Priya Lal




African Socialism and the Limits of Global Familyhood:
Tanzania and the New International Economic Order
in Sub-Saharan Africa


In November 1963, Julius Nyerere, president of the newly independent East African
country of Tanganyika, delivered a stirring speech to open a conference of the United
Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome. He began by
commending the rise of an ‘‘almost world-wide recognition of the common humanity
of man, and a growing sense of human brotherhood,’’ affirming that ‘‘the existence of
the FAO is indeed one of the expressions of this feeling of involvement in each other’s
welfare.’’ Yet Nyerere’s speech quickly departed from this sanguine language of global
fraternity and mutual concern as he turned to the subject of economic development.
‘‘Economically there are still two worlds, not one,’’ he declared. Decolonization was
giving rise to ‘‘an atmosphere of ever rising expectations among the poor of the
world,’’ but ‘‘the gap between the haves and the have-nots of the world’’ was
‘‘widening on a progressive scale.’’ At the heart of the problem, he insisted, was the
nature of the international political and economic order itself, with its philosophical
basis in ‘‘multilateral free trade theory’’ and attendant disregard of the pronounced
hierarchies ordering the community of supposedly equal nations. To correct the
growing trend of developmental divergence and achieve basic economic justice for
underdeveloped countries like Tanganyika, Nyerere asserted that isolated commodity
agreements and occasional disbursements of aid were insufficient; a ‘‘World Economic
Development Plan’’ was essential. ‘‘The FAO must either have the power to plan
world food and agriculture, both production and marketing, or it will remain what it
is now; a charity organization,’’ he concluded incisively.1
    Nyerere’s speech simultaneously highlighted both the importance and irrelevance
of international development organizations in their existing form, eschewed technical
discussions about agricultural modernization in favor of explicit reckoning with global
inequalities, and argued that atomized policy prescriptions for national development
could not succeed without countering the forces of uneven development inherent in
the ideologies and practices regulating the world economy as a whole. In doing so, it
invoked two contrasting (although not mutually exclusive) models for conceptualizing
the global community: a humanistic, harmonious vision of transnational familyhood
structured by the principle of mutual obligation, on the one hand, and a more
confrontational, Marxist-inflected image of a world increasingly divided—along
national lines—into the two polarized groups of profiteers and the poor, on the other.
These paradigms alternately animated Third World activism on a global scale during


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     the mid-to-late twentieth century, variously translating into calls for increased soli-
     darity or unity and demands for substantive structural reforms.
          Temporally positioned at a midpoint between what scholars have taken to identi-
     fying as the bookends of the Third World movement—the Bandung Afro-Asian
     Conference of 1955 and the New International Economic Order (NIEO) call of 1973—
     Nyerere’s 1963 lecture serves as a useful point of departure for an examination of the
     roots of the NIEO, particularly given the broad resonance of his bid for a ‘‘World
     Economic Development Plan’’ with the G-77’s later proposal.2 Returning to this
     earlier moment helps illuminate the broader dynamics of Third World activism as it
     transitioned from its Bandung-era incarnation—emphasizing cultural or racial bonds
     and promoting cooperation (in very general terms) among participating countries—to
     its NIEO one—joining these same players in the formal institutional setting of the
     United Nations to stage precise, concrete economic and legal demands on what they
     referred to as the global north. More specifically, it helps account for how and why
     specific forms of activism became imaginable, compelling, and impossible at particular
     stages of this trajectory.
          Revisiting Nyerere’s 1963 address also serves as an important reminder that the
     NIEO was not ‘‘of marginal relevance’’ to sub-Saharan countries, and neither was
     sub-Saharan Africa a marginal player in the making of this movement.3 Indeed, many
     of the issues that the NIEO raised were of central concern to leaders of left-leaning
     African countries that emerged from colonial rule in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
     These included the vulnerabilities of primary product exporters to the tumultuous
     price fluctuations of international markets, the arbitrariness of preferential trade
     arrangements and the undemocratic character of GATT institutions and norms, the
     tendency of conditions attached to foreign aid and investment to further compromise
     the political autonomy and economic capacity of poor countries, and the enduring
     legacies of colonialism manifested in a variety of forms. In some ways the FAO
     meeting was an especially appropriate venue for an African leader to voice these anxi-
     eties; after the euphoria of independence settled, many sub-Saharan African countries
     found themselves unable even to provide a steady supply of adequate food to their
     citizens.4 Though the challenges of underdevelopment were especially acute in Africa,
     however, leaders like Nyerere recognized them as consistent with a condition common
     to a wider Third World or global south.
          Nonetheless, in 1963 Nyerere’s vision for the creation of a ‘‘World Economic
     Development Plan’’ still seemed a remote fantasy. The Tanganyikan president himself
     acknowledged that perhaps his proposal was ‘‘not realistic.’’ In the absence of truly
     global structural reform, he suggested, the only possible path to meaningful devel-
     opment for Third World countries lay in consolidating ‘‘their unity against the rich’’
     in ‘‘a separate economic unit’’—through a system of concerted planning, managed
     credit, trade linkages, and mutual assistance.5 On a global scale, this concept of elective
     but institutionalized transnational cooperation resonated with the political mission of
     organizations such as the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization and the Non-
     Aligned Movement, both of which held meetings in Tanzania in the 1960s and early
     1970s. On a continental scale, Pan-Africanist efforts sought to more concretely bolster


