BUILDING THE RULE OF LAW. Jennifer A. Widner. W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 2001. 454 pages. $29.95.

Few judges become well-known, let alone popular, public personalities. But then, few judges have the opportunity and motivation to play a formative role beyond the court-room, by leading their nations through major constitutional changes over several decades. This book tells the important story of one who did: the subtitle, ‘Francis Nyalali and the road to judicial independence in Africa’, appears only on the paper cover -perhaps an afterthought, when the book was already printed -but aptly summarises the subject-matter. Nyalali, Chief Justice of Tanzania for 23 years, 1977-2000 (Julius Nyerere was President for the same length of time, 1962-85), was the longest-serving ‘CJ’ in the Commonwealth. (The average service for some other African Chief Justices is calculated as 3.6 years.) He could look back upon an exceptional career of public service in which he was instrumental in transforming the work of the judiciary and the life of the nation, including replacing the one-party state by a multi-party system.

This is not a biography. Key points in Nyalali’s life are briefly noted as background to his personal and professional achievements, which are examined in the context of problems facing ‘the rule of law’, the administration of justice and, especially, the independence of the judges in Tanzania and in other comparable African states. The tone is one of respectful appreciation. Nyalali’s personal story is remarkable. The Sukuma herd-boy who registered himself at primary school at the age of 11 progressed to Tabora School in the 1950s (the launch-pad for many future Tanzanian leaders, including judges) and was inspired by a visit by Nyerere, then founding TANU. After studying history at Makerere University College (no legal education in East Africa then), where he was elected President of the Students’ Guild, to Lincoln’s Inn, where he was ‘Called to the Bar’ in 1965.

The following year he was appointed Resident Magistrate in Musoma -a difficult district, not least as the President’s home area. Aware of local dissatisfaction with the judiciary, Nyalali sought remedies, ‘inspired by a personal interest in organisational problem solving’. He took justice to the people, taking his court on circuit, and won the trust of the community so that his proposed transfer to Kigoma was cancelled after local elders petitioned the President to block it.

Nyalali continued his innovatory approach in Tabora but regarded his next transfer, to teach on the training programme for primary court magistrates at Mzumbe, as a sign of disfavour; yet it gave him further opportunities for influential innovation and also, through teaching in Kiswahili, to develop his fluency in the Swahili legal vocabulary. He was soon moved again -to Bukoba, to deal with a growing backlog of cases by further innovations, including evening
courts.

From 1971 to 1974 at Nyerere’s request Nyalali was seconded from the judiciary to preside over the Permanent Labour Tribunal, in the troubled industrial situation of workers’ strikes following the adoption of the Mwongozo Guidelines. He gained experience in promoting settlements by negotiation and mediation, recognising the need for workers to be respected, including such practical steps as offering them tea in refurnished premises.

In 1974 Nyalali reached the senior judiciary, as High Court judge in Arusha. But all was not well with the judiciary (not only in Tanzania): its morale and legitimacy had declined, challenged in various ways by legislative and executive authority and provoking widespread public dissatisfaction with the courts. Indeed, Widner asserts that the rule of law had collapsed. The Judicial System Review Commission was set up, which reported in 1977.

Nyalali had decided to leave the bench to take up a new post in Geneva with the International Labour Organisation when he was mysteriously summoned by Nyerere and offered the choice of an alternative appointment: Chief Justice. It must have been a difficult decision for him. He was only 42, with relatively limited judicial experience, and was only eleventh in seniority in the High Court: would ten more experienced judges resent his leap-frogging? It was a difficult time for the judiciary and the collapse of the East African Community had removed the regional court of appeal, which had served Tanzania for decades. His wife and children were set on Geneva and the salary there would be incomparably higher. But Nyalali recalled his student days, when he aspired to serve his country. His choice was clear.

These and later landmarks of Nyalali’s life are dispersed through the book and frame its complex structure. Each episode provides a peg for an in-depth analysis of a relevant issue which concerned him. Most of these were issues of judicial policy, albeit with great significance for the wider public. Nyalali felt he had to build support, first within the judiciary and then with political leaders in the executive and legislature. He persuaded Nyerere to improve the judges’ terms of service but ‘it took him some time to learn his way around the one-party state’. His sense of history led him to restore to view the discarded portraits of colonial judges.

After coping with various challenges to judicial independence, the economic crisis of the early 1980s and the government’s severe response, including the (retrospective) Economic Sabotage Act, prompted Nyalali to speak with President Nyerere. Invitations followed to address first the Central Committee and then the whole National Executive Committee of the ruling party. These were crucial addresses to powerful, unsympathetic and even hostile audiences. His clear but uncompromising speeches, explaining the judicial role and pointing out illegalities in government policies, were turning-points in the relations between politicians and judges. The new Act was amended and the Economic Crimes Court brought within the High Court. Later Nyalali was to deliver many influential speeches and conference papers.

Widner summarises the debate which surrounded the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1984, in which Nyalali was prominent. Addressing the University Law Faculty, he gave a clear, though cautious and coded, call for a generous judicial application of the new rights. But his greatest challenge came in 1991 when President Mwinyi asked him to chair a commission on political change to a multi­party system. Nyalali knew that such a system would help to maintain judicial independence; but would he compromise that very independence by leading the review of such a highly-charged political issue? His acceptance, and his formative influence on ‘the Nyalali Report’, was decisive, although the public prominence it gave caused him embarrassment when, before the 1995 elections, he had to rebuff invitations to stand as a candidate for the presidency.

Into this personal story, Widner, an American political scientist, weaves comprehensive and perceptive discussions of many basic problems, apart from political interference, which have beset African judges: lack of training for judges, magistrates and court staff; lack of resources -not only weather-proof court-rooms and libraries but even paper; the colonial legacy of ‘deep legal pluralism’, requiring harmonisation of common law and statutes with customary and Islamic laws; the related need to promote gender equality; massive delays in both civil and criminal trials, and especially the inhumanity and costliness of lengthy imprisonment of many defendants awaiting trial while police, prosecutors and politicians resisted wider implementation of the right to bail; the development of ‘alternative dispute resolution’ by way of negotiation and mediation; the persistent problem of corruption, in societies which paid judges poorly and lower­grade magistrates a mere pittance; problems of witchcraft and vigilantism; the promotion of ‘legal literacy’ -public knowledge and understanding of the legal system (Nyalali invited religious leaders to participate in ‘Law Day’ ceremonies, opening the legal year).

Nyalali was particularly successful in two dimensions. Within Tanzania he developed internal support, previously weak, for the judiciary. But he also found and tapped foreign sources which have provided ground-breaking and sympathetic assistance: Ireland, which has provided judicial training courses, and the United States, in particular the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, which responded vigorously to his initial approach, from which valuable judicial exchange visits, other practical help and deep friendship have followed. Nyalali admired John Marshall, fourth Chief Justice of the USA., whose response to political pressures early in the nineteenth century established judicial independence and offered instructive parallels. American support helped Nyalali to realise a personal project -the Lushoto Institute for Judicial Administration, which he opened in 1996 to serve the courts ofthe region.

Widner’s book is a mine of information, based on extensive and varied research: many interviews with Nyalali and other judges and lawyers in several countries and study of his many speeches and papers (listed in a Bibliography though not all published); many other published sources, most of them relatively recent, are briefly and uncritically, even deferentially, cited; personal observations, for example at judicial conferences, and opinion surveys are also used.

The structure of this long book causes some repetition, with too much detail of some legal issues for general readers but insufficient specificity and precision for lawyers. Widner refers to ‘the region’ -‘eastern and southern Africa’ -but this is really a book about Tanzania. She gives several detailed references to Uganda and a few to Botswana and Kenya (including unnecessarily lengthy accounts of the celebrated Dow and Olieno cases) but only general references to other countries, with some misleading over-generalisations (e.g. that they have English ‘common law’, understating the role of Roman-Dutch law in the majority of them). There are occasional errors (Lord Woolf is not Lord Chancellor). Nyalali would be the first to acknowledge, more directly than Widner does, the support which he received from most of his fellow judges, many of whom have also served Tanzania with distinction and commitment. (Your reviewer admits his partiality, having had the privilege of sharing in teaching many of these dedicated judges in those far-off days of the yOlUlg Faculty of Law in Dar es Salaam.)

There is no account of the formation of the Court of Appeal, over which Nyalali presided, or of the Conference which he organised to review its work on its tenth anniversary in 1989 (the proceedings were published). There is no systematic examination of Nyalali’s main writings -the many judgments which he delivered in the course of his long judicial service; only a few of his best-known judgments are considered at relevant points.
JimRead

BWANA SHAMBA (MR AGRICULTURE). Peter M Wilson. The Pentland Press (see below), 2001. 235 pages. ISBN 1 85821 9078

This reviewer spent 4 years in the mid-1960s doing cotton research at Ilonga in the Kilosa District of Tanzania. Bwana Shamba recounts the personal experiences of Peter Wilson during his thirteen years in Tanganyika/Tanzania from 1958 to 1971 and more than two thirds of the book are devoted to his first assignment in Kilosa where he worked for three years for the Eastern Province Cotton Committee. The book is therefore of particular interest to this reviewer given the links to cotton and to the agriculture of the Kilosa District as a whole. The remainder of the book relates Peter’s experiences at Tengeru near Arusha where he taught agriculture and Swahili for about six years and in Dar es Salaam where he worked for four years in the Ministry of Agriculture. In the town of Kilosa at that time there was no electricity, many roads in the District were frequently impassable but the railway to Tabora passed through the town and there were several well stocked shops. The expatriate population in the town was sufficient to run the usual sort of Gymkhana Club and this, along with the Church, was one of the more important social centres. Peter’s description of family life at that time and of attending functions at the Club during the heat of the tropical night, wearing evening dress, seem today somewhat archaic!

But most of the book is devoted to accounts of the work of a Field Officer in attempting to develop district agriculture and there are vivid descriptions of how this was done. Communications were difficult and one of the first jobs Peter had to accomplish was to build a ‘murram’ road through the bush for some 25 miles to open up an area for cotton growing and thereby enable the cotton to be transported out to Kilosa town. Other descriptions relate to using the local train service to reach villages otherwise inaccessible by road and the welcome he received from the local people who rarely, if ever, saw outsiders. After independence Peter was based at Tengeru where he lectured to students of agriculture and then took on the task of teaching Swahili over several years to groups of expatriate volunteers. Many of these volunteers then worked in remote parts of the country where a knowledge of Swahili was essential. Peter’s accounts of organising the Swahili courses give an interesting insight into the life of expatriates after independence in contrast to the lifestyle he had previously followed in Kilosa.

Anyone who knows Tanzania, and particularly those with experience in agricultural development, will find many of the chapters and reminiscences in this book very interesting and those readers who were in Tanganyika before 1961 may well know many of the people and places mentioned in Kilosa.
Jim Watson
(It is understood that the Pentland Press of Bishop Auckland, which used to claim a special interest in books concerning Africa, has gone into receivership. This means that anyone who has ordered any book from them will receive neither the book nor money back. Those wishing to obtain this book should apply to Peter Wilson, P 0 Box 304 Horley RH6 7NE. The price is £15.00 plus £5,00 p&p -Editor).

PINK STRIPES AND OBEDIENT SERVANTS: AN AGRICULTURALIST IN TANGANYIKA. John Ainley. The Ridings Publishing Company Ltd.

John Ainley was appointed as an Agricultural Field Officer in the Department of Agriculture in 1949 at the age of 23. He was recruited through the Crown Agents. John’s time in Tanganyika/Tanzania included three years in Iringa and Njombe in the then Southern Highlands Province, two tours in Handeni in Tanga Province, ending with his promotion to Agricultural Officer (Tanganyika) whilst on leave. A tour in Bukoba in West Lake Province followed, during which he was promoted to Provincial Agricultural Officer and finally posted to Head Office in Dar es Salaam, where he witnessed the transition of the country to independence. This tour was followed by leave in England and a final tour of duty in Bukoba.

This book recounts in some detail the author’s various experiences and duties during his sixteen years of service.To quote a few examples: his description of walking safaris through the Livingstone Mountains and across the Elton Plateau, the resettlement of Mau Mau detainees in the Handeni District, the part played by the District Team in locating the wreck of a Central African Airways machine which came down in remote bush country, his becoming a ‘script writer’ for the Tanganyika Broadcasting Services’ programme for farmers based on the idea of ‘The Archers’ and acting as Presiding Officer in the first ever elections held in the country.

Throughout he displays a most remarkable ability to recall names and dates and one suspects that he must have been a committed diarist! The author has included some personal details of life on a station, home leaves and his marriage in 1955. One is able to appreciate the part played by his wife, often under extremely adverse conditions. The variety of tasks undertaken and included in the job description ‘general extension work’ is truly remarkable and even more so in the case of a man who progressed from Field Officer to Provinvcial Agricultural Officer in the course of his service. It is worth recording that during his time in Head Office his duties included editorship of ‘Uklima wa Kisasa’.

The variety of tasks undertaken and included in the job description ‘general extension work’ is truly remarkable and even more so in the case of a man who progressed from Field Officer to Provinvcial Agricultural Officer in the course of his service. It is worth recording that during his time in Head Office his duties included editorship of ‘Uklima wa Kisasa’, a monthly agricultural newspaper for the more progressive farmers, this adding the skill of journalism to his many talents.

This book contains no ‘message’. It is written in a straight forward style and is merely an account of a life, or a good part of one, of service. The total commitment of the author, ably assisted by his wife, to the task in hand and to the people he is working amongst, is obvious. Such an attitude seems to be quite contrary to the populist view of today that ‘colonialism’ was completely wrong and totally exploitive.

The Epilogue describes the Joint Commemoration and Thanksgiving service for Her Majesty’s Overseas Colonial Service and the Corona Club held in Westminster Abbey on May 25 1999 at which the author was one of eight ex-Overseas Service Officers presented to Her Majesty the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.
CA (Tony) Waldron

ECOLOGY, CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE INFORMAL ECONOMY IN NORTH WEST TANZANIA. C.D.Smith. Ashgate. 2000. 222pp. £43.95

This book will be of interest to students of Development Studies and to staff and supporters of N.G.O.’s working in Tanzania. It may well also be of interest to B.T.S. members not intimidated by the sociological language of the early chapters.

It challenges two widely held views: first the commonly expressed pessimism about the present and future prospects of the mass of the Tanzanian people; and secondly the idea that successful development must necessarily involve agriculture based on large estates for export crops and/or industrial projects, both requiring heavy capital investment.

After some early fairly theoretical chapters, it examines the physical and human environment of the Kagera Region, the effects of AIDS, the impact of Rwandan refugees, the place of bananas in the life of the people and the role of coffee production in the local economy. Detailed findings are based on the study of some 250 households in Kagera. Particular attention is paid to the differences between rich and poor farmers and to the situation of women heads of households (who comprised 30% of the sample ).

The author suggests that, so far from being merely a subsistence economy, it is to a considerable extent cash-based and much less dependent on coffee than is generally supposed. He contends that the people have shown remarkable innovative skill in confronting their economic problems and that official figures, since they ignore the informal economy and illegal trade, greatly underestimate this. Readers may find it interesting to compare his work with that of Aili M. Tripp (1997) which examined the informal economy in Dar es Salaam in a not dissimilar fashion.

Smith believes that the best short and medium term policy for development—in Kagera at least—would be the injection of capital to assist the poorer farmers who are held back only by the lack of relatively small amounts of investment capital. It is a pity the book did not receive better proof-reading and editing. There are typographical and grammatical errors and the punctuation is, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic.. Nevertheless, this reader found it both challenging and thought provoking
Trevor Jagger

EXPLORE KILIMANJARO. Jaquetta Megarry. Rucksack Readers, 2001 ISBN 1 898481 105 £l2.50, 64pp maps photos. E-mail: info@rucsacs.com Web: www.rucsacs.com

Nearly 20 years ago in the mid’80’s a friend and I, equipped with little more than two 2 pieces of advice proffered by the elderly German owner of the Marangu Hotel, our base, set off to scale the mountain. “Take it slow and steady” she counselled and “Should you reach Gilman’s Point then little extra effort is involved in getting to the summit. Heeding her words, I at least made it to Uhuru Peak. My companion went no further than the rim and has since very much regretted it!

Today for those intending to climb the highest mountain in Africa, there is an alternative and rather more detailed source of reference. This handy, spiral bound, tightly packed guide provides a ‘step by step’ practical approach to doing Kili. It takes the would be trekker through the planning and preparation stages necessary before stepping a foot on the mountain, offering such advice as when best to go, what to take in the way of clothing and equipment, altitude sickness etc. By means of maps and illustrations, it then directs the reader along the two most popular (Marangu and the more arduous Machame) routes. Other sections are devoted to the habitats/zones and wildlife to be found along the way, and some background history and local culture. A useful addition to the pack, particularly for those intending to attempt the mountain for the first time, and even myself who is half tempted by the Machame route second time round!
Pm Watts-Russell

A LIVELIHOOD PERSPECTIVE ON NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE IN SEMI-ARID TANZANIA. T Birch-Thomsen et al Economic Geography. 77 (l)January 2001. 23 pages.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

ENGENDERED ENCOUNTERS: MEN OF THE CHURCH AND THE “CHURCH OF WOMEN” IN MASAILAND, TANZANIA 1950-1993 Dorothy L. Hodgson. Comparative Studies in Society and History VoI41.4. Oct. 1999 (pp 758 to 781)

This is a fascinating account of the consequences of the encounter between Christian missionaries and the Masai. It begins by pointing out that in many parts of Africa there tends to be a preponderance of female converts despite concerted efforts by most mainstream missionary groups to convert men, and this indeed is what has happened in Masailand.

The Congregation of the Holy Ghost, also known as the ‘Spiritans’, has spent forty years attempting to evangelise Masai men with virtually no success. The article describes the three strategies employed, first the setting up of schools, second the providing of instruction in the Masai homesteads, and finally the setting up of ‘individual’ instruction classes. Masai women were restricted from attending school, tolerated but not encouraged to attend homestead instruction and dissuaded from holding formal leadership positions in the church. The Christian churches tend to manifest a patriarchal culture with a preference for men as priests and leaders and the Roman Catholic church still does not accept women priests. Yet in spite of all this, significantly more women than men have sought instruction and baptism in the Catholic church.

There is a clear account of the political and economic changes which took place up to the 1950s as a result of various colonial interventions and which affected the gender relations between the Masai, with a marked reduction in the role of women, in these fields. However, despite this the women retained their involvement in the religious domains of everyday life. While men prayed to their one God, Eng’ai, (whose prefix shows her to be female) on special occasions, women prayed throughout the day most importantly at the early morning and evening milking when they would sprinkle a little milk on the ground thanking and entreating Eng’ai for the continued protection, preservation, and expansion oftheir family and herds.

The school strategy largely failed because conversion was seen as a threat to Masai maleness. You could not be a Christian and a Masai at the same time. Conversion meant that the progression from uncircumcised youth to morran to elder could not be maintained and those who did convert were despised as ormeek and essentially excluded from the clan.

The homestead strategy failed with the men precisely because the main thrust was towards the conversion of the men, particularly the elders of the group who were those consulted initially and who had to agree to the missionaries working in the homestead. The aim was to try to convert the whole homestead at once so that it would form a unified Christian community. However, the elders were those who were least receptive and they often simply did not appear at the scheduled meetings so that the missionaries became frustrated because they were not reaching them. In contrast, because these meetings were conducted in KiMasai, and involved discussion about key religious concepts, the women found themselves with direct access to the missionaries so that they could hear the Christian message and became regular and active participants in the sessions to the point of actually speaking out in public.

The ‘individual’ strategy became possible with the government’s villagisation policy and here the gender differences became vividly apparent. Now that anyone was free to attend religious instruction regardless of school enrolment or homestead residence, women flocked to the classes and women outnumbered men by two to one at baptism. Some missionaries still refuse to teach Just women’ claiming it would divide the family, others disparage the ‘church of women’ and insist on the need for a church to be a proper community with proper (male) leadership.

Many Masai women feel that conversion to Christianity enhances their already substantial spiritual life by providing yet another place to sing to and praise God, and they perceive little difference between the Masai god Eng’ai and the Christian God or between the prayers and rituals of Masai religion and of Catholicism. The church provides frequent opportunities for the women to meet as a group, talk to one another in small circulating groups both before and after services or classes and to sing and pray together.

Thus it is that through both direct and indirect means the women have overcome the disinterest of missionaries and the resistance of men to their participation in the church and there is evidence that that is a source of joy to them.
Peter Hill

PROMPTING DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS FROM ABROAD: INTERNATIONAL DONORS AND MULTI­P ARTYISM IN TANZANIA. Jessica I Vener. Democratization, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2000, pp 133-162,

The author uses Tanzania as a case study to assess the extent to which international donors tied commitment to the democratization process as a condition for aid. Noting that using aid as a reward for promoting democratic modes of governance is essentially a post -cold war policy, and that by 1992 all of Tanzania’s major donors had “incorporated democratization as a contingency for continued economic assistance”, the author asks whether foreign donors explicitly required this as a condition for aid. Tracking aid statistics for the years 1985-1995, the author concludes that while there were numerous increases or decreases in funding, interviews with donor representatives indicated that these fluctuations were a result of circumstances, e.g., specific Tanzanian needs, or donor fatigue, rather than any demands for democratic contingency. However, local sentiment suggested otherwise. Using interviews as a means of assessing perspectives among Tanzanian government leaders, opponents of the one party system, and various leaders within the civil society, the author found they expressed a strong sense of external pressures for some measure of democratization. Nevertheless, these leaders also acknowledged that changing domestic circumstances had minimized the efficacy of the one-party system and stimulated the move to multi-partyism. Since Tanzania did not test whether economic sanctions would be applied if it did not liberalize its political process, the causal role of donor pressures on future democratization remains to be seen.
MarionDoro

ZANZIBAR TOURISM DIRECTORY 2002. Swahili Coast Publications. 48 pages in full colour with information on Zanzibar and contact details on tourism companies.

BOOKS

SELECTED STUDIES OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN TANZANIA. Eds. Waheeda Shariff Samji and Alana Albee. Dar es Salaam: Department for International Development, 2000. 103 pages.

TANZANIA WITHOUT POVERTY. Arusha: HakiKazi Catalyst, 2001. 36 pages.

These two booklets are funded by the British ‘aid’ department DFID, but the editors and writers are Tanzania based and the focus of both publications is the poverty reduction programme in Tanzania. ‘Selected Studies’ is an academic treatment of several aspects of the current approach to civil society, while ‘Tanzania without Poverty’ is a popularising version of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper which emanates from the Vice President’s Office (it also exists in a Kiswahili text). Both are enhanced by ‘Masoud’s hard hitting and sometimes agreeably cynical cartoons.

In Selected Studies the overview of civil society in Tanzania by Stefan Kossoff is the most accessible article for a non specialist reader. The author writes with the confidence that comes from a staff post under a major donor, and states the downside as well as the favourable aspects; typically for Tanzania, the picture is a mixed one between pluralism and authoritarianism. He discusses the numerous categories of civil society organisations: human rights and legal aid, democracy and political empowerment, the churches and the media, anti corruption, independent research organisations and the political parties. The dominance of donor strategies in the field is clearly established, and the risky area of donor involvement in ‘political empowerment’ is touched upon. The second chapter (Dangor and Nadison) is written from a South African base, and draws interesting experience from there to illuminate the Tanzanian problem. It is perhaps a little optimistic about the results achieved, and emphasises the special areas of gender and disability which are subsumed in Tanzania by the general term ‘vulnerability’. Other chapters deal with the means of supporting village groups and organisations (Hobbs) and the field experience of SAW AT A (Saidia Wazee Tanzania) working with the elderly in Kagera District (O’Donoghue).

Tanzania without Poverty is more clearly a government based policy document, though infinitely more open to public opinion than were earlier ‘official handouts’. Political reform is touched; upon, but regarded as outside the core interest of poverty reduction. The language of the booklet is modest, and it amounts to a serious attempt to set out the whole government approach to development and poverty reduction, in simple language. Targets, activities and indicators are explained, together with a section on the sources of funding.

Civil society has been ‘flavour of the month’ in the development field for some 10 or 15 years now. As Hyden analyses it, earlier thinking was about development -for the people, then with the people, until it became development by the people with the thinking was about development -for the people, then with the people, until it became development by the people with the support of governments and donors. This was not so much a change in ideology, but rather a pragmatic response to the failure of the former’ aid’ efforts to achieve useful objectives. It slowly became apparent to donors that bureaucracy and inefficiency in government prevented any cost effective results. By the 1980s this conclusion was reinforced by general financial breakdown, which made even governments anxious to hand down responsibility to other groups in the society. Community inputs were required if any progress was to be achieved towards the aim of poverty reduction but could they be obtained if the state itself was centralising and clientilist?

The problem is that civil society organisations are not equipped for the essential tasks of questioning state officials and defending individual freedoms; having no defined position in the state they easily become coopted by the rich and powerful elements in their community. By their nature they are not competent to practise legitimate, inclusive and accountable decision making over public resources. This is the role which local government is designed to play, yet donor agencies have currently left local government on the back burner while they pursue development through non-state organisations. In this reviewer’s opinion it is a dangerous choice. Popular energies will be released, if at all, through political decentralisation: voting by electors, budgeting and service administration and development planning by councillors. If poverty reduction programmes are to be self sustaining, they need to give more attention to the political. To quote Markovitz, state and society do not stand apart in Africa, (on the contrary) all interests seek the support of the state. In the final assessment it will be local democracy, in whatever form, that alone can give lasting results.
Philip Mawhood

REASON FOR HOPE. AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE. Jane Goodall and Philip Berman. Thorsons 2000.282 pages. £8.99.

