystallizing the nation via the establishment of distinct yet interconnected ‘extended family villages’—the national family. Moreover, the benefits resettlement provided to women persist in the contemporary period and sustain their political alliance with President Julius K. Nyerere and TANU’s continuing legacy—the Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) Party.

            Using women’s personal narratives collected from several villages in Lindi from 2010 and 2014 to re-examine mandatory villagization in Tanzania, this paper reveals the tension and polysemy between official ideology and lived experience. More importantly, women’s recollections alert us to the frequently eclipsed benefits of forced resettlement, which challenge normative understandings of Ujamaa Vijijini and the postcolonial African state more broadly as failure.