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| Mahmood Mamdani |
Assessments of Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first president,
are conventionally focused on his quest for ujamaa, a just social order based
on community solidarity. Whereas supporters hailed ujamaa as a creative
adjustment of socialist thought to local realities, critics contemptuously
dismissed it as a romantic and unscientific endeavour.
Nyerere’s concern with social justice needs to be understood
in the context of his overriding commitment to building a nation state. In his
farewell address to the Tanzanian Parliament on July 29 1985, Nyerere recalled:
“The single most important task, which I set out in my inaugural address in
December 1962, was that of building a united nation on the basis of human
equality and dignity.”
