cultivation; the Sumbawanga area in the southwestern part of the country is an important area of corn cultivation; and the Mtwara Region in the southeastern region of the country is an important area of cashew nut production. The wide distribution of arable lands means that members of many different ethnic groups are able to participate in high value agriculture, thereby preventing the emergence of a sense that high value agriculture is limited to only one or two fortunate communities.
Land abundance has been critically important. With an independence-era population of just over ten million, distributed over an area that contained many regions with good quality agricultural land, there were no land pressures that caused ethnic groups to compete for this resource. As recently as the 1990s, despite a fourfold population increase since independence, from ten million to nearly forty million, developmentally oriented geographers continued to suggest that Tanzania possessed unsettled areas of agriculturally suitable land.13 Although the quality of this land and therefore its suitability for high versus medium value crops varied from one region to the next, Tanzanians did not experience a land environment in which the land needs of one community could only prevail at the expense of others. Although Tanzania today has begun to experience incidents of competition for land, as when agricultural populations begin to encroach on areas that have been the traditional grazing habitat for migratory pastoralists, such problems are still relatively rare.
The regional distribution of the population also contributed to the atmosphere of civil peace. Most of Tanzania’s best land areas are located near the perimeters, along its border with neighboring countries, and not near Dar es Salaam. The dispersed location of quality lands has resulted in a doughnut-shaped population distribution, with significant concentrations near the borders of Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, and Mozambique and significantly less population density in the center of the country. The ethnic groups that have enjoyed agriculturally based development are at a physical remove from the capital, and this has made it difficult for them to translate their agricultural advantages into commensurate political advantages.
In contrast to numerous African capital cities, Dar es Salaam arose and developed as a multicultural city. It had its earliest beginnings as a commercial center rooted in the Indian Ocean trade in ivory and human beings. Unlike Nairobi, for example, Dar es Salaam is not located in the center of the most fertile agricultural area, and the ethnic group that occupies the region, the Zaramo, has not had the insurmountable double advantage of agrarian prosperity combined with close physical proximity to political power. The slave caravans that fanned out from Dar es Salaam captured their victims from a variety of regions throughout eastern Africa, and some remained behind as a work force in Dar es Salaam and other coastal cities. Over many centuries, Dar es Salaam became a place of residence where Tanzanians of a wide mixture of ethnic groups worked and made their homes. Sociologist Deborah Bryceson has used the term creolization to call attention to its rich mixture of the country’s many cultures and languages. Individual neighborhoods may have ethnic characteristics but no ethnic group dominates the city’s economic, political, or cultural life.14
Distinctive aspects of Tanzania’s colonial experience further contributed to the low salience of ethnicity. The first thirty years or more of Tanganyika’s colonial experience, from 1885 to 1918, took place under German rule. Unlike the British, who emphasized the importance of traditional authorities as the basic administrative units of colonial government, a practice that hardened ethnic identities, German colonial practice emphasized direct forms of administration that suppressed traditional institutions and cultures. German officials tended to disregard indigenous institutions, which they treated with a mixture of indifference and contempt. They preferred instead to govern through a system of centrally recruited administrators called akidas, whom they then deployed to localities with which they did not have any cultural commonalities. The akida system diffused Swahili throughout Tanzania, since local communities could only communicate with their appointed akidas through a commonly spoken language. It also perfectly exemplified the German refusal to acknowledge or incorporate local forms of organization.15
By the time Britain assumed colonial jurisdiction over Tanganyika in 1918 through the League of Nations Mandate system, local forms of institutional authority had been so thoroughly squelched that it was often necessary to create these anew before implementing indirect methods of colonial administration. Britain’s determination to administer Tanzania through the indirect rule system made it necessary to ascribe political identity and impose political organization on language communities that did not have a history of political solidarity. Aili Mari Tripp has shown that a number of Tanzania’s largest ethnic groups are of relatively recent colonial creation. Far from having deep historic roots, numerous ethnic groups in Tanzania are the products of Britain’s twentieth-century application of the indirect rule system.16
Tanzania’s status as a ward of the international community from the end of World War I until its independence in 1961 also contributed to ethnic peace. At the end of the war, Tanganyika became a League of Nations Mandate and after World War II it became a United Nations Trusteeship Territory. International supervision caused British colonial rule in Tanganyika to be less severe than that in most other colonial territories. First, it introduced the assumption of an eventual but timely transition toward national independence. The League of Nations did not permit Britain to develop Tanganyika as a permanent settler colony as it had done in Kenya and Rhodesia. Absent a significant settler presence, Tanzania’s abundant supply of arable land remained in African hands: land alienation did not foster a problem of land scarcity that pitted one ethnic group against another in a life or death struggle over a scarce resource.17 International supervision also meant that the British government had to treat emerging African nationalist organizations with greater restraint than it showed elsewhere. Britain was less able to employ ethnically based tactics of divide and rule by creating political alliances with favored groups to maintain better control over others. As nationalism in Tanganyika began to take full shape in the late 1950s, it was not riven by internal strains between ethnic communities that felt differently about how they had been treated by colonial administration.
To preserve and build on this inheritance, Nyerere and the TANU government began to implement a set of policies intended to create a cultural climate in which Tanzanians would not organize their political organizations based on separate ethnic identities. The first step was to ban racially or religiously based schools and hospitals. These had to become public institutions open to Tanzanians of all races and religions. In the effort to create a non-ethnic social culture, the government gave its highest priority to educational policy. It changed most of the country’s high schools into boarding schools so that students from diverse regions of the country would live and study together. The government undertook similar efforts with respect to teachers and principals. The goal of educational policy was for each high school to become a microcosm of the nation, where a community of ethnically diverse students would study, play, live, and work together, alongside an equally mixed educational staff.
Following their high school education, Tanzanian students were obliged to participate in a National Service program that continued the process of mingling students of different ethnic groups in common projects in which they worked together building schools, improving roads, and constructing community buildings. Young Tanzanians who joined the military and became members of the Tanzanian People’s Defense Force (TPDF) became absorbed in a non-ethnic environment in which military units comprised soldiers from all regions of the country. Countless older Tanzanians remember their high school and National Service experience as a time when they formed friendships across cultural lines, played together on multicultural sports teams, and participated in multicultural musical and dramatic activities.
Many of the factors that initially gave rise to Tanzania’s atmosphere of civil peace have long since disappeared. German colonialism in Tanganyika ended almost a century ago. The benign effects of international supervision ended with independence, more than fifty years ago. As Tanzania’s economy declined, financial pressures necessarily constrained the scope and scale of the government’s efforts to mingle students of various ethnicities together at the secondary school level. Budgetary
