Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam by Andrew Ivaska (review)

Andrew Ivaska’s Cultured States analyzes the role of youth in contestations over national culture in Dar es Salaam during the “long sixties” following Tanzania’s independence from British colonial rule. Ivaska brilliantly captures the essence of debates about fashion, student activism, women’s work, marriage, and sexuality: the competition between young men and older men for the affections of young women who themselves discovered greater educational and occupational opportunities in the capital city. This argument alone is enough to encapsulate the rich material presented throughout the book, but Ivaska pushes further to advance his more theoretical conclusion about the relationship between the state and society in the production of national culture. He depends heavily on newspapers to prove that national culture was a product of both government reforms and popular protest. Young men and women were symbolically and practically essential to these negotiations.

The book is organized into four chapters. The first chapter frames the discourse on national culture around late colonial and early postcolonial debates about modernity and tradition, the urban and the rural, as Tanzania moved toward a policy of ujamaa, a local form of African socialism that combined preservation and creation of “traditional” villages as part of “modern” economic and social development. Ivaska draws on Partha Chatterjee’s work to demonstrate the ways in which the state articulated national culture in terms of indigenous modernity, distinguishable from outdated African traditions and non-African understandings of modernity. This was most obvious in the coexistence of Operation Dress Up, a program that urged Maasai men to don shirts and trousers when traveling through towns, alongside Operation Vijana (Operation Youth), a movement that attacked young women in town for wearing miniskirts and wigs because these were not “African” styles. Like modernity itself, youth was both “promise and threat,” a common point made in histories of adolescence and youth. This force had to be subsumed under the nationalist agenda in order to harness the promise and mitigate the threat. The Youth League of the ruling party, the Tanganyikan African National Union (TANU), which acted as a sort of moral police in Dar es Salaam, was central to the honing of this national culture in the 1960s and 1970s.

Whereas the first chapter sets up the broader concepts of urbanity and modernity shaping national culture, the remaining chapters delve into those issues most immediately relevant to young urbanites. Chapter 2 focuses on the gendered aspect of campaigns against urban (read capitalist) decadence, particularly the ban on miniskirts, as indicative of the dissatisfaction that young urban men felt as young women gained access to lucrative employment. This was a reflection of young women’s greater mobility and cultural influence in the town and the anxieties this produced in young men who cast their female counterparts as gold diggers and prostitutes. These dynamics emerged out of increased migration of women into Dar es Salaam and a rise in unemployment among young men in the 1960s. The oppressive tactics of the TANU Youth League (TYL), however, did not necessarily prevail. Ivaska highlights the failed trial of a young woman charged with indecency as insight into the growing salience of the discourse on women’s rights by the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The third chapter, a discussion of the role of the University College, Dar es Salaam (later the University of Dar es Salaam) in political debates, engages most directly with existing literature on the history of youth in the 1960s. Those university students who expected to assume high-level positions in government upon graduation were considered too elitist and capitalist, while those attracted to the university as a hotbed of international leftist activism were touted as too militant and un-African in their brand of socialism. Protest began when the state attempted to force students into national service programs and continued as the state banned the leftist United Students’ African Revolutionary Front...