Jane Goodall’s autobiography (structured by Philip Berman) is a ‘book and a half packed with so many interesting stories, thoughts, happenings that I dare not miss a paragraph but had to read the whole book before venturing to review it. lane is probably known to most of us as the lady who went to live among the chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania. Her interest in all living things began early; at 18 months taking a handful of earthworms to bed, she hurriedly returned them to the garden on being told they would die in bed. At four years old she hid in a hen house for four hours in order to discover how hens laid eggs.

Her dream of going to Africa was realised in 1957 when she was invited by friends to Kenya. This led to a meeting with Dr Loius Leakey and she became his personal assistant, accompanying him to Olduvai Gorge. Louis was interested in research into chimpanzees who are man’s nearest relative. He wanted someone with a ‘mind unbiased with scientific theory’ but with a love of animals and ‘monumental patience’. Jane filled the bill and went to Gombe, near Kigoma, in 1960 aged 26 and accompanied by her remarkable mother for the first five months, as required by the British government.

During these early days Jane made the amazing discovery that chimps used and ‘made’ tools; that is to say they selected and modified twigs or grasses to extract termites from their earth; mounds. Hitherto it was thought that only man was a toolmaker. Now Louis was able to obtain a grant from the National Geographic Society for Jane to continue her research.

In the book Jane describes her observations and her growing empathy with the chimps, pointing out that personalisation of animals was rather frowned upon in scientific circles at that time.

Between 1964 and 1974 lane obtained her PhD in Ethology (Animal Behaviour) from Cambridge and later became an adjunct professor at Stanford University. She married Hugo van Lawick, Wildlife photographer, and they had a son, commonly known as Grub. Together they built up the research station at Gombe which was to become ‘one of the most dynamic interdisciplinary field stations for the study of animal behaviour in the world’.

Jane’s second marriage was to Derek Bryceson, whose story she tells briefly. He was then a much respected Tanzanian MP and Director of National Parks. Very sadly, Derek died after four years of marriage. Jane found healing in the forests of Gombe, in the wonderful diversity and resilience of nature, and in the spiritual power she feels so strongly is around us. The book contains a lot of philosophical thought about life and death, good and evil. Jane has a tremendous ability to recall and relive her very full life. Personal encounters with many interesting people make fascinating reading and indeed help us to put life into perspective. The back cover of the book calls Jane ‘one of the most extraordinary and inspiring women of the 20th century’. I think I agree.
Christine Lawrence

NOTE: the Jane Goodall Institute, with branches in several countries, comprises a) the Gombe Research Centre; b) TACARE (Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education) established in 1994 with funding from the European Union; it addresses the inter-related problems of poverty and unsustainable land use in 30 villages; c) Sanctuaries for Orphan Chimps in Congo Brazzaville, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania; it rescues chimps illegally taken from the wild and d) ‘Roots and Shoots’ -programmes for young people started in Tanzania in 1991 and now in over 20 countries.

The Jane Goodall Institute-UK is a registered charity number 327858, and is open for membership. Jane’s books may be bought from it -15 Clarendon Park, Lymington, Hants S041 8AX

GUNS AND GHANDI IN AFRICA. PAN AFRICAN INSIGHTS ON NON-VIOLENCE, ARMED STRUGGLE AND LIBERATION IN AFRICA. Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer. Africa World Press. £14.99 (Paper).

Bill Sutherland became well known in Tanzania from 1953 when, among other things he was a special assistant to the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania. This book includes contributions from many leaders in the fight against colonialism including Julius Nyerere and Salim Ahmed and examines the strategies and tactics they used in their struggles.

INTERSECTING PLACES, EMANCIPATORY SPACES, WOMEN JOURNALISTS IN TANZANIA. Melinda Robins. This book is said to ‘take a critical feminist approach in an effort to recognise the complex relationships among economic and political systems, the media industries and those who produce its content. .. male and female journalists speak candidly about their experiences … we are taken home with the researcher (who lectures at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts) as she struggles with the ethnographic tradition and the realities of her day to day experiences.’

GENDER, F AMIL Y AND WORK IN TANZANIA. C Creighton and C K Omari. Ashgate. 2000 308pp. £50.

ZANZIBAR: THE BRADT TRAVEL GUIDE. 4TH EDITION. 2000. 296 pages. £12.95. Obtainable from the Africa Book Centre, Covent Garden. Tel:020 7240 6649.

POLITICAL CULTURE OF LANGUAGE. SWAHILI, SOCIETY AND THE STATE. A new edition. Ali and Alamin Mazrui. USA. Institute of Global Cultural Studies. 305 pp. £12.95. From Africa Book Centre. Comprises essays on Swahili and its uses in markets, mosques and politics in East Africa.

SWAHILI-ENGLISH; ENGLISH-SWAHILI DICTIONARY. Nicholas Awde. Hippocrene Books Inc. New York, 2000. 586 pp. Large pocket size. $19.95; in London it can be obtained at prices varying from £13.99 to £17.50. It claims it has over 35,000 entries.

The second edition of the TUKI ENGLISH SWAHILI DICTIONARY. Institute of Kiswahili Research, University of Dar es Salaam. 924 pages compared to the first edition’s 882 pages. London price of £30. (Thank you Peter White for letting us know about these two dictionaries -Editor).

TANZANIAN ARTS DIRECTORY. UK. Visiting Arts. 1999. £10.00.
A PLAGUE OF PARADOXES: AIDS, CULTURE AND DEMOGRAPHY IN NORTHERN TANZANIA. Philip Setel. Chicago University Press. 2000. 308pp. £13.50 (paperback).

BY THE SEA. Abdulrazak Gurnah. Bloomsbury. This well known Tanzanian novelist’s latest novel tells the story of a journey. Of necessity Saleh Omar has fled Zanzibar to seek asylum by the grey waves of the English Channel and this is the story of his experiences.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

EXPANSION OF PRIVATE SECONDARY EDUCATION: LESSONS FROM RECENT EXPERIENCE IN TANZANIA. Gerard Lassibille, Jee-Peng Tan and Suleman Sumra. Comparative Education Review, February 2000.

The education scene in Tanzania is depressing. The post­independence attempt to link enrolment in schools with manpower projections, at a time when manpower planning was in a crude handicraft condition, has been disastrous. ‘Tanzanian children’ the paper states, ‘have amongst the lowest probability of attending secondary school of all children in the developing world.’ The enrolment rate has increased from 3 per cent to about 5 per cent! And the ones who get there have often been robbed of their opportunity of making adequate progress by the low quality of the primary schools they attended. The children are already so handicapped when they arrive at their secondary schools that they cannot make rapid progress there, without remedial attention.

This is not surprising. In common with many African countries, the share of the budget spent on education has been in steady decline. Since the brave days of the 60s and 70s, the amount of the budget spent on education has declined from 17 per cent to about 11 per cent between 1985 and 1994. The assumption is that it has continued to decline from the 66 per cent enrolment figure of 1996. Universal primary education seems to be further away every year, however many statements of intent to provide education for all are enthusiastically signed.

Private education is usually available for one or more of three reasons. The first is that there is not enough public education to go round. Since virtually all parents worldwide would like their children to have a better education than they have had themselves, they are ready to make any sacrifice to send their children to school. The second reason, which applies in countries where there is already adequate provision, is to provide an education of a higher quality than is to be found within the public school sector. This is usually done by attracting the best teachers by paying higher salaries, teaching in smaller classes and providing superior facilities. The third reason is to provide an education which gives access to the higher social classes in society. Where the fees are very high, only the rich will have access to the schools, and the next government and commercial ruling elite can be formed in schools to provide the next generation of rulers.

The third type can be found in most cities and large towns in Africa, as in other countries, by seeing which schools have the largest number of expensive cars parked outside, when children leave at the end of the school day. Nor are these schools necessarily private, though they generally are. It would be surprising if these schools do not exist in Tanzania.

For the most part, however, private schools in Tanzania are in the first category. They are simply filling a gap, making available a number of school places, which would not otherwise be available, ensuring that some children are going to school, who would otherwise not be able to do so. Unsurprisingly, the quality of education they provide is not always superior to that provided in the public schools.

They are governed by government regulations which are as restrictive as those which apply to public schools. They depend almost exclusively on school fees and private contributions to defray both recurrent and capital costs. While they pay slightly more to their teachers than public schools, most of them find it -impossible to give permanent contracts; the 39 per cent holding such a contract in the private schools compares poorly with the 95 per cent in the public schools. Consequently they depend very largely on new teachers, who are not faced with the necessity of sacrificing an existing contract. Consequently most heads in public schools are better qualified than those in the private schools, most of whom have no other experience of being head of a school.

Nevertheless the private schools are fulfilling their purpose in creating opportunities for many more children to go to school than would otherwise be possible, and while their results are not on the whole as good as those in the public schools, the difference is marginal. ‘In terms of examination results, students in both sectors perform equally poorly, with students averaging no more that one-third correct on the Form 4 examinations.’

The authors of the paper have the usual difficulty in accessing statistics that are really up to date, and in making adequate comparisons between the two systems they are studying. But they make a valiant attempt, and their paper provides a good deal of information which is highly suggestive for future decision making, while their final section provides some important proposals. Let us hope that they will be read not just by those who read journals like Comparative Education, but by policy makers who can actually provide change.
John Turner

MANAGING UNIVERSITY CRISES. Eds: T.S.A Mbwette and AG.M. Ishumi. DUP (1996) Ltd, University of Dar es Salaam, 2000. 247pp.

The cover photo – of a young Julius Nyerere robed as Chancellor of the University of East Africa on an unidentified formal occasion early in the life of the University College, Dar es Salaam (probably the first graduation ceremony, which marked the opening of the new campus at Ubungo) – recalls the optimism of the period, which belied the difficulties which lay ahead. Why were universities in Africa, with such great potential to contribute positively to national development, to endure so many crises? Why was academic freedom to prove such an insecure legacy? Was it because the 1960s, the decade of independence when so many universities were founded or expanded, was also the decade of student unrest in the older universities of Europe and America? Was it rather because new African governments saw universities as yet another source of potential opposition which, like traditional chiefs, trade unions and the media, should be closely controlled?

Successive crises at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) (as it became in 1970) over more than three decades are considered from different perspectives in the fifteen papers collected in this volume; despite the broad title, there are few, brief references to other universities. The papers were presented at a workshop held by UDSM in 1996, largely funded by the European Union. The book offers a diversity of viewpoints, but almost entirely from within UDSM: university teachers and administrators at a senior level predominate, although the voices of students and a lone parent are also heard. How were the events perceived at a senior political level, or by the general public? We can only guess.

One weakness of the book is the lack of any factual account of successive crises; indeed, the various contributors do not fully agree in identifying the crises for consideration. Writing originally for each other, workshop participants assumed a shared recollection of basic events which not all readers of the book will have. Most writers seem to accept a list of the main ‘crises’: the mass expulsion by government in 1966, after a student demo against government policies, especially national service; the ‘Akivaga,’ crisis of 1971, when students, ultimately supported by academic and administrative staff, confronted the university administration after electing a Kenyan as student leader, against government wishes; expulsions of staff and students in 1977; expulsions and the banning of the students’ organisation in 1978 after a demo against new terms of service for politicians, and the imposition of a state-controlled student body in 1979; the closure of UDSM for eight months in 1990 in the face of various student demands. However, no systematic account is given of these episodes, two of which (1971 and 1990) were the subjects of formal inquiries, although the respective Mungai and Mroso Committee Reports are only briefly mentioned. Some writers refer to other incidents. Yared Kihore, writing as Chairman of the Academic Staff Assembly, notes that crises at UDSM have been the mildest of any African university, never involving such violence as to warrant police or military action. Moreover, he might have added, closures at Dar have been fewer, and shorter, than at many other African universities.

In a thoughtful introductory chapter, one of the few with albeit brief references to other countries, Paschal Mihyo, a law teacher, discerns three stages of university conflicts: ‘Ivory Tower struggles’, when students confront the state for control of the university; welfare struggles, aggravated by diminishing resources; most recently, students’ efforts to reconstruct their identity as social movements for wider political mobilisation. Juma Mwapachu, Vice-Chairman of UDSM Council and President of Convocation, identifies two stages distinguished by national ideologies: under socialism (1967-85) a weak university administration lost legitimacy with academic staff as well as students, who reacted against management failures, while under subsequent market-led policies and the subjection of the university ‘to the wrath of the budget butcher’s knife’, which by 1995 had brought UDSM to ‘the edge of the precipice’, the underlying causes of crises were of a welfare or monetary kind.

Evidently, aside from obvious upheavals, the contributors might not agree on what constitutes a university crisis. The real, continuing crisis at Dar, as at other African universities, is identified by Costa Mahalu, writing as Director of Higher Education (on secondment from his university chair): ‘Our universities are in constant crises.’ He persuasively sees the real crisis as one of resources, of underfunding due to the university’s dependence upon government. He expected the workshop to propose reforms, which he promised government would welcome as long as they aimed at reducing government expenditure! A joint paper recalls (at p 171) the decline in spending on higher education in Tanzania – from 13.32% of the budget in 1980 (when it exceeded the 9.17% allocated to defence) to 8.28% in 1985 (just over half of the defence share at 15.78%) and 4% or less in 1996. Yet since the workshop UDSM has been under increasing financial pressure, with a substantial increase in student numbers without a corresponding rise in state funding.

The juxtaposition of papers can be illuminating, e.g. when the former Vice-Chancellor criticised for high-handedness (pp 180-81) immediately presents his own defence in his blow-by-blow account of the 1977-78 events (pp 189-93). The 1970 Act which established UDSM is criticised for its undemocratic provisions and for giving the government too much power over academic life. Kihore notes that it ‘took years of hard fight,’ to achieve amendments allowing the election of deans and heads of departments. One of the most telling reports is by S.L. Lwakatare, father of a student whose ‘totally unjustified’ expulsion in 1990, first notified by a radio announcement, proved to have been a decision taken (and later reversed) by the President himself, as Chancellor. The cause, ultimately disclosed through the parent’s patient inquiry, was a scrap of paper found in rubbish in the student’s room, probably mischievously planted by another student.

The main weakness of the book is the absence of any report of the deliberations at the workshop and, especially, of any conclusions reached. The Annex reports the largely predictable speeches of dignitaries at the opening of the workshop and its closing, the latter referring to the Recommendations made – of which, however, there is no trace. The book also has a slightly dated air: the papers have not been up-dated since 1996, when the Vice-Chancellor’s Foreword was also written. There is no index and much closer editing was needed to reduce the numerous misprints and grammatical errors.
Jim Read

GENDER AND EDUCATION IN TANZANIAN SCHOOLS. Eds: S J Bendera and M W Mboya. Dar es Salaam University Press. 1998.

This book covers a wide field from girls’ participation in science to streaming, from violence in schools to poverty issues, all written to answer the question in Chapter 1 ‘Does a gender problem exist in education in Tanzania?’ Stella Bendera’s research clearly demonstrates the issues and sets out to offer ways forward. One of her major concerns is a lack of dialogue between the education system and the parents and she offers practical suggestions to ensure more understanding through dialogue. Other problems identified are as a result of poverty at all levels in Tanzanian society and it is less easy to see resolution here though Bendera has words of commendation for all the efforts by outside agencies to the Ministry of Education. Chapter two gives us a fascinating insight into the impact of a western education system on the community’s traditional education of young people especially girls. Conflict arises for many families because the girls are away at school at the time of puberty and unable to join traditional ceremonies. Bendera recognises the importance of traditional initiation ceremonies and counsels collaboration with elders to draw out what they feel should be imparted to pupils so that they learn to function in society. She wants to couple this with clear education about sexuality and in a society affected by HIV / Aids, messages on safe sex. She speaks eloquently of empowering girls with knowledge and skills to help them break through cultural and traditional attitudes which keep them from participating fully in the development process.

She acknowledges the conflict and quotes the example of a Tunduru parent who was jailed for six months for withdrawing his daughter from school for two months to be initiated. “I will never forget the experience in prison and I curse the headteacher for having reported my case, which I still see as no issue at all. These children have to be initiated in order to be accepted as true members of our society anyway.”

It would be good to have had further illustration in the book of such incidents and to know whether more contact between this headteacher and the Tunduru parent could have led to a less dramatic consequence.

At the end of the book we are still left with a sense of two different value systems in conflict. Bendera is hopeful that if everyone keeps talking about these issues and girls and women participate in discussions, the best of both systems can help Tanzanian women move forward. In Stella Bendera they have a powerful and eloquent champion.
Judith Holland

ZANZIBAR, SLAVERY AND THE ROYAL NAVY. Kevin Patience. Zanzibar publications (suburi@hotmail.com). 108 pages.

Despite its title this latest book by Kevin Patience is only partly concerned with the suppression of the slave trade in the last quarter of the 19th century. It gives equal, if not more space, to the Royal Navy’s mini expeditions into what later became Kenya Colony in support of the British East Africa Company. It also tells the familiar story of the bombardment of Zanzibar on 27th August, 1896, known as the “shortest war in history”. In describing these classic examples of gunboat diplomacy, the author gives us a wealth of graphic detail with many fascinating photographs from the Zanzibar archive.

For good measure the book includes a description of the various medals awarded by the British and Zanzibar governments for these actions as well as potted biographies of the leading British dramatis personae, such as the redoubtable Sir Lloyd Matthews (Lieutenant RN at the age of 27, Brigadier General Commanding the Sultan’s army at a 31). My only regret was that the author did not name the nearly 100 sailors who died in action or by illness and are buried on Grave Island but instead listed the British warships in which they served. A recommended read for all who are interested in Zanzibar and its chequered history.
John Sankey

BAREFOOT IN THE SERENGETI. The Travel Book Club. 1984. 208 pages with 8 pages of illustrations. £8.99. plus p&p: £l.25.

BEATING ABOUT THE BUSH. Published in 2000.291 pp. £10.99. Plus p&p: £l.25.

THE WATERS OF SANJAN. 1982. 212 pp including illustrations. Price: £8.99. Plus p & p: £1.25. P&p for two books £1.50. P&p for three books: £l.75.
All three books can be obtained from: “Crime in Store”, 14 Bedford Street, London.WC2 2HE. Tel: 020-7379 3779. EMail: Crimebks_AT_AOL_DOT_com

David Read, farmer, cattle dealer, and hunter, is unquestionably a leading authority on the Maasai and related tribes of East Africa, speaking fluent Maasai and several other East African dialects. He spent his formative years with the Maasai mainly on the Serengeti Plains, and has been associated with them ever since. David Read was born in Kenya at the start of the 1920s. His mother had been left on her own and eventually moved to Loliondo, an outpost on the Northern borders of the Serengeti plains, where she ran a small hotel. She later married Otto Fischer, a Czech, who ran a nearby trading store, and life improved for the family.

Here, David spent the next seven years of his boyhood, a period during which he became almost a Maasai, but for the colour of his skin. His only playmates were Maasai children. Maasai became his first language and he ran wild, unfettered by European conventions, free to roam the wide-open spaces of the Serengeti steeped in African tradition and the Maasai way of life and associating with nature and wildlife in the process. At the age of seven, his family moved to the Lupa Goldfield in the Southern Highlands, as searching for gold seemed the only way to recoup the family’s finances at a time of financial depression in the early thirties. This period of his life is covered in his first book ‘Barefoot in the Serengeti’. During David’s time on the Lupa, and to remedy his lack of a proper education, he was sent as a boarder to a school in Arusha. His previous lack of education and association with European youths of his own age at first proved a great handicap, but within three years he drew level with them all. During his school holidays he was able to explore the local bush life, shooting crocodiles with his elder brother on Lake Rukwa, and helping his stepfather to prospect for gold.

On leaving school, he completed his education by correspondence course, and then obtained an appointment as an apprentice metallurgist with the Geological Survey in Dodoma. This proved quite a cultural shock for him, as some of his superiors tended to take a stem view of the somewhat unorthodox style of his upbringing.

At the outbreak of World War 2 he enlisted in the Army and was posted firstly to the Kenya Regiment and then transferred to the Royal Air Force, where he underwent pilot training in Rhodesia. He then transferred back into the Army and was posted to a Tanganyika Battalion of the KAR, with whom he saw active service in Abyssinia and Madagascar. After this period of active service, he was commissioned and posted to a Uganda Battalion of The KAR. His Battalion was posted to India and Burma for further active service. At the conclusion of hostilities and on promotion, he was selected to lead the Uganda KAR detachment on The Victory Parade. Like his soldiers, he had never been to Europe before.

On his return to Tanganyika he took up a fresh appointment with the Veterinary Department, initially in Dodoma as a Livestock Marketing Officer. This proved an ideal occupation for him as, combined with an additional job as an Honorary Game Warden, he was able to not only to supervise the movement and marketing of cattle, he was free to indulge in his love of the open bush and wildlife. He also had ample opportunity to meet up with his old Maasai friends. Eventually he acquired a farm of his own on the Western slopes of Kilimanjaro and became a leading figure in the local farming community. After Independence in 1961, his farming interests were gradually eroded and for a short time he was involved in agriculture in a consultative capacity, but he eventually returned to East Africa, where he still lives. This on-going account of his life is told in his second book: BEATING ABOUT THE BUSH. His third book is THE WATERS OF SANJAN – an historical novel of the Maasai. This novel is based around the life of a known Maasai warrior who lived at the turn of the century. The events portrayed were not unusual in the life of a warrior in those times, though some may shudder at the more violent sections. The customs and traditions mentioned are accurate and the places where events took place are real places and to date still go by the same names.
Geoffrey Cotterell

THE BOOK OF SECRETS. M. G. Vassanji. Picador, 1996.
339pp. £ 6.99.

This is a many-layered and absorbing story, set in Tanzania (and the Voi-Taveta area of Kenya) over the period from 1913 to the present day, and written by an author who was born in the Kenya Asian community but brought up in Tanzania. It shows remarkable insight and sympathy for its characters who stem from a wide range of cultures: the early British colonial administrator, the Indian merchant family, and people of the African majority with whom this long history is shared. The novel is both a family chronicle and a detective story, and Vassanji writes with conviction about human relations and the experience of exile; he is a Swahili speaker, which adds to his attraction from a British/Tanzanian point of view.
Philip Mawhood

ENGLISH SWAHILI DICTIONARY. W A Kirkeby (a Norwegian former teacher in Iringa). Kakepela Publishing Company, Dar es Salaam and Kirkeby Forlag AS, Eikekroken 30, 2020 Skedsmokoret, Norway. 1,069 pages. Prices vary from £47 in UK to Shs 30,000 in Tanzania. (Thank you Peter White for letting us know about this – Editor).

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

THE BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT IN TANZANIA AFTER SOCIALISM – CHALLENGES OF REFORMING BANKS, PARASTATALS, TAXATION AND THE CIVIL SERVICE. A E Temu and Jean M Due (University of Illinois). Journal of Modem African Studies, 38, 4 (2000) pp 683-712. Cambridge University Press.

This comprehensive and conscientious study of the development of privatisation in Tanzania indicates that although the overall impact of economic liberalism has been positive, “significant weaknesses remain”, especially in the regulatory frameworks required “to prevent abuses by private enterprises”. It claims that the “trickle down” of welfare to poorer sections of society has been inadequate as has the extension of financial services to smaller business ” and rural areas. The overall conclusion is that “further public investment is required, especially in health, education and infrastructure.”

The argument is based largely on the failure to deliver of Tanzanian socialism’, with public enterprises performing badly. After 1986 the government undertook broad-ranging formal economic reforms with the support of the IMF and the World Bank, by dismantling the system of state control and promoting private sector expansion, so that a more market-driven financial system began to emerge. Multi-national firms bought shares in the large and relatively profitable firms, such as brewery and cigarette companies, but most firms were running below capacity and plants were badly dilapidated and only international capital could afford to remedy the situation. Stressing the importance of the utilities in this transformation, the authors decided that regulation of the private sector did not receive adequate consideration. Privatised manufacturing and processing plants often “violated fair trade principles. ” The inevitable result of liberisation has been the rapid increase in private sector participation in the economy, with a growth in advertising, an increase in the number of restaurants, cafes and hotels, increased competition and a broader range of alternate sources of almost every consumable. The number of private TV stations, dependent on private sector advertisements, rose from none in 1993 to seven in 1998. Over ten new daily and weekly independent newspapers were established.

Reforms in the public service succeeded in reducing the workforce, but “not much was achieved in changing the work habits and hence the efficiency of employees.”

The study concludes: “Reform prescriptions by the World Bank and the IMF, though in principle inevitable for Tanzania, need not be followed blindly. But for the changes to bear fruit, institutional development both in the form of organisations and rules and by-laws needed to be established. Otherwise excesses in the private sector could easily replace inefficiencies in the public sector, especially in the case of utilities”.

The study adds: “The major failure of reform to date lies in the
apparent lack of tangible benefits for many of the poorer sections of society. Rectifying the failure calls for increased revenue earnings to be translated into investments in public services that will improve people’s well-being, mostly in health, education and infrastructure. While the inadequacies of Tanzania’s former socialist economy has been very clearly demonstrated by the achievements of the reform process, the management of an equitable and effective market economy still requires a key role for the state.”
John Budge

CORDINATING HEALTH RESEARCH TO PROMOTE ACTION: THE TANZANIAN EXPERIENCE. Andrew Y Kitua, Yohana J S Mashalla, Joseph K Shija. British Medical Journal. 321 (7264). September 2000. 3pp.

THE PARADOX OF THE COST AND AFFORDABILITY OF TRADITIONAL AND GOVERNMMENT HEALTH SERVICES IN TANZANIA. Susanna H Muela, Adiel K Mushi and Joan M Ribera. Health Policy and Planning. 15 (3) 7pp.

Coordination of health research activities is one of the important aims of the Tanzanian Health Research Forum launched by the Minister of Health in February 1999. The Forum has been set up with laudable aims to use research resources effectively. It not only promotes and coordinates research but also enhances the use of health research results for planning policy and decision making.

