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 Youth, the TANU Youth League, and Managed Vigilantism in Dar es Salaam, 1925–73 james r. brennan This chapter examines the underappreciated role played by male youth in the political history of Dar es Salaam in particular and Tanzania in general. It demonstrates how colonial and postcolonial political authorities constructed and manipulated male youth, and how young men formed an increasingly powerful political force in their own right. The chapter also looks into the larger questions raised by the political history of youth, such as creating meaningful citizenship in a colonial and one-party state, the manipulation of patron-client networks to mobilize underemployed urban youth for political ends, and finally wider questions about the legitimacy of violence, other forms of coercion, and their political intelligence in a system where youth and party distrust yet also rely on a state bureaucracy. It also raises questions relevant to our understanding of the contemporary dilemmas of political violence among male youth in urban Africa today. Networks of patronage underwrote the work of the nationalist party’s Youth League in Tanzania, but sharp limits to the patrimonial capacity of both state and party in postcolonial urban Tanzania had already revealed themselves by the 1970s, opening a new and still unfinished chapter of youth politics, characterized by the gradual fragmentation of centralized party-state controls over the violence, vigilantism, and intelligence gathering of young men. “Youth” here is understood as both an abstract social category and an empirically definable group whose members are eligible to participate in specific institutions . Borrowing Insa Nolte’s description, youth is “not so much circumscribed by biological age as by status and behaviour: the group includes all those who do not (yet) have the material means and the recognition to establish themselves as providers for others.”1 As both category and group, “youth” was changing rapidly during the twentieth century,defined “less by a set of inherited discursive constructs as by unique historical circumstances and narratives that set their generation apart from others before or after.”2 Also in flux during this period were the instruments and organization of legitimate violence. Channeling the violent energies of male youth through sharply defined generational duties of defensive or destructive 8 Youth, the TANU Youth League, and Managed Vigilantism  labor is a signature dynamic of several African age systems.3 In the colonial context , harnessing the dissatisfactions of potentially violent male youth had become a common strategy of emerging nationalist parties during the late 1940s and 1950s. This was realized institutionally within most African nationalist parties through the creation of “Youth Wings” responsible for the more coercive activities of mass political mobilization.4 This chapter focuses primarily on a period in African history (1945–73) characterized by a strong faith in state-led development projects and single party domination over national political structures.5 The theoretical ambitions and institutional capacities of parties and states to manage the coercive powers of youth toward normative unitary ends seem to have passed with this era. This chapter proceeds chronologically in three sections. The first section (1925–54) examines how a group of young African bureaucrats in Dar es Salaam, seeking to set themselves apart from local “elders” claiming traditional authority, shifted the very meaning of generation and youth by pioneering a form of racial politics that enabled outsiders to become urban citizens. The second section (1954–64) investigates how the political victory of African nationalism was realized in Dar es Salaam and elsewhere in part through the strategic deployment of coercive youth in the form of the TANU (Tanganyika African National Union) Youth League. The third section (1964–73) considers the dilemmas of managing Youth League vigilantism in a one-party state in the decade following independence . As with most African cities, the public space of Dar es Salaam today is overwhelmingly male, young, and occasionally punctured by bursts of vigilante justice.6 Explanations of vigilantism and other forms of violence in contemporary Africa where youth take a leading role need to be situated within the specific historical contexts in which they emerge.Tanzania has largely avoided the horrors of child soldiers and nihilistic urban gang culture, but male youth today play a central role in the increasingly fractious political competition on the mainland and particularly Zanzibar, as new ideological motivations and patron-client chains take shape. To a large extent the dangers of violence among political youth are intrinsic to the nature of youth itself—what have changed are the strategies and structures created...

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