Agrarian Poetics and Development Dreams: Ujamaa Villagization and Literary Experiments in Tanzania
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This talk revisits Tanzania’s experiment in agricultural collectivization through villagization under President Julius Nyerere between 1967 and 1976, a project animated by the intertwined influences of Pan-Africanism and Maoist models of rural development. While official narratives celebrated the achievements of the Arusha Declaration, scholars such as James C. Scott have shown that Nyerere’s vision of permanent peasant resettlement remained strikingly continuous with British colonial discourses of agrarian modernization and social planning. Reading debates in radical student journals of the 1970s alongside the literary work of writers and playwrights such as Ismael Mbise and Ebrahim Hussein, the talk traces a central tension within agrarian socialism: between its articulation as a developmental project of large-scale social engineering and accumulation, and its promise of popular self-government and autonomy. It attends in particular to how the contradictions of this period were refracted and negotiated through literary form, from experiments in literary realism to a range of emergent and hybrid genres.
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