Writing almost exactly fifty years since first going to newly independent Tanganyika in 1962, I offer thoughts on three of the reassessment tasks isolated in the introduction to this section: setting the record straight, unearthing key but neglected themes; remembering the dynamics beyond politics.
Getting the record straight
First, examples of correcting or adding to the historical record offer some counter-evidence on a couple of matters. Saul recounts the admittedly harsh treatment meted out to the Student Union President, Simon Akivaga, in 1971 – used as evidence not only of Julius Nyerere's authoritarianism, but the breakdown of any discourse between him and the radical students that had been an important intellectual and political ingredient of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Shivji alludes to the fact that there were links in the couple of years previously. But not only had they existed, they were never severed: the president's office reached out immediately after to the dramatic arrest of Akivaga to reinstitute admittedly clandestine discourse with the radicals, behind the back of the university authorities, as I can testify, being then the director of the political-education programme, Development Studies, I was asked to be a lowly go-between in restarting that dialogue.
Thereafter, the distinguished historian Arnold Temu's disaffection with Nyerere is related as an example of how the president was seen by the ‘left’. Instead one of my strongest personal memories is of a conversation in Addis Ababa, where the late Charles Kileo, who had been in the original University Students’ African Revolutionary Front (USARF) was now Tanzanian ambassador, and although it was a couple of years after his death, when Mwalimu was mentioned there were tears in Charles's eyes. No single anecdote embodies the broader truths of course, but together these two point to the complexity of interrelations between Nyerere and other influential Tanzanians, especially those on the ‘left’.
Another story is used to downplay Nyerere's contribution to the liberation struggle in Southern Africa. It cannot be denied that Zambia and Tanzania conspired to put South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) dissidents beyond the reach of Zambia's habeas corpus law, and moved these Namibians to detention in Tanzania. And it does not exonerate Tanzania and Nyerere to say that there were many instances of front-line states intervening in the internal workings of liberation movements. By comparison, some of these had disastrous implications for the pursuit of struggles: Zambia's dismantling of the Zimbabwean armed struggle in 1974–6 or its prolongation of the ‘civil war’ by backing the intervention of the US Central Intelligence Agency and the apartheid regime into Angola; or the withdrawal of the African National Congress (ANC) structures from Mozambique with the Nkomati Accord in 1984 (albeit enforced). Indeed, Saul draws a distinction between Tanzania's ‘interference’ in Frelimo, but one on the side of the ‘good guys’, and that into SWAPO. At issue here is a major question of weighting. At no point did Tanzania ‘betray’ the cause. But the occasions of Tanzania's intervention should not shake the general assessment of the strength of its backing of the liberation cause in southern Africa – to a degree that exceeded those of other states, and without the overall ambivalence that several showed.
Gaps in the recorded history
The main emphasis of my recollections is to offer a collective self-critique of those in the first generation of scholars grappling with an independent country and point not to debates about what did happen but to explore some topics that were not dealt with as thoroughly as they deserved. Hopefully some contemporary scholars can be encouraged to address such an agenda of neglected issues.
For those who were alive to see it, the great dawn of African independence from 1960 was an exhilarating moment, and for those who sought to understand its dynamic it also posed a challenge. But there was no better place to observe and seek to understand than the new university in Dar es Salaam.
There have been institutional histories of the university, but its intellectual history is what should be celebrated. In its first decade it became the site of the most stimulating and innovative hothouse of ideas in Africa. Crucial aspects of that process in the fields of political economy and society posed questions about the significance and meaning of that very independence, rooting these questions in an understanding of Africa's indigenous dynamics, and in the totality of the ‘colonial situation’ – a term we used at the time to denote far more than the fact of colonial rule and the wellsprings of imperialism but also the responses of its people in interacting with those forces. This work sought to identify the options and prospects of independence, and also the dangers.
In what have been seen as the classical debates in the 1970s, the discussion of imperialism and differing views of its metropolitan economic logic, and of its African impact – underdevelopment – took centre stage. The nature of classes and of ‘basic contradictions’, and thus what political issues were deemed to be central, were derived from this model. Criticisms were voiced at the time: that this debate was ‘scholastic’, or (by Babu) that it was at times overly intense in the bitterness of its rhetoric. There was also a tendency for the theoretical debate to be isolated from the rich harvest from much detailed empirical work that was undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s. With hindsight the intellectual intensity and stimulus of this debate tended to overlook the emerging nature of politics in Tanzania. Beyond identifying and debating the ‘essential’ class character of the state and the over-simplifying tendency to see class struggle as limited to anti-imperialism, there was little attention to the fractions of capital, the complex relations of production and reproduction of different strata of working people, and the forms of their resistances. In particular the processes of politics were either not fully explored or not related back to the political economy framework. Some instances are offered below, in the hope of stimulating new investigations of the last 50 years of history. It should be said that some issues – the post-single-party structure of politics and the politics of neoliberalism – were addressed in the 1990s and 2000s, notably in Issa Shivji's collection, Let the people speak: Tanzania down the road to neo-liberalism.
