Viongozi na watu wengi wa nchi za Magharibi, na nchi zingine, walikuwa wanamheshimu sana Nyerere kwa sababu alikuwa ni kiongozi makini sana. He was a man of principle and high moral integrity who never wavered when he took a stand on vital issues affecting the wellbeing of Africa. That is why he came to be acknowledged as "The conscience of Africa." His fellow African leaders also nicknamed him "OAU's minister of foreign affairs."
Tofauti alizokuwa nazo na viongozi wa nchi za Magharibi did not diminish his stature as a highly principled leader just as the differences Mao had with the West did not in anyway diminish his stature as a great leader in spite of the mistakes he made. Great leaders also make big mistakes.
China would not be what it is today had it not been for the foundation laid by Mao. Ghana would not be what it is today had it not been for Nkrumah - he laid the foundation for modern Ghana - and achieved a lot in less than 10 years he was prime minister and president. He was prime minister for three years and president for almost six years before he was overthrown in February 1966 in a military coup engineered by the United States and Britain together with France and West Germany. The leaders of those countries met at the White House in Washington, D.C., a number of times to formulate plans, including a military coup, on how to get rid of Nkrumah.
Every successive government in Ghana has built on the foundation laid by Nkrumah and has acknowledged its indebtedness to him. And Tanzania would not be what it is today had it not been for the foundation laid by Nyerere.
Watu wanaosema Nyerere hakustahili kupewa sifa kama kiongozi, na alikuwa msanii tu, wakumbuke kwamba hata viongozi wa nchi za Magharibi wanaowasifu, na labda hata kuwaabudu, kwamba wana sera nzuri kuliko sera za Nyerere, ni viongozi hao hao wanaosema Nyerere alikuwa ni kiongozi mwenye uwezo mkubwa sana kama kiongozi licha ya kutofautiana naye katika mambo mbali mbali.
Some of them even acknowledged him as a world leader, not just a Tanzanian or an African leader. One of them was President Jimmy Carter.
That is a very high compliment for a leader of a poor, Third World country like Tanzania. But that was Nyerere. When he died, a report in The Washington Post stated that during Nyerere's leadership, Tanzania was one of the top 25 countries in the world. It punched above its weight, and came to be acknowledged as a leading country in the international arena, because of Nyerere.
Professor Ali Mazrui, a towering intellectual of international standing and one of the best Africa has ever produced, articulated the same position in terms of Nyerere's achievements, also contending that Nyerere did not get the credit he deserved as a great nation builder:
"Nyerere's policies of nation-building amount to a case of Unsung Heroism. With wise and strong leadership, and with brilliant policies of cultural integration, he took one of the poorest countries in the world and made it a proud leader in African affairs and an active member of the global community." (Ali A. Mazrui, "Nyerere and I," in Voices, Africa Resource Center, October 1999: Professor Ali Mazrui writes a memorial tribute on the special bonds between him and the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, one of Africa's few great statesmen.)
Tuko wapi siku hizi, kama taifa, tangu Nyerere aondoke? Nani anatuheshimu? Tunadharauliwa na nchi za Magharibi na zingine.
That is in sharp contrast with the past - what we were, as a nation, under the leadership of Nyerere.
American ambassadors who knew Nyerere and who were accredited to Tanzania during his presidency acknowledged that he was a world leader, not just a Tanzanian or an African leader. They also said he was a selfless leader who was fully committed to the wellbeing of his people. They also admitted that he was a man of enormous intellect.
Baadhi ya viongozi hao wamenukuliwa katika kitabu cha Godfrey Mwakikagile, Why Tanganyika united with Zanzibar to form Tanzania, published last year. As Mwakikagile states:
"Deputy American ambassador Robert Hennemeyer who was in Tanganyika, later Tanzania, from 1961 - 1964, described President Nyerere as 'a great political theorist,...a charismatic figure,...a great leader of his people. I don't believe for a moment that he meant anything but to do the best he could for the wellbeing of his people....He had an enormous amount of influence with other black African leaders. He was so revered as the great father....Clearly he was a world leader, not just an African leader.'
Ambassador Claude G. Ross described Nyerere as a leader who was 'full of good intentions and the epitome of integrity....I don't think any kind of financial scandal was ever attached to him....He was a very interesting man, very articulate, you know, and had a better education. He'd gone to Edinburgh and had advanced training, not a doctorate, but advanced training.'
Ambassador John H. Burns had the following to say about Nyerere:
'The country had a President, the remarkable Julius Nyerere, unique---then and ever since in Africa...a highly intelligent and cultivated president....He, himself, lived very simply and insisted that members of his government do likewise.
I have rarely known anyone more dedicated to what he saw as his purpose in life. I once said that the song 'The Impossible Dream' could have been written for him.
He was a remarkably educated and cultured man, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh. One of his hobbies was translating Shakespeare into Swahili and one or two of them --Julius Caesar was one-- were performed at the University of Dar es Salaam, an institution in which Nyerere, not surprisingly, took great interest.....
We couldn't attract much attention from Washington for Nyerere. He was regarded by certain influential circles of the Johnson administration as a dangerous thinker."
In the words of Ambassador John W. Shirley:
'I enjoyed the fact that during my tenure in Dar es Salaam Julius Nyerere was still President of Tanzania. I found him an interesting and extremely intelligent man. And since South Africa was in turmoil at the time, and because Nyerere was, to say the least, not particularly sympathetic to the policy of constructive engagement, my meetings with him were frequent, animated, sometimes sharp, but never acrimonious. It was as intellectually stimulating to deal with him, as it was to deal with Prime Minister Salim Salim.'
Ambassador W. Beverly Carter described Nyerere in the following terms:
'Julius Nyerere was...one of the early heroes, political heroes, of mine and of many other Africanists....(He) was an extremely popular person....(Other African) countries tended to look to Tanzania for leadership, and Nyerere was never hesitant about offering it and giving it and doing it well. He is probably one of the most principled men I ever met in my life....
I talked earlier about my Government's ambivalence about Tanzania....Nyerere should have been treated more like the world leader that he is and that everyone recognized him to be....Just unheard of for a man of his... Nyerere's worldwide leadership being treated, I felt, as, not as well as other people who didn't come nearly up to his size. It's sort of symptomatic of the problem I had in dealing with my own Government....
You didn't think of (President) Tolbert (of Liberia) as being ... a Kenneth Kaunda or Julius Nyerere. He didn't have that capability, was not an intellectual giant. He did not even have quite the quality that Botswana's Seretse Khama had, who was not a giant intellectually the way I think Nkrumah was or Nyerere is.....With Nyerere it was the kind of relationship that you have in a dormitory at night when you're engaging in a good debate.'
Ambassador James W. Spain described Nyerere this way:
'Nyerere's rule was relatively benign. I am quite sure he never ordered anybody killed. There were a few people in jail but not many. Some were from Zanzibar, under sentence of death there but kept alive on the mainland....People didn't get killed. They might get relocated under the ujamaa system of farming, but Nyerere never even thought of 'liquidating the kulaks'....
He was a hopeless socialist. Still, he was clearly a very sincere and humane man.
If I did anything useful, it was to convince Washington that Nyerere was not a brutal African dictator and a Communist stooge....I found Nyerere fascinating....I never read a book that he hadn't read. He translated Shakespeare into Kiswahili....I am very fond of Julius Nyerere....
Most Western development aid to Tanzania came from Scandinavia, particularly the Swedes. They liked the intellectual socialist, the benign father of his people who didn't kill or imprison people, while trying to create a new way of life with better prospects....Unlike other parts of Africa, no one was starving or dying of uncontrolled disease in Tanzania.... He was basically a humanist with a keen sense of both tribal traditions and modern politics....
The fact was that Nyerere certainly wasn't on our side, but he wasn't a tool of the Chinese or the Russians either....
I was personally very fond of Nyerere--not necessarily a good thing for a diplomat. He was a very remarkable man and, I think, a very constructive element in the peaceful solutions to the problems of Southern Africa that eventually emerged.'
Ambassador Richard N. Viets said the following about Nyerere:
'At that time in mid-1979, the so-called front-line states in Southern Africa, I think there were five of them...the organization was chaired by Julius Nyerere, the President of Tanzania, a very remarkable gentleman. Nyerere really towered over the other four heads of state and this organization in many respects was a one-man operation.
Because of his long association with the independence movements in East Africa and throughout Southern Africa he was highly respected.
Nyerere is an intellectual of very considerable dimensions, an extraordinarily articulate person. So the leadership of this group was essentially his without any challenge. He was offering almost daily advise to the Zimbabwean leadership on tactics, strategy, etc. in their negotiations with the British and the Americans and the others involved....
I decided I needed to know more about Julius Nyerere than anybody else on the face of the earth.... He is a very shrewd man.
He was...a most remarkable figure in contemporary African political history. I always said, and others who knew him well I think shared this view, that if Nyerere had been born in Western Europe or the Far East or even in North America, he would have been an exceptional figure in public life. He was a superb politician.
He had an acute brain, the memory of an elephant, intellectual horsepower that was second to none.
He was cunning. He could be warm-hearted one moment and cut you off at the legs at the next if it met his political or personal needs. He had, of course, been the principal political figure behind theTanzanian independence movement in the 1950s....
Nyerere...remains as far as I know the principal translator of Shakespeare from English into Swahili and one of the most gifted orators I have ever heard in English, and a marvelous drafter of the English language....
I can remember listening to him rail hour after hour against the IMF and the prescriptions the IMF was demanding of Tanzania that he argued would send it further into poverty, etc....
Nyerere regime's record is...in the human rights arena when one is talking about imprisonment and torture, or loaded legal shenanigans against opposition, I think his record is remarkably good. If human rights include the right to a job, an education, hospitalization, etc., then you have to give him pretty good marks.'
Ambassador Viets also acknowledged how intelligent Salim Ahmed Salim was:
'In the final months of my tour the Foreign Minister of Tanzania was a gentleman named Salim Salim, who nearly became the Secretary General of the United Nations. I think he would have had it not been for George Bush.
Bush remembered Salim Salim as the Tanzanian delegate who came and danced in front of his chair in the General Assembly the day the Chinese were admitted to the United Nations. And Bush never forgot Mr. Salim Salim. I found Salim Salim, who I think is now Secretary General of the OAU, to be a very, very bright, interesting man whose revolutionary zeal had long since cooled.'
Ambassador David C. Miller, a staunch Republican, said the following about Nyerere:
'He was on his way to the Cancun summit, the only head of government from Africa among the 13 presidents at Cancun. He was the leader of the frontline states in the negotiations over Resolution 435, which was the Namibian independence resolution passed by the UN. In terms of national power at home, he was at quite a peak. Physically, he was old enough to be wise and young enough to be vigorous. He was a great guy to work with....
Nyerere had been a world leader of the non-aligned movement for a long time. His economic policies were well-known and the impact of his economic policies had been apparent for some period of time. In a nutshell, on the domestic front, Tanzania had succeeded in integrating itself as a political entity.
Bu there was also Julius Nyerere's belief that it was important for every citizen of Tanzania to move forward roughly together economically and to integrate themselves socially and that over a period of time his approach to the economic management of Tanzania would produce a more coherent, unified country than, as he was fond of pointing out, Kenya, his nextdoor neighbor, which was our favorite country. So, domestically, he had succeeded with a single party approach to governing Tanzania and thought that that had worked well for him...
Wonderful, warm, friendly, smart, honest, brave, humble. He was as great a head of government as Africa has seen as evidenced not by his ability to do the little day-to-day things of running a country but on the big accounts, the most important being his lifestyle, which remained humble throughout his whole time as head of government. Most remarkable, was his retirement from the presidency at a time when he was perfectly capable of going on physically.
Then, of course, he returned to his village upcountry as one of the few heads of government in Africa who behaved the way George Washington behaved here and said, 'We do not need presidents for life in Africa and I don't intend to be one.'
Frankly, he was probably happiest when he was back home in Butiama with his wife and grandchildren in a very humble home. It was hard to get to by vehicle. So, for me, he stands out in stark relief to the failed public leadership in Africa that can be found in almost every country....
Julius Nyerere because of his global leadership - and this is the thing that you have to remember: nobody in their right mind today can tell you who was president of Burundi or Rwanda 20 years ago; Julius was an international author, an international statesman, and used that effectively as a head of government to gain support for Tanzania well beyond either its objective importance or its internal economic performance. To a great degree, that's what a head of government in a developing country ought to be trying to achieve. Julius achieved that.
So, did the economy ever work perfectly? No. Did it achieve what he wanted? Yes, it did. It produced a level economic base that is now producing a solid Tanzanian economy without the disasters that befell Kenya. If Julius were here today sitting with us, he would say, 'I told you, David. Kenya turned into a corrupt mud hole. Tanzania is now slowly taking off the ground with responsible leadership in a country that's socially unified.' I'm happy to make that argument for him....
It was an outstanding diplomatic world simply because of Nyerere's presence and who he was and the importance of having Julius' support when he was head of the Non-Aligned Movement, of having Julius' support when he was running the Frontline States. When Julius Nyerere spoke or traveled, people listened to him. So, countries that were playing in that environment wanted to have a good mission in Dar es Salaam....
He had a position on the world....He was first and foremost an intellectual and an ideologue.... Julius Nyerere was an intellect. He wanted to talk to people about his ideas and what worked and didn't work.'" - (Godfrey Mwakikagile, Why Tanganyika united with Zanzibar to form Tanzania, pp. 128 - 134, and 430).
The invitation of Nyerere to the Cancun summit, being the only African leader who was invited, is another example which demonstrates the profound respect Western leaders had for Mwalimu as a spokesman for the entire African continent because of his keen understanding of Africa's problems.
Nyerere's keen insights into Africa's problems and of the entire Third World were also acknowledged by his critics and admirers alike in both ideological camps – East and West. As Professor Gerry Helleiner of the University of Toronto who worked in Tanzania for many years stated not long after Nyerere died:
“It is now 'conventional wisdom' in Washington (even in the IMF, at least in terms of its rhetoric) and in donor capitals that poverty needs to be addressed as a matter of highest priority; that political stability and good governance (notably reduced corruption) are prerequisites for development; and that national ownership of programmes is critical to their success. It has taken them a long time to reach these positions. But Julius Nyerere was espousing them and trying to build practice upon them 30 years ago. His slogan of 'socialism and self-reliance', if transmitted today as 'equity, honesty and ownership', would win universal assent. He was decades ahead of his time in these matters....
Whatever his other mistakes in the realm of economics, in one area of economic policy Mwalimu was dead right - and, again, ahead of his time. Both in his anguished cry about the IMF in 1981 and in his subsequent work in the South Commission and the South Centre, he steadily maintained the need for fairer international (or global) systems of economic governance, particularly in the financial sphere. It is important to underline his consistent emphasis upon equity in global economic governance arrangements....
