Chapter 3 introduces Senegal’s decentralization reforms in depth, specifying the transfer of authority over basic social services to the local state in 1996. Because it is possible that the very process of delimiting decentralized units allowed more coherent communities to select into shared administrative divisions, I have to take into account the possibility that institutional congruence was not simply an outcome of the precolonial past, but available to any group able to influence boundary construction. Accordingly, the chapter details the politics of subnational boundary creation from the colonial onward. Employing archival and interview data, I demonstrate that decentralization and boundary delimitation were largely top-down processes, suggesting that the emergence of institutional congruence was not driven by endogenous, bottom-up demand.

The final chapter concludes by summarizing the book’s core argument before offering reflections on the implications my findings hold for ongoing decentralization reforms and the study of historical legacies.

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.

What was the relationship between a revolutionary African state and the postcolonial media? This chapter analyses the evolution of the press in Dar es Salaam after independence. By the mid-1970s, Tanzania had just two national daily newspapers, one of which was owned by the party, the other by the state. But this was not the outcome of a teleological slide from an independent to a muzzled media, as liberal Cold War-era conceptions of the ‘freedom of the press’ would have it. This chapter shows how the press became a contested site of socialist politics in Dar es Salaam’s internationalised media world. Stakeholders debated questions of who should own newspapers, who should work for them, and what they should write in them. Even when the government nationalised the country’s only independent English-language newspaper, it placed it under the control of a radical, foreign editor and emphasised the need for it to serve as a critical voice. However, when this editorial independence transgressed Tanzania’s foreign policy, the state moved to bring the press under closer control, justified by Third World trends towards ‘development media’.

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 2 introduces the core antecedent condition under study: Senegal’s precolonial political geography. The chapter delineates the differences between areas that were home to precolonial states and those that lacked centralized political structures prior to colonization before introducing my strategy for measuring the territorial extent of Senegal’s precolonial kingdoms. The chapter then explains why these states left enduring legacies despite French colonial ambitions, migration induced by the introduction of a cash crop economy, and the religious conversion, notably the rise of Sufi Islamic practice by identifying the mechanisms of persistence: the enduring nature of village-based social hierarchies that have proven remarkably adaptable to these challenges.

In the final empirical chapter, I push beyond Senegal to look broadly across West Africa to assess the generalizability of my findings. Senegal is not the only West African state to display remarkable subnational variation in exposure to precolonial statehood nor to have recently undertaken decentralization reforms. I extend my coding of precolonial kingdoms to the subregion and match it to data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Afrobarometer public opinion surveys to test the theory's generalizability. I find that areas of West Africa that were exposed to precolonial states have seen bigger gains in locally delivered public goods and that Afrobarometer respondents in these areas are more positive about their local governments and democratic practice than their counterparts in historically acephalous zones. While my theory is built around the specific legacies of precolonial statehood, the chapter's second half move beyond Africa to show the broader analytic leverage of the theory’s twin mechanisms of shared social identification and social network ties for Comparative Politics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of scope conditions for the argument.

This chapter deploys model-testing case studies to explore the theoretical mechanisms laid out in Chapter 1. I follow a "typical" or on-lier case selection strategy from the statistical analysis by selecting cases that are similar in as many respects as possible apart from their exposure to a precolonial polity. By pairing oral histories, in-depth interviews, and network analysis of local elite social ties, I trace how the presence of a shared social identity and dense networks shape redistributive preferences in a "typical" case of institutional congruence, while their absence generates more biased forms of redistribution elsewhere. A third case utilizes the example of a precolonial kingdom that collapsed prior to French colonization leading to the out-migration of the kingdom's population. This reinforces the necessity of the theory's mechanism of persistence – durable rural social hierarchies – to carry precolonial legacies into the calculus of local elites today.

Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? This book offers a novel answer to this question by looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa: local actors are better able to cooperate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms of appropriate comportment in the public sphere demarcated by group boundaries. In this introductory chapter, I lay out the main contours of my theory as well as the implications that the argument holds for key debates in Comparative Politics, including the use of narratives as a lens into actors’ political strategies, the social identities we prioritize in our research, prospects for state-building in sub-Saharan Africa, and our understanding of how historical legacies shape contemporary development outcomes.