| This thesis is about the times of mageuzi, a popular term in Tanzania---meaning change, alteration and turn around---that people have coined with the implementation of the structural adjustment and democratization package. It focuses on the transformations and struggles over development, access and distribution of resources, and the formation and defining of rights of social groups that have taken place in the era of market liberalization. The overarching question is how the moral order of the "new society" of mageuzi is re-defined in the process of its politico-economic restructuring.;The thesis analyzes mageuzi from a historical perspective in two mutually constitutive ways. First, I show how the era of liberalization (mageuzi) has been shaped by events and processes that took place under the British Mandate and socialist Tanzania. Second, I examine how Tanzanians' interpretations of mageuzi (the present) are shaped by their experiences and understandings of the Mandate and uhuru (the past). At the same time, I demonstrate how Tanzanians' constructions of the past under the Mandate and uhuru are informed by the social reality they are living under mageuzi. The analysis centers on how simultaneous temporalities constitute and inform the present for different social agents.;The thesis is structured around the making and reproduction of three spaces, namely Tanzania, the sisal industry and a transnational corporation. Based on ethnographic and archival research in London and Tanzania, I examine the production of the state and nation space of Tanzania as it intersects with the space of a plantation industry (sisal) and that of a multinational corporation. I highlight how a national space is shaped by the workings of the world economic system and how corporations and world markets are influenced by the location and relations of states within international politics. The analysis focuses on the relationships and negotiations between state agents, international capital, and people in the political-economic and moral reproduction of the three spaces over time and in relationship to each other. |
