Dar es Salaam on the Frontline: Red and Black Internationalisms

ABSTRACT

This article highlights Tanzania’s role in global decolonisation by combining personal stories rooted in everyday life with political and pedagogical accounts of experiments in African socialism. The Dar es Salaam school of scholars and activists developed into an epicentre of productive and fraught debates that continue to offer us lessons today. By paying close attention to the stories these thinkers tell, and by situating them in the context of both political events and quotidian experiences, we can further uncover what Fanon called the “grandeur and weakness” of anti-colonial praxis. Gendering these syntheses of red and black internationalisms also contributes a perspective rooted in a more radical democratic politics, productively extending this decolonial genealogy into our present conjuncture.

KEYWORDS:

• Dar es salaam school
• decolonisation
• education
• liberation
• Tanzania and South Africa
• anti-apartheid movement
• intellectual geography
• red and black internationalism

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the Third World Thematics editors, peer reviewers, and the special issue editors, Martin Boston and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, for their close engagement with multiple drafts of this piece, their steadfast support, and their tremendous patience. Much appreciation to Stefan Ouma for offering his generous feedback, and for directing me to crucial studies that were still missing from my original account. I also want to thank my father, Mussa/Msafiri Al-Bulushi, who graciously offered me his time, allowed me to tell a small snippet of his own story, and to situate it in the historical context of Tanzania’s role as a frontline state in the struggle for the liberation of Southern Africa. Any errors in this account are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The first draft was written for a panel at the March 2021 National Conference of Black Political Scientists. A central theme of that panel, and of this special issue, concerned the intersection of the personal and the political in contemporary international research on Africa and the anti-apartheid struggle.

2. For an accessible and short introduction to the life of Julius Nyerere and its significance to Africa, see Paul (Bjerk 2017) Julius Nyerere. However, the definitive study of this towering figure is without a doubt the recently published, three-volume collaborative work by Issa Shivji, Saida Yahya-Othman and Ng’wanza Kamata 2020 Julius Nyerere: A Biography.

3. Jenerali Ulimwengu.

4. Donald Kaberuka.

5. Interview February 16, 2021.

6. Ibid.

7. For a useful rumination on our continued dependency on thinking with the “post-” despite its fraught nature, see Grant (Farred 2013) “The Post-: Thinking Dependency”.

8. Box 5–16, Walter Rodney papers, Robert Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center.

9. For a wonderful people’s history of Dar es Salaam during this time period, under German and then British rule, see the as yet unpublished dissertation by David Henry Anthony III 1983 Culture and Society in a Town in Transition: A People’s History of Dar es Salaam, 1865–1939. University of Wisconsin-Madison.

10. Interview, 8 August 2017.

11. As Stefan Ouma pointed out, Hirji and Shivji, among others, also suffered under this authoritarian turn, and have documented it in their various writings.

12. (Nyoka 2019), vii.

13. (Nyoka 2019), viii.

14. https://reuters.screenocean.com/record/244385

15. Thanks to Stefan Ouma for reminding me of this.

16. Michael Hardt, in his 1995 article “The Withering of Civil Society,” usefully reformulates Marx’s metaphor of a burrowing mole by drawing on Gilles Deleuze.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yousuf Al-Bulushi

Yousuf Al-Bulushi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His research draws on political theory, urban geography, intellectual history, African and African Diaspora Studies, and political economy to understand how social movements confront the challenges posed by racial capitalism. His forthcoming book manuscript, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City, explores a movement of shack dwellers in the city of Durban, South Africa for the lessons they offer to national, continental, and global debates on precarity, anti-blackness, transition, autonomy, and development. His most recent publications can be found in the journals Geoforum, Safundi, Urban Geography, and the Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism.