The Indigenization Debate in Post-Socialist Tanzania* Ronald Aminzade

Aminzade 43 From Race to Citizenship: The Indigenization Debate in Post-Socialist Tanzania* Ronald Aminzade Neoliberal economic reforms in post-socialist Tanzania heightened racial as well as anti-foreign hostilities, while liberal political reforms made possible the expres- sion of these antagonisms in electoral politics. Newly formed opposition parties mobilized popular support by advocating anti-Asian indigenization policies that questioned a key element of liberal democracy, the protection of minority rights. This prompted the ruling party, which had initially denounced advocates of indigenization as racist, to alter its position. In doing so, ruling party leaders rede- fined the meaning of indigenization, shifting the focus of the debate away from racial issues and Asian control of the economy toward issues of free trade, foreign investment, and foreign economic domination. By implementing indigenization measures targeting non-citizens and featuring anti-liberal economic policies, including tariff barriers, local content laws, and restrictions on property ownership, the government faced the danger of losing international support from foreign do- nors and international financial institutions. The trajectory of the indigenization debate reveals the role of electoral competition and party formation in shaping race relations and national identity in post-socialist Tanzania. It suggests the need for event-centered studies of the way in which political identities are constructed in processes of conflict within the institutional arenas created by liberal political reforms. fter years of economic crisis and failure to achieve sustained economic Adevelopment, Tanzania’s socialist experiment was gradually abandoned during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in response to internal as well as exter- nal pressures. “I have no quarrel with capitalism,” stated Julius Nyerere, the central architect of Tanzanian socialism, at a press conference in April 1997. Ronald Aminzade is professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. His publications concerning the social and political consequences of capitalist development include Ballots and Barricade: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830-1871 (Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1993) and Class, Politics, and Early Industrial Capitalism: A Study of Mid-Nineteenth Century Toulouse, France (State University of New York Press, 1981). He is also co-editor of Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Social Worlds of Higher Education (Pine Forge Press, 1999). Studies in Comparative International Development, Spring 2003, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 43-63. 44 Studies in Comparative International Development / Spring 2003 “It is possible that free market policies can bring about people’s development if properly administered. Capitalism is wealth. People should go for it” (New African, June 1997: 22). Like other former socialist countries in Eastern Eu- rope, Africa, and Southeast Asia, Tanzania experienced a relatively rapid tran- sition to neoliberal economics and multiparty politics in the final decades of the twentieth century, adopting the same neoliberal economic policies imple- mented in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America, including currency de- valuation, trade liberalization, cutbacks in state-provided social services, and the privatization of public enterprises. Diverse national responses to these policies were constructed through political activities, via organizational and ideo- logical mechanisms that link economic change to collective political action. The translation of interests and grievances fostered by neoliberal economic policies into subjective political dispositions and collective political action depends on a political process in which institutions such as political parties and ideologies like nationalism play a central role. This article explores this political process in the context of a contentious debate over the meaning of race and nation in Tanzania. In his comparative analysis of South Africa, Brazil, and the United States, Anthony Marx (1998) argues that trajectories of nation formation in each case were a result of elite uses of state power to build coalitions which, in the cases of South Africa and the United States, unified whites within the nation-state by excluding blacks. In these cases, racially based civic exclusions helped foster national unity among a divided white population. Efforts to foster national unity by appealing to racial solidarities also figure prominently in the history of Tanzanian nation building (Aminzade 2000; Brennan 2002). In Tanzania, however, political elites have been and remain divided over whether to use civic exclusion of the Asian racial minority as a means of fostering national unity among the black majority. Since the demise of state socialism and advent of multiparty politics and neoliberal economics, this division has found ex- pression in an ongoing debate within and between political parties over the issue of indigenization (uzawa). Racial understandings of identity and difference have played a central role in the construction of nations around the globe. “Nationalism’s dominant con- ceptual partners,” argues Kathryn Manzo, “are not simply nation and state. They are also race and alien, for without the racialized kind of alien there can be no national kin” (1996: 3). My research analyzes the debate over indigenization and efforts of opposition and ruling party leaders to frame it in terms of a rhetoric of race versus one of citizenship. Those different frames seek to construct different boundaries of inclusion and exclusion and identify different enemies and threats. Indigenization defined in terms of race sees the nation as constituted by indigenous black Africans (wazawa), excluding Asian- Tanzanians as disloyal outsiders who are exploiting the nation for their own benefit. Indigenization understood in terms of territory draws a different boundary, between citizens (wananchi) and foreigners, and seeks to protect the nation’s economy and culture from the threat of foreign domination. Political theorists have often highlighted the institutional dimensions of the process of identity formation. In analyzing class identity, for example, Giovani Aminzade 45 Sartori argues that political parties constitute “the structural cement of class reality” and hypothesizes that “a thorough-going organizational network is a necessary condition of class consciousness and behavior...” (1969: 86-87). Adam Przeworski and John Sprague (1986) also identify political parties as central forces determining the saliency of different sources of political identity and voting behavior, arguing that party strategies and the struggles they organize are central determinants of the extent to which individuals experience their lives in terms of the identities and commitments of class. Scholars of nationalism have been much less attentive to the role of political parties and party struggles in the creation of national identities. They typically ignore the role of political parties and party competition in creating national identities, em- phasizing instead the constraints and opportunities imposed by structural relations of the global economy and international relations. Institutions like parties are viewed as translators rather than creators of shared meanings of the nation, and such meanings are typically treated as firmly rooted in larger structural realities of modernity, capitalism, and state formation (Gellner 1994; Hobsbawm 1990; Giddens 1985) rather than produced by a continual process of political contention within the electoral arena. The following account fol- lows Brubaker’s admonition that “we should focus on...‘nation’ as practical category, institutionalized form, and contingent event” (1996: 7). In document- ing the trajectory of the indigenization debate, I highlight the role of political parties, and the dynamic process of party competition, in shaping contested boundaries of the nation. Political parties have been central in the creation of national identity in Tanzania and they continue to contest and shape national identities during the post-socialist era. An event-centered narrative approach reveals how the meaning of the term “indigenous” (uzawa) has shifted during the post-socialist period from a racially charged designator of the boundary between Asians and black Africans to a term used to designate the boundary between foreigners and citizens. This narrative relies heavily on accounts from the popular opposition press, which expanded rapidly during the political liberalization of the 1990s to challenge the monopoly of the state-owned print media. By early 1998, there were sev- enty registered publications appearing on newsstands, including four English daily newspapers that competed with the government-owned Daily News (The East African February 16-22, 1998: 3). Opposition papers were quite outspo- ken on a variety of contentious issues that had been taboo during the socialist period of single-party rule. Such issues, including racial inequalities between Asians and Africans, were regarded by the ruling party as a divisive threat to national unity and were excluded from public debate. During the 1990s, opposition newspaper reports provided detailed accounts of racial conflict and anti- foreign hostility, but they typically treated these events as isolated happenings, failing to adequately situate them in a broader historical or sociopolitical

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