Arusha Declaration and Tanzanian Ujamaa
Julius Nyerere set out an African socialism in February 1967 and spent twenty years discovering what it cost. Tanzania was five years independent, overwhelmingly rural, and dependent on sisal, coffee and cotton whose prices it did not set. The declaration's argument was that a poor agricultural country cannot develop by waiting for foreign investment, that self-reliance means relying on land and people rather than on money and machinery, and that a leadership code should prevent officials from becoming a class — no second salaries, no shares, no rented property. It nationalised the banks, insurance, the export trade and the larger factories within a week. The policy that followed was ujamaa, meaning familyhood: rural production organised in village communities holding land in common, with schools, clinics and water supply that scattered homesteads could not support. The voluntary phase produced a few hundred villages. From 1973 it was compulsory, and some five to eleven million people were moved, often by lorry and sometimes with houses burned behind them, in an operation that disrupted the harvest and permanently damaged agricultural output. The results split cleanly. Literacy rose from about a third to over ninety per cent, life expectancy and access to clean water improved sharply, and the country held together across 120 language groups without ethnic conflict — which almost none of its neighbours managed. The economy stagnated and food had to be imported. Nyerere admitted the failure publicly in 1985 and resigned, which almost none of his contemporaries did either. Nyerere also gave the country a national language. Swahili was made the medium of administration and primary education, which is a large part of why Tanzania has no politics of ethnicity in a region where almost everyone else does.
- Year: 1967 CE
- Category: Political
