SELF-RELIANCE AND THE STATE: THE MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF DEVELOPMENT IN EARLY POST-COLONIAL TANZANIA

E-ISSN： 1750-0184|82|2|212-234

ISSN： 0001-9720

Source： Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, Vol.82, Iss.2, 2012-05, pp. : 212-234

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Abstract

This article uses a key principle of the Tanzanian ujamaa project – self-reliance – as an analytical lever to open up the historical landscape of development politics in that national context during the 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout this period Tanzanians understood and experienced self-reliance in a variety of ways: as a mandated developmental strategy or a collective developmental aspiration, a condition of dignity or privation, a hallmark of national citizenship or a reflection of local survivalism, a matter of luxury or necessity. I trace these multiple meanings through three distinct but overlapping fields of inquiry: first, by cataloguing the plural ideological registers indexed by self-reliance within official development discourse vis-à-vis domestic and international politics; second, by illuminating a diverse range of rural elders' accounts of ujamaa villagization and self-reliance policy in the south-eastern region of Mtwara; and third, by examining the ambivalent position of self-reliance within public debates about regional development in relation to the national scale. In doing so, I expose the dialectical friction between competing constructions of citizenship and development at the heart of ujamaa, and suggest new avenues forward for conceptualizing the afterlives of ‘self-reliance’ and the changing meaning of development in contemporary Tanzania and beyond.