Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet by Selma James

Author:Selma James [James, Selma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781629638386
Google: ctV8zQEACAAJ
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2021-07-20T23:38:16.081520+00:00

Notes

1Ralph Ibbott, Ujamaa: The Hidden Story of Tanzania’s Socialist Villages (London: Crossroads Books, 2014).

2Britain had experience in partitioning colonies that wanted freedom; in 1921, they had partitioned Ireland, their oldest colony.

3Ikamba Bunting, “The Heart of Africa” (1970 interview with Julius Nyerere), New Internationalist 309 (January 1999), accessed September 22, 2020, https://newint.org/features/1999/01/01/anticolonialism.

4Julius Nyerere, introduction to Freedom and Unity—Uhuru na Umoja: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1952–65 (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1967), 1.

5Shan van Vocht, “Socialism and Nationalism” (1897), in Peter Beresford-Ellis, ed., James Connolly: Selected Writings (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 121–24.

6Introduction to Ralph Ibbott, False Start in Africa (London: Sphere Books, 1966), 20.

7Ibid., 21.

8René Dumont, False Start in Africa (London: Andre Deutsch, 1966).

9Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1967 [1961]), 136, 138.

10Cited in Cranford Pratt, The Critical Phase in Tanzania 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 110.

11Kate Wenner, who worked in Litowa for a year, says: “Millinga … sometimes brought his [radio] along to ujamaa meetings…. When the news came on everyone hushed…. They wanted to hear news of Tanzania and the world”; Kate Wenner, Shamba Letu (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 205.

12Tanganyika, Legislative Council Official Report, 36th Session, vol. 1, cols 390–1, October 20, 1960, cited in Ibid., 85.

13Ibid., 173.

14He is referring to the policy of delaying independence until “the natives” were “ready for self-government,” having learnt parliamentary democracy as practised in Westminster.

15“Ujamaa—the Basis of African Socialism” (TANU pamphlet, 1962), in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, 170–1.

16Nyerere was sometimes criticized or even dismissed for not being a Marxist. Responding on one occasion, he is reported to have said, “If Marx had been born in Sumbawanga, he would have probably come out with the Arusha Declaration rather than Das Kapital!”; Issa G. Shivji, “The Mwalimu in Nyerere,” October 16, 1999, 7, accessed November 24, 2020, https://www.academia.edu/5027998/The_Mwalimu_in_Nyerere, accessed October 15, 2020. The joke had an element of truth. Nyerere was closer to Marx than even he may have realized. They both were convinced that in the process of collectively transforming society people transform themselves. That is the basis of the ujamaa strategy.

Marx’s 1870s Ethnological Notebooks contain his research into pre-class and more recent societies with many communal or collective relationships. In his famous 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, he said that in some circumstances these societies could bypass capitalism to become “the fulcrum of social regeneration”; see Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism” (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).

Nyerere lived in a continent with many such societies; they had, of course, changed, but their communalism had still not been destroyed by imperialism. His strategy of ujamaa presumed that in the circumstances of that time the communal African village could become the fulcrum of Tanzania’s social regeneration.

Marxist historian Walter Rodney, who worked for some years in Tanzania (and later became leader of a mass movement in his native Guyana), also notes the similarity between Nyerere’s African socialism and Marx’s view of the anti-capitalist potential of communal societies. Rodney dismisses

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