The Rationalization of Space and Time: Dodoma and Socialist Modernity (original) (raw)

Construction of Postcolonial Tanzanian National Identity

Scaling Identities: Nationalism and Territoriality , 2017

Tanzania has one of Africa's most developed national identities, despite its large size and ethnic diversity (see textbox 5.1). In a 2009 Afrobarometer study, Robinson (2009, 13) found that Tanzanians were more nationalistic than people from many other African countries (figure 5.1). The country's high nationalism is the product of a complex interplay of its centripetal (unifying) and centrifugal (divisive) forces in the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. Despite being poor, highly ethnically diverse, and being a former British colony that did not fight a bloody unifying anticolonial war, Tanzania is highly patriotic because of its prevalent use of Kiswahili as a national and instructional language, the nationalist content of its primary school curriculum, the relatively fair regional distribution of state resources in the early postindependence era, and the leadership of the country's first president, Julius Nyerere (Robinson 2009). Moreover, Tanzania is united because of the weakening of clan-based identities through the slave trade; the strengthening of larger identities through resistance to German, Portuguese, Arab, and British incursions; the country's short, weak, and less-divisive British colonial imprint because of a UN trusteeship; the lack of a politically or economically dominant ethnic group in the country; the country's large and well-endowed territory relative to its population; the gradual development of an internal circulation (transport and communication) system; the uniting influence of external threats; and the potentially beneficial impact of regional, continental, and global supranationalism. Tanzania is also faced with many centrifugal forces including the cultural and geographic Zanzibar-mainland split; its growing ethnic, religious, regional, rural-urban, and class distinctions under neoliberalism; the failures of post-Nyerere leaders; the decay and corruption of the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM); a rapidly growing population that is increasingly forced to compete for resources at the local, 17_441_Herb.indb 85 7/13/17 5:55 AM