Nyerere’s activities in the international/global sphere included efforts to bolster analysis, both economic and political, to inform those who speak for the developing countries, especially the poorest among them, in international negotiations and organizations. The developing countries are still woefully weakly equipped to deal with the batteries of well-funded economists, lawyers and lobbyists who defend Northern interests in international discussions and the media. He was among those who saw, far ahead of others, that there is ultimately no substitute for one’s own technical, professional and institutional strength. Today it is known as 'capacity building', and it has entered 'conventional wisdom' as to what is to be done not only in Africa but throughout the developing world.” - (Gerry Helleiner, “The Legacies of Julius Nyerere: An Economist's Reflections,” University of Toronto, Canada, 2000).
Those are just a few examples of Western leaders, and some scholars, who had great respect for Nyerere as a leader of global stature.
Pia hao ni miongoni mwa viongozi ambao walitofautiana na Nyerere - they had profound philosophical and ideological differences with him - lakini licha ya tofauti hizo, na misimamo tofauti katika mambo mbali mbali, viongozi hao hawakusita hata kidogo kusema Nyerere alikuwa ni kiongozi anaye heshimiwa sana, kwa nini anaheshimiwa hivyo, na kwamba alikuwa ni kiongozi wa dunia, a world leader, na si kiongozi waTanzania au Afrika tu.
Hata Waafrika wenzake ambao hawakukubaliana na sera zake walimsifu hivyo. Mmoja wao ni Professor Ali Mazrui ambaye wapinzani mbali mbali wa Nyerere wamejaribu kutumia jina lake kumshambulia Nyerere bila hata kujua Mazrui mwenyewe alisema au aliandika nini kuhusu Nyerere na tofauti zao. Sijui wamesoma vitabu gani na maandishi gani mengine ya Mazrui.
Anzeni na kitabu chake cha kwanza, Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition, first published in 1967, developed from his doctoral thesis at Oxford. He stated in some of of his writings and interviews years later that his dissertation was inspired by Nkrumah's political thought; especially Nkrumah's pan-African daring in his quest for immediate continental unification under one government and the establishment of an African High Command to liberate the rest of the countries still under white minority rule (Nkrumah even contemplated sending Ghanaian troops to Rhodesia to topple Smith), defend the continent, and maintain peace without external assistance and interference in African affairs by world powers. Hence Pax Africana, a concept reminiscent of Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana, and even Pax Sovietica.
Pax Asiatica, highly abstract even more than Pax Africana, is for all practical purposes an extension of Pan Americana which is now being challenged by China in the absence of a Sino-Soviet alliance which seemed possible during the Cold War partly demonstrated by Soviet and Chinese involvement in Vietnam, although not necessarily as allies, to oppose the United States.
With regard to Pax Africana, Mazrui himself stated years later about the profound influence Nkrumah had on him:
"The African leader who influenced me most positively was Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, although I met him face-to-face only a couple of times. I had far less personal contact with him than I have had with at least a dozen other African leaders. So in what sense was Nkrumah such an influence on me? The impact was intellectual and political rather than personal. My doctoral thesis at Oxford University was partly influenced by his ideas on Pan Africanism (See my first book ever Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition).
Kwame Nkrumah also stimulated my vision of Africa as a convergence of three civilizations - Africanity, Islam and Western culture. Nkrumah called that convergence 'Consciencism.' I later called it 'Africa's Triple Heritage.' I was able to elaborate on my own concept in a BBC/PBS television series titled The Africans: A Triple Heritage (1986)." - (Ali A. Mazrui in IGCS Reporters, "Ali A. Mazrui, Witness to History?," Special Edition Newsletter, Institute of Global Cultural Studies (IGCS), Binghamton University - State University of New York, Vol. 7, Issue 1, Spring 2008, p. 2).
His dissertation at Oxford, "The Idea of Self-Government and the Idiom of Nationalism in Some Commonwealth African Countries, 1957 - 1963," was later published as Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition after he earned his doctorate in 1966. Earlier, Mazrui had also shown leadership qualities when his fellow African students at Manchester University in England - where he obtained his bachelor's degree - elected him president of the African students union.
Mazrui would have become a UN employee after graduating from Oxford had it not been for the intervention of Colin Leys, a British scholar who was a professor of political science at Makerere during that period – it was he who also fast-tracked Mazrui's career to professorship at Makerere because of the confidence he had in the young man's academic potential. He was vindicated by history as Mazrui swiftly rose to prominence in the academic arena on a global scale. It was he who convinced Mazrui to go to Makerere instead of pursuing a career as an international civil servant at the United Nations. Leys also once taught at Kivukoni College in Dar es Salaam. As Mazrui himself stated:
"When I was a graduate student at Nuffield College, Oxford, in the 1960s, and was agonizing about my future career, the ultimate choice was between becoming an international civil servant at the Secretariat of the United Nations in New York, on the one hand, and pursuing a full-time academic career, on the other. There then walked into my life Colin Leys, a British academic who was then the professor of Political Science at Makerere in Uganda, and had once been a Don at Oxford. Colin Leys had heard about me, and came to Oxford in 1962 explicitly to persuade me to join him at Makerere.
One of the arguments which persuaded me to abandon the idea of serving at the Secretariat of the United Nations was Colin Leys’ proposition that an academic career would enable me to serve the United Nations in other ways from time to time. I agreed to join Leys at Makerere – one of the most important decisions of my life, and one which I have never regretted." - (Ali A. Mazrui, “Fifty Years as a Part-time Westerner: A Self-Portrait,” Annual Mazrui Newsletter No. 29, Early 2005, p. 5).
Mazrui was also known for popularising the concept of Pax Africana in academic circles and even among some members of the African political elite more than any other scholar.
Credit goes to Nyerere for being the first leader to enforce Pax Africana, peace enforced and maintained by Africans themselves, on their own initiative, and on their own terms; not by forces - even if they are African - mobilised under UN auspices or that of any other non-African organisation. Among all African countries, it is Tanzania which has given concrete expression to the concept of Pax Africana, sending troops, on its own, on pacification campaigns in Uganda, Mozambique, the Seychelles, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and would probably have done so in Rwanda to stop the genocide had Nyerere been in power during that period.
It was Nyerere who started that. No other African leader had done that before. Nkrumah would have been the first to enforce Pax Africana had he succeeded in sending Ghanaian troops to Rhodesia to remove the white minority regime from power but was ousted before he could launch his mission (which would have needed the support of Tanzania and Zambia). So, instead of Nkrumah, it was Nyerere who came to put Pax Africana into practice years later.
As far back as 1961, Nyerere supported formation of an African High Command to pacify Congo (then Congo-Leopoldville), defend Africa and impose peace on countries which degenerate into chaos. As he stated in a speech to the Second Pan-African Seminar, World Assembly of Youth (WAY), in Dar es Salaam in August 1961:
"During the difficulties in the Congo, when the idea of an African High Command was first proposed, I was very taken with it. I do think we in Africa should think seriously of a method by which that idea could be put into practice....It provides a real force for the defense of Africa against external aggression." - (Julius K. Nyerere, excerpts from a speech delivered to the Second Pan-African Seminar, World Assembly of Youth. Reprinted from WAY Forum, No. 40, September 1961, in Paul E. Sigmund, Jr., ed., The Ideologies of the Developing Nations, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1963, p. 210).
Professor Mazrui also stated that there was not a single African leader who was a strong supporter of the liberation movements like Nyerere:
"Nyerere was second to none in that commitment....He became the toughest spokesman against the British on the Rhodesian question. His country played a crucial role at the OAU Ministerial meeting at which it was decided to issue that fatal ultimatum to Britain's Prime Minister, Harold Wilson - 'Break Ian Smith or Africa will break with you.'" - (Ali A. Mazrui, "Nkrumahism and The Triple Heritage: Out of The Shadows," Third Lecture, Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lectures, University of Ghana, Legon, 2002).
Tanzania became the first country to sever diplomatic ties with Britain, followed by Ghana and Egypt the next day.
Nyerere's commitment to African liberation was also underscored by Professor Piero Gleijeses in his book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959 - 1976:
"Of all the African leaders who proclaimed their support for the liberation struggle in Africa - Nkrumah, Nasser, Ben Bella, Sekou Toure - he (Nyerere) was the most committed. And by the second half of 1964, spurred by events in Zaire and the obvious failure of peaceful attempts to end white rule in southern Africa, this commitment, and his disappointment with the Western powers, was increasingly evident.
By the time Che arrived (in 1965), Dar es Salaam had become the Mecca of African liberation movements....Dar es Salaam 'has become a haven for exiles from the rest of Africa,' the CIA lamented in September 1964. 'It is full of frustrated revolutionaries, plotting the overthrow of African governments, both black and white'....
In September 1964, Frelimo, the movement against Portuguese rule in Mozambique, had launched the opening salvo of its guerrilla war from bases in southern Tanzania, its only rear guard.
Following Stanleyville, Nyerere had thrown his full support to the Simbas, and Tanzania had become their main rear guard and the major conduit of Soviet and Chinese weapons for them.
It was also the seat of the Liberation Committee of the OAU. The head offices of Frelimo and a host of other movements struggling against the white regimes in South Africa, Namibia, and Rhodesia were in Dares Salaam.
The Cuban embassy there was, the CIA reported accurately in March 1965, 'the largest Cuban diplomatic station in sub-Saharan Africa.' The ambassador, Captain Pablo Ribalta, was a close friend of Che Guevara." - (Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959 - 1976, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA: The University of North CarolinaPress, 2002, pp. 84 and 85).
Trevor Grundy, a British journalist who worked at the Standard, renamed Daily News, in Dar es Salaam in the late sixties and early seventies, wrote the following about Nyerere (a graduate of the University of Edinburgh) in his review of Nyerere:The Early Years, a book written by Thomas Molony, a senior lecturer in African studies at the University of Edinburgh, in spite of the fact that he disagreed with Nyerere's socialist policies:
"I worked in Dar es Salaam (1968-1972) for one of the English papers he nationalized in 1970....
He got into Edinburgh and that city and the people he met there left an indelible mark on his future career. Julius fell in love with the British and their great writers, economists and philosophers.
He went on to use his Edinburgh years to great advantage, bewildering - some might say bamboozling - liberal-minded journalists in the 1960s and 1970s with his formidable intellect which was the result of his reading of Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill, T.H. Green's Principles of Political Organization, Benard Bosanquet's Philosophical Essay of the State and Harold Laski, the famous London School of Economics theorist.
He had a blotting paper brain.
Hardly a soul at Edinburgh guessed he would turn into Africa's number one brain box in years to come. As the historian George Shepperson put it in a BBC interview: 'We at Edinburgh were very surprised in the mid-1950s when Dr Nyerere's name became widespread throughout the world press. We never felt when he was here that he was going to become a leading politician.'
Statesmen and journalists were amazed at his knowledge....
With his eager tongue, (and) a formidable intellect,...he is presented by Commonwealth groupies as the politician who did the most to mastermind the downfall of Portuguese and British/Afrikaner rule in Africa....The Rhodesian leader Ian Smith several times referred to Nyerere as Africa's 'evil genius.'"
Also, read Professor Mazrui's articles in Transition, published in the sixties, and what he wrote about Nyerere; also read his other works. You will see exactly what he wrote about Nyerere, badala ya kuchukua mstari mmoja hapa na pale, na kuiunganisha out of context, just to attack Nyerere.
A devout Muslim and prominent Islamic scholar, Professor Mazrui also defended Nyerere, a Catholic, when some people said Nyerere recognised Biafra because the secessionists, who were mostly Igbo, were fellow Catholics; and that he authorised military intervention in Uganda to defend Christians against a Muslim dictator, Idi Amin. As he stated in his lecture at Cornell University in October 1999 in which he paid tribute to Nyerere:
"Has Nyerere's political behaviour sometimes reflected his upbringing as a Catholic? One school of thought explains his recognition of the secessionist Biafra as a form of solidarity with fellow Catholics against a Federal Nigeria, which would have been dominated by Muslims. This was in the middle of the Nigerian civil war. The Igbo of Biafra were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.
I personally did not share the suspicion that Nyerere recognized Biafra because the Igbo were fellow Roman Catholics claiming to be threatened by Muslim Northerners in Nigeria....It seems much more likely that Nyerere recognized Biafra for humanitarian reasons.
Less convincing is the assertion that Nyerere's military intervention in Uganda in 1979 was motivated by a sectarian calculation to defend a mainly Christian Uganda from the Muslim dictator Idi Amin. In reality, Nyerere might once again have been more motivated by a wider sense of humanitarianism and universal ethics. He was also defending Tanzania from Idi Amin's territorial appetites." - ("Africa's Mwalimu: Ali Mazrui Pays Tribute to Julius Nyerere," in Worldview Magazine, Washington, D.C., Vol. 12, No.4, Fall 1999; also Ali A. Mazrui, "Mwalimu's Rise to Power," in Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, 17 October 1999).
Mazrui was a bona fide scholar, not a religious bigot. One of his students at the University of Michigan, Keith Richburg from Detroit who later became a reporter of The Washington Post and the paper's bureau chief in Nairobi for three years in the nineties, states in his book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, that "Dr. Ali Mazrui (was) the best-known African scholar in the West."
Mazrui alitofautiana na Nyerere katika mambo mbali mbali tangu mwanzoni mwa miaka ya sitini lakini alikiri baadaye kwamba he came to admire Nyerere even more through the years and agreed with him on a number of fundamental issues, unlike in the past when he strongly disagreed with him although even then, back in the sixties, he was a great admirer of Nyerere as a superb intellectual and an ardent Pan-Africanist. Mazrui also described Nyerere as "the most original thinker" among all the leaders in Anglophone Africa, and the most intellectual African leader besides Leopold Sedar-Senghor of Senegal. When Nyerere died, Professor Mazrui had the following to say about Mwalimu:
"In global terms, he was one of the giants of the 20th century.... He did bestride this narrow world like an African colossus....Julius Nyerere was my Mwalimu too. It was a privilege to learn so much from so great a man." - (Ali A. Mazrui, ibid.)
Not long before Mazrui himself died (what a tragic loss), he said in an interview:
"I knew Nyerere very well."
They also met many times. Therefore, his assessment of Nyerere as a leader and as an intellectual comes from someone who personally knew Mwalimu for more than 30 years.
Lakini si hayo tu. Professor Mazrui pia alisema intellectually, alimheshimu Nyerere kuliko karibu wanasiasa wote dunia nzima; yaani, karibu kuliko viongozi wote duniani kwa vile nao ni wanasiasa.That was a very high compliment from someone who was also a critic of Nyerere. As Mazrui stated about 10 years after Nyerere died:
"Intellectually, I admired Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania higher than most politicians anywhere in the world (emphasis added)." - (Ali A. Mazrui, in "Witness to History: Interview with Ali A. Mazrui," in The Gambia Echo, Banjul, Gambia, 25 July 2008).
Jonathan Power, a British conservative who once worked in Tanganyika and who was highly critical of Nyerere's policies and one party-rule, also paid high tribute to Nyerere in spite of the ideological differences he had with him. As he stated in his article, "Lament for Independent Africa's Greatest Leader":
"His extraordinary intelligence, verbal and literary originality... and apparent commitment to non-violence made him not just an icon in his own country but of a large part of the activist sixties' generation in the white world who, not all persuaded of the heroic virtues of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, desperately looked for a more sympathetic role model.
