Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service with me Rob Walker.

Today it's back to the late 1960s in Tanzania.

It was then one of the poorest countries in the world,

but a new form of socialism called Ujama was being

introduced.

And for many Tanzanians, it was a time of hope, my Hindusinhita kulindh had you

co-fana-a-na-i-de-vehah d'i-cha mamma my pinusinita Koolinha, had the Kofa.

It means, I swear in front of God

and in front of the party that I'll guard the revolution until I die.

And that was a bold promise for a 12 year old living in a remote rural village.

But at the time, Berhella Lunigello was swept up in the enthusiasm for Ujama. The government believed the new

policy would bring about a form of socialism rooted in the realities of African village life and propaganda about it was everywhere.

As part of that the awareness campaign you had a very very nice posters showing the bourgeois capitalist with the big tummy, big belly

siphoning off money from poor people who are thin and skinny. I believed in it actually, but then we had also songs.

We used to have some beautiful songs praising with Jama. The man behind Ujama was Tanzania's first post-independence president, the

charismatic Julius Nerere. He believed that endemic poverty in rural areas

could only be addressed if peasant farmers relocated to larger villages and worked collectively.

Nerere had taken the Suhi concept of Uyama familyhood and given it a new meaning of

socialist solidarity.

This program from the BBC's archives presented by the Kenyan academic Ali Musru Missouri explains Nureri's ideas.

He planned model villages, scattered rural families would share facilities.

The clinic, the school, the cooperative, the shop, and the

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