Desire and Decline: Schooling amid Crisis in Tanzania (review)

This monograph is the thirteenth in the series Society and Politics in Africa, edited by Yakubu Saaka. Ostensibly about Tanzania as a whole, the book actually focuses on schooling in Kilimanjaro Region, and more precisely on schooling among the Chagga of Old Moshi. Schooling is not discussed systematically for the other groups such as Pare and Maasai who live in Kilimanjaro Region, or for other Tananzians whose country is the size of Texas and New Mexico combined. That said, the book is a solid case study that adds to the literature on education among the Chagga and to critical discussions about schooling, development policy, and international actors in East Africa and beyond.

The work derives from research conducted from 1996 to 2004 and cogently analyzes the interrelationships of schooling with fertility and health, HIV/AIDS, and environmental conservation during a time of enormous political, economic, and social change. Liberalizing the economy clearly produced multiple ironies, not least of which is the influx of commodities from South Africa (Tanzania was the ANC's second home) that most locals simply cannot afford to buy. Vavrus underscores the debilitating power of discourses of development that champion education as universally transformative, empowering, and the hallmark of modernity. The painful truth is that education all too often prepares youth for unattainable futures and drives wedges between the haves and the have-nots within a community and beyond. Nonetheless, Vavrus invokes Arjun Appadurai to argue that education, like imagination, can be "a staging ground for action, and not only for escape" (19). Thus the book has a hopeful tone and never underestimates people's power to transform their own lives in ways that permit pursuit and protection of what they hold near and dear.

A professor of education with expertise in curriculum and instruction, Vavrus casts schooling in terms of "desire" and "decline." A strong desire for "the life of an 'educated person'" (19) persists among the Chagga despite maisha magumu (a difficult life) characterized by real economic decline. They have had more than one hundred years of missionary schooling in their communities, frequent interaction with international development agencies and agendas, and enough collective experience with education's rewards as manifested in successful businesses and salaried employment to fuel desire despite economic hardship at the national level. But "decline" frames the larger context of postcolonial, neoliberal Tanzania in which "only 6% of a population of 35 million attend secondary school" (3). International development agencies active in Kilimanjaro promote development through education but continue to conceptualize education as universally ameliorative (education as panacea), regardless of the specificities of context, leading Vavrus to argue that while schooling has the potential to effect equality, "in the absence of a concomitant restructuring of national and international development priorities, schooling can transform very few lives" (5).

The introductory chapter discusses education in Tanzania's postcolonial context, while chapter 1 examines education from the combined perspective of international development and the "feminist modern"—the premise that socioeconomic change can be best realized by focusing on the female. Chapter 2 tackles Tanzanian social policy as it relates to schooling-as-a-cure, using a chronological approach. Chapter 3 presents current data that demonstrate the contestation between locals and internationals over fertility and culture, health curricula, and family planning agendas. Education's well-documented link to fertility decline is often thwarted by the everyday material challenges presented by maisha magumu. Vavrus follows the lives of the secondary school graduates portrayed in chapter 3, who are among the most knowledgeable about HIV/AIDS, to show in chapter 4 that many who experience postgraduation inertia because they cannot find employment engage in high-risk sexual activities with "sponsors" who are willing to pay for their schooling. The graduates say that the risk of "getting AIDS is like having a car accident: It's common, it's painful, it can kill you outright, but no one is going to start walking to...