African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World by Priya Lal (review)

The legacy of the national development project known as ujamaa (familyhood), initiated by Julius Nyerere and the Tanzanian African National Union (tanu), has attracted considerable scholarly debate. Lal’s interdisciplinary approach incorporates historical, sociological, ethnographic, gender, familial, and economic analyses of Tanzanian society under tanu rule. In four chapters, each with numerous sub-sections, Lal insightfully explores how Tanzanians in the southeastern region of Mtwara experienced ujamaa during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition to consulting primary sources from Tanzania, the United States, and the United Kingdom, as well as numerous secondary sources from history, political science, and international studies, Lal also conducted more than 100 oral interviews with Tanzanians whose lives were affected by Nyerere’s most ambitious national development project. Her primary argument is that Mtwarans’ experiences with ujamaa reflected the Tanzanian state’s increasing yet uneven presence in their lives. Ujamaa’s structural economic transformations resulted in both positive and negative consequences for individuals and families in rural communities.

Envisaged as a national agricultural development program based on villagization, ujamaa was meant to improve the overall economic standing of the nation. Lal convincingly demonstrates that the push for individual self-reliance at the personal and village level in Mtwara also dovetailed with the government’s concerns about boosting national security and state sovereignty along Tanzania’s southern border. By highlighting how ujamaa was part of broader pan-Africanism that emphasized African socialism as the pathway toward national development, Tanzanians were geographically and ideologically positioned to support liberation struggles elsewhere in southern Africa (for example, Frelimo in Mozambique).

Another significant context that informs Lal’s interdisciplinary analysis of ujamaa was the Cold War. Focusing extensively on the post–Arusha Declaration period (1967–1975), Lal’s book further explores how global decolonization, African postcolonial development projects, and Cold War rivalries informed the experiences of Tanzanians within the program. She emphasizes that these intersecting and overlapping international realities shaped domestic policies and discourses about ujamaa. Under Nyerere’s leadership, Tanzania sought to avoid mounting neo-colonial pressure from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Nyerere’s foreign-policy agenda gravitated instead toward the Chinese and other nonaligned nations. tanu’s adaptation of certain aspects of Chinese political- and economic-development models further demonstrated ujamaa’s socialist attributes. Believing that the peasants were the essential class for the overall economic success of the country, Nyerere sought to include aspects of local input into the implementation and enforcement of ujamaa policies.

Although the Tanzanian state vigorously encouraged participation and engagement with ujamaa, Lal emphasizes that Nyerere also sought to avoid a Soviet-style practice of violently enforcing authoritarian mandates by urban bureaucrats from the upper echelon of the one-party state. Villagization, however, eventually became compulsory, though largely because of uneven structural deficiencies with ujamaa. Moreover, despite utopian visions of the program’s eventual success, ujamaa did not always respond successfully to environmental disasters; nor did it take into account local frustrations about how the program usurped time from the peasants’ ability to engage with long-standing cultural practices or their own subsistence production. Lal reports, however, that many Mtwarans continued to see merit in the program despite its coercive change during the early 1970s. In Chapter 4, “Remembering Villagization,” Lal relies on the voices and memories of Tanzanians to augment her point about the value of analyzing personal and communal experience under ujamaa (177–226). This chapter is rich with the conflicting memories of ujamaa that undergird Lal’s argument.

Overall, this book is a welcome addition to the growing canon of transnational histories infused with local perspectives and the experiences of rural people in East Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. Although Lal’s analysis of both the macro-level (the global and national) and micro-level (the region, village, and individual) of Tanzanian history is effective, she would have strengthened her argument with a more...