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

I

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 of Ujamaa Vijijini [African socialism in the villages], it would be argued, was formulated here and not at the dictate of any foreign power.²

In an edited volume entitled The State in Tanzania, published in 1980 just before the precipitous denouement of President Julius Nyerere's philosophy of African socialism known as Ujamaa, 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.³

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. It is clear that Tanzania's socialism was at the same time a claim to sovereignty—ideological, economic, and political. The tension in scholarship on the Tanzanian state has not been between moderate and radical socialism as has often seemed the case. Rather debates have pitted the diffuse international discourses of modernization, socialist and otherwise, against the specific cultural needs of defining a truly independent African state. Addressing this distinction will allow a historical perspective that moves beyond obsolete debates about various theories of socialism, and understand those debates as evidence of an internationally compelling national philosophy. Disentangling the complex interchange of local and foreign discourses that constituted Tanzania's claim to sovereign statehood will offer insight into how the presentist concerns of past generations can inform historical analysis.

The debates about socialism represented Tanzania's intellectual engagement in global politics, communicating its claim to an independent voice among the nations. As such, socialist policies must be first understood within the exercise in sovereign authority and its contestation. The passionate debate about Tanzania's socialism highlights not successful policy, but rather successful politics. While "flag" sovereignty followed logically from independence, it was only with varying success that African countries laid claim to the exercise of internal and external sovereign authority. The debate that came with Nyerere's socialist policies created as their context a robust sense of Tanzanian nationhood. Such an approach allows a multifaceted yet critical approach to the diverse archival materials available for post-colonial African research. Documents in Tanzania's national archive are dominated by administrative minutia, but as state documents they offer the voice of the sovereign and the multi-cultural debates that shaped its attempt to garner legitimate authority. At the same time, in post-colonial African politics, there is a necessary dependence on outside observations of the Tanzanian political scene in foreign diplomatic archives. Here as well, a theory of sovereignty helps bring a critical understanding of the interchange represented in those perspectives shaped by overseas concerns. Oral history can provide a crucial supplement to factual narrative, but more usefully offers interpretive context emerging from the memories of historical actors. Such memories hint at potential anthropological insights as well as how former intellectual debates shaped political decisions. A review of past scholarship can thus help the historian sift all of these voices and so glean the kernels...