In December 1960, the international advocates Rev. Michael Scott and Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan met for a conference at Gandhigram Ashram in Madras State (now Tamil Nadu), India. Although Scott and JP did not agree on certain issues – such as the demands of Naga nationalist claimants within India – they both supported anticolonial nationalism across much of the decolonizing world and were committed proponents of nonviolent political action. At the conference, JP called for the creation of a World Peace Brigade, an international civil society organization that would send peace activists to intervene nonviolently in confrontations between states, empires, and nationalist movements. The Brigade’s first endeavor, the Africa Freedom Action Project, was launched in Dar es Salaam in 1962, which they hoped to make the “anti-Algiers” – a training ground for nonviolent, anti-communist, anticolonial national liberation.

In 1962, Sikota Wina wrote a report on the United National Independence Party (UNIP) International Publicity Bureau, which had just opened an office in Dar es Salaam, capital of newly independent Tanganyika and liberation hub in the making. Chapter 6 asks how the anticolonial culture of this cohort fell away over the course of the staggered independence dates of Tanganyika, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia. Accra, having just begun to host liberation movements from around 1960, appeared unable to provide a platform for activists after Munu Sipalo’s stint on the editorial board of Voice of Africa. Cairo lost much of the appeal it held in John Kale’s heyday, as conflict over the legitimacy of political parties paralleled a crisis in office resources. Lobbying groups on the Western European Left grew irrelevant in a new funding landscape that came with the timetabling of statehood, while PAFMECA soon dissolved. The acceleration of independence negotiations in the region was ambivalent: this chapter closes by arriving in Dar es Salaam by way of radio broadcasting and technical training for Zambian secretaries – whose experience was not only one of anticolonial regional solidarity.

From Tanganyika’s independence in 1961 to the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974, Dar es Salaam was an epicentre of revolution in Africa. The representatives of anticolonial liberation movements set up offices in the city, attracting the interest of the Cold War powers, who sought to expand their influence in the Third World. Meanwhile, the Tanzanian government sought to translate independence into meaningful decolonisation through an ambitious project to build a socialist state. This chapter explains how the lens of the city reveals the connections between the dynamics of the Cold War, decolonisation, and socialist state-making in Tanzania. It locates this approach among new approaches to the history of the Cold War, decolonisation, and global cities. Scattered across continents, the postcolonial archive offers the potential for exploring the revolutionary dynamics which intersected in Dar es Salaam.

Chapter 3 describes the historical development of the educational system in Tanganyika/Tanzania and how it has become entangled with growing socio-religious inequalities since the mid-1990s. I argue that the various moral, political, and epistemological uncertainties that the increasingly diffuse religious landscape of Dar es Salaam presents to its inhabitants are all closely intertwined. Religious competition and the desire to claim spiritual, moral, and geographical territory in the city impel the state to intervene and establish order (for example, by vetting new religious organisations). But they also present a moral challenge for students and teachers at faith-oriented schools, who are often highly aware of public perceptions of their institutions’ religious networks and their efforts to sustain and further expand their claims. In order to understand the politicisation of religious differences over the last decades, I explore the dynamics of inter- and intra-religious competition and polemics in Dar es Salaam, as well as the state’s attempts to govern religious difference and conflict in the postcolonial context, which became particularly emblematic in the dissolution of the East African Muslims Welfare Society in 1968.

From Tanganyika’s independence in 1961 to the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974, Dar es Salaam was an epicentre of revolution in Africa. The representatives of anticolonial liberation movements set up offices in the city, attracting the interest of the Cold War powers, who sought to expand their influence in the Third World. Meanwhile, the Tanzanian government sought to translate independence into meaningful decolonisation through an ambitious project to build a socialist state. This chapter explains how the lens of the city reveals the connections between the dynamics of the Cold War, decolonisation, and socialist state-making in Tanzania. It locates this approach among new approaches to the history of the Cold War, decolonisation, and global cities. Scattered across continents, the postcolonial archive offers the potential for exploring the revolutionary dynamics which intersected in Dar es Salaam.

This chapter continues to assess the impact of colonial rule on the townspeople, and the ways in which it revealed their attachments to the town and their ties to one another, but it emphasizes an economic theme. I begin with an investigation of the German imperial government’s plot to undermine the Wabagamoyo. Uncertain of how to wrest trade in the port away from local hands, the Germans’ plan was to develop the less economically significant town of Dar es Salaam, located about 70 km south of Bagamoyo, and divert the central caravan routes there, where the Germans had greater control over the economy. Yet building a new city did not mean that it was guaranteed to usurp Bagamoyo as the preeminent trading entrepôt of the colony. During the British period, many of the townspeople plotted ways to get around rationing restrictions imposed upon them by the British during WWII. This chapter concludes with a detailed examination of smuggling networks, revealing yet again the ties among the various social groups which bound them together as Wabagamoyo