Church and State

The fifth of February 1967 marked a new beginning for Africa. It was the day of the publication by Julius Nyerere of the Arusha Declaration on Socialism and Self-Reliance, to be quickly followed by two further documents Education for Self-Reliance and Socialism and Rural Development. These together outlined the policy which Tanzania has consistently attempted to apply since then: a policy of rural socialism and village re-groupment; overall state control of the economy; a stress upon self-help, local or national, in preference to reliance upon the assistance of international agencies, whether capitalist or communist; deliberate restriction of affluence of the elite; the primacy of the interests of the masses, especially the rural masses; a working democracy structured upon a one-party pattern. They represented the most serious challenge yet made to independent Africa's flagrant failure hitherto to do other than perpetuate, and even considerably accentuate, the elitist structures of a divided society inherited from imperial days. They also represented Nyerere's personal thinking, faced by the poverty of Tanzania and the wider collapse of African political morale in the mid-1960s. The epoch of Nkrumah as the continent's prime guru was over and that of Nyerere had begun: far less flamboyant than Nkrumah, less ambitious in continental terms, more aware of the weakness of his own position, more realistically down to earth of the village where most Africans live and die.

Ujamaa has not been everywhere in Tanzania a popular policy, particularly not with the incipient capitalists of wealthier areas, and since the increasingly compulsory tone of its implementation after 1973.