Mapokezi ya Nyerere huko Uingereza
- Thread starter Nyani Ngabu
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tinkanyarwele
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Dah ama kweli
Inferior Complex
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Kweli nn mkuu
Beast_Mzee
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Muda unaeñda...its 2018 now
mbongo_halisi
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State visit za Kikwete zilikuwa kwenda kubembea Jamaica....yule jamaa kwa kweli alituchezea akili sana. Nashangaa kina Fatma Karume walikuwa kimya wakifurahia kula rasilimali za nchi, sasa nchi inaongozwa ipasavyo kwa kunyooshwa eti wanajifanya wana uchungu na nchi yao.
The year 1974 was also a turning point in relations between Tanzania and the African diaspora. It marked a setback in the advancement of Pan-Africanism due to a convergence of factors which had a direct and negative impact on Pan-African solidarity.
Tanzania was seen by many people of African descent round the globe as a beacon of hope in the quest for the liberation of Africans from colonial domination and racial oppression. It was also seen as shining example of the determination of Africans to achieve genuine independence and self-reliance because of the socioeconomic policies the country pursued under the leadership of Nyerere.
But a deterioration of relations between some bureaucrats as well as a number of high-ranking government officials and some African-Americans living and working in Tanzania brought an abrupt end to what may have been one of the most ambitious attempts by black Americans to get directly involved in the social and economic development of an African country that had emerged from colonial rule only a few years before.
A prelude to that, even if only in a symbolic way, was the government's reaction to what was perceived to be negative influence on the country being spread by some Americans. It had to do with the popularity of some of their music among the youth in Tanzania that was considered to be un-African.
The government's response was framed in the context of the cultural revolution that was going on during that period. It formally started in October 1968 under the stewardship of Lawi Nangwanda Sijaona, chairman of the TANU Youth League (TYL) Central Committee, and continued during the following years although with less intensity – and success. There was also, during the same period, a cultural revolution going on in Guinea under Ahmed Sékou Touré, Nyerere's close friend and ideological compatriot.
At the centre of this maelstrom in Tanzania was soul music, mini-skirts, bleaching cream (Ambi being the most popular), hair straightening and other things and practices considered to be un-African and which became the focus and target of the TYL shock troopers led by Sijaona.
But the problem, with regard to relations between black Americans and Tanzania, was more than soul music. The music was only an outward manifestation of a deeper problem.
The problem had, in a profound way, to do with the attitude of some bureaucrats and highly influential politicians towards African Americans and their involvement in various fields in the development of the country.
Some bureaucrats did not like or trust Afro-Americans working in Tanzania. And there were those who saw them as a threat to their careers, hence well-being, competing with them for jobs.
The problem also had to do with what was, rightly or wrongly, perceived to be a paternalistic attitude of African Americans towards their “backward” and “less-developed” African brethren. They saw themselves as “saviours,” an accusation they vehemently denied, as did their compatriots in other African countries including Ghana where they flocked in large numbers when Nkrumah was in power just as they did to Tanzania under Nyerere.
They said they were there just to help their African brothers and sisters and contribute the best way they could to the development of their motherland.
Inextricably linked with all this was national security, however hypersensitive the reaction may have been by the Tanzanian authorities, yet understandable, especially when one takes into account the state of relations between Tanzania and the United States during that period when the two countries were on opposite sides on the liberation struggle in southern Africa and on other issues concerning Africa's well-being as well as others in the context of the Cold War.
No one could, with certainty, rule out the involvement of some Afro-Americans in espionage on behalf of their country, the United States, although it also would be an overreaction to say all or most of them were spies.
Just like Africans, there were African Americans who worked against African interests. One is reminded of Franklin Williams, Nkrumah's classmate at Lincoln University, later United States ambassador to Ghana, who played a role in Nkrumah's ouster. Nkrumah even wrote about that in his book on the coup, Dark Days in Ghana.
The decision by the Tanzanian government to curb foreign influence – by banning soul music, vigorously denouncing ways of life which were not compatible with African culture – was also directly linked to its determination to control the youth.
The ruling party wanted to mould their thinking to reflect its ideology, virtually denying them the right to criticise the government and question its policies. Party leaders, in a one-party state, wanted all the youth, not just TANU Youth League members, to toe the party line even though they knew that would be impossible even under mass regimentation.
Whatever the case, there is no question that what happened in Tanzania in the early seventies had a profound impact on relations between Tanzania and Black America although, because of Nyerere's leadership, the country was still held in high esteem among many blacks in the United States and elsewhere. Its uncompromising commitment to the liberation of Africa and to the ideals of Pan-Africanism was beyond question.
Professor Andrew Ivaska who wrote about African Americans in Tanzania during the pivotal decade (1964 – 1974) stated the following in “Movement Youth in a Global Sixties Hub: The Everyday Lives of Transnational Activists in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam”:
“The tensions between Tanzanian officials and black diasporic activists emerging at 6-PAC had a history in the relationship between the ruling party the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and the community of African Americans who had settled in-country.
Indeed, this relationship had always been a complex one, with wawereaji (sic) at once being welcomed by the Tanzanian government and encountering the ambivalence of apolitical establishment that was crisscrossed by local rivalries, struggles, and agendas.
Friction between Tanzanian officials and African American migrants emerged in radically different situations in the years leading up to 6-PAC; in most, though, youth and transnationality were bound together at the heart of what positioned wawereaji as a perceived threat.
At times it was the very popularity among young Tanzanians of African American cultural forms and practices that generated anxiety in official quarters. This was the case, for instance, with the government’s 1969 ban on soul music.
Aided by the presence of the many African Americans passing through Dar who became fixtures on its social scene, the 1960s had seen the sounds, fashions, images, and icons of African American popular culture making their appearance in the capital, to be engaged and reworked alongside other transnational influences.
Other elements of African American style – both wigs and the Afro, for example – were often publicly condemned by officials, but it was soul’s perceived link with youth in specific urban spaces like nightclubs that earned it an official ban in November 1969 for the corruption of ‘our young girls, especially schoolchildren’ and the imperative to ‘preserve our national culture’ against destructive foreign influence.”
The ban had a profound impact on African Americans living in Tanzania. It also had an impact on the perception they had of Tanzania as a global leader in the quest for Pan-African solidarity overflowing continental boundaries and embracing Africans in the diaspora, especially in the United States and the Caribbean, two regions which produced some of the leading Pan-Africanist intellectuals and activists through the decades. They included Dr. W.E. Du Bois, an African American Pan-Africanist intellectual who organised the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, and who was also a mentor to many Pan-Africanists including Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah. As Professor Ivaska stated about the ban on soul music in Tanzania:
“Many African Americans living in the capital at the time felt uniquely targeted by the soul ban. Some spoke out.
In the midst of public debate over the ban, for instance, an African American working at UDSM (University of Dar es Salaam) named Bob Eubanks contributed a long missive giving voice to a common feeling of dismay among African Americans in Dar that Tanzanians treated them as equally foreign to the country as whites.
Addressing ‘those who would say that soul music is foreign music to Tanzanian Wananchi [citizens]’, Mr Eubanks discussed African Americans’ roots in Africa, the destruction of their culture under slavery, and their continuing cultural separation from white America. Appropriating vocabulary from official national cultural rhetoric, Eubanks argued that in light of this history, soul music, soul dancing, blues music and jazz music are...the Afro-Americans’ Ngoma ya Taifa [national dance]. They are no more foreign to Tanzania than music from the Congo or from Zambia. We understand that each nation has to make sure that its own Ngoma ya Taifa comes first before other music...But, to ban soul music and leave the music of the oppressor to be heard...brothers and sisters of Tanzania do not forsake your ancestors who died in that strange and foreign land of America; and we, the Afro-Americans of today are their children. All Power to the People, A Soul Brother.'”
The tensions between the government – some bureaucrats and politicians, not all – and the African Americans living in Tanzania were better explained in a larger context beyond soul music and the Afro-American life style which were blamed for perverting the youth in Dar es Salaam and elsewhere in the country:
“If the soul ban was driven by Tanzanian government anxieties about control over its urban youth, in other cases tension arose from the physical presence of young African Americans in wawereaji-led initiatives. This was the case with the PAS, mentioned earlier.
Designed to provide opportunities for young African American volunteers to put their skills as nurses, teachers, mechanics, and engineers to work serving ‘nation building’ efforts in Tanzania, it was headed by prominent US-based activists, including Irving Davis and Fred Brooks, who were both high-up in the SNCC. As the project’s head, Davis had initially received encouragement from key members of the Tanzanian political establishment, including President Nyerere, who had declared a ‘deliberate policy...to recruit skilled personnel for service in Government among black Americans.’
Buoyed by this, PAS organizers set up operations with determined energy: conducting extensive recruiting sessions at Black Colleges and Universities as well as with Black Student Unions on ‘white’ campuses; shepherding suitable recruits through the process of placing them in positions in Tanzania, often in medicine, education, and urban planning; partnering with a New Jersey organization to conduct three-week ‘Heritage Tours’ of Tanzania; cultivating connections with the Tanzanian Embassy in Washington, DC and in the ministries in Dar; and, finally, setting up the PAS office in Dar – complete with an ‘AfroRoom’ library that would become a social hub for African Americans in the city as well as representatives of the various Southern African liberation movements in exile there.”
But something went wrong. The enthusiasm and expectations, on both sides, did not correspond to reality when the implementation phase began:
“In spite of this early optimism, however, as the project played out it generated a complex field of solidarities as well as misunderstandings and mixed messages.
Within four years it had all but collapsed amid mutual suspicion and accusations between its staff and Tanzanian partners.
Part of the reason for the demise of the project had to do with its taking on different meanings for different people. The stress on service to Africa’s newly independent nations that was central to participants’ vision of PAS was also frequently expressed through a narrative of African Americans as a technologically advanced population with a duty to help out their less-fortunate brothers on the continent. This framing was one shared by many Tanzanians, but it could also take on a tone that some found patronizing.
A report by Brooks on PAS enthusiasm for acquiring a 300-acre plot of land outside Dar to provide an ‘example’ to Tanzanians of how to run a profitable farm, for instance, prompted an official in the Tanzanian Embassy in Washington, DC to write in the margins, ‘Do we need an example?’
Indeed, while some in Tanzania’s political establishment were enthusiastic, others were more cautious.
Foreign Minister Stephen Mhando, himself one of the Project’s most supportive boosters, reported on this wariness in a letter to the Tanzanian Principal Secretary in PAS’ first few months. ‘Obviously’, he wrote, ‘this project will present some problems of its own....A problem of particular interest is the one of adjustment to attitudes both for our guests and for ourselves;...this is a sensitive area and past experience in placing and settling down Afro-Americans in Tanzania has shown it to be particularly delicate’.
And while many PAS staff and volunteers in Dar saw themselves not as expatriates but as ‘returnees’, they often found themselves regarded as the former. Even Nyerere’s initial decision to cooperate with PAS seemed to position them this way: ‘If we recruit other expatriates, including white Americans, we can also recruit Afro-Americans.’
This only underlined the effect for African Americans of the rolling controversies in Dar over African American popular culture.”
There is no question that the suspicions some Tanzanian officials had about Afro-Americans working in the country – their motives, their 'patronising' attitude and the competitive advantage they had over the indigenes because they were more skilled, and so on – did play a major role in undermining the Pan-African skills project and in compromising the relationship and whatever trust existed between the two.
Afro-Americans also contributed to the deterioration of this relationship. They were overly optimistic and, in their enthusiasm to help, ended up stepping on some toes. They may also have been culturally insensitive, however inadvertently, and misunderstood or misread their hosts.
They wanted to work together, especially Afro-Americans who were so excited to be back in their motherland, yet misunderstood each other. And they may have been too aggressive which was interpreted by their Tanzanian hosts as being patronising and paternalistic. Even their enthusiasm, being overly enthusiastic, to work in Africa may have been misconstrued that way by their hosts. And some Tanzanian bureaucrats used that as a pretext to end the project they perceived as a threat to their status and careers.
