Hybrid Expertise: Economic Knowledge Production in Tanzania, 1965-1985

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From the late 1960s, the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) became one of the foremost centres of radical activism and intellectually rigorous scholarship in Africa. The commitment of Tanzania's governing party to goals of socialism and self-reliance attracted sympathetic foreign scholars, who encountered Tanzanian intellectuals educated both abroad and at UDSM. Through interviews and the study of contemporary texts, my project investigates how Tanzanian economists contributed to the global debates about transitioning to socialism and combatting underdevelopment that became concentrated at UDSM. It also investigates how their intellectual work shaped the political imaginations of Tanzanian politicians and policy makers.Economic texts will be my core sources, especially the working papers produced at the Economic Research Bureau in Dar es Salaam from 1965 until its reorganisation in 1985, student dissertations and magazines, and the research produced at government institutions like the Bank of Tanzania. Monographs and journals such as Utafiti and Africa Development will also be important primary sources. Close readings of these texts (most except student dissertations accessible at Edinburgh) will yield case studies of the arguments made, concerns motivating, and intellectual resources drawn upon by specific individuals, ultimately supporting a balanced account of the intellectual work involved in producing economic knowledge about contested issues like industrialisation, export and food crop production, and the management of Tanzania's monetary system. Institutional documents such as annual reports, held at UDSM and in the basement of the National Library in Dar es Salaam, contain information about research and seminar programmes, staff, and sources of funding, while newspapers (e.g., Daily News and Uhuru, both available at the British Library) will be used to build up a broader understanding of contemporary debates about economic issues. I would also access the Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party archives in Dodoma in order to establish a more robust evidence base for discussing the relationship between economic knowledge production and policy making. Lastly, the largely digitised UN and World Bank archives contain details about international forums like the 1976 UNCTAD conference in Nairobi at which proposals for a NIEO were debated. Finally, I intend to conduct interviews with prominent economists like Samuel Wangwe in order to gain a more holistic understanding of Tanzanian economic knowledge production and its relation to the personal relations and aspirations of individual scholars. Establishing relationships with interviewees could facilitate access to sources like personal papers, but will be especially important for understanding the ways in which Tanzanian economists were responding to global intellectual debates. This is obscured in many published texts by institutional obligations to produce policy-relevant research.