Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry explores the challenges of development and underdevelopment in Africa, with a focus on Tanzania’s experience during its early socialist years. The book critiques the dominant ideologies of development, whether capitalist or socialist, as being rooted in Western industrial paradigms that often fail to address the realities of pre-capitalist African societies. It argues that the underdevelopment in Africa is not solely due to excessive penetration by global capitalism but also to capitalism’s inability to dismantle the resilient pre-capitalist structures in many rural societies. The author highlights the role of the Tanzanian peasantry, whose economic and social autonomy often resists the centralizing tendencies of modern development, presenting them not as mere appendages to the global economy but as key players with their own modes of production and unique societal structures.
The book is grounded in over a decade of fieldwork and engagement with rural Tanzanian communities, enriched by the author’s fluency in Swahili and deep involvement in local life. It argues for a more nuanced approach to studying African societies, one that goes beyond Western assumptions and models. By placing the peasant mode of production at the center of analysis, the study challenges conventional wisdom and suggests that the primary development challenge in Africa lies not with multinational corporations but with understanding and working within the dynamics of the smallholder peasant economy. The author also reflects on the limitations of conventional social science research and calls for greater involvement in the lived realities of the communities studied, emphasizing the need for research methods that are sensitive to local contexts and values. The book combines academic critique, field observations, and a focus on the epistemological biases of Western scholarship to present a compelling argument for rethinking development in Africa.
This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.
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