The relative neglect of any close scrutiny of politics and political processes was exemplified by the failure to analyse some potentially significant events and episodes in independent Tanzania's early history. Indeed the limits in the historical record make it difficult in retrospect to appreciate which were the key moments that were decisive and system defining. The lack of attention to certain moments also represents a missed opportunity to offer case studies of what kinds of political forces were determining outcomes. Some possible key events can be indicated that may now repay retrospective analysis of a more thorough kind than the often superficial mention they received in contemporary writing. Among them are a few that seem, on reflection, to have shaped the location of power in the new state.
First, historically, would be Julius Nyerere's resignation in early 1962 as prime minister within just a few weeks of achieving independence. It would still provide illumination of what comes after, to ask whether this move was simply a convenient manoeuvre to give time for the constitutional change to a republic with a president who was head of state as well as head of government. Or was it a symptom of internal divisions, and if so what were these splits over, and were they between leaders, between them and members, or between the party and the broader public?
Another shift in the power base of personalities that arguably reflected policy clashes and broader political forces and may in turn have had decisive impacts on the broader working of politics, was the removal of Oscar Kambona as minister and secretary general of the ruling party, and eventually from the country. In the latter role especially he carried major influence with party officials, many of whom owed him some loyalty. A note in a recent Chemchemi (No. 3, April 2010) does hark back to his role, but the issue of his integrity and whether he was a ‘socialist’ are not the only questions worth posing. Just how powerful was he; could he have represented an alternative politics? What were the political consequences of the fact that every one of his successors in the party secretary's role came from the state bureaucracy rather than being a ‘politician’? These are questions still worth probing.
Another decisive episode that had repercussions on the nature of the party and power relations was the restructuring of the national executive of the ruling party, Tanzania African National Union (TANU), just after the Arusha Declaration, when its composition was made more representative by increasing the membership elected from the regions – in part to give a more grass-roots voice to the implementation of ujamaa villages. But when the membership were sent for orientation to existing ujamaa villages in Ruvuma, they reacted against the democratic practices they were exposed to, and returned to vote for centralised control of villages, and the abolition of the Ruvuma Development Association (see Saul in this issue). Thus this structural change in the party hierarchy was arguably counter-productive and lead to a commandist approach to ujamaa. The details of these events and whether or not they were indeed the seed for the later form of villagisation by compulsion after 1973 (discussed by Shivji and Saul) deserve historical probing.
Examples can be cited of other potentially decisive shifts, in the actual structures of power, not just leadership and personalities, which also deserve revisiting. The first was the abolition of the formal powers of chiefs and sub-chiefs by the Act of 1963, and their marginalisation into ceremonial roles, being replaced by executive officers under the elected district councils. Many African countries in the last 50 years have not just retained, but often resurrected or the enhanced powers of traditional leaders over their ‘subjects’ on behalf of a distant and alienated central government (just as under colonial rule). Tanzania's experience in transforming the nature of inherited power, and the resulting tendencies for inhibiting patronage politics and unaccountability, is thus so distinct it deserves to be placed centre stage. But the lack of attention given to this development and its long-term outcomes underlines how fundamental an omission it was in the work of those of us who studied Tanzania in the 1960s. We collectively overlooked a transformation that makes Tanzania's path distinct from almost all others in the last 50 years. It only received a two-line mention in the 1969 History of Tanzania, for instance. What would probing the abolition of chiefs have told us about the nature of emerging politics: how was it possible for those traditional authorities to be swept aside, seemingly without demur? Where is there an evaluation of its later significance: how have the realities of local power played out in practice? Do chiefs retain influence unofficially despite the law? And should one see this step, as I am inclined to do, as a curbing of arbitrary and unaccountable power, or as the loss of one of the few local institutions with legitimacy? One area where other countries have chosen to retain or revert to chiefly power is over land tenure, indicating a failure to come up with a system that develops indigenous practices as an alternative to capitalist property relations. One particular question about the outcome of abolition in Tanzania is thus to wonder whether it created the context wherein a category of ‘village land’ could emerge?
