Desiring the state: Social welfare and kinship in post-socialist Tanzania

Abstract

Every day, from Monday to Friday, women, men, and children sit on the uncomfortable benches outside the Tanzanian social welfare office and wait patiently for hours to meet with a welfare officer. There are mothers claiming alimony payments, fathers seeking visiting rights, quarrelling spouses, minors with legal problems, and families disputing inheritances. Most are ineligible for benefits, so this article asks why they nonetheless accept state practices of subordination like waiting. Based on case studies from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Department of Health in a northern district of Tanzania, I argue that queuing outside the welfare office signifies a ‘desire for the state’ as proposed by Street. To understand this desire, I explore the relationship between welfare clients and the state using the lens of post-socialism, specifically Verdery’s concept of ‘socialist paternalism’. This article explores kinship, the state, and the negotiation of responsibility in relation to the paternalistic images of the state reproduced by the ruling party, and argues that welfare clients appropriate these in search of care, advice, and guidance to address family and kin-related crises.

One late morning in March 2019, two women walked into the social welfare office (ofisi ya ustawi wa jamii) where I was conducting research. ¹ The younger one was carrying a small child on her back, wrapped in a cloth. After greeting the welfare officer (afisa ustawi wa jamii), ² who sat facing the door behind a large desk, they sat on the chairs next to the door as they made their case. During the younger woman’s initial statement, the baby on her lap started whimpering and reaching for her breast, but instead of giving in and feeding it – as I had regularly observed other mothers doing during such consultations –she brushed off the child’s attempts. The welfare officer seemed irritated by this: after watching for a moment, she interrupted her and asked in a severe tone why she was refusing to feed her child. The mother muttered something in her defence and the welfare officer again prompted her to breastfeed her child. Hesitant at first, she gave in to the welfare officer’s stern look and started feeding her child. Content, the welfare officer prompted her to continue her statement. It turned out that the younger woman had reported the older one, her mother-in-law, to their balozi (the leader of their housing section, see below) for taking away her child after her husband had kicked her out of the house. During this speech, the mother-in-law repeatedly tried to interrupt and each time the welfare officer reminded her that it was not yet her turn to speak. When the young woman had finished, the mother-in-law defended herself, accusing her of having abandoned the child seven times already. In the middle of the consultation, six more women suddenly appeared in the open office door. They turned out to be relatives of the mother-in-law who had been waiting on the benches outside. Once seated in the small office, they immediately started accusing the younger woman of neglecting her child. At this point, the welfare officer intervened, reminded everyone that this was not a court (‘hapa si mahakamani’) but a place for help (‘tuko sehemu ya kusaidia’) and comforted the mother, who was now crying. The welfare officer, trying to bring the consultation to an end, searched for a solution. Since the case could not be resolved without the child’s father present, the mother was ordered to return with him and relatives from both sides. Meanwhile, the welfare officer advised, she should return to her husband and mother-in-law. However, she refused vehemently and insisted on returning to her own parents with the child. Although the social worker was concerned about the mother’s fitness as a parent, in the end she allowed her to keep the child but threatened to involve the police if anything happened to the baby.

Scolding clients for the way they spoke, dressed, or sat on a chair, and instructing parents in how to treat their children was common in the welfare office. Breastfeeding was a recurring theme in interactions between social workers and female clients, with the former scrutinizing it as an indicator of the clients’ performance of maternal responsibilities. As my initial surprise at finding a welfare office in a country that offered almost no welfare programmes faded, I recognized the paternalistic attitude at the heart of the interactions between clients and the officials. Not only did social workers scold their clients, but consultations often culminated with long lectures about proper parenting, during which the social workers pointed out the possible consequences of parental neglect. Usually, clients did not dare interrupt those monologues. While I often had a hard time staying focused, they sat on their chairs and seemed to be listening attentively to the officers’ words. Only rarely did a client fall asleep. Their stoicism seemed to suggest that, rather than being surprised by the procedure, they expected the state agents to lecture them. I was even more surprised that most clients approached the welfare office voluntarily. The majority could expect no material benefits and yet the benches outside were fully occupied when I arrived every morning.

