African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World - Softcover

Lal, Priya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1107507006 ISBN 13: 9781107507005

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Drawing on a wide range of oral and written sources, this book tells the story of Tanzania's socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 1967-1975. Inaugurated shortly after independence, ujamaa ('familyhood' in Swahili) both invoked established socialist themes and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy, seeking to reorganize the Tanzanian countryside into communal villages to achieve national development. Priya Lal investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively envisioned ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, without affixing the project to a trajectory of inevitable failure. By forging an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of ujamaa, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania restores a sense of possibility and process to the early years of African independence, refines prevailing theories of nation building and development, and expands our understanding of the 1960s and 70s world.

About this title

Book Description:

This book tells the story of Tanzania's socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 1967-75. It investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively conceptualized ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, refining prevailing theories of national development and expanding our understanding of postcolonial Africa.

About the Author:

Priya Lal is an Assistant Professor of History at Boston College, Massachusetts. Her work has been published in the Journal of African History, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, and Humanity.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1107507006
• ISBN 13: 9781107507005
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 282