Issa Shivji's "Silent Class Struggle" and Decolonization in Tanzania: Class Struggle or Class Struggle for Classes?

This article focuses on the history of the heated debate that erupted in the early 1970s as a result of the publication of the article "The Silent Class Struggle" by contemporary Tanzanian scholar Issa Shivji, written while he was still a student and first published in the activist journal Cheche. By reconstructing the event and intellectual context of the article's writing, the author proposes to interpret the article not only as a research text, but also as a political statement by an engaged scholar involved in the global political project of decolonization. By demonstrating connections between the political vocabulary of the Ujamaa era, class concepts emerging in Dar es Salaam's popular urban culture, and debates on the campus of the University of Dar es Salaam, the author shows the innovations in political language and imagination that the article's publication introduced to the public debates around Tanzania's global and national politics in the 1970s.