Much of the recent scholarship on the anthropology of the state suggests that, rather than ‘keeping the state away’, as James C. Scott (1985) suggested, citizens who belong to marginal communities are constantly interacting with it. This expansive body of ethnography focuses on encounters between state agents and impoverished clients, bureaucratic encounters in the offices of state agencies, and the negotiation of access to material benefits (see, for example, Dubois, 2014; Fassin, 2015; Koch, 2019; Lipsky, 2010). However, in the case of Tanzania, as well as other so-called developing countries with limited welfare provisions, material gains were negligible (see, for example, Häberlein, 2018). As my fieldwork progressed, I realized that clients had come for something more than social benefits – something worth the wait, the often lengthy journeys to the local district office, and the loss of a day’s wages.

In this article, I explore the relationship between welfare officers and their clients and how it unfolds inside and outside the office. First, I look at daily encounters between welfare clients and officers and at practices of subordination such as waiting, asking why clients put up with the unequal treatment when they have no chance of realizing their claims. I argue that citizens thus express a desire for the state by accepting their own subordination. Second, I consider the country’s socialist past, which both the media and academics often neglect in African contexts (Pitcher and Askew, 2006; Thelen, 2011). Most studies of African socialism focus either on the failure of socialist projects or neoliberal transformations, but only a ‘[f]ew observers […] have framed these transformations with reference to a previous socialist moment, or interrogated whether, or how, a socialist past might shape a postsocialist present’ (Pitcher and Askew, 2006: 3; for exceptions, see Green, 2010 on Tanzania; Sumich, 2020 on Mozambique). Using a post-socialist lens, I show how the relationship between state agents and citizens in contemporary Tanzania is informed by the country’s socialist era. Based on Verdery’s (1996) concept of ‘socialist paternalism’, I analyse the negotiation of responsibilities in relation to paternalistic imageries of state–citizen relationships that stem from the socialist period and argue that welfare clients desire a paternal state whose care materializes not in the form of benefits but in the form of advice, mediation and guidance through personal challenges and crises affecting kinship relations.

Waiting and complying at the welfare office

As is typical at public institutions in Tanzania, the welfare office’s grounds were well maintained. The paths which led to its veranda and the toilets were well-defined, kept clean and partly bordered by bushes; a colourful swing invited children to play; and large trees provided shade. It was less prominent than the other offices in the District Council, like those of the District Commissioner, the Executive Officer, and Community Development Officer, and was hidden in an annex at the back of the main building. The impression that it was an afterthought within the district administration was reinforced by the conditions inside: the two offices were small and often crammed with people; the toilets were much simpler than those in the main building; and the air was often acrid with the smell of burnt plastic from a garbage dump behind it. Three wooden planks laid across large rocks served as benches in the makeshift waiting area; and the few trees offered some shade but almost no shelter during the April and October rainy seasons. Material resources were scarce, social benefits such as unemployment benefits or subsidiary housing, were non-existent, and only a few specific groups ³ were eligible for benefits. Still, the wonky uncomfortable benches were full every morning and several more people waited in back or on the veranda, peeking into one of the office doors or eavesdropping through the open windows.

As Fassin points out, social services are core state institutions ‘where the state reveals itself through these professionals as they simultaneously implement and produce public action’ (Fassin, 2015: 2–4; see also Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014; Das and Poole, 2009; Gupta, 1995; Thelen et al., 2018). As part of the district’s Department of Health, the welfare office served as the main provider of state services to various groups of people, such as families, children, the elderly, and disabled persons. Thus, the waiting clients and clients-to-be included mothers demanding alimony payments, fathers claiming visiting rights, parents struggling with their offspring, quarrelling spouses, teachers seeking support for disabled pupils, minors with legal problems, and families disputing inheritances.

The general appearance of the clients sitting on the benches – second-hand shirts, faded trousers, kanga ⁴ , and plastic sandals – testified to their poverty and contrasted starkly with the female welfare officers’ tailored dresses. Their economic status was confirmed by the personal information they provided during the consultations: most had only completed primary education and some were illiterate and had to sign with a fingerprint. They were mainly peasants or day labourers, with intermittent incomes. And while men occasionally appeared to claim their rights as fathers, most were female and many of them were bringing parenting and domestic conflicts to the attention of the officers.

