Jonathan Jackson’s new book has its virtues. I discovered that, in my book on Tanzania’s first years of independence, I almost certainly misidentified a reference to Sonjo village made by a supercilious British civil servant in the Commonwealth Relations Office. Jackson is correct that the comment referred presciently to a disappointing pre-independence settlement scheme initiated by the Dar es Salaam branch of the independence party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), intended to grow rice in the Kilombero Valley (196). While I might otherwise be pleased that the author overlooked my mistake, it is emblematic of Jackson’s thin engagement with the literatures at stake here, and an analytical approach that is the opposite of “thick description.”
His initial thought, to constitute a theory of “imagined futures” around the repeatedly deferred ambitions for development of a hard-to-reach region of Tanzania, is a promising one. But it emerges as more of a rhetorical ploy, derivative of Benedict Anderson’s famous title, that never quite bears the analytical fruit that might comment usefully on the ways in which colonial imaginaries shaped postcolonial nationalism. “Imagined futures” works as a framing device here, but it may have been more useful to critically engage the still ambiguous “worldmaking” concept Adom Getachew articulated, and that Emmanuel Akyeampong has deployed in his survey of postcolonial Africa. Or, more philosophically, it could leverage Geoffrey Hawthorn’s “plausible worlds” theory which may have critiqued the field of history itself.
To the extent that Jackson does bring in relevant literature, it is just in passing, and little comes of it. In regard to the dismissive comment on the TANU settlement scheme by the British civil servant, the incident has everything to do with colonial and postcolonial ambitions to rid Dar es Salaam of rural migrants and unemployed young men by settling them, in a paternalist manner, in far-flung locations in the countryside where they might be taught to lead productive lives. This has been documented in some detail by Andrew Burton in particular, but also James Brennan, Thomas Burgess, Michael Jennings, and James Giblin who are all cited earlier in the chapter, or at least their articles, but only to say that this particular chapter of the book “intersects with … well developed sub-fields of youth and modernity” (188). If it intersects, then why not comment usefully upon this very relevant scholarship? This is not to pick nits about this particular case. This is a problem across the entire text.
At the comical extreme is the unexpected appearance of the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who was in Dar es Salaam in 1938 as an employee of Shell Oil, saying “District officers were a breed I admired” (88). An entire book on colonial production relations with the metropole together with bourgeois tastes and pleasures might be leveraged upon this interlude. Yet Roald Dahl comes and goes with hardly a howdy-do.
And indeed the core problem with Jackson’s study is that, despite a few nods to critical literature on development deriving from James Scott and James Ferguson’s concepts of “developmentalism” (fluently elaborated in the Tanzanian context by Leander Schneider), the study takes form within the discourse of colonial development itself. In his introduction, reinforced in his conclusion, Jackson states the rationale for the study: “This historical perspective encourages more effective planning and implementation as lessons are learned from past experiences” (8). By that token, this might have been a special issue of the colonial British Journal of African Administration, as it is articulated to contribute so completely to the very discourse it proposes to critique.
Lacking a critical argument, the analysis that remains is structured around four themes that link to the broader literature where more probing arguments might be found: agricultural intensification, ecology control, infrastructure, and settlement schemes. The author dutifully conducted nearly fifty interviews, and some of that material appears in the latter chapters. Rich potential for analysis arises in a patriotic song remembered and recited by one interviewee, but as with the Roald Dahl quote, it goes largely unanalyzed, the author stating only that the songs “are imbued with the same spirit that urged Sonjo’s settlers on” (192–93). Probing that “spirit” in relation to the broader themes of the monograph and the cited literature seems in order here.
The thematic point of reference for this is really Allen and Barbara Isaacman’s award-winning Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development (Ohio University Press, 2013). Although Jackson’s study is about the visions of such imperial developments notable for their absence of implementation in Kilombero, the broad themes and methods here are shared, and Jackson’s work might bring a critical take precisely because of Kilombero’s underdevelopment. Yet, although it is cited in the bibliography, I can’t find reference to it in the text, let alone an engaged discussion of it. Without an original argument that comments in substantive ways upon this literature, Visions for an African Valley winds up being little more than a useful guide to the colonial archival record.