Measured against most of his peers, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sekou Toure of Guinea, he towered above them. On the intellectual plane only the rather remote president of Senegal, the great poet and author of Negritude, Leopold Senghor, came close to him." - Jonathan Power, TFF Jonathan Power Columns, "Lament for Independent Africa's Greatest Leader," London, 6 October 1999).
Nakumbuka pia lecture ya Mtanzania mwenzetu Professor Haroub Othman kuhusu Nyerere, alipokwenda University of Cape Town, delivered before students and members of the academic staff, entitled, "An Intellectual in Power."
Hakuna shaka hata kidogo kwamba intellectually, and as a man of high moral stature, Mwalimu was nothing to play with, regardless of what his critics say in an attempt to diminish his stature as a thinker and as a world leader.
The American secretary of state, Dr. Henry Kissinger, an arrogant intellectual and a formidable opponent who was hated by many of his colleagues at the State Department because of his arrogance and who tried to intimidate his adversaries in the international arena, met his equal in terms of intellectual power when he came to Dar es Salaam in mid-September 1976 to talk to Nyerere about southern Africa, Rhodesia in particular, and how to end white minority rule in the region.
Kissinger also had deep-seated contempt for Africa just like President Richard Nixon did. As James K. Bishop, a seasoned diplomat since the Kennedy Administration who was deputy director for West Africa at the State Department and served as ambassador to Nigeria, Liberia and Somalia, among other high-level diplomatic assignments in Africa and elsewhere – he was also subjected to Kissinger's arrogance in a very humiliating way – stated in an interview:
“For countries I covered, we had a pretty broad spectrum of US interests at a time when the US administration was not particularly concerned about Africa. In addition to other issues that Nixon and Kissinger had to face--Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, disarmament--they both had also had very disparaging views of Africa. Nixon told one of our ambassadors--with whom I was working when he made his farewell call on the President at the White House--that Africans were a bunch of children and should be treated as such. Those were the ambassador's marching orders. Kissinger went to Africa once during my period in Washington--when I was the Deputy Office Director for West Africa. Bill Schaufele was the Assistant Secretary at the time; he looked over the manifest for Kissinger's plane and realized that he was the only African expert aboard. He asked whether he could bring an assistant along to help him. I was marched up to Kissinger's office and inspected--as a slave might have been inspected 200 years earlier on a block in Annapolis. He looked at me as if I were a piece of rancid meat. During the inspection, Kissinger went out of the room to take a telephone call from the President. Winston Lord, who remained with Schaufele and I, was kind enough to tell me not to be offended because Kissinger treated all of his staff the same way. The bottom line was that I didn't go on the plane; Schaufele went by himself.” - (James K. Bishop, Jr., interviewed by Charles S. Kennedy, The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, 15 November 1995, p. 30).
Another example of Kissinger's arrogance involved a Pakistani diplomat. The diplomat recalled with bitterness how Kissinger mistreated him. He said he met Kissinger before and talked to him. When he saw Kissinger again, at some kind of gathering, he said he told him they met before and wondered if he remembered him. He said Kissinger curtly responded: "It is not important for me to remember you."
The Pakistani diplomat felt extremely insulted and said about Kissinger: "He is very arrogant."
William Yandell Elliott who was one of Kissinger's professors at Harvard and who also was his adviser when he was a doctoral candidate told him years later: "Henry, you're brilliant. But you're arrogant. In fact you're the most arrogant man I've ever met. Mark my words, your arrogance is going to get you in real trouble one day." - (William Yandell Elliott, in Greg Grandin, Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015, p. 39).
Kissinger's dissertation was on Napoleonic era diplomacy.
Elliott himself was a highly influential figure. He was presidential adviser for many years and served both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Kissinger's contemptuous attitude even towards national leaders was demonstrated when he went to Jamaica in December 1975 on a private visit. But he also had something else on his mind during that visit: Cuban troops in Angola.
He was staying with his wife at a resort in the northwestern part of Jamaica and asked Prime Minister Michael Manley, a close friend of Fidel Castro, to go and see him. That was very disrespectful and extremely arrogant for Kissinger to say that and very insulting to Manley. Manley, being prime minister, refused to go there. Instead, he asked Kissinger to go down to Kingston and see him at Jamaica House, the prime minister's official residence. Kissinger did so. He wanted Manley to condemn Castro for sending troops to Angola. Manley refused to do so. Instead, he defended Castro's involvement in Angola where Cubans were fighting the South African armed forces.
Manley's uncompromising stand and refusal to condemn Cuban involvement in Angola infuriated Kissinger; Manley also got along very well with Nyerere and the two leaders shared the same position on many issues including their attitude towards the United States as an imperialist power and strong supporter of apartheid South Africa. That is why, in pointed reference to South Africa and the United States as well as other Western powers supporting the apartheid regime, Nyerere asked a rhetorical question in an interview with American journalists in the late seventies (on ABC, "Issues and Answers"):
"Why are Western countries arming South Africa? Why are you arming South Africa? Against what military combination? And you expect us to sit just like that."
At a rally in Kingston, after his meeting with Kissinger, Manley vehemently condemned apartheid South Africa and its supporters, hence the United States, and defended Cuban involvement in Angola, drawing a thunderous applause from the people at the rally. A man of great oratorical skills who was also highly articulate, Manley said among other things:
"Now there are certain people in the world who say now why are we taking this risk to anger the United States of America. And the answer is this: We are not angering the United States of America, they are angering themselves. We have friendship with Cuba as part of a world alliance of Third World nations that are fighting for justice for poor people in the world. They are not going to tell me what kind of relationship I have with Fidel Castro. And I tell you as a party leader, as long as this party is in power, we intend to walk through the world on our feet and not on our knees."
Months later, in June 1976, Nyerere articulated the same position on the Cuban involvement in Angola. When he was asked on American television, ABC, "Issues and Answers" programme, if he knew who was behind the instability in Angola, he responded:
"I believe the CIA. Who is doing it? Who else could be doing it? Why do we keep on hearing these whispers coming from Washington, saying, 'Let us create another Vietnam for the Russians in Angola'? You are causing us trouble."
He was also asked:
"Can you use your influence, which is tremendous influence, and ask Castro to withdraw his troops from Angola?"
Nyerere responded:
"Even if I had that kind of influence, it would be unnecessary. First, you remove the cause...."
"Will you commit troops (in a war against South Africa)?"
"Yes, I will commit troops. We would rather hang together than hang separately...."
Kissinger denied the United States was involved in Angola. He lied, typical of his arrogance, thinking he could get away with anything including insulting other leaders, and in spite of the evidence showing the United States was deeply involved in Angola. His lies and arrogance were also based on his belief that it was necessary to "create your own reality," as he once put it, in terms of how the United States should formulate and conduct its foreign policy.
Yet, after repeatedly denying American involvement in Angola, Kissinger later conceded: If the United States allowed the Soviet Union to project its capabilities so far away in Angola, far beyond its traditional sphere of influence, that would threaten and even destabilise the whole international system.
Nyerere took a different position. He and Manley never changed their position on the involvement of Cuban troops in Angola which they felt was justified; also, the Soviet Union continued to supply weapons to the Cubans and the MPLA forces in Angola. Kissinger equally maintained his position that Cuban troops should leave Angola since they were a threat to American geopolitical interests in Africa, a continent he arrogantly wanted to be dominated by the West or which he felt was already an integral part of the Western sphere of influence.
Kissinger's arrogance and his disrespect for Prime Minister Michael Manley still rankled many Jamaicans years later.
A destabilisation campaign by the United States that was already underway to undermine Manley, because of his socialist orientation and strong friendship with Castro, was intensified; Kissinger was well-known for his policy of destabilisation to undermine leaders and governments he considered to be "unfriendly" to the United States; one of the best examples being the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in September 1973 in a military coup supported by Kissinger and the CIA.
ITT (International Telephone & Telegraph), in collaboration with the CIA, played a major role in facilitating Allende's ouster; it also worked together with the CIA, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the AFL-CIO to overthrow President Joao Goulart of Brazil in 1964. The coup, authorised by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was masterminded by the CIA. Other American agencies, including the United States Information Service (USIS), renamed the United States Information Agency (USIA), have been involved in nefarious schemes - engineered, facilitated, and masterminded by the CIA - to undermine, weaken and overthrow governments in Third World countries; some of the prime targets being in Africa. They also have been known to formulate their own programmes, approved by the American authorities, to undermine governments considered to be a "threat" to American interests, despite professions to the contrary.
USAID is a very good example of CIA penetration of Third World countries because of its extensive network of workers and projects. The CIA has used USAID as a very good cover for its agents for decades since the sixties. Many USAID employees are CIA agents working in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and other parts of the world, dispensing foreign aid, while they are also busy working as spies for the American government.
The CIA also has been highly notorious for infiltrating academia in African countries and other parts of the Third World and for recruiting foreign students to work for the agency. Kissinger himself, who was once a professor at Harvard before entering government service, was very much in favour of such penetration. He knew how foreign students could be recruited and nurtured to serve American interests especially when they returned to their home countries and became national leaders or high-ranking government officials.
One example of such infiltration of academic institutions in Africa involved a visiting American scholar, Dr. Stephen Andrew Lucas, at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in the late sixties and seventies. He taught at UDSM for seven years. He was a lecturer in sociology and a CIA agent, seasoned and highly accomplished. He served as a CIA agent in Congo during the turbulent sixties before he came to Tanzania. He worked under Larry Devlin who was the CIA station chief in Leopoldville when Lumumba was arrested and assassinated. Devlin died at his home in Virginia, USA, on 6 December 2008. He was 86.
Dr. Lucas also worked as a CIA agent in Angola, Mozambique and Madagascar. When he retired, he was awarded "the Defense Intelligence Director's Award and Retirement Medallion and Certificate of Distinction."
He died in Italy on 24 May 2006 when he was on vacation with his wife. He was 69. He was buried in his home state of Oklahoma in the United States. Before his death, he was a professor at Louisiana State University where he was the executive director of international programmes. He also taught Swahili among other subjects.
The case of Dr. Lucas, with regard to Tanzania and other countries where CIA agents are assigned, demonstrates how the agency does everything it can to infiltrate governments to the highest levels. His obituary states, among other things: "He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam for seven years and served as an advisor to Tanzanian President, Julius Nyerere."
That may be coded language, saying he was "an advisor" to President Nyerere. What it obviously means is that he was able to establish contacts at the highest levels of the Tanzanian government to spy for the United States probably even without the knowledge of the Tanzanian intelligence service during that period. But the KGB knew about him from the time he was in Leopoldville and may have alerted the Tanzanian authorities on his activities.
It also happened in Ghana where the CIA station chief in Accra, Howard T. Bane, who was the mastermind of the military coup against Nkrumah, was able to penetrate security and establish contacts at the highest levels of government in preparation for the coup. The British intelligence service, MI5, also had an agent in Accra, John Thomson, who infiltrated the Ghanaian government during that period and was equally involved in Nkrumah's ouster. Soon after Nkrumah was overthrown, Thomson "unofficially" congratulated the head of the new military regime, General Joseph Ankrah, on behalf of the British government, for getting rid of Nkrumah. Thomson and Ankrah, together with John Willie Kofi Harlley who was the deputy chairman of the new military ruling council, drank a bottle of brandy to celebrate Nkrumah's downfall. The military junta formed the National Liberation Council (NLC) to rule Ghana. Nkrumah dismissed it as the Notorious Liars Council. It was fully controlled by the United States. As Christopher Andrew states in his book, Defend The Realm: The Authorized History of MI5:
"Thomson went on to be welcomed by, and deliver unofficial congratulations to, the NLC chairman, General Ankrah, and the other NLC members. On 2 March, following a favourable report from Thomson, Britain formally recognized the new Ghanaian regime, establishing full diplomatic relations three days later. This was the only occasion on which a Security Service officer was charged by HMG with making the first contact with a new government which had seized power in a coup d'etat." - (Christopher Andrew, Defend The Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, p. 471. See also Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, New York: Harper Perennial, HarperCollins, 1996).
Robert P. Smith who served as U.S. ambassador to Ghana – he was working at the State Department when Nkrumah was overthrown – explained how happy Secretary of State Dean Rusk was when he heard Nkrumah had been ousted:
“I also remember, the morning of the coup, I got the call about 2 a.m. here at the house and went into the Department and immediately set up a little task force in the Operations Center. Later in the same morning, about 8 or 8:30, Secretary Rusk wandered down the hall and came in and said, 'I've seen the early reports, but I just want to hear it firsthand. What's going on in Ghana?' When I related how Nkrumah had landed in Peking and had been informed by his Chinese hosts of what had happened in Ghana, Dean Rusk broke into an ear-splitting grin. I've never seen him look so happy.'” - (Robert P. Smith interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy, The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project (ADST), 28 February 1989, p. 14).
The State Department under Rusk also recommended covert operations against President Nyerere in an attempt to overthrow him. As John Prados states in his book, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA:
"The Special Group (at the CIA) reportedly considered a State Department proposal to supply arms to certain groups in Tanzania, where secret-war wizards saw President Julius Nyerere as a problem, in the summer of 1964....Like Nyerere, Washington viewed Ghana's leader Kwame Nkrumah as a troublemaker." - (John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, Chicago, Illinois, USA: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2006, p. 328).
Two years before the 1966 coup against Nkrumah, the United States was already plotting to overthrow him. In February 1964, the CIA director told the head of foreign operations at the State Department that Ankrah was the right person to replace Nkrumah. The American embassy in Ghana was already working with opposition groups to depose Nkrumah.
The British were also, right from the beginning together with the Americans, deeply involved in the plot to overthrow Nkrumah. A cable sent to the Home Office in London from the British High Commissioner in Accra, A.W. Snelling, bluntly stated that the British establishment had to get rid of Nkrumah because he was making the Africans too politically conscious; not just in Ghana but across the continent and beyond. He expressed his exasperation at Nkrumah's Pan-African militancy and commitment to Africa's wellbeing more than four years before Nkrumah was overthrown and did not hide his dislike for the Ghanaian leader. As Gamel Nasser Adam states:
“Britain was more forthright in its abhorrence of the rise in awareness among the African people. Earlier on the British High Commissioner in Ghana at the time, A.W. Snelling in a dispatch dated 5th September 1961 sent to the Commonwealth Relations Office in London, noted Nkrumah's '...knack of giving expression to the feelings of so many Africans, who are all the time rapidly becoming more and more politically conscious, is exasperating. I can well understand the fury he arouses in London, and often share it myself.'
In other words halting the rising tide of African consciousness of liberation was a major priority of those forces which wanted to maintain the status quo of colonial and neo-colonial consciousness.” - (Gamel Nasser Adam, “Constructing National Consciousness in Russian Literature: Some Lessons for the African Milieu,” in Helen Lauer, Nana Aba Appiah Amfo, Jemima Asabea Anderson, eds., Identity Meets Nationality: Voices from the Humanities, Legon-Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2011, p. 236).
