Ujamaaaaaaaa!

I am embarrassed to say that, until recently, I did not realize that Ujamaa was anything other than a residence hall at Cornell...I was corrected by a book I am reading called 'The Fate of Africa,' which is basically a (terrifically depressing) account of every country in Africa's transition from colonial rule to independence.
Ujamaa was the philosophy of communal living and economy developed and adhered to by Julius Nyerere, the first President of independent Tanzania. Under this governing philosophy, the economy was nationalized and the government administered through a centralized unit similar to those in communist governments. Ujamaa was supposedly different, however, because it dovetailed with the African tendency towards communal/village living. At first, Nyerere made collective living optional, incentivizing the practice through government subsidies, but soon realized that he would need more people to join into collective living in order for his precarious system to work. Unsurprisingly, Nyerere was 'forced' to mandate collective membership and resorted to violent measures in order to carry out his vision.
While not as abhorrent as the policies and practice of many of his neighbors, Nyerere's originally idyllic notions ended in the same way that most communist experiences seem to: 'reeducation'/indoctrination, sending to work camps, economic collapse. The World Bank and many western powers were embarrassed by their initial optimism and correspondingly generous investment in the program.
It seemed initially that, because Tanzanians had a historic tendency towards some form of communal living, Ujamaa would fare better there than in other places where more materialistic, modern impulses had already taken hold. The philosophy was also rooted in the desire to free Africans from their Western colonial overlords who, even during ostensible 'independence', still exerted an inordinate amount of control over the economic fate of their former colonies. Although the experiment was ill-fated, the notion of 'ujamaa' has persisted as an ideal, a symbol of African pride.