Iselamagazi
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- Sep 26, 2011
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Sawa.
Mapokezi ya Nyerere huko Uingereza
- Thread starter Nyani Ngabu
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In his book, Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition, Professor Ali Mazrui stated the following on prospects for continental unity advocated by Nkrumah and Nyerere but pursued differently by the two leaders:
“The union between Ghana and Guinea...did not assume much vigour. But at least it was evidence enough of Nkrumah's readiness to approach the issue of African unity on a peacemeal basis. But by the time that he and other heads of African states assembled at Addis Ababa for the conference which gave birth to the Organization of African Unity, Nkrumah was no longer a believer in a step-by-step approach to unity. His book Africa Must Unite was released in time for the conference, and in it he made a vigorous plea for immediate continental union. He was isolated at the conference – but he gave nationalists everywhere a major hypothesis to argue about.
What was the essence of that hypothesis? Voltaire had once asserted that 'the best is the enemy of the good.' In his theory of African unification, Nkrumah reversed the order and seemed to be arguing that the good was the enemy of the best. He was saying that while modest functional co-operation might be good in itself, it would reduce the impetus for a more ambitious degree of integration. By the same token, movements for regional unification like the one which aspired to an East African federation would militate against the cause of a broader continental union. As Nkrumah put it:
'The idea of regional federations in Africa is fraught with many dangers. There is the danger of the development of regional loyalties, fighting against each other. In effect, regional federations are a form of balkanization on a grand scale.'
Ugandans came to use this as a rationale for their own growing opposition to the federal aim in East Africa. But Julius Nyerere was emphatic in his dismissal of Nkrumah's thesis. On 9 December 1963, Nyerere said:
'We must reject some of the pretensions that have been made from outside East Africa. We have already heard the curious argument that the continued 'balkanisation' of East Africa will somehow help African unity....These are attempts to rationalize absurdity.'
In this context of an East African federation in relation to the prospects of a continental government, Nyerere was probably right and Nkrumah wrong. 'We believe that the East African Federation can be a practical step towards the goal of Pan-African Unity,' Nyerere and his East African comrades asserted in their declaration to form such a federation in June 1963. And plausibility was on their side.
And yet Nkrumah's argument that narrower forms of union harm the cause of broader unions is not always implausible. Nyerere and his Government described Tanganyika's union with Zanzibar as a step towards the goal of an East African federation. In this latter sense Nyerere was wrong. The narrower unification of Tanganyika and Zanzibar has harmed the ambition of a broader unification of East Africa as a whole. Nothing could have dramatized more effectively the problems which would attend a prospective East African federation than the problems already met in relations between Zanzibar and Tanganyika. Even in external affairs it has not always been certain that the central government in Dar-es-Salaam could speak for the union as a whole. The prolonged argument as to which of the two Germanies was to have an Embassy in Tanzania was one case in point.
The moral of this whole experience is that there are occasions when a blind plunge into union is what is needed to make the union take place at all. The union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar did itself constitute such a sudden plunge. But once that took place, East Africa as a whole could no longer federate blindly – for the smaller union had opened the eyes of the region as a whole to the difficulties involved in such a venture. Nkrumah's hypothesis has therefore found some kind of evidence in East Africa's experience after all.” – (Ali A. Mazrui, Towards a Pax Africana, op. cit., pp. 70 – 71. Ali A. Mazrui, “See my article, 'Tanzania versus East Africa: A Case of Unwitting Federal Sabotage,' The Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, Vol. III, No. 3, November 1965).
Yet years later, Mazrui seemed to question and even refute his own thesis on the negative impact of Tanganyika's union with Zanzibar on prospects for an East African federation when he commended Nyerere for his Pan-African vision and commitment in uniting Tanganyika with Zanzibar, a union he had earlier described as “annexation” of Zanzibar by Tanganyika. The step-by-step approach to unity was the only practical one.
He also conceded that Nyerere had expressed displeasure with the article he wrote contending that Tanzania's policies amounted to sabotage against prospects for federation of the East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. As he stated in another article, “Nyerere and I,” which was a eulogy on Nyerere:
“Nyerere was particularly irritated when I published an article in the Journal of Commonwealth Studies in London accusing him of having unintentionally destroyed prospects for an East African Federation by his policies of socialism and economic nationalism. My article was titled 'Tanzania versus East Africa: A Case of Unwitting Federal Sabotage.' He conveyed his displeasure through the Principal of the University College of Dar es Salaam, Professor Pratt.” – (Ali. A. Mazrui “Nyerere and I,” October 1999).
It was a thesis whose validity had been refuted by historical experience in the East African context and Nyerere was vindicated, as Mazrui himself conceded years later.
Nyerere's approach to African unity had also found expression and justification on a continental scale by formation of regional communities to foster cooperation in economic and security matters short of federation.
Formation of such regional economic blocs, especially the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the revival and expansion of the East African Community (EAC) with prospects for federation, are clear vindication of Nyerere's gradualist approach to continental unity after he himself tried and failed to unite immediately the three East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika before independence so that they could emerge from colonial rule as a federation under one government; an approach similar to Nkrumah's in terms of immediate unification on continental basis except on a regional scale in Nyerere's case. As Nyerere stated in his speech at the OAU summit in Cairo in July 1964 in response to Nkrumah's denunciation of Nyerere's attempts to form an East African federation dismissing it as balkanisation of Africa on a grand scale and an imperialist plot conceived by “an imperialist agent,” Nyerere:
“What is needed...is no more preaching about unity, but more practising of unity.
I know the obstacles, I have never underestimated the obstacles to unity. Indeed, it was an acute awareness of these difficulties in the way to unity that made me suggest to my colleagues in East Africa that we should unite before independence.” – (Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Unity: A Selection from Writings and Speeches 1952 – 65, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 300).
Although Nyerere was willing to delay Tanganyika's independence so that the three East African countries could attain sovereign status as a single political entity under one federal government, his colleagues did not share his vision and were not as enthusiastic as he was about that prospect. Later, he said after he failed in his attempt to convince his colleagues in Kenya and Uganda to unite with Tanganyika, immediately, he “became wary" of Nkrumah's approach of immediate continental unification and reiterated that position not long before he died in an interview with Ikaweba Bunting of the New Internationalist:
“I tried to get East Africa to unite before independence. When we failed in this I was wary about Kwame’s continental approach. We corresponded profusely on this. Kwame said my idea of ‘regionalization’ was only balkanization on a larger scale. Later African historians will have to study our correspondence on this issue of uniting Africa.” – (Nyerere, in an interview with Ikaweba Bunting, “The heart of Africa,” New Internationalist, 1 January 1999).
In his speech at the OAU summit in Cairo, Nyerere raised a number of issues pertinent to continental unity: the nature of government proposed and advocated by Nkrumah under which African countries would remain sovereign yet be under a continental government; if such a union would be of functional utility when the countries would remain sovereign, hence not accountable to a higher authority in spite of Nkrumah's claim, and assertion, that they would be under a continental government; Nkrumah's dismissal of Nyerere's gradualist approach as an imperialist plot to undermine Africa; and whether or not all talk about immediate continental unification was merely for propaganda purposes and self-glorification by those who claimed they cared about African unity and therefore African countries had to unite now, without delay, and without going through a process of gradual integration and unification. As he stated:
“At one time I used to think that we all genuinely wanted a continental Government of Africa; that the major difference between us was how to bring it about. I am afraid I am beginning to doubt this earlier assessment of mine. I am becoming increasingly convinced that we are divided between those who genuinely want a continental Government and will patiently work for its realization, removing the obstacles, one by one; and those who simply use a phrase 'Union Government' for the purpose of propaganda.
Nothing could be more calculated to bring ridicule to the whole concept of a continental Government in Africa than this incessant and oft-repeated propaganda....
Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika declare that they want their countries to form a single state. They do this in the sincere belief that it would be in the best interests of their countries and a contribution to African Unity. But this declaration provokes the most incredible attack, and strenuous attempts are made to stop this development in unity. Why? Union Government; for an East African federation is considered to be contrary to the spirit of the Addis Ababa Charter. The curious argument is advanced that the more balkanized we remain the better for the achievement of a Union Government. And now, at this very rostrum, this curious argument in favor of the status quo is again advanced.
We are told that we should not appoint a permanent Administrative Secretary-General, nor select a place for a permanent headquarters of this Organization of African Unity. What is the reason for this? We have been told, in so many words...Union Government!
And to cap this whole series of absurdities; after all the wonderful arguments against unity in East Africa we are now told at this very rostrum that those who are ready should go ahead and unite....
I also want to suggest that there is a fundamental difference between the continental Government of Africa which we all genuinely want, and the 'Union Government' of propaganda. To have a Government of Africa is to have a single state of Africa, even if, necessarily, it is a Federal State. The essential attribute is a national state which has an international personality: that of sovereignty. This means that its component parts must surrender sovereignty to it, for it alone becomes a truly sovereign state.
But the 'Union Government,' we are told, does not require the surrender of sovereignty at all by the individual states. It is some curious animal to which our individual states do not surrender sovereignty, and yet somehow becomes the strong instrument which we require to fulfil the purposes of modern states....
I would like to make the position of my country very clear on this question of African Unity. We are committed to the achievement of a United Africa under a single continental Government. We have already surrendered our sovereignty in the name of greater unity. We shall be ready to surrender it again for a bigger unity.
We do not believe there is a choice between achieving African Unity step by step and achieving it in one act. The one act choice is not available to us except in some curious imagination.
It has not been given to us human mortals to simply will things into existence. Between our willing of an end and the achievement of that end there is a process. This process is sometimes long and sometimes short, and indeed the greater the objective the longer may be the process. But whether short or long it is a process and a process by definition is progress step by step. To say that the step by 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!
The only choice open to us is the choice of step by step, both territorially and functionally. If, for instance, the North African countries were ready to come together and form one single state, I for one would welcome that step to African Unity.
Each one of them would be the proper judge as to whether the time and conditions were right for such unity. If, on the other end, they felt that a political merger was not feasible yet, but they were ready to co-operate in other fields, again, I for one, would welcome such co-operation as a step towards eventual African Unity.
What is essential is that all these steps should take place within the spirit and under the umbrella of the Organization of African Unity. That's why my country would like to see this spirit and this umbrella of unity strengthened in every respect, including the appointment of a Secretary-General and permanent headquarters.
Mr Chairman, as already indicated at the beginning of my speech, I had no intention of making a long speech. I have already spent too much of your time on matters which are not particularly pleasant.” – (Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, op. cit., 300 – 303).
"Matters which are not particularly pleasant" had to do with the acrimonious exchange Mwalimu Nyerere had with Nkrumah when the Osagyefo, the Redeemer, called Nyerere "an imperialist agent" and attacked him for advocating formation of regional federations instead of supporting Nkrumah in his quest for immediate continental unification – a Utopian ideal then and now.
Nkrumah's opposition to formation of an East African or any other regional federation which was strongly supported by Nyerere did not resonate well among most African leaders, demonstrated by their resounding applause of Nyerere after he delivered his speech on 20 July 1964 in response to the Ghanaian president at the OAU summit in Cairo.
Sharply contrasted with that was the response Nkrumah got from his colleagues. They were silent throughout most of his speech on 19 July 1964 and gave him only a mild applause when he finished speaking, clearly showing they agreed with Nyerere on what he said on the imperative need for regional federations or unions – including economic integration – as a practical step towards continental unification; and on Nkrumah's denunciation of Mwalimu as “an imperialist agent.” As Nyerere said in his speech on 20 July 1964:
“The great Osagyefo then asks: 'What could be the result of entrusting the training of freedom fighters against imperialism into the hands of an imperialist agent?'...Secondly, if the reference to an imperialist agent refers to my country or any of its leaders, those who know my country, its leaders, and its people...” - then Nyerere went on to elaborate on his country's commitment to African liberation and unity and pointed out that Tanganyika had even taken practical steps in pursuit of unity – instead of just talking – when the country united with Zanzibar to form the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar. (See Africa Research Bulletin: Africa, Political, Social and Cultural Series, London: Africa Research Limited, 1964; and International Bulletin, Volume 2, 1964, p. 271).
Professor Carlos Moore, an Afro-Cuban scholar, in his book, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa, stated the following on the differences between Nkrumah and Nyerere:
“To Nkrumah, Nyerere was an English-speaking version of the Ivory Coast's Felix Houphouet-Boigny. Nyerere, in turn, suspected the Osagyefo of Napoleonic ambitions. The conflict never found a truly happy outcome, even when Nyerere began showing signs that he wished to leave the 'moderate' camp of African leaders.” – (Carlos Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa, Los Angeles, California, USA: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California Press, 1988, p. 200).
Nyerere was not the only African leader who thought Nkrumah had Napoleonic ambitions and even bluntly told him when they met in 1963: “We are not going to have an African Napoleon.” Others included Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Leopold Sedar Senghor. As Professor Larry Grubbs of Georgia State University stated in his book, Secular Missionaries: Americans and African Development in the 1960s:
“Senghor told Kennedy that the Ghanaian leader 'required the attentions of a psychiatrist' to cure him of his stupendous dreams of leading Africa.” – (L. Grubbs, Secular Missionaries: Americans and African Development in the 1960s, op. cit., p. 156).
But Nkrumah was wrong about Nyerere. Nyerere was not a Felix Houphouet-Boigny of Anglophone Africa. He was not subservient or servile to the former colonial power, Britain, the way Boigny was to France. And he was not an Anglophile; nor was he an Anglophobe.
Like Senghor, Boigny was Francophile. He was not only proud of his Francophilia; he even glorified the French who controlled his government – the entire civil service and cabinet – and said he was very proud of them for providing security for his country – the country's defence also was under absolute French control; this coming from an African leader, proud of his country being an appendage of the former colonial power. Boigny also was extremely hostile towards Sekou Toure, a fiercely independent African leader.
Nyerere never glorified the British or any European power and was fiercely independent and proud of his African identity. He never wanted Tanganyika – later Tanzania – or any other African country to be a satellite of Britain or any other European or imperial power the way Boigny, Senghor and other leaders in Francophone Africa did, with regard to France (with the exception of Sekou Toure and Modibo Keita) and even strongly condemned any attempts by European colonial rulers to turn Africans into carbon copies of Europeans. As he stated with regard to the policy of assimilation in the African Portuguese colonies:
“Africans are not European, could not become European, and do not want to become European. They demand instead the right to be Africans in Africa, and to determine their own cultural, economic, and political future.” – ( Julius K. Nyerere, “The Honour of Africa,” in Freedom and Socialism/Uhuru na Ujamaa: A Selection from Writings and Speeches 1965 - 1967, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Oxford University Press, 1968, pp. 123).
There were major differences between Nyerere and Boigny, contrary to what Nkrumah said about the two leaders as if they were political and ideological twins.
Differences between Nyerere and Houphouet Boigny were clearly evident even during the Nigerian civil war in spite of the fact that both countries ended up recognising Biafra as an independent state.
Boigny maintained that the war was Nigeria's internal affair and the conflict should be resolved by the Nigerians themselves. Nyerere disagreed and wanted the OAU to be actively involved in finding a solution to the conflict, a position shared by other African leaders including Kenneth Kaunda, Milton Obote and Jomo Kenyatta.
Nyerere and Kaunda even exerted pressure on the Nigerian federal military government to negotiate with the Biafrans without preconditions. They told the Nigerian leaders that they must negotiate with the secessionists under the auspices of the OAU and without preconditions (asking Biafrans to renounce secession first) – otherwise they would recognise Biafra as a sovereign entity.
Tanzania also clashed with Ivory Coast at the United Nations after Boigny authorised his security officials to arrest ten Guinean diplomats, including Guinea's minister of foreign affairs, at Abidjan airport in June 1967 in clear violation of conventions on diplomatic immunity prohibiting the arrest of diplomats.
The arrest of the diplomats was in retaliation for the seizure of an Ivorian trawler and its crew by Guinea in February 1967 when members of the crew were jailed for allegedly being involved in a plot to kidnap Dr. Nkrumah who had sought exile in Guinea after being overthrown the previous year. Tanzania sided with Guinea.
Nyerere also was not impressed by Boigny's Francophilia and made that clear when he visited Ivory Coast and other West African countries during that time. As Daniel C. Bach stated in his thesis to earn a PhD from the University of Oxford, entitled “Relations between Nigeria, France and Selected Francophone States in West Africa 1960 – 1975”:
“Houphouet Boigny's restrained attitude to the Nigerian civil war was maintained during Nyerere's visit to Ivory Coast at the end of February 1968. The war was a major issue in the discussions held by Nyerere during his successive visits to Ivory Coast, Liberia and Senegal....
Relations between Houphouet Boigny and Nyerere had been uneasy since the latter's arrival at Abidjan airport. Nyerere had been greeted by a guard of honour in uniform resembling that of the Garde Nationale in Paris. For this reason, at the banquet given in his honour he decided to reply in Swahili to Houphouet Boigny's speech, thereby underlining the non-African aspects of his welcome. Nyerere then visited Bouaké in the north of Ivory Coast and declared that he was now in Africa, after having spent a few days in France.” – (Daniel C. Bach, “Relations between Nigeria, France and Selected Francophone States in West Africa 1960 – 1975,” 1978, pp. 153, 154).
For Nkrumah to say or think Nyerere was a version of Houphouet-Boigny in English-speaking Africa was absolute rubbish and an insult to a proud African nationalist and Pan-Africanist.
And he grossly underestimated Nyerere. He thought Mwalimu was easy-going and he could intimidate him the way he tried to scare other African leaders – although not all; he couldn't, for example, intimidate Sekou Toure who was equally headstrong, probably even more than Nkrumah himself was. Nkrumah also underestimated Nyerere's capacity to respond to such insults, as he learned the hard way at the OAU summit in Cairo when Nyerere responded forcefully, and in very strong language, to Nkrumah's accusation when he called him “an imperialist agent.”
Even before then, Nyerere took a very strong stand against Nkrumah. In 1963, Nyerere publicly rebuked Nkrumah when he said Nkrumah's opposition to an East African federation and his argument, by implication, that it was better for Africa to remain divided and wait for immediate continental unification instead of forming regional federations “are attempts to rationalise absurdity.” Nyerere also took a very strong stand against Nkrumah when he wrote him a very angry letter in August 1963 reprimanding him for interfering in East Africa to block formation of an East African federation which Nkrumah denounced as an imperialist plot, with Nyerere being “an imperialist agent.”
That should have been enough for Nkrumah to know that Nyerere was not afraid of him – anymore than Sekou Toure was; the two leaders clashed when Nkrumah wanted to dominate the Ghana-Guinea union and, with Sekou Toure, proud and strong-willed as he was, that was not going to happen. And in East Africa, Nyerere was not going to allow Nkrumah to dominate and control him the way he controlled Obote in order to block formation of an East African federation.
Nyerere was the only East African leader who was most passionate about it, triggering an equally passionate response from Nkrumah, including sabotage of Nyerere's efforts to achieve regional integration on federal basis; it was one of Nyerere's most cherished goals.
Professor Mazrui said Nkrumah was wrong when he called Nyerere “an imperialist agent.” He went on to say Nyerere was the toughest leader – and the most persistent – among all African leaders in championing the cause of African liberation.
And he didn't just talk. He did what had to be done to achieve the goal, demonstrated by Tanzania's enormous contribution, financial and material, to the liberation struggle under his leadership; a contribution acknowledged by the freedom fighters themselves. So, it is not just Tanzanians who say that.
One of the leading freedom fighters who acknowledged Tanzania's great contribution to the African liberation struggle was President Robert Mugabe. At a meeting of the leaders of the member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in Harare, Zimbabwe, in April 2015, which he chaired, Mugabe lamented that Nyerere had not been accorded the respect, recognition and gratitude he deserved for the major and decisive role he played in the liberation of the countries of southern Africa and others elsewhere on the continent. As he stated:
“The OAU decided that the liberation of the whole of Africa would be done now through a body called the Liberation Committee to be hosted in Tanzania, Mwalimu's country. And all the freedom movements were harboured there; some of them divided, ZANU, ZAPU, we were two. ANC, PAC. SWAPO, SWANU. We were all there.
And the results, of course, were resounding. Africa became free....We have not done much by way of paying tribute to our forefathers. Yes, something has been done to Kwame Nkrumah at the AU, and recently the hall was named after Mandela.
But we forgot, perhaps because we are a new generation, a new generation of leaders, that the greatest burden of freeing Africa was borne by the one country Tanzania, and that one - I am saying the greatest, not that he was alone, Nyerere, Mwalimu.
No mention has been made, no symbol, to remember his part. And I say, no, we must do something, we will do something. Even if Zimbabwe was - we can't be that ungrateful. No. So I would want to say, help us, help me, my thought that we respect Mwalimu at the AU, somehow." - ("President Robert Mugabe Pays Tribute to Mwalimu," Harare, Zimbabwe, April 2015).
