George Roberts's Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–1974 provides a well-researched and engagingly written account of Dar es Salaam's status as what he calls a ‘Cold War city’ (27) during Tanzania's ujamaa era. It joins a raft of recent scholarship composing new histories of the city's long-famous place in the worlds of nonalignment, Third World socialism, left-wing activism, and Southern African liberation.Footnote ¹ An international historian, Roberts's unique contribution to this wave of work is his attunement to the complexities of how the Cold War played out across the city's politics and inflected the government's state-making. He achieves this without neglecting Tanzanian political actors. Indeed, more than many international historians with similar roots in mostly globally northern archives, Roberts pays detailed, nuanced attention to the agential power of his cast of characters, African and otherwise — even if his focus is on a terrain of ‘high-politics in the capital’ (10). He explores this across seven chapters that work their way through some of the already canonical events and themes in early postcolonial Tanzanian history — the Zanzibari revolution, the 1964 army mutiny, the Arusha Declaration, Southern African liberation movement politics, youth protest, the ruling Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) party's 1971 Mwongozo ‘Guidelines’Footnote ² — and adds new ones like East-West German rivalry for Tanzanian ally-ship and the operation of the press.

The Cold War frame generates both the book's strengths and limitations. Roberts succeeds in restoring Dar es Salaam to its rightful place as a city important to any account of the global Cold War. He resists easy assumptions of all-powerful superpowers, ideological binaries, and unidirectional flows of influence from American and Soviet patrons to pliant Third World client states. The book convincingly demonstrates that as much as the US, USSR, and their respective blocs saw Tanzania as a significant prize in their struggle for gaining allies among new nations throwing off the yoke of European empires, neither superpower was able to determine how the battle for influence would play out on the ground there, because a range of Tanzanian and other African actors — ‘a mobile cast of politicians, intellectuals, and other activists who possessed the means to obtain an air ticket’ (6) — had their own agendas and the tools to pursue them. This cast included those like the more technocratic economic advisers retained by Nyerere in the wake of the Arusha Declaration to assure the West that Tanzania was not pursuing socialism, to the party bureaucrats dedicated to mass mobilization that sometimes battled them. Even if he somewhat questionably opposes ‘sound economic thinking’ to ‘political mobilization’ in describing such battles (71), Roberts is at his best when tracking ‘the creative state-making endeavors of this postcolonial political elite’ as they ‘brokered relationships inside and outside of the country, developing ideological visions of the future, and securing new-found nodes of power through patronage relationships’ (13). Even within the new ‘global turn’ in Cold War historiography, this kind of attention to the details of decision-making in a Third World site is rare and highly important.Footnote ³

Yet if Roberts's book powerfully intervenes in Cold War scholarship, the Cold War frame generates somewhat different effects when viewed within Tanzanian and African historiography. Roberts claims the book works in the ‘opposite direction’ to most accounts of postcolonial Tanzanian statehood, arguing that it turns ‘away from the countryside and grassroots experiences of socialism and towards the capital and governing elite’ (11). In fact, the book builds upon a considerable body of scholarship on Dar es Salaam, including on the politics of urban life and the city's status as a mecca for activists (work that populates Roberts's footnotes). Indeed, work on Dar es Salaam has been so prevalent that the opposite charge has sometimes been made: that in a state even more focused on the rural than much of Africa, academic writing on Tanzania has had a rather urban bias.Footnote ⁴

Perhaps even more importantly, during the 1960s the city's radicalism had multidirectional influences, including many homegrown ones that lay outside or exceeded formal politics and call into question whether ‘state-making’ truly drove what was ‘revolutionary’ about Tanzania at the time. Labelling Dar es Salaam a ‘Cold War city’ and making a top-down investigation of formal politics the ground for the study is too narrow a lens to capture the city's radicalism. Indeed, some of the key phenomena Roberts covers — the Zanzibari uprising, the army mutiny, youth protest, and struggles within liberation movements like the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) — were driven by redistributionist notions of justice and the proper conduct of authority that the domain of high international politics does not truly capture. Although Roberts correctly notes that broad categories of left and right did not always apply in Tanzania, in his analysis it is other modes legible within state-driven formal politics (often what he calls President Nyerere's ‘pragmatism’) that fill the gap. Treating the government's navigation of the Cold War as the signal playing field of Tanzania's radicalism underemphasizes, for instance, the degree to which Dar es Salaam's homegrown Marxist left — influenced by international thinkers who were critical of existing state socialism — saw the country's leadership as a ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’ whose ‘so-called “African socialism”’ was suspect.Footnote ⁵ Likewise, arguing that ‘Tanzanian youth were Third World nationalists who mobilized themselves through the structures of the ruling party’ (196) minimizes the deep sense of grievance that many of Dar es Salaam's young had with their elders in this early postcolonial moment, as well as the complicated relationship that youth had to the state. Declaring one's willingness to ‘defend’ the state or performative praise of it were just as often a means of making vigorous claims on the government and holding the state to its duties to provide, rather than simply nationalistic support of it. Redistributionist demands cast in vernacular terms similarly marked many of the struggles foregrounding Africanization — forms of mobilization to which Roberts sometimes refers as ‘seeking political solutions to economic problems’ (73) — in a way that is occluded by a narrative centering the Cold War players and those brokering with them.

To query how a Cold War framing, no matter how nuanced, risks drawing our attention away from other deeply-rooted moral economies that shaped the politics of street and state in Dar es Salaam is not to detract from the importance of Roberts's contribution to new international histories of the Cold War and Tanzanian statehood. Rather, it is to ask a question that needs to be asked of all our global histories: how do we construct accounts that not only connect Africa to, and foreground Africa within, global historical patterns, but which also center distinctive African political cultures and their capacity to reshape our global frames and categories?