Dar es Salaam on the Frontline: Red and Black Internationalisms

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article highlights Tanzania’s role in global decolonisation by combining personal stories rooted in everyday life with political and pedagogical accounts of experiments in African socialism. The Dar es Salaam school of scholars and activists developed into an epicentre of productive and fraught debates that continue to offer us lessons today. By paying close attention to the stories these thinkers tell, and by situating them in the context of both political events and quotidian experiences, we can further uncover what Fanon called the “grandeur and weakness” of anti-colonial praxis. Gendering these syntheses of red and black internationalisms also contributes a perspective rooted in a more radical democratic politics, productively extending this decolonial genealogy into our present conjuncture.