Allen Kilewella
JF-Expert Member
- Sep 30, 2011
- 18,280
- 33,884
Haya maisha haya!!
Mapokezi ya Nyerere huko Uingereza
- Thread starter Nyani Ngabu
- Start date
One of the prominent African American leaders who greatly admired Mwalimu Nyerere was Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones. He led the Congress of African People (CAP), a political organisation based in Newark, New Jersey. He even wore Tanzania's "national dress" worn by Nyerere and many other politicians in Tanzania; so did the leaders and members of another political organisation, the Pan-African Congress-USA based in Detroit, some of whom also learned and even taught their children basic Swahili.
There were five leaders Pan-African Congress (PAC) members admired the most: Malcolm X, Nyerere, Nkrumah, Sékou Touré and Lumumba. They studied their speeches and writings and even had their pictures on the wall of their conference hall.
One of the PAC leaders, Ed (Edward) Vaughn, even adopted the title, Mwalimu. He even met Mwalimu Nyerere when he and other PAC members came to Dar es Salaam in June 1974 to attend the Sixth Pan-African Congress.
He was the organisation's most prominent leader and owned one of the largest black bookshops in the United States which became a focal point for political activism among many blacks in Detroit and elsewhere, especially militants.
One of them was Ken Hamblin who, years later, became a renowned nationally syndicated radio talk show host in the United States. He was very close to Ed Vaughn and other PAC members including Kwame Atta and Kwadwo Akpan who were among the PAC leaders in Detroit until he underwent an ideological conversion and became a hardline conservative, a position he forcefully articulated in his book, Pick A Better Country.
It is a conversion similar to David Horowitz's from a white radical in the sixties and early seventies to a Reaganite conservative, having repudiated his past including his close ties to the Black Panther Party, especially its leaders Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver as he explained in his book, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, which is a searing indictment of the Left and his erstwhile comrades including Tom Hayden who wrote the political manifesto of the New Left, the Port Huron Statement.
But even after he became a conservative, Horowitz acknowledged Hayden's brilliance. As he stated in his book, Radical Son, when your read the Port Huron Statement you can't fail to recognise Hayden's intellectual power.
One also has to take into account the fact that Hayden, a student at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, was only 22 years old when he wrote the Port Huron Statement. Contribution by others was minimal - it was Hayden's work.
Hayden started working on it when he was in jail in the south for opposing segregation when the civil rights movement was gaining momentum. As he himself stated:
"I began drafting the Port Huron Statement from a segregated jail cell in Albany, Ga., after a freedom ride....I wrote the first notes for the Port Huron Statement in December 1961, when I was briefly in an Albany, Georgia, jail cell after a Freedom Ride to fight segregation in the South." - (Tom Hayden, "The Port Huron Statement: A Manifesto Reconsidered," Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2012; Tom Hayden, "Participatory Democracy: From the Port Huron Statement to Occupy Wall Street," The Nation, April 16, 2012).
It was a 75-page document and the most eloquent expression of the aspirations, goals and ideals of the New Left. Its repudiation by former leftists such as David Horowitz did not in any way undermine its relevance and legitimacy, underscored by the major role it played in jolting the conscience of the nation - so did Michael Harrington's book The Other America - into addressing racial and socioeconomic injustices which became the focus of the Great Society under President Lyndon Johnson; with Hayden, like Harrington, being mentioned as one of the few individuals who singularly played a major role in reshaping the American society despite the condemnation he drew from Horowitz and others for articulating a vision of America that radically differed from theirs at the other end of the ideological spectrum on the right as conservatives.
In an interview with Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University, Eldridge Cleaver condescendingly dismissed David Horowitz as a "nitwit" for denouncing the Panthers.
Gates asked him: "Eldridge, now, thirty years later, the smoke has cleared, bodies are buried, people have moved on. Was it worth it? I mean was the Panther movement worth it? Was it a good thing?"
Cleaver: "It was a good thing and like all things, there was good and bad, but nothing like what this nitwit, Horowitz, is talking about because that is not where we were coming from. And I regret the way that the Party was repressed because it left a lot of unfinished business because we had planned to make a transition to the political arena and we would have been able to transmute that violence and that legacy into legitimate and peaceful channels. As it was they chopped off the head and left the body there armed. That's why all these young bloods out there now, they've got the rhetoric but without the political direction and they've got the guns."
Gates: "Will history judge you and your contemporaries from the '60s -- Karenga, Rap, Stokely, Angela, the whole gang, Julian Bond -- favorably, do you think?"
Cleaver: "I think they will. I think they will give us Fs where we deserve them and they'll give us As where we deserve them and they're going to give Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver an A plus." - ("Interview with Eldridge Cleaver: The Two Nations of Black America," March 1997).
Cleaver bluntly stated there was nothing to apologise for, in terms of what the Black Panthers did during those days, because they had to do what they had to do in response to the brutalities black people had to endure at the hands of the police and the authorities in general.
The Panthers responded accordingly. They were turbulent times and race relations were really bad. Like other black militants, the Black Panthers also were on the ideological left.
The Pan-African Congress in Detroit also was securely anchored on the left and advocated African socialism based on Nyerere's teachings, not on Marxism-Leninism advocated by Nkrumah.
The organisation was formed in Detroit by Ed Vaughn and Riley Smith, renamed Kwame Atta and before then popularly known as Smitty, who was a close friend of Malcolm X. They worked together at the Detroit main post office when they formed the organisation in 1969. Vaughn also taught at colleges in Detroit when he was one of the leaders of the organisation which was under collective leadership. He later served as executive assistant to Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman Young, was elected to the Michigan State Legislature representing a district in Detroit, and became president of the NAACP in the state of Alabama, among other positions he held through the years.
The Pan-African Congress was infiltrated by the FBI – targeted under the agency's counter-intelligence programme (COINTELPRO) - just as other black organisations were and still are. But it never wavered in its commitment to the liberation of black people in the United States, Africa and round the globe. The FBI may even have been partly responsible for the organisation's demise in the late seventies, the same way it destroyed the Black Panther Party by the mid-seventies, but the Pan-African spirit which animated the organisation lived on, embodied by its former members including some of the African students who were sponsored by this black militant group during those days.
The director of the Pan-African Congress-USA scholarship programme was Malikia Wada Lumumba (formerly Rosemary Jones) who, like Mwalimu Ed Vaughn, was also a professor in Detroit and attended the 6th Pan-African Congress held in Dar es Salaam in June 1974. She was also one of the organisation's most prominent leaders.
During its heyday, the Pan-African Congress-USA had an excellent track record of working with other black nationalist organisations including Amiri Baraka's Congress of African People in Newark in a spirit of Pan-African solidarity drawing inspiration from leaders such as Nyerere, Nkrumah and Sékou Touré. It was also, together with the Republic of New Afrika also based in Detroit, as well as other black groups in the city, responsible for organising African Liberation Day rallies every year in the Motor City. The leaders of the Pan-African Congress-USA also invited African diplomats to speak to its members in Detroit. They included Paul Bomani, Tanzanian ambassador to the United States, Hamza Aziz who once served as Tanzania's deputy ambassador under Bomani, and Martin Kivumbi, a senior diplomat at the Tanzanian embassy in Washington, D.C.
In his book, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka wrote about the meetings he had with Mwalimu Nyerere and Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu when he attended the Sixth Pan-African Congress at the University of Dar es Salaam in June 1974:
"June of that year (1974) the Sixth Pan-African Congress was to be held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It was the first Pan-African Congress designated as such held on African soil. Colonialism had kept the rest outside of Africa....
Even in Dar, at the conference itself, Owusu (Sadaukai) and I found ourselves contending with the whole delegation of African Americans – the most independent delegation because completely nongovernmental – who maintained nationalist positions. But because of the influence of the liberation movements that were taking the most progressive positions, and Nyerere's attacks on 'narrow nationalism,' the left held the day in that international conference. In the end Pan-Afrikanism was redefined as 'the worldwide struggle of African people against imperialism.'
I had taken Obalaji, who was seven, with me to the conference. All the way he practiced what he would say if he met Mwalimu Nyerere. Then, sure enough, we were invited to Nyerere's house, and instead of 'Shikamoo, Mzee,' Obalaji just stared with his mouth hung open as Mwalimu shook his little paw. The two of us had a few deliriously happy days there in the warm beautiful land of our ancestors....
I gave a speech at the 6PAC entitled 'Revolutionary Culture and the Future of Pan-African Culture,' calling for a 'worldwide commitment by African people to build socialism everywhere and to take up the struggle against imperialism everywhere.'
The fact that both Owusu and I stood now clearly on the left, in some still largely undefined position, had been trumpeted to the four winds. But in Africa, listening to the liberation movement speakers from Frelimo, MPLA, PAC of South Africa, PAIGC, and others, I was convinced that I was moving in the correct direction.
I met Walter Rodney, who was hospitalized for a minor ailment and so had missed the conference (most of it). He was teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam at the time, but Owusu took me to the hospital to see him.
One shocking draggy thing was that Babu, my old friend with whom I had met and sat with Malcolm X in the Waldorf in 1965 just a month before Malcolm was murdered, had been locked up in Tanzania. To me, it was obviously the work of the CIA, the framing of Babu for the assassination of the vice president, Karume, who, like Babu, was from Zanzibar. Babu was a Marxist and the CIA had clearly not wanted him in the Tanzanian government. He had been locked up just outside Dar, where he stayed for several years without trial.
When I asked President Nyerere about this, he told me that he thought Babu was guilty and that he was afraid to put him on trial because he feared the Zanzibaris would try to kill him.
It was Babu whom those outside Africa feared most. When I had visited his home before, I remember going into his study wondering why he had all those volumes, some forty-five of them, of Lenin lined up in his bookcases. That night he'd asked me what I thought of Cleaver and should he be allowed to come to Tanzania. Eldridge had by then jumped his bail and fled the U.S. to Cuba, then Algeria, but worn out his welcome in Algeria. I told him what I thought about Cleaver, none of it complimentary.
Babu had even introduced me to Karume, at a cocktail party. Karume snubbed me and asked Babu in Swahili why he always wanted to hang around Afro-Americans.
He escorted me to countless affairs, even though he was then Minister of Economics of Tanzania, but the two of us zoomed around Dar in his car, with Babu driving.
It was also Babu who was the chief moving force behind the Tanzanian Recruitment Program, which CAP (the Congress of African People) pushed all over the U.S. This program called for qualified African Americans to come to Tanzania to help develop the country. It was opposed by the Tanzanian right-wing bureaucrats but the program still had gone forward. Now Babu was in jail. He was released some four years later." – (Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Chicago, Illinois, USA: Lawrence Hill Books, 1984, pp. 440 – 441).
Amiri Baraka was also a great admirer of Malcolm X whose life symbolised the suffering of millions of African Americans; victims of racial injustices which had been an integral part of the nation's character since its founding. When Malcolm's mother was pregnant with him, their home in Omaha, Nebraska, was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1925, the same year he was born. The family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1926 and then to Lansing, Michigan, where their house was burned down by white racists in 1929. In 1931 their father was killed by some members of a white vigilante group, the Black Legion, affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan.
Malcolm's father, who came from Georgia, also had a tragic history. Four of his six brothers were killed by white racists; one was lynched.
Malcolm X recalled with bitterness that after their father was killed, their life became hard, very hard. He stated in his autobiography that their mother used to collect dandelion leaves along the road in Lansing, Michigan, to feed her eight children.
She could not even get the money she was entitled to from her husband's insurance policy because the insurance company claimed her husband had committed suicide. The police said his death was an accident.
Malcolm X said he was so hungry many times that he felt dizzy. "Hunger became my middle name," he said.
Then another tragedy struck. Their mother had a mental breakdown in 1938, overwhelmed by the problems she was facing – that was also during the Great Depression – taking care of her children without the help of their father, and had to be committed to a mental hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she stayed for almost 25 years. Malcolm X said when he went to visit her for the first time in 1953, she did not even recognise him.
He was assistant minister of the Nation of Islam's Temple Number One in Detroit during that time, appointed to the post in June the same year he visited his mother. He was already on the FBI watch list. The FBI opened a file on him in March 1953 and followed him for the rest of his life.
Tragedies also continued to follow him. When he was in Cairo, Egypt, in July 1964 just before he spoke at the OAU summit, his food was poisoned at the hotel where he was staying. He almost died. The food and the poison had to be pumped out of him to save his life.
Then the following year, on 9 February 1965, after arriving in Paris, he was expelled from France on orders from the United States embassy. Five days later, back in the United States, his house was firebombed (on February 14th) by Black Muslims in New York City. He barely escaped with his family.
Seven days later on February 21st, he was dead from a hail of bullets fired by his fellow Black Muslims, a tragic end to a short life (he was 39) which remains a constant reminder of the racial injustices African Americans have suffered and continue to suffer in a country they helped to build.
They not only helped to build it; it was African slaves who laid the foundation of the most powerful country in the world. The United States was not founded on the twin ideals of liberty and equality, as it is claimed, the so-called twin pillars of the republic; it was founded on slavery - outright enslavement of millions of Africans who provided the labour to build it and to sustain it.
It was also founded on the extermination of the indigenous people, prompting President Donald Trump, with imperial arrogance and unbridled racism, to say in his commencement address at the US Naval Academy on 25 May 2018, "Our ancestors tamed a continent and we are not going to apologise for America....Too many people have forgotten that truth....Our independence was won by farmers. And our continent was tamed by farmers"; ignoring the gross injustices the indigenes suffered at the hands of his ancestors, as if the land belonged to nobody.
For an American president to spew such racist filth and bigotry is despicable and unconscionable. But that is the doctrine of white supremacy rooted in American history which finds expression in daily life even today and has been espoused even by some of the nation's leading personalities including John Wayne who stated in an interview in May 1971:
"I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them....Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves....
I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility...."
He expressed a collective sentiment shared by millions of whites that was echoed by Trump decades later. Almost all white racists voted for Trump, millions of them, although some whites who voted for him may not have been racist and supported him for other reasons, mainly economic, just as some non-whites including blacks did, in spite of the fact that he campaigned from a racist platform, appealing to racial sentiments and invoking white identity as a rallying point, however indirectly. In fact, his incendiary rhetoric did little to conceal the fact that as a white nationalist he did not really want to deliver his message in coded language. And he continues to get thunderous applause from his white supporters especially when his bilious rage is directed against nonwhites, mainly immigrants and other Third Worlders.
His support for white supremacists and the support he gets from them – the "enlightened" racist intellectual Jared Taylor (there are others of his ilk) being one of them, praising Trump for formulating and implementing an agenda based on white identity – as well as his callous attitude towards the killing of blacks by the police, have only enhanced and solidified his credentials as a rabid racist and one of the most crude and ignorant ever to occupy high office. Yet he is acclaimed by his supporters as a paragon of virtue and one of the best ever produced by the white race.
In spite of his intellectual deficiency, he probably would have won accolades even from renowned white supremacist and former physics professor, the late William Pierce, founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who was so proud of the intellectual superiority of whites that he even invoked "science" to bolster his claim, although such claims have no basis in science and are based on mysterious genetic logic.
Trump's policies and appalling ignorance have alienated even some of the most respected and loyal Republicans such as George Will, a conservative guru and cerebral analyst in the tradition of National Review founder and editor William F. Buckley Jr., who left the Republican party and has absolutely no respect for Trump and the entire Republican party leadership because of its support for this president; Noam Chomsky doesn't think Buckley was that intellectual although he was and still is revered by conservatives as much as George Will is. As Will succinctly put it in his column in The Washington Post, "Trump Has A Dangerous Disability," 3 May 2017, the president is intellectually challenged, incapable of sequential thought and so on, a handicap he is not even aware of.
He does not even know his native language very well, misspells simple words in his tweets and elsewhere and can not write a single sentence with lucidity, let alone a whole paragraph. A graduate of an Ivy League school. And he can not think. As George Will stated:
"It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.
In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that 'Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.' Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses.
Now, however, he has instructed us that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War that began 16 years after Jackson’s death. Having, let us fancifully imagine, considered and found unconvincing William Seward’s 1858 judgment that the approaching Civil War was 'an irrepressible conflict,' Trump says:
'People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?'
Library shelves groan beneath the weight of books asking questions about that war’s origins, so who, one wonders, are these 'people' who don’t ask the questions that Trump evidently thinks have occurred to him uniquely? Presumably they are not the astute 'lot of,' or at least 'some,' people Trump referred to when speaking about his February address to a joint session of Congress: 'A lot of people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber.' Which demotes Winston Churchill, among many others.
What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history....The problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.
