Julius Nyerere and Ujamaa Socialism in Tanzania
Learning from the historic anti-colonial struggles of the people
In my commentary of January 25, 2024, “Cuba and Tanzania heighten collaboration: Valdés Mesa in the land of Mwalimu Nyerere,” I reported on the recent agreements of cooperation between Cuba and Tanzania and on the historic relation between the two countries, dating to the era of Julius Nyerere and Fidel. As a follow-up to the commentary, I today post a revised version of my previously unpublished writing on Julius Nyerere and Ujamaa Socialism in Tanzania. These writings drew upon the following sources: Julius Nyerere, Ujamaa: Essays in Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania (London: Heinemann, 1980); Michaela von Freyhold, Ujamaa Villages in Tanzania, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979); Cranford Pratt, The Critical Phase in Tanzania 1945-1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); and James N. Karioki, Tanzania’s Human Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979).
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Tanzania developed a social experiment that many viewed as a model for a formerly colonized nation seeking to overcome the legacies of colonialism and underdevelopment. Julius Nyerere was the leader in the nationalist struggle against colonial rule, the head of state in post-colonial Tanzania, and the person most responsible for the vision of ujamaa socialism. It was a vision of a socialist society, in which there would be no class division, and goods would be shared on an equitable basis. But this socialist society was to be unlike socialism in Europe, because it would be based on traditional African culture, especially on the traditional institution of ujamaa, a Swahili word that has no exact English equivalent but is generally translated as extended family. Although the project of ujamaa socialism had some gains, it was clear that by the late 1970s and early 1980s it had failed to attain its most fundamental goals, and the project in effect was abandoned.
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Colonial Tanganyika
The country now called Tanzania was formed in 1963 as a result of a merger between independent Tanganyika and Zanzibar, an island off the coast. Tanganyika originally was formed as a result of German conquest of the region, and it was declared as German East Africa in 1891.
The German conquest of Tanganyika was met with resistance by Africans. From 1888 to 1898, there were many rebellions against German rule, but the rebellions were put down, and by 1904 the German forces were in control. In 1905, another rebellion broke out and evolved into a two-year war. However, Germany again prevailed, as the African losses were considerable. Karioke writes, “although the rebels fought valorously, an estimated 135,000 Africans are reported to have died as a result of the systematic German counteroffensive and the famine that followed in its wake.”
Having established colonial rule in Tanganyika through military force, the Germans imposed a tax on Africans. African peasants paid the tax by using part of their land to produce raw materials (mainly sisal, coffee and rubber) for sale to German merchants and resale in Germany. The tax thus functioned to coerce the providing of cheap raw materials for factories and consumers in Germany and to provide revenue for the colonial government and German merchants in Tanganyika. For the Africans, colonialism not only meant coerced labor, but also the loss of the right to decide how to use land and labor to promote development. Africans were no longer subjects in their own development, but tools for the development of others.
Following the First World War, Tanganyika was transferred to Great Britain. Under British colonial rule, the colony continued to provide cheap raw materials, but now the colonial authorities and the merchants were British, and the raw materials were destined for industry and consumers in Britain.
In the political system of colonial Tanganyika, the colonial government designated the traditional African chiefs as Native Authorities who were responsible for carrying out the directives of the government. It was a system of indirect rule that placed the chiefs as intermediaries in the conflict between the interests of the African people and the demands of the British colonial government. The chiefs were compelled to defer to the authority of the colonial government, and they were thus seen by the people as instruments of colonial rule, which undermined their legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
The British also established educational and religious institutions in colonial Tanganyika. These institutions functioned to inculcate English language and values and the Protestant religion among Africans. The British colonial authorities hoped that this would lead to a general belief among Africans of the superiority of English culture and an acceptance of British colonial rule. Thus, educational and religious institutions were functionally interrelated with British economic and political domination of Africa, independent of the intentions of the English missionaries and teachers who labored to develop them.
