Tanzanian and african socialism: Comment on Weaver and Kronemer

In an article appearing in a special issue of this journal in 198 1, reprinted as a book -Socialist Models of Development ~ James Weaver and Alexander Kronemer discussed the failure of Tanzanian socialism, putting heavy and appropriate emphasis upon agriculture, and relying particularly on their readings of Andrew Coulson, Goran Hyden, Michael Lofchie and a few other authors. Unfortunately, at this remove from the Tanzanian experience itself, a number of facts appear to have been misconstrued. Puttin Q general disagreements with these authors aside, I think that a few specific statements demand criticism lest they assume the status of ‘stylized facts’ in further generations of requia for poor Tanzania. My comments are restricted to rural institutional issues only. Like many other observers, Weaver and Kronemer view the ujarnaa village programme as both an attempt to restore a traditional ‘communitarian’ way of life, and an effort to bring about modernization and surplus-production. It is unclear from reading the paper whether the programme failed because it was too late to resuscitate the tradition of communal production, because there never had been such a tradition, or because the government’s programme was somehow unreconcilable with peasants’ traditions and way of life. The role of collective productionversus village creation (‘villagization’) and other government efforts and policies in the problems encountered by Tanzanian agriculture is also not well sorted out. The important facts to be stated are first, that pre-colonial agricultural systems in Tanzania involved very little collective production. The social systems were ‘communitarian’ in the sense that individual rights to land use stemmed from membership in the community, that there was mutual aid in such activities as house construction and certain field operations, and that there was some community responsibility for individual welfare. These aspects of traditional community, called ‘ujima’ in the Swahili, have a great deal in common with features of traditional community in many other parts of the world, and fairly little in common with the postIndependence ujanzaa programme.* Second, distinctions must be drawn between living in modern, development or registered villages (and the process for bringing this about, called ‘villagization’), and undertaking collective agricultural production, which has been associated with Nyerere’s ujamaa concept. The villagization idea was proposed by foreign advisers and embraced by Nyerere as early as 1962. The village settlement schemes discussed by Weaver and Kronemer were in part to play the role of showcase villages for this policy thrust, in part to be models in the technical transformation of agriculture. ‘Ujamaa’, on the other hand, was the notion of up-dated communalism which, as applied to agriculture, came, in the crucial policy statement of 1967 (‘Rural Socialism’) to look a great deal like the classical socialist collective farm idea, with the possible difference that the rate of transition to collective production, and the interim mix of household and collective activities, were to be matters of the peasants’ own local discretion.3 While ‘villagization’ and ‘ujamaa’ were married in the ‘ujamaa village’ concept in 1967 and continued to be largely intertwined up to the early 197Os, what the government eventually came to promote via the (early 1970s) regional ‘operations’ and the (mid-70s) nationwide compulsory ‘villagization’ was the grouping of peasant households (which had often, previously, been in small, scattered homesteads) into villages of relatively standard size, without a necessaqj or widespread role for collective farming. This fact, attested to by the language of the Villages Act of 1975 (which distinguished ‘village’ from ‘ujamaa village’ there is still not a single village recog-