The tradition of ethnic peace has been foundational. It provided the enabling environment for the long and failed experiment with a statist economy and then set the stage for the country’s peaceful transition to a liberal one. The low visibility of ethnicity has meant that the political arena has been more open to a politics based on the clash of economic interests and ideas detached from ethnic identification. Tanzania, like every other country, has had winners and losers from the political process. However, Tanzanians do not identify their winners and losers in ethnic terms. Although a politico-economic oligarchy governs the country, this oligarchy is conspicuously multi-ethnic, multireligious, and multiregional in social composition. As a result, Tanzanians do not define or describe their oligarchy by using an ethnic terminology, nor do they describe the opposition parties in ethnic terms. The most basic reason is that Tanzania does not have a hegemonic ethnic group that holds a disproportionate share of the nation’s power and wealth.8
The atmosphere of ethnic and religious amity that the Tanzanian Government carefully constructed during the period of one-party rule has begun to come under strain during the multiparty era. It would be naïve to suggest that Tanzanian voters are indifferent to ethnicity when casting their votes. The return to multipartyism in the early 1990s brought about a more open political atmosphere and some candidates for public office have sought to take advantage by using religion or ethnicity as a basis for mobilizing electoral support.9 But fundamental challenges of interpretation arise. Did the emergence of the strident anti-Asian10 Democratic Party (DP) during the 1990s signal that the culture of ethnic peace had begun to fray? Or was it more significant that this party has never gained the support of more than a tiny fraction of Tanzanian voters and that most Tanzanians found its leader’s expressions of racial animosity repugnant? Similarly, is the presence of a party of Muslim identity, the Civic United Front (CUF) evidence of the decline of the cultural norms that stressed religious as well as ethnic inclusiveness?11 Or is it more revealing that, in a country where Muslims may constitute a majority of the population, and where there have been serious issues of Muslim access to higher education, the higher reaches of the civil service, and the highest levels of business sector, CUF has never gained the support of more than a small fraction of Tanzanian Muslims?
The answer to these difficult questions is that any appraisal of the current state of civil peace in Tanzania requires careful nuance. The founder-leaders of the Tanzanian nation worked assiduously to create a lasting culture of ethnic, racial, and religious inclusiveness. They were largely but not entirely successful in doing so. The emergence of a more liberal economy beginning in the 1980s and the reemergence of a multiparty system in the early 1990s have placed the culture of inclusiveness under strain.12 However, the vast majority of Tanzanians continue to be uncomfortable with parties and leaders that seek to capitalize on these sources of division, and there is a broad social preference for a political environment in which ethnic, religious, and racial divisions have low salience. As a result, the culture of civil peace remains largely intact; candidates who seek to gain electoral traction by appealing to ethnic or religious animosities do not generally succeed.
The low visibility of ethnicity in Tanzanian political affairs has its mirror image in the limited importance of ethnic identity in everyday life outside the political realm. It would be misleading to suggest that Tanzanians are unaware of one another’s ethnic backgrounds. However, it is no exaggeration to note that Tanzanians are comfortable in personal, social, and professional relationships that regularly cross ethnic lines. In their personal friendships, at their workplaces in governmental and business offices, in occupational and recreational organizations, and in the host of casual transactions that form the bulk of everyday life, Tanzanians relate to one another as if differences in ethnic identity were of limited importance. In a wide range of social settings, from the membership of the Dar es Salaam Rotary Club to the drivers in the taxi line at major hotels, the Tanzanians present will be a diverse cross section of their society.
The environment of civil peace provides the indispensable beginning for understanding aspects of contemporary Tanzania that are otherwise puzzling. It provides a compelling explanation, for example, why Tanzanians have reacted peaceably to the two greatest challenges of the post-independence period: twenty years of unremitting economic decline between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s, and the all-pervasive and seemingly intractable problem of official corruption that emerged during that period and continues to exist. The great puzzle of Tanzania’s protracted economic decline was that it did not result in serious social fractures such as massive anti-government protests, clashes between supporters and opponents of the ruling party, regime instability, or regional secession. The most important basis of civil peace was that Tanzanians had not come to view their political process as one that involved domination by one ethnic group or a coalition of ethnic groups over all others. Since Tanzania does not have a hegemonic ethnic group, there has never been a sense that the political elite pursues economic policies to favor one group of ethnic supporters over others, or to distribute the positive benefits of political power and the negative effects of disempowerment unevenly across the ethnic spectrum.
Tanzania’s atmosphere of civil peace is the product of both a fortuitous inheritance and a set of public policies that the government implemented during the immediate post-independence period. The most important inherited factor has been a common language, Swahili, which is spoken by many Tanzanians as a first language and by practically all Tanzanians as a second language, thus making it possible for Tanzanians to communicate, travel, undertake commerce, and engage in political discourse across ethnic boundaries. Unlike English, which Tanzanians acquire in school as part of the educational curriculum, they acquire Swahili, even in areas where it is not the first language, simply as an aspect of growing up. Tanzania also possesses a national Swahili culture, as evidenced in the countrywide popularity of the Swahili press, Swahili poetry and literature, Swahili humor, and Swahili music.
Geographical factors have also contributed to the atmosphere of civil peace. The most important of these is that throughout the colonial period and during the early post-independence decades, Tanzania was a land-abundant society. With a land area of about 365,000 square miles and a population of just over forty-five million, Tanzania is about one-third the size of India but has only one thirtieth of its population. Vast areas are suitable for intensive agricultural production. The best known of these is the coffee-growing region on the south-facing slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro–Mt. Meru region in north-central Tanzania, an area that has also proved well suited to other high value crops. There are other regions of high value agriculture as well. The Shinyanga Region south of Lake Victoria is an area of intensive cotton cultivation; the Sumbawanga area in the southwestern part of the country is an important area of corn cultivation; and the Mtwara Region in the southeastern region of the country is an important area of cashew nut production. The wide distribution of arable lands means that members of many different ethnic groups are able to participate in high value agriculture, thereby preventing the emergence of a sense that high value agriculture is limited to only one or two fortunate communities.
Land abundance has been critically important. With an independence-era population of just over ten million, distributed over an area that contained many regions with good quality agricultural land, there were no land pressures that caused ethnic groups to compete for this resource. As recently as the 1990s, despite a fourfold population increase since independence, from ten million to nearly forty million, developmentally oriented geographers continued to suggest that Tanzania possessed unsettled areas of agriculturally suitable land.13 Although the quality of this land and therefore its suitability for high versus medium value crops varied from one region to the next, Tanzanians did not experience a land environment in which the land needs of one community could only prevail at the expense of others. Although Tanzania today has begun to experience incidents of competition for land, as when agricultural populations begin to encroach on areas that have been the traditional grazing habitat for migratory pastoralists, such problems are still relatively rare.
The regional distribution of the population also contributed to the atmosphere of civil peace. Most of Tanzania’s best land areas are located