The Roots of Civic Peace in Tanzania

Abstract

Tanzania’s¹ postindependence politico-economic trajectory is familiar in every major respect but one. In the economic realm, its well-documented decline replicated the economic experience of a host of other newly independent African nations. The two decades following independence in 1961 were a period of deepening economic crisis, as the country suffered a decline that sharply lowered real per capita income. Tanzania’s postindependence political trajectory also followed a familiar pattern, as the lively multiparty democracy of the early independence period was replaced by a single-party system that maintained itself principally through a host of repressive mechanisms and oppressive laws. Within a short time of independence, Tanzania had become a one-party autocracy. However, Tanzania has differed markedly from the vast majority of African countries in a third important respect. It possesses a culture of civic peace that contrasts with the political atmosphere in African countries where ethnic or religious animosities are the basis for political conflict. In Tanzania, ethnicity, religion, and race do not provide the principal bases of political affiliation or party identification, and Tanzanians recoil at political parties or leaders that seek to politicize these factors for their political advantage.