and from this embrace was born a particularly spacey and feckless socialism call ujamaa, or “familyhood.” Excerpts from Nyerere’s writing sound like a 1969 three-bong-hit rap from somebody going off to found an organic tofu-growing commune: “Our agricultural organization would be predominately that of cooperative living and working for the good of all. . . . Some degree of specialization would be possible, with one member being, for example, a carpenter.” Dig it. “If every individual is self-reliant . . . then the whole nation is self-reliant.” Heavy. The 1967 Arusha Declaration, a government manifesto cataloging the right- on goals and groovy ideals of ujamaa, states that agriculture and animal husbandry are where the Tanzanian economy is at. Industrialization would mean a bummer money trip. In the words of the tuned-in Mwalimu, “We make a mistake in choosing money—something we do not have—to be the big instrument of our development.” Development being something else they don’t have. Issa G. Shivji, a law professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, has written an article summing up ujamaa. He says, “There were two central premises of this ideology: equality of human beings and developmentalism.” Equality is the thirty-five cents a day mentioned earlier. Developmentalism sounds like some even worse offshoot of Scientology. “The problem,” Shivji continues, “was that the ideology of ujamaa was not supported by any explicit social theory,” and that the Tanzanian government “pursued this policy logically and consistently.” In other words, ujamaa made about as much sense as most things in the 1960s. Slogans were coined, such as the Hitlerish “ Uhuru na Kazi, ” which sounds even more Hitlerish when translated: “Freedom and Work.” Price controls were instituted, lasting until 1986. In 1981 farmers were being forced to sell corn to the government for 20 percent of market value, and that market value is nothing to write to Iowa about. In Mto-wa-Mbu, price-uncontrolled corn now sells for twenty-three cents a pound. Local industries were nationalized, foreign companies were expropriated, and compensation for these takings was, in the words of the U.S. State Department, “extremely slow and ponderous.” Much of commerce met the same ponderous, if not so slow, fate. East Indian and Arab minorities were the targets. The history textbook used in Tanzanian public high schools blandly states, “The monopolistic position of Indian wholesale traders was abolished.” A program of “villagization” was begun, which sounds benign enough: “Hey,
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