Tanzania!

Welcome back to my travel blog! Last fall I used this site to write about my study abroad experiences in Uganda and Rwanda. You can still read all of those entries here, but now I’m going to be writing about my travels in Tanzania this summer.

So what am I doing in Tanzania, anyways?
I’m here for eight weeks, thanks to a fellowship with Beyond Good Intentions, and a grant from the Tow Foundation (through Barnard). Beyond Good Intentions sends fellows to various countries around the world to do research relating to aid effectiveness and create photo essays or other digital media projects, which will be posted to the group blog every week (and when I know where that is, I’ll post the link here). The Tow Foundation gave me the grant to do research for my senior thesis. I’m hoping to compare the way aid organizations work with slum-dwellers and the way they work with refugees. My current plan is to spend four weeks in Dar es Salaam (doing the slum-dweller part) and then four weeks in the northwest part of the country, where most of the refugee camps are located.

Why am I comparing slum-dwellers and refugees?
I was kind of blown away when I was doing preliminary research and found no scholarship comparing these two populations. There are a lot of striking similarities between them. Both groups live in precarious, transient situations, and share many of the same problems, including substandard housing and a lack of clean water, electricity, sanitation and other basic services. As a result, the international community has typecast both refugees and slum-dwellers as passive, voiceless victims. States see each population as problematic, since refugees are not legally protected under the modern nation-state system and slums reveal the state’s inability to provide for all of its citizens. I think that if these populations can establish agency, they will be able claim their human rights in ways that passive victims can’t. I’m interested in how aid agencies can help people to do so, instead of reproducing images of helpless victims.

Of course, there are fundamental differences between slum-dwellers and refugees, and those differences make the comparison even more interesting. Slum-dwellers, unlike refugees, are citizens of the states they live in and hold legal claims on their governments. Since refugees are stateless people, holding no claims to protection by either their country of origin or the foreign government under which they now live, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) becomes their “government,” since it’s responsible for managing and providing services to refugees. However, this is a government that’s accountable not to the governed, but rather to its own headquarters and donors. So I’m wondering how much citizenship matters, and how UNHCR compares to the Tanzanian government. Can the international community translate effective approaches to promoting agency from one group to another?

Why Tanzania?
This trip is going to be really different from my semester in Uganda and Rwanda, because I don’t know anywhere near as much about Tanzania as I do about the other countries. In some ways, this is kind of nice, because I have fewer expectations, but I’m definitely looking forward to learning more about the country and sharing it here. In the meantime, here’s some background:

Tanzania is on the East Coast of Africa, surrounded by Kenya and Uganda (to the North), Rwanda and Burundi (Northwest), DRC (West), Zambia and Malawi (Southwest), and Mozambique (South). The country includes the island of Zanzibar, although there are some disagreements between Zanzibar (which would like more independence) and the mainland (which would like to maintain control). I’ve heard that Zanzibar is stunning, and an easy daytrip from Dar, so hopefully I can go there sometime!

A speed-read through the country’s history: Some of the earliest humans walked the earth in what is now Tanzania. Much later, Indian traders came for ivory and slaves. Later, the British had established control over Zanzibar, the Germans had nominal control over the mainland, and the two countries agreed to split the territory, creating the current border between Tanzania (German) and Kenya (British). The British took Tanzania back from the Germans after WWI. Anti-colonial sentiments were popular, and led by Julius Nyerere, a school teacher who had been educated in Uganda and Scotland. The British pulled out of Tanzania (1961) and Zanzibar (1963), but, like most recently decolonized countries, there was very little infrastructure and very few educated people. Nyerere became president, and formed the United Republic of Tanzania with Zanzibar, after a violent and bloody coup broke out on the island shortly after independence.

Ok, this is the part that’s really interesting. Nyerere was a fascinating leader: he embarked on an ambitious (socialist) project, known broadly as ujamaa (familyhood). He felt that Africa should try to create a society based on mutual assistance and economic and political equality. His Arusha Declaration set out to instill a community self-reliance, with people around the country helping their neighbors, rather than dependence on foreign aid. The greatest accomplishment of his policies lies in the high rates of education during his rule, which led to a broad School children were taught to identify themselves as Tanzanians with a shared language (Swahili), instead of by tribe. For this reason, there is almost no tribal or religious conflict in the country. I can’t wait to find out more about this when I get there.

Of course, in some ways, Nyerere’s policies were an abysmal failure: by 1974, the economy was shrinking, and continued to do so for 25 years. The country is now deeply in debt, and critics argue about whether the situation is better or worse for the IMF’s structural adjustment program.

One of the most fascinating and terrible aspects of ujamaa was the villagization project. Nyerere thought that communal farming would lead to a massive increase in agricultural production, so Tanzanians were encouraged to reorganize themselves into communal villages. Very few people did so voluntarily, so the government began forcibly displacing 80% of the population, causing all sorts of human rights violations and unnecessary suffering, while also completely disrupting agricultural production. In the end, most people reverted to subsistence farming, and the project was a failure. What’s interesting about this initiative is that it represents another example of governments trying to impose legibility – trying to order the population in a way that allows better control. This is discussed much more in-depth in Seeing Like a State, one of my favorite books (which I highly recommend to, uh, everyone). States, and more recently NGOs and international organizations, all over the world have embarked on these massive projects to help people, which backfire, because they are also designed to impose an order that doesn’t accord with normal, disorganized human life. Refugee camps are another example of such a project.

As I was reading about all this on the plane, I was struck by how completely Nyerere’s goals matched with current Rwandan President Kagame’s. I’ve written more about this in previous entries, but basically Kagame, just like Nyerere, wants to try to create a unified society that does not define itself by its ethnic or tribal groups. Like Nyerere, he has established one-party rule (de facto, at least), using similar justification to Nyerere’s claim that, “The only socially defensible use of ‘we’ is that which includes the whole society.” Furthermore, many of Kagame’s policies rely on increasing control over the population: a recent, hotly debated article in the NYTimes on his relocation of supposed/suspected street children to a vocational training camp is suspiciously similar to villagization, for example.

All of this adds up to make Tanzania a really fascinating place, and I’m looking forward to my arrival there soon! In the meantime, I’m off to explore Zurich during my layover.