Ujamaa wrongs; can they be corrected?

I often wonder how this country, Tanzania, would have developed, had it not embarked on the Ujamaa policies in the 1960ies and 1970ies. Today, during a research visit at the District Land and Housing Tribunal in Tanga, it struck me again. When going through land conflict files I came across a land conflict case, which I had heard about the first time in the village in which I am currently working.

One of the parties in the case, a man in his sixties, had lost the family land because of villagisation in the mid-1970ies. Like millions of other Tanzanians he and his family had been ordered to move to the nearest village where schooling and other social services would be available. In that area of Handeni people were forced to move. New land, so they were told, would be provided by the nearby state ranch.

Then came the privatisation policies of the 1980ies and the ranch was sold to investors. Since then our man, whom I interviewed last week, has borrowed land from neighbours and relatives and thereby managed to feed his family. But now competition for land is getting stronger and the time of borrowing seems to be over. He therefore decided, when hearing about a land registration project in the area a couple of years ago, to try to get his family land back. It was still, he told me, unoccupied. But a man cultivating land in the same area had decided to expand his farm and had registered the land in his name a couple of months before.

Now they have taken the dispute to the District Land and Housing Tribunal here in Tanga. Soon the tribunal will decide who owns the land. But it will not be able to correct the wrongs done during Ujamaa.

Comments

[Pernille]

very interesting blog post - I'll link up to it today... ;-)

[Rasmus]

thanks. Good question you raise in your blog post about how Tanzanians view their first president, Nyerere, who was better than most presidents, but who did not do everything right. I often get the feeling that it is hard for them to accept both.

[Chambi Chachage]

At the risk of appearing too much of a defender of Mwalimu Nyerere I suggest that we closely unpack what was/is Ujamaa. Was Villagisation Ujamaa? In this regard you may find this quote from Shivji informative:

There are three broad phases in Mwalimu's attitude/thought to the village. The basis of the first was the transformation approach recommended by the World Bank (Nyerere 1967, 183). This was the experiment in creating model farmers who were settled in a village and provided with technology and managerial cadre. As we know, the village settlement programme was a failure (Cliffe & Cunningham 1968). The ujamaa village of the Arusha Declaration, where production would be communal, quickly gave way to the 'development village' and the forced villagisation of the early 1970s.

Source: The village in Mwalimu's thought and political practice – Issa G. Shivji