Mhola – The Utopia of Peace: An Ethnographic Exploration of the Sungusungu Movement in Tanzania

This study is about the formation and spread of the Sungusungu movement in Tanzania that arose in the early 1980s among the Sukuma-Nyamwezi people in west-central Tanzania, south of Lake Victoria. In the wake of the international oil crisis in the 1970s, aggravated by the costly war with Uganda that led to the demise of Idi Amin’s regime in 1979, the country experienced a period of deep economic and social crisis with inflation, collapsing markets, a shortage of basic commodities and a breakdown