Mzee Tz,
Ninaomba niseme kitu kimoja tukiwa tunaendelea na huu mjadala, kwamba ni muhimu kujua chanzo cha uanasiasa wa wanasiasa wetu, Originally, wanasiasa wetu walikuwa ni makundi mawili, yaani la Kambona na la Mwalimu,
Kambona aliwaingiza kwenye siasa kwa kutumia ubavu wake binafsi, viongozi kama Balozi Lusinde, Dr. Malecela, Dr. Marsha, Kamaliza, Chifu Fundikira, General Nyirenda, Sitta, General Sarakikya, Bibi Titi, Dr. Babu, Balozi Magombe, Kihampa, Kisumo na wengineo..!
Inaendana na hii,
Tanzania: Mkapa's Brush With Bad Karma
East African (Nairobi)
26 June 2007
Philip Ochieng
During his term in office, the former Tanzanian president led a campaign to 'de-Tanzanianise' publisher Jenerali Ulimwengu, who it was claimed was Malawian. Now there are allegations that Mkapa is in fact a Mozambican. PHILIP OCHIENG', recalling the days when he, Mkapa and Ulimwengu all worked together at the Daily News, draws the moral lessons from this tale
THE ANCIENT TEACHERS HAD A FITTING moral rule for Benjamin Mkapa: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; or, the other way round: Never do to anybody anything you would not want him to do to you. Both the Buddha and the Christ are reported to have admonished: Never condemn or punish anybody for a "sin" that you yourself commit. It is difficult to see what his detractors hope to achieve - so late in the former president's life - by charging that he is not a "Tanzanian." According to reports reaching me from Dar es Salaam, the charge is getting thicker by the day that he is a "Mozambican."
A surprising number of Tanzanians have fallen into this ethnic Eldama Ravine. When I worked in Dar, in the early 1970s, Tanzania looked like the only African country completely free of tribalism - the virus that has eaten so destructively into Kenya's body politic.But if Ben now finds himself a target of it, it does unfortunately look like a fitting comeuppance. For, not so long ago - during his years at Ikulu (State House) - he reportedly led the way by spearheading a determined campaign to "de-Tanzanianise" a mutual friend, saying that our friend's parents had come from the other side of Lake Tanganyika.
Even at the personal level, I found it most painful, because I once worked very closely with Jenerali Ulimwengu and Benjamin Mkapa under the direction of what is probably the broadest mind I have ever known among the world's practising politicians. I mean Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere.
Ben was our managing editor when I wrote a highly critical column called "The Way I See It" for a government-owned newspaper originally known as The Tanganyika Standard. This Dar es Salaam Standard had been part of a huge East African newspaper conglomerate owned by Roland "Tiny" Rowland's Lonrho.Nairobi's own East African Standard - which had for a long time been a mouthpiece of Kenya's diehard British colonial settlers - was its flagship. Its satellites included The Argus of Kampala, The Times of Zambia, The Mombasa Times and a Nairobi-based Kiswahili periodical called Baraza.
IN 1970, WHEN MWALIMU NATIONALISED The Tanganyika Standard, he renamed it The Standard Tanzania. But, in 1972, it was merged with The Nationalist, which had been the organ of the ruling party Tanu since nationalist times, to give birth to the present Daily News.
Benjamin Mkapa, one of the keenest minds I have ever worked with, was always central to these changes - indeed, to Tanzania's entire information system. He was always to Nyerere's right, to be sure, and never indulged in the "revolutionary" phrase-mongering that went on in Tanzania at that time.
But one thing I must say. Ben's manner was always polished, his mind always remarkably cosmopolitan. His capacity for tolerance was shown by the fact that he allowed all nuances of political thought - from "sixth-lane right-wing" reaction to Trotskyite leftism - to be expressed fully through the newspapers that he edited.
AND, ALTHOUGH BEN WAS firm in the implementation of the editorial policies that Mwalimu had laid down for The Standard when he took it over, I never detected any arrogance of power, and not a single whiff of ethnic or national narrowness, in Ben's leadership.
His amiable personality, and Nyerere's, probably contributed to the disproof of a deeply held Western prejudice - that a newspaper can serve society fully, objectively and with impartiality only if it is independent of all government influences. Clearly, it depends also on what kind of government is in place.
