Tanzanian Villages after Forty Years
Between 1967 and 1977, some 10 million Tanzanians were moved from scattered individual holdings into government mandated Ujamaa (literally, ‘familyhood’) villages in one of the largest resettlement movements in history. President Julius Nyerere, ‘father’ and philosopher of Tanzanian socialism, justified villagization on the grounds of being better able to provide basic services, such as medical clinics, schools, and clean water, to the citizenry. Yet in the wake of the quiet abandonment of socialist policy and rhetoric in the mid-1980s, the fate of these villages remains largely unknown. How do villagers evaluate life in these villages now as compared to socialist times? Have any elements of communal cooperation that may have existed been retained? In this paper, interviewed with residents in former Ujamaa villages in Mwanza Region provide some answers to these questions and are contextualized within a broader analysis of agricultural policy in socialist and postsocialist Tanzania.