Et tu, Samia? Tanzania’s autocratic state and the denial of a massacre

The autocratic state that now reigns over Tanzania is actively constructing alternative narratives over last year’s post-election massacre. The government of Samia Suluhu Hassan is implementing a far-reaching strategy of state denial, hoping to evade international justice and diplomatic isolation. Twice we are witnessing not only the banality of evil, as referenced by Hannah Arendt, but the betrayal of the pain of survivors, of victims’ families, of the disappeared, the jailed and the tortured.

Over the past few months I have read through numerous accounts, looked at the brutality of verified footage, and studied the lists of confirmed victims, as part of our second submission of evidence to the International Criminal Court. What happened between 29 October and 6 November, and thereafter, was a premeditated and well-planned security operation to neutralise protests, punish dissent and bludgeon democracy advocates. What the world witnessed were crimes against humanity. Hassan now wants us to believe the opposite, shielding carnage with sovereign legitimacy. In the government’s false narrative the perpetrators become victims, the opposition become perpetrators, and a besieged government did its best to maintain peace and stability. This is a lie.

Tanzania’s 29 October 2025 elections were a façade, not a free choice. With major opposition parties effectively banned from competing and key leaders imprisoned on treason and related charges, Hassan was declared the winner with an unbelievable 98% of the vote. Observer missions and legal experts agreed: this was not a genuine, competitive election. It was the culmination of a systematic closure of civic space and the deliberate removal of any meaningful alternative to the ruling regime. What happened on election day was a human rights catastrophe that the authorities are still trying to bury. When Tanzanians across the country took to the streets to protest against exclusion, fraud and an increasingly authoritarian government, they were met not with dialogue, but with bullets. Security forces fired live ammunition into crowds, beat unarmed civilians and carried out mass arrests. Domestic and international organisations documented killings, torture, enforced disappearances, sexual assault, arbitrary detentions and denial of medical care. The internet was shut down, cities were locked down and journalists and activists were harassed and silenced, all pointing to a regime intent on hiding the scale of its own violence. Bodies were disposed of in mass graves and then dug up and moved when the mass graves were identified.

The cover-up would continue in the subsequent months, a latest reverberation of this being the current campaign of state denial. Opposition figures have spoken of hundreds, even up to 2,000 people killed. Civil society groups have already documented more than 3,000 killings linked to the crackdown. While exact figures remain contested, in part because of the state’s efforts to intimidate witnesses, restrict information and obstruct independent investigation, the pattern of systematic, state-linked lethal force is undeniable.

State denial often accompanies events of mass violence. Historical revisionism has long been a tool of authoritarian control and political humiliation of victims. Atrocities are erased, events registered under the perspective of one side, the history of a nation redefined by a political lens and the population’s memory contradicted. But denial works against peace, reconciliation and justice. Truth is a prerequisite to heal deep wounds and move beyond collective pain. Denial of the truth is revictimising those who were brutalised.

Twenty-two years ago, I had the privilege of studying under sociology professor Stanley Cohen at the London School of Economics, whose pioneering work unpacked the intricacies of state denial of atrocities. Having witnessed the barbarity of apartheid South Africa in the 1950s as a child and having studied the institutionalised strategies of Nazi Germany, the military dictatorships of Latin America and others, Cohen aptly explained the stages of state denial. When an atrocity is first exposed, the state will use literal denial as its primary line of defence. However, when evidence becomes overwhelming, it shifts to interpretative denial to allow for an element of ambiguity and the reframing or spinning of what happened. At a later stage the state relies on implicatory denial by justifying the need to act in defence of a superior cause like peace and security to the benefit of the majority.

The totality of Hassan’s government statements over the past few months confirm Cohen’s stages of denial. The pattern progressed from: outright denial (“no excessive force”, 31 October), to deflection of responsibility to foreigners (3 November), an acknowledgment of deaths without numbers (14 November), the characterisation of force as “proportional” (2 December), the rejection of higher estimates without providing lower ones (18 December) and a categorical denial of policy while acknowledging results (January 2026). Hassan’s 2 December statement – “What would less force have looked like?” – is an admission that force was used on a scale that requires justification. Four other strategies have also been used to deny the massacre of what we believe were thousands of civilians: the distorted findings of a partisan commission of inquiry, the emergence of a documentary restoring the “truth”, the deployment of lobby groups to influence governments and the use of football stars to facilitate sportswashing. Ironically, these actions are more incriminating than absolving.

The evidence is overwhelming. Several investigations by respected and credible organisations have proved the state’s involvement and responsibility in the atrocities committed. Among these are: the Centre for Information Resilience’s investigation published on 4 December 2025, comprising of 185 pieces of digital evidence with 44 verified geolocated images/videos, CNN’s forensic investigation of 21 November 2025 provided unprecedented documentary evidence of extrajudicial killings, mass graves and systematic body concealment, Amnesty International’s investigation of 19 December 2025, Reuters’ investigation of 9 January 2026 documenting the Mjimwema café killings, Deutsche Welle’s exclusive investigation on 13 January 2026, based on eyewitness accounts, leaked police files and ballistics reports, corroborating the use of lethal force against unarmed civilians in Mwanza. Other reports included those by Human Rights Watch and from the Human Rights Monitor investigation, which combined direct witness interviews, narrative testimonies, documentary evidence and cross-verified accounts from victims, family members, community actors, religious leaders, healthcare professionals and journalists. In parallel, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights confirmed “at least 700” extrajudicial killings, with experts stating the true figure may be in the thousands.

Under mounting domestic and international pressure, Hassan announced a Presidential Commission of Inquiry chaired by retired chief justice Mohamed Othman Chande. On paper, this looked like a step towards accountability. In practice, its work raises serious concerns about an official attempt to control the narrative and contain the political fallout. The commission collected nearly 1,000 sworn statements and met more than 6,000 people across the country. In April 2026, it finally reported what survivors already knew: there were serious abuses and excessive force, with an estimated 518 civilians killed. It called for some reforms and further investigations into certain officers. Yet, even as it acknowledged grave violations, the commission carefully stopped short of naming the true architects of the violence. It framed much of the unrest as planned, financed political violence, shifting blame back onto the victims and their political representatives. The commission concluded that the violence was “planned, coordinated, financed and executed by trained individuals”, an interpretation designed to shift responsibility away from the security services and onto an imaginary external adversary. The report failed to identify perpetrators of the violence or investigate any government entities charged with security and police action. Instead, it blamed social media and inflammatory rhetoric as primary catalysts and concluded that the violence was planned, coordinated, financed and executed by trained individuals who recruited vulnerable groups to participate in attacks to overwhelm the security forces. It rejected specific claims of mass graves, downplayed wider patterns of killings and avoided drawing a clear chain of command that would link field abuses to those who ordered, enabled or tolerated them at the highest levels of the state.

Solidifying this version of events was crucial for the lie to take hold. Enter here the documentary What Happened on October 29? By Nigerian blogger David Hundeyin who described it as an independent investigation into what the international media got wrong about the post-election events. The film’s main argument was that reporting of the violence was fabricated by a foreign adversary “more powerful than any African government”. Hundeyin rapidly emerged as a regime apologist as the killings were under way. A day after the massacre began, he framed the violence on his verified X account as “yet another western regime change psy-op” targeting Hassan for the sole reason that her government was “pro-China and pro-Russia”.

The latest attempt to rehabilitate Tanzania’s international image involved the courting of two football celebrities – Rio Ferdinand and Didier Drogba – who met Hassan. One was later invited to serve as ambassador for the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations. This sportswashing, like the documentary, carries the hallmarks of state propaganda.

For survivors and human rights defenders, this is not justice; it is damage control. We now have an official record, although it downplays the actual figure, that grave crimes occurred, but almost no meaningful consequences for those responsible and no credible path to full truth, accountability and reparation. Instead of opening the door to genuine reckoning, the regime appears intent on managing information, limiting liability to a few low-ranking officers, and closing the book on a massacre that it would prefer the world forget.

Until there is an independent, transparent process that confronts the full scale of the killings and the responsibility of those who ordered them, the message to victims and their families is brutally clear: their lives can be taken, their rights trampled and their suffering rewritten, all in service of a regime that would rather conceal a massacre than confront its own crimes. DM