Opening its general meeting on 27 December 1966, the state-sponsored National Union of Tanganyika Workers, known as NUTA, proposed a combative response to a presidential commission's investigation into mismanagement in the union. The union's general secretary also issued an azimio (resolution) that prefigured much of the socialist rhetoric and policy prescriptions that appeared a month later in Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere's Azimio la Arusha (Arusha Declaration) that refined his policy of African Socialism or Ujamaa . Although the NUTA azimio circulated widely and was submitted to the Arusha party meeting, it was excluded from both the record of that meeting and NUTA's own file of related material. This elision happened before its main author, NUTA general secretary Michael Kamaliza, was convicted of treason two years later. The suppression of NUTA's azimio offers a point of entry to investigate the diffuse agency of political rhetoric and the history of Nyerere's influential speech.
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University PressOver the New Year's holiday, from 27 December 1966 to 4 January 1967, the state-sponsored National Union of Tanganyika Workers, known as NUTA, held its fifth general meeting since its formation in 1964. Footnote 1 A set of resolutions presented on the first day of the meeting prefigured much of the rhetoric and policy prescriptions that appeared a month later in president Julius Nyerere's Arusha Declaration (Azimio la Arusha) that refined his policy of African Socialism or Ujamaa, and launched far-reaching policies of industrial nationalization, rural villagization, and economic restrictions on politicians. NUTA's general secretary proclaimed later that year that ‘the Arusha Declaration is an outcome of our [December] resolutions’. Footnote 2 In Andrew Coulson's foundational account of Tanzania's political economy, which paid close attention to the key role of labor activism, NUTA's resolutions go unmentioned. The Arusha Declaration is described as ‘largely written by Nyerere’ in an ‘intellectual coup’ that outwitted competing interests in the ruling party. Footnote 3 In almost all respects it was Nyerere's speech and a ‘coup’, by which Nyerere regained the reins of the Tanzanian political establishment, mainly by controlling the terms of debate in the one-party state under the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). But Nyerere's centrality does not account for the diffuse agency of its composition, publication, and implementation as policy. We find that although authorship may confer authority, it does not signal individual agency.
The immediate prompt for Nyerere's Arusha speech was a document composed the month before and presented at the TANU meeting as the ‘Azimio la NUTA’. Footnote 4 NUTA's azimio (resolution) was included in a report by its General Secretary, Michael Kamaliza, submitted for the TANU National Executive Council (NEC) meeting in Arusha. NEC meetings were large gatherings of TANU leaders from across the country. Kamaliza was a veteran of the labor movement who also served as minister of labor in Nyerere's cabinet and in the TANU Central Committee that shaped party policy. The NUTA azimio was a radical addendum to its point-by-point response to a sharply critical report by a presidential commission investigating complaints of mismanagement and self-enrichment in the union's administration. Footnote 5 At the same time, Kamaliza was also denying published allegations of a secret meeting with the Kenyan dissident politician Oginga Odinga and Abdulrahman Babu, the pragmatic Zanzibari socialist in Nyerere's cabinet. They were accused of planning subversive activities against the Kenyan government. Footnote 6 Nyerere proposed the presidential commission to investigate NUTA within days of those reports. Footnote 7 NUTA's azimio served, at least in part, to divert criticism of the union's administration and Kamaliza's controversies. It presented little that was wholly new, but accurately laid claim to emerging trends in Tanzanian politics. It thereby provided impetus to the party to act upon its populist themes.
The multi-point azimio announced by Kamaliza at the NUTA meeting was the talk of the town in Dar es Salaam in mid-January 1967, according to the US ambassador at the time. It was summarized in newspapers and translated in full in a US diplomatic cable at the time. Footnote 8 If there was a heightened level of speechmaking mid-month, however, it was also because Nyerere was on an upcountry tour and his speeches were broadcast nationally on radio and covered in the same newspapers. Nyerere hinted at a major ideological statement for a hastily called party meeting at the end of the month. Politicians were hustling to pre-position themselves in support of emerging ideological themes and the expectation of a crackdown on money-making activities by political leaders by a government that had recently been constituted as a one-party state. The speech was Nyerere's, but youth and labor leaders were catalysts. Some were themselves under suspicion for self-enrichment and found a useful smokescreen in populist advocacy for socialist dogma. In the Arusha Declaration, Nyerere called their bluff and proposed to reform the Tanzanian political economy in pursuit of a socialist model of state-owned industry and a classless society.
The Arusha Declaration was a key point in this internal process and became an influential policy document across postcolonial Africa, ‘a beacon of hope that Africa might yet find a route to the kind of new society that nationalist leaders once imagined’, in the words of journalist Martin Meredith. Footnote 9 The speech features prominently in literature on the Tanzanian state and socialist economy. Footnote 10 It inspired Milton Obote's 1969 Common Man's Charter in Uganda and Emeka Ojukwu's Ahiara Declaration of 1969. The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe was a member of the Biafran National Guidance Committee and recalled that the Ahiara Declaration was drafted on the model of the Arusha Declaration. ‘The importance of Julius Nyerere in Africa at that time was immense’. Footnote 11 Citing Chachage Seithy Chachage's view of ‘developmentalist ideology’ as a neocolonial legacy in modern Africa, Emmanuel Akyeampong recently highlighted the ubiquitous ‘imperative to unite…in the service of development…to make the state an effective “distributor of hope”’. Footnote 12 In a parallel line of thought, James Ferguson influentially defined developmentalism as an ‘anti-politics machine’ that facilitated interventionist policies while evading political debate. Footnote 13 The wide acceptance of developmentalist assumptions did not eliminate political contestation, and the pursuit of national unity often took the form of suppressing opposition under the banner of idiosyncratic rhetorical strategies that authorized executive control. Footnote 14 Among them, Nyerere's Ujamaa was arguably the most systematic as policy. The Arusha Declaration dictated the terms of policy debate in Tanzania, even as it set the country on an authoritarian and economically disastrous path. Footnote 15
The Arusha Declaration is generally seen as Nyerere's personal initiative aimed at restricting wealth accumulation by civil servants, nationalizing industry, and collectivizing agriculture. It effectively mediated between radical and moderate factions within his party by reinforcing his signature ideology of Ujamaa with a dose of socialist dogma. Footnote 16 By studying the composition of the Arusha Declaration, we gain insight into the manner in which political agency is best understood as semiotic mediation in a diffuse discursive context prior to the subsequent institutionalization of coercion and control. Footnote 17 This view reinforces James Brennan's thesis:
TANU exercised no monopoly over nationalist rhetoric, but rather worked within a shifting discursive field consisting of international and indigenous concepts and terms. TANU and the TANU-led government were not unmoved movers of nationalist discourse, but conduits and translators of popular dissatisfaction, sharply limited by commitments to maintain public order. Footnote 18