A second set of structural changes were those that governed the nature of the ruling party and its relations with the state. At independence there was notionally a competitive party system, but in practice a dominant party – just like today. Then in 1963, there was the enactment of a single-party system. One dimension of this was the introduction of competitive elections among a pair of candidates selected by the party. How that worked over the years, and the extent that it offered some degree of democratisation was the subject of a series of electoral studies. But to what extent any such legacy was carried over into the phase of political liberation has not been probed. Nor were some other features of the single-party system: what was the logic and the politics behind it being a mass party rather than a vanguard party? What was the consequence of fusing party and state bodies at local levels, and the legacy for the post-single-party period?
There are also profound analytical questions about the very nature of politics in Tanzania that have not received the attention they deserve – and that could be illuminated within a comparative conceptual framework. One is nationalism. It is often treated in the passive sense of avoiding ethnic or religious political conflict; and it is simply recognised that Tanzania has a sense of national unity, without much probing into its roots. In the decades of intense debate about the country, mentions could be found of the importance of the ‘national question’, but its social, cultural and economic base and how it was actually played out in practice in Tanzania were not subject to rigorous empirical analysis. Nor were the reasons Tanzania avoided what Basil Davidson (in The black man's burden) called the ‘curse of nation-statism’ (the unthinking strategies whereby the complex make-up of populations arbitrarily grouped together within colonial borders was assumed away by anti-tribalism rhetoric), problems that have bedevilled most African states in the last 50 years. These historical and comparative questions still need fuller answers, through for instance a fuller probing of the politics of Swahili, and could illumine the risks of any ‘new tribalism’ that is a current fear in some Tanzanians’ minds.
A comparative view also poses another basic issue – about what Tanzania politics is not. It is arguably distinctively different to the many African states that are characterised by clientelist politics, in the managed or crisis/failed state forms, or neo-patrimonialism, the fashionable term in Western political science (see the article earlier in this issue). So long as one does not believe these labels explain these outcomes, they are useful descriptive rubrics. And they bring home the fact that although Tanzania shares some of the features, such as corruption and even some nepotism, it is not characterised by the same systemic hierarchies of tribalism and other forms of structured patronage. But insofar as that is true, how to explain the difference, and how does it operate? And what of the future risk? Or could it be one of the most fundamental embodiments of the ‘hope’ that Shivji sees as the most basic legacy of ujamaa.
Beyond politics
Hopefully these reminiscences of what was not covered by past scholarship on Tanzanian politics may suggest some agendas for present-day Tanzania historians. They may also prompt, along with responses to the other pieces published in this issue, possible contributions to ongoing debate in future Issues of ROAPE. But for a thorough exploration of the political economy of the past 50 years, other themes not addressed by the first three contributions require attention. Each of them recognises, indeed even tries to delineate, the greatness of the first president. But their authors would also accept that as central as his role was, for better or worse, other actors – politicians and officials, institutions of state, party, and increasingly civil society bodies, international and bilateral agencies – played parts in the political processes of the last 50 years. So too should the broad class and other social forces that shaped politics be recognised.
In fact, one error would be to seek all the main events and trends of the post-independence period as resultants of the conscious political choices of elites or even broader social forces. Among many major determinants of outcomes in this period have to be inherited features: ecology, economy and history. For me, one of these is the happy melange of demographic, ethnic and cultural factors – many small- to medium-sized ethnic entities without one dominating from the centre or a squabble for power between few contenders, and the widespread and active political promotion of Swahili, as mentioned by Saul. But for me the importance of the latter lies not merely in a handy lingua franca and a common language of politics that is not colonial, but also in a degree of cultural self-confidence among Tanzanians, not just those formally educated, that might make them slightly more proof against imported ideologies.
A second assemblage of forces are the environmental variations and mixed history of colonial economic sectors (between peasant and settler) that makes for a range of agricultures and of farming and livelihood systems with very limited industry in the 1960s. The ‘failure’ of socialist development may thus owe less to the inadequacy of explicit strategy, inappropriate as it was in several respects, and more to the intractability of that structure to efforts to promote expanded reproduction – a problem that has still to be faced up to in any future of Tanzania.
Note on contributor
Lionel Cliffe was lucky enough to work in Tanzania from ‘Day 2’ – from 1962 teaching at Kivukoni College, itself reaching 50 years that are worth celebrating, then 1967–71 at the university, though also involved in the university college's in-service courses, the first offerings 50 years ago.