The mission schools and other educational institutions in colonial Tanganyika were instrumental in the emergence of an African petit bourgeoisie. The schools created a small class of Africans who spoke and read English, and who typically adopted English customs, including English styles of dress and the Protestant religion. Being educated, members of this class obtained low-level positions in the colonial administration, such as clerks, as well as positions as schoolteachers. With the wages earned, they were able to engage in various commercial activities, such as purchasing land and hiring Africans to produce cash crops, developing retail businesses, or buying and selling commodities. At first, they engaged in these activities as a supplement to their wage as teacher or clerk. But as their economic enterprises grew, they were able to move to full-time management of their business ventures. In this way, an African petit bourgeois class was created.
From the African petit bourgeoisie, African nationalism emerged. In Tanganyika, African nationalism emerged in the late 1940s, two decades later than in Africa generally. Its late emergence in Tanganyika was a consequence of the relatively low level of colonialist and capitalist penetration in Tanganyika, due to its more limited natural resources and its history of being transferred from German to English colonial rule.
Julius K. Nyerere was the central figure in the development of African nationalism in Tanganyika. He was born in Butiama in the Mara region of colonial Tanganyika, the son of a Zanaki chief, one of the smallest of the 120 tribes in the colony. As a child, Nyerere assisted in farming subsistence crops and in herding goats and cattle. In accordance with expectations of the colonial administration for the sons of chiefs, he was sent to a primary school thirty-five kilometers from his home, where he excelled in his studies, which enabled him to attend secondary school in the elite Tabora Government School. He developed an interest in studying Christianity, and he converted to Catholicism, adopting his baptismal name “Julius.”
From 1943 to 1947, Nyerere studied at Makerere College, which had been established in Uganda for East African students. He was focused on his studies, studying science, Latin and Greek, and reading the Papel Encyclicals and the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. He was active in student organizations, and he began to formulate a critique of capitalism from the perspective of African socialism, but distinct from the concepts of European social democracy or Marxism.
From 1947 to 1949, Nyerere taught at a Catholic mission school, but was dismissed for maintaining in a public debate that the colonial partition of Africa had benefitted Europeans more than Africans. He also gave free lessons in English to older locals and gave talks on political subjects.
From 1949 to 1952, he studied at Edinburgh in Scotland, where he studied political economy, anthropology, and history, among other subjects. He socialized with Nigerians and West Indians living in Edinburgh.
Upon his return to Tanganyika, he taught history at St. Francis College near Dar es Salaam, and he was active in the politics of independence. He was elected President of the Tanganyika African Association, and in 1954 he transformed the organization of educated Africans into a mass organization, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). Nyerere’s strategy was to forge a political unity among Africans by focusing on their common interest in political independence from colonial rule. He left aside questions concerning how the post-colonial economy and society ought to be constructed, believing that these issues would be best addressed once independence was attained. Although TANU did not have a program for economic reconstruction, the colonial authorities defined it as a radical nationalist organization, due to its orientation toward organizing the masses.
Nyerere and TANU quickly succeeded. To the masses, the formation of an organization of young, educated Africans prepared to challenge the British colonial authorities had much appeal, especially since the chiefs or Native Authorities had declined in prestige and were no longer accepted as spokespersons for the African masses. Given the relatively limited level of capitalist penetration, there were not many other organizations in the colony. There were some trade unions, and Nyerere was effective in persuading them to support the TANU-led movement. In an effort to stop the momentum of TANU, colonial administrators encouraged the formation of a more moderate political party, the United Tanganyika Party (UTP).
In 1958, elections to a parliament with advisory powers were held, and TANU achieved an overwhelming victory. The British thus were compelled to negotiate terms of independence with TANU, given the general situation in Africa of mass action organized by nationalist organizations and the overwhelmingly popular support of TANU. In October 1958, the colonial government announced that Tanganyika would become an African-ruled state. Following that announcement, TANU worked cooperatively with the colonial government to facilitate the transition to independence. On May 15, 1961, Tanganyika became an independent nation, TANU became its ruling party, and Julius Nyerere was installed as Prime Minister.
