This article re-examines the relationship between two key historiographical traditions seeking an epistemological sovereignty at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in the 1960s. The first, sometimes dubbed the “Dar school of historiography” and associated with Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere’s recruitment of Terence Ranger to build a new History department at the University, centred “African initiative” as the sine qua non of any approach to the continent that was serious about breaking with Eurocentric epistemologies and approaching African histories on their own terms. The second was “dependency theory” or “world systems theory,” for which UDSM became a centre as Dar es Salaam’s fame in global leftwing circles attracted Marxist academics like Walter Rodney, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Giovanni Arrighi. In contrast to the “Dar School,” these scholars worked at a distinctly global scale and future-oriented timeline. Comparing the epistemological approaches of these schools as different attempts at a meaningful decolonisation of knowledge, the article also re-embeds them in the material politics of the University at the time. For underneath UDSM’s two expatriate-driven “schools” was a gradual but significant decolonisation of the professoriat happening just below their scholarly radars – one in which Walter Rodney, not coincidentally, would play a major role.
