REVOLUTION IN ZANZIBAR: AN AMERICAN’S COLD WAR TALE. Don Petterson. Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-3949-9. £19.99

This memoir will instantly become required reading for every student of the Revolution. It is an incredible and fascinating first hand account of the Revolution in Zanzibar, a unique perspective on a unique period of history. Strangely though, the teller of
the tale does not seem to appreciate its drama. For those who know some of the history and debates surrounding the Revolution it will be hard to see this book as anything other than a classic and brilliant revisionist history. It is for this reason that the style disappoints, since without a sense of the context and the controversy that the book will undoubtedly provoke, the material is flat. The role of the Americans and the British in the foggy days of early 1964 has been the source of much speculation, even recrimination on the part of Babu and other leading opposition figures in the years since. Petterson’s detailed descriptions of his meetings with all the key players at the time provide a wealth of insights into the sequence of events and how the Great Powers at the time viewed this ‘Cuba of East Africa’. This is explosive history at its best, yet diplomatic showdowns and violent massacres are described in the same pedestrian style as trips to the beach.

In a sense, Petterson’s dispassionate style is the hallmark of classic diplomacy. Reportage allows the author to remain un-implicated in the story he is telling (not me guv, I’m just the messenger). The problem though, is that this is an illusion. At many points the story would benefit from a strong dose of opinion. Petterson is at his best when he is unafraid to contradict other sources. For example, in his telling of the formation of the Union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar, Babu’s claim that the US engineered the Union and the British assertion that their influence on Nyerere prevailed are both shown to be false as he provides convincing eye-witness testimony of the cunning strategy of Kambona, Nyerere and Karume in doing it quietly themselves.

Similarly, the inside account of Nyerere’s expulsion of American diplomats from Zanzibar and Tanzania in 1965 is gripping historic stuff. Misinterpretation of a mundane US embassy telephone conversation, tapped by the Chinese and supplied to the Zanzibar government gave rise to the (now popular) fable that the US was planning a coup in Zanzibar a year after the Revolution. Nyerere mishandled the affair by going to the press before the mistake had been corrected, the consul was expelled and a myth was born. Nyerere appears an inexperienced and emotional figure and the early politics of the Union to have been especially fragile.

Petterson is literally rewriting history, but does not seem to be aware that he is doing so. Nevertheless, in the long run, and for anyone interested in the history of Zanzibar the facts should speak for themselves. Tales of Petterson’s family life at the time give a flavour of the social context of the diplomatic corps at the end of the colonial era and his loving descriptions of Zanzibar and its geography will surely strike chords with many.
Ben Rawlence

CONFLICTING MISSIONS: HAVANA, WASHINGTON AND AFRICA, 1959 -1976. Piero Gleijeses. University of North Carolina Press. 2002. $34.95, cloth.

This weighty volume of 550 pages uses CIA documents, diplomatic cables and other archival research (the notes on this stretch over 50 pages) much of which has not been seen before, to explain what Cuba was up to in its clandestine activities in Africa in the 1960’s and 70’s. It was Cold War time and anything to do with it was of intense interest to the USA. Cuba became involved in Algeria, Guinea Bissau and later, Angola, to which it sent 30,000 of its troops. All is described here. For readers of ‘Tanzanian Affairs’ however it is the chapters on Zanzibar and Zaire which will be of most interest. In order to reach Zaire the Cubans had to travel through Tanzania by road and then cross Lake Tanganyika by boat.

The author describes the panic which arose in Washington when Zanzibar exploded in the revolution of January 12, 1964. The US was worried that non-communist leaders of the new Zanzibar government would be manipulated by ‘subversive Communist elements.’ US President Lyndon Johnson urged the British to send troops to Zanzibar because Britain had the ‘primary responsibility for handling the problem.’ To the dismay of the Americans the British refused. In any case, the crisis subsided when President Nyerere and President Karume signed an agreement setting up the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar and called it Tanzania.

By June 1964 however the situation in the Congo (later Zaire) was attracting the attention ofthe Cold War adversaries. Midst much turmoil ‘rebels’ calling themselves the Simbas (lions) armed with vaguely Marxist jargon and led by the man who became, many years later President Kabila of Zaire, had started causing considerable worry. They had taken over a major part of the country and Fidel Castro saw in them the possible beginnings of an African revolution, Cuban style. He decided to send volunteers, under the leadership of the famous guerrilla leader Che Guevara, to help the Simbas. President Nyerere, who was then at loggerheads with the Congo government of President Tshombe, agreed to allow Tanzania to be used as a conduit and staging area for this Cuban intervention.

