Tanzania’s police said Friday that nationwide demonstrations expected next week would be illegal, raising concerns about renewed clashes following a brutal crackdown during protests against what was widely viewed as unfair election in October. President Samia Suluhu Hassan was declared the landslide winner of that vote after her main challengers were excluded, prompting Tanzanians to take the streets. Security forces then crushed the demonstrations, leaving hundreds of people dead in what WPR contributor Sophie Neiman called “the deadliest political violence Tanzania has seen in decades.”
Neiman reviewed harrowing imagery that captured the violence unleashed by security forces and interviewed Tanzanian activists for a briefing published by WPR last month. They told her that “Tanzania will never be the same again.”
Dan Paget, an assistant professor of politics at the University of Sussex who studies Tanzania, said the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi had long been seen as the party of benevolent strongmen that helped deliver Tanzania’s independence from the U.K. “That image is damaged,” Paget told Neiman. “It may be damaged for a generation. There will be communities where everyone knows someone who was killed, or knows someone who knows someone who was killed.”
In the aftermath of the violence, Neiman asked Tito Magoti, a Tanzanian human rights activist, what would come next. His answer: “Resistance. Resistance. Resistance.”
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