The Orbis

Issue date: 3/26/08 Section: News/Features

A garbage pile in a Tanzanian neighborhood grows into an impromptu landfill.

Before actually arriving in Africa, it's difficult to imagine what life is like there. Despite a good amount of arm-chair social research and canvassing of Lonely Planet guides on Tanzania and East Africa, I found it difficult to shake off the amalgam of scenes from popular films, postcards and Animal Planet that shaped my default preconceptions about what it might be like.

I spent most of my time in the city of Arusha in northern Tanzania visiting my partner who is teaching violin for a year at the newly-formed Umoja Arts Project. To posit a Tennessean geographical analogy, Arusha is roughly the size of the city of Franklin, discarding the surrounding suburban nastiness known as Cool Springs. From anywhere in Arusha, you are liable to simply gaze down a street and have a striking view of Mt. Meru whose summit is capped with snow.

Arusha has figured into several important political moments in Tanzanian history. It was the site of the accords wherein the first documents codifying independence from the British were signed. In addition, it was the site of the 1967 "Arusha Declaration", when Tanzania's first post-independence government declared its intention to strive for a distinctly Tanzanian version of socialism. Julius Nyerere, the first President of the United Republic of Tanzania, was at the forefront of this movement. Nyerere began his career as a teacher (he is apparently still known colloquially as simply "teacher" in Tanzania), but by the late 1950s was drawn into politics and by 1962 his charisma, pan-Africanism, rhetorical talents and idealism earned him the inaugural presidency of the newly independent nation. Drawing intellectual origins from Marxism, traditional African social practice, the emancipatory and egalitarian roots of Christianity as well as from aspects of the Communist systems of the era, Nyerere forged a social and political vision centered on ujamaa (familyhood), economic cooperation, equality and self-reliance. In a 1962 essay he wrote titled, "Ujamaa -The Basis of African Socialism," Nyerere emphasized an economic and social order in which everyone cared for each other, embodying many of the values and commitments of pre-colonial African society.

Despite serious promise and international acclaim in its early years, the struggle for socialism in Tanzania was essentially struck by the deathblows of spiking oil prices and falling commodity prices in the late 70s, the breakup of the East African Union as well as various intra-national difficulties. I was nonetheless able to notice some visible legacies of the Nyerere era (social cohesion and lack of tribal tension, for instance). Despite these gains, however, it quickly becomes very obvious that the idea of pursuing a model of economic development based on equality, solidarity and human need has been abandoned for some time. The struggle for socialism in Tanzania was officially pronounced dead in 1986 when the government accepted International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans and reluctantly underwent IMF-directed 'structural adjustment' in which most of the public enterprises and social institutions that had facilitated substantial gains in health and education were dismantled.

Continued...

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