As the civil war in the Congo had escalated, the CIA had created a naval patrol on Lake Tanganyika consisting of eight heavily armed boats which were assembled piece by piece on the shores of the lake by CIA agents. The Simbas also had several motorboats supplied by the Soviet Union, but the author says that they did not know how to maintain them. When the boats arrived the Cubans helped them in this. The author claims that America was determined to crush the Simbas but did not want to do so itself and called upon Britain and other countries to send in troops. This call was rejected but, meanwhile, foreign mercenaries, mostly from South Africa, came to help government forces attack the Simbas.

Men from Cuba in groups of three to six on scheduled commercial flights, claiming to be athletes, agronomists, engineers and musicians, arrived in Dar es Salaam and were whisked quickly from the airport to a small farm on the outskirts of the city that the Cuban embassy had bought. The volunteers were almost all black because this was what the Simbas had requested. In order to explain the presence of two whites it was said that one was a doctor and the other an interpreter. Che decided that it would not be appropriate for him to inform Nyerere of his presence before he told Simba leader Kabila who was at a conference in Cairo. The Cubans were disappointed at the very cool reception they received in the Congo. The local Simba leaders seemed surprised to see them and did not know what to do with them. A message was sent to Kabila who was apparently stunned to learn that Che was in the Congo.

On 29th June 160 Simbas and 40 Cubans attacked the town of Bendera but, according to the book, the Simbas fled in panic and left the Cubans to face the enemy alone. Four Cubans and 20 Simbas lost their lives. It was their bodies that fmally alerted the CIA to the presence of the Cubans in the Congo. Eventually, under intense pressure from the ruthless and increasingly numerous mercenaries, the Simbas began falling apart on the battlefield. Nyerere, pre-occupied with other parts of the African liberation struggle, in particular in trying to persuade the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to send troops to prevent UDI in Rhodesia, began restricting the flow of weapons, medicine and other suppliers to the Cubans. The Simbas soon wanted to abandon the struggle altogether and resented the Cubans for urging them to keep on fighting. On November 21st two boats arrived to take the Cubans back to Tanzania after seven months ofhardship and frustration. Che wrote to Castro “I believe more than ever in guerrilla warfare, but we have failed.” He returned to Dar wanting only to write. He lived in a small apartment in the embassy in Dar Salaam for more than three months but, because ofhis security concerns, he never went out. However, he was full of praise for the Tanzanians. They had been very helpful; everything was well organised and well structured. When Nyerere withdrew Tanzania from the war he had done so with dignity. Surprisingly the Cuban embassy only informed Nyerere about Che’s presence after he had left Tanzania in early 1966. It was explained that the silence had been due to security considerations. According to the author the Tanzanians were angry, but relations remained friendly.

The Washington Post has described this book as ‘rich and provocative and downright entertaining.’ The Los Angeles Times wrote: ‘The author brilliantly describes deceits, disguises with all the accompanying blood and guts and glory. Over the 10 years it took him to research this book the author tracked down every lead, every participant, every document on all sides of the conflicts. This is a fascinating account of Cuban involvement in Africa.’ This reviewer fully supports these comments.
David Brewin.

EAST AFRICAN DOCTORS: A HISTORY OF THE MODERN PROFESSION. John IllifIe. ISBN 9970023039. 350pp. Fountain Publishers. £20.95. Available from African Books Collective Ltd, The Jam Factory, 27 Park End Street, Oxford OXl IHD.

The book has 246 pages of text and 92 pages of Notes referring to each page of the text, 17 pages of bibliography and an index. The need to refer constantly to the notes for clarification made for laborious and difficult reading.

The purpose for writing the book was not made clear other than a note on page two stating “the idea for this book came partly from reading David K. Leonard’s “African successes: four public managers of Kenyan rural development”, (Berkeley 1991). The author states that the book is a collective biography of East African doctors, dealing only with black Africans. The title of the book is therefore confusing and will disappoint the many European, Asian and doctors of other nations who served in East Africa in a tradition which started from the late nineteenth century, in Government service, in specialised fields including research, in the missions, and in private practice.

