Research Repository :: Browsing by Author "Shivji, Issa G."

Browsing by Author "Shivji, Issa G."

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Accumulation in an African Periphery
(Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2009) Shivji, Issa G.
The "Washington consensus" which ushered in neo-liberal policies in Africa is over. It was buried at the G20 meeting in London in early April, 2009. The world capitalist system is in shambles. The champions of capitalism in the global North are rewriting the rules of the game to save it. The crisis creates an opening for the global South, in particular Africa, to refuse to play the capitalist-imperialist game, whatever the rules. It is time to rethink and revisit the development direction and strategies on the continent. This is the central message of this intensely argued book. Issa Shivji demonstrates the need to go back to the basics of radical political economy and ask fundamental questions: who produces the society's surplus product, who appropriates and accumulates it and how is this done. What is the character of accumulation and what is the social agency of change? The book provides an alternative theoretical framework to help African researchers and intellectuals to understand their societies better and contribute towards changing them in the interest of the working people.
Agrarian Problems and Development
(University of Dar es Salaam, 1980-08-12) Shivji, Issa G.
The Concept of Human Rights in Africa
(CODESRIA, 1989) Shivji, Issa G.
Hitherto the human rights debate in Africa has concentrated on the legal and philosophical. The author, Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, here moves the debate to the social and political planes. He attempts to reconceptualise human rights ideology from the standpoint of the working people in Africa. He defines the approach as avoiding the pitfalls of the liberal perspective as being absolutist in viewing human rights as a central question and the rights struggle as the backbone of democratic struggles. The author maintains that such a study cannot be politically neutral or intellectually uncommitted. Both the critique of dominant discourse and the reconceptualisation are located within the current social science and jurisprudential debates.
The Dawn of Pan-Africanism
(2000) Shivji, Issa G.
This is a short piece calling Upon African intellectuals to make PaAfricanism a category of intellectual thought and rise to the vision of continental unity rather than sink in parochial nationalisms.
Democracy and Democratization in Africa: Interrogating Paradigms and Practices
(2011-11-09) Shivji, Issa G.
Democracy is a model. Democratisation is a process. Democracy is a transplant. Democratisation is organic. By democracy I mean the concept of bourgeois liberal democracy imposed by the West on the Rest. By democratisation I mean the struggles of the Rest against the West and its local ‘implants’ to expand the sphere of human freedom and dignity. Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1492 and blazed the trail for Western invasion of Africa and Asia. Christopher Columbus landed in Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and Dominican Republic) also in 1492 planting the seeds of first genocide of the original inhabitants of the Americas, the so-called Red Indians, and the most gruesome trade: The triangular, Atlantic slave trade. Thus began the next five centuries of the development of the world capitalist system and Western civilisation, with accumulation in the centre and dispossession in the periphery. The stories we tell our children and the history we teach them and the values we preach at the altar are spurned by the hegemonic West. This is called civilisation, progress, universal human rights, development, modernisation and now globalisation. The process of resistance against dispossession is called barbarism, cannibalism, nativism, witchcraft, juju, tribalism and terrorism. Thus goes on the story of the West and the Rest to this day as we meet here to discuss the liberal model of democracy, good governance, human rights, transparency, accountability, humanitarianism etc.
The democracy Debate in Africa: Tanzania
(Taylor & Francis, 1991-03) Shivji, Issa G.
Demolish to Develop (2003)
(2003) Shivji, Issa G.
Edward Moringe Sokoine: Fikra Zake Juu ya Maendeleo
(2004-04-07) Shivji, Issa G.
Eighth Amendment Fiasco at Law
(University of Dar es Salaam, 1992-04-23) Shivji, Issa G.
The proposed Bills being presented to the National Assembly at the end of this month following the adoption of multi-party system raise a number of issues. The first issue is the context and the circumstances under which these Bills are being presented to the Assembly. It is not clear from the Bills or the political statements made by various leaders whether what is proposed in them constitutes interim measures for a transition to a new multi-party constitution or that these proposals are indeed what would be the final shape of the multi-party democracy in Tanzania. Lack of clarity on this issue arises primarily because the Government has so far issued no statement, let alone a White Paper, on their attitude to the Nyalali Report.
The Federation of Great Lakes Region
(2004-12-04) Shivji, Issa G.
The East African Federation is again on the horizon. The timetable is out. The Federation that was much talked about over forty years ago by the nationalist leaders may just come to fruition but under very different conditions. All the peoples of East Africa must debate these new conditions. This time around we should not leave it simply to the states and politicians to unite us. Only if we unite as a people can we ensure sustained unity. And as a people we have to widen our horizons to take into account new conditions and possibilities. I would like to underscore two new conditions. First, the original four countries Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar which were supposed to be part of the Federation in the early 1960s have contracted to three as Tanganyika and Zanzibar are now Tanzania. As we know, the Union question itself has been a subject of much discussion among us. Do we need to resolve this issue as we enter the Federation? Secondly, the number of potential members of the Federation has expanded to five, Rwanda and Burundi have not only shown interest but want very much to be part of the process right from the beginning. This is a welcome sign. But we have to go beyond. We have to think in terms of a Federation of Great Lakes Region (FGLR). The Federation of Great Lakes Region would include the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are many very good reasons why we should think in terms of a greater federation. The DRC shares long borders with at least four East African countries, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. It is the richest country in Africa, holding the world's biggest deposits of copper, cobalt, and cadmium. DRC has seen no peace as its riches are coveted by imperial powers. Even neighbouring countries like Uganda and Rwanda did not spare DRC. The wars in DRC invariably spill over to the neighbouring East African countries, whether this is in the form of hundreds of thousands of refugees as in Tanzania or armed conflicts as in Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda. Both peace and prosperity in this part of the world depend strategically on peace, stability and prosperity in the DRC. It is not possible to secure peace without the DRC being part of a larger political entity.