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Ujamaa Socialism
When Nyerere first became Prime Minister, his intention was to develop a cooperative relation with the former colonial power. He believed at that time that economic development in Tanzania would be best attained by continuing many of the economic policies of the colonial administration. Accordingly, the new government approved a development plan that was written by English civil servants who were continuing their positions in independent Tanzania. The plan was oriented to the growth of the African bourgeoisie, and it included a retirement package for English civil servants who had worked in colonial Tanganyika. The package contained terms unfavorable to the Tanzanian government, but the government accepted it because of British promises to provide 10 million pounds in aid for development.
When Great Britain reneged on the promise of aid, Nyerere began to reevaluate the strategy of a cooperative relation. The new orientation also was stimulated by other events, such as the failure of the European powers to boycott the white-minority government of South Africa; the granting of independence to a white-minority government in Rhodesia; the sending of troops by the United States to the Congo; and the blatant Cold War concerns of Great Britain and the United States in regard to the merger of Tanganyika and Zanzibar. The young leaders of the newly independent nation were learning through experience the pitfalls of independence and the dynamics of neocolonialism.
As a result of the reevaluation of its relation with Great Britain, the government of Tanzania by 1967 had formulated a different development policy that was based on two fundamental principles. The first was the principle of self-reliance through non-alignment. The strategy of non-alignment sought to sever economic dependency on Britain by diversifying the nation’s markets for its raw materials, the sources of its manufactured goods, and the sources of its capital for investment and development. After 1967, Tanzania made agreements of aid for development with a variety of countries, including Sweden, Canada, the United States, the Soviet Union, Eastern European socialist-bloc countries, and China. Tanzania would develop stronger economic ties with each of these countries than with Great Britain.
The second principle of the post-1967 development plan was ujamaa socialism, a form of socialism constructed on a foundation of traditional African society. For Nyerere, traditional African society was a socialist society. Land was distributed to families according to their need and capacity to work the land. The families had the right to work the land, but they did not have the right to employ others to work the land. Thus, inequality in traditional African society was limited, because there was not a class of owners who could generate income through the employment of others. In addition, inequality was limited by the fact that the wealth that an individual accumulated during his lifetime was distributed in the society upon his death. And inequality was limited by a social norm that mandated that all individuals in the society be provided with necessities before any one member could enjoy luxuries.
Nyerere believed that traditional African society was morally superior to the capitalism brought by European colonialism. In addition to its socialist values, traditional African society possessed a foundation in vibrant extended family relationships, generating a spirit of living together, working together, and helping one another, especially in times of need.
On the other hand, an important weakness in traditional African society, according to Nyerere, was its low level of efficiency in the production of goods. Its family-based equitable production on small scale units was less efficient than the large-scale plantation agriculture brought to Africa by the Europeans.
Nyerere believed that a form of production must be developed that synthesizes the efficiency of the European system with the socialism and respect for family of the African system. Accordingly, Nyerere formulated a reconstruction of African agriculture in accordance with what he called ujamaa agriculture, which begins with a reorganization of land use. Rather than each family working a piece of land, all the village land ought to be centralized into a single enterprise, with the large-scale enterprise being worked, managed and owned on a cooperative basis by all the people in the village. It would be like European capitalism, in that it would be large-scale economic production, able to utilize labor, machinery, and modern technology more efficiently. But it would be like the traditional African system, because the work and benefits would be shared equally among the members of the village, who would be leading and active participants.
Nyerere envisioned that ujamaa villages would be characterized by democracy. They would have self-government, where the people would elect managers who would make decisions concerning production, marketing and investment, subject to the approval of the people. In addition, ujamaa villages would seek to overcome gender inequality, which Nyerere viewed as a weakness of traditional African society.