In the first sentence of the book the author opines that “not since the origins of Mankind has East Africa been so important to the world as it is to-day. This special importance comes from the AIDS epidemic”. But surely the opening up of central Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century, culminating in the building of the Mombasa-Lake Victoria railway, had a greater impact on the development of medical care and the growth of the medical team in East Africa than the outbreak ofAIDS in the early 1980’s? The text gives scant recognition to the amazing basic research work carried out in several centres in the territories on the major tropical diseases, nor to the leadership ofW.H.O. in the worldwide Smallpox Eradication Programme in the 1970’s, the Global Immunisation Programme in the 1980’s and 90’s and later again in the 1990’s in collaborative programmes for research and control of AIDS. Nor is the disparity between Zanzibar and other East African territories in the role played by African doctors noted. By 1961 the posts of radiologist, ophthalmologist, the specialists in T.B. and dentistry, and the two M.O.H. posts for the two islands were all filled by local nationals who had been trained and taken post-graduate qualifications overseas.

To sum up in the words of the author, the book “is not a contemporary sociology of the East African Medical Profession, but a collective biography of East African Doctors dealing only with black Africans”. It would be impossible to include biographies of all the black African doctors, but the names of many who contributed greatly to the successful delivery of medical care and the development of the profession generally, are missing.
William Barton

PRIESTS, WITCHES AND POWER -POPULAR CHRISTIANITY AFTER MISSION IN SOUTHERN TANZANIA. Maia Green. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp.xiii/180, maps, index. ISBN 0521 62189 5 (hardback). £40.00

Many in the secularized north imagine that global Christianity is dying and leaving the field open to Islam. The reality is different. Christianity in the south is enjoying a boom. Much of Africa, during the past century for example, became quietly and massively Christian. Northerners who are aware of this new Christianity may not like what they see. Instead of being democratic, liberal, activist or liberationist, it is an authoritarian, morally conservative Church which is concerned with personal salvation and is absorbing the habits and thoughts of cultures very different from the European. Maia Green’s book gives us a fascinating specimen, the Catholic Church among the Pogoro people of Tanzania. In spite of the persistence of missionary Church structures, of continued economic support from Europe, of a clerical elite locally engaged in controversial financial operations, the Pogoro of Ulanga District, though poor and unempowered, are predominantly, even fervently, Catholic. Moreover, they have developed a popular, post-mission Christianity with its own theological nuances. Green sees both tension and ambiguity in this situation, and believes the gap between formal Christianity and popular practice is growing. On the other hand, the Pogoro have a deep sense of being Christian. Green describes a fluid situation in which authority and practice are changing.

German Benedictine monks before World War I and Swiss Capuchin friars afterwards established what was to become the Diocese of Mahenge. Both German colonial rule and the Catholic mission were challenged in 1905 by German colonial rule and the Catholic mission were challenged in 1905 by the maji maji rebellion which engulfed half the ethnic groups of Tanzania, including the Pogoro. German retaliation took the form of a scorched earth policy which resulted in side lining Ulanga District in the development process. The Church moved into the vacuum, developing a system of patronage and synergy with govermnent that continued under the British and beyond political independence in 1961. With the contraction of the Tanzanian state, Church influence has grown even greater.

Christianity is a religion of the book and, to ensure enduring conversions, evangelization was linked, as elsewhere, to education and literacy. The adult catechumenate, prevalent in other parts of Tanzania, does not feature in Green’s account. However, she sees the community-based Christianity led by village catechists as a counterweight to the clerical structures of diocese and parish. Green is silent about the extent to which the Catholic pastoral policy of jumuiya ndogondogo (small Christian communities) has been implemented in Mahenge.

Popular Christianity sees priests as a source of blessing and power, but women also engender power through the management of fertility in puberty rituals (unyago) and the removal of death pollution at burials. These roles inspire a female religiosity, which is focused on Mary, the bereaved and compassionate mother of Jesus. One wonders to what extent Pogoro priests are aware of this popular theology, especially in view of Vatican II’s interest in initiation rituals, and the proposals for unyago wa kikristu (Christian initiation) in Tanzania. Women also feature prominently in the witchcraft cleansing movements, which Green credibly associates with political rivalry and the critique of clerical power.

