‘Their problems are in many ways ours too’ – The Tanzanian Ujamaa -philosophy in Swedish foreign aid information and the Karibu Campaign of 1974

This article examines Karibu, a 1974 nation-wide Swedish governmental information campaign about Tanzania aimed at influencing public opinion in favor of Sweden's aid policies. The campaign praised President Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa-philosophy of communal farming even as it turned into coercive displacement of millions of Tanzanians. Drawing from archival sources and read against research on Swedish foreign aid history and issues of representation in development aid discourses, the study is driven by the assumption that post-colonial aid-relations share with colonialism the perceived necessity for the donor/colonizer to justify its actions by communicating ‘knowledge’ about the aid-receiver/colonized subject back to the home-front. The result shows that such representations do not necessarily uphold the traditional interpretative privilege and agency of the Global North. In Karibu, the Ujamaa-philosophy saturated the campaign to such an extent that it even shaped Swedish agency in blind compliance with Nyerere's development politics.