Socialism In Tanzania Research Articles

Does Tanzania's Development Trajectory Borrow from the China Model?

Tanzania has experienced a remarkable economic growth averaging 6 percent over the past two decades. While this growth is usually associated with the liberalization of the economy that began in the mid‐1980s, the influence of African Socialism in Tanzania cannot be overemphasized. Specifically, Tanzania has mostly been a developmental state focusing on infrastructural push. This article qualitatively analyzes rhetoric from senior political and government figures to detect if there is a political myth underpinning the existence of the “China Model” in Tanzania. Results show that, while for the past two decades Tanzania's development trajectory has been partially influenced by the China model, the China case is unique and thus its model may not be successfully replicated in Tanzania. I thus recommend a home‐grown model if sustainable economic development has to be achieved in Tanzania.Related Articles (in this Special Issue)Davidsson, Simon. 2020. “Modeling the Impact of a Model: The (Non)Relationship between China's Economic Rise and African Democracy.” Politics & Policy 48 (5).Duggan, Niall. 2020. “China – The Champion of the Developing World: A Study of China's new Development Model and its Role in Changing Global Economic Governance.” Politics & Policy 48 (5).Ganda, Willie D. 2020. “The China Model in Zimbabwe: The Belt and Road Initiative and Beyond.” Politics & Policy 48 (5).

From Modernization to Villagization: The World Bank and Ujamaa

On February 5, 1967, the leadership of the young nation of Tanzania made a bold statement that it was prepared to chart a new course towards development and modernity. The Arusha Declaration, delivered by President Julius Nyerere to the Executive Council of the Tanzanian African Nation Union (TANU), was intended to be a powerful articulation of aims and principles for the nation of Tanzania and its people. The Declaration opened with the simple statement that “the policy of TANU is to build a socialist state,” before laying out the principles behind Tanzanian socialism and TANU party membership.1 To accomplish this core mission of building socialism in Tanzania, Nyerere and the TANU instructed the nation, “Let us pay heed to the peasant,” arguing that equitable development, free of exploitation, could only be achieved if the nation focused on its small farmers in the countryside.2 From this new attention to the peasants, Nyerere would formulate a development plan based around a concept known as ujamaa, a Swahili word that can be translated as “family-hood.” In practical terms, ujamaa would take the form of collective villages in which rural peasants would voluntarily come together to form a communal farm. These new villages would be organized along the lines of a socialism that Nyerere claimed to be deeply rooted in African history and tradition.3

The Quest for Information Privacy in Africa

The Quest for Information Privacy in Africa

Working in the slaughterhouse: Tanganyika Packers Ltd., from colonialism to collapse, 1947–2014

Between 1947 and 1975, Tanganyika Packers Ltd (TPL) was Tanzania’s only export-oriented slaughterhouse and beef-canning factory, a branch of UK-based Liebig’s Extract of Meat Corporation (Lemco), which originated in 1860s Uruguay. Until shortly before TPL was nationalized in 1974, it was a profitable parastatal, employing some 1200 workers, anchoring a working-class community, and providing an outlet for indigenous Tanzanian cattle from open rangelands. While nationalization aimed to capture the full value of TPL profits and expand exports into the European Economic Community, it instead severed TPL from the world market when Lemco withdrew its marketing license. Worker layoffs followed, and TPL became primarily a domestic supplier of military rations, creating precarious working conditions, until the factory was shuttered in 1993. Although technically TPL still exists, this article contends that, far from being a victim of a post-cold war neo-liberal transition, as is usually asserted, TPL’s fate is properly located in the period between 1967 and 1974, when state socialism in Tanzania created pressures on the parastatal and its workers to contribute to nation building, particularly by supplying fresh beef to the local butcher trade. This was coupled with a political ecology of disease and corruption, at a time of drought, villagization, and agro-pastoral resistance to market pressures, which prevented TPL from acquiring sufficient numbers of cattle in Africa’s third largest cattle country to take advantage of international beef scarcities in the early 1970s. Global pressures, especially disease controls and the OPEC oil embargo, frustrated TPL beef exports as the world economy moved from beef scarcity to a sudden glut by 1974.

African Socialism in Tanzania: Lessons of a Community Development Strategy for Rural Transformation in Developing Countries

In a bid to formulate an appropriate development strategy to curb the quagmire of the underdevelopment crisis of the continent, African leaders adopted various policy options to extricate her economies from the dominance of colonial hegemony. In Tanzania, the philosophy of African socialism was initiated at post-colonial independence to consolidate not only the true spirit of African brother-hood but also to achieve self-reliance which is the basic principle of community development. This paper examined the practices of African socialism as a nexus toward the actualization of self-reliance and rural development. It adopted the exploratory research and relied on the conceptual framework methodology to establish the relationship between the philosophy of African socialism and community development. This was done with a view to unravel the lessons that could be drawn by any society that desired to achieve community development under the context of the African experience. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s2p540

