Taarifa kupitia Citizen Tv ya Kenya, wanachama wa Chadema na wajumbe wa kamati kuu, John Pambalu na Rose Mayemba wameomba hifadhi nchini Kenya baada ya vurugu zilizotokea Tanzania 29 Oktoba.
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Jambo jema wakati wa mapambano ni muhimu baadhi ya makada kuwa nje ya nchi , kama vile Tanzania wakati wa mapambano ya kuondoa utawala wa wachache wabaguzi South Africa na pia harakati za kungoa utawala mkongwe wa Wareno Mozambique, Tanzanoa ilitoa hifadhi kwa makada wa vyama vya ukombozi vya PAC, ANC vya Afrika ya Kusini, FRELIMO ya Mozambique ili kusukuma gurudumu la kuchochea mabadiliko
TOKA MAKTABA :
07 October 2025
From Dar es salaam to Nairobi: The soil that makes and breaks Africa’s leaders
Story by Charles Onyango-Obbo
Peter Mutharika, the octogenarian former president of Malawi, has staged a dramatic comeback, sweeping back to State House after defeating incumbent Lazarus Chakwera with nearly 60 percent of the vote.
Chakwera conceded defeat, acknowledging the voters’ decision after a term marked by economic hardship, fuel shortages, accusations of corruption, and concerns over nepotism.
With his fall, Chakwera might have marked the last of Southern African leaders bred in East Africa’s trenches. For several years, Chakwera lectured at the Pan Africa Christian University, then a modest evangelical college, teaching theology and philosophy.
He also preached and built networks in Kenya’s vibrant religious world, long before becoming head of the Assemblies of God in Malawi and later a politician.
It was not the harsh exile that shaped so many of his African peers, but those Nairobi years placed him within a tradition that links East Africa’s cities with the making of African leaders. Exile or expatriate life, like Chakwera’s, is rarely neutral and has been one of the significant undercurrents of African politics.
Over the years, African leaders were shaped not only by struggles at home but also by their time abroad—in refugee camps, borrowed flats, or foreign schools.
For some, these experiences opened their minds to greater possibilities. For others, they fostered resentment, mistrust, and the bitterness of men who endured the humiliation of statelessness.
East Africa has produced a high number of continental political figures for whom exile enlarged their vision or shrank their spirit. And no country shaped this story more than Tanzania, as for two decades, Dar was a revolving door of exiled revolutionaries and future presidents.
Founding father Julius Nyerere turned Dar es Salaam into the capital of liberation Africa, a city where the future of nearly half the continent was plotted.
Samora Machel of Mozambique trained and operated from Tanzanian soil before returning home to lead the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) and later serve as president.
Joaquim Chissano, his successor, also lived and worked in Dar in his early years. Eduardo Mondlane, the founder of Frelimo, was likewise based in Dar before his assassination in 1969.
Angola’s liberation was also tied to Tanzanian soil: Angola’s first post-liberation president, Agostinho Neto, passed through Dar, as did his successor, José Eduardo dos Santos, while the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) maintained offices and bases there.
The same soil sheltered South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC). Thabo Mbeki, who would later become president, lived in Dar es Salaam during some of his years of exile before the ANC shifted more of its operations to Lusaka.
Namibia’s Sam Nujoma and Hifikepunye Pohamba both lived in Tanzania during the liberation struggle before returning home to lead the country as its first and second presidents.
The DR Congo’s Joseph Kabila also spent part of his youth in Tanzania, following the guerrilla years of his father, Laurent Kabila, around Lake Tanganyika.
Kenya, meanwhile, became a quieter but significant corridor of exile. Nairobi was Chakwera’s temporary academic home, but it also sheltered Somali politicians escaping Siad Barre’s crumbling regime.
Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, who would later become Somalia’s president, operated from Kenya during the fragile years of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) and the subsequent transitional governments.
South Sudan’s long liberation war also leaned on Nairobi: John Garang, chairman of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), who became first vice president of Sudan and died in a helicopter crash on July 30, 2005 (he was also president of the pre-independence autonomous Government of Southern Sudan), and his colleagues used the city as a place of diplomacy and negotiation.
Uganda, too, produced leaders in exile, as did its own in foreign lands. President Yoweri Museveni, after Idi Amin’s coup in 1971, crossed into Tanzania, where he regrouped under the protection of Nyerere.
Milton Obote, deposed by Amin, lived in Dar, brooding over his lost presidency before storming back in 1980. Exile embittered Obote, leaving him grumpy and less tolerant.
At the same time, Uganda hosted the displaced of Rwanda and Burundi. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame grew up as a refugee in western Uganda after his family fled Rwanda in the early 1960s.
He attended schools in Uganda, joined Museveni’s guerrilla National Resistance Army (NRA), rose to become a senior intelligence officer, and then led the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) to power in 1994. Burundi’s President Évariste Ndayishimiye also spent years as a refugee in Uganda.
From this exile, some returned with an expanded vision, with a continental breadth, able to see their nation’s struggles within the broader frame. Machel’s pan-Africanism and Kagame’s strategic clarity both owed something to their years outside.
For others, exile distorts. The daily humiliations of living at the mercy of hosts, the memory of being unwanted, or of competing with other exiles for small favours, can sour the spirit once power is gained. Obote’s second presidency and Robert Mugabe’s paranoia in Zimbabwe bore the latter imprints of exile.
Chakwera’s milder sojourn in Nairobi as an expatriate scholar, rather than a political fugitive, and his earning a salary, likely explains why he carried himself with more intellectual ease than the combat-hardened leaders of exile.
Whatever their ilk, in offering its soil as refuge, East Africa gave Africa its best and its worst rulers—leaders who built nations and others who broke them. For all the promise, Chakwera, a man of God, nearly broke his.
Source : article written by Charles Onyango-Obbo who is a journalist, writer, and curator of the «Wall of Great Africans
TOKA MAKTABA:
MAKALA SEHEMU YA KWANZA:
TANZANIA ILIPOKUWA MAKAO MAKUU YA VYAMA VYA UKOMBOZI NA CHANGAMOTO ZAKE
MWAKA 1959 CHAMA CHA MRENGO MKALI PAC PAN AFRICANIST CONGRESS
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