The British saw Nkrumah as a threat to Western interests in Africa, a position shared by the United States government which stated that Nkrumah had done more than any other African leader to undermine American interests in Africa. Therefore he had to go, even if it meant assassinating him; a job the CIA is well known for, working closely with the State Department. And it continued to do so when Henry Kissinger was secretary of state, as is still the case today.
Nkrumah survived seven assassination attempts. Some of the assassination plots were supported by the CIA.
The CIA is also known for fomenting trouble in Third World countries, infiltrating the media and other institutions, state and private, to achieve its goals. Provision of funds and even weapons to groups which serve its interests is one of the tactics the CIA uses, as happened in Ghana to undermine and ultimately overthrow Nkrumah. It also happened in Congo-Leopoldville when Lumumba was prime minister. Joseph Mobutu was already on the CIA payroll when he was Lumumba's secretary and went on to seize power with CIA support.
The CIA, which was authorised by President Dwight Eisenhower to assassinate Lumumba, even claimed the Congolese prime minister was “insane” and “a dope fiend” in an attempt to tarnish his image and discredit him as a leader. As Christopher Andrew states in his book, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush:
"Allen Dulles (the CIA director, also known as the DCI – Director of Central Intelligence) told Eisehower that Lumumba was insane; later reports alleged that he was also 'a dope fiend.'
On September 21 (1960) the DCI reported to an NSC (National Security Council) meeting, chaired by the president, that 'Lumumba was not yet disposed of.' Still fascinated by the use of poisons in covert action, Richard Bissell (head of CIA's covert operations) instructed a CIA scientist (Dr. Sydney Gottlieb) to prepare biological toxins designated to assassinate or incapacitate an unnamed 'African leader' (Lumumba).” – ( Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, New York: Harper Perennial, HarperCollins, 1997, p. 253).
The CIA also armed and funded the opposition in Jamaica when Michael Manley was prime minister. Many people were killed in clashes between Manley's supporters and members of the opposition party led by Edward Seaga who was the"darling" of the United States. Manley himself survived three assassination attempts. In a radio interview in 1980 - at the end of his first term as prime minister - when he lost the election to Seaga whose campaign was funded and directed by the CIA, Manley said the following about Seaga: "He is a mental weakling" who was taking orders from his masters and was ready sell his country to the United States and other Western powers.
Manley's wife Beverley (formerly Beverly Anderson), a fiercely proud Afrocentric nationalist, in an interview years later after her husband died, recalled how she was equally offended by Kissinger when he asked her husband to go and see him at a resort in northern Jamaica:
"Kissinger was staying just outside of Ocho Rios and he asked Michael to come down there and see him and Michael talked to me about that; and I said, 'but I don't understand, you are prime minister, he comes to see you at Jamaica House.' And then Kissinger came and saw him at Jamaica House."
One of Manley's supporters, also in an interview years later, had this to say about Kissinger:
"Kissinger doesn't come down here and stick his finger in Manley's face, you box his finger out of your face. That's almost a national call for a reaction to it. Give thanks to the fact that Manley stood up to Kissinger."
You don't go to another country and tell the leader of that country, a president or a prime minister, to come and see you at your hotel room, ordering him around, telling him what to do as if you own him and his country. You enquire first, to find out if it is even possible for you to see him. If it is possible, then you ask for permission, and in a respectful way, to go and see him at his office or at his official residence.
But that was Henry, with his arrogance, and contemptuous attitude towards other people including national leaders, ignoring all protocol.
Had he shown any kind of arrogance when he met Nyerere, it would have been a different story. He met a strong and highly intellectual leader who was not afraid of him and whom he could not intimidate into submission. And he knew that even before he came to Dar es Salaam, what kind of leader he would be dealing with. As David Martin, a prominent British journalist who worked in Tanzania for many years - he knew Nyerere very well - and who covered southern Africa extensively, stated:
"Tanganyika became independent on 9 December 1961 and a year later when the country became a republic, Nyerere, elected by over 96 per cent of the voters, became its first president.
For the next 24 years Nyerere was to fill the African and international stage like a colossus. When he met the astute American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for the first time in Dar es Salaam in 1976, the two men began a mental verbal fencing match of David and Goliath proportions.
One began a quote from Shakespeare (some of whose works Nyerere translated into Swahili setting them in an African context) or a Greek philosopher and the other would end the quotation. Then Nyerere quoted an American author. Kissinger laughed: Nyerere knew Kissinger had written the words.
Neither man trusted the other. Kissinger wanted the negotiations (over Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and southern Africa) kept secret. Nyerere, understanding the Americans' duplicity, took the opposite view and as Africa correspondent of the London Sunday newspaper, The Observer, I was to become the focal point of the Tanzanians' strategic leaks.That year the newspaper led the front page on an unprecedented 13 occasions on Africa. All the leaks, as Kissinger knew, came from Nyerere. One political fox had temporarily outwitted the other.
Apart from his simplicity and piercing intellect, one of Nyerere's most endearing traits was his honesty. " - (David Martin, "Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere: Obituary," Southern African Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC). A former news editor and deputy managing editor of the Standard, renamed Daily News, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, David Martin was a founder-director of the Southern African Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC) of which Julius Nyerere was patron. He lived in Tanzania for 10 years from 1964 to 1974 and frequently talked with Nyerere through the decades, a period of 35 years, until Nyerere's last days).
Kissinger met with Nyerere three times in 1976. He met with Nyerere and Tanzania's minister of foreign affairs, Ibrahim Kaduma, 25 – 26 April. He met with Nyerere again, 14 – 15 September, when the two leaders discussed Rhodesia and Namibia. Kissinger met with Nyerere for the third time on 21 September when the American secretary of state briefed Mwalimu on his meetings with Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, and the other leaders of the white minority regime in Rhodesia.
Kissinger said Nyerere was one of the toughest and most intelligent negotiators he ever dealt with. Others he named in that category included Soviet foreign affairs minster Andrei Gromyko; Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin who had a reputation for being inflexible in negotiations; Chou En-Lai, and Hafez al-Assad. He said when negotiating with Gromyko, you think you are making progress, as he addresses every point you made, and then you find out he takes you right back to the beginning without making any concessions.
James Spain, who was the American ambassador to Tanzania when Kissinger came to Dar es Salaam, also recalled what Kissinger told him about Nyerere during that time:
"One of the amusing sidelights of Henry Kissinger's second or third visit was this. He stayed in the Kilimanjaro Hotel. When the party was clearing out to go to the airport, I was told that the Secretary wanted me. I went upstairs. People were carrying away files and suitcases.
In the middle of a table there was a 'bug' protector that was still making weird electronic sounds. Henry gets both of us hunched over this thing. He said 'Thank you very much. This visit has been useful. Your arrangements were fine, but I want to warn you about one thing. This fellow Nyerere is not on our side.'
This was a pretty accurate reflection of the spirit of the times." -(James Spain, quoted in an interview, WhyTanganyika united with Zanzibar to form Tanzania, op. cit., p. 407).
Kissinger did not get what he wanted from Nyerere. Asked at a press conference in Dar es Salaam after Kissinger's mission if he considered it to be a failure because Kissinger did not get the assurances and the concessions he wanted to get from Nyerere on how to resolve the contentious issue of white minority rule in Rhodesia and in southern Africa in general, Nyerere, quoted by David Ottaway of The Washington Post, responded:
"A mission of clarity is not a mission of failure."
David Ottaway, who sent his report from Dar es Salaam, was one of the American reporters who covered Kissinger on that trip. He regarded Nyerere's response as intellectual and stated in his report to The Washington Post: Nyerere "answered professorially, 'A mission of clarity....'"
Kissinger got the chance to know exactly how Nyerere felt and what his stand was on the subject. He learned something from Mwalimu. As David Ottaway stated in The Washington Post just before Kissinger went to Africa, when Kissinger gets to Tanzania he is going to "get a dose of African nationalism" from Nyerere. David's wife, Marina Ottaway, also covered Kissinger and Nyerere during that time. She also worked for The Washington Post.
Nyerere's high intellectual calibre, together with his humility and commitment to the wellbeing of the masses, was one of the major assets which served him well during his leadership. As Professor Mazrui stated:
"Above all, Nyerere as president was a combination of deep intellect and high integrity...(and) was in a class by himself in the combination of ethical standards and intellectual power. In the combination of high thinking and high ethics, no other East African politician was in the same league." - (Ali A. Mazrui, "Mwalimu's Rise to Power," in the Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, October 17, 1999).
Almost four years later in September 2003 at the University of Nairobi, Professor Mazrui also had the following to say about Nyerere in his lecture, "Towards Re-Africanizing African Universities: Who Killed Intellectualism in Post-Colonial Africa?":
"The most intellectual of East Africa's Heads of State at the time was Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania - a true philosopher, president and original thinker....
Who killed intellectualism in Tanzania? In Tanzania intellectualism was slow to die. It was partially protected by the fact that the Head of State - Julius Nyerere - was himself a superb intellectual ruler. He was not only fascinated by ideas, but also stimulated by debates....Ujamaa and the justification of the one-party state stimulated a considerable amount of intellectual rationalization and conceptualization....
In my own personal life I was respected more as an intellectual by Milton Obote in Uganda and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania than I was by either Mzee Kenyatta or Daniel arap Moi.
Even Idi Amin, when he was in power in Uganda, wanted to send me to apartheid South Africa as living proof that Africans could think. Idi Amin wanted me to become Exhibit A of the Black Intellectual to convince racists in South Africa that Black people were human beings capable of rational thought." - (Ali A. Mazrui, "Towards Re-Africanizing African Universities: Who Killed Intellectualism in Post-Colonial Africa?" The lecture was dedicated to Dr. Crispin Odhiambo-Mbai of the University of Nairobi who was assassinated in Nairobi on 14 September 2003).
Nyerere alikuwa ni tofauti kabisa na viongozi kama Kenyatta, Mobutu na wengineo kama hao. Mzee Kenyatta was on the CIA payroll. Mobutu also was on the CIA payroll, among other leaders. Tangu miaka ya sitini, enzi ya Mzee Kenyatta, Nairobi has been a major operational centre and hotbed of intrigue for the CIA. During Mobutu's reign, the largest CIA station in Africa was in Kinshasa. Watu wanao wasifu viongozi hao sijui wanawasifia nini. Sijui viongozi hao wanastahili sifa gani, kama viongozi wa Afrika, wanapolipwa na CIA to preserve, protect and promote American interests to the detriment of Africa's wellbeing.
Nyerere was not one of them. Hata wanaomchukia wanajua ukweli huo. Aliwahi kuzungumzia suala hilo, jinsi viongozi wetu wanavyo nunuliwa na mataifa makubwa, na wanavyopata amri kutoka kwa watawala wao bila kujali Africa's wellbeing. Alitoa mfano wa viongozi wa nchi za Francophone Africa:
"I went to Addis and it was an incredible meeting. Here is this continent of young nations coming from colonialism and so forth and the debate is awful, and really what provoked me was the French-speaking countries, you know. With all their French culture, training in rationalization - you can't really argue with those fellows. And I discovered some of these fellows have their visas -THEIR VISAS - signed by the French ambassadors in their own countries! And I said, 'Oh, but I thought you were fighting for freedom?'" - Julius K. Nyerere, in Bill Sutherland and Matt Mayer, eds., Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan African Insight on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle, and Liberation, Africa World Press, 2000. The interview was also reproduced, from the book, by Chambi Chachage, "Excerpt from Interview with Bill Sutherland," Centre for Consciencist Studies and Analyses (CENSCA), 5 September 2008).
Kulikuwa na viongozi wawili tu katika nchi hizo, President Ahmed Sekou Toure of Guinea and President Modibo Keita of Mali, who refused to remain under French control; and a few years later, President Marien Ngouabi of Congo-Brazzaville.
Katika bara letu kwa ujumla, wengine walikuwa ni Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser na Ahmed Ben Bella, pamoja na Nyerere. Hawakuwa vibaraka wa nchi zozote. Nyerere also was a very close friend of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ahmed Sekou Toure.
In an interview with Jorge Castaneda (the author of Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara) in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1995, Ahmed Ben Bella said there were six leaders - Nkrumah, Nyerere, Nasser, Sekou Toure, Modibo Keita, and Ben Bella himself - who formed their own secret group, known as The Group of Six, within the OAU. He said they worked together secretly on a number of issues - including the Congo crisis and the liberation struggle - vital to the wellbeing of Africa, excluding other African leaders.
The six were true African leaders, independent-minded and committed to the wellbeing of Africa.
Sasa mtajua kwa nini viongozi wa nchi za Magharibi walitaka kumwondoa Nyerere madarakani; kwa nini walimpindua Nkrumah, kwa nini walimpindua Modibo Keita na walijaribu kumuua Ahmed Sekou Toure; kwa nini walimuua Lumumba, na kwa nini hawakufikiria hata kidogo kumpindua Kenyatta au Mobutu.
Ukitaka kujua zaidi, soma kitabu kipya cha Godfrey Mwakikagile, Western Involvement in Nkrumah's Downfall, kilicho chapishwa mwaka huu. Vingine, by the same author, ni Africa in The Sixties, na Remembering The Sixties: A Look at Africa, vilivyo chapishwa mwaka uliopita.
Pia soma vitabu vya Nyerere mwenyewe ili mjue msimamo wake badala ya kuropoka tu na kumshambulia bila kujua mnasema nini. Baadhi yetu tumemfuatilia Nyerere kwa miaka mingi sana tangu miaka ya hamsini. I attended his political rallies in the late fifties when he was campaigning for independence. I remember him very well, even some of the things he said at those rallies, when he was still a young man in his late thirties. Hakuna anayesema hakufanya makosa. Lakini binafsi, na si mimi tu, siamini hata kidogo tutapata kiongozi mwingine kama Nyerere. He was the best.
“Tanzania in East Africa has long been one of the 25 poorest countries in the world. But there was a time when it was described, in terms of its political influence, as one of the top 25. It punched far above its weight. That formidable achievement was the work of one man, now lying close to death in a London Hospital.” - (Jonathan Power, "Lament for Independent Africa's Greatest Leader," London, 6 October 1999).
"Julius Nyerere is among the extremely few world leaders who have selflessly attempted great things for their national peoples....
Dar es Salaam was a Mecca of the world's national liberation movements, and a hotbed of global intellectual thought....
Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere is the most successful leader that Africa has ever produced since the European colonial regime collapsed 50 years ago....
Until his death, Nyerere, who was humble, self-effacing and selfless, continued to serve humanity on many capacities....
An intellectual of immense stature, a man of great personal integrity, a paragon of humanism, Julius Kambarage will be hard to replace in Tanzania, in Africa and on the globe. I was privileged to know and work with such a man. That is why, as I mourn, I ask, with Marcus Antonius, whence cometh such another?" - (Philip Ochieng', "Africa's Greatest Leader," The East African, Nairobi, 19 October 1999; P. Ochieng, "There Was Real Freedom in Mwalimu's Day," The East African, 20 October 1999).
