Tanzania — Mwalimu, Ujamaa, and the Liberation Capital
Julius Nyerere stands among the most morally serious and intellectually substantial of Africa's independence leaders — a teacher's son from a small chieftaincy on the shores of Lake Victoria who studied at Makerere and Edinburgh, returned to Tanganyika in 1952, and built the Tanganyika African National Union from an embryonic organisation into the mass movement that negotiated independence from Britain without a shot being fired, on 9 December 1961. Nyerere's political philosophy — Ujamaa, which he translated as "familyhood" and which he argued represented an authentically African form of socialism rooted in the communal values of traditional village life — was his attempt to chart a development path that was neither Soviet nor Western, neither command economy nor free market. Its practical expression, the forced Ujamaa villagisation programme of the 1970s, in which millions of Tanzanians were compelled to move into planned villages, was a failure that he eventually acknowledged. But the broader project — building a non-tribal national consciousness, investing in education and health care, maintaining political stability without the political repression that characterised most of Africa's one-party states — produced results that distinguished Tanzania from most of its neighbours.
The woman who made TANU a genuine mass movement rather than an elite organisation was Bibi Titi Mohamed — a singer and leader of the Islamic women's mutual aid associations in Dar es Salaam who, when Nyerere recruited her to TANU in 1955, threw herself into the work of building the women's section with an energy and organisational talent that transformed the movement. She could not read or write at the time of her recruitment — she had learned her politics through oral culture, through the networks of the women's associations, through the ngoma music and dance societies that were the social infrastructure of Dar es Salaam's working-class African community. Within a year she had enrolled thousands of women into TANU. Within five years she had built a women's section that was the backbone of TANU's mass mobilisation, extending the movement's reach into communities that its educated male leadership could not penetrate. She became one of the first women members of the Tanganyika Legislative Council, a member of parliament, and eventually a junior minister. In 1969 she was arrested, tried for treason, convicted, and imprisoned — accused of involvement in a plot against Nyerere's government. The conviction was widely regarded as politically motivated. She was pardoned in 1972. The story of her rise, her achievement, her imprisonment, and her eventual rehabilitation is one of the more complex and under-told stories of East African independence.
The Zanzibar Revolution of 12 January 1964 was the most violent rupture in the history of East African independence. Zanzibar had achieved independence from Britain in December 1963 as a constitutional sultanate, with the Arab Sultanate government and the ZNP party in power — an arrangement that the African majority population, organised in the Afro-Shirazi Party led by Abeid Karume, regarded as a continuation of Arab domination under British blessing. On the night of 12 January, a self-described "Field Marshal" named John Okello — a Ugandan migrant worker who claimed divine mandate — led a force of several hundred Africans armed with machetes, spears, and a handful of firearms in an assault on Zanzibar Town's police stations and the sultan's palace. The revolution was over in hours. The sultan fled. The violence that followed — in which somewhere between several hundred and several thousand members of the Arab and Asian communities were killed — was beyond Okello's or anyone else's control, and Karume, who took power as the ASP's leader, eventually expelled Okello from the islands. Three months later, Karume and Nyerere negotiated the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar that created the United Republic of Tanzania. Karume ruled Zanzibar as an increasingly authoritarian state within the union until his assassination in 1972.
Tanzania's most important contribution to the pan-African liberation struggle was geographical and logistical — Dar es Salaam became the headquarters of the Organisation of African Unity's Liberation Committee and the base of operations for virtually every southern African liberation movement during the 1960s and 1970s. The ANC, FRELIMO, SWAPO, the PAIGC, ZAPU, ZANU, and MPLA all maintained offices in Dar es Salaam; their leaders moved through the city, planned their strategies, trained their cadres, and received their diplomatic support from Nyerere's government. Oscar Kambona, as Tanzania's first Foreign Minister, was the primary architect of this hospitality — building the diplomatic relationships that made Tanzania the indispensable hub of southern African liberation. When Kambona broke with Nyerere in the late 1960s and went into exile, the solidarity programme continued, but something of the personal energy that had driven it in the early years was lost. Nyerere himself transferred power to Ali Hassan Mwinyi in 1985 — the first voluntary handover of power by an elected African president since Osman Daar in Somalia in 1967 — and spent his retirement years as an elder statesman and mediator, including in the Burundian civil war. He died in 1999, having given his country something that very few African states received from their independence generation: genuine stability, genuine education, and a genuine national identity that transcended the ethnic boundaries that colonialism had imposed.