The composition, delivery, and initiation of the Arusha Declaration was an unplanned process unfolding over the entire month of January 1967 while Nyerere traveled by car from Lake Victoria to Dar es Salaam. The published text of the Arusha Declaration was produced via a series of revisions from a draft by a party committee based on Nyerere's ad hoc speech at the hastily called TANU meeting in Arusha on 26 January 1967. Footnote 19 Presenting the official document, Nyerere gave another speech in Dar es Salaam on 5 February 1967. Footnote 20 Although the published version provided an official text for ideological reference, the visceral language of Nyerere's 26 January speech was so effective that its rhetorical flourishes shaped Tanzanian politics for a generation. His 5 February speech in Dar es Salaam proclaimed nationalization policy, which had not been mentioned in the Arusha speech. Nationalization began the next day with a government takeover of the banking system on 6 February and the state acquisition of major industries by the end of the week. Footnote 21
This essay is mainly concerned with the rhetoric and jostling of the political class in the weeks and months leading up to Nyerere's initial speech in Arusha, and is not an account of the policies implemented in its wake. The first half of the essay establishes a historiographical and interpretive frame in Tanzanian scholarship and theories of discourse. The second half of the essay traces several overlapping timelines that converged in Nyerere's Arusha speech. The conclusion suggests that memory practices, including archival elisions, retroactively reinforced the centrality of Nyerere and the authority of the Arusha Declaration as a basis of policy. While we may be able to map out a series of moments when different concepts and metaphors became prominent in Tanzanian political discourse, there are no discrete points of origin. I follow Leander Schneider's theoretical lead in his account of developmentalist governing practices in the post-Arusha period: ‘Agents are not atomic individuals—rather they are deeply embedded in agentic space—an ecology of discursive practices’. Footnote 22 Words became meaningful, acts became powerful, only in relation to constellations of contemporary words and actions in a swirling galaxy of ambition.
Priya Lal, in her fine-grained study of people's experience of socialism on the ground, perhaps overstates the case that ‘the poorly maintained and poorly funded Tanzania National Archives [TNA] contains few accessible materials relating to the origins of ujamaa ideology…and the former TANU party archives – now housed in the offices of the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (or “Party of the Revolution,” known as CCM) – are closed to most researchers’. Footnote 23 In the case of Tanzania, such ‘archival pessimism’, to use Nana Osei-Opare's phrase, is not quite warranted. Footnote 24
As Laura Fair and Joshua Grace have found, there are many back office archives, some akin to the ‘arquivos mortos’ that Benedito Machava found in regional headquarters in northern Mozambique, others very much alive and attentively maintained. Footnote 25 Tanzania's dispersed archival holdings are quite rich, if unkempt. Footnote 26 TNA Accession 589 is a collection of high-level TANU materials in the papers of a central committee member and Nyerere confidant, Bhoke Munanka, which have been intermittently restricted to researchers. I went through these files in a series of visits, taking detailed notes, often transcribing entire documents, including Nyerere's earthy speech on 26 January that became the basis for the Arusha Declaration. Tanzania's National Assembly (parliamentary) debates were recorded verbatim in published volumes that have hardly been used by researchers, nor similar volumes transcribing meetings of TANU's National Executive Council (NEC), which constituted a parallel national assembly during the years of one-party rule. After much lobbying in the halls of Tanzania's ruling party for access to its tightly held collection, I ran across a Swahili copy of NUTA's New Year's resolution in the CCM archive in Dodoma, where it was included in a NUTA report submitted to the ruling party meeting on 26–28 January 1967 in Arusha, but it does not appear in related TANU and NUTA files at the TNA. I also conducted interviews with over a hundred retired members of Nyerere's government and contemporary political activists. These interviews are deposited on DVD with the Mwalimu Nyerere Foundation.
Two recent publications revisit the origins of the Arusha Declaration, highlighting the political process of revising Nyerere's 26 January speech into the final published declaration, with NUTA appearing as one voice among many. Issa Shivji cites an article about the December-January NUTA meeting in the party-controlled newspaper, The Nationalist, and George Roberts cites a similar article in the Tanganyika Standard, both highlighting NUTA's calls for a governmental commission on socialism but not addressing the broader claims of its azimio. Footnote 27 Shivji's history analyzes many new sources, including parliamentary debates and transcripts of Nyerere's speeches, which are excerpted in his extensive account. The only other published mention of NUTA's immediate impact appears in the epilogue of William Friedland's 1969 book on Tanganyika trade unions, based on Nikos Georgulas’ presentation at the 1967 African Studies Association meeting. Footnote 28 Neither took note of the specific influence of NUTA's resolutions on the Arusha Declaration, but they highlighted the importance of the damning report of the presidential commission. Friedland accurately summarized the new context created by the nationalization policies that ensued.
Since the government contemplated nationalization of all major sectors of the economy, most of Tanganyika's workers would become employees of the government…The government's response to the commission's proposal therefore reemphasized the productionist function of trade unionism. Footnote 29
Two older dissertations outlined the competitive political atmosphere that gave impetus to the Arusha Declaration. C. S. L. Chachage's much ignored 1986 thesis mentioned the presidential commission, but more broadly proposed a colonial inheritance for the ‘developmentalist’ orientation of the postcolonial state and its tendency to centralize power: ‘The institutionalization of this ideology after independence took place within the struggles to concentrate powers in the executive arm of the state and defeat the social movements under the banner of economic development’. Footnote 30 In her 1983 dissertation, based partly on anonymous interviews with party leaders, Jeannette Hartmann emphasized that the Arusha Declaration ‘was not an act but a process’. Footnote 31 She took issue with Shivji's influential but monocausal view that the nationalist policies arising from the Arusha Declaration ‘constituted the first open attempt on the part of the bureaucratic sector of the petty bourgeoisie to carve out an economic base for itself’. Footnote 32 Instead, Hartmann proposed a ‘tripartite’ policy process, negotiated between a ruling party dominated by populist voices and a politically moderate governmental bureaucracy tasked with quotidian administration, with Nyerere in the unique position as a mediating force between the two, empowered to initiate policy on his own authority. In the Arusha Declaration, she argued, ‘Nyerere's overriding concern was the maintenance of political stability’, citing an interview with a senior NEC member who attended the 1967 meeting. The member recalled that, despite evident administrative constraints, ‘socialism was a political decision, which had to be made. The economic problems that derived from this decision, as well as the intricate problems of management etc., would be confronted during implementation phase’. Footnote 33 Such a sudden ‘political decision’ was typical of Nyerere, who often used surprise announcements for immediate political effect with little regard for administrative consequences.
