The Bureaucracy and the Bourgeoisie: Decentralization and Class Structure in Tanzania

Abstract

A decade ago, most African states had proclaimed their commitment to centralized planning and administration. At the end of European rule, African leaders saw their countries as poor and malintegrated, but with great potential. That potential could be realized, they thought, only through firm central direction. Scarce resources, including capital and technology, had to be coordinated effectively and managed carefully. The few skilled personnel had to be located at key points. And the divisive tendencies of regional, religious, and ethnic differences had to be constrained by a centralized, national authority.

Middle class construction: domestic architecture, aesthetics and anxieties in Tanzania

“…The class debates which dominated African Studies in the 1960s and 1970s were preoccupied by analyses of a political economic landscape polarised between two classes, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie, who were constituted by their relations to the means of production (Bernstein 1977;Sklar 1979). Late colonial attempts to create a rural middle class through targeted assistance to 'progressive farmers', particularly in the upland coffee-and tea-growing areas of Bukoba, Kilimanjaro and Rungwe (Iliffe 1979) did generate a class of rich peasants, or petite bourgeoisie, but they were understood as struggling for inclusion in a local or national bourgeoisie (Raikes 1978;Samoff 1979). Indeed what exercised many of Tanzania's radical commentators after the Arusha Declaration of 1967 was the dissonance between Nyerere's (1966) claims to a classless society and the evidence of rural and urban class formation, the antecedents of which were laid down during the colonial period and exacerbated by the postcolonial government.…”

Making Development Agents: Participation as Boundary Object in International Development

“…Participation has been associated with meetings, electoral representation and with the financial or labour contributions (michango) to state facilitated public goods (Falk Moore, 1977;Samoff, 1979;Marsland, 2006). The participatory methods now associated with development projects which combine the populist inclusivity of prior forms of participation with innovative ways of engaging 1246 M. Green in group discussion, something half way between a seminar and a meeting, appear truly at home in the national development consciousness.…”

“…The seemingly natural affinity between Tanzanian governmentality and participatory methods is strengthened by their historical development which has partial origins there. Indeed, the continued claim to national ownership of participation as a characteristically Tanzanian way of doing development, as developmental in itself (Samoff, 1979), has legitimated their widespread acceptance in the country. This has been considerably enhanced in Tanzania, as in other poor countries, by the culture of incentivisation surrounding participation in development through the payment of allowances (posho), although this is not the only factor.…”

“…The institutionalisation of participatory approaches in Tanzania is not simply a product of donor interventions. Commitment to participation is part of a longstanding discourse of national development which anticipates more recent technologies of participatory development (Falk Moore, 1977;Samoff, 1979;Jennings 2003Jennings , 2007) by more than a decade. Not only were some of the core approaches now associated with participatory development first devised in Tanzania (Hall, 1992(Hall, , 2005.…”

Partnerships and Sustainability in the Tea Industry: A Critical Analysis of Dynamics Between Smallholders and Estates in Tanzania

“…The elite, the "bureaucratic bourgeoisie," emerged within the state and undermined its developmental role, using state power for its own ends. The attendant corruption alongside the military's role in politics undermined the government's legitimacy and was a contributing factor in political instability (Shivji, 1976;Samoff, 1979;Nyong'o, 2002).…”