Anthropological fieldwork in Africa has traditionally been conducted by the lone foreigner, whose valid criticisms may be resented by the local elite. The latter can only be co-opted by means of a self-study. Moreover, condensed, technical language, while it suits the professional anthropologist, runs the risk of being misunderstood by the ordinary reader in Africa.
Aylward Shorter

ONCE INTREPID WARRIORS: GENDER, ETHNICITY AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF MAASAI DEVELOPMENT. Hodgson, Dorothy L. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2001. -from a review for Africa Today, by Peg Snyder.

Dorothy Hodgson explores “continuities and changes between the ideas and experiences of development in the colonial period and those of the post colonial period” in the lives of the Maasai of Arusha Region, the “once intrepid warriors”, as they were called by Harry Johnston in 1886. She shows how both being a Maasai, and being a Maasai man or woman changed over time. Delightful “Maasai Portraits” appear between the chapters.

Finding that failure of planned development projects only served to inspire another try at a similar model, the author judged that it was the ways of “seeing Maasai” rather than “being Maasai” that underlay failures, so she observes development efforts through the lenses of gender, ethnicity and cultural politics, and associations between development and state power. During the British colonial period, projects were directed to men, leaving women marginalized; “taxation classified women as property to be paid for by men”. By the eve of independence, after a half century of water development projects, the Maasai experienced a drought whose effects were exacerbated by loss of most of their dry-season pastures and water points that government had closed off or ceded to settlers. The colonial government shifted blame for their condition onto the Maasai.

After independence, government representatives in Arusha Region had no better image of the Maasai, and soon sought to impose a “modern” dress code on them. Women got angry, cursed their elites whom they thought were complicit in the campaign, and were preparing to travel en masse to Dar es Salaam to express their views to the President when Government dropped the campaign.

The follies of the famous, failed groundnut scheme pale in comparison to the multi-million dollar, USAID sponsored Masai Livestock Development and Range Management Project of 1969. Like the Masai Development Plan of the colonial 1950s, its evaluations were consistently negative and the Masai were blamed for the failure of something they neither chose nor designed. Hodgson describes the whole fiasco scathingly, pointing out the “marvellous ambiguities” of the term development, as when “in the mid-1970s, USAID discovered that people were part of development”.

Donors and NGOs were expected to accept women’s lessened status as “tradition”; elite men were the authentic and indigenous representatives of the Maasai. Young women confronted change in gender relations through spirit possession (orpeko) then converted to Christianity to remove the curse and achieve moral superiority over men.

This excellent book reveals how the legacies of development projects are far, far broader than their technical goals. The author cautions that “neither the Maasai of the present nor the Maasai of the past bear much resemblance to the stereotypical images of them that pervade, and have always pervaded, Western and African media.”

INTO AFRICA -THE DRAMATIC RETELLING OF THE STANLEY-LIVINGSTONE STORY. Martin Dugard. Transworld Publishers/Bantam Press. 2003. 339 pages. £18.99.

Not another book about Livingstone surely! And about Stanley too! Yes, but this one, as is claimed in the title, is different. It will be found exceptionally entertaining by both those who already know the story and those who do not.

The author describes himself as an adventurer -one of his earlier books traced the ‘rise and fall’ of Captain James Cook -and the layout of the drama, as he narrates it, with alternating chapters on the two main characters, obliges the reader to keep on reading to see what happens next.

The author’s racy writing style may not be to everyone’s taste and is probably best described as evocative. Dugard describes Stanley’s writing as ‘purple and intimate; the sentences meandering, sparsely punctuated, sometimes lazily crafted -yet always evocative.’ Livingstone is described as possessing ‘a very human mixture of hope, dreams, longing, depression, spirituality, sexuality and regret.’

In contrast to some other books on the same subject this one gives quite detailed character sketches of the other key participators in the saga. These include the explorers Speke and Burton, Royal Geographical Society Presidents Sir Roderick Murchison and Sir Henry Rawlinson, the ex-slave Sidi Mubarak Bombay, British Vice-Consul in Zanzibar John Kirk and his adversary, American Consul Francis Webb, Royal Navy Gunnery Officer E. D. Young, the celebrated African Chief Mirambo who vanquished the Arab military leader in Tabora, Khamis bin Abdullah, the New York Herald’s James Gordon Bennett Jr, Prime Minister William Gladstone, Sir Samuel White Baker, and others.

The final chapters, with their moving description of the famous meeting, bring the book to an abrupt end. The remarkable loyalty of Livingstone’s servants Chuma and Susi and events subsequent to Livingstone’s death are dealt with all too briefly. The reader is left wanting more.