Even in South Africa where Nyerere's role in the liberation struggle is acknowledged, there seems to be some reluctance to accord him full recognition as a liberation icon. Hence the unwillingness, or refusal, by the ANC leadership to erect a monument in his honour.
This ingratitude to Mwalimu Nyerere has not gone unnoticed by many Africans. As one Nigerian scholar, Said Adejumobi, who was at the University of Cape Town – he later became a professor – stated:
“I recall that when Julius Nyerere died (I was in South Africa then), he was depicted in the media in a very negative sense. Headlines like the 'tyrant is gone' replete media stories on him. This is highly unfortunate. Julius Nyerere was one of the most steadfast leaders on South Africa's liberation struggle – committed his country's scarce resources, diplomatic strength and military support for the ANC. Nyerere was not to be celebrated but vilified. This is one of the gains of self-denial.” – (Said Adejumobi, “Shame on South Africa!: Black South Africans are Suffering from Colonial Mentality,” The New Black Magazine, 28 May 2008, and in The Guardian).
And as Jenerali Ulimwengu stated in his article on Nelson Mandela's first visit to Tanganyika in January 1962, and on the liberation struggle in South Africa and Tanzania's role in helping the freedom fighters to abolish the abominable institution of apartheid, "Tanzania Visit: First Glimpse of Independent Country, Catalysed His Struggle," in The East African, 12 July 2013:
"To the best of my knowledge, at least, there is no landmark anywhere in South Africa commemorating Nyerere’s contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle."
That is not the case in the other countries of southern Africa which were also helped by Tanzania in their struggle to end white minority rule. Nyerere has been honoured there. There are streets named after him. His memory has also been enshrined in other ways in those countries.
On another occasion, President Mugabe paid tribute to Nyerere at the launch of a book, Julius Nyerere: Asante Sana, Thank You Mwalimu, for the major role Mwalimu played in the liberation struggle. As he stated, the liberation of the countries of southern Africa was planned in Dar es Salaam under the leadership of President Nyerere. He went on to say:
"When we gained our independence in Mozambique and Angola in 1975, in Zimbabwe in 1980, Namibia in 1990, and a new democratic dispensation, in South Africa in 1994, we said – Asante sana, Thank you, Mwalimu....
Mwalimu Nyerere was honoured this year (2015) by the African Union with the naming of the AU Peace and Security headquarters after him....
The time is now to recognise the role played by Julius Nyerere in the political liberation of Africa, and to enshrine his legacy to reside with the present and future generation of Africans." - (Robert Gabriel Mugabe, foreword to Julius Nyerere: Asante sana, Thank You, Mwalimu, Harare, Zimbabwe, 2015).
Remembering those days, Philip Ochieng, who worked at the Daily News in Dar es Salaam when the liberation struggle was most intense, stated:
"Under Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Dar es Salaam served as the external headquarters of practically every one of the nationalist movements fighting to bring down Europe's racially conceited tyrannies all over our continent - all the way from the borders of Egypt in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, including Kenya (Ochieng's home country).
That was how I first met Robert (Bob) Mugabe, a great nationalist, at that time considered as the most redoubtable of all of Southern Africa's campaigners for indigenous self-rule.
For, in the Tanzanian capital, Robert Mugabe was seen then as the topmost and most cherished among Africa's nationalist leaders fighting to bring down European tyranny all over our vast continent, especially in that Southern African colony, and throughout the world....
Of all the nationalists fighting to bring down Britain's colonial high-handedness and arrogance, Robert Mugabe was at one time one of Africa's most cherished darlings.
When I worked in Dar es Salaam, I often met and deeply admired the person whom fellow nationalists in exile called 'Dear Bob.'
Time was indeed when I wholeheartedly recommended 'Bob' as the chief spokesman for our continent and for humanity's downtrodden classes all over the world, including even in that same Western Europe which had, for the nonce, assumed the role of model of what was alleged to be 'democracy'....
When I first met face to face and interviewed what was then our 'dear Bob' in an hotel room in Dar es Salaam at some point in the early 1970s, he proved overwhelmingly charming, courteous, captivating in manner, overpowering in intellect and overwhelmingly knowledgeable of history and the modern human world.
Of all the nationalists seeking to defeat Caucasian racist tyranny and conceit in Africa, especially in Namibia and Southern Rhodesia, Robert Mugabe remained what William Shakespeare - the great bard of England's own intellectual and cultural celebration - would have embraced in poetry and drama as 'the nonpareil.'” – ((Philip Ochieng, "The Mugabe We All Adored in Dar Turned Out an Embarrassment," Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, 25 November 2017).
At least one southern African leader, Mugabe, had the decency to say Mwalimu Nyerere had not been accorded the status he deserved as an icon of liberation and for the great role he played in helping liberate the countries in the region and as “the most successful leader that Africa has ever produced since the European colonial regime collapsed 50 years ago," as Philip Ochieng put it in his article, "Africa's Greatest Leader," in The East African, Nairobi, 19 October 1999.
When Nyerere was president and even after he stepped down, he spoke for Africa as whole more than any other African leader did. His colleagues even nicknamed him "OAU's minister of foreign affairs." His commitment to the liberation of Africa and continental unity was unquestionable, despite Nkrumah's doubts about Nyerere's credentials as a true African nationalist and Pan-Africanist; doubts which fuelled his dislike for regional federations supposedly because they were imperialist designs.
Nkrumah's opposition to the East African federation - ostensibly for a greater cause of continental unity - became a personal crusade against Nyerere, with the Osagyefo resolutely determined to block Mwalimu from achieving his goal.
Ghana's high commissioner to Uganda, Bediako Poku who knew Nkrumah very well and once served as head and secretary-general of the ruling Convention People's Party (CPP) and was Ghana's ambassador to China when Nkrumah was overthrown, attributed Nkrumah's opposition to Nyerere's attempt to form an East African federation, to jealousy. Nkrumah feared that Nyerere would succeed in forming an East African federation which would enhance his position as a continental leader, although there may have been political and ideological reasons as well, behind Nkrumah's opposition to regional federations, since he was a fervent advocate of immediate continental unification, at least rhetorically, more ardent than most African leaders were. But he was concerned about Nyerere or any other leader who would eclipse or overshadow him in the quest for continental unity on any scale even if regional. He even used agents to infiltrate the Tanzanian government in order to undermine Nyerere. As Professor Willard Scott Thompson stated in his book, Ghana's Foreign Policy:
“Ghana's real battle in 1963 – 1964 was against the East African Federation. Nkrumah's own dislike of regional links was of long-standing, but his ideas had only crystallized as a result of his 1961 trip to the Soviet Union. In an important address shortly thereafter he had stressed that local associations, regional commonwealths, and territorial groupings, as opposed to union government, would be 'just another form of balkanisation.' His policy was soon implemented, at the 1962 PAFMESCA conference in Addis Ababa, where a delegation of Ghanaian militants attempted to weaken that organization by claiming supremacy for the virtually defunct, Accra-based All African People's conference.
By the time of the founding of the OAU, the proposed East African Federation offered the most exciting prospects of unity anywhere on the continent. On June 5, 1963, President Nyerere and Prime Ministers Kenyatta and Obote signed a declaration of intent which seemed to point directly to early federation. Throughout the summer, the attitude of Prime Minister Obote and Ugandan officials progressively cooled, from fear that Uganda would gain least in such a union. Moreover, 'three was an awkward number,' as a Tanganyikan minister described the situation. Nkrumah had worked hard at Addis Ababa in May to convince Obote that such a federation would be an obstacle to African unity.” – (Willard Scott Thompson, Ghana's Foreign Policy, op. cit., pp. 330 – 331).
Professor Thompson went to state:
“David Bosumptwi-Sam, Ghana's high commissioner in Kampala, was a personal friend of Obote, and labored throughout the summer to reinforce Ghanaian-Ugandan links. The high commission in Kampala was reinforced with an additional (and agile) diplomat, George Nipah, transferred from Dar, and by several executive officers from Flagstaff House and the Bureau of African Affairs.
Nkrumah began writing lengthy letters to the leaders involved, stating his fear that federation would be a tool of British imperialism, like the French-linked associations in West Africa, and a monumental impediment to continental unity. Nyerere's reaction can be gauged by a cable from (Alex) Quaison-Sackey to Nkrumah:
'I have had long discussions with President Nyerere today at his request [while Nyerere was on a visit to the U.S., U.K., Canada, Algeria, and Guinea] regarding Osagyefo's letter which President Nyerere showed me. Nyerere was openly distressed by the tone of the letter and feels that he has been misunderstood. He believes that the formation of one federal state in East Africa within the context of African Unity will further the cause of Union of African States which, as Osagyefo knows, is dear to his heart.'
More serious efforts than letter writing were undertaken, however. Barden (A.K. Barden, the director of the Bureau of African Affairs in Accra, a Nkrumah loyalist) was introducing agents who operated, however ineptly, throughout East Africa in attempts to penetrate Government House in Dar es Salaam, and to bribe organizations in Uganda that could be calculated to oppose federation. Some Ghanaian agents were recruited under a false flag.
Ghanaian diplomacy in East Africa showed a 'a new cult of bad manners' – as Gordon Craig described Italian diplomacy under Mussolini. When Joseph Murumbi, of Kenya, suggested publicly that Tanganyika and Kenya alone might form a federation, attacking Nkrumah (by implication) for good measure, Bosumptwi-Sam replied through an advertisement in the Uganda Argus:
'Judging from Murumbi's career which is marked by opportunism, it is not surprising that he should have distorted and entirely perverted evaluation of African leaders of international stature and repute like Osagyefo.
By playing to the gallery of the imperialists...Mr. Murumbi has proved himself an adroit puppet. His vituperations have revealed in time his neo-colonialist stand....'
Murumbi had merely noted that Nkrumah had once advocated West African Federation, and Sam quite incorrectly denied that this was ever the case. This statement was not out of line with the general character of Sam's diplomacy.” – (Ibid., pp. 331 – 332).
There were strong personal reasons which may help to explain why Nkrumah was so opposed to formation of an East African federation. Pan-Africanist considerations may have played a secondary role, if at all, in this case. That was mainly because Nkrumah was frustrated by his nemesis, Nyerere, in his wild ventures pursued under the rubric of Pan-African commitment. As Professor Thompson stated:
“Nkrumah's attitude was a result of several factors. Until 1960 he had been a popular symbol of African liberation in East Africa; he had aided political movements there, and cultivated the leaders. It was difficult for him to accept the new situation, in which his advice and help were neither needed nor wanted. Bediako Poku, who succeeded Sam in Kampala, thought 'jealousy' explained the better part of Nkrumah's attitude, and so did much of the rest of the world. The fear that from East Africa would emerge a more powerful leader than himself was a factor in his policy.” – (Ibid., pp. 332 – 333).
That leader was Nyerere. The mere thought that Nyerere might climb that high terrified Nkrumah even though it cannot be denied that he was also concerned about Africa's well-being in spite of his weaknesses as a mere mortal. But he was worried Nyerere's achievements would surpass his. Even his envoys, following in his footsteps, made embarrassing mistakes which amounted to insults to their hosts:
“After the East African mutinies of January 1964 – which accentuated Nkrumah's sense of urgency (for an African High Command, an idea Nyerere supported since 1960 during the Congo crisis as shown in previous posts on this thread) – Ghana's envoy in Dar es Salaam, a former trade unionist, translated Nkrumah's frustrations into more bad-mannered diplomacy. Nyerere later described it this way:
'We experienced army mutinies in East Africa and had to go through the humiliation of asking for assistance from a former colonial power. But in my country...the Ambassador of a brotherly African State celebrated and rejoiced, and I am forced to request that he be removed...And what was the reason for this rejoicing at the humiliation of a fellow African country? Union government.'” – (Ibid., p. 338).
The quotation above comes from Nyerere's speech at the OAU summit in Cairo in July 1964 in which he responded to Nkrumah's attacks on him, quoted in BBC, IV, No. 1611, 22 July 1964, and cited by Professor Willard Scott Thompson in his book, Ghana's Foreign Policy, 1957 – 1966: Diplomacy Ideology, and the New State, Princeton University Press, 1969, p. 338).
The speech was reprinted in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity: A Selection from Writings and Speeches 1952 – 65, pp. 300 – 304, but not in its entirety. Substantial parts of the speech, which were a direct response to Nkrumah and expressed in very strong language by Nyerere, were omitted. But the speech was fully covered by the media including BBC, The New York Times, The Observer, London, and other outlets.
Professor Thompson went on to state in his book:
“Nkrumah saw Nyerere's difficulties as an opportunity to underline the fragility of separately constituted African states or federations. The Ghanaian Times editorialized that 'the concept of regional federation as a substitute for continental African unity has been largely destroyed by the sequence of events in East Africa.'
Nyerere, on the other hand, saw the occasion as an opportunity to strengthen African solidarity, by asking that 'the problems arising from the mutiny...be dealt with in a way which will foster, and not harm, the common objectives of African Unity.'
He requested an extraordinary foreign ministers' session in Dar es Salaam. Premiers Obote and Kenyatta did not join him in making the request, though their armies had also experienced mutinies.
Botsio's (Ghanaian Foreign Affairs Minister Kojo Botsio's) instructions were to press for a high command, and he and his deputy, the Rev. Stephan Dzirasa, both claim that in a private meeting with Nyerere they were assured that this would not be resented. Botsio and Nyerere were friends, and Nyerere would have known that Botsio was bound by instructions. Nyerere's opening words to the conference make clear, however, that he drew a distinction between Botsio's personal position and the Ghanaian delegation's brief from Nkrumah: 'The presence of British troops in Tanganyika is a fact which is too easily exploited by those who wish to divide Africa or to dominate Africa (Applause). Already it is clear that there are some people who will seize upon this opportunity to play upon natural fears of neo-colonialism in the hope of sowing seeds of suspicion between the different African States. For this reason alone the meeting in Dar es Salaam would have been worthwhile.” – (Ibid., pp. 338 – 339).
The meeting of the African ministers of foreign affairs was held in Dar es Salaam from 12 to 15 February 1964. What was even more disturbing was that the army mutinies in the three East African countries – Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika – occurred not long after the countries won independence from the same colonial power, Britain. Around the same time, military coups took place in Congo-Brazzaville and Dahomey. And attempts were made to overthrow governments in Senegal and Ivory Coast. As Professor Immanuel Wallerstein stated in his book, Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity:
“East Africa was as volatile as French Africa. On January 12, 1964, the Sultan of newly independent Zanzibar was overthrown in a profound social revolution. There were immediate reverberations throughout East Africa. On January 20 an army mutiny broke out in Tanganyika, but with none of the social content of the Zanzibari revolution. Nonetheless the government's existence was seriously menaced. On January 23 there were similar army mutinies in Uganda and Kenya. On January 24 the Tanganyika government, followed by Uganda and Kenya, requested British troops to help restore order. On January 28 the government of Tanganyika requested an extraordinary session of the Council of Ministers of the OAU to consider 'the grave situation arising from many revolts...in East Africa'....
The Council endorsed 'the decision of the Government of Tanganyika to have the British troops withdrawn and replaced by Africans.' On March 20, 1964, the Nigerian government sent a battalion to Tanganyika and the British troops left immediately thereafter....
Some suggested a permanent African military force for use in such situations. One of those strongly opposed to this suggestion was the Foreign Minister of Congo (B – Brazzaville), Charles Ganao, who said: 'We Congolese are especially unfavorable to it since if this force had existed last August, Fulbert Youlou could have appealed for it and thus have entrenched his dictatorship.'” – (Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA: Nebraska University Press, 2005, pp. 74 – 75. See also Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence, New York: Vintage Books, 1961; Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Unity, New York: Random House, 1967).
Besides restoring law and order, there were other reasons why Nyerere called an emergency meeting of the African foreign affairs ministers soon after the mutiny in Tanganyika was quelled:
“There are other factors behind Tanganyika's decision to ask for an All-African discussion of our current circumstances. For Africa, Tanganyika is a 'border-state.' By virtue of that fact the headquarters of the Liberation Committee of the OAU is situated in the capital. In addition we have many Freedom Fighters from Mozambique and Southern Africa organizing their affairs in this country....It is obvious to us that a state of affairs in Tanganyika which might interfere with the effectiveness, or even the psychological comfort, of these Freedom Movements is the concern of the whole of Africa. And although there is nothing to hide in Tanganyika, the situation is obviously exploitable. I am told that Portugal has already complained that Britain has not used the presence of her troops to tell them what is going on here.” – (Nyerere, quoted, ibid., p. 75).
Because of her strategic location, unflinching determination and commitment, Tanzania played an indispensable role in the liberation of the countries of southern Africa still under white minority rule, a role Nkrumah wanted Ghana to play under his leadership.
Three months and two weeks before Nkrumah was overthrown on 24 February 1966 in a military coup which Nyerere strongly condemned, the white minority regime in Southern Rhodesia declared independence on 11 November 1965. As Professor Ali Mazrui stated about the two leaders in relation to the liberation struggle and Africa's quest for genuine independence:
“"The torch of African radicalism, after the coup which overthrew Nkrumah in 1966, was in fact passed to Nyerere. The great voice of African self-reliance, and the most active African head of government in relation to liberation in Southern Africa from 1967 until the 1980s was in fact Julius Nyerere....He became the toughest spokesman against the British on the Rhodesian question. His country played a crucial role at the OAU Ministerial meeting at which it was decided to issue that final ultimatum to Britain's Prime Minister, Harold Wilson – 'Break Ian Smith or Africa will break with you.'" - (Ali A. Mazrui in his lecture "Nkrumahism and The Triple Heritage: Out of the Shadows," Third Lecture, Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lectures, University of Ghana, Legon, 2002).
Nyerere led the rest - including Nkrumah's Ghana - when Tanzania became the first country to break diplomatic relations with Britain because of her refusal and unwillingness to use force to oust Smith who described Nyerere as Africa's "evil genius.” As Trevor Grundy, a British journalist who worked at the Standard, later Daily News, in Dar es Salaam from 1968 to 1972 who was also critical of Nyerere, stated about him in his review of Thomas Molony's book Nyerere – The Early Years:
“He is...presented by Commonwealth groupies as the politician who did the most to mastermind the downfall of Portuguese and British/Afrikaner rule in Africa....He did so much to help liberate different parts of Africa from European rule.” – (T. Grundy, op. cit.).
He will always be remembered for that in spite of attempts by some of his detractors and rivals to belittle him and tarnish his image as a true Pan-Africanist and champion of African liberation and independence. It will be hard to find a leader of comparable stature among Africa's post-colonial leaders in terms of what he did and achieved and will remain a towering figure not just in African but in world history.
“The union between Ghana and Guinea...did not assume much vigour. But at least it was evidence enough of Nkrumah's readiness to approach the issue of African unity on a peacemeal basis. But by the time that he and other heads of African states assembled at Addis Ababa for the conference which gave birth to the Organization of African Unity, Nkrumah was no longer a believer in a step-by-step approach to unity. His book Africa Must Unite was released in time for the conference, and in it he made a vigorous plea for immediate continental union. He was isolated at the conference – but he gave nationalists everywhere a major hypothesis to argue about.
What was the essence of that hypothesis? Voltaire had once asserted that 'the best is the enemy of the good.' In his theory of African unification, Nkrumah reversed the order and seemed to be arguing that the good was the enemy of the best. He was saying that while modest functional co-operation might be good in itself, it would reduce the impetus for a more ambitious degree of integration. By the same token, movements for regional unification like the one which aspired to an East African federation would militate against the cause of a broader continental union. As Nkrumah put it:
'The idea of regional federations in Africa is fraught with many dangers. There is the danger of the development of regional loyalties, fighting against each other. In effect, regional federations are a form of balkanization on a grand scale.'
Ugandans came to use this as a rationale for their own growing opposition to the federal aim in East Africa. But Julius Nyerere was emphatic in his dismissal of Nkrumah's thesis. On 9 December 1963, Nyerere said:
'We must reject some of the pretensions that have been made from outside East Africa. We have already heard the curious argument that the continued 'balkanisation' of East Africa will somehow help African unity....These are attempts to rationalize absurdity.'
In this context of an East African federation in relation to the prospects of a continental government, Nyerere was probably right and Nkrumah wrong. 'We believe that the East African Federation can be a practical step towards the goal of Pan-African Unity,' Nyerere and his East African comrades asserted in their declaration to form such a federation in June 1963. And plausibility was on their side.
And yet Nkrumah's argument that narrower forms of union harm the cause of broader unions is not always implausible. Nyerere and his Government described Tanganyika's union with Zanzibar as a step towards the goal of an East African federation. In this latter sense Nyerere was wrong. The narrower unification of Tanganyika and Zanzibar has harmed the ambition of a broader unification of East Africa as a whole. Nothing could have dramatized more effectively the problems which would attend a prospective East African federation than the problems already met in relations between Zanzibar and Tanganyika. Even in external affairs it has not always been certain that the central government in Dar-es-Salaam could speak for the union as a whole. The prolonged argument as to which of the two Germanies was to have an Embassy in Tanzania was one case in point.