Perhaps for good reason Shivji does not fully revise his ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’ thesis originally stated in the wake of the Arusha Declaration, but he does propose a more complex origin story for the declaration that largely agrees with Hartmann's thesis. Shivji now argues that the pressure to amplify socialist policy in early 1967 came from an assortment of ‘strange bedfellows’. Footnote 34 There was populist pressure from several factions to ‘get into the shoes of the Asian bourgeoisie’ by nationalizing businesses to be managed by governmental appointees. Among NUTA leaders, there was a sense ‘that they were missing out’ on the salaries and spoils of Africanization. Then there was a small group of youth leaders educated in socialist countries who returned as true believers and advocated for governmental policy to go beyond mere rhetoric and take more concrete action to reconstruct the economy in socialist form. Shivji argues that these factions all found common cause in demanding a clearer definition of socialism, ‘calling Nyerere's bluff’, and thereby exposing his underlying moderation and marking themselves as authentically revolutionary.
Nyerere's response came in the form of the Arusha Declaration, which might fairly be described as Nyerere calling their bluff in turn, raising the stakes on the assorted advocates of socialism. In the declaration, TANU is proclaimed as a worthy shepherd of worker interests, but the effect of the Arusha nationalizations was to constrain NUTA and worker demands since, as Friedland pointed out, the government became the predominant employer of wage labor. Amidst proliferating parastatals, Shivji's pithy phrase, ‘the bureaucratic bourgeoisie’ remains an accurate description of the situation that took form in the wake of the Arusha Declaration, and points to the opposing interests of NUTA and the government that informed his more recent view that Nyerere's fundamental flaw was his refusal to recognize class conflict within Tanzania. Footnote 35 It is clear, however, that in the Arusha Declaration Nyerere spoke explicitly about class divisions in Tanzanian society, and that the policies proposed were his solution. The question (that will go unanswered here) is not whether the declaration was cognizant of class conflict, but whether it was effective in addressing it.
NUTA came into existence in the wake of the January 1964 mutiny by non-commissioned officers in the unreformed army left over from the colonial state. In the week following the mutiny, evidence emerged of radical labor leaders urging the mutineers to demand more than just pay and promotions; they urged them to overthrow the government. As a result, when Nyerere's government regained control with the help of a British commando unit, both the army and the labor unions were disbanded and rebuilt from scratch. With the mutineers neutralized, Tanzanian security forces detained hundreds of trade union leaders and activists, releasing some quickly after interrogation while detaining others indefinitely. Footnote 36 In December 1964, the National Assembly passed the Security of Employment Act which established NUTA as an integral part of government, instituting workers’ committees at all places of employment, regulating disputes, and limiting the ability of employers to dismiss workers.
The creation of NUTA upon the dissolution of the Tanganyika Federation of Labour (TFL) in 1964 fit a pattern across Africa of governmental co-optation of trade unions that had been so active and influential in the independence struggles, and scholars have since struggled to assess the nature of worker agency in the postcolonial setting. Footnote 37 At the time, Roger Scott cited Tanzania as ‘an extreme in the process of union subordination to political leadership, but events elsewhere seem to indicate that many other countries are moving in the same direction’. Footnote 38 Nyerere's speech to the first NUTA general meeting in March 1965 pointed in this direction. He asked why there should be a separate labor union when its goals were entirely congruent with those of TANU, and why the demands of wage laborers should outweigh those of rural peasants when the overall imperative of economic growth was the first priority in a country with a per capita annual income of 400 shillings, and wage laborers earning around 2000 shillings annually (equivalent to $2640 today adjusted for inflation). Footnote 39 The new union, headed by the secretary of labor serving in the president's cabinet, was functionally a branch of one-party government to control labor. It transformed the trade union movement into a nascent parastatal with no autonomy outside its internal administration. Kamaliza became ex officio a vice president of the Ghana-based All-Africa Trade Union Federation (AATUF), which shifted its headquarters to Dar es Salaam after Kwame Nkrumah's government was overthrown in 1966. Footnote 40 No direct evidence of outside influence on political discussions in Dar es Salaam has yet surfaced, but exploring the atmosphere created by these events may shed light on themes emerging in 1966.
Over the next two years, increasing criticism of nepotism and mismanagement by NUTA officials brought about the appointment of a presidential commission to investigate and make recommendations for reform. Footnote 41 From May to August 1966, the seven-man commission ‘interviewed thousands of people’, including union members, leaders, employers, and TANU representatives across the country, and ‘received upwards of 500 memoranda’. Footnote 42 Union members wanted more training, better representation, transparent administration, more effective wage negotiation, and hastier Africanization of upper level management. To NUTA's rank-and-file, its administrators felt distant and unresponsive, its fees merely extractive, its procedures incompetent, and its workers’ committees ineffective.
Excluded from the TNA files, but present in the CCM archive together with the January azimio, is the full text of an audit of NUTA's books by Cooper Brothers chartered accountants in Dar es Salaam. Footnote 43 The auditors were engaged by the commission to review NUTA finances and their findings were partly summarized in the commission's report. NUTA's financial reporting was incomplete with many indications that union money was pocketed by its administrators. Loans to staff, mostly upper-level administrators, valued at 328,911 shillings were not verifiable due to poor records ‘and to the absence of signed acknowledgements of the loans from the debtors concerned’. Tens of thousands of shillings in cash expenses were missing. Footnote 44 A 1.3 million shilling advance to the Workers’ Development Corporation was ‘entered in the balance sheet of the union at a figure considerably in excess of the net tangible assets shown by the most recent unaudited balance sheet of the corporation’. In all, a third of NUTA's recorded income in the first half of 1966 could not be located, and the union-owned Worker's Development Corporation was facing business losses of the same scale (around a million shillings).
The extent of the financial mismanagement was not fully apparent to workers, but they clearly saw evidence for it. NUTA had promised its members ‘houses, hotels, bars, schools, farms, dispensaries, recreation centres, etc. Great expectations were therefore aroused’. Meanwhile reports of embezzlement and bribery by business owners seemed all too credible given ‘suspicious relations with employers, [and] the use of the English language before Swahili-speaking members’ that further alienated the workers. Members told the commissioners that the mandatory ‘check-off’ dues system and the policy of choosing NUTA's top administrators by presidential appointment rather than internal election by the rank-and-file ‘had led the leaders to relax and adopt a care-free position’. Footnote 45 Inquiries from members went unanswered, union negotiators regularly caved to management demands, and records were not properly kept.
