African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania Between the Village and the World [Paperback]

This is the first major historical study of Tanzania's socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 196775.This book tells the story of Tanzania's socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 196775. It investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively conceptualized ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, refining prevailing theories of national development and expanding our understanding of postcolonial Africa.This book tells the story of Tanzania's socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 196775. It investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively conceptualized ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, refining prevailing theories of national development and expanding our understanding of postcolonial Africa.Drawing on a wide range of oral and written sources, this book tells the story of Tanzania's socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 19671975. Inaugurated shortly after independence, ujamaa ('familyhood' in Swahili) both invoked established socialist themes and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy, seeking to reorganize the Tanzanian countryside into communal villages to achieve national development. Priya Lal investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively envisioned ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, without affixing the project to a trajectory of inevitable failure. By forging an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of ujamaa, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania restores a sense of possibility and process to the early years of African independence, refines prevailing theories of nation building and development, and expands our understanding of the 1960s and 70s world.Introduction; 1. A postcolonial project in the Cold War world; 2. Militants, mothers, and the national family; 3. Uneven development and the region; 4. Rel(