Tanzania: Union and Ujamaa (1961-1976)

Updated September 2010

In the immediate aftermath of independence Julius Nyerere installed Rashidi Kawawa as Prime Minister. Kawawa began a reorganisation of the civil service, centralising administration and laying out the policies to guide Africanisation. A republican constitution was adopted and Nyerere began organising and campaigning for the 1962 presidential elections, which he won convincingly (see for 1962 Presidential election results details; Columbia Encyclopedia 2004, US State Department 2005, PBS Foundation Undated). The new constitution deliberately sought to strengthen the executive against the other branches of state and to centralise decision making. This was done in the belief that such measures were necessary to facilitate the implementation of the socialist development policy of the ruling Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). This centralisation was further strengthened in 1963 by the abolition of the chieftaincies through which the British had exercised indirect rule (Chachage 2003). The simultaneous pursuit of centralisation and development resulted in the state taking over and directing socio-economic and welfare activities previously performed by local authorities and by missionaries. Matters such as healthcare, education and welfare became increasingly the province of the state (Chachage 2003).

In late 1963 Zanzibar became independent of Britain under the governing coalition of the Zanzibar Nationalist Party and the Zanzibar and Pemba People's Party (ZPPP). In early 1964 the Sultanate was overthrown in a bloody revolution that saw large scale communal violence. The newly formed Umma Party (People's Party) led by Abdul Babu, a Maoist breakaway from the ruling Zanzibari Nationalist Party, played a leading role in fomenting the revolution. However, in the chaos that followed, Abeid Karume, the leader of the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), supported by Nyerere, was able to seize power. The ASP set about expropriating property from the Arab aligned ruling class and suppressing opposition political parties (Talbot 2000, Liberation 1996).

In January 1964, soldiers of the Tanganyika Rifles embarked on a strike over salaries and promotions, and over the Africanisation of the military. Nyerere reacted firmly by calling in British troops to quell the mutiny. He then disbanded the army and recruited a new military force, named the Tanzania Peoples' Defence Force, from amongst the ranks of the TANU youth wing. Thus the subordination of the military to civilian leadership was accomplished by the politicisation of the military (Lupogo 2001).

Following negotiations between Nyerere and Abeid Karume, the head of the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar, the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar was declared in April 1964 (In October it was renamed the United Republic of Tanzania). Nyerere became President of this union and Karume was made Vice-President, while remaining President of Zanzibar (Columbia Encyclopedia 2004, PBS Foundation Undated, US State Department 2005). In 1965 Tanzania was proclaimed a one-party state and one party state elections were held (see The 1965 One-Party Elections). This was a premature move, since the country had two distinct parties that dominated two distinct geographic areas, TANU on the mainland and the ASP on Zanzibar. Moreover, despite the close relations between the two parties, the ASP refused to merge with TANU (see Zanzibar: 1964 Revolution and the one party system and Tanzania: One party elections 1970-1990; Temwende 2004, 1).

Tanzania inherited a difficult social and economic situation at independence. Poverty was endemic, unemployment high, illiteracy widespread, infrastructure weak and ill health widespread. The development plans laid out before independence could not be financed from national government income and the country was reduced to heavy dependence on foreign (primarily British) aid. At the same time commodity prices fell, foreign aid declined and droughts wracked much of the country, eventually forcing the importation of food (PBS Foundation Undated, Temwende 2004, 2, Chachage 2003). In the immediate post-independence period there was a massive outflow of capital, both financial and human, as the greater part of the settler population immigrated. Independence had raised expectations, so these blows were coupled with demands for massive salary and wage increases and Africanisation based promotions. These demands were backed by waves of strike action (Chachage 2003). A series of legislative measures were rapidly implemented to place the trade union movement firmly under government control and to head off any further industrial action (Chachage 2003).