The committee shied away from acknowledging the opposing interests of employers, government, and workers, preferring instead the dubious official premise (critiqued by Shivji) of ‘an independent socialist state where the aims of the Government and Workers are the same’. Footnote 46 The commission's report was presented in October 1966 and circulated among government ministries. The solutions proposed by the commission fell back upon a paternalist presumption of authority by the cabinet and central committee. The government's response only reinforced this orientation, refusing even the commission's suggestion of an elected general secretary for the union. Footnote 47 Broadly, as Nikos Georgulas argued in a contemporary paper, the government's response ‘suggests that emphasis was placed on the improvement of the administrative rather than the political strength of NUTA…Indeed, it is suggested that the Government's proposals diluted the political influence of the labor organization’. Footnote 48
In response, NUTA's resolutions at its December meeting pointed out a series of affronts to the country's proclaimed socialist morality, including the presence of racially identified ‘foreigners’ who owned most commercial and industrial activities, and ‘those who call themselves Tanzanians (Indians) who employ workers (especially at higher levels) following the nationality or color of a person’. Footnote 49 NUTA also lamented the way that upper-level party leaders were piling up real estate, lorries, and shares in capitalist companies. The statement concluded with an accusatory request:
There is a need for a proper interpretation of Ujamaa for our country as all of this is against the foundations of Ujamaa. They requested that the Father of the Nation [Nyerere] should appoint a Presidential COMMISSION to investigate and recommend the way in which the policy of Ujamaa will guide our Nation. Footnote 50
The idea for such a commission had been bandied about in 1963, but never constituted during the tumultuous the events of 1964. The first to revive the idea as means of contesting Nyerere's leadership was a TANU Youth League (TYL) representative, A. S. Kasongo, in a question submitted before the June 1966 NEC meeting: ‘When will a Presidential commission to investigate African socialism be announced so that the citizens can understand the basis of this policy?’ Footnote 51 Although such a commission was never formed, the January 1966 TANU constitution promised to ensure that ‘the government of our country should properly manage the major means of producing wealth and follow a policy that will facilitate means of collectively owning the wealth of our country’. Footnote 52 At the close of the June meeting Nyerere issued a memorandum emphasizing Tanzania's diplomatic neutrality and his vision for a ‘mixed economy’ that would depend heavily on state-led industrialization. Footnote 53 But amidst parliamentary by-elections, a university student protest, and two presidential commissions investigating NUTA and the cooperative movement, there is little evidence that TANU gave any further thought to nationalization or a commission on Ujamaa until the splash made by the NUTA azimio at the end of the year. Footnote 54 The NUTA azimio was perhaps the most fluent of several attempts to wrest agency on this topic from Nyerere, and he spent all of January 1967 reclaiming that initiative with a vengeance.
A survey of debates in the July 1966 meeting of the National Assembly (parliament) offers insight into political rhetoric in the lead-up to the Arusha Declaration. Assembly policy debates were couched in street-corner rhetorical habits. Swahili aphorisms, pointed rhetorical questions, appeals to conscience, and sharp leaps of logic that elicited cheers, laughter, and shouts from fellow members. Almost all motions were passed, usually preceded by extended debate in which members tried to shape an interpretive consensus around policy. In the July 1966 session, NUTA was the topic of a long discussion in response to a speech on budgetary estimates for the Ministry of Labor. Michael Kamaliza, the minister of labor and general secretary of NUTA, was absent. Nsilo Swai, the minister of industry, minerals, and electricity, read his speech for him. The speech dealt with the ministerial budget, administrative matters, and worker productivity. It concluded with a populist call to pursue goals stated in the 1966 party constitution in favor of government-owned industry.
Our Ujamaa has the meaning that the economy of the country must be in the hands of the majority, who until now, through no fault of their own, are the poor…which is to say it will remove this exploitation and make the workers to be the owners of the economy and thereby benefit from their own sweat. Footnote 55
In response, speech after speech criticized NUTA's administrative problems and raised many of the same criticisms emanating from the NUTA rank-and-file later summarized in the presidential commission's report in October. Members accused NUTA of appointing incompetent administrators who wanted nothing other than ‘to be seen walking around with big bellies, pipes on their lips, beards and moustaches’. From Kamaliza's perspective, NUTA was caught between the government's desire to contain labor costs for the sake of economic growth, and NUTA's fundamental role of representing workers in a confrontational relationship with employers and government, advocating for higher pay, job security, and Africanization. Kamaliza's pique, evident in his speech and in the union's response to the commission, was that administrators were being personally blamed for structural contradictions in NUTA's role. It was a fair question, as J. R. Kibogoyo pointedly asked: was NUTA ‘a union for the government or employers?’ Footnote 56
The Swahili wafanya kazi is consistently the translation for ‘workers’, and prior to the Arusha Declaration, the Swahili matajiri was consistently the word for ‘employers’. The English language report of the presidential commission on NUTA referred to ‘employers’ in this non-ideological manner, and I use that word here as the translation for the non-ideological use of ‘matajiri’ (literally rich people) in the National Assembly debates. In NUTA's responses to the presidential commission, the word ‘employers’ is also translated as ‘matajiri’, and this remains common colloquial usage today. After the Arusha Declaration, the word matajiri faded out of political rhetoric, replaced by the more ideological and derogatory makabaila and mabepari to mean ‘feudalists’ (that is, large landowners) and ‘capitalists’ respectively. Footnote 57
No one picked up Kamaliza's suggestion of state-led industrialization until two weeks later in response to Nsilo Swai's official presentation for the Ministry of Industry, Minerals, and Electricity. Governmental strategy at the time was to encourage private investment in strategic areas, and Swai reviewed developments by various privately held companies. The radical leader of the TANU Youth League, Eli Anangisye, gave the first response, saying the Youth League would welcome an effort to increase industrial production and employment. He concluded with an uncharacteristically diffident call for state investment in industry.
I would just ask our Government if it could think about building our own industrial facilities, that they become ours via Governmental efforts which is to say they should be our property, and a plan to prepare our countrymen sufficiently to be able to take control of the same. Footnote 58
In an even more tentative mode, Joseph Kasella-Bantu spoke mostly of regulating and incentivizing private industry to develop according to national priorities, but posed a similar question, proposing a gradualist import-substitution strategy.