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the economic prospects of isolated national units by subsuming them within inte-
grated regional federations. In turn, these varied projects of internationalist or
transnational engagement were premised upon maintaining the internal unity of
constituent national participants, which could hardly be taken for granted amid the
volatile context of Cold War competition, covert foreign intervention, intensifying
liberation struggles, and disputes over resources raging across sub-Saharan Africa at
the time.6 Radical African countries responded to these real or potential threats to
national stability by adopting domestic programs of African socialism; the Tanzanian
version was conceptually anchored by the principles of mutual assistance—rendered
as ‘‘familyhood’’—and self-reliance—variously configured to mean autonomy or
autarky. The contradictions that resulted from amalgamating these two apparently
opposed ethics captured the broader tensions of efforts at Third Worldist organizing
during the 1960s and 1970s.
     This essay contextualizes the emergence of the NIEO—as an ideological formation
and political project—from the particular vantage point of early postcolonial Tanzania,
beginning with the early 1960s moment of Nyerere’s FAO speech. In doing so, it aims
both to help write sub-Saharan Africa into the newly emerging history of the NIEO and
to open up more established histories of early postcolonial Africa to the dynamic global
contests over the international order in which they were embedded.7 A close evaluation
of the Tanzanian case illuminates some of the primary contours and contradictions of
the larger transition from the Bandung to NIEO versions of the Third World movement
from a perspective that a panoramic global view on this process cannot capture.8
     Tanzania came to be one of the most vocal sub-Saharan African proponents of the
NIEO and maintained the most sustained commitment to nonaligned and anti-
colonial internationalism, Pan-Africanism, and African socialism among its
continental counterparts throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, by the mid-1970s,
Tanzania was the recipient of more foreign aid than any of its African
neighbors—much of it from the very western or northern countries whose exploitative
practices Nyerere critiqued—and its Pan-Africanist and socialist efforts were floun-
dering.9 This condition belied the broader dilemmas of Third World strategizing
during this era. As Tanzanian leaders experimented with various political and
economic initiatives to improve their country’s position in the world, they struggled
to reconcile the imperatives of national independence and transnational interdepen-
dence, democracy and equality, and confidence in human agency and consciousness
of structural constraints. Many of these tensions and ambivalences were woven into
the institutional makeup and ideological foundations of the international order itself,
which at once enabled and crippled the NIEO.10

By the mid-1970s, the terms of the balance between the Third World’s emphasis on
transnational unity and its desire for substantive economic and political sovereignty
had shifted from its earlier configuration in the previous decade. National borders had
become fixed, concerns about underdevelopment had yielded to a concerted push for
the reorganization of the world system and not just the internal reconfiguration of
individual national units, and discussions of human rights came to center on issues of
collective economic justice. In order to make sense of this transition, it is critical to


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     dismantle three binaries that have dominated analyses of the mid-to late twentieth-
     century world, which Tanzania’s early postcolonial trajectory challenges in especially
     visible ways. The first is the opposition of subordinated colonial status with that of
     independent nationhood.
         Although decolonization ultimately produced an assortment of new nation-states,
     this outcome was not actually conclusive until the late 1960s. In 1960, the Tanganyika
     African National Union (TANU), which went on to become the country’s ruling
     political party, offered to ‘‘postpone the celebration of Tanganyika’s independence,’’
     which was then scheduled for the following year, to ‘‘celebrate East Africa’s indepen-
     dence in 1962 rather than take the risk of perpetuating the balkanization of East
     Africa.’’11 Nyerere and his TANU allies, in other words, pushed for self-determination
     to take the shape of a transnational federation rather than narrow national statehood,
     believing that the former offered greater geopolitical and economic security for the
     constituent colonies of British East Africa.12 Although this initial effort failed, with
     Tanganyika becoming an independent nation-state in late 1961, talks for a postinde-
     pendence federation continued. In the summer of 1963, East African leaders signed a
     declaration agreeing to establish a federation by the end of the year, specifying
     ‘‘economic planning, the maximum establishment of manpower and our other
     resources, the establishment of a central bank and common defence programme, and
     foreign and diplomatic representation,’’ as sectors of future joint action.13 Within
     months, it had become clear that ‘‘major difficulties’’ had arisen in negotiations;14
     eventually, the Ugandan leader Milton Obote pulled out of the talks. Alternatively,
     Nyerere looked to the possibility of a Tanganyika-Kenya federation and even spoke of
     including Nyasaland and the Rhodesias.15 However, after that December, when Kenya
     moved ahead with its national independence, the region’s countries would henceforth
     advance the ideal of unity ‘‘not as a block but as partners.’’16
         Despite its ultimate breakdown, the movement for an East African Federation
     reveals a more fluid and indeterminate picture of political imagination in
     decolonization-era Africa than is conventionally depicted.17 Independent nationhood
     in the threatening, unequal global order was a hard-won prize but inspired consid-
     erable anxiety; so did the prospect of compromising national autonomy within a
     transnational political community—even one composed of similarly disadvantaged
     members. Presiding over a largely agrarian country oriented overwhelmingly toward
     the export of raw materials such as sisal, coffee, and cotton, Nyerere recognized that
     on its own, Tanzania would be ‘‘helpless in the world market.’’18 Yet Kenya’s relatively
     more robust development prospects rendered its leaders wary of tying themselves to
     their poorer neighbor. Meanwhile, Nyerere’s vocal promotion of African socialism
     (starting in 1962) raised further suspicions among his less radical counterparts. On a
     microcosmic level, these divisions represented the same obstacles to cultivating Third
     World unity that G-77 members confronted some ten years later—namely, uneven
     development, ideological divergences, and the shared vulnerabilities that both
     propelled and constrained transnational cooperation.
         Though Tanganyika successfully merged with Zanzibar in 1964 to form the United
     Republic of Tanzania, in the absence of a concerted commitment to Pan-African
     integration that could mitigate direct exposure to the world economy, TANU