The moral of this whole experience is that there are occasions when a blind plunge into union is what is needed to make the union take place at all. The union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar did itself constitute such a sudden plunge. But once that took place, East Africa as a whole could no longer federate blindly – for the smaller union had opened the eyes of the region as a whole to the difficulties involved in such a venture. Nkrumah's hypothesis has therefore found some kind of evidence in East Africa's experience after all.” – (Ali A. Mazrui, Towards a Pax Africana, op. cit., pp. 70 – 71. Ali A. Mazrui, “See my article, 'Tanzania versus East Africa: A Case of Unwitting Federal Sabotage,' The Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, Vol. III, No. 3, November 1965).
Yet years later, Mazrui seemed to question and even refute his own thesis on the negative impact of Tanganyika's union with Zanzibar on prospects for an East African federation when he commended Nyerere for his Pan-African vision and commitment in uniting Tanganyika with Zanzibar, a union he had earlier described as “annexation” of Zanzibar by Tanganyika. The step-by-step approach to unity was the only practical one.
He also conceded that Nyerere had expressed displeasure with the article he wrote contending that Tanzania's policies amounted to sabotage against prospects for federation of the East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. As he stated in another article, “Nyerere and I,” which was a eulogy on Nyerere:
“Nyerere was particularly irritated when I published an article in the Journal of Commonwealth Studies in London accusing him of having unintentionally destroyed prospects for an East African Federation by his policies of socialism and economic nationalism. My article was titled 'Tanzania versus East Africa: A Case of Unwitting Federal Sabotage.' He conveyed his displeasure through the Principal of the University College of Dar es Salaam, Professor Pratt.” – (Ali. A. Mazrui “Nyerere and I,” October 1999).
It was a thesis whose validity had been refuted by historical experience in the East African context and Nyerere was vindicated, as Mazrui himself conceded years later.
Nyerere's approach to African unity had also found expression and justification on a continental scale by formation of regional communities to foster cooperation in economic and security matters short of federation.
Formation of such regional economic blocs, especially the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the revival and expansion of the East African Community (EAC) with prospects for federation, are clear vindication of Nyerere's gradualist approach to continental unity after he himself tried and failed to unite immediately the three East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika before independence so that they could emerge from colonial rule as a federation under one government; an approach similar to Nkrumah's in terms of immediate unification on continental basis except on a regional scale in Nyerere's case. As Nyerere stated in his speech at the OAU summit in Cairo in July 1964 in response to Nkrumah's denunciation of Nyerere's attempts to form an East African federation dismissing it as balkanisation of Africa on a grand scale and an imperialist plot conceived by “an imperialist agent,” Nyerere:
“What is needed...is no more preaching about unity, but more practising of unity.
I know the obstacles, I have never underestimated the obstacles to unity. Indeed, it was an acute awareness of these difficulties in the way to unity that made me suggest to my colleagues in East Africa that we should unite before independence.” – (Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Unity: A Selection from Writings and Speeches 1952 – 65, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 300).
Although Nyerere was willing to delay Tanganyika's independence so that the three East African countries could attain sovereign status as a single political entity under one federal government, his colleagues did not share his vision and were not as enthusiastic as he was about that prospect. Later, he said after he failed in his attempt to convince his colleagues in Kenya and Uganda to unite with Tanganyika, immediately, he “became wary" of Nkrumah's approach of immediate continental unification and reiterated that position not long before he died in an interview with Ikaweba Bunting of the New Internationalist:
“I tried to get East Africa to unite before independence. When we failed in this I was wary about Kwame’s continental approach. We corresponded profusely on this. Kwame said my idea of ‘regionalization’ was only balkanization on a larger scale. Later African historians will have to study our correspondence on this issue of uniting Africa.” – (Nyerere, in an interview with Ikaweba Bunting, “The heart of Africa,” New Internationalist, 1 January 1999).
In his speech at the OAU summit in Cairo, Nyerere raised a number of issues pertinent to continental unity: the nature of government proposed and advocated by Nkrumah under which African countries would remain sovereign yet be under a continental government; if such a union would be of functional utility when the countries would remain sovereign, hence not accountable to a higher authority in spite of Nkrumah's claim, and assertion, that they would be under a continental government; Nkrumah's dismissal of Nyerere's gradualist approach as an imperialist plot to undermine Africa; and whether or not all talk about immediate continental unification was merely for propaganda purposes and self-glorification by those who claimed they cared about African unity and therefore African countries had to unite now, without delay, and without going through a process of gradual integration and unification. As he stated:
“At one time I used to think that we all genuinely wanted a continental Government of Africa; that the major difference between us was how to bring it about. I am afraid I am beginning to doubt this earlier assessment of mine. I am becoming increasingly convinced that we are divided between those who genuinely want a continental Government and will patiently work for its realization, removing the obstacles, one by one; and those who simply use a phrase 'Union Government' for the purpose of propaganda.
Nothing could be more calculated to bring ridicule to the whole concept of a continental Government in Africa than this incessant and oft-repeated propaganda....
Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika declare that they want their countries to form a single state. They do this in the sincere belief that it would be in the best interests of their countries and a contribution to African Unity. But this declaration provokes the most incredible attack, and strenuous attempts are made to stop this development in unity. Why? Union Government; for an East African federation is considered to be contrary to the spirit of the Addis Ababa Charter. The curious argument is advanced that the more balkanized we remain the better for the achievement of a Union Government. And now, at this very rostrum, this curious argument in favor of the status quo is again advanced.
We are told that we should not appoint a permanent Administrative Secretary-General, nor select a place for a permanent headquarters of this Organization of African Unity. What is the reason for this? We have been told, in so many words...Union Government!
And to cap this whole series of absurdities; after all the wonderful arguments against unity in East Africa we are now told at this very rostrum that those who are ready should go ahead and unite....
I also want to suggest that there is a fundamental difference between the continental Government of Africa which we all genuinely want, and the 'Union Government' of propaganda. To have a Government of Africa is to have a single state of Africa, even if, necessarily, it is a Federal State. The essential attribute is a national state which has an international personality: that of sovereignty. This means that its component parts must surrender sovereignty to it, for it alone becomes a truly sovereign state.
But the 'Union Government,' we are told, does not require the surrender of sovereignty at all by the individual states. It is some curious animal to which our individual states do not surrender sovereignty, and yet somehow becomes the strong instrument which we require to fulfil the purposes of modern states....
I would like to make the position of my country very clear on this question of African Unity. We are committed to the achievement of a United Africa under a single continental Government. We have already surrendered our sovereignty in the name of greater unity. We shall be ready to surrender it again for a bigger unity.
We do not believe there is a choice between achieving African Unity step by step and achieving it in one act. The one act choice is not available to us except in some curious imagination.
It has not been given to us human mortals to simply will things into existence. Between our willing of an end and the achievement of that end there is a process. This process is sometimes long and sometimes short, and indeed the greater the objective the longer may be the process. But whether short or long it is a process and a process by definition is progress step by step. To say that the step by 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!
The only choice open to us is the choice of step by step, both territorially and functionally. If, for instance, the North African countries were ready to come together and form one single state, I for one would welcome that step to African Unity.
Each one of them would be the proper judge as to whether the time and conditions were right for such unity. If, on the other end, they felt that a political merger was not feasible yet, but they were ready to co-operate in other fields, again, I for one, would welcome such co-operation as a step towards eventual African Unity.
What is essential is that all these steps should take place within the spirit and under the umbrella of the Organization of African Unity. That's why my country would like to see this spirit and this umbrella of unity strengthened in every respect, including the appointment of a Secretary-General and permanent headquarters.
Mr Chairman, as already indicated at the beginning of my speech, I had no intention of making a long speech. I have already spent too much of your time on matters which are not particularly pleasant.” – (Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, op. cit., 300 – 303).
"Matters which are not particularly pleasant" had to do with the acrimonious exchange Mwalimu Nyerere had with Nkrumah when the Osagyefo, the Redeemer, called Nyerere "an imperialist agent" and attacked him for advocating formation of regional federations instead of supporting Nkrumah in his quest for immediate continental unification – a Utopian ideal then and now.
Nkrumah's opposition to formation of an East African or any other regional federation which was strongly supported by Nyerere did not resonate well among most African leaders, demonstrated by their resounding applause of Nyerere after he delivered his speech on 20 July 1964 in response to the Ghanaian president at the OAU summit in Cairo.
Sharply contrasted with that was the response Nkrumah got from his colleagues. They were silent throughout most of his speech on 19 July 1964 and gave him only a mild applause when he finished speaking, clearly showing they agreed with Nyerere on what he said on the imperative need for regional federations or unions – including economic integration – as a practical step towards continental unification; and on Nkrumah's denunciation of Mwalimu as “an imperialist agent.” As Nyerere said in his speech on 20 July 1964:
“The great Osagyefo then asks: 'What could be the result of entrusting the training of freedom fighters against imperialism into the hands of an imperialist agent?'...Secondly, if the reference to an imperialist agent refers to my country or any of its leaders, those who know my country, its leaders, and its people...” - then Nyerere went on to elaborate on his country's commitment to African liberation and unity and pointed out that Tanganyika had even taken practical steps in pursuit of unity – instead of just talking – when the country united with Zanzibar to form the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar. (See Africa Research Bulletin: Africa, Political, Social and Cultural Series, London: Africa Research Limited, 1964; and International Bulletin, Volume 2, 1964, p. 271).
Professor Carlos Moore, an Afro-Cuban scholar, in his book, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa, stated the following on the differences between Nkrumah and Nyerere:
“To Nkrumah, Nyerere was an English-speaking version of the Ivory Coast's Felix Houphouet-Boigny. Nyerere, in turn, suspected the Osagyefo of Napoleonic ambitions. The conflict never found a truly happy outcome, even when Nyerere began showing signs that he wished to leave the 'moderate' camp of African leaders.” – (Carlos Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa, Los Angeles, California, USA: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California Press, 1988, p. 200).
Nyerere was not the only African leader who thought Nkrumah had Napoleonic ambitions and even bluntly told him when they met in 1963: “We are not going to have an African Napoleon.” Others included Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Leopold Sedar Senghor. As Professor Larry Grubbs of Georgia State University stated in his book, Secular Missionaries: Americans and African Development in the 1960s:
“Senghor told Kennedy that the Ghanaian leader 'required the attentions of a psychiatrist' to cure him of his stupendous dreams of leading Africa.” – (L. Grubbs, Secular Missionaries: Americans and African Development in the 1960s, op. cit., p. 156).
But Nkrumah was wrong about Nyerere. Nyerere was not a Felix Houphouet-Boigny of Anglophone Africa. He was not subservient or servile to the former colonial power, Britain, the way Boigny was to France. And he was not an Anglophile; nor was he an Anglophobe.
Like Senghor, Boigny was Francophile. He was not only proud of his Francophilia; he even glorified the French who controlled his government – the entire civil service and cabinet – and said he was very proud of them for providing security for his country – the country's defence also was under absolute French control; this coming from an African leader, proud of his country being an appendage of the former colonial power. Boigny also was extremely hostile towards Sekou Toure, a fiercely independent African leader.
Nyerere never glorified the British or any European power and was fiercely independent and proud of his African identity. He never wanted Tanganyika – later Tanzania – or any other African country to be a satellite of Britain or any other European or imperial power the way Boigny, Senghor and other leaders in Francophone Africa did, with regard to France (with the exception of Sekou Toure and Modibo Keita) and even strongly condemned any attempts by European colonial rulers to turn Africans into carbon copies of Europeans. As he stated with regard to the policy of assimilation in the African Portuguese colonies:
“Africans are not European, could not become European, and do not want to become European. They demand instead the right to be Africans in Africa, and to determine their own cultural, economic, and political future.” – ( Julius K. Nyerere, “The Honour of Africa,” in Freedom and Socialism/Uhuru na Ujamaa: A Selection from Writings and Speeches 1965 - 1967, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Oxford University Press, 1968, pp. 123).
There were major differences between Nyerere and Boigny, contrary to what Nkrumah said about the two leaders as if they were political and ideological twins.
Differences between Nyerere and Houphouet Boigny were clearly evident even during the Nigerian civil war in spite of the fact that both countries ended up recognising Biafra as an independent state.
Boigny maintained that the war was Nigeria's internal affair and the conflict should be resolved by the Nigerians themselves. Nyerere disagreed and wanted the OAU to be actively involved in finding a solution to the conflict, a position shared by other African leaders including Kenneth Kaunda, Milton Obote and Jomo Kenyatta.
Nyerere and Kaunda even exerted pressure on the Nigerian federal military government to negotiate with the Biafrans without preconditions. They told the Nigerian leaders that they must negotiate with the secessionists under the auspices of the OAU and without preconditions (asking Biafrans to renounce secession first) – otherwise they would recognise Biafra as a sovereign entity.
Tanzania also clashed with Ivory Coast at the United Nations after Boigny authorised his security officials to arrest ten Guinean diplomats, including Guinea's minister of foreign affairs, at Abidjan airport in June 1967 in clear violation of conventions on diplomatic immunity prohibiting the arrest of diplomats.
The arrest of the diplomats was in retaliation for the seizure of an Ivorian trawler and its crew by Guinea in February 1967 when members of the crew were jailed for allegedly being involved in a plot to kidnap Dr. Nkrumah who had sought exile in Guinea after being overthrown the previous year. Tanzania sided with Guinea.
Nyerere also was not impressed by Boigny's Francophilia and made that clear when he visited Ivory Coast and other West African countries during that time. As Daniel C. Bach stated in his thesis to earn a PhD from the University of Oxford, entitled “Relations between Nigeria, France and Selected Francophone States in West Africa 1960 – 1975”:
“Houphouet Boigny's restrained attitude to the Nigerian civil war was maintained during Nyerere's visit to Ivory Coast at the end of February 1968. The war was a major issue in the discussions held by Nyerere during his successive visits to Ivory Coast, Liberia and Senegal....
Relations between Houphouet Boigny and Nyerere had been uneasy since the latter's arrival at Abidjan airport. Nyerere had been greeted by a guard of honour in uniform resembling that of the Garde Nationale in Paris. For this reason, at the banquet given in his honour he decided to reply in Swahili to Houphouet Boigny's speech, thereby underlining the non-African aspects of his welcome. Nyerere then visited Bouaké in the north of Ivory Coast and declared that he was now in Africa, after having spent a few days in France.” – (Daniel C. Bach, “Relations between Nigeria, France and Selected Francophone States in West Africa 1960 – 1975,” 1978, pp. 153, 154).
For Nkrumah to say or think Nyerere was a version of Houphouet-Boigny in English-speaking Africa was absolute rubbish and an insult to a proud African nationalist and Pan-Africanist.
And he grossly underestimated Nyerere. He thought Mwalimu was easy-going and he could intimidate him the way he tried to scare other African leaders – although not all; he couldn't, for example, intimidate Sekou Toure who was equally headstrong, probably even more than Nkrumah himself was. Nkrumah also underestimated Nyerere's capacity to respond to such insults, as he learned the hard way at the OAU summit in Cairo when Nyerere responded forcefully, and in very strong language, to Nkrumah's accusation when he called him “an imperialist agent.”
Even before then, Nyerere took a very strong stand against Nkrumah. In 1963, Nyerere publicly rebuked Nkrumah when he said Nkrumah's opposition to an East African federation and his argument, by implication, that it was better for Africa to remain divided and wait for immediate continental unification instead of forming regional federations “are attempts to rationalise absurdity.” Nyerere also took a very strong stand against Nkrumah when he wrote him a very angry letter in August 1963 reprimanding him for interfering in East Africa to block formation of an East African federation which Nkrumah denounced as an imperialist plot, with Nyerere being “an imperialist agent.”
That should have been enough for Nkrumah to know that Nyerere was not afraid of him – anymore than Sekou Toure was; the two leaders clashed when Nkrumah wanted to dominate the Ghana-Guinea union and, with Sekou Toure, proud and strong-willed as he was, that was not going to happen. And in East Africa, Nyerere was not going to allow Nkrumah to dominate and control him the way he controlled Obote in order to block formation of an East African federation.
Nyerere was the only East African leader who was most passionate about it, triggering an equally passionate response from Nkrumah, including sabotage of Nyerere's efforts to achieve regional integration on federal basis; it was one of Nyerere's most cherished goals.
Professor Mazrui said Nkrumah was wrong when he called Nyerere “an imperialist agent.” He went on to say Nyerere was the toughest leader – and the most persistent – among all African leaders in championing the cause of African liberation.
And he didn't just talk. He did what had to be done to achieve the goal, demonstrated by Tanzania's enormous contribution, financial and material, to the liberation struggle under his leadership; a contribution acknowledged by the freedom fighters themselves. So, it is not just Tanzanians who say that.
One of the leading freedom fighters who acknowledged Tanzania's great contribution to the African liberation struggle was President Robert Mugabe. At a meeting of the leaders of the member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in Harare, Zimbabwe, in April 2015, which he chaired, Mugabe lamented that Nyerere had not been accorded the respect, recognition and gratitude he deserved for the major and decisive role he played in the liberation of the countries of southern Africa and others elsewhere on the continent. As he stated:
“The OAU decided that the liberation of the whole of Africa would be done now through a body called the Liberation Committee to be hosted in Tanzania, Mwalimu's country. And all the freedom movements were harboured there; some of them divided, ZANU, ZAPU, we were two. ANC, PAC. SWAPO, SWANU. We were all there.
And the results, of course, were resounding. Africa became free....We have not done much by way of paying tribute to our forefathers. Yes, something has been done to Kwame Nkrumah at the AU, and recently the hall was named after Mandela.
But we forgot, perhaps because we are a new generation, a new generation of leaders, that the greatest burden of freeing Africa was borne by the one country Tanzania, and that one - I am saying the greatest, not that he was alone, Nyerere, Mwalimu.
No mention has been made, no symbol, to remember his part. And I say, no, we must do something, we will do something. Even if Zimbabwe was - we can't be that ungrateful. No. So I would want to say, help us, help me, my thought that we respect Mwalimu at the AU, somehow." - ("President Robert Mugabe Pays Tribute to Mwalimu," Harare, Zimbabwe, April 2015).
Even in South Africa where Nyerere's role in the liberation struggle is acknowledged, there seems to be some reluctance to accord him full recognition as a liberation icon. Hence the unwillingness, or refusal, by the ANC leadership to erect a monument in his honour.
This ingratitude to Mwalimu Nyerere has not gone unnoticed by many Africans. As one Nigerian scholar, Said Adejumobi, who was at the University of Cape Town – he later became a professor – stated:
“I recall that when Julius Nyerere died (I was in South Africa then), he was depicted in the media in a very negative sense. Headlines like the 'tyrant is gone' replete media stories on him. This is highly unfortunate. Julius Nyerere was one of the most steadfast leaders on South Africa's liberation struggle – committed his country's scarce resources, diplomatic strength and military support for the ANC. Nyerere was not to be celebrated but vilified. This is one of the gains of self-denial.” – (Said Adejumobi, “Shame on South Africa!: Black South Africans are Suffering from Colonial Mentality,” The New Black Magazine, 28 May 2008, and in The Guardian).
And as Jenerali Ulimwengu stated in his article on Nelson Mandela's first visit to Tanganyika in January 1962, and on the liberation struggle in South Africa and Tanzania's role in helping the freedom fighters to abolish the abominable institution of apartheid, "Tanzania Visit: First Glimpse of Independent Country, Catalysed His Struggle," in The East African, 12 July 2013:
"To the best of my knowledge, at least, there is no landmark anywhere in South Africa commemorating Nyerere’s contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle."
That is not the case in the other countries of southern Africa which were also helped by Tanzania in their struggle to end white minority rule. Nyerere has been honoured there. There are streets named after him. His memory has also been enshrined in other ways in those countries.
On another occasion, President Mugabe paid tribute to Nyerere at the launch of a book, Julius Nyerere: Asante Sana, Thank You Mwalimu, for the major role Mwalimu played in the liberation struggle. As he stated, the liberation of the countries of southern Africa was planned in Dar es Salaam under the leadership of President Nyerere. He went on to say:
"When we gained our independence in Mozambique and Angola in 1975, in Zimbabwe in 1980, Namibia in 1990, and a new democratic dispensation, in South Africa in 1994, we said – Asante sana, Thank you, Mwalimu....
Mwalimu Nyerere was honoured this year (2015) by the African Union with the naming of the AU Peace and Security headquarters after him....
The time is now to recognise the role played by Julius Nyerere in the political liberation of Africa, and to enshrine his legacy to reside with the present and future generation of Africans." - (Robert Gabriel Mugabe, foreword to Julius Nyerere: Asante sana, Thank You, Mwalimu, Harare, Zimbabwe, 2015).
