In her speech, aptly titled ‘Africans are not poor’, Lameck would go on to lay out her view of the immense riches and potential of her country, outlining the need for community sacrifice, self-reliance, and a distinctly African development process that neither mimics imperialist countries nor hinders the advancement of women on account of harmful customs.[5]
The themes she discussed would become core tenets of Tanzanian national identity over the course of the 1960s.[6] Yet, Lameck’s life and political career offer simultaneous insights into the commitment, endurance and flexibility required of women attempting to hold a predominantly male state apparatus accountable.[7] As Susan Geiger argues, the common narrative of linear progress and continuing achievement that sorts nationalist movements neatly into ‘successes’ or ‘failures’ obscures the complicated and nuanced dynamics of women’s negotiations with an increasingly authoritarian postcolonial state.[8] Thus, at a time still marked by uncertainty as to the precise future of Tanzania, Lameck’s speech offers an impassioned plea for the inclusion of women on equal footing, while also revealing the potential dangers in not questioning paternalism and appealing to colonial standards of modernity.
Lameck’s entry into politics
In order to properly contextualise Lameck’s positionality as she gives this speech it is worth looking back on her early life. As she recounted in a 1984 interview, she was born in 1934 under British colonial rule, to a farmer’s family and lived, in her words, “like any normal African child, with a poor background, eager for education, full of question marks”[9]. Trained as a nurse and midwife, she later recalled the racial discrimination and terrible treatment of black nurses under the colonial system as an inciting reason for her early involvement in politics.[10] Joining the recently established Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in 1955, Lameck became part of the drive for nationalism and independence.
Indeed, the spread of nationalist consciousness was in large part due to thousands of women TANU activists[11], whose work ensured male leaders had to act on their most inclusive impulses and engage with women’s visions of nationalism[12]. Despite her gender, Lameck was far from representative of these key nationalist activists, who tended to be less educated, older, Muslim and from the capital Dar es Salaam. Lameck’s family on the other hand was Christian and after two years of TANU activism Lameck received a TANU scholarship to study in Oxford and the U.S.[13] Moreover, thanks to her mother, the central nationalist leader Julius K. Nyerere was a ‘family friend’ recognizant of Lameck’s efforts within the party.[14] Returning from her studies in 1960, Nyerere - now President of the independent state of Tanganyika - nominated her to Parliament.[15]
Her rare positionality no doubt facilitated her decades-spanning political career.[16] Yet, as Peeples argues, the dominance of non-elite women in the women’s movement shaped the political identity of more privileged women like Lameck.[17] She herself later attributed the relative success of the Tanzanian women’s movement compared with other African countries to its origins among “humble, simple peasant women”[18].
The independence of Tanganyika (later Tanzania after unification with Zanzibar in 1964) was marked, however, by a shift in gendered power relations. President Nyerere and the post-independence TANU bureaucracy soon came to reassert male, increasingly authoritarian, and paternalistic control over the nationalist narrative and the new state institutions.[19] This is reflected in the shifting titles used for him: Lameck’s mother, like many TANU women later interviewed by Geiger, would refer to him as ‘my child’ when sheltering the nationalist leader in her home[20], whereas she in 1965 addressed him with his preferred title of ‘father of the nation’[21] appealing to his leadership in creating a clear vision for the future.
Nyerere declared poverty, ignorance, and disease Tanzania’s three enemies[22]. The hopes, dreams, and aspirations of Tanganyikans were to become tied up in the process of economic and social development, a supposed war against a foe far more deadly than armed invaders.[23] Locating the illegitimacy of the colonial state in the territory’s underdevelopment, to be a citizen henceforth required active participation in the state’s developmental projects, self-reliance, and acceptance of responsibility for community advancement.[24]
Lameck’s vision of development
In her 1965 speech, Lameck adopted the imagery of nation-building as a war requiring sacrifice and commitment from everyone in the nation but rejected one of Nyerere’s enemies. In Lameck’s eyes poverty would mean starvation, homelessness, people who have nothing. Tanzania in contrast was rich in culture, people, animals, minerals, and agriculture. In fact, the budget of the postcolonial government amounted in 1965 to more than double that of the colonial administration with more than five times the development expenditure. Therefore, she cited two reasons for the prevailing perception of poverty. First, what was needed for development, was a more regular stream of revenue and the translation of their riches into concrete economic growth, through acquiring the expertise to “explore the minerals, exploit our resources, expand our industries, and employ many workers”[25]. The second reason was international comparison with other fast developing countries in the economic and scientific sphere. When witnessing space rockets, skyscrapers and rising living standards, Lameck demanded not to forget the undemocratic, racist, and imperialist means by which these countries had achieved said development: “from the sweat of other people”[26]. Their development should be “objective and a warning to us, reminding us of our principles”[27].
