African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.44 (965 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1107507006 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 281 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-08-07 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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.. 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. 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
Hodgson, Rutgers University, New Jersey"This beautifully crafted, subtly argued study offers a penetrating reassessment of ujamaa, the villagization project that transformed property ownership, agricultural production, and urban life in postcolonial Tanzania. Priya Lal not only offers a very nuanced and convincing historical interpretation of the probably most ambitious version of African Socialism, ujamaa in Tanzania. Priya Lal's nuanced analysis of the complexities and contradictions of the imaginaries, implementation and experiences of ujamaa not only challenges dominant readings of Tanzanian history (and African history more broadly), but provides a sophisticated model for how oral and archival history can be interwoven and why this kind of history matters." Dorothy L. Her study also carefully contextualizes this case within the broader framework of transformatio
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.