Abstract
Abstract This essay offers an ethnographic analysis of Tanzania's electrical power crisis in 2011 and the national disposition to endure suffering that it seemed to make evident. It shows that in asking citizens to suffer the near-total breakdown of the power supply in good faith, the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, or Party of the Revolution), drew on a cultural-political orientation developed during the socialist era and sustained through a long period of partial neoliberal reform. While some Tanzanians saw this suffering in good faith as an expression of docility and credulity, the essay suggests that it also speaks to the moral power of socialism's underlying vision of collective interdependence, and might be read as a utopian insistence on that vision in an era of growing oligarchy and inequality.
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