Why don't we ourselves try to set up things that can help this country by pursuing our own raw products?…Government could take on one or two major industries until they fulfill the demand of the people. Then other areas of industry can be in the private sector until the Government begins to show that they've accomplished a few jobs. Footnote 59
These cautious comments by some of the assembly's most outspoken politicians hint at the political potential latent in nationalization, but also its intimidating ambition as it would further stretch governmental capacities. Both comments proposed trial efforts to develop expertise. There is no hint at across-the-board nationalization of existing industries, and Nyerere's memo at the NEC meeting the month before only proposed a ‘mixed economy’. However, nationalization did emerge as a popular theme that had the political class chattering and Nyerere thinking about how to retain the initiative amidst insinuations that he was dragging his feet on socialism. Footnote 60
We might note that Kamaliza's speech used the word dhuluma to mean ‘exploitation’, rather than the more vulgar unyonyaji, which was rare in polite public discourse prior to Nyerere's Arusha speech, with its visceral account of rural men sucking beer through straws from a common vessel continually refilled by a lower-status attendant. Unyonyaji derived from the verb kunyonya (literally ‘to suck’), a term that James Brennan highlighted in important point of rhetorical insight into Tanzanian political culture. Prior to 1967 the term had a profane and often racialized connotation, but it had begun to percolate in official TANU rhetoric the year before. Footnote 61 The NUTA azimio at the end of the year quoted the new party constitution in its admonition to ‘prevent one person from exploiting [kumnyonya] another’. Footnote 62 As with makabaila and wabepari, unyonyaji only emerged in common usage after the Arusha Declaration, when its use became a sign of participation in the dominant political discourse. Its appearance, however, in Nyerere's 1967 speech was powerful precisely because it was already circulating among politicians as an emotive metaphor.
In addition to its ability to plug into global socialist tropes, unyonyaji had a distinctly African moral context, as Luise White has demonstrated. Footnote 63 Brennan anchored the term in indigenous medical practices which entailed a discourse of harm and healing generally translated as witchcraft and anti-witchcraft. Waganga (traditional healers) were often engaged to defend against wachawi (malevolent sorcerers), but these were overlapping categories separated by a moral distinction rather than one of power or practice. It was a recurring theme in letters to the editor, and a letter entitled ‘Stamp out this evil’ printed on 11 January 1967 was typical. Decrying its ubiquitous damage across rural Tanzania, the writer insinuated that witchcraft was a core element of the increasingly visible corruption of Tanzania's administrative class. Footnote 64 His framing also alerts us to the ‘social context of health and healing’, as witchcraft has effect not only on the body but also the body politic. Footnote 65
In this context, unyonyaji likewise marked a fundamentally moral status rather than a specific practice. Its verb form, kunyonya, can mean to ‘suck’ or ‘suckle’; sucking implying something parasitic while, by contrast, suckling is the right of an infant at the mother's breast. Footnote 66 A rural parliamentarian concluded his statement on NUTA's difficulties with a call for the union itself to establish factories, ‘because the Swahili have a saying, “The mother's breast is sweet, another's cannot satisfy”. Thus we look at the union of NUTA as our mother's breast, it must satisfy our needs’. Footnote 67 A few minutes later, to applause from the chamber, the Zanzibari deputy minister of finance insisted on an economy that ‘will not allow any person to suck [kumnyonya] the blood of a fellow person’. Footnote 68 These two statements within minutes of each other at the National Assembly highlighted a moral dichotomy embedded in economic metaphors attached to the verb kunyonya.
In a similar vein, Modestus Chogga took the government to task for low prices paid to farmers by agricultural marketing boards. Defending agricultural marketing cooperatives against another highly critical presidential commission report, Chogga complained about the displacement of cooperatives by government-appointed marketing boards. ‘This is to say that it [the Board] becomes itself the middleman who sucks [from the farmers, but in fact] we are sucking from each other…it causes the farmer to be sucked [exploited] of this money where instead if he received it himself, it would be better [for him]’. Footnote 69 The term ‘unyonyaji’, as a translation for exploitation made ubiquitous after the Arusha Declaration, resonated in East African culture but also channeled a long-standing European concept of ‘parasitism’ that became a prominent part of twentieth-century socialist rhetoric emanating from the Eastern Bloc. Footnote 70 Brennan makes clear that the Tanzanian concepts of ‘unyonyaji’ and kupe (tick/parasite) contributed to ‘purge categories’ whose characterization of the Asian minority merchant classes drew close parallels to European antisemitic tropes. Footnote 71 The interwoven African and European origins for these terms cannot be disentangled, and it is likely that their salience emerged precisely because of their ability to bridge these two cultural complexes. Footnote 72
The Swahili word for ‘economy’ is uchumi, which also derives from an agricultural reference — the verb kuchuma (to harvest) — which itself exists amidst a set of concepts and connotations relating rain and rainmaking to discourses of fertility and sexuality. Footnote 73 Nyerere's own given name, Kambarage, referred to a rain spirit. Footnote 74 Nyerere's 5 February speech in Dar es Salaam coincided with the late start to the main rainy season that year, and party activists had already associated Nyerere with an ability to control the rain. Footnote 75 TANU activist Khadija Binti Kamba recalled that at the first mass meeting she attended during the independence movement, Nyerere said ‘if self-rule is our right, and God-given, inshallah the rain will not fall on us’, and, in Kamba's memory of the event, ‘immediately all the rain disappeared…and there people asked, eh! What kind of man is this? A witchdoctor, a wizard, or what?…This is where many people were inspired by him’. Footnote 76 In the Great Lakes region, whence Nyerere hailed, a common term for king or political leader was mukama, sharing a root with the verb kukamua (to milk a cow; or to squeeze out juice or water). In these metaphors of governance, a political leader both facilitates agricultural production and takes a rightful share of it as his due for ensuring agricultural fertility. A well-regarded leader in this context provides for the people, who in this sense suckle like children at the metaphorical breast of the leader; by contrast a corrupt or tyrannical leader sucks (blood/milk) from the people in an illegitimate manner. Comparing taxation to ‘milk from a cow’, the Arusha Declaration drew on these debates and the moral distinction of sucking versus suckling inhering in East African metaphor. Footnote 77
In its meeting of 19 November 1966, the TANU central committee slated the subsequent NEC meeting for Tabora in February or March. Footnote 78 On 23 December, Nyerere flew to Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika to meet with Burundian representatives, and went thence to Mwanza on Lake Victoria and his home in Butiama for the Christmas holiday. Footnote 79 It is likely that Nyerere communicated with members of the Central Committee from Mwanza, prompting them to schedule a seminar for regional party secretaries in Arusha a month hence, on 23 January 1967. Footnote 80 In a meeting on New Year's Eve 1966, the day following Michael Kamaliza's plenary speech at the NUTA conference, the committee decided to merge the planned seminar for party members with a rescheduled meeting of regional commissioners in Arusha ‘since many issues to be discussed relate to leadership and administration’. Footnote 81
Official umbrage at NUTA's presumptuousness was expressed in a two-part essay in The Nationalist by Abdulrahman Babu. Just after the close of the NUTA meeting, Babu pilloried the union for its failure to propose a policy reflecting ‘working class thinking on socialism’, and instead hurling only the ‘accusation that we are not yet a socialist society’. Footnote 82 Babu's essay was published on 7 January, the same day as the first in a series of upcountry speeches by Nyerere that were broadcast almost daily as he made his way around Lake Victoria and then across the Serengeti region to Arusha. This same day, the central committee ‘was informed that the Father of the Nation gave a recommendation that the meeting of the National Executive Council that was to be held in Tabora in early March, should be held in Arusha after the meeting of the regional commissioners’. Footnote 83
The immediate concern related to TANU investigations into village-level allegations of embezzlement and financial mismanagement by party leaders and regional commissioners. Footnote 84 Describing the lead-up to the Arusha Declaration, Peter Kisumo recalled that within a few years of independence ‘when the government was guaranteeing loans for motor cars for middle and top-grade civil servants…a corrupt business group began talking to them…by the year 1965–66 you could see corrupt elements in the civil service’. Footnote 85 These concerns and the content of Nyerere's upcountry speeches indicate that the seminar topic proposed for Arusha entailed what came to be known as the Leadership Code.
