How did Dar es Salaam became a ‘Cold War city’ in Africa? This chapter sets out the principles which informed the basis of Julius Nyerere’s engagement with the outside world – a set of foreign policy coordinates which remained remarkably consistent. It then shows how a violent revolution in the Zanzibar archipelago pushed Tanganyika into a hasty union with the islands, while an army mutiny in Dar es Salaam exposed the fragility of Nyerere’s government. A series of foreign policy crises with major Western states followed. Meanwhile, Tanzania reached out to the socialist world and developed close connections with China. By the mid-1960s, Dar es Salaam had attracted the attention of the Cold War world. The remainder of the chapter then demonstrates how a ‘Cold War political culture’ became inscribed into Dar es Salaam’s public sphere and concrete spaces. Propaganda, rumour, and espionage were major preoccupations of the Tanzanian government.

Chapter 3 examines the Brutus as an intervention in contemporary politics. It begins by revisiting the preface but focuses on its discussion of the contemporary civic crisis and the immediate history of the civil war (1–25). In both the preface and the digression on Julius Caesar (254–57) Cicero presents an alternative civic vision as a response to the crisis. The chapter concludes by considering the portrayal of the younger generation of orators: Curio (filius), Caelius, Publius Crassus, and Marcellus. The last figure merits special attention because Cicero’s oratorical canon includes only two living figures: Marcellus and Caesar. Marcellus is accorded a prominent role as part of Cicero’s attempt to offer a coherent vision of the republic, one based on the restoration of the senatorial elite and the reinstatement of the traditional institutions of government.

Chapter 2 focuses on the dialogue’s intellectual filiations. It begins by examining the preface’s (1–25) insistence on remaining silent about the civic crisis even as the interlocutors' exchange of written texts incessantly circles back to the accomplishments and struggles of the Roman state. Atticus’ Liber Annalis and Brutus’ de Virtute inspired the Brutus, but to what extent and to what purpose remains initially unclear. In aligning their texts with de Republica and the Brutus, Cicero creates a complex web of learned exchange in the service of the republic. The chapter then considers other potential intellectual predecessors: Varro’s writings on literature, the history of the dialogue genre, and Cicero’s own works. The Brutus draws together several intellectual currents and promises significant innovations in how to document and conceptualize the literary past.

Chapter 5 takes up the work’s beginnings: why did Cicero choose Marcus Cornelius Cethegus as the first Roman orator? Appius Claudius Caecus made much more sense, and Cicero’s reasons for excluding Caecus from his canon tellingly reveal his literary-historical principles. The literary history presented ultimately justifies his own role as a literary historian and confirms his prejudices about the past, present, and future of oratory. His manicuring of the past emerges prominently in the perplexing “double history” of Greek oratory (26–51), which is a methodological template for Roman oratorical history, and in Ennius’ special place as a literary historian (57–9).

Chapter 1 begins with the “Ciceropaideia” (301–29), the account of Cicero’s education and training. It begins with the end of the Brutus in order to provide a sense of what the dialogue has been building up to. Cicero’s concluding discussion of himself reveals and brings together several assumptions, problems, and techniques of presentation that are crucial to the earlier parts of the dialogue. In the Ciceropaideia he carefully shapes biographical and historical details into a tandem narrative, intertwining his ascent with the decline of Hortensius. The account suggestively documents Cicero’s development of a moderate “Rhodian” style and implicitly undermines his Atticist detractors.

The Introduction outlines crucial intellectual contexts and frameworks for thinking about how Cicero's Brutus is a crucial intervention in the the civic crisis and the writing of literary history. It also surveys the scholarship to date and examines how Cicero's project reflects general trends in academic inquiry and civic government.

The rivalry between the two states of divided Germany played out on a global scale across the Third World. The chain of upheavals in East Africa in 1964-65 led to Dar es Salaam becoming the first African capital south of the Sahara in which the German Democratic Republic maintained a diplomatic mission. This turned the city into a propaganda battlefield. East Berlin strove for full recognition from Tanzania, while Bonn tried to prevent such a development from coming to pass. In the face of this rivalry, Julius Nyerere’s government sought to pursue a non-aligned foreign policy and broker aid agreements to further its socialist project. Adopting a triangular approach, this chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s relationship with the two German states turned on developments in Central Europe, especially West Germany’s Ostpolitik. It reveals the challenges of upholding non-alignment in a Cold War world which did not revolve around simple binaries and was complicated by politics ‘on the ground’ in Dar es Salaam.

This chapter explores the debates about the future of the Tanzanian state after independence, which culminated in the Arusha Declaration of 1967. It sets out the contours of elite-level conversations about development in the 1960s, as Tanzania groped for a path forwards that would translate independence into meaningful socio-economic progress. After showing how Julius Nyerere’s decision to embark on a radical programme of socialist reform was motivated by local unrest and the fate of postcolonial regimes elsewhere in Africa, it then revisits the little-understood politics of the Arusha Declaration and its fallout. Offering an alternative dimension to readings of Arusha as a stimulant for national unity, the chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s socialist revolution created fissures among the political elite. In particular, it pushed Oscar Kambona, a prominent politician, into exile in Britain. The Arusha Declaration represented a critical turning point in Tanzania’s postcolonial history that narrowed space for dissent, while also sowing the seeds for future challenges to the TANU party-state.

By the mid-1970s, much of the wind had gone out of the sails of Tanzania’s socialist project. Economic crisis, political authoritarianism, and the collapse of the Portuguese empire meant that Dar es Salaam ceased to be a major centre of anticolonial revolution in Africa. This concluding chapter briefly traces this demise and then sets out the book’s major findings and their implications. It finishes with a short reflection on the legacy of Dar es Salaam’s revolutionary past for Tanzania today.