forced-villagization

The chapter analyzes the Tanzanian government's villagization campaign under Nyerere, which forcibly relocated rural populations into planned villages designed for state control and agricultural transformation. Despite initial pilot schemes and cooperative efforts, the campaign became coercive and authoritarian, imposing communal farming and monocropping through top-down planning and forced labor. This approach, rooted in a colonial mindset and emphasizing visual order and legibility, disregarded local ecological and social realities, resulting in widespread peasant resistance, alienation, decreased productivity, and significant political and financial costs.

The chapter examines the forced villagization campaigns in Tanzania and Ethiopia as emblematic cases of high-modernist social engineering driven by bureaucratic and authoritarian interests. Both campaigns prioritized quantitative metrics and centralized planning over local knowledge, resulting in coercive resettlements that disrupted agricultural productivity, social cohesion, and ultimately led to widespread failure and resistance. The analysis highlights the hubris of state planners who sought to impose rationalized, standardized villages to enhance political control and socialist modernization, but instead produced notional villages that served bureaucratic and surveillance purposes.