What especially struck me was the patience and endurance with which the clients waited. I hardly ever heard them complain, even though they often had to wait for hours, sometimes only to be told to come back the next day. Patiently, they sat on the benches, conversed, nursed their children, or stoically stared at the two doors waiting to be called in. As Stasik et al. (2020) point out, waiting has been a recurring theme in recent ethnographic accounts of Africa. These often draw on ‘a sense that the future is an elusive good and the present is a chronic state of waiting emerged in the aftermath of neoliberal structural adjustment policies’ (Stasik et al., 2020: 1). The relationships that are inscribed in processes of waiting provide crucial insights into the distribution of power and forms of inequality, both on a local and global scale, with institutional settings ‘revealing the effects of subjection, dependency and subordination that being kept waiting generates among unprivileged groups (Stasik et al., 2020: 4). The welfare office presents such a setting: as Auyero has pointed out in an Argentinian context: ‘[t]o be an actual or potent welfare recipient is to be subordinated to the will of others’ (Auyero, 2011: 24). Developing a ‘patient model’, he argues that repetitive practices of waiting with an uncertain outcome, like the waiting procedures in a hospital, render welfare clients ‘patients of the state’ rather than ‘citizens with rightful claims’ (Auyero, 2011: 22f.). Instead of complaining and antagonizing the officers, welfare clients comply and wait. While Auyero’s patient model delivers an answer to the question why (poor) people accept their own subordination, it does not hold in the Tanzanian context as most clients can expect no material benefits from their patience. Thus, they must desire something beyond monetary resources, and which it is worth putting up with the state’s practices of subordination to attain.

Desiring the state

As Stasik et al. point out, waiting ‘necessarily involves clear goals or desires, even if one is quite uncertain about their attainment’ (Stasik et al., 2020: 3). I argue that when the clients of the Tanzanian welfare office waited for hours on uncomfortable benches, they were expressing their desire for the state. Drawing on her research in a governmental hospital in Papua New Guinea, Alice Street (2012) suggests that the state’s ‘absent presence’ is one reason citizens desire it. She suggests that after failing to realize the post-war promise of development for its citizens, ‘the [Papua New Guinean] state exerts its presence as both an absence and an object of desire’, leading to ‘active attempts to force the state to recognise its obligations towards them’ (Street, 2012: 1ff.). But while Street describes Papua New Guinea as ‘a society where the majority of people are said to have little sense of national identity and perceive the state as an absent presence’ (2012: 12) this is not the case for Tanzania. Although the state seems to fail its citizens continuously, as the complaints I heard throughout my fieldwork testify, it is omnipresent and Tanzanians have clear expectations of it. This rests in large part on a strong sense of national identity that is inextricably linked with the image of Julius Kambarage Nyerere as Baba wa Taifa, the Father of the Nation (Fouéré, 2014; Phillips, 2010). As the first president following independence in 1962, Nyerere undertook major efforts to unite the country, strengthen a shared national identity, and realize his African version of socialism, Ujamaa (Lal, 2015; Nyerere, 1968). Besides increasing state involvement in the country’s economy, promoting agricultural production, and abolishing chiefship, Nyerere’s government implemented social improvement programmes like free public education and health services to fight the high levels of poverty and inequality stemming from colonial rule (Eckert, 2004; Vavrus, 2005). A resettlement programme called Operation Kijiji (Operation Villages) started on a voluntary basis in 1973, but after 1975 resulted in the forced relocation of millions of peasants from their original villages into planned ‘Ujamaa villages’, especially in the southern regions (Lal, 2015: 3). This was accompanied by the state’s expansion into the country’s remotest corners (Green, 2010), with a significant impact on the relationship between state and citizens. Despite the socialist period’s dark side (Jennings, 2008), many contemporary Tanzanians today, like their counterparts in many other post-socialist countries (see, for example, Velikonja, 2009), regret the loss of the socialist welfare system and remember the past with nostalgia while emphasizing the current government’s shortcomings (Fouéré, 2014; Kamat, 2008).

By 1985, an economic crisis caused by an expensive war with neighbouring Uganda, the changing situation on the world market, and internal political inadequacies (Vavrus, 2005: 180) led the government to declare the socialist project a failure and Nyerere voluntarily resigned. In the following years, the country underwent major reforms under his successor, Ali Hasssan Mwinyi that included several structural adjustment programmes (such as the reintroduction of fees for education and health; Joseph and Maluka, 2017) intended to improve the economy and make the country eligible for international loans (Vavrus, 2005: 182; see also Snyder, 2008). With this imposed transformation and the introduction of a multi-party system, institutions that had been prominent during Ujamaa – such as the Nyumba Kumi, a section of ten houses supervised by an ambassador (balozi) – appeared to lose their role as the most important link between villagers, the ruling party, and the local government (Green, 2010). During my fieldwork, however, it became obvious that these structures are still relevant, despite their nominal dissolution and the balozi continue to work closely with village and district governments (Sambaiga, 2018). ⁵ Most people could identify their balozi to me, and additional evidence for the continuing role of this local institution could also be found at the welfare office. Many clients left with letters addressed to both their village chairperson (mwenyekiti wa kijiji) and their balozi; the latter often participated in consultations since they were conversant with the living situation of the residents of their sections.