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embraced a domestic program of African socialism beginning in 1967. African
socialism was neither a camouflaged variant of capitalism nor a crude derivative of
socialism; this Cold War binary, a projection that lingers in much historical schol-
arship today, obscures the wide range of developmental ideologies circulating in the
Third World at the time.19 Though the NIEO reflected the influence of leftist intel-
lectual production during the 1960s and early 1970s—particularly in the area of
dependency or underdevelopment theory—it sought to engage with and transform
the existing capitalist global order, rather than thoroughly overturn it with a socialist
system.20 This position was consistent with, and emerged from, creative efforts to
combine socialist and capitalist ideology when formulating national development
programs.
     On the African continent, a loose continental repertoire of African socialism over-
lapped with Pan-Africanist concepts and networks. It blended various developmental
models into a distinctive hybrid characterized by its rhetorical embrace of traditional
African culture, bid for economic equality but rejection of class struggle, and human-
istic censure of exploitation (often described as parasitism). Guinea, Ghana, and Mali,
among others, adopted programs of African socialism in the 1960s.21 In 1967, Nyerere
inaugurated a Tanzanian variant termed ujamaa, or ‘‘familyhood’’ in Swahili. This
event was marked by a wave of government nationalizations and policies encouraging
the nationwide formation of communal villages, instituting universal access to
education and health care, and mandating against the individual accumulation of
wealth. To use a developmental lexicon popularized by the International Labor Orga-
nization one decade later, from 1967 onward, Tanzania’s agrarian-oriented socialism
foregrounded the ‘‘basic needs’’ of individual citizens over the seductive logic of
aggregate growth.
     Ujamaa discourse also held up the romanticized (that is, nonhierarchical) tradi-
tional African extended family as a metaphor for political community. On a global
stage, Nyerere deployed the language of international kinship to underwrite appeals
to a common humanity in support of both calls for global economic reform and
proposals for Pan-Africanist or Third World unity.22 In his first statement of ujamaa
philosophy in 1962, he outlined a moral case for transcending national divisions,
insisting that ‘‘our recognition of the family to which we all belong must be extended
yet further—beyond the tribe, the community, the nation, or even the continent—to
embrace the whole society of mankind.’’ This was ‘‘the only logical conclusion for
true socialism.’’23 Given the actual persistence of a ‘‘national order of things’’24 in
which African countries held the status of second-class citizenship, however, Nyerere
and his TANU colleagues became increasingly preoccupied with protecting whatever
fragile scraps of sovereignty Tanzania did possess—from within as well as without.
Internally, the TANU-led government harnessed the ideal of socialist familyhood to
underscore the imperative of domestic consensus, which legitimated the one-party
state’s outlawing of autonomous labor unions and suppression of political dissent. In
particular, Nyerere’s regime—like Kwame Nkrumah’s in Ghana and Ahmed Sékou
Touré’s in Guinea—silenced internal critics who demanded a more ‘‘scientific’’ appli-
cation of doctrinaire socialism to address the capitalist dynamics they believed had
taken root in African soil.25


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          By the late 1970s, however, Nyerere was urging the global south to come together
     as ‘‘a trade union for the poor’’—mobilizing the very language of class struggle inter-
     nationally that he had been so reluctant to countenance domestically.26 Whereas
     earlier Nyerere had encouraged Third World countries to delink from the world
     economy to achieve collective self-reliance, in the 1970s he began calling on the south
     to intensify its engagement with the north by articulating concerted material demands
     on the latter. If necessary, he explained, ‘‘we may be forced to call a strike in order to
     show that certain things are no longer acceptable!’’27 This shift reflected the dire
     circumstances in which most African countries found themselves by the mid-1970s,
     no matter what shape their domestic policy agendas had taken in the preceding years.
     In the Tanzanian case, not only had the expansive prospect of Pan-African federation
     faltered but so had the ujamaa project that followed. Whereas ujamaa ideology opti-
     mistically posited that hard work and a spirit of mutual assistance alone could lead to
     development, at a Tanzania-based G-77 meeting in 1979 a disillusioned Nyerere
     reflected, ‘‘We all’’—meaning the world’s developing nations in general—‘‘discovered
     that hard work and prosperity were not cause and effect; something external to
     ourselves always seemed to break the reputed connection.’’28 In pursuit of nonaligned
     diversification instead of autarky, Tanzania’s foreign economic relations had dimin-
     ished rather than bolstered the country’s autonomy. High rates of debt compounded
     a shortage of domestic skilled workers and a precipitous drop in domestic agricultural
     production when the centerpiece of the ujamaa initiative, a campaign for rural villagi-
     zation, became compulsory in 1973, disrupting agricultural labor and environmental
     conditions in the countryside.29 Though many in sub-Saharan Africa viewed the
     OPEC oil embargo of that same year as a flash of hope amid otherwise darkening
     economic prospects, African countries were among the worst affected by the skyrock-
     eting of oil prices and concomitant global recession. Within a few years, Tanzania had
     essentially abandoned its course of agrarian socialism, as the limits of national devel-
     opment had become all too clear.
          Throughout the 1970s, as Nyerere participated in and increasingly led calls for a
     NIEO, he alternated between asserting the moral responsibility of the global north to
     its poorer relations and urging countries in the global south to come together to
     materially force the hand of their wealthier exploiters. The former position overlapped
     with and strategically drew upon the language of global human rights, even though it
     also emerged from a conception of political ethics anchored in African socialist
     thought and forged through anticolonial activism. In implicitly or explicitly adopting
     human rights discourse, Nyerere did not choose between upholding individual rights
     and enshrining group rights—another commonly supposed but false binary. Rather,
     he invoked a combination of both, depending on the type of rights in question and
     the scale of their application. Thus the NIEO grew out of a radical human rights
     tradition rooted in Third World anticolonial activism, predating the atomizing, depo-
     liticizing movement for individual human rights that emerged most strikingly in the
     global north in the NIEO’s aftermath.30
          Human rights talk had a longer history in the region, but its character and
     function evolved over time. During the 1950s, anticolonial activists in Tanganyika—a
     UN Trust Territory—sent thousands of petitions to the UN, demanding equal access