Readers of ‘Tanzanian Affairs’ will be glad to know that the major part of the book describes events which took place in what is now Tanzania 135 years ago.
David Brewin

‘MR. MYOMBEKERE AND HIS WIFE BUGONOKA, THEIR SON NTULANALWO AND DAUGHTER BULIHWALI: the Story of an Ancient African Community’ by Aniceti Kitereza. Translated from Kikerewe by Gabriel Ruhumbika. Published 2002 by Mkuki na Nyota 687pp. available from African Books Collective, Oxford. £29.95.

This 700-page novel makes a compulsive read. I found myself reading it simultaneously on two levels: first, on the level of narrative plot, and second, as a piece of closely documented social history.

The novel was written during the early 1940s. The author, born in 1896, had been a lifelong writer -involved with early Kikerewe translations of the Bible and a Kikerewe dictionary, as well as being a prolific reteller of local stories. This, however, was the climax of his life’s writing. The work was written with the explicit aim of preserving the Kikerewe way of life, which the author saw as increasingly threatened by change; although multilingual in a range of possible lingua francas (in Latin and Greek, German, Kiswahili and English), the natural choice of language for this intimately personal work was Kikerewe. The fate of the manuscript reflects the complexity of the ‘language map’ of Tanzania: initially archived overseas in Montreal by the White Fathers, the novel reached a wider public only in 1980 when the author’s Kiswahili translation was published in Tanzania. While the original Kikerewe manuscript remains unpublished, the work has now at last found an international audience, translated in this full-length English version by the author’s nephew Gabriel Ruhumbika, now at the University of Georgia.

Set in pre-colonial Ukerewe, the main narrative plot is tellingly simple, depicting the lives of a husband and wife whose misfortune it was to find themselves childless. While on the narrative level the unhurried pace sustains the reader’s interest in the unfolding events of the story, the reader is at the same time drawn into understandings of the rich and complex world of pre-colonial Ukerewe. The author’s declared intention to provide a record of all aspects of pre-colonial Kikerewe life, ‘from birth to death’, is clearly evident and might well in other hands have become clumsily obtrusive. In fact, the descriptive matter is skilfully integrated to complement and amplify the plot, and the two levels work together to provide a richly rewarding text ­albeit a long one, which demands time, attention, and a deliberately leisurely reading.

The volume contains an excellent Introduction by the translator. Particularly intriguing is the account of the way in which this ‘novel’, in written prose form, relates to the conventions of epic oral literature. The Introduction also contains revealing comment on translation issues. A genealogical table is supplied (a map of Ukerewe would have usefully supplemented this), and a glossary of names and their meanings. A further glossary of Kikerewe words would have been useful as meanings are back-referenced in the chapter notes to their first occurrence: an editorial irritation. The translation may occasionally jar (‘gatecrash’, for example, for an unexpected arrival, or ‘barbecue’ as equivalent for traditional cooking over an open fire). There are a number of typos. An invaluable resource, which will be of interest to all social historians, are the chapter notes supplied by the translator, who -in the spirit of his Uncle’s original intentions -has added a wealth of explanatory matter drawn from written sources and from recent personal field-study among the elders of Ukerewe.
Ann Brumfit

“ALMOST AN OXFAM IN ITSELF”: OXFAM, UJAMAA AND DEVELOPMENT IN TANZANIA, by Michael Jennings. Journal of the Royal African Society, African Affairs voll01, 509-530. 2002.

This article by Michael Jennings, currently Research Officer at the Well come Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford, is based on work undertaken for his PhD at the University of London, 1998. It traces the rise and fall of the ‘Ujamaa’ policy of the Tanzania Government in the 1960s and early 1970s Jennings shows how Oxfam thinking, at least in its Tanzania programme, became committed to the policy -in particular its emphasis on voluntarism, self help and grass roots democracy -and continued to support it, and even to advocate it as a strategy for other developing countries, for several years after the Tanzania Government had effectively abandoned it, in its actions if lot its words, and had shifted to a more conventionally individualistic Jrogramme of social and economic development.

Jennings describes in some detail the growth of the Ruvuma Development Association, established in Songea Region in the early 1960s under the leadership of the charismatic local secretary of the Tanu Youth League, John Ntimbanjayo Millinga. The RDA linked the first and perhaps ‘purist’ of Tanzania’s ujamaa villages, and supplied much of the practical experience on which Julius Nyerere based his early thinking and writing on ujamaa. Jimmy Betts, Oxfam’s first Field Director for Tanzania, was understandably impressed by the achievements of the RDA, as were most visitors to the RDA villages in the 1960s, including myself: Betts described it as ‘a physical manifestation of what Oxfam wished to promote on a larger scale’.

Yet by 1969, following a visit to Ruvuma by TANU’s Central Committee, the Government had declared the RDA an illegal organisation and had forced its disbandment. Jennings is not explicit on the reasons underlying this action -he explains it as an indication of ‘regional fears combined with political factions at the centre’. But banning the RDA was surely the predictable response of an insecure political bureaucracy to a peasant movement which tried to take its future into its own hands. The very name RDA is provocative, suggesting that the Association, rather than the Government, was the driving force responsible for the development of Ruvuma Region! With Oxfam’s historic commitment to equality and grass roots democracy, it is not surprising that Betts and his successors were reluctant to recognise the shift in Tanzania Government policy in the late 1960s and early 1970s -from voluntary towards compulsory villagisation, and from collective towards individual action and decision-making -and the widening gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of what was happening on the ground. This was surely a classic if understandable case of wishful thinking writ large.

As an objective academic observer of political developments Jennings is careful not to pass judgement on the rights or wrongs of Tanzania’s early dalliance with socialist development, nor on Oxfam’s extended backing of the ujamaa policy. Many observers at the time, and since, have, however, compared Nyerere’s “utopian idealism”, usually unfavourably, with the more pragmatic individualistic development strategies adopted in neighbouring countries such as Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Congo. In the light of the political and economic chaos now reigning in most of those countries, compared to the relative political stability and steady (albeit socially divisive) economic growth experienced in Tanzania in recent years, one might be excused for questioning whether the roots of Tanzania’s recent success may not lie in the democratic and communitarian foundation which Nyerere strove to lay down in Tanzanian society in the 1960s. One might even wonder whether, had the Tanzania Government, as well as Oxfam, maintained its faith in such policies for a little longer, this foundation might have become even more solid.
Antony Ellman

FROM RACE TO CITIZENSHIP: THE INDIGENIZATION DEBATE IN POST-SOCIALIST TANZANIA, Ronald Aminzade, Studies in Comparative International Development Vol. 38, No. 1. 2003. Pp43-63.

Aminzade’s study seems to serve several purposes. First, he focuses on how anti-Asian sentiment during Tanzania’s post-socialist era was politicized as an indigenization factor rather than the stealth racist issue it represented. And, second, he offers it as a tool to explain electoral behavior of political parties as they attempt to create as well as mediate policy differences, conflicts and competition with the major party. He outlines the colonial and socio-economic factors establishing the Asian community’s separate identity as both envied and resented and thus susceptible to political exploitation in Tanzania’s new era of capitalism. Tracing indigenous identities as a means of distinguishing between citizens and foreigners, Aminzade outlines the evolution of this policy when anti­Asian sentiment was used as a political weapon, mainly by Chama Cha Mapinduzi’s opposition, to seek electoral support especially after 1992 when multiparty competition was institutionalized. Political parties across the political spectrum utilized anti-Asian sentiment as a political weapon after Reverend Christopher Mtikila, leader of an unregistered party and a candidate in another opposition party, opportunistically raised the “indigenization” issue, and thus not only unleashed widespread violence against Asians, especially shopkeepers, but also legitimized usage of the issue for other opposition politicians. As the liberalization and privatization process evolved in the 1990s, Government responses to these political demands included various economic policies limiting activities of “non-indigenous” investors that aided the emergence of an influential black, and sometimes corrupt, African bourgeoisie which often sent its profits abroad rather than re-invest in the local economy. Aminzade fails to note that while the government excluded non-indigenous peoples from trade it also permitted them to engage in banking, finance, and technology, and the Asians used this to their advantage. Government policies led to an increase in foreign investments, especially from South Africa, and the “dumping” of foreign goods sold at cheaper prices than local goods. The historically authenticated anti-Asian sentiment became a convenient weapon for opposition groups reluctant to make charges of corruption against the major political party. The more things change the more they remain the same.

Much of the evidence is based on sources published during the 1990s, and its worth noting that the author draws on material published in six issues of Tanzanian Affairs.
Marion E Doro, College New London, CT 06320.