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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the relationship between the Vietnam War and Tanzanian socialism. It demonstrates that while the government used youth protest against the war to pursue its nation-building efforts, it was also concerned about the effects of radical polemics on its non-aligned foreign policy.

Paper long abstract:

In the Western experience of the 'long 1968', protest against the Vietnam War often formed a focal point for a broader countercultural movement which presented the conflict in Indochina as the apotheosis of neo-imperialism and the abuse of state power. But in Tanzania, the resolute anticolonial foreign policy adopted by the government of Julius Nyerere meant that the energies of street protest and press invective against the American-led war in Vietnam were channelled into state-building efforts. While acknowledging that the echo of the 'Bandung Moment' influenced Tanzanian responses to the Vietnam War, this paper argues that focusing on transnational Afro-Asian solidarities obscures the government's use of anti-imperial rhetoric to bolster its own claims to power and suppress opposition under the idea of 'vigilance' against neo-colonial threats. Yet this involved a difficult balancing act. While student leaders and newspaper polemicists were at times encouraged to criticise the United States, the government was conscious that such rhetoric might undermine its carefully constructed, non-aligned foreign policy, especially given Western commentators and diplomats already regarded Tanzania as being under Chinese influence. Youth wing leaders and newspaper editors were therefore issued both private and public warnings about the need for self-restraint in their language of protest. This study of Tanzania's engagement with the Vietnam War therefore serves as a window onto the relationships between international diplomacy, grassroots politics, and the mechanics of socialist state-making in post-colonial Africa. In the process, it raises critical questions about historians' use of the labels 'national' and 'transnational'.