In 1983, Professor Gerhard Kohler, a technocratic expert from East Germany, arrived at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to lead a one-week seminar to develop a plan for cutting down on imports. Koh-ler's visit was part of a larger effort to remake industrial production across Tanzania. Just a few weeks earlier, the Ministry of Industries had announced a new committee of experts to "identify ways of reducing dependency on raw materials, capital machinery, accessories, and spare parts" with an eye to using more locally available materials. In Kohler's seminar on the same topic, he urged citizens of the "Third World" to cut their reliance on foreign imports and "as much as possible be inward looking by exploiting local resources instead of seeking foreign assistance." Indeed, animated by different (yet not disconnected) circumstances, the shortages that vexed daily life in Dar es Salaam and much of the Third World in the early 1980s were not unlike those faced by countries in the Eastern Bloc. At a moment when the Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, was turning inward and seeking to resist impositions by the International Monetary Fund to open the national economy and devalue the currency, the press coverage of Kohler's visit and similar conferences was quite purposeful. It was an attempt to draw up the austerity of life in Dar es Salaam as a transnational condition rather than the result of poor governance. Many countries were facing increasing insolvency, and cooperation offered the opportunity to secure a better material future.
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