The United States is rightly worried that a strange and callow leader controls North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. North Korea should reciprocate this worry. Yes, a 70-year-old can be callow if he speaks as sophomorically as Trump did when explaining his solution to Middle Eastern terrorism: 'I would bomb the s--- out of them. . . . I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.'
As a candidate, Trump did not know what the nuclear triad is. Asked about it, he said: 'We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame.' Invited to elaborate, he said: 'I think — I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.' Someone Trump deemed fit to be a spokesman for him appeared on television to put a tasty dressing on her employer’s word salad: 'What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?' To which a retired Army colonel appearing on the same program replied with amazed asperity: 'The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing.'
As president-elect, Trump did not know the pedigree and importance of the one-China policy. About such things he can be, if he is willing to be, tutored. It is, however, too late to rectify this defect: He lacks what T.S. Eliot called a sense 'not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.' His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.
Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict."
His ignorance is unfathomable. There are facts, simple facts, about American history and government even a primary school child knows more than Trump does. As George Will, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, stated in an interview after his column was published generating a lot of interest:
"The problem isn't just that his sentences don't parse and that his pronouns float around in search of antecedents; it's not just that he's syntactically challenged, Dwight Eisenhower occasionally was although I think his opacity was sometimes tactical; it's not just that he's given to verbal fender benders, George W. Bush had his share of those. The question is whether or not the way he talks and the judgements he makes about matters of fact, history for example, suggest that he really is not capable of sequential thought, which is rather alarming in a president.
You add that to the fact that his demonstrated lack of knowledge of American history, his recent talk about Andrew Jackson being angry about a civil war that occurred 16 years after he died suggest that, again, his basic unfamiliarity not just with our past but with our present - remember during the Republican candidates debates, he once said, in defending the conservatism of his sister who is a federal judge, he said that his sister had signed some of the same bills that Justice Alito had signed on the Supreme Court. Now that suggests that he would flunk a sixth grade civics exam because he suggested that federal judges and Supreme Court justices sign bills.
This is rather alarming, I mean if next week he comes out and says Grover Cleveland was a stern critic of the New Deal, on the one hand we'll all be pleased and surprised to know he knows there was a president, Grover Cleveland, but there comes a point at which this goes, manages to be ludicrous without being at all funny when you have a president who doesn't understand the basic facts of American history, the basic realities of American governance, and finds it impossible to put into simple declarative sentences what he's talking about." - ("Trump Has A Dangerous Disability," George F. Will interview, MSNBC, May 6, 2017).
Yet, in a bellicose tone, he called himself "a genius," a "very stable genius," if he even knows what "genius" means. But he knows how to be a racist even if he can not define the term "racism" in a rational way, as he probably won't be able to, anymore than he can "genius."
One question that arises is why did tens of millions of whites vote for such a blatantly racist – and mentally incompetent – person to be president if they were not racist themselves? The United States may no longer be a racist country, at least in the legal sense, but the voters – including electors of the Electoral College – elected a racist to be president, thus giving the impression or simply confirming that the United States is indeed a racist country. As Wole Soyinka said in an interview:
"I have a green card. The day Donald Trump becomes president of America, I'll take that card, call a press conference, and I'll cut the green card to pieces and you'll never see me in America again. Because I shudder to think what America will become....
The rhetoric that got him there was rhetoric against the black people." (Wole Soyinka, "I Will Destroy My American Green Card If Trump Wins," October 28, 2016; "Donald Trump's Election: Soyinka Explains Decision on Green Card," December 5, 2016).
He went even further in another interview:
"Did you follow the campaign? As far as I was concerned, that man should have been arrested and tried a long time ago for hate speeches. It's as elementary as that.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. What was worse, I couldn't believe the sight of hordes of ecstatic supporters. Every outrageous statement, every racist statement, every xenophobic statement was applauded by wildly cheering hordes. And I said, well, this society is changing backwards right before our very eyes.
The United States had moved, had progressed so far that we on the African continent could boast that we now had a contemporary descendant of the African continent ruling the United States. And suddenly, somebody is making speeches which are supposed to reverse those gains, and had masses of people cheering. And this at a particular period, where as I said, in one of those interviews, by the way, when I said I was getting out, I said, did this man not realise that he was giving yardage to the phenomenon of black killings in the United States? I said in that interview that it was as if the police had evolved a new fraternity requirement for remaining members of the police force and that was to go out and kill a black man.
You saw the rise, the protests across the country, one killing one day replicated over there, and during that period, somebody wants to be the leader of a nation, is giving xenophobic speeches.
The damage is already done whether we like it or not. People's minds, extreme right-wing, has been empowered across the nation. The notion, this sense of undeclared impunity, especially against minorities, has been encouraged, and I would see it enhanced; whether he even wants to do a 180-degree turn, the fact is that hatred has been sown, the country has been further divided...
I have done it....Yeah, I cut it up (my green card)...Why should I stay in an environment that doesn't make me comfortable? Why? It does not make sense to me....I have already packed....And that is it." - ("Wole Soyinka Renounces US Green Card," December 1, 2016).
The injustices perpetrated against blacks and other nonwhites in the United States including the indigenous people, Native Americans, mean absolutely nothing to Trump and others of his ilk just as they meant nothing to "The Duke," John Wayne. And it means nothing to tens of millions of whites.
It all started with the conquest of America by the European invaders who had no right, absolutely none, and no permission, to take the land they took from the indigenes, let alone exterminate them. The suffering of native Americans was a horrendous tragedy which paved the way for other tragedies.
It is a fate that befell enslaved Africans - extreme cruelties including lynching and cropping (chopping off feet for those who tried to run away) - who laid the foundation of a nation President Trump and many whites are so proud of, and in a country where the pain black people and their descendants endured for so long was immortalised in heart-rending Negro spirituals such as this one by Mahalia Jackson, "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," which she sang in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington when Dr. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on 28 August 1963:
I been 'buked and I been scorned/
Trying to make this journey all alone/
I'm gonna tell my Lord/
When I get home/
Just how long you've been treating me wrong.
Many scholars, including black American conservative pundit Dr. Thomas Sowell – he does not want to be called "African-American" just as most black conservatives don't – in his book Race and Culture: A World View, concede that America would not have been able to survive as a nation without the labour provided by African slaves and it is doubtful there would be a United States today as the most powerful country in the history of mankind; quite a concession for a black conservative like Sowell who does not have much good to say about Africans - and even about fellow black Americans - just like most black conservatives don't. As Professor Harold Cruse stated in his book, Rebellion or Revolution?:
"America lies to itself that it was always, from the beginning, a democratic nation when its very constitution sanctioned and upheld chattel slavery. Moreover, America conveniently forgets that the first capitalist 'free enterprise' banks and stock markets in the land were made possible by accumulated capital accrued from the unpaid labor of Negro slaves. But it would be too much to expect contemporary America to go back over its own history and reassess all these racial facts." - (Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? New York: William Morrow, 1968, pp. 240 - 241).
That is an indisputable fact underscored by Professor Cruse in one of the most influential works published during the civil rights movement together with his magnum opus, The Crisis of The Negro Intellectual, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's Black Power, complemented by other works through the years including Godfrey Mwakikagile's Africa and America in The Sixties: A Decade That Changed The Nation and The Destiny of A Continent (2009, paperback edition, 736 pages). As Bailey Wyat, a former slave and although illiterate, put it poignantly when arguing for redistribution of land to former slaves not long after the Emancipation Proclamation:
"We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands has been sold over and over again to purchase the land....And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops?....And then didn’t them large cities in the North grow up on the cotton, on the sugars, on the rice that we made?....I say they has grown rich and my people is poor." - (Bailey Wyat, a former slave, quoted by Hugh Pearson, "The Birth of the New South," in The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 1996, in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, op. cit., p. 45).
James Baldwin lamented the predicament of black Americans – who were denied equal rights in the land of their birth – when he stated in his essay, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” published in Esquire and in his book Nobody Knows My Name:
“Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement containing seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.” – (James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” Esquire, July 1960; and in James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, New York: Dial Press, 1961).
Almost forty years later, Baldwin's painful insight was underscored by Professor Nathan Glazer – a renowned academic and author of a highly influential work Beyond the Melting Pot partly written by Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan – when he stated in his book We Are All Multiculturalists Now that the fundamental problem "is the refusal of other Americans to accept blacks." – (Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Mwalimu Nyerere knew the plight of African Americans and even some of the progress they made since the civil rights movement and won admiration from many of them not only as a highly esteemed and illustrious leader in the Pan-African world but in the global arena as well.
He also met with some of the most prominent African American leaders who came to Tanzania at the height of the civil rights movement; among them, Malcolm X who spent three hours with Nyerere at Mwalimu's Msasani residence and was in Tanzania for two weeks, according to Professor Seth Markle, an African American, in his book, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964 – 1974. It is a definitive work and seminal study, probably one of the best on Tanzania's relations with Black America and the African diaspora in general.
Another work similar to that, but focusing on the Tanzanian-Afro-Caribbean connection especially with Jamaica and Trinidad, is Professor Monique Bedasse's Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017) in which she demonstrates the prominence of Nyerere as a Pan-Africanist icon and Tanzania's role as a leader in fostering and implementing Pan-Africanist ideals.
Nyerere also met with Stokely Carmichael, James Farmer and Queen Mother Moore, among others, during that period. Shirley Graham Du Bois was a regular visitor of Mwalimu and his family at Msasani and even became a Tanzanian citizen.
Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver also came to Dar es Salaam; so did other Black Panthers. Dar became a haven for them in a country which had unparalleled magnetic power during those days drawing political activists and intellectuals from around the world including future leaders such as Yoweri Museveni and many black American civil rights leaders as well as freedom fighters from southern Africa and Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in West Africa because of Nyerere's leadership. Some of the leaders who lived or spent some time in Tanzania during the liberation struggle included Eduardo Mondlane, Samora Machel, Marcelino dos Santos, Joaquim Chissano, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki, Robert Mugabe, Emmerson Mnangagwa, Sam Nujoma, Agostinho Neto, and Amilcar Cabral.
Those were the days when Tanzania was respected as a major player in the global arena, one of the top 25, because of Nyerere. He was in a class by himself as a leader. Those of us who were there remember those days with nostalgia. That was when Tanzania was respected as a nation under principled leadership committed to justice and equality for all, favouring none, true to our egalitarian principles and uncompromising in our quest for African unity and liberation. Those days are gone. As Professor Andrew Ivaska stated in "Movement Youth in a Global Sixties Hub: The Everyday Lives of Transnational Activists in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam":
"Writing in a mimeographed student journal in 1970, long before he would become a household name across Africa as president of Uganda, a young Yoweri Museveni reflected on his undergraduate years away from home at the University of Dar es Salaam in neighboring Tanzania. He explained how the choice to leave Uganda for university abroad but not in the West was a natural one at the time for any young East African with leftist political leanings. Tanzania’s capital city, after all, had developed an unparalleled ‘atmosphere of freedom fighters, socialists, nationalizations [and] anti-imperialism’, Museveni recalled, one which he was determined to join ‘at any cost’.
By the time Museveni arrived in 1967, Dar es Salaam had already seen Che Guevara and Malcolm X come through town on tours of this ‘revo-lutionary’ capital. Over the course of the next several years, many more leading lights of a ‘global sixties’ left would follow: Stokely Carmichael, C.L.R. James, Angela Davis, Giovanni Arrighi, Eldridge Cleaver, Walter Rodney, Amiri Baraka, Robert F. Williams, Ruth First – to name but a selec-tion. As one of Museveni’s peers at the university would remark, in Dar es Salaam ‘you could not help but be infected by the liberation bug.’
The 1960s and early 1970s did indeed see Dar es Salaam emerge as a key nodal point for transnational political activism. Developing in counterpoint to dramas of armed movements against the colonial holdouts of Southern Africa, a shifting US civil rights struggle, Cold War geopolitics, and student movements on campuses worldwide, this ‘Dar scene’ was composed of a few distinct strands.
First, there were the thousands of political refugees attached to the several Southern African liberation movements in exile there. The major nationalist movements battling colonialism’s holdouts in Mozambique, Namibia, Angola, Southern Rhodesia, and Apartheid South Africa all established their headquarters-in-exile at one point or another in Dar es Salaam, drawn by President Julius Nyerere’s commitment to make his newly independent Tanzania a key ‘frontline state’ in the push against white settler regimes further south.
They were joined by well over a thousand African American activists, including scores of Black Panthers fleeing FBI harassment, who saw the country as an exciting site for political engagement with the continent and, in many cases, long-term settlement there.
Competing Chinese, Soviet, and Cuban government interests were active too.
And then there were the many other fellow travelers from around the world, including such prominent figures on the left as Walter Rodney and Giovanni Arrighi, who were drawn to live and work in Tanzania by Nyerere’s experiments in ujamaa socialism.
The university (hereafter UDSM), where Arrighi and Rodney were mainstays of a small but very visible group of international socialist faculty, also saw the emergence of a vocal student left drawing from across East Africa – one which Museveni not only joined, as he had hoped, but in which he ended up playing a central role.
These networks may have been distinct, following differing paths to Dar es Salaam, but once there they intersected and overlapped with one another. Many young African Americans in Tanzania, for instance, had a whole political world open up to them through contact with members of the Southern African liberation movements in the capital. For their part, these latter move-ments used the occasion of the Sixth Pan-African Congress – held in Dar es Salaam in 1974 as a marker of the city’s prominent place on the landscape of transnational black politics – as an opportunity to make connections with a new potential set of North American allies in the struggle against colonialism.
The university student and faculty left – hosting prominent speakers from a global black diaspora, taking trips to volunteer with the Mozambican liberation movement, FRELIMO, at their frontlines in Southern Tanzania – often served as a medium for these contacts between liberation movement partisans and recently arrived African Americans.
With these multilateral connections playing out spatially across a relatively small set of sites – downtown hotel bars, university lecture halls, liberation movement offices, parties at the Cuban or Algerian embassies – they formed a critical mass that could rightly be called a scene. Bringing together the worlds of globally oriented Marxists, black diasporic politics in both Marxist and Black Power forms, campus radicals, and international anti-apartheid campaigners, Dar es Salaam was uncontested among African cities of the time as a hub for a transnational, global 1960s left. This status, while looming large in the memories of many activists of the period, has received surprisingly little attention in histories of either the movements involved or of Dar es Salaam itself.” – (Andrew Ivaska, "Movement Youth in a Global Sixties Hub: The Everyday Lives of Transnational Activists in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam," in Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret, eds., Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, New York: Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series, 2015, pp. 188- 189).
African American activists living in Dar es Salaam also served as a vital link between Tanzanian officials and civil rights leaders and other black Americans coming to Tanzania. One of them was Bill Sutherland who played that role when Malcolm X came to Dar es Salaam in 1964:
“Black America, through its people, politics, and aesthetics, made a significant impact in Dar es Salaam in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Especially after the military coup overthrowing Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, Tanzania became the main African destination for black diasporic intellectuals and activists seeking to develop personal and political linkages between civil rights struggles in North America and liberation movements on the African continent.
Such visits were varied in both motivation and form. With many on the left attracted by Nyerere’s commitment to ‘African socialism’ and pan-African liberation, others with more cultural nationalist leanings were drawn by ‘back to Africa’ sentiments that connected power-fully with ujamaa ’s declared basis in idealized African cultural norms.
For some, such as the many Black Panthers for whom Nyerere provided a haven from harassment by the FBI, there were also pressing personal situations.
Others came as part of volunteer programs like the PAS, a project founded by a handful of high-profile civil rights leaders from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to ‘gather the much needed technical skills of Afro-Americans to assist in the internal development of our Motherland, Africa’ and to ‘help bridge a gap, brought about through years of deliberate misinformation on the part of others, between Afro-Americans and our African Brothers and Sisters’.
By the time Dar es Salaam played host to the Sixth Pan-African Congress in 1974, this community of wawereaji, or ‘returnees’, constituted a significant presence across the capi-tal’s everyday social landscape....
Bill Sutherland, an African American Quaker who came to Tanzania from a political past in the US as a conscientious objector and civil rights campaigner and would go on to be a central hub for the activist community in Dar over the next 25 years, described meeting Malcolm X in 1964 at a party given by the Algerian Embassy in Tanzania:
'He had full participation in this party, without drinking, without dancing, but just fully enjoying others doing their thing. Malcolm remained out in the kitchen, but would talk to people as they came to refresh their drinks. He was perfectly at ease.
My meeting with him there resulted in my being his chauffeur for the next week, because he was staying at the Deluxe Inn in Dar and didn’t have transport. Although he had sessions with people in government, including President Nyerere, he apparently wasn’t put in the category of V.I.P. official visitor ....
