Every morning across Tanzania, crowds gather around street-side newspaper stands to read the headlines. The array of titles attests to the country’s vibrant and historical culture of printing and publishing, in both Swahili and English. While there is an extensive scholarship on the region’s colonial era print cultures, only recently have scholars of Tanzania revisited the post-independence decades in historical perspective. This period was characterised by the government’s ‘African socialist’ project. But there remained significant diversity in social and political life in post-colonial Tanzania. Despite overwhelming state control of the media, newspapers and books continued to provide vehicles for agendas that extended beyond the official ideologies of socialism and nationalism. Indeed, the creativity and activism of Tanzania’s print sphere placed the region and nation at the centre of global debates in the 1960s and 1970s.
These themes were taken up by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars at an online workshop on 5 November 2021, co-organised by Emma Hunter (Edinburgh) and George Roberts (King’s College London and IASH Postdoctoral Fellow), with the support of IASH.
The papers presented covered developments stretching from the late colonial era to the present. Some speakers focused on the content of the press. Musa Sadock (Dar es Salaam) explored the role of state-owned media in shaping perceptions of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in Tanzania in the late 1970s. Nico Brice-Bennett (Edinburgh) examined the intellectual history of Lutheran newspapers during the time of decolonisation. Faraja Kristomus (Dar es Salaam) brought these conversations into the twenty-first century through an analysis of political arguments in contemporary religious newspapers. Other speakers delved beyond the written word to uncover the evolving infrastructure of the publishing industry. Zamda Geuza (Dar es Salaam) investigated the development of academic publishing housing in the socialist period. Yu Xiang (Shanghai) added an international perspective through her research on the presentation of Tanzanian socialism in the Mao-era magazine China Pictorial. James Brennan (Illinois) concluded discussions by tying together some of the major themes emerging from this research and pointing to potential fresh directions of inquiry.
We now hope to developing these papers as part of an edited volume to be published in Tanzania and are grateful to the assistance provided by IASH in organising this event.