This was a form of African socialism aimed at developing the rural area of Tanzania. Ujamaa is a Swahili word meaning brotherhood. This policy involved the setting up of villages throughout the country where people could cooperate directly in small groups in order to promote their well-being.

Through these villages, government would provide extension services in the agricultural and veterinary sectors.

Education and health services were also to be fully provided. The people were to govern themselves by way of grass root popular democracy. Each village had a committee of officials who were elected by villagers themselves. Village meetings would be held and attended by people in the area. Issues were discussed amicably.

The Ujamaa villages were established throughout the country with the intention of exploiting all the domestic resources other than depending on foreign resources. Land and labour of Tanzanians were to be utilized without borrowing ideas and funds from abroad.

Nyerere also considered the Ujamaa villages as the only way of doing away with the evils of capitalism, colonialism and neo‑colonialism. He emphasized that all people were workers and did not expect idlers, exploiters and dependants as it happens in a capitalist society.

In the words of the Arusha Declaration.

'We are crying to overcome our weakness by using the weapons of the economically strong - weapons which in fact we do not possess'.

This was the basic contradiction of weaponry which the-new Tanzanian policies were designed to resolve. The substitute approach to the war against poverty was a simple mobilization of the masses for specific tasks.

One of the main causes of the Arusha Declaration in 1967 was the failure of the first Five-Year Plan (1964-9) to attract investment capital from abroad. The second Five-Year Plan (1969-74) concentrated on rural development by a voluntary 'villagization' programme, but it ended in a general economic crisis caused by the international recession, oil-price increases and the 1974 drought in Tanzania. Nyerere recognized the failure of the policy of voluntary formation of Ujamaa villages, and on 6 November 1973 he announced:

'To live in villages is an order.'

Already, however, over-zealous local TANU officials in some areas had begun to move peasant families to new village sites. In time, millions of families were moved, with considerable destruction of property, some use of force, and disastrous effects on agricultural output for several years.

The objectives of the Ujamaa village programme were: primarily, to concentrate the peasantry in compact units so that state officials (village managers) could enforce minimum acreage cultivation laws and increase peasant labour productivity; and secondly, to develop communal production for ideological reasons, and make it easier to provide improved agricultural extension, water, health and educational services. By the end of the 1970s there were over 7000 Ujamaa villages with a population of over 13, 500 000. By this lime, too, the villagization programme was beginning to show long-term beneficial results, as production was rising following improved organization (i.e. better management, expanded storage facilities) and the success of a National Maize Programme. 1978 proved to be a year of record maize production.