Remembering those days, Philip Ochieng, who worked at the Daily News in Dar es Salaam when the liberation struggle was most intense, stated:
"Under Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Dar es Salaam served as the external headquarters of practically every one of the nationalist movements fighting to bring down Europe's racially conceited tyrannies all over our continent - all the way from the borders of Egypt in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, including Kenya (Ochieng's home country).
That was how I first met Robert (Bob) Mugabe, a great nationalist, at that time considered as the most redoubtable of all of Southern Africa's campaigners for indigenous self-rule.
For, in the Tanzanian capital, Robert Mugabe was seen then as the topmost and most cherished among Africa's nationalist leaders fighting to bring down European tyranny all over our vast continent, especially in that Southern African colony, and throughout the world....
Of all the nationalists fighting to bring down Britain's colonial high-handedness and arrogance, Robert Mugabe was at one time one of Africa's most cherished darlings.
When I worked in Dar es Salaam, I often met and deeply admired the person whom fellow nationalists in exile called 'Dear Bob.'
Time was indeed when I wholeheartedly recommended 'Bob' as the chief spokesman for our continent and for humanity's downtrodden classes all over the world, including even in that same Western Europe which had, for the nonce, assumed the role of model of what was alleged to be 'democracy'....
When I first met face to face and interviewed what was then our 'dear Bob' in an hotel room in Dar es Salaam at some point in the early 1970s, he proved overwhelmingly charming, courteous, captivating in manner, overpowering in intellect and overwhelmingly knowledgeable of history and the modern human world.
Of all the nationalists seeking to defeat Caucasian racist tyranny and conceit in Africa, especially in Namibia and Southern Rhodesia, Robert Mugabe remained what William Shakespeare - the great bard of England's own intellectual and cultural celebration - would have embraced in poetry and drama as 'the nonpareil.'” – ((Philip Ochieng, "The Mugabe We All Adored in Dar Turned Out an Embarrassment," Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, 25 November 2017).
At least one southern African leader, Mugabe, had the decency to say Mwalimu Nyerere had not been accorded the status he deserved as an icon of liberation and for the great role he played in helping liberate the countries in the region and as “the most successful leader that Africa has ever produced since the European colonial regime collapsed 50 years ago," as Philip Ochieng put it in his article, "Africa's Greatest Leader," in The East African, Nairobi, 19 October 1999.
When Nyerere was president and even after he stepped down, he spoke for Africa as whole more than any other African leader did. His colleagues even nicknamed him "OAU's minister of foreign affairs." His commitment to the liberation of Africa and continental unity was unquestionable, despite Nkrumah's doubts about Nyerere's credentials as a true African nationalist and Pan-Africanist; doubts which fuelled his dislike for regional federations supposedly because they were imperialist designs.
Nkrumah's opposition to the East African federation - ostensibly for a greater cause of continental unity - became a personal crusade against Nyerere, with the Osagyefo resolutely determined to block Mwalimu from achieving his goal.
Ghana's high commissioner to Uganda, Bediako Poku who knew Nkrumah very well and once served as head and secretary-general of the ruling Convention People's Party (CPP) and was Ghana's ambassador to China when Nkrumah was overthrown, attributed Nkrumah's opposition to Nyerere's attempt to form an East African federation, to jealousy. Nkrumah feared that Nyerere would succeed in forming an East African federation which would enhance his position as a continental leader, although there may have been political and ideological reasons as well, behind Nkrumah's opposition to regional federations, since he was a fervent advocate of immediate continental unification, at least rhetorically, more ardent than most African leaders were. But he was concerned about Nyerere or any other leader who would eclipse or overshadow him in the quest for continental unity on any scale even if regional. He even used agents to infiltrate the Tanzanian government in order to undermine Nyerere. As Professor Willard Scott Thompson stated in his book, Ghana's Foreign Policy:
“Ghana's real battle in 1963 – 1964 was against the East African Federation. Nkrumah's own dislike of regional links was of long-standing, but his ideas had only crystallized as a result of his 1961 trip to the Soviet Union. In an important address shortly thereafter he had stressed that local associations, regional commonwealths, and territorial groupings, as opposed to union government, would be 'just another form of balkanisation.' His policy was soon implemented, at the 1962 PAFMESCA conference in Addis Ababa, where a delegation of Ghanaian militants attempted to weaken that organization by claiming supremacy for the virtually defunct, Accra-based All African People's conference.
By the time of the founding of the OAU, the proposed East African Federation offered the most exciting prospects of unity anywhere on the continent. On June 5, 1963, President Nyerere and Prime Ministers Kenyatta and Obote signed a declaration of intent which seemed to point directly to early federation. Throughout the summer, the attitude of Prime Minister Obote and Ugandan officials progressively cooled, from fear that Uganda would gain least in such a union. Moreover, 'three was an awkward number,' as a Tanganyikan minister described the situation. Nkrumah had worked hard at Addis Ababa in May to convince Obote that such a federation would be an obstacle to African unity.” – (Willard Scott Thompson, Ghana's Foreign Policy, op. cit., pp. 330 – 331).
Professor Thompson went to state:
“David Bosumptwi-Sam, Ghana's high commissioner in Kampala, was a personal friend of Obote, and labored throughout the summer to reinforce Ghanaian-Ugandan links. The high commission in Kampala was reinforced with an additional (and agile) diplomat, George Nipah, transferred from Dar, and by several executive officers from Flagstaff House and the Bureau of African Affairs.
Nkrumah began writing lengthy letters to the leaders involved, stating his fear that federation would be a tool of British imperialism, like the French-linked associations in West Africa, and a monumental impediment to continental unity. Nyerere's reaction can be gauged by a cable from (Alex) Quaison-Sackey to Nkrumah:
'I have had long discussions with President Nyerere today at his request [while Nyerere was on a visit to the U.S., U.K., Canada, Algeria, and Guinea] regarding Osagyefo's letter which President Nyerere showed me. Nyerere was openly distressed by the tone of the letter and feels that he has been misunderstood. He believes that the formation of one federal state in East Africa within the context of African Unity will further the cause of Union of African States which, as Osagyefo knows, is dear to his heart.'
More serious efforts than letter writing were undertaken, however. Barden (A.K. Barden, the director of the Bureau of African Affairs in Accra, a Nkrumah loyalist) was introducing agents who operated, however ineptly, throughout East Africa in attempts to penetrate Government House in Dar es Salaam, and to bribe organizations in Uganda that could be calculated to oppose federation. Some Ghanaian agents were recruited under a false flag.
Ghanaian diplomacy in East Africa showed a 'a new cult of bad manners' – as Gordon Craig described Italian diplomacy under Mussolini. When Joseph Murumbi, of Kenya, suggested publicly that Tanganyika and Kenya alone might form a federation, attacking Nkrumah (by implication) for good measure, Bosumptwi-Sam replied through an advertisement in the Uganda Argus:
'Judging from Murumbi's career which is marked by opportunism, it is not surprising that he should have distorted and entirely perverted evaluation of African leaders of international stature and repute like Osagyefo.
By playing to the gallery of the imperialists...Mr. Murumbi has proved himself an adroit puppet. His vituperations have revealed in time his neo-colonialist stand....'
Murumbi had merely noted that Nkrumah had once advocated West African Federation, and Sam quite incorrectly denied that this was ever the case. This statement was not out of line with the general character of Sam's diplomacy.” – (Ibid., pp. 331 – 332).
There were strong personal reasons which may help to explain why Nkrumah was so opposed to formation of an East African federation. Pan-Africanist considerations may have played a secondary role, if at all, in this case. That was mainly because Nkrumah was frustrated by his nemesis, Nyerere, in his wild ventures pursued under the rubric of Pan-African commitment. As Professor Thompson stated:
“Nkrumah's attitude was a result of several factors. Until 1960 he had been a popular symbol of African liberation in East Africa; he had aided political movements there, and cultivated the leaders. It was difficult for him to accept the new situation, in which his advice and help were neither needed nor wanted. Bediako Poku, who succeeded Sam in Kampala, thought 'jealousy' explained the better part of Nkrumah's attitude, and so did much of the rest of the world. The fear that from East Africa would emerge a more powerful leader than himself was a factor in his policy.” – (Ibid., pp. 332 – 333).
That leader was Nyerere. The mere thought that Nyerere might climb that high terrified Nkrumah even though it cannot be denied that he was also concerned about Africa's well-being in spite of his weaknesses as a mere mortal. But he was worried Nyerere's achievements would surpass his. Even his envoys, following in his footsteps, made embarrassing mistakes which amounted to insults to their hosts:
“After the East African mutinies of January 1964 – which accentuated Nkrumah's sense of urgency (for an African High Command, an idea Nyerere supported since 1960 during the Congo crisis as shown in previous posts on this thread) – Ghana's envoy in Dar es Salaam, a former trade unionist, translated Nkrumah's frustrations into more bad-mannered diplomacy. Nyerere later described it this way:
'We experienced army mutinies in East Africa and had to go through the humiliation of asking for assistance from a former colonial power. But in my country...the Ambassador of a brotherly African State celebrated and rejoiced, and I am forced to request that he be removed...And what was the reason for this rejoicing at the humiliation of a fellow African country? Union government.'” – (Ibid., p. 338).
The quotation above comes from Nyerere's speech at the OAU summit in Cairo in July 1964 in which he responded to Nkrumah's attacks on him, quoted in BBC, IV, No. 1611, 22 July 1964, and cited by Professor Willard Scott Thompson in his book, Ghana's Foreign Policy, 1957 – 1966: Diplomacy Ideology, and the New State, Princeton University Press, 1969, p. 338).
The speech was reprinted in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity: A Selection from Writings and Speeches 1952 – 65, pp. 300 – 304, but not in its entirety. Substantial parts of the speech, which were a direct response to Nkrumah and expressed in very strong language by Nyerere, were omitted. But the speech was fully covered by the media including BBC, The New York Times, The Observer, London, and other outlets.
Professor Thompson went on to state in his book:
“Nkrumah saw Nyerere's difficulties as an opportunity to underline the fragility of separately constituted African states or federations. The Ghanaian Times editorialized that 'the concept of regional federation as a substitute for continental African unity has been largely destroyed by the sequence of events in East Africa.'
Nyerere, on the other hand, saw the occasion as an opportunity to strengthen African solidarity, by asking that 'the problems arising from the mutiny...be dealt with in a way which will foster, and not harm, the common objectives of African Unity.'
He requested an extraordinary foreign ministers' session in Dar es Salaam. Premiers Obote and Kenyatta did not join him in making the request, though their armies had also experienced mutinies.
Botsio's (Ghanaian Foreign Affairs Minister Kojo Botsio's) instructions were to press for a high command, and he and his deputy, the Rev. Stephan Dzirasa, both claim that in a private meeting with Nyerere they were assured that this would not be resented. Botsio and Nyerere were friends, and Nyerere would have known that Botsio was bound by instructions. Nyerere's opening words to the conference make clear, however, that he drew a distinction between Botsio's personal position and the Ghanaian delegation's brief from Nkrumah: 'The presence of British troops in Tanganyika is a fact which is too easily exploited by those who wish to divide Africa or to dominate Africa (Applause). Already it is clear that there are some people who will seize upon this opportunity to play upon natural fears of neo-colonialism in the hope of sowing seeds of suspicion between the different African States. For this reason alone the meeting in Dar es Salaam would have been worthwhile.” – (Ibid., pp. 338 – 339).
The meeting of the African ministers of foreign affairs was held in Dar es Salaam from 12 to 15 February 1964. What was even more disturbing was that the army mutinies in the three East African countries – Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika – occurred not long after the countries won independence from the same colonial power, Britain. Around the same time, military coups took place in Congo-Brazzaville and Dahomey. And attempts were made to overthrow governments in Senegal and Ivory Coast. As Professor Immanuel Wallerstein stated in his book, Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity:
“East Africa was as volatile as French Africa. On January 12, 1964, the Sultan of newly independent Zanzibar was overthrown in a profound social revolution. There were immediate reverberations throughout East Africa. On January 20 an army mutiny broke out in Tanganyika, but with none of the social content of the Zanzibari revolution. Nonetheless the government's existence was seriously menaced. On January 23 there were similar army mutinies in Uganda and Kenya. On January 24 the Tanganyika government, followed by Uganda and Kenya, requested British troops to help restore order. On January 28 the government of Tanganyika requested an extraordinary session of the Council of Ministers of the OAU to consider 'the grave situation arising from many revolts...in East Africa'....
The Council endorsed 'the decision of the Government of Tanganyika to have the British troops withdrawn and replaced by Africans.' On March 20, 1964, the Nigerian government sent a battalion to Tanganyika and the British troops left immediately thereafter....
Some suggested a permanent African military force for use in such situations. One of those strongly opposed to this suggestion was the Foreign Minister of Congo (B – Brazzaville), Charles Ganao, who said: 'We Congolese are especially unfavorable to it since if this force had existed last August, Fulbert Youlou could have appealed for it and thus have entrenched his dictatorship.'” – (Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA: Nebraska University Press, 2005, pp. 74 – 75. See also Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence, New York: Vintage Books, 1961; Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Unity, New York: Random House, 1967).
Besides restoring law and order, there were other reasons why Nyerere called an emergency meeting of the African foreign affairs ministers soon after the mutiny in Tanganyika was quelled:
“There are other factors behind Tanganyika's decision to ask for an All-African discussion of our current circumstances. For Africa, Tanganyika is a 'border-state.' By virtue of that fact the headquarters of the Liberation Committee of the OAU is situated in the capital. In addition we have many Freedom Fighters from Mozambique and Southern Africa organizing their affairs in this country....It is obvious to us that a state of affairs in Tanganyika which might interfere with the effectiveness, or even the psychological comfort, of these Freedom Movements is the concern of the whole of Africa. And although there is nothing to hide in Tanganyika, the situation is obviously exploitable. I am told that Portugal has already complained that Britain has not used the presence of her troops to tell them what is going on here.” – (Nyerere, quoted, ibid., p. 75).
Because of her strategic location, unflinching determination and commitment, Tanzania played an indispensable role in the liberation of the countries of southern Africa still under white minority rule, a role Nkrumah wanted Ghana to play under his leadership.
Three months and two weeks before Nkrumah was overthrown on 24 February 1966 in a military coup which Nyerere strongly condemned, the white minority regime in Southern Rhodesia declared independence on 11 November 1965. As Professor Ali Mazrui stated about the two leaders in relation to the liberation struggle and Africa's quest for genuine independence:
“"The torch of African radicalism, after the coup which overthrew Nkrumah in 1966, was in fact passed to Nyerere. The great voice of African self-reliance, and the most active African head of government in relation to liberation in Southern Africa from 1967 until the 1980s was in fact Julius Nyerere....He became the toughest spokesman against the British on the Rhodesian question. His country played a crucial role at the OAU Ministerial meeting at which it was decided to issue that final ultimatum to Britain's Prime Minister, Harold Wilson – 'Break Ian Smith or Africa will break with you.'" - (Ali A. Mazrui in his lecture "Nkrumahism and The Triple Heritage: Out of the Shadows," Third Lecture, Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lectures, University of Ghana, Legon, 2002).
Nyerere led the rest - including Nkrumah's Ghana - when Tanzania became the first country to break diplomatic relations with Britain because of her refusal and unwillingness to use force to oust Smith who described Nyerere as Africa's "evil genius.” As Trevor Grundy, a British journalist who worked at the Standard, later Daily News, in Dar es Salaam from 1968 to 1972 who was also critical of Nyerere, stated about him in his review of Thomas Molony's book Nyerere – The Early Years:
“He is...presented by Commonwealth groupies as the politician who did the most to mastermind the downfall of Portuguese and British/Afrikaner rule in Africa....He did so much to help liberate different parts of Africa from European rule.” – (T. Grundy, op. cit.).
He will always be remembered for that in spite of attempts by some of his detractors and rivals to belittle him and tarnish his image as a true Pan-Africanist and champion of African liberation and independence. It will be hard to find a leader of comparable stature among Africa's post-colonial leaders in terms of what he did and achieved and will remain a towering figure not just in African but in world history.
Nkrumah's contribution to African political thought should be viewed in terms of ideas propagated by this great African, not in terms of his role as an original thinker.
His most important books in terms of political thought which earned him a reputation as a major political thinker were Africa Must Unite, published to coincide with the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in May 1963 - he even sent copies of the book to other African leaders before the meeting hoping to convince them to agree at the conference on the imperative need for immediate continental unification; Consciencism, published in April 1964, three months before the first OAU summit held in Cairo, Egypt, in July; and Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, published in October 1965 in the same month the second OAU summit was held in Accra under his chairmanship.
Unfortunately, they were not entirely his works. He earned his reputation as a major political thinker from the works of others. Africa Must Unite was no more than an elaboration of George Padmore's ideas on continental unity, a work Nkrumah dedicated to him obviously in partial acknowledgement of his indebtedness to him; it was preceded by Padmore's seminal and highly influential work, Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa first published in 1956.
Consciencism was written by Nkrumah's court philosopher, Dr. Willie Abraham, one of Africa's most prominent intellectuals in the twentieth century and beyond. And Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism was an intellectual product of American and British Marxists, black and white, including some African American Pan-Africanists such as Shirley Graham Du Bois who later became a citizen of Tanzania.
But Nkrumah still deserves credit for propagating those ideas even if they were not his in terms of original conception. And they enhanced his stature as a relentless anti-imperialist and Pan-Africanist even if a flawed one. He was not new to the struggle for African freedom and independence and was, for a long time, an anti-imperialist and a Pan-Africanist of immense stature even before the books were written.
Nyerere was just as relentless, as a formidable anti-imperialist and Pan-Africanist, but also as an original thinker.
His most important books in terms of political thought which earned him a reputation as a major political thinker were Africa Must Unite, published to coincide with the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in May 1963 - he even sent copies of the book to other African leaders before the meeting hoping to convince them to agree at the conference on the imperative need for immediate continental unification; Consciencism, published in April 1964, three months before the first OAU summit held in Cairo, Egypt, in July; and Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, published in October 1965 in the same month the second OAU summit was held in Accra under his chairmanship.
Unfortunately, they were not entirely his works. He earned his reputation as a major political thinker from the works of others. Africa Must Unite was no more than an elaboration of George Padmore's ideas on continental unity, a work Nkrumah dedicated to him obviously in partial acknowledgement of his indebtedness to him; it was preceded by Padmore's seminal and highly influential work, Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa first published in 1956.
Consciencism was written by Nkrumah's court philosopher, Dr. Willie Abraham, one of Africa's most prominent intellectuals in the twentieth century and beyond. And Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism was an intellectual product of American and British Marxists, black and white, including some African American Pan-Africanists such as Shirley Graham Du Bois who later became a citizen of Tanzania.
But Nkrumah still deserves credit for propagating those ideas even if they were not his in terms of original conception. And they enhanced his stature as a relentless anti-imperialist and Pan-Africanist even if a flawed one. He was not new to the struggle for African freedom and independence and was, for a long time, an anti-imperialist and a Pan-Africanist of immense stature even before the books were written.
Nyerere was just as relentless, as a formidable anti-imperialist and Pan-Africanist, but also as an original thinker.
Festo Ndibanje
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- Jun 25, 2019
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saf
Tanzania under Mwalimu Nyerere nurtured one of the leading scholars of the twentieth century, Walter Rodney. It was Tanzania which provided the political, social and cultural context and environment in which he crystallised his ideas. Had he gone to Ghana, which was his first choice - he changed his mind after Nkrumah was overthrown and came to Tanzania, instead - it is possible he could have written an entirely different book, unlike How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. But it is also possible he could have written one similar to that, had he pursued the same thesis, because of the similarities in the underdeveloped nature of both countries and shared ideological orientation as "socialist" states committed to the liberation of Africa.
It was at the University of Dar es Salaam where Walter Rodney reached his intellectual maturity and became one of the world's leading scholars in his field after he went to teach there as a young academic who had just earned his doctorate from the University of London. It was also when he was at “the Hill” that he wrote his widely acclaimed work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and was engaged in robust debate on a wide range of issues including the country's socialist policies in an environment of academic freedom that was rare on the African continent. That was mainly because the president of Tanzania himself was a titan among intellectuals who encouraged such freedom critical to free flow of ideas. He cherished intellectual exchange. He was not only a man of high intellectual calibre but also a fountain of ideas and even had lively exchanges with students and faculty members at the University of Dar es Salaam.
The University of Dar es Salaam was not an ideological institute, as some of Nyerere's critics disparagingly claimed or implied it was, simply because it had a significant although small number of faculty members - some of them internationally renowned - with socialist leanings, including Walter Rodney who was a Marxist, in a country committed to socialist transformation of society by implementing its socialist blueprint, the Arusha Declaration. The critics ignored the fact that this venerable academic institution, with an international reputation for academic excellence especially in the sixties and seventies, had a broad spectrum of academics including staunch capitalists such as Stephen Andrew Lucas, an American lecturer in the department of sociology for seven years, who was also a CIA agent.