The Leadership Code was not wholly new in the Arusha Declaration. In agreement with Coulson, Chachage argued that ‘socialism was the peg on which the doctrines of the Leadership Code were hung, and the nationalizations were corollary of the decision to present the main proposals as part of the overall move’. Chachage showed that most of the code's rules were copied from a British policy to cultivate ‘rational bureaucracy’ as it prepared its colonies for independence. Government was envisioned as a neutral administrator without political or economic loyalties. Footnote 86 On 22 December, the day before Nyerere left for his holiday, the government had issued a policy that became the core of the Leadership Code. Footnote 87 Regional and area (district) commissioners could own shares of private companies, provided they informed the president's office of their holdings, but they were not to take any position in private business. Footnote 88
In Nyerere's home library in Butiama, Shivji and his colleagues found a set of blurry mimeographed transcripts of these speeches. In his upcountry tour, Nyerere mostly reflected on his conversations with local party activists. At his first stop, in Jirango village, Mara Region, on the road to Mwanza from his home in Butiama, Nyerere promised economic development and educational improvement, and hinted at problems with corrupt regional commissioners. But the major local complaint was cattle rustling. Nyerere's response barely concealed a double meaning: ‘As for your other issues, I will go and discuss them with these commissioners…but the major issue, I've been told, is this one of theft. On this one, my friends, you all will have to help me with the thieves’. Footnote 89 He elaborated on this double entendre the following day on his way to inaugurate a textile factory in Mwanza.
My intention is to go talk with the people about development and not go to talk with the people about [cattle] theft…on the issue of theft I leave it in your hands…Go tell your area commissioners or your regional commissioners to deal with it. Right now I think today we probably have 60 or 70 thieves who will go work for us there [in local government], who will go build the country there, [but] they will build in some other way, [they are] not building but stealing. Footnote 90
At the factory opening later that day he highlighted a major theme that would emerge at the Arusha Declaration, of the need to fund industrial development with agricultural proceeds from cash crop sales abroad. Footnote 91 He talked about the growth of markets for cash crops: coffee, sisal, cashew, tobacco, pyrethrum. All this growth was important ‘because our development will depend a lot on agriculture’. Footnote 92 In Mwanza he lamented the delay in pushing forward with industrial policy, and blamed it on the capitalists (‘matajiri’) who ‘have no end to their…doubts and fears, outlandish fears’, even though there was a law on the books telling them ‘have no fear, we are not eating [confiscating] your property. But even so, their fears are without end’. He then explained that earlier in the morning, with TANU elders, he had recounted the Biblical parable about the rich young man who was asked to give up all his wealth and could not do it. With reference to political leaders in the crowd, the implication was that transformative development would require a leap of faith. ‘Self-government is not a village dance’. Nyerere concluded by returning to the reluctant capitalists, ‘these gentlemen, their fears are without end, we will compose another law, and we will give a speech and other things, but not just yet’.
In these nationally broadcast speeches, Nyerere hinted repeatedly at a major policy statement containing core elements of the Arusha Declaration: self-reliant industrial investment, equity between rural and urban development, and the enforcement of ethical administration. There was no hint that internal investment would entail the nationalization of existing firms, but that does not mean that such a policy was not under consideration as it was clearly in the air. To have announced nationalization prior to its implementation would have presumably caused panic and capital flight. It is possible that Nyerere had decided upon nationalization by January, but did not announce it, or even inform his ministers, until the day it was instituted on 6 February. Footnote 93
In Bukoba on 16 January, his speech mostly focused on the anniversary of the Zanzibari revolution and his respect for the Islamic holiday season of Ramadan. He used the tradition of Ramadan fasting to illustrate the utility of self-discipline in a manner that echoed his reference to Christian scripture the week before. He concluded by addressing the concerns of the NUTA azimio and the dogmatic calls for the clarification of Ujamaa:
So, a what does it mean to have country of Ujamaa? A country of Ujamaa is a country where there is no sucking of blood, where ogres don't suck blood,…where [a citizen] obeys the law of God that he should work by his own sweat…I say that a country of Ujamaa, a true Ujamaa, is one in which people are not exploited [sucked] of their own sweat. Footnote 94
What emerges is a skillful moral appeal to the intertwined Christian, Muslim, and indigenous religious context of the Tanzanian public. His message also crossed class lines. He asked the Christian capitalist to give up wealth in a leap of faith; he asked the Muslim merchant to endure a time of fasting; he asked every citizen who understood the sucking-as-exploitation metaphor to eschew profit from another's unremunerated labor. In this context, nationalization emerged as the moral inverse of sucking-as-exploitation. The otherwise modernist policy of nationalization also reflected a moral obligation of an authority figure in local metaphor of the milk-providing leader who provides for society. Coulson and Chachage's argument that Nyerere sweetened the restrictions of the Leadership Code by providing the bounty of the parastatals takes on a clearer cultural resonance in this metaphor.
The text of Nyerere's speech at the regional commissioner's conference on 23 January appears in a brief account by the TANU publicity secretary at the time, Fortunatus Lwanyantika Masha. Nyerere directly addressed activist demands from the previous year: the never-constituted commission on socialism, public ownership of industry, and unyonyaji. He reviewed themes from his cross-country tour, taking an uncompromising view on economic conflicts of interest.
