Self‐help and Volunteerism in Tanzania in the 1960s: Voluntary Labour, Nation Building and Constructing Modernity

The United Nations has declared 2026 the International Year of Volunteers for Sustainable Development. Against that backdrop, this article examines the experience of volunteerism, and specifically self‐help voluntary labour in Tanzania in the early colonial period, to explore the place of volunteerism in the construction of the post‐colonial state and its role as a site of alternative understandings of the nature of that state. The article draws attention to the long history of Global South volunteering, which pre‐dates the rise of neoliberal state roll‐back and increased reliance on private actors (including volunteers) for public provisioning. It seeks to understand the ways in which volunteerism by Tanzanians, in Tanzania, was a critical part of the (contested) imaginaries of what a new nation might look like after the collapse of colonial occupation. In doing so it challenges analyses and critiques of volunteering which present Global North mobilities as the normative experience. The analysis presented here explores volunteerism as a form of labour rather than primarily an experience and expression of civic engagement, and through that explores the relationship between volunteerism and the state in public provisioning and state construction.