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.
