Hunter’s new book offers a fresh and complex perspective on Tanzanian history, revealing multiple and competing visions of political liberation from World War II through the late 1960s. By excavating multiple political visions from the decades preceding and following independence, Hunter decenters national independence as the defining event in Tanzanian politics. In this way, she takes up the challenge posed by Cooper, who has emphasized that citizenship in sovereign African nation-states was only one of many political possibilities imagined by Africans in the 1940s and 1950s, calling on historians to uncover alternative visions.1
Given the purview of this journal, it is worth stating from the outset that this book is rooted squarely within the discipline of history. Hunter relies on two kinds of historical source—documents from the Tanzanian National Archives and Swahili language newspapers. She mines these written sources exhaustively and effectively to uncover shifting political discourses authored by...