But the upshot is that, thanks to the policy guidelines that Mwalimu issued, The Standard Tanzania for which I worked (successively under Frene Ginwala, Sammy Mdee, Ben Mkapa and Ferdinand Ruhinda) was probably the freest newspaper that I have ever known. Probably Ben's moral and intellectual attributes were inborn. But he must owe much to his formal intellectual upbringing. It is hard to imagine he didn't go to Tabora Boys Government Secondary School, Tanganyika's equivalent of Kenya's Alliance High School and Uganda's King's College, Budo. Most of Tanzania's prominent leaders at that time - including Mwalimu - were Tabora products.
Instead, he went to Ndanda Secondary School and St. Francis College, Pugu. Ben then took a degree in English from Kampala's Makerere - that era's tertiary concentration of East Africa's intellectual elite - where he was a classmate of such potent minds from Kenya as the novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the poet Jonathan Kariara and the literature don Grant Kamenju. On returning from New York City's Columbia University with a master's in English, Ben started life as a speech writer for Oscar Kambona, the party's secretary-general who, at Independence, became the foreign minister, probably the most brilliant of the stars rising in the Haven of Peace.
However, following Azimio - the Arusha Declaration of 1967 - Kambona rebelled against Nyerere over the document's Ujamaa policy, especially the imposition of a stringent code of conduct barring a certain echelon of party and government leaders from private business.
Kambona dashed into exile in London, from where, in the beginning, he gave Nyerere quite a run for his money in terms of propaganda, but where he gradually wasted away into national oblivion. By the time he returned home, in the 1980s, he had lost all steam and died soon afterwards.
BUT, BACK IN THE MID-60S, it was Kambona who arranged for Ben Mkapa to be appointed the editor of The Nationalist, assisted by such able journalists and dedicated wazalendo (patriots) as Costa Kumalija and Ferdinand Ruhinda. It would never at that time have occurred to any Tanzanian to mention the link.
But Kambona and Ben had something in common that may shed light on what is happening to Ben today. If the question of one's tribe had been as paramount in Tanzania's national mind as it remains in Kenya's today, Kambona would have been accused of tribalism.
For both he and Mkapa were said to belong to the Ngoni community. Rashidi Kawawa, the redoubtable colonial-era trade unionist who was later to become even more powerful as prime minister, was also said to be a Ngoni. The thing about that ethnic community is its omnipresence in the southern half of the continent.
In his book A History of the African People, Robert W. July, an American historian, traces the Ngoni all the way to the Zulu of Natal and reports that, today, they are to be found in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanganyika (mainland Tanzania), Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Kambona's roots were claimed to be either in Malawi or Mozambique. So were those of Austin Shaba and Michael Kamaliza. The latter was a powerful trade unionist (with close links with Kenya's Tom Mboya). Both were close allies of Kambona in Nyerere's first Cabinet, and both petered out with him.
But that is where the question arises. What does it matter if Ben Mkapa has this South African link? What does it matter that - like the denizens of Mombasa's Kisauni - Kambona's people came from Malawi? What does it matter if Jenerali's great grandparents were Rwandese or Congolese?
In the first place, every last one of Africa's international boundaries is completely artificial. All were drawn up totally arbitrarily by European powers following the partition conference in Berlin in 1885. The Maasai, for instance, were divided into two, half going to Kenya and half to Tanganyika.
THAT IS WHY TWO BROTHERS called Awori may one day become presidents simultaneously, Moody in Kenya and Aggrey in Uganda. Jenerali's family may have been sundered in a similar manner, some going to Belgian Congo, some to Belgian Rwanda, and some to German Tanganyika.
Every African country has that problem and it is the cause of all our secessionist movements, which, if allowed, would - as Kwame Nkrumah pointed during the formation of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa in 1963 - logically culminate in puny little tribal states.
But, secondly, even before Europe's advent, tribes and races - like human beings all over the world - were moving into and out of Africa, back and forth, all over. That is why the "Hottentots" of South Africa and the Malagasy of Madagascar have such prominent Mongoloid (Indonesian) features.