He also met with members of the African American community, and spent quite a bit of time with some Harvard volunteers who were teaching at a school for refugees near Dar. A lot of his most lively discussions were with these white folks from Harvard ....
Another session that I attended was at the Zahir Restaurant in Dar, with Chucha Hunonu [sic]. Chucha was a member of the Unity Movement of South Africa, which was one of the smaller revolutionary groups, closely associated with the Trotskyists. It was 3 o’clock in the morning and the animated discussions were carried over plates of shrimps and rice.'
The quotidian, even mundane character of Sutherland’s recollections of his week with Malcolm convey in a compelling manner the everyday texture of the Dar scene (not to mention confirming key parts of the broad circuitry of connections worked through by Nesbitt a year later). Rather than being of peripheral importance to life in Dar’s activist circles, a minor appendage to the ‘real’ political work being done, the affective quality of the connections being made there was a key element in the political ‘coming of age’ that many of Dar’s young sojourners credit the city with sparking.
By the early 1970s Dar es Salaam would become such a recognized center of black diasporic political activity that when discussions began among key Caribbean and North American black activists over holding a Sixth Pan-African Congress (6-PAC), this time on the continent of Africa, Tanzania was the first choice of venue.
President Nyerere enthusiastically endorsed the suggestion, and, after three years of sometimes fraught planning, the congress was held in Dar es Salaam in June 1974 with more than 600 young delegates from across the diaspora in attendance - over 200 from North America alone. They included some of the leading figures in diasporic politics of the time: Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Owusu Sadaukai, Walter Rodney, Horace Campbell, and Courtland Cox, among others....Ed Vaughn, who ran a bookstore in Detroit." - (Ibid., pp. 191, 195 - 196, 197).
Black American political activists also established contacts with Tanzanian diplomats in the United States.
John Malecela, when he was Tanzania's permanent representative to the United Nations, met with H. Rap Brown at the UN, according to Professor Seth Markle.
Malcolm X also had contacts with Tanzanian diplomats at the UN. Richard Reeves, in his book President Kennedy: Profile of Power, stated that when Malcolm X returned to New York from his African trip, FBI agents were at the airport waiting for him and commented on his close ties to Tanzania. An FBI report stated that Malcolm X got into a car with a diplomatic licence plate which was traced to “the new nation of Tanzania.”
And Babu, of course, had wide contacts with African American leaders and was a close friend of Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka among others.
Besides being an exemplary leader, Mwalimu Nyerere was a transcendent figure respected even by his critics because of his highly principled leadership despite his flaws as a mere mortal with frailties. As Professor Peter Cole states in "Black Power Meets Pan-Africanism in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania":
"Black Power adherents, in the 1960s and ‘70s,...traveled to and were inspired by the African continent’s Pan-African lodestar of that time, Tanzania, and its legendary leader, Julius Nyerere, who championed Pan-Africanism.
Due to Nyerere and Tanzania’s embrace of Pan-Africanism, many hundreds of radical African Americans and West Indians made pilgrimages to Tanzania, to learn about and support that nation. Some visitors, like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, are legends. So, too, historian Walter Rodney who wrote his still-vital How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) while teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM). Many other less-renowned but still-important African Americans and West Indians also visited Tanzania or settled there in the years from 1964 to 1974,...the pivotal decade....
Due to Nyerere’s bold domestic and foreign policies—Ujamaa and Pan-Africanism—Black radicals from across Africa and the diaspora celebrated Tanzania and flocked to Dar. Exiled Black Power activists like Stokely Carmichael and Robert F. Williams came as did intellectuals and political activists like Malcolm X and Walter Rodney. So, too, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other Black radicals from across the diaspora....Some Black radicals abandoned the United States in despair that real transformation would not occur there; others settled in Tanzania to bear witness to and assist in building African Socialism. Heady times indeed....
A close associate of both Malcolm and Nyerere, Babu proved a key Tanzanian connect for African Americans interested in exploring Africa’s leading Pan-African nation after a military coup overthrew Nkrumah. (Seth) Markle describes Malcolm’s friendship and collaboration with Babu, setting the bar for Black internationalism in the mid-1960s, just as legions of young African Americans explored Black Power ideals.
Readers who know plenty about African American student radicals will appreciate learning about young Tanzanians equally bold in advancing Pan-Africanism. Markle examines the University Students African Revolutionary Front at UDSM, the nation’s premier school of higher learning and a global hotbed of Pan-Africanism in the late 1960s and 1970s....As Tanzanians and other African students at UDSM strove to press Pan-Africanism further, they ran into the stone wall of the party and state apparatus, exposing tensions that later split wide open during 6PAC (the Sixth Pan-African Congress).
The magisterial chapter on Walter Rodney alone is worth the price of the book. Rodney, one of the most important and influential historians of Africa and its diaspora, spent five years teaching at UDSM while writing his magnum opus which further sealed the legend of Tanzania as the intellectual center of Pan-Africanism. Like other parts of the book, this chapter is tinged with tragedy—not just because Rodney later was murdered in his home country of Guyana but also as the radical promise of Tanzania ultimately went unfulfilled....
Connecting past and present, Markle briefly introduces Pete O’Neal, who founded the Black Panther chapter in Kansas City and has lived in Tanzania ever since fleeing the United States after what, very possibly, was a trumped-up federal gun law conviction in 1970.
O’Neal and his wife, Charlotte, still run the United African Alliance Community Center and school, which they founded to serve the families around Imbaseni village in northern Tanzania. In a recent interview, he explained why they invested their lives in rural East Africa: 'That’s what the Black Panther Party originally set out to do, and we are continuing that work here,' he said. 'People remember the guns and rage. We were so much more than that…I’ve lived in a remote African village for the majority of my life…This land is my home now.' Africans in the Diaspora continue to be drawn to Tanzania, home of Ujamaa and Uhuru." (Peter Cole, "Black Power Meets Pan-Africanism in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania," in Black Perspectives, 13 November 2017, review of Seth Markle, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964 – 1974, East Lansing, Michigan, USA: Michigan State University Press, 2017).
Professor Peter Cole also interviewed Professor Seth Markle, author of A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964 – 1974. In his introduction to the interview, Cole stated:
"Between 1964 to 1974, the East African nation of Tanzania was seen by peoples across Africa and in the diaspora as a nation deeply committed to African liberation and in solidarity with black people worldwide. As a result, many hundreds of African American and Caribbean nationalists, leftists, and Pan Africanists visited or settled in Tanzania to witness and participate in the country they believed then led the struggle for African liberation."
Cole: Why did Tanzania and its founding president, Julius Nyerere, became touchstones for Pan Africanism in the 1960s and 1970s?
Markle: "If you look at the history of the black radical tradition, you’ll see that certain African independent nations emerge as political symbols and representations of the homeland among African diaspora peoples. I’m thinking of Ethiopia and Liberia during the colonial period and Ghana and Tanzania after 1945.
Tanzania’s place in the pan-African movement had a lot do with Nyerere, both the person and head of state. Black folk in the diaspora, especially the United States, were attracted to his principled leadership and his belief and commitment to African unity, expressed in actual foreign and domestic policies—from solidarity with African liberation groups, to official regional unification between Tanganyika and Zanzibar in 1964, to the Arusha Declaration in 1967. These were all hopeful and inspirational signs that placed Tanzania at the vanguard of pan-Africanism. For African Americans, it is also important to remember that this was a time when Africa was "on the mind," so to speak. When African Americans started to crave information about all things Africa.
Nyerere also spoke out against racial oppression in the United States and invited African Americans to live and work in Tanzania. The fact that African Americans were a racial minority denied full citizenship rights in the United States, made migrating to a black-ruled nation led by a visionary African leader all the more appealing.
Cole: Especially after declaring for African Socialism in the Arusha Declaration of 1967 (in Kiswahili, Ujamaa na Kujitegemea), Tanzania inspired many African Americans and other blacks in the diaspora to find their way to Dar es Salaam in the 1960s and 1970s. Malcolm X, Robert Williams, Queen Mother Audley Moore, Stokely Carmichael, and a legion of less well-known made their way there. Give us an example of one such person from your book.
Markle: Malcolm X is one such person explored in my book....The Plot To Kill Malcolm X by Karl Evanzz, which looks at the role of the CIA and FBI in Malcolm’s assassination, blew me away....Ever since, I’ve been researching Malcolm X, especially drawn to the last year of his life after he left the Nation of Islam.
Malcolm X is such an important historical actor in this book because his visit to Tanzania in 1964 signaled a shift in the Black Freedom Movement in the US. He brought Tanzania to the attention of the Black Power generation of activists I address in the chapters that follow. These young men and women in their mid to late twenties really took to heart Malcolm’s message of connecting with Africa–Tanzania specifically–culturally, politically, psychologically, and spiritually. He laid down this useful model for African Americans to follow in terms of how to internationalize their struggle against racism.
Cole: One of the chapters I found most powerful focused upon the career of Guyanese historian and activist Walter Rodney, who taught for five years at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM). He literally wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) while on the faculty. While there, he also inspired and worked with the University Students African Revolutionary Front. These were radical African students—not just Tanzanians—who wanted to push the country into a more avowedly socialist and Pan-African direction. In this chapter and others, you explore the contradictions of promoting a transnational ideology in a single nation. Will you discuss that further?
Markle: This story is indeed a cautionary tale about the African postcolonial state and its capacity to liberate, its capacity to collaborate with the grassroots (including the diaspora) against a common foe, its capacity to meet the expectations of its own citizens and its "racial citizens" of the diaspora.
In the case of the Africans students, their Marxist interpretation of postcolonial Africa, Tanzania especially, ruffled the feathers of the ruling government and party. Through Walter Rodney’s mentorship, radical African students believed they were helping the government with their criticism of class struggle, socialism and imperialism. The government and party thought otherwise.
Due to its promotion of a transnational ideology, the University African Students Revolutionary Front was forced to disband.
This chapter essentially tries to illustrate the constraints the Nyerere government imposed on student and diaspora activism within Tanzania as much as it tries to highlight the agency of Walter Rodney and the African students he mentored. This tension is a recurring one that also manifests in the book publishing, anti-apartheid solidarity, and technical skills assistance initiatives explored in the book.
Cole: Related to that, talk more about the challenges that Nyerere and his supporters had in carrying through on the Arusha Declaration, on building African Socialism, in Tanzania.
Markle: "You can’t build socialism without committed socialists." That’s what a lot of Tanzanians told me when doing field research for this book. I interpret this to mean that the development of leaders within the government and party was easier said than done. Moreover, the internal class struggle made it difficult to stem the tide of government corruption.
Breaking free from the economic legacies of colonialism during the height of the Cold War presented challenges as well. So did the oil crisis of the 1970s followed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank intervention of the 1980s. All of these forces and events contributed greatly to Tanzania becoming one of the poorest countries in Africa by the mid-1980s. The Cold War really wreaked havoc on the African continent, I can’t stress that point enough.
Cole: It begs the question, what role democracy (plays) in a one-party nation? Tanzania was hardly alone, meaning that in many postcolonial nations, liberation movements immediately became the one political party leading their new nations. What did Nyerere think about multiparty democracy and was this subject a touchy one for blacks coming from the United States or elsewhere outside of Africa?
Markle: That’s an interesting question when thinking about what’s happening right now in Tanzania where the party that has been in power since independence is slowly losing the people’s trust and confidence and (the people are) increasingly throwing their support behind the main opposition party.
While Nyerere, no doubt, saw the value in a multi-party system, he took a gradualist approach to its implementation. He believed a democratic culture and ethos could be fostered within a single mass party framework. I do think he also saw the dangers of multi-partyism for newly independent nations, seeing the political-ethnic violence that arose in other countries as warning sign of sorts.
If you look at Tanzania’s political history since the 1960s, it not a history colored by extensive political violence, which brings us back to Nyerere and how he viewed nation building in gradual steps and stages.
The transition to multi-partyism in Tanzania in the mid-1990s was relatively a smooth one— not a coincidence, I think. At the same time, political violence has erupted during the last two election cycles.
One party rule in Tanzania was not a touchy subject for African Americans. It bothered the moderate civil rights leaders who saw a link between single party rule and communism. But for the people I examine in my book, this issue was not a deal breaker or anything like that. The banning of soul music and the wearing of mini-skirts, and the ways which the government and party policed these polices, were particularly jarring to some.
One African American living in Tanzania back then relayed to me a funny story about how Tanzanian youth clandestinely visited his home just to listen to James Brown!
The main issue with the ruling party had more to do with a faction within the party comprised of conservatives who were not big fans of the Black Power movement. This faction was largely responsible for the mass arrest of African American expatriates in Tanzania in 1974, which was pretty much the beginning of the end.
Cole: Tell me about how you conducted your research in Tanzania. I’m especially interested in how you found people to interview and conducted your interviews—there and in the United States.
Markle: I did research for this book all in the U.S., Tanzania, and Trinidad and Tobago, collecting and reviewing personal papers, newspapers, government documents and reports, FBI and CIA files, journal and magazine articles, letters, diaries, interviews, the list goes on.
I also conducted interviews like you mentioned. Judy Richardson and Mejah Mbuya helped me connect with people to interview. I met Judy, a former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), when I did youth organizing work back in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
When I started doing research for the book and came to learn of Judy’s role in Drum and Spear Press, a Black Power publishing company (in Washington, D.C.) that published books in Kiswahili, Tanzania’s national language, I reached out to her. She got me in touch with a lot of the African Americans I interviewed such as Courtland Cox, Charlie Cobb, Jennifer Lawson, among others.
Doing oral histories was one of the best parts of putting this book together. It takes a lot of experimentation and persistence. I got the chance to meet and talk with some remarkable people.
On the Tanzania side, I was lucky to link up with an activist named Mejah Mbuya. We met through a mutual friend – an African American lawyer living and working in Tanzania when I first travelled there in 2002.
Mejah knew a lot of people from the socialist era. He connected me with Tanzanians like the book publisher Walter Bgoya, former radical students and professors of the University of Dar es Salaam like Karim Hirji and Issa Shivji, and politicians like Paul Bomani, the former ambassador to the U.S.
There was this one time when I was interviewing a former member of the ruling party’s youth wing at a café in Dar es Salaam. The person sitting at the table next to us was listening in on the interview turned out to be (Neema) the daughter of Oscar Kambona, the former Defense Minister of Tanzania!
She later introduced me to her mother and gave me access to portions of her father’s personal papers, which included the gift Malcolm X gave him when they met for the first time in Dar es Salaam. This is just to say that luck played a role as well.
Sometimes they found me instead of me finding them. I do want to say that each year people from this era are passing away which makes capturing their stories through oral history all the more important." - (Peter Cole, "Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism," Africaasacountry.com, 9 March 2018).
The Sixth Pan-African Congress held in Dar es Salaam in June 1974 was one of the most dramatic events in relations between Tanzania and the African diaspora, especially Black America and the Afro-Caribbean region. The vast majority of the diasporans who went to live or to work in Tanzania, or simply to visit, came from there.
One of the highlights of that historic event was the role played by women during the conference. They refused to be sidelined and relegated to an inferior status as participants:
"HILL: So another piece of this was President Nyerere and Bomani, Ambassador Bomani [Tanzanian ambassador to the United States]–President Nyerere wanted to meet with the leaders of the delegations. But he said five people....So we [the US delegation leaders] were meeting in a room. I will never forget Mary Jane Patterson for this, too.
Q: Okay, so Nyerere is meeting with five people, and these are you –
HILL: No, no, no. [James] Turner proposed that the five be Baraka, Owusu Sadaukai, Haki Madhubuti, and Ed Vaughn, who ran a bookstore in Detroit. And himself, of course. The five were all men. So they excluded me. Now this is when – and of course, you develop yourself politically, but I’ve often looked back on that because I was so hurt, but I was hurt like a woman being hurt, who wanted people to appreciate her for her work.
Q: Rather than on principle.
HILL: Yeah, rather than on principle. Rather than on principle, so I felt wounded, as opposed to –
Q: Offended?
HILL: Offended, politically offended. So that was an important lesson. That’s how you develop your political personality, really. But Mary Jane Patterson said, wait – because of course, she had functioned internationally in different arenas. So she had a sense of herself, as an older woman. And she said Sylvia has done all this organizing, she’s been a political operative and so forth, and she should be part of this delegation. But they replied we only have five slots and these are the five people, who are national organizers, and she’s not a – doesn’t have a political constituency.
