THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS!

Above: Fighters of an African-led uprising against German colonial exploitation in Tanganyika, remembered as one of the earliest large-scale expressions of collective resistance that shaped Tanzania’s political consciousness.

Dear Zanzibar Ni Kwetu readers,

Few hours ago, this blog published a critique by Dr. Shaaban Fundi, in which he sought to map an essay written decades ago onto Tanzania’s contemporary political situation. 

https://zanzibarnikwetu.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-power-of-powerless-critique-by-dr.html

While this response does not deny the right—indeed the necessity—of critiquing Tanzania, it challenges a troubling habit: the outsourcing of our political understanding to European historical trauma while ignoring our own lived realities.

The attempt to map The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel—written in 1978 at the height of Cold War totalitarianism in Eastern Europe—onto present-day Tanzania is not an act of courageous critique. It is an act of intellectual shortcutting, and worse, a confession of analytical dependence on foreign historical experience to explain an African political reality that demands its own vocabulary, its own history, and its own standards.

Let us be clear from the outset: invoking Havel does not automatically elevate an argument. When misapplied, it does the opposite—it reveals conceptual bewilderment and an inability to engage Tanzania on its own terms.

Havel wrote under a closed, externally imposed, ideologically rigid one-party system, enforced by foreign military power and governed by an all-encompassing doctrine that penetrated every layer of life. His “post-totalitarian” system was ideologically frozen, economically stagnant, internationally isolated, and politically immobile. Tanzania today is none of these things.

To treat “context” as a minor caveat—different contexts, but similar dynamics—is an academic sleight of hand. Context is not a decoration. It is not an innovation. It is a substance. Remove it, and the argument collapses.

What the critique describes—fear, misinformation, opportunism, corruption, moral compromise—are not uniquely Tanzanian phenomena. They are features of a disorderly global moment, synonymous with the lawlessness of the world in which we live today: a fractured digital public sphere, misinformation economies, declining trust in institutions worldwide, and the weaponization of law across jurisdictions, democratic and otherwise. To isolate Tanzania as if it uniquely embodies these pathologies is to exceptionalize African governance failures while normalizing identical patterns elsewhere. That is not analysis. It is selective moralization.

Havel’s famous “greengrocer” symbolized existential survival under ideological compulsion. In the critique, this metaphor is repurposed into a broad accusation against Tanzanian elites, flattening complex socio-economic negotiations into a morality play. This move ignores the developmental-state context, the post-liberalization economy, the uneven legacies of structural adjustment, and the hard realities of post-colonial state-building. To label participation, compromise, or pragmatism as “living within the lie” is to indulge in armchair heroism—the luxury of moral absolutism unburdened by responsibility for governing a real society.

The essay repeatedly conflates law-enforcement failures and legal contestation with ideological repression. Yet Havel’s world was one where law existed primarily as ideological ritual. By contrast, Tanzania operates within constitutional structures, contested courts, an active civil society, electoral cycles, and ongoing internal reform debates. Failures, abuses, and overreach deserve scrutiny—but to declare them evidence of a Havelian “ritualized lie” is to inflate critique into indictment without proof.

Havel’s call to “live in truth” emerged in a world where truth itself was criminalized. Today, truth is noisy, fragmented, weaponized, monetized, destroyed, and often irresponsible. To romanticize “truthful normality” while ignoring misinformation, agenda-driven activism of Gen-Z-ism, NGO careerism, and social-media theatrics is to substitute ethical clarity with performative dissent. Moral courage is not measured by how loudly one borrows metaphors from Prague.

The deeper problem, then, is not Havel. It is how he is used.

The analogy rests on an old reflex: when Africa struggles, reach for European dissidents to explain it. This reflex assumes that legitimacy flows from European suffering, that African political experience is derivative, and that progress is measured by proximity to Western moral scripts. This is not solidarity. It is epistemic dependency.

Tanzania is not a metaphor for someone else’s trauma. It is not a stage for imported Cold War allegories. It is a living, contested, and evolving political project, shaped in the African furnace by its anti-colonial struggle; by its 1964 People’s Revolution that swept away a Sultanate oligarchic regime; by its Maji Maji rebellion against the German colonial rule; by its regional realities; by its demographic pressures; and by its developmental ambitions. 

This is Tanzania!

Critique is welcome. Something else is not.

Havel’s essay is powerful—in its time, in its place, for its struggle. To wield it as a universal diagnostic tool for Tanzania today is to misunderstand both Havel and Tanzania.

We deserve better than recycled metaphors!

We deserve analysis rooted in our own history, our own contradictions, our own wars, and our own aspirations.

Anything less is not enticing!

/ZNK Reader

NOTE: In Havel’s work, “post-totalitarian” does not mean after dictatorship; it describes a mature authoritarian system in which repression has been normalized, bureaucratized, and internalized.