Sovereignty and Socialism in Tanzania: The Historiography of an African State

Observers of the Tanzanian political scene would point out that the country makes its own decisions on matters of internal and international importance. The policy ofUjamaa Vijijini[African socialism in the villages], it would be argued, was formulated here and not at the dictate of any foreign power.In an edited volume entitledThe State in Tanzania, published in 1980 just before the precipitous denouement of President Julius Nyerere's philosophy of African socialism known asUjamaa, Haroub Othman began with the question of the sub-title, “Who Controls it and Whose Interest Does it Serve?” The cover featured a large black question mark on a red background. Provocatively Othman asked, “can one say in a specific and definite sense that Tanzania is building socialism?” Exhibiting a remarkable level of open criticism of the government in a one-party state, the essays framed their issues in the Marxist terms that were long predominant in literature on the Tanzanian state. The book dealt with an ongoing concern that Tanzania's ambitious goals for democracy and development were not being met and the overarching nationalist question of which sovereign defined those goals. It was a question that continues to vex political scientists of Africa today who seek to reconcile Westphalian concepts of sovereignty with the layered realities of African polities struggling to exert sovereign authority both internally and externally.Reviewing a representative sample of nearly fifty years of scholarship on the postcolonial Tanzanian state, one is struck by the tension enervating Othman's essays. Scholars are torn between the impulse to understand the theoretical implications of Tanzania's experience for socialism and a more pragmatic concern to evaluate the country's claim to sovereign authority.

Limited choices: the political struggle for socialism in Tanzania

Studies Tanzania's post-independence attempts to build a socialist society. The text examines the country's efforts to achieve socio-economic equality; to use agricultural co-operatives as a vehicle to socialism; and to contain Zanzibari sub-nationalism, which threatened the project.

The Long Transition: Building Socialism in Tanzania

The Long Transition: Building Socialism in Tanzania

The Long Transition; Building Socialism in Tanzania

The Long Transition; Building Socialism in Tanzania

Review: Africa: Toward Socialism in Tanzania

Review: Africa: Toward Socialism in Tanzania

Towards socialism in Tanzania. Edited by Bismarck U. Mwansasu and Cranford Pratt University of Toronto Press, 1979, 243 pp.

Towards socialism in Tanzania. Edited by Bismarck U. Mwansasu and Cranford Pratt University of Toronto Press, 1979, 243 pp.

Toward Socialism in Tanzania

Toward Socialism in Tanzania

The Long Transition: Building Socialism in Tanzania

The Long Transition: Building Socialism in Tanzania

Crises and Socialism in Tanzania

A strikingcommentary on Tanzania: two respected scholars, having studied the same country, having relied largely on the same data, reach opposing conclusions. There is not only disagreement here, but confusion on the nature of change in Tanzania. There is also misunderstanding of the processes of change in the Third World more generally. The first task in the analysis of the recent Tanzanian experience, therefore, is to free ourselves of encumbrances. To make sense of what has happened we must first sort through some of the major confusions and distractions that unfortunately permeate the literature.

Towards Socialism in Tanzania. Edited by Bismarck U. Mwansasu and Cranford Pratt. (Buffalo, N.J.: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Pp. x + 243. $20.00.)

Towards Socialism in Tanzania. Edited by Bismarck U. Mwansasu and Cranford Pratt. (Buffalo, N.J.: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Pp. x + 243. $20.00.)

Towards Socialism in Tanzania

Towards Socialism in Tanzania

Christianity and socialism in Tanzania, 1967-1977

assistance are all taken as evidence of the of socialism in Africa. For those who take socialism to be primarily concerned with egalitarianism and individual liberation, to be achieved through education and cooperation, the modest results of Tanzania's socialist villages and the occasional use of coercion in resettlement programs are taken as evidence of the of socialism in Tanzania. And for those who scoff at efforts to make a transition to socialism without intensified class conflict, Tanzania's emphasis on education and ideology and its apparently slow pace prove their initial skepticism to be correct. Perhaps they are all right, but not yet.1 It would be easy to elaborate on many other factors which have contributed to the failure of socialism in Tanzania, for example the breakdown of the East African Community and the costly invasion of Uganda, but this will not be done here. The above quotation is primarily intended to show the present pessimism of many Western intellectuals, some of whom have previously suffered from a romantic Tanzaphilia. J. Samoff still seems to be cautiously optimistic about the prospects for a long-term success of Tanzanian socialism or ujamaa; others seem to have lost much of their interest in this 'alternative' political model. It should be stressed at this point that ujamaa is a kind of superimposed socialism, a socialism from above. It is a political theory which has been elaborated particularly by President Julius Nyerere. Due to the great problems of implementation it has to a large extent remained a theoretical ideology. Its kernel of rural

Towards Socialism in Tanzania

Towards Socialism in Tanzania

Christianity and Socialism in Tanzania, 1967-1977

Christianity and Socialism in Tanzania, 1967-1977

Towards Socialism in Tanzania

Towards Socialism in Tanzania