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The Resistance of the Peasants
From 1967 to 1969, modest steps were taken toward the practical implementation of the ideal of ujamaa socialism. Some young people enthusiastically formed new settlements that engaged in communal production. Some villages transformed their agriculture into communal production. Others began to produce on a communal plot that complemented the individual plots each family worked. But progress was slow. Among thousands of villages in Tanzania, only 400 were registered as ujamaa villages by 1969.
As a result, TANU and Nyerere became more active in encouraging people to form ujamaa villages. Nyerere, for example, lived for a time in a village and visited various villages to dramatize his personal support for the experiment. These efforts were successful in dramatically increasing the number of registered ujamaa villages, which rose to 1,956 in 1970 and 4,484 in 1971; there were over 5,000 registered ujamaa villages in 1972, 1973 and 1974.
However, the number of registered ujamaa villages was deceptive. Forming ujamaa villages was a politically favorable thing to do, and many villages did so for political reasons, without making the necessary effort to develop an ujamaa village as an economic and political reality. The great majority of ujamaa villages established supplementary communal plots that were given much lower priority than individual plots and thus were worked haphazardly.
Recognizing the superficiality of the ujamaa villages in practice, the government in 1973 launched a program of compulsory villagization. Nyerere had for years urged the people to relocate from isolated huts to villages, believing that this would facilitate a greater sense of community consciousness, and it also would make more possible the providing of social services. With the compulsory villagization program, people who did not agree to relocate were forced to move, and army units were used when necessary. By 1976, an estimated 5 million people were relocated to villages.
During the 1970s, Tanzania experienced two major droughts (1973-1975 and 1976-1978), which led to decline in agricultural production and shortages of food. In conjunction with a significant increase in oil prices, serious balance of payments problems emerged. In the context of the crisis, the government emphasized increasing grain production, whether it be through individual production or communal production. This relegation of communal production to secondary importance in effect meant that the experiment in ujamaa socialism was over.
Peasant production in Tanzania in the 1970s was small-scale subsistence production, in which each household produces most of its basic necessities and produces cash crops on a supplementary basis to buy the remaining necessities and a few luxuries. When peasants produce most of the things they need, they have greater independence from the market than other social classes.
Such peasant autonomy gives peasants a particular perspective on economic development. Peasants favor an economic development that would enable them to buy more of the things that they want, but not at the expense of their independence as producers of most of the things they need. To lose this independence would make them subject to the whims of market forces, over which they have no control. From the peasant point of view, economic development ought to involve increasing the availability through the market of a few modest items—such as rice, meat, fish, iron corrugated roof, radio, bicycle, good clothes, and shoes—without surrendering independence.
In contrast, the African petit bourgeoisie sees development as the expansion of production and commerce, enabling the growth of their economic enterprises. Economic expansion requires the development of an industrial infrastructure, including transportation systems, utility systems and factories. This requires capital, which in a country with a limited manufacturing capacity, can only be attained through the exportation of cash crops. So the African bourgeoisie has an interest in increasing peasant production of cash crops in order to facilitate the development of an industrial infrastructure necessary for sustained economic expansion. But such industrial development not only does not necessarily benefit peasants. In turning the peasant away from the production of subsistence needs, it places the peasant in a situation of dependency on market forces, undermining peasant autonomy.
From this vantage point, ujamaa socialism can be understood as a plan conceived by a political party controlled by the African petit bourgeoisie. It was a plan to improve efficiency in peasant production for the good of non-peasant sectors, and as such, it promoted the interests of the petit bourgeoisie, independent of the intentions of its authors. Recognizing this, the peasants resisted. From the peasant point of view, the demands made on their production by the African bourgeoisie were not greatly different from the demands of the colonial era, although the political and social situation was very different.
Peasant resistance to ujamaa agriculture was central to the limitations of the experiment. The limitations to ujamaa socialism would seem to indicate that a plan for the economic development of rural Africa ought to be developed with the active participation of African peasants and ought to incorporate a peasant concept of development.
