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Catégorie : Tanzania 2025. On the Shift Towards State Violence

This series of Mambo! focuses on the 2025 election year in Tanzania. It offers an original format for a close reading of politically-related empirical objects linked to this eventful election year, marked by a shift toward massive state violence. In each episode, the selected object is reproduced in its original form and translated where necessary, carefully contextualized and closely annotated or commented with the aim of providing keys to understanding its production, meaning and significance. These objects constitute relevant sources or documents for analysing the openly brutal authoritarian turn taken by the Tanzanian regime during this electoral sequence at the end of 2025.

Episode #5. ‘Kura ni alama ya maendeleo’ (‘Voting is a symbol of development’): Promising development in Zanzibar through poster-intensive campaigning

Marie-Aude FOUÉRÉ, Nicodemus MINDE, Mambo!, no. 110, 2026.
In Zanzibar’s 2025 elections, maendeleo did not merely signify ‘development’—it functioned as a political technology through which the CCM (Chama cha Mapinduzi, or Party of the Revolution) sought to transform infrastructure into political legitimacy and voting into an act of allegiance rather than choice. Like any notion, and even more so in the case of a notion which, throughout Tanzania (including Zanzibar), bears the weight of colonial and post-colonial history, maendeleo has multiple and contextual meanings.

Episode #4. Kenya’s press coverage of Tanzania’s shift into state violence through the headlines of The Standard newspaper (29 October-10 November 2025)

Marie-Aude FOUÉRÉ, Nicodemus MINDE, Mambo!, no. 109, 2026.
For eight consecutive days, from Election Day (Wednesday 29 October 2025) until two days after the official inauguration ceremony of Tanzania’s newly elected president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, the front pages of the Kenyan weekly The Standard followed the daily descent into state violence took place during this decisive period of voting and early post-voting linked to the last Tanzanian elections in 2025.

Episode 3# Foreign bodies, Misguided youth: Samia Suluhu Hassan’s inauguration speech, 3 November 2025

Nicodemus MINDE, Marie-Aude FOUÉRÉ Mambo!, no. 108, 2026.
On Monday 3 November 2025, Samia Suluhu Hassan’s inauguration ceremony as President of Tanzania takes place on a military parade ground in Dodoma, the capital of Tanzania, just two days after her victory was announced. There was heavy security and the mood was tense. The internet, which had been shut down since election day (29 October), began to be gradually restored. Tanzania was coming back to life after being in the dark for a week – it felt like hell. Four years earlier, on 19 March 2021, Samia Suluhu Hassan was sworn in as Tanzania’s first female president following the death of President John Magufuli, therefore succeeding the position without having to be elected. Samia Suluhu Hassan’s tone and candour in 2021 reflected the nation’s mood: sombre and solemn. Her 2021 speech embodied a nation’s grief. In her address, she rallied the nation that yearned to be comforted and assured of a better tomorrow. “It is not a good day for me to speak to you because I have a wound in my heart. Today I have taken the oath different from the rest…in mourning,” she said.

Episode #2 Depicting the moral infamy of Samia Suluhu Hassan through a press cartoon by Gado on 1 November 2025

Marie-Aude FOUÉRÉ, Nicodemus MINDE, Mambo!, no. 107, 2026.
On 1 November 2025, a press cartoon by artist Gado stroke a chord. It showed Tanzania’s president-elect, Samia Suluhu Hassan, being sworn in before the Chief Justice, one hand holding the Quran, the other resting on the Constitution, standing on a pile of bloody corpses that the carpet covering them fails to hide. The president-elect’s hands, clothes, and even the Quran itself are stained with blood. Armed men with fierce expressions, masked faces, and skull-adorned berets protect the president and secure the inauguration ceremony.

Episode #1. Tundu Lissu’s “Tutakinukisha (Ignite it): ‘No Reform, no Election’” Speech of 3 April 2025.

Nicodemus MINDE, Marie-Aude FOUÉRÉ Mambo!, no. 106, 2026.
On 21 January 2025, Tundu Lissu defeated Freeman Mbowe in the internal elections of CHADEMA (Chama Cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo, Party of Democracy and Development) and became the new party’s chairman. Two burning questions immediately arose: Would the party survive this change from Mbowe, a seasoned politician at the helm of the party for over twenty years and promoter of the political status quo, to Lissu, known to be a radical and uncompromising leader (Minde, 2024)? And how would the long-standing ruling CCM party (Chama Cha Mapinduzi, Party of the Revolution), within an authoritarian one-party system (Makulilo, 2008; Paget, 2019), react to it?