Jonathan M. Jackson. Visions for an African Valley: Histories of Development in Kilombero, Tanzania Since 1877. James Currey, 2025. xvi + 253 pp. $130.00. Hardcover. ISBN: 9781847013941.

Jonathan Jackson's new book has its virtues.I discovered that, in my book on Tanzania's first years of independence, I almost certainly misidentified a reference to Sonjo village made by a supercilious British civil servant in the Commonwealth Relations Office.Jackson is correct that the comment referred presciently to a disappointing pre-independence settlement scheme initiated by the Dar es Salaam branch of the independence party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), intended to grow rice in the Kilombero Valley (196).While I might otherwise be pleased that the author overlooked my mistake, it is emblematic of Jackson's thin engagement with the literatures at stake here, and an analytical approach that is the opposite of "thick description."His initial thought, to constitute a theory of "imagined futures" around the repeatedly deferred ambitions for development of a hard-to-reach region of Tanzania, is a promising one.But it emerges as more of a rhetorical ploy, derivative of Benedict Anderson's famous title, that never quite bears the analytical fruit that might comment usefully on the ways in which colonial imaginaries shaped postcolonial nationalism."Imagined futures" works as a framing device here, but it may have been more useful to critically engage the still ambiguous "worldmaking" concept Adom Getachew articulated, and that Emmanuel Akyeampong has deployed in his survey of postcolonial Africa.Or, more philosophically, it could leverage Geoffrey Hawthorn's "plausible worlds" theory which may have critiqued the field of history itself.To the extent that Jackson does bring in relevant literature, it is just in passing, and little comes of it.In regard to the dismissive comment on the TANU settlement scheme by the British civil servant, the incident has everything to do with colonial and postcolonial ambitions to rid Dar es Salaam of rural migrants and unemployed young men by settling them, in a paternalist manner, in farflung locations in the countryside where they might be taught to lead productive lives.This has been documented in some detail by Andrew Burton in particular, but also James Brennan, Thomas Burgess, Michael Jennings, and James Giblin who are all cited earlier in the chapter, or at least their articles, but only to say that this particular chapter of the book "intersects with well developed subfields of youth and modernity" (188).If it intersects, then why not comment usefully upon this very relevant scholarship?This is not to pick nits about this particular case.This is a problem across the entire text.