Ujamaa versus Scientific Socialism – Why Walter Rodney is wrong

“A glaring example is that of Tanzanian President Nyerere’s Ujamaa experiment. While it is true that his ideas were motivated by the highest moral convictions on his part, theoretically and in practice they have proved to be limited and unworkable. His conception of development is very close to that of the Narodniks, and Lenin’s critique of the latter is applicable in this instance Ujamaa’s declared target is to improve the material conditions of the peasant, ‘at his own risk and responsibility for the market’, by methods firmly rooted in the old system, at the same time resuscitating social values corresponding to a pre-feudal mode of production.”¹ – A. M. Babu

Within Africa Nyerere’s legacy and the question if Ujamaa can be regarded as socialist is disputed until today. The debate was led among many important Marxist and socialist ideologists all over Africa during the 60s and 70s especially.

The Guyanese Trotskyite Walter Rodney wrote in 1972:

“The mobilization of the producers, the defence of revolutionary gains and the advance of the struggle against modern monopoly capitalism are not tasks that can be accomplished by good intentions alone. Masses of people have to enter into an epistemology and a methodology different from those to which they have been accustomed. In China, they call it ‘Mao Zedong thought’ – a blend of specific insights and pre-existing theory. There is nothing inherently improbable in Tanzanian Ujamaa continuing to advance to reach that position. But, in the light of the claim that certain intellectuals have become so enamoured of Tanzania as to relinquish their critical function, let it be clear that this is no paean of praise. It is an assessment of a possibility that can be realized only through an ideological and political struggle to transcend the alienation from that part of the heritage of man which is called ‘Scientific Socialism’.”²

Rodney puts Ujamaa on the same step of Marxism (scientific socialism) and compares its position of importance in the ideological canon to that of Mao Zedong Thought in China.

Kwame Nkrumah wrote in 1967:

“I warned in my book Consciencism that “our society is not the old society, but a new society enlarged by Islamic and Euro-Christian influences”. This is a fact that any socio-economic policies must recognise and take into account. Yet the literature of “African socialism” comes close to suggesting that today’s African societies are communalistic.”³

Milton Obote wrote in 1969:

“We do not consider that all aspects of the African traditional life are acceptable as socialistic now. We do not, for instance, accept that belonging to a tribe should make a citizen a tool to be exploited by and used for the benefit of tribal leaders. Similarly, we do not accept that feudalism, though not inherently something peculiar to Africa or to Uganda, is a way of life which must not be disturbed because it has been in practice for centuries.”⁴

Both Nkrumah and Obote indirectly criticized the approach of Nyerere. Instead of exaggerating Ujamaa to be part of scientific socialism, they see in it quite the opposite: A try to revert time.

Workers and peasants or peasants and workers?

The fundamental document of Ujamaa is the Arusha Declaration authored by Julius Nyerere in 1967, like the Common Man’s Charter is so essential for Obote’s Outlook of the Common Man.

The Arusha Declaration was somewhat correct, though not very scientific, in describing the basic conditions for a socialist society:

“A truly socialist state is one in which all people are workers and in which neither capitalism nor feudalism exists. It does not have two classes of people, a lower class composed of people who work for their living, and an upper class of people who live on the work of others. In a really socialist country no person exploits another; everyone who is physically able to work does so; every worker obtains a just return for the labour he performs; and the incomes derived from different types of work are not grossly divergent. In a socialist country, the only people who live on the work of others, and who have the right to be dependent upon their fellows, are small children, people who are too old to support themselves, the crippled, and those whom the state at any one time cannot provide with an opportunity to work for their living.”⁵

About the means of production it says:

“To build and maintain socialism it is essential that all the major means of production and exchange in the nation are controlled and owned by the peasants through the machinery of their Government and their co-operatives. Further, it is essential that the ruling Party should be a Party of peasants and workers.

The major means of production and exchange are such things as: land; forests; minerals;water; oil and electricity; news media; communications; banks, insurance, import; and export trade, wholesale trade; iron and steel, machine tool, arms, motor-car, cement, fertilizer, and textile industries; and any big factory on which a large section of the people depend for their living, or which provides essential components of other industries; large plantations, and especially those which provide raw materials essential to important industries.”⁶

The Arusha Declaration speaks of “peasants and workers” not of “workers and peasants”. This is not by coincidence but underlines that the peasantry and not the workers have been regarded as the leading ruling class. This can specifically be seen in the formulation that “all the major means of production and exchange in the nation are controlled and owned by the peasants”. This is what makes Ujamaa a bourgeois ideology and falls well under what Marx and Engels called “petty bourgeois socialism” in the “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, which they regarded as “reactionary and utopian”⁷. This was because petty bourgeois socialism tries to preserve the old society.

