Independence
By 1958 internal and external developments had opened the way to self-government, achieved in September 1960; independence quickly followed in December 1961.
Progress toward independence in Zanzibar, initially slow, gathered steam in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The situation in Zanzibar and Pemba was not simple, allegiances and antipathies based on race, socioeconomic class, and religion cutting across one another. In the end the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) achieved a popular majority, but a coalition of two minority parties held a parliamentary majority when independence was granted in December 1963. In January 1964 a revolution led to the ouster of the Arab-led coalition and the end of the sultanate. On April 26 Tanganyika and Zanzibar joined to form the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar (later the United Republic of Tanzania).
The reasons for the union were complex and are not altogether clear. In any case there were no significant implications for the internal political and economic systems of the mainland or the islands. Zanzibar maintained its autonomy in virtually all matters. Only in 1977 when the ASP and TANU formally became one under the name of the Revolutionary Party (Chama Cha Mapinduzi — CCM) were tentative steps taken toward the integration of the two territories.
From self-rule in 1960 to the mid-1960s, Tanganyika was a de facto one-party state, but TANU was given a subsidiary role as Nyerere and his colleagues sought to function in terms of the parliamentary system given by the independence constitution prepared by the British. They also relied heavily on British civil servants and assumed that development necessarily required a great deal of foreign aid, British and other.
These assumptions gradually gave way in the face of internal discontents and conflicts with the Western powers. The internal pressures, present from the beginning, arose from Nyerere's reluctance to Africanize the civil service too swiftly lest expertise and efficiency be diminished and from his unwillingness to cater to what he considered African racialism. Nevertheless some adjustments were carried out.
The growing wealth of party and government leaders was dealt with by instituting a leadership code; the code required that they give up most of their sources of wealth other than their salaries, a step that led to some disgruntlement but was in part, at least, effective. Above all, Nyerere's conception of socialism was founded on his view of the nature of the traditional African rural community, and it was oriented to the axiom that the great bulk of the mainland's population would remain agricultural.
This set of ideas and assumptions accounts for the salience of the idea of ujamaa in the years after the Arusha Declaration. Ujamaa, inadequately translated as familyhood, refers to a pattern of equality, cooperation, interdependence, and sharing presumably characteristic not only of the family but also of traditional rural communities, even if they are not composed of kin. Given Tanzania's essentially rural character, ujamaa was to be made concrete in ujamaa villages. But if a mode of village social and economic organization was to go hand in hand with economic development and the provision of social services to which all Tanzanians were entitled, the dispersed communities characteristic of much of Tanzania would have to give way to nucleated ones — a process that came to be called villagization.
After a slow start and a good deal of coercion, villagization proceeded rapidly in the mid-1970s; ujamaa as a set of attitudes and social arrangements took hold much more slowly, a fact recognized by Nyerere and others. The idea was not abandoned, however; it was assumed that the process would take longer and that it could not be coerced.
A second salient point in the Arusha Declaration was the notion of self-reliance (kujitegemea). Both leaders and followers had come increasingly to assume that economic development depended on huge quantities of aid from foreign sources, untenable and unfortunate in Nyerere's view. He did not reject such aid (and it was, in fact, still very important in the late 1970s), but he considered the attitude an obstacle to hard work by Tanzanians. One of TANU's early slogans was "Freedom and Work" (Uhuru na Kazi); the latter intended to disabuse Tanzanians of the idea that independence alone would bring the millennium. His insistence on self-reliance was consistent with the earlier notion. These attempts to institute socialism involved a degree of coercion. Further, it has been assumed that a consensus existed and that opposition to that postulated consensus could stem only from a selfish perspective or from external sources, and suppression has followed (see ch. 2; ch. 5). Nevertheless public and private criticism of specific programs and, indeed, of instances of coercion does occur, and the government takes account of it, even if after the fact.
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