The Rule of Law and Ujamaa in the Ideological Formation of Tanzania
| Author | Issa G. Shivji |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399500400201 |
| Date | 01 June 1995 |
| Published date | 01 June 1995 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
THE RULE OF LAW
AND
UJAMAA IN THE IDEOLOGICAL
FORMATION OF TANZANIA
ISSA G. SHIVJI
University of Dar es Salaam
THE DEBATE
OST-INDEPENDENCE states in Africa were bedevilled by such
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frequent changes of regime during the first two decades that few radical
P
scholars paid attention to the issue of legitimacy of the state or political
rule. Stability of political rule arguably is the minimum condition at the
phenomenal level to throw up the query: how do the rulers rule? How do the
rulers mobilize the consent of the ruled? What makes the ruled accept their rule?
Coercion and consent are the opposite ends of the axis around which many
explanations of legitimacy and hegemony revolve.’ It is fair to say that the
ultimate content of legitimacy turns out to be some mix of the two. It is the
relationship between consent and coercion and the way it expresses itself on
various levels of state and society which constitutes the key issue in the varied
theories of legitimacy and hegemony from Weber to Gramsci.
Coercion, and not consent, was the prevalent mode of political rule and
political change in post-independence Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. Little
wonder then that the issue of legitimacy was not raised in a sustained fashion, at
least in radical scholarship. Yet the flip side of the coin, that is to say, lack of
legitimacy as an explanation for lack of stability, also received a short shrift. This
can be explained by the other important element in the political rule in Africa.
This is the continued presence of imperialism. Imperialist powers were directly
z
or indirectly involved in changes of regime. The foreign factor, therefore, was
SOCIAL &
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often the dominant, if not the only, explanation leaving little room for intellectual
inquiry on the plane of internal legitimacy or the lack of it. This explanation
seemed so powerful - and, indeed, empirically it was irrefutable - that the
stability of such exceptions as Senegal in West Africa and Kenya in East Africa
was also attributed to external imperialist support.
One exception in East Africa that did not quite fit the neat picture was
Tanzania. Here radical scholars, though, were debating on a different (if related,
although the relation was not teased out at the time) plane (Tandon, 1982; Shivji,
1990a; Copans, 1991). They raised the problem of who ruled in Africa and
sought to answer it within Marxist political economy. The political economy
approach no doubt enlightened our vision significantly. But it did leave out what
could have been fruitful inquiries on other planes and levels. The political
economy approach which tended in practice to be more economistic than
political virtually dismissed the questions: how do those who rule, rule? And
how do the rulers and the ruled perceive that rule? Such questions would have
then been ruled out of court as Weberian (and idealist) or Gramscian (and
neo-Marxist), both being terms of abuse in the debating vocabulary of the time.
Further limits to the terms of the debate were set by the way vulgar political
economy resolved the issue of ’who rules?’. It was resolved into polarized
positions: ’those who control capital, rule’ was one position; ’those who control
the state, rule’ was another (see, for instance, Tandon, 1982 and Hirji, 1982).
Much ink was spilt on the character of the state. Little was said on specific state
forms. And virtually nothing was attempted on different ideological forms,
particularly on their historical and social specificity, which inform the percep-
tions of the rulers and the ruled. To be sure, the rulers of Africa spawned many
ideologies, but few could claim the coherence of a worldview and very few
indeed have had any credible staying power. Even the credible few were
dismissed by radical scholars by the process of labelling and name-calling, while
publicists eulogized these ideologies without engaging in serious interrogation of
their historical and social form.
Perhaps the greatest limitation of the political economy debate on ’who rules’
was that it belittled an engagement with the perceptions, culture, forms of
consciousness and modes of thought of the people - particularly the ruled - not
only with respect to the state of political rule, as narrowly defined, but with
regard to the larger life processes within which that rule is located, perceived and
articulated. This was the limitation of the debate as a whole as well as that of its
intellectual and activist participants. Although we have the benefit of hindsight,
we
are yet to appreciate fully the far reaching implications of this limitation on
the past and present intellectual practices of the African Left.
