Blood Enemies: Exploitation and Urban Citizenship in the Nationalist Political Thought of Tanzania, 1958–75

Brennan, James Robert

doi:10.1017/s0021853706001794

Cited by 70 publications

(28 citation statements)

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“…Moreover, it is not uncommon to find marriages between Muslims and Christians. However, there are currently increasing concerns of tensions between Muslims and Christians on mainland Tanzania, including Morogoro region (see De Mey, 1997;Brennan, 2006;Mesaki, 2011).…”

Section: Morogoro Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rumours, Riots and the Rejection of Mass Drug Administration for the Treatment of Schistosomiasis in Morogoro, Tanzania

Hastings

2016

J. Biosoc. Sci.

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SummaryIn 2008 in Morogoro region, Tanzania, mass drug administration (MDA) to school-aged children to treat two neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) – urinary schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminths – was suspended by the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare after riots broke out in schools where drugs were being administered. This article discusses why this biomedical intervention was so vehemently rejected, including an eyewitness account. As the protest spread to the village where I was conducting fieldwork, villagers accused me of bringing medicine into the village with which to ‘poison’ the children and it was necessary for me to leave immediately under the protection of the Tanzanian police. The article examines the considerable differences between biomedical and local understandings of one of these diseases, urinary schistosomiasis. Such a disjuncture was fuelled further by the apparent rapidity of rolling out MDA and subsequent failures in communication between programme staff and local people. Rumours of child fatalities as well as children’s fainting episodes and illnesses following treatment brought about considerable conjecture both locally and nationally that the drugs had been either faulty, counterfeit, hitherto untested on humans or part of a covert sterilization campaign. The compelling arguments by advocates of MDA for the treatment of NTDs rest on the assumption that people suffering from these diseases will be willing to swallow the medicine. However, as this article documents, this is not always the case. For treatment of NTDs to be successful it is not enough for programmes to focus on economic and biomedical aspects of treatment, rolling out ‘one size fits all’ programmes in resource-poor settings. It is imperative to develop a biosocial approach: to consider the local social, biological, historical, economic and political contexts in which these programmes are taking place and in which the intended recipients of treatment live their lives. If this is not done, the world’s poor will continue to be neglected.

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Section: Morogoro Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rumours, Riots and the Rejection of Mass Drug Administration for the Treatment of Schistosomiasis in Morogoro, Tanzania

Hastings

2016

J. Biosoc. Sci.

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“…These studies employ analytical frameworks of anti-colonialism and African nationalism, ascribing to Indians the role of either nationalist heroes or colonialist collaborators. Indians could be both, but, as the present author has argued elsewhere (Brennan 1999), over much of the colonial period they were above all advocates of Indian secular and religious nationalisms, which overlapped in both fruitful and destructive ways with emergent African nationalisms. South Asian nationalists in East Africa were Janus-faced, playing the role of sub-imperialists as well as anti-colonialists.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 67%

“…The present author has used the same two Indian newspapers for such ends in an earlier project (Brennan 1999). But newspapers themselves were produced as informational fragments in composite, a naked business model of advertisements, sports results, commodity prices, official departures and arrivals, and other local notices that competed for space with historians' more conventional source material of political editorials and letters of protest.…”

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confidence: 99%

Politics and Business in the Indian Newspapers of Colonial Tanganyika

Brennan

2011

Africa

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This article examines the history of two Indian newspapers, Tanganyika Opinion and Tanganyika Herald, to demonstrate how business considerations provided both the opportunity for East African Indians to make public arguments and the central limitation on the arguments that could be made. Founded on the inspiration of mass nationalist action through a territorial hartal, the Tanganyika Opinion and later the Herald blazed the trails that articulated ‘Greater India’ among the Anglo-Gujarati reading public in Tanganyika. But growing conservative sentiments within this vulnerable minority, along with rising sectarian division, reduced both the patronage and audience for a singular ‘anti-colonial’ politics by the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, as a marginal print node along the Indian Ocean littoral, the Opinion and Herald came to rely on an opportunistic mixture of wire services and consular propaganda to keep abreast of regional and international news developments. Ultimately, the shrinking market for Anglo-Gujarati newspapers and rising opportunities in Swahili-language journals had sealed the doom of these and similar Indian newspapers by the time ‘African’ political independence arrived in the early 1960s.

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“…So, examining ideas about citizenship in Tanzania, Brennan (2006) Attempting to disentangle these ideas, this paper argues that the belief that citizenship is rooted in the soil is not simply a primordial 'african' trait. Rather, it reveals the tenacity of colonial notions about urban/rural divides in settler states, which explicitly excluded unemployed Africans and women from cities.…”

Section: Citizenship In Africa: Belonging or Producing?mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘We have not made anybody homeless’: regulation and control of urban life in Zimbabwe

Dorman

2015

Citizenship Studies

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In May and June 2005, thousands of Zimbabweans were brutally displaced from urban areas. But 'Operation Murambatsvina' was not simply an unpredictable 'tsunami,' rather it provides a moment in which long-held prejudices and assumptions which shaped the developmental state became visible, reflecting not just the internalisation of the Rhodesian, modernist world-view, but also its imbrication with local understandings of home and home-ness. To see Murambatsvina as simply a politically expedient move is to miss the deep resonance of the political rhetoric, the ways it was embedded in the state, and how it is shaped by norms of citizenship.Contextualised against Harare's urban politics, the clearances reveal a long-standing set of policies designed to regulate and control urban life, forming part of a broader crisis of the post-colonial developmental state. (150 words)

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Blood Enemies: Exploitation and Urban Citizenship in the Nationalist Political Thought of Tanzania, 1958–75

Cited by 70 publications

References 0 publications

Rumours, Riots and the Rejection of Mass Drug Administration for the Treatment of Schistosomiasis in Morogoro, Tanzania

Rumours, Riots and the Rejection of Mass Drug Administration for the Treatment of Schistosomiasis in Morogoro, Tanzania

Politics and Business in the Indian Newspapers of Colonial Tanganyika

‘We have not made anybody homeless’: regulation and control of urban life in Zimbabwe

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