Tofauti alizokuwa nazo na viongozi wa nchi za Magharibi did not diminish his stature as a highly principled leader just as the differences Mao had with the West did not in anyway diminish his stature as a great leader in spite of the mistakes he made. Great leaders also make big mistakes.
China would not be what it is today had it not been for the foundation laid by Mao. Ghana would not be what it is today had it not been for Nkrumah - he laid the foundation for modern Ghana - and achieved a lot in less than 10 years he was prime minister and president. He was prime minister for three years and president for almost six years before he was overthrown in February 1966 in a military coup engineered by the United States and Britain together with France and West Germany. The leaders of those countries met at the White House in Washington, D.C., a number of times to formulate plans, including a military coup, on how to get rid of Nkrumah.
Every successive government in Ghana has built on the foundation laid by Nkrumah and has acknowledged its indebtedness to him. And Tanzania would not be what it is today had it not been for the foundation laid by Nyerere.
Watu wanaosema Nyerere hakustahili kupewa sifa kama kiongozi, na alikuwa msanii tu, wakumbuke kwamba hata viongozi wa nchi za Magharibi wanaowasifu, na labda hata kuwaabudu, kwamba wana sera nzuri kuliko sera za Nyerere, ni viongozi hao hao wanaosema Nyerere alikuwa ni kiongozi mwenye uwezo mkubwa sana kama kiongozi licha ya kutofautiana naye katika mambo mbali mbali.
Some of them even acknowledged him as a world leader, not just a Tanzanian or an African leader. One of them was President Jimmy Carter.
That is a very high compliment for a leader of a poor, Third World country like Tanzania. But that was Nyerere. When he died, a report in The Washington Post stated that during Nyerere's leadership, Tanzania was one of the top 25 countries in the world. It punched above its weight, and came to be acknowledged as a leading country in the international arena, because of Nyerere.
Professor Ali Mazrui, a towering intellectual of international standing and one of the best Africa has ever produced, articulated the same position in terms of Nyerere's achievements, also contending that Nyerere did not get the credit he deserved as a great nation builder:
"Nyerere's policies of nation-building amount to a case of Unsung Heroism. With wise and strong leadership, and with brilliant policies of cultural integration, he took one of the poorest countries in the world and made it a proud leader in African affairs and an active member of the global community." (Ali A. Mazrui, "Nyerere and I," in Voices, Africa Resource Center, October 1999: Professor Ali Mazrui writes a memorial tribute on the special bonds between him and the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, one of Africa's few great statesmen.)
Tuko wapi siku hizi, kama taifa, tangu Nyerere aondoke? Nani anatuheshimu? Tunadharauliwa na nchi za Magharibi na zingine.
That is in sharp contrast with the past - what we were, as a nation, under the leadership of Nyerere.
American ambassadors who knew Nyerere and who were accredited to Tanzania during his presidency acknowledged that he was a world leader, not just a Tanzanian or an African leader. They also said he was a selfless leader who was fully committed to the wellbeing of his people. They also admitted that he was a man of enormous intellect.
Baadhi ya viongozi hao wamenukuliwa katika kitabu cha Godfrey Mwakikagile, Why Tanganyika united with Zanzibar to form Tanzania, published last year. As Mwakikagile states:
"Deputy American ambassador Robert Hennemeyer who was in Tanganyika, later Tanzania, from 1961 - 1964, described President Nyerere as 'a great political theorist,...a charismatic figure,...a great leader of his people. I don't believe for a moment that he meant anything but to do the best he could for the wellbeing of his people....He had an enormous amount of influence with other black African leaders. He was so revered as the great father....Clearly he was a world leader, not just an African leader.'
Ambassador Claude G. Ross described Nyerere as a leader who was 'full of good intentions and the epitome of integrity....I don't think any kind of financial scandal was ever attached to him....He was a very interesting man, very articulate, you know, and had a better education. He'd gone to Edinburgh and had advanced training, not a doctorate, but advanced training.'
Ambassador John H. Burns had the following to say about Nyerere:
'The country had a President, the remarkable Julius Nyerere, unique---then and ever since in Africa...a highly intelligent and cultivated president....He, himself, lived very simply and insisted that members of his government do likewise.
I have rarely known anyone more dedicated to what he saw as his purpose in life. I once said that the song 'The Impossible Dream' could have been written for him.
He was a remarkably educated and cultured man, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh. One of his hobbies was translating Shakespeare into Swahili and one or two of them --Julius Caesar was one-- were performed at the University of Dar es Salaam, an institution in which Nyerere, not surprisingly, took great interest.....
We couldn't attract much attention from Washington for Nyerere. He was regarded by certain influential circles of the Johnson administration as a dangerous thinker."
In the words of Ambassador John W. Shirley:
'I enjoyed the fact that during my tenure in Dar es Salaam Julius Nyerere was still President of Tanzania. I found him an interesting and extremely intelligent man. And since South Africa was in turmoil at the time, and because Nyerere was, to say the least, not particularly sympathetic to the policy of constructive engagement, my meetings with him were frequent, animated, sometimes sharp, but never acrimonious. It was as intellectually stimulating to deal with him, as it was to deal with Prime Minister Salim Salim.'
Ambassador W. Beverly Carter described Nyerere in the following terms:
'Julius Nyerere was...one of the early heroes, political heroes, of mine and of many other Africanists....(He) was an extremely popular person....(Other African) countries tended to look to Tanzania for leadership, and Nyerere was never hesitant about offering it and giving it and doing it well. He is probably one of the most principled men I ever met in my life....
I talked earlier about my Government's ambivalence about Tanzania....Nyerere should have been treated more like the world leader that he is and that everyone recognized him to be....Just unheard of for a man of his... Nyerere's worldwide leadership being treated, I felt, as, not as well as other people who didn't come nearly up to his size. It's sort of symptomatic of the problem I had in dealing with my own Government....
You didn't think of (President) Tolbert (of Liberia) as being ... a Kenneth Kaunda or Julius Nyerere. He didn't have that capability, was not an intellectual giant. He did not even have quite the quality that Botswana's Seretse Khama had, who was not a giant intellectually the way I think Nkrumah was or Nyerere is.....With Nyerere it was the kind of relationship that you have in a dormitory at night when you're engaging in a good debate.'
Ambassador James W. Spain described Nyerere this way:
'Nyerere's rule was relatively benign. I am quite sure he never ordered anybody killed. There were a few people in jail but not many. Some were from Zanzibar, under sentence of death there but kept alive on the mainland....People didn't get killed. They might get relocated under the ujamaa system of farming, but Nyerere never even thought of 'liquidating the kulaks'....
He was a hopeless socialist. Still, he was clearly a very sincere and humane man.
If I did anything useful, it was to convince Washington that Nyerere was not a brutal African dictator and a Communist stooge....I found Nyerere fascinating....I never read a book that he hadn't read. He translated Shakespeare into Kiswahili....I am very fond of Julius Nyerere....
Most Western development aid to Tanzania came from Scandinavia, particularly the Swedes. They liked the intellectual socialist, the benign father of his people who didn't kill or imprison people, while trying to create a new way of life with better prospects....Unlike other parts of Africa, no one was starving or dying of uncontrolled disease in Tanzania.... He was basically a humanist with a keen sense of both tribal traditions and modern politics....
The fact was that Nyerere certainly wasn't on our side, but he wasn't a tool of the Chinese or the Russians either....
I was personally very fond of Nyerere--not necessarily a good thing for a diplomat. He was a very remarkable man and, I think, a very constructive element in the peaceful solutions to the problems of Southern Africa that eventually emerged.'
Ambassador Richard N. Viets said the following about Nyerere:
'At that time in mid-1979, the so-called front-line states in Southern Africa, I think there were five of them...the organization was chaired by Julius Nyerere, the President of Tanzania, a very remarkable gentleman. Nyerere really towered over the other four heads of state and this organization in many respects was a one-man operation.
Because of his long association with the independence movements in East Africa and throughout Southern Africa he was highly respected.
Nyerere is an intellectual of very considerable dimensions, an extraordinarily articulate person. So the leadership of this group was essentially his without any challenge. He was offering almost daily advise to the Zimbabwean leadership on tactics, strategy, etc. in their negotiations with the British and the Americans and the others involved....
I decided I needed to know more about Julius Nyerere than anybody else on the face of the earth.... He is a very shrewd man.
He was...a most remarkable figure in contemporary African political history. I always said, and others who knew him well I think shared this view, that if Nyerere had been born in Western Europe or the Far East or even in North America, he would have been an exceptional figure in public life. He was a superb politician.
He had an acute brain, the memory of an elephant, intellectual horsepower that was second to none.
He was cunning. He could be warm-hearted one moment and cut you off at the legs at the next if it met his political or personal needs. He had, of course, been the principal political figure behind theTanzanian independence movement in the 1950s....
Nyerere...remains as far as I know the principal translator of Shakespeare from English into Swahili and one of the most gifted orators I have ever heard in English, and a marvelous drafter of the English language....
I can remember listening to him rail hour after hour against the IMF and the prescriptions the IMF was demanding of Tanzania that he argued would send it further into poverty, etc....
Nyerere regime's record is...in the human rights arena when one is talking about imprisonment and torture, or loaded legal shenanigans against opposition, I think his record is remarkably good. If human rights include the right to a job, an education, hospitalization, etc., then you have to give him pretty good marks.'
Ambassador Viets also acknowledged how intelligent Salim Ahmed Salim was:
'In the final months of my tour the Foreign Minister of Tanzania was a gentleman named Salim Salim, who nearly became the Secretary General of the United Nations. I think he would have had it not been for George Bush.
Bush remembered Salim Salim as the Tanzanian delegate who came and danced in front of his chair in the General Assembly the day the Chinese were admitted to the United Nations. And Bush never forgot Mr. Salim Salim. I found Salim Salim, who I think is now Secretary General of the OAU, to be a very, very bright, interesting man whose revolutionary zeal had long since cooled.'
Ambassador David C. Miller, a staunch Republican, said the following about Nyerere:
'He was on his way to the Cancun summit, the only head of government from Africa among the 13 presidents at Cancun. He was the leader of the frontline states in the negotiations over Resolution 435, which was the Namibian independence resolution passed by the UN. In terms of national power at home, he was at quite a peak. Physically, he was old enough to be wise and young enough to be vigorous. He was a great guy to work with....
Nyerere had been a world leader of the non-aligned movement for a long time. His economic policies were well-known and the impact of his economic policies had been apparent for some period of time. In a nutshell, on the domestic front, Tanzania had succeeded in integrating itself as a political entity.
Bu there was also Julius Nyerere's belief that it was important for every citizen of Tanzania to move forward roughly together economically and to integrate themselves socially and that over a period of time his approach to the economic management of Tanzania would produce a more coherent, unified country than, as he was fond of pointing out, Kenya, his nextdoor neighbor, which was our favorite country. So, domestically, he had succeeded with a single party approach to governing Tanzania and thought that that had worked well for him...
Wonderful, warm, friendly, smart, honest, brave, humble. He was as great a head of government as Africa has seen as evidenced not by his ability to do the little day-to-day things of running a country but on the big accounts, the most important being his lifestyle, which remained humble throughout his whole time as head of government. Most remarkable, was his retirement from the presidency at a time when he was perfectly capable of going on physically.
Then, of course, he returned to his village upcountry as one of the few heads of government in Africa who behaved the way George Washington behaved here and said, 'We do not need presidents for life in Africa and I don't intend to be one.'
Frankly, he was probably happiest when he was back home in Butiama with his wife and grandchildren in a very humble home. It was hard to get to by vehicle. So, for me, he stands out in stark relief to the failed public leadership in Africa that can be found in almost every country....
Julius Nyerere because of his global leadership - and this is the thing that you have to remember: nobody in their right mind today can tell you who was president of Burundi or Rwanda 20 years ago; Julius was an international author, an international statesman, and used that effectively as a head of government to gain support for Tanzania well beyond either its objective importance or its internal economic performance. To a great degree, that's what a head of government in a developing country ought to be trying to achieve. Julius achieved that.
So, did the economy ever work perfectly? No. Did it achieve what he wanted? Yes, it did. It produced a level economic base that is now producing a solid Tanzanian economy without the disasters that befell Kenya. If Julius were here today sitting with us, he would say, 'I told you, David. Kenya turned into a corrupt mud hole. Tanzania is now slowly taking off the ground with responsible leadership in a country that's socially unified.' I'm happy to make that argument for him....
It was an outstanding diplomatic world simply because of Nyerere's presence and who he was and the importance of having Julius' support when he was head of the Non-Aligned Movement, of having Julius' support when he was running the Frontline States. When Julius Nyerere spoke or traveled, people listened to him. So, countries that were playing in that environment wanted to have a good mission in Dar es Salaam....
He had a position on the world....He was first and foremost an intellectual and an ideologue.... Julius Nyerere was an intellect. He wanted to talk to people about his ideas and what worked and didn't work.'" - (Godfrey Mwakikagile, Why Tanganyika united with Zanzibar to form Tanzania, pp. 128 - 134, and 430).
The invitation of Nyerere to the Cancun summit, being the only African leader who was invited, is another example which demonstrates the profound respect Western leaders had for Mwalimu as a spokesman for the entire African continent because of his keen understanding of Africa's problems.
Nyerere's keen insights into Africa's problems and of the entire Third World were also acknowledged by his critics and admirers alike in both ideological camps – East and West. As Professor Gerry Helleiner of the University of Toronto who worked in Tanzania for many years stated not long after Nyerere died:
“It is now 'conventional wisdom' in Washington (even in the IMF, at least in terms of its rhetoric) and in donor capitals that poverty needs to be addressed as a matter of highest priority; that political stability and good governance (notably reduced corruption) are prerequisites for development; and that national ownership of programmes is critical to their success. It has taken them a long time to reach these positions. But Julius Nyerere was espousing them and trying to build practice upon them 30 years ago. His slogan of 'socialism and self-reliance', if transmitted today as 'equity, honesty and ownership', would win universal assent. He was decades ahead of his time in these matters....
Whatever his other mistakes in the realm of economics, in one area of economic policy Mwalimu was dead right - and, again, ahead of his time. Both in his anguished cry about the IMF in 1981 and in his subsequent work in the South Commission and the South Centre, he steadily maintained the need for fairer international (or global) systems of economic governance, particularly in the financial sphere. It is important to underline his consistent emphasis upon equity in global economic governance arrangements....
Nyerere’s activities in the international/global sphere included efforts to bolster analysis, both economic and political, to inform those who speak for the developing countries, especially the poorest among them, in international negotiations and organizations. The developing countries are still woefully weakly equipped to deal with the batteries of well-funded economists, lawyers and lobbyists who defend Northern interests in international discussions and the media. He was among those who saw, far ahead of others, that there is ultimately no substitute for one’s own technical, professional and institutional strength. Today it is known as 'capacity building', and it has entered 'conventional wisdom' as to what is to be done not only in Africa but throughout the developing world.” - (Gerry Helleiner, “The Legacies of Julius Nyerere: An Economist's Reflections,” University of Toronto, Canada, 2000).
