Contradictions between race, class and nation in Tanzania

Relative to many a country in Africa, Tanzania has received considerable scholarly attention, especially with regard to the study of its – by most accounts successful – nation-building process. Surrounded on all sides by countries beset by ethnic, religious or other forms of politicized violence, the Tanzanian mainland (former Tanganyika) constitutes by contrast a ‘Haven of Peace’, as its commercial capital Dar es Salaam is named. The triumphal narrative touted by both state and sympathetic observers attributes its success to a variety of fortuitous factors: the charismatic and incorruptible first president Julius Nyerere; an ethnic landscape not dominated by one or two numerically preponderant groups; a lingua franca (Kiswahili) that – owing to its geographic breadth and ethnic ambivalence – serves well as a national language; and an unorthodox version of socialism configured to resonate with widespread cultural values. Two recent works, however, interrogate this widely accepted depiction of Tanzania. James Brennan’s Taifa: making nation and race in urban Tanzania (2012) and Ronald Aminzade’s Race, Nation, and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Africa: the case of Tanzania (2013) delve into the oft-overlooked junctures in Tanzania’s history where conflict, not consensus, and exclusionary, not inclusionary, forces threatened to produce a very different outcome. Through close examination of archival materials and interviews and an intensive review of period newspapers, these authors complement each other in revealing a highly contingent, and by no means determined, process of state formation. They cover some of the same ground and exhibit different strengths, but nonetheless both make important contributions to Tanzanian historiography and, more generally, to scholarship on multi-ethnic or multiracial societies, nationalism, state–market relations and race relations in Africa.

Nyerere’s insistence on a race-blind, ethnicity-blind and religion-blind nation met frequent challenge, as both Brennan and Aminzade show. Whereas Brennan focuses his attention on the British colonial and early postcolonial periods ending with the nationalization of urban housing in 1971, Aminzade tackles a more ambitious time frame, from German colonialism into British colonialism, then socialism and neoliberalism, ending with a spate of corruption scandals in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Both authors offer narratives that fall at an uncomfortable angle relative to conventional Tanzanian historiography. Focusing not on successes and outcomes, they train our attention on the frequently fraught negotiations over national identity and belonging that occurred both within the ruling party of CCM (Chama cha Mapinduzi or Party of the Revolution) and in the public sphere. Opposition to Nyerere’s non-racialism took various forms, from internal CCM factionalism to labour union protests, from student movements to newspaper critiques, and evoked varied responses from the neutralizing of opposing factions, the disciplining of students and newspaper editors, the seizure and redistribution of assets deemed national, and the removal (either via imprisonment or forced exile) of perceived enemies of the nation. Brennan and Aminzade share a particular focus on race, especially concerning the position and competing rhetorics about South Asian communities in the emergent Tanzanian nation state.

In analysing ‘the growth and intensification of racial and national thought in the context of colonial and postcolonial urbanization’ (p. 3), Brennan, a historian, highlights continuities across time and political periods. British colonial administrators discouraged urban migration out of a racialized world view that reserved urban residence as the privilege of ‘non-natives’, meaning Europeans, Asians and Arabs. They declared rural areas, by contrast, to be the domain of ‘natives’ whose land might be stolen by cunning foreigners in the absence of pre-emptive policies. Asians who had invested in rural agriculture were forced to abandon their rural holdings and relocate to towns, where they joined other Asians in investing heavily in urban housing. After independence, Brennan explains, the rhetoric shifted away from racialized discourse but the goal of relegating Africans to rural...