African Socialism and the Limits of Global Familyhood: Tanzania and the New International Economic Order in Sub-Saharan Africa

This essay contextualizes the emergence of the NIEO—as an ideological formation and political project—from the particular vantage point of early postcolonial Tanzania. The political imagination of Tanzanian leaders was never imprisoned within binaries opposing formal colonialism to independent nationhood, capitalism to socialism, or individual rights to collective rights. Moving among, between, and within these discursive and material poles, Julius Nyerere and other leftist African leaders forged a variety of political languages, agendas, and policies throughout the 1960s and 70s in response to a shared set of obstacles to the interlinked goals of economic sovereignty and development.