In order to stop people exploiting others, they must be denied the means to do so…Deny them the power to own land, deny them the power to own minerals, deny them the power to employ labor…But there is another way to enable workers to own property…Workers can own industry. Footnote 95
To accomplish this, ‘workers must be controlling government.’ Political leaders should be considered ‘workers’, restricted to collecting one salary regardless of how many positions they held, and have no share in business nor own income-generating property. He called on TANU to implement this policy in 1967. The speech previewed the language of the Arusha Declaration and Leadership Code, and caused a good deal of consternation within party ranks. The party formed a committee to compose a formal party resolution based on the speech, chaired by Edward Barongo, a long-standing TANU member who was then regional commissioner for Ruvuma. Meanwhile, in Dar es Salaam, TANU secretary general Kambona initiated a parallel committee that included youth leader Anangisye which recommended across-the-board nationalizations and even broader leadership restrictions.
The Arusha Declaration that took form in January was an impromptu speech at an ad hoc party meeting, its timing and content driven by immediate issues rather than fully formed plans authorized by the party hierarchy. Nyerere had intended to issue a major ideological statement at a NEC meeting originally scheduled for March in Tabora, and thereby build upon that town's status as the site of previous important TANU meetings in 1954 and 1958. Footnote 96 While the party had begun envisioning tighter restrictions on political leaders and increased state involvement in economic development, there is little indication that across-the-board nationalizations were under consideration before January 1967. Opening the NEC meeting on 26 January, Nyerere revisited an image of unyonyaji from his speech to the regional commissioners, referring to his own Zanaki people.
If you go to England you'll see big buildings and other things that result from exploiting [kunyonya] their colonies…If we look closely, what exactly has been reduced in their meal that comes from this unyonyaji? Here in our country, they have their farms, they have their banks…There is a good example that I think will really help us explain this issue of unyonyaji. The Zanaki elders drink beer from a single pot using straws. Every elder has his straw. They suck their beer in the shade…There are people whose job it is to boil the water, since you make this beer by pouring in hot water. There are people whose job it is to make sure that the beer never diminishes in this pot. Others taste the beer to make sure the elders are getting good beer. The old men just sit and suck it up…Do we really govern ourselves? Here in our country there are lots of straws. Straws from Germany, the United States, England…We promised them that their straws can remain in place even after independence…We have become the ones who check to see if the pot is full…They come to investigate and others come to see the President and ask if everything is okay. I tell them everything is fine. They ask, ‘can we invest more?’ I answer, ‘Yes!’ They ask, ‘can we bring more straws?’ And I answer, ‘Bring them!’ They ask, ‘what about NUTA?’ I answer, ‘don't worry about NUTA.’…We assure them that they should not have worries about NUTA…The first stage of colonialism has gone but a new style of one country exploiting another is now in place. Footnote 97
Nyerere continued by pointing to interventionist policies and business practices in Europe and the United States, developing a thesis that can be recognized as Kwame Nkrumah's concept of neocolonialism. It had been just one year since Nkrumah had been overthrown with American support in Ghana, the coup at least partly intended to preserve American ownership of the Volta River Dam project. Footnote 98 Nyerere had been fighting political battles over neocolonial control in Congo, where Joseph Mobutu who was now firmly fixed in power with American support, and had just nationalized the Belgian mining company Union Minière. Ben Bella had been overthrown in Algeria, and in Indonesia Sukarno was defeated by an American supported military and gave his last speech under house arrest on 10 January 1967. Footnote 99 In the face of such trends the Arusha Declaration was a cry of outrage and defiance. It was also a performance of rhetorical excess intended to reinforce Nyerere's preeminence in Tanzania's political constellation. The entire series of speeches over the whole month had accomplished this, and by the end of January NUTA's azimio was all but forgotten and consciously erased from public memory. Instead its priorities were sanitized of racial populism and woven into Nyerere's speech, the official declaration, and its resulting policies.
In Swahili, the Arusha speech is known as the Azimio la Arusha, but that is not what Nyerere or the party called it initially. In normal usage, azimio is used to refer to a resolution or a ‘minute’ approved in a meeting of a legally constituted body. According to Shivji, the phrase Azimio la Arusha and its translation as the Arusha Declaration were coined by the young Cuban-trained editor of The Nationalist at the time, Kabenga Nsa Kaisi, who had anointed Nyerere's journey across the northern part of the country as a Maoist ‘long march’. Footnote 100 The day before Nyerere's NEC speech, The Nationalist reported that the NEC would adopt a document called the ‘Arusha Declaration’, to be drafted by the Barongo committee. Footnote 101 Interviewed in 2006, Barongo attributed the declaration entirely to Nyerere.
These were his [Nyerere's] ideas, they were Ujamaa ideas. There is no one who can sit here and deceive you that they helped Nyerere with this. It was him by himself, when we were in Arusha for the TANU National Executive meeting. He shut himself in a room for four hours while he wrote this thing. He came out, he read it, and we applauded him. Footnote 102
Asked about Ujamaa, Barongo said ‘I'm a Haya man. We believe in, we have that idea of “mine” [that is, private property]…The truth is that Mwalimu [Nyerere] had a unique skill, the skill to speak and bring everyone to agree with him’. There was much disgruntlement about the Arusha policies, but part of Nyerere's skill was to corral doubters into commitment by making them the authors and enforcers of TANU policy. Footnote 103 Barongo's post-retirement attribution to Nyerere belied his own central involvement in drafting the published policy document of the declaration. Likewise, Kambona's resignation six months later obscured his own contribution to socialist policy in January.
In its New Year's meeting, NUTA had debated the meaning of Ujamaa and implementation of socialism in Tanzania, and issued its own maazimio (the plural of azimio) at the close of its meeting on 4 January 1967. These resolutions were appended to a report submitted to the TANU meeting of 26–8 January, and collectively labeled as a single azimio in an introductory paragraph. Footnote 104 It was an innovative use of the term in that they referred to a laundry list of items collectively as a single azimio. That TANU eventually adopted the same term in the same manner signals a link between the NUTA declaration and the official text of the Arusha Declaration, whose policies reflected both NUTA's azimio and Nyerere's critical response to it, evident in his January speeches.