The Forum includes 20 member institutions from research, the ministries of health, education and community development, women’s affairs and children. Encouraging progress has been made developing partnership between institutions and for the first time national health research priorities have been drawn up and national health and social problems identified. Two disease eradication programmes are compared in the first of these two papers to illustrate the value of coordinating their implementation at a national level. The onchocerciasis and malaria programmes were both given global, regional and national commitment with political backing and financial and technical resources. The onchocerciasis programme has been a success but the malaria programme has had difficulties with some countries failing to coordinate the resources effectively. The essential elements for putting research into action are being developed by the Tanzanian Health Research Forum. It is working with the scientific community, the Population Services International Social Marketing Group and other partners in the production and distribution of bed nets and the promotion of their use, in the prevention of malaria. At the international summit on Malaria in the year 2000 over 50 African heads of state signed a pledge to halve Africa’s malaria deaths by the year 2010 and the main focus of the control programme is the use of bed nets that have been treated with insecticide. Research demonstrates their value but the implementation of their production and use requires the essential coordinating role of the Tanzanian Health Research Forum.

An understanding of the dynamics of cross cultural health care is considered in the second article to throw light on the ability or the willingness of people to pay for biomedical health care or traditional medicine. It is the type of illness that often defines the sector of health care the individual uses. Also the social network for financial help with the payment for treatment varies depending on whether biomedical health care or traditional medicine is chosen.

The article is based on a study of field observations of lay people’s perspectives of malaria and its treatment and a second study (Munjinja et al 1997) on the impact of a cost sharing system done at St Francis Designated District Hospital in Ifakara.

It was found that people define two types of illness. ‘Normal illness’ is the one group and includes such conditions as malaria, schistosomiasis and diarrhoeal diseases. The other is ‘out of the order’ illness and includes afflictions such as barrenness, impotence, mental and chronic disorders. People believe that ‘normal’ illness is best treated by biomedical methods whereas ‘out of order’ diseases are the domain of traditional healers who have the skills to enter into contact with the invisible world. Treatment for normal illnesses is usually paid for by the individual or by the immediate family circle. Hospital care is paid for before treatment is started in cash and the fees are fixed. Treatment for ‘out of order’ illnesses leads to a much broader social involvement. The traditional healer will involve an extended kin group who will be urged by the elders to participate in the treatment process and to assist financially. Payment will be during treatment or after recovery and will be negotiable according to wealth status. Also the payment may be in kind, in cash or on a credit basis.

Affordability studies need to consider the social networks contributing to a patients care and who ultimately pays for the treatment whether biomedical or traditional. Social and financial support within the community varies significantly depending on the type of health care chosen by the individual.
Peter Christie

COST EFFECTIVENESS OF VOLUNTARY HIV1 COUNSELLING AND TESTING IN REDUCING SEXUAL TRANSMISSION OF HIV1 IN KENYA AND TANZANIA.

Michael Sweat and seven others. The Lancet. Volume 356. July 2000. 8 pages.
The authors of this impressive paper estimated cost effectiveness for a hypothetical cohort of 10,000 people seeking counselling in urban East Africa and concluded that HIV1 voluntary counselling was highly cost-effective in urban East African settings but slightly less so than interventions such as improvement of sexually transmitted disease services and universal provision of nevirapine to pregnant women in high prevalence settings.

ZANZIBAR: DEMOCRACY ON SHAKY FOUNDATIONS. Article 19.49 pp. 2000. £5.99. This is a report on restrictions on freedom of expression and other fundamental freedoms in Zanzibar and the impact of these on the credibility of the October 2000 elections.

COMPLEMENTARY WATER SYSTEMS IN DAR ES SALAAM: the case of water vending. Marianne Kjellen.
Water Resources Development, V01.16, No.1 (2000), pp.143-54 Whilst water vending may to the casual observer be considered a somewhat marginal occupation, it is actually an activity which is central to the daily life of a large proportion of Dar es Salaam’s population; it is also one of the oldest means of generating an income in the town. In the course of this short article Marianne Kjellen, a human geographer based at Stockholm University, insight is gained not only into the (hard) lives of the vendors (and to a lesser extent their customers), but also some of the strains arising :from rapid urbanisation in developing countries. The inability of public utilities to provide secure water provision to Dar es Salaam households (in 1991 it was estimated that 45% of the urban population had no access to running water) leads to economic opportunities for resourceful urbanites. Amongst those fortunate enough to have connections to the water mains (whether legal [30%] or illegal [29%]), some use it as a handy source of additional income by re-selling mains water to vendors. For the vendors themselves, however, generating an income is far less easy. Whilst periods of water shortage (which of course periodically occur in Dar es Salaam) can lead to increased profits; more usually estimated average monthly earnings work out at a penurious Shs.24,000, Shs.6,000 less than the official minimum wage. When taking into account job insecurity (demand for water is variable), along with the dangers associated with the work (vendors are often involved in road accidents), and its physically demanding nature, this is indeed a pittance. In order to earn even this modest amount vendors have to charge consumers ten to twenty times the price for which the water is bought. This means that their customers – often amongst the poorest town-dwellers – pay on average around Shs 5 per litre. By contrast, those connected to the mains – who tend to live in the more affluent, better serviced areas – pay just Shs 0.3 per litre. Kjellen concludes that, as long as the extension of piped water services to all urban communities remains beyond the capacity and resources of the public utility, then improved access for vendors should be prioritised, as a result of which consumer costs would be reduced and the valuable service the vendors provide to the urban poor facilitated.

This accessible, well researched and written article deserves a wider readership than its publication in a specialist journal suggest it may attract. However, a longer Swahili version (with photographs) is available in booklet form, entitled Uuzaji wa maji katika jiji la Dar es Salaam (pub. date February 2000, ISSN 1404-6784), from the Environmental and Development Studies Unit, Stockholm University.
Andrew Burton

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FINANCIAL DEEPENING AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN TANZANIA. 0 A Akinboade, University of South Africa. Journal of International Development. Vo!. 12.2000. 11 pages.
The ratio of bank deposit liability to nominal gross national product was used in this study as a measure of financial deepening and modelled for relationship with real per capita income. The results suggested that financial deepening and economic growth were independent in Tanzania.

THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION IN TANZANIA. Eds: J C J Galabawa, FE M K Senkoro and AFL Lwaitiama. Faculty of Education. University of Dar es Salaam. This book gives the results of a conference in Arusha in March 1997.

REFLECTIONS ON LEADERSHIP IN AFRICA FORTY YEAR AFTER INDEPENDENCE. ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF MWALIMU NYERERE ON THE OCCASION OF HIS 75TH BIRTHDAY. Ed: Haroub Othman. VUB University Press (Belgium) and Institute of Development Studies, University of Dar es Salaam. September 2000. This book has 13 papers, six of them by Tanzanians.

‘PEPO’ AS AN INNER HEALING FORCE. PRACTICES OF A FEMALE SPIRITUAL HEALER IN TANZANIA. Jessica Erdstsieck. Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam and University Press, Tanzania.

John Mbonde, reviewed this book in the Dar es Salaam Sunday Observer on 22nd October 2000 and explained how there were five main chapters: ‘Nambela, the healer’ (based on the author’s own account of her illnesses); diagnostic sessions in her healing practice by means of divination (including Nambela’s attitude to the client); singing sessions (group therapy through daily rhythmic singing); plants and the aetiology of disease; and, the issue of spiritual forces (the exposure of ‘pepo’ both in illness and therapy). The author of the book observes that in modem Tanzania people’s pursuit of health and healing usually takes place at the interface between cosmopolitan clinical medicine and a variety of alternatives – self-medication, intra-family treatment and the services of such African specialists as midwives, diviners, herbalists, priest-healers and ritualists. The component of spiritual healing plays an important role in traditional medicine. She says that, although socially and politically cosmopolitan medicine is widely accepted in Africa, and it dominates the conventional health care system, cognitively, indigenous medicine still has the upper hand. She believes that chronic diseases, psychosomatic and psychiatric disorders, which usually last a long time and require personal attention, have remained predominantly the field of traditional healers.

NARRATIONS OF SHEIKH THABIT KOMBO JECHA . (MASIMULIZI YA SHEIKH THABIT KOMBO JECHA) with a preface by Mwalimu Nyerere. Author: Minael H 0 Mdundu.
Editor Paul Sozigwa. Dar es Salaam University Press. 270pp.

In 13 chapters, several appendixes and bibliography based on recorded cassettes, the author captures Sheikh Thabit in his own words narrating his 82 years of life which covered both world wars. He died in 1986. His formal education finished at Form IV but he worked in a variety of jobs from seaman to weighing scale mechanic. The author traces Thabit’s history of the six political parties that arose in Zanzibar on what he calls racially based grounds and details the setting up of the Mro-Shirazi party and the later assassination of President Karume at which he was present ­Extract from a review in the Dar es Salaam Guardian by Edwin Semzaba.

AGRARIAN ECONOMY, STATE AND SOCIETY IN CONTEMPORARY TANZANIA. Ed: P G Foster and Sam Maglrimbi. Ashgate. 1999. 282 pages. £42.50. Key areas covered in this book include credit, land refonn, agricultural extension, environmental issues, population, migration and social control.

GENDER, FAMILY AND WORK IN TANZANIA. Eds: Colin Creighton and C K Omari. Ashgate. December 2000. 31Opp. £42.50. The social construction of marriage, the interplay of family life and gender relations with economic processes and forms of work.

DAR ES SALAAM WATER DEMAND. AN END-USE PERSPECTIVE. Tanzania Centre for Energy, Environment. 1999. £9.95 from the Africa Book Centre. 138 pages.

THE BIG C. A BBC Radio 4 programme on the 9th August.
Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald. In this programme Geoff Watts met the doctors and nurses of Tanzania’s only Cancer Institute. The Cancer Institute is in Dar es Salaam’s old Ocean Road Hospital. All five of the country’s oncologists are based there. Geoff Watt’s interview was conducted mainly with the doctor in charge who explained that there were about 20,000 new patients each year, many more women than men. It used to be thought that there was not much cancer in Africa but this is not so nowadays. There are even children with the disease. But not many cancer cases enter the health system in Tanzania. Sufferers often come too late because they are ignorant of the disease. Others do not come because they have to pay for all the drugs which are very expensive. Radiotherapy treatment is free but not chemotherapy. The National Health budget is about one dollar per person per year. The Institute relies on donations to keep going.

A lot of sick people go to traditional healers for help. These healers are thriving because they understand the needs of the people, cultural and spiritual, better than professional doctors. Rather like our own holistic practitioners, I thought. Sometimes cancer is HIV related. HIV is really taking over medical resources. There are no funds for preventive measures for cancer so the emphasis on is on curing patients, but because of drug and equipment shortages, an innovative approach has to be adopted. The doctor in charge was trained in Glasgow and at first found trying to apply what he had learnt very difficult to apply in Dar es Salaam. Later he was able to return to Glasgow for a year, bearing in mind the conditions in Tanzania, and now he is able to approach his work in a more appropriate way. He said very definitely that he would rather work in Tanzania than for the NHS in the UK. There is no despondency at Ocean Road, he said. He added that lung cancer is not a problem yet but he is not happy with the commercialisation of tobacco firms. More people are smoking now in Tanzania.

This was an informative and very interesting programme. When one considers all the medical facilities at our disposal in the UK, one can only admire the struggle in Tanzania to meet the needs of sick people.
Christine Lawrence

THE ASSESSMENT OF VULNERABILITY AND ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS IN TANZANIA. M J Mwandosya, B S Nyenzi and M L Luhanga. Tanzania Center for Energy, Environment. 1999. 235pp. £11.95 from
African Book Centre.

KARIAKOR. THE CARRIER CORPS. THE STORY OF THE MILITARY LABOUR FORCES IN THE CONQUEST OF GERMAN EAST AFRICA. Nairobi
University Press. 2000. 247pp. £12.95.

TANZANIANS ARISE AND GET RICH. H N Kida. Kai. Dar es Salaam. 1999. 205pp.

ASIAN COMMUNITIES IN TANZANIA: A JOURNEY THROUGH PAST AND PRESENT TIMES. Institut fur Afrika­kunde, Hamburg. 1999. 211pp. Maps.

ALMASI. Peter Wilson. Pentland Press. 109pp/ £7.50. In his retirement Peter Wilson has departed from Swahili grammar (‘Simplified Swahili’ and related books) and written an intriguing detective novel. When a Cessna plane crashes on Kilimanjaro in suspicious circumstances, diamond smuggling is suspected and a detective from UK is requested to assist the Tanzanian police. Some of the action takes place on the mountain and some at the diamond mine Buibui (spider) near the village of Sisimisi (very small ant) not far from Arusha. The whole tale moves along swiftly. I much enjoyed the humour throughout and the good descriptions of familiar places. Finally all the villains come to a sticky end and ‘la femme fatal’ who wins the heart of the British detective ­until he has second thoughts -retreats to her comfortable villa in Hounslow. Might there be a sequel? I wonder.
Christine Lawrence

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

CIVIL SERVICE REFORM IN TANZANIA: ORGANISATION AND EFFICIENCY THROUGH PROCESS CONSULTANCY. Ronald McGill. International Journal of Public Sector Management. 12 (5).1999. 9pp.
Behind the tortuous jargon that perhaps an article in the learned IJPSM requires, lies a very interesting and heartening account of recent efforts in civil service reform in Tanzania. One real question is whether the management concepts and terminology really help us in any way. This article is apparently about ‘institutional development’ and ‘process consultancy’; it could equally be about ‘organisational development’ and ‘change management’ -all these are in practice fairly common sense approaches to capacity building in administrative reform.
Tanzania like nearly all Sub-Saharan African countries had seen drastic declines in civil service efficiency and effectiveness. Demoralised officials could not and did not deliver and were increasingly being drawn into corruption; resources were far outrun by responsibilities, moving public administration onto an almost symbolic level; and service provision to citizens was increasingly non-existent.
The reform programme recognised that external consultant driven reforms had proved completely ineffective. In an approach that has been paralleled, in for example, Zambia and Ghana, the alternative was to rely upon the knowledge and eventual commitment of middle level civil servants themselves. Once an overall framework for the reorganised ministries, departments and attendant functions had been established, officials were brought together in diagnostic and planning workshops where, after intensive rudimentary training, they were able to define problems and resulting solutions -and make plans for implementation. The commitment and motivation developed by this diagnostic/planning exercise also helped in implementation. Very impressive results are claimed in streamlining and efficiency improvement -though it is not clear whether these were actually achieved or merely declared targets.
Experience in reform programmes of this type does show that this is an effective approach. Two of the essential requirements are recognised by McGill: some overall framework and guidance in terms of functions, ministerial portfolios etc; and skilful facilitation and guidance in workshops to ensure movement in the right direction. What is not made so clear is: the need for politicians to be involved in the process and share in the ownership and motivation; and the need for resources to be made available to implement reforms and new directions. The latter are not impossible though harder to provide in contemporary African conditions. Nonetheless, this is an encouraging account of an approach to CSR that is more productive than most.
Garth Glentworth

TRADING ON INEQUALITY: GENDER AND THE DRINKS TRADE IN SOUTHERN TANZANIA. Maia Green. Africa. 69 (3) 1999.
Maia Green’s article offers a carefully researched and detailed study of one of the most important, and most neglected, areas of the informal economy. The sale of locally-made liquor is a vast business in Tanzania. The bulk of the alcohol consumed in Tanzania is made and sold in the informal sector -though always on a very small scale, so that this economy is vast in the aggregate, but also minute and ubiquitous. Yet we know very little about it, and the 1980s has somehow never come to embrace this most active and informal sector of the economy_ This article provides precise details of the costs and returns of brewing for small-scale women producers. Green shows how women’s involvement in brewing beer for this trade is a sign of political and economic exclusion -since they are denied access to other sources of income -but is also a potentially empowering economic strategy. In doing so, she makes a very significant contribution to overcoming the extraordinary lack of interest in or knowledge of this economy ­what Mike McCall has called the phenomenon of the ‘invisible brewer’. She argues that many women in the Mahenge highlands, her study area, rely on income from brewing, and that in doing so they are in effect buying their way out of involvement in grain farming, for they are unable to mobilize the labour needed for effective accumulation through agriculture. She distinguishes between investment brewers -a group of women who brew for sale only occasionally, to meet specific cash needs -and a smaller body of livelihood brewers. The latter are often female household heads, and rely almost entirely on brewing for a cash income. Interestingly, Green’s findings suggest a slightly different pattern of brewing here to that which I found in research in Rungwe/Kyela, and in other parts of East Africa. There it seemed that the most regular brewers were those who did have some other source of income, though generally a slight one. These women were, apparently, the most regular brewers because they could call on these other resources when their brewing activities ran into problems: when brews went wrong (as they do), when drinkers failed to pay (as they do), or when there was some unexpected demand for cash from some local official. Regrettably, Green does not deal with this last issue in this otherwise very valuable piece of research. There is a further story here -which Beidelman touched on, many years ago -of how the dynamics of sale and debt, and the rents extracted by local officials and ‘club’ owners, have an important effect upon the distribution of the cash income from the sale of local liquor, bringing benefits to men and to minor functionaries of the state, rather than to women.
Justin Willis

THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF CHILDHOOD DIARRHOEA AMONG GOGO INFANTS. Mara Mabilia. Anthropology and Medicine 7 (2). 16pp.
This article records the findings of Mabilia’s research into two types of childhood diarrhoea, attributed by the Gogo to states of breast-feeding and influenced by sexual behaviour. The Gogo interpretation and treatment was found by Mabilia, an Italian anthropologist, to differ markedly from the more clinical diagnosis and treatment which would be provided by a health centre. Herein lie considerable dangers for young Gogo children’s health and survival.
Through her in-depth research Mabilia has identified cultural reasons why prescriptions of health clinics so often fail in the prevention of diarrhoea and malnutrition in Gogo infants, and by extrapolation in infant’s of other African countries (and Brazil). The importance of finding reasons is highlighted by the UNICEF report of 1998 which states that up to 2.2 million infant and child deaths (a year) are the result of dehydration due to persistent diarrhoea often accompanied by malnutrition. In Tanzania these diseases are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in children under five.
Using a variety of methods for her research in the Dodoma District Mabilia included a survey at the Cicongwe village dispensary in which a baby’s health was shown to be at risk after the first six months. Since Gogo explanation of diarrhoea seemed to be closely related to beliefs about sexual taboos and practices, the most rewarding results came from information obtained from friendships and intensive discussions with women and healers in the area. For this a deep knowledge of ‘cigogo’, the Gogo language, was essential to follow the use of double meaning, metaphor and mithonymics used by the women to explain the different situations involved in a child’s health.
As Mabilia says “the utilisation of information concerning the mothers’ understanding of the nature and causes of diarrhoea can be very important for paediatricians in the treatment of diarrhoea”. It opens the way to new forms of communication with the users of medical services. A new (different) doctor ­patient relationship, more sensitive to the local meanings of disease effects, causes and practices, needs to be part of the multi-variable causes of diarrhoea and malnutrition. Thereafter successful health intervention is better assured. This article is recommended reading for all interested in the welfare of children and communities but especially for health specialists and biological anthropologists who work in Africa.
Fiona Armitage

PUBLIC SECTOR REFORM IN A POOR, AID­ DEPENDENT COUNTRY -TANZANIA. O. Therkildsen. Public Administration Development 20 61-71. 2000. This article describes how the multiple changes in the public sector during recent years have been pursued despite fragile political support and few service delivery improvements on the ground. The paper argues that this has been because of substantial external influences, fragmented domestic policy making, weak links between policy making and implementation and questionable assumptions about some of the reform measures -DRB.

BURNING WITH ENTHUSIASM: FUELWOOD SCARCITY IN TERMS OF SEVERITY, IMPACTS AND REMEDIES. F H Johnsen. Forum for Development Studies. 1999 (1)
24 pp.

BUILDING ON YOUR OWN DOORSTEP. Aida Kisanga. Courier. 182. August/September 2000. 3 pages. This paper points out that 40% of Tanzania’s annual development budget goes on construction but that foreign contractors (less than 3% of all contractors) are still dominating the building trade. There is now a policy to increase the share of indigenous firms to between 20% and 30% of the value of foreign­funded projects in the medium term. The paper goes on to discuss the problems -underestimation of overheads, scheduling of hired equipment use, management and marketing and makes recommendations on ways to improve the situation by technology transfer and targeting -DRB

CULTURAL TRANSFER IN ADULT EDUCATION: THE CASE OF THE FOLK DEVELOPMENT COLLEGES IN TANZANIA. Alan Rogers. International Review of Education. 46 (1/2) 25 pages.

This paper, about the Swedish financed Folk Colleges in Tanzania between 1975 and suggests that, for success to be achieved, there needs to be a match between the ideologies, discourse and functions of the educational institutions within both societies and that the transfer of more than one element of any educational system would assist take-up.

EFFICACY OF VOLUNTARY HIV 1 COUNSELLING AND TESTING IN KENYA, TANZANIA AND TRINIDAD. Voluntary Counselling and Testing Efficacy Study Group. Lancet. 356
(9224). July 2000. 9pp.

FROM SOCIAL NEGOTIATION TO CONTRACT: SHIFTING STRATEGIES OF FARM LABOUR RECRUITMENT IN TANZANIA UNDER MARKET LIBERALISATION. S Ponte. World Development. 28 2000. 13 pages.

WHY DO FARMERS EXPAND THEIR LAND INTO FORESTS? THEORIES AND EVIDENCE FROM TANZANIA (A Angelsen et al) and TANZANIA’S SOIL WEALTH (K A Brekke). Environment and Development Economics. 4 (3) July 1999. lSpp and 23pp respectively.

EXPORTING, OWNERSHIP AND CONFIDENCE IN TANZANIAN ENTERPRISES. World Economy. 22 1999. 16pp.

TANZANIA – EXPORT MARKET DEVELOPMENT SERVICES FOR SME’S
L Tomesen and A Gibson. Small Enterprise Development 10(4)December 1999. 9pp

THE SEARCH FOR THE SOURCE OF THE NILE: CORRESPONDANCE BETWEEN BURTON, SPEKE AND OTHERS FROM BURTON’S UNPUBLISHED EAST AFRICAN LETTER BOOK… Ed Donald Young Roxburghe Club 1999 207pp, maps

When Michael Wise, Reviews Editor of Tanzanian Affairs, passed away in November 1998 he left behind a big gap. We are now looking for a volunteer to take over the job he used to do. This involves collecting new books and articles about Tanzania, selecting those worthy of a full review, requesting help with such reviews or merely mentioning or briefly summarising the others. Just three times a year about 8 pages of Tanzanian Affairs are given over to these reviews and mentions. We will supply full details of all new publications and also a list of possible reviewers. Qualifications for the job? An interest in Tanzania and in books and word processing capacity. Please give me a phone call, or send a letter or an e­mail (the addresses are at the back) if you are interested in helping. Many thanks -Editor.

THE POLITICAL PLIGHT OF ZANZIBAR. Ed: T L Mwaliyamkono TEMA publishers Co. Ltd. 2000. 255 pages.

At the annual Consultative Group meeting in Dar es Salaam in May almost every donor delegate stressed the need for the Union government to contain the Zanzibar political situation which they said was tarnishing Tanzania’s image and reputation. President Mkapa responded by cautioning the donor community against patronising the situation in Zanzibar. He advised them to dig deeper into history before making a judgement. This timely and revealing book, which was launched in June this year, could serve the purpose well as it does delve deeply into the history of the Isles and goes a long way to explaining its present political plight.

At the launch, Executive Director of the Eastern and Southern Africa Universities Research Programme (ESAURP) Prof Maliyamkono said that political hostilities go back to the colonial era. “People in Zanzibar are born in politics as they are born like Christians or Moslems” he said. Post-independence governments up to 1995 did almost nothing successfully to unify the people. He went further (some might say too far) by saying that a coalition government (as proposed by the CUF party in the present elections) could not be established in Zanzibar because of fundamental differences, particularly regarding the 1964 revolution. CCM members considered themselves to be pure Africans and had favoured the violent revolution; CUF supporters who were Africans/Shirazis and Arabs, had not supported the revolution. These groupings were almost exactly the same as in the three elections held in Zanzibar in 1961 and 1963. There had been no change. However, neither CUF nor CCM had an absolute majority in the Isles; the election would be decided by the 20% best described as neutral.

The opinion survey on which the book was based was conducted by 75 Tanzanian scholars who interviewed 7,500 Zanzibaris. It reveals people’s views on such issues as ethnicity, race, religion, political affiliation and relations between Unguja and Pemba. Chapters by Professors J Mwimbiliza and D R Mukangara explain how and why these views were formed historically; Judge Ramadhan goes into the legal framework; C A Rugalabamu explains why the 1955 elections were so chaotic; and, Prof Mwaliyamkono delves into the controversial issue of the extent to which Zanzibaris are subsidised by mainland Tanzanians.

This is an excellent book packed with information and data which enables the layman to begin to understand the extraordinary complexity of Zanzibar politics -DRB.

CONFLICT AND GROWTH IN AFRICA. VOL. 2. KENYA, TANZANIA AND UGANDA. J Klugman, B Neyapati and F Stewart. Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 1999. 113 pages.

This is a book about conflict which contrasts in a balanced way (with an abundance of tables and charts) the varying experiences of the three countries from the standpoint of economic analysis. It includes brief reference to earlier history but concentrates mainly on the post­independence period. It concludes that the key economic condition for stability rather than conflict is equitable growth. It describes Tanzania (which has its own chapter, unlike Kenya and Uganda which are grouped together) as having been the most stable country, avoiding even the relatively minor outbreaks suffered by Kenya and attributes this to its inclusive and egalitarian policies along with some historical and political factors. The paper makes sound recommendations for both government and donor policy and repeatedly emphasises the need for inclusive economic and social policies. Democratic reforms alone will not resolve and may even cause political violence it states -DRB.

THEY CAME TO AFRICA. 200 YEARS OF THE ASIAN PRESENCE IN TANZANIA. Lois Lobo. Sustainable Village. PO Box 23904. Dar es Salaam. 100 pages.