Nyerere stepped down as President of Tanzania in 1985. His successor, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, adopted neoliberal economic policies, in accordance with international tendencies and pressures. Today, Tanzania’s GDP per capita is $3,574 (163rd in the world). Approximately 61% live below the poverty line of $1.25 per day; 32% are malnourished. Fifteen percent of the population have access to electric power.
The economy of Tanzania today remains overwhelmingly dedicated to food crops (maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, beans, bananas, rice, and millet). Eighty percent of the population engage in subsistence agriculture. Cash crops are produced, but in quantities much lower than food crops. Manufacturing remains limited. Tourism accounts for 17.5% of the nation’s GDP and employs 11% of the labor force, with Zanzibar and wildlife conservation areas in the north being popular tourist destinations.
Tanzania’s commercial relations reflect the legacy of Nyerere’s emphasis on non-alignment and reducing dependency on the neocolonial powers. Her largest trading partners are India, Vietnam, South Africa, Switzerland, and China, which indicates possibilities for the development of mutually beneficial trade and South-South cooperation.
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Further Considerations
The greater the degree of colonialist capitalist penetration, the less the autonomy of peasants. Colonialist capitalist transformation involves the displacement of peasants from the land, reducing them to seasonal low-wage laborers; or the conversion of peasants into tenants or sharecroppers. As a result, the greater the degree of colonialist penetration, the less the resistance to socialist transformation.
One of the principles of socialist transformation today is that socialism cannot be imposed. If there is resistance, it must be overcome through ideological education, persuasion, and inducement through the construction of schools, health clinics and cultural and recreational institutions, and the improvement of transportation, water, and electricity. This is why socialism cannot be constructed overnight; it is a long-term project requiring patience and persistence.
Socialist transformation also requires capital for investment in education, health, culture, transportation, potable water, and electricity; and for investment in agricultural and industrial production, seeking to modernize and diversify the economy. For the colonized regions of the world, the lack of necessary capital is a persistent problem, which is a consequence of the fact that the world-economy is structured to ensure the flow of capital from the peripheralized regions to the colonialist center. Inasmuch as the colonialist center has demonstrated its political incapacity to share capital in order to improve the world-economy as a whole, the nations of the neocolonized regions are increasingly turning to South-South cooperation and mutually beneficial trade, seeking to gradually attain the capital necessary for economic development.
If it is true, as my reading sources indicated, that ujamaa socialism was implemented as an anti-colonial project by and for the African petit bourgeoisie, then this could be viewed as a fundamental error in formulation, inasmuch as conceptualizations must be formulated from the vantage point of the majority of the people. And if it is true, as my sources claimed, that there was forced villagization, then this could be viewed as a historic error of strategy, because socialist transformations cannot be imposed. But the identification of such errors pertains to the collective judgment of the people of Tanzania and Africa, upon whom history has placed the duty of mature critical reflection on the Tanzanian project of ujamaa socialism.
Julius Nyerere is remembered with high regard internationally and in Tanzania, where he is given the Swahili honorific title of “Mwalimu” (teacher) and is called the "Father of the Nation." From 1987 to 1990, Nyerere served as Chairman of the South Commission, an independent commission established by developing countries to make recommendations concerning development strategies. He was the first Chairman of the Board of the South Centre, an intergovernmental policy research center of developing countries that succeeded the South Commission, in which he served until his death in 1999.
In the Third World anti-colonial struggles from the early nineteenth century to the present, one can observe the phenomenon of the emergence of leaders with an exceptional capacity to understand the historical and structural sources of social problems and the necessary steps for their resolution; and with an exceptional capacity to lead the people in the taking of political power and in the taking of necessary steps. And they possess an unbounded commitment to the wellbeing of the people. They possess gifts so exceptional that they defy natural explanation. They are capable of errors, but their errors are of idealism and overreach, motivated by desire for the wellbeing of the people in the long run. Mwalimu Julius Nyerere was one of the exceptional leaders in the modern process of anti-colonial revolution.
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