Race, Nation, and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Africa: The Case of Tanzania by Ronald Aminzade (review)

Tanzania’s struggles to achieve sovereignty, development, and equality have attracted considerable attention over the years. In Race, Nation, and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Africa Ronald Aminzade sheds new light on the inherent strains between Julius Nyerere’s inclusive socialist vision of nation building and the exclusive racial nationalism embraced by many officials within the ruling party. Is socialism merely a means by which to appropriate the assets of Tanzania’s relatively affluent Asian minority? While this question has been fruitfully explored by James Brennan and other scholars, Aminzade paints an unusually broad canvas. He examines Tanzania’s racially tinged politics from TANU’s inception in the 1950s all the way to the present—well beyond socialism’s ostensible demise. In doing so he necessarily provides a synthesis of others’ work, yet also draws heavily from primary materials such as newspapers, Tanzanian national assembly debates, and archival and oral materials. And while Race, Nation, and Citizenship works as a thematic study, I would argue that its greatest value is as a political and economic history of postcolonial Tanzania. Given the relative scarcity of scholars willing to pursue such a wide-ranging approach, this is indeed praise. Even so, specialists will also find new angles on a host of familiar topics.

In light of the “tri-partite racial order” that emerged during the colonial era, TANU debates revolved around electoral strategy and whether or not to extend membership to non-Africans. With independence, contests shifted toward the pace of Africanization of the army and civil service. Aminzade notes that such disputes led to Nyerere’s resignation as prime minister in 1962, as well as the 1964 mutiny. Nyerere moved to neutralize the racialists by making Tanzania a de jure one-party state and the Parliament a rubber-stamp institution, and by abolishing ethnic associations. Even though after the mutiny race became a taboo subject, relations between Asians and Africans remained tense. While not shying away from the ugliness of popular opinion, the author presents a fairly even-handed assessment of the sources of racial enmity.

Aminzade reconstructs TANU debates over the meaning and direction of socialism, Tanzania’s dependence on foreign aid and expertise, and what to do about alleged enemies and saboteurs. He recovers ideological divisions—as expressed in the media and parliamentary debates—between populist party officials and their more educated and technocratic kinsmen in the civil service. While Nyerere dismissed racial thought as xenophobic, his polemics against urban parasitism resonated with popular antipathies. He also nationalized the assets of Asian businesspeople and investors, which led to an economic crisis in the early 1980s, when Tanzanians faced rampant inflation and chronic consumer shortages. Feeling targeted by the state, Asians sought illegal means by which to maintain their economic positions, or to export their wealth and persons abroad. Aminzade also explores Nyerere’s acrimonious relationship with Abeid Karume, the president of Zanzibar, whose policies toward non-African minorities were more arbitrary and exclusionary than those of the mainland.

Facing a debt crisis in the 1980s, Tanzania gradually conformed to many if not all IMF and popular demands for reform. Aminzade notes that civil servants embraced these more often than ruling party officials; indeed, such officials were never to regain their former influence over public policy. Likewise, parliamentary debates became meaningful and influential once again; opposition parties began to question both the wisdom and integrity of ruling elites. While Structural Adjustment lowered inflation, ended consumer shortages, raised tax revenue, reduced government borrowing, and increased exports and foreign investment, it also reduced consumer and educational subsidies. Aminzade asserts, contrary to common assumptions, that it produced a stronger, not a weaker, state, with enhanced taxing and regulatory powers. Neoliberalism did not reject but instead redefined popular aspirations toward good governance and participatory development.

It also opened the way for unprecedented corruption, a trend that...