Dorn

SIS 375
Intro & Outline

Geopolitical imaginaries have worked to shape the economic, social, and political

makeup of post-independence Tanzania by utilizing cartographic erasures of rural

Tanzania in the Ujamaa villages, by asserting Western ideologies to assist in the demise

of “African Socialism,” and by inadvertently reconstructing popular geopolitical

imaginaries in ways that cut down problematic tribal divides. Tanganyika gained its

independence from Great Britain in 1961. Joining with the island nation of Zanzibar, it

formed the state of Tanzania on April 26, 1964 and during the following ten years, set out

on a socio-political experiment headed by Prime Minister Julius Nyerere. This

experiment was called Ujamaa, and was often referred to as “African Socialism” by those

in the West. The program of Ujamaa utilized cartographic erasures in fulfilling

Nyerere’s geopolitical imaginary of villagization. The program sought to congregate

rural, subsistence farmers into collective villages in order to boost efficiency. It was

theorized that this re-visualization of the Tanzanian population would facilitate the

delivery of government services as well as encourage socialist means of production. The

program failed through its implementation, often resulting to military means and forced

relocations rather than its intended voluntary measures. The program also failed because

the nation was unable to receive sufficient international support. Western involvement in

Tanzania was diminished as the West saw the country as ideologically aligned with the

Soviet Bloc. International institutions such as the IMF and World Bank pushed for socio-

political reform as a contingency of aid. The program was ultimately abandoned as the

cost became too high socially, politically, and economically. However, the program may

have had the unintended consequence of closing some of the social divides between tribal
groups that have caused so much grief for neighboring nations, such as Rwanda, Burundi,

and Kenya.

Cartographic Erasure and Ujamaa

The idea of villagization in Post-independence Tanzania was a continuance of

colonial agricultural and social policies under a legitimized Nationalist banner. Nyerere’s

Ujamaa village was a geopolitical imaginary which used cartographic erasures in order to

recreate space in ways which were more conducive to control. It re-imagined the ways in

which rural Tanzanians lived and sought to reorder the rural life so that it may be ordered

and controlled, to promote efficiency and productivity. At independence the new

government saw its inability to distribute social services to a rural population of nearly

90%. As a result the state imagined a system in which social services were centralized

and communities were built around them by voluntary populations. In Seeing Like a

State, James C. Scott states that “only by radically simplifying the settlement pattern was

it possible for the state to efficiently deliver such development services as schools,

clinics, and clean water.”1 .”2

Villagization also had economic motivations. One of the primary economical

problems facing East African countries is their inability to move their economies beyond

a dependency on subsistence agriculture. It was the desire of Nyerere, and of

international organizations like the World Bank, to re-imagine the way in which

agriculture was practiced and promoted so that larger yields could be produced and

exported.3 “The thinly veiled subtext of villagization was also to reorganize human

communities in order to make them better objects of political control and to facilitate the

new forms of communal farming favored by state policy

1 (Scott 1998, 224)
2 (Scott 1998, 224)
3 (Scott 1998, 230)
 The Western Gaze

The Western view of African Socialism assisted in the demise of the program by

utilizing financial pressures to encourage economic and political change. This

experiment was taking place during the Cold War, in a time when containment of

communist ideals and socialist policies was considered to be of upmost importance.

Re- imagined Popular Geopolitics

Villagization failed, in part, because of an inability to adhere to the principles of

its imaginary. Nyerere, unlike other socialist leaders, did not want the villages to be

settled by compulsion. He stated early on in the project that “Socialist communities…can

only be established with willing members; the task of leadership and of Government is

not to try and force this kind of development, but to explain, encourage, and participate.”4

Even though the idea of villagization began as benevolent, internal and outward pressure

for results led to corruptive and coercive behavior. During the villagization process,

thousands were forcibly moved and former residences destroyed so that populations

would have no choice but to join the collectives. The Tanzanian leaders adopted a “god-

trick” view point from which they believed that they knew better than the rural and

impoverished populations. They believed that the farmers simply could not grasp that

villages were more beneficial to their livelihoods. Nyerere said in 1973 that “it may be

possible- and even necessary- to insist on all farmers in a given area growing a certain…

crop until they realize that this brings them a more secure living.”5 Even though the

forced moving of many rural Tanzanians was a regrettable and unnecessarily violent

move by the government, the geopolitical imaginaries of the Ujamaa ideology re-shaped

Tanzanian society. A small, tertiary goal of the Ujamaa villagization project was to

4 (Scott 1998, 231)

5 (Scott 1998, 231)
encourage communal cooperation. This had a two-fold result. Because of the mingling

of tribal groups, which did not take place in neighboring countries, many problematic

social divides were destroyed. In addition, the socialist cooperatives discouraged a

privileged class from arising.

Conclusion