The author of this informative illustrated oral history book is a fourth generation Tanzanian Asian who chronicles the lives of Asians who emigrated at various times from India to Tanzania. What makes the book doubly interesting is that the 20 extended families described are selected from the Zaroastrian, Hindu, Jain, Sunni, Ismaili, Ithnasheri, Bohra, Christian, Sikh and Buddhist communities. Even the author admitted that when she started writing the book she did not know enough about these various communities and so she includes a helpful introductory chapter on each sub-group and the differing religious cultures. (Thank you Gloria Mawji for sending me this book for review -Editor.)

BEEKEEPING AND SOME HONEY BEE PLANTS IN UMALILA, SOUTHERN TANZANIA. Paul Latham. 92 pages with over 100 colour photographs. 1999. Available from Bees for Development, Troy, Monmouth NP25 4AB £33.

This is the English edition of a manual produced in Swahili. It is intended to encourage the conservation and planting of useful bee plants (74 are illustrated) in the southern highlands. The introductory section describes log hive beekeeping practised in the area and shows a typical smoker constructed from bamboo.

LOVE -IS IT BLACK OR WHITE? E. Cory-King & V. Ngalinda. Citron Press. 1999.231 pages.

Despite a challenging title that has the appearance of a sociological inquiry, Cory-King’s novel succeeds in promising a little more than it can deliver. Upendo (love) follows the relationship between Eliza, a young woman from Nyaishozi (Lake Victoria), and Mark, a Black English expatriate, posted to work in Tanzania. The couple’s problematic relationship allows the narrative to bring to the fore the dilemma facing young Tanzanian women in a modem context as they struggle against the opposing forces of traditionalism and westernisation. The treatment of Mark and Eliza’s cross-cultural relationship at times shows an interesting level of insight, but on the whole it is burdened by the author’s obsession with cultural nationalism.

Upendo resists falling into any specific genre of novel, precisely because it can’t make up its mind what direction to follow. Cory-King’s narrative moves from one debate to another without really accommodating any depth of discussion; stumbling from the issue of African feminism onto the topic of development and the next minute returning to the subject of cultural nationalism. I remain uncertain as to the author’s intention in stereotyping the novel’s central characters. Could this possibly have been deliberate? Whatever the reason, Upendo has got the lot: the headstrong ‘African Queen’; the greedy Swahili Moslem trader; the handsome yet stubborn male hero; and of course the stiff upper lipped British parents, and not forgetting the down-to-earth American feminist. On the subject of character representation, I became even more concerned when the heroine arrives in Oxford Circus and is ‘instantly assaulted by a pair of black men fighting with knives!’ In fact the only other representation of blacks in England is of Mark’s parents who are portrayed as wealthy and aristocratic as Queen Elizabeth herself. Is this really a realistic representation? By this time, I had consoled myself with the fact that Cory-King’s novel is in fact more of a fairytale then a serious novel.

Indeed, in true fairytale style, the final chapter sees the heroine transported in a glittering carriage (all right, it’s a Mercedes not a pumpkin) to a fairytale wedding with a real prince charming. The more compelling parts of the novel are furnished with vivid and colourful descriptions of Tanzanian village life, thanks to V. Ngalinda who assisted Cory-King by acting as a cultural advisor, and they make lively and entertaining reading.

Readers who have had experience of living in Tanzania may well enjoy this novel, as Cory-King has obviously worked hard to adorn her narrative with the vibrant characteristics of everyday life in rural Tanzania.
Jonathan Donovan

CLIMBING MOUNT KILIMANJARO. S W Carmichael and S Stoddard. 1999. 112 pages. Approximately $ 15.00.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

PERI-URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN AN ERA OF STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT IN AFRICA: THE CITY OF DAR ES SALAAM. John Briggs and David Mwamfupe. Urban Studies. 37 (4) 12pp.

Anyone returning to Dar es Salaam after a prolonged absence in recent years will have been struck above all by two things: its prodigious expansion and an apparently vibrant urban economy which has emerged in the wake of economic liberalisation. In this article, co-written by geographers from the universities of Glasgow and Dar es Salaam, connections between these two phenomena are explored. Davis and Mwamfupe argue that the nature of the city’s growth since the early 1990s has been fundamentally affected by the implementation of structural adjustment policies in Tanzania, not necessarily for the better. Prior to 1992, urban growth in Dar es Salaam could be characterised as taking the form of ‘ribbon’ development, which entailed expansion along the main arterial routes leading out of the city. This was prompted by demand for residential space, but more particularly peri-urban land was occupied as agricultural land and used for subsistence purposes in place of, or supplementary to, waged employment. The direction of this development was determined above all by transport availability. In the 1980s, the government-owned company, Usafiri Dar es Salaam, had a virtual monopoly over urban transport, providing irregular and inefficient services to only the most accessible areas, notably those located along the roads heading west and north from the city. As a result, development tended to occur close to these routes.

Since 1992, as the impact of structural adjustment policies has begun to be felt, the character of Dar es Salaam’s expansion has changed. ‘Ribbon’ development has been replaced by ‘in-fill’ development -the occupation of vacant areas between existing population settlements. This has been conditioned above all by the de-regulation of the urban transport sector, with new areas being settled as privately-owned public transport has expanded apace, reaching formerly inaccessible locations. A progression is described whereby pioneer settlers are initially serviced by Land Rovers, and as communities expand and roads improve they are eventually incorporated into the city-wide network of vipanya (small mini-buses) and dala-dalas (larger mini-buses), which in turn encourages further settlement in neighbouring areas. In addition, ‘in-fill’ development has been stimulated by an expansion in car ownership in the 1990s, which has also opened up locations previously considered too remote. Both car and home ownership have received official support amongst state employees, in the shape of supplementary entitlements. Consequently, in some of the ‘in-fill’ areas surveyed by the authors around two-thirds of the houses under construction were owned by government employees.

Another change occurring in the wake of structural adjustment, Davis and Mwamfupe argue, is that the acquisition of land for subsistence purposes has given way to acquisition for investment purposes (either in the shape of property development and rental, or for commercial agriculture). A construction boom in the peri-urban areas has been stimulated by a growth of surplus capital in the de-regulated urban economy. This surplus has stemmed from the expanding economic opportunities resulting from the removal of import-export restrictions and other obstacles to trade. It also arose from -up to the mid-1990s, at least -corruption amongst government officials, who took advantage of the abundant opportunities for private gain during the permissive, liberalising regime of President Mwinyi. Davis and Mwamfupe lament the fact that the surplus generated since the implementation of structural adjustment has been invested in construction and property, as opposed to manufacturing activity. This is one indication, they argue, that structural adjustment in Tanzania is failing in one of its main aims -the promotion of sustainable long-term investment in the productive capacity of the economy. They are concerned that as the consumption boom which occurred in the wake of liberalisation wanes, and as President Mkapa’s anti-corruption initiatives begin to have an impact (thus blocking another source of private -if illicit -surplus), the city’s long term economic health will be adversely affected.

Davis and Mwamfupe are right to voice their concern. However, the position is perhaps not as serious as they fear. Firstly, the construction industry is not -as they acknowledge in an aside -necessarily a ‘consumption-dominated’ rather than a productive activity -it has important linkages which help stimulate economic growth. Secondly, as the memory of the nationalisation of industry and assets in the dirigiste 1970s and 1980s fades (to which the authors, in part, attribute investors reluctance to support industry as opposed to the less risky property development) investors -both domestic and foreign -should become more confident about sinking capital into long-term productive projects. Indeed, there is already some evidence of this occurring -the Bora Shoe Company and Associated Breweries are two examples of recently established local manufacturing companies producing goods for domestic consumption. However, Davis and Mwamfupe are surely right in concluding that without increased investment in industry, the urban economy will be hard-put to provide for its rapidly expanding population. This, as they indicate, is an important failing of structural adjustment policy in Tanzania.
Andrew Burton

AGENCIES IN FOREIGN AID: COMPARING CHINA, SWEDEN AND THE UNITED STATES IN TANZANIA. Ed: Goram Hyden and R Mukandala. Macmillan. 1999. 246pp. £45.00.

In a review of this book in African Affairs (99) Douglas Rimmer writes that Tanzania was a special favourite of donors in the 1960’s and 1970’s especially of Sweden and so warm were the relations that SIDA’s aid could be given as a ‘country programme’ or effectively on the recipient’s terms. ‘Not until 1984 was this approach reluctantly conceded to have been a mistake’. US aid was governed by presidential diktats and congressional prohibitions so that, according to Rimmer, ‘it seems indulgent to characterise it as ‘pragmatic altruism’ as the book does. The Chinese delivered loan aid-in-kind and the resulting enterprises were left to the management of Tanzanians who, according to the book, ‘messed them up’ along with the rest of the state sector. ‘Chinese efforts at rescue through the formation of joint ventures were not well received and the loans have not been repaid’. The book finds that none of the methods of providing aid proved satisfactory and recommends the payment of aid into ‘autonomous public funds, rather like banks or research councils to which bids could be made for complementary funding by institutions (NGO as well as governmental) already receiving their core requirements from other sources. A possible implication would be that aid flows would be much reduced.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PARTICIPATORY MEDIA IN SOUTHERN TANZANIA. Dominick de Waal. INTERVIEW WITH FARIDA NYAMACHUMBO UTAMBIE WANANCHI (TELL THE PEOPLE!). QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT PARTICIPATORY VIDEO. Lars Johansson, Dominick de Waal and Farida Nyamachumbo. Forests, Trees and People Newsletter No. 40/41. Dec 1999/Jan 2000.

It has long been argued that radio is by far the most effective media for rural people in poor countries. The breathtaking advances in technology may be changing that idea. Inexpensive, lightweight, easy-to-use digital video equipment, cheap tape’ and portable editing computers are making possible participatory video (PV) -that is, scriptless video production directed by local people.

In these three fascinating articles the authors describe work that has been going on in southern Tanzania since the mid-1990s. They show that PV is an excellent tool in processes of public consultation, advocacy and policy dialogue, as well as for mediation in conflicts.

Experiments began with the setting up of a communications media facility in Mtwara as part of the Rural Integrated Project Support (RIPS) Programme. The Mtwara Video Centre was formed in 1994. The object was to promote regional rural media that would give villagers a voice and improve their access to information. In this way villagers could influence the management of local natural resources and social services.

Villagers and facilitators with basic video camera skills work together to tell a story so that a social or environmental problem can be aired. During filming the raw material is shown back to the villages where it is shot and villagers choose representatives to help with the editing. Then the edited film is shown in the villages.

One issue chosen and discussed by villagers was prompted by women who ask why men in their village say that all women who sell food and locally produced artefacts are prostitutes. Another arose from complaints from a youth group that they have no market for the cashew nuts they are processing. In a third case schoolgirls complained that when they return from school each day they are faced with a heavy work load while boys have only light duties.

To the question “Isn’t radio a more appropriate medium for reaching rural people?” the authors say: “For reaching out to rural people, yes. But for setting up a dialogue through exchanging tapes with others, and for rural people reaching urban people and policy makers, we found video much more effective. “For capturing the interest of an entire village and initiating debate, a video show is better than playing back an audio tape. Both video and radio are more cost effective than print for communicating with thousands of rural people -particularly if they cannot read. ”

The authors make a much wider point, namely that “there is actually a TV set in the majority of the world’s villages today, even in many places where there is no electricity. People are beginning to watch CNN and BBC in Shinyanga, Mtwara and in Pemba. This is only the beginning of a globalised media landscape in which almost every person in the world is able to watch the same TV images. In this situation doesn’t the decentralisation of video imagery production make a lot of sense?”
Derek Ingram

KNOWLEDGE AND POWER: THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF GENDER POLICIES IN MALAWI, TANZANIA AND ZIMBABWE. Nicola Swainson. International Journal of Educational Development. Vo120. No 1. pp 15

LIBERALISATION, GENDER AND THE LAND QUESTION IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA. Gender and Development. 7 (3) November 1999. 10 pages. This paper focuses on case studies in Tanzania and Zimbabwe and states that current theories of land and debates on gender issues fail to explain the complex processes through which women’s access to land have been affected, contested and negotiated during socio­economic and political restructuring.

CENTS AND SOCIABILITY: HOUSEHOLD INCOME AND SOCIAL CAPITAL IN RURAL TANZANIA. Deepa Narayan and Lant Pritchet. World Bank/University of Chicago. 1999. Pp 26. After outlining the various concepts of social capital (eg. membership in voluntary groups such as churches, political parties, burial societies farmers groups) the authors explain why and how they created data on social capital using a large-scale household survey designed to illicit social connections and attitudes. By using the Social Capital and Poverty Survey and data from a different survey on incomes, they show that a village’s social capital has an effect on incomes.

INNOVATIVE WAYS FOR SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT IN DAR ES SALAAM: TOWARD STAKEHOLDER PARTNERSHIPS. Francis Halla and Bituro Majani. Habitat International 23 (3) 1999, ppl0. THE ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT PROCESS AND THE CONFLICT OVER OUTPUTS IN DAR ES SALAAM by the same authors in the same publication (11 pages).

The first paper points out that, because of limited public sector resources, until the early 90’s the city authority collected less than 5% of the total refuse generated in the city each day. It evaluates a number of innovative approaches which have proved effective in recent years -emergency cleanup campaigns, community involvement, disposal site management and waste recycling. The second paper writes about the conceptual confrontation among three different approaches to urban development planning in the city -Land-Use Planning, Information Management and Participatory Urban Management.

FINDING WAYS TO FIGHT CHILD LABOUR IN TANZANIA. K. Mehra-Kerpelman. World of Work. No 28. 1999. 3 pages. This article describes how the ILO’s International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour is helping Tanzania to cope with this problem. It shows how in urban areas children below 15 constitute about half the labour force and that other major areas of child employment include plantation agriculture, artisanal mines and prostitution.

A PLAGUE OF PARADOXES: AIDS, CULTURE AND DEMOGRAPHY IN NORTHERN TANZANIA. P Steel and P W Setel. University of Chicago Press. Pp 272. $19.00. 1999. A case study about the Chagga people and the cultural circumstances out of which AIDS emerged.

THE SOCIAL SERVICES CRISIS OF THE 1990: STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE SYSTEMS IN TANZANIA. (Making of Modern Africa Series). Ed: Anna Tibaijuka. Ashgate Publishing Co. 1999. $73.00.

FAMILY PLANNING AND THE POLITICS OF POPULATION IN TANZANIA: INTERNATIONAL TO LOCAL DISCOURSE. Lisa Richey, University of North Carolina. Journal of Modern African Studies. 37.3. 1999. pp 30.

One of the first Third World countries to introduce family planning services in 1959, Tanzania, according to this paper, has been one of the last in Africa to prepare a comprehensive policy. The peculiar ambiguity and ambivalence of the government’s National Population Policy is thoroughly explored, but not entirely explained in this carefully considered study.

When former President Julius Nyerere ardently supported family planning for the purpose of child spacing some leftist groups and religious leaders combined to oppose it and even forced the closure of some clinics during the 1970s, with the leftists blaming “an imperialist and capitalist tendency.”

Posing ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ approaches to the problem the writer describes the latter as tackling it on the basis of the freedom of the individual from interference, especially by government and institutions, while the former sees it in terms of what a person “is actually able to do or be.” The negatives see population as quantitative and the increase in the population leading to the overburdening of development systems, such as the environment, health care and education -even the family itself -while the positives focus on the ‘quality’ of people. Rather than focusing simply on whether or not people have access to services it stresses people’s productive capacities, calling for more social sector spending, employment creation and state assistance for the most vulnerable. The writer suspects that the sudden policy shift from a ‘development’ to a ‘population’ solution might have “strategic” motives, especially as it came at a time when the economy was “hitting rock-bottom”, dramatically altering its relationship with donors and international lending institutions. Developing countries stopped referring to international population assistance as racist, genocidal or imperialistic or accusing western nations of advocating population control as a substitute for foreign aid. It looked very much as though indebtedness and reliance on aid made Third World countries careful about damaging their relations with the West. By maintaining a strategic ambivalence, she believes, Tanzania was able to appease donors by promoting subtly different demographic objectives. During the 1980s changes seemed to be taking place in the government’s overall approach to development, especially when the IMF and the World Bank began to dominate aid to the health sector. The latter began to use “careful” language to avoid any possible implication that its policies had any impact on the government’s national policy, although a Dar es Salaam professor declared that the country was “forced into a policy by conditionalities which were not written down” indicating that the donors really wanted to control population if they were to give aid.

The author concludes that it is unlikely that family planning alone will provide sufficient remedies. It seems that some people in the villages continue to believe that family planning means “white people not wanting Tanzanians to have children”
John Budge

CATALYSING COASTAL MANAGEMENT IN KENYA AND ZANZIBAR: BUILDING CAPACITY AND COMMITMENT. Lynne Zeitlin Hale. Coastal Management. 28 (1) 2000. 10 pages.

LAKE VICTORIA’S NILE PERCH FISH CLUSTER: INSTITUTIONS, POLITICS AND JOINT ACTION. Winnie V Mitullah. IDS Working Paper No. 87. Brighton Institute of Development Studies. 1999.28 pages.

COASTAL AND MARINE RESOURCE USE CONFLICTS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN TANZANIA. D C P Masalu. Ocean and Coastal Management 43. 2000. 19pp. This paper surveys conflicts (eg: a sugar factory versus fisheries, rice farming versus fisheries, port expansion versus neighbouring users, seaweed farming versus tourism and the marine environment) and recommends the setting up of a lead agency with full authority on all activities in the coastal area.

STROKE MORTALITY IN URBAN AND RURAL TANZANIA. R W Walker and seven others. The Lancet. Vol. 335. May 13, 2000. This paper records the results of regular censuses of a vast population of almost half a million people between 1992 and 1995 including the monitoring of all deaths (11,975) which arose. Amongst the findings were that 5.5% of the deaths were attributed to cerebrovascular disease and that yearly age-adjusted rates per 100,000 were 65 in the urban area, 44 in a fairly prosperous rural area and 35 in a poor rural area (for men) and 88, 33 and 27 (for women) compared with UK rates of 10.8 for men and 8.6 for women. The authors concluded that the high rates in Tanzania were due to untreated hypertension and that ageing of the population was likely to lead to a very large increase in mortality from strokes in the future. (Sir Colin Imray has passed on to us some correspondence he has been having with Sir George Alberti, President of the Royal College of Physicians who is at the University of Newcastle, concerning a related project in which he is interested -it is the Adult Morbidity and Mortality Project –which is looking at all causes of death in Dar es Salaam, Hai and Morogoro (rural) following earlier work on diabetes, hypertension, asthma and epilepsy -Editor).

BIRDS OF DAR ES SALAAM. G Wium Anderson and Fiona Reid. Wildlife Conservation Society of Tanzania. 2000. Dar es Salaam has 470 of Tanzania’s 1,097 bird species but this illustrated guide for novice bird watchers concentrates on 113 of the most likely to be spotted.

TOP-DOWN DEMOCRATISATION IN TANZANIA. Goren Hyden. Pp 9. Journal of Democracy. Johns Hopkins Univ, Press. 10 (4) 1999. This book review states that Tanzania’s democratic transition path has been unique in the African context. In other countries there has been political polarisation (eg. Kenya), no improvement after a change in government (Zambia) or military rule (Ghana). Democratisation is moving forward slowly.

DIVERSIFICATION AND ACCUMULATION IN RURAL TANZANIA: ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON VILLAGE ECONOMICS. Copenhagen. NIAS. 1999. 244pp.

COMMUNITY-BASED WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT (CMW) IN TANZANIA: ARE THE COMMUNITIES INTERESTED? A S Songorwa, Lincoln University, New Zealand. World Development 27
(12) Pp 18. 1999
This paper states that the ‘fences and fines’ approach to wildlife protection is now perceived to have failed in Africa. In evaluating an alternative approach in which rural communities are given custodianship or management responsibilities (CWM) using the Selous Conservation Programme and seven other African cases, it was found that the communities were generally not interested. Their decision to join the programme was largely influenced by promises of socio-economic benefits which were not fulfilled in line with their expectations.

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES?
Continuity and change in colonial and post-colonial East Africa
At a one-day workshop at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies on June 21 organised by Andrew Burton and Michael Jennings papers presented included:

The ‘Haven of Peace’ purged: tackling the undesirable and unproductive poor in Dar es Salaam. 1950-85 (Andrew Burton).
Continuity and Change in the laws of East Africa (Emeritus Professor James S Read).
A critique of development from below: Villagisation and ‘customary’ land practices, Dodoma District. (Ingrid Yngstrom).
Popular participation and development crisis in Tanzania, 1961­66. (Michael Jennings).
Central Administration, Local Government, Cooperatives: Organising the State in Tanzania, 1940’s to 1960’s. (Andreas Eckert, Humboldt University, Berlin).
Using Information and Communication Technologies in Tanzania: responses ofinfOImation professionals (Julia Nawe).

EAST AFRICA
The new East African Community’s Secretary General Francis Muthaura was quoted in the East African on April 24 as saying that regional integration would not be achieved without resistance from groups who benefited from the present situation. 13 articles in the treaty dealing with trade were left for further negotiations when the treaty was signed on November 30 1999. The trade chapter is said not to address in detail the need to eliminate internal tariffs. Tanzania ratified the treaty on June 13 but does not expect to be able to fulfil the next stage, the enactment by parliament of a law to make the treaty legally enforceable, until after the elections in October. The ratification paves the way for the establishment of an East African Legislative Assembly and a Regional Court of Justice. The revived Inter-University Council for East Africa was inaugurated on June 5 at Arusha and Tanzanian Open University Vice Chancellor Professor G V R Mmari was elected Chairman of the 27­member Governing Board. The editorial in the East African (June 19) headed ‘Budgeting for disintegration’ criticized the budgets of the three member countries -‘They strongly suggest that the sister states are pulling in different directions … .Tanzania’s budget contained no specific measures for regional integration … Tanzania clearly feels that it is not helpful to team up with rich neighbours until it has crossed through the valley of poverty … ‘.

SOUTH AFRICA
According to the East African (June 5) South African investors are losing their favoured status in the country following what it described as the National Bank of Commerce ‘debacle’. The South African ABSA bought the bank for $18 million and then demanded payment of the same amount from another state-owned bank as a delayed inter-bank branch transaction. South African investors were said to have been left out of the preferred list of buyers for the Tanzania Telecommunications Company Ltd. Tanzania Investment Centre Director Samwel Sitta was quoted as saying “Most South African investors are white. When anything happens at a work place Tanzanian workers are reminded of apartheid”.

TALES FROM THE KING’S AFRICAN RIFLES. John Nunneley Cassell & Company. £16.99 and THE AFRICAN RANK AND FILE. SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF COLONIAL MILITARY SERVICE IN THE KING’S AFRICAN RIFLES 1902-1964.
Timothy H Parsons. James Currey (UK), Heinemann (USA) and other publishers. £15.95

“In dreams,” the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, wrote, “begins responsibility.” As a boy, John Nunneley, the author of Tales From the King’s African Rifles, sourced his dreams from the African stories of H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan, narratives of exploration, and the military history of the British empire, particularly those late nineteenth­century campaigns in the southern part of the African continent, the Zulu Wars, and the South African War of 1899-1902, in which his own father served. He read with, “bug-eyed enthusiasm”, of the heroism at Rourke’s Drift and Ulundi, as well as the appalling debacle of lsandhlwana and the personal disasters that, deservedly and undeservedly, fell upon Lieutenant Carey of the Royal Engineers who, in 1879, was given charge of the young Prince Imperial of France, the only son of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie, and Lieutenant Hayward, whose charges were his own men. Both officers faced courts martial for abandoning those they had a duty to remain with after coming under attack from the Zulus. Nuuneley writes, “These were perplexing questions I wrestled with and I was coming to understand that duty is a hard taskmaster.” Other questions, such as “the rights and wrongs of Britain’s colonial policy” were left alone, being “too deep a subject for a 12-year-01d.” Dreams. Responsibilities.

In 1941, Nunneley was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry. He was nineteen years of age. His first experience under enemy fire, during a strafing attack on an airfield in the southeast of England, was “Boy’s Own Paper stuff’ and it was desire for more of the same that led him to seek a posting to the Middle East. Chance took him instead to service with a Tanganyikan battalion of the King’s African Rifles. Set to guard some of the large numbers of Italian military prisoners and civilian internees that had fallen into British hands following Wavell’s campaign in the Horn of Africa, he worked hard to turn himself into an officer equal to the responsibilities of command of the African soldiers he had been put in charge of, but all the time continued to hope for transfer to the Middle East and a hot war.
In the end, though, Nunneley got his war. The KAR were to see action again, not this time on their own continent, but in Bunna, where the Japanese, defeated at the battles of Imphal and Kohima, were in retreat. Following a period of training for jungle warfare in Ceylon, these African soldiers were committed to the field in Burma’s Kabaw valley, during the monsoon season; their task to pursue the retreating Japanese and prevent them reaching the Chindwin River.
Nunneley conducted reconnaissance patrols behind Japanese lines, his face blackened with a cream reputedly concocted by Elizabeth Arden, because the Japanese, once they had recovered from the shock of being attacked by black African troops, made a habit of shooting the white officers at the very earliest opportunity. One such patrol, when he led a string of his Tanganyikans out to establish the strength of the Japanese on a dominant hill, mixed farce with the terrors of combat. Nunneley decided that the information he required would be best gathered by killing a Japanese sentry with a burst of fire from his Sten gun, followed by “five rounds rapid” from the accompanying askaris. With the Japanese response thus elicited, it then remained for the patrol to extricate itself from the ensuing informative predicament. During the retreat, Nunneley was overcome by a searing pain between his legs, as if his genitals were on fire. Forgetting all about the pursuing Japanese, he sought temporary relief by, first, ripping open the flies on his trousers and emptying the contents of his water bottle over the affected parts of himself. The second time he was forced to stop, he lay down while two of the askaris emptied their bottles over him. The third time, while his soldiers provided covering fire, Nunneley immersed his afflicted parts in a stream, firing away with his Sten, until the pain was gone. The cause of the endangering discomfort turned out to be an insect repellent, aptly named Skat, which had leaked from its container down the front of his trousers. After the patrol got back to the British position safely, which, perhaps surprisingly, it did, Nunneley was known as Bwana Moto Sana, Mr Very Hot.