The other field which received superficial treatment was the ideology of the
rule of law.2 Law
was
conflated with legal rules which in turn were seen as part of
the superstructure reflecting the economic base (Owori, 1982). The role of legal
ideology in legitimating political rule, or the lack of such a role and the reasons
for it, did not feature in the debate in any sustained manner (Shivji,1993: passim).
Absence of that analysis is being keenly felt in the current period when the liberal
ideological package of democracy with its satellite concepts - rule of law,
149
constitutionalism, human rights, multi-parties, pluralism and so on - is being
offered as an alternative in Tanzania as elsewhere in Africa.
From the 1980s, there has been some effort to theorize the legal practices of
the state in Tanzania. This was augmented by the participation of activist-
intellectuals in legal aid as part of the rights struggle (Faculty of Law, 1984).’ This
took the form of debates, discussions and the evaluation of (human) rights
theories, among other things (Mwaikusa, 1990; Peter, 1990; Shivji, 1991). In the
footsteps of the tradition set by earlier debates, the legal debates also have been
largely home-grown although they have dovetailed into similar debates
elsewhere, in particular the ’rule of law’ debate in Britain (Fine et al.,1979; Beirne
and Quinney, 1982). The aim of this article is to take the debate beyond the
discussion of the social character of law and rules to the ideological level and in
this context to investigate the place of the rule of law in the ideological formation
of Tanzania.
The other concern of this article, the ideology of ujamaa, has yet to be fully
interrogated. It has received little theoretical attention from the radical left (but
see Hartmann, 1991). The current conjuncture has seen a significant erosion of
the ideology of ujamaa and the manifestation of incipient elements of potential
instability. Yet for a whole generation the country enjoyed unequalled political
stability on the African continent. This needs to be explained.
Officially the ruling party, Chama cha Mapinduzi, has all but in name given up
the ujamaa rhetoric. Since the introduction of the multi-party system in 1991, the
political debate among the elites and the middle class is conducted essentially in
the liberal ideology of democracy, rule of law, constitutionalism and human
rights. At the same time, there appears to be an upsurge in the expression of
parochial racial, ethnic, religious and narrow nationalist rhetoric followed by
instances of racial and religious violence. It is in the context of the waning of
ujamaa and the apparent ’rise’ of the rule of law as legitimizing ideologies that I
propose to investigate their role in the construction of counter-hegemonic
ideologies and struggles.
The argument of the article takes off from the extant debates among radical
Tanzanian (and African) scholars on the character of law and its ideological role
in post-colonial formations. I refer to Western scholars and debates on the rule of
law and rights only to the extent that this helps me to juxtapose and highlight the
underlying assumptions of the hegemonic role of the rule of law/rights in liberal
capitalist formations.
The second section of this article deals with the ideological premises
(principles) around which the consensual character of the rule of law is
constructed and various explanations as to why these principles have failed to
operate in African countries. The third section goes into more details to illustrate
the role of law (rules) as an unmediated expression of state coercion in the case of
Tanzania and how and why legitimacy is sought on the terrain of non-legal
ideologies.
The fourth section is a quick overview of the major elements and premises of
ujamaa as an ideological construct. The hypothesis of the article is that ujamaa
provided a consensual ideology to legitimize political rule (manifesting primarily
150
in political stability) because it had resonance in popular consciousness/
worldview. The failure of the rule of law to invoke similar resonance is discussed
and argued in the next section where I dwell on the crisis of hegemony and the
erosion of ujamaa. The final section attempts to explore the implication of my
thesis on ujamaa and the rule of law as legitimizing ideologies on the
construction of counter-hegemonic ideologies to legitimate counter-hegemonic
social struggles for social emancipation and transformation.
RULE OF LAW AND LEGITIMACY
Central to the rule of law ideology is the conception of rights which appear on
the surface of law masking the ultimate force behind it as well as legitimating
political rule - the rule of the state. Social-democratic currents in the West have...
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