Rodney himself was one of the luminaries in academia - among intellectual activists - whose work was a shining example of committed scholarship, taking new and innovative approaches in research and to the study of underdevelopment and Africa's predicament in an international system fashioned to benefit industrialised nations. African American civil rights activist Angela Davis, who later became a renowned academic, stated the following in her Foreword to another edition of Rodney's seminal work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 2018:
“When Walter Rodney was assassinated in 1980 at the young age of thirty-eight, he had already accomplished what few scholars achieve during careers that extend considerably longer than his. The field of African history would never be the same after the publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. At the same time, this meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has radicalized approaches to anti-racist activism throughout the world....
In refuting the argument that Africa's subordination to Europe emanated from a natural propensity toward stagnation, Rodney also repudiates the ideological assumption that external intervention alone would be capable of provoking progress on the continent....In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney painstakingly argues that imperialism and the various processes that bolstered colonialism created impenetrable structural blockades to economic, and thus also, political and social progress on the continent. At the same time his argument is not meant to absolve Africans of the 'ultimate responsibility for development.'
I feel extremely privileged to have been able to meet Walter Rodney during my first trip to the African continent in 1973. I mention this visit to Dar es Salaam because it took place shortly after the original publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and because I witnessed firsthand for a brief period of time the revolutionary urgency generated within the scholarly and activist circles surrounding him. Not only did I have the opportunity to witness lectures and discussions he organized at the University of Dar es Salaam on the relation between African Liberation and global contestations to capitalism, but I also visited the training camps of the MPLA, where I met Agostinho Neto and the military cadre fighting the Portuguese Army.
Walter Rodney's analyses reflected both a sober, well-reasoned historical investigation, shaped by Marxist categories and critiques, and a deep sense of the historical conjecture defined by global revolutionary upheavals, especially by African Liberation struggles at that time....
He was assassinated because he believed in the real possibility of radical political change, including in Guyana, his natal land.” – (Angela Y. Davis, in her Foreword to How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, New York: Verso, imprint of New Left Books, 2018, pp. ix, x – xi).
Had he not returned to Guyana, he probably would have lived longer, much longer, than he did. He could even have applied for Tanzanian citizenship but decided not to; he was determined to return to the land of his birth and explained why:
“One must know that society, that environment. One must have a series of responses and reflexes that come from having lived a given experience. One must be able to share a joke because of a nuance in language and pronunciation. One must be able to go to the marketplace in the case of Tanzania, and bargain in the Swahili manner without being perceived as an outsider. Now, when one thinks of all of these factors it's virtually a lifetime task to master a language and then to master the higher level of perception which normally goes into a culture. And I didn't believe that I could afford that. I believed that there is another culture from which I derived into which I could project myself with greater ease.
As long as I remained in Tanzania as a non-Tanzanian, as a marginal participant in the political culture, then it followed that I couldn't change my role. I would just have to remain at the university. I was in a fixed political role and my own feeling was that to break beyond those boundaries was necessary to return once more to the Caribbean. That is the background that explains where I'm at in the Caribbean and in Guyana today.” – (Walter Rodney, Institute of the Black World, 42, quoted by Immanuel Harisch, “Walter Rodney's Dar es Salaam Years, 1966 – 1974: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Tanzania's ujamaa, and Student Radicalism at 'the Hill'”, op. cit., p. 17).
His comrade, Issa Shivji, provided another perspective on Rodney's decision to return to Guyana although his explanation did not contradict Rodney's. As Shivji stated:
“This idea that Rodney left Dar es Salaam because of, or just ahead of, an order to leave—I do not think it’s true. If it were true, he would have definitely told us.
Don’t forget, Rodney left early and went to Jamaica. From Jamaica he was deported. That’s where he wrote his very famous pamphlet Groundings with My Brothers. After the riots in Jamaica, he came back to Dar es Salaam. Then he left in 1974.
Now, when he was about to leave, I remember specifically a personal conversation. We were driving from the campus, and at the time he and Pat were preparing to leave for Guyana. I told Walter, I said, 'Walter, why do you have to go? Look, stay here. You can easily try and get your citizenship and continue the struggle. You don’t have to go back.' He said, 'No, comrade. I can make my contribution here but I will not be able ever to grasp the idiom of the people. I will not be able to connect easily. I have to go back to the people I know and who know me.' I heeded that. That was his position and he left.
Then during the Zimbabwe independence celebration—he had returned to Guyana and formed the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) and we closely followed it. On his way to Zimbabwe, and this was a time when the movement was in trouble, he passed through and stayed with one of our comrades here. This comrade told him, 'Walter stay, don’t go back. Guyana is dangerous.' There was a case against him in court. Walter said, 'No, I cannot just run away. I have to go back.' So it is certainly not true that he was pushed out.
It’s more believable that he was pulled because he felt he could make his contribution there, in Guyana. And he did, in my view. One can make critical assessments in hindsight, but one of the things we appreciated, and came to learn from, the Party, the WPA, was how it managed to bring together Indian and African youth. This was a real breakthrough. Of course, there were other problems.
So my own view is that Walter was not forced out of Tanzania. It could not be true. If so, we would have known.” – (Issa Shivji, “Walter Rodney in Tanzania: A Tribute,” Pambazuka News, June 27, 2013; Issa G. Shivji, “Remembering Walter Rodney,” Monthly Review, December 1, 2012).
It was at the University of Dar es Salaam where Walter Rodney reached his intellectual maturity and became one of the world's leading scholars in his field after he went to teach there as a young academic who had just earned his doctorate from the University of London. It was also when he was at “the Hill” that he wrote his widely acclaimed work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and was engaged in robust debate on a wide range of issues including the country's socialist policies in an environment of academic freedom that was rare on the African continent. That was mainly because the president of Tanzania himself was a titan among intellectuals who encouraged such freedom critical to free flow of ideas. He cherished intellectual exchange. He was not only a man of high intellectual calibre but also a fountain of ideas and even had lively exchanges with students and faculty members at the University of Dar es Salaam.
The University of Dar es Salaam was not an ideological institute, as some of Nyerere's critics disparagingly claimed or implied it was, simply because it had a significant although small number of faculty members - some of them internationally renowned - with socialist leanings, including Walter Rodney who was a Marxist, in a country committed to socialist transformation of society by implementing its socialist blueprint, the Arusha Declaration. The critics ignored the fact that this venerable academic institution, with an international reputation for academic excellence especially in the sixties and seventies, had a broad spectrum of academics including staunch capitalists such as Stephen Andrew Lucas, an American lecturer in the department of sociology for seven years, who was also a CIA agent.
Rodney himself was one of the luminaries in academia - among intellectual activists - whose work was a shining example of committed scholarship, taking new and innovative approaches in research and to the study of underdevelopment and Africa's predicament in an international system fashioned to benefit industrialised nations. African American civil rights activist Angela Davis, who later became a renowned academic, stated the following in her Foreword to another edition of Rodney's seminal work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 2018:
“When Walter Rodney was assassinated in 1980 at the young age of thirty-eight, he had already accomplished what few scholars achieve during careers that extend considerably longer than his. The field of African history would never be the same after the publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. At the same time, this meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has radicalized approaches to anti-racist activism throughout the world....
In refuting the argument that Africa's subordination to Europe emanated from a natural propensity toward stagnation, Rodney also repudiates the ideological assumption that external intervention alone would be capable of provoking progress on the continent....In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney painstakingly argues that imperialism and the various processes that bolstered colonialism created impenetrable structural blockades to economic, and thus also, political and social progress on the continent. At the same time his argument is not meant to absolve Africans of the 'ultimate responsibility for development.'
I feel extremely privileged to have been able to meet Walter Rodney during my first trip to the African continent in 1973. I mention this visit to Dar es Salaam because it took place shortly after the original publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and because I witnessed firsthand for a brief period of time the revolutionary urgency generated within the scholarly and activist circles surrounding him. Not only did I have the opportunity to witness lectures and discussions he organized at the University of Dar es Salaam on the relation between African Liberation and global contestations to capitalism, but I also visited the training camps of the MPLA, where I met Agostinho Neto and the military cadre fighting the Portuguese Army.
Walter Rodney's analyses reflected both a sober, well-reasoned historical investigation, shaped by Marxist categories and critiques, and a deep sense of the historical conjecture defined by global revolutionary upheavals, especially by African Liberation struggles at that time....
He was assassinated because he believed in the real possibility of radical political change, including in Guyana, his natal land.” – (Angela Y. Davis, in her Foreword to How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, New York: Verso, imprint of New Left Books, 2018, pp. ix, x – xi).
Had he not returned to Guyana, he probably would have lived longer, much longer, than he did. He could even have applied for Tanzanian citizenship but decided not to; he was determined to return to the land of his birth and explained why:
“One must know that society, that environment. One must have a series of responses and reflexes that come from having lived a given experience. One must be able to share a joke because of a nuance in language and pronunciation. One must be able to go to the marketplace in the case of Tanzania, and bargain in the Swahili manner without being perceived as an outsider. Now, when one thinks of all of these factors it's virtually a lifetime task to master a language and then to master the higher level of perception which normally goes into a culture. And I didn't believe that I could afford that. I believed that there is another culture from which I derived into which I could project myself with greater ease.
As long as I remained in Tanzania as a non-Tanzanian, as a marginal participant in the political culture, then it followed that I couldn't change my role. I would just have to remain at the university. I was in a fixed political role and my own feeling was that to break beyond those boundaries was necessary to return once more to the Caribbean. That is the background that explains where I'm at in the Caribbean and in Guyana today.” – (Walter Rodney, Institute of the Black World, 42, quoted by Immanuel Harisch, “Walter Rodney's Dar es Salaam Years, 1966 – 1974: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Tanzania's ujamaa, and Student Radicalism at 'the Hill'”, op. cit., p. 17).
His comrade, Issa Shivji, provided another perspective on Rodney's decision to return to Guyana although his explanation did not contradict Rodney's. As Shivji stated:
“This idea that Rodney left Dar es Salaam because of, or just ahead of, an order to leave—I do not think it’s true. If it were true, he would have definitely told us.
Don’t forget, Rodney left early and went to Jamaica. From Jamaica he was deported. That’s where he wrote his very famous pamphlet Groundings with My Brothers. After the riots in Jamaica, he came back to Dar es Salaam. Then he left in 1974.
Now, when he was about to leave, I remember specifically a personal conversation. We were driving from the campus, and at the time he and Pat were preparing to leave for Guyana. I told Walter, I said, 'Walter, why do you have to go? Look, stay here. You can easily try and get your citizenship and continue the struggle. You don’t have to go back.' He said, 'No, comrade. I can make my contribution here but I will not be able ever to grasp the idiom of the people. I will not be able to connect easily. I have to go back to the people I know and who know me.' I heeded that. That was his position and he left.
Then during the Zimbabwe independence celebration—he had returned to Guyana and formed the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) and we closely followed it. On his way to Zimbabwe, and this was a time when the movement was in trouble, he passed through and stayed with one of our comrades here. This comrade told him, 'Walter stay, don’t go back. Guyana is dangerous.' There was a case against him in court. Walter said, 'No, I cannot just run away. I have to go back.' So it is certainly not true that he was pushed out.
It’s more believable that he was pulled because he felt he could make his contribution there, in Guyana. And he did, in my view. One can make critical assessments in hindsight, but one of the things we appreciated, and came to learn from, the Party, the WPA, was how it managed to bring together Indian and African youth. This was a real breakthrough. Of course, there were other problems.
So my own view is that Walter was not forced out of Tanzania. It could not be true. If so, we would have known.” – (Issa Shivji, “Walter Rodney in Tanzania: A Tribute,” Pambazuka News, June 27, 2013; Issa G. Shivji, “Remembering Walter Rodney,” Monthly Review, December 1, 2012).
Who killed Eduardo Mondlane?
The assassination of Eduardo Mondlane:
FRELIMO, Tanzania, and the politics of exile in Dar es Salaam
The assassination of Eduardo Mondlane:
FRELIMO, Tanzania, and the politics of exile in Dar es Salaam
At ten o’clock on the morning of 3 February 1969, Dr Eduardo Mondlane pulled up his car outside 201 Nkrumah Street in central Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The address housed the offices of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, FRELIMO), the guerrilla movement which was fighting Portuguese colonialism beyond Tanzania’s southern frontier.
Mondlane was FRELIMO’s president. He collected his mail and drove to the beachfront villa of an American friend in the upmarket suburb of Oyster Bay. Mondlane preferred to work there, away from the noise and heat of Nkrumah Street. He sat down with coffee and sifted through his post. Unwrapping a parcel bearing stamps from Moscow, Mondlane saw that it was a French translation of the turn-of-the-century Russian Marxist, Georgi Plekhanov. He went to flip through the pages. When Tanzanian police arrived on the scene minutes later, they found Mondlane’s remains spattered across the room, ripped apart by a parcel bomb.
A number of recent histories of contemporary Africa have utilised assassinations as cracks through which to prise open the murky networks of transnational and international politics in the era of decolonisation. Investigative histories of the two highest profile deaths in the Congo Crisis – the murder of Patrice Lumumba and the mysterious plane crash which killed the UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld – have elucidated complex issues of contingency and agency that cross-cut narratives centred on the nation-state. Like Susan Williams’ book on Hammarskjöld, this article does not offer a full explanation of Mondlane’s assassination. Rather, by setting FRELIMO’s struggle in the cosmopolitan political landscape of Dar es Salaam in the late 1960s, it shows how the movement was riven with tensions, caught up in Tanzanian affairs and the dynamics of the twin metadynamics of international affairs at the time, decolonisation and the Cold War.
Over the past decade, the rising interest in the global dimensions of the Cold War has brought scholars of the superpower rivalry into conversation with a rich body of literature exploring the history of decolonisation. While successfully breaking down intra-disciplinary subfields by challenging established analytical categories, this historiographical development poses a methodological problem: how to interpret such diverse forces within a single analytical framework. This article suggests that urban settings offer a potential solution, as concentrated environments in which a range of actors and dynamics – local, national, transnational, international, and global – come together. Through the geographic viewpoint of a city, physically fixed yet porous to movements of people, materials, and information, the entanglements of ostensibly separate narrative threats can be addressed without removing them from their immediate context.
In the so-called Third World, certain urban loci became epicentres of the political friction between the dual forces of decolonisation and the Cold War. The cosmopolitanism of the Saigon captured in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American – a city caught between a French colonial fin-de-siècle, anticolonial fervour, and Cold War paranoia – represents a southeast Asian example of this juncture. In Algeria and Egypt, the radical stances of the governments of Ahmed Ben Bella and Gamal Abdel Nasser led liberation movements from across the sub-Saharan and Arab worlds to flock to Algiers and Cairo. On the frontline of the struggle against white minority rule in southern Africa, 1960s Dar es Salaam assumed a similar character. As Andrew Ivaska argues in his history of cultural politics in post-colonial Tanzania, the capital constituted a 'nodal point', where circuits of global information were filtered through meshes of local understanding.
In the absence of relevant, accessible post-colonial archives in Tanzania and Mozambique, this article follows Daniel Branch’s example in using the 'archives of repression' – in this case diplomatic despatches from foreign embassies located in Dar es Salaam. While there are obvious dangers in a narrative written from the perspective of the global North, a multiarchival approach permits a degree of triangulation from different vantage points and the excavation of networks of information and interests within and passing through the city. These diplomatic sources are complemented by the limited African written sources available, here the Tanzanian press and memoirs of FRELIMO members.
Dar es Salaam and the making of a 'Cold War city'
At the heart of the developments that turned Dar es Salaam into a hotbed of international politics was Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere.
Scholars have tended to reify Nyerere, placing him at the centre of Tanzania’s post-colonial history. They focus on his vision of an African socialist path to development, based on the principle of ujamaa ('familyhood') and supposedly anchored in the communal traditions of the peasantry rather than abstract Marxist-Leninism. Yet as a number of recent histories have shown, Nyerere’s control of ujamaa socialism was contested at both elite and grassroots levels. Although the sense of national identity that his policies fostered has proved remarkably enduring, ujamaa was replete with cultural, social, and political tensions.
However, in terms of Tanzania’s contribution to the cause of the liberation of those African colonies under white minority rule, Nyerere’s own role is clear. At Addis Ababa in May 1963, heads of African states formed the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). Nyerere emphasised the continent’s duty to free those still under colonial oppression. 'The real humiliating truth is that Africa is not free', he implored,'‘and therefore it is Africa which should take the necessary collective measures to free Africa.'
After Tanganyika became independent in 1961, Nyerere therefore permitted exiled liberation movements from the Portuguese territories, Namibia, Rhodesia, and South Africa to establish military training camps in the country. They also set up offices in Dar es Salaam, where they canvassed for external support. The city also hosted the OAU’s Liberation Committee, established to fund and support the guerrillas' activities. The liberation movements became a central feature of Dar es Salaam’s political life. When the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński passed through in January 1964, he described the scene at the bar at the New Africa Hotel, a prominent city centre watering hole:
'All of Africa conspires here these days. Here gather the fugitives, refugees, and emigrants from various parts of the continent. One can spot sitting at one table Mondlane from Mozambique, Kaunda from Zambia, Mugabe from Rhodesia. At another – Karume from Zanzibar, Chisiza from Malawi, Nujoma from Namibia, etc…In the evening, when it grows cooler and a refreshing breeze blows in from the sea, the terrace fills with people discussing, planning courses of action, calculating their strengths and assessing their chances…We, the correspondents, come by here frequently, to pick up something. We already know all the leaders, we know who is worth sidling up to.'
Kapuściński arrived in Dar es Salaam just as two near simultaneous crises thrust the city into the international spotlight.
First, the government of Zanzibar – an archipelago lying a short distance off Tanganyika’s coast, which had become independent from Britain the previous month – was overthrown in a violent uprising. The revolution was grounded in a complex mixture of ethnoracial tensions, economic inequalities, and grievances at the circumstances of democratic politics around the time of independence. However, the presence of a number of Marxists in the revolutionary government, especially Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, led some Western commentators to interpret the coup as a communist-backed plot. Britain and the United States therefore delayed recognising the revolutionary government of President Abeid Karume. The resulting vacuum was exploited by China, the Soviet Union, and East Germany, which 'descended on Zanzibar like the Three Kings, bearing gifts of economic and military aid and opening embassies'.
Days after the revolution, a barracks mutiny broke out in Dar es Salaam, forcing Nyerere to flee into hiding and then call upon British troops to put down the revolt. Faced with unrest at home and a neighbour drifting into communist hands – and thereby risking Western intervention – in April Nyerere secretly brokered an act of union with Karume. This tethered radical Zanzibar to the more moderate mainland government, creating the state of Tanzania. Welcomed by Washington, the union curbed Zanzibar’s leftward slide, but left a volatile legacy for the government of the United Republic.
In the immediate aftermath of the union, Tanzania confronted a number of foreign policy crises with its main donor partners. A dispute about the future of East German diplomatic representation in Tanzania after the union embroiled the country in the Cold War sub-plot of inter-German rivalry. The tussle ended with West Germany withdrawing military aid over Tanzania’s decision to accept the opening of an East German consulate-general in Dar es Salaam.
In a fierce demonstration of his non-alignment, Nyerere responded by rejecting all West German aid.
Two spats over supposed American plots to overthrow the Tanzanian government also damaged relations with Washington.
In November 1964, Oscar Kambona, the foreign minister and chairman of the Liberation Committee, seized upon supposed evidence that the United States and Portugal were seeking to overthrow Nyerere to whip up anti-American anger among demonstrators in Dar es Salaam. The documents were later shown by the State Department to be clumsy forgeries.
Then in February 1965, two American diplomats were expelled after they were accused of plotting against the regime in Zanzibar.
More seriously, in November 1965, Nyerere severed diplomatic relations with Britain over London’s failure to prevent Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence.
These disputes pushed Nyerere into diversifying Tanzania’s sources of development aid.
After the union, several Marxist Zanzibari ministers, including Babu, had been moved into the mainland government. Through Babu’s assistance, China and Tanzania developed a strong relationship, underscored by shared Afro-Asian identities – though Nyerere maintained he was not under Beijing’s influence.
When Western governments declined to finance a railway between the copperbelt of neighbouring Zambia and the port at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania turned to Mao’s China for a $400 million interest-free loan, which was agreed in 1967. Nyerere insisted the decision was taken out of necessity, rather than ideological inclination.
Conscious of the fragility of his own government, especially after the Zanzibar Revolution, the mutiny, and events in neighbouring Congo, Nyerere recognised the risks of supporting the liberation movements. The crates of weapons bound for the guerrillas that arrived in Dar es Salaam from the Soviet Union and China often did so without prior Tanzanian consent. This influx of arms concerned the government, which complained that in supplying weapons directly to the liberation movements, the communist powers were undermining the Liberation Committee’s coordinating role.
In November 1964, Nyerere ordered the number of representatives for each liberation movement in Dar es Salaam to be limited to just four. Surplus officials, the British high commission reported, were to move to 'a more remote place than the capital, where they would be less able to stir up trouble, and conversely, where foreign diplomats would be less able to subvert them'.
In no small part because of the liberation movements’ activities, Dar es Salaam was transformed into a 'Cold War city', at the intersection of superpower rivalry and decolonisation. In a snowball effect, the city attracted not only liberation movements, diplomatic representations, and agents of the white minority regimes, but also an array of journalists, stringers, radical academics, and chancers in search of influential contacts or fistfuls of dollars.
The city’s public sphere became superheated with Cold War propaganda and the interventions of an outspoken, state-sponsored local press. The city was often engulfed in murmurings about coups. Nyerere’s biographer noted that 'a sort of free-flowing paranoia sometimes seems to hang suspended in Dar es Salaam’s heavy air'.
Nyerere himself spoke of the danger of careless talk in the city’s bars and cafés. He referred to his capital as 'Rumourville'.
FRELIMO and the Cold War powers
FRELIMO was created in 1962 from the merger of three separate Mozambican groups which had converged in Dar es Salaam in 1961: the Mozambique African National Union (MANU), the National Democratic Union of Mozambique (União Democrática Nacional de Moçambique, UDENAMO), and the African Union of Independent Mozambique (União Africana de Moçambique Independente, UNAMI).
Nyerere wanted to prevent the fragmentation of the liberation struggle in Mozambique, especially as independent Congo fractured along ethnopolitical lines. He was also concerned about the growing influence over UDENAMO of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, as Africa’s post-colonial states vied for influence over the exiled movements.
FRELIMO began military operations against the Portuguese in Mozambique in September 1964. However, the movement was more than a fighting force: it provided relief for refugees from offices scattered across southern Tanzania and operated a school in Dar es Salaam, the Mozambique Institute. It used the Tanzanian press to carry exaggerated body-counts of Portuguese casualties and circulated a glossy magazine, Mozambique Revolution. In 1965, the Canadian high commissioner described it as 'perhaps the only such organization in Africa which is now carrying out substantial operations designed to subvert and eventually overthrow a government under European control.'
President Eduardo Mondlane headed a twenty-man Central Committee. Born in Mozambique in 1920, Mondlane studied in Johannesburg and Lisbon, before moving to the United States, where he obtained degrees from Oberlin College and Northwestern University. When Mondlane was elected president of FRELIMO in 1962, he was teaching Anthropology at Syracuse University. Shortly after, he resigned his position and moved to Tanzania with his white American wife, Janet, who organised the Mozambique Institute.
Mondlane did not initially support violent struggle, but felt he had little option in the face of Portugal’s intransigence. He espoused a form of grassroots socialism, attuned with a pragmatism that recognised the pitfalls of global politics in the midst of the Cold War. Mondlane believed that victory over Portugal could be achieved only with the cooperation of the peasantry in liberated areas of northern Mozambique. This owed in part to his understanding of Mao Zedong and the experience of the Vietcong guerrillas.
Mondlane spent much of his time outside of Africa, attempting to build diplomatic relations, secure aid, and raise awareness about FRELIMO. Wherever he travelled, he impressed bureaucrats and politicians of all ideological shades. 'Mondlane is one of the most cultured and intelligent Africans in Dar es Salaam – a potential Kaunda, Nyerere or Adu', wrote the British high commissioner to Tanzania.
Mondlane was also adept at using the opportunities provided by the international environment of Dar es Salaam to promote FRELIMO’s cause. 'The most notable and refreshing African liberation figure I reported on was Eduardo Mondlane', recalled one foreign journalist. 'He had his own press network and when he wanted particular cover he would use journalists from outside to ensure better, more broad acceptance and coverage'.
FRELIMO was the only Dar es Salaam-based liberation movement to receive aid from all three superpowers. Other European states also made valuable contributions, especially the Nordic countries. Initially, FRELIMO’s connections to the communist world were strongest with China, which Mondlane first visited in 1963. Chinese military instructors and arms soon began arriving for FRELIMO. Uria Simango, Mondlane’s deputy, was the closest of FRELIMO’s inner circle to Beijing. He was a familiar face at the Canton Restaurant, a stone’s throw from the movement’s Nkrumah Street offices. The establishment served not only as a popular meeting place for Tanzanian politicians and guerrilla leaders, but also as a front organisation for China’s espionage activities in Dar es Salaam.
As the 1960s wore on, FRELIMO developed stronger ties with the Soviet Bloc, at Beijing’s expense. This reflected a growing irritation among African states and guerrilla movements at China’s inflexible approach to bilateral relations – a trend to which the Tanzanian government was an exception.
Speaking to the chairman of the East German Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee in November 1966, Mondlane complained about the treatment of a FRELIMO delegation in Beijing and China’s 'divisive' intentions among Third World states. China began to support a rival organisation to FRELIMO, the Zambia-based Mozambique Revolutionary Committee (Comité Revolucionário de Moçambique, COREMO).
The Soviet Union cast aside initial doubts about Mondlane’s political stance and American background. Mondlane made three trips to Moscow, in 1964, 1966, and 1967, where he secured packages of aid and arms. FRELIMO delegations also received favourable receptions in Czechoslovakia and East Germany. In December 1966, after meeting with Mondlane in Berlin, the East Germans concluded that he had moved to the left, under the steady influence of Marxists within FRELIMO, such as Marcelino dos Santos, the secretary for external affairs, and Samora Machel, the director of military operations.
The presence of the African liberation movements in Dar es Salaam posed a dilemma for the West. Washington and London expressed concern about their leftist inclination. Some cited this as reason enough for steering clear of the guerrillas. Others argued that it was in the West’s interest not to lose touch with potential governments-in-waiting, to prevent them from slipping directly into the hands of Beijing or Moscow. 'We do not wish to find ourselves entirely isolated from and out of sympathy with the rebel movements if and when they come to obtain a share in power', argued one British official.
In Dar es Salaam, contact between diplomats and the liberation movements was unavoidable. In 1965, the British high commissioner told the Foreign Office that it would be 'surprised to see the extent to which exiles and representatives of the various liberation movements circulate in diplomatic social circles here. They are to be seen at practically every National Day party or big reception'.
The matter was complicated by Cold War geopolitics. Portugal was a key NATO ally of Britain and the United States. The strategic importance of the Azores air base, on Portuguese territory in the Atlantic, was not lost on Washington – nor Lisbon. When in 1961 President John F. Kennedy adopted a more critical stance towards Portuguese colonialism at the UN and announced that Portugal’s use of NATO military hardware would be restricted to the northern hemisphere, Salazar threatened to prevent the United States from renewing its soon-to-expire lease on the base.
Meetings with guerrilla leaders in Dar es Salaam also did not go unnoticed by Lisbon. In 1966, Salazar sent a letter to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, criticising the reception given to 'terrorist chiefs' by the British high commission in Tanzania.
Nonetheless, Washington provided covert support for Mondlane. While a student in the United States, he befriended Wayne Fredericks, who became assistant secretary of state for Africa under the Kennedy administration. Via Fredericks' introduction, in February 1963 Mondlane met Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, and Averill Harriman, under-secretary of state, in Washington. Both recognised that Mondlane represented the best chance for a negotiated settlement in Mozambique and a counterweight to more radical elements within FRELIMO.
Shortly after, the CIA channelled $60,000 to FRELIMO via the African-American Institute in New York. $99,700 followed from the Ford Foundation to the Mozambique Institute.
Mondlane’s connections with the United States were subject to continual rumour in Dar es Salaam. In May 1967, a member of the Liberation Committee told a Polish diplomat that he was convinced Mondlane was working for the Americans. These rumours were encouraged by the case of Leo Milas, who was FRELIMO’s first publicity secretary, having been invited to Tanzania from the United States by Mondlane. He was expelled from the movement in August 1964, after Mondlane found that he was actually an American, named Leo Clinton Aldridge.
Mozambicans were not alone in attracting such accusations in a public sphere pregnant with anti-Americanism. In 1967, Tanzania’s minister for health and housing, Austin Shaba, was the target of an anonymous pamphlet that accused him of being a 'traitor', ‘working hand in glove with the mad dogs of CIA [sic]'.
Although the government denounced the tract as 'disgraceful', the American embassy noted that the regime, by permitting scathing attacks on Washington from ministers and the government-controlled press, had 'helped to create an atmosphere in which scurrilous pamphleteering of this sort can easily blossom'.
FRELIMO and its discontents
Although a full analysis of the schisms within FRELIMO lies beyond the scope of this article, the developments described below can only be understood in the context of the broader dynamics of the liberation struggle.
FRELIMO’s early years were plagued by splits, as the leaders of the parties which were subsumed into the unified movement under Mondlane resented their reduced status. By the late 1960s, the main opposition to Mondlane within FRELIMO was clustered around the figure of Lazaro Kavandame, the movement’s provincial secretary in Cabo Delgado in 'liberated' northern Mozambique. He was a Makonde, an ethnic group which straddled the Mozambican-Tanzanian frontier. Waves of Makonde had migrated northwards into Tanganyikan territory over the preceding centuries, with influxes in 1922 and 1933, as they fled exorbitant Portuguese taxes. Some were involved in the Tanganyikan independence struggle and later set up MANU – originally the Makonde African National Union. MANU’s members felt slighted at their displacement by the likes of Mondlane and dos Santos, who were from southern Mozambique.
Class differences mapped onto these ethnic divisions. Most Makonde were poorly educated: Kavandame did not speak Portuguese. Many held low-paid jobs on sisal plantations in Tanzania. Some of the Central Committee, on the other hand, had studied overseas. Mondlane’s lifestyle in Dar es Salaam's wealthy suburb of Oyster Bay, while FRELIMO's rank-and-file lived in crowded dormitories or training camps, also drew criticism. 'Mondlane's dogs eat better than we do', grumbled one member. This image was not helped by Mondlane’s American connections, nor by his intellectual demeanour.
However, this class divide did not produce a more revolutionary approach among the M'konde. Rather, while Mondlane, dos Santos, and Machel increasingly stressed the need for a ‘People’s War' and social revolution in the liberated territory, Kavandame and the so-called 'Council of Elders', which represented a rival authority to the Central Committee, espoused a narrow, racially-defined nationalism which saw the elimination of white rule in Mozambique as an endgoal in itself. They were deeply hostile to white members of FRELIMO, like Janet Mondlane. Dos Santos – a mestiço with a white, Jewish, South African wife – also fell under suspicion.
The dual ideologies which had glued together so many liberation coalitions elsewhere in Africa, socialism and nationalism, were thus uncoupled.
These differences were drawn upon by rival leaders to further their own personal interests. Kavandame's opposition to the transformation of Cabo Delgado owed to the fact he was materially benefitting from the status quo. He and the chiefs working underneath him ran the province much like the Portuguese, extorting produce from the peasantry and, with the connivance of the local Tanzanian authorities, taking a cut from cross-border trade. At the same time, FRELIMO’s military campaign in Mozambique stalled. After making initial inroads in 1964-5, a Portuguese counteroffensive pushed back the guerrillas. The number of FRELIMO dead and lack of progress contributed to the growing resentment towards Mondlane.
As Michel Cahen cautions, historians should not seek to explain the subsequent crisis via strict categories. Issues of class, ethnicity, and ideological stances towards the Cold War powers all contributed to schisms, aggravated by the 'internal democratic centralism' that prevented public disagreement among the FRELIMO cadres.
There was not a 'simple crisis', but rather 'tensions at the crossroads of numerous, varied factors, without the possibility of democratic control'.
These splits did not go unnoticed by the Portuguese and other foreign powers. In mid-1967, the Portuguese secret police (PIDE) reported that Chinese agents were cultivating an opposition faction to Mondlane among Mozambican workers of Makonde background at the Friendship Textile Factory, a Chinese-funded scheme in Dar es Salaam.
The crisis of 1968
In 1968, these pressures spilled over into open unrest, as a series of violent episodes exposed the extent of the fractures within FRELIMO. At the centre of this crisis was Mateus Gwenjere, a Roman Catholic priest. Mondlane initially supported Gwenjere when he fled to Tanzania from Mozambique in August 1967.
Gwenjere was fast-tracked into FRELIMO’s leadership and represented it at the UN General Assembly. Then he began to criticise FRELIMO’s education policy. He tapped into discontent at the Mozambique Institute in Dar es Salaam regarding the lack of scholarship opportunities to study abroad and the leadership’s insistence that students spend time fighting at the front, to foment opposition to Mondlane.
Encouraged by Gwenjere, the students called for the removal of the Institute’s white teachers. The ensuing stand-off resulted in the temporary closure of the Institute and reached a climax when a FRELIMO party, including Machel, raided the student dormitories on the night of 6 March.
Weeks later, FRELIMO was convulsed by more violence. On 6 May, a group of Mozambicans forcibly closed the movement’s offices at 201 Nkrumah Street. When FRELIMO’s leadership succeeded in getting the offices reopened on 8 May, the following day the group of Makonde returned, armed with clubs and machetes. In the ensuing violence, one member of the Central Committee was fatally wounded. At the time, Mondlane was in Mozambique with representatives of the Liberation Committee.
At a press conference, Simango blamed the unrest on underground Portuguese activities. He claimed that he did not recognise any of the eighteen men arrested and that none was a FRELIMO member. In a public statement on 26 May, Mondlane largely concurred: two of the men were former members who had deserted FRELIMO over a year before, the rest were unknown to the leadership.
These claims were rejected in a letter from the 'Council of Elders', printed in the Tanzanian trade union newspaper, Mfanyakazi. It accused Simango of conspiring against Mondlane, but then of shying away from cooperation with the Elders when they sought his cooperation in forcing new presidential elections. It also criticised Mondlane’s 'contemptuous designs' in refusing to work with the Elders and reopening the office.
Gwenjere was also at the heart of this latest disturbance. Mondlane told George Houser, head of the American Committee on Africa, an anticolonial pressure group, that Gwenjere had lobbied the Tanzanian civil service and the Liberation Committee to shut the FRELIMO offices and order elections. When this proved unsuccessful, Gwenjere encouraged members of his church, who were mostly Makonde, to first close the offices and then attack the reopened premises.
On 27 May, a Portuguese informer in Tanzania reported that 'at any moment now, there will be an attempt on the life of Dr. Mondlane to assassinate him. He will be extremely lucky if he escapes or save [sic] his life from this attempt'.
Portugal sought to aggravate these divisions. According to a report produced by the Italian secret services, the SCDI, between June 1968 and October 1969, Robert Leroy carried out a series of interviews in East Africa, including with Mondlane, dos Santos, and Gwenjere. Leroy was purportedly a journalist, but in reality worked for an organisation named Aginter Press. Ostensibly a publishing house, Aginter was connected to Operation GLADIO, NATO’s stay-behind network of sleeper cells in western Europe after the Second World War. Intended to coordinate resistance in the event of a Soviet invasion, GLADIO instead became associated with groups that carried out a number of false-flag terrorist attacks, which were blamed on left-wing extremists in order to whip up anti-communist sentiment and bolster conservative governments.
Leroy’s work in Tanzania was part of Operação Zona Leste, a series of Aginter interventions against Portugal’s enemies in Africa. An SDCI officer told journalist Frederic Laurent that 'Leroy’s job of intoxication consisted of giving false information to the leaders of FRELIMO and of creating discord among them by playing on their personal rivalries'. The cosmopolitan public sphere which Mondlane skilfully used to broadcast FRELIMO’s struggle to the world could therefore also be turned against him.
In these circumstances, Mondlane bowed to Kavandame’s demands that FRELIMO hold a Special Congress in July, at which Kavandame and Gwenjere hoped to topple the leadership. Kavandame wanted it to be held in southern Tanzania, where his support base was strongest. Instead, Mondlane held the meeting on liberated Mozambican soil. Fearing an anti-Makonde plot, Kavandame and his supporters boycotted the Congress, at which Mondlane and dos Santos strengthened their positions. The former was re-elected president, beating Simango in a secret ballot. The Congress passed a programme that transformed FRELIMO into a more centralised 'vanguard party', along Marxist line(s).
Concerned by the splits within FRELIMO, Nyerere intervened. In August he brought Mondlane and Kavandame together in southeastern Tanzania, but the latter refused to compromise. Instead, Kavandame pushed ahead in his attempt to set up a rival Makonde nationalist movement. He was deluded enough to think that Nyerere would support him, on the grounds that Tanzania was already providing assistance for the Biafran separatists in Nigeria.
After Paulo Kankhombe, a FRELIMO representative sent to implement the reforms agreed on in July, was murdered in Cabo Delgado in December, on 3 January 1969 the Central Committee suspended Kavandame from his duties as provincial secretary.
Tanzanian entanglements
These divisions within FRELIMO were not purely a Mozambican affair, but also involved Tanzanians pursuing their own agendas in destabilising Mondlane’s position. The longer the liberation movements were based in Dar es Salaam, the more they became 'domesticated' and entangled with local political frictions. This was especially so in the case of FRELIMO, given the shared Makonde background of many Tanzanians and Mozambicans.
In FRELIMO’s early years, Mondlane fell back on his good relations with the Tanzanian leadership, especially Kambona, to remove dissident members. However, in July 1967 Kambona fled into exile after falling out with Nyerere. The Tanzanians henceforth responsible for the guerrillas' security were less inclined towards Mondlane.
Among these officials was Lawi Sijaona, who was tasked with refugee matters as minister of state in the office of the second vice-president, Rashidi Kawawa. A British pen-portrait described Sijaona as 'a vigilante, fanatical and lacking in humour'....Sijaona was of Makonde background – a reminder of the artificiality of the colonial border at Tanzania’s southern frontier. As a Portuguese military reported from Mozambique just days before Mondlane’s assassination, a 'crisis which was initially an internal FRELIMO issue seems to have been generalised by Makonde connections'.
Hostile to Tanzania’s Asian commercial class, Sijaona shared Kavandame’s antipathy towards Mondlane on the same anti-white, racial grounds. The American embassy also believed that Sijaona resented the manner in which Mondlane frequently bypassed him in preference for dealing directly with Kawawa.
Sijaona divided his time between his ministerial responsibilities and his role as chairman of the TANU Youth League, the party’s activist arm. The Youth League became closely associated with Maoist practices. Its 'Green Guards', wearing shirts in the TANU colours, were consciously modelled on their Chinese counterparts. Sijaona himself had visited China as early as 1963 – before the establishment of Beijing’s close relationship with Tanzania – and accompanied Nyerere another trip in 1968. These sympathies gave him common ideological ground with Simango, who was reportedly dissatisfied at FRELIMO’s deepening relations with the Soviet Bloc.
Sijaona and senior civil servants in Kawawa’s office deliberately undermined Mondlane. After the trouble at the Mozambique Institute, Mondlane attempted to clear rebellious students by ordering the school’s closure and for the students to be sent to rural camps. In Kawawa’s absence, Sijaona countermanded Mondlane’s order – until Kawawa returned and overruled Sijaona.
Similarly, on 29 May the Tanzanian government expelled three white Portuguese teachers from the Mozambique Institute. A FRELIMO official told the East Germans that the decision was again taken in the absence of Kawawa, suggesting the hand of Sijaona. This time, when Kawawa returned, he did not overturn the order, but merely extended the deadline for the teachers’ departure. According to Helder Martins, a white Portuguese doctor, who was FRELIMO’s director of health services and among the expelled teachers, Sijaona was also closely associated with Gwenjere.
The institution that was supposed to provide Mondlane’s security deliberately failed to do so. On 26 April, despite opposition from Sijaona, Mondlane won Kawawa’s agreement for a round-up of FRELIMO deserters and dissidents in Dar es Salaam. However, these measures were never implemented.
In parliament, Kawawa was forced to defend his office against accusations made in Mfanyakazi that the attack on the FRELIMO headquarters could have been prevented by adequate police protection.
In October, Mondlane told British officials in London that he believed Sijaona had known about the attack in advance – a not unlikely suggestion, given the Makonde ethnic background of both the minister and the assailants.
Mondlane also informed the East German consul-general that an internal Tanzanian investigation had found that many of the false accusations about him emanated from the Second Vice-President’s Office, alleging that Sijaona was collaborating with the Chinese.
In October, Sijaona was moved out of Kawawa’s office to the less politically-charged position of minister for health. In London, Mondlane claimed that this was the result of his petitioning of Sijaona’s superiors. This may have played its part in Nyerere’s decision, but there were other reasons. On 23 August, Sijaona had led a raucous TANU Youth League demonstration in protest at the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, during which the grounds of the Soviet embassy in Dar es Salaam were vandalised. The episode embarrassed Nyerere, who was tiring of his minister’s irresponsible activities.
The reshuffle also followed a pattern in which Nyerere sought to prevent potential rivals from building power-bases in settled ministries.
These interwoven developments exemplified confluences of diverse issues that typified political life in Dar es Salaam – the Cold War in Europe, liberation movement affairs, and Tanzanian politics.
At the same time, the Tanzanian press seized on the unrest in FRELIMO to make a series of attacks on Mondlane. The Nationalist was owned by TANU, but the outspoken Marxists who dominated its editorial staff were permitted a relatively free rein by Nyerere.
The day after the fight at 201 Nkrumah Street, a Nationalist editorial contemplated the reasons behind the divisions within FRELIMO and other liberation movements. 'As a result of such non-observance of the constitutional rights of ordinary members', it stated, 'conferences are never called to allow for members to exercise their right to choose their leaders or to endorse their trust in the existing ones'.
On 27 May, the newspaper carried extracts from a speech made by Abeid Karume, vice-president of Tanzania and president of Zanzibar. At a rally in Dar es Salaam to mark Africa Liberation Day, Karume criticised the guerrilla movements for being more preoccupied with issuing news bulletins than liberating their territory. He called on their leaders to reject the bribes of 'the very imperialists we are fighting' and desist from befriending people whom they 'fully well knew were enemies'.
Following Karume, The Nationalist delivered a brutal verdict on the liberation movements. It accused certain unnamed leaders of living 'luxuriously in air conditioned bungalows in independent African countries at a time when their own people are suffering from untold colonial cruelties'. 'It is not rare in Dar es Salaam for example to see a freedom fighter locked in heavy drinking bouts with strange faces of white men', it continued, warning that 'our brothers should be extra careful about such guises which the agents of the enemy may employ, through drinks, diplomatic parties or cheap bribes'.
The target was clearly the Mondlanes.
This attitude towards the liberation movements predated the unrest in FRELIMO in 1968. The previous December, the East German intelligence services, the Stasi, noted that the guerrillas were 'increasingly seen as 'salon parasites' [Salonschmarotzer] in Dar es Salaam'.
Such latent feeling was brought to the boil by the violent incidents concerning FRELIMO.
The extent of the opposition to Mondlane among the Tanzanian establishment was revealed again when on 23 November, The Nationalist reported on (a) visit he had made to Nairobi. It claimed that at a private dinner there, Mondlane had briefed a group of Americans, who were in Kenya to attend the Ford Foundation-sponsored 'American-African Dialogue' meeting. Some of them had connections in the State Department. The Nationalist repeated rumours that the CIA had penetrated FRELIMO.
Mondlane claimed that he had been in Kenya to meet President Jomo Kenyatta and had met the Americans by chance. Information passed to the British high commission in Dar es Salaam by a Zimbabwean liberation movement leader, who had spoken to Mondlane on his return flight from Nairobi, suggested the meeting was more organised than admitted. Wayne Fredericks, who had left the State Department the previous year, had been among the group. He observed that Mondlane seemed frustrated by the splits within FRELIMO.
Regardless of Mondlane’s honesty about his dealings in Nairobi, The Nationalist’s selective use of information was another demonstration of its hostility towards him. The article was written by Nsa Kaisi, described by the American embassy as The Nationalist’s 'leading Marxist true believer'. While condemning Mondlane’s meeting with the Americans, Kaisi neglected to mention that Joseph Nyerere, brother of the president, had been in attendance too. It was also odd that The Nationalist had based its article on a story from the Daily Nation, a Kenyan newspaper which had been banned in Tanzania the previous month, having long been attacked by The Nationalist as a vehicle of 'imperialist' propaganda.
Houser, who attended the meeting in Nairobi and then travelled onwards to Dar es Salaam, noted in a letter to the editor of Newsweek magazine that the incident and The Nationalist reports had produced 'a great deal of flak'. Houser spoke to President Nyerere about the situation. He considered The Nationalist’s articles 'ridiculous', but added that 'we don't censor everything that goes into the paper.'
Private criticism of Mondlane was heard elsewhere in government circles. The minister of state for foreign affairs, Stephen Mhando, told an East German news agency correspondent that Mondlane should fight in Mozambique rather than 'sitting around in Dar es Salaam'.
Mondlane’s continued associations with Western diplomats in Dar es Salaam did not help his cause. While the East Germans acknowledged that FRELIMO were moving closer to the Eastern Bloc, they noted that Mondlane maintained close relations with American diplomats, especially an attaché, Philip Potter – who was a CIA agent.
With FRELIMO fractured, its Tanzanian hosts distrustful of or even openly hostile towards its president, and Dar es Salaam agog with gossip, Mondlane began to fear for his safety. He was rumoured to have asked Nyerere in mid-December to expel Gwenjere from Tanzania in connection with the murder of Kankhombe. According to the French embassy, Nyerere flatly refused. A number of Gwenjere’s supporters were arrested, however, and when the priest approached to police to request their release on 28 December, he too was placed under detention, though all were released on 6 January.
In mid-January, Portuguese intelligence in Mozambique reported that the crisis inside FRELIMO was worsening due to the conflict between Kavandame and Mondlane. They observed that Dar es Salaam was 'swarming with people from all around, completely out of control and causing the FRELIMO leadership serious concerns'.
Amid this unrest, Mondlane travelled to Khartoum, where he attended a 'Conference of Solidarity with the Patriots of South Africa and the Portuguese Colonies', organised by the Soviet Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation. Mondlane’s participation at the meeting, at which Chinese representatives were distinctly unwelcome, suggested the severance of his ties with Beijing.
On 1 February, Mondlane met officials from the Second Vice-President’s Office. He expressed concern about the threat posed to him by Kavandame and his Tanzanian supporters, especially Sijaona.
Two days later, Eduardo Mondlane was dead.
Who killed Eduardo Mondlane?
The Tanzanian Criminal Investigation Department (CID) took up the murder case. It soon recognised the Soviet stamp on the parcel as a forgery. The remnants of the device – plus two further bombs encased in Plekhanov volumes, addressed to dos Santos and Simango and intercepted by the police in the following weeks – were sent to London for analysis by Scotland Yard. Through Interpol, they found that the batteries in the detonators had been manufactured in Japan and sold by a firm in Lourenço Marques (present-day Maputo).
The police believed that the bomb had been constructed in Mozambique and then inserted into Mondlane’s mailbag in Dar es Salaam. This information was not made public, but was communicated by a deputy CID officer to the American embassy; and later by Geoffrey Sawaya, head of the CID, to David Martin, a British journalist.
The assassination has never been satisfactorily explained. Despite concluding its investigation in May 1969, the CID kept silent for three years.
In February 1972, Radio Tanzania announced that the police knew who had killed Mondlane, but refused to name him, as he was a Portuguese resident in Mozambique.
Martin published a story in The Observer, which used insider information from the Tanzanian police to establish the technical specifics involvement in the bombing. However, no culprit was revealed.
More recently, historians have blended oral testimony with archival research, but still no smoking gun has been found. As Duarte de Jesus outlines, both the Soviet Union and China both had vested interests in eliminating Mondlane, as the moderate tip of a movement lurching to the left. However, the broad consensus is that the plan was hatched by the Portuguese, with African collaboration in transporting the bomb to Dar es Salaam.
Lisbon was taken off guard by the assassination. An Overseas Ministry report concluded that although the turmoil arising from Mondlane’s death represented a short-term advantage to Portugal in the short-term, the long-term consequences of a more revolutionary FRELIMO were far more disadvantageous. The PIDE also distanced itself from the crime. An internal report into the murder concluded that responsibility for the assassination, plus the unrest within FRELIMO over the previous year, lay with Beijing.
Even if we accept this denial as genuine, the absence of 'official' PIDE participation does not preclude the involvement of Portuguese agents, via the clandestine Aginter Press network. Several sources have claimed that the bomb was assembled by Casimiro Monteiro, a Goan-born explosives expert and Aginter operative.
Monteiro had fought for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, for Hitler with the Division Azul on the Eastern Front, and murdered the Portuguese opposition leader Humberto Delgado in Spain in 1965. He later fought for the anti-communist Mozambique National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, RENAMO) against FRELIMO in post-independence Mozambique’s civil war.
Monteiro was first named as a participant in the assassination plot by Martin in 1975. This has been corroborated by two PIDE agents and a Rhodesian intelligence officer, though there remains scepticism as to whether their stories can be trusted.
The question of Mozambican involvement also remains unclear. The logistics of delivering the bomb to Dar es Salaam must have required some African collaboration. However, no consensus has emerged.
Substantial space would be required for a full exploration of the myriad allegations and refutations that continue to mark Mozambican politics, in what has become a memory war entangled with the country’s post-independence travails.
Martin’s 1972 Observer article identified two prime suspects. Kavandame was questioned by the CID a week after Mondlane’s death, but gave little away. In March, he defected to the Portuguese. Silvério Nungu, an official at FRELIMO’s headquarters with access to Mondlane’s mail, was the CID’s other main suspect. Arrested by the Tanzanian police while trying to defect to Mozambique, Nungu officially died of a hunger strike in prison. Simango later claimed he was executed.
Aginter Press documentation uncovered by Italian intelligence implicates Simango in Mondlane’s assassination. Simango denied any involvement, claiming that he had come perilously close to opening the book, only to notice that it was in French, a language he could not read.
Suspicion of Simango’s involvement largely stems from his activities after the death of Mondlane. Under FRELIMO’s constitution, the vice-president should have taken over the leadership of the movement. However, doubts about Simango’s loyalty led the Central Committee to establish a 'Council of the Presidency' in April 1969, in which he shared power with dos Santos and Machel. The latter pair developed into a stronger faction.
In November, Simango issued a pamphlet entitled Gloomy Situation in FRELIMO which accused Machel and dos Santos of murder, tribalism, and nepotism, and demanded they resign and be put on trial.
Simango was expelled from FRELIMO and subsequently joined COREMO.
In May 1970, the Central Committee abolished the triumvirate and appointed Machel as president, with dos Santos as vice-president.
After Mozambique gained its independence in 1975, Simango was brought before a kangaroo court. At a show trial in Nachingwea in southern Tanzania in April 1975, he was forced to read a 'confession' of his guilt at betraying FRELIMO. Simango was sent to a 're-education camp' and eventually murdered in 1978 to prevent him from falling into the hands of RENAMO.
Few members of FRELIMO’s leadership have escaped suspicion. Oscar Cardoso, the former head of PIDE, has accused Joaquim Chissano (then chief of security for FRELIMO, later President of Mozambique) of collaborating with Monteiro.
In his memoirs, Mondlane’s secretary, Sérgio Vieira, recounts a fantastic conspiracy in which the package-bomb was transferred to Dar es Salaam via Portuguese agents in Malawi and Mozambicans in Tanzania, including Nungu and Gwenjere.
Helder Martins places Gwenjere at the centre of the plot, but asserts that it was only made possible by co-conspirators inside FRELIMO.
Finally, there is the question of Tanzanian complicity. The fact that the inquiry into Mondlane’s death was carried out by the Second Vice-President’s Office raises serious doubts about its transparency. Martins believes that Sijaona was 'undoubtedly' involved.
The potential implication of senior members of Tanzania’s state and security apparatus may also explain why the CID’s findings have never been released.
Conclusion
In The Struggle for Mozambique, Mondlane warned against the dangers of factionalism within FRELIMO. The enemy, he argued, may use a member of the main organization to try to spread dissent, so as to bring over a section of the membership. The complexities of motive behind divisive conduct makes it the more difficult to guard against: individual neuroses, personal ambitions, real ideological differences are muddled up with the tactics of the enemy secret service.
Mondlane’s assessment was more astute than much of the scholarship about him. The early historiography portrayed FRELIMO as waging a bold struggle against its internal and external enemies. These histories, usually written by scholars sympathetic to FRELIMO’s ideological cause, especially after its full conversion to Marxism-Leninism under Machel, tended to glorify the revolution. They did not deny the schisms within the movement, but integrated them into a heroic narrative, in which the progressive proto-state overcomes Kavandame’s backward, parochial tribalism, then joins forces with the oppressed Mozambican peasantry to drive out the Portuguese colonialists.
Building on more recent scholarship which questions these obfuscating binaries and Marxist teleologies, this article has demonstrated how the micropolitics of FRELIMO (in) its Dar es Salaam exile was rife with tensions. These did not only take place within the movement’s leadership, but overlapped with centrifugal dynamics among a range of local actors in the 'Cold War city'.
While Mondlane skilfully utilised Dar es Salaam’s position at the epicentre of international politics in sub-Saharan Africa to attract material aid and public support, the same environment was exploited by FRELIMO’s enemies to subvert the movement. Despite having Nyerere’s backing, there were limits to the security this provided.
Tanzanian politicians and journalists, sharing ideological, racial, and ethnic affinities with Mondlane’s opponents, attacked FRELIMO’s leader, eroding his support base. These dynamics came together in the rumour-filled environment of Dar es Salaam, which bred uncertainty and distrust. The city’s politics complicated the efforts by actors based in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing to influence the late decolonisations in Africa.
The textured histories which emerge through this urban aperture thus foreground the agency of Africans and disrupt conventional narratives of both the global superpower rivalry and liberation struggles in the Third World.
Abstract
This article uses the city of Dar es Salaam as an urban lens for understanding the politics of FRELIMO in exile and the assassination of its first President, Eduardo Mondlane, in 1969. By adopting a multiarchival technique, these narratives can be broken down to a micropolitical level, shedding light on the distribution of agency in the confluence of superpower rivalry and decolonisation in the Third World. The splits within the liberation movement can be explained via the intersection of internal disagreements, Cold War dynamics, and relations with the Tanzanian state, within the context of Dar es Salaam’s cosmopolitan public sphere.
Biographical note
George Roberts is a Teaching Fellow in Modern African History at the University of Warwick. He recently completed a PhD thesis entitled ‘Politics, decolonisation, and the Cold War in Dar es Salaam, c.1965-72’. His work on the Uganda-Tanzania War of 1978-9 has previously been published in the Journal of Eastern African Studies.
Acknowledgements
A draft version of this paper was presented at the International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War, held at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2015, and co-organised by George Washington University and the University of California at Santa Barbara. I am grateful for the feedback received there. I also wish to thank James R. Brennan for his valuable comments, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful remarks. Finally, my thanks to David M. Anderson and Daniel Branch for their support for my broader PhD work.
Funding
This research forms part of a PhD project entitled 'Politics, decolonisation, and the Cold War in Dar es Salaam, c. 1967-1972', funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council doctoral award. Additional research funding was generously provided by the Society for the History for American Foreign Relations, the Royal African Society, the German History Society, and the Society for the Study of French History.
The article on Mondlane's assassination posted above has been extracted from George Robert's dissertation:
Politics, decolonisation, and the Cold War in Dar es Salaam c ...
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org › ...
Politics, decolonisation, and the Cold War in Dar es Salaam c ...
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org › ...
I remember Mondlane's funeral at Kinondoni Cemetery in February 1969. I was in Form V at Tambaza High School. My classmates and I, together with many other students, attended the funeral. I also remember some of the leaders who were there; among the first to arrive, Bhoke Munanka, George Magombe, followed by Amir H. Jamal, Hasnu Makame, Derek Bryceson, Babu and others. Kawawa arrived several minutes before Nyerere did.
Nyerere did not speak at the funeral - Uria Simango, Marcelino dos Santos, Samora Machel and others did.
It was a sad day for us. Nyerere was visibly grief-stricken; so were we.
Nyerere did not speak at the funeral - Uria Simango, Marcelino dos Santos, Samora Machel and others did.
It was a sad day for us. Nyerere was visibly grief-stricken; so were we.
Duh, halafu ukute watoto kama Jokakuu wanakusimamishia ndevu humu!😆😆😆
David Martin, news editor of the Tanganyika Standard during that time – Brendon Grimshaw was the managing editor – said the Portuguese secret police killed Mondlane. He had high-level contacts with officials in the Tanzanian government and elsewhere and was close to Nyerere.
He was a very reliable source of information and did not have a reputation of parroting the government's version of events. I knew him.
He was also a strong supporter of the liberation struggle and had close ties with the liberation movements and their leaders including Robert Mugabe who stayed in Tanzania for quite some time, as did other leaders. He went to live in Zimbabwe after the country won independence and worked closely with Mugabe and other ZANU officials. He lived there before when the country was known as Rhodesia, before then as Southern Rhodesia.
Ian Christie, a British journalist who also worked at the Tanganyika Standard during the same time David Martin did and stayed on the editorial staff when the paper was renamed Daily News and after David left – both were there when Mondlane was assassinated – stated the following, in his book Samora Machel, a Biography, about Mondlane's assassination:
“The Tanzanian C . I . D . chief, Geoffrey Sawaya, worked on the case with the cooperation of Interpol and it was established that the murder was planned by the Portuguese secret police, the PIDE . Batteries used in the device were traced to a shop in Lourenço Marques, Casa Pfaff.” – (Ian Christie, Samora Machel, a Biography, London: Zed Books, 1990, p. 58).
Almost four years after Mondlane was assassinated, a senior Tanzanian government official whom I knew well said the same thing David Martin and Ian Christie did – that it was the Portuguese authorities – their secret police, PIDE – who assassinated Mondlane. He didn't tell me anything new. He only confirmed what I had heard earlier from other reliable sources in Tanzania that it was the Portuguese secret service that was responsible for Mondlane's assassination.
The Portuguese didn't want FRELIMO to succeed or have a good reputation in the international arena. They were already at war with the liberation movement and wanted to tarnish its image. Mondlane was the embodiment of that image. He was a highly respected leader, internationally, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain and kept FRELIMO united in spite of the fact that the organisation was divided within because of bitter rivalries among different factions – ideological, ethnic, regional and so on. He also earned FRELIMO a good international reputation as a credible liberation movement; so did Marcelino dos Santos, a Marxist intellectual and FRELIMO's leading ideologue and theoretician who later became vice president of Mozambique under Samora Machel. Dos Santos died in February 2020. He was 90 years old.
He was a very reliable source of information and did not have a reputation of parroting the government's version of events. I knew him.
He was also a strong supporter of the liberation struggle and had close ties with the liberation movements and their leaders including Robert Mugabe who stayed in Tanzania for quite some time, as did other leaders. He went to live in Zimbabwe after the country won independence and worked closely with Mugabe and other ZANU officials. He lived there before when the country was known as Rhodesia, before then as Southern Rhodesia.
Ian Christie, a British journalist who also worked at the Tanganyika Standard during the same time David Martin did and stayed on the editorial staff when the paper was renamed Daily News and after David left – both were there when Mondlane was assassinated – stated the following, in his book Samora Machel, a Biography, about Mondlane's assassination:
“The Tanzanian C . I . D . chief, Geoffrey Sawaya, worked on the case with the cooperation of Interpol and it was established that the murder was planned by the Portuguese secret police, the PIDE . Batteries used in the device were traced to a shop in Lourenço Marques, Casa Pfaff.” – (Ian Christie, Samora Machel, a Biography, London: Zed Books, 1990, p. 58).
Almost four years after Mondlane was assassinated, a senior Tanzanian government official whom I knew well said the same thing David Martin and Ian Christie did – that it was the Portuguese authorities – their secret police, PIDE – who assassinated Mondlane. He didn't tell me anything new. He only confirmed what I had heard earlier from other reliable sources in Tanzania that it was the Portuguese secret service that was responsible for Mondlane's assassination.
The Portuguese didn't want FRELIMO to succeed or have a good reputation in the international arena. They were already at war with the liberation movement and wanted to tarnish its image. Mondlane was the embodiment of that image. He was a highly respected leader, internationally, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain and kept FRELIMO united in spite of the fact that the organisation was divided within because of bitter rivalries among different factions – ideological, ethnic, regional and so on. He also earned FRELIMO a good international reputation as a credible liberation movement; so did Marcelino dos Santos, a Marxist intellectual and FRELIMO's leading ideologue and theoretician who later became vice president of Mozambique under Samora Machel. Dos Santos died in February 2020. He was 90 years old.
Nyani Ngabu
Platinum Member
- May 15, 2006
- 92,216
- 113,519
Mondlane's assassination had striking parallels to the assassination of Herbert Chitepo, chairman of ZANU, in Lusaka, Zambia. Chitepo was also the first African Director of Public Prosecutions in Tanganyika.
Both were killed by planted bombs, hidden in a book in Mondlane's case and in a car in Chitepo's. Both had a great reputation as leaders. Their colonial enemies did not like that. And both assassinations were blamed on rivalry in the liberation movements.
Both assassinations were sophisticated operations involving agents outside the liberation movements even if there was collusion with some dissidents within; so was the assembly of the explosive devices which ended the lives of the two leaders – external agents were responsible for that.
When Chitepo was assassinated, David Martin said Chitepo was killed by the agents of the Rhodesian intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), on orders of rebel Prime Minister Ian Smith.
Martin even wrote a book about the assassination. He knew some agents in the Rhodesian intelligence service when he lived and worked in Salisbury (now Harare) before coming to Tanzania in 1964 and probably had contacts with some of them through the years. He lived in Tanzania for about ten years until he was reportedly expelled by Kawawa. It is said he was given 24 hours to leave when Mwalimu Nyerere was out of the country. Mwalimu would probably have rescinded the order of Martin's expulsion had he been in the country – he and Martin were close friends. Kawawa may not even have tried to expel him.
I heard people in Dar in the early seventies saying David Martin was a double agent. I don't know if he was one or not. But he probably knew some agents in the South African intelligence service, not just the ones in Rhodesia's, and may have been an asset to the Tanzanian intelligence service. He was clearly very close to Nyerere and Mwalimu trusted him. Nyerere even used him to leak information to the press to outfox Kissinger when he was negotiating with the American secretary of state in 1976 on how to resolve the crisis in Zimbabwe, and by extension, the crisis in apartheid South Africa in order to end white minority rule in both countries. As David Martin himself conceded:
“When he (Nyerere) 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 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.” David Martin, "Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere: Obituary," Southern African Research and Documentation Centre – SARDC.).
David Martin was vindicated later when some agents of the Rhodesian intelligence service said Chitepo's assassination was ordered by Ian Smith and that the operation was carried out by the agents of the intelligence service, not by Josiah Tongogara as James Chikerema, leader of FROLIZI and Mugabe's maternal uncle, who was then in Lusaka, claimed. Chikerema attributed the assassination to intra-ethnic rivalries among the Shona between the Karanga (Tongogara's clan) and the Manyika (Chitepo's).
Chitepo's home province was Manicaland in the Eastern Highlands.
Chitepo's Volkswagen Beetle was rigged with a bomb, planted underneath the car, outside his home in Lusaka.
Ken Flower, head of Rhodesia's Central Intelligence Organisation under Smith – he was retained by Mugabe as head of CIO after Mugabe became prime minister in 1980 – said Tongogara had absolutely nothing to do with Chitepo's assassination; there was a man who was an arch-enemy of the white minority regime as commander of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) of ZANU, yet he was absolved of the crime by his enemies. Flower said it was Smith who ordered Chitepo's assassination and he was killed by the agents of Rhodesia's intelligence service.
He knew what he was talking about. He had first-hand knowledge of the operation because the agents were under his command as head of the Rhodesian intelligence service. Nothing, especially such a major operation, could have been conceived and executed without his knowledge and approval.
Ken Flower said he even flew to Lusaka to tell President Kaunda's men assigned to investigate Chitepo's assassination that Tongogara was not responsible for Chitepo's death and they were just wasting their time and resources investigating the murder. He also told them the assassination report was not even worth the paper on which it was written.
The assassination was clearly ordered by Ian Smith. Later, he went on to target another ZANU leader, Mugabe, for assassination, a plot that was foiled by the British intelligence service.
Other CIO agents, besides Ken Flower, said the same thing that it was the Rhodesian intelligence service that was responsible for Chitepo's assassination ordered by Smith.
They said two CIO agents, a Rhodesian and a Scot born in Glasgow who also worked for the Rhodesian intelligence service, killed Chitepo.
David Martin, in his book The Chitepo Assassination, stated that it was the Scotsman who carried bomb parts to Zambia where they were assembled into a bomb used to assassinate Chitepo.
Had Chitepo stayed in Dar instead of moving to Lusaka, it is very much possible he may not have been assassinated. And had he not been assassinated and continued to be the leader of ZANU, it is highly probable he would have become the first prime minister and later president of Zimbabwe. As Shridath Ramphal, who was the second Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations (1975 – 1990), stated in his book, Glimpses of a Global Life:
“Herbert (Chitepo) was a pupil in the Chambers (of Dingle Foot and others) in 1953 – the year I left; but he had been around it while I was there. He was in quasi exile from white-ruled Rhodesia. I had got to know him well. He was the first African from Southern Rhodesia to qualify as a Barrister and he went back there in 1954 after his pupillage in the Chambers.
In Harare, he defended many African nationalists in court and was Legal Adviser to Joshua Nkoma at the Southern Rhodesia Constitutional Conference in Salisbury in 1961. In constant peril of being detained by the Ian Smith regime, he went into voluntary exile in Tanganyika – not yet 'Tanzania' – in 1962.
The next year, in the wake of the Sithole/Nkomo split, Hebert Chitepo became the first President of ZANU – having sided with Sithole. For ten years, then living in Zambia, he was the respected face of the Liberation Movement in world capitals. But in a particularly dark period of liberation politics in 1975, Herbert Chitepo was assassinated by a car bomb outside his home in Lusaka.
Following his death, there was extensive blood-letting between ZANU's ethnic and ideological factions and a comparatively unknown ZANU militant emerged as Chitepo's successor – Robert Mugabe: the man with whom I would have so much to do in the making of Zimbabwe.
It has never been definitively established who killed Chitepo – Rhodesia intelligence, or ZANU activists. However, Mugabe was certainly the political beneficiary of his death. I was later to work with Herbert Chitepo's widow, Victoria, as a Minister in Mugabe's Government.
I have often wondered how different my own experience as Commonwealth Secretary-General in the 1980s might have been had my interactions then been with my fellow pupil of 2 Paper Buildings; or what Zimbabwe itself would have been had Chitepo lived to become its first Prime Minister.” – (Shridath Ramphal, Glimpses of a Global Life, Toronto, Canada: Dundurn, 2014, p. 84).
I got the chance to talk to Chitepo briefly in Dar in 1972 but I really didn't know him – except from what I learned about him from other people who knew him well. He was head of ZANU at its headquarters here in Dar. And he was probably safer in Dar than he was in Lusaka because after Mondlane's assassination, Tanzanian security forces were on high alert. Security was strengthened.
The Rhodesian intelligence service, together with the intelligence services of the South African apartheid regime and the Portuguese, infiltrated the liberation movements. Rhodesian CIO agents even came very close to assassinating Mugabe in Mozambique. He was saved when he got a tip from the British intelligence service that the CIO was about to assassinate him. Smith wanted Mugabe dead as much as he did Chitepo. They led the most active, and most successful, liberation movement fighting to end white minority rule in Rhodesia.
Dissidents in the liberation movements were blamed for subversive activities including murders – they were responsible for some of them – while infiltrators, black and white, who worked for the white minority regimes were also at work at the same time, carrying out murders and acts of sabotage at the behest of their masters. The Tanzanian security forces were kept busy trying to track them down.
The Tanzanian intelligence service during Nyerere's era was very professional and did a very good job, considering the capability of the adversaries and the forces it had to contend with, including the powerful apartheid regime.
There were problems even in relations between Tanzania and other independent African countries which had to be addressed by our intelligence service. One example had to do with Ghana. When Nyerere went to Accra in October 1965 to attend the second OAU summit, he was accompanied by the head of Tanzania's intelligence and security services, Emilio Charles Mzena, among others. Mzena and his team found out that Nkrumah's agents had planted bugs in the rooms at the Star Hotel where members of the Tanzanian delegation, including Nyerere, were staying. Dr. Aloysius Nhonoli was also there as Nyerere's personal physician.
In his book, East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession, Professor John Illife stated the following about Dr. Nhonoli:
"Nzega produced, in Aloysius Nhonoli, the country's most distinguished physician of the next generation.” – ( John Illife, East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 83).
With all the qualities he had as a great leader – he was one, unquestionably – Nkrumah was very worried about Nyerere whom he saw as the only African leader who could eclipse him, especially in sub-Saharan Africa; Nasser was a towering figure in North Africa where Nkrumah had no influence.
Had Mzena and his team not found the listening devices, especially in Nyerere's room, Nkrumah would have been very glad to get whatever intelligence his agents would have been able to gather about his rival, and nemesis, Mwalimu.
Unfortunately, our intelligence service was unable to save Mondlane. But it is very much possible it could have saved Chitepo had he stayed in Tanzania.
One of the well-known individuals who was saved by the Tanzanian intelligence and security services was Kanyama Chiume, former minister of foreign affairs under Kamuzu Banda. Banda's agents came to Dar on a mission to get – and possibly assassinate – Chiume but did not succeed in their nefarious attempt to do so. Chiume's son, Nathan, even publicly thanked the intelligence and security services for protecting his family during those years. He acknowledged that in a television interview with Jenerali Ulimwengu.
Mondlane was not that fortunate.
It must also be acknowledged that during those days, Tanzania was dealing with enemies – the white minority regimes of southern Africa – whose resources and capabilities she could not match; which largely explains some of the successes the white minority rulers had in their diabolical campaigns against the liberation movements based in our country.
They had, at their disposal, what we did not have because of the assistance – virtually unlimited – they were getting from the Western powers who considered them to be their allies but mainly because they were their kith and kin; apartheid South Africa being the citadel of white supremacy on the continent supported and sustained by the West as were the rest of the white minority rulers. As Nyerere stated in his article, “Rhodesia in the Context of Southern Africa,” in Foreign Affairs:
“The West has demonstrated its intentions....There has been a refusal even to challenge South African and Portuguese support for Smith by making sanctions mandatory upon all members of the United Nations. And there have been repeated statements by the responsible authority that force will not be used except in case of a break-down in law and order – which apparently does not cover the illegal seizure of power! What happens if the economic sanctions fail to bring down the Smith regime is left vague.
The domination of a white minority over blacks is acceptable to the West....It is time...for Britain and the United States of America to make clear whether they really believe in the principles they claim to espouse, or whether their policies are governed by considerations of the privileges of their kith and kin.” – (Julius K. Nyerere, “Rhodesia in the Context of Southern Africa,” Foreign Affairs, New York, April 1966, reprinted in J.K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, op. cit., pp. 143, 154 - 155, and 156; and in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, op. cit., pp. 140 – 141).
Both were killed by planted bombs, hidden in a book in Mondlane's case and in a car in Chitepo's. Both had a great reputation as leaders. Their colonial enemies did not like that. And both assassinations were blamed on rivalry in the liberation movements.
Both assassinations were sophisticated operations involving agents outside the liberation movements even if there was collusion with some dissidents within; so was the assembly of the explosive devices which ended the lives of the two leaders – external agents were responsible for that.
When Chitepo was assassinated, David Martin said Chitepo was killed by the agents of the Rhodesian intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), on orders of rebel Prime Minister Ian Smith.
Martin even wrote a book about the assassination. He knew some agents in the Rhodesian intelligence service when he lived and worked in Salisbury (now Harare) before coming to Tanzania in 1964 and probably had contacts with some of them through the years. He lived in Tanzania for about ten years until he was reportedly expelled by Kawawa. It is said he was given 24 hours to leave when Mwalimu Nyerere was out of the country. Mwalimu would probably have rescinded the order of Martin's expulsion had he been in the country – he and Martin were close friends. Kawawa may not even have tried to expel him.
I heard people in Dar in the early seventies saying David Martin was a double agent. I don't know if he was one or not. But he probably knew some agents in the South African intelligence service, not just the ones in Rhodesia's, and may have been an asset to the Tanzanian intelligence service. He was clearly very close to Nyerere and Mwalimu trusted him. Nyerere even used him to leak information to the press to outfox Kissinger when he was negotiating with the American secretary of state in 1976 on how to resolve the crisis in Zimbabwe, and by extension, the crisis in apartheid South Africa in order to end white minority rule in both countries. As David Martin himself conceded:
“When he (Nyerere) 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 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.” David Martin, "Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere: Obituary," Southern African Research and Documentation Centre – SARDC.).
David Martin was vindicated later when some agents of the Rhodesian intelligence service said Chitepo's assassination was ordered by Ian Smith and that the operation was carried out by the agents of the intelligence service, not by Josiah Tongogara as James Chikerema, leader of FROLIZI and Mugabe's maternal uncle, who was then in Lusaka, claimed. Chikerema attributed the assassination to intra-ethnic rivalries among the Shona between the Karanga (Tongogara's clan) and the Manyika (Chitepo's).
Chitepo's home province was Manicaland in the Eastern Highlands.
Chitepo's Volkswagen Beetle was rigged with a bomb, planted underneath the car, outside his home in Lusaka.
Ken Flower, head of Rhodesia's Central Intelligence Organisation under Smith – he was retained by Mugabe as head of CIO after Mugabe became prime minister in 1980 – said Tongogara had absolutely nothing to do with Chitepo's assassination; there was a man who was an arch-enemy of the white minority regime as commander of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) of ZANU, yet he was absolved of the crime by his enemies. Flower said it was Smith who ordered Chitepo's assassination and he was killed by the agents of Rhodesia's intelligence service.
He knew what he was talking about. He had first-hand knowledge of the operation because the agents were under his command as head of the Rhodesian intelligence service. Nothing, especially such a major operation, could have been conceived and executed without his knowledge and approval.
Ken Flower said he even flew to Lusaka to tell President Kaunda's men assigned to investigate Chitepo's assassination that Tongogara was not responsible for Chitepo's death and they were just wasting their time and resources investigating the murder. He also told them the assassination report was not even worth the paper on which it was written.
The assassination was clearly ordered by Ian Smith. Later, he went on to target another ZANU leader, Mugabe, for assassination, a plot that was foiled by the British intelligence service.
Other CIO agents, besides Ken Flower, said the same thing that it was the Rhodesian intelligence service that was responsible for Chitepo's assassination ordered by Smith.
They said two CIO agents, a Rhodesian and a Scot born in Glasgow who also worked for the Rhodesian intelligence service, killed Chitepo.
David Martin, in his book The Chitepo Assassination, stated that it was the Scotsman who carried bomb parts to Zambia where they were assembled into a bomb used to assassinate Chitepo.
Had Chitepo stayed in Dar instead of moving to Lusaka, it is very much possible he may not have been assassinated. And had he not been assassinated and continued to be the leader of ZANU, it is highly probable he would have become the first prime minister and later president of Zimbabwe. As Shridath Ramphal, who was the second Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations (1975 – 1990), stated in his book, Glimpses of a Global Life:
“Herbert (Chitepo) was a pupil in the Chambers (of Dingle Foot and others) in 1953 – the year I left; but he had been around it while I was there. He was in quasi exile from white-ruled Rhodesia. I had got to know him well. He was the first African from Southern Rhodesia to qualify as a Barrister and he went back there in 1954 after his pupillage in the Chambers.
In Harare, he defended many African nationalists in court and was Legal Adviser to Joshua Nkoma at the Southern Rhodesia Constitutional Conference in Salisbury in 1961. In constant peril of being detained by the Ian Smith regime, he went into voluntary exile in Tanganyika – not yet 'Tanzania' – in 1962.
The next year, in the wake of the Sithole/Nkomo split, Hebert Chitepo became the first President of ZANU – having sided with Sithole. For ten years, then living in Zambia, he was the respected face of the Liberation Movement in world capitals. But in a particularly dark period of liberation politics in 1975, Herbert Chitepo was assassinated by a car bomb outside his home in Lusaka.
Following his death, there was extensive blood-letting between ZANU's ethnic and ideological factions and a comparatively unknown ZANU militant emerged as Chitepo's successor – Robert Mugabe: the man with whom I would have so much to do in the making of Zimbabwe.
It has never been definitively established who killed Chitepo – Rhodesia intelligence, or ZANU activists. However, Mugabe was certainly the political beneficiary of his death. I was later to work with Herbert Chitepo's widow, Victoria, as a Minister in Mugabe's Government.
I have often wondered how different my own experience as Commonwealth Secretary-General in the 1980s might have been had my interactions then been with my fellow pupil of 2 Paper Buildings; or what Zimbabwe itself would have been had Chitepo lived to become its first Prime Minister.” – (Shridath Ramphal, Glimpses of a Global Life, Toronto, Canada: Dundurn, 2014, p. 84).
I got the chance to talk to Chitepo briefly in Dar in 1972 but I really didn't know him – except from what I learned about him from other people who knew him well. He was head of ZANU at its headquarters here in Dar. And he was probably safer in Dar than he was in Lusaka because after Mondlane's assassination, Tanzanian security forces were on high alert. Security was strengthened.
The Rhodesian intelligence service, together with the intelligence services of the South African apartheid regime and the Portuguese, infiltrated the liberation movements. Rhodesian CIO agents even came very close to assassinating Mugabe in Mozambique. He was saved when he got a tip from the British intelligence service that the CIO was about to assassinate him. Smith wanted Mugabe dead as much as he did Chitepo. They led the most active, and most successful, liberation movement fighting to end white minority rule in Rhodesia.
Dissidents in the liberation movements were blamed for subversive activities including murders – they were responsible for some of them – while infiltrators, black and white, who worked for the white minority regimes were also at work at the same time, carrying out murders and acts of sabotage at the behest of their masters. The Tanzanian security forces were kept busy trying to track them down.
The Tanzanian intelligence service during Nyerere's era was very professional and did a very good job, considering the capability of the adversaries and the forces it had to contend with, including the powerful apartheid regime.
There were problems even in relations between Tanzania and other independent African countries which had to be addressed by our intelligence service. One example had to do with Ghana. When Nyerere went to Accra in October 1965 to attend the second OAU summit, he was accompanied by the head of Tanzania's intelligence and security services, Emilio Charles Mzena, among others. Mzena and his team found out that Nkrumah's agents had planted bugs in the rooms at the Star Hotel where members of the Tanzanian delegation, including Nyerere, were staying. Dr. Aloysius Nhonoli was also there as Nyerere's personal physician.
In his book, East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession, Professor John Illife stated the following about Dr. Nhonoli:
"Nzega produced, in Aloysius Nhonoli, the country's most distinguished physician of the next generation.” – ( John Illife, East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 83).
With all the qualities he had as a great leader – he was one, unquestionably – Nkrumah was very worried about Nyerere whom he saw as the only African leader who could eclipse him, especially in sub-Saharan Africa; Nasser was a towering figure in North Africa where Nkrumah had no influence.
Had Mzena and his team not found the listening devices, especially in Nyerere's room, Nkrumah would have been very glad to get whatever intelligence his agents would have been able to gather about his rival, and nemesis, Mwalimu.
Unfortunately, our intelligence service was unable to save Mondlane. But it is very much possible it could have saved Chitepo had he stayed in Tanzania.
One of the well-known individuals who was saved by the Tanzanian intelligence and security services was Kanyama Chiume, former minister of foreign affairs under Kamuzu Banda. Banda's agents came to Dar on a mission to get – and possibly assassinate – Chiume but did not succeed in their nefarious attempt to do so. Chiume's son, Nathan, even publicly thanked the intelligence and security services for protecting his family during those years. He acknowledged that in a television interview with Jenerali Ulimwengu.
Mondlane was not that fortunate.
It must also be acknowledged that during those days, Tanzania was dealing with enemies – the white minority regimes of southern Africa – whose resources and capabilities she could not match; which largely explains some of the successes the white minority rulers had in their diabolical campaigns against the liberation movements based in our country.
They had, at their disposal, what we did not have because of the assistance – virtually unlimited – they were getting from the Western powers who considered them to be their allies but mainly because they were their kith and kin; apartheid South Africa being the citadel of white supremacy on the continent supported and sustained by the West as were the rest of the white minority rulers. As Nyerere stated in his article, “Rhodesia in the Context of Southern Africa,” in Foreign Affairs:
“The West has demonstrated its intentions....There has been a refusal even to challenge South African and Portuguese support for Smith by making sanctions mandatory upon all members of the United Nations. And there have been repeated statements by the responsible authority that force will not be used except in case of a break-down in law and order – which apparently does not cover the illegal seizure of power! What happens if the economic sanctions fail to bring down the Smith regime is left vague.
The domination of a white minority over blacks is acceptable to the West....It is time...for Britain and the United States of America to make clear whether they really believe in the principles they claim to espouse, or whether their policies are governed by considerations of the privileges of their kith and kin.” – (Julius K. Nyerere, “Rhodesia in the Context of Southern Africa,” Foreign Affairs, New York, April 1966, reprinted in J.K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, op. cit., pp. 143, 154 - 155, and 156; and in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, op. cit., pp. 140 – 141).
Nyani Ngabu
Platinum Member
- May 15, 2006
- 92,216
- 113,519
- Thread starter
- #297
State banquet in Lagos honoring Nyerere.
Nyani Ngabu
Platinum Member
- May 15, 2006
- 92,216
- 113,519
- Thread starter
- #298
Nyani Ngabu
Platinum Member
- May 15, 2006
- 92,216
- 113,519
- Thread starter
- #299
Nyani Ngabu
Platinum Member
- May 15, 2006
- 92,216
- 113,519
- Thread starter
- #300
Julius Nyerere: Democracy, Zanzibar, and African Unity.
Anzia dakika ya 4 kumsikia Nyerere.
Anzia dakika ya 4 kumsikia Nyerere.
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