Nation-building in post-colonial nation-states: the cases of Tanzania and Fiji Erik Larson and Ron Aminzade In 1975 Sakeasi Butadroka was expelled from Parliament in Fiji for calling for the repatriation of citizens whose ancestors were from the Indian sub-continent. 1 Aside from this Idi Amin- like proposal, Butadroka advanced a number of policy proposals to reserve certain economic institutions and activities for indigenous Fijians. While Butadroka’s vision of repatriation never materialised, many of his other proposals have been advanced by indigenous Fijian-dominated govern- ments in the aftermath of coups in 1987 and 2000 under the justification that these policies promote political sta- bility, equality and indigenous rights. During the initial years of multi-party politics in Tanzania in the early 1990s, Reverend Christopher Mtikila, a 48 year-old clergy- man of the Full Salvation Church who led the unregis- tered Democratic Party (DP), shook up political debate by targeting Asians as enemies of the nation and coining a new racial nationalist vocabulary of indigenisa- tion to express his exclusive sense of who was a real Tanzanian. Denouncing Indians and Arabs as thieves and looters of the country’s wealth (gabacholis) who had sold out the nation and exploited dispossessed Africans (walalahoi), he coined the racially coded term wazawa (indigen- ous) as an alternative reference for citizens and called for the expulsion of Asians and Arabs from Tanzania, urging neighbouring African countries to repay the as- sistance Tanzania pro- vided during their liberation struggles by sending troops to drive the Asians and Arabs out of Tanzania (Evans 1993, p. 36). The ruling party attempted to co-opt his call for indigenisation by redefining the term indi- genous to include all citi- zens and by passing legislation restricting cer- tain foreign economic activities. The experiences in these two countries high- light the fragile nature of membership in the national community in racially divided post-colo- nial states. In both instances the calls for re- patriation were combined with proposals to restrict the economic activi- ties of the ‘‘non-indigenous’’ population. While the extremist elements in both countries did not win direct political control, the partial success of their proposals for economic indigen- isation shows that they were not advanc- ing ideas outside the realm of popular political discourse. Given the resonance with the Erik Larson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Macalester College. His research focuses on the emergence and transformation of legal, economic and political institutions in relation to the global and national developments. His current projects examine the establishment of stock exchanges; the preparation, presentation and interpretation of evidence for interna- tional treaty monitoring bodies and the nexus between the global indigenous rights movement and national and regional indigenous rights movements. Email: larsone@macalester.edu Ronald Aminzade is a Professor of Sociol- ogy at the University of Minnesota. He has published two books and numerous articles on the political consequences of capitalist development in nineteenth-century France and has also published articles on higher education and on social movements and contentious politics. His current research explores the impact of neo-liberal econom- ics and democratic political reforms on the ideologies and practices of citizenship and nationalism in East Africa. Email: aminzade@umn.edu ISSJ 192 r UNESCO 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DK, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.