Written by Hector Le Luel
In 1967, Julius Nyerere, President of Tanzania and leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) party, outlined his vision of postcolonial development with the Arusha Declaration. It centred around the notion of Ujamaa, or “familyhood” in Swahili, based on a return to precolonial values of solidarity and self-reliance. Fifty-seven years after Arusha, Ujamaa is still at the heart of debates surrounding postcolonial paths of development in Africa: it is either branded as a concrete example of the shortcomings of state socialism or praised as a model of equity and emancipation. The intense attention and discussions that have surrounded the policy still reflect today the fascination, hopes and criticisms projected onto postcolonial Africa by continental and non-African actors.
What was Ujamaa?
The policies led by the TANU government of Nyerere were rooted in both the material and ideological spheres; Ujamaa was firstly a form of nation-building within a multiethnic state marked by rising discrepancies between urban dwellers and the majority rural population. Through Ujamaa, Nyerere painted a common fight of solidarity, where all fringes of the population would unite to create the new Tanzanian nation – citizens were incited to participate in building hospitals, schools, and roads connecting the country, and TANU presented itself as a vehicle of social progress by condemning religious and ethnic division, using the new common language of Swahili as a vector of unification. In the years following the independence of 1961, Ujamaa rhetoric became a true language of Tanzanian citizenship and civic duty, overstepping class, and religious and ethnic divisions.
In political terms, the material grounding of Ujamaa was also inspired by notions of unity and solidarity. Tanzania became a one-party state in 1965, with TANU acting as the central organ of political decision-making. This first paradox of Ujamaa, forfeiting a multi-party system for the sake of development, was explained by Nyerere as “more democratic than a multi-party system when there is a general agreement over the principles of equality, freedom, and unity”. The move allowed TANU to flush out the growing corruption of political elites and helped strengthen national cohesion through open participation within the party-state. TANU membership and elected offices were open to all, and enlarged powers were given to new Village Development Committees overseeing local decision-making and representing previously marginalised communities, following Nyerere’s ideals of freedom and self-governance. However, by tying the nationwide push for Ujamaa with state power, Nyerere had made a first move towards the alienation of differing voices that would leave a mark on his legacy: anti-Ujamaa newspapers were shut down, and some critics were imprisoned or exiled for opposing the new policies.
The centralised state gave Nyerere and his government free reign in the pursuit of an ambitious socio-economic program launched in 1967 that would become the cornerstone of the Ujamaa policy. Large parts of the industrial and financial sectors were nationalised, and the Tanzanian hinterland was reorganised through the Ujamaa Vijijini program, which would push for the resettlement of the quasi-totality of the rural population into Ujamaa villages. These villages would become the driving force behind Tanzania’s postcolonial development as centres of accessible healthcare and schooling connected by roads for the easy penetration of the welfare state into previously scattered areas. In the Ujamaa village, a supposed replication of the precolonial Tanzanian community, values of cooperation would be materialised through plots of commonly worked land in an effort to strive for rural self-reliance – that had been broken up by the colonial model of cash-crop export – and drive development through agricultural production.
Villagisation Scheme
The villagisation scheme, initially led by volunteers, became law in 1973. By 1979, 91% of the Tanzanian rural population lived in Ujamaa villages. How did this scheme, which has now become synonymous with Ujamaa as a whole, fare?
In terms of the social welfare goals laid out by TANU, the villages were a success. Primary schools offered Swahili education for the entire population, and Tanzania became one of the African countries with the highest literacy rates by the 1980s. Access to healthcare and running water was democratised, ensuring welfare provisions for the general population. But these achievements came at a cost: TANU’s model of agricultural self-reliance seemed to have severely underestimated the time it would take to see rewards crystallise. Throughout the 1970s, Tanzania was a net importer of maize to supply a population that was yet to reach full agricultural subsistence. A series of droughts and the collapse of world commodity prices in the wake of the OPEC crisis further damaged the Tanzanian economy. Nyerere, a staunch proponent of economic independence and non-alignment, was forced to accept foreign aid from World Bank and IMF programs that undermined the very foundations of his rhetoric of self-reliance. Tanzania was simply overspending using borrowed money and was yet to reap the benefits of both its new economic model and education program. In the words of Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, the minister of Economic Planning during the Ujamaa period, “What we should have tackled last was given top priority, and what should have come first was consequently never attempted”.
The villages themselves, far from being the purely socialist communities described by commentators from all sides, were also prone to paradoxes. Private farming continued to flourish, and many villages still lagged behind on their targets of communal agricultural goals with a prioritisation on individually-owned plots of land. Crucially, the Tanzanian state lacked a pool of organised and well-trained officials to implement such ambitious policies. In the Rufiji region, for example, villagers were resettled from fertile flood valleys to arid hilltops, which severely hindered output. The expert knowledge of local farmers was thus ignored by overzealous officials. In some cases, the use of force was also denounced as rural dwellers were coercively ushered into the new villages. Such incidents highlight the contradictions surrounding Nyerere’s ideals: farmers were both idealised as a driving force behind Tanzanian independence but also objectified as anti-Ujamaa elements when resisting state orders; the return to a precolonial model also entailed a disruption of deep-rooted practices and kinship models of authority.
Despite such contradictions and failures, TANU held strong throughout the economic turmoil of the 1970s. Foreign aid was accepted heavy-heartedly by Nyerere, with restructuring policies put in place, much of it provided conditionally by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. From an economic point of view, Ujamaa as a form of independent state socialism was over. For these reasons, Ujamaa has regularly been marked as a failure in many accounts as an economically naive utopia. But what were the other possible paths of development for postcolonial Tanzania? Ivory Coast pursued free-market policies and a multi-party system based on ethnic lines straight after independence, which broke out in conflict in the late 1990s after the depression of an “economic miracle” supported by the IMF and World Bank. Many African countries, such as Tanzania’s neighbour Kenya, followed Western institutional aid plans and saw their initially prosperous economies falter and inequalities deepen, with development goals that have neglected the long-term objectives of institutional and social security. On the other hand, more radical socialist leaders such as Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara were toppled in coups backed by foreign powers when refusing to bend to liberal reforms and debt repayments.
Julius Nyerere’s pragmatic balancing act and centralised policies guarded Tanzania from such fates, making Ujamaa a model of development in the scope of nation-building and social welfare. Ujamaa-era Tanzania successfully embarked on one of the swiftest distributions of social welfare in the modern world and created a common language of nationhood and solidarity. Following Nyerere’s peaceful resignation as president in 1985, Tanzania moved to a multi-party system that has largely avoided internal turmoil. Socialist policies and the Ujamaa villages were progressively abandoned, but their legacies are still felt in contemporary Tanzania. Nyerere is still today seen as a national hero, adorning shop front windows and the names of international airports, with people speaking fondly of “the teacher” Mwalimu Nyerere. Ujamaa’s economic policy did falter, an over-ambitious project that relied on funding and time that the new nation simply did not have at its disposal. Like many statist plans, it also fell prey to the same developmental and paternalist policies that have characterised various planning policies regarding rural populations. The answers and contradictions it provided to the very real issues facing new independent states are, however, invaluable in our understanding of unorthodox avenues of development. It is thus important to evaluate Ujamaa beyond a success and failure dichotomy articulated in strictly economic terms, but rather as an informative example of third-way development possibilities in the postcolonial world.
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Image credit: “UJAMAA” by nep is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
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