Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania
Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization

This book is a study of the interplay of vernacular and global languages of politics during Africa's decolonization.

Emma Hunter (Author)

9781107088177, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 April 2015

282 pages, 1 map
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.55 kg

'Hunter's adeptness at moving between the specificity of such particular cases and the broad discussion of abstract ideas on a global scale is facilitated by her lucid writing and engagement with an impressively wide body of comparative scholarly literature. These features help make this book at once accessible to non-specialists and meaningful to Africanists.' Priya Lal, African Studies Review

Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania is a study of the interplay of vernacular and global languages of politics in the era of decolonization in Africa. Decolonization is often understood as a moment when Western forms of political order were imposed on non-Western societies, but this book draws attention instead to debates over universal questions about the nature of politics, concept of freedom and the meaning of citizenship. These debates generated political narratives that were formed in dialogue with both global discourses and local political arguments. The United Nations Trusteeship Territory of Tanganyika, now mainland Tanzania, serves as a compelling example of these processes. Starting in 1945 and culminating with the Arusha Declaration of 1967, Emma Hunter explores political argument in Tanzania's public sphere to show how political narratives succeeded when they managed to combine promises of freedom with new forms of belonging at local and national level.

Introduction
1. Concepts of progress in mid-twentieth-century Tanzania
2. Transnational languages of democracy after 1945
3. Representation, imperial citizenship and the political subject in late colonial Tanganyika
4. Patriotic citizenship and the case of the Kilimanjaro Chagga Citizens Union
5. Freedom in translation
6. Languages of democracy in Kilimanjaro and the fall of Marealle
7. One party democracy: citizenship and political society in the post-colonial state
8. Ujamaa and the Arusha Declaration
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], African history [HBJH]