Michael Jennings. Surrogates of the State: NGOs, Development and Ujamaa in Tanzania. Bloomfield: Kumarian Press, 2008. xxi + 262 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-56549-243-1.

Reviewed by Goran Hyden (University of Florida)
Published on H-Africa (February, 2011)
Commissioned by Brett L. Shadle (Virginia Tech)

The Limits of Idealism in Tanzania

Few countries occupied a more prominent position in the minds of development analysts and practitioners in the 1960s and 1970s than Tanzania did. Its first president, Julius Nyerere, helped set the tone for the discourse on development by advocating his form of African socialism, Ujamaa, a concept that builds on the indigenous forms of familyhood in African societies. It was set up as a suitable alternative to the two contending and dominant paradigms at the time: liberal capitalism and totalitarian communism. His ideology, which also included an element of British Fabian socialism, was an answer to the search in many African countries for a self-reliant model of development and one that proved acceptable to the Third Way of the non-aligned movement.
Nyerere's socialist experiment, which lasted little more than ten years after it was first introduced in 1967 with the launching of the Arusha Declaration, was the subject of much scholarly attention in those days and into the 1980s. Following Tanzania's own turn away from socialism in the mid 1980s publications on the Ujamaa period have understandably become far fewer. Attention has instead turned to issues of governance and the challenges associated with the institutionalization of multiparty politics. Surrogates of the State, which analyzes the role that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) played in promoting the state-sponsored Ujamaa policies, focuses on a set of issues that were largely ignored in the previous literature. It is thus a welcome addition to the literature not only on Tanzania but also on the role of NGOs in the development field.

The scope of the book is initially quite wide as Jennings tries to situate his work in the broader development context of the time. The first three chapters introduce the reader to voluntarism in development (also an overview of the NGO sector), resettlement policies in Tanzania, and faith and development (a discussion of the church sector in the country). They constitute the background to the more specific discussion of the NGO role during the Ujamaa period which centers first and foremost on Oxfam, the British charity with which the author is especially familiar.

Despite a personal admiration for Oxfam and its philosophy of empowering the poor, Jennings keeps a professional distance in his analysis of the organization's work in Tanzania during the 1960s and 1970s, the time period that he covers in some detail. As the title of his book indicates, he is especially critical of how the Oxfam ideals became compromised through an unquestioned approval of what the Tanzanian state did in its efforts to develop the country's rural areas.

The puzzle that the author tries to solve is why an organization so proud of its operational independence would agree to go along with a policy that quite early on revealed consequences that were opposite to the stated objective of empowering people in Tanzanian villages. The enthusiasm with which the Oxfam field director and staff reported about the process of creating communal villages influenced the central organs of the organization as well. A statement from one of the staff reports reads: "Tanzania's brand of socialism ... has great appeal to those of us who are idealists.... As a philosophy it is hard to beat" (p. 174). What Tanzania wanted to do was also what Oxfam wished to promote.

Oxfam went along with this assumption despite at least two clear signals that should have given the staff reason to reflect on their position. The first was the disbanding of the Ruvuma Development Association, a group of villages where inhabitants had agreed on a voluntary basis to engage in communal production and life. To Nyerere, the RDA had been one of the inspirations to the Ujamaa program, but even his enthusiasm for the initiative could not save it from closure by the ruling party hierarchy in 1969. Jennings is the first writer to make the RDA incident an important explanation of the failure of Ujamaa to really become what it was intended to be--a grassroots empowerment of local villagers to engage in communal production on a voluntary basis for a better life together. The second signal, which has been picked up by most analysts of the Tanzanian experiment--the shift from a focus on collective production to mere settlement in villages--was also largely ignored until the exercise was complete in 1976. During this whole period, therefore, Oxfam blindly embraced the official state policy, despite the fact that its tenets and practice contradicted the ideals of the organization.

The larger lesson that this story tells us is how little difference idealism could make in an era when the state was viewed as the evident engine of development and its policies were justified with reference to values embraced by liberal and leftist NGOs in the West. They allowed themselves to play the role not only of service providers but also legitimizing agents of authoritarian measures carried out in the name of development. The legacy of the days when the state could do what it wanted in the name of development still lingers on in Tanzania and many other African countries, the difference today being that the current generation of NGOs is more ready to oppose human rights violations of the type that occurred in the Ujamaa days. In short, they are more ready than earlier NGOs to combat the limits to idealism and voluntarism that continue to exist.

Jennings's book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of a critical period in contemporary Tanzanian history. It also speaks to broader, comparative issues such as the role of voluntarism in development. The book is well researched both in Tanzania and in the archives in Oxford. It is written with an attempt to understand the minds of the principal actors in Oxfam without at the same time becoming apologetic of their particular viewpoints. My criticism of the book centers on the following points: (1) the organization and presentation of the material, (2) the interpretation of the events surrounding the intervention to stop RDA, and (3) the choice of factors to explain what happened.

It takes far too long before the reader gets to the crux of the matter--the issue of NGOs like Oxfam getting caught in a process that negates their own principles and ideals. The beginning half of the book discusses background and context. While both are important for the reader, such information could have been handled more parsimoniously. It could have been substituted by more information and analysis of the principal case study. Oxfam in Tanzania constitutes a fascinating story and more could have been said about its own internal dynamics. As the book stands, it is less focused because it tries to give equal attention to development, Tanzania, and Oxfam and merge discussions of each into one.

Jennings wants the readers to believe that the intervention to put an end to the voluntary nature of the RDA was the work of key members of the central organs of the ruling party who wanted to control the expansion and implementation of Ujamaa on their own. Personal interventions by the Oxfam field director at the highest level--he was a close friend of Nyerere's private secretary--to leave RDA untouched as a voluntary organization were made to no avail. A plausible alternative explanation of this event is that the party's top organs decided against the continuation of RDA because it was located in a politically sensitive area where freedom fighters from Mozambique were operating. The party leaders were reluctant to have a good number of European and American volunteers in the area. The enthusiasm that the field director and all the other volunteers demonstrated over the work of the RDA, therefore, became a reason for clamping down on the association. Jennings alludes to the sensitivity issue but does not pursue it as part of the explanation of what happened to RDA.

The author has done a good job in going through reports and other archival material, but his explanation of what determined specific decisions seems often a little too closely tied to what this archival material tells or indicates as most likely factors to consider. He could have placed his case more historically in the period that he covers. More specifically he could have made more of the statist approach to development that was shared all around in the 1960s and 1970s by not only donor governments but also other stakeholders. He could also have given more weight to the tasks of nation-building that faced Tanzania so soon after independence as well as its commitment to the liberation struggle in Mozambique which was played out in the very area where Oxfam had its most important project. These and related issues were important elements in shaping the outlook of the political leadership that the book could have devoted more attention to.

These issues notwithstanding, this book enhances our knowledge of a particularly important period in post-independence Tanzania and should be of interest to anyone interested in the challenges facing NGOs working in the development field in Africa.

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Citation: Goran Hyden. Review of Jennings, Michael, Surrogates of the State: NGOs, Development and Ujamaa in Tanzania. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. February, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30969

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