Taifa is a work of urban social history that traces the intellectual and cultural evolution of the intertwined concepts of race and nation in the city of Dar es Salaam (capital of present-day Tanzania) from the establishment of the Tanganyika Territory in 1919 through the end of British colonial rule and the first decades of political independence. With a population of coastal and inland Africans, South Asians, and Europeans, colonial Dar es Salaam was a plural society that became a kind of laboratory not only for colonial urban policy but also for emerging popular notions of race, citizenship, and identity, particularly from the interwar years onward. Taifa, the modern-day Kiswahili word for “nation,” was foremost among those ideas.

Tracing the origin of race and nation, James Brennan offers a counter-argument to what he characterizes as “instrumentalist” theories of colonial policy's role in identity formation, which hold that “the sole agent of racial consciousness is the colonial state” (p. 119). He uses British colonial documents to show how makeshift government projects failed to keep pace with the complicated realities of urban life. For instance, British efforts to segregate Dar es Salaam's Asian, European, and “native” populations—a continuation of German colonial policy and initially justified as a sanitary measure—were undermined almost from the outset by city residents' energetic blurring of spatial demarcations in the 1930s and 1940s.

In Dar es Salaam, the politically charged categories of “indigene” and “outsider” arose during the same period. This process generated the figure of the non-integrating Indian urban resident as Africans' “constitutive Other,” and for Brennan the most significant colonial policy behind the hardening of “native” and “Indian” identity categories was not indirect rule (which was never applied in the city) but rather wartime rationing. Colonial authorities provided differential access to food, textiles, and housing according to urban subjects' membership in various ethnic and religious groups, which made a formerly implicit status hierarchy plain for all to see. Rationing also allowed colonial subjects to cement urban identities around claims to scarce resources. The government's pledge to provide minimal living standards to all urban residents fostered what Brennan calls “urban entitlement,” an idea that “served to racialize urban life far more than any interwar colonial policy” (87).

Brennan surveys “print debates” in English- and Kiswahili-language media in the decades before and after independence, and contends that African intellectuals, far more than colonial officials, shaped the popular political vocabulary pertaining to national and racial identity in urban Tanzania. Much of this discursive work ran counter to the inclusive official ideology of the dominant nationalist TANU party. In the end, a conscious nationalist strategy to reverse the injustices of colonial-era racial exploitation isolated Dar es Salaam's residents of Asian origin and cast them as outsiders by virtue of their racially marked bodies. In a compelling and highly nuanced way, Taifa shows how African colonial subjects conceived and articulated their own ideas about race and citizenship during the final decades of colonialism and the early years of self-rule.