by VIJAY PRASHAD
Baba wa Taifa or Father of the Nation and Tanzania’s first President and Prime Minister Dr. Julius Nyerere (1922-1999). PHOTO/BBC
Walking the streets of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with Professor Issa Shivji produces a remarkable sensation. Everyone knows him—the men sitting in the shade sell consumer goods made in China, the woman at the Bureau de Change, an intellectual who finds his way to the Mkuki Na Nkyota bookstore on Samora Avenue, or the waiters at Al Qayam Take Away on Zanaki Street. I ask Shivji why he does not run for public office. “I love politics,” he says, “but dislike politicians. Politicians hate politics. They love power.”
Shivji, born in 1946 to Ismali parents who ran a store in small-town Tanzania, emerged in the late 1960s as one of the most clear-headed student activists at the newly formed University of Dar es Salaam. Involved with the University Students African Revolutionary Front and influenced by well-known Marxists such as the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney and the Hungarian economist Tamas Szentes, Shivji developed a critical stance towards Tanzania’s socialist experiment. Led by the charismatic Julius Mwalimu (“teacher”) Nyerere, Tanzania embarked on a long march to ujamaa, freedom. When the process drifted, Nyerere drafted the Arusha Declaration in 1967 to deepen the process.
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I ask Shivji why the Left, so promising in Cheche, was not able to flower. For one thing, despite Nyerere’s own capacious appetite for radical ideas, he was not comfortable with the development of an independent, critical Left. “The budding Left outside [Nyerere’s party, Tanganyika African National Union, or TANU] did not manage to either build links with the masses or take on a serious organisational form. Just when it was beginning to assume some serious form, it got dissipated by a fratricidal debate.” Nyerere used the Left when it suited him, and closed it down when it threatened his agenda. Trade unions, for example, could not maintain any independence. When the neoliberal policy framework struck Tanzania in the 1990s, Shivji points out, “people did not have the organisational resources to fall back on.” TANU did not have the capacity to defend Nyerere’s socialist policies against the neoliberal ideas of his successors, notably Benjamin Mkapa, President from 1995 to 2005. Four years after Mkapa left office, he told Roberto Savio:
“We privatised everything the state had. Everything was bought up by foreign capital because we had no national capital to compete. The foreign companies almost always closed local business, which were not competitive, transforming them into distributors of foreign products and driving up unemployment. The experts of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund predicted that this would happen, but they told us: Now, the influx of foreign investment will lead to the creation of new competitive and technologically current businesses that will provide the foundations of everlasting modern development. None of this happened for us.”
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anzania’s loss of self-confidence is visible at the Dar es Salaam airport. It was originally named the Mwalimu Nyerere International Airport. But, with pressures to increase tourism apace, the managers worried that foreign tourists would not be able to pronounce Mwalimu. They named it the Julius Nyerere International Airport. In the first issue of Cheche, November 1969, the editors published an extract from Franz Fanon on tourism:
“The national bourgeoisie will be greatly helped on its way towards decadence by the Western bourgeoisies, who come to it as tourists avid for the exotic, for big-game hunting and for casinos. The national bourgeoisie organises centres of rest and relaxation and pleasure resorts to meet the wishes of the Western bourgeoisie. Such activity is given the name of tourism, and for the occasion will be built up as a national industry. If proof is needed of the eventual transformation of certain elements of the ex-native bourgeoisie into the organisers of parties for their Western opposite numbers, it is worthwhile having a look at what has happened in Latin America. The casinos of Havana and of Mexico, the beaches of Rio, the little Brazilian and Mexican girls, the half-breed thirteen-year-olds, the ports of Acapulco and Copacabana—all these are the stigma of this depravation of the national middle class. Because it is bereft of ideas, because it lives to itself and cuts itself off from the people, undermined by its hereditary incapacity to think in terms of all the problems of the nation as seen from the point of view of the whole of that nation, the national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for Western enterprise, and it will in practice set up its country as the brothel of Europe.”
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