Sovereignty and Socialism in Tanzania: The Historiography of an African State

Abstract

Observers of the Tanzanian political scene would point out that the country makes its own decisions on matters of internal and international importance. The policy ofUjamaa Vijijini[African socialism in the villages], it would be argued, was formulated here and not at the dictate of any foreign power.In an edited volume entitledThe State in Tanzania, published in 1980 just before the precipitous denouement of President Julius Nyerere's philosophy of African socialism known asUjamaa, Haroub Othman began with the question of the sub-title, “Who Controls it and Whose Interest Does it Serve?” The cover featured a large black question mark on a red background. Provocatively Othman asked, “can one say in a specific and definite sense that Tanzania is building socialism?” Exhibiting a remarkable level of open criticism of the government in a one-party state, the essays framed their issues in the Marxist terms that were long predominant in literature on the Tanzanian state. The book dealt with an ongoing concern that Tanzania's ambitious goals for democracy and development were not being met and the overarching nationalist question of which sovereign defined those goals. It was a question that continues to vex political scientists of Africa today who seek to reconcile Westphalian concepts of sovereignty with the layered realities of African polities struggling to exert sovereign authority both internally and externally.Reviewing a representative sample of nearly fifty years of scholarship on the postcolonial Tanzanian state, one is struck by the tension enervating Othman's essays. Scholars are torn between the impulse to understand the theoretical implications of Tanzania's experience for socialism and a more pragmatic concern to evaluate the country's claim to sovereign authority.