The project was thus compromised from the beginning:
“Against the backdrop of these mutual perceptions, relations between PAS and Tanzanian officials were a roller coaster ride for the project’s organizers.
The early success in gaining government support generated considerable early optimism among PAS staff that they would have little trouble placing the hundreds of interested candidates deemed qualified. By the end the Project’s second year, however, concerns about the slow pace of placements – only 25 of the candidates had been placed – had graduated to suspicions of bureaucratic sabotage by specific Tanzanian officials in the ministries whom Brooks, as head of the Dar office, heard ‘did not like and distrusted Afro-Americans.’
More likely, a particular segment of functionaries in the bureaucracy had begun to view PAS volunteers – young, skilled, American-trained – as potential threats to positions just like their own. With independence still in the very recent past (1961), these were positions only just recently gained – or in some cases still sought – by Tanzanians through an ‘Africanization’ process that many found frustratingly slow and partial. The stakes for vigilance over state positions once acquired were therefore high indeed.”
Relations continued to deteriorate. It seemed clear that the Pan-African skills project would not last long, especially when it did not have the kind of support it should have had from the bureaucrats and politicians who were responsible for its implementation. Exactly the opposite happened; they were some of the very same people who were busy working hard to sabotage it within the corridors of power:
“The situation for PAS became increasingly tense. By the beginning of 1972 Brooks was reporting on an atmosphere of fear of ‘internal sabotage and the need for vigilance’ sweeping Dar es Salaam, a mood that seemed to be affecting PAS.
He pointed to an editorial broadside against African Americans in the capital, alluding to PAS specifically, which had appeared in the ruling party’s newspaper, the Nationalist. Accusing some wawereaji of possessing ‘coca-cola values,’ the piece harshly criticized ‘reactionary mili-tancy’ as ‘worse than a spy’: ‘black racists posing as ultra-militants, who spend their time exercising and instigating people and dividing ranks.’
Throughout 1972 and 1973 the signs continued to build that PAS was seen by many mid-level bureaucrats as a live wire, bound up with power struggles within the government itself.
This sense culminated in an April 1973 meeting between Brooks and representatives from 12 ministries to discuss the fact that the processing of applications had all but ground to a halt. Addressing this concern, but blaming PAS for it, the representative from the Ministry of Defense was quoted in the minutes as ‘saying that this recruitment drive had started three years ago and that the Government had expected by now there would be a well-organized system and machinery setup to deliver the people. He said that because this had not happened, there ‘were certain elements in the government that were beginning to point the finger and we all know what that means.’
Indeed, PAS seems to have been caught up in a snowball effect. As Bill Sutherland recalled, PAS being perceived as a threat by particular bureaucrats was responsible for initial foot-dragging fueled by concerns for their own livelihood.
If this was the case early on, then the project’s resulting lack of success in placing more of its candidates itself only increased suspicion as it came to be seen as a liability among bureaucrats further down the chain – bureaucrats for whom being implicated in a contested and weak initiative could spell trouble.”
Then came the arrests and the beginning of the end. It was probably the most tragic chapter in the history of relations between the Tanzanian government and African Americans living in Tanzania. What happened then had repercussions far beyond the borders of Tanzania even if it was difficult to assess its full impact, especially on Pan-Africanist activists in the United States and elsewhere in the diaspora including the Caribbean:
“Building up through the early 1970s, these frictions culminated with the temporary arrest and detainment in 1974 of hundreds of African Americans in Tanzania following accusations that they were spying for the CIA. The ‘Big Bust,’ as the event became known among wawereaji, began with the impounding by the Dar es Salaam port police of a shipment said to include guns and bound for an upcountry ujamaa village linked to two African Americans in the capital.
Expanding over the next few months into a much broader surveillance of wawereaji across the country, the roundups ended only after vociferous personal appeals by prominent African Americans in Tanzania and abroad, including Bill Sutherland, who was a confidant of Prime Minister Rashidi Kawawa.
Beginning quietly on the eve of 6-PAC and picking up steam in the Congress’ wake, the timing of the arrests could not have been more charged.
Among wawereaji it was widely believed to be more than coincidental, with some seeing it as a putsch on the part of bureaucrats wary of African Americans’ influence, others as a deliberate attempt to sabotage 6-PAC in the wake of the Tanzanian government’s clash with activists over the presence of Caribbean opposition movements.
Whatever the case, the event marked a watershed for the community of African Americans in Dar es Salaam. Coupled with a marked drop in enthusiasm for the Tanzanian project, many who had settled there left.”
But they left an impact, especially on the youth attracted to Afro-Americans and their life style including soul music, and an influence that lasted long after they left; partly as a reminder that natural ties – such as those between Africa and the African diaspora – never die.
To bureaucrats and others opposed to the Afro-American presence in Tanzania, not just in the nation's capital Dar es Salaam, their departure was good news. “Afro-Americans are gone. Good riddance.” It was undoubtedly a perception shared by many people in the Tanzanian government who were uncomfortable with the presence of African Americans right from the beginning:
“Transnationality and youth were important aspects of what made Dares Salaam’s African American activists appear threatening in some quarters of Tanzanian officialdom, though not in any uniform way.
In the case of PAS, it was the specter of hundreds of young African Americans taking up positions within Tanzanian ministries that troubled recently ‘arrived’ bureaucrats. With the soul ban, by contrast, it was the perceived influence over Dar es Salaam’s own youth of the cultural forms of black America that alarmed Tanzanian policymakers anxious to maintain control over the meanings and political valence of youth.”
There was also the impact of Tanzanian activists on the youth and on the direction the country was taking in terms of policy formulation and implementation. One of the most visible and active groups of Tanzanian youths in that category was the radical left at the University of Dar es Salaam, militants in their own right, who did not seek guidance or radicalisation from other youth movements elsewhere outside Tanzania to be what they were although they shared the same concerns about transforming society and the world in general:
“African American ‘returnees’ were not alone in this regard among the strands making up Dar’s transnational activist scene. Both the UDSM student left and Southern African liberation movements in town also played out their own politics of transnationality and youth that were key sources of both their vibrancy and their difficulties.
With its highly transnational membership and sense of itself as a youth vanguard, for instance, the USARF left (the core of UDSM leftwing activism) certainly drew a great deal of its energy and political importance from both of these elements.
Committed to a political engagement of broad scope – ‘within the University, Tanzania, Africa, and the world in general,’ as its mission statement declared – the group at its height managed to generate a visibility and prominence for an independent, internationalist left on campus that belied the group’s relatively modest size.
Wielding this transnational commitment and profile, USARF built a collective scene on campus around its lectures and discussions, teach-ins, provocative actions, and its lively journal Cheche.
Members voraciously read, swapped, and debated texts connecting them to international networks of left theory and praxis – networks whose representatives would frequently appear at UDSM, as if confirming the campus’ connectedness to global movements for progressive change. As Karim Hirji, one of USARF’s active core, put it:
‘We are not alone. Around the globe, students pour into the streets. The present loci of the storm are in France and Pakistan. With them we share a common goal – a world devoid of injustice, hunger and misery.’"
Radical leftists at the University of Dar es Salaam were also headed for trouble. The government was not going to tolerate them. Their days were numbered:
“If USARF’s characteristics as transnational and youthful were key factors in the vibrancy of a student left at UDSM, they also became central in its demise. For the Tanzanian government had limited tolerance for a group that took the rhetoric of a youth vanguard in an explicitly internationalist direction, as USARF did.
The potency of youth as a political force was something the TANU ruling party sought to monopolize for its own purposes under the auspices of its Youth League, the TYL.
After USARF published law student Issa Shivji’s trenchant critique of the government’s ostensibly socialist policies as constituting the ‘triumph of a bureaucratic bourgeoisie,’ TANU officials moved swiftly, banning the group.
In subsequently subsuming the student left under the wing of the TYL, the government worked to reassert a national scope for campus activism and party control over the politics of youth – thus excluding from legitimate political activity at least half of USARF’s core membership, founder and chair Museveni included, hailing as they did from countries across the region.”
Those were exciting years to be in Dar es Salaam, the headquarters of all the African liberation movements, and a hotbed of intellectual activism unmatched elsewhere on the continent, and on the globe.
Those were the days when Walter Rodney and Haroub Othman, prominent leftist intellectuals and great admirers of Mwalimu Nyerere, taught at the University of Dar es Salaam as did others with the same intellectual calibre and leftist credentials.
Kenyan journalist and socio-political analyst Philip Ochieng who worked at the Daily News in Dar as a columnist during those days, and who was a close friend of Walter Rodney, stated the following about Dar es Salaam during that period in an interview with the Daily Nation, Nairobi, 6 July 2013:
“Walter Rodney was my friend and I even edited his seminal work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Dar es Salaam was the world headquarters of intellectual debate those days.”
Cross-fertilisation of ideas spanned the ideological spectrum among academics and government officials. There were many bureaucrats who harboured rightist sentiments – conservative and capitalist – and only professed to be socialists; so did some academics at the University of Dar es Salaam. But the debate was undoubtedly dominated by leftist intellectuals in a country deeply immersed in socialist fermentation, with those on the ideological right only drifting with the current, afraid to be labelled “reactionaries.”
Many people from different ideological camps around the world came to Dar es Salaam and participated in the intellectual debates which characterised the Dar elite during that period; thanks to Nyerere's leadership, with the president himself addressing a wide range of issues with intellectual verve.
There was free flow of ideas and robust debate on a wide range of issues at the University of Dar es Salaam which some of Nyerere's critics regarded as no more than an ideological institute committed to the propagation of ideas central to Mwalimu's ideology of African socialism and other schools of thought in the socialist camp. Walter Rodney, Haroub Othman and other scholars and students were among the active participants in those exchanges at Mlimani (“the Hill).” As Immanuel R. Harrisch who studied at the University of Dar es Salaam stated in his thesis for his master's degree at the University of Vienna, “Walter Rodney's Dar es Salaam Years, 1966 – 1974: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Tanzania's ujamaa, and Student Radicalism at 'the Hill'”:
“Rodney first came to Tanzania in October 1966....Tanzania's President Nyerere's foreign policy and political commitment to transform the fate of 'his' people with innovative socialist policies attracted a diverse array of scholars to the growing East African port city of Dar es Salaam: international socialists, social-democrats, Marxists, Leninists and Maoists as heterogeneous representatives of the political left, but also liberals and conservatives found their way to the UDSM and accepted advisory positions in the government or civil service.
'Tanzaphilia,' as Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui called 'the romantic spell which Tanzania casts on so many of those who have been closely associated with her,' caused an influx of foreign scholars, that created a cosmopolitan, highly politicized atmosphere with heated debate on campus.
Under the leadership of President julius Nyerere, Tanzania was looming large as a defender of freedom from colonial oppression and apartheid rule in Southern Africa....
Due to Tanzania's diplomatic and material support to African liberation movements, Dar es Salaam quickly emerged as the liberation hub in Africa....Not only did numerous liberation movements establish offices in Dar es Salaam, but prominent figures expressing anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-racist attitudes visited Dar es Salaam, among them Che Guevara, Cheddi Jagan, Amilcar Cabral, C.L. R. James and Eric Williams.
Rodney was one of the scholars who was attracted by the Tanzanian political climate. After obtaining his PhD from SOAS, Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana was Rodney's first choice as a place to teach; but since the staunch Pan-Africanist Nkrumah was ousted in 1966, and Rodney still wanted to teach and research on the African continent, Tanzania remained for him as the only 'progressive' country that was left. Aged only twenty-four, Rodney took up a temporary lectureship for two years at the University of Dar es Salaam.” - (Immanuel Harrisch, “Walter Rodney's Dar es Salaam Years, 1966 – 1974: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Tanzania's ujamaa, and Student Radicalism at 'the Hill',” University of Vienna, 2018, pp. 11 – 13).