The 1961-1964 Development Plan had been undertaken on the recommendation of the World Bank. The focus was on state projects to improve education, develop communications infrastructure and facilitate agricultural expansion. Trade and industry were to be left to private enterprise in the expectation that an economic laissez-faire policy would attract much needed capital investment (Chachage 2003). However TANU adopted a course of socialist development focused on the upliftment of the rural poor through the development of farming cooperatives; the capital for investment in agricultural development was to be generated by holding down wage increases for the urban working class. The agrarian-socialist development path adopted by TANU, called "Ujamaa" found its articulation in the Arusha Declaration of 1967. The key principles that were to underpin the policies and actions of the state were self-reliance, with a move away from dependence on foreign aid and even the discouragement of foreign investment, and African socialism. Here self-reliance meant the labour intensive development of agriculture, rather than capital intensive industrialisation. African socialism meant that development was to be directed top down by the centralised one-party state through a model that emphasized unity and consensus rather than dissent and debate. Financial enterprises, agricultural plantations, processing and marketing concerns and foreign trading firms were all nationalised (PBS Foundation Undated, Chachage 2003, Columbia Encyclopedia 2004).

At the centre of the Ujamaa programme was the drawing together of scattered rural communities into villages that would be sufficiently large to attain agricultural economies of scale and could act as centres for administration and the provision of state services such as education and healthcare. These villages were to form the locus of agrarian socialist development that could replace the failing agricultural cooperatives. The centralization of state power undertaken hitherto had replaced the rural people as decision makers in the cooperatives with bureaucrats; the result was a rising tide of graft, great economic inefficiency and the dissolution of democratic structures (Chachage 2003). The intention was to cure this malaise by reviving democracy at grass roots level in the villages. This would decentralise decision making and lead to greater transparency with a corresponding reduction in graft. It was believed that each village could become a largely economically independent self-reliant production unit. The quest was for innovative use of traditional technologies with minimal capital investment. For this reason the emphasis was placed on overcoming illiteracy and the development of educational capacity (Temwende 2004, 2, Chachage 2003, History World undated). The peasants, as it turned out, were not easily persuaded to move and the state found that the implementation of the programme required ever higher levels of coercion. These in turn provoked the usual forms of resistance characteristic of the disempowered; disengagement, tokenism of effort and sabotage. By 1976 about 80% of the population had been consolidated into 7 300 villages (PBS Foundation Undated).

Karume, who had survived two previous attempts to kill him, was assassinated in 1972; Talbot (2000) suggests that Babu may have been behind the slaying. Aboud Jumbe succeeded Karume to the Zanzibari presidency and set about reorganising the administration of Zanzibar, solidifying the grip of the ASP over the government (PBS Foundation Undated).

References

CHACHAGE, CSL 2003 "Globalization and Democratic Governance in Tanzania", Development Policy Management Forum, [www] http://www.dpmf.org/Publications/Occassional%20Papers/occasionalpaper10.pdf [PDF document, opens new window] (accessed 23 Feb 2010).

COLUMBIA ENCYCLOPEDIA 2004, Sixth Edition, "Tanzania", [www] http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=101273670 [opens new window] (accessed 23 Feb 2010).

HISTORY WORLD UNDATED "History of Tanzania", [www] http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ad23 [opens new window] (accessed 23 Feb 2010).

LIBERATION 1996, "Homage: A.M.Babu - An ardent anti-colonialist from Africa", Liberation September 1996, [www] http://cpiml.org/liberation/year_1996/september/homage.htm [opens new window] (accessed 23 Feb 2010) September 2005.

LUPOGO, H 2001 "Tanzania: Civil-military Relations and Political Stability", African Security Review 10(1), [www] http://www.iss.co.za/pubs/ASR/10No1/Lupogo.html [opens new window] (accessed 23 Feb 2010).

PBS FOUNDATION UNDATED "Tanzania Overview", [www] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/lo/countries/tz/tz_overview.html [opens new window] (accessed 23 Feb 2010).

TALBOT, A 2000 "Nyerere's legacy of poverty and repression in Zanzibar" World Socialist Web Site, International Committee of the Fourth International, [www] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/nov2000/zanz-n15.shtml [opens new window] (accessed 23 Feb 2010) .

TEMWENDE, OK 2004 "Tanzania: A Political and Historical Overview", Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), [www] http://tanzania.fes-international.de/doc/bot-historical-overview.pdf [opens new window] (accessed 23 Feb 2010).

US STATE DEPARTMENT 2005 "Background Note: Tanzania", Bureau of African Affairs [www] http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2843.htm [opens new window] (accessed 23 Feb 2010).