Seminar 2000

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Beyond Nostalgia: The Global Ujamaa Village

Nyerere opens his most important general statement of political philosophy, the little pamphlet from 1962, "Ujamaa-The Basis of African Socialism," with the striking claim that "socialism, like democracy is an attitude of mind. In a socialist society," he maintains, "it is the socialist attitude of mind, and not the rigid adherence to a standard political pattern, which is needed to ensure that the people care for each other's welfare" (FU 162). The fundamental features of this attitude of mind are the notions of freedom, democracy, and socialism understood as the "familyhood" enshrined in the term ujamaa that I have already discussed from the perspective of my own nostalgic longings. Now Nyerere insists that, although the socialist attitude of mind has its roots in African tradition, the legacy of colonialism demands that the Tanzanian people reawaken this attitude of mind: "Our first step, therefore, must be to re-educate ourselves; to regain our former attitude of mind" (FU 166). It is to this task of re-education that the leadership of the state must fundamentally devote itself.

In practice, the bureaucracy of the Tanzanian leadership pursued this goal of re-education largely through the highly controversial, and ultimately ecologically and economically disastrous, resettling of nearly seventy percent of the population in ujamaa villages planned by government officials and foreign "experts."¹⁴ James Scott has argued that this was a stunning example of authoritarian, if well-meaning, "high modernism,"¹⁵ and that Nyerere's rhetoric of a return to traditional African ways of living was effectively undermined in practice. Scott concludes, for example, that "what is significant, however, is that the modern planned village in Tanzania was essentially a point-by-point negation of existing rural practice."¹⁶ I think Scott's critique of the implementation of Nyerere's vision of ujamaa is largely compelling and unanswerable. What I would suggest, however, is that we conclude from this that Nyerere's government in the end failed to live up to Nyerere's insistence that socialism is essentially "an attitude of mind."

If the testament of Nyerere remains a promise for us today, and not simply an occasion for nostalgic reverie, this is because his call for the transformation of attitudes of mind has a new relevance in the cultural context of informational capitalism. It is at this point that I will invoke my second epigraph, Castells' claim that "The era of globalization of the economy is also the era of localization of polity" (III:377-378). Castells elaborates this statement as follows: "What local and regional governments lack in power and resources, they make up in flexibility and networking. They are the only match, if any, to the dynamism of global networks of wealth and information" (III:378. Cf., II:349-353). The optimism apparent in this passage is grounded in Castells' earlier argument that the dominant form of employment in the developing world, as well as in many of the labor markets of advanced economies, is characterized by the "individualization of labor," "the process by which labor contribution to production is defined specifically for each worker, and for each of his/her contributions, either under the form of self-employment or under individually contracted, largely unregulated, salaried labor" (III:72). What this means, I suggest, is that the special "flexibility and networking" capacities to be found in governments at the local and regional level are themselves the products of individuals working within those institutions. Given Castells' analysis of the human personality in the information age as engaged in endless reconstruction of the self, it follows that localized institutions will share-perhaps in complex and unpredictable ways-in these infinitely flexible, improvisatory processes of redefinition and reconstruction. In this way, then, Nyerere's call for careful attention to "attitudes of mind" in the postcolonial situation finds new life in the interpenetrating structures of individual personalities and localized social and political institutions in the context of global informational capitalism.

Of course, this emphasis on the power of local institutions presupposes that those institutions are fully included within the web of capital and information flows that define the new globalization. As I have already noted, Castells sees as perhaps the greatest problem currently afflicting sub-Saharan Africa and the fourth world generally the fact that technological dependency and underdevelopment have effectively excluded these parts of the world from the flows of capital and information. Nevertheless, the stunning example of the burgeoning software industry in India suggests that becoming connected to the flows of informational capitalism is a good deal easier to accomplish than was the task of becoming a successful competitor in the world of industrial capitalism. If Castells is right in his overall analysis, a fundamental priority for the development of the fourth world is that it quickly become fully connected into the information networks that currently facilitate the international economy.

