Tanzania is one of the countries in SSA. It is geographically located in East Africa and shares its borders with Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia. Given that it shares borders with eight African countries, it is very possible that Tanzania exerts social, economic, cultural and political influence on its neighbours. What happens in Tanzania, such as the killings and the amputation of body parts of people with albinism, can easily spread to other countries as indicated in Chapter Four because there is close and frequent interaction and migration among people and tribes residing on the Tanzanian borders. For example, the Maasai
people in Tanzania and Kenya all speak the same language, and have similar traditions and culture. They also have free border interactions, as do the Luo people in Kenya and Tanzania and the Haya and Toro, Nyankore and Bakiga in Uganda, to mention a few. According to the 2012 national census, Tanzania had a population of approximately 44.9 million people. The current population, however, is estimated at 49.5 million people (World Population Review, 2014). Given its tropical climate, the majority of Tanzanians are dark in colour. It is estimated that only one per cent of the population is non-black African (World Population Review, 2014), and consists of Tanzanians whose ancestors emigrated from Asian, Middle Eastern or European countries. The small number of non-black Africans in Tanzania means that black Africans dominate the country. Thus any person who differs from this norm like people with albinism, therefore, is likely to standout as an outsider who does not belong (Ahmed, 2012; 2000).
Tanzania is a union of two countries, Tanganyika and Zanzibar. Tanganyika received its independence from the British government on 9 December 1961 and a year later became a republic. Zanzibar received a provision for full self-government from the British government on 10 December 1963. A month later, on 12 January 1964, a revolution took place and the Peoples’ Republic of Zanzibar was established. A few months later, on 26 April 1964, a union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar was formed and Tanzania was born. The Union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar was followed by the Arusha Declaration in 1967. The declaration formulated the Ujamaa ideology. Ujamaa is a Kiswahili word meaning ‘family-hood’. The Ujamaa ideology, which has come to mean African Socialism, emphasised human dignity, equality of opportunities, and the equal distribution of society’s resources (also see Section 1.6). It also emphasised the importance of non -exploitation, social integration and the inclusion of all groups of people in the society (Nyerere, 1968). In its totality, the ideology propagated the idea of collective development and emphasised that every Tanzanian citizen was ndugu, meaning a sibling to each other, which meant loving each other. This therefore required every citizen to have an equal stake in society (Nyerere, 1968), which could mean what Ahmed (2010) terms a promise of happiness. In her notion of a promise of happiness, Ahmed (2010) analyses the link between happiness and the promise of a good life. Here, she argues that certain ideas and objects are often
perceived as happy ideas or objects, which can promise such a life, and lists those ideas and objects as marriage, family and heterosexual intimacy. In the context of Tanzania, I can say that the ideology of Ujamaa can be perceived as the promise of a good life. Although the level of happiness among Tanzanians was unknown during the Ujamaa era, it has been low during the Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs). A study by the team of experts, Helliwell et al. (2015), which measured the level of happiness and well-being of people in 158 countries worldwide, places Tanzania at number 146, indicating that the country has many unhappy people.
Working towards the establishment of the Ujamaa ideology in his book Ujamaa: The
Basis of African Socialism, Nyerere, (1962) gave an example of true African Socialists as
people who do not love one class of people and hate the other. He went on to emphasise that a true African Socialist:
(d)oes not form an alliance with the brethren (sic) for the extermination of the non- brethren (sic). He (sic) rather regards all men (sic) as his brethren - as members of his ever-extending family (Nyerere, 1962: 5).
Nyerere’s (1962) views can be interpreted and critiqued as not gender sensitive for the use of male words such as ‘brethren’ or ‘men’. He could have used such words because in the 1960s, when he made the statement, patriarchal words such as mankind were still largely used to mean humanity because ‘humanity was male’ (de Beauvoir, 2011[1949]: 5). As a feminist researcher, I do not support such words or views, but the point of my interest was his advocacy for a society that values and respects all human beings irrespective of their gender, class, race or physical or mental ability differences and even their albinism, when he said that:
(o)ur recognition of the family to which we all belong must be extended yet further - beyond the tribe, the community, the nation, or even the continent- to embrace the whole society of [humankind]. (Nyerere, 1962: 5).
