BEING OF `ONE HEART': POWER AND POLITICS AMONG THE IRAQW OF TANZANIA.

ABSTRACT

This article explores local understandings of and experience with democracy in an Iraqw community in northern Tanzania. At independence, President Julius Nyerere in his development of a one-party state, argued that democracy in this new nation state would be modelled on that which is round in indigenous, precolonial political systems. In the Iraqw homeland, pre-colonial `democracy' was expressed in elders' councils in which male elders made decisions on behalf of the test of the community. Differences of opinion were voiced but eventually the group would come to one ...

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