Issa Shivji assumed in 1975 that Tanzania was led by a “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” (which he self put in quotation marks all the time)⁸. As it seems, Shivji uses the Trotskyite and not the Maoist⁹ meaning of the term “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” since he is not even trying to provide evidence that the leadership was grabbing money from the state apparatus to become bourgeois. He sees their rule in a “struggle between the petty bourgeoisie and the commercial bourgeoisie”¹⁰ (with which he seems to mean the comprador bourgeoisie). “Up until the Arusha Declaration, the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’ cannot be said to have really become a bourgeoisie. Rather it was a politico-administrative bureaucracy.”¹¹ – This is what Shivji also claims. In my point of view this assessment also suits the time after the Arusha Declaration. In short: Shivji makes a similar mistake like Mahmood Mamdani in his assessment of the Obote I government.

Pre-colonial Africa – A classless harmonious society?

Nyerere believed that the pre-colonial society would have had no classes. This is untrue. Our Kenyan comrades have shown the existence of slavery and the transition into a feudal society on the Swahili coast¹². Similarly, the Bantu kingdoms of Uganda prove the existence of feudal classes as well¹³. I lack a concrete analysis of Tanzania and the necessary materials for writing one, but it is very unlikely that Tanzania had been exempted from this development of a feudal society.

Nyerere claimed: “The traditional African family lived according to the basic principles of ujamaa.”¹⁴ He completely ignores the existence of feudalism in pre-colonial Tanzania. Nyerere also spoke of “tribal socialism” and rejects the fact that capitalism created the material conditions for a socialist society in a 1962 pamphlet for the TANU:

“Brought up in tribal socialism, I must say I find this contradiction quite intolerable. It gives capitalism a philosophical status which capitalism neither claims nor deserves. For it virtually says, ‘Without capitalism, and the conflict which capitalism creates within society, there can be no socialism’! This glorification of capitalism by the doctrinaire European socialists, I repeat, I find intolerable.

African socialism, on the other hand, did not have the ‘benefit’ of the Agrarian Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. It did not start from the existence of conflicting ‘classes’ in society. Indeed I doubt if the equivalent for the word ‘class’ exists in any indigenous African language; for language describes the ideas of those who speak it, and the idea of ‘class’ or ‘caste’ was non-existent in African society. “¹⁵

Nyerere by that denies historical materialism. Instead of seeing the benefits of the capitalist development over feudalism and of feudalism over slavery, he just denounces them completely without utilizing its productive forces, cultural progress and institutions. Nyerere doesn´t see the social development upwards into higher stages but lacks a proper understanding of feudalism, capitalism and socialism.

He would later change his view on the necessity of capitalism as a pre-condition for socialism from complete refusal to complete endorsement of foreign capitalist “investments”. Nyerere has shown that his idealist views were purely rooted in opportunism. What he never changed is the claim of classlessness of the pre-colonial society.

Nyerere was like a toddler trying to crawl back into the womb of his mother: It is impossible to undo development steps. Also: It is not even a real picture of the past that Nyerere sought to return to but rather an illusion of harmony in an imaginary pre-colonial society without classes.

This wrong view is what led to his “Ujamaa vijijini” project, the so-called Ujamaa villages.

Ujamaa villages – Dream or nightmare?

Ujamaa is internationally known for its collective villages, the Ujamaa villages. Nyerere had a vision:

“What is here being proposed is that we in Tanzania should move from being a nation of individual peasant producers who are gradually adopting the incentives and the ethics of the capitalist system. Instead we should gradually become a nation of ujamaa villages where the people co-operate directly in small groups and where these small groups co-operate together for joint enterprises.”¹⁶

Collective ownership is indeed a form of socialist ownership. In this point Nyerere had a similar view like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. But the pursuit of collectivization was different in Ujamaa than under scientific socialism.

Lenin knew:

“Cooperation must be politically so organized that it will not only generally and always enjoy certain privileges, but that these privileges should be of a purely material nature (a favorable bank rate, etc.). The cooperatives must be granted state loans that are greater, if only by a little, than the loans we grant to private enterprises, even to heavy industry, etc. A social system emerges only if it has the financial backing of a definite class.”¹⁷

This made the collectivization in the USSR and the socialist countries following Marxism-Leninism a success.