Harrisch went on to state:
“With Walter Rodney as an important and ultimately long-serving member...the History Department at Dar es Salaam was at the forefront of writing African history in the 1960s and 1970s. The first decade of the university's existence witnessed a considerable output of academic knowledge production. Like Nigeria's Ibadan University, it is said to have established a distinctive school of African History which was flourishing in intense dialogue and close alliance with the country's national politics and policy goals. Moreover, with faculty staff from East and West in a climate of considerable academic freedom, UDSM can be perceived as an exceptional crossing point between the 'three worlds'...
Rodney (was) an active member of the so-called Dar school....Rodney was using a Marxist class analysis that was inspired by nationalism as a liberating force and Pan-Africanism as a cultural and political marker of African heritage. Due to his own upbringing he was influenced by a Caribbean socialization, individuals such as Marcus Garvey and C.L. R. James and leading figures of the Black Power movement in the US....
Rodney...departed to his homeland Guyana in 1974, where he was promised a professorship at the University of Georgetown (sic). A number of colleagues at UDSM and beyond warned Rodney upon returning to Guyana and urged him to stay in Tanzania. Rodney, however, felt that since he was lacking the Swahili cultural background and Tanzanian citizenship, he could only make his contribution in native land where he was well versed with all the cultural specificities....
When Rodney arrived in Guyana in 1974, upon pressure from the government of Forbes Burnham, the University of Georgetown had to renounce the offered scholarship.” – (Ibid., pp. 15, 17, 18).
He was assassinated in Georgetown on 13 June 1980. It was Burnham himself who blocked Walter Rodney from assuming professorship at the University of Guyana. He vetoed the appointment. There is no question that he authorised Rodney's assassination. But he could not snuff out the spirit that animated Rodney and his work:
“In July 1980 a Memorial Symposium named Walter Rodney's contribution to the Revolution was organized at UDSM. The conference adopted a number of resolutions such as condemning the Burnham regime, calling th UDSM to award Rodney an honorary degree, and to set up a fund to erect a Rodney memorial.
The university's Arts Lecture Theatre was full to the brim with not only students but the general public attending as well. The organizers explained how Rodney stood for the emancipation of Black people in both Africa and the Caribbean, a theme he put forward in his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa:
'[T]he majority [of the audience] had never met him, except through the medium of the written word, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, which remains his legacy and inspiration to us, our link with this great son of the oppressed masses of Africa and the West Indies.'” – (Ibid., p. 18. Se also, cited by I. Harrisch, Maji Maji, No 43/1980. Special Issue: Walter Rodney's Contribution to the Revolution. Published by the Youth Organization of Dar es Salaam, East Africana, EAF PER LH8 M3).
Walter Rodney's colleague and friend at the University of Dar es Salaam, Haroub Othman, recalled, as did Rodney, the intense intellectual debates – and freedom of expression – which were an integral part of intellectual life on campus, addressing subjects of global significance. As Harrisch stated:
“The intense political climate of the 1960s was meshed with the global system competition of capitalist and communist states, leftist student demonstrations all over the world, the US invasion in Vietnam, and the intensification of Southern African liberation struggles – just to name some major currents.
The intellectual climate at UDSM was very receptive to these debates. Haroub Othman, Professor of Law and Development Studies and a comrade of Rodney, remembered the UDSM as 'the epicentre of radicalism in the African continent.' He continued: 'In the ten year period 1967 – 1977, the University was a major cooking pot of ideas, and provided a splendid platform for debates and discussions. No African scholar, statesman or freedom fighter could ignore its environs.'” – (Harrisch, ibid., p. 19. See also, cited by Harrisch, Haroub Othman, “A crumbling ivory tower,” in Africa Events, May 1987, pp. 40 – 42).
Rodney himself recalled with fondness the freedom he and his colleagues enjoyed when they were active in the Dar School of history when the history department at UDSM was headed by the renowned historian and liberal scholar, Professor Terence Ranger, who was also the first head of the department in the university's history. Faculty members and students shared a passion for cross-fertilisation of ideas in an environment that was an incubator of singular significance for those ideas on a continent where most academic institutions did not have the kind of freedom members of the academic community had at UDSM. As Rodney stated:
“We had a degree of freedom which was greater and remains greater than that which is accorded to academics in most parts of the Third World. That allowed us to pursue scientific socialist ideas within a political framework that was not necessarily supportive of those ideas, but was not repressive in any overt sense.” – (Walter Rodney, quoted by I. Harrisch, ibid., p. 53).
Walter Bgoya, who was once a senior official at the Tanzanian ministry of foreign affairs before he became head of the Tanzania Publishing House (which published Rodney's groundbreaking work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, in 1973), and who was a friend of Rodney also stated that the University of Dar es Salaam enjoyed freedom “the kind of which the University has not witnessed since.” – (Walter Bgoya, “Reminiscences of Comrade Walter Rodney,” quoted by I. Harrisch, ibid., p. 52).
The lively exchanges were conducted in an egalitarian atmosphere, a point underscored by Issa Shivji, a close comrade of Walter Rodney, cited below by Immanuel Harrisch in his thesis:
“Around November 1967 the small group of socialist students founded the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF)....Walter Rodney was of the faculty members that took part in the meetings of the Socialist Club later the USARF. A number of USARF members entered into a close relationship with Rodney who was at that time in his mid-twenties, and therefore hardly older than most of the students.
Issa Shivji, who was a law student at UDSM from 1967 to 1970 remembers that the USARF 'was all the initiative of students, not the faculty. Walter was one of the few young faculty who was invloved, but purely within a relationship of equality. There was no professor and student there.' Rodney was among the most active, 'but like others, he was a comrade among comrades'....
Renowned radicals such as Stokely Carmichael, Cheddi Jagan, Gora Ebrahim, C.L. R. James, and A.M. Babu spoke at USARF events at the university's Arts Lecture Theatre.” ” – ( Harrisch, ibid., pp. 49, and 50).
Franklin Knight, who attended the University of the West Indies-Mona in Jamaica during the same time Walter Rodney did remembers him well. Both were members of the school's debating team and represented the university at a debating competition in Pittsburgh, USA. Knight later became a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University where he still teaches. He stated the following about Rodney:
“[He had] an almost singular quality of mind. He was the smartest guy I ever knew. In a minute Rodney could demolish the argument of his opponent. He would have made an absolutely brilliant lawyer. He also had a good sense of humour.” – (Franklin Knight, quoted by Harrisch ibid., pp. 47 – 48. See also Rupert Charles Lewis, Walter Rodney's Intellectual and Political Thought, Detroit, Michigan, USA: Wayne State University Press, 1998, p. 19).
And here is a tribute to Walter Rodney by Issa Shivji, “Walter Rodney in Tanzania: A tribute”
Walter Rodney in Tanzania: A tribute | Pambazuka News
“Remembering Walter Rodney”
Monthly Review | Remembering Walter Rodney
That was the University of Dar es Salaam in Mwalimu's era some of us remember so much.
It was because of Nyerere that Tanzania commanded so much respect on the global scene and had many admirers on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, prompting Professor Ali Mazrui, in one of his most famous and widely read articles, “Tanzaphilia: A Diagnosis,” published in Transition, June-July 1967, a few months after the Arusha Declaration was issued in February the same year, to state:
“What is Tanzaphilia? It is neither a disease nor an exotic flower. It is a political phenomenon. I would define 'Tanzaphilia' as the romantic spell which Tanzania casts on so many of those who have been closely associated with her.
Perhaps no African country has commanded greater affection outside its borders than has Tanzania. Many of the most prosaic Western pragmatists have been known to acquire that dreamy look under the spell of Tanzania. Perhaps many Easterners too have known moments of weakness. What explanation can one advance for this striking phenomenon?
Opium of Afrophiles
The first thing to be noted is that Tanzaphilia has been particularly marked among Western intellectuals. If we are seeking to know its causes we should perhaps first seek to understand what in an African country is likely to appeal to Western intellectuals.
Intellectuals everywhere in the world have a weakness for fellow intellectuals. A major element in the mystique of Tanzania is, of course, Julius K. Nyerere himself. He is the most intellectual of all English-speaking Heads of African States. He has commanded the same admiration among Anglo-American intellectuals that Leopold Senghor used to command among French ones.” – (Ali A. Mazrui, “Tanzaphilia: A Diagnosis,” Transition, Vol. IV, no. 31, June-July 1967, p. 20; and Ali A. Mazrui, “Tanzaphilia,” in Alamin M. Mazrui and Willy Mutunga, eds., Governance and Leadership: Debating the African Condition: Mazrui and His Critics, Volume Two, Trenton, New Jersey, USA: Africa World Press, Inc., 2003, p. 79. The article was also republished in Ali A. Mazrui, Violence and Thought: Essays on Social Tensions in Africa, London: Longmans, 1969, and in Ali A. Mazrui, On Heroes and Uhuru-Worship: Essays on Independent Africa, London: Longmans, 1967).
Although Senghor was a celebrated intellectual, he drew scathing criticism from a number of fellow Africans – as well as non-Africans – for his concept of négritude. But he was equally lauded by others including renowned French philosopher Jean-Paul Satre. Few questioned his intellect even when they disagreed with him.
One of his prominent critics, together with Wole Soyinka, was the eminent Ghanaian philosopher Dr. Willie Abraham who dismissed Senghor's argument that emotion and feeling are African and are at the heart of négritude as “sheer nonsense”:
“When Senghor says that the African is non-intellectual – that reason is Greek and feeling is African, that the African knows things with his nose – that's sheer nonsense! What does he think I have above my nose?”
Dr. Abraham went on to say that there was “nothing particularly African about his [Senghor's] poetry” and that he was an “apologist of France speaking to Africa.” - (Willie E. Abraham in O.R. Dathorne, African Literature in the Twentieth Century, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1974 and 1975, p. 218).
By the way, Dr. Willie Abraham, now 84 years old, returned to his alma mater, Oxford, in August 2018, almost 60 years after he earned a doctorate in philosophy from the school. He developed his thesis into a book, The Mind of Africa, one of the most influential works in the field.
He is All Soul's first - and still the only - African scholar inducted (in 1959) into the exclusive and venerable institution of intellectuals which for more than 500 years has been acclaimed as “the home of Britain's brightest scholars.” – (Alec Russell, “William Abraham: All Soul's first African scholar returns to Oxford,” Financial Times, London, 3 August 2018).
Dr. Abraham has attributed that to racism. There are other African scholars - although not many - who could have been elevated to that status. He was a victim of racism himself when he was at Oxford.
He is still known to be an ardent Pan-Africanist like Nkrumah, Nyerere and Sekou Toure, three ideological compatriots who earned Africa a respectable place in the international arena as uncompromising champions of African liberation, unity and independence even when the leaders of powerful nations, especially Western, disagreed with them on a number of issues affecting the well-being of Africa and the Third World in general.
Recalling his days when he was Nkrumah's court philosopher, Dr. Abraham said Nkrumah sometimes even called him at two o'clock in the morning and sought advice from him:
“It’s true he was apt to call me at two o’clock in the morning and ask me what I was doing. Whenever he was in a corner he would consult me....He was the sort of person you wanted to do something for. One of the reasons he liked me was because of my youthfulness. I told him what I thought.” (Willie Abraham, ibid.).
Dr. Willie Abraham was in a unique position of power in Ghana when Nkrumah left for Hanoi:
“Abraham’s family teases him that Nkrumah said he liked to leave a philosopher to run the show when he travelled as they would never make a decision.
Abraham was in charge in February 1966 when the army and police launched the coup that toppled Nkrumah, who was then visiting China. 'He was informed by the Chinese that there had been a coup in Ghana. He said, ‘Are you sure you don’t mean Guinea?’” (Ibid.).