John Nunneley appears from his narrative to have been a very brave officer, one who had his own very clear and strong ideas of his duty and his responsibilities. It is a pity then that his writing does not give better testimony to his feelings for the soldiers he undoubtedly served so well. For this reader, at least, Nunneley’s sympathies are more clearly demonstrated when he writes of his brother officers and of his former enemies, the Japanese, rather than those he led. Even the element which is meant to serve as a unifYing element in this extremely episodic and often rudely disjointed narrative, Nunneley’s relationship with his personal servant, Tomasi Kitinya, a Luo tribesman from the Kenyan shore ofLake Victoria, is, for me, curiously flat.

John Nunneley’s name appears in the Acknowledgements of Timothy H. Parsons’ book, The African Rank-And-File. Parsons, an American university professor, presents British colonialism, as reflected in the KAR, as a thoroughly Bad Thing. The book takes as its central idea the contradictory nature of existence for those caught up in any authoritarian regime. In terms of the KAR’s askaris, this contradiction has to do with “… soldiers who were simultaneously coerced and coercing, who enforced the will of the elite yet made demands themselves.”

The African Rank-And-File covers its chosen field (covering mainly Kenya and Nyasa KAR battalions) with exhausting thoroughness. It presents a depressing and, for the British, a shaming argument; one that the example of John Nunneley can qualify but not, finally, refute.
Clive Collins

Other publications

THE SUCCESS OF NEWLY PRIVATIZED COMPANIES: NEW EVIDENCE FROM TANZANIA. A Temu and J M Due. Canadian Journal of Development Studies. XIX 2. 1998

Under pressure from the World Bank, the IMF and other lenders, Tanzania began to privatize in earnest in 1992 with the formation of the Parastatal Sector Reform Commission. Privatization was expected to reduce the huge state subsidies consumed by the parastatals, create additional revenue for the government and turn moribund enterprises into productive privately owned companies.

In this article, the authors explore the process, extent and success of privatization in Tanzania through the experiences of six agro-industrial enterprises in the Dar es Salaam -Morogoro region. Four characteristics were focussed upon: the identity of the majority stake holder, the source of the new management, the type of privatization and economic viability.
Access to capital is difficult and expensive in Tanzania, prolonging the length of the privatization process and favouring external buyers. Despite this, four of the enterprises in the sample were purchased by indigenous buyers (although non “indigenous African”). Management is entirely foreign for the sample, which is hardly surprising given the opportunities in Tanzania over the last 15 years to develop suitable experience. The type of privatization is mixed, and no specific conclusions are drawn from this.

Two interesting additional observations were made about the workforce: the former employees are a major source of recruitment for the new venture and privatization appears to have promoted gender equality

Economic viability is clearly subjective and based largely on interviews. The owners describe a harsh operating environment characterised by a lack of quality material and labour inputs, non or late payment by customers (often the government), and tax avoidance providing an unfair advantage to competitors. Despite this the authors have determined that the viability of the organization are, at the very least, fair.

Owners were also asked about the privatisation process: the length and complexity of the privatisation process was the biggest cause of complaint, with a key cost, both in terms of time and money, being cited as the International Accounting Firms. These firms are routinely commissioned by the PSRC to carry out pre-divestiture valuations of enterprises.

Findings are summarised below:

Enterprise | Majority Ownership | Management | Type of Privatisation | Economic Viability

Tanzania Cigarette Company Ltd. | Multinational | Expatriate | Joint venture | Good

Guled & Tanzania Shoe Co. Ltd. | Foreign private | Expatriate | Private sale | Fair

Africa Trade | Indigenous (Asian) | Expatriate | Joint venture | Partially in operation

New Msowero Farm | Indigenous (Asian) | Expatriate | Private sale | Fair

Noble Azania Food and Beverages Ltd. | Indigenous (Asian) | Expatriate | Lease | Leased enterprise not in operation

Bora Industries Ltd. |Indigenous (Asian) | Expatriate | Private sale | Fair

This paper undoubtedly adds to our understanding of privatization in Tanzania but the sample size is too small to generalise from. Valuations are difficult to make in the “developed” world, and much more so in the volatile and uncertain economic environment in Tanzania. This makes Tanzanian enterprises difficult to sell externally and makes the process more of a gamble than a calculated decision. Those that do enter the fray are either heroes, who risk great loss in order to establish productive and efficient enterprises in the most difficult of conditions, or opportunists who are eying the assets without any intent to operate a viable business. Time will tell who falls in which category, and will allow a fuller and more analytical debate on whether privatization has really proved of benefit to Tanzania.
Sam Baker

FREE COMPETITION WITHOUT SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT? TANZANIAN COTTON SECTOR LIBERALISATION 1994/95 to 1997/98. P Gibbon. Journal of Development Studies, 36, 1999,22 pages.

This is a thorough review of the impact of liberalisation on cotton in Western Tanzania with some general comments on the principle. Watson agrees with Gibbon’s findings and during a visit to Tanzania in late 1998 (after Gibbon’s data was collected), found the cotton industry in chaos with a shortage of planting seed, mixing of seed of different varieties, lack of insecticides and farmer loss of confidence. Two large ginneries had ceased buying seed cotton after local prices went above international equivalents (and were still closed in March 2000).
International pressure prompted some reforms from 1990 and full liberalisation began in the 1994-95 growing season when inputs distribution, seed cotton buying, ginning, sales of lint and seed were opened to private traders. From 1958 to 1990 the state Cotton Board had controlled seed cotton prices, input supplies and lint marketing but by 1990 was inefficient, with delays in paying farmers causing output decline.
The new liberalisation was far reaching. The existing co­operatives and emergent private traders took over exports, but all had difficulty in financing insecticides, so essential to productivity and fibre quality. By 1998 there were 33 buyers, with some villages served by more than 5 buyers. This proliferation of buyers had led directly to several ginnery take-overs and building of new ginneries, as the buyers needed guaranteed access to ginning. In consequence, by 1998 there was double the capacity needed to gin the quantity of seed cotton recently grown. Many ginneries were small and inefficient with only three new modern saw ginneries, of high capacity and high efficiency.
The 1997-98 crop was damaged by excessive rains and reduced to about 30,000 tonnes lint, less than half the previous season -which further aggravated competition between seed cotton buyers. This forced up prices and the ginneries had difficulty making a profit. The low crop led to seed shortages for the 1998-99 planting season, as some ginneries had sold all the seed for oil, and planting seed then had to be moved between districts.
Competition caused the buyers to abandon quality control and all seed cotton was bought as Grade A, whereas the lack of insecticide use had actually increased the proportion of Grade B. Lint quality was then low and export difficult and only at discounted prices. This contrasted with earlier years when good quality, hand-picked lint attracted premiums. A further deterioration in lint quality (noted during Watson’s visit) was caused by buyers visiting many regions and mixing varieties, previously kept in different planting zones and ginned separately.
Is such liberalisation sustainable? Will the target of higher seed cotton prices survive as the co-operatives withdraw and private operators take over completely? There is a limit on what producer prices can be paid, linked to quality and the world lint price, and there must surely be a need for increased scepticism of the principle of liberalisation, given these findings on the cotton sector.

Statistics (Tonnes):

Market Season Seed Cotton Lint
1995-96 250,000 85,000
1996-97 250,000 85,000
1997-98 190,000 65,000
1998-99 84,000 30,000
1999-2000 ? 34,000

The 1999-2000 market season is from the 1998-99 growing season. Similarly for earlier years.
Jim Watson

THE DAR ES SALAAM MILK SYSTEM: DYNAMICS OF CHANGE AND SUSTAINABLITY. J. Sumberg. Habitat International. 23 (2). 11 pages. 1999
This paper is concerned with the Dar es Salaam system for the production and distribution of milk for human consumption. It is presented as an example of urban systems in Africa against the background of current discussion in relation to poverty, the effects of economic and structural changes and the need for increased support to food production.
Economic hardship at national level has led to a programme of economic liberalisation. Structural adjustment, in parallel with falling incomes of urban middle-class residents, has led to a search for additional sources of income such as may be provided by milk production. Useful relevant information is provided in relation to land and population density, cattle distribution and characteristics, milk production, processing and distribution and upon the supply and consumption of milk.
Three systems of milk production are described:
-Small herds in urban or peri-urban areas where owners are predominantly middle-class and deliver milk directly to the consumer. Such suppliers are subsidised indirectly by the owners’ main employment and other related privileges;
-Larger specialised commercial herds; and, -Traditional cattle keepers such as the Maasai who sell their surplus milk.
The most important changes in the milk system are described as the large increase in the numbers of cattle kept in urban or peri-urban areas and the termination of direct government involvement in milk production, processing and distribution.
Attempts to increase milk production in peri-urban areas have failed due to diseases such as trypanosomiasis and to adverse climatic conditions which influence the quantity and quality of fodder. However, anticipated improvements in transportation may favour milk production in outlying areas. he author takes the view that support for urban and peri-urbanagriculture should not result in diversion of funds from agricultural activities which offer a greater long-term advantage. He concludes that neither the limited number of commercial milk producers in the peri-urban areas nor the recently expanded number of urban producers are likely to form the basis of sustainable locally based systems for the city.

Harnish Goalen EFFECTS OF AN ENTERTAINMENT-EDUCATION RADIO SOAP OPERA ON FAMIL Y PLANNING BEHAVIOUR IN TANZANIA. E. M. Rogers, P.W. Vaughan, R. M.A Swalehe, Nagesh Rao, P Svenkerud, and S. Sood. Studies in Family Planning. VoL 30 No. 3 September 1999.

Radio Tanzania had never produced a scripted serial drama before it undertook in 1993 the soap opera Twende na Wakati (Let’s Go with the Times). It found, says this detailed study, unique talents, and on meagre facilities and with a turnover of four producers, broadcast for four years a programme that significantly affected patterns of family planning. To an extent the progrannnes were about taking charge of one’s life. The message stressed control of family size by planning.
Listeners could identifY with positive, negative and transitional role models. Mkwaju, for example, is a promiscuous, alcoholic truck driver who steals to support his many girl friends. He lacks self-control and is punished by events. Many listeners identified with him at first, but then he develops AIDS. As one listener wrote: “Now I see the consequences … where will his seven children go? They will remain orphans. Who will take care of these children … ? You people with Mkwaju’s behaviour … change now.”
For listeners Mkwaju had become symbolic of a sexually irresponsible individuaL
The progrannne was first broadcast by seven mainland stations of Radio Tanzania in 1993 and from 1995-7 nationwide. It was highly popular and after a pause the series was resumed in 1999. The effects of the soap opera in its fITst years were gathered in five annual surveys of about 2,750 households and from a sample in 79 health clinics. They show, as this article explains in detail, that the progrannnes changed attitudes to family planning and encouraged listeners to talk about contraception.
They increased the ideal age at marriage for women, changed the ideal number of children and led to continuing planning visits to clinics. Word-of-mouth popularity of the programmes meant they reached less­educated, lower-income males -a prime target audience in Tanzania ­with a potential for high fertility and resistance to family planning.
The population of Tanzania was 27.4 million in 1992 -four times that in 1948. A growth rate of 3.5 per cent meant the population would double in 20 years. The 1992 fertility rate was 6.3 children per woman. In 1996 it was 5.8. The national population policy introduced in 1992 aimed to reduce population growth to less than 2 per cent by 2010.
The success of the soap operas was helped by the fact that the national programme was providing contraceptive service free in 2,700 clinics and 65 per cent of women lived within four kilometres of a family planning service provider.
Derek Ingram

ZANZIBAR AND THE GERMANS -A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP 1844-1966. Heinz Schneppen. Published by the National Museums of Tanzania 1998.

This book, according to a review by J P Mbonde in the Sunday Observer (February 13) covers relations between Germans and Zanzibar from January 7 1844 when, what the author believes was the date the fIrst German disembarked in Zanzibar harbour, to the troubled sixties when the two different German states were juggling for influence in both Zanzibar and Tanganyika. Zanzibar is described by the reviewer as the victim between British claims and German aims in the early years and it seems as though Zanzibar was the victim between the two halves of Germany in later years.

ENTERING THE FIELD: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON WORLD FOOTBALL. Oxford, New York: Berg. 1997. 319 pages.

Includes chapters on Cameroon, Sierra Leone and Tanzania.

REVIEWS

Posted on January 1, 2000 by editor

2

JOURNEY TO REPUBLIC. Randal Sadleir. Foreword by Julius Nyerere. The Radcliffe Press. 1999.384 pages. £24.50 (hardback).

Randal Sadleir’s book is neither history, nor politics, nor straight autobiography, although historical and political events and Randal Sadleir himself are the stuff of it. The author refers to it as his memoirs, but it is not spasmodic, nor solemn, nor about earth-shaking events -except perhaps at national or local events. It is really a story -and a narration of intertwined seriousness, hard work, and laughter, with the bulk of the book covering his work for twelve years before Tanganyika’s independence, and twelve years after.

The story is told by an Irish citizen with a deep love for the country where he was born and where his family had lived for 300 years, a loyal British Colonial Civil Servant who in practical terms ignores Tanganyika’s Trusteeship status, and a dependable public servant of Tanganyika after uhuru and later of the United Republic of Tanzania.

The early chapters, about Sadleir’s childhood and life before he began work in Tanzania, are not only interesting in themselves; they also do much to Illustrate his motivations and approach to the opportunities and challenges met in the following twenty-four years. In particular they depict how deeply imbued he was with the principle that ‘privilege entails responsibility’ -or, in army terms, that ‘the first duty of an Officer and a gentleman is concern for the welfare of his men’.

That saying carries shades of feudalism and of the class structured society from which he came, and indeed which he appears to take as natural. But the principle itself is surely valid everywhere; high office is always a privilege -and inevitably gives personal privileges too. Certainly it was valuable for the country when interpreted -as it was by Sadleir and many other District and Provincial Officers -to mean concern both for those working under his leadership and for the people generally.

The accounts of his life and work as a British Colonial Servant from the time he was posted as a ‘Cadet District Officer’ to Western Province are given in some detail in this book. The author clearly kept a precise diary of what he did, and the people met; this makes for easy reading most of the time, but some of the lists of names could, with benefit, have been edited out! There are, however, frequent little comments about the persons (both African and British) with whom he worked or came to know through work; these are never unkind, and often evocative and amusing.

It has to be understood that Sadleir tells the pre-and post­independence story through accounts of his personal experiences; little inaccuracies sometimes creep in when he talks of events in the background of what he was doing -as, for example, when he says that under the 1962 Republic Constitution “the President would rule for seven years”. His activities, however, often serve to explain in an interesting way the workings of the colonial system in practice; they give life to dry analyses of admin structures and political happenings.

Further, the comments in the book (especially around and after independence) show a degree of administrative and political understanding which was not shared by all colonial officers. These could even be helpful now in the face of some current political comments about Africa’s poverty and ‘inefficiency’. Yet some of Randal’s other comments are likely to grate on the sensitivities of those with different cultural backgrounds or ideological convictions!

Among these I would include the practice of almost always referring to the tribe of the Africans he met, and using descriptive words in a way which, in other hands, are the basis for cultural or racial stereotyping. For example, when he refers to someone being one of “the highly intelligent Nyakyusa people” my own reaction is to ask which is the ‘highly unintelligent people?’ something Sadleir is clearly too nice a person ever to say! There are also phrases like (when on the summit of Kilimanjaro) “We were aware of standing literally on the top of the great unknown continent itself’ which reminds my generation at least of being taught about the ‘discovery of the Victoria Falls’.

The kind of work done ‘up-country’ by Randal Sadleir was probably not untypical of the manifold serious responsibilities and challenges faced by the young District Officers and Commissioners all over the country ­and probably in other parts of the British Empire too. It explains much about how successful empires were governed throughout recorded history, and why they ultimately died. However, the chapters on the Handeni famine and an air crash in the Bush, as described here, were more unusual experiences for a young man. And the very personal accounts are compulsive reading.

Sadleir’s later posting to Dar es Salaam to be responsible for ‘Public Relations’ was also unusual, but I suspect not as much so as his decision that it required his attendance at great TANU rallies in the capital (where his excellent Swahili was an immense advantage) as well as visits to TANU HQ to meet Mwalimu Nyerere. It is clear that both enjoyed the acquaintance -and gained from it, although naturally neither converted the other! For the sake of accuracy, however, it is necessary to stress that Mwalimu was not educated in a Roman Catholic school; he attended a Local Authority primary school in Musoma, the Govermnent Tabora Boys Secondary School, Makerere College, and Edinburgh University. His conversion to Christianity arose through the accidental combination of a particular school friend and his own curiosity! After Makerere he did teach in Roman Catholic secondary schools.

After independence, Randal Sadleir was one of the British Colonial civil servants who agreed to continue working in Tanganyika. That required an acceptance of political direction from elected Africans -very few of whom had a formal education comparable to that of the British Officers, and some of whom had experience of racial discrimination under British rule. It is a tribute to both sides that Sadleir continued to work for the post-independence governments for twelve years -for it is clear from this book that he was always frank with his superiors, and never kow-towed to anyone.

He was given some very responsible and challenging as well as new tasks to do. He appears to be particularly proud of his contribution to the success of the Tanzanian pavilion at EXPO 70 in Japan. But most people would judge that, more important even than that, was his valuable role in helping and supporting the expansion of education and training for the Cooperative Movement, with particular reference to the Cooperative College set up in Moshi.

Randal Sadleir was also involved in the training of African Administrative Officers, including some of those scheduled to work overseas. But it is the manner in which he was given full control of dealing with the 1967 famine (mostly in Kilwa District as well as around Handeni) which most clearly indicates both the Government’s high opinion of, and its trust in, Sadleir. And incidentally, the book is one of the few on Tanzania which pays proper tribute to Rashidi Kawawa’s ability and services to the country.

There are many petty ways in which this book can be criticised, and there are sections (e.g. about his home leaves) which could have been severely cut. But it is easy as well as pleasant reading -and the author loves words! True, there are times when the author gets carried away and in his graphic descriptions of places, and slips into ‘fine writing’ which made this reader smile -such as talking of a stream in certain moods as ‘mossily murmuring’. But it is a good change to have a book which errs ­when it errs -on the side of grammatical but not pedantic English, and on a love of language.

For despite all justified criticisms, this book is of greater enjoyment, and is likely to be of wider interest, than the title suggests; titles are always liable to be a problem for books which do not fit easily into any routine classification. Therefore, although in the present publishing environment it might have been quite brave of O.U.P. to publish it, I hope they will follow through by advertising it intelligently so that it attracts buyers without special interest in Tanzania.

This book is basically a story, written by a sympathetic foreign participant, about the peaceful birth of an independent African country, about its early ambitions, and something of its endeavours. It does not replace any other book about the period, but it adds some flesh to bones and helps to emphasise that such political and economic events are by, for, and about People. Among those who were in Tanzania over the relevant period, it might well start some discussions; I can only suggest that it be read first. And in any case -it is a ‘Good Read’!
Joan E Wicken

LIVINGSTONE’S TRIBE: A JOURNEY FROM ZANZIBAR TO THE CAPE. Stephen Taylor. Harper Collins. 260 pages. £17.99.

Born in South Africa of English parentage the author left for Britain at the age of 22 ‘sickened by the malevolence of apartheid and the dour resentful racists and zenophobes.’ When he took his family to live in Harare for four years the idea of an African journey ‘in search of his own tribe’ was conceived. He located many of the few remaining white people still living in Britain’s former territories.

Recounted in a highly readable style with great sympathy and understanding of the strengths and frailties of human nature, his travels through Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia bring to life the history, as well as the beauties of the scenery and wildlife, especially the birds, of the countries through which he passes.

His comments are often challenging in their frankness. He considers, for instance that during colonial times Europeans, exhibiting ‘a vapid smugness’, tended to see Africa as ‘either Elysium or an abyss, bringing out extremes of idealism or cynicism.’ Horrified by the slave trade, he adds: ‘Far more damaging than the physical abuse suffered by Africans at the hands of the odd individual sadist was the system which created the borders of modem Africa’ as they carved it up ‘with set-squares and compasses. ‘

Despite everything Africa’s ‘resourcefulness and humanity’ had endured. Her people were ‘frontiersmen who had colonised an especially hostile region of the world on behalf of the human race’ and while outsiders thought of it as the most fragile continent a case could just as well be made out that it was the most resilient.

By means of the ‘Five-bar test’ he first learned about the Africans’ ‘awesome capacity for detachment’ in a Dar eating-house, after being driven crazy by a faulty CD system which kept slipping back after every five bars of ghetto-blasting music with no-one seeming to take any notice. With many petty irritations lying ahead he realised that ‘for enduring in Africa this was a starter.’ He also concluded that while the Western belief that we can control our destinies might be deluded in Africa acceptance of mortality ‘goes deeper than mere fortitude’ and that Aids may even have compounded the tendency to fatalism.

The courtesy of Tanzanians surprised him most. It was not only ‘the grace of the humble’ that was touching but the politeness and ‘an even rarer quality, kindness’. Many services were all the more unexpected for being offered without any hope of reward.

He met with several celebrated whites including Garfield Todd and his daughter Judith in Zimbabwe and Richard Leakey and Lord Delamere in Kenya and in a small white-washed cottage near Kunduchi beach in Dar es Salaam Daudi Ricardo, descendant of the owners of Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire, now living in ‘genteel poverty’, who happily confessed to having learned ‘a new cultural language.’ A Tanzanian taxi­driver fervently referred to him as ‘a good man.’

During a whirlwind tour of Zanzibar on the back of Cannon David’s motorbike he learned about missionaries ‘of the old school’, including Marion Bartlet, a surgeon, who performed the relatively simple operation to release contracted leg tendons on children with polio so that many Tanzanians were only able to walk because of the skills of ‘a small, frail, shy and unassuming woman.’ Caroline Thackeray, East Africa’s first woman missionary and a cousin of William Makepeace Thackeray, went to Zanzibar to teach and stayed there for the rest of her life, while Frank Weston, another missionary, and a ‘lone voice’ recognised that for Africans to benefit from European influence and not be damaged by it, ‘the institutions of tribe, family and custom needed to be nurtured and not destroyed. ‘

Randal Sadleir, a former district officer, told the author how, in the Cosy Cafe in Dar, the youthful Nyerere had declared: “The most important thing in the lives of people in Dar is ‘witchcraft”, and an American pastor also stated: “Our biggest mistake is that we have failed to address the Africans’ terrible fear of being bewitched.”

What the author describes as ‘the worst bit of doggerel I can recall’ nevertheless seems to say something about the cheerfulness and optimism of the Tanzanian character:
Always remember to forget the things that made you sad
But never forget to remember the things that made you glad.

With several interesting photographs this book is a revealing and thoughtful account of contemporary African concerns, many of which readers of Tanzanian Affairs will recognise with nostalgic affection.
John Budge

KAMUSI YA VISAWE. SWAHILI DICTIONARY OF SYNONYMS. Mohamed A Mohamed and Saidi A Mohamed. Obtainable from African Books Collective (Tel: 01865 726686). 1998. 267 pages. £13.95.

The publication last year of the first ever Dictionary of Synonyms is an important milestone in the history of this rich and beautiful language with the finest poetry in Africa.

Great credit is due to the industry and scholarship of the two Zanzibar authors who state in their excellent introduction that ‘they worked day and night for five years to complete their task! Small wonder, since they listed some 14,000 words with 71,000 synonyms.

The dictionary well illustrates the variety and flexibility of Swahili and its constant reinforcement by modem words and expressions often borrowed from other languages.

In a foreword, former President Mwinyi, himself a Zanzibari, points out the great value of this novel dictionary not only to school­children but also to university students, teachers and Swahili scholars as well as to beginners and those who already speak it fluently but wish to broaden their knowledge of its growing vocabulary.

The book is a literary and linguistic delight. Old favourites are there like angalau on p-7 with synonyms walau, ijapokuwa, ingawa, japo, hata kama all roughly meaning ‘although’. SambaSamba on p-198 with no less than 23 synonyms including the magical TangaTanga ­translated in my local dictionary to ‘frig about like a goat’ was popular in the old KAR -yugayuga, chugachuga, hangaika, tapatapa, all meaning ‘screw up’ in the modem idiom. I’m not so keen on sensa = ‘census’ on p -200 and many like it such as sentensi, semina, setla on the same page but, after all, ‘imitation is the sincerest from of flattery!. However, takriban (p-216) an Arabic word, I had never heard before is glorious and means ‘nearly’ or ‘about’. Finally, I have no hesitation in recommending this work as an essential reference book for all lovers of Swahili.
Randal Sadleir

SELECTED CASES AND MATERIALS. Chris Maina Peter. Publisher: Rudiger Koppe Verlage, Cologne. 1997. 893 pages.

Quoting from Justice Roberts Kisanga’s foreword the Dar es Salaam Guardian describes this book as a serious study of the human rights situation in Tanzania and a meticulously written legal masterpiece. The book is said to ‘attack vitriolically’ the Court of Appeal as being insensitive to justice; it also criticises the Chief Justice for issuing a directive during the villagisation process stating that all cases involving ujamaa villages should be sent to him directly and for openly siding with the government on such cases. He writes that in matters of bail persons are treated differently for the same offences depending on the court to which they go. The author, who is Associate Professor of Law in the University of Dar es Salaam, is against the death penalty and corporal punishment considering them to be serious infringements of human rights.