So that night, Ambassador Bomani came and said to me there will be a car to pick you up to take you to the president. You will meet with the president alone, and when the gentlemen get there you will already be there [laughter]. They have such a sense of humor [laughter]. So sure enough, the car was there. I was there like a half hour before they got there. I was already on my second cup of tea [laughter] when they walked in and they were so stunned to see me sitting there. It’s just a perfect story, isn’t it?
So that was one of these moments of coming of age politically, as well....
Part of my assignment was to work with the liberation movements to provide information to them and whatever, and they thought I was a nice little young girl who was educable. And they educated me. And it was also fortunate that Walter Rodney was teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam, and he too thought I was a nice little girl and he needed to educate me. He came to the house with a reading list and said to me – very nicely, I’ll never forget – he said you’re very bright and this is important work you’re doing. I have some quarrels with it. I feel that you may not understand as much about imperialism as you would want to for the work you’re doing, or some such –
Q: I can see Walter saying that.
AUGUSTO: – Euphemistic thing for saying, well, you little African Americans think you all know the whole world and you’re going to be the Messiahs to save Africa, and you don’t know the A or B about imperialism. And he gave me a reading list, which I read through. The Cuban consul of the time was also assigned to work on Six-PAC by his ambassador, and he too brought things for me to read. And this is while all that – the brouhaha and the furor was going on with Owusu [Sadaukai] and the African American delegation, which sided more closely, one, with some of the Caribbean comrades, because that makes sense. And in addition, the discussion – a lot of them were captured [enthralled] by UNITA and –
Q: Yeah, I want to get into that argument, yeah.
AUGUSTO: I’m not the best person to tell you, because, as I said, a peculiar thing happened to me while I was on the way to the store. I got kidnapped by Africans and they changed my head around. By the time everybody showed up in June 1974 – I did my work. Kathy and I did our work. I did all my work, but I was already thinking like a Southern African, an Eastern or a Southern African, about the various political questions.
By the time Walter Rodney got through with me, and Walter Bgoya [editor of the Tanzanian Publishing House] got through with me, and Ruhinda got through with me and the Cubans got through with me, and going around to all the liberation movements and visiting and doing journalistic things. By the time all that – and I’d learned my Kiswahili – I was a different person, really. Even my own mother, who came to the end of the conference, looked at me and she shook her head. She said, boy, you’ve changed. And I then could only see everything from the Southern African optic. So by the time my brothers and sisters got there with their arguments, I had to stand back, because I said to myself, this is an argument for the Western hemisphere. It is not an argument that fits here. To the extent that it fits, I think they’re mistaken....
And so they had big fights and arguments in which I took absolutely no part. I would go off and be off in the streets at night in Dar es Salaam. I went with the OAU interpreters, who were Senegalese or whatever. We’d be stopping at places where you could have hot soup at midnight. That’s up in some neighborhood in Dar es Salaam. I learned another point of view. I was then ready to cut loose every messianic impulse I may have ever had...And I decided, one, I wanted to stay for a while. And two, I would integrate as closely as possible as I could. They had adopted me. I was everybody’s little sister. I thought, just carry on in this same mode and see where it will take me.” - (Andrew Ivaska, “Movement Youth in a Global Sixties Hub,” op. cit., pp. 195 – 197, 198 – 199).
There were five leaders Pan-African Congress (PAC) members admired the most: Malcolm X, Nyerere, Nkrumah, Sékou Touré and Lumumba. They studied their speeches and writings and even had their pictures on the wall of their conference hall.
One of the PAC leaders, Ed (Edward) Vaughn, even adopted the title, Mwalimu. He even met Mwalimu Nyerere when he and other PAC members came to Dar es Salaam in June 1974 to attend the Sixth Pan-African Congress.
He was the organisation's most prominent leader and owned one of the largest black bookshops in the United States which became a focal point for political activism among many blacks in Detroit and elsewhere, especially militants.
One of them was Ken Hamblin who, years later, became a renowned nationally syndicated radio talk show host in the United States. He was very close to Ed Vaughn and other PAC members including Kwame Atta and Kwadwo Akpan who were among the PAC leaders in Detroit until he underwent an ideological conversion and became a hardline conservative, a position he forcefully articulated in his book, Pick A Better Country.
It is a conversion similar to David Horowitz's from a white radical in the sixties and early seventies to a Reaganite conservative, having repudiated his past including his close ties to the Black Panther Party, especially its leaders Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver as he explained in his book, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, which is a searing indictment of the Left and his erstwhile comrades including Tom Hayden who wrote the political manifesto of the New Left, the Port Huron Statement.
But even after he became a conservative, Horowitz acknowledged Hayden's brilliance. As he stated in his book, Radical Son, when your read the Port Huron Statement you can't fail to recognise Hayden's intellectual power.
One also has to take into account the fact that Hayden, a student at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, was only 22 years old when he wrote the Port Huron Statement. Contribution by others was minimal - it was Hayden's work.
Hayden started working on it when he was in jail in the south for opposing segregation when the civil rights movement was gaining momentum. As he himself stated:
"I began drafting the Port Huron Statement from a segregated jail cell in Albany, Ga., after a freedom ride....I wrote the first notes for the Port Huron Statement in December 1961, when I was briefly in an Albany, Georgia, jail cell after a Freedom Ride to fight segregation in the South." - (Tom Hayden, "The Port Huron Statement: A Manifesto Reconsidered," Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2012; Tom Hayden, "Participatory Democracy: From the Port Huron Statement to Occupy Wall Street," The Nation, April 16, 2012).
It was a 75-page document and the most eloquent expression of the aspirations, goals and ideals of the New Left. Its repudiation by former leftists such as David Horowitz did not in any way undermine its relevance and legitimacy, underscored by the major role it played in jolting the conscience of the nation - so did Michael Harrington's book The Other America - into addressing racial and socioeconomic injustices which became the focus of the Great Society under President Lyndon Johnson; with Hayden, like Harrington, being mentioned as one of the few individuals who singularly played a major role in reshaping the American society despite the condemnation he drew from Horowitz and others for articulating a vision of America that radically differed from theirs at the other end of the ideological spectrum on the right as conservatives.
In an interview with Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University, Eldridge Cleaver condescendingly dismissed David Horowitz as a "nitwit" for denouncing the Panthers.
Gates asked him: "Eldridge, now, thirty years later, the smoke has cleared, bodies are buried, people have moved on. Was it worth it? I mean was the Panther movement worth it? Was it a good thing?"
Cleaver: "It was a good thing and like all things, there was good and bad, but nothing like what this nitwit, Horowitz, is talking about because that is not where we were coming from. And I regret the way that the Party was repressed because it left a lot of unfinished business because we had planned to make a transition to the political arena and we would have been able to transmute that violence and that legacy into legitimate and peaceful channels. As it was they chopped off the head and left the body there armed. That's why all these young bloods out there now, they've got the rhetoric but without the political direction and they've got the guns."
Gates: "Will history judge you and your contemporaries from the '60s -- Karenga, Rap, Stokely, Angela, the whole gang, Julian Bond -- favorably, do you think?"
Cleaver: "I think they will. I think they will give us Fs where we deserve them and they'll give us As where we deserve them and they're going to give Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver an A plus." - ("Interview with Eldridge Cleaver: The Two Nations of Black America," March 1997).
Cleaver bluntly stated there was nothing to apologise for, in terms of what the Black Panthers did during those days, because they had to do what they had to do in response to the brutalities black people had to endure at the hands of the police and the authorities in general.
The Panthers responded accordingly. They were turbulent times and race relations were really bad. Like other black militants, the Black Panthers also were on the ideological left.
The Pan-African Congress in Detroit also was securely anchored on the left and advocated African socialism based on Nyerere's teachings, not on Marxism-Leninism advocated by Nkrumah.
The organisation was formed in Detroit by Ed Vaughn and Riley Smith, renamed Kwame Atta and before then popularly known as Smitty, who was a close friend of Malcolm X. They worked together at the Detroit main post office when they formed the organisation in 1969. Vaughn also taught at colleges in Detroit when he was one of the leaders of the organisation which was under collective leadership. He later served as executive assistant to Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman Young, was elected to the Michigan State Legislature representing a district in Detroit, and became president of the NAACP in the state of Alabama, among other positions he held through the years.
The Pan-African Congress was infiltrated by the FBI – targeted under the agency's counter-intelligence programme (COINTELPRO) - just as other black organisations were and still are. But it never wavered in its commitment to the liberation of black people in the United States, Africa and round the globe. The FBI may even have been partly responsible for the organisation's demise in the late seventies, the same way it destroyed the Black Panther Party by the mid-seventies, but the Pan-African spirit which animated the organisation lived on, embodied by its former members including some of the African students who were sponsored by this black militant group during those days.
The director of the Pan-African Congress-USA scholarship programme was Malikia Wada Lumumba (formerly Rosemary Jones) who, like Mwalimu Ed Vaughn, was also a professor in Detroit and attended the 6th Pan-African Congress held in Dar es Salaam in June 1974. She was also one of the organisation's most prominent leaders.
During its heyday, the Pan-African Congress-USA had an excellent track record of working with other black nationalist organisations including Amiri Baraka's Congress of African People in Newark in a spirit of Pan-African solidarity drawing inspiration from leaders such as Nyerere, Nkrumah and Sékou Touré. It was also, together with the Republic of New Afrika also based in Detroit, as well as other black groups in the city, responsible for organising African Liberation Day rallies every year in the Motor City. The leaders of the Pan-African Congress-USA also invited African diplomats to speak to its members in Detroit. They included Paul Bomani, Tanzanian ambassador to the United States, Hamza Aziz who once served as Tanzania's deputy ambassador under Bomani, and Martin Kivumbi, a senior diplomat at the Tanzanian embassy in Washington, D.C.
In his book, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka wrote about the meetings he had with Mwalimu Nyerere and Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu when he attended the Sixth Pan-African Congress at the University of Dar es Salaam in June 1974:
"June of that year (1974) the Sixth Pan-African Congress was to be held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It was the first Pan-African Congress designated as such held on African soil. Colonialism had kept the rest outside of Africa....
Even in Dar, at the conference itself, Owusu (Sadaukai) and I found ourselves contending with the whole delegation of African Americans – the most independent delegation because completely nongovernmental – who maintained nationalist positions. But because of the influence of the liberation movements that were taking the most progressive positions, and Nyerere's attacks on 'narrow nationalism,' the left held the day in that international conference. In the end Pan-Afrikanism was redefined as 'the worldwide struggle of African people against imperialism.'
I had taken Obalaji, who was seven, with me to the conference. All the way he practiced what he would say if he met Mwalimu Nyerere. Then, sure enough, we were invited to Nyerere's house, and instead of 'Shikamoo, Mzee,' Obalaji just stared with his mouth hung open as Mwalimu shook his little paw. The two of us had a few deliriously happy days there in the warm beautiful land of our ancestors....
I gave a speech at the 6PAC entitled 'Revolutionary Culture and the Future of Pan-African Culture,' calling for a 'worldwide commitment by African people to build socialism everywhere and to take up the struggle against imperialism everywhere.'
The fact that both Owusu and I stood now clearly on the left, in some still largely undefined position, had been trumpeted to the four winds. But in Africa, listening to the liberation movement speakers from Frelimo, MPLA, PAC of South Africa, PAIGC, and others, I was convinced that I was moving in the correct direction.
I met Walter Rodney, who was hospitalized for a minor ailment and so had missed the conference (most of it). He was teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam at the time, but Owusu took me to the hospital to see him.
One shocking draggy thing was that Babu, my old friend with whom I had met and sat with Malcolm X in the Waldorf in 1965 just a month before Malcolm was murdered, had been locked up in Tanzania. To me, it was obviously the work of the CIA, the framing of Babu for the assassination of the vice president, Karume, who, like Babu, was from Zanzibar. Babu was a Marxist and the CIA had clearly not wanted him in the Tanzanian government. He had been locked up just outside Dar, where he stayed for several years without trial.
When I asked President Nyerere about this, he told me that he thought Babu was guilty and that he was afraid to put him on trial because he feared the Zanzibaris would try to kill him.
It was Babu whom those outside Africa feared most. When I had visited his home before, I remember going into his study wondering why he had all those volumes, some forty-five of them, of Lenin lined up in his bookcases. That night he'd asked me what I thought of Cleaver and should he be allowed to come to Tanzania. Eldridge had by then jumped his bail and fled the U.S. to Cuba, then Algeria, but worn out his welcome in Algeria. I told him what I thought about Cleaver, none of it complimentary.
Babu had even introduced me to Karume, at a cocktail party. Karume snubbed me and asked Babu in Swahili why he always wanted to hang around Afro-Americans.
He escorted me to countless affairs, even though he was then Minister of Economics of Tanzania, but the two of us zoomed around Dar in his car, with Babu driving.
It was also Babu who was the chief moving force behind the Tanzanian Recruitment Program, which CAP (the Congress of African People) pushed all over the U.S. This program called for qualified African Americans to come to Tanzania to help develop the country. It was opposed by the Tanzanian right-wing bureaucrats but the program still had gone forward. Now Babu was in jail. He was released some four years later." – (Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Chicago, Illinois, USA: Lawrence Hill Books, 1984, pp. 440 – 441).
Amiri Baraka was also a great admirer of Malcolm X whose life symbolised the suffering of millions of African Americans; victims of racial injustices which had been an integral part of the nation's character since its founding. When Malcolm's mother was pregnant with him, their home in Omaha, Nebraska, was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1925, the same year he was born. The family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1926 and then to Lansing, Michigan, where their house was burned down by white racists in 1929. In 1931 their father was killed by some members of a white vigilante group, the Black Legion, affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan.
Malcolm's father, who came from Georgia, also had a tragic history. Four of his six brothers were killed by white racists; one was lynched.
Malcolm X recalled with bitterness that after their father was killed, their life became hard, very hard. He stated in his autobiography that their mother used to collect dandelion leaves along the road in Lansing, Michigan, to feed her eight children.
She could not even get the money she was entitled to from her husband's insurance policy because the insurance company claimed her husband had committed suicide. The police said his death was an accident.
Malcolm X said he was so hungry many times that he felt dizzy. "Hunger became my middle name," he said.
Then another tragedy struck. Their mother had a mental breakdown in 1938, overwhelmed by the problems she was facing – that was also during the Great Depression – taking care of her children without the help of their father, and had to be committed to a mental hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she stayed for almost 25 years. Malcolm X said when he went to visit her for the first time in 1953, she did not even recognise him.
He was assistant minister of the Nation of Islam's Temple Number One in Detroit during that time, appointed to the post in June the same year he visited his mother. He was already on the FBI watch list. The FBI opened a file on him in March 1953 and followed him for the rest of his life.
Tragedies also continued to follow him. When he was in Cairo, Egypt, in July 1964 just before he spoke at the OAU summit, his food was poisoned at the hotel where he was staying. He almost died. The food and the poison had to be pumped out of him to save his life.
Then the following year, on 9 February 1965, after arriving in Paris, he was expelled from France on orders from the United States embassy. Five days later, back in the United States, his house was firebombed (on February 14th) by Black Muslims in New York City. He barely escaped with his family.
Seven days later on February 21st, he was dead from a hail of bullets fired by his fellow Black Muslims, a tragic end to a short life (he was 39) which remains a constant reminder of the racial injustices African Americans have suffered and continue to suffer in a country they helped to build.
They not only helped to build it; it was African slaves who laid the foundation of the most powerful country in the world. The United States was not founded on the twin ideals of liberty and equality, as it is claimed, the so-called twin pillars of the republic; it was founded on slavery - outright enslavement of millions of Africans who provided the labour to build it and to sustain it.
It was also founded on the extermination of the indigenous people, prompting President Donald Trump, with imperial arrogance and unbridled racism, to say in his commencement address at the US Naval Academy on 25 May 2018, "Our ancestors tamed a continent and we are not going to apologise for America....Too many people have forgotten that truth....Our independence was won by farmers. And our continent was tamed by farmers"; ignoring the gross injustices the indigenes suffered at the hands of his ancestors, as if the land belonged to nobody.
For an American president to spew such racist filth and bigotry is despicable and unconscionable. But that is the doctrine of white supremacy rooted in American history which finds expression in daily life even today and has been espoused even by some of the nation's leading personalities including John Wayne who stated in an interview in May 1971:
"I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them....Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves....
I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility...."
He expressed a collective sentiment shared by millions of whites that was echoed by Trump decades later. Almost all white racists voted for Trump, millions of them, although some whites who voted for him may not have been racist and supported him for other reasons, mainly economic, just as some non-whites including blacks did, in spite of the fact that he campaigned from a racist platform, appealing to racial sentiments and invoking white identity as a rallying point, however indirectly. In fact, his incendiary rhetoric did little to conceal the fact that as a white nationalist he did not really want to deliver his message in coded language. And he continues to get thunderous applause from his white supporters especially when his bilious rage is directed against nonwhites, mainly immigrants and other Third Worlders.
His support for white supremacists and the support he gets from them – the "enlightened" racist intellectual Jared Taylor (there are others of his ilk) being one of them, praising Trump for formulating and implementing an agenda based on white identity – as well as his callous attitude towards the killing of blacks by the police, have only enhanced and solidified his credentials as a rabid racist and one of the most crude and ignorant ever to occupy high office. Yet he is acclaimed by his supporters as a paragon of virtue and one of the best ever produced by the white race.
In spite of his intellectual deficiency, he probably would have won accolades even from renowned white supremacist and former physics professor, the late William Pierce, founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who was so proud of the intellectual superiority of whites that he even invoked "science" to bolster his claim, although such claims have no basis in science and are based on mysterious genetic logic.
Trump's policies and appalling ignorance have alienated even some of the most respected and loyal Republicans such as George Will, a conservative guru and cerebral analyst in the tradition of National Review founder and editor William F. Buckley Jr., who left the Republican party and has absolutely no respect for Trump and the entire Republican party leadership because of its support for this president; Noam Chomsky doesn't think Buckley was that intellectual although he was and still is revered by conservatives as much as George Will is. As Will succinctly put it in his column in The Washington Post, "Trump Has A Dangerous Disability," 3 May 2017, the president is intellectually challenged, incapable of sequential thought and so on, a handicap he is not even aware of.
He does not even know his native language very well, misspells simple words in his tweets and elsewhere and can not write a single sentence with lucidity, let alone a whole paragraph. A graduate of an Ivy League school. And he can not think. As George Will stated:
"It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.
In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that 'Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.' Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses.
Now, however, he has instructed us that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War that began 16 years after Jackson’s death. Having, let us fancifully imagine, considered and found unconvincing William Seward’s 1858 judgment that the approaching Civil War was 'an irrepressible conflict,' Trump says:
'People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?'
Library shelves groan beneath the weight of books asking questions about that war’s origins, so who, one wonders, are these 'people' who don’t ask the questions that Trump evidently thinks have occurred to him uniquely? Presumably they are not the astute 'lot of,' or at least 'some,' people Trump referred to when speaking about his February address to a joint session of Congress: 'A lot of people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber.' Which demotes Winston Churchill, among many others.
What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history....The problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.
The United States is rightly worried that a strange and callow leader controls North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. North Korea should reciprocate this worry. Yes, a 70-year-old can be callow if he speaks as sophomorically as Trump did when explaining his solution to Middle Eastern terrorism: 'I would bomb the s--- out of them. . . . I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.'
As a candidate, Trump did not know what the nuclear triad is. Asked about it, he said: 'We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame.' Invited to elaborate, he said: 'I think — I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.' Someone Trump deemed fit to be a spokesman for him appeared on television to put a tasty dressing on her employer’s word salad: 'What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?' To which a retired Army colonel appearing on the same program replied with amazed asperity: 'The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing.'
As president-elect, Trump did not know the pedigree and importance of the one-China policy. About such things he can be, if he is willing to be, tutored. It is, however, too late to rectify this defect: He lacks what T.S. Eliot called a sense 'not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.' His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.
Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict."
His ignorance is unfathomable. There are facts, simple facts, about American history and government even a primary school child knows more than Trump does. As George Will, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, stated in an interview after his column was published generating a lot of interest:
"The problem isn't just that his sentences don't parse and that his pronouns float around in search of antecedents; it's not just that he's syntactically challenged, Dwight Eisenhower occasionally was although I think his opacity was sometimes tactical; it's not just that he's given to verbal fender benders, George W. Bush had his share of those. The question is whether or not the way he talks and the judgements he makes about matters of fact, history for example, suggest that he really is not capable of sequential thought, which is rather alarming in a president.
You add that to the fact that his demonstrated lack of knowledge of American history, his recent talk about Andrew Jackson being angry about a civil war that occurred 16 years after he died suggest that, again, his basic unfamiliarity not just with our past but with our present - remember during the Republican candidates debates, he once said, in defending the conservatism of his sister who is a federal judge, he said that his sister had signed some of the same bills that Justice Alito had signed on the Supreme Court. Now that suggests that he would flunk a sixth grade civics exam because he suggested that federal judges and Supreme Court justices sign bills.
This is rather alarming, I mean if next week he comes out and says Grover Cleveland was a stern critic of the New Deal, on the one hand we'll all be pleased and surprised to know he knows there was a president, Grover Cleveland, but there comes a point at which this goes, manages to be ludicrous without being at all funny when you have a president who doesn't understand the basic facts of American history, the basic realities of American governance, and finds it impossible to put into simple declarative sentences what he's talking about." - ("Trump Has A Dangerous Disability," George F. Will interview, MSNBC, May 6, 2017).
Yet, in a bellicose tone, he called himself "a genius," a "very stable genius," if he even knows what "genius" means. But he knows how to be a racist even if he can not define the term "racism" in a rational way, as he probably won't be able to, anymore than he can "genius."
One question that arises is why did tens of millions of whites vote for such a blatantly racist – and mentally incompetent – person to be president if they were not racist themselves? The United States may no longer be a racist country, at least in the legal sense, but the voters – including electors of the Electoral College – elected a racist to be president, thus giving the impression or simply confirming that the United States is indeed a racist country. As Wole Soyinka said in an interview:
"I have a green card. The day Donald Trump becomes president of America, I'll take that card, call a press conference, and I'll cut the green card to pieces and you'll never see me in America again. Because I shudder to think what America will become....
The rhetoric that got him there was rhetoric against the black people." (Wole Soyinka, "I Will Destroy My American Green Card If Trump Wins," October 28, 2016; "Donald Trump's Election: Soyinka Explains Decision on Green Card," December 5, 2016).
He went even further in another interview:
"Did you follow the campaign? As far as I was concerned, that man should have been arrested and tried a long time ago for hate speeches. It's as elementary as that.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. What was worse, I couldn't believe the sight of hordes of ecstatic supporters. Every outrageous statement, every racist statement, every xenophobic statement was applauded by wildly cheering hordes. And I said, well, this society is changing backwards right before our very eyes.
The United States had moved, had progressed so far that we on the African continent could boast that we now had a contemporary descendant of the African continent ruling the United States. And suddenly, somebody is making speeches which are supposed to reverse those gains, and had masses of people cheering. And this at a particular period, where as I said, in one of those interviews, by the way, when I said I was getting out, I said, did this man not realise that he was giving yardage to the phenomenon of black killings in the United States? I said in that interview that it was as if the police had evolved a new fraternity requirement for remaining members of the police force and that was to go out and kill a black man.
You saw the rise, the protests across the country, one killing one day replicated over there, and during that period, somebody wants to be the leader of a nation, is giving xenophobic speeches.
The damage is already done whether we like it or not. People's minds, extreme right-wing, has been empowered across the nation. The notion, this sense of undeclared impunity, especially against minorities, has been encouraged, and I would see it enhanced; whether he even wants to do a 180-degree turn, the fact is that hatred has been sown, the country has been further divided...
I have done it....Yeah, I cut it up (my green card)...Why should I stay in an environment that doesn't make me comfortable? Why? It does not make sense to me....I have already packed....And that is it." - ("Wole Soyinka Renounces US Green Card," December 1, 2016).
The injustices perpetrated against blacks and other nonwhites in the United States including the indigenous people, Native Americans, mean absolutely nothing to Trump and others of his ilk just as they meant nothing to "The Duke," John Wayne. And it means nothing to tens of millions of whites.
It all started with the conquest of America by the European invaders who had no right, absolutely none, and no permission, to take the land they took from the indigenes, let alone exterminate them. The suffering of native Americans was a horrendous tragedy which paved the way for other tragedies.
It is a fate that befell enslaved Africans - extreme cruelties including lynching and cropping (chopping off feet for those who tried to run away) - who laid the foundation of a nation President Trump and many whites are so proud of, and in a country where the pain black people and their descendants endured for so long was immortalised in heart-rending Negro spirituals such as this one by Mahalia Jackson, "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," which she sang in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington when Dr. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on 28 August 1963:
I been 'buked and I been scorned/
Trying to make this journey all alone/
I'm gonna tell my Lord/
When I get home/
Just how long you've been treating me wrong.
Many scholars, including black American conservative pundit Dr. Thomas Sowell – he does not want to be called "African-American" just as most black conservatives don't – in his book Race and Culture: A World View, concede that America would not have been able to survive as a nation without the labour provided by African slaves and it is doubtful there would be a United States today as the most powerful country in the history of mankind; quite a concession for a black conservative like Sowell who does not have much good to say about Africans - and even about fellow black Americans - just like most black conservatives don't. As Professor Harold Cruse stated in his book, Rebellion or Revolution?:
"America lies to itself that it was always, from the beginning, a democratic nation when its very constitution sanctioned and upheld chattel slavery. Moreover, America conveniently forgets that the first capitalist 'free enterprise' banks and stock markets in the land were made possible by accumulated capital accrued from the unpaid labor of Negro slaves. But it would be too much to expect contemporary America to go back over its own history and reassess all these racial facts." - (Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? New York: William Morrow, 1968, pp. 240 - 241).
That is an indisputable fact underscored by Professor Cruse in one of the most influential works published during the civil rights movement together with his magnum opus, The Crisis of The Negro Intellectual, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's Black Power, complemented by other works through the years including Godfrey Mwakikagile's Africa and America in The Sixties: A Decade That Changed The Nation and The Destiny of A Continent (2009, paperback edition, 736 pages). As Bailey Wyat, a former slave and although illiterate, put it poignantly when arguing for redistribution of land to former slaves not long after the Emancipation Proclamation:
"We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands has been sold over and over again to purchase the land....And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops?....And then didn’t them large cities in the North grow up on the cotton, on the sugars, on the rice that we made?....I say they has grown rich and my people is poor." - (Bailey Wyat, a former slave, quoted by Hugh Pearson, "The Birth of the New South," in The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 1996, in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, op. cit., p. 45).
James Baldwin lamented the predicament of black Americans – who were denied equal rights in the land of their birth – when he stated in his essay, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” published in Esquire and in his book Nobody Knows My Name:
“Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement containing seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.” – (James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” Esquire, July 1960; and in James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, New York: Dial Press, 1961).
Almost forty years later, Baldwin's painful insight was underscored by Professor Nathan Glazer – a renowned academic and author of a highly influential work Beyond the Melting Pot partly written by Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan – when he stated in his book We Are All Multiculturalists Now that the fundamental problem "is the refusal of other Americans to accept blacks." – (Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Mwalimu Nyerere knew the plight of African Americans and even some of the progress they made since the civil rights movement and won admiration from many of them not only as a highly esteemed and illustrious leader in the Pan-African world but in the global arena as well.
He also met with some of the most prominent African American leaders who came to Tanzania at the height of the civil rights movement; among them, Malcolm X who spent three hours with Nyerere at Mwalimu's Msasani residence and was in Tanzania for two weeks, according to Professor Seth Markle, an African American, in his book, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964 – 1974. It is a definitive work and seminal study, probably one of the best on Tanzania's relations with Black America and the African diaspora in general.
Another work similar to that, but focusing on the Tanzanian-Afro-Caribbean connection especially with Jamaica and Trinidad, is Professor Monique Bedasse's Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017) in which she demonstrates the prominence of Nyerere as a Pan-Africanist icon and Tanzania's role as a leader in fostering and implementing Pan-Africanist ideals.
Nyerere also met with Stokely Carmichael, James Farmer and Queen Mother Moore, among others, during that period. Shirley Graham Du Bois was a regular visitor of Mwalimu and his family at Msasani and even became a Tanzanian citizen.
Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver also came to Dar es Salaam; so did other Black Panthers. Dar became a haven for them in a country which had unparalleled magnetic power during those days drawing political activists and intellectuals from around the world including future leaders such as Yoweri Museveni and many black American civil rights leaders as well as freedom fighters from southern Africa and Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in West Africa because of Nyerere's leadership. Some of the leaders who lived or spent some time in Tanzania during the liberation struggle included Eduardo Mondlane, Samora Machel, Marcelino dos Santos, Joaquim Chissano, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki, Robert Mugabe, Emmerson Mnangagwa, Sam Nujoma, Agostinho Neto, and Amilcar Cabral.
Those were the days when Tanzania was respected as a major player in the global arena, one of the top 25, because of Nyerere. He was in a class by himself as a leader. Those of us who were there remember those days with nostalgia. That was when Tanzania was respected as a nation under principled leadership committed to justice and equality for all, favouring none, true to our egalitarian principles and uncompromising in our quest for African unity and liberation. Those days are gone. As Professor Andrew Ivaska stated in "Movement Youth in a Global Sixties Hub: The Everyday Lives of Transnational Activists in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam":
"Writing in a mimeographed student journal in 1970, long before he would become a household name across Africa as president of Uganda, a young Yoweri Museveni reflected on his undergraduate years away from home at the University of Dar es Salaam in neighboring Tanzania. He explained how the choice to leave Uganda for university abroad but not in the West was a natural one at the time for any young East African with leftist political leanings. Tanzania’s capital city, after all, had developed an unparalleled ‘atmosphere of freedom fighters, socialists, nationalizations [and] anti-imperialism’, Museveni recalled, one which he was determined to join ‘at any cost’.
By the time Museveni arrived in 1967, Dar es Salaam had already seen Che Guevara and Malcolm X come through town on tours of this ‘revo-lutionary’ capital. Over the course of the next several years, many more leading lights of a ‘global sixties’ left would follow: Stokely Carmichael, C.L.R. James, Angela Davis, Giovanni Arrighi, Eldridge Cleaver, Walter Rodney, Amiri Baraka, Robert F. Williams, Ruth First – to name but a selec-tion. As one of Museveni’s peers at the university would remark, in Dar es Salaam ‘you could not help but be infected by the liberation bug.’
The 1960s and early 1970s did indeed see Dar es Salaam emerge as a key nodal point for transnational political activism. Developing in counterpoint to dramas of armed movements against the colonial holdouts of Southern Africa, a shifting US civil rights struggle, Cold War geopolitics, and student movements on campuses worldwide, this ‘Dar scene’ was composed of a few distinct strands.
First, there were the thousands of political refugees attached to the several Southern African liberation movements in exile there. The major nationalist movements battling colonialism’s holdouts in Mozambique, Namibia, Angola, Southern Rhodesia, and Apartheid South Africa all established their headquarters-in-exile at one point or another in Dar es Salaam, drawn by President Julius Nyerere’s commitment to make his newly independent Tanzania a key ‘frontline state’ in the push against white settler regimes further south.
They were joined by well over a thousand African American activists, including scores of Black Panthers fleeing FBI harassment, who saw the country as an exciting site for political engagement with the continent and, in many cases, long-term settlement there.
Competing Chinese, Soviet, and Cuban government interests were active too.
And then there were the many other fellow travelers from around the world, including such prominent figures on the left as Walter Rodney and Giovanni Arrighi, who were drawn to live and work in Tanzania by Nyerere’s experiments in ujamaa socialism.
The university (hereafter UDSM), where Arrighi and Rodney were mainstays of a small but very visible group of international socialist faculty, also saw the emergence of a vocal student left drawing from across East Africa – one which Museveni not only joined, as he had hoped, but in which he ended up playing a central role.
These networks may have been distinct, following differing paths to Dar es Salaam, but once there they intersected and overlapped with one another. Many young African Americans in Tanzania, for instance, had a whole political world open up to them through contact with members of the Southern African liberation movements in the capital. For their part, these latter move-ments used the occasion of the Sixth Pan-African Congress – held in Dar es Salaam in 1974 as a marker of the city’s prominent place on the landscape of transnational black politics – as an opportunity to make connections with a new potential set of North American allies in the struggle against colonialism.
The university student and faculty left – hosting prominent speakers from a global black diaspora, taking trips to volunteer with the Mozambican liberation movement, FRELIMO, at their frontlines in Southern Tanzania – often served as a medium for these contacts between liberation movement partisans and recently arrived African Americans.
With these multilateral connections playing out spatially across a relatively small set of sites – downtown hotel bars, university lecture halls, liberation movement offices, parties at the Cuban or Algerian embassies – they formed a critical mass that could rightly be called a scene. Bringing together the worlds of globally oriented Marxists, black diasporic politics in both Marxist and Black Power forms, campus radicals, and international anti-apartheid campaigners, Dar es Salaam was uncontested among African cities of the time as a hub for a transnational, global 1960s left. This status, while looming large in the memories of many activists of the period, has received surprisingly little attention in histories of either the movements involved or of Dar es Salaam itself.” – (Andrew Ivaska, "Movement Youth in a Global Sixties Hub: The Everyday Lives of Transnational Activists in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam," in Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret, eds., Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, New York: Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series, 2015, pp. 188- 189).