If I have managed to breathe new life into Nyerere's testament of ujamaa, I think a similar argument can be used to revive another dimension of his legacy, his emphasis on "self-reliance" in development. Beginning with the "Arusha Declaration" of 1967 (FS 231-250), Nyerere began to stress the theme that Tanzanian and African development must proceed in a fundamentally "self-reliant" way. From his perspective in the mid to late 1960s, this meant that the path towards successful development needed to focus largely on agriculture, since any form of industrial development would be dependent upon significant monetary investment on the part of individuals and institutions outside Tanzania. Such economic dependency would, in Nyerere's view, unacceptably interfere with the freedom of the Tanzanian people (FS 318-319). Thus, self-reliance means, Nyerere claims, "that we must make maximum use of the resources which we have" (FS 386), resorting to foreign expertise only where absolutely necessary. From Nyerere's perspective as from that of the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is clear that the greatest resource of the fourth world is a population eager for education. That the Nyerere government was able to raise the literacy rate in Tanzania to some eighty-three percent¹⁷ is yet another key element of his legacy, and I think this suggests that the goal of integrating the fourth world into the information flows of global capitalism is not utterly utopian. Castells' celebration of the flexibility and networking capacities of localized social and political institutions strikes me as a variation on the theme of self-reliance, particularly to the extent that this institutional flexibility is grounded in the creative, improvisatory processes of self-reconstruction in which educated individuals of the information age endlessly engage. Moreover, James Scott's indictment of the Tanzanian policy of massive population dislocation and resettlement also suggests the kind of local wisdom that might constitute the informational capital of the fourth world. Ignored by the planners of the ujamaa villages was Tanzania's "existing rural practice, which included shifting cultivation and pastoralism; polycropping; living well off the main roads; kinship and lineage authority; small, scattered settlements with houses built higgledy-piggledy; and production that was dispersed and opaque to the state."¹⁸

As a final stage in my attempt to recover the promise of Nyerere's testament in this post-postcolonial epoch and to rediscover the core of his legacy in a reading of his work that moves beyond simple nostalgia, I would like to look again at the notion that socialism is properly understood as an "attitude of mind." Nyerere's own elaboration of this idea focuses, as I have already indicated, on the concept of freedom, on the process of democracy as grounded in free discussion amongst equals, and on the socialist commitment to the fundamental value of "such an organization of society that man's inequalities are put to the service of his equality" (FS 303). I must now beg your indulgence as I try to give some philosophical flesh to these ideals by turning to what can best be described, I believe, as the reinvigoration of the spirit of democracy in the writing of Jacques Derrida.

To suggest that democracy has a spirit, that democracy may even touch upon questions of the spiritual, might seem a curious manner of speaking. Yet in this matter, I take my bearings from the recent work of Derrida, who has spent the 1990s engaged in a series of projects, each of which thematizes some aspect of what he has called "a democracy to come." Writing in his book, Specters of Marx of "the gap between fact and ideal essence," Derrida insists that "this failure and this gap also characterize, a priori and by definition, all democracies, including the oldest and most stable of so-called Western democracies. At stake here is the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can only arise in such a diastema (failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being 'out of joint')."¹⁹ Elaborating the character of this gap, Derrida argues that the very idea of a democracy to come "is the opening of this gap between an infinite promise (always untenable at least for the reason that it calls for the infinite respect of the singularity and infinite alterity of the other as much as for the respect of the countable, calculable, subjectal equality between anonymous singularities) and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what has to be measured against this promise. To this extent, the effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the communist promise, will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated."²⁰

The spirit of democracy, then, is to be found in the promise of an encounter with the unique and absolute otherness of the other. To do justice to this spirit, I suggest, would be to nurture a cultural imagination in which it will be possible for the infinite alterity of others to be recognized as such and, thus, to be fully encountered. Paradoxically enough, Castells' vision of the informational culture as a medium within which the endless play of self-reconstruction can be carried out without the constraints of time or place would seem to offer a context for Derrida's notion of the encounter with the infinite otherness of the other.

That we are now, in some important sense, in the terrain of the spiritual is perhaps all-too-clear from Derrida's insistence on the infinity of the other's alterity. However, the specific contours of the spirituality at stake here are made more explicit in Derrida's regular invocation of the Neoplatonism of Plotinus — on whom, you will remember, I wrote my dissertation some years ago — in which the highest notion of the divine, what Plotinus calls the Good, is described quite precisely as that which gives what it does not have.²¹ The moral for democracy is clear: for the spirit of democracy to be realized, we each must develop and nourish the paradoxical ability to give what we do not have. In particular, we must, in some sense, give the other the other's infinite alterity. That is, we must imagine and try to construct a society in which the other's alterity can be fully recognized and realized, not reduced to some finite set of characteristics already found in ourselves.

A key implication of this is that, if the spirit of democracy demands that we give what we do not have, it also asks that the other receive from us this gift which the other already has: namely, the other's infinite alterity. Curiously enough, Plotinus anticipates this paradox as well in his metaphysical doctrine of "reception according to the capacity of the recipient," a doctrine which inevitably suggests that the material world always already possesses the essences and the attributes, the characteristics and the qualities, which the Platonic theory of forms presumably explains in terms of some notion of metaphysical participation.²² Both the giving and the receiving characteristic of the spirit of democracy are inherently paradoxical, then, and the paradoxes here outline the structure of what I will call "democratic imagination."

I call this structure of giving and receiving "democratic imagination," because I believe that the spirit of democracy is best manifested in the imaginative creations of human beings, whether these creations take the form of social and political institutions, works of art, or bodies of knowledge. My own focus on creation here complements Castells' emphasis on reconstruction of the self (and the consequent reconstruction of localized institutions), but I take this focus to entail that a contemporary examination of Nyerere's postcolonial politics ultimately will steer its course away from politics proper to find its destination in something like aesthetics. To reach this harbor which seems most safe to me, I want to allude to the argument that structures the final chapter of Derrida's Politics of Friendship. Here Derrida suggests that competing models of friendship ultimately appeal to some "third thing" to mediate, to interrupt, the jealous narcissism of friendship between two friends, and this "third thing" is generally conceived as the law. Derrida asks, "Does not my relation to the singularity of the other qua other, in effect, involve the law?"²³ The difficulty with such an analysis, however, is that the law always presupposes some sort of "countable, calculable, subjectal equality" (to repeat the formulation in Specters of Marx) between one person and another, thereby glossing over, if not repressing, the infinite alterity of the other as a singular subject. At the very end of Politics of Friendship, Derrida holds open the promise of a democracy to come which will not perpetually interpose the law between one person, one friend, and another. He asks, "When will we be ready for an experience of freedom and equality that is capable of respectfully experiencing that friendship, which would at last be just, just beyond the law, and measured up against its measurelessness?"²⁴

I take it to be profoundly significant that Derrida's discussion of democracy here tries to give a sense to the experiences of freedom and of equality that are precisely the prerequisites of Nyerere's vision of democracy. Moreover, Derrida's call for a kind of human relationship that might exemplify a form of justice "beyond the law" resonates with Nyerere's own attempt to distinguish between the "spontaneous and therefore free" democracy of traditional Africa and the "organized and therefore automatic" democracy characteristic, he suggests, of the Anglo-Saxon tradition (FU 105).

In any event, I suggest that we will only be ready for such an experience of freedom and equality when the spirit of democracy is enlivened by democratic imagination. This, in turn, will most effectively happen when it is the creative products of culture-institutions, works of art, bodies of knowledge-that serve as the "third thing" mediating between one person and another, one community and another, when it is works of cultural production that facilitate our giving what we do not have to those who already have it, thereby instantiating a mode of exchange that goes "beyond the law." We can sense the importance of this Derridian linking of the spirit of democracy to the manifestation of democratic imagination in the creative products of culture by noticing how far this rather simple argument has already taken us from the debate between liberalism and communitarianism that has so dominated recent discussions of democratic theory in the United States.²⁵ What the liberal seems unable to grasp fully is that liberal democratic institutions can only function in ways that their citizens will find meaningful when those who people them remain open to the concrete ways in which every individual other is singular and different from every other individual other. The continuing ways in which the liberal conception of racial and/or ethnic "integration" in the United States runs the risk of collapsing into "assimilation" are testament to a genuine failure in this regard. Similarly, what the communitarian seems unable to realize is that the kinds of communities that can give meaning to the life of democracy must be communities open to the promise implicit in the singularity and alterity of others. The proliferation of various kinds of hate crimes in the United States would seem to reflect stunning instances of failure in this regard.

The stage is set, then, for us to welcome and work with the philosophical testament of Julius Nyerere. If it is true that we have now effectively gone beyond the postcolonial era into a new era of globalization, I think it is also true that we can now move beyond a merely nostalgic response to the extraordinary philosophical accomplishments of our postcolonial forebears. Let us work to make ourselves fully responsible heirs both to the endlessly challenging flux of the contemporary and to the deepest promptings of the postcolonial.²⁶

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14. For this statistic, see Nyerere's obituary in the New York Times, Friday, October 15, 1999, C20. Back

15. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 224. Back

16. Ibid., 238. Back

17. New York Times, Friday, October 15, 1999, C20. Back

18. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 238. Back

19. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, with an introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 1994), 64. Back

20. Ibid., 65. Back

21. Ibid., 26-27. This Plotinian theme-found most explicitly in Plotinus, Ennead VI.7, chapters 15-17-surfaces, among other places, in Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 29-30, and in Jacques Derrida, On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 70, 84-85. Back

22. The classical source for this doctrine is Ennead VI.4-5. For my earlier thoughts about this notion, thoughts that seem at this distance to represent at best a one-sided reading of Plotinus, see Jonathan Scott Lee, "The Doctrine of Reception According to the Capacity of the Recipient in Ennead VI.4-5," Dionysius III (1979):79-97. Back

23. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, translated by George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 277. Back

24. Ibid., 306. Back

25. For two very different approaches to this debate, see Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Back

26. This paper owes a great deal to stimulating conversations with John Riker and Donovan Tracy. Back

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