TREVOR HUDDLESTON – A LIFE. Robin Denniston. Macrnillan £20.00

Without question .Trevor Huddleston was one of the great Christian influences on the twentieth century on events, on churchmanship and on people, particularly young people but this is a deeply disappointing book. True, the author inherited the project from Canon Eric James who had for some years painstakingly chronicled the life of Trevor Huddleston, spending regular Friday afternoons interviewing his subject. He had also visited South Africa, Tanzania and the Indian Ocean in search of the ‘real Trevor’ and had done some considerable work on the book before ill­health forced him to give up the project.

Robin Denniston, once an editor at Collins and responsible for the publication of Nought for your Comfort, went on to become one of the most distinguished figures in British publishing as publisher to Oxford University Press which makes the many inaccuracies in this book more curious. Scarcely 200 pages long, Denniston pads his work by a further hundred pages with Nicholas Stebbing’s account of Trevor’s last and unhappy days as an invalid back in Mirfield, and then, what seems to be a random collection of lectures and sermons given by Trevor on various occasions.

Of course the book is an account of Trevor’s life. There is Trevor the undergraduate, the novice, the priest, the activist. There are accounts of his work in South Africa and of his relations with the South African authorities, together with an account of the reasons for his recall to Mirfield. There is some account of his time at Masasi and of the period at Stepney with reference to the accusations of improper conduct, and an analysis of his affection for and relationship with good-looking boys. But the book makes no suggestion that such character assassination remained part of the South African Bureau Of State Security’s agenda until the fall of Apartheid and many honourable Christian and Muslim activists were discredited.

However the whole book is a fish-eye biography. It is as if everything is seen through the South African perspective and, while at one level this is understandable, with Trevor’s lifelong commitment to the fight against the injustice of the apartheid system, at another it is unforgivable. It gives an almost unhealthy perspective, reducing the rest of his life to second best. Trevor was in South Africa for only ten of his 85 years -from 1943 to 1953; he was in Masasi from 1960 to 1968, in Stepney from 1968 to 1978 and Bishop of Mauritius and Archbishop of the Seychelles from 1978 to 1983.

Without wishing to diminish Denniston’s analysis or evaluation of Trevor’s achievements, there are so many inaccuracies in the text which suggest some disturbing proof reading by the editor. The chapter about Trevor’s episcopate in Masasi is disfigured by distortions and inaccuracy.

One of Trevor’s concerns while there had been the so-called poaching of Anglicans by the more affluent Roman missions, but it must be acknowledged that there was, and to some extent still is, exchange between the two Churches. Ndanda, a German Benedictine centre close to Masasi, is described as being staffed by African monks. While there were a few African brothers there in the 1960s, by far the majority of resident brethren were expatriate Ottilian Benedictines, most of whom had been in the country for many years. Their constant generosity to the poorer brethren of UMCA was legendary and good relationships were enjoyed between Masasi and Ndanda despite the theological and social differences.

Denniston writes about ‘the arrival of the Newcastle team of doctors’ inspired by Trevor’s charisma; for the casual reader one could believe that there had been no medical work worth speaking of before their advent. Their expertise developed technologies but they had the pioneering work of C. Frances Taylor and Leader Sterling to build on. The Newcastle team were the first for whom special financial arrangements were made which ruffled the unquestioned acceptance of the traditional poverty by the former UMCA missionary staff! Trevor’s policy of never explaining or apologizing to his staff did nothing to help this.

There is reference to taking ten children to Lulindi for a swim -a somewhat unlikely excursion as Lulindi is a small inland town. Lindi is the seaport where the modest hotel sits on the beach opposite the Anglican church. Kilwara is mentioned up the coast. One assumes the author refers to Kilwa, one of the earliest centres of Swahili culture and the source for the Kilwa Chronicle, a seminal source of utenzi literature.

While the account of Trevor’s concern to reduce the expatriate representation in the church is made, there is no reference to the response to Trevor’s final synod address to the clergy at Mtandi, when at least one clergyman came up to him and told him it was improper of him to tell them there would never be another expatriate Bishop. It was, he was firmly told, the business of the diocese to propose names’ (Indeed Hilary Chisonga’s immediate successor was Richard Norgate, a UMCA missionary who had for years been chaplain at Mkomaindo, and, although a Tanzanian citizen, definitely an expatriate!)

Bishop Chisonga his successor as Bishop of Masasi is curiously mis-spelt twice in the earlier pages of the Masasi section as Kisonga. I worked for him for three years and saw the enormous care he exerted to heal the rift in the diocese caused by Trevor’s appointment of an Assistant Bishop in 1963, who assumed he would naturally succeed Trevor as the next Bishop. So divided was the diocese that when Bishop Hilary set out for confirmations in certain parts of the diocese he was sent death threats. There is little reference to the legacy Trevor bequeathed to his old diocese.

Such inaccuracies in one section undermine confidence in the rest of the text and this writer, at least, hopes that one day there may be a book which reveals the real man behind the various titles he had.
David Craig

Other publications

HARAKA, HARAKA…LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP. Magdalena Rwebangira & Rita Liljestrom. Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. 1998. 271 pages. £19.95. A compilation of nine studies from the Reproductive Health Study Group at the University of Dar es Salaam. They highlight the erosion of customary institutions that regulate procreation and express the meaning of gender and marriage. They show that without an understanding of the dynamics of local customs change initiated from without becomes ineffective and unsustainable.

SPREAD OF HIV INFECTION IN A RURAL AREA OF TANZANIA. (Boerrna/Urassa/SenkorolKlokke/Ng’weshemi). AIDS 1999 University of North Carolina. Vol13. No 10. 7 pages. This article is concerned with research assessing the spread of HIV in Kisesa, Mwanza using a ‘Demographic surveillance system’. Data was collected on mobility, bars and commercial sex through confidential interviews and blood tests on a range of individuals. The general conclusion was that HIV was found to be more prevalent around trading centres than in surrounding areas, sometimes 3-4 times higher than in the villages. Most of the article is concerned with explaining methods of data collection and listing data, which makes much of the reading laborious. However, the main point comes through that the trading centre is the major factor in the high levels of HIV in the district. The authors argue this is due to a number of factors including the high incidence of promiscuous sexual behaviour, prostitution, travelling workers and the high consumption of alcohol in ‘pombe’ bars. Furthermore they point out that HIV prevalence is underestimated as many tests are carried out at “Sentinel Antenatal clinics” ~ Roy Wilsoll.

BETWEEN THE STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY: MEDICAL DISCIPLINE IN TANZANIA. John A Harrington. Journal of African Studies, 37, 2 (1999) pp 32. Cambridge University Press. Despite the drastic changes in the last decade which forced a broad shift in policy from the general provision of services by the state to a mixed system with private providers making up the increasing shortfall in public resources, doctors in Tanzania have maintained a relatively privileged position. The writer, a member of Warwick University’s Law School, discusses in some detail the origins and development of the medical profession, from ‘the capture of the state by African elites’ in the first two decades of independence to the reduction in the state’s size and functions under external pressure in the last 15 years. The colonial medical service, he writes, was by and large aimed at the European population and administered by medical officers and missionaries. With only 14 African doctors at independence the demand for ‘Africanisation’ began with the setting up of a medical faculty in 1963 at Dar es Salaam University. By 1991 the number of doctors had increased to 1,265, still only one per 21,423 people.

As part of the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’ doctors were able to attract a disproportionate degree of overseas aid when compared with non-curative public health programmes aimed at improving the health of the rural majority. The current costs of urban hospitals and clinics are still a major drain upon the health budget and foreign currency reserves. Progress suffered a severe economic setback in the 1980′ s. When, in 1986, the government was forced to accept World Bank and IMF conditionalities on further aid, severe cutbacks led to a collapse in the morale of health care workers and a ‘brain drain’ of Tanzanian-trained physicians, of whom 26 per cent left the country. During the villagisation programme in the 1970’s peasants were urged to leave their existing settlements for ujamaa villages with the promise that improved medical facilities would be available there. According to the writer tIns indicated that ‘health care could be said to have been both an end and a means of development.’ Resources such as water and medicine were directed to ujamaa villages in preference to others ‘as a means of pressurising the population to comply’. One of the features of ujamaa was a more or less complete takeover of non-governmental institutions by TANU in the interests of development, but later, with the backing of international organisations, attempts were made to undo this process. ‘Democratisation’ and broad liberalisation were linked to aid so that sectional interest groups were given a role in the political bargaining process ‘often at the behest of international bodies and foreign NGOs’. Many doctors responded by entering into private practice, while others ‘attempted to position the profession within the notional sphere of a non-market civil society’.

The writer believes that commercialisation, with the introduction of private clinics and ‘the parallel economy of bribery’ undennine the status of medical practice and that the Medical Council of Tanganyika was ‘forced to shore up professional ethics in the face of structural alTangements which tended massively to undennine them’. The writer concludes: ‘If medicine becomes a commodity its producers are forced to compete with purveyors of other substitutable commodities, such as traditional African medicine and the practice of so-called ‘injection doctors.’ As well as professional autonomy all semblance of disinterested service would be lost’. And a leading doctor warned: ‘The imposition of structmal adjustment programmes is having a profound effect on the doctor/patient relationship at the same time as reducing the quality of health services and the access to them by the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups’ -John Budge.

INCORPORATING INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE INTO AFRICAN URBAN PLANNING: A CASE STUDY WITH CHINESE CONNECTIONS. Garth Myers. Hong Kong Papers in Design and Development. Voll 1998.9 pages. This paper is one of several by Garth Myers on the Kikwajuni neighbourhood of Zanzibar’s Ng’ambo area. East of Stone Town across the former tidal creek, this area (‘the Other Side’) began to be settled in the 1850s, largely by African and Swahili slaves, servants and peasants, on the land of their owners, employers and patrons. The land belonged to the Omani royal clan and its allies and rivals, or to Indian merchants. Most of Kikwajuni belonged to Abdullah bin Sallam al-Shaksi, a wealthy Omani trader and slave holder, and the settlers included both islanders and a number of mainland groups. Development and administration was left in the hands of overseers or locally chosen imams, and an indigenous urban form developed, based on the concepts of uwezo (power), imani (faith) and desturi (custom).

Residents lacked uwezi, in the form of either material wealth or land ownership -even in the 1960s the Shaksi clan controlled most of the land and it was subsequently nationalised. Occupants of the area were and still are almost all Sunni Shafi’i Muslims, a school of Islamic thought which emphasises consensus in religious and social affairs. Organised into areas around mosques, the imams helped to force a sense of belonging and consensus amongst the neighbourhood’s diverse African cultures. Much of the detailed spatial organisation was based on custom, for example, houses were arranged along pathways kept clear of buildings and clean by cooperation between neighbours, and social life focused on spaces where the area’s social cohesiveness was reproduced (maskani, small meeting places for men, and baraza, porches on the front of Swahili houses).

Amongst the many expatriates who produced plans for Zanzibar were planners from the Peoples Republic of China, who produced a Master Plan in 1982. Influenced by Chinese attempts of the time to develop a planning system suitable for the new push for economic growth, the group prepared a master plan (which completely neglected issues of finance and implementation) and detailed area plans, including one for the upgrading of Ng’ambo which entailed the superimposition of a grid road layout, considerable demolition and installation of waterborne sewerage.

Indigenous planners involved in implementation modified the proposals slightly, but still gave priority to improving roads, despite low vehicle ownership, relatively good access to existing houses, and local priorities for lighting along existing paths, drainage and improvements to latrines. The subtext, in the eyes of many residents, had to do with the state using road construction for security purposes. The upgrading plans provided for a few large private houses in each ward. In practice, these were the only physical aspect of the improvement schemes to be carried out and the plots were allocated to members of the CCM-allied political, bureaucratic and business elite, who continued to ignore the needs of most residents. Dependent on their own resources, only the better off house owners, especially those who can call on overseas funds, have been able to make the significant physical renovations the houses need. Collectively consumed goods, such as shared taps, schools and drainage, have continued to deteriorate. Moreover, the transition to multiparty rule has been marked by the politicization of community spaces. The resulting association of particular spaces with rival parties has reduced their function in conflict resolution and enhancing social cohesion. The parallel role of the mosques has also been undermined by increased religious conservatism, following competition between Saudi Arabian and Iranian assistance agencies.

Upgrading sensitive to indigenous physical and social organisation has, therefore, been undermined not only by Chinese planners who considered the area’s physical fabric poor quality and disorderly and provided no framework for dealing with conflictual planning decisions, but also by the technocratic approach and security concerns of the one-party state, the spoils-oriented politics of the Mwinyi regimes, and the political rivalry which has accompanied multiparty politics. Myers concludes that the opportunity for appropriate upgrading has been missed. He asserts, contrary to his own evidence, that the Chinese planners of the early 1980s “began to ‘hear’ the indigenous planning system, but not to listen to it”. He also suggests that the “team took no account of conflictual land rights that have been at the heart of the 1982 plan’s lack of success in implementation”, but does not adequately analyse this issue. Finally, his prognosis for upgrading based on dialogue with residents, managed through forms of social organisation which are able to produce consensus, and resulting in physical improvements appropriate for the poor majority of residents, is gloomy ~ Carole Rakodi

RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND WOMEN: WHAT ARE THE BEST APPROACHES TO COMMUNICATING INFORMATION? Joyce Otsyina & Diana Rosenberg. Gender and Development. Vol 7 No
2. July 1999. 11 pages. This article focuses on research in Shinyanga region from the ‘Hifadhi Ardhi Shinyanga’ project (HASH!) which was aimed at introducing new development ideas into a rural community. The authors cite the ‘lack of effective communication strategies and methods’ in bringing about these technological ideas to rural Tanzania. They suggest that the technologies are available but rather the problem lies with cultural factors preventing women from taking part in awareness of these new technologies. They claim that most development programmes meet with little success because these schemes often neglect the participation of women. For example, timetables for seminars and film shows are arranged at inconvenient times for many women. Cultural seclusion of women can also be another factor, which stops them from contact outside the community. However, many local women were also noted as being suspicious of outsiders such as the UWT (Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanzania). Conclusions made by the authors include the lack of education among women of their rights, the importance of the initiative and control being in the hands of locals, the information gap between men and women in a community and the fact that women rely more on ‘informal information networks’ for knowledge of what is happening. No attempts have been made to challenge the crucial factor of gender division of labour -Roy Wilson.

BUDGETING WITH A GENDER FOCUS. Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP). 1999. 46pp. The TGNP is an NGO formed in 1993 to facilitate gender equality and women’s empowerment. This book reports on the results of research on macro-level budgetary processes in the ministries of Finance, Education and Health and in the Planning Commission and illustrates in clear and simple terms, with many imaginative drawings, photographs and charts, the theory and practice of budgeting and how it can contribute to the objectives of the NGO. (Thank you Strata Mosha for sending us a copy of this book ­Editor).

A GERMAN GUERILLA CHIEF IN AFRICA. David Rooney. History Today. November 1999. David Rooney has skilfully condensed the story of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, commander of the German army in German East Africa during the 1914-1918 war, into seven pages, illustrated by a useful map and ten photographs. Von Lettow-Vorbeck realised that he had no chance of beating the British, with their command of the sea, and decided instead to tie down as many British troops as possible in order to prevent them from being used against Germany in other theatres of war. In this he was remarkably successful, and his small army (170 Germans and 1,400 African askaris) was still fighting for some days after the Armistice was signed in Europe on November 11 1918. Rooney gives a graphic account of the various phases of the campaign including his defeat of the British at Tanga and his brilliantly conducted retreat, first to the Rufiji valley, then to Masasi and Mozambique and finally to Northern Rhodesia. Readers will spot one error: C S Forester’s African Queen was not based on the scuttling of the German light cruiser Konigsberg in the Rufiji Delta but on the sinking of the Graf von Goetzen in Lake Tanganyika.
J.A.Sankey

DOORS OF ZANZIBAR A Mwalim Mwalim. 1998. 143 pp. 95 plates. £14.95. A photographic study of the famous decorative doors of Stone Town including a map of door locations and sepia photographs. Obtainable from African Books Centre. TeI: 0171 497 0309.

PASTORALISM, PATRIARCHY AND HISTORY: CHANGING GENDER RELATIONS AMONG MAASAI IN TANGANYIKA 1890 -1940. Dorothy L Hodgson. Rutgers State University of New Jersey. CUP. Journal of African History, 40 (1999). pp 24. This painstaking and careful analysis of the effect of German and British colonialism on the Maasai people, shows how the whole nature of the people’s pastoral life and culture was drastically transformed and well­nigh destroyed. A tolerant and tmly interdependent tribe became an intolerant patriarchal society, in which women were thought of as ‘property’ and ‘possessions’ owned and controlled by men. ‘Commodification’ of livestock, the monetisation of the economy and incorporation into the colonial system reinforced and enhanced male political authority and economic control shifting the contours of male­female power relations. Even after the Second World War the pace and zeal of these interventions only intensified as British and then Tanzanian governments tried to encourage, bribe or force the Maasai to sell their cattle and perceive them as commodities. Men usurped women’s role as traders. The article argues that the new forms of property relations had important consequences for gender relations. Taxation classified women as property to be paid for by men and the incorporation into the colonial state extended the formal political power of men in general and older men in particular. ‘Instead of mutual respect men and women scorn one another’ the writer says. She concludes: ‘Unlike Static a historical analysis of pastoral gender relations that posit women’s subordination as an inherent feature of pastoralism, thereby assuming that Western notions of private property and ownership are culturally and historically universal, my historical analysis demonstrates that patriarchy must be understood as a consequence not of cows but of history’ ­John Budge

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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ABDULWAHID SYKES (1924-1968). THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE MUSLIM STRUGGLE AGAINST BRITISH COLONIALISM IN TANGANYIKA. Mohamed Said. Minerva Press. 1998. 358pp.

The key to this complex fascinating and at times infuriating book lies in the first paragraph of the author’s introduction.

‘This work is a product of my own experience and exposure to the memories and recollections of many people, and to events which took place in Dar es Salaam. Being born in Dar es Salaam where the modem politics of Tanganyika, as mainland Tanzania was then known, had its strongest bas~, I have many recollections of personalities and events which took place at that time. Word of mouth from people who saw events take place before their very eyes enriched my knowledge. When I was a student of Political Science at the University of Dar es Salaam where the research for this book actually began, I found out that what was taught about nationalist politics in Tanganyika did not tally with what I knew. Gradually I came to conclude that there was a deliberate attempt to down play the role of certain personalities in the nation’s political history.’

The ‘personalities’ referred to are revealed in the book to be the Muslim leaders in general, and his hero and subject Abdulwahid Sykes in particular. Note that the author, born in Dar es Salaam in 1952, was a two year old toddler when T ANU was formed, only 9 years old at the time of UHURU, and a 16 year old teenager when his subject died. He had perforce to rely largely on his father, his family and their friends for information, reinforced later by his own extensive and scholarly academic research.

His filial piety is to be commended as is his transparent loyalty to Islam which illuminates his book. The problem for the reader however is that the result of this blend of reminiscence repetition hearsay experience and scholarship is an extraordinary literary maze with paths leading in all directions through time and space, hundreds of characters appearing and re­appearing in bewildering succession, until one hardly knows which way to turn. Although I have the advantage of having known personally many of the leading figures, albeit some 40 years ago, including Abdulwahid Sykes himself and his brothers Ally and Abbas; Ally in particular having been a close friend. The illustrations include an enchanting photograph of the Sykes boys in the 1930s, the youngest Abbas clutching a bunch of flowers and Ally wearing a white pith-helmet! Their father Kleist, a legendary character, died in 1949 before I came to Dar es Salaam, but I knew his kinsman and fellow Zulu Machado Plantan, editor of ZUHRA, quite well. They brought the courage energy and intelligence of the Zulu to the drowsy denizens of Gerezani, ensuring for themselves a secure place in the Muslim elite so often referred to by the author.

Kleist Sykes enlisted in the German Army at the age of 12 and fought in World War I. His eldest son Abdulwahid was conscripted into the K.A.R. aged 17; inspired by this Ally ran away from home aged 15 to volunteer for the War. They served together in Ceylon and Burma, where on Christmas Eve 1945, they made a pact to found a political party after the War. Its’ name was to be ‘Tanganyika African National Union’ (TANU). Ally remembers that Abdulwahid wrote the name of the proposed party in his diary. Later Ally personally designed the TANU membership card (similar to his Tanganyika Legion Card) and chose the national colours. (Black for [text missing in original]

The reader is rewarded for his pains however when he finds some of the precious pearls which Mohamed Said has uncovered in the depths of his research, referred to in Dryden’s couplet at the start of the book:

‘Errors like straws, upon the surface flow.
He who would search for pearls must dive below.’

They include: a tribute to the liberal Governor Sir Donald Cameron who encouraged the founding of the African Association in New Street in 1930; the fact that the colours of the Young Africans’ Football Club, green and black, were the same as TANU’s and their supporters identified with the new party; the strange tale of the banishment by the British of Sheikh Abdallah, the Liwali of Mikindani, the centre of Islamic knowledge, after ‘declining to perform duties not conforming with his status, dignity and respect to Islam .. .’ What were they?! the revelation that there were only 630 registered voters in Muslim Bagamoyo District from a population of 89,000 in the 1958 election; and, in lighter vein, Trevor Griffith-Jones is referred to as the Chief Secretary on page l39 where the then Attorney-General, the late Sir Arthur Grattan-Bellew, is also delightfully described as Gratten Below! Finally, the author’s claim that Nyerere, having been supported for the leadership of TANU in 1954 by Abdulwahid Sykes, then Chairman of the Tanganyika African Association, and the Muslim elite on whose support he also initially relied to gain independence from the British, quietly chose to ‘forget them …’; he goes further still citing a catalogue of alleged arrests, detentions, vote rigging and even cooking the Census and bribery by the independent Government of Tanzania in order to ensure the downgrading of Islam.

Mohamed Said recalls the fact that Muslims had lived on the coast since the 8th Century, whilst the 19th Century Christian Missionaries were relatively recent arrivals in the wake of the Colonial rulers. Eight Christian Ministers of Education held office in succession until the appointment of Professor Kighoma Ali Malima as the first Muslim Minister in 1987. ‘In Islam politics and religion are inseparable … in 1955 we saw how Muslims managed to establish a secularist -nationalist ideology as a means of forging national unity. Separation of religion and politics was therefore one of the sacred and cherished ideals of TANU. It is from this background that we can now understand the contradictions which came to engulf Tanzanian politics soon after Independence.’

Here I must leave it to the readers to make up their own minds since I was not there after 1973. In any event the author, whilst striving to maintain academic detachment, has seen to it that the Muslim case has not gone by default.

I can only close by saying that throughout my own service in East Africa and Tanzania (1943-1973) I never noticed any anti-Muslim bias by the British or the Tanzanian Governments. If anything rather the reverse since the great local rulers revered by the British like the Sultan of Zanzibar, the Liwalis of the Coast, Chief Adam Sapi, Chief Abdallah Fundikira and the merchant princes H.H. The Aga Khan, Abdulkarim Karimjee and V.M. Nazerali were all Muslim. After all, Nyerere’s successor was a Muslim; ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ CASE NOT PROVEN.
Randal Sadleir

IN QUEST OF LIVINGSTONE. A journey to the Four Fountains. Colum Wilson and Aisling Irwin. House of Lochar. 1999.242 pages. £13.99.

In this quite exceptional travel book a man and wife, each with distinctive reactions and intuitions, describe a cycling odyssey through south-western Tanzania, while endeavouring incidentally to inject some meaning into the three most fundamental influences on the lives of African people -colonisation, Christianity and the slave trade.

Considering the immensity of such a task it is unsurprising that the issues are not as comprehensively examined as they obviously need to be, but the findings and observations of the writers provide many fresh insights into them. Unusual also is the fact that sometimes contradictory interpretations of the same scenes and events are freely and candidly expressed by two accomplished writers with excellent powers of description.

Both, like Livingstone, are brave and determined. Whereas most travel writers tend to journey in comparative comfort and spend a lot of time on research and passive observation, Colum and Aisling are under constant attack from the elements and other natural obstacles such as mud and sand as well as occasionally suffering from the limitations of mechanical transport. While expressing astonishment at Livingstone’s stoical fortitude and endurance they unwittingly reveal their own steadfastness and courage, for they were not constantly accompanied, as he was, by a train of devoted servants. Aisling, it would appear, suffered more than her husband.

Explaining the choice of transport Aisling writes: ‘Authenticity is all­important … We had to be free to pass into the depths of the land, not knowing when we would return to a road. Bicycles were the answer; they would be our pack-animals.’
While Colum was intrigued by Livingstone’s exploratory obsession, Aisling was more interested in the seemingly irreconcilable aspects of his character, including the psychological effects of his upbringing in Blantyre, Scotland, as a child worker in a cotton mill, accentuated by his religious convictions and his ‘ascetism’. She writes: “In a sense he sought pain. His was a conscious and deliberate endurance. ”

She compared his impatience with his fellow whites with his sensitive and sympathetic attitude towards Africans, even understanding their resistance to Christianity. Livingstone wrote ‘Africans are not by any means unreasonable. I think unreasonableness is more a hereditary disease in Europe than in this land.’ This seems illogical when one considers Livingstone’s behaviour to his long-suffering wife who died on a previous Zambesi expedition, and his children, for which he later suffered remorse.

There are intriguing accounts of meetings with missionaries, including the White Fathers and the Benedictine monks at Mwimva. Simon and Celia, of the African Inland Mission, told them: “The life of an African fanner is very similar to the life described in the Bible. Their food, their clothes, their houses -it’s much closer to the Bible than our lives in the West. They understand spirituality here.”

On the question of cultural interference, Colum refers to ‘the cold intransigence’ of the missionary movements and believes that many African churches ‘became a vehicle for those attempting to realise a nationalist dream’, leading to the ‘African socialism’ of President Nyerere and the problems of ujamaa and villagisation, with which he deals sympathetically.

