African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World

The legacy of the national development project known as ujamaa (familyhood), initiated by Julius Nyerere and the Tanzanian African National Union (tanu), has attracted considerable scholarly debate. Lal’s interdisciplinary approach incorporates historical, sociological, ethnographic, gender, familial, and economic analyses of Tanzanian society under tanu rule. In four chapters, each with numerous sub-sections, Lal insightfully explores how Tanzanians in the southeastern region of Mtwara experienced ujamaa during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition to consulting primary sources from Tanzania, the United States, and the United Kingdom, as well as numerous secondary sources from history, political science, and international studies, Lal also conducted more than 100 oral interviews with Tanzanians whose lives were affected by Nyerere’s most ambitious national development project. Her primary argument is that Mtwarans’ experiences with ujamaa reflected the Tanzanian state’s increasing yet uneven presence in their lives. Ujamaa’s structural economic transformations resulted in both...