Tanzania: a year after the killings, mourning under surveillance

According to RFI, Tanzanians marked this Thursday, 29 October 2026, the first anniversary of the deadly crackdown on protests that followed the last presidential election. There was no official national ceremony. Masses were held from the morning, then work resumed. The authorities warned against any new mobilisation, while the US embassy paid tribute to the victims. The families, for their part, still await truth, justice and reparations.

That is what we know. The rest of this article is our reading, and its limits need stating at the outset: the dispatch gives no death toll, no detail on the authorities' warnings, and nothing on any possible investigation. We will not invent them. This silence on figures is, in itself, part of the story.

A year on, the calendar of mourning is therefore dictated by those responsible for being held to account. An ordinary working day, churches as the only tolerated spaces, warnings in place of an official message: people commemorate in a whisper, behind four walls, what they cannot name in public. Grieving is permitted; demanding accountability much less so. Yet the families are asking for nothing extravagant: to know what happened to their loved ones, and for someone to answer for it.

This scene can be read through what anti-colonial thinkers, Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral chief among them, said about independence. When national liberation is not accompanied by social transformation, a local elite inherits the colonial state apparatus, its reflexes and its distrust of the governed. The flag changes; the structure does not. A state that treats its own population as a danger to be contained, rather than a political body to be represented, reproduces an old logic: order before people.

Should we see here, as our angle suggests, a neocolonial dependence? Caution. The dispatch establishes no direct link between this crackdown and outside interests. What can be observed is an asymmetry: the most visible tribute comes from a foreign embassy, not from the country's own institutions. That does not make Washington a disinterested defender of peoples; powers that express outrage now and then are often the same ones that deal with those very governments when business requires it. But it says something about the political space left to Tanzanians themselves.

The central question therefore remains open, and it is simple: to whom does an African state answer, its citizens or its partners and creditors? As long as the answer leans towards the second, the families of those who died in 2025 risk remaining alone with their candles. Their demand for truth, justice and reparations is not partisan opposition. It is the minimum a country owes those it has lost.