Defending the People's Railway in the Era of Liberalization: TAZARA in Southern Tanzania

Abstract

AbstractWhen the services of the TAZARA railway in Tanzania were threatened with cutbacks in the 1980s and 1990s, rural community leaders wrote petitions of protest to district–level officials. In these petitions, they complained that railway decision–making was being guided by profit–making rather than nation–building priorities in response to pressure from the IMF and the World Bank. The railway had abandoned its original role as a servant of the people, they argued, employing the language of socialism, nationhood and pan–African solidarity that had been utilized by the state during the construction era in the 1970s. Yet the railway services sought by these local communities had facilitated their own entry into profit–seeking behaviour as entrepreneurs in the TAZARA corridor. The transition from socialism to liberalization along the TAZARA railway was therefore a negotiated process in which the meaning of concepts such as ‘privatization’, ‘profit’ and ‘freedom’ were contested.