INTRODUCTION
    PROFESSOR ARNOLD TEMU
    Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Science
   There is always a reason why new journals are born. A general reason is
   that the old ones cease at some time to reflect the changed balance of
   forces in society. Like other institutions, academic journals also eventually
   fall into the hands of those who would like to conserve a certain balance
   of social forces, and the ideas that correspond to this balance, against the
   onslaught of revolutionary changes. The bulk of Western Social Science
   journals are, in this sense, deeply, and understandably, conservative.
        It has been the practice among third world scholars to seek to place
   the fruits of their academic work in these Western journals. Sometimes
   they succeed. The journals generally practise "tokenism", by which an
   occasional article by a third world or, in a different context a Marxist
   scholar, serves to vindicate their rulmg ideology of liberalism and eclecticism.
   But they make sure that the balance of ideological forces firmly remains in
   their favour.
        Instead of losing scholarly work in such futile exercises in tokenism,
  third world scholars have increasingly founded their own journals. These
  journals now have a firm editorial base in third world countries, and not
  in the metropoles, as the case with many journals that profess to speciaIise
  in the issues that concern the third world but which are stilI "organised"
  from the metropoles.
        The Utafiti is a journal of the new kind. It hopes to provide a focus-
  a narrow sharp focus-on        the contradictions of development in third world
  countries generally, and more specifically, in Tanzania and in her immediate
  environment. Tanzania, we think, provides a good example of a country in
  which the balance of SOCialforces is undergoing change. Much of this change
  is of course purely formalistic and as yet experimental. The more fundamental,
  substantive changes have to encounter formidable forces of resistance. Some
  of these forces are local; others are external to Tanzania and external to
  Africa. The Utafiti hopes to mirror this confrontation between the forces of
  change and the forces of resistance, as they manifest in Tanzania, in Africa,
  and insofar as is relevant to us here, in the whole world.
        We hope that this inaugural issue, whilst we are only too aware of its
  limitations, justifies this promise in its potential.
        Dr. Tschannerl. an engineer by qualification and a member of the
  University's Bureau of Resource Assessment and Land Use Planning, has
1 attempted to apply Samir Amin's analysis of underdevelopment to the case


of Tanzania, backed with insight and competent empirical research. He             UTAFITI
challenges the more conventional approaches to understanding the third world
countries but at the same time raises the question about the level of abstrac-
tion at which he has pitched his analysis. Rugumisa, a young Tanzanian
economist also at the University, ftakes up this issue and argues essentially
for a more concrete class analysis of Tanzania based on historical materialism.
      The problem of imperialism and the struggle for liberation is an old
issue with Africa. West Asia, which Eurocentrists call "Middle East", has
an even longer history of struggle. Jami/ Hi/ai, a Palestinian active in the
struggle, and for a year a member of the Department of Sociology at the
University, analyses the nature of this struggle, clearly identifying the charac-
ter of Zionism as a settler-colonial, petty-bourgeois ideology, and the balance
of class forces that determines the character of the PLO and of the Arab
countries in which the PLO operates.
      Brian Bowles, a member of the History Department, applies the theory
of underdevelopment, and consequently makes considerable advance, on our
existing understanding of the place of export crops in integrating colonial
Tanganyikan economy to the world capitalist system between 1929 and 1961.
He argues that peasants' protests against export crop growing, often said to
be due to "backwardness", are better understood as passive resistance to
changes made with the welfare of people other than peasants in mind.
Similarly, their so-called perverse reactions to price "incentives" are better
understood as symptoms of dependence, and as a result of the historical
process of the creation of that dependence. Martin Kaniki of the same
Department applies, though not uncritically, Trimingham's thesis about the
three stages of the process of Islamisation, and identifies the factors in
pre-Islamic Africa that facilitated, and those that inhibited, the penetration
of Islam in the continent. The material base that might explain the depth
or lack of penetration is not analysed, but the author careful1y delineates
the institutions that were susceptible to Islamic influence and those that
were resistant.
      We have in this issue an article in Kiswahili by A. S. Nchimbi of the
Department of Linguistics at the University. The inclusion of an article in
Kiswahili is not an exercise in tokenism. It is an express.ion of an open
door to those who would rather write in the national language. Mr. Nchimbi's
article itself is symbolic, in that he is concerned about the dangers. of mis-
comprehension inherent in translation that a country like Tanzania faces,
dependent as she is on technical assistance personnel coming from various
countries. The author offers a suggestion of how this problem might be
tackled.
      Finally, we have what we hope wiH be a regular column. Vtafiti Notes
is not meant to be a gossip column of the journal. It is a serious attempt at
providing, as comprehensively as possible, an account of the issues which
have worried Social Scientists at the University of Dar es Salaam over the                2


UTAFITI six months preceding publication of the journal, since this is a bi-annual
        publication. The account, therefore, is not simply a listing down of publica-
        tions and seminar presentations of the Faculty members, for an attempt is
        made to pick out a few of them for a closer examination in order to demons-
        trate the range and kind of controversies that have raged on the Hill.
        Those who have been unaware of these controversies have obviously not
        fully participated in the intellectual liveliness of the campus, and might
        perhaps make an effort to read the publications referred to here, or to pick
        up an argument with their authors, and thus add to the life of the campus.
        Those outside, who we hope will subscribe to the journal, might find in these
        Notes a microcosm of the controversies that probably are now, in the present
        epoch, the daily bread of most universities in the third world. As a former
        student of the University of Dar es Salaam once said, what theories reign
        in academic circles is not simply of academic interest. Ideas reflect and
        attempt to legitimise certain group interests, and the struggle between ideas
        is only a struggle at the most abstract level, whose material base lies at
        the level of how the society organises itself for the produotion and distribu-
        tion of 'its means of social existence.
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