African socialism in Tanzania: Lessons of a community development strategy for rural transformation in developing countries

Abstract

In a bid to formulate an appropriate development strategy to curb the quagmire of the underdevelopment crisis of the continent, African leaders adopted various policy options to extricate her economies from the dominance of colonial hegemony. In Tanzania, the philosophy of African socialism was initiated at post-colonial independence to consolidate not only the true spirit of African brother-hood but also to achieve self-reliance which is the basic principle of community development. This paper examined the practices of African socialism as a nexus toward the actualization of self-reliance and rural development. It adopted the exploratory research and relied on the conceptual framework methodology to establish the relationship between the philosophy of African socialism and community development. This was done with a view to unravel the lessons that could be drawn by any society that desired to achieve community development under the context of the African experience.