across different regions of the country, much less to support them in a boarding school environment. To the extent that sparse population helped ameliorate the ethnic tensions that might have arisen from competition over scarce land resources that factor, too, is outdated. Tanzania’s population has more than quadrupled since independence, from about ten million to more than forty-five million people, and population pressures in some areas have begun to trigger scattered incidents of conflict over land between pastoral and agricultural communities, a division that corresponds to an ethnic cleavage. Although the Tanzanian constitution and electoral laws continue to proscribe ethnically based appeals, the freer political atmosphere that has attended the rebirth of multipartyism has opened a wider political space for ethnic expressions. The new political environment has reduced the government’s ability to maintain tight controls over political discourse, including appeals to ethnicity. Perhaps the most consequential change has been the death of Nyerere himself and the loss of the moral force he brought to the idea of a non-ethnic culture for his country.
Why, then, has ethnicity not asserted itself with greater force in Tanzania? A theory of cultural pluralism that emphasizes the importance of inequalities between different ethnic groups provides one answer. Colonial historian John S. Furnivall first developed the idea that ethnicity was a volatile political factor in socioeconomic environments where differing ethnic groups had differing amounts of access to the upper levels of a society, such as the highest positions in government and administration or the business sector.18 Later cultural pluralists termed this phenomenon “differential incorporation,” a concept that called attention to ethnic frictions that arise when a country’s patterns of economic, social, and political stratification display distinctively ethnic characteristics. Later cultural pluralists also believed that the volatility of stratification along ethnic lines derived from the tendency for people to perceive this form of inequality as relatively permanent.19
Colonial Tanzania exhibited one important element of this phenomenon. Members of Tanzania’s Asian community—persons of Indo-Pakistani descent—tended to be concentrated at the middle or upper levels of the Tanzanian social structure. They were prominent in Tanzania’s mercantile sector as the owners of the business enterprises that conducted much of the country’s retail trade. During the colonial period, Asians were also a conspicuous presence in Tanzania’s white-collar professions, in the middle levels of the civil service, and in the clerical and managerial levels of major private sector organizations, such as the country’s largest banks, insurance companies, and trading firms. The Asian presence as a predominant middle class seemed to represent a significant barrier to African upward mobility both in the public sector and in the middle levels of these private sector institutions, a goal that was at the heart of the Tanzanian nationalist movement.
At the time of independence, the prominent Asian presence in the middle class gave rise to an intense debate among nationalists over whether their post-independence government should pursue an indigenization policy that would privilege Tanzanians of indigenous descent over those whose family backgrounds traced to different continents.20 Within TANU, Nyerere favored a nonracial policy. A small number of party members favoring a policy of indigenization, however, split off and formed an opposition called the African National Congress (ANC). Nyerere and the nonracialists won the debate between the two groups, ensuring that the government would not use its powers to create preferred social categories based on ethnicity or race.
The success of this policy is at the heart of modern Tanzanian politics. It helps explain why Tanzanians were prepared to accept the failed economic policies the Nyerere Government implemented along with the conjoined problems of repression and corruption. Tanzanians never perceived the Nyerere government’s economic policies as an attempt to confer benefits on favored groups while depriving others. This also explains why Tanzanians have not reacted with greater vehemence to their country’s all-pervasive and seemingly intractable problem of official corruption. Although Tanzanians abhor corruption, they do not perceive it as a pattern of economic transfers that moves wealth from ethnic have-nots to ethnic haves.
The limitations of an ethnically based approach to Tanzanian politics call attention to the need for a different way to understand the country’s post-independence trajectory. Political economy provides it. Regarding the relationship between ethnicity and politics, Tanzania has little in common with other independent African countries. Regarding its post-independence economic trajectory, however, it has almost everything in common.
Political Economy and Tanzanian Development
In the field of political economy, Tanzania attracts attention because of the extended process of economic decline that began immediately after independence and continued for nearly twenty-five years, until the beginning of economic reforms in the mid-1980s. Tanzania’s post-independence policies failed in many respects. The socialist strategy of economic development did not lead to growth; it did not narrow the gap between the country’s urban middle class and the vast majority of the rural poor. It did not prevent the emergence of a privileged political-economic elite. The principal reason for Tanzania’s economic decline lay in its poor choice of economic policies during the post-independence period. This much is unsurprising: poor policies produce poor results. What remains is the need to answer Robert Bates’s enduring question: “Why should reasonable men adopt policies that have harmful consequences for the societies they govern?”21 The answer is that Tanzania’s choice of policies derived from a set of ideas about economic development that prevailed throughout the developing world during the generation following World War II. The ideas that had the greatest influence in Tanzania were those of the sub-field of economics its practitioners termed development economics.
Post-independence Tanzania had two distinct economic philosophies, each important in its own way. The first was the socialist humanism of Julius Nyerere, a set of convictions that grew out of his long interest in the mild socialism of the British Fabian society. Nyerere’s ideas attracted global admiration and captured the attention of the Tanzanian people. Because they set forth the normative objectives of Tanzanian development, they attracted the respectful support of his fellow leaders as well as the admiration of students, scholars, and international organizations everywhere. The second set of ideas consisted of the analysis of the development economists. This intellectual framework consisted of a large body of scientific research about how developing countries with agriculturally based economies could best attain rapid economic growth. Although these ideas were less accessible than Nyerere’s because of their arcane terminology and daunting mathematics, they had a great influence on the government’s day-to-day decisions about development policy.
The core of development economics was simple and compelling. The development economists believed that industry, not agriculture, offered the greatest prospect of rapid economic growth. Governments that wanted to attain economic growth should therefore find ways to launch industrial development. The fundamental challenge was how to go about doing so. Their answer was to create a set of infant industries that, until they could stand on their own, would require protection from competition by global industrial giants. The immediate practical question was how to finance these industries. The development economists’ answer was that these industries would require financial support from a variety of sources. One would be foreign public investment, through aid programs that would provide resources for infrastructure and improved public services. The second would be foreign private investment from corporations anxious to do business in a protected environment. The third would be the governments themselves, which would need to impose taxes on the agricultural sector to gain the revenues necessary to provide domestic capital for investment in the new industries. The vast majority of the world’s developing countries adopted this strategy, Tanzania among them.
The development economists believed that their strategy for economic growth would enable developing countries such as Tanzania to transform themselves, within a short period from low-performing agricultural economies to higher-performing ones based on an expanding industrial base. The name they assigned to this strategy was import-substituting industrialization (ISI), and this approach prevailed in regions of the