Whether or not the Tanzanian state fulfils the citizens’ expectations, it is – unlike that of Papua New Guinea – not experienced as absent or as run by an elite in the capital, but as embodied by well-known local agents. It plays an active role in the daily life of citizens, ⁶ who have many opportunities to engage in local politics. Besides public offices, a variety of associations connect citizens with the local state at various levels. These include the Baraza la Wazee, a senior citizens association which seeks to improve elders’ living situation through cooperation with the local government; the women’s organization Umoja Wa Wanawake Wa Tanzania (UWT), which originated as the Women’s Section of the Tanganyika African Nation Union (TANU, the ruling party during Ujamaa) and remains an important forum for promoting gender equality (Geiger, 1982); and neighbourhood watch groups and youth associations, such as bodaboda and bajaji groups (motorcycles and tricycles that are commonly used for public transport in Tanzania), which mimic the structure of Nyumba Kumi and offer the opportunity to engage with the local government (Sambaiga, 2018). Villagers and city-dwellers alike are able to participate in grassroots politics and reach out to state agents whenever they have problems, and the network of officials present in everyday life fosters closeness and immediacy. The welfare office, as a bureaucratic institution, was only one of many arenas where citizens could easily access officials and encounter the local state (Gupta, 1995: 378).

If the Tanzanian state was present at the lowest village levels, easily accessible, and a part of everyday life, then why did people still long for the state? In the next section, I will discuss a consultation involving a son and his mother that provides one explanation for the desire for the state. While being recognized by the state seems to play an important role when citizens reach out to it, they expect still more: they want the state to care for them, support them in their daily struggles, and mediate their conflicts. As shown in the introductory example, kinship is a favoured domain in which these expectations played out: most of the cases the welfare officers dealt with concerned family and parenting issues.

Mediating conflicts, educating parents

On another busy day at the welfare office, a boy of about 15 entered, followed by a middle-aged woman. Irene, the social worker from my introductory case, seemed to recognize them and told them to sit down. She looked sternly at the two for a moment; then broke the tension by turning to the mother for her statement. The case that unfolded over the next half hour highlights the ways the officers carried out their roles as mediators and arbitrators while educating their clients about how to be ‘proper’ citizens. It turned out that the boy’s teachers had advised him to report his mother after he alleged that she had kicked him and his brother out of the family home. The mother had been called into the office by herself the week before; now they were returning together so that Irene could learn more about the family’s circumstances. As it turned out, the woman worked at the market and had three children with different fathers. Irene acknowledged this and then asked if she took the children to church. The mother conceded that she did not, but blamed the boys for refusing to go. She anxiously insisted that she had not kicked her children out and Irene reassured her and promised to help. After having examined the mother’s moral fitness as a parent, she turned to the boy and noticed that he was wearing two green plastic wristbands with ‘I love you’ and ‘I miss you’ printed on them. With raised eyebrows, she asked if he had a girlfriend, suggesting that maybe it wasn’t appropriate for a boy to wear such jewellery. When he denied having a girlfriend and claimed that the wristbands expressed his love for his family, Irene looked at him sceptically.

While the boy presented his side of the story, the office supervisor entered. After listening for a few minutes, she started interrogating the mother with sharp, short questions. If she had really kicked out her children, she warned, she had made a kosa kubwa, a huge mistake. Harshly, she asked the boy what he wanted and prompted him to apologize to his mother. Maombi, another welfare officer who was listening, also intervened and lectured Irene: ‘Hawa wote ni wateja wako […] huyu anataka kumsaidiwa, huyu anataka kumsaidiwa’, ‘Both [mother and son] are your clients…. She wants help; he wants help.’ Her advice was to conclude the consultation by sending the boy, who had missed school for two weeks, to his father. The mother had suffered enough, she continued angrily, first from the children’s fathers and now with her two sons. Upon that, Irene agreed, the boys were a mateso, a burden. Maombi advised the mother never to give birth again (‘usizae tena!’). After that, the supervisor roughly ordered the son to attend school the next day and left. Irene repeated these words, and added that he had to get home by six in the evening. And, she warned, if he did not obey, or if he misbehaved in any other way, the mother should report him to the welfare office immediately. Close to tears, the boy looked down at the ground and mumbled an explanation. However, Irene did not bother to react to his utterances and turned back to the mother, now taking up the accusation that she had kicked out her children. Sharply, she warned her against chasing off her children and painted a dark picture of the dangers on the streets: ‘huku njiani kuna kulawiti, ubakaji’, ‘on the streets, there is abuse and rape’. She concluded the consultation in a more conciliatory tone: ‘Kila mtu ana shida zake’, ‘Each person has their own troubles’, implying that both the mother and the son had reasons for what they had done.