And he is reluctant to criticise Nkrumah even today and is not blunt in his assessment of Nkrumah's intellectual ability the way Nkrumah's mentor C.L.R. James was when he said Nkrumah did not have critical and analytical skills, intellectually, and was not a deep and an original thinker like Nyerere; an assessment shared by Professor Mazrui who stated:
“In intellectual terms Nyerere is a more original thinker than Kwame Nkrumah – and linguistically much more innovative.” – (Ali A. Mazrui in Ali. A. Mazrui, ed., General History of Africa VIII: Africa Since 1935, Berkeley, California, USA: University of California Press, 1993, p. 674; Ali A. Mazrui, African Thought in Comparative Perspective, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, p. 22).
With regard to Nyerere, Mazrui also stated the following:
“[Nyerere's] great experiments and inspirational ideas are an indication that the mystique of Nyerere is not simply in his being an intellectual. It is also in his being a gifted and imaginative one.
Of all the top political figures in English-speaking Africa as a whole, Nyerere is perhaps the most original thinker....The originality of Nyerere consisted not in the policies advocated but in the arguments advanced in their defense.” - (Governance and Leadership, op. cit., p. 85).
Professor Mazrui, in his tribute to Nyerere at Cornell University in October 1999 three days after Nyerere died, gave this assessment which was also published in the Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya:
“Nyerere as president was a combination of deep intellect and high integrity...(and) was in a class by himself in the combination of ethical standards and intellectual power. In the combination of high thinking and high ethics, no other East African politician was in the same league.” – (Ali A. Mazrui, “Mwalimu Rise to Power,” in the Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, October 17, 1999).
Nyerere himself enjoyed intellectual debates and went to the University of Dar es Salaam to exchange ideas with the students and their teachers.
Even conservative elements in the bureaucracy found comfort and could breathe freely in such an atmosphere. They included those who were sympathetic to Nyerere's erstwhile compatriot Oscar Kambona.
More than anybody else, Nyerere was the ideological and intellectual magnet attracting people from round the globe and was the main reason Dar became a leading intellectual centre of international stature to which even some of the most reactionary elements gravitated to engage in intellectual debates with leftists. As Ochieng, on another occasion, stated about those halycon days:
“Tanzania’s amazing pluralism of ideas at that time...reached the world, attracting into that country hundreds of intellectuals from all over the world. The University of Dar-es-Salaam at Ubungo was Africa’s, perhaps the world’s, intellectual Mecca.
Dar-es-Salaam harboured all the radical liberation movements in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Ireland, South-East Asia, even the United States. It was a crossroads of such celebrated freedom fighters as Agostinho Neto, Samora Machel, Marcelino dos Santos, Jorge Rebello, Janet Mondlane, Yoweri Museveni, Sam Nujoma, Thabo Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, Gora Ebrahim, Amilcar Cabral, Angela Davis and others, changing ideas with us, often hotly....
There were intellectuals – both native and alien – who expressed ideas so far to the right that they bordered on fascism. Others expressed ideas so far to the left that again they bordered on fascism.... For these were not uniform minds.... The humdinger, however, was that all these ideas were expressed freely and printed in the party and government newspapers with little attempt at editorial slanting and chicanery.” – (Philip Ochieng, “There Was Real Freedom in Mwalimu’s Day,” The East African, Nairobi, Kenya, 26 October 1999).
The University of Dar es Salaam was a leading academic centre, internationally, with unquestionable leftist credentials. Leftist students of that era at UDSM included Issa Shivji and Jenerali Ulimwengu who went on to play prominent roles on the national stage in the following years and became some of the country's leading political analysts. They are also remembered as some of Nyerere's great admirers although, like Professor Ali Mazrui who was another great admirer of Nyerere as an outstanding leader and as a superb intellectual, never hesitated to criticise him.
Professor Mazrui also described Nyerere in the following terms:
"Julius Nyerere is the most enterprising of African political philosophers. He has philosophized extensively in both English and Kiswahili." - (Ali A. Mazrui in Ali. A. Mazrui, ed., General History of Africa VIII: Africa Since 1935, Berkeley, op. cit., p. 674.).
That is also why the internationally renowned Kenyan scholar, not long before he himself died, said:
" Intellectually, I admired Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania higher than most politicians anywhere in the world." - (Ali A. Mazrui, interview, The Gambia Echo, 25 July 2008).
Mazrui also stated the following about Nyerere:
"In global terms, he was one of the giants of the 20th Century....He did bestride this narrow world like an African colossus." - (Ali A. Mazrui, "Nyerere and I," inVoices, Africa Resource Center, October 1999; "Nyerere and I" by Mazrui, Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, 26 December 1999).
He also had the following to say about Nyerere in his lecture at the University of Nairobi:
"The most intellectual of East Africa's Heads of State at the time was Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania - a true philosopher, president and original thinker....
In Tanzania intellectualism was slow to die. It was partially protected by the fact that the Head of State - Julius Nyerere - was himself a superb intellectual ruler. He was not only fascinated by ideas, but also stimulated by debates.” - ((Ali A. Mazrui, "Towards Re-Africanizing African Universities: Who Killed Intellectualism in Post-Colonial Africa?" The lecture was dedicated to Dr. Crispin Odhiambo-Mbai of the University of Nairobi who was assassinated in Nairobi on 14 September 2003).
Professor Mazrui stated in an interview in July 2008 that he knew Nyerere for decades and met with him many times during that period. In fact, he met with Mwalimu far more often and over a much longer period than he did with any other African leader. And not long before he died, he said in an interview with Jeff Koinange on Kenya Television Network (KTN):
“I knew Nyerere very well.”
Therefore, his assessment of Nyerere as a leader and as an intellectual is also based on his firsthand knowledge of Mwalimu not just on Mwalimu's writings, speeches and interviews through the years.
Kwame Nkrumah's eldest son Gamal Nkrumah, a prominent journalist at a leading Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram, who said Nyerere became a father to him after his own father died, also paid tribute to Mwalimu, stating in his article, "The Legacy of a Great African":
"Former Tanzanian President Julius Kambarage Nyerere had the gift of incandescence. Undaunted by the multiplicity and complexity of the development problems his people faced, Nyerere's presence at political rallies, remote poverty-stricken villages, academic conferences and international forums where he pleaded the case of the South always lit up the occasion.
He had a way with words, especially in his native Kiswahili. He was the philosopher-king, intellectual, enlightened, the polar opposite of the despotic ruler so common in the Africa of his day. But he was also a man of the people....
Two years ago, at celebrations marking the 40th anniversary of Ghana's independence, I met and spoke to Nyerere for the last time. I would never have guessed that he was ill. As always, he spoke so eloquently and with such intellectual vigour....
He was not only a man of great integrity, but he also had the courage and modesty to admit to past mistakes. I have heard him speak in London, at the Commonwealth Institute, in several forums in the United States and at the United Nations, as well as in many an African setting. To me personally, Nyerere was always the attentive father figure, never missing an opportunity to remind me that my own father's vision for a united Africa was the only way forward.
With his wit, humour, sharp intellect and disarming sincerity, Nyerere was always a winning personality....
He...continued to champion the liberation movements of southern Africa and provide training camps for their freedom fighters on Tanzanian soil....
However we judge him on particular issues, there is no denying Nyerere's enormous contribution to the post-independence African political scene. His greatest achievement is undoubtedly the successful unification of mainland Tanganyika with the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar....It was to Nyerere's credit that he managed to unite this most ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse of nation-states and make it one of Africa's most politically stable countries....
Until his death, Nyerere continued to serve as the Leader and chief spokesman of the Geneva-based South Commission. He also remained actively involved in scores of developmental and peacekeeping missions both in Africa and throughout the developing world....
Nyerere bequeathed his country and Africa a great legacy, that of unity, solidarity with the poor and down-trodden worldwide and political secularism, together with a real pride in the continent's languages and cultural heritage.
He could have chosen an academic career in the West, after graduating from Kampala's celebrated Makerere University, then one of Africa's finest institutions of higher learning, and then again when he left Africa to do post-graduate work at Edinburgh in 1949. He translated two of William Shakespeare's plays into Kiswahili, his namesake Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice. But instead, he wisely chose to return to Africa and lead the anti-colonial struggle. In 1960, he even offered to delay Tanganyika's independence plans if the move would facilitate the creation of an East African Federation of Tanganyika, Kenya and Uganda.
That dream failed, and Nyerere officiated instead over the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar. It is a union that has lasted long, and there are no signs of cracks in it to this day. That this is so is thanks in large measure to Nyerere's own force of character and vision." - (Gamal Nkrumah, "The Legacy of a Great African," Al Ahram, Cairo, Egypt, 21 - 27 October 1999).
And in the words of Philip Ochieng:
“An intellectual of immense stature, a man of great personal integrity, a paragon of humanism, Julius Kambarage will be hard to replace in Tanzania, in Africa and on the globe. I was privileged to know and work with such a man. That is why, as I mourn, I ask, with Marcus Antonius, whence cometh such another?" (P. Ochieng, “There Was Real Freedom in Mwalimu’s Day”).
But the Dar es Salaam, and Tanzania as a whole under Mwalimu Nyerere, many of us knew during those days is gone, except in our memories. As Professor Ivaska stated:
“In both its vibrant connections and its complicating disconnects, the transnational activism that developed in Dar es Salaam in the 1960s and early 1970s offers insights for broader understandings of the politics of transnationality and youth in a global ‘long sixties’ moment that was distinctive for both.
First of all, the transnationalism of the Dar scene becomes important for the way it centered on connections that exceeded the dichotomies of host-guest relationships on which even some of the most groundbreaking efforts to transnationalize activist histories of this period have focused.
The kinds of sophisticated contacts made by African American activists from an earlier fifties moment with Nkrumah-era Ghanaians (masterfully mapped out by Kevin Gaines) or by Third World students with German youth in shaping the politics of that country’s 1960s politics (recently analyzed by Quinn Slobodian) are vital demonstrations of the quite global imbrications of movements previously regarded as Euro-American in inspiration.
However, the Dar scene brings to this effort an illustration of the ways in which some of the most important circulatory paths traveled by activist networks in this period saw people from multiple elsewheres connecting with one another – sometimes much more than with ‘host’ populations – on the terrain of a ‘home in exile’ that was a transit point for most of them.
Moreover, examined at close range, the Dar scene does more than just provide additional illustrations of the point that some of the most important transnational activist movements in this period were youth movements. It also suggests a complex, triangular dynamic between transnationality and twin manifestations of ‘youth’: its status as both an ideological category for political mobilization and, perhaps even more centrally to the stories here, an ontological condition that enabled practices that were crucial to the kind of transnational activist work being done in Dar es Salaam.
The entwinement of transnationality with each of these faces of youth is showcased repeatedly in the ‘Dar moments’ of various activist networks. As a contested category, performances of, and claims upon, youth by these movements sometimes lay at the very heart of their challenge to political establishments with stakes in the national. Not only was the challenge posed by a transnational group like USARF to official control over youth activism important in its own right – it was also that this move sharpened the challenge inherent in the group’s transnational character as well. Likewise, with regard to youth as an embodied experience, the transnationality of activist movement – the basic fact of travel upon which it depended – was enabled by activists’ age and relative mobility, even as the mobility of most African Americans in Dar differed significantly from that of the political refugees of liberation movements in exile.
And, for many young activists, it was through the transnational nature of their experience – traveling and connecting with new people, networks, and worlds – that they came to understand their experiences as youthful ones, part of a ‘coming-of-age.’
Of course, activists were not the only ones shaped by their time in Tanzania. In various ways, the influence of young wawereaji – from new arrivals offering lectures on African American politics, to volunteers working in ministries, to their simple presence in downtown clubs – could impact the capital’s social and political landscape, though not always in ways they intended, as the soul ban illustrates.
Youth agency, then, was both multidirectional and contingent in Dar’s transnational activist scene. Moreover, some of the unanticipated trajectories that resulted from this contingency lay in the intersecting nature of transnationality and youth as critical components of the networks and encounters making up this scene.
Indeed, if these two elements were key in shaping the political possibilities opened up by the solidarities bred in Dar es Salaam, they also lay at the heart of challenges posed to a postcolonial Tanzanian political establishment with deep investments in national frames and jurisdiction over the political power of youth.” – (Andrew Ivaska, “Movement Youth in a Global Sixties Hub: The Everyday Lives of Transnational Activists in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam,” ibid., pp. 201 – 207).
The misunderstanding and differences that arose between some Tanzanian leaders and Afro-Americans was a sad chapter in the history of Pan-Africanism. Yet it did not represent a permanent rupture in relations between Tanzania and Black America, if there was such a rupture at all; nor did it tarnish the image of Tanzania among black Americans as a leading country in the struggle for African liberation.
Tanzania's image was also enhanced by Nyerere's leadership. Without Nyerere or another leader of his calibre, Tanzania would not have had the stature it had, not only in the African diaspora but in the global arena as well.
He had another attribute which was a major asset to him as a leader and enhanced his status in Africa and beyond. He was incorruptible:
“Nyerere is personally considered to be above reproach. A wealthy Nairobi-based Greek businesswoman, whose family has been involved in Tanzania for two generations, says, 'Nyerere is the only man in East Africa who cannot be bought.'
A practicing Roman Catholic of simple tastes, the 55-year old philosopher-president is said to be the lowest paid head of state in Africa.” – ((Roger Mann, “Nyerere Visit Seen as Symbol of Shift in U.S. Policy on Africa,” The Washington Post, 4 August 1977).
See also Lessie B. Tate, "The Power of Pan-Africanism: Tanzanian/African-American Linkages, 1947 - 1997," dissertation, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015.
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/78446/TATE-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1
It's a far cry ever since Nyerere days
Philip Ochieng, Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya
Sunday, 3 July 2005
When I worked for the Standard Tanzania (now Daily News) over 30 years ago, I stepped on very many toes. In a Friday column, I didn't spare even Julius Nyerere.
Yet nobody victimised me for not having a work permit. At least three factors protected voices like mine: The man, the system he had created and the regional climate. For Mwalimu was a rara avis among Africa's post-colonial leaders - intelligent, well-bred, honest, simple, humble, self-respecting, respectful of other people's opinions, noted for the logic with which he replied to critics.
Mwalimu was among the extremely few who could pass the leadership test that he himself had set in Azimio - the 1967 Arusha Declaration which required the strictest accountability. The one thing you can say for Ujamaa - the "socialism and self-reliance" which Azimio ushered in - was that it led to the fiercest and freest debate that this continent has ever seen.
For 10 years after Arusha, the University of Dar es Salaam was a Mecca for thinkers and liberation movements from all over the world. I had a tete-a-tete with Samora Machel, Janet Mondlane, Hernando Guebuza, Amilcar Cabral, Robert Mugabe, Thabo Mbeki, Albert Rene, Sam Nujoma, Lopo do Nascimento, Agostinho Neto, Yoweri Museveni, Yasser Arafat. I mingled with Breyten Breytenbach, Gora Ebrahim, John Saul, Paulo Freire, Cheik Anta Diop, Giovani Arrighi, Lionel Cliffe, Richard Gott, Walter Rodney, Marga Holness, Alice Miller, Clive Thomas, Angela Davis. I peeked directly into the minds of Abdulrahman Babu, Ngombale Mwiru, Issa Shivji, Annar Cassam, Salim Salim, Mahmoud Mamdani, Dan Nabudere, Grant Kamenju, Adhu Awiti.
Conducted mainly through our newspaper, opinions ran from the farthest right to others that were so left that they bordered on the right - but all expressed with no fear of state victimisation. This was the protective canopy in which a Kenyan could wax as critical as I did with such impunity. It does not contradict the fact that Tanzanians had a very low opinion of Kenyans. They told ribald jokes about our philistinism, lack of refinement, greed, consumer crudity, absence of taste, gracelessness in service areas, ethnic parochialism.
The Way I See It
Yet there was a counter-force in the euphoric "East Africanism" awakened by Uhuru and whetted by our founding fathers' vow to set up a shirikisho in the immediate future. While it lasted - and Arusha being the seat of that East African Community which symbolised the federation - Kenyans and Ugandans could work in Tanzania without let or hindrance.
Among our targets of criticism was the growing corruption in the very institutions that had just been "nationalised" in accordance with Azimio. But the story that such potentates of Ujamaa property as Amon Nsekela and George Kahama had prevailed on Mwalimu to detain and then deport me is apocryphal. I left entirely of my own volition.
By 1973, any discerning person could sense a general right-wing swing and growing intolerance, especially of criticism by "foreigners". I resigned because our own managing editor - a squat young man called Benjamin Mkapa - had become visibly hostile. In other institutions, foreigners were leaving en masse for similar reasons.
I mention Ben Mkapa because he has been in the thick of Tanzania's parochialisation since then - from editor through high commissioner and foreign minister to president. The EAC collapsed in 1977, mainly because of subversion by Kenya, prodded by Britain, the country whose colonially stolen property was most threatened by Tanzania's "communism".
With Mwalimu's death, the country that once was Africa's most honest, broadest-minded and most committed to regional and continental causes has become increasingly inward-looking and socially rotten. The intolerance was recently expressed with crudity when the president tried to strip Jenerali Ulimwengu - a colleague of ours in the Daily News - of his citizenship just because Jenerali had become a fierce critic of Mkapa.
The country that was once Africa's most conscious against imperialism is humbly on its knees grovelling towards an Anglo-Saxon neo-colonisation design being implemented through a South African proxy. Thus a kaburu banker will get a work permit in a day, while a Kenyan has been Waiting For Godot. We have come a long way since I wrote The Way I see It.
His friends stayed loyal even in death
Daily Nation, Nairobi Kenya
Friday, 23 June 2000
Pio Gama Pinto's colleagues and friends in the socialist movement defied diplomatic protocol and, in the face of the Kenya Government's indifference, even made secret donations to the family trust fund started after his death, writes KAMAU NGOTHO
Were Pio Gama Pinto to come back to life, he would be pleased that his socialist friends never let him down in death.
President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania made a secret donation to his memorial fund, as did the Chinese Government. The Russian Ambassador to Kenya at the time, Mr V. Lavrov, breached diplomatic protocol and sent his government's condolences directly to the Pinto family and not through the Kenya Government.
At home, Pinto's "comrades-in-arms" set up a memorial fund for the upkeep of his family within less than a week of his murder. The founders and joint trustees of the fund were Foreign Affairs Minister Joseph Murumbi and Information and Broadcasting Minister Achieng' Oneko. The two were in the trust in their private capacity. Other members were backbencher J.D. Kali and Dr Fitz de Souza.
It is noteworthy that the same divide that defined Pinto's life followed him in death. While the government refused to get involved or donate to the Pinto Trust, the Leftists gave generously.
The different attitudes towards the Pinto Trust Fund are best illustrated in correspondence Trust Chairman Murumbi exchanged with President Nyerere and the Chinese Ambassador of the day, Mr Wang Yu-tien.
A week after the assassination, Murumbi wrote to Nyerere:
"You will no doubt have heard of the tragic death of our dear brother, Pio Pinto, who was brutally assassinated on February 24.
"Pinto leaves a widow and three small children and a mother-in-law whom he also used to support. I am afraid that people like Pinto are never rich and never think of putting money aside for their families. Pio gave everything he had to the poor and to the comrades detained with him during the Emergency. He asked for nothing for himself.
"...We have formed a Trust and are appealing to friends in East Africa and abroad to make generous contributions towards this Trust Fund, which will be used solely for the education of his children.
"...His wife Emma will continue to work but the salary she draws at the moment is barely sufficient to maintain herself, her three children and her mother.
"I have written a separate letter to Oscar (Kambona) appealing to Tanu for support, and I do hope that you will be generous enough to seek at least the sum of £2,000 from your government in support of the fund."
Nyerere responded: "Thank you for you letter of March 1st. I had, of course, heard about Pio Pinto's death and was both shocked and saddened by it.
"I am sure you will see that it would not be appropriate for me to approach the Tanzanian Government for a contribution to help Pinto's family until a fund has been started and the Kenya Government's contribution has been made public.
"We will look into the matter after that, for I certainly realise that Pio sacrificed a great deal for the Kenya struggle and, therefore, for East Africa."
In reply, Murumbi secretly informed Nyerere that, for some reason, the Kenya Government would not be interested in contributing to the Pinto kitty and advised him to make a donation without alerting the Nairobi Government. Murumbi's second letter to Nyerere read:
"You will remember I discussed with you the question of your government contributing to the Trust Fund, which we have set up to support Pio Pinto's children.
"... Your reply was that you would make a contribution provided the Kenya Government also made one. I did explain to you the difficulties and the unlikelihood of the Kenya Government making any contribution. As a result, you did tell me that you would like to make a cash donation provided it was kept secret and not known to the Kenya Government. This could easily be done and I would suggest that one of your ministers be sent to Nairobi (in disguise) to personally hand over whatever sum you wish to contribute direct to Mrs Pinto and the Trustees of the Fund.
"Mrs Pinto is emigrating to Canada in April and arrangements are being made to transfer some money to the Principal of Loyola College in Montreal."
A few weeks later, Nyerere's Foreign Minister, Mr Oscar Kambona, came to Nairobi on official duties. Murumbi arranged a visit to Pinto's home, where Kambona handed Nyerere's donation to Mrs Pinto.
The Chinese had been more prompt and direct in responding to Murumbi's appeal for funding. A few days after receiving Murumbi's letter, Chinese Ambassador Yu-tien wrote back:
"Your letter of March 4, 1965, has been duly received. Just as you said, Mr Pinto stood steadfastly with the Kenyan people in the early days of their struggle for independence. My colleagues and I grieve together with the Kenyan people at his unfortunate death.
"Regarding the desire which you expressed in your letter that the Chinese Government make a contribution of £20,000 towards the fund, I have the pleasure to inform Your Excellency that in order to show the deep concern of the Chinese people towards the children Mr Pinto leaves, and for the children to be educated as they should, the Sino-African People's Friendship Association has decided to fully satisfy your desire. I am waiting for your reply as to when the sum will be handed to you."
In his message of condolences dispatched directly to Pinto's widow, Russian Ambassador Lavrov did not mince his words – as expected of diplomats – and termed Pinto's killing a politically-motivated assassination. He wrote, on behalf of his government:
"We are deeply shocked to learn of the tragic death of the Hon Mr Pio Gama Pinto by villainous assassination. The death of Hon Mr Pio Gama Pinto is a great loss not only to those who knew him personally as a tireless fighter for freedom, democracy and social progress but to all who believe in these noble ideals."
But it is the secretary-general of the leftist All-Africa Trade Union Federation, Mr John Tettegah (a Ghanaian), who delivered the punchline salute to the fallen comrade-in-arms when he said: "Comrade Pinto! You live on in us, your fighting African trade union brothers. We pledge to vindicate your life and your death. Your murder has only strengthened the determination of people – not only in Africa, but in Asia and Latin America, too. No force on earth can stem our determination to win that freedom and dignity of Man for which you lived and died."
NYERERE AT CAIRO ASSAILS NKRUMAH
Tanganyikan Says Ghanaian Only Preaches Unity
The New York Times
July 21, 1964
CAIRO, July 20 —President Julius K. Nyerere of the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar made a bitter attack on President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana before the conference of the Organization of African Unity here today.
He accused Mr. Nkrumah of preaching rather than practicing unity and of advocating African union with reasons that were “absurdities.” He said Mr. Nkrumah was “extremely petty” in refusing support of the organization's liberation committee.
“This union government business has become a cover for doing some of the most unbrotherly things in Africa,” the 42-year-old Tanganyika leader declared.
It was the first personal assault on a fellow African leader the conference had heard. Mr. Nkrumah remained in his seat throughout Mr. Nyerere's speech, his face impassive, his hands folded.
Mr. Nkrumah had repeated his call for a strong federal union of all independent African sates yesterday. He argued that this was the only way Africans could maintain their freedom in the face of outside imperialism.