In the original version of the TANU minutes compiled shortly after the meeting, we encounter only the colorful opening speech by ‘The Father of the Nation’, an honorific for Nyerere as the founding chairman of TANU and first president of the independent nation. His speech was then revised in the official minutes into a more coherent statement by the Barongo committee and labeled as the Tamko la Arusha, tamko meaning something closer to the English ‘statement’ than the more legalistic ‘azimio’. Speaking in Swahili on 5 February, Nyerere used maazimio and the untranslated English word ‘resolution’, but the word azimio appeared only in the header of the radio transcript. Nsa Kaisi's retention of ‘declaration’ rather than ‘resolution’ as the English translation retained a sense of the sweeping grandeur of the speech. The published version, and the nationalizations that came in quick succession, made it clear that it was not just a philosophical statement but also a formal resolution to pursue a socialist policy. Months later, a TANU general secretary's report stated,
Many of us already knew that for a long time the idea was put out to form a Committee to elucidate Ujamaa…for various reasons the appointment of this commission was not possible, but despite this TANU saw that it could not be silent without doing something to guide Tanzania on a path built upon Ujamaa and Self-Reliance. Footnote 105
The sentence elides the impact of the NUTA azimio, and its call for just such a commission, thereby reclaiming TANU, and Nyerere in particular, as the initiator of the Arusha policies. Emma Hunter is correct in her assessment that ‘on a political level Arusha was a decisive attempt by Nyerere to recapture the initiative’. Footnote 106
The archival elision of NUTA's impact, the obscurity of parliamentary debates, and Nyerere's co-optation of their policy ideas and rhetorical devices obscured the diffuse composition of the Arusha Declaration, and thereby reinforced Nyerere's unique role as the indispensable leader and producer of Tanzanian policy and rhetoric. This co-optation and its effect were political acts. Analytically, we seek then to sort out the question of agency. To what extent can the Arusha Declaration be ascribed as an act of political genius saturated with Nyerere's personal agency? To what extent does its diffuse composition signal the impossibility of individual agency as an analytical concept? These are questions addressed in twentieth-century debates about language and discourse.
John Searle's concept of an ‘illocutionary act’ is an apt entry point to understand the particular power concentrated in the Arusha Declaration as a presidential speech and published policy. Such ‘speech acts’ deal with categories of speech that accomplish something specific by the mere fact of being uttered. Footnote 107 In one sense Nyerere's speech and the published declaration were mere rhetoric, but in becoming a ‘resolution’ of the ruling party they put policies into motion that initiated a vast reengineering of the political economy. This corresponds to Searle's category of declarations: ‘The speaker in authority brings about a state of affairs specified in the propositional content by saying in effect, I declare the state of affairs to exist’. Footnote 108 By constituting this discursive field with himself as its primary author, the speech augmented Nyerere's personal political authority. This effect was then reinforced by its illocutionary consequence of concentrating economic power in the political center and instituting a vast administrative bureaucracy over a nationalized economy.
Searle's work derives from a positivist anglophone tradition consciously cast in opposition to the discursive approach developed in francophone scholarship. The latter approach is evident in studies of Tanzania's politics by Schneider and Brennan. The implications of this ‘discursive condition’ are summarized in Elizabeth Ermarth's consummate manifesto centered on the problem of agency identified in ‘postmodern’ scholarship rooted in Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of language. Footnote 109 ‘Action’ (that is, agency) in Ermarth's conceptualization ‘is conceived as an enunciation, a specification of codes where multiple codes are in play’. Footnote 110 The Arusha Declaration(s) is not only a paradigmatic ‘declaration’ in Searle's sense, but also an ‘enunciation’ in Ermarth's vast sense, generating continual consequences for Tanzanian history, not just in policy, but in rhetoric and perception itself. The secretary of the Barongo committee, Peter Kisumo, recalled that the main difficulty was to define a socialist policy that was uniquely Tanzanian while maintaining the support of both moderates and hardliners in the party.
We wrote up some of the items that we believed would benefit the poor, but some of the items were ‘bookish’.… We borrowed some outside words [and] ‘phraseology’…but other ideas were interpretations of our life here together.… There were a few wealthy people, all foreigners, who monopolized the economy, and we had no doubt that it would be good, one day, if we could own the whole economy communally, without a few being very rich and others very poor. So we wrote it up [the resolutions of the meeting derived from Nyerere's speech] and we put it back before the [proper] authority, the National Executive. The Arusha Declaration was passed, like it was just a game! We left, we went to Dar es Salaam, and Nyerere got started. He implemented it. He knew exactly what he wanted.… On 5 February 1967 Mwalimu held the first [mass] meeting in Dar es Salaam. He explained that ‘we just came from Arusha. We made big decisions for our country’. He explained them, and he then implemented them right there. He said, ‘starting now, all the banks are the property of the government’. The people cheered… And as he said it, soldiers surrounded the banks. And nationalization began. Footnote 111
In fact, Kisumo conflated two speeches — Nyerere's Sunday afternoon speech introducing the Arusha Declaration, and his speech the following day nationalizing the banks — but in doing so, Kisumo highlighted their illocutionary effect. The party's vote on the matter was a mere formality, the declaration's real ratification happened when Nyerere put it incontrovertibly into action, with an immediacy that made the action an integral part of the statement. In retirement, former vice president Rashid Kawawa explained that the declaration was the (illocutionary) implementation of Ujamaa, by which ‘every law enacted has to address this basic policy’. Footnote 112 Its unique attribution to Nyerere further elided the influence of NUTA, the youth league, and the TANU radicals in parliament.
The implementation of what Henry Bienen called the ‘Arusha Formulations’ in the years that followed also entailed a purge of party dissidents, including Kambona, Anangisye, Chogga, and Kasella-Bantu; several of them were detained over the next few years, with Kamaliza and Kambona tried for treason. Footnote 113 But the censorial impact of these detentions and the enforcement of Nyerere's Arusha formulations come after-the-fact; they generate subsequent acts of power and new forms of contestation but do not explain the power generated in Nyerere's Arusha speech itself, which derives precisely from its diffuse inception. Nothing in it can be traced to a single originator; its contents emerge from an unbounded field of discourse made momentarily concrete, and subsequently powerful, in its delivery and reconstruction as policy declaration attributed entirely to Nyerere. This myopic attribution served as a type of double signature, authorizing the declaration by making Nyerere its sole agent, and thereby authorizing Nyerere as the prime mover who could do such things. If dramatic policy statements like the Common Man's Charter or the Ahiara Declaration followed Nyerere's lead, it was because they offered the possibility of a comparable exchange of signatures authorizing vast powers.
When a youth league spokesman tried to dethrone Nyerere's idiosyncratic and self-defined Ujamaa with a demand for a more explicit statement of socialism, that demand became at once a rallying cry questioning Nyerere's place at the center of Tanzanian politics, and an invitation for Nyerere to define socialism even more authoritatively and thereby reinforce his centrality. It is not simply that Nyerere took up the latter challenge and prevailed; rather as Hunter suggested, the circumstances for his commanding role were produced in the discursive conditions of postcolonial politics, where certain types of demands required the authorization of the same structural agents that their opponents hoped to contest. Footnote 114 This trade-off was just as true for dictators as for dissidents. Nyerere's ability to command depended on the co-optation of the demands of those who sought to displace him, and those demands were formulated in the diffuse circumstances of life itself.