state-building, infrastructure, and citizenship in rural tanzania: persistence and change in nyumba kumi kumi (the 10-house cell)

Abstract

An enduring feature of rural Tanzanian political life has been the organization of villages down to the 10-house cell (nyumba kumi kumi). The cell system was established in 1963 as the smallest unit of the single-party state to eradicate rural isolation and facilitate communication, security, and self-help. Even after the 1992 turn to multipartyism, the cell has endured as a salient (though not static) feature of rural government. Existing scholarship has theorized the cell’s significance for political linkage, state spatialization, and party entrenchment, highlighting ongoing state appropriation of this party structure. But the cell has also been central to how rural Tanzanians experience and produce the functionality of the rural state to ensure the conditions for meeting basic needs. Based on a case study from the Singida region, and comparative perspectives from other parts of Tanzania, this article argues that the 10-house cell is both an infrastructure of rural statecraft but also of rural citizenship, enabling vital functions such as communication, adjudication, security, surveillance, taxation, development, and claims-making. Tracing how Tanzanians have used nyumba kumi kumi to exercise (and grow) the functionality of the state from below expands notions of state-building in Africa beyond notions of ‘reach’ and ‘capture’ from above.