ABSTRACT
Ujamaa became a catchword that fired imaginations in the young state of Tanzania when, in February 1967, in a charismatic speech in Dar es Salaam, at a mass meeting attended by 100,000 people, the country’s president, Julius Nyerere, proclaimed that Tanzania would become an ujamaa nation based on self-reliance. The point of departure was a declaration that the country’s only party TANU had adopted at a meeting in Arusha a week before. His outline of the future was inspired by British social-democratic Fabianism and Chinese Maoist communism and was accompanied by the ambition of translating them into an African experience or, perhaps better phrased, giving them an African origin. The story of ujamaa illustrates the contradictions and ambiguities of decolonization and postcolonialism. This chapter shows how the concept lost its initial galvanizing and mobilizing power in the 1970s when the idea emerged that decolonization did not automatically mean development. It demonstrates how the happy partners of development and democracy, or capitalism and democracy, are often in fact opposites and even incompatible. It puts ujamaa in a larger framework of global crisis and transformation beyond the Tanzanian framework of the ujamaa discourse.