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to the ‘‘principles promising self-determination, an end to racial discrimination, and
social and economic equality’’ outlined in the UN Charter.31 At this time, too, TANU
followed Nkrumah’s example in rejecting violence as a tactic in liberation struggle,
prioritizing the sanctity of individual life consistent with what would soon become a
largely Western-based human rights movement.32 From 1960 onward, however, as
continental conditions shifted, Tanzania transitioned from passive, peaceful support
of anticolonial movements in proximate lusophone and southern African
territories—a ‘‘withdrawing of support,’’ as in the South African boycott of
1959—into active engagement and support for armed struggle.33 Tanzania headed the
Organization of African Unity’s Liberation Committee and hosted, supplied, and
trained a range of freedom fighters.34 These activities threatened to invite unwelcome
foreign invasion by imperial or anticommunist parties, a fear that increasingly
pervaded Tanzania’s political culture and drove undemocratic practices such as preven-
tative detention.35 Accordingly, even while Tanzanian leaders frequently used the UN
as a platform to decry all types of human rights abuses in external sites, such as
Rhodesia, they resisted attempts by Western organizations to police the suppression
of civil liberties and compromise of political rights in Tanzania itself.36 These efforts
were perceived as a neocolonial violation of Tanzania’s own national sovereignty and
a threat to its efforts to secure this same status for the rest of the African continent.
    On the whole, Nyerere and his TANU colleagues foregrounded the collective
rights of political self-determination and economic sovereignty in their international
advocacy—with regard to both cases of ongoing formal colonialism or white minority
rule and independent African countries that had not yet wrestled free from what were
widely discussed as neocolonial ties.37 On the anniversary of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, a 1967 editorial in the TANU-run newspaper The Nationalist
declared, ‘‘Human Rights are to date still being trampled upon in many countries of
the world.’’ It asserted that on the one hand, ‘‘millions of Africans are still denied the
right to self-determination,’’ and on the other, ‘‘millions of people are also denied
their rights to full development due to economic exploitation inflicted upon them by
so called rich nations of the world.’’38 For Nyerere, however, national sovereignty—
whether in legalistic or more substantive developmental terms—was a means to an
end, and individual rights—particularly economic and social rights—still mattered.
He demonstrated this by defying the OAU’s position on the Biafran war in late 1960s
Nigeria to become the first African country to recognize the secessionist republic of
Biafra, condemning the Nigerian government’s tactic of ‘‘bombing [Biafrans] into
submission’’ even if it meant ‘‘giving formal recognition to even greater disunity in
Africa.’’39 Similarly, in practice and not just theory, he prioritized economic equality
within Tanzanian borders—the protection of individual citizens from exploitation by
others—over the advancement of the country’s global economic standing as a whole.40
    The conviction of the individual and collective right to material welfare implicit
in African socialist thought infused Nyerere’s advocacy for international reform during
the NIEO era. African socialism, though a varied ideology, was distinguished by its
‘‘comprehensive local moral vocabulary,’’ in which ‘‘exploitation was thus understood
as a moral fault rather than as an aspect of a mode of production or an economic
structure,’’ and ‘‘the social meaning of production and accumulation’’ as well as


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     exchange and consumption, was always foregrounded.41 This approach overlapped
     with aspects of international socialist and human rights discourse but was hardly
     reducible to either. Whereas northern opponents of the NIEO tended to resort to the
     abstract, technically calibrated language of ‘‘scientific capitalism,’’42 Nyerere was part
     of a contingent of the global south that aimed to restore discussions about the world
     economy to an explicitly ethical, humanist realm. To achieve this, he often metaphori-
     cally rendered international relations as interpersonal ones, speaking of
     underdeveloped nations as mistreated individuals who deserved not only the right to
     concrete items like food and shelter but also the fundamental dignity of not being
     ‘‘forced into the position of beggars.’’43 This was similar but not equivalent to the
     comparatively decontextualized, depoliticized morality of the ‘‘basic needs’’ approach
     adopted by what one scholar calls the ‘‘neo-functionalist’’ approach to international
     economic reform in the 1970s.44 Though a strong critic of narrow nationalism,
     Nyerere was all too aware that borders mattered and thus that combating the nation-
     based divisions of the international order was essential for protecting individuals
     within nations. Simply calling for a global Keynesianism, as the Brandt Commission
     did, was insufficient to the task. To many African activists, the commission’s language
     of mutual economic interest likely invited comparison to late colonialism’s reference
     to an agenda of mutual development.45 Structural overhaul alone would guarantee
     poorer postcolonial countries substantive liberation at last—through a kind of decolo-
     nization of the world system as a whole.