These values and principles led to Tanzanian politics and people making the country one of the most peaceful countries in Africa until 1991, when the Zanzibar Declaration was enacted. Although the Zanzibar Declaration did not specifically mention the abandonment of Ujamaa values and principles of collective development, it ushered in the creation of new neoliberal ideologies by adopting SAPs which were stipulated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
SAPs demanded, among other things, the liberalisation of trade, cost sharing, retrenchment of workers in the public sector and the promotion of privatisation (Wagao, 1990; Ponte, 1998 cited by Varvus, 2005: 180). The adoption of such policies meant a shift away from state control and towards privately-owned means of production. In other words, it meant a shift from collective ownership to individual ownership or away from African values (see section 1.6). The government was no longer responsible for the welfare services of its citizens, whereas under ujamaa policies, public services had been free, including education from primary to HE.
When government withdrew from such services I would say its promise of happiness for its citizens was abandoned. With cost sharing, people – the majority of whom are poor (see World Bank, 2015a) - were now required to contribute towards public services such as education and thus the predominantly free public services earlier enjoyed by all citizens was abandoned. Services like education were privatised. Private schools, which had better learning and teaching facilities and a better environment, were established and promoted in place of a unified public school system (Mbilinyi, 2003).
Private schools are mostly accessible to a few affluent and elite groups in the country (see the percentages of middle and high classes in Section 1.2). The public schools, accessible by the majority of Tanzanians from less affluent families including most disabled students, had limited teaching and learning facilities and non-conducive learning environments (Komba and Nkumbi, 2008). Class differences therefore began to appear in the education system as those from schools with better facilities excelled and had better opportunities to interact and occupy HE spaces. Those from public schools, on the other hand, became victims of blame for their own misfortune, or for failing to help themselves, as propagated by neo-liberal ideology (Mbilinyi, 2003).
As mentioned above neo-liberal policies also demanded government retrenchment. This meant that a number of people went out of formal employment and were thus involved in informal employment for survival, which widely made peoples’ economic situations worse off. For example, a study by Osberg and Bandara (2012), which looked at the economic situation of 4,986 people in various regions of Tanzania revealed that 99 per cent of the participants indicated that their economic situation in 2007 was worse than that in 2004, showing that more people were being continuously pushed into poverty;
now 65 per cent of the Tanzanian population is categorised as living in poverty (World Bank, 2015a). The World Bank Report (2015a) further reveals that 28.2 per cent of the Tanzanian population lives below the poverty line where they cannot meet their daily basic needs, including their food supply. The Bank’s report estimates that the national basic needs poverty line was Tshs 36,482/- (UK £12) per adult per month whereas the national food poverty line per adult per month was Tshs 26,085/- (UK £9), which was below the World Bank universal extreme poverty line of less than US $1.25 per person a day (World Bank, 2015b).
This kind of poverty means the majority of Tanzanians are desperate merely to survive. Ahmed (2010) tells us that when people are desperate to survive they can seek out their own ways of achieving a good life or their own means of finding happiness. Under current neo-liberal policies, which stress privatisation and free market development, people in Tanzania depend on savings, inheritance, loans or investments in their search for a good life. But those who might not qualify for these resources may, in their desperation to survive, seek out illegitimate ways of achieving happiness or a good life, such as corruption or burglary. In some cases, the search for a good life can be influenced by myths or beliefs. For example, in a country like Tanzania where 62 per cent of people believe that charms and witchdoctors can prevent or offset bad omens, suffering or hardships (PEW Research Center, 2010), it is possible that some would believe – and even act on the belief - that the body parts of people with albinism are a means of achieving wealth, which is often associated with happiness. Such beliefs might have occurred after people had despaired of succeeding in life without the support of an extra ordinary power. Having looked at the country context of this research, it is equally important to discuss the education system.