[DEBATE] : (Fwd) New Shivji book

[Patrick Bond]

Let the People Speak: Tanzania Down the Road to Neo-Liberalism

Issa G. Shivji

Published June 2006, ISBN 2-86978-183-0 ; 320pages

Africa: US$25.00, 12500CFA; Elsewhere: £16.95 /$32.50

"This is an extraordinary record of one country's descent into 
'neo-liberalism', which roughly translated means socialism for the rich 
and capitalism for the poor. Issa Shivji's shrewd eye concentrates on 
Tanzania, but his stories could be from almost anywhere in Africa, if 
not the world."
John Pilger

This book of 90 critical and thought-provoking essays, selected from 
over 150 written between 1990 and 2005 in three different newspapers, 
captures the richness of Shivji’s contributions as a public 
intellectual. It deals with the period when Tanzania under external 
pressures from donors and financial institutions was forced down the 
road of neo-liberalism. The local compradorial elites whose economic 
appetites had been suppressed under Nyerere’s radical nationalism now 
openly flexed muscles to get a place under the capitalist sun as 
nationalism, radical or otherwise, was abandoned, and neo-liberalism 
uncritically embraced.

The essays are on varied subjects ranging from the politics of 
multi-party, the strains and stresses of the Union with Zanzibar, the 
deep-seated extra-constitutional behaviour of the ruling elite to the 
hopes, fears and resistance of the working people. In these essays, 
contemporary Tanzanian history is recorded in sweeping journalistic 
strokes without burying the commitment of a critical public intellectual 
in turgid scholarship. As a warning on the slippery slope that 
neo-liberalism constitutes, Let the People Speak will echo in many an 
African country. Hence the salience and relevance of Shivj’s renewed 
call for the resurrection of a radical, people driven Pan-Africanism.

Issa G. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam 
where he has been teaching since 1970. He has authored over a dozen 
books and numerous articles. His books include Class Struggles in 
Tanzania (1976), The Concept of Human Rights in Africa (1989) and Not 
Yet Democracy: Reforming Land Tenure in Tanzania (1998).

ISBN: 2-86978-183-0

Introduction

Part I
Enter Multiparty: A Critical Review of the Nyalali Report

Part II
On Constitutionalism and Constitution-Making

Part III
The Union Question

Part IV
Parties, Power and Politicians: The Tycoonisation of CCM

Part V
Intellectuals in Politics

Part VI
Down the Road to Neo-Liberalism

Part VII
The Loss of Vision and the Rise of Chauvinism, Race, Religion and Ethnicity

Part VIII
State Violence and Impunity

Part IX
Freedom of Assembly, Association and Expression

Part X
Pan-Africanism or Imperialism?



ISBN 2-86978-183-0 Africa: US$25.00, 12500CFA; Elsewhere: £16.95 /$32.50



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