About another aspect of Tanzanian life Colum has this to say: ‘As I returned from the market the rain began. Fierce stuff, it thrummed on the dusty ground around me and formed rivulets down the road. I remembered that Livingstone’s equipment for dealing with the rain had included a small segmental boat and paddles. We were bringing nothing but waterproof groundsheets. To succeed in following Livingstone would depend on a long series of triumphs over broken bicycles, swollen rivers, pathless mountains and endless swamps. How could we possibly triumph over such odds?’

Succeed they did, and the story of their pilgrimage through many Tanzanian villages into Zambia, including a number of fascinating photographs, is a riveting one.

John Budge THE BOERS IN EAST AFRICA. ETHNICITY AND IDENTITY. Brian M. du Toit, University of Florida. Bergin and Garvey. 1998.209 pages.

This book provides a fascinating account of Boer Settlement in East Africa. My interests in the Afrikaner began when as a boy in Holland I was gripped by books about the Boer war detailing Boer victories. The book briefly discusses the scramble for Africa, the Boer war, and its aftermath and looks in greater detail into the role ethnicity played in the Boer settlement into East Africa and in its final demise in the early sixties.

The Boer defeat in the Anglo -Boer war in 1902 and the destruction, bitterness, and divisions which it caused among the Afrikaners was the root cause for the Boers arrival in East Africa. Today Field Marshall Lord Kitchener, the British War Hero and victor, would possibly sit in the cells of the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague accused of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. After my own childhood years in Japanese concentration camps I fully understand Boer feelings. My mother cursed the Japanese until the day she died.

The period of active settlement in East Africa was short -1905 to 1908. Neither the British (in Kenya) nor the Germans (in Tanganyika) enjoyed or encouraged the arrival of the Afrikaners, a troublesome lot of suspect loyalty. Their story is one of adventure, hardship, suffering, tenacity, and a brief period of triumph and economic success after World War II, but in the final analysis, one of failure as the Afrikaner returned to his roots in the South and abandoned the land of which he had never become a part.

The scramble for Africa is a story of Europe’s unbridled audacity and arrogance during which it grabbed a continent much larger than itself. A couple of enterprising young Germans and a gunboat off Zanzibar yielded up Tanganyika. By 1913, 79 German officials supported by black Zulu, Sudanese and Somali mercenaries controlled 7.6 million Africans. There was resistance but it was quickly overcome at a time when the country suffered from disastrous rinderpest and an outbreak of smallpox; locust attacks inflicted famine. Afrikaners did not like the German administration in Tanganyika. It was strict and bureaucratic and Germans tended to think of African interests as being paramount. Many settlers soon moved on into the Belgian Congo or into British East Africa. They found life under the Germans too restrictive. One German woman married to an Afrikaner is quoted as having discouraged and warned the Afrikaners on the ship bound for German East Africa, that in German territory the unfettered lifestyle of the Boers would clash with strict German laws. The Afrikaner wanted space and solitude. He was not going to get it.

Du Toit traces Boer ethnicity back to factors, such as race, language, culture and especially to religion and education. I was fascinated to read that in 1873 an Afrikaner had argued that Afrikaners included people of Dutch, French, German, English, Danish, Portuguese, Mozambican and Hottentot extraction. The Afrikaner moved away from this broad concept of Afrikanerdom and turned to the ill-fated concept of pure white, protestant, Afrikaners.

Du Toit discusses what he describes as the Boers ‘trekgees’, a spiritual inability to remain long in one place and the ‘treklus’, the desire for novelty and adventure as part of the Boer spirit. Long before the Boer war, Boers had fanned out far into the African interior, but conditions after the Boer war, rather than “trekgees”, triggered off the exodus to East Africa. Boers moving to Kenya had often stood with the British and were regarded as traitors in the South. Those moving initially to German East Africa, were the so called “Bitter einders” who had fought the British to the bitter end. The journeys of the Boer settlers to East Africa, by ship from Lourenco Marques, to Tanga or Mombasa, from there by train and ox wagon into the interior, are rather sad stories of incredible tenacity, hardship and suffering. Both the British and the Germans found the Afrikaners stubborn, resenting and resisting assimilation, quarrelsome, and suspected them of disloyalty towards their colonial masters.

Du Toit talks about the grinding poverty of the Boer settlers, but at the same time he writes about them as chartering German ships to take them and their oxwagons to Tanga and Mombasa and of buying cattle from the natives, so there must have been some fairly wealthy men among them.

Boer settlement in German East Africa was a failure and by 1964 most Tanganyika Afrikaners had left.

Maintaining church and educational ties with the South the Boer settler never cut the umbilical cords with the fatherland. The enormous influence of Church leaders coming in from South Africa, according to Du Toit, reinforced the isolation of the Afrikaner in the larger community and, although they did much good they can also be largely blamed for the Afrikaner failure to assimilate into East Africa.

Boer -Black relations are briefly touched upon in the book, but I would have loved to see more about them. Du Toit’s statement that changes in attitude that occurred among most East African Afrikaners contrasted with their contemporaries who remained in South Africa, is not backed up with examples.
Willem Bakker

HEROES OF THE FAITH IN TANZANIA. Seven Witnesses from the Central African Mission 1880-1993. Dr Leader Dominic Sterling. Benedictine Publications, Ndanda, Peramiho. 1997. 33 pages. Copies available in UK @ £2.50 from Christine Lawrence, 26 Wordsworth Place, Southampton Road, London NW5 4HG (Tel: 0171 4822088).

Although only a very small book it is good to have this latest ‘story telling’ from Leader Stirling who, according to my calculations, has written it at age 90! His other books known to me: Bush Doctors (1947), Tanzanian Doctor (1977) and Africa My Surgery (1987) have all made compulsive and informative reading. The recent one is not autobiographical as the others are but written as a tribute to record details of the lives of certain UMCA/SPCK missionaries of whom he has some knowledge. He does point out that there were others equally zealous and dedicated but he has no personal knowledge of some and others have been written up elsewhere.

The important introduction is written with Stirling’s characteristic wry humour and I found it (perhaps being a Methodist) really delightful. I quote about the Central African Mission: ‘Born of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England, but brought to birth oddly enough by a dour Presbyterian, David Livingstone, it professed to be bringing the Catholic Faith to Africa, yet had definitely no connection with or submission to the Holy See of Rome. It just went its own unique way, with its own theology in which, admittedly, no major heresy could be demonstrated and in the end subsided rather lamely into the arms of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, where it quietly lost its identity and its own peculiar ecclesiastical position, but left an extensive African church based on the same’. Needless to say Stirling transferred to the Roman Catholic Church in 1949, after going to Tanganyika in 1935 under the CAM (UMCA).

The ‘Heroes’ he writes about are: William C Porter, Frederick W Stokes, Clara Munro, Edith Shelley, Donald Parsons, Robert Neil Russell and Robin Lamburn. All of them died and are buried in Tanzania. Two, at least, are ‘saints’; one a martyr and two pioneers in the treatment of leprosy. ‘Lived very simply and worked tirelessly’ can describe them all but their stories are individual and remarkable.

Stirling is known to us, of course, for his many, many achievements in the medical field in Tanzania from 1935 onwards. In 1958 he became an MP and from 1975-80 was Minister of Health. He was responsible for introducing Scouting to Southern Tanzania and became Chief Scout in 1962. All this can be read about in the books mentioned earlier. After retirement he continued with voluntary activities in the cause of health. But he says, at the end of his 1987 autobiography , You see I am still a missionary after all this’ and that, I guess, is why, ten years later, he has written the latest small valuable book.
Christine Lawrence

CHINESE AID AND AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT. Deborah Brautigam. St. Martins Press, New York. 1998.256 pages. $69.95.

EAST AFRICAN DOCTORS, A HISTORY OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION. John Iliffe.
Cambridge University Press. 1998. 336 pages. £40. 00 (hardback).
This book was rather critically reviewed by Eldryd Parry of the Tropical Health and Education Trust in ‘African Affairs’ Vo!. 98. No. 391. April 1999. Extracts from his review:
‘It is a ….. pity that in this absorbing and remarkably researched review of the rise of the medical profession in East Africa, whose pioneers endured cold injustice and antagonistic attitudes, the author should not give reasonable credit to those who were totally committed to training their students and colleagues with disinterested service, as did many of the staff at Makerere …. Professor Iliffe chronicles much that was wrong in the past and describes breathtaking white racial arrogance, notably in Kenya, but his pursuit of his theme, to concentrate solely on indigenous doctors, sometimes presents an unbalanced picture ……… .

As the author contributed so much to Tanzania, it must have been difficult for him to write, as he has certainly succeeded in doing, fairly and objectively, about that country and the impact of ‘villagisation’ on health care. The stampede of its rural dispossessed was catastrophic, so that all indicators of health in Dar es Salaam got worse and there was a sad decline in the medical profession. This alarmed the Minister of Health; he blamed their poor working conditions and salaries, intellectual laziness and a lack of leadership from senior doctors. As a result he could only reverse the socialist health policy; ujamaa was impracticable. He began to reform the service but did not last and was replaced on account of the unfettered corruption in his Ministry, for which he was responsible but to which he was not party.’

THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN IN TANZANIA. Robert V Makarimba. Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. 1998. Printed by AMREF Tanzania.

This book, written by a law lecturer at Dar es Salaam University, critically examines the legal and constitutional rights of children in Tanzania and the administration of juvenile justice. The author finds much room for improvement in the laws affecting children, the lack of specialised juvenile courts and the child labour regulations and condemns the importation of child pornography.

CULTURE, TRANSNATIONALISM AND CIVIL SOCIETY: Aga Khan Social Service Initiatives in Tanzania. CT: Praeger. 1997. 152 pages. £43.95. COASTAL RESOURCES OF BAGAMOYO DISTRICT. Ed: M Howell and AK Semesi. Faculty of Science. University ofDar es Salaam. 156 pages.

‘What ails Bagamoyo?’ asks Emmanuel Mwera in reviewing this book in the Dar es Salaam ‘Sunday Observer’ on May 9. He points out that 100 years ago Bagamoyo was politically and commercially far superior to Dar es Salaam. The book lists Bagamoyo’s natural resources; the authors are critical about sea weed being a largely untapped source and the mangrove forests not being properly managed; they are concerned about dynamite fishing, and the inability of traditional fishermen to exploit areas away from the shore. They recommend much greater monitoring of the crustacean resource; management of sea cucumber and mollusc shells on a sustainable basis and better facilities for tourists. The book contains a wealth of well researched and well presented data.

GENDER, FAMILY AND WORK IN TANZANIA. Editors: C Creighton, and C K Omari. 1999.310 pages. £42.50.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

POLITICAL ECOLOGY AND URBANISATION: ZANZIBAR’S CONTRUCTION INDUSTRY. Garth Myers (University of Kansas). Journal of Modern African Studies. 37. 1. 1999.25 pages.
Any comment or discussion on Zanzibar usually focuses on the political conflicts or the constitutional set-up for the isles within the United Republic. However this article gives readers an insight into some of the things that have been happening on the ground there in recent years.

The author covers particularly the period since the Revolution of 1964 and has studied the effects of the development of Zanzibar town, with consequent building of housing, and other projects. He says ‘the current intersection of neo-liberal economic growthmanship, political change, environmental sustainability discourse and the marginalised area of the city, are examined’ (p.94). He sees how this development has led, in particular, to substantial demands for supplies of building materials. He surveys the political background, and the local ecology, especially of Zanzibar island (Unguja). He notes that many of the materials needed for construction work must be imported, but shows how large amounts of local stone, gravel, and sand are now being procured from local sources, often very near the town. The suppliers of the materials are typically small-scale operators of the informal sector, most being immigrants to Unguja from the mainland or Pemba. He comments on the conflict of interest between, on the one hand, the suppliers and their customers, and, on the other hand, the national and local government officials and leaders and other elites who are often the customers too.

The reviewer finds the author’s understanding of the political and environmental situation in Unguja to be generally accurate and perceptive. The subject may seem to be obscure and technical, but if a reader can plough through the heavy academic language, he or she can learn much of interest about what has been really happening in Zanzibar since the Revolution.
Canon Paul R Hardy

POWER, SOVEREIGNTY, AND INTERNATIONAL ELECTION OBSERVERS. THE CASE OF ZANZIBAR. Paul J Kaiser. Africa Today. Vol 46. No i. 1999. 17 pages. This concise account of the controversial 1995 elections in Zanzibar will not be news to readers of ‘Tanzanian Affairs’ but it does place the matter in the context of the whole international observer process. The author examines the degree to which host nations are dependent on donor countries and hence the freedom which they feel they have to give to observers (something usually welcomed by opposition parties) even though there might be some infringement on their sovereignty.

POPULAR VERSUS LIBERAL DEMOCRACY IN NICARAGUA AND TANZANIA. Robin Luckham. Democratization. Vol5 No. 3. Autumn 1998. 34 pages -An interesting two part analysis -the first part ‘contrasting the narratives of popular and of liberal democracy’ and the second, described as a ‘requiem for the apparent failure of the popular democratic experiments’ ­Nyerere’s African Socialism and the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

REVIEWS

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EAST AFRICAN EXPRESSIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. Thomas SPEAR and Isaria KIMAMBO Oxford: James Currey 1999. 340pp., ISBN 0-85255­758-2. £40.00 cloth; £14.95 paper.

‘From the perspective of the world system, Tanzania is poor, insignificant and marginal, a fact reinforced daily by the mass media.’ Yet in the eyes of Father Felician Nkwera of the Marian Faith Healing Ministry in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania is a ‘Chosen Nation’, dedicated to the Queen of Peace by Pope John XXIII (on Independence Day 1961, coinciding with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception), the ‘Star of Africa’ and the liberator of Southern Africa. So write Christopher Comoro and John Sivalon in this new volume of essays by academics, mainly historians and anthropologists.

Such evidence of spiritual revival, combined with a typically African concern for the physical as much as the spiritual, and for justice as much as piety, pervades this book. It accounts for the confidence of East African Christian leaders today and calls in question the Western secular habit of ignoring the phenomenal growth of Christianity on the African continent. ‘Christianity is no longer an exotic transplant, but is deeply embedded in everyday thoughts and expressions.’ Religion may be regarded as politically incorrect by many who offer their services sacrificially to help Africa, but this view is little understood by Africans.

The essays are divided into seven topical sections, each of which begins with a short analysis of the theses presented. Most essays conclude with a summary of their chief arguments. There is no attempt at a historical coverage, but the sharply localised foci of the essays are dramatic illustrations of the adoption and inculturation of the Christian message by East Africans over the last 120 years.

The most readable contributions come from the pens of Tanzanians. Anza Lema offers a fascinating account of Chaga traditional religion and the Chaga response to the early Lutheran missionaries who showed little interest in their deeply theistic religion. Bruno Gutmann was one of only a few exceptions -the story of his conflict with his colleagues would have made an interesting appendix -but make no mistake, African evangelists are the real heroes of the story, and of this book.

Cuthbert Omari traces the story of the very recent bitter and bloody conflict on Mount Meru within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania -unedifying perhaps, but needing to be heeded by all the Churches if local sectarianism, now appearing disconcertingly often, is not to undermine the universal brotherhood of the gospel. Ecumenical brotherhood is much in evidence in Josiah Mhalagwa’s essay, focussed chiefly on Dar es Salaam, about the spiritual revivals which have been such an East African feature for at least sixty years. They continue today in garb more distinctively African than ever before, tending to be orthodox in doctrine and pentecostal in spirituality.

The growth of the Roman Catholic Church in Ugogo and their relations with CMS Anglicans are traced by Gregory Maddox. Many (but not all) missionaries, Catholic and Protestant alike, ‘did not trust Africans to be true Christians’ -a fault which the famous Anglican missiologist, Roland Allen, tirelessly exposed from 1910 until his death in 1947. The ultimate irony, however, is that those Africans ‘began earnestly to enquire into the Christian Scriptures they had been given to see where the missionaries had misunderstood the gospel … and in turn insisted that missionary attitudes should be scrutinized in its revealing light.’ They still do, as Lambeth and Vatican Conferences have recently shown. Lamin Sanneh, the West African theologian, is frequently quoted to show how throughout Africa it is the Christ of the Scriptures who is the test of faith and practice.

Other essays focus on the origins of Catholic and Lutheran congregations in Ufipa and Uzaramo. These local and particular studies of African reception and reinterpretation of the faith enable us better to appreciate broader, more systematic histories like that of Elizabeth Isichei (SPCK) -and also suggest that it may be high time for the direction of the old missionary traffic to be put into reverse in the interests of the re­evangelisation of Europe.
Roger Bowen

TANZANIA: PORTRAIT OF A NATION. Photographs by Paul Joynson­Hicks. Quiller Press. 1998. (Tel: 4996529) 304 pages. £28.00

This is a beauty. Hundreds of colour photographs from the camera of a 27-year old highly skilled British freelance photographer who spent two years on the job and travelled 25,000 miles throughout the country. This book is unlike other Tanzanian tourist travel books. It is Tanzania as a whole and Tanzania as it is now. The book does not devote itself largely to wildlife as most such books do although there are scores of beautiful pictures from the less well known game parks as well as from the Serengeti. Pictures of the Maasai are few; pictures of other Tanzanians are many. There is little on traditional musical instruments and traditional dancing. But, unlike other such books, this one has pictures from every region of the country. The author is interested in places and people and their way of life. Have you ever seen pictures of the miner in Chunya, Mbeya Region, still panning for gold after 50 years, or the spectacular Kalambo Falls in Rukwa Region, or the mobile music maker in Morogoro, or part of the 1.5 km-long diamond pipe at Mwadui near Shinyanga, or the stone age sites at Iringa, or the rarely visited Katavi Plains National Park in Rukwa or the depth of the dust in the main street of Mwanza or how coffee and cotton and tea and sisal are processed? It is all here in these pages.

The captions and the regional introductions do not quite live up to the high quality of the photographs but you will want to read every one of them. The introduction, which comprises a concise history of Tanzania, is excellent.
Christmas is a long way away but this book would make an ideal birthday present. Or, you could give yourself a treat that you will be able to enjoy over and over again. It can enrich your library or be placed on your coffee table for the benefit of visiting Tanzanophiles (as the late Bishop Huddleston used to call us) -DRB.

MATETEREKA: TANZANIA’S LAST UJAMAA VILLAGE. David Edwards. 1998. Occasional Paper No. 77. Centre of African Studies. Edinburgh University, £4.50 or $9.00.
This writing covers the period from 1960 when Julius Nyerere, soon to become President, with his ujamaa policy, was encouraging the formation of small farming socialist communities up until 1998.

The work is built around the history and development of one such ujamaa village. Matetereka, from its formation in 1962, through its time as a member village of the Ruvuma Development Association (RDA) until that organisation’s destruction in 1969; through its growth and struggles with the authorities following this; and to the problems and conflicts brought about by the influx of a large number of newcomers with the implementation of villagisation in 1975, conflicts which continue until this day. There was obviously, at the time of villagisation in 1975, the chance that the whole of the original Matetereka ujamaa group might have been forced to leave all their achievements and move their families elsewhere. This was a fact of life for several of the other RDA villages.

The story of Matetereka was gathered from the ujamaa group in the village where Edwards spent eleven days. It is therefore a story told from their angle. I feel sure that they will have appreciated a sympathetic visitor hearing their story and recording it for outsiders to read. I’m glad that the centre for African Studies at Edinburgh University saw fit to publish it as one of their Occasional Papers.

Together with the Matetereka story, Edwards joins the many writings on the relationship between peasant communities and their governments. In relation to this question in the Tanzania of President Nyerere, the fact that two of his informants, Ntimbanjayo Millinga and Lukas Mayemba were not only involved with the RDA villages but also in local and national politics has provided some interesting details on the lead up to and the banning of the RDA. These largely confirm what I have always believed, that the action of the TANU Central Committee in insisting on the banning of the RDA was in reality moving to put paid to President Nyerere’s concept of ujamaa villages as bodies who took their own decisions on their running and development.

It would be interesting to have the experience of Matetereka from those who were forced into the village through the villagisation programme. Where these newcomers arrived to a village where a group of people had already, through several years hard work, achieved a considerable amount of development, it is easy to see how they might hope to have a share of what was there. Having been uprooted and moved by a government decision, with no consultation, they could hardly be expected to be in co-operative mood. In spite of that it does seem that at Matetereka efforts of the original inhabitants to try and help the newcomers along a similar development road as that along which they had travelled did seem to have a degree of early success. Essential to obtaining the drive for development through communal working that was the hallmark of the RDA villages was the understanding of the members that they were working for their better future and that of their children.
Ralph Ibbott

LIMNOLOGY AND HYDROLGY OF LAKES TANGANYIKA AND MALAWI. Ruud C M Crul. UNESCO Publishing, Paris.

This book is listed as No. 54 in a series by UNESCO on Hydrology but, as its title indicates, it also covers limnology (the study of chemical, physical and biological aspects of freshwater habitats). The book is not intended for the general reader; there is frequent use of technical terms, without any glossary, but it forms a very useful source of a great range of information, published articles and books. There are good accounts of the geography, exploration and European discovery of the lakes, their early scientific investigation, geological and climatic history as well as details of changes in lake levels; the catchment areas are well mapped as are bathymetric details (mapping of the lake bottom). There are accounts of the lake sediments and of their biotic components, especially phytoplankton and zooplankton.

Water balance details show up the limited out flow (about 6% annually) of Lake Tanganyika compared with Lake Malawi (17.6%) ­enough to generate electricity from power stations on the Shire River.

There is a great deal of overlap in the references and a joint bibliography, rather than one for each lake, would have been better. In fact the whole book might have been condensed. It seems that UNESCO could have been a little more painstaking in its editing but, nevertheless it is a most useful publication.
Brian Harris

NOT DEAR TO THEMSELVES. Barbara Wolstenholme. Teamprint. 1994, reprinted 1998. Available from 10 Myrtle Drive, Preston, Lancs. PR4 2Z1 £10.00 incl. p&p. All proceeds to the Methodist Church.

This fascinating account of the severe trials faced by the first missionaries sent by the Methodist Church to East Africa (especially during the long voyage from England, the subject of a major part of the book) has been researched by the great-granddaughter of Rev. Thomas Wakefield who landed at Zanzibar and continued by dhow to Mombasa in 1862. At this time the coast from Lamu to Kilwa, at least, was controlled by the Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar; the British were busy chasing slave ships in the Indian Ocean, and had a Consul in Zanzibar; and, Livingstone had not yet started his last expedition into the interior. Thomas was accompanied by Dr Ludwig Krapf of the C.M.S. and was later joined by Rev. Charles New, the first Europeans to reach the snowline of Kilimanjaro.

I found this ‘look back’ at history extremely readable and even helpful in putting the present into perspective. It is astonishing that the church founded by Thomas Wakefield at Ribe in Kenya is still flourishing. His first wife and baby are buried there.

The book is attractively produced with many line drawings and would make a pleasing gift.
Christine Lawrence

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

WHO ARE TANZANIANS? COMPETING CONCEPTIONS OF TANZANIAN CITIZENSHIP IN THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY. Bruce Heilman. Africa Today. 45, 3-4 (1998) 19 pages.
This article examines the linkage between citizenship and access to political, economic and social opportunities in Tanzania from the colonial to the present time. Heilman rightly notes that during the colonial period, the country’s population was segregated between Europeans who had full access to economic and political opportunities, Asians who occupied an intermediate place with access to commerce and the professions but were essentially excluded from the political life of the country and Mricans who were marginalised in both economic and political spheres. In citizenship terms therefore, Europeans were full members of the society, Asians were a kind of semi-citizens while Africans were simply subjects.

After independence the government adopted a citizenship policy based on the principle of equal rights for all Tanganyikans irrespective of their race but also attempted to redress the under representation of Africans in the civil service, first through Africanisation and later localisation policies. In 1967 the government adopted the socialist path of development, and nationalised the major means of production. With the abolition of private accumulation of private capital and wealth, citizenship as a means of access to resources became largely irrelevant. The policy also created a de facto separation of economic spheres of influence as Africans pursued lucrative careers in the expanding public sector and Asians continued to engage in private sector activities.

The debate over citizenship re-emerged again in the 1990′ s when the transition from a one party socialist state to a multiparty market economy led to a shrinkage of both the civil service and the public economic sector thus undermining the power base of the African bureaucratic bourgeoisie while creating unprecedented opportunities for the Asian commercial bourgeoisie.

The author argues that economic liberalisation in Tanzania has stimulated economic growth, but it has also heightened private sector competition between Africans and Asians resulting in anti-Asian sentiments among African business people. To prove this point, the writer cites a high profile conflict between Reginald Mengi, an African owner of the Independent Television Network (ITV) and two Asians, AI Munir Karim and Shabir Dewji of Coastal Television Network (CTN) and Dar Television (DTV) respectively over the rights to broadcast the World Cup of 1994. As the dispute went on, Mengi claimed that he had received threats against his life and TV station and the two Asians and nine other persons were arrested. Eventually Mengi maintained exclusive rights to broadcast the soccer matches and the charges against the eleven arrested were withdrawn.

The second example is the incident which took place between 1993 and 1994 in which African street vendors attacked Asian owned shops in the Kariakoo area of Dar es Salaam and in Morogoro. These incidents, according to the writer, show that ‘increased economic competition not only created tensions between large-scale African and Asian business but, in some instances, also served as a catalyst for the expression of anti-Asian feelings among participants in the informal sector’. According to the author ‘the actions ofMengi, like those of the Morogoro street vendors, conveyed a similar message to the Asian community: despite their formal legal rights, Asians are still a special group whose status is somewhat like that of guests, their ability to live and prosper in Tanzania depending upon the goodwill of their African hosts’.

While agreeing with the historical review and conclusions on the citizenship debate in Tanzania up to 1990, this reviewer remains doubtful about the conclusion drawn from the two post 1990 episodes noted above. Whatever its prominence, a single incident of the dispute over the rights to broadcast the World Cup, is insufficient to support a general conclusion that there was conflict between large-scale African and Asian businesses. Indeed the author had noted earlier on that even in the post 1990 debates, not all African businessmen supported indigenisation of the economy.

