Michael Jennings

'Surrogates of the State' explores the delicate relationship between development NGOs and the states they work in using the exhaustive and illuminating case study of Tanzania in the 1960s and 70s. During that time Tanzania instituted the rural socialist Ujamaa program, resulting in the forced resettlement of 6 million people to villages, transforming the map of the country. Rather than questioning this policy, NGOs working in the area (as typified by Oxfam) became surrogates of the state, helping to carry out the program.

the book argues that the NGO community was seduced by its own interpretations of what Ujamaa represented, and was consequently blinded to the dark realities of resettlement. Bound by ideological chains of their own forging, organizations that in other contexts have criticized over-mighty states and the use of overt force, NGOs committed themselves fully to Tanzania and its development policy. Through this study, the book uncovers not just the story of development in Tanzania in this critical period, but the history of the NGO itself. And in doing so, raises questions about the future direction of this institution which has become so prominent in international development.

Since the 1990s, civil society has been a significant locus of concern in development studies, but this concern has been noticeable for its neglect of religion and faith and their role in international development. This collection uses the analytical lens of faith-based organizations (FBOs) to redress this gap.

Development policymakers, practitioners and academics have little understanding of FBOs, seeing them as exclusive and chauvinistic organizations. Moreover, the secularism of the North, with its traditional separation between church and state, has underpinned development policy and practice of North America and Western Europe. Focusing on Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and examining the work of Christian, Islamic and Hindu organizations, this book argues that FBOs are, in fact, important stakeholders in the development enterprise. FBOs are crucial in managing international aid, they provide services including health and education, they advocate and support human rights, and they uphold ideals of democratic governance. Arguing that faith communities will be central to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, this study overturns previous perceptions of the role of religion and its impact on civil society.

NGOs are currently at a crossroads. They have grown in scale and remit and have been given a role by states and official aid organizations that fundametally challenge many of the assumptions that accompanied their creation. There is a general, albeit vague, feeling that NGOs are no longer what they used to be. Yet aside from the obvious differences in scale of activity and resources, there is little understanding of the processes that have led NGOs to be the types of organization that they are today. This book challenges the static picture of the NGO industry, to inform the debate on the "relief-to-development continuum", and to provide an historical account of key issues facing NGOs today. Each chapter, a case study based on extensive fieldwork, seeks to identify and analyze the roots of problems, past and present, which have led to the current dilemma facing charitable organizations.

This paper re-examines missionary medicine in Tanganyika, considering its relationship with the colonial state, the impulses that led it to evolve in the way that it did, and the nature of the medical services it offered. The paper suggests that, contrary to traditional depictions, missionary medicine was not entirely curative in focus, small in scale, nor inappropriate to the health needs of the communities in which it was based. Rather, missionary medicine should be considered as a vital aspect of early colonial health services, serving those excluded by the colonial state. Missionary medicine before 1945 was fragmented, small-scale, lacking in resources and overstretched. Its services could not necessarily compete in quality with the best of the state hospitals. But it succeeded, within the local context, in providing a network of health services that stretched into the rural society, and ensured that, where there was a mission hospital, there was an option for the local people t...

This paper explores the link between nationalism, development and national consciousness. In Tanzania, post-independence nation-building resulted in the establishment of a national consciousness sufficiently versatile to balance and contain most of the competing ideas about what it means to be part of the Tanzanian nation. By giving insight into how this has variably been related to a discourse on development and the responsibilities of the Tanzanian citizen, the paper argues for a convivial reading of national consciousness that recognises that nationalism remains a process of collective bargaining, with official versions constantly challenged, re-formulated and re-emerging in new forms.

This article explores development policy in colonial Tanganyika in the late 1940s and 1950s. It argues that the increased interventionism of this period reflected not just a desire by colonial authorities to regulate the actions and behaviour of Tanganyikans, but sought to create new, ‘‘modern’’ identities. In regarding ‘‘the African’’ as the key challenge facing development planners, increasingly coercive measures were justified to enforce change that would ultimately benefit those communities being targeted. Development in Tanganyika in the 1940s and 1950s was at heart an attempt to create a new form of society, a new identity, forged by the state, and oriented towards the vision of that state. It explores the extent to which development processes in Tanganyika in this period, and more generally, function as a ‘‘coercive utopia’’.