From Neoliberalism to PanAfricanism: Towards Reconstructing an Eastern African Discourse
(Critical Perspectives On Southern Africa, 2006) Shivji, Issa G.
The purpose of this short intervention is to review the state of interaction between our universities in East Africa so far as intellectual debate is concerned. If in the process I refer somewhat passionately to the debates of the 60s and 70s, it is not out of nostalgia but to draw inspiration. And we need this inspiration given the state of intellectual inertia and marketisation of academia that has set in with the invasion of neoliberal agenda in our universities. At the end I am also making a modest proposal as to how we may use the vantage point of this Workshop to start about reflecting on the mechanisms to kickstart the process of an Eastern African Discourse. But the academics that we are, I must provide the background and the context, albeit in somewhat disjointed sketches.
Haya ni Mahindi, sio Makana
(2002-10-17) Shivji, Issa G.
Intellectuals at the Hill
(Dar es Salaam University Press, 1993) Shivji, Issa G.
Intellectuals in Politics
(1993-01-30) Shivji, Issa G.
Is Might a Right in Human Rights
(University of Dar es Salaam, 2000) Shivji, Issa G.
Human rights is a contentious discourse. Like any other articulated set of ideas, or ideology, human rights ideology is historically and politically determined. It embodies unequal relations of power and social and economic inequities present in our national societies and international orders. (See Shivji 1989, 1999). Those who dominate and rule also produce ruling and dominating ideas. But wherever there is oppression there is bound to be resistance. Just as domination is articulated through ruling ideologies and mainstream discourses, so does resistance find expression, however truncated, in contending ideologies and discourses. Human rights discourse therefore is not an absolute truth, true for all times and all people in all places but a series of historically and politically constructed contentions (or truths, half-truths and untruths, if you like) articulating within it the wishes, desires and interests of the powerful as well as the voices and cries of the powerless. The powerful cloth their might in 'right and legality', while the powerless struggle to justify their resistance in 'righteousness and justice'. This is not a watertight binary as at times 'resistance' appropriates 'legality', while 'might' feigns 'justice and morality'. In this brief presentation, I try to highlight the contentious discourse around one of the rights central to our modern societies, the right of peoples to self-determination.
Keynote address on Poor's access to justice
(2002-05-09) Shivji, Issa G.
The problems of the poor to access justice are legendary. They are well known to all of us here who, in one way or the other, have been involved with legal aid. I could rehearse them all over again, perhaps more eloquently, perhaps with greater detail and examples, but, I ask myself, for what purpose and why? Does poverty disappear by singing about it? Or, to give a better analogy, does charity eradicate poverty? After all, they have lived together as Siamese twins over the ages. One cannot exist without the other. What Marx said about religion, applies mutatis mutandis to charity. It comforts the rich and massages their consciences, while dampening the anger of the poor. And lo! behold, we continue to have more rich, more poor and more charity!
Keynote Address to Kenyas National Conventional Assemblyon People driven Constitution making
(University of Dar es Salaam, 2001-01-19) Shivji, Issa G.
Let me say that this is not only a great honour but also a great opportunity you have given me to participate in, what you rightly and proudly call, a peopledriven constitutional process. I sincerely and humbly thank you. With great humility, too, I wish to make a small contribution from the little much less people driven, I must say experience from your neighbour. The message and lessons to be drawn from that experience may not equally apply here, but they may still teach by negative example. Allow me to share those lessons with you.
Law and Access to Justice: The Rhetoric and the Reality
(East African Journal of Peace and Human Rights, 2001) Shivji, Issa G.
This article discusses the marked contrast between theory and reality of law and access to justice in Tanzania. Based on a legal matter the author prosecuted some twenty years ago, it first reflects on the problems of the needy in accessing what is essentially an alien, class law and justice. The article considers issues pertaining to legal education, beginning with the author's narrative of his experiences with teaching and learning law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Dar es Salaam. It finally concludes that there is a yawning schism between need and demand in legal education. Whereas there is a clear need for training a lawyer-as-a-social-critique and lawyer-as-a-professional-craftsperson, grounded in the vision of a rational and humane social order, the demand is for a lawyer-mechanic to mend the ruthless machines of the globalizing corporate world. However, the vocation of universities should be to train a lawyer who combines in him/her a social critique, and a professional craftsperson, and thus is guided by his/her social reponsibilities.
Law's Empire and Empire's Lawlessness: Beyond the Anglo-American Law
(2003-05) Shivji, Issa G.
Law's Empire has been irreversibly shattered by the Empire's lawlessness of which * the recent invasion and occupation of Iraq was the highest and most cynical expression. The outrage created by the invasion cut across the globe as it hurt every human sensitivity. Thought was ridiculed, conscience was wounded, and traditions of humanity mocked. There was a sense of despair and hopelessness. But human spirit is indomitable. Millions, of all ages, marched the streets in 650 cities, simultaneously, with one voice: 'No Blood for Oil.' In this the peoples of the world showed their common humanity bound by blood against imperial barbarism thirsty for oil.
Law, State and the Working Class in Tanzania
(African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989) Shivji, Issa G.; Nimtz, August

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