He united all of us under one national identity. He is credited with unifying the country and pushing development through ambitious socialist policies that followed decades of colonial rule — first by the Germans and then the British.
These plans were mapped out in the Arusha Declaration , in which Nyerere paints a picture of a utopian society based on egalitarianism. He imagines a self-reliant country in which hard work within a cooperative framework ensures human equality and dignity.
With a population dispersed over a vast landscape and rural areas still severely underdeveloped, Nyerere envisioned collecting farmers into cooperative agricultural settlements. These ujamaa villages would then be provided with equipment along with fertiliser and seeds. This would facilitate agricultural production, while making it easier for the government to distribute state services such as education and healthcare.
He says this with pride beaming from his face in much the way many politicians, academics and activists speak of ujamaa both in Tanzania and around the world. However, not all Tanzanians share this perspective. Some who lived through this era tell a very different story — one riddled with imprisonment without charge or trial, enforced disappearances, and destroyed livelihoods. Nyerere promised to establish a new economic order based on traditional African communal values.
He argued that Tanzania did not need to borrow ideas from Marx or Lenin because the culture of socialism — defined as hospitality, cooperation and hard work — was already a staple of societies throughout Africa. We took care of the community, and the community took care of us.
He argued that these core African values just needed to be strengthened and built. For him, that meant villagisation along with the nationalisation of banks, farms and industries. To be considered an ujamaa village, an agricultural settlement had to consist of at least households, with each house adhering to specific measurements.
Every family, regardless of size, was allocated a maximum of one or two acres of land. Mohammad did not live in one of these villages as he was a lieutenant in the Tanzania army at the time, but he looked on them admiringly. Yet relatively few of his compatriots were as convinced. This came at a significant price. Homes and entire villages were burned to the ground as people were ushered into agricultural collectives, which oftentimes lacked adequate planning and sanitation.
He noted in Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity that Tanzania went from exporting , tons of surplus maize in to importing , tons of maize in Between and , total per capita food production fell to its level. Many other scholars agree. Lesira Samburi in his village of Terat in Simanjiro. For some Tanzanians who were on the receiving end of these policies, however, indignation still runs deep.
Lesira Samburi, 67, is a leader in the semi-pastoralist Maasai community from the village of Terat in the Simanjiro district. They came and burned our bomas [homesteads]. Samburi sits on a green plastic chair next to his traditional home — constructed of cow dung, mud, wood and cowhide — and offers tea mixed with milk to other Maasai who have gathered to listen. Samburi says that the Maasai, who were scattered across a vast region of land in northern Tanzania, did not own radios at the time.
We were busy caring for our cattle. Ujamaa , the Swahili word for extended family, was a social and economic policy developed and implemented in Tanzania by president Julius Kambarage Nyerere — between and Based on the idea of collective farming and the "villagization" of the countryside, ujamaa also called for the nationalization of banks and industry and an increased level of self-reliance at both an individual and national level.
Nyerere argued that urbanization, which had been brought about by European colonialism and was economically driven by wage labor, had disrupted the traditional pre-colonial rural African society. He believed that it was possible for his government to recreate precolonial traditions in Tanzania and, in turn, re-establish a traditional level of mutual respect and return the people to settled, moral ways of life.
The main way to do that, he said, was to move people out of the urban cities like the capital Dar es Salaam and into newly created villages dotting the rural countryside.
The idea for collective rural agriculture seemed like a sound idea—Nyerere's government could afford to provide equipment, facilities, and material to a rural population if they were brought together in "nucleated" settlements, each of around families. Establishing new groups of rural populations also made the distribution of fertilizer and seed easier, and it would be possible to provide a good level of education to the population as well.
Villagization was seen as a way to overcome the problems of "tribalization"—a plague which beset other newly independent African countries that drove people to separate into tribes based on ancient identities.
Nyerere set out his policy in the Arusha Declaration of Feb. The process started slowly and was voluntary at first, but by the end of the s, there were only or so collective settlements. In the s, Nyerere's reign became more oppressive, as he began to force people to leave the cities and move to the collective villages.
By the end of the s, there were over 2, of these villages: but things weren't going well in them. Ujamaa was intended to recreate nuclear families and engage the small communities in an "economy of affection" by tapping into the traditional African attitudes, while at the same time introducing essential services and modern technological innovations for the rural population that was now the majority.
But traditional ideals of how families operated no longer matched the reality of the Tanzanians. The traditional devoted female domestic guardian of the family rooted in the village was contrary to the actual lifestyles of women—and maybe the ideal never had worked. Instead, women moved in and out of working and raising children throughout their lives, embracing diversification and flexibility to provide personal security. At the same time, although young men complied with the official orders and moved to the rural communities, they rejected the traditional models and distanced themselves from the older generation of male leaders within their family.
According to a survey of people living in Dar es Salaam, villagization did not provide enough economic incentive to people who had been used to wage labor.
Ironically, Ujamaa villagers resisted engaging in communal life and withdrew from subsistence and commercial agriculture, while urban residents chose to live in the cities and practice urban agriculture. Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number.
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