Those are just a few examples of Western leaders, and some scholars, who had great respect for Nyerere as a leader of global stature.
Pia hao ni miongoni mwa viongozi ambao walitofautiana na Nyerere - they had profound philosophical and ideological differences with him - lakini licha ya tofauti hizo, na misimamo tofauti katika mambo mbali mbali, viongozi hao hawakusita hata kidogo kusema Nyerere alikuwa ni kiongozi anaye heshimiwa sana, kwa nini anaheshimiwa hivyo, na kwamba alikuwa ni kiongozi wa dunia, a world leader, na si kiongozi waTanzania au Afrika tu.
Hata Waafrika wenzake ambao hawakukubaliana na sera zake walimsifu hivyo. Mmoja wao ni Professor Ali Mazrui ambaye wapinzani mbali mbali wa Nyerere wamejaribu kutumia jina lake kumshambulia Nyerere bila hata kujua Mazrui mwenyewe alisema au aliandika nini kuhusu Nyerere na tofauti zao. Sijui wamesoma vitabu gani na maandishi gani mengine ya Mazrui.
Anzeni na kitabu chake cha kwanza, Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition, first published in 1967, developed from his doctoral thesis at Oxford. He stated in some of of his writings and interviews years later that his dissertation was inspired by Nkrumah's political thought; especially Nkrumah's pan-African daring in his quest for immediate continental unification under one government and the establishment of an African High Command to liberate the rest of the countries still under white minority rule (Nkrumah even contemplated sending Ghanaian troops to Rhodesia to topple Smith), defend the continent, and maintain peace without external assistance and interference in African affairs by world powers. Hence Pax Africana, a concept reminiscent of Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana, and even Pax Sovietica.
Pax Asiatica, highly abstract even more than Pax Africana, is for all practical purposes an extension of Pan Americana which is now being challenged by China in the absence of a Sino-Soviet alliance which seemed possible during the Cold War partly demonstrated by Soviet and Chinese involvement in Vietnam, although not necessarily as allies, to oppose the United States.
With regard to Pax Africana, Mazrui himself stated years later about the profound influence Nkrumah had on him:
"The African leader who influenced me most positively was Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, although I met him face-to-face only a couple of times. I had far less personal contact with him than I have had with at least a dozen other African leaders. So in what sense was Nkrumah such an influence on me? The impact was intellectual and political rather than personal. My doctoral thesis at Oxford University was partly influenced by his ideas on Pan Africanism (See my first book ever Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition).
Kwame Nkrumah also stimulated my vision of Africa as a convergence of three civilizations - Africanity, Islam and Western culture. Nkrumah called that convergence 'Consciencism.' I later called it 'Africa's Triple Heritage.' I was able to elaborate on my own concept in a BBC/PBS television series titled The Africans: A Triple Heritage (1986)." - (Ali A. Mazrui in IGCS Reporters, "Ali A. Mazrui, Witness to History?," Special Edition Newsletter, Institute of Global Cultural Studies (IGCS), Binghamton University - State University of New York, Vol. 7, Issue 1, Spring 2008, p. 2).
His dissertation at Oxford, "The Idea of Self-Government and the Idiom of Nationalism in Some Commonwealth African Countries, 1957 - 1963," was later published as Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition after he earned his doctorate in 1966. Earlier, Mazrui had also shown leadership qualities when his fellow African students at Manchester University in England - where he obtained his bachelor's degree - elected him president of the African students union.
Mazrui would have become a UN employee after graduating from Oxford had it not been for the intervention of Colin Leys, a British scholar who was a professor of political science at Makerere during that period – it was he who also fast-tracked Mazrui's career to professorship at Makerere because of the confidence he had in the young man's academic potential. He was vindicated by history as Mazrui swiftly rose to prominence in the academic arena on a global scale. It was he who convinced Mazrui to go to Makerere instead of pursuing a career as an international civil servant at the United Nations. Leys also once taught at Kivukoni College in Dar es Salaam. As Mazrui himself stated:
"When I was a graduate student at Nuffield College, Oxford, in the 1960s, and was agonizing about my future career, the ultimate choice was between becoming an international civil servant at the Secretariat of the United Nations in New York, on the one hand, and pursuing a full-time academic career, on the other. There then walked into my life Colin Leys, a British academic who was then the professor of Political Science at Makerere in Uganda, and had once been a Don at Oxford. Colin Leys had heard about me, and came to Oxford in 1962 explicitly to persuade me to join him at Makerere.
One of the arguments which persuaded me to abandon the idea of serving at the Secretariat of the United Nations was Colin Leys’ proposition that an academic career would enable me to serve the United Nations in other ways from time to time. I agreed to join Leys at Makerere – one of the most important decisions of my life, and one which I have never regretted." - (Ali A. Mazrui, “Fifty Years as a Part-time Westerner: A Self-Portrait,” Annual Mazrui Newsletter No. 29, Early 2005, p. 5).
Mazrui was also known for popularising the concept of Pax Africana in academic circles and even among some members of the African political elite more than any other scholar.
Credit goes to Nyerere for being the first leader to enforce Pax Africana, peace enforced and maintained by Africans themselves, on their own initiative, and on their own terms; not by forces - even if they are African - mobilised under UN auspices or that of any other non-African organisation. Among all African countries, it is Tanzania which has given concrete expression to the concept of Pax Africana, sending troops, on its own, on pacification campaigns in Uganda, Mozambique, the Seychelles, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and would probably have done so in Rwanda to stop the genocide had Nyerere been in power during that period.
It was Nyerere who started that. No other African leader had done that before. Nkrumah would have been the first to enforce Pax Africana had he succeeded in sending Ghanaian troops to Rhodesia to remove the white minority regime from power but was ousted before he could launch his mission (which would have needed the support of Tanzania and Zambia). So, instead of Nkrumah, it was Nyerere who came to put Pax Africana into practice years later.
As far back as 1961, Nyerere supported formation of an African High Command to pacify Congo (then Congo-Leopoldville), defend Africa and impose peace on countries which degenerate into chaos. As he stated in a speech to the Second Pan-African Seminar, World Assembly of Youth (WAY), in Dar es Salaam in August 1961:
"During the difficulties in the Congo, when the idea of an African High Command was first proposed, I was very taken with it. I do think we in Africa should think seriously of a method by which that idea could be put into practice....It provides a real force for the defense of Africa against external aggression." - (Julius K. Nyerere, excerpts from a speech delivered to the Second Pan-African Seminar, World Assembly of Youth. Reprinted from WAY Forum, No. 40, September 1961, in Paul E. Sigmund, Jr., ed., The Ideologies of the Developing Nations, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1963, p. 210).
Professor Mazrui also stated that there was not a single African leader who was a strong supporter of the liberation movements like Nyerere:
"Nyerere was second to none in that commitment....He became the toughest spokesman against the British on the Rhodesian question. His country played a crucial role at the OAU Ministerial meeting at which it was decided to issue that fatal ultimatum to Britain's Prime Minister, Harold Wilson - 'Break Ian Smith or Africa will break with you.'" - (Ali A. Mazrui, "Nkrumahism and The Triple Heritage: Out of The Shadows," Third Lecture, Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lectures, University of Ghana, Legon, 2002).
Tanzania became the first country to sever diplomatic ties with Britain, followed by Ghana and Egypt the next day.
Nyerere's commitment to African liberation was also underscored by Professor Piero Gleijeses in his book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959 - 1976:
"Of all the African leaders who proclaimed their support for the liberation struggle in Africa - Nkrumah, Nasser, Ben Bella, Sekou Toure - he (Nyerere) was the most committed. And by the second half of 1964, spurred by events in Zaire and the obvious failure of peaceful attempts to end white rule in southern Africa, this commitment, and his disappointment with the Western powers, was increasingly evident.
By the time Che arrived (in 1965), Dar es Salaam had become the Mecca of African liberation movements....Dar es Salaam 'has become a haven for exiles from the rest of Africa,' the CIA lamented in September 1964. 'It is full of frustrated revolutionaries, plotting the overthrow of African governments, both black and white'....
In September 1964, Frelimo, the movement against Portuguese rule in Mozambique, had launched the opening salvo of its guerrilla war from bases in southern Tanzania, its only rear guard.
Following Stanleyville, Nyerere had thrown his full support to the Simbas, and Tanzania had become their main rear guard and the major conduit of Soviet and Chinese weapons for them.
It was also the seat of the Liberation Committee of the OAU. The head offices of Frelimo and a host of other movements struggling against the white regimes in South Africa, Namibia, and Rhodesia were in Dares Salaam.
The Cuban embassy there was, the CIA reported accurately in March 1965, 'the largest Cuban diplomatic station in sub-Saharan Africa.' The ambassador, Captain Pablo Ribalta, was a close friend of Che Guevara." - (Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959 - 1976, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA: The University of North CarolinaPress, 2002, pp. 84 and 85).
Trevor Grundy, a British journalist who worked at the Standard, renamed Daily News, in Dar es Salaam in the late sixties and early seventies, wrote the following about Nyerere (a graduate of the University of Edinburgh) in his review of Nyerere:The Early Years, a book written by Thomas Molony, a senior lecturer in African studies at the University of Edinburgh, in spite of the fact that he disagreed with Nyerere's socialist policies:
"I worked in Dar es Salaam (1968-1972) for one of the English papers he nationalized in 1970....
He got into Edinburgh and that city and the people he met there left an indelible mark on his future career. Julius fell in love with the British and their great writers, economists and philosophers.
He went on to use his Edinburgh years to great advantage, bewildering - some might say bamboozling - liberal-minded journalists in the 1960s and 1970s with his formidable intellect which was the result of his reading of Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill, T.H. Green's Principles of Political Organization, Benard Bosanquet's Philosophical Essay of the State and Harold Laski, the famous London School of Economics theorist.
He had a blotting paper brain.
Hardly a soul at Edinburgh guessed he would turn into Africa's number one brain box in years to come. As the historian George Shepperson put it in a BBC interview: 'We at Edinburgh were very surprised in the mid-1950s when Dr Nyerere's name became widespread throughout the world press. We never felt when he was here that he was going to become a leading politician.'
Statesmen and journalists were amazed at his knowledge....
With his eager tongue, (and) a formidable intellect,...he is presented by Commonwealth groupies as the politician who did the most to mastermind the downfall of Portuguese and British/Afrikaner rule in Africa....The Rhodesian leader Ian Smith several times referred to Nyerere as Africa's 'evil genius.'"
Also, read Professor Mazrui's articles in Transition, published in the sixties, and what he wrote about Nyerere; also read his other works. You will see exactly what he wrote about Nyerere, badala ya kuchukua mstari mmoja hapa na pale, na kuiunganisha out of context, just to attack Nyerere.
A devout Muslim and prominent Islamic scholar, Professor Mazrui also defended Nyerere, a Catholic, when some people said Nyerere recognised Biafra because the secessionists, who were mostly Igbo, were fellow Catholics; and that he authorised military intervention in Uganda to defend Christians against a Muslim dictator, Idi Amin. As he stated in his lecture at Cornell University in October 1999 in which he paid tribute to Nyerere:
"Has Nyerere's political behaviour sometimes reflected his upbringing as a Catholic? One school of thought explains his recognition of the secessionist Biafra as a form of solidarity with fellow Catholics against a Federal Nigeria, which would have been dominated by Muslims. This was in the middle of the Nigerian civil war. The Igbo of Biafra were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.
I personally did not share the suspicion that Nyerere recognized Biafra because the Igbo were fellow Roman Catholics claiming to be threatened by Muslim Northerners in Nigeria....It seems much more likely that Nyerere recognized Biafra for humanitarian reasons.
Less convincing is the assertion that Nyerere's military intervention in Uganda in 1979 was motivated by a sectarian calculation to defend a mainly Christian Uganda from the Muslim dictator Idi Amin. In reality, Nyerere might once again have been more motivated by a wider sense of humanitarianism and universal ethics. He was also defending Tanzania from Idi Amin's territorial appetites." - ("Africa's Mwalimu: Ali Mazrui Pays Tribute to Julius Nyerere," in Worldview Magazine, Washington, D.C., Vol. 12, No.4, Fall 1999; also Ali A. Mazrui, "Mwalimu's Rise to Power," in Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, 17 October 1999).
Mazrui was a bona fide scholar, not a religious bigot. One of his students at the University of Michigan, Keith Richburg from Detroit who later became a reporter of The Washington Post and the paper's bureau chief in Nairobi for three years in the nineties, states in his book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, that "Dr. Ali Mazrui (was) the best-known African scholar in the West."
Mazrui alitofautiana na Nyerere katika mambo mbali mbali tangu mwanzoni mwa miaka ya sitini lakini alikiri baadaye kwamba he came to admire Nyerere even more through the years and agreed with him on a number of fundamental issues, unlike in the past when he strongly disagreed with him although even then, back in the sixties, he was a great admirer of Nyerere as a superb intellectual and an ardent Pan-Africanist. Mazrui also described Nyerere as "the most original thinker" among all the leaders in Anglophone Africa, and the most intellectual African leader besides Leopold Sedar-Senghor of Senegal. When Nyerere died, Professor Mazrui had the following to say about Mwalimu:
"In global terms, he was one of the giants of the 20th century.... He did bestride this narrow world like an African colossus....Julius Nyerere was my Mwalimu too. It was a privilege to learn so much from so great a man." - (Ali A. Mazrui, ibid.)
Not long before Mazrui himself died (what a tragic loss), he said in an interview:
"I knew Nyerere very well."
They also met many times. Therefore, his assessment of Nyerere as a leader and as an intellectual comes from someone who personally knew Mwalimu for more than 30 years.
Lakini si hayo tu. Professor Mazrui pia alisema intellectually, alimheshimu Nyerere kuliko karibu wanasiasa wote dunia nzima; yaani, karibu kuliko viongozi wote duniani kwa vile nao ni wanasiasa.That was a very high compliment from someone who was also a critic of Nyerere. As Mazrui stated about 10 years after Nyerere died:
"Intellectually, I admired Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania higher than most politicians anywhere in the world (emphasis added)." - (Ali A. Mazrui, in "Witness to History: Interview with Ali A. Mazrui," in The Gambia Echo, Banjul, Gambia, 25 July 2008).
Jonathan Power, a British conservative who once worked in Tanganyika and who was highly critical of Nyerere's policies and one party-rule, also paid high tribute to Nyerere in spite of the ideological differences he had with him. As he stated in his article, "Lament for Independent Africa's Greatest Leader":
"His extraordinary intelligence, verbal and literary originality... and apparent commitment to non-violence made him not just an icon in his own country but of a large part of the activist sixties' generation in the white world who, not all persuaded of the heroic virtues of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, desperately looked for a more sympathetic role model.
