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A View from Campus. The Attitude of University Students to the European and South Asian Minorities in Tanzania and Zambia Compared
The evidence shows that Tanzanian and Zambian university students representing the African by origin overwhelming majority of the countries’ population are generally tolerant towards their compatriots of the non-African (European and South Asian) origins. However, the evidence also gives reason to argue that, on the one hand, in both countries the perception of Europeans is better than of Indians and, on the other hand, the level of tolerance among Zambian students is higher than among Tanzanian. The aim of the article is to find out why it is so; most attention is paid to the second, previously undiscovered phenomenon. The authors examine a number of factors that supposedly could lead to the Zambian educated youth’s higher level of tolerance and arrive at the conclusion that the most significant among them is the existence since pre-colonial time of the Swahili culture and language at minimal number of expansionist centralized polities on the contemporary state’s territory as the background for autochthonous peoples’ unity in Tanzania and lack of such a background till colonial period in Zambia. Among the other factors tested, those that turned out important for defining the respondents’ attitude to the non-autochthonous minorities are their look at colonialism (the Zambian aggregate is characterized by less total rejection of colonialism due to which the European and South Asian diasporas appeared, as it is seen widely as the time when the nation began to form) and degree of concentration on the values of traditional culture (which is lower among Zambian students). In the meantime, the role secularization plays is contradictory, while belonging to the Christian or Muslim faith, to a larger or smaller ethnic group, place of birth (city, town, village, etc.), and probably financial situation proved insignificant.