The Politics of Liberalization in Tanzania: The Crisis of Ideological Hegemony

Abstract

Liberalization literally meant rehabilitating the former saboteurs while making the workers and the peasants pay for education, water, health, and medical care. The concept of ideological hegemony in the Gramscian model has to undergo several modifications when applied to the dominated social formations of Africa. Ujamaa, as an ideology, is a subtle blend of petty-bourgeois socialism, deriving its legitimacy from what it claims to have been traditional African communal practices. Economic liberalization and the situation of the crisis can only become an occasion for the popular classes to raise appropriate demands so as to create political space for constituting the forces of their revolution, the New Democratic Revolution. New democratic struggles and political repression and authoritarianism, on the other, constitute the main contradictions of the politics of liberalization. The Ugandan war in 1978 was the turning point in the crisis of hegemony. The autocratic regime in Zanzibar had no sympathy or use for Ujamaa.