Word.ws English Dictionary

ujamaa

ujamaa noun: a socialist ideology of cooperation and collective advancement that formed the basis of socioeconomic policies in Tanzania in the 1960s.

Noun

ujamaa (countable and uncountable, plural ujamaas)

  1. (uncountable) A socialist ideology of cooperation and collective advancement that formed the basis of socioeconomic policies in Tanzania in the 1960s.
    • On Tuesday night at the Club Serene in Brooklyn, Mayor Koch proclaimed Kwanzaa Week in New York. Then he told the crowd of about 400 that he had practiced his Swahili in order to pronounce correctly such exotic-sounding words as kujichagulia (self-determination), ujamaa (cooperative economics) and...1983 December 30, Ron Alexander, “The Evening Hours”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 03 Jan 2022, page B7
    • She told him the gift was in keeping with the spirit of ujamaa, or cooperative economics, one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa.2021 January 30, Christina Morales, “A 10-Year-Old GameStop Investor Cashed In. His Return? Over 5,000%”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 22 Feb 2021
  2. (countable) A village built according to this ideology, with central homes and school surrounded by communal farmland.

Forms of ujamaa

pluralujamaas

Origin of ujamaa

Borrowed from Swahili ujamaa (“brotherhood, extended family”), from jamaa (“family”), from Arabic جَمَاعَة (jamāʕa, “group (of people)”).

Questions about ujamaa

What does ujamaa mean?
Ujamaa means a socialist ideology of cooperation and collective advancement that formed the basis of socioeconomic policies in Tanzania in the 1960s.
What part of speech is ujamaa?
Ujamaa is a noun.
What is the plural of ujamaa?
The plural of ujamaa is ujamaas.

Words near ujamaa in the dictionary

  1. Uitzilopochtli
  2. Uivar
  3. UJA
  4. Ujah
  5. Ujahs
  6. ujamaa
  7. ujamaas
  8. uji
  9. Ujiiye
  10. Ujiiyes
  11. Ujiji

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ujamaa (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “ujamaa.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ujamaa. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.