     In a sense, there was no single NIEO movement, just as there was no one monolithic
     coalition for or conception of Pan-Africanism, African socialism, or human rights.
     There was, of course, a single concrete document that outlined the principles of a new
     global economic framework, including fairer trade, resource and technology transfer,
     national sovereignty in economic decision-making, and stabilized, remunerative prices
     for primary commodities. Translating the General Assembly’s 1974 ratification of these
     guidelines into an actual transformation of the status quo, however, would require
     more sustained organizing. NIEO advocates spoke of their cause in different idioms
     and with different agendas; these could and did evolve between the proposal’s initial
     germination at the 1973 meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Algiers and the
     rapid ascendance of a new neoliberal paradigm in the early 1980s.46 Over time it
     became clear that the viability of the south’s movement depended on not merely the
     ‘‘political will’’ of the north but also that of its own members; the global south was a
     construction that required constant labor to authenticate. In this effort, numerous
     statistics could be mobilized to illustrate staggering inequalities of wealth across a
     single global divide; for instance, in 1970, the minority of the world’s population
     living in the northern hemisphere held 84 percent of the global share of GDP versus
     the southern majority’s 16 percent. However, after the oil price hikes of 1973 and 1979,
     another fracture began to manifest itself within the south itself.47 By 1974, OPEC
     countries’ share of world export profits had jumped from 5.6 percent in 1970 to 15
     percent, more than that of the rest of the Third World combined.48 Other ‘‘locomo-
     tives of the South’’ in Asia followed developmental paths that were also increasingly
     diverging from those of their African counterparts, while Latin American countries


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struggled with the particular challenges of pervasive U.S. economic entanglement and
political intervention.49
     As the African experience showed, meaningful transnational partnerships were
often so difficult to cultivate precisely because of the same constraints on national
sovereignty that motivated such solidarity. Though the Cold War friction of the 1960s
had somewhat abated by the mid-1970s, opening up new space for global engagement,
internal cleavages continued to plague the cause of G-77 unity.50 Even within indi-
vidual African states, unity remained elusive; waves of coup d’états began sweeping
the continent shortly after decolonization, removing African socialist pioneers
Nkrumah and Modibo Keita, among others, from power by the end of the 1960s.
Tanzania’s foreign affairs minister described the coup d’état phenomenon as evidence
of colonialism’s enduring ability to divide and rule, suggesting that in this light, all
Africans were ‘‘still freedom fighters struggling to achieve true independence.’’51 While
formal anticolonial struggles provided common cause for other coalitions, even liber-
ation movements themselves suffered from rancorous divisions, exacerbated by the
patronage contests associated with Cold War competition between and within capi-
talist and socialist blocs.52 But the challenge of unity became still more daunting when
it sought to transcend racial, religious, ideological, geographic, economic, and national
distinctions in the name of global justice. In 1979, Nyerere admitted to members of
the G-77 that ‘‘ours is a unity of opposition’’ and ‘‘a unity of nationalisms,’’ stating
that ‘‘it was our separate nationalisms which caused us to come together, not the ideals
of human brotherhood, or human equality, or love for each other.’’53 The limits of a
discourse of transnational fraternity had been exposed; the common denominator of
the fragile southern coalition had been reduced to national self-interest alone.
     Yet it was no small task to convince OPEC countries, in particular, that their
national self-interest lay in economic alliances with their poorer, more vulnerable
neighbors to the south, rather than aspirational identification with their more
powerful clients to the north. From the perspective of many sub-Saharan African
countries, the stabilization of commodity prices was an urgent priority—both to
ensure a minimum income for farmers and to place caps on food imports (which in
the 1970s were rising in proportion to exports across the African continent).54 Such a
policy would be realizable only if all primary commodities were negotiated collectively,
linking the price of products such as cashews and rice to that of oil. In this respect the
success of the NIEO hinged upon the cooperation of OPEC countries. African
socialist regimes’ substantial ties to North African radicals such as Algeria and Egypt
in support of leftist freedom fighters, as well as their connections to Israel in the early
1960s, strained relations with more conservative oil-producing states in the Middle
East.55 In East Africa, moreover, the massacres and ensuing exodus of Arab-descended
residents of Zanzibar during and after the 1964 revolution further underlined that
when it entered the matrix of national or local politics, the Afro-Asian solidarity cele-
brated at Bandung was difficult to sustain.56 However, such cultural and political
concerns ultimately paled in the face of sheer economic self-interest. In the mid-to-
late 1970s, even while Tanzanian officials anticipated promised aid from and improved
trade with OPEC countries, imagining their country’s conversion into East Africa’s


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     primary oil-processing and distribution hub, OPEC countries refused to accom-
     modate the dire financial situations of their African buyers and devoted relatively little
     surplus profit to industrial development in the broader global south.57 Even the over-
     tures of oil-rich African countries seeking to benefit from OPEC’s technopolitical
     savvy were rejected.58 Across the continent, disappointment reigned.
          The broad narrative of sub-Saharan Africa’s course in the wake of the NIEO’s eclipse
     and the ascendance of the Washington Consensus in the 1980s is already well known.
     After the second oil price hike in 1979, the prices of basic commodities plummeted,
     creating an untenable situation for countries already drowning in debt that was rapidly
     compounding under high interest rates. Within several years, the heated, insistently
     politicizing debates on global inequality of the 1970s would cede to the dry technical
     calculations of World Bank and IMF bureaucrats, who rhetorically reduced the
     economic troubles of Third World countries to evidence of internal mismanagement,
     neatly excising historical and international factors from their assessment. Of course, the
     ensuing interventions into Third World economies in the name of structural adjustment
     were morally charged in their own way; this was the selective, implicit ethical superiority
     of the powerful, who—in the name of good governance—dispensed with African
     citizens’ political rights to accountability and democracy by slashing the developmental
     capacities of African states at their moment of greatest weakness.59 The full history of
     structural adjustment has yet to be written, much like that of Third World responses to
     the neoliberal turn of the 1980s.60 In Tanzania, under pressure from the IMF, Nyerere
     presided over a domestic structural reform agenda in the early years of the decade and
     stepped down from the presidency in 1985, just before his successor signed an agreement
     with the IMF to undergo full adjustment. The following year, Nyerere became the head
     of the South-South Commission, a new institutional home for Third World cooperation
     on issues of development. Over time the South Commission, too, would find itself an
     increasingly fractured and marginalized voice on the global stage.


