Independent consultant and blogger in Dar es Salaam
As I said, I got to see Prof Abdulrazak Gurnah from a distance as I attended the rather gorgeous 2024 Tuzo Ya Taifa Ya Mwalimu Nyerere Ya Uandishi Bunifu. I am always seduced by a good session where Africans celebrate themselves — we just party so well.
As expected at such a cultural event, there were the three Big Ones: Food, song and dance. There were also stories and poetry, even sessions of call-and-response wherein the collective memories of Tanzanians of a certain age were stimulated to remember the sayings of yore. Anthems were sung, jokes were made, we relaxed and enjoyed ourselves.
If languages had a fragrance, Kiswahili fasaha spoken in one of the Swahili accents would rival the night-blooming jasmine for beauty and intoxication. I was indeed intoxicated… and the part of me that is always tracking the Performance of Statehood remained sober and crisp and a touch cynical.
I revelled in our Tanzanian moment all the more because it is all entirely made up. How else would the room contain such a vast diversity of people all celebrating this one tongue whose entire existence is owed to the mingling of cultures?
People take offence when social constructivists like me state plainly that this is all an invention. The world economic order, the world political order? Invented. The State of Tanzania within the physically invisible boundaries it occupies? Totally a human creation. The rules and regulations that we use to govern ourselves, the languages we speak, the culture: All of these a beautiful emergence from the power of Homo Sapien’s capacity to make real that which we imagine. It is our most formidable power, the power to create. And we love what we create.
And so, the Tanzanian project is the one I am attached to. I want to see it advance in the best way possible for the thriving of its club members, primarily, and perhaps even humanity as a general concept. But for that to happen I need some freedom. We need some freedom. Imagination, humans, and the things they craft do not do well in captivity. When one considers this reality, then the difference between thinking of oneself and acting like a subject as opposed to a citizen really stands out. The one who has agency in this world we have crafted. The other does not.
I don’t think it is an obvious choice nor a comfortable one to make. The agency is exhausting. It comes with decisions and responsibilities. It charges us with duties, including those of defending the freedoms that guarantee our agency. This explains so much of our love of paternalism, the comforting feeling of thinking of oneself as a child in the safekeeping of the state. This is, sadly, a misreading of the situation. After all, Tanzania remains stubbornly a Republic and so we must dream it with lucidity as citizens as opposed to the helpless unconsciousness of subjects.
Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report; Email [email protected]
