The rise and fall of a Swahili tabloid in socialist Tanzania: Ngurumo newspaper, 1959–76

While historians of East Africa have examined the region’s rich print cultures in the era of decolonisation, they have viewed newspapers primarily in intellectual terms, rather than as businesses embedded in capital networks. Through the Asian-owned Tanzanian tabloid Ngurumo, this article examines the political economy of newspapers and printing during the time of decolonisation in Tanzania. It argues that Randhir Thaker’s printing firm played an essential yet overlooked role in sustaining nationalist expansion in the late 1950s, before then entering the newspaper market in a period marked by racial tensions. However, the same undercapitalised business model which allowed Ngurumo to become Tanzania’s most popular newspaper then constrained its ability to expand its operations. Ngurumo’s demise in the mid-1970s was not caused by direct government intervention, but by its lack of the infrastructural and financial support which sustained the state- and party-owned press through a time of economic hardship.