Lameck envisioned a co-constituent, mutually beneficial relationship between citizens and the state centred around socialism, self-reliance, and sacrifice. As she argued, contributing to the national budget is the responsibility of every citizen irrespective of income levels: “to tighten our belts (…) so that our country can develop as fast as we are able to make it”[28]. Practically, this revenue was needed to build more schools, roads, and hospitals. On a larger scale, it would enable the country to uphold self-reliance, build a permanent basis for socialism, revolutionise people’s standard of living by eradicating past imperialist oppression and contribute to realising Tanzanian ownership over the country’s economy, without which “our politics becomes useless, aimless, and targetless”[29].
The great responsibility towards the republic then was to lay the economic, political, and developmental foundations for people and community that conform to the needs and experiences of Tanzanians. Such foundations should not be foreign, but should rather arise from and be in harmony with the Tanzanian people’s traditions.
Customs and colonial visions of modernity
As much as she called on development to conform to certain traditions, Lameck in turn demanded that traditions needed to serve or at least not hinder development. Turning to problems arising out of customs she described several practices relating to women’s traditional position in society that she argued harmed national development and thus required state intervention.[30] Lameck criticised bride price, which lead to cattle hoarding, and child marriage, which impeded girls’ access to education and right to self-determine their spouses, as well as female excision. These examples were neatly woven into one category with the practice of body piercings judged as humiliating and reducing women’s beauty. These standards she explicitly extended to the Maasai as well, pastoralist indigenous communities inhabiting northern Tanzania. To Lameck, the Maasai were Tanzanian citizens and thus she argued it was unacceptable that “they should keep on wearing skins and being photographed by Americans”[31] and should instead change to be “just like their other fellow Tanzanians”[32].
Thus, her discussion of customs reveals an ambivalent mixture of insisting on women’s rights and equal inclusion into the nationalist vision of development, while also replicating a colonial legacy in her thinking on who gets to be seen as ‘developed’, excluding an indigenous community on the symbolic level of clothing alone. The delicate balance Lameck appealed to in the identification of a ‘Tanzanian’ way of development and growth that neither replicated harmful colonial patterns nor restrained itself by sexist local traditions would in fact prove hard to strike.
As Lameck’s contemporary Marjorie Mbilinyi documented modernization, urbanisation and growing industrialization would often erode traditions and rituals that protected women’s interests in their communities, all while patriarchal relationships persisted.[33]Furthermore, in a larger shift in the post-independence era women were transformed from key agents of the country’s independence to ‘objects’ of state development policy.[34] The speech, too, predominantly frames economic growth as an unquestioned necessity and matter of technical expertise. This can be argued to align with the broader depoliticization of women’s economic problems pursued by the state and her ministry, a strategy with harmful consequences on women’s capacity to mobilize and self-determine their problems.[35]
Conclusion
In the months and years after Lameck’s speech a number of significant events would set the course for both Tanzania’s future and her own. In September, the first Tanzanian national elections would officially begin the era of one-party-rule and Lameck would win her first electoral victory for a seat. In 1967 Nyerere announced the Arusha declaration of African Socialism and launched the ujamaa initiative of a large-scale re-organization of rural life around specially conceived villages that would leave a complicated, controversial, and significantly gendered impact on Tanzania’s development landscape.[36] Lameck continued her political career through various positions over the next decades until her death in 1993 to become a both nationally and internationally recognized politician and “an ardent voice for legislation intended to address inequalities in women’s lives”[37]. Her speech, from the very beginning of her political career, can provide both historically interesting and contemporarily relevant insights into early Tanzania’s successes and failures to break with colonial development patterns and the ongoing struggle to redefine the concept of development into one that truly enhances everyone’s lives without demanding adherence to narrow conceptions of what a better, modern developed life ought to look like. In reflecting upon her political career and the unresolved gendered inequalities in both laws and customs, Lameck concludes in a resolution to continue the struggle:
