In contrast to numerous African capital cities, Dar es Salaam arose and developed as a multicultural city. It had its earliest beginnings as a commercial center rooted in the Indian Ocean trade in ivory and human beings. Unlike Nairobi, for example, Dar es Salaam is not located in the center of the most fertile agricultural area, and the ethnic group that occupies the region, the Zaramo, has not had the insurmountable double advantage of agrarian prosperity combined with close physical proximity to political power. The slave caravans that fanned out from Dar es Salaam captured their victims from a variety of regions throughout eastern Africa, and some remained behind as a work force in Dar es Salaam and other coastal cities. Over many centuries, Dar es Salaam became a place of residence where Tanzanians of a wide mixture of ethnic groups worked and made their homes. Sociologist Deborah Bryceson has used the term creolization to call attention to its rich mixture of the country’s many cultures and languages. Individual neighborhoods may have ethnic characteristics but no ethnic group dominates the city’s economic, political, or cultural life.14
Distinctive aspects of Tanzania’s colonial experience further contributed to the low salience of ethnicity. The first thirty years or more of Tanganyika’s colonial experience, from 1885 to 1918, took place under German rule. Unlike the British, who emphasized the importance of traditional authorities as the basic administrative units of colonial government, a practice that hardened ethnic identities, German colonial practice emphasized direct forms of administration that suppressed traditional institutions and cultures. German officials tended to disregard indigenous institutions, which they treated with a mixture of indifference and contempt. They preferred instead to govern through a system of centrally recruited administrators called akidas, whom they then deployed to localities with which they did not have any cultural commonalities. The akida system diffused Swahili throughout Tanzania, since local communities could only communicate with their appointed akidas through a commonly spoken language. It also perfectly exemplified the German refusal to acknowledge or incorporate local forms of organization.15
By the time Britain assumed colonial jurisdiction over Tanganyika in 1918 through the League of Nations Mandate system, local forms of institutional authority had been so thoroughly squelched that it was often necessary to create these anew before implementing indirect methods of colonial administration. Britain’s determination to administer Tanzania through the indirect rule system made it necessary to ascribe political identity and impose political organization on language communities that did not have a history of political solidarity. Aili Mari Tripp has shown that a number of Tanzania’s largest ethnic groups are of relatively recent colonial creation. Far from having deep historic roots, numerous ethnic groups in Tanzania are the products of Britain’s twentieth-century application of the indirect rule system.16
Tanzania’s status as a ward of the international community from the end of World War I until its independence in 1961 also contributed to ethnic peace. At the end of the war, Tanganyika became a League of Nations Mandate and after World War II it became a United Nations Trusteeship Territory. International supervision caused British colonial rule in Tanganyika to be less severe than that in most other colonial territories. First, it introduced the assumption of an eventual but timely transition toward national independence. The League of Nations did not permit Britain to develop Tanganyika as a permanent settler colony as it had done in Kenya and Rhodesia. Absent a significant settler presence, Tanzania’s abundant supply of arable land remained in African hands: land alienation did not foster a problem of land scarcity that pitted one ethnic group against another in a life or death struggle over a scarce resource.17 International supervision also meant that the British government had to treat emerging African nationalist organizations with greater restraint than it showed elsewhere. Britain was less able to employ ethnically based tactics of divide and rule by creating political alliances with favored groups to maintain better control over others. As nationalism in Tanganyika began to take full shape in the late 1950s, it was not riven by internal strains between ethnic communities that felt differently about how they had been treated by colonial administration.
To preserve and build on this inheritance, Nyerere and the TANU government began to implement a set of policies intended to create a cultural climate in which Tanzanians would not organize their political organizations based on separate ethnic identities. The first step was to ban racially or religiously based schools and hospitals. These had to become public institutions open to Tanzanians of all races and religions. In the effort to create a non-ethnic social culture, the government gave its highest priority to educational policy. It changed most of the country’s high schools into boarding schools so that students from diverse regions of the country would live and study together. The government undertook similar efforts with respect to teachers and principals. The goal of educational policy was for each high school to become a microcosm of the nation, where a community of ethnically diverse students would study, play, live, and work together, alongside an equally mixed educational staff.
Following their high school education, Tanzanian students were obliged to participate in a National Service program that continued the process of mingling students of different ethnic groups in common projects in which they worked together building schools, improving roads, and constructing community buildings. Young Tanzanians who joined the military and became members of the Tanzanian People’s Defense Force (TPDF) became absorbed in a non-ethnic environment in which military units comprised soldiers from all regions of the country. Countless older Tanzanians remember their high school and National Service experience as a time when they formed friendships across cultural lines, played together on multicultural sports teams, and participated in multicultural musical and dramatic activities.
Many of the factors that initially gave rise to Tanzania’s atmosphere of civil peace have long since disappeared. German colonialism in Tanganyika ended almost a century ago. The benign effects of international supervision ended with independence, more than fifty years ago. As Tanzania’s economy declined, financial pressures necessarily constrained the scope and scale of the government’s efforts to mingle students of various ethnicities together at the secondary school level. Budgetary constraints gradually made it impossible to move students across different regions of the country, much less to support them in a boarding school environment. To the extent that sparse population helped ameliorate the ethnic tensions that might have arisen from competition over scarce land resources that factor, too, is outdated. Tanzania’s population has more than quadrupled since independence, from about ten million to more than forty-five million people, and population pressures in some areas have begun to trigger scattered incidents of conflict over land between pastoral and agricultural communities, a division that corresponds to an ethnic cleavage. Although the Tanzanian constitution and electoral laws continue to proscribe ethnically based appeals, the freer political atmosphere that has attended the rebirth of multipartyism has opened a wider political space for ethnic expressions. The new political environment has reduced the government’s ability to maintain tight controls over political discourse, including appeals to ethnicity. Perhaps the most consequential change has been the death of Nyerere himself and the loss of the moral force he brought to the idea of a non-ethnic culture for his country.
Why, then, has ethnicity not asserted itself with greater force in Tanzania? A theory of cultural pluralism that emphasizes the importance of inequalities between different ethnic groups provides one answer. Colonial historian John S. Furnivall first developed the idea that ethnicity was a volatile political factor in socioeconomic environments where differing ethnic groups had differing amounts of access to the upper levels of a society, such as the highest positions in government and administration or the business sector.18 Later cultural pluralists termed this phenomenon “differential incorporation,” a concept that called attention to ethnic frictions that arise when a country’s patterns of economic, social, and political stratification display distinctively