Chapter 3
Development Workers From the Two German States and Inequalities in Socialist Tanzania
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Abstract
The presence of expatriate aid workers and the dependence on foreign expertise were sources of concern and debate in postcolonial Tanzania, where the policies of ujamaa aimed to create an egalitarian society. Expatriate aid workers were often suspected of being ‘Trojan horses’ who undermined socialist objectives through non-socialist convictions as well as their way of living. Based on oral history interviews and documents from German and Tanzanian official and private archives, this contribution first outlines how debates and policies in Tanzania regarding the presence of foreign experts revolved around technocratic, political, and material considerations and also reflected the competition between various models of socialism. The second part of the chapter analyses how aid workers from East Germany and West Germany navigated conflicting imperatives regarding their work and lives in Tanzania: firstly, in terms of the appropriate standard of living; and secondly, regarding the employment of domestic staff, a practice that many aid workers—even some who initially rejected it as ‘neo-colonial’—engaged in. The change of debates, policies, and subjectivities across time signals a broader shift. In the 1960s and early 1970s, long-term political goals informed Tanzanian policies regarding expatriates. The shift to pragmatic short-term strategies from the mid-1970s onwards, in order to deal with the deteriorating economic situation, buttressed the consolidation or re-establishment of some of the very hierarchies that had been identified as central impediments to the attainment of development and sovereignty.