Hansjörg Dilger, 2022, Learning Morality, Inequalities, and Faith: Christian and Muslim Schools in Tanzania, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 292pp., ISBN 9781316514221

Keywords: Religion, Education, Schools, Moral formation, Inequality, Social class, Inter-religious coexistence, Belonging, Tanzania

In the mid-1990s, about a decade after entering a phase of neoliberal economic restructuring, Tanzania saw the partial privatisation of its education sector. As government schools began to suffer a decline in their reputation, religious—and particularly Christian—private schools became increasingly attractive to middle-class Christian and Muslim families in urban contexts like Dar es Salaam. In more recent years, Muslim schools have also grown in popularity. Some, funded by international Muslim organisations, have particular appeal among middle- and upper-class residents, including Christian families (see Dohrn 2016 and Guner 2021). Meanwhile, there are other Muslim schools that have been developed by revivalist groups in Tanzania, and which cater exclusively to Muslim families and students. These, too, have also started to attract middle-class students, despite their structural marginality relative to the prestigious Christian and (international) Muslim schools mentioned above. While the backgrounds and orientations of these schools are highly diverse, they share a common appeal: they “promise to combine high-quality education with the moral (self-)formation of young people” (2) at a time of heightened economic uncertainty and enduring anxiety about moral decay in urban settings. In Tanzania, then, religious groups have, through the provision of private schooling, come to exert a considerable influence on the formation of students as moral subjects and citizens, and in doing so have afforded their parent organisations and movements greater public visibility and political reach.

In this book, Learning Morality, Inequalities, and Faith: Christian and Muslim Schools in Tanzania, Hansjörg Dilger draws on ten months of ethnographic research in Dar es Salaam, over the course of which he investigated the ordinary lives of six religious schools, some Christian and others Muslim, all of which have sprung up in the wake of privatisation. While the book has much relevance to those interested in Tanzania’s education sector, Dilger is primarily concerned with what these schools can tell us about dynamics of moral subject formation and social inequality in Tanzania—though here, the analysis also speaks to settings far beyond East Africa, including other postcolonial contexts with religiously plural populations. Dilger examines how the everyday moral strivings of students, families, and staff members are shaped through a range of entangled processes at various scales: from the reproduction of (class-inflected) networks of belonging, and (post)colonial dynamics of religious difference and educational inequality, to the embedding of neoliberal logics and transnational education policies in state apparatuses and institutional arrangements.

Dilger’s capacity to trace how these different threads are entwined with the making of individual subjectivities is enhanced by his refusal to allow his analysis to be confined to “the micro-social environments that anthropologists usually study” (234). He triangulates his comparative ethnographic findings with relevant knowledge from secondary sources, archival materials, and quantitative datasets concerning (post)colonial historical developments in the East African region, as well as ongoing political-economic shifts that have resonance at a global scale. The book models an approach to social research that combines rich ethnographic insights into ordinary realities and individual experiences with “a stronger focus on institutionalisation [and] configurations of inequality and power” (31) than is conventionally associated with