     The push for a NIEO had roots in older debates, desires, and dilemmas for many of
     its African participants. Just as the 1970s movement for global economic justice is not
     reducible to a stable, monolithic formation, neither are sub-Saharan African experi-
     ences of the early postcolonial era easily understood within the framework of
     conventional analytical categories retroactively grafted onto this context. The political
     imagination of Tanzanian leaders was never imprisoned within binaries opposing
     formal colonialism to independent nationhood, capitalism to socialism, or individual
     rights to collective rights. Grasping this conceptual fluidity—which was hardly
     exclusive to the Tanzanian case—is essential to understanding the broader character
     of the evolving Third World movement from which the NIEO eventually emerged
     and the complex nature of the NIEO itself. Moving among, between, and within
     these discursive and material poles, Nyerere and other leftist African leaders forged a
     variety of political languages, agendas, and policies in response to a shared set of
     obstacles to what increasingly seemed to be the interlinked goals of economic sover-
     eignty and development.
         The first chapter of these efforts took the shape of movements at transnational


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federation in the name of Pan-Africanism, which were designed to enhance the possi-
bility of collective self-reliance by expanding its scale. By the mid-1960s, Nyerere
turned away from the project of East African federation, which had crumbled in the
face of prematurely entrenched national subjectivities, and took up a domestic
program of ujamaa socialism. Within a few years, however, the limits of this nationally
enclosed utopian project had likewise become glaringly apparent. As this second
chapter of radical developmental activism was closing, so was a third opening; in the
mid-to-late 1970s Tanzania joined other G-77 members to actively engage the global
north in demands for a reconfiguration of the ideologies, institutions, and regulations
governing the world economy. Though Nyerere had perceived the necessity of such a
‘‘World Economic Development Plan’’ some ten years earlier, it was only after other
alternatives had been exhausted that such a course of action became viable on a global
scale. Yet it would take considerable labor to mobilize the political will to materialize
a NIEO. To this end, Nyerere harnessed the lexicon of international human rights,
linking individual social and economic rights to collective political sovereignty, as well
as invoked the concept of self-determination, insisting that ‘‘economic domination
should be politically perceived’’ to ‘‘push the process of liberation to its logical
conclusion.’’61 He also drew upon a distinctive language of African socialism, strategi-
cally summoning ujamaa’s romanticized version of the traditional African extended
family to underscore the mutual obligations of wealthy countries in the global north
to their southern counterparts. Ultimately, however, this metaphor of transnational
kinship proved inadequate to the task of cultivating the unity of a southern bloc,
which had run aground on the very national divisions whose fragility the NIEO
movement had sought to combat in the first place.

NOTES

    1. Julius Nyerere, Memorial Lecture delivered in Rome at the 12th Session of the Conference
of the FAO on November 18, 1963, in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity: A Selection From Writings and
Speeches, 1952–65 (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1966), 231–51.
    2. See, for instance, Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World
(New York: New Press, 2007), and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (New
York: Verso, 2012). See also Christopher Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung
Moment and Its Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010).
    3. Hugh Arnold, ‘‘Africa and the New International Economic Order,’’ Third World Quarterly
2, no. 2 (April 1980): 295–304.
    4. For a discussion of food shortages in postcolonial Africa, see Phillip Raikes, Modernising
Hunger: Famine, Food Surplus and Farm Policy in the EEC and Africa (Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1988).
    5. Nyerere, Memorial Lecture.
    6. As detailed in Elizabeth Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the
War on Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
    7. In particular, with regard to Tanzanian historiography, taking the NIEO and related 1970s
global debates seriously complicates a common periodization splitting the postcolonial period into
two halves—a socialist (1960s–70s) and postsocialist (1980s onward) one. See, for example, a recent
special issue on ‘‘Tanzania at 50’’: Review of African Political Economy 39, no. 131 (2012). More



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     broadly, emphasizing the NIEO as an extension of earlier Third World organizing begun at
     Bandung (1955) and the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement (1961) and the G-77 (1964)
     allows for a revised periodization of this global dynamic that is more inclusive of African actors,
     given their later timeline of decolonization.
         8. For reflections on the limitations of the category of ‘‘global,’’ see Frederick Cooper, ‘‘How
     Global Do We Want Our Intellectual History to Be?,’’ in Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds.,
     Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
         9. On foreign aid in Tanzania, see Severine Rugumamu, Lethal Aid: The Illusion of Socialism
     and Self-Reliance in Tanzania (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1997).
         10. Mark Mazower discusses the internal contradictions of the UN by tracing its ambivalent
     origins in No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations
     (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
         11. Julius Nyerere, ‘‘East African Federation,’’ in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity. This speech
     was published as a pamphlet by the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa
     (PAFMECA) after the organization approved the proposal for a federation in Uganda in October
     1960.
         12. On the wide spectrum of interpretations of self-determination, see Bradley Simpson, ‘‘Self-
     Determination, Human Rights, and the End of Empire in the 1970s,’’ Humanity 4, no. 2 (Summer
     2013): 239–60. Little has been written on the East African Federation effort, save for Joseph Nye,
     Pan-Africanism and East African Integration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).
     This is reflective of a broader tendency to dismiss efforts at regional federation on the continent,
     including the Mali Federation linking Senegal and Mali (then Soudan) in 1960, and the Union of
     African States joining Ghana and Guinea (and subsequently Mali) between 1958 and 1962. On the
     United Arab Republic, which joined Syria and Egypt between 1958 and 1961, see James Jankowski,
     Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism, and the United Arab Republic (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner,
     2002).
         13. United Kingdom National Archives (UKNA), Foreign Office (FO) 371/167147. Kenya
     News: Press Office Handout No. 838.
         14. UKNA, FO 371/167147, Memorandum, written and sent by James Murray, British
     Embassy, Usumbura, Burundi to G. E. Millard, Foreign Office, London, August 15, 1963.
         15. Paul Bjerk, ‘‘Postcolonial Realism: Tanganyika’s Foreign Policy under Nyerere, 1960–
     1963,’’ International Journal of African Historical Studies 44, no. 2 (2011): 215–47.
         16. UKNA, FO 371/167147, Milton Obote, President’s speech to the National Assembly on
     November 4, 1963.
         17. Here I am drawing upon the work of Frederick Cooper, ‘‘Possibility and Constraint:
     African Independence in Historical Perspective,’’ Journal of African History 49, no. 2 (July 2008):
     167–96.
         18. Nyerere, Memorial Lecture.
         19. This tendency is remarkably persistent; for a recent example, see Jeffrey Byrne, ‘‘Africa’s
     Cold War,’’ in The Cold War in the Third World, ed. Robert McMahon (Oxford: Oxford
     University Press, 2013), 101–23. The best new scholarship on postsocialism is breaking down
     putative distinctions between actually practiced capitalism and socialism; see, for instance, Parvathi
     Raman and Harry West, ‘‘Poetries of the Past in a Socialist World Remade,’’ introduction to
     Raman and West, eds., Enduring Socialism: Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Resto-
     ration and Continuation (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009). In arguing against bipolar conceptions



