The scholarly literature on sentencing reform has largely overlooked the African continent. The paucity of legal scholarship is particularly striking with respect to Tanzania, one of Africa's largest and most populous countries. This article explores the first significant sentencing reform in Tanzania's history. In 2020, the Tanzanian judiciary issued a comprehensive set of sentencing guidelines for courts to follow. Until this point, sentencing was a highly discretionary stage of the criminal process, and the Tanzanian penal code offered very little guidance with respect to the exercise of that discretion. After providing a brief summary of the new sentencing regime, we explore the innovative guidance contained in the reforms. In the conclusion we discuss the extent to which the Tanzanian reforms reflect core African values of Ubuntu, or more specifically in the case of Tanzania, Ujamaa, the philosophy popularized by Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyerere.

In the early 1960s, three pilot agricultural and settlement schemes were set up along the shores of Lake Victoria in the north-western region of Tanzania with the involvement of Israeli development agency Agridev. One of these sites was Mbarika, where the experimental project ran for three years and had mixed results before being discontinued by the young Tanzanian government. This article explores the story of that scheme and its long-term legacies some 50 years on. Unpacking the representational and material ruinations that outlived the project's official timeline, we examine the memories and rumours that continue to haunt the site to this day and their entanglement with successive development experiences and shifting political ideologies. Through interviews, ethnographic observations and archival research, we shed light on the complex, deeply ambiguous legacies and ‘afterlives’ of a development intervention set between expectations of modernity and a sense of exclusion.

Joel Barkan’s interest in Kenya as a high school student inspired a lifetime’s commitment to the country and wider East African region, reflected in his three edited volumes comparing political, economic, and policy developments in Kenya and Tanzania, his work as USAID’s Regional Democracy and Governance Advisor in the early 1990s, and his continuing engagement with the country’s political development through his work at CSIS and his role as founder and chair of the Kenya Working Group, the Washington, D.C.–based lobbying group.

The Anglican Church in Tanzania emerged from the work of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) and the Australian Church Missionary Society (CMSA). The Anglican missions had goals which stood against colonialism and supported the victory of nationalism. Using archives and interviews as sources, this article considers the roles and reaction of the Anglican missions in the struggle for political independence in Tanganyika and Zanzibar, the effects of independence on the missions and the Church more broadly, and the responses of the missions to ujamaa in Tanzania.

Academic discussions of development continue to grow, yet critical engagements with communities affected by development interventions remain limited. Drawing from life history interviews conducted in southern Tanzania, this article details the varied experiences of development interventions among older people and how these affect broader understandings of progress. Many juxtapose their negative views of ujamaa villagization with more positive recollections of previous interventions (especially the Groundnut Scheme), which are infused with what is described here as “development nostalgia.” Perceptions of the past clearly inform the social, political, and economic aspirations forwarded today, with the richness of the constructed narratives adding further nuance to existing depictions of Tanzanian historiography.

Since the 2000s, Tanzania has witnessed the return in the public sphere of a reconfigured version of Ujamaa as a set of moral principles embodied in the figure of the first president of Tanzania, Julius Kambarage Nyerere. The persisting traces of Nyerere and Ujamaa are not so evident in actual political practices or economic policies, but rather in collective debates about politics and morality—in short, in contemporary imaginaries of the nation. Contributing to a long-standing discussion of the moral stature of Tanzania’s “father of the nation,” the article explores how and why a shared historical memory of Nyerere is being built or contested to define, mediate, and construct Tanzanian conceptions of morality, belonging, and citizenship in the polis today.