African American activists living in Dar es Salaam also served as a vital link between Tanzanian officials and civil rights leaders and other black Americans coming to Tanzania. One of them was Bill Sutherland who played that role when Malcolm X came to Dar es Salaam in 1964:
“Black America, through its people, politics, and aesthetics, made a significant impact in Dar es Salaam in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Especially after the military coup overthrowing Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, Tanzania became the main African destination for black diasporic intellectuals and activists seeking to develop personal and political linkages between civil rights struggles in North America and liberation movements on the African continent.
Such visits were varied in both motivation and form. With many on the left attracted by Nyerere’s commitment to ‘African socialism’ and pan-African liberation, others with more cultural nationalist leanings were drawn by ‘back to Africa’ sentiments that connected power-fully with ujamaa ’s declared basis in idealized African cultural norms.
For some, such as the many Black Panthers for whom Nyerere provided a haven from harassment by the FBI, there were also pressing personal situations.
Others came as part of volunteer programs like the PAS, a project founded by a handful of high-profile civil rights leaders from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to ‘gather the much needed technical skills of Afro-Americans to assist in the internal development of our Motherland, Africa’ and to ‘help bridge a gap, brought about through years of deliberate misinformation on the part of others, between Afro-Americans and our African Brothers and Sisters’.
By the time Dar es Salaam played host to the Sixth Pan-African Congress in 1974, this community of wawereaji, or ‘returnees’, constituted a significant presence across the capi-tal’s everyday social landscape....
Bill Sutherland, an African American Quaker who came to Tanzania from a political past in the US as a conscientious objector and civil rights campaigner and would go on to be a central hub for the activist community in Dar over the next 25 years, described meeting Malcolm X in 1964 at a party given by the Algerian Embassy in Tanzania:
'He had full participation in this party, without drinking, without dancing, but just fully enjoying others doing their thing. Malcolm remained out in the kitchen, but would talk to people as they came to refresh their drinks. He was perfectly at ease.
My meeting with him there resulted in my being his chauffeur for the next week, because he was staying at the Deluxe Inn in Dar and didn’t have transport. Although he had sessions with people in government, including President Nyerere, he apparently wasn’t put in the category of V.I.P. official visitor ....
He also met with members of the African American community, and spent quite a bit of time with some Harvard volunteers who were teaching at a school for refugees near Dar. A lot of his most lively discussions were with these white folks from Harvard ....
Another session that I attended was at the Zahir Restaurant in Dar, with Chucha Hunonu [sic]. Chucha was a member of the Unity Movement of South Africa, which was one of the smaller revolutionary groups, closely associated with the Trotskyists. It was 3 o’clock in the morning and the animated discussions were carried over plates of shrimps and rice.'
The quotidian, even mundane character of Sutherland’s recollections of his week with Malcolm convey in a compelling manner the everyday texture of the Dar scene (not to mention confirming key parts of the broad circuitry of connections worked through by Nesbitt a year later). Rather than being of peripheral importance to life in Dar’s activist circles, a minor appendage to the ‘real’ political work being done, the affective quality of the connections being made there was a key element in the political ‘coming of age’ that many of Dar’s young sojourners credit the city with sparking.
By the early 1970s Dar es Salaam would become such a recognized center of black diasporic political activity that when discussions began among key Caribbean and North American black activists over holding a Sixth Pan-African Congress (6-PAC), this time on the continent of Africa, Tanzania was the first choice of venue.
President Nyerere enthusiastically endorsed the suggestion, and, after three years of sometimes fraught planning, the congress was held in Dar es Salaam in June 1974 with more than 600 young delegates from across the diaspora in attendance - over 200 from North America alone. They included some of the leading figures in diasporic politics of the time: Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Owusu Sadaukai, Walter Rodney, Horace Campbell, and Courtland Cox, among others....Ed Vaughn, who ran a bookstore in Detroit." - (Ibid., pp. 191, 195 - 196, 197).
Black American political activists also established contacts with Tanzanian diplomats in the United States.
John Malecela, when he was Tanzania's permanent representative to the United Nations, met with H. Rap Brown at the UN, according to Professor Seth Markle.
Malcolm X also had contacts with Tanzanian diplomats at the UN. Richard Reeves, in his book President Kennedy: Profile of Power, stated that when Malcolm X returned to New York from his African trip, FBI agents were at the airport waiting for him and commented on his close ties to Tanzania. An FBI report stated that Malcolm X got into a car with a diplomatic licence plate which was traced to “the new nation of Tanzania.”
And Babu, of course, had wide contacts with African American leaders and was a close friend of Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka among others.
Besides being an exemplary leader, Mwalimu Nyerere was a transcendent figure respected even by his critics because of his highly principled leadership despite his flaws as a mere mortal with frailties. As Professor Peter Cole states in "Black Power Meets Pan-Africanism in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania":
"Black Power adherents, in the 1960s and ‘70s,...traveled to and were inspired by the African continent’s Pan-African lodestar of that time, Tanzania, and its legendary leader, Julius Nyerere, who championed Pan-Africanism.
Due to Nyerere and Tanzania’s embrace of Pan-Africanism, many hundreds of radical African Americans and West Indians made pilgrimages to Tanzania, to learn about and support that nation. Some visitors, like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, are legends. So, too, historian Walter Rodney who wrote his still-vital How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) while teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM). Many other less-renowned but still-important African Americans and West Indians also visited Tanzania or settled there in the years from 1964 to 1974,...the pivotal decade....
Due to Nyerere’s bold domestic and foreign policies—Ujamaa and Pan-Africanism—Black radicals from across Africa and the diaspora celebrated Tanzania and flocked to Dar. Exiled Black Power activists like Stokely Carmichael and Robert F. Williams came as did intellectuals and political activists like Malcolm X and Walter Rodney. So, too, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other Black radicals from across the diaspora....Some Black radicals abandoned the United States in despair that real transformation would not occur there; others settled in Tanzania to bear witness to and assist in building African Socialism. Heady times indeed....
A close associate of both Malcolm and Nyerere, Babu proved a key Tanzanian connect for African Americans interested in exploring Africa’s leading Pan-African nation after a military coup overthrew Nkrumah. (Seth) Markle describes Malcolm’s friendship and collaboration with Babu, setting the bar for Black internationalism in the mid-1960s, just as legions of young African Americans explored Black Power ideals.
Readers who know plenty about African American student radicals will appreciate learning about young Tanzanians equally bold in advancing Pan-Africanism. Markle examines the University Students African Revolutionary Front at UDSM, the nation’s premier school of higher learning and a global hotbed of Pan-Africanism in the late 1960s and 1970s....As Tanzanians and other African students at UDSM strove to press Pan-Africanism further, they ran into the stone wall of the party and state apparatus, exposing tensions that later split wide open during 6PAC (the Sixth Pan-African Congress).
The magisterial chapter on Walter Rodney alone is worth the price of the book. Rodney, one of the most important and influential historians of Africa and its diaspora, spent five years teaching at UDSM while writing his magnum opus which further sealed the legend of Tanzania as the intellectual center of Pan-Africanism. Like other parts of the book, this chapter is tinged with tragedy—not just because Rodney later was murdered in his home country of Guyana but also as the radical promise of Tanzania ultimately went unfulfilled....
Connecting past and present, Markle briefly introduces Pete O’Neal, who founded the Black Panther chapter in Kansas City and has lived in Tanzania ever since fleeing the United States after what, very possibly, was a trumped-up federal gun law conviction in 1970.
O’Neal and his wife, Charlotte, still run the United African Alliance Community Center and school, which they founded to serve the families around Imbaseni village in northern Tanzania. In a recent interview, he explained why they invested their lives in rural East Africa: 'That’s what the Black Panther Party originally set out to do, and we are continuing that work here,' he said. 'People remember the guns and rage. We were so much more than that…I’ve lived in a remote African village for the majority of my life…This land is my home now.' Africans in the Diaspora continue to be drawn to Tanzania, home of Ujamaa and Uhuru." (Peter Cole, "Black Power Meets Pan-Africanism in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania," in Black Perspectives, 13 November 2017, review of Seth Markle, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964 – 1974, East Lansing, Michigan, USA: Michigan State University Press, 2017).
Professor Peter Cole also interviewed Professor Seth Markle, author of A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964 – 1974. In his introduction to the interview, Cole stated:
"Between 1964 to 1974, the East African nation of Tanzania was seen by peoples across Africa and in the diaspora as a nation deeply committed to African liberation and in solidarity with black people worldwide. As a result, many hundreds of African American and Caribbean nationalists, leftists, and Pan Africanists visited or settled in Tanzania to witness and participate in the country they believed then led the struggle for African liberation."
Cole: Why did Tanzania and its founding president, Julius Nyerere, became touchstones for Pan Africanism in the 1960s and 1970s?
Markle: "If you look at the history of the black radical tradition, you’ll see that certain African independent nations emerge as political symbols and representations of the homeland among African diaspora peoples. I’m thinking of Ethiopia and Liberia during the colonial period and Ghana and Tanzania after 1945.
Tanzania’s place in the pan-African movement had a lot do with Nyerere, both the person and head of state. Black folk in the diaspora, especially the United States, were attracted to his principled leadership and his belief and commitment to African unity, expressed in actual foreign and domestic policies—from solidarity with African liberation groups, to official regional unification between Tanganyika and Zanzibar in 1964, to the Arusha Declaration in 1967. These were all hopeful and inspirational signs that placed Tanzania at the vanguard of pan-Africanism. For African Americans, it is also important to remember that this was a time when Africa was "on the mind," so to speak. When African Americans started to crave information about all things Africa.
Nyerere also spoke out against racial oppression in the United States and invited African Americans to live and work in Tanzania. The fact that African Americans were a racial minority denied full citizenship rights in the United States, made migrating to a black-ruled nation led by a visionary African leader all the more appealing.
Cole: Especially after declaring for African Socialism in the Arusha Declaration of 1967 (in Kiswahili, Ujamaa na Kujitegemea), Tanzania inspired many African Americans and other blacks in the diaspora to find their way to Dar es Salaam in the 1960s and 1970s. Malcolm X, Robert Williams, Queen Mother Audley Moore, Stokely Carmichael, and a legion of less well-known made their way there. Give us an example of one such person from your book.
Markle: Malcolm X is one such person explored in my book....The Plot To Kill Malcolm X by Karl Evanzz, which looks at the role of the CIA and FBI in Malcolm’s assassination, blew me away....Ever since, I’ve been researching Malcolm X, especially drawn to the last year of his life after he left the Nation of Islam.
Malcolm X is such an important historical actor in this book because his visit to Tanzania in 1964 signaled a shift in the Black Freedom Movement in the US. He brought Tanzania to the attention of the Black Power generation of activists I address in the chapters that follow. These young men and women in their mid to late twenties really took to heart Malcolm’s message of connecting with Africa–Tanzania specifically–culturally, politically, psychologically, and spiritually. He laid down this useful model for African Americans to follow in terms of how to internationalize their struggle against racism.
Cole: One of the chapters I found most powerful focused upon the career of Guyanese historian and activist Walter Rodney, who taught for five years at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM). He literally wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) while on the faculty. While there, he also inspired and worked with the University Students African Revolutionary Front. These were radical African students—not just Tanzanians—who wanted to push the country into a more avowedly socialist and Pan-African direction. In this chapter and others, you explore the contradictions of promoting a transnational ideology in a single nation. Will you discuss that further?
Markle: This story is indeed a cautionary tale about the African postcolonial state and its capacity to liberate, its capacity to collaborate with the grassroots (including the diaspora) against a common foe, its capacity to meet the expectations of its own citizens and its "racial citizens" of the diaspora.
In the case of the Africans students, their Marxist interpretation of postcolonial Africa, Tanzania especially, ruffled the feathers of the ruling government and party. Through Walter Rodney’s mentorship, radical African students believed they were helping the government with their criticism of class struggle, socialism and imperialism. The government and party thought otherwise.
Due to its promotion of a transnational ideology, the University African Students Revolutionary Front was forced to disband.
This chapter essentially tries to illustrate the constraints the Nyerere government imposed on student and diaspora activism within Tanzania as much as it tries to highlight the agency of Walter Rodney and the African students he mentored. This tension is a recurring one that also manifests in the book publishing, anti-apartheid solidarity, and technical skills assistance initiatives explored in the book.
Cole: Related to that, talk more about the challenges that Nyerere and his supporters had in carrying through on the Arusha Declaration, on building African Socialism, in Tanzania.
Markle: "You can’t build socialism without committed socialists." That’s what a lot of Tanzanians told me when doing field research for this book. I interpret this to mean that the development of leaders within the government and party was easier said than done. Moreover, the internal class struggle made it difficult to stem the tide of government corruption.
Breaking free from the economic legacies of colonialism during the height of the Cold War presented challenges as well. So did the oil crisis of the 1970s followed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank intervention of the 1980s. All of these forces and events contributed greatly to Tanzania becoming one of the poorest countries in Africa by the mid-1980s. The Cold War really wreaked havoc on the African continent, I can’t stress that point enough.
Cole: It begs the question, what role democracy (plays) in a one-party nation? Tanzania was hardly alone, meaning that in many postcolonial nations, liberation movements immediately became the one political party leading their new nations. What did Nyerere think about multiparty democracy and was this subject a touchy one for blacks coming from the United States or elsewhere outside of Africa?
Markle: That’s an interesting question when thinking about what’s happening right now in Tanzania where the party that has been in power since independence is slowly losing the people’s trust and confidence and (the people are) increasingly throwing their support behind the main opposition party.
While Nyerere, no doubt, saw the value in a multi-party system, he took a gradualist approach to its implementation. He believed a democratic culture and ethos could be fostered within a single mass party framework. I do think he also saw the dangers of multi-partyism for newly independent nations, seeing the political-ethnic violence that arose in other countries as warning sign of sorts.
If you look at Tanzania’s political history since the 1960s, it not a history colored by extensive political violence, which brings us back to Nyerere and how he viewed nation building in gradual steps and stages.
The transition to multi-partyism in Tanzania in the mid-1990s was relatively a smooth one— not a coincidence, I think. At the same time, political violence has erupted during the last two election cycles.
One party rule in Tanzania was not a touchy subject for African Americans. It bothered the moderate civil rights leaders who saw a link between single party rule and communism. But for the people I examine in my book, this issue was not a deal breaker or anything like that. The banning of soul music and the wearing of mini-skirts, and the ways which the government and party policed these polices, were particularly jarring to some.
One African American living in Tanzania back then relayed to me a funny story about how Tanzanian youth clandestinely visited his home just to listen to James Brown!
The main issue with the ruling party had more to do with a faction within the party comprised of conservatives who were not big fans of the Black Power movement. This faction was largely responsible for the mass arrest of African American expatriates in Tanzania in 1974, which was pretty much the beginning of the end.
Cole: Tell me about how you conducted your research in Tanzania. I’m especially interested in how you found people to interview and conducted your interviews—there and in the United States.
Markle: I did research for this book all in the U.S., Tanzania, and Trinidad and Tobago, collecting and reviewing personal papers, newspapers, government documents and reports, FBI and CIA files, journal and magazine articles, letters, diaries, interviews, the list goes on.
I also conducted interviews like you mentioned. Judy Richardson and Mejah Mbuya helped me connect with people to interview. I met Judy, a former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), when I did youth organizing work back in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
When I started doing research for the book and came to learn of Judy’s role in Drum and Spear Press, a Black Power publishing company (in Washington, D.C.) that published books in Kiswahili, Tanzania’s national language, I reached out to her. She got me in touch with a lot of the African Americans I interviewed such as Courtland Cox, Charlie Cobb, Jennifer Lawson, among others.
Doing oral histories was one of the best parts of putting this book together. It takes a lot of experimentation and persistence. I got the chance to meet and talk with some remarkable people.
On the Tanzania side, I was lucky to link up with an activist named Mejah Mbuya. We met through a mutual friend – an African American lawyer living and working in Tanzania when I first travelled there in 2002.
Mejah knew a lot of people from the socialist era. He connected me with Tanzanians like the book publisher Walter Bgoya, former radical students and professors of the University of Dar es Salaam like Karim Hirji and Issa Shivji, and politicians like Paul Bomani, the former ambassador to the U.S.
There was this one time when I was interviewing a former member of the ruling party’s youth wing at a café in Dar es Salaam. The person sitting at the table next to us was listening in on the interview turned out to be (Neema) the daughter of Oscar Kambona, the former Defense Minister of Tanzania!
She later introduced me to her mother and gave me access to portions of her father’s personal papers, which included the gift Malcolm X gave him when they met for the first time in Dar es Salaam. This is just to say that luck played a role as well.
Sometimes they found me instead of me finding them. I do want to say that each year people from this era are passing away which makes capturing their stories through oral history all the more important." - (Peter Cole, "Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism," Africaasacountry.com, 9 March 2018).
The Sixth Pan-African Congress held in Dar es Salaam in June 1974 was one of the most dramatic events in relations between Tanzania and the African diaspora, especially Black America and the Afro-Caribbean region. The vast majority of the diasporans who went to live or to work in Tanzania, or simply to visit, came from there.
One of the highlights of that historic event was the role played by women during the conference. They refused to be sidelined and relegated to an inferior status as participants:
"HILL: So another piece of this was President Nyerere and Bomani, Ambassador Bomani [Tanzanian ambassador to the United States]–President Nyerere wanted to meet with the leaders of the delegations. But he said five people....So we [the US delegation leaders] were meeting in a room. I will never forget Mary Jane Patterson for this, too.
Q: Okay, so Nyerere is meeting with five people, and these are you –
HILL: No, no, no. [James] Turner proposed that the five be Baraka, Owusu Sadaukai, Haki Madhubuti, and Ed Vaughn, who ran a bookstore in Detroit. And himself, of course. The five were all men. So they excluded me. Now this is when – and of course, you develop yourself politically, but I’ve often looked back on that because I was so hurt, but I was hurt like a woman being hurt, who wanted people to appreciate her for her work.
Q: Rather than on principle.
HILL: Yeah, rather than on principle. Rather than on principle, so I felt wounded, as opposed to –
Q: Offended?
HILL: Offended, politically offended. So that was an important lesson. That’s how you develop your political personality, really. But Mary Jane Patterson said, wait – because of course, she had functioned internationally in different arenas. So she had a sense of herself, as an older woman. And she said Sylvia has done all this organizing, she’s been a political operative and so forth, and she should be part of this delegation. But they replied we only have five slots and these are the five people, who are national organizers, and she’s not a – doesn’t have a political constituency.
So that night, Ambassador Bomani came and said to me there will be a car to pick you up to take you to the president. You will meet with the president alone, and when the gentlemen get there you will already be there [laughter]. They have such a sense of humor [laughter]. So sure enough, the car was there. I was there like a half hour before they got there. I was already on my second cup of tea [laughter] when they walked in and they were so stunned to see me sitting there. It’s just a perfect story, isn’t it?
So that was one of these moments of coming of age politically, as well....
Part of my assignment was to work with the liberation movements to provide information to them and whatever, and they thought I was a nice little young girl who was educable. And they educated me. And it was also fortunate that Walter Rodney was teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam, and he too thought I was a nice little girl and he needed to educate me. He came to the house with a reading list and said to me – very nicely, I’ll never forget – he said you’re very bright and this is important work you’re doing. I have some quarrels with it. I feel that you may not understand as much about imperialism as you would want to for the work you’re doing, or some such –
Q: I can see Walter saying that.
AUGUSTO: – Euphemistic thing for saying, well, you little African Americans think you all know the whole world and you’re going to be the Messiahs to save Africa, and you don’t know the A or B about imperialism. And he gave me a reading list, which I read through. The Cuban consul of the time was also assigned to work on Six-PAC by his ambassador, and he too brought things for me to read. And this is while all that – the brouhaha and the furor was going on with Owusu [Sadaukai] and the African American delegation, which sided more closely, one, with some of the Caribbean comrades, because that makes sense. And in addition, the discussion – a lot of them were captured [enthralled] by UNITA and –
Q: Yeah, I want to get into that argument, yeah.
AUGUSTO: I’m not the best person to tell you, because, as I said, a peculiar thing happened to me while I was on the way to the store. I got kidnapped by Africans and they changed my head around. By the time everybody showed up in June 1974 – I did my work. Kathy and I did our work. I did all my work, but I was already thinking like a Southern African, an Eastern or a Southern African, about the various political questions.
By the time Walter Rodney got through with me, and Walter Bgoya [editor of the Tanzanian Publishing House] got through with me, and Ruhinda got through with me and the Cubans got through with me, and going around to all the liberation movements and visiting and doing journalistic things. By the time all that – and I’d learned my Kiswahili – I was a different person, really. Even my own mother, who came to the end of the conference, looked at me and she shook her head. She said, boy, you’ve changed. And I then could only see everything from the Southern African optic. So by the time my brothers and sisters got there with their arguments, I had to stand back, because I said to myself, this is an argument for the Western hemisphere. It is not an argument that fits here. To the extent that it fits, I think they’re mistaken....
And so they had big fights and arguments in which I took absolutely no part. I would go off and be off in the streets at night in Dar es Salaam. I went with the OAU interpreters, who were Senegalese or whatever. We’d be stopping at places where you could have hot soup at midnight. That’s up in some neighborhood in Dar es Salaam. I learned another point of view. I was then ready to cut loose every messianic impulse I may have ever had...And I decided, one, I wanted to stay for a while. And two, I would integrate as closely as possible as I could. They had adopted me. I was everybody’s little sister. I thought, just carry on in this same mode and see where it will take me.” - (Andrew Ivaska, “Movement Youth in a Global Sixties Hub,” op. cit., pp. 195 – 197, 198 – 199).
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Nyerere was not given credit by his critics and detractors for saving Babu's life. Instead, they blamed him for locking up Babu. Had Babu been sent back to Zanzibar, he would have been executed. His detention on the mainland should be viewed in that context.
It should also remind Nyerere's critics of what Mwalimu said after Kassim Hanga was executed. He said had he known Hanga was going to be killed, he would not have sent him back to Zanzibar; a decision he regretted and about which Oscar Kambona was right when he said Hanga should not be sent back to Zanzibar – he obviously believed he would be killed by Karume. As Godfrey Mwakikagile states in his book, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era:
"When I asked Andrew what he thought about Kambona since the early days of Tanganyika's independence in the sixties, in terms of what type of person he was, he responded by saying:
'He was a good man. But there was misunderstanding, and what happened, happened. For example, he strongly disagreed with Mwalimu Nyerere about Kassim Hanga, the Zanzibar (cabinet) minister who was sent back and killed. And Kambona was right about this. He did not want Hanga sent back to Zanzibar. And Mwalimu Nyerere said that, concerning Hanga, he sent him back, but he did not know that they were going to kill him.'
During the 1970 treason trial involving Kambona, it was alleged by the prosecution team that the conspirators intended to launch a military coup between October 10 and 15, 1969. During that time, President Nyerere and a large number of high-ranking government officials including cabinet members, as well as the head of the Tanzania People's Defence Forces (TPDF), Major-General Mrisho Sarakikya, were out of the country. The plotters felt that was the perfect time for a coup. Some people in Zanzibar were also implicated in the coup plot." – (Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, op. cit., pp. 367 – 368).
Babu's fate and of other Zanzibaris on the mainland was linked to the fate of some Zanzibaris in the isles who also would have been executed but were saved by Mwalimu Nyerere, as Ali Sultan Issa conceded after Karume was assassinated:
"The months passed, and finally it was time for our trial to begin. The guards took us first to the People's Court, where there were three magistrates without any kind of legal training; they were just elders appointed by the party whose attitude was that a prisoner was guilty until proven innocent. It was our responsibility to extricate ourselves from their accusations. But they never gave us any defense lawyers!
Wolfgang Dourado, the attorney general, was the prosecutor, but he was also supposed to defend us at the same time. It was a strange system. I still joke with Dourado now about this, calling it a kangaroo court. How can he both prosecute and defend us at the same time?
Early on, the prosecution managed to get nine of the accused to confess and plead guilty, including my old friend Badawi. The judges sentenced the nine to death, and then they used their testimonies against the rest of us. Only one of the nine, Amar Salim Saad, implicated me; the other eight did not. The prosecution claimed I was not just trying to kill Karume but to launch a coup d'etat. I was informed that it had been my job to take over the airport. I was 'Mr. Airport.' I asked, 'With whom was I supposed to take the airport? Alone, by myself?'
'That was your job to arrange,' they said.
Instead of being at the airport, I was at the cinema with my wife. There was no evidence; even among themselves, my accusers could not corroborate their testimonies.
The court atmosphere was like a cinema with cameras televising the entire proceedings. Television was very new in Zanzibar; each party branch was provided with a color television by the government, and some individuals owned their own sets. So people sat at home or came to the party branches to watch us because every evening they broadcast the whole proceedings, even in the rural areas. The whole island followed our case, and all of us detainees became celebrities as a result, though we had the noose hanging over us.
The first trial was like a purge, a political case. The authorities just wanted to get rid of us, to execute the Umma elite. They had a problem, however, in that Nyerere had arrested Babu and some Umma army officers in Dar es Salaam and refused to send them over to Zanzibar for what would have been their certain execution. When we discovered in our prison that Babu was sitting in a prison on the mainland and that were were going to be sent to court and not just taken out and slaughtered, we believed in our hearts that we would not be killed. Aboud Jumbe, a man of some education, and not Karume or Seif Bakari, was now in power, and Babu was still alive. For this, I am actually very grateful to Nyerere.
May be he had learned his lesson after what happened with Hanga and Shariff; by refusing to hand over Babu and the other prisoners, he saved us all from execution. Had he handed them over, we would have all perished, all of us together. But Jumbe and his government thought, 'How can we kill them all, when the leader of the conspiracy is safe on the mainland?'" – (Ali Sultan Issa, in G. Thomas Burgess, Race, Revolution, and The Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar: The Memoirs of Ali Sultan Issa and Seif Sharif Hamad, Athens, Ohio, USA: Ohio University Press, 2009, pp. 139 – 140).
Mwalimu Nyerere's critics and detractors should look at all that in its proper context instead of criticising him for locking up Babu and other Zanzibaris on the mainland when he did so to save their lives by refusing to send them back to Zanzibar where they would have been killed.
He could not have let them go free when they were facing treason charges in Zanzibar. The choice was clear. Send them back to Zanzibar to be executed, as Hanga and others were, or keep them alive on the mainland but in confinement as punishment for the charges they were facing in the isles even if that did not satisfy the leaders of Zanzibar who wanted to kill them.
That is why Amiri Baraka stated:
"When I asked President Nyerere...(why) Babu...had been locked up,...he told me that he thought Babu was guilty and that he was afraid to put him on trial because he feared the Zanzibaris would try to kill him." – (Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, op. cit., p. 441).
Babu himself stated:
"I was tried in absentia and sentenced to death, but Nyerere didn't send us to Zanzibar....We were in prison for six years, until 1978." – (Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu in Haroub Othman, Babu: I Saw the Future and It Works: Essays Celebrating the Life of Comrade Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, 1924 – 1996, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: E&D Limited, 2001).
Don Petterson, in his book, Revolution in Zanzibar: An American's Cold War Tale, also states:
"Following Karume's assassination, Babu was arrested and charged with planning to overthrow the government in Zanzibar....Nyerere, knowing that Babu would be executed if he were returned to the island, refused to accede to requests by the Zanzibaris to have him sent there." – (Don Petterson, Revolution in Zanzibar: An American's Cold War Tale, Boulder, Colorado, USA: Westview Press, 2002).
Professor Ronald Aminzade also states in his book, Race, Nation, and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Africa: The Case of Tanzania:
"Human rights policies also differentiated Zanzibar from the mainland. Nyerere, like Karume, concentrated power in the presidency, but – unlike Karume – he respected the rule of law. In dealing with political opponents and purported conspiracies against his government, Nyerere relied on the judicial system; many who were convicted of political offenses were later pardoned and released. In contrast, Karume summarily executed political opponents, showing his disdain for the rule of law. He threatened to secede from the union in 1968 – 1969 after Nyerere hesitated to send Hanga and Othman Shariff, accused of plotting to overthrow the Zanzibar government, back to Zanzibar. Nyerere received assurances that they would get a fair trial, but both were executed as soon as they reached Zanzibar....
In April 1972, Karume was assassinated. After the arrest of around 1,100 people and widespread use of torture to secure confessions, the Zanzibari government alleged the assassination was part of a wider plot to overthrow the government. Charges of treason were filed against eighty-one supporters of the defunct Umma party, with eighteen tried in abstentia because Nyerere refused to allow their extradition....The mastermind of the assassination, Abdulrahman Babu, was imprisoned on the mainland but was pardoned and allowed to leave the country for England." – (Ronald Aminzade, Race, Nation, and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Africa: The Case of Tanzania, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 203. See also, cited by R. Aminzade, Hank Chase, "The Zanzibar Treason Trial," Review of African Political Economy, 3, 1976, pp. 22 – 23; Haroub Othman, "The Agony of Political Succession in Zanzibar," The African, 12 January 2004, p. 9)).
That is why Ali Sultan Issa also said he was grateful to Nyerere for saving their lives. Nyerere wished he could have saved Hanga's life as well, and would have, had he not to sent him back to Zanzibar. He sent him back because he believed he would be given a fair trial, as Karume promised; an assessment also supported by Babu who said that is what Nyerere was promised and sent Hanga – and Othman Shariff – back to Zanzibar in good faith because Karume promised they would get a fair trial; a tragic decision but which later saved Babu's own life and the lives of other Zanzibaris who were accused of treason following Karume's assassination when Nyerere refused to send them back.
It should also remind Nyerere's critics of what Mwalimu said after Kassim Hanga was executed. He said had he known Hanga was going to be killed, he would not have sent him back to Zanzibar; a decision he regretted and about which Oscar Kambona was right when he said Hanga should not be sent back to Zanzibar – he obviously believed he would be killed by Karume. As Godfrey Mwakikagile states in his book, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era:
"When I asked Andrew what he thought about Kambona since the early days of Tanganyika's independence in the sixties, in terms of what type of person he was, he responded by saying:
'He was a good man. But there was misunderstanding, and what happened, happened. For example, he strongly disagreed with Mwalimu Nyerere about Kassim Hanga, the Zanzibar (cabinet) minister who was sent back and killed. And Kambona was right about this. He did not want Hanga sent back to Zanzibar. And Mwalimu Nyerere said that, concerning Hanga, he sent him back, but he did not know that they were going to kill him.'
During the 1970 treason trial involving Kambona, it was alleged by the prosecution team that the conspirators intended to launch a military coup between October 10 and 15, 1969. During that time, President Nyerere and a large number of high-ranking government officials including cabinet members, as well as the head of the Tanzania People's Defence Forces (TPDF), Major-General Mrisho Sarakikya, were out of the country. The plotters felt that was the perfect time for a coup. Some people in Zanzibar were also implicated in the coup plot." – (Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, op. cit., pp. 367 – 368).
Babu's fate and of other Zanzibaris on the mainland was linked to the fate of some Zanzibaris in the isles who also would have been executed but were saved by Mwalimu Nyerere, as Ali Sultan Issa conceded after Karume was assassinated:
"The months passed, and finally it was time for our trial to begin. The guards took us first to the People's Court, where there were three magistrates without any kind of legal training; they were just elders appointed by the party whose attitude was that a prisoner was guilty until proven innocent. It was our responsibility to extricate ourselves from their accusations. But they never gave us any defense lawyers!
Wolfgang Dourado, the attorney general, was the prosecutor, but he was also supposed to defend us at the same time. It was a strange system. I still joke with Dourado now about this, calling it a kangaroo court. How can he both prosecute and defend us at the same time?
Early on, the prosecution managed to get nine of the accused to confess and plead guilty, including my old friend Badawi. The judges sentenced the nine to death, and then they used their testimonies against the rest of us. Only one of the nine, Amar Salim Saad, implicated me; the other eight did not. The prosecution claimed I was not just trying to kill Karume but to launch a coup d'etat. I was informed that it had been my job to take over the airport. I was 'Mr. Airport.' I asked, 'With whom was I supposed to take the airport? Alone, by myself?'
'That was your job to arrange,' they said.
Instead of being at the airport, I was at the cinema with my wife. There was no evidence; even among themselves, my accusers could not corroborate their testimonies.
The court atmosphere was like a cinema with cameras televising the entire proceedings. Television was very new in Zanzibar; each party branch was provided with a color television by the government, and some individuals owned their own sets. So people sat at home or came to the party branches to watch us because every evening they broadcast the whole proceedings, even in the rural areas. The whole island followed our case, and all of us detainees became celebrities as a result, though we had the noose hanging over us.
The first trial was like a purge, a political case. The authorities just wanted to get rid of us, to execute the Umma elite. They had a problem, however, in that Nyerere had arrested Babu and some Umma army officers in Dar es Salaam and refused to send them over to Zanzibar for what would have been their certain execution. When we discovered in our prison that Babu was sitting in a prison on the mainland and that were were going to be sent to court and not just taken out and slaughtered, we believed in our hearts that we would not be killed. Aboud Jumbe, a man of some education, and not Karume or Seif Bakari, was now in power, and Babu was still alive. For this, I am actually very grateful to Nyerere.
May be he had learned his lesson after what happened with Hanga and Shariff; by refusing to hand over Babu and the other prisoners, he saved us all from execution. Had he handed them over, we would have all perished, all of us together. But Jumbe and his government thought, 'How can we kill them all, when the leader of the conspiracy is safe on the mainland?'" – (Ali Sultan Issa, in G. Thomas Burgess, Race, Revolution, and The Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar: The Memoirs of Ali Sultan Issa and Seif Sharif Hamad, Athens, Ohio, USA: Ohio University Press, 2009, pp. 139 – 140).
Mwalimu Nyerere's critics and detractors should look at all that in its proper context instead of criticising him for locking up Babu and other Zanzibaris on the mainland when he did so to save their lives by refusing to send them back to Zanzibar where they would have been killed.
He could not have let them go free when they were facing treason charges in Zanzibar. The choice was clear. Send them back to Zanzibar to be executed, as Hanga and others were, or keep them alive on the mainland but in confinement as punishment for the charges they were facing in the isles even if that did not satisfy the leaders of Zanzibar who wanted to kill them.
That is why Amiri Baraka stated:
"When I asked President Nyerere...(why) Babu...had been locked up,...he told me that he thought Babu was guilty and that he was afraid to put him on trial because he feared the Zanzibaris would try to kill him." – (Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, op. cit., p. 441).
Babu himself stated:
"I was tried in absentia and sentenced to death, but Nyerere didn't send us to Zanzibar....We were in prison for six years, until 1978." – (Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu in Haroub Othman, Babu: I Saw the Future and It Works: Essays Celebrating the Life of Comrade Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, 1924 – 1996, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: E&D Limited, 2001).
Don Petterson, in his book, Revolution in Zanzibar: An American's Cold War Tale, also states:
"Following Karume's assassination, Babu was arrested and charged with planning to overthrow the government in Zanzibar....Nyerere, knowing that Babu would be executed if he were returned to the island, refused to accede to requests by the Zanzibaris to have him sent there." – (Don Petterson, Revolution in Zanzibar: An American's Cold War Tale, Boulder, Colorado, USA: Westview Press, 2002).
Professor Ronald Aminzade also states in his book, Race, Nation, and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Africa: The Case of Tanzania:
"Human rights policies also differentiated Zanzibar from the mainland. Nyerere, like Karume, concentrated power in the presidency, but – unlike Karume – he respected the rule of law. In dealing with political opponents and purported conspiracies against his government, Nyerere relied on the judicial system; many who were convicted of political offenses were later pardoned and released. In contrast, Karume summarily executed political opponents, showing his disdain for the rule of law. He threatened to secede from the union in 1968 – 1969 after Nyerere hesitated to send Hanga and Othman Shariff, accused of plotting to overthrow the Zanzibar government, back to Zanzibar. Nyerere received assurances that they would get a fair trial, but both were executed as soon as they reached Zanzibar....
In April 1972, Karume was assassinated. After the arrest of around 1,100 people and widespread use of torture to secure confessions, the Zanzibari government alleged the assassination was part of a wider plot to overthrow the government. Charges of treason were filed against eighty-one supporters of the defunct Umma party, with eighteen tried in abstentia because Nyerere refused to allow their extradition....The mastermind of the assassination, Abdulrahman Babu, was imprisoned on the mainland but was pardoned and allowed to leave the country for England." – (Ronald Aminzade, Race, Nation, and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Africa: The Case of Tanzania, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 203. See also, cited by R. Aminzade, Hank Chase, "The Zanzibar Treason Trial," Review of African Political Economy, 3, 1976, pp. 22 – 23; Haroub Othman, "The Agony of Political Succession in Zanzibar," The African, 12 January 2004, p. 9)).
That is why Ali Sultan Issa also said he was grateful to Nyerere for saving their lives. Nyerere wished he could have saved Hanga's life as well, and would have, had he not to sent him back to Zanzibar. He sent him back because he believed he would be given a fair trial, as Karume promised; an assessment also supported by Babu who said that is what Nyerere was promised and sent Hanga – and Othman Shariff – back to Zanzibar in good faith because Karume promised they would get a fair trial; a tragic decision but which later saved Babu's own life and the lives of other Zanzibaris who were accused of treason following Karume's assassination when Nyerere refused to send them back.
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It is important to remember why Nyerere's critics – not just his admirers – across the ideological spectrum had profound respect and admiration for him. One of them, an internationally-renowned scholar, Professor Ali Mazrui, who had tremendous respect for Nyerere as a leader and as an intellectual and who said Nyerere was also his mwalimu and learned so much from him, stated the following in a moving tribute to Nyerere, "Nyerere and I," to the consternation of some of Nyerere's detractors:
A memorial tribute to the late Julius Nyerere, one of Africa's few great statesmen. His relations with the Kenyan political elite deteriorated further and further. He found Attorney-General Charles Njonjo particularly distasteful and arrogant as a person and reckless in his attitudes towards Kenya's neighbours. Nyerere was fond of Mzee Kenyatta, but he thought Njonjo exercised disproportionate influence on the old man.
When he was President of the United Republic of Tanzania, Julius Kambarage Nyerere's vision was bigger than his victories; his perception was deeper than his performance. In global terms, he was one of the giants of the 20th Century. Like all giants, he had both great insights and great blind spots. While his vision did outpace his victories, and his profundity outweigh his performance, he did bestride this narrow world like an African colossus.
It is also one of the ironies of my life that Julius Nyerere and I first met neither in his country (Tanzania) nor in mine (Kenya). I first met Mwalimu Nyerere at what was then Makerere University College in Uganda. That was more than 30 years ago. He had done his homework before coming to the campus. I was at the time regarded as one of the rising stars of East Africa's academia. As soon as Nyerere and I were introduced in English, he switched into Kiswahili and said "Tunasikia sifa tu!" ["We have only been hearing of your praise!"]. He made my day!
Long before I became a professor at Makerere, Nyerere had himself been a student there. He later went to the University of Edinburgh for his master's degree. Makerere and Edinburgh prepared him for the title of Mwalimu (meaning "teacher") which he was to carry for the rest of his life. Young Julius entered the gates of Edinburgh University in October 1949.
Being both British-educated and having both been greatly influenced by Makerere were not the only bonds which Julius Nyerere and I had. After our first encounter on the Makerere campus, a complicated relationship developed.
As personalities, what did Julius Nyerere and I have in common? He was a politician who was sometimes a scholar. I was a scholar who was sometimes a politician. Indeed, President Obote once asked me in exasperation whether I knew the difference between being a political scientist and being a politician. Some of my public pronouncements in Uganda during Obote's first administration amounted to direct participation in the politics of Uganda. Nyerere shared some of Obote's exasperation with my political intrusion into matters of public policy.
Nyerere was particularly irritated when I published an article in the Journal of Commonwealth Studies in London accusing him of having unintentionally destroyed prospects for an East African Federation by his policies of socialism and economic nationalism. My article was titled "Tanzania versus East Africa: A Case of Unwitting Federal Sabotage". He conveyed his displeasure through the Principal of the University College of Dar es Salaam, Professor Pratt.
Nyerere and I had other areas of shared concern. He translated into Kiswahili two of Shakespeare's plays - Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice. He was making available to Africa the genius of another civilisation. It was in the same period that I published an article titled "Edmund Burke and Reflections on the Revolution in the Congo". Burke, the Anglo-Irish philosopher of the 18th Century (1729-1797) had never written on the Congo. What I had done in 1963 was to apply his ideas about the French Revolution of 1789 to the revolution in the Congo in 1960. In my own way, this was the equivalent of translating Shakespeare into Kiswahili.
In another scholarly article, I also "Africanised" the French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) by applying his ideas to African affairs. Nyerere and I were trying to build bridges between Africa and great minds of Western civilisation. While Nyerere 'Swahilised' Shakespeare, I Africanised Burke and Rousseau.
With his concept of Ujamaa, Nyerere also attempted to build bridges between indigenous African thought and modern political ideas. Ujamaa, which means "familyhood", was turned by Nyerere into a foundation for African Socialism. Ujamaa became the organising principle of the entire economic experiment in Tanzania from the Arusha Declaration of 1967 to the mid-1980s.
His relations with the Kenyan political elite deteriorated further and further. He found Attorney-General Charles Njonjo particularly distasteful and arrogant as a person and reckless in his attitudes towards Kenya's neighbours. Nyerere was fond of Mzee Kenyatta, but he thought Njonjo exercised disproportionate influence on the old man. Nyerere was not sure whether to be amused or outraged when Njonjo turned any discussion on Kenyatta's mortality into something close to a capital offence!
Nyerere was against turning rulers into gods - "Like the old Pharaohs of ancient Egypt." Making Kenyatta immortal was like turning him into a god.
Nyerere and I remembered the proposal which was made in 1964 to celebrate annually the day of Kenyatta's arrest by the British as "the Last Supper". There was such a strong negative reaction from Christian churches in Kenya against using the concept of "the Last Supper" in this way that the idea was dropped.
My own strongest disagreements with Nyerere concerned Zanzibar and Nigeria. Did Tanganyika unite with Zanzibar to form Tanzania under pressure from President Lyndon Johnson of the United States and Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas Home of Britain who did not want Zanzibar to become another communist Cuba? Nyerere bristled when it was suggested that the union with Zanzibar was part of the Cold War and not a case of Pan- Africanism.
Nyerere's recognition of Biafra in the middle of the Nigerian civil war was another hot subject. I personally did not share the suspicion that Nyerere recognised Biafra because the Igbo were fellow Roman Catholics claiming to be threatened by Muslim Northerners in Nigeria. But I did believe in one Nigeria and therefore disagreed with Nyerere's policies. Nyerere also bristled if it was suggested that he was ungrateful to Nigeria which had helped him with his own army in1964, and wanted to create a new force.
Nyerere's involvement with Uganda was more direct. In 1971, did Julius Nyerere convince Milton Obote to leave Uganda and go to Singapore to attend the Commonwealth conference of Heads of State and government? Milton Obote had hesitated about going to Singapore because of the uncertain situation in Uganda. Did Nyerere tilt the balance and convince Obote that he was needed in Singapore to fight Prime Minister Edward Heath's policy towards apartheid South Africa? Obote's decision to go to Singapore was disastrous for himself and for Uganda. In Obote's absence, Idi Amin staged a military coup and overthrew Obote. Eight years of tyranny and terror in Uganda had begun.
I never succeeded in getting either Nyerere or Obote to confirm that it was Nyerere who convinced Obote to leave for Singapore. But we do know that Nyerere was so upset by the coup that he gave Obote unconditional and comfortable asylum in Tanzania. Nyerere also refused to talk to Idi Amin even if the policy practically destroyed the East African Authority which was supposed to oversee the East African Community. Was Nyerere feeling guilty for having made it easy for Amin to stage a coup by diverting Obote to Singapore?
I shall always remember Nyerere's speech in Tanzania upon his return from Singapore. I was in Kampala listening to him on the radio. Nyerere turned a simple question in Kiswahili into a passionate denunciation of Idi Amin. Nyerere's repeated question was "Serikali ni kitu gani?" ("What is government?"). This simple question of Political Science became the refrain of denouncing usurpation of power through a military coup. It was a powerful speech to his own people and against the new "pretenders" in Kampala.
I visited Milton Obote at his home in Dar es Salaam during his first exile. Obote and I discussed Idi Amin much more often than we discussed Julius Nyerere.
One of the major ironies of my life is that I was introduced to my own founder president of Kenya, Mzee Kenyatta, by President Obote before Amin's coup.
We were all at a major ceremony of the University of East Africa in Nairobi in the 1960s. I knew Obote far better than I knew Kenyatta. Obote took me to Kenyatta to introduce me!
In 1979, Nyerere paid his debt to Milton Obote. His army marched all the way to Kampala and overthrew the regime of Idi Amin. My former Makerere boss, Prof Yusufu Lule, succeeded Idi Amin as President of Uganda. But Nyerere was so keen on seeing Obote back in power that Nyerere helped to oust Lule. Was Nyerere trying to negate the guilt of having encouraged Obote to go to Singapore for the Commonwealth Conference way back in 1971? Was that why Nyerere was so keen to see Obote back in the presidential saddle of Uganda in the1980s?
Unfortunately, Obote's second administration was catastrophic for Uganda. He lost control of his own army, and thousands of people perished under tyranny and war. Was Julius Nyerere partly to blame?
"The two top Swahili-speaking intellectuals of the second half of the 20th Century are Julius Nyerere and Ali Mazrui". That is how I was introduced to an Africanist audience in 1986 when I was on a lecture-tour of the United States to promote my television series: The Africans: A Triple Heritage (BBC-PBS.) I regarded the tribute as one of the best compliments I had ever been paid. In reality, Mwalimu Nyerere was much more eloquent as a Swahili orator than I although Kiswahili was my mother tongue and not his.
In the month of Nyerere's death (October 1999), the comparison between the Mwalimu and I took a sadder form. A number of organisations in South Africa had united to celebrate Africa's Human Rights Day on October 22. Long before he was admitted to hospital, they had invited him to be their high-profile banquet speaker.
When Nyerere was incapacitated with illness, and seemed to be terminally ill, the South Africans turned to Ali Mazrui as his replacement. I was again flattered to have been regarded as Nyerere's replacement. However, the notice was too short, and I was not able to accept the South African invitation.
It is one of the ironies of my life that I have known the early Presidents of Uganda and Tanzania far better than I have known the Presidents of Kenya. Over the years, Julius Nyerere and I met many times. Milton Obote was one of the formative influences of my early life, inspite of our tumultuous relationship.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o (the novelist) and I were marginalised by the Kenyatta regime in spite of the fact that Ngugi and I wanted to become Kenyatta's literary biographers. When Daniel arap Moi was still Vice-President, I was considered a possible speech-writer for him in order to strengthen his credentials for the Presidency. I never played that role. Since he became President, the Moi regime and I have had an ambivalent relationship. I have never been formally introduced to him as President.
With Julius Nyerere and I, it was a bond of genuine ups and downs. Nyerere was once angry with me because I had written a citation for an honorary doctorate which was too long. The honorary doctorate was for an elderly American academic, and Nyerere was awarding the degree as Chancellor of the University of East Africa (which at that time consisted of the campuses of Makerere, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam).
As University Orator, I had written the citation, and was reading it as the elderly gentleman knelt before Nyerere. My oration was indeed too long. Nyerere did not speak to me that evening after the ceremony. He deliberately snubbed me. He had been disturbed that the elderly recipient of the honorary degree had to kneel for so long while I delivered the oration praising him. I had not struck the right balance. I felt truly chastised by the Mwalimu.
Let me also refer to Walter Rodney. He was a Guyanese scholar who taught at the University of Dar es Salaam and became one of the most eloquent voices of the left on the campus in Tanzania. When Walter Rodney returned to Guyana, he was assassinated.
Chedi Jagan, on being elected President of Guyana, created a special chair in honour of Walter Rodney. Eventually I was offered the chair and became its first incumbent. My inaugural lecture was on the following topic: "Comparative Leadership: Walter Rodney, Julius K. Nyerere and Martin Luther King Jr."
After delivering the lecture, I subsequently met Nyerere one evening in Pennsylvania, USA. I gave him my Walter Rodney lecture. He read it overnight and commented on it the next morning at breakfast. He promised to send me a proper critique of my Rodney lecture on his return to Dar es Salaam. He never lived long enough to send me the critique.
Nyerere's policies of Ujamaa amounted to a case of Heroic Failure. They were heroic because Tanzania was one of the few African countries which attempted to find its own route to development instead of borrowing the ideologies of the West. But it was a failure because the economic experiment did not deliver the goods of development.
On the other hand, 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.
Julius Nyerere was my Mwalimu too. It was a privilege to learn so much from so great a man.
Source:
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.
See also "Nyerere and I" by Mazrui, Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, 26 December 1999: "Professor Ali Mazrui writes on the special bonds between him and the late Julius Nyerere, one of Africa's few great statesmen. From their first meeting at Makerere, he follows the life of the man fondly called Mwalimu and admits that Nyerere was his teacher and mentor too."
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