Indians, Arabs and Shirazis (Iranians) were settling along the East African littoral a millennium and half before my Luo people arrived in Nyanza from the Sudan or the Kikuyu in the Mount Kenya region from Mozambique.
In his remarkable book The Kalenjin People's Egypt Origin Legend Revisited: Was Isis Assis? - sub-titled A Study in Comparative Religion - Kipkoech arap Sambu shows that the Kalenjin arrived in East Africa from Nilotic North Africa. Indeed, we can say that their cousins, the Maasai, are Kenya's only true autochthons.
So neither Mwai Kibaki nor Raila Odinga nor Musalia Mudavadi nor Musikari Kombo nor Uhuru Kenyatta nor William Ruto nor Kalonzo Musyoka nor Ali Mwakwere nor Joe Khamisi can claim that he is "more Kenyan" than Davinder Lamba, Ali Mazrui, Najib Balala and Pheroze Nowrojee or, for that matter, Richard Leakey and even the hapless scion of Lord Delamere.
That is the point. If you pose the question: Who is a Tanganyikan? - the answer has to be: every tribe and race which was covered by the Berlin treaty that created Tanganyika, and everybody else whom the vicissitudes of history brought into that country who satisfies all other legal citizenship requirements.
That is why neither Jakaya Kikwete nor Kingunge Ngombale-Mwiru nor Chief Abdalla Fundikira nor Pius Msekwa nor Mark Bomani nor Bhoke Munanka nor Anna Tibaijuka can claim that he or she is "more Tanzanian" than Salim Ahmed Salim, Zakia Meghji, Timothy Apiyo and Joseph Mungai.
That is why Ben Mkapa should have left Twaha - Jenerali Ulimwengu's given name - well alone. But that is also why Tanzanians should leave Ben Mkapa himself alone. Not only are both fully Tanzanian but also both have served the people of that country in very senior capacities.
Jenerali, who now publishes his own newspaper, was the one to whom I bequeathed my Daily News column when I left Tanzania in 1973. Afterwards, he served Tanu - later rechristened Chama cha Mapinduzi - in various senior capacities, including for many years as its envoy to a continental youth organisation based in Algiers.
When The Nationalist was merged with The Standard Tanzania to create the Daily News, Ben replaced Mdee as its editor. He then served for a number of years as Tanzania's diplomatic envoy first in Ottawa and then in Washington, before being named foreign minister. Benjamin William Mkapa was on his way to Ikulu.
I had occasion to criticise some other aspects of his government, especially corruption and, more recently, Tanzania's un-Nyerere-like surrender to the predatory global power structure. Official Dar es Salaam's reaction to my criticism was remarkable for its cowardice.Instead of replying through the newspaper in which I had written it, Dar simply organised a few Kiswahili rags in Dar to pour uneducated insults on my name. It was not behaviour that Julius Nyerere would have applauded. It was a far cry from Mwalimu's 1967 injunction to us: "Argue, don't shout!"
What had happened to the open and firm but positive, friendly and good-mannered freedom of opinion and criticism which I had enjoyed successively under Frene, Sammy, Ferdinand and, above all, Ben Mkapa himself? What unalloyed fun it was!
COULD IT BE THAT SUCH SENIOR Dar colleagues of mine as Tony Barros, Immanuel Bulugu, Felix Kaiza, Kusai Kamisa, Fili Karashani, Naijuka Kasihwaki, Scholastica Kimaryo, Hadji Konde, Guido Magome, Joseph Mapunda, Khassim Mpenda, Nsubisi Mwakipunda, Ulli Mwambulukutu, Adarsh Nayar, Abdalla Ngororo, Robert Rweyemamu and Pascal Shija were the ones now pouring such bilge water on me?
I don't know. But one thing is certain. When Ben Mkapa was editing an authoritative newspaper, Tanzania was the African nation most conscious of its objective interests and, at the same time, most committed to mankind's liberation, especially Africa's.
When Benjamin William Mkapa was the chief policy custodian of the Indian Ocean city, Tanzania seemed to lose that international leadership role which once made Dar es Salaam the moral and intellectual capital of the world. What happened?
Mjumbe hauwawi!!!!
Tanzanianjema