Mr. Nyerere espoused the more popular step-by-step approach, on the ground that full final union now was impossible. The Tanganyikan received an ovation at the close of his speech, which he said he had not wanted to make.
Formal addresses were suspended at noon and the African leaders joined committees assigned to the specific problems of promoting unity, driving out the remaining “colonialists,” handling boundary disputes and developing trade and better standards of living for Africa's 250 million inhabitants. They hope to prepare and adopt resolutions so the conference can end tomorrow night.
Mr. Nyerere was plainly angered by various remarks made by Mr. Nkrumah yesterday, including one accusing the organization's liberation committee of inaction throughout the last year. Mr. Nyerere said this was a “curious accusation” to come from the leader of the “only country that has not paid a single penny to the committee since its establishment.”
The committee was established to organize and aid freedom fighters’ movements in territories under foreign control, notably Mozambique, Angola and Portuguese Guinea.
Yesterday Mr. Nkrumah referred to the army mutiny in Tanganyika last winter and spoke of the “humiliation” of an African state's having, as Mr. Nyerere did, to call troops of the “former colonial power”—Britain—to restore order and save the government.
Mr. Nyerere charged today that Ghana's Ambassador in Tanganyika at the time “rejoiced” in this humiliation, and “I was forced to request that he be removed.”
The heads of state, before adjourning the conference, are expected to strengthen the Organization of African Unity by choosing a permanent headquarters and selecting a permanent secretary general.
Nyani Ngabu
Platinum Member
- May 15, 2006
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Ahsante sana Shwari kwa hili bandiko lako.
Ila ningependa kuuliza. Wewe ndiye uliyeliandika au umelitoa sehemu?
Halafu, kuna video ya hiyo hotuba ya Nyerere?
Nyani Ngabu,
Asante sana.
Hilo bandiko lilichapishwa katika gazeti la New York Times. kama ilivyo onyeshwa hapo juu. Liliandikwa na mwandishi wa habari wa gazeti hilo aliyekuwa kwenye mkutano wa OAU, Cairo, July 1964, ambako Nkrumah alimshambulia Nyerere na kumwita "imperialist agent" kwa sababu ambazo nimeeleza kwenye posts zangu katika mjadala huu. Nilikuwa boarding school namaliza darasa la nane, middle school, mwaka huo (1964).
Sijawahi kuiona video ya Nyerere kwenye mkutano huo lakini nitajaribu kuitafuta.
Nyani Ngabu
Platinum Member
- May 15, 2006
- 92,232
- 113,610
- Thread starter
- #259
Siyo tatizo.
Bandiko hilo liko hapa:
NYERERE, AT CAIRO, ASSAILS NKRUMAH; Tanganyikan Says Ghanaian Only Preaches Unity
Professor Willard Scott Thompson, katika kitabu chake Ghana's Foreign Policy, ambacho nimenukuu katika posts zangu za nyuma kwenye mjadala huu, aliandika kujaribu kueleza kwamba Nkrumah aliposema "imperialist agent," Nyerere hakumuelewa vizuri. Sikubaliani naye. Professor Ali Mazrui hakubaliani naye. Ndiyo maana Mazrui alisema "Nkrumah was wrong" kuhusu Nyerere's commitment to African liberation. "He was second to none," Mazrui wrote.
Kuna wengine pia ambao hawakubaliani na Professor Thompson kuhusu suala hilo pamoja na wale wanaomtetea sana Nkrumah. Aliposema "imperialist agent," wanasema alimaanisha Nyerere. Mpaka leo, kuna baadhi ya Nkrumah's supporters ambao wanamshangilia kwa kusema upuuzi huo, blinded by their unconditional loyalty to him.
Nkrumah was a great leader, no question about that; one of the best Africa has ever produced. But he was not as intellectual as Nyerere; he was nowhere close to him intellectually. Even his supervisor in the doctoral programme (philosophy), which he did not complete at the University of London, said Nkrumah did not have an analytical mind. His ideological mentor, CLR James, who knew him very well since his student days in the United States, was even more blunt when he said: "He is not very bright...He talked a lot of nonsense."
But he wanted people to think he was very intelligent, while relying on ghostwriters - especially Dr. Willie Abraham, his court philosopher, among others - to write some of "his" most important books which, besides jealousy and perhaps even insecurity towards Nyerere, may partly explain why he spewed such filth - talked a lot of nonsense - calling Nyerere "an imperialist agent" to tarnish Mwalimu's image; an accusation which backfired and only reflected on him, showing what kind of person he was as a leader and diminished his stature among his colleagues at the OAU summit in Cairo who applauded Nyerere after he responded to Nkrumah's accusations, including his unwarranted criticism of the OAU Liberation Committee based in Tanganyika.
For a leader of continental and even global stature to stoop so low in a desperate attempt to besmirch the character of an equally reputable colleague who was also his ideological compatriot and whose integrity was unimpeachable, was probably one of the lowest points in Nkrumah's political career. It was also one of his biggest political mistakes which even other African leaders knew it was, when they applauded Nyerere after he responded to him.
And in spite of his desire to be acknowledged as a deep thinker, he was not a distinguished student even in the subject he loved the most: philosophy.
When Nkrumah was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, he had a reputation of not contributing to philosophical discussions in a philosophy class taught by Professor Edgar Arthur Singer. He hardly said anything in class, which was unusual for him because he liked to talk a lot. This was confirmed by one of his classmates, Charles West Churchman, who years later became an internationally renowned professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and earlier taught at their alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. Their professor, Edgar Arthur Singer, was a student of renowned American philosopher and psychologist, William James, at Harvard University whose students included W.E.B. Du Bois, the first person of African descent to earn a doctorate from that school.
There may have been other reasons why Nkrumah was quiet in his philosophy class. But it is also possible that he did not understand the lectures; much of what Professor Singer taught may have been beyond his ability to comprehend in a class dealing with ideas and concepts at a high level of abstraction - Nkrumah was not an original thinker. And it seems to be a plausible explanation when looked at in the context of his personality and character. He was talkative. He was self-confident. He was not shy. So why was he quiet in class?
Even his works could come under more scrutiny than Nyerere's integrity. Always proud of his “high intelligence” because of his inflated ego – one of the reasons he had such contempt for other African leaders – one wonders why such an intelligent person would need ghostwriters to write “his” most important books - especially Consciencism and Neo-Colonialism - which defined his political thought and ensured his legacy as a leading political thinker without even thinking that it was very much possible people would, sooner or later, find out that he did not write them himself.
He used other people not only to write books for him but also to think for him, thus claiming credit for their intellectual depth, analysis and ideas as his since he claimed to be the author of their works, because he wanted to be glorified so much as a deep thinker – which he never was; he wasn't shallow either. He was a thinker, but an average thinker, and very passionate about his goals; a passion and determination – as well as a flair for the spotlight – which earned him accolades and even distinction as one of Africa's greatest leaders not just in the history of the post-colonial era but since the advent of colonial rule; which he was, and will always be, regardless of what his detractors – unlike impartial observers – say about him just to tarnish his image.
Dr. Willie Abraham who was very defensive of Nkrumah, as he still is today, conceded – although not explicitly – that he was the one who wrote Consciencism for Nkrumah. He was interrogated by the new military rulers who had just overthrown Nkrumah and wavered in his answers when they asked him if he was the one who wrote the book. He finally said, yes, that was his writing style but the ideas in the book were Nkrumah's. They were not; they were Abraham's, couched in highly philosophical terms.
Ghanaian scholars and other people who knew and supported Nkrumah, not just his opponents, knew he did not have the intellectual capacity to write such a highly philosophical text, let alone expound on the set theory in the mathematical appendix Dr. Abraham included in his book. They knew it was Abraham's work and even questioned Nkrumah's ability to understand elementary set theory incorporated into this philosophical text.
It is very much possible he could not even comprehend the work's substance unless Dr. Willie Abraham simplified it for him; a book the Osagyefo claimed he wrote.
Professor Ali Mazrui, in his inaugural lecture, “Ancient Greece in African Political Thought,” delivered at Makerere University College on 25 August 1966, described Consciencism as “the most intellectual of all Nkrumah's works.” – (cited by Ama B. Biney, Kwame Nkrumah: An Intellectual Biography, doctoral thesis, 2007, p. 231, from R. Laremont and F. Kalouche, eds., Africa and Other Civilisations Conquest and Counter Conquest: Collected Essays of Ali A. Mazrui, Vol. II, Trenton, New Jersey, USA: Africa World Press, 2002, p. 353. See also Ali A. Mazrui, Ancient Greece in African Political Thought: An inaugural lecture delivered on 25th August 1966 at Makerere University College, Nairobi, Kenya: East African Publishing House, 1967; and Ali. A. Mazrui, “Ancient Greece in African Political Thought,” Présence Africaine, 1966).
Although Mazrui said Consciencism was Nkrumah's most intellectual work, he probably knew Nkrumah did not write the book. Mazrui also stated in one of his essays in Africa and Other Civilisations that Consciencism was “the least Africa-oriented of all Nkrumah's books.” - (A. Biney, ibid., p. 232. See also A.A. Mazrui, Africa and Other Civilisations, p. 353).
Mazrui said that mainly because the work's outline was based on Western philosophical thought although the book's focus was on Africa.
Even Dr. Ama Biney who is sympathetic towards Nkrumah in her writings (see her work, The Political and Social Thought of Kwame Nkrumah) - she is also a friend of Gamal Nkrumah, Nkrumah's eldest child with his Egyptian wife - concedes:
“There is considerable speculation that Nkrumah was not the writer of this book (Consciencism) and rather Prof. William Abraham was instead the author....The impenetrable style of writing is unlike that of Nkrumah's other more accessible works.” – (Ibid.).
She also acknowledges disputed authorship of Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism.
Professor Kevin Gaines, an African American who was in Ghana, knew of some African Americans and other people who wrote Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism for Nkrumah. As he stated in his book, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era:
“The book was said to have resulted from Nkrumah's collaborations with several expatriate ghostwriters.” – (Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006, p. 225).
One of them, Hodee Edwards, a white American Marxist mentioned earlier, who was an ideologue for Nkrumah's government extolling the virtues of scientific socialism among other things, was relieved of her duties by John Tettegah, a hardline trade unionist firebrand with great oratorical skills and minister plenipotentiary under Nkrumah. Tettegah also once served as general secretary of the Ghana Trades Union Congress where he was highly influential, and as secretary general of the All-Africa Trade Union Federation which was formed on Nkrumah's initiative. As Professor Gaines stated concerning her dismissal and her analysis of the coup against Nkrumah – as well as the views of some American Africans in Ghana on Nkrumah's downfall:
“Mayfield argued that the glee throughout the West at Nkrumah's overthrow had not erupted because he was a dictator or corrupt or because he had wracked Ghana's economy; rather, the true source of the widespread scorn for Nkrumah was the ideological threat he posed to Western interests. Mayfield sought to draw out for posterity the lessons of Nkrumah's mistakes. Clarke shared with Mayfield a lengthy account from Ghana by Hodee Edwards, whom John Tettegah had recently fired as a writer and researcher. Mayfield agreed with Edwards's analysis that Nkrumah had been brought down by the corrupt bargain between neocolonial expatriate firms and self-seeking CPP ministers and by his failure to smash the colonial machinery inherited from the British, particularly the army and police.” – (Ibid., pp. 240 – 241).
For some inexplicable reason, Hodee Edwards did not bluntly or explicitly state that it was the United States government (through the CIA), more than anybody else, that was responsible for Nkrumah's ouster – helped by other Western powers, especially Britain, France and West Germany. Even Canada played a role in deposing Nkrumah.
For all his faults, Nkrumah remains an African icon almost half of a century after he died. Yet that does not mean he was great in all areas. He was not a man of mediocre mental calibre. But, intellectually, he was not what he claimed to be. His writings show he wanted to be seen as Africa's messiah and as a superb original thinker; he was neither. Some of his writings were not his; even some of his works were not entirely his in terms of intellectual production.
