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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Self-reliance and the State: the multiple meanings of development in early post-colonial Tanzania
Author:Lal, PriyaISNI
Year:2012
Periodical:Africa: Journal of the International African Institute (ISSN 0001-9720)
Volume:82
Issue:2
Pages:212-234
Language:English
Geographic term:Tanzania
Subjects:development
ujamaa
villagization
1960-1969
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/41485040
Abstract:This article uses a key principle of the Tanzanian ujamaa project - self-reliance - as an analytical lever to open up the historical landscape of development politics in that national context during the 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout this period Tanzanians understood and experienced self-reliance in a variety of ways: as a mandated developmental strategy or a collective developmental aspiration, a condition of dignity or privation, a hallmark of national citizenship or a reflection of local survivalism, a matter of luxury or necessity. The article traces these multiple meanings through three distinct but overlapping fields of inquiry: first, by cataloguing the plural ideological registers indexed by self-reliance within official development discourse vis-à-vis domestic and international politics; second, by illuminating a diverse range of rural elders' accounts of ujamaa villagization and self-reliance policy in the southeastern region of Mtwara; and third, by examining the ambivalent position of self-reliance within public debates about regional development in relation to the national scale. In doing so, the author exposes the dialectical friction between competing constructions of citizenship and development at the heart of ujamaa, and suggests new avenues forward for conceptualizing the afterlives of 'self-reliance' and the changing meaning of development in contemporary Tanzania and beyond. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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