The Political Economy of Tanzania: Decline and Recovery

Acknowledgments

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s The helpful taxi driver is a fabled figure in African political studies, and this book owes more than most to such well-disposed individuals. The narrative that follows grows out of nearly fifty years of research on Tanzania, beginning with research on Zanzibar during 1962 and 1963 and continuing with visits to Tanzania almost every year since. It is squarely in the genre of scholarship that finds many of its most compelling sources of information in casual conversations with ordinary Tanzanians. In addition to taxi drivers, the author owes profound thanks to a somewhat broader circle that includes hotel staff, sales clerks, bank tellers, restaurant waiters, kiosk operators, street vendors, shopkeepers, bartenders, occasional passersby, and all those warmly supportive individuals who waited patiently together in lines at post offices, laundries , banks, gas stations, book stores, car rental agencies, the Office of the Government Printer, copy centers, exchange bureaus, internet cafes and airport formalities. I am especially grateful to the many members of the Tanzanian academic community who were prepared to share their views, some on a not-forattribution basis, over this long period. I owe thanks to the Tanzanian government officials, journalists, and students, both in Tanzania and abroad, who gave the benefit of their insights to a foreign scholar. Regrettably, the list of people whose reflections and experiences have helped to shape this book is so long that it is simply impossible to thank all of them by name, much less provide a reference for each conversation. An incalculable debt of gratitude is owed to UCLA’s James S. Coleman African Studies Center and to its founder-director, Jim Coleman, who afforded a beginning scholar a first-job arrangement that included an annual trip to Africa. Despite all-too familiar budget difficulties, the African Studies Center honored that arrangement for almost twenty-five years, providing the funds for the visits to Tanzania during which so many of the conversations 264 Acknowledgments that inform this volume took place. By the 1990s, when university-provided research funds had dwindled to an impractically low level, it became possible to observe the Tanzanian political process as a member of various USAID consulting projects. Dr. Anne Fleuret of USAID, amid her development assignments , conducted an informal multiyear seminar on Tanzanian society: innumerable graduate researchers, visiting academics, and consultants benefited from her knowledge and teaching skills. Although consulting research differs from scholarly research, and therefore does not often make its way into scholarly journals, it provides an opportunity for ongoing academic contact. I hope that these projects have afforded a special vantage point for this study. Scholars of Tanzania stand on tall shoulders. We are especially fortunate that Tanzania’s hospitable atmosphere for research has nurtured an extensive, rich, and highly variegated tradition of country studies. Tanzania may well be the best documented of African countries. It should go without saying—but will not—that this book is profoundly indebted to the work of many scholars including Göran Hydén, dean of Tanzanian social scientists, as well as Henry Bienen, Lionel Cliffe, William Tordoff, Reginald Green, Cranford Pratt, John Saul, Rwekaza Mukandala, Gelase Mutahaba, Aili Tripp, Benson Nindi, Louise Fortmann, Richard Mshomba, John Shao, Chris Maina Peter, Jennifer Widner, Issa Shivji, Dean McHenry, Jr., Sam Maghimbi, and Clyde Ingle. Scholars of contemporary Tanzania also owe a debt of gratitude to historians of colonial and postcolonial Tanzania including Ralph Austen, Bernard Chidzero, James Giblin, and James Brennan. Any student of Tanzanian political economy is especially indebted to the work of several scholars whose pioneering studies provide the indispensable foundation for contemporary research on that subject. This book is especially indebted to the work of several individuals. Among economists of Tanzania, Frank Ellis stands out for early research that showed the extent to which postindependence agricultural policy was framed to impose high tax levels on agricultural producers; Louise Fortmann and Andrew Coulson offered convincing evidence of the dissonance between President Nyerere’s vision of a communal society where local self-help initiatives would improve the condition of the rural poor and the reality of self-interested control by the country’s centrally empowered and overbearing bureaucracy; Aili Tripp, writing in the 1990s, showed not only the magnitude, vitality, and complexity of Tanzania’s parallel economy, but the extent to which the lives of ordinary Tanzanians had come to depend upon it; Gerald Helleiner for his uncanny ability always to provide observations...