Even the term “African Personality” Nkrumah used in his speeches and writings was first used by his friend, Reverend Stephen Dzirasa, to describe Nkrumah's political beliefs which collectively constituted Nkrumahism or Nkrumaism. The term was coined by Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden and first used in one of his speeches in 1893. As Ama Biney stated in her work, Kwame Nkrumah: An Intellectual Biography, a dissertation she wrote to earn her doctorate from the University of London in 2007:
“Stephen Dzirasa...became a personal friend to Nkrumah and called Nkrumah's ideology 'the African Personality.'” - (Ama Barbara Biney, Kwame Nkrumah: An Intellectual Biography, p. 222, in which she cites K.D. Agyeman, Ideological Education and Nationalism in Ghana under Nkrumah and Busia, p. 7, (Accra, 1988), and T. Killick, Development Economics in Action: A Study of Economic Policies in Ghana, p. 33, (London, 1978), on the subject).
Even his autobiography – Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah – of all books, was not entirely his work in terms of writing. Professor St. Clair Drake, a prominent African American scholar and one of the most distinguished in his fields who also championed African independence, lived in Ghana for many years and was close to Nkrumah, said Nkrumah did not write but dictated his autobiography.
Therefore, the actual writing was done by other people for him even if the content, in terms of substance, was his. George Padmore who, together with his partner Dorothy Pizer, encouraged Nkrumah to write his autobiography probably played a role even if not as much as he did in Nkrumah's other work, Africa Must Unite, which was greatly influenced by and incorporated Padmore's ideas on continental unity on federal basis patterned after the Soviet Union – a nation whose political and socioeconomic system Padmore had greatly admired in his early years until he became disillusioned with Soviet leadership even though he retained the ideas on unity derived from the Soviet model. The book is even dedicated to George Padmore. It is also dedicated to the nation yet unborn - of a united Africa - conceived on principles enunciated by the great Pan-Africanist from Trinidad.
Padmore provided the theoretical and intellectual framework for Nkrumah's thesis although Nkrumah deserves credit for advancing the idea of immediate continental unification but without insightful analysis of how to achieve his goal since he was more of an agitator than a theoretician.
Even though his arguments did not have flashes of brilliance and the intellectual sophistication of a theoretical analyst, he clearly provided intellectual stimulus to the highly controversial idea of immediate continental unification by simply broaching it, thus initiating debate on the subject when he came up with this Utopian ideal; the first African head of state to do so in his speeches and writings even though he really did not live up to his claim as a philosopher and as an original thinker – evidence of his attempts at self-glorification gleaned from “his works” written by others for him at his request.
Consistent with his image of self-glorification, he relied heavily on Dr. Willie Abraham and Marxist ghostwriters to provide intellectual heft to his writings.
The title Nkrumah chose for his autobiography, Ghana: The Autobiography of ... - just as he wanted to be glorified as Osagyefo, meaning Redeemer - demonstrated a major flaw in his character as a man of extreme arrogance that knew no bounds. "I am Ghana," that is what the title of his autobiography means.
He saw himself as the embodiment of Ghana - Ghana was Nkrumah and Nkrumah was Ghana - reminiscent of Louis XIV: "L'état, c'est moi," "I am the State," a legend attributed to the French king as the source because of the power he exercised as an absolute monarch.
That was even before he assumed unlimited powers under the constitution (in a constitutional usurpation of power) as president for life - his autobiography was first published in 1957 - but which he invoked even during that time. He already saw himself as Ghana, the country and the nation, not just as one of the millions of his fellow countrymen who collectively constituted the nation.
Professor Ali Mazrui aptly described him as a “Leninist Czar.”
He was, of course, Czarist as a ruler – and had all the characteristics of a Czar including imperial manifestations reminiscent of the Russian Czars - even when he was prime minister (March 1957 - July 1960) before he assumed his imperial presidency (July 1960 – February 1966). And he was Leninist in terms of his ideological convictions even though his Convention People's Party (CPP) was not communist and lacked the ideological “purity” of a typical Leninist-communist party best exemplified by communist parties in the Soviet Union during the Leninist and Stalinist eras.
Although not a man of intellectual bent in terms of abstract thinking, he tried to Africanise his Leninism – without success – by invoking philosophical concepts derived from Marxism instead of “going to the source,” to use Amilcar Cabral's term in this context, the way Nyerere did when he relied on indigenous thought, and used his own original arguments, to successfully explain and defend his socialist philosophy.
May be he would have done better had he tried to dig deeper into Akan philosophy, with the assistance of Dr. Willie Abraham who knew it very well, instead of trying to give “intellectual” flavour to his justification of Leninism in an African setting by resorting to Marxist arguments. They supposedly had universal validity because of the universality of the concepts of socialism, ignoring the fact that even socialism is contextual in terms of relevance, application and implementation based on historical and objective conditions prevailing in a given society. As Nyerere stated in his work, Freedom and Socialism, had Karl Marx lived in Ruvuma Region, he would have written a book that would have been very different from Das Kapital which was based on his analysis of the social and economic conditions which prevailed in the society in which he lived in Europe.
Even Nkrumah's quest for immediate continental unification was probably not well thought out. Yet, there is no question that he was, at least rhetorically, the most energetic champion of immediate continental unification although the ideas on how to achieve the goal – establish a functional collective entity under one government – were not his but Padmore's. But he still deserves credit for keeping the dream of continental unity alive even for future generations.
And, at home in Ghana, his success in uniting his people is indisputable. It must be acknowledged that he was great for Ghana. He was also great for Africa. Professor Mazrui said Nkrumah "was a great African but not a great Ghanaian." Some of us contend he was both - a great African and a great Ghanaian.
Ghana would not be what it is today as a solid and stable political entity, and as a prosperous nation, had it not been for the foundation laid by Nkrumah. He did not neglect Ghana in pursuit of his Pan-African ambitions, as some of his critics contend; nor was he the only authoritarian or despotic ruler during the era of rising expectations after African countries attained sovereign status.
He may have been detached from the people, an aloofness which may have been misconstrued as neglect, unlike Nyerere who was deeply involved in the activities of the masses including working with the peasants in poverty-stricken villages. Nkrumah did not work with the peasants and moved around as a potentate. But in fairness to Nkrumah, it must also be stated that most African leaders did not work with the peasants the way Nyerere did; they still don't.
And the policies Nkrumah formulated and implemented improved the lives of millions of Ghanaians and in only a few years he was in power; he was prime minister for only three years and four months, and president for only five years and seven months. Yet he will always be remembered for the infrastructure he built and the social services including educational opportunities he provided across the country, including Ashantiland where he was hated by tribalists and regionalists.
And although his quest for immediate continental unification remained a Utopian ideal throughout his political life, he deserves credit for creating a viable nation, post-colonial Ghana, despite the fierce opposition he faced from regionalists and tribalists throughout his political career, especially among the Ashanti. There was even a time when Ashantiland was forbidden territory for him. As Professor Leslie James stated in his book, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire:
“Between September 1954 and 1956, violence wracked the Ashanti region of the Gold Coast. Most Ashanti supporters of the CPP (Nkrumah's Convention People's Party) were forced to live in Accra, and Nkrumah did not cross the boundary into the Ashanti region until well after independence.” – (Leslie James, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire, Cambridge Imperial & Post-Colonial Studies, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, p. 151).
Nyerere achieved even more than Nkrumah did in terms of nation building. No African country has been able to contain and even neutralise tribalism the way Tanzania has. All that was done under Nyerere's leadership. It is an achievement that has been acknowledged by many observers through the years, including Keith Richburg, a black American – he does not want to be called “African American” – who was Africa's bureau chief of The Washington Post based in Nairobi, Kenya, from the early to mid-nineties. As he states in his book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa:
“One of my earliest trips was to Tanzania, and there I found a country that had actually managed to purge itself of the evil of tribalism. Under Julius Nyerere and his ruling socialists, the government was able to imbue a true sense of nationalism that transcended the country's natural ethnic divisions, among other things by vigorous campaigns to upgrade education and to make Swahili a truly national language. Swahili today is widely spoken everywhere....I met a professor of Swahili studies who was busy translating the latest American computer program into Swahili. Tanzania is one place that has succeeded in removing the linguistic barrier that separates so many of Africa's warring factions.
But after three years traveling the continent, I've found that Tanzania is the exception, not the rule. In Africa, as old man Douglas said, it is all about tribes.” – (Keith B. Richburg, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, New York: Basic Books, 1998, p. 241).
And no leader of an independent African country played a bigger role than Nyerere did in the liberation of the countries of southern Africa from white minority rule.
And look at Nyerere's closest friends and ideological compatriots during that period, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ahmed Sekou Toure, staunch African nationalists and Pan-Africanists who admired Nyerere as much as he admired them, if they are the kind of leaders who would have been so close to him if they thought and believed he was "an imperialist agent," as Nkrumah alleged. Why would an imperialist agent be their close friend?
Nkrumah himself worked closely with Nyerere together with the other leaders who collectively constituted the Group of Six within the OAU. Why, if he really believed Nyerere was an imperialist agent? These were the leaders who were serious about African liberation - and unity - and decided to work together, virtually excluding other leaders, taking practical steps to achieve the goal. Modibo Keita, the oldest among them, was the chairman of the group, founded on Ben Bella's initiative; with Nyerere noted for his meteoric rise - by his colleagues in the OAU - as a leader of continental and even international stature in spite of his age as one of the youngest not only in Africa but in the entire world. When Tanganyika attained sovereign status in 1961 under his leadership, he was 39; the youngest leader in the world during that time.
Nkrumah wanted all the other African leaders to acknowledge and accept him as their leader. He even made strenuous efforts to neutralise his ideological comrade and friend, Ahmed Sekou Toure – the same way he did Nyerere – when he felt he would be eclipsed by him after Sekou Toure tried to organise a meeting of African countries to discuss formation of a continental organisation which would be used to mobilise forces in pursuit of continental unity; an attempt which, if successful, would have thrust Sekou Toure into the spotlight, overshadowing Nkrumah, as the true champion of continental unification.
He also felt that Sekou Toure was ungrateful to him since it was he, Nkrumah, who had provided Guinea with financial assistance (a $200 million loan) after the French cleaned out the treasury and left with everything else including telephones and typewriters after Guineans voted "No" in a referendum to a French proposal that they should remain in the French community – virtually as a satellite in the French orbit – instead of demanding independence. As Cameron Duodu, a veteran Ghanaian journalist who also worked in Tanzania for some time in the sixties, stated in his article, “The Birth Pangs of the OAU,” in the New African, 11 July 2013:
“Nkrumah and Touré shook the continent...when they announced the formation of a 'Ghana- Guinea Union' of states which, they said, would serve as 'the nucleus' of an African union of states which other African countries could later join, if they liked....Mali soon joined the union....
By late 1960, Nkrumah and Sékou Touré – both headstrong personalities – had fallen out and the union was tottering. No announcement was forthcoming on the disagreement that had torn them apart. Indeed, I only became aware of it when Kojo Addison, the censor whom Dr Nkrumah had sent to the Radio Ghana newsroom (where I was working as a news editor) began surreptitiously to take news items that mentioned Guinea or Sékou Touré out of our news bulletins! It was a crass act of intolerance that was, unfortunately, typical of the emotional manner in which international politics was often pursued in Ghana at the time....
1960 saw Africa begin to 'sleepwalk' into splitting into two blocs that became known as the 'Monrovia Group' and the 'Casablanca Group'....It was not only Nkrumah who was disheartened by the existence of the Monrovia and Casablanca Groups in Africa.
President Sékou Touré of Guinea (a member of the Casablanca Group) was also unhappy and he linked up with Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie (of the Monrovia Group) to try and organise a conference of the foreign ministers of the two groups, preparatory to a summit of their heads of state. Nkrumah heard of this and was irritated that his former ally, Sékou Touré, seemed to be trying to steal his thunder as the unacknowledged 'father of African unity.' So he set his own secret diplomatic moves in motion to get the Monrovia and Casablanca Groups to merge and form a common organisation. Nkrumah dispatched one of his most trusted aides, Kwesi Armah (better known as Ghana’s high commissioner in London), to Liberia to see President William Tubman, who was widely respected as one of the 'old wise men' of Africa....
Nkrumah’s message spurred Tubman to convince his fellow members of the Monrovia Group that the pressing issues facing the world and Africa...could best be addressed in unison.”
Nkrumah felt he had effectively contained Sekou Toure. But he was frustrated with Nyerere far more than he was with Sekou Toure. He saw Nyerere as a threat - the biggest threat - to him as the "pre-eminent" African leader and even wanted him overthrown. North Africa had Nasser and Ben Bella. Sub-Saharan Africa had Nkrumah and Nyerere – they eclipsed all the other leaders in the region. Only Sekou Toure and Modibo Keita, who were also their ideological compatriots, were in the same league with them on the radical Pan-Africanist front in sub-Saharan Africa. Nkrumah himself was overshadowed by Nyerere in the context of the liberation struggle in southern Africa.
He even tried to dissuade Shirley Graham Du Bois, the widow of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, from moving to Tanzania, warning her, “I don’t trust these 'guys',” in oblique reference to Nyerere and his colleagues. He further warned her: “'East Africa at the moment is filled up with American agents—CIA and so forth.”
Nkrumah was then living in exile in Guinea after he was overthrown in February 1966, an abrupt change of government which forced Mrs. Du Bois, who had been living in Ghana with her husband when Nkrumah was in power, to find a new home; she was, in fact, deported and chose Tanzania as her new home. Nkrumah did not like that. Mrs. Du Bois was director of the Ghana Broadcasting Service (GBS) while her husband worked on the Encyclopedia Africana academic project funded by the Ghanaian government when Nkrumah was president.
Nkrumah had close ties with Oscar Kambona. Kambona even sent him some money in Guinea. Nkrumah mentioned that in his book Dark Days in Ghana. Included in the book is a letter from Kambona in which he mentioned the amount of money he sent him. It was a small amount but there were other sources saying he sent him a much larger amount at another time.
Malcolm X, who attended the OAU summit in Cairo as an observer and even addressed the meeting because Nyerere urged his colleagues to allow him to do so (Babu,who was a member of the Tanzanian delegation to the Cairo summit, also encouraged Nyerere to convince the other leaders to allow Malcolm X to speak), sided with Nkrumah in his dispute with Nyerere, contending that what Nyerere said, in criticising Nkrumah, “was pleasing only to the West and its stooges.”
What about Nkrumah's accusation when he called Nyerere “an imperialist agent”? Didn't Malcolm X see that also as “pleasing to the West and its stooges” and only promoted the interests of the imperialists who wanted to see African leaders attack each other, with Nkrumah firing the first salvo against Nyerere and to which Nyerere was forced to respond forcefully the next day?
In his book, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964 – 1974, Professor Seth Markle wrote the following about Malcolm X on that OAU summit:
“His strongest criticisms of the conference were reserved for African heads of state opposed to Nkrumah's call for immediate continental unification. He took particular note of the debate that broke out between Nyerere and Nkrumah on the best course of action for African continental unification. President Nyerere criticized Nkrumah's immediate approach to African unity:
'To say that the step to step method was invented by the imperialists is to reach the limits of absurdity. I have heard the imperialists blamed for many things, but not for the limitations of mankind. They are not God.'
In his diary, Malcolm sided with Nkrumah while adding, 'I didn't like Nyerere's attacks on Nkrumah. It was pleasing only to the West and its stooges.'” (Seth Markle, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964 – 1974, op. cit.).
Malcolm X should have added to his diary: “I liked Nkrumah's attack on Nyerere calling him an imperialist agent. It was displeasing to the West and its stooges and helpful to the cause of African unity when you have some African leaders attacking and insulting some of their colleagues with righteous indignation, although it was Nkrumah who started it.”
After the OAU summit, Malcolm X came to Tanzania where he was warmly received and did not make his visit a secret:
“In fact, it was at the conference that Babu invited Malcolm X to Tanzania.
The Nationalist, the English-speaking newspaper of the TANU party, made public Malcolm X's presence in the country with a front-page headline that read 'Malcolm Rips USA.'” - (Ibid.).
And it was Babu who took Malcolm X to Mwalimu's residence in Msasani. Babu was also at the meeting which was on October 13th and lasted for three hours.
When Malcolm X returned to the United States, he spoke highly of Tanzania and its leaders including President Nyerere sympathetic to the struggle for racial equality African Americans were denied in the “citadel” of democracy. Like Nyerere, Nkrumah was also held in high esteem among many black Americans. The differences the two leaders had in pursuit of African unity did not diminish their stature among many blacks in the United States. What was critical was that they shared a vision for a united Africa although pursued along different lines.
Nkrumah alijaribu sana kumchafua Nyerere ingawa viongozi hao pia walikuwa wanashirikiana sana katika mambo mengi pamoja na ukombozi wa bara letu. Walikuwa pamoja katika "Group of Six" ya viongozi waliokuwa wanashirikiana sana kutatua matatizo ya Afrika. Professor Jorge Castaneda (later, Mexico's minister of foreign affairs), katika kiitabu chake, Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, ameeleza kwamba alipomhoji Ahmed Ben Bella, Geneva, Switzerland, 1995, alipokuwa anaandika kiitabu hicho, Ben Bella alimwambia kuhusu kundi hilo, the "Group of Six," kwamba lilikuwa ni kundi la siri katika OAU, na kwamba lilikuwa na members hawa: Nkrumah, Nyerere, Nasser, Sekou Toure, Modibo Keita, na Ben Bella mwenyewe.
Pia Ben Bella alimwambia Castaneda, 4 November 1995: “We arrived in the Congo too late,” akimaanisha viongozi hao sita wa Group of Six. (See Ahmed Ben Bella in Jorge Castaneda, Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, p. 276).
About two years later, Ben Bella elaborated on that – “We arrived in the Congo too late” – (he also wrote about Che Guevara and his Congo mission among other things including his own downfall in the 1965 military coup) when he stated in October 1997:
“Parallel to Che's activity, we were pursuing another course of action to save the armed revolution in western Zaire (then Congo-Leopoldville). In agreement with Nyerere, Nasser, Modibo Keita, Nkrumah, Kenyatta and Sekou Toure, Algeria contributed by airlifting arms via Egypt, while Uganda and Mali supplied military cadres.
The rescue plan had been conceived at a meeting in Cairo convened on my initiative. We were beginning to implement it when we received a desperate cry for help from the leaders of the armed struggle. Despite our efforts, we were too late and the revolution was drowned in blood by the assassins of Patrice Lumumba....
Che Guevara had left Algiers by the time of the military coup on June 19, 1965. He had warned me to be on my guard.
His departure from Algeria, his death in Bolivia, and my own disappearance for 15 years need to be studied in the historical context of the ebb that followed the period of victorious liberation struggles. After the assassination of Lumumba, it spelled the end of the progressive regimes of the Third World, including those of Nkrumah, Modibo Keita, Sukarno and Nasser.” – (Ahmed Ben Bella, “Che Guevara, Cuba, and The Algerian Revolution,” in The Militant, Vol. 62, no. 4, 2 February 1998, from “Che Guevara and The Cuban Revolution” series).
Viongozi hao - Nyerere, Nkrumah, Ben Bella, Nasser, Sekou Toure, na Modibo Keita - walikuwa na umoja na walikuwa wanashirikiana sana katika masuala mbalimbali kuhusu bara zima la Afrika. Hata Nkrumah alipopinduliwa February 1966, Nyerere, licha ya kutofautiana naye, alimwambia anakaribishwa, anaweza kuja kuishi Tanzania. Viongozi wengine wa Group of Six - Nasser, Sekou Toure, Modibo Keita except Ben Bella ambaye alipinduliwa 1965 - walimwambia hivyo Nkrumah. Lakini aliamua kwenda Guinea.
Also, in spite of their differences, Nyerere and Nkrumah kept in touch with each other, sometimes quite often; for example, when they discussed how to unite Africa. As Nyerere, not long before he died, stated about Nkrumah in an interview with the New Internationalist:
“We corresponded profusely on this....Later, African historians will have to study our correspondence on this issue of uniting Africa." - (Nyerere, New Internationalist, ibid.)
But Nkrumah underestimated Nyerere when he attacked him at the OAU summit in Cairo in July 1964. Even before then, he wanted to intimidate other leaders into submission and be looked up to as their guiding star. As Nyerere stated about Nkrumah: “He had tremendous contempt” for other African leaders.
Nyerere was not scared of him. Just the year before, in August 1963, he even wrote Nkrumah "a very angry letter" reprimanding him for meddling in East African affairs in an attempt to neutralise Nyerere's efforts to form an East African federation.
Nkrumah also got a rude awakening when Nyerere responded to his speech at the 1964 OAU summit in Cairo and made him look stupid with his outrageous and unrealistic demand for immediate continental unification when he even refused to support the African Liberation Committee (simply because it was based in Tanganyika under Nyerere, his nemesis) and knowing full well that other leaders were not going to agree to the establishment of a union government and had in fact said so; for example, Nigerian prime minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, and Senegalese president, Leopold Sedar Senghor. Balewa bluntly stated, more than once, that Nigeria would never surrender her sovereignty to a continental government. And as Nyerere stated, it would be only “some stupid historian” in the future who would glorify such leaders – Nkrumah, without naming him, yet in pointed reference to the Osagyefo – who really didn't care about unity except to glorify themselves as the first to pursue this goal.
Nkrumah was arrogant but did not know what to do with Nyerere. It was the same kind of rude awakening Kissinger had when he first met Nyerere although he was more prepared than Nkrumah was to deal with Nyerere. David Ottaway of The Washington Post warned Kissinger and his delegation during their African mission in 1976 they would be dealing with a different kind of African leader when they get to Tanzania and should be prepared for “a dose of African nationalism” from Nyerere, with his sharp intellect. And as David Martin (quoted earlier) stated:
“When he met the astute American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for the first time in Dar es Salaam in 1976, the two men began a mental verbal fencing match of David and Goliath proportions.
One began a quote from Shakespeare (some of whose works Nyerere translated into Swahili setting them in an African context) or a Greek philosopher and the other would end the quotation. Then Nyerere quoted an American author. Kissinger laughed: Nyerere knew Kissinger had written the words.
Neither man trusted the other. Kissinger wanted the negotiations (over Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and southern Africa) kept secret. Nyerere, understanding the Americans' duplicity, took the opposite view and as Africa correspondent of the London Sunday newspaper, The Observer, I was to become the focal point of the Tanzanians' strategic leaks. That year the newspaper led the front page on an unprecedented 13 occasions on Africa. All the leaks, as Kissinger knew, came from Nyerere. One political fox had temporarily outwitted the other.
Apart from his simplicity and piercing intellect, one of Nyerere's most endearing traits was his honesty."
Mwalimu was nothing to play with. Those who underestimated him did so at their own peril, as Nkrumah found out the hard way during the OAU summit in Cairo in July 1964.
Kissinger also, as I quoted him earlier, noticed that Nyerere had another side to his character. He could be extremely tough. As he stated:
"With an awesome command of the English language (he had translated Julius Caesar into Swahili), Nyerere could be a seductive interlocutor. But he was also capable of steely hostility. I had the opportunity to see both these sides during my three visits to Dar es Salaam."
That is how uncompromising he was on African liberation.
Alikuwa ni mpole lakini pia mkali sana. Hata baadhi ya viongozi wa Tanzania waliokuwa karibu naye sana walisema hivyo. Kuna mmoja, nilipo muuliza kuhusu Nyerere, nakumbuka alisema: "Nyerere ni mpole lakini ni mkali sana when you encroach on his authority."
I have quoted him verbatim.
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