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Paper short abstract:

This paper is located in the growing field of African post-socialism studies. By drawing on ethnographic research in Tanzania, it argues for a post-socialist lens to better understand the everyday lives in formerly African socialist countries.

Paper long abstract:

African post-socialism has long been a neglected topic, both in academia and the media. Instead, the discourse after the demise of socialist projects and eras on the African continent focused on neo-liberal transformations, democracy building, and the emergence of a civil society (Pitcher/Askew 2006). This erasure of African post-socialism is a result of the predominant frame of post-colonialism in African contexts and a discourse which is mainly dictated by scholars and development agents from the Global North.

Over the past years the field of African post-socialism is slowly growing and several accounts emerged which explore the continuities of African socialisms (Eaton 2006; Campbell 2010; Sumich 2021). Still, despite these important accounts African post-socialism remains a marginalized topic in African studies and is often treated as more of an afterthought.

Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic research in Tanzania, this paper argues that a post-socialist lens allows for a more comprehensive understanding of African everyday lives, the continuities of the past, and ideas of the future. By exploring the daily encounters between state agents and citizens in a public hospital and social welfare office, it shows how ideas stemming from the country's socialist past continue to shape the present state-citizen relationship. The analysis of people's expectations, ideas, and images of what 'the state' is and, more importantly, how it is supposed to care for its citizens against the backdrop of the country's past thereby offers important insights into Tanzania's unique history as one of the most famous examples of African socialism.