The welfare officers saw the office as a place for help (kusaidia). By often stressing this during heated consultations, they redefined clients’ rights to welfare as aid (Auyero, 2011: 22). In contrast to the courts and the police, their goal was mediation: instead of collecting evidence and finding a winner, they sought an acceptable solution for both parties. As the consultation above exemplifies, the welfare officers often strategically alternated between supporting the claims of each party. During the often lengthy meetings, they tried to make sense of conflicting statements, mediated between parties and created narratives that ideally would lead to a mutually acceptable solution that could be captured in a file (Dubois, 2014: 44f.). However, the consultations took place in a hierarchical setting, beginning with uncomfortably waiting outside and continuing with the officers determining who would speak when and for how long, and who would have the last word. In order to receive the support they desired, clients had to comply with the welfare officers’ rules (Auyero, 2011: 24; see also Lipsky, 2010:16) and accept the ‘double face of bureaucracy’ (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2019: 244). The officers’ constant alternation between ‘domination and oppression as well as of protection and liberation’ (2019: 244) represents another feature of such settings related to the ‘tension between the penal state and the welfare state’ in the context of precarity (Fassin, 2015: 2). Tanzanian welfare offices, like those around the world, deal mainly with marginalized communities, and threatening to involve the police or a court was a popular – but mostly rhetorical – means of persuasion if clients were reluctant to accept the solutions offered (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2019: 247). In the double role of oppressor and protector, the welfare officers claimed they were educating their clients to become ‘better’ citizens by enabling them to be ‘proper’ parents. Thus, they expressed ‘values of good and bad, right and wrong, true and false, and feelings like compassion or indignation, empathy or suspicion, admiration or hostility’ (Fassin, 2015: 256). In the case presented above, the officers focused on the performance of respectable motherhood and, by chastising the mother of the complainant for her promiscuous past and not taking the children to church, indicated that her parenting was morally deficient. This idea reflected ‘the values and sentiments prevalent within the public realm and political discourse’ (Fassin, 2015: 256), and also pointed to the welfare officers’ positionality as middle-class citizens who shared normative ideas about motherhood (Papadaki, 2018; see also Alber, 2023 on parenting responsibilities and moralities, this volume). While I was often surprised by the paternalistic character and tone of the consultations, clients did not seem to mind: it even seemed that they expected to be lectured, subjected to long monologues, and told what to do to resolve challenging situations. In other words, they expected the officers to enact the caring state: a state that listened to their struggles, supported them in their individual endeavours, and tried to resolve conflicts. The desire for a caring state was best expressed when such expectations were not met: then, clients phrased their disappointment towards the state officials as ‘hawajali’, ‘they don’t care’. In coming to the welfare office, they placed their matters in front of the state and expected the officers ‘vested with the power of the state’ (Dubois, 2014: 38) to guide them.

Conclusion: The long shadow of socialist paternalism

One afternoon, shortly before the office closed, another young woman with a baby on her back came in. None of the social workers offered her a seat, so she stood in the open door as she explained how her husband had kicked her out two days ago. She wanted the welfare office to call him in to discuss alimony. After learning that the mother had another child with a different man, the social workers got upset. Coming to the office right after getting kicked out was not the proper way to deal with such problems, one of the social workers angrily lectured the woman. Shocked at the officer’s unexpected outburst, the woman only nodded with tears in her eyes. After calming down a bit, Maombi suggested that she come back with her relatives and told the office’s intern to write a summons to the woman’s relatives. The woman mumbled ‘asante’, ‘thank you’, and quietly waited for the letter. After she had left, the social workers complained about the woman’s audacity in appearing at the welfare office immediately instead of consulting with her family first. On another occasion, I witnessed several officers sarcastically joking that young mothers were now coming to the welfare office right after giving birth to tell them ‘ni mtoto wako’, ‘it’s your child’ and demand money.

