Michael F. Lofchie

Political and Economic Origins of African Hunger

Drought and famine have become so inextricably linked in both popular and academic analyses of Africas food problems in the 1970s that the relationship between the two is now taken almost axiomatically as cause and effect. The logic is simple and persuasive. Drought produces crop failure and crop failure, just as inevitably, leads to human starvation. This reasoning and the colour photography of starving children in the world press have proved so irresistible that social scientists have had surprisingly little role in scholarly discussions of the causes of the recent African famine. The subject has been left almost entirely to climatologists, physical geographers, water experts, and agronomists. Social scientists have so taken it for granted that the causes of African famine are natural and climatic that most of their literature on the subject falls into the genre of‘impact’ studies which omit the issue of causality and deal almost entirely with the social and political after effects.

Agrarian Crisis and Economic Liberalisation in Tanzania

It is now generally acknowledged that Tanzanias policy of rural collectivisation has been abandoned as a failure. By most accounts, systematic efforts to bring about collective production ceased altogether during 1975 and may have halted, informally, as early as the end of 1974. According to the Villages and Ujamaa Villages Act of 1975, one or another form of block farming is considered sufficient for a village to become officially identified as an ujamaa village. Thus, ujamaa as a concept once intended to convey a social ideal of collective ownership, labour, and sharing is reduced to describing a state of affairs in which individual farming is intermittently supplemented by occasional cooperation in such tasks as planting and harvesting. Villagisation without socialism is, in effect, the current policy.

The Uganda Coup—Class Action by the Military

There will undoubtedly be many interpretations of the Uganda coup. The purpose of this article is merely to suggest one and, on the basis of available, though admittedly incomplete evidence, to outline a case for its plausibility. The central argument is as follows. The Uganda army can be best understood as a kind of economic class, an elite stratum with a set of economic interests to protect. The coup of January 1971 was the armys political response to an increasingly socialist regime whose equalitarian domestic policies posed more and more of a threat to the militarys economic privileges.

Party Conflict in Zanzibar

T he British Protectorate of Zanzibar, comprising the two islands of Zanzibar and Pemba and a number of small adjacent islands, is progressing from Protectorate status towards self-government. In strict constitutional terms, Zanzibar is a multi-racial state with an Arab Sultan under the protection of the Government of Great Britain. Though the concept of protectorate implies a limited domestic role on the part of the protecting power, Great Britain has—through usage, agreement, and concession—come to occupy a position of decisive ascendancy within Zanzibar. The present policy of the British administration is to devolve full political power into local hands through a process of constitutional development which will result in a fully representative system of government. This policy has expressed itself in Zanzibar, as elsewhere in the British African territories, in the expansion of the unofficial side of the Legislative Council, in the gradual replacement of nominated and ex-officio members of the Legislative Council by members chosen on the basis of nation-wide common roll elections, and in the introduction of a ministerial system, which is now to be followed by internal self-government.

The Roots of Civic Peace in Tanzania

Tanzania’s1 postindependence politico-economic trajectory is familiar in every major respect but one. In the economic realm, its well-documented decline replicated the economic experience of a host of other newly independent African nations. The two decades following independence in 1961 were a period of deepening economic crisis, as the country suffered a decline that sharply lowered real per capita income. Tanzania’s postindependence political trajectory also followed a familiar pattern, as the lively multiparty democracy of the early independence period was replaced by a single-party system that maintained itself principally through a host of repressive mechanisms and oppressive laws. Within a short time of independence, Tanzania had become a one-party autocracy. However, Tanzania has differed markedly from the vast majority of African countries in a third important respect. It possesses a culture of civic peace that contrasts with the political atmosphere in African countries where ethnic or religious animosities are the basis for political conflict. In Tanzania, ethnicity, religion, and race do not provide the principal bases of political affiliation or party identification, and Tanzanians recoil at political parties or leaders that seek to politicize these factors for their political advantage.

The murder of Wilbert Klerruu: collective agriculture on trial in Tanzania

ABSTRACT This article uses the idea of a “tipping event” to help explain why the Government of Julius Nyerere called an abrupt end to the collective aspect of its policy of collective villagization. Perhaps the most striking feature of the program was its precipitous trajectory; intensive efforts at collectivization between 1970 and early 1973 gave way to an abrupt de-emphasis on the collective aspect of the program that may have begun to manifest itself as early as mid-1972. Of all the Tanzanian governments ambitious efforts to build a socialist economy, which included nationalization of the banking system, rental housing, and large industries as well as the creation of a state monopoly over the procurement, processing, and marketing of food staples, collective agriculture was the most short-lived. On Christmas Day 1971, an Ismani farmer, Saidi Abdallah Mwamwindi, shot and killed the Iringa Regional Commissioner, Dr. Wilbert Andrew Klerruu. As the murder trial proceeded during 1972, even the most ideologically inclined of Nyereres allies became aware that their choice of agricultural policy was imposing deep political costs on the governing party in the form of declining rural support.

The Politics of Africa's Economic Stagnation

List of tables Acknowledgements Glossary Map 1. Disappointments of independence 2. Why capitalism fails 3. Colonial roots of the contemporary crisis 4. Class, tribe and politics 5. Anatomy of personal rule 6. The downward spiral 7. Survival strategies Notes Index.