With regard to the shop stoning incidents, it is worthy noting that virtually all the shops on the streets where the riots took place are owned by Asians. Accordingly, it is not entirely certain whether the shops were attacked because they were owned by Asians or simply because they were formal tax-paying businesses preferred by the government against non-tax paying street vendors. If the reason for stoning the shops was because they were owned by Asians, why didn’t this take place until the government sought to bar the petty traders from doing business in the same areas?

Also the reaction of the petty traders after their goods had been destroyed or confiscated is consistent with the response of any aggrieved group of people when the state handles them with strong arm tactics. The victims usually turn to destroying whatever is in their sight.

In my view, the incidents cited by Heilman were primarily economic/class wars between the losers and the gainers in the new economic dispensation and it just happened to be the case that the majority of the gainers were Asians while the losers were Africans. The principle lesson therefore is whether a liberal economic order which enables the few who are already wealthy to prosper even more at the expense of the economically marginalised majority is sustainable.
Bonaventure Rutinwa

DAKA WA DEVELOPMENT CENTRE: AN AFRICAN NATIONAL SETTLEMENT IN TANZANIA. 1982-1992. Sean Morrow. African Affairs. No 97. 1998.24 pages.

When apartheid South Africa banned the African National Congress CANC) in 1960 Tanzania was one of the fIfSt countries to offer asylum and succour to the growing number of refugees. After delving into records deposited in the Liberation Archives at the Fort Hare University, Sean Morrow has been able to present an extremely valuable account of an historic project, enabling him to conclude: ‘It is now possible to aspire to a more subtle and realistic picture of exile as a factor in the history of South Africa’

Now synonymous with the Art and Craft Community Centre in Grahamstown, the name of Dakawa is being preserved ‘to maintain symbolically the memory and spirit of the years of exile’.

The Soloman Mahlangu Freedom College, named after one of the martyrs of the struggle, set up in 1977 on an abandoned sisal estate at Mazimbu, near Morogoro, ultimately housed a population of around 3,500 South Africans and consisted of a large farm, hospital, primary and nursery schools, cultural and sports facilities, a furniture factory and extensive housing. There was however an urgent need for a place where newly-arrived young people might stay until they could be received at the college and the opportunity came in 1982 when the Tanzanian government donated a 2,800 hectare plot at Dakawa, about 55 kms away. The area was undeveloped, isolated, with no electricity or access to sweet water or building stone; it was flat and difficult for the installation of piped water or a sewage system. During the rainy season it turned into a sea of mud. The exiles were badly affected by malaria and other tropical diseases while the experience of exile caused some refugees to take refuge in alcohol and drug abuse.
Ideally, Dakawa was intended as a centre for the orientation of up to 5,000 youths -a model community for a future South Africa. There were plans for agriculture, water reticulation, roads and various welfare facilities. But in 1990 there were only about 1,200 South African workers there. Not all arrivals were students and there was a widespread perception by ANC cadres of Dakawa as a ‘dumping ground’ -the impression could not be avoided that the rehabilitation centre was virtually a penal settlement.

Attempts were made to develop the farm but the land was heavily overgrown with bush and there were drainage and irrigation problems ­three quarters of one sunflower crop was eaten by rats, while roaming Maasai stock, wild pigs and, on one occasion, elephants from the Mikumi Game Reserve devastated crops.

Another issue was the relationship between the ANC and Tanzanian workers. In the context of Tanzania the South Africans were comfortable, even privileged, by comparison with their generally impoverished hosts, on whom they relied for labour. The leadership complained that the South African labour force was ‘very unstable and unreliable’. There were numerous relationships between South African men and Tanzanian women and there are offspring of mixed parentage in the area today. There was also an alleged tendency (,vehemently rejected by the more socially and politically conscious’) for some South Africans to ‘look down’ on Tanzanians as being ‘less sophisticated and poorer than themselves’. As was to be expected amongst a population from a traumatised country, there was also social dislocation and personal maladjustment, leading at times to criminality and violence. Generally speaking the morale was low.

A vocational centre gave instruction in carpentry, plumbing, bricklaying and electrical installation; the leather factory made shoes, belts, and bags and there was a garment factory. Much help was received from Holland, Eastern Europe, the German Democratic Republic and Scandinavia with Western aid arriving much later.

According to Sean Morrow: ‘The spirit of Dakawa is embodied in individuals who moved to Grahamstown. The fact that it was a much wider endeavour than an arts centre alone is not well-known beyond the memories ofthose exiles who were based there.

Now, when the constant flow of refugees is a global reality, it is salutary to obtain an insight such as this into the consequences, so often tragic, of unjust and violent measures imposed by unscrupulous people in authority.

John Budge PROTECTING SCHOOLGIRLS AGAINST SEXUAL EXPLOITATION: A GUARDIAN PROGRAMME IN MWANZA, TANZANIA. Z Magla, D Schapink, J Ties Boerma. Reproductive Health Matters Vol. 6. No. 12. November 1998.11 pages.

This study, carried out in 1996, looked at a protection programme in primary schools in two districts of Mwanza, which had as its aim the protection of adolescent girls against sexual exploitation. The role of the Guardians (walezi), designated female teachers, is to help young women in cases of violence or sexual harassment, and to give advice about problems of sexual health, since the sexual exploitation of female pupils by schoolboys, young men and teachers is common. The programme of protection has already drawn a good deal of attention to this issue among the wider public. One ofits most important initial effects has been to lift the veil of secrecy which hides sexual violence; teachers, among others, have found it more difficult to conceal such abuses than in the past. Even so, the fact that the majority of Guardians and other teachers were opposed to all sexual activity among schoolgirls limited the possibilities of encouraging contraception, and teaching about the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV.
Pat Caplan

PAGAN PRACTICES AND THE DEATH OF CHILDREN: GERMAN COLONIAL MISSIONARIES AND CHILD HEALTH CARE IN SOUTH PARE, TANZANIA. N T Hakansson, Uppsala University. World Development. Vo126. No 9. 1998.9 pages. At the beginning of this century German Lutheran missionaries implemented a successful campaign to lower child mortality without the aid of modem medical technology but through their understanding of indigenous ideas, co-operation with indigenous healers and through co-operation and mutual learning. This paper quotes, from archives, case studies on infant feeding and birth procedures in South Pare 90 years ago.

ACCEPTABILITY AND USE OF CEREAL-BASED FOODS IN REFUGEE CAMPS; CASE STUDIES FROM NEPAL, ETHIOPIA AND TANZANIA. Catherine Mears with Helen Young. Oxfam. 1998. 135p. £12.95

ZANZIBAR AUJOURD’HUI. Jean-Louis Balans. In French. 1998. £25 Obtainable from Africa Book Centre. Tel: 01718363020.

KAULI YA MALALHOI (VOICE OIF THE WRETCHED OF THE WORLD). Mlenge Fanuel. Benediction Publications, Ndanda-Peramiho. 63 pages. 1998. The author of this Swahili book is very angry. He wrote the 25 essays which make up the book to vent his frustration against the establishment for the harsh punishment it meted out to students at the Ardhi Institute after they had been on strike. The East African says that the book has striking similarities to ‘Animal Farm’. It ridicules ‘the political establishment and politicians and their notorious greed and disregard for the public good’.

SWAHILI. ROUGH GUIDE PHRASEBOOK. 179p. 1998. £4.00. Obtainable from the Africa Book Centre.

FOREIGN AID AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE IN TANZANIA. Timothy S Nyoni. World Development. Vol 26. No 7. 5 pages. This highly technical paper uses cointegration technique and an error-correction model to examine the relationship between foreign aid inflows and the real exchange rate and assess the potential for aid-induced ‘Dutch disease’ (defined as the undesirable effects of aid). It found that aid inflows, increased openness of the economy and devaluation of the local currency caused real depreciation while increased government expenditure caused real appreciation. Foreign aid has not caused ‘Dutch disease’.

REVIEWS

Posted on January 1, 1999 by editor

Reply

Readers will be shocked to hear that Michael Wise, our Reviews Editor, died suddenly and unexpectedly on November 11. He brought his considerable experience plus great enthusiasm to his task and his own reviews were always a delight to read. He was in the process of preparing this section of TA when he died but has left his files in good order and it has not been too difficult to complete the work for this issue. Reviewers whose work is not included in this issue can contact me although Michael had intended to hold over some reviews to a later date because of shortage of space. For this reason it has been necessary to abbreviate some of the material he did receive. I am sure that readers will support me in sending our deepest sympathy to his wife on her terrible loss – a loss which we also share – David Brewin.

LETHAL AID -THE ILLUSION OF SOCIALISM AND SELF­RELIANCE IN TANZANIA. Severine Rugumamu. Africa World Press, Trenton, New Jersey, 1999

It was the subtitle which grabbed my attention, but the first sections didn’t keep it -a stodgy literature review discussing concepts of the unequal power relationships between aid donors and recipients.

However, when the author starts writing about Tanzania in Chapter three, it’s much better. There’s an excellent historical survey, and a lot of very helpful economic statistics, not merely about foreign aid, but also about the whole economy. The author has also found a 1968 quote from Nyerere about foreign debt: “To burden the people with big loans, the repayment of which will be beyond their means, is not to help them but to make them suffer”.

He analyses the giving and receiving of aid-the interests of the donor state and those of the ruling class receiving it tend to outweigh “development”. In the longer term, aid has fostered dependence which “forces its victims to lose faith and confidence in their own abilities and paralyses their initiatives”, and has made a mockery of the old slogan of “Self-reliance”.

Tanzania did not have a policy framework for absorbing aid. Also, it was very difficult for Tanzanian civil servants to dispute aid-givers conclusions, however misinformed, or funds would disappear, so projects which any local could tell were misguided went ahead.

To illustrate his more general conclusions, he has three case studies ­a Norwegian fishing project “a classic example of a poorly conceived, designed and executed project”, Danish aid at Sokoine University (lecturers obtained higher degrees in Denmark and studied Danish veterinary issues) and Swedish aid at the bureau of statistics (successful in meeting its objectives, but also responsible for “notorious aid-dependence mentality”). He shows how inherent in much of the project design was the interests of the donors, while Tanzanian interests had to be fitted in as best as possible. Tanzanian institutional weakness also meant that they were often not even able to negotiate well.

In the last few pages the author suggests the solutions of better governance, so that the state acts in the interests of the whole country, and of genuine self-reliance-selective delinking from the world economy. But that would be another book.

It is easy to complain that the book minimises the successful impact of aid. Donors have done a lot of good with Tanzania’s roads and railways, for example, but his conclusion that much aid has not helped is incontrovertible, and his analysis as to why is very thought-provoking. It would have been interesting to compare how NGO aid fares compared with government aid ­this could perhaps have painted a slightly more encouraging picture.
Tim Idle

TANZANIA POLITICAL ECONOMY SERIES, 1 TRANSITIONAL ECONOMIC POLICY AND POLICY OPTIONS IN TANZANIA. Eds: Samuel Wangwe, Haji Semboja and Paula Tibendbage of the Economic and Social Research Foundation. Mkuki wa Nyota. Distributed by African Books Collective, The Jam factory, 27 Park End St. Oxford OXl lHU. 130 pages. £18.00.

Many friends of Tanzania, anxious to see its people prosper, have viewed with sadness the failure of many economic experiments of past decades and look forward eagerly to the success of the new policies of President Mkapa. To us this little book will be an encouragement; and to the powers that be it should be a valuable guide.

The book puts forward a set of economic policy options. They reflect current thinking on the role of the state as liberator of market forces, stimulator of private investment, creator of a competitive commercial environment and provider of efficient health, education and social services.

The book was published early last year yet most of the text appears to have been written 2 ‘is years ago; no statistic is given after the Spring of 1966 and frequently the writers indicate that they are putting forward their ideas at the outset of the ‘Third Phase Government’ whose remit runs from 1995 to 2000. I have just one other complaint. The book loses impact by being just a little too academic. The generalisations leave the reader uncertain at times what the authors really want their government to do in a given situation. Just a few comparisons are made with other developing countries; far more would have been helpful. Practical examples of theoretical arguments are rare. We learn of the beneficial privatisation of the Morogoro Shoe Company and the valuable effect on productivity of the Sasakawa Global 2000 Project, but that is about all. Some figures are quoted but the analysis lacks any graphs or charts to clarify movements in the country’s economy during the period under study.

The editors have been very ambitious. They had five objectives: to assess the tentative economic reforms initiated by the ‘Second Phase’ Government of President Mwinyi between 1985 and 1995; to draw lessons from the past; to set out the challenges facing the ‘Third Phase’ Government; to put forward policy options for it to consider when developing its plans; and, to set benchmarks from which future evaluations could be made.

Twenty senior academics and civil servants contributed to the text and the job of the editors cannot have been easy. They provided a good short introduction and a concise summary of the author’s views. In between, one by one, just about all relevant areas of public policy are discussed ­financial, industrial, agricultural, service, the environment, education, women, children, civil service reforms, water, health and so on as well as some ‘cross-cutting’ issues. Each one is reviewed under the headings: ‘current status’, ‘problems and challenges’, ‘short term’ and ‘long term’ policy options’. This rigorous demarcation does not always prevent duplication of ideas but it does help the reader through some fairly complex arguments.

The dryness of some of the text can be an advantage. It has enabled the authors to report the tragic deterioration of conditions in the country in the 70’s and 80’s without comment and without offence. The authors recognise the beginnings of a shift from state control to a more market­oriented economy after 1985, but see reform as far from complete. Their list of policy changes necessary to set Tanzania on the road to prosperity is very, very long.

All the authors are agreed that, the role of the government should be to provide public goods; improve the infrastructure; correct for ‘externalities’; increase the intensity of competition; create an environment suitable for private investment; and, tackle poverty by helping the poor to increase their productivity and incomes. The principle challenge facing the present government is to enhance its ability to manage development through a much stronger legal and institutional framework.

Looking at foreign aid, the authors record that the foreign debt due for repayment in 1995/96 was about 60% of Tanzania’s national debt and 50% of the recurrent budget. We are given three powerful reasons why it must be reduced by attracting private investment and using internal resources. It must come down, not merely to lesson the massive diversion of hard-won taxes, but also to enable the country to stand finally on its own two feet and to continue development from its own efforts when eventual ‘donor fatigue’ leads to the withdrawal of aid.

In sum, if the E&SR Foundation has not succeeded in all it undertook, at least the authors have made an important contribution to the national debate. The Foundation should pursue this exercise. Let them update the economic statistics with graphs to illuminate recent trends, accompany the up-date with a concise list of the policy options and conclude with a set of specific and quantified benchmarks, not merely of GDP, inflation and the like but also of production, productivity, literacy, health, educational attainment and so on. This would surely be helpful as a means of measuring the nation’s progress towards the stated objectives.
Dick Eberlie

TANU WOMEN: GENDER AND CULTURE IN THE MAKING OF TANGANYIKAN NATIONALISM, 1995-1965. Susan Geiger. James Currey, 1997. 217p. £15.95 (paperback) £40.00 (hardback).

This book provides an absorbing and detailed account of the part played by women activists in the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). Their role in the nationalist movement which set out to secure independence for Tanganyika has previously gone mostly unacknowledged. Whilst Susan Geiger carried out her research from written sources both in the UK and Tanzania, much of her book is based on dictated and recorded accounts, the oral life histories, that the women themselves provided in the 1980s. These, whilst given individually, when combined emerge as a collective biography of a larger whole. Paramount place and space is given to Bibi Titi Mohammed, the most prominent women leader in the nationalist phase (1955-65), whose story provides the thread throughout the narrative.

The author sets the scene and describes the social and political conditions that prevailed in the ’50’s and motivated the women to get involved and play an active part. What stands out is that there was the tendency, at least in the early days, for these women to be drawn from the urban Muslim, Swahili coastal community with little formal or western education; often divorced with few or no children. (It was common practice for girls to marry young and divorce early). In contrast in Moshi the women were usually younger than their Dar es Salaam counterparts with more schooling, more children, fewer divorces and with greater religious diversity. It is their influence which has continued to a greater extent into the post-colonial period.

Regardless of the ethnic backgrounds from which they came, common to all these women was an over-riding belief not only in the right of Tanzanians to rule themselves but also in the equality of the sexes ie that their daughters should have the right to education and employment denied or still not widely open to themselves. Women’s then lack of standing in society and considered inferiority was a strong force and motivating factor in their call for change which they felt would only come with independence and its aftermath. This book therefore does not confine itself purely to the struggle for independence but also looks at the continuation of women’s political culture of nationalism in the post-colonial years and with it the disappointments and setbacks that have since been encountered.

Notwithstanding the fact that TANU Women is both a scholarly and methodically researched book aimed primarily at an academic audience it is also of broader appeal to those with a more general interest in Tanzania.
Pru Watts-Russell

THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE A LEADER. ESSAYS ON THE 1995 GENERAL ELECTION. Edited by C K Omari. Dar es Salaam University Press. 1996. 160 pages.
TANZANIA POLITICAL REFORM IN ECLIPSE. CRISES AND CLEAVAGES IN POLITICAL PARTIES. Max Mmuya. Freidrich Ebert Stiftung. PO Box 4472. Dar es Salaam. 1998. 192 pages.

The recent past, the present and, to some extent, the future of political development in Tanzania are covered competently in these two books.

Regular readers of TA will find little new in ‘The Right to Choose a Leader’ but to others, this is probably the most informative account of Tanzania’s 1995 elections yet produced. Editor Omari proved his credentials by accurately forecasting the results ahead of the elections. Factors he describes in detail which influenced the results include the importance of personality rather than policy in voter choice; the religious factor (the efforts of Muslim fundamentalists in Dar es Salaam backfired); ethnicity (still very important) and NGO involvement. Chapter 5, written by the young Dr Festus Limbu, describes politics at the grass roots and how he tried but failed to win the Magu (Mwanza) seat for the NCCR party. The final chapter on Zanzibar explains concisely the complicated historical background to what happened but steers clear, perhaps wisely, of expressing an opinion on whether the results represented the true will of the electorate.

Senior Lecturer in Government and Politics at Dar es Salaam University, Dr Max Mmuya, in his profound and original book, brings us up to date on the way in which the effort to introduce multipartyism to Tanzania has been pervaded by ‘crisis and cleavages’ and is now, in the view of most observers, in eclipse.

In describing the five main parties, the author, who is a member of the committee set up to propose revisions to Tanzania’s constitution, struggles hard to define CCM’s present policy (‘CCM -The Establishment United ­ From Ujamaa to Ruksa’) but states that recent research indicates that most rural poor people still prefer ujamaa to capitalism, something CCM has to take into account as it becomes more and more capitalist in its orientation.

CUF (Utajirisho -Enrichment) which, according to the author, was the only other party which originally had a vision of the kind of society it wanted (what about John Cheyo’s creation, the UDP, and its Margaret Thatcherism?) but, because its only real strength is now in Zanzibar, has had to ‘form into the same rigid ideology as the CCM on the Isles’.

In the heart of the book Mmuya points out that conflict is a necessary aspect of any political party and reveals in detail the internal conflicts in the CCM (eg: between the elders and the youth; between the mainland and Zanzibar parties) and how it has (so far) successfully coped with them. Mmuya wisely rejects the conspiracy theory that the collapse of the other parties has been instigated by CCM. He prefers such causes as their flouting of their own constitutions, personal ambition and ethnic affiliations.

In a fascinating discussion on how the new multiparty parliaments operate, the book reveals that if Tanzania had had proportional representation rather than the ‘first-past-the-post’ system, CCM would now have 137 seats (rather than the actual 186) and NCCR would have 50 compared with its existing 16.
There is an intellectual discussion in Chapter 6 on relations between parties and civil society organisations. He writes: ‘Unfortunately, as though colonialism was not atrocious, post-independence regimes have either attempted to control the single party or, as in the case of the current reform movement, the colonial laws and regulations have been invoked to drive a wedge in the natural and logical process of parties being founded in civil society organisations’. Case studies in Bariadi, Shinyanga (not very successful), and Dar es Salaam showed civil society to be weak and undeveloped. By contrast, in Zanzibar before the revolution, there were 48 registered organisations -religious, social, recreational and charitable.

Mmuya’s rather brief conclusions make sad reading. He writes, with much support from his own research, that Tanzania is ‘lacking in the appropriate infrastructure upon which to build a liberal democratic system ­a vision shared by all the parties …the cOlmtry cannot afford to pay for countrywide elections for local, parliamentary and presidential elections and leave enough funds for other important allocations’. But, as he says correctly, democracy will eventually triumph.

He concludes the book with these questions: ‘Where are the liberals and where is the liberal infrastructure for them?’ I conclude that this well­researched and well-written book is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in Tanzanian political development.
David Brewin

TREKKING IN EAST AFRICA. David Else. Lonely Planet Publications. New Edition 1998. 348p. £11.99.

This book is a comprehensive guide to mountain treks throughout the whole of East Africa, Malawi and Ethiopia. It includes the standard Lonely Planet advice about the countries covered, getting there and away, information about health and safety, including a section on mountain sickness and notes on tipping guides and porters.

Tanzania is covered in 69 pages and, as you would expect, Kilimanjaro is given a lot of space with good maps and six routes described. There are diagrams showing the steepness of ascent and there is a full list of trekking companies with appropriate warnings about rogue companies. There is a smaller but useful section on Mount Meru which, as the book says, is frequently overlooked by trekkers, but provides an excellent climb through varied landcapes, culminating in a scramble along an exposed crater rim to the summit. The book provides welcome sections on other mountain areas visited by few tourists which are the hidden jewels of the country. Tanzania’s Five Year Tourism Plan seeks to encourage tourists to spread out from the ‘Northern Circuit’ and Zanzibar and with the assistance of the Dutch aid project (SNV) villagers are being encouraged to provide tourist facilities in these areas.

The areas given good coverage in the book are the Crater Highlands, Mt Hanang and the Western Usambaras. I was particularly pleased to see Hanang included as this is a splendid 11,500 ft. isolated extinct volcano, providing an excellent two days trekking. Short sections devoted to the Monduli Mountains, the Pare Mountains, the Eastern Usambaras and the Southern Highlands centred on Mbeya do not do these areas justice and there is no mention at all of the Uluguru Mountains or of Udzungwa. The Southern Highlands in particular offer a vast range of attractions -high mountains, waterfalls, gorges, volcanic features, pleasant climate and excellent walking country.

This book is an essential guide to planning a trek in the region but Tanzania has enough natural treasures to justify a book for Tanzania alone. !
Tony Janes

A VET ABROAD. Stuart Wilson. The Book Guild, High St. Lewes, Sussex. BN7 2LU. TeI: 01723 472534. £15.95.

Books about travel; memoirs; animal stories; all may be of interest. But when you have a combination, you have a winner!
Stuart Wilson gave up a profitable vet practice in Lincolnshire to spend five years in Tanzania. Part of the time he was involved in research programmes and vet practice, but mostly he was training veterinary assistants to mn the animal health control services. He has either used extensive notes made at the time, or has a remarkable memory for detail and moves from animal stories (wild as well as domestic), descriptions of the country as it was some 30 years ago, amusing characters and incidents, many of them at his own expense, with a skill reminiscent of the vet stories in Yorkshire which have been so popular in book and on TV in the UK.

This book would be fun for anyone to read, but for those who knew some of the characters and who experienced Tanzania at the time, it is fascinating. Stuart spent part of his time at Mpapwa but most at the Ministry of Agriculture Training Institute at Tengeru near Arusha. His obvious enjoyment of the work, his involvement with cattle, sheep, horses and dogs both in the area and as far away as West Kilimanjaro and far into Masailand, illustrate that he was much more than just a teacher. His students obviously recognised this when they said in a speech prior to his departure “your teaching has always been systematic, simple and thought­provoking”. I have visited Tengeru several times recently and it is sad to see that the facilities which Stuart struggled so hard to build up have deteriorated disastrously. Further, the Government has not employed veterinary assistants since 1992, and as there are no job prospects, there are hardly any students. As Stuart was about to leave, Tengeru was to be handed over to the East African Community for a few years. At least it is now back to its earlier function and there is a prospect of major renovation. A further regret is that so many of the well established commercial farms to which the author refers have ceased to function.

There are some endearing features. Stuart starts off with a fairly colonial attitude, as one might expect so soon after the colonial era, but he visibly mellows over the five years and clearly gets on well with his students. He realises his own fiery nature (I should like to see if the door in which he hit a hole is still at Tengeru) and is able to joke about it. He jumps fully clothed into a pool when he sees his daughter apparently in trouble! He gets into trouble with lions, snakes, rabid animals, not to mention senior officers. A few minor criticisms should not detract from a warm recommendation. A Swahili speaking editor would have made many corrections to the spelling; in fact the editing in general leaves something to be desired. I wish he had put the full name of all his colleagues. But these are very small points in what is otherwise an entertaining, amusing and a fascinating story not to be missed.
David Gooday

MEMORY AND MAPS. An exhibition of paintings by Jonathan Kingdom at the Royal Geographical Society. October 16-22, 1998.

The paintings in this exhibition followed an expedition to Mkomazi, Southern Tanzania, in which the well-known naturalist and painter 10nathan Kingdom was involved in 1995/96. His oil paintings blend art, science and memories of a lifetime in East Africa (he was born and brought up in Tanzania). They have an immediacy which gives them vibrant life and his interpretation overlays these with topographical and historical knowledge. His intimate knowledge of the area enables him to paint locales invested with weather, temperature and a shifting light.

The wildlife is predominant in the pictures, the physical elements giving an impressionistic landscape but showing the paths and conditions along which the wildlife travels. Prey is watched by predators, the frail confront the elements, competition is played out. A few of the pictures can be seen as abstracts though the viewer can solve the patterns. They are not drawing room pictures; they need some explanation (which was provided in a booklet at the exhibition) but repay close attention.
Cherridah Coppard