have fully and actively engaged themselves in the task of socialist,
construction. Their continuing lack of a fully realised capacity for
socialist creativity remains a major weakness.

Partly this is a matter of self-interest, partly of cultural set. Thus
further, more genuine, sacrifice is not readily elicited, nor is fur-
ther, more radical, transformation easily sanctioned. From the
standpoint of bureaucratic incumbents (including those in the
parastatal sector) whose paternalistic and hierarchical styles of

work have also not altered much since independence, the latter -

process is particularly unpredictable and worrisome. Reference to
the Chinese experience and the insights of ‘Maoist economics’,?
for example, conjures up for them images of a release of human
energies which may not be easily channeled along established
grooves; much safer to ride the existing system unadventurously.
And a variety of inherited theoretical constructs are ready to hand
which can serve to rationalise these tendencies. Conventional
wisdom about development, albeit bent by the impact of the
Arusha Declaration and by ‘socialism and self-reliance’ reasserts
itself more subtly in the bowels of the policy-making process: the
‘necessity’ of aid, the (unequivocal and neutral) ‘superiority’ of
western technology and management system, the priority of ‘ef-
ficiency’, narrowly and techno-cratically conceived, over radical
risk and that release of human energies referred to as a possibility
above. Concrete socialist programmes, of necessity the end-
product of creative but laborious, day-to-day, planning and im-
plementation, only spring with difficulty from such infertile soil.

The creative terms of the Tanzanian socialist equation have
most often lain elsewhere in any case — in certain features of the
country’s political and ideological development which seem
almost to defy the logic of the objective conditions within which
they have emerged. A political leadership has surfaced — the Party
(Tanu), the President (Nyerere) — which has managed both to
exemplify unity and to link its destinies to the needs of the masses
in ways almost unknown elsewhere on the continent. And a
distinctive ideology extrapolating and consolidating the most
progressive tendencies of the nationalist moment, suspicious of
imperialism in at least some of its guises and caustic towards
many of the pretensions of Africa’s new elites, confident of the
creative potential of the mass of the African population — also
came to power with this leadership.