This paper re-examines missionary medicine in Tanganyika, considering its relationship with the colonial state, the impulses that led it to evolve in the way that it did, and the nature of the medical services it offered. The paper suggests that, contrary to traditional depictions, missionary medicine was not entirely curative in focus, small in scale, nor inappropriate to the health needs of the communities in which it was based. Rather, missionary medicine should be considered as a vital aspect of early colonial health services, serving those excluded by the colonial state. Missionary medicine before 1945 was fragmented, small-scale, lacking in resources and overstretched. Its services could not necessarily compete in quality with the best of the state hospitals. But it succeeded, within the local context, in providing a network of health services that stretched into the rural society, and ensured that, where there was a mission hospital, there was an option for the local people to make western biomedicine a choice for healing.

African healing systems have always been pluralistic in form and structure, capable of absorbing new traditions and practices. The spread of Chinese medicine in Tanzania over the past decade is a testament to the flexibility of pluralistic healing systems, as well as evidence of south–south processes of globalisation that are often ignored by the literature on globalisation. This article suggests, through a study of a Chinese medical clinic in Dar es Salaam, that its popularity highlights the strengths of local cultures despite increasing globalising forces, and that any consideration of globalisation must include south–south (or East–south) dynamics as well as the customary focus on the north–south track. The article also suggests that whilst the absorption of new traditions of healing speaks to the strength of the local, it also functions as an indication of the failure of alternative healing systems to address key current medical needs, and as such represents a crisis in health, as much as strength, in the healing sector.

The early independence period in Tanzania was not simply an ante-chamber to the post-Arusha Declaration period of Ujamaa. The state undertook to incorporate, for the first time, the people of Tanzania in the formal development planning structures in an attempt to marry national developmental objectives to local needs. Self-help, or ‘nation building ’ as it was also known, was an attempt to bring consensus and dialogue to the planning process. The scale of self-help activity unleashed by its formal adoption as part of rural development policy caught the government by surprise, however, and raised fears over the level of control that local government in particular was able to exert over popular efforts in development. The gradual emergence of statism in Tanzania, in place by the end of the decade, was in large part the response of a panicking state, fearing an imminent crisis in its power to direct development policy, and maintain command over scarce resources.

This article examines how Oxfam came to forge an exceptionally close relationship with the Tanzanian state during the 1960s and 1970s. Oxfam as an organisation that sought in this period to build and strengthen grassroots participation in development planning and implementation, participated in a development programme in Tanzania that, during the 1970s, actually withdrew power from the peasantry. The government shifted ever more towards an authoritarian position, and forced the relocation of upwards of six million people into newly established villages. Yet Oxfam seemingly was blind to the realities of what was going on, maintaining throughout this period that the development programme was oriented towards the creation of communal production and grassroots democracy - Oxfam's definition of Ujamaa. The article argues that Oxfam came to this position through its involvement in a rural development project in southern Tanzania in the 1960s. The Ruvuma Development Association became, for Oxfam, its touchstone for interpreting and defining what Ujamaa meant. Having erected a prism through which to understand Tanzanian development, Oxfam failed to perceive the growing divergence between the state and itself in objectives and strategy in the implementation of a rural development strategy.

From the first moment of the UMCA's incursion into the African interior, the greatest challenged it faced was the problem of mortality and morbidity. Between 1860 and 1918, over one-third of the mission staff were lost to death, or invalided out due to ill-health. This article tracks the institutional response to the problems of death and disease, and seeks to explain why, from the mid-1890s, there was a notable downward shift, both in the numbers of missionaries dying, and in the numbers forced to retire through sickness. For the first 35 years of the UMCA's existence, it paid little attention to establishing and enforcing a disease-management strategy. Health issues were left to the individual missionaries, and medical policy (in as much as the UMCA can be said to have had a 'policy'before the mid-1890s) was driven by the periphery. A mortality crisis in the 1890s refocused the attention of the Mission authorities on the need to establish more rigorous procedures for overcoming the impact of disease. Control over medical policy was centralised, and structures established for the better enunciation and enforcement of this policy. This institutional response ensured an improvement in the health environment of the missionaries, and consequent reductions in the impact of disease upon the UMCA