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of development I am not suggesting that African socialism can be subsumed under a single mono-
lithic category of generic ‘‘developmentalism,’’ which has become an increasingly fashionable
analytical label in recent years. See Priya Lal, ‘‘Self-Reliance and the State: The Multiple Meanings
of Development in Early Post-Colonial Africa,’’ Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
82, no. 2 (May 2012): 212–34.
    20. The University of Dar es Salaam was the institutional base for a number of dependency
theorists at this time. For autobiographical reflections on the cosmopolitan 1960s–70s Dar es
Salaam intellectual scene, see Giovanni Arrighi, ‘‘The Winding Paths of Capital,’’ New Left Review,
n.s., no. 56 (March–April 2009): 61–94; Walter Rodney, Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of a
Black Intellectual (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990).
    21. Literature on African socialism is still thin. Surveys include William H. Friedland and
Carl G. Rosberg, eds., African Socialism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964); Kelly
Askew and M. Anne Pitcher, eds., ‘‘African Socialisms and Postsocialisms,’’ special issue of Africa:
Journal of the International African Institute 76, no. 1 (February 2006). Recent country studies
include Jay Straker, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2009).
    22. Here Nyerere’s configuration of global familyhood existed in tension with a discourse
rendering the ‘‘family of nations’’ as normatively ordered in patriarchal or paternalistic terms; see
Liisa Malkki, ‘‘Citizens of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of
Nations,’’ Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 41–68.
    23. Julius Nyerere, ‘‘Ujamaa: the Basis of African Socialism,’’ in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity,
162–71.
    24. Liisa Malkki, ‘‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of
National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,’’ Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (February 1992):
24–44.
    25. On this dynamic in Tanzania, see Issa Shivji, The Silent Class Struggle (Dar es Salaam:
Tanzania Publishing House, 1973); Karim Hirji, ed., Cheche: Reminiscences of a Radical Magazine
(Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2010). A similar phenomenon occurred in the continent’s later
Afro-Marxist revolutions; see, for instance, Donald Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic
History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
    26. Julius Nyerere, ‘‘Unity for a New Order,’’ Black Scholar 11, no. 5 (1980): 55–63, reprint of
a speech delivered at a 1979 Ministerial Conference of the G-77 in Arusha, Tanzania.
    27. Ibid.
    28. Ibid.
    29. These problems were compounded by a simultaneous regional drought. For more on
villagization’s local and national implementation and implications, see Priya Lal, ‘‘Between the
Village and the World: Imagining and Practicing Development in Tanzania, 1964–75’’ (Ph.D.
diss., New York University, 2011).
    30. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010).
    31. Meredith Terretta, ‘‘From Below and to the Left? Human Rights and Liberation Politics
in Africa’s Postcolonial Age,’’ Journal of World History 24, no. 2 (2013): 389–416, 394. For a broad
survey of human rights discourse in early postcolonial Africa, see Issa Shivji, The Concept of Human
Rights in Africa (London: CODESRIA, 1989), chap. 1.
    32. Jeffrey Ahlman, ‘‘The Algerian Question in Nkrumah’s Ghana, 1958–1960: Debating



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     ‘Violence’ and ‘Nonviolence’ in African Decolonization,’’ Africa Today 57, no. 2 (Winter 2010):
     67–84.
         33. Julius Nyerere, letter to Africa South, October–December 1959, http://www.anc.org.za/
     show.php?id 6901&t Boycotts (accessed September 15, 2014).
         34. Liberation movements from Mozambique, Rhodesia, South Africa, Angola, and Namibia
     operated out of Tanzania. This work tied Tanzania to a variety of socialist and radical Third World
     countries, including Cuba, China, the USSR, East Germany, Algeria, and Egypt; it also entailed
     closer relations with some Western-based humanitarian agencies, radical African American groups,
     and others.
         35. The example of the Congo inspired considerable anxiety in other radical African leaders,
     as did the Portuguese army’s 1970 operation to assassinate the Guinean leader Ahmed Sékou Touré
     in Conakry, in retaliation for Guinea’s support for the PAIGC’s liberation struggle. In Tanzania, a
     series of Portuguese attacks across the Mozambican border during the 1960s, the assassination of
     Eduardo Mondlane by parcel bomb in Dar es Salaam in 1969, and series of mysterious bombings
     in Dar es Salaam in 1972 rumored to be the work of South African agents heightened fears of
     covert intervention to destabilize the TANU regime.
         36. This was particularly exemplified in the increasing application of Tanzania’s Preventative
     Detention Act, modeled after similar legislation in Ghana. See Terretta, ‘‘From Below and to the
     Left?’’
         37. For a classic statement of this position, see Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last
     Stage of Capitalism (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965).
         38. Editorial: ‘‘Human Rights,’’ The Nationalist, December 13, 1967.
         39. Julius Nyerere, ‘‘Why We Recognized Biafra,’’ The Observer, April 28, 1968.
         40. In 1967 TANU enshrined a Leadership Code that limited the wages and property of party
     elites; ujamaa also configured accumulation by exploitation by the wider population as a central
     violation of its moral code. Nyerere was the most outspoken proponent of agrarian-centered devel-
     opment among his African socialist counterparts.
         41. James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC:
     Duke University Press, 2006), 75–76.
         42. Ibid.
         43. Julius Nyerere, ‘‘The Economic Challenge: Dialogue or Confrontation,’’ International
     Development Review 18, no. 1 (1976): 242–49 (speech delivered to the Royal Commonwealth
     Society in London on November 21, 1975).
         44. Michael Doyle, ‘‘Stalemate in the North-South Debate: Strategies and the New Interna-
     tional Economic Order,’’ World Politics 35, no. 3 (April 1983): 426–64.
         45. See, for instance, Monica van Beusekom, Negotiating Development: African Farmers and
     Colonial Experts at the Office du Niger, 1920–1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001).
         46. For some reflections on this process, see Khadija Haq, ed., Dialogue for a New Order
     (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980); Craig Murphy, The Emergence of the NIEO Ideology (Boulder,
     CO: Westview Press, 1984); Prashad, The Poorer Nations, chap. 1.
         47. Statistical Yearbook, 1983/4 (New York: United Nations, 1986), as cited in Keisuke Iida,
     ‘‘Third World Solidarity: The Group of 77 in the UN General Assembly,’’ International Organi-
     zation 42, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 375–95.
         48. Statistical Yearbook, 1978 (New York: United Nations, 1979), as cited in Iida, ‘‘Third World
     Solidarity.’’



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    49. Prashad, The Poorer Nations.
    50. Yet there were significant late-stage Cold War resurgences, as documented in Sue Onslow,
ed., Cold War in Southern Africa: White Power, Black Liberation (New York: Routledge, 2009),
among others.
    51. UKNA, FCO 31/968, Speech by the Minister of State, Foreign Affairs to the National
Assembly on July 21, 1971, when presenting estimates for the year 1971–72.
    52. See, for instance, Christian Williams, ‘‘Living in Exile: Daily Life and International Rela-
tions at SWAPO’s Kongwa Camp,’’ Kronos 37, no. 1 (2011): 60–86; Michael Panzer, ‘‘Building a
Revolutionary Constituency: Mozambican Refugees and the Development of the FRELIMO
Proto-State, 1964–1968,’’ Social Dynamics 39, no. 1 (April 2013): 5–23.
    53. Nyerere, ‘‘Unity for a New Order.’’
    54. On this process in Tanzania, see Stefano Ponte, Farmers and Markets in Tanzania: How
Policy Reforms Affect Rural Livelihoods in Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002).
    55. For an overview of Israeli-African ties, see Joel Peters, Israel and Africa (London: British
Academic Press, 1992). In general, the early ties of African socialist states to Israel in the fields of
military and developmental aid were severed after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; after this point,
Tanzanian officials referred to Israelis as colonial occupiers.
    56. The same is true with regard to East Africa more broadly, with its troubled postcolonial
history of state and popular relations with South Asian citizens; see, for instance, Anneeth Kaur
Hundle, ‘‘Exceptions to the Expulsion: Violence, Security and Community among Ugandan
Asians, 1972–79,’’ Journal of East African Studies 7, no. 1 (2013): 164–82. A similar dynamic is
apparent in the postcolonial history of West Africa with regard to a large Lebanese and Syrian
diaspora in that region; see, for instance, Emmanuel Akyeampong, ‘‘Race, Identity and Citizenship
in Black Africa: The Case of the Lebanese in Ghana,’’ Africa: Journal of the International African
Institute 76, no. 3 (August 2006): 297–323.
    57. For an overview of the initial application of OPEC surpluses, see Michael Hudson, Global
Fracture: The New International Economic Order (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 206–15. On
Tanzanian developmental expectations in relation to OPEC, see Joshua Grace, ‘‘Modernization
Bubu: Cars, Roads, and the Politics of Development in Tanzania, 1870s–1980s’’ (Ph.D. diss,
Michigan State University, 2013).
    58. Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2012). Hecht treats the case of Gabon in particular; her discussion of technopolitical
dimensions of Africa’s position with the international nuclear order has important parallels to
Africa’s position within the international oil economy.
    59. As James Ferguson writes, ‘‘The promise of democracy has been held out to African
publics just at the moment in history when key matters of macroeconomic policy were taken out
of the hands of African state.’’ Ferguson, Global Shadows, 12.
    60. For an insightful study of popular responses to structural adjustment in Tanzania, see Aili
Mari Tripp, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in
Tanzania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
    61. Julius Nyerere, ‘‘Third World Negotiating Strategy,’’ Third World Quarterly 1, no. 2
(1979): 20–23.




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