DUTIFUL SUBJECTS, PATRIOTIC CITIZENS, AND THE CONCEPT OF ‘GOOD CITIZENSHIP’ IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY TANZANIA

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe growing interest in citizenship among political theorists over the last two decades has encouraged historians of twentieth-century Africa to ask new questions of the colonial and early post-colonial period. These questions have, however, often focused on differential access to the rights associated with the legal status of citizenship, paying less attention to the ways in which conceptions of citizenship were developed, debated, and employed. This article proposes that tracing the entangled intellectual history of the concept of ‘good citizenship’ in twentieth-century Tanzania, in a British imperial context, has the potential to provide new insights into the development of one national political culture, while also offering wider lessons for our understanding of the global history of political society.