Measured against most of his peers, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sekou Toure of Guinea, he towered above them. On the intellectual plane only the rather remote president of Senegal, the great poet and author of Negritude, Leopold Senghor, came close to him." - Jonathan Power, TFF Jonathan Power Columns, "Lament for Independent Africa's Greatest Leader," London, 6 October 1999).
Nakumbuka pia lecture ya Mtanzania mwenzetu Professor Haroub Othman kuhusu Nyerere, alipokwenda University of Cape Town, delivered before students and members of the academic staff, entitled, "An Intellectual in Power."
Hakuna shaka hata kidogo kwamba intellectually, and as a man of high moral stature, Mwalimu was nothing to play with, regardless of what his critics say in an attempt to diminish his stature as a thinker and as a world leader.
The American secretary of state, Dr. Henry Kissinger, an arrogant intellectual and a formidable opponent who was hated by many of his colleagues at the State Department because of his arrogance and who tried to intimidate his adversaries in the international arena, met his equal in terms of intellectual power when he came to Dar es Salaam in mid-September 1976 to talk to Nyerere about southern Africa, Rhodesia in particular, and how to end white minority rule in the region.
Kissinger also had deep-seated contempt for Africa just like President Richard Nixon did. As James K. Bishop, a seasoned diplomat since the Kennedy Administration who was deputy director for West Africa at the State Department and served as ambassador to Nigeria, Liberia and Somalia, among other high-level diplomatic assignments in Africa and elsewhere – he was also subjected to Kissinger's arrogance in a very humiliating way – stated in an interview:
“For countries I covered, we had a pretty broad spectrum of US interests at a time when the US administration was not particularly concerned about Africa. In addition to other issues that Nixon and Kissinger had to face--Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, disarmament--they both had also had very disparaging views of Africa. Nixon told one of our ambassadors--with whom I was working when he made his farewell call on the President at the White House--that Africans were a bunch of children and should be treated as such. Those were the ambassador's marching orders. Kissinger went to Africa once during my period in Washington--when I was the Deputy Office Director for West Africa. Bill Schaufele was the Assistant Secretary at the time; he looked over the manifest for Kissinger's plane and realized that he was the only African expert aboard. He asked whether he could bring an assistant along to help him. I was marched up to Kissinger's office and inspected--as a slave might have been inspected 200 years earlier on a block in Annapolis. He looked at me as if I were a piece of rancid meat. During the inspection, Kissinger went out of the room to take a telephone call from the President. Winston Lord, who remained with Schaufele and I, was kind enough to tell me not to be offended because Kissinger treated all of his staff the same way. The bottom line was that I didn't go on the plane; Schaufele went by himself.” - (James K. Bishop, Jr., interviewed by Charles S. Kennedy, The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, 15 November 1995, p. 30).
Another example of Kissinger's arrogance involved a Pakistani diplomat. The diplomat recalled with bitterness how Kissinger mistreated him. He said he met Kissinger before and talked to him. When he saw Kissinger again, at some kind of gathering, he said he told him they met before and wondered if he remembered him. He said Kissinger curtly responded: "It is not important for me to remember you."
The Pakistani diplomat felt extremely insulted and said about Kissinger: "He is very arrogant."
William Yandell Elliott who was one of Kissinger's professors at Harvard and who also was his adviser when he was a doctoral candidate told him years later: "Henry, you're brilliant. But you're arrogant. In fact you're the most arrogant man I've ever met. Mark my words, your arrogance is going to get you in real trouble one day." - (William Yandell Elliott, in Greg Grandin, Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015, p. 39).
Kissinger's dissertation was on Napoleonic era diplomacy.
Elliott himself was a highly influential figure. He was presidential adviser for many years and served both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Kissinger's contemptuous attitude even towards national leaders was demonstrated when he went to Jamaica in December 1975 on a private visit. But he also had something else on his mind during that visit: Cuban troops in Angola.
He was staying with his wife at a resort in the northwestern part of Jamaica and asked Prime Minister Michael Manley, a close friend of Fidel Castro, to go and see him. That was very disrespectful and extremely arrogant for Kissinger to say that and very insulting to Manley. Manley, being prime minister, refused to go there. Instead, he asked Kissinger to go down to Kingston and see him at Jamaica House, the prime minister's official residence. Kissinger did so. He wanted Manley to condemn Castro for sending troops to Angola. Manley refused to do so. Instead, he defended Castro's involvement in Angola where Cubans were fighting the South African armed forces.
Manley's uncompromising stand and refusal to condemn Cuban involvement in Angola infuriated Kissinger; Manley also got along very well with Nyerere and the two leaders shared the same position on many issues including their attitude towards the United States as an imperialist power and strong supporter of apartheid South Africa. That is why, in pointed reference to South Africa and the United States as well as other Western powers supporting the apartheid regime, Nyerere asked a rhetorical question in an interview with American journalists in the late seventies (on ABC, "Issues and Answers"):
"Why are Western countries arming South Africa? Why are you arming South Africa? Against what military combination? And you expect us to sit just like that."
At a rally in Kingston, after his meeting with Kissinger, Manley vehemently condemned apartheid South Africa and its supporters, hence the United States, and defended Cuban involvement in Angola, drawing a thunderous applause from the people at the rally. A man of great oratorical skills who was also highly articulate, Manley said among other things:
"Now there are certain people in the world who say now why are we taking this risk to anger the United States of America. And the answer is this: We are not angering the United States of America, they are angering themselves. We have friendship with Cuba as part of a world alliance of Third World nations that are fighting for justice for poor people in the world. They are not going to tell me what kind of relationship I have with Fidel Castro. And I tell you as a party leader, as long as this party is in power, we intend to walk through the world on our feet and not on our knees."
Months later, in June 1976, Nyerere articulated the same position on the Cuban involvement in Angola. When he was asked on American television, ABC, "Issues and Answers" programme, if he knew who was behind the instability in Angola, he responded:
"I believe the CIA. Who is doing it? Who else could be doing it? Why do we keep on hearing these whispers coming from Washington, saying, 'Let us create another Vietnam for the Russians in Angola'? You are causing us trouble."
He was also asked:
"Can you use your influence, which is tremendous influence, and ask Castro to withdraw his troops from Angola?"
Nyerere responded:
"Even if I had that kind of influence, it would be unnecessary. First, you remove the cause...."
"Will you commit troops (in a war against South Africa)?"
"Yes, I will commit troops. We would rather hang together than hang separately...."
Kissinger denied the United States was involved in Angola. He lied, typical of his arrogance, thinking he could get away with anything including insulting other leaders, and in spite of the evidence showing the United States was deeply involved in Angola. His lies and arrogance were also based on his belief that it was necessary to "create your own reality," as he once put it, in terms of how the United States should formulate and conduct its foreign policy.
Yet, after repeatedly denying American involvement in Angola, Kissinger later conceded: If the United States allowed the Soviet Union to project its capabilities so far away in Angola, far beyond its traditional sphere of influence, that would threaten and even destabilise the whole international system.
Nyerere took a different position. He and Manley never changed their position on the involvement of Cuban troops in Angola which they felt was justified; also, the Soviet Union continued to supply weapons to the Cubans and the MPLA forces in Angola. Kissinger equally maintained his position that Cuban troops should leave Angola since they were a threat to American geopolitical interests in Africa, a continent he arrogantly wanted to be dominated by the West or which he felt was already an integral part of the Western sphere of influence.
Kissinger's arrogance and his disrespect for Prime Minister Michael Manley still rankled many Jamaicans years later.
A destabilisation campaign by the United States that was already underway to undermine Manley, because of his socialist orientation and strong friendship with Castro, was intensified; Kissinger was well-known for his policy of destabilisation to undermine leaders and governments he considered to be "unfriendly" to the United States; one of the best examples being the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in September 1973 in a military coup supported by Kissinger and the CIA.
ITT (International Telephone & Telegraph), in collaboration with the CIA, played a major role in facilitating Allende's ouster; it also worked together with the CIA, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the AFL-CIO to overthrow President Joao Goulart of Brazil in 1964. The coup, authorised by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was masterminded by the CIA. Other American agencies, including the United States Information Service (USIS), renamed the United States Information Agency (USIA), have been involved in nefarious schemes - engineered, facilitated, and masterminded by the CIA - to undermine, weaken and overthrow governments in Third World countries; some of the prime targets being in Africa. They also have been known to formulate their own programmes, approved by the American authorities, to undermine governments considered to be a "threat" to American interests, despite professions to the contrary.
USAID is a very good example of CIA penetration of Third World countries because of its extensive network of workers and projects. The CIA has used USAID as a very good cover for its agents for decades since the sixties. Many USAID employees are CIA agents working in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and other parts of the world, dispensing foreign aid, while they are also busy working as spies for the American government.
The CIA also has been highly notorious for infiltrating academia in African countries and other parts of the Third World and for recruiting foreign students to work for the agency. Kissinger himself, who was once a professor at Harvard before entering government service, was very much in favour of such penetration. He knew how foreign students could be recruited and nurtured to serve American interests especially when they returned to their home countries and became national leaders or high-ranking government officials.
One example of such infiltration of academic institutions in Africa involved a visiting American scholar, Dr. Stephen Andrew Lucas, at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in the late sixties and seventies. He taught at UDSM for seven years. He was a lecturer in sociology and a CIA agent, seasoned and highly accomplished. He served as a CIA agent in Congo during the turbulent sixties before he came to Tanzania. He worked under Larry Devlin who was the CIA station chief in Leopoldville when Lumumba was arrested and assassinated. Devlin died at his home in Virginia, USA, on 6 December 2008. He was 86.
Dr. Lucas also worked as a CIA agent in Angola, Mozambique and Madagascar. When he retired, he was awarded "the Defense Intelligence Director's Award and Retirement Medallion and Certificate of Distinction."
He died in Italy on 24 May 2006 when he was on vacation with his wife. He was 69. He was buried in his home state of Oklahoma in the United States. Before his death, he was a professor at Louisiana State University where he was the executive director of international programmes. He also taught Swahili among other subjects.
The case of Dr. Lucas, with regard to Tanzania and other countries where CIA agents are assigned, demonstrates how the agency does everything it can to infiltrate governments to the highest levels. His obituary states, among other things: "He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam for seven years and served as an advisor to Tanzanian President, Julius Nyerere."
That may be coded language, saying he was "an advisor" to President Nyerere. What it obviously means is that he was able to establish contacts at the highest levels of the Tanzanian government to spy for the United States probably even without the knowledge of the Tanzanian intelligence service during that period. But the KGB knew about him from the time he was in Leopoldville and may have alerted the Tanzanian authorities on his activities.
It also happened in Ghana where the CIA station chief in Accra, Howard T. Bane, who was the mastermind of the military coup against Nkrumah, was able to penetrate security and establish contacts at the highest levels of government in preparation for the coup. The British intelligence service, MI5, also had an agent in Accra, John Thomson, who infiltrated the Ghanaian government during that period and was equally involved in Nkrumah's ouster. Soon after Nkrumah was overthrown, Thomson "unofficially" congratulated the head of the new military regime, General Joseph Ankrah, on behalf of the British government, for getting rid of Nkrumah. Thomson and Ankrah, together with John Willie Kofi Harlley who was the deputy chairman of the new military ruling council, drank a bottle of brandy to celebrate Nkrumah's downfall. The military junta formed the National Liberation Council (NLC) to rule Ghana. Nkrumah dismissed it as the Notorious Liars Council. It was fully controlled by the United States. As Christopher Andrew states in his book, Defend The Realm: The Authorized History of MI5:
"Thomson went on to be welcomed by, and deliver unofficial congratulations to, the NLC chairman, General Ankrah, and the other NLC members. On 2 March, following a favourable report from Thomson, Britain formally recognized the new Ghanaian regime, establishing full diplomatic relations three days later. This was the only occasion on which a Security Service officer was charged by HMG with making the first contact with a new government which had seized power in a coup d'etat." - (Christopher Andrew, Defend The Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, p. 471. See also Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, New York: Harper Perennial, HarperCollins, 1996).
Robert P. Smith who served as U.S. ambassador to Ghana – he was working at the State Department when Nkrumah was overthrown – explained how happy Secretary of State Dean Rusk was when he heard Nkrumah had been ousted:
“I also remember, the morning of the coup, I got the call about 2 a.m. here at the house and went into the Department and immediately set up a little task force in the Operations Center. Later in the same morning, about 8 or 8:30, Secretary Rusk wandered down the hall and came in and said, 'I've seen the early reports, but I just want to hear it firsthand. What's going on in Ghana?' When I related how Nkrumah had landed in Peking and had been informed by his Chinese hosts of what had happened in Ghana, Dean Rusk broke into an ear-splitting grin. I've never seen him look so happy.'” - (Robert P. Smith interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy, The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project (ADST), 28 February 1989, p. 14).
The State Department under Rusk also recommended covert operations against President Nyerere in an attempt to overthrow him. As John Prados states in his book, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA:
"The Special Group (at the CIA) reportedly considered a State Department proposal to supply arms to certain groups in Tanzania, where secret-war wizards saw President Julius Nyerere as a problem, in the summer of 1964....Like Nyerere, Washington viewed Ghana's leader Kwame Nkrumah as a troublemaker." - (John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, Chicago, Illinois, USA: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2006, p. 328).
Two years before the 1966 coup against Nkrumah, the United States was already plotting to overthrow him. In February 1964, the CIA director told the head of foreign operations at the State Department that Ankrah was the right person to replace Nkrumah. The American embassy in Ghana was already working with opposition groups to depose Nkrumah.
The British were also, right from the beginning together with the Americans, deeply involved in the plot to overthrow Nkrumah. A cable sent to the Home Office in London from the British High Commissioner in Accra, A.W. Snelling, bluntly stated that the British establishment had to get rid of Nkrumah because he was making the Africans too politically conscious; not just in Ghana but across the continent and beyond. He expressed his exasperation at Nkrumah's Pan-African militancy and commitment to Africa's wellbeing more than four years before Nkrumah was overthrown and did not hide his dislike for the Ghanaian leader. As Gamel Nasser Adam states:
“Britain was more forthright in its abhorrence of the rise in awareness among the African people. Earlier on the British High Commissioner in Ghana at the time, A.W. Snelling in a dispatch dated 5th September 1961 sent to the Commonwealth Relations Office in London, noted Nkrumah's '...knack of giving expression to the feelings of so many Africans, who are all the time rapidly becoming more and more politically conscious, is exasperating. I can well understand the fury he arouses in London, and often share it myself.'
In other words halting the rising tide of African consciousness of liberation was a major priority of those forces which wanted to maintain the status quo of colonial and neo-colonial consciousness.” - (Gamel Nasser Adam, “Constructing National Consciousness in Russian Literature: Some Lessons for the African Milieu,” in Helen Lauer, Nana Aba Appiah Amfo, Jemima Asabea Anderson, eds., Identity Meets Nationality: Voices from the Humanities, Legon-Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2011, p. 236).
