Building better people: modernity and utopia in late colonial Tanganyika

Abstract

This article explores development policy in colonial Tanganyika in the late 1940s and 1950s. It argues that the increased interventionism of this period reflected not just a desire by colonial authorities to regulate the actions and behaviour of Tanganyikans, but sought to create new, "modern" identities. In regarding "the African" as the key challenge facing development planners, increasingly coercive measures were justified to enforce change that would ultimately benefit those communities being targeted. Development in Tanganyika in the 1940s and 1950s was at heart an attempt to create a new form of society, a new identity, forged by the state, and oriented towards the vision of that state. It explores the extent to which development processes in Tanganyika in this period, and more generally, function as a "coercive utopia".

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