As mentioned in the introduction, most work on the anthropology of the state focuses on the material outcomes of negotiations between the state and citizens. In a context like Tanzania, where resources are scarce and only provided to certain groups, citizens come to the welfare office for something other than material benefits. By accepting hours of waiting and other forms of subordination, they express their desire for a paternalistic state that will care for them. In her ethnography on Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery (1996) offers an approach that I consider helpful in reinterpreting Auyero’s model of state–citizen relationships in the Tanzanian context. Following Hobsbawm’s (1990) analysis of the role of nationalism in people’s everyday lives, which pans out in terms of citizenship (rights and so on) and ethnicity (a sense of belonging), Verdery proposes a third possible meaning for nationalism: a ‘socialist paternalism’ that ‘posit[s] a moral tie linking subjects with the state through their rights to a share in the redistributed social product’ (Verdery 1996: 63). In this variation on nationalism as a theme, ‘[s]ubjects [are] presumed to be neither politically active, as with citizenship, nor ethnically similar to each other: they [are] presumed to be grateful recipients – like small children in a family – of benefits their rulers decided upon for them’ (Verdery 1996: 63). While the relationship between state and citizens has changed significantly since the end of Ujamaa in regard of political participation and people have gained confidence in their status as citizens with rights (Snyder, 2008), I argue that the state’s practices of subordination at the social welfare office turned the clients into children, who in turn expected the state to guide them and offer an alternative to solve their conflicts.

By turning to the state, the young mother from the case presented in the introduction sought authority beyond the patriarchal family order of her home. With an obviously weak position among her relatives, she reached out to the state to mediate in a conflict that otherwise seemed hopeless given how many supporters her mother-in-law could call on. Mediating between the two parties, the welfare officer tried to find a solution for the conflict by referencing moral ideals related to marital life and parenting, put the women in their place by dictating the order of speech, and scolded them when they violated the protocol. That a familial state acting in a paternalistic manner exists beyond (post-)socialist contexts has been amply proven by ethnography. For example, Delaney shows how kinship idioms were attached to Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, when he was given the surname Atatürk (‘Father of the Turks’) and how this related to villagers’ ideas about state and nation (Delaney, 1995; also Donner, 2023 on paternalistic attitudes towards poor women in urban India of state and quasi-state actors, this volume). While this is common practice, Verdery argues ‘that [socialism] went further than most [political systems] in seeing society as not simply like a family but as itself a family, with the Party as parent’ (Verdery, 1996: 230). Such paternalistic idioms were common in socialist Tanzania – the TANU party described itself as the head of the national family (Phillips, 2010) – and continue to be reproduced by political parties today, especially its successor the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution, CCM). As Phillips (2010) points out, CCM has invoked images of Nyerere as the Father of the Nation and itself as his sole legitimate heir to strengthen their position during the 2005 presidential campaign and continues to do so. Phillips concludes that ‘[the] CCM continues to rhetorically frame Tanzania as a national family, presided over by CCM, a political “father” who provides “gifts” like takrima [gifts that are distributed during political campaigns] (not rights or entitlements) to his political children’ (2010: 127). Just as in Delaney’s example of Turkey, the image of the state as father crucially informs the relationship between state actors and citizens as it is enacted in local institutions such as the welfare office. In their daily interactions, welfare clients and officers invoke the paternal relationship stemming from Ujamaa and reformulate it in contemporary Tanzania.

However, even though the relationship between state and citizens is often depicted as one of parental care and nurture, the representatives of the state did not necessarily agree with the expectations of citizens, or the way they presented their cases. In the introductory case, the mother-in-law brought her relatives along to support her position before the welfare officer, while in the others the welfare officers actively asked complainants to involve their relatives. Applying a neoliberal discourse, they rejected the responsibility clients attempted to impose on them, as with the young mother whom they expected to consult with her family first before she came to them. In this way, welfare officers made use of and at the same time reproduced, an image of a ‘traditional’ African way of solving conflicts within the extended family, even as they act as arbitrators and guardians of such values. As the citizens invited the state into their domestic affairs and the state agents relocated such responsibilities back to the family, they developed a triadic relationship between citizens, state, and family that can be understood as the long shadow of socialist paternalism.