The British saw Nkrumah as a threat to Western interests in Africa, a position shared by the United States government which stated that Nkrumah had done more than any other African leader to undermine American interests in Africa. Therefore he had to go, even if it meant assassinating him; a job the CIA is well known for, working closely with the State Department. And it continued to do so when Henry Kissinger was secretary of state, as is still the case today.
Nkrumah survived seven assassination attempts. Some of the assassination plots were supported by the CIA.
The CIA is also known for fomenting trouble in Third World countries, infiltrating the media and other institutions, state and private, to achieve its goals. Provision of funds and even weapons to groups which serve its interests is one of the tactics the CIA uses, as happened in Ghana to undermine and ultimately overthrow Nkrumah. It also happened in Congo-Leopoldville when Lumumba was prime minister. Joseph Mobutu was already on the CIA payroll when he was Lumumba's secretary and went on to seize power with CIA support.
The CIA, which was authorised by President Dwight Eisenhower to assassinate Lumumba, even claimed the Congolese prime minister was “insane” and “a dope fiend” in an attempt to tarnish his image and discredit him as a leader. As Christopher Andrew states in his book, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush:
"Allen Dulles (the CIA director, also known as the DCI – Director of Central Intelligence) told Eisehower that Lumumba was insane; later reports alleged that he was also 'a dope fiend.'
On September 21 (1960) the DCI reported to an NSC (National Security Council) meeting, chaired by the president, that 'Lumumba was not yet disposed of.' Still fascinated by the use of poisons in covert action, Richard Bissell (head of CIA's covert operations) instructed a CIA scientist (Dr. Sydney Gottlieb) to prepare biological toxins designated to assassinate or incapacitate an unnamed 'African leader' (Lumumba).” – ( Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, New York: Harper Perennial, HarperCollins, 1997, p. 253).
The CIA also armed and funded the opposition in Jamaica when Michael Manley was prime minister. Many people were killed in clashes between Manley's supporters and members of the opposition party led by Edward Seaga who was the"darling" of the United States. Manley himself survived three assassination attempts. In a radio interview in 1980 - at the end of his first term as prime minister - when he lost the election to Seaga whose campaign was funded and directed by the CIA, Manley said the following about Seaga: "He is a mental weakling" who was taking orders from his masters and was ready sell his country to the United States and other Western powers.
Manley's wife Beverley (formerly Beverly Anderson), a fiercely proud Afrocentric nationalist, in an interview years later after her husband died, recalled how she was equally offended by Kissinger when he asked her husband to go and see him at a resort in northern Jamaica:
"Kissinger was staying just outside of Ocho Rios and he asked Michael to come down there and see him and Michael talked to me about that; and I said, 'but I don't understand, you are prime minister, he comes to see you at Jamaica House.' And then Kissinger came and saw him at Jamaica House."
One of Manley's supporters, also in an interview years later, had this to say about Kissinger:
"Kissinger doesn't come down here and stick his finger in Manley's face, you box his finger out of your face. That's almost a national call for a reaction to it. Give thanks to the fact that Manley stood up to Kissinger."
You don't go to another country and tell the leader of that country, a president or a prime minister, to come and see you at your hotel room, ordering him around, telling him what to do as if you own him and his country. You enquire first, to find out if it is even possible for you to see him. If it is possible, then you ask for permission, and in a respectful way, to go and see him at his office or at his official residence.
But that was Henry, with his arrogance, and contemptuous attitude towards other people including national leaders, ignoring all protocol.
Had he shown any kind of arrogance when he met Nyerere, it would have been a different story. He met a strong and highly intellectual leader who was not afraid of him and whom he could not intimidate into submission. And he knew that even before he came to Dar es Salaam, what kind of leader he would be dealing with. As David Martin, a prominent British journalist who worked in Tanzania for many years - he knew Nyerere very well - and who covered southern Africa extensively, stated:
"Tanganyika became independent on 9 December 1961 and a year later when the country became a republic, Nyerere, elected by over 96 per cent of the voters, became its first president.
For the next 24 years Nyerere was to fill the African and international stage like a colossus. When he met the astute American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for the first time in Dar es Salaam in 1976, the two men began a mental verbal fencing match of David and Goliath proportions.
One began a quote from Shakespeare (some of whose works Nyerere translated into Swahili setting them in an African context) or a Greek philosopher and the other would end the quotation. Then Nyerere quoted an American author. Kissinger laughed: Nyerere knew Kissinger had written the words.
Neither man trusted the other. Kissinger wanted the negotiations (over Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and southern Africa) kept secret. Nyerere, understanding the Americans' duplicity, took the opposite view and as Africa correspondent of the London Sunday newspaper, The Observer, I was to become the focal point of the Tanzanians' strategic leaks.That year the newspaper led the front page on an unprecedented 13 occasions on Africa. All the leaks, as Kissinger knew, came from Nyerere. One political fox had temporarily outwitted the other.
Apart from his simplicity and piercing intellect, one of Nyerere's most endearing traits was his honesty. " - (David Martin, "Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere: Obituary," Southern African Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC). A former news editor and deputy managing editor of the Standard, renamed Daily News, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, David Martin was a founder-director of the Southern African Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC) of which Julius Nyerere was patron. He lived in Tanzania for 10 years from 1964 to 1974 and frequently talked with Nyerere through the decades, a period of 35 years, until Nyerere's last days).
Kissinger met with Nyerere three times in 1976. He met with Nyerere and Tanzania's minister of foreign affairs, Ibrahim Kaduma, 25 – 26 April. He met with Nyerere again, 14 – 15 September, when the two leaders discussed Rhodesia and Namibia. Kissinger met with Nyerere for the third time on 21 September when the American secretary of state briefed Mwalimu on his meetings with Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, and the other leaders of the white minority regime in Rhodesia.
Kissinger said Nyerere was one of the toughest and most intelligent negotiators he ever dealt with. Others he named in that category included Soviet foreign affairs minster Andrei Gromyko; Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin who had a reputation for being inflexible in negotiations; Chou En-Lai, and Hafez al-Assad. He said when negotiating with Gromyko, you think you are making progress, as he addresses every point you made, and then you find out he takes you right back to the beginning without making any concessions.
James Spain, who was the American ambassador to Tanzania when Kissinger came to Dar es Salaam, also recalled what Kissinger told him about Nyerere during that time:
"One of the amusing sidelights of Henry Kissinger's second or third visit was this. He stayed in the Kilimanjaro Hotel. When the party was clearing out to go to the airport, I was told that the Secretary wanted me. I went upstairs. People were carrying away files and suitcases.
In the middle of a table there was a 'bug' protector that was still making weird electronic sounds. Henry gets both of us hunched over this thing. He said 'Thank you very much. This visit has been useful. Your arrangements were fine, but I want to warn you about one thing. This fellow Nyerere is not on our side.'
This was a pretty accurate reflection of the spirit of the times." -(James Spain, quoted in an interview, WhyTanganyika united with Zanzibar to form Tanzania, op. cit., p. 407).
Kissinger did not get what he wanted from Nyerere. Asked at a press conference in Dar es Salaam after Kissinger's mission if he considered it to be a failure because Kissinger did not get the assurances and the concessions he wanted to get from Nyerere on how to resolve the contentious issue of white minority rule in Rhodesia and in southern Africa in general, Nyerere, quoted by David Ottaway of The Washington Post, responded:
"A mission of clarity is not a mission of failure."
David Ottaway, who sent his report from Dar es Salaam, was one of the American reporters who covered Kissinger on that trip. He regarded Nyerere's response as intellectual and stated in his report to The Washington Post: Nyerere "answered professorially, 'A mission of clarity....'"
Kissinger got the chance to know exactly how Nyerere felt and what his stand was on the subject. He learned something from Mwalimu. As David Ottaway stated in The Washington Post just before Kissinger went to Africa, when Kissinger gets to Tanzania he is going to "get a dose of African nationalism" from Nyerere. David's wife, Marina Ottaway, also covered Kissinger and Nyerere during that time. She also worked for The Washington Post.
Nyerere's high intellectual calibre, together with his humility and commitment to the wellbeing of the masses, was one of the major assets which served him well during his leadership. As Professor Mazrui stated:
"Above all, Nyerere as president was a combination of deep intellect and high integrity...(and) was in a class by himself in the combination of ethical standards and intellectual power. In the combination of high thinking and high ethics, no other East African politician was in the same league." - (Ali A. Mazrui, "Mwalimu's Rise to Power," in the Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, October 17, 1999).
Almost four years later in September 2003 at the University of Nairobi, Professor Mazrui also had the following to say about Nyerere in his lecture, "Towards Re-Africanizing African Universities: Who Killed Intellectualism in Post-Colonial Africa?":
"The most intellectual of East Africa's Heads of State at the time was Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania - a true philosopher, president and original thinker....
Who killed intellectualism in Tanzania? In Tanzania intellectualism was slow to die. It was partially protected by the fact that the Head of State - Julius Nyerere - was himself a superb intellectual ruler. He was not only fascinated by ideas, but also stimulated by debates....Ujamaa and the justification of the one-party state stimulated a considerable amount of intellectual rationalization and conceptualization....
In my own personal life I was respected more as an intellectual by Milton Obote in Uganda and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania than I was by either Mzee Kenyatta or Daniel arap Moi.
Even Idi Amin, when he was in power in Uganda, wanted to send me to apartheid South Africa as living proof that Africans could think. Idi Amin wanted me to become Exhibit A of the Black Intellectual to convince racists in South Africa that Black people were human beings capable of rational thought." - (Ali A. Mazrui, "Towards Re-Africanizing African Universities: Who Killed Intellectualism in Post-Colonial Africa?" The lecture was dedicated to Dr. Crispin Odhiambo-Mbai of the University of Nairobi who was assassinated in Nairobi on 14 September 2003).
Nyerere alikuwa ni tofauti kabisa na viongozi kama Kenyatta, Mobutu na wengineo kama hao. Mzee Kenyatta was on the CIA payroll. Mobutu also was on the CIA payroll, among other leaders. Tangu miaka ya sitini, enzi ya Mzee Kenyatta, Nairobi has been a major operational centre and hotbed of intrigue for the CIA. During Mobutu's reign, the largest CIA station in Africa was in Kinshasa. Watu wanao wasifu viongozi hao sijui wanawasifia nini. Sijui viongozi hao wanastahili sifa gani, kama viongozi wa Afrika, wanapolipwa na CIA to preserve, protect and promote American interests to the detriment of Africa's wellbeing.
Nyerere was not one of them. Hata wanaomchukia wanajua ukweli huo. Aliwahi kuzungumzia suala hilo, jinsi viongozi wetu wanavyo nunuliwa na mataifa makubwa, na wanavyopata amri kutoka kwa watawala wao bila kujali Africa's wellbeing. Alitoa mfano wa viongozi wa nchi za Francophone Africa:
"I went to Addis and it was an incredible meeting. Here is this continent of young nations coming from colonialism and so forth and the debate is awful, and really what provoked me was the French-speaking countries, you know. With all their French culture, training in rationalization - you can't really argue with those fellows. And I discovered some of these fellows have their visas -THEIR VISAS - signed by the French ambassadors in their own countries! And I said, 'Oh, but I thought you were fighting for freedom?'" - Julius K. Nyerere, in Bill Sutherland and Matt Mayer, eds., Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan African Insight on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle, and Liberation, Africa World Press, 2000. The interview was also reproduced, from the book, by Chambi Chachage, "Excerpt from Interview with Bill Sutherland," Centre for Consciencist Studies and Analyses (CENSCA), 5 September 2008).
Kulikuwa na viongozi wawili tu katika nchi hizo, President Ahmed Sekou Toure of Guinea and President Modibo Keita of Mali, who refused to remain under French control; and a few years later, President Marien Ngouabi of Congo-Brazzaville.
Katika bara letu kwa ujumla, wengine walikuwa ni Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser na Ahmed Ben Bella, pamoja na Nyerere. Hawakuwa vibaraka wa nchi zozote. Nyerere also was a very close friend of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ahmed Sekou Toure.
In an interview with Jorge Castaneda (the author of Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara) in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1995, Ahmed Ben Bella said there were six leaders - Nkrumah, Nyerere, Nasser, Sekou Toure, Modibo Keita, and Ben Bella himself - who formed their own secret group, known as The Group of Six, within the OAU. He said they worked together secretly on a number of issues - including the Congo crisis and the liberation struggle - vital to the wellbeing of Africa, excluding other African leaders.
The six were true African leaders, independent-minded and committed to the wellbeing of Africa.
Sasa mtajua kwa nini viongozi wa nchi za Magharibi walitaka kumwondoa Nyerere madarakani; kwa nini walimpindua Nkrumah, kwa nini walimpindua Modibo Keita na walijaribu kumuua Ahmed Sekou Toure; kwa nini walimuua Lumumba, na kwa nini hawakufikiria hata kidogo kumpindua Kenyatta au Mobutu.
Ukitaka kujua zaidi, soma kitabu kipya cha Godfrey Mwakikagile, Western Involvement in Nkrumah's Downfall, kilicho chapishwa mwaka huu. Vingine, by the same author, ni Africa in The Sixties, na Remembering The Sixties: A Look at Africa, vilivyo chapishwa mwaka uliopita.
Pia soma vitabu vya Nyerere mwenyewe ili mjue msimamo wake badala ya kuropoka tu na kumshambulia bila kujua mnasema nini. Baadhi yetu tumemfuatilia Nyerere kwa miaka mingi sana tangu miaka ya hamsini. I attended his political rallies in the late fifties when he was campaigning for independence. I remember him very well, even some of the things he said at those rallies, when he was still a young man in his late thirties. Hakuna anayesema hakufanya makosa. Lakini binafsi, na si mimi tu, siamini hata kidogo tutapata kiongozi mwingine kama Nyerere. He was the best.
“Tanzania in East Africa has long been one of the 25 poorest countries in the world. But there was a time when it was described, in terms of its political influence, as one of the top 25. It punched far above its weight. That formidable achievement was the work of one man, now lying close to death in a London Hospital.” - (Jonathan Power, "Lament for Independent Africa's Greatest Leader," London, 6 October 1999).
"Julius Nyerere is among the extremely few world leaders who have selflessly attempted great things for their national peoples....
Dar es Salaam was a Mecca of the world's national liberation movements, and a hotbed of global intellectual thought....
Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere is the most successful leader that Africa has ever produced since the European colonial regime collapsed 50 years ago....
Until his death, Nyerere, who was humble, self-effacing and selfless, continued to serve humanity on many capacities....
An intellectual of immense stature, a man of great personal integrity, a paragon of humanism, Julius Kambarage will be hard to replace in Tanzania, in Africa and on the globe. I was privileged to know and work with such a man. That is why, as I mourn, I ask, with Marcus Antonius, whence cometh such another?" - (Philip Ochieng', "Africa's Greatest Leader," The East African, Nairobi, 19 October 1999; P. Ochieng, "There Was Real Freedom in Mwalimu's Day," The East African, 20 October 1999).
