ABSTRACT
Like almost every country in Africa, Tanzania consists of a piece of territory delimited during the nineteenth century through agreements between European powers. Tanganyika went to Germany. Railways were built, natural resources were duly exploited, and a small number of German settlers migrated to the country. After the defeat of Germany in the First World War, Tanganyika came under British protection. After the Second World War, in the interests of political ‘economies of scale’ an attempt was made to merge Tanganyika, Kenya and Uganda into a federation. In due course, however, Tanganyika became independent, and, with the island of Zanzibar coerced into a merger, became modern Tanzania. Thus the former colonial territory, including about a hundred different tribes and a great diversity of physical conditions, continued in existence. Its dynamic leader, Julius Nyerere, concentrated on improving the agricultural sector, a reasonable policy because in 1965 about 95 per cent of the population was in that sector. The ideology of the political viewpoint was socialist, considerably influenced by the misguided assumption that rural developments in China in the 1960s, where large communes had been introduced, had been a great success.