How about Tanzania? Nyerere had a very different approach. He said:

“Ujamaa villages will have to be established, and will grow through the self-reliant activities of our people. They will be created by the village people themselves, and maintained by them. It must be done from their own resources.”¹⁸

This meant: The peasants were on their own. Unlike in the socialist countries where the state helped in the formation and stabilizing of cooperatives as well granting them material benefits to industrialize production, the Ujamaa villages received nothing. Shivji correctly criticized this policy as having a “petty bourgeois class character”¹⁹.

The collectivization of agriculture has not even been completed. Nyerere said in 1985:

“There is a belief in the world that Tanzania has collective farming. This is not true. But I have always believed that collectivization should be done voluntarily and is therefore a slow process. Actually, had we collectivised, we would not have had the problems we now face because all the villages that have collectivised are doing very well. We have not forced collectivization at all.”²⁰

Not just that collectivization was never completed, the results in agriculture in general were very lackluster. Nyerere admitted in 1977:

“The truth is that the agricultural results have been very disappointing. Modern methods have not spread very quickly or very widely; the majority of our traditional crops are still being grown by the same methods as our forefathers used. Irrigation, and even the building of small dams, is talked about more than done.”²¹

In 1985 Nyerere said in an interview:

“To produce enough food; and most countries can produce sufficient food. Africa can produce enough for itself and more. When we have a shortage of food in Tanzania it is not because of lack of rain but because of primitive agriculture. For four years we have had food shortage even though we have had sufficient rain. If our farming had been sufficiently advanced, southern Tanzania would be producing enough food for the deficit areas and more.”²²

That means that with the proper means of production Tanzania could have become self-sufficient on food – but it was not for years and had to import(!) food. Nyerere failed like Pol Pot, but at least he didn’t let his people die like Pol Pot let his Cambodian compatriots starve to death. Nyerere’s approach shows that dreams turn into nightmares when they are pursued without a scientific concept.

Ujamaa stressed agricultural development so much on paper, but achieved so little. The main reason was the lack of an industrial basis supplying agriculture with machines, tools, fertilizer and other means of production necessary to modernize this economic sector.

The (non-existent) industrial policy

The Arusha Declaration states: “Because of our emphasis on money, we have made another big mistake. We have put too much emphasis on industries.”²³ And: “Our emphasis on money and industries has made us concentrate on urban development.”²⁴ It is obvious that Ujamaa focused on agriculture – and achieved not much due to the lack of industrial supply.

Shivji was right to say: “In absence of an industrial sector proving the requirements (proper goods and consumer necessities) of the agriculture sector, the productivity in agriculture is not likely to rise substantially.”²⁵ This should be obvious. Obvious for everyone except Nyerere as it seems, otherwise he would have put emphasis on developing industry.

Instead he praised the small industrial growth that happened within a decade in Tanzania. In January 1977 he said:

“The industrial expansion over the last ten years is certainly small in comparison with our needs, but it is nothing to be ashamed of. Once again it is good to remember where we come from. The value of our industrial production has trebled over the decade, and industry now accounts for about 10 per cent of our national income instead of 8.0 per cent in 1966. This is in a much more expanded economy. The number of people who earn their living in industry is now about 24 times as great as it was in 1967.”²⁶

The industry might have developed in that decade, but the proportionality on the national income almost stagnated. Where is there “nothing to be ashamed of”? The socialist countries in Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia, especially China, had a far higher growth of the national industry and especially its share of the national income. What Nyerere presents here is a small growth, almost stagnation of the share of the national income, after an entire decade and he refused to call it a failure of his phoney-socialist policies!

Mao Zedong said in April 1956 in his famous speech “On the Ten Major Relationships”:

“The emphasis in our country’s construction is on heavy industry. The production of the means of production must be given priority that’s settled. But it definitely does not follow that the production of the means of subsistence, especially grain, can be neglected. Without enough food and other daily necessities, it would be impossible to provide for the workers in the first place, and then what sense would it make to talk about developing heavy industry? Therefore, the relationship between heavy industry on the one hand and light industry and agriculture on the other must be properly handled.”²⁷

What did Nyerere do? He put emphasis on agriculture first and therefore hasn’t developed the means of production much, which also resulted in stagnation in agriculture. With a stagnant agriculture, it is impossible to supply a growing population, especially in the industrial cities. Developing the productive forces first of all needs industry – no matter if in the industry itself or in agriculture. But Nyerere had an irrational fear of the urban proletariat.

Nyerere even hallucinated this in the Arusha Declaration: “We can put the capitalists and feudalists on one side, and the farmers and workers on the other. But we can also divide the people into urban dwellers on one side and those who live in the rural areas on the other. If we are not careful we might get to the position where the real exploitation in Tanzania is that of the town dwellers exploiting the peasants.”²⁸ It might be true that there can be contradictions between urban and rural development, but they are not antagonistic like the contradiction between exploiting classes and exploited classes. This is one of the many foul teeth of Ujamaa. In this wrong assessment of the situation his anti-industrial, anti-urban views have their roots. This is why Tanzania got nowhere.

Conclusion

As shown above, Nyerere’s “socialism” was nothing more than words. He wrote in 1962 in a pamphlet for the TANU: “Socialism – like democracy – is an attitude of mind. In a socialist society it is the socialist attitude of mind, and not the rigid adherence to a standard political pattern, which is needed to ensure that the people care for each other’s welfare.”²⁹ That means that his “socialism” is not more than an idea effectively.

Nyerere also called Ujamaa “Tanzanian socialism”³⁰. Abdulrahman Babu rejected such notions entirely as a Marxist: “Socialism has its own theory – dialectical and historical materialism. It has its own raison d’etre. It is not Russian; it is not Chinese. It is not African, or Asian or European – it is proletarian. It is the only weapon in the hands of the workers and other oppressed classes. It is the only theory which they can use. They do not expect the bourgeois or their class allies to approve of or support socialism, because it is directed against the bourgeoisie as a class and against its exploitative system.”³¹ In the end Nyerere’s “socialism” was at best a rural-oriented social-democratic course led by the national bourgeoisie of Tanzania.

Nyerere said in a 1985 interview with the New African: “I believe the saying: “Use the capitalist if you want to develop socialism”.”³² This was even more wrong than the Arusha Declaration stating: “The policy of inviting a chain of capitalists to come and establish industries in our country might succeed in giving us all the industries we need but it would also succeed in preventing the establishment of socialism unless we believe that without first building capitalism, we cannot build socialism.”³³ Nyerere seems to have given up every criticism of making concessions towards foreign capitalists and therefore has even given up the utopic-socialist ideal of Ujamaa in its very core. The result is the Tanzania of today: A capitalist country in East Africa just like Uganda and Kenya.

When Nyerere said in January 1977 “Tanzania is still a dependent nation, not an interdependent one. We have not reached our goal; it is not even in sight.”³⁴, the fate of Ujamaa was already sealed. It was obvious that Ujamaa is a wrong, phoney-socialist course. But like the captain of the Titanic who gave full speed towards the iceberg, Nyerere gave order to speed up the formation of Ujamaa villages by administrative means at the time these words were written. Instead of accepting the truth that Marxism-Leninism is the path to socialism, he instead made the vile claim: “No country in the world is yet fully socialist, although many committed themselves to this philosophy decades before Tanzania even became independent.”³⁵ This was obviously untrue and a sentence born out of an anti-Marxist paradigm.

Shivji came to the conclusion as well and recognized that this is the reason why Nyerere was tolerated even by the West. He wrote: “Foreign investment was to be encouraged for it did not appear to conflict with the commitment to ‘African socialism’ this socialism was both anti-capitalist and anti-communist, it aspired to a ‘mixed economy’!”³⁶ Nyerere supported the UNITA against the MPLA in Angola for example – which proves his principally reactionary, anti-communist stance; he imprisoned many Tanzanian Marxists, among them Abdulrahman Babu; and he later supported Museveni and his NRM government.

Therefore: It were Nkrumah and Obote, not Rodney, who correctly assessed Ujamaa (even though they didn’t directly name it). Nyerere’s approach was a reactionary one. Instead of utilizing the few means of state monopolist capitalism imperialism left behind in Tanzania to develop a socialist country based on the working class, on industry, on urban production to guide the development of agriculture, he crippled the growth of cities and industry to “strengthen” the villages by resettling urban workers there. This was the same method as Pol Pot used – though in a more humane way. Nyerere was not an autogenocidal cold-blooded murderer like Pol Pot, but his fundamental error was the same.

We should learn from Ujamaa and see the Mwalimu as a teacher – but not as a teacher of a positive but a negative example to not repeat the same errors again.