Building a Peaceful Nation - 9781580465052

In the early 1960s, nationalist politicians in Tanzania established a stable government in the face of external threats and internal turmoil. This comprehensive history illuminates the cultural resources and policies developed under the leadership of Julius Nyerere, one of the great figures of modern Africa. During the first years of independence, Nyerere invented Ujamaa (a philosophy of African socialism) and established nearly all the policies that defined his tenure. In an era when many postcolonial countries succumbed to corrupt dictatorship or civil war, Tanzania pursued more idealistic ambitions. Making difficult choices between democratic ideals and authoritarian imposition, Nyerere creatively confronted the destabilizing forces of decolonization and Cold War. With extensive archival research and interviews with scores of participants in this history, Paul Bjerk reorients our understanding of the formative years of Tanzanian independence. This study provides a new historical paradigm for the postcolonial nations that became independent in a global postwar order defined by sovereignty. To take their place as members of the international community, nationalist leaders had to establish sovereignty by negotiating the divergent discourses of modernism, Cold War, religion, and ethnicity among the diverse people who became citizens of new independent nations.BR> Paul Bjerk is associate professor of history at Texas Tech University. He previously taught journalism at Tumaini University in Tanzania.