Massive bridge building, ring roads, huge dams, large-scale agricultural schemes, aluminum smelters, gas, coal, iron and fertilizer investment plans have in a few instances been implemented over the last fifth-teen years but as ‘expectations’ hyping up feverish anticipations about a second coming of Eastern African countries are taking a life of their own. Most if not all of these grand-plans were part of the post-independence ‘socialist’ state-led development pursued from the 1960s in Tanzania and 1970s in Mozambique. In this part of the world high-modernistic aspirations were based on the ideology of scientific socialism or Marxism although a good deal of pragmatism guided planning. Particular ideas concerning the creation of a ‘new society’ and Ujamaar underpinned the high-modernity aspirations of these societies where the role of the state and the vanguard party dominated by foundational ideas concerning ‘national unity’ have had a long shelf life. One question is how the uneven and ‘variegated’ implementation of neoliberal reforms after 1980 changed the earlier phase of high-modernity in Mozambique and African-socialism in Tanzania. Another question concerns which, if any, remnants from the high-days of high-modernity with state-led, industrial and big ideas about infrastructural development that blossomed after independence have found their way into the present new resource economies in Mozambique and Tanzania today.