Whether and to what extent African states and societies have been able to break away from colonial impact is a still contentious issue.

Harald Barre considers newspapers and academic activism in Tanzania as forums in which the project of an independent African nation was shaped through heated debates. Examining the changing discourses on race and gender in the 1960s and 1970s, he reveals that equating difference with inequality in the national narrative was fiercely contested. Pervasive images rooted in colonialism were thus challenged and in some cases fundamentally transformed by journalists, students, (inter)national scholars, (inter)national events and the promise of an egalitarian socialist state.