Cameron Duodu
LETTER FROM THE NORTH
We were at the end of the interview on BBC World TV. We’d been talking about Julius Nyerere. To round off, the interviewer asked, me, “So what would you say was his one great legacy to Africa and the world?”
I couldn’t answer the question! “You can’t credit him with only one thing,” I said. “He was one of the few African leaders who were not personally corrupt. He had compassion for the rural people of Tanzania and tried to improve their standard of living. He was the greatest champion of the freedom fighters who brought an end to racism and colonialism in South Africa, in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola. He translated Shakespeare into Swahili. He …”
“Thank you very much, Mr Duodu; that’s all we have time for,” said the interviewer.
And my punchline, which was to have been, “And he put Tanzania’s fragile economy at great risk by invading Uganda to rid the African continent of that murderous buffoon, Idi Amin, the greatest embarrassment to black people all over the world,” remained in my head.
The incident sums up the contribution Nyerere made to African history. When you start recounting his deeds, the list doesn’t end.
When I first visited Dar es Salaam in the early Sixties, the place was abuzz with plans for Africa’s total liberation. I met the founder of Frelimo, Edouardo Mondlane, there. Next I heard, he’d frightened the Portuguese so much they killed him with a parcel bomb.
We all had great hopes for the liberation of our continent from the remnants of colonialism and racism. Many of us talked a lot. But Nyerere acted. He created an atmosphere that enabled freedom fighters’ organisations to arrange the military and political training that they needed, either from Tanzania or friendly countries. Tanzania was not rich, but Nyerere was willing to give whatever he could to help make living in Tanzania not quite such a hell for the thousands of exiles who swarmed the country.
Freedom fighters are not the easiest people to accommodate, as they are always extremely politically aware and sometimes quite ambitious. So there was always trouble in their ranks.
Add to this the infiltration of apartheid and CIA agents into their ranks, and also the resentment that some Tanzanians began to cultivate for the exiles, of whom some Tanzanians had become irrationally jealous.
It was without doubt a very difficult scenario. Yet Nyerere and his countrymen overcame it. For practically its entire life, the Organisation for African Unity liberation committee was based in Dar es Salaam, under a Tanzanian military officer, Colonel Hashim