Agency and the Arusha Declaration: Nyerere, NUTA, and Political Discourse in Tanzania, 1966–7

Opening its general meeting on 27 December 1966, the state-sponsored National Union of Tanganyika Workers, known as NUTA, proposed a combative response to a presidential commission's investigation into mismanagement in the union. The union's general secretary also issued an azimio (resolution) that prefigured much of the socialist rhetoric and policy prescriptions that appeared a month later in Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere's Azimio la Arusha (Arusha Declaration) that refined his policy of African Socialism or Ujamaa. Although the NUTA azimio circulated widely and was submitted to the Arusha party meeting, it was excluded from both the record of that meeting and NUTA's own file of related material. This elision happened before its main author, NUTA general secretary Michael Kamaliza, was convicted of treason two years later. The suppression of NUTA's azimio offers a point of entry to investigate the diffuse agency of political rhetoric and the history of Nyerere's influential speech.