Professor of Political and Social Science, York University, Toronto. This article draws on personal experience during seven years of teaching in and writing about Tanzania (in the 1960s and early 1970s), a familiarity with more recent scholarship on the country, and reflections evoked by my participation in a memorial workshop on Nyerere at Queen's University, Kingston, in February, 2000. The paper I presented there, 'Julius Nyerere: the theory and practice of (un)democratic socialism in Africa,' will be published in David M. McDonald and Eunice Njeri Sahle, eds, The Legacies of Julius Nyerere: Influences on Development Discourse and Practice (forthcoming; Trenton NJ: Africa World Press). A research trip to Tanzania in July-August 2001 deepened the perspectives I sought to develop at the Queen's University conference.THE ABJECT FAILURE OF NEOLIBERAL 'reforms' since the 1980s, the malignant nature of global capitalism's continuing grip upon Africa, and the deepening conditions of poverty that face most Africans suggest that the search for genuine alternatives - revolutionary, socialist - must, with ever renewed force, find its way back onto the continental agenda. In that context Africans will be encouraged (amongst other necessary tasks) to reflect critically upon earlier projections of heterodox futures for the continent, including, it is suggested here, the one exemplified by Julius Nyerere's Tanzania during the 1960s and 1970s. From a re-evaluation of that experience they may hope to draw creative stimulus as well as lessons, both positive and negative. This article suggests two principal themes for attention, each central to Nyerere's own theory and practice. However, they resonate beyond Nyerere's moment and remain pertinent, even crucial, for any on-going discussion of the challenges that confront present-day, dependent, and poverty-stricken Africa. For at the core of both Nyerere's political philosophy and his life work in the public sphere were his own imaginative takes on the theory and practice of 'democracy' (think: 'the democratic one-party state') on the one hand and of Ujamaa na Kujitegemea ('socialism and self-reliance') on the other. What can we hope to learn from exploring these two themes through a consideration both of Nyerere's own undertakings and of the Tanzanian setting within which those undertakings were grounded?(1)DEMOCRACY'Democracy,' its theory and its practice, is a contentious topic in Africa. In fact, it was over precisely this issue that Cranford Pratt and I locked horns in all too acrimonious debate several decades ago.(2) In that exchange Pratt professed to find in my criticisms of Tanzania's politics a preference for an approach, Marxist and/or Leninist, that was far more dangerously and self-righteously authoritarian than anything Nyerere inclined towards. Indeed, for Pratt, Nyerere's political practice was essentially democratic, albeit a practice that sought to shape and to guide from above the consolidation of democracy in Tanzania so that the country could weather the very real threats to consolidation that characterized the immediate post-independence years. In rejecting Pratt's charge that I favoured an overtly dictatorial approach, I argued that Pratt himself had actually underestimated both the authoritarian nature of Nyerere's 'democratic' practice and the very high costs that the Tanzanian president's chosen approach (and that of TANU, the party he led) inflicted on the movement for progressive change in Tanzania. Accepting, with Pratt, the prevailing framework of the one-party state, I then argued that Nyerere's polity could hope to provide a framework for nurturing democracy only if popular forces - workers, peasants, students, women - were empowered within it to act quite dramatically from below to ensure the safeguarding of their own interests and the maintenance of a socialist direction for the country. What of this debate today? It is still of interest, I think, but only if, with the benefit of hindsight, we note that both Pratt and I were mistaken, in important if rather different ways, in our arguments about the nature and potential of Nyerere's one-party democracy. …