RevisitingUjamaa: Political Legitimacy and the Construction of Community in Post-Colonial Tanzania

Abstract

Tanzania's post-colonial social and economic policies, often referred to with the shorthand term of ujamaa and variously translated as ‘familyhood’ or ‘African socialism’, have attracted the attention of scholars since their inception. While the first analysts were interested in these policies primarily as strategies of development, historians have recently begun to focus on the importance of ujamaa and related political metaphors, particularly those of ujamaa na kujitegemea (ujamaa and self-reliance), wakupe (ticks) and mirija (straws) as a set of discursive strategies aimed at constructing state legitimacy in a post-colonial context. This article builds on these developments, but argues that focussing on discourse produced at the centre has its limitations. It is suggested here that attention to the use of ujamaa vocabulary on the periphery and by non-official actors in the months after the Arusha Declaration demonstrates that it could be employed to argue about social and economic morality in a way which necessarily engaged with a broader national discourse. It is also further argue, however, that there were limits to the power of nationalist discourses to construct political legitimacy rhetorically, and that discourse must be examined in interaction with the material challenges facing the post-colonial state. Methodologically, this approach has the potential to offer a richer view of political life in the post-colony.

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