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" Between the Village and the World: "
Priya Lal
F. Cooper
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1103738
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| Doc. No
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TLpq911034471
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| Main Entry
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F. Cooper
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Priya Lal
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| Title & Author
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Between the Village and the World:\ Priya LalF. Cooper
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| College
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New York University
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| Date
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2011
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| student score
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2011
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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427
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| Abstract
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This dissertation focuses on the policy of ujamaa that shaped life in Tanzania during the early postcolonial period. Ujamaa , or "familyhood," began as a utopian initiative to transform the Tanzanian countryside and fuel national development by encouraging peasants to move into concentrated villages and farm communally. Over time, this project evolved into a state-supervised compulsory drive for rural resettlement, and its socialist objectives were ultimately abandoned after a series of economic and ecological crises in the mid-1970s. The central purpose of my study is to move beyond standard narratives of ujamaa to forge a more empirically-grounded and theoretically nuanced account of the Tanzanian project. Whereas many scholars have dismissed ujamaa as a centralized, authoritarian, or misguided developmental disaster from its inception, I reopen an inquiry into the complex and dynamic period between the promising moment of Tanzanian independence and the ideological and material closures of the subsequent decade. Drawing upon official and newspaper archives, interviews with elderly villagers and former state officials in southeastern Tanzania, and secondary studies, I explore the multiple ways in which ujamaa villagization was conceptualized, debated, and executed by a range of people during the late 1960s and early 1970s, without affixing it to a trajectory of inevitable failure. The broader argument of my dissertation hinges upon this multiplicity. I show that ujamaa was motivated by a variety of often competing constructions of national citizenship and development, and demonstrate that this policy was implemented and understood in diverse ways on the ground. Towards this end, I connect local experiences of villagization to global political and economic processes, and illuminate the imaginative and practical agency of rural and official actors within the structural limitations they encountered. In crafting a fuller account of ujamaa , I also interrogate the ways in which the categories of gender and space informed Tanzanian development. By combining a detailed investigation of Tanzanian development policy in practice with a broader evaluation of the multifaceted political imaginary of ujamaa , my dissertation deepens our understanding of the early years of African independence and challenges theories of nationalism and development that fail to account for African experiences.
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African socialism
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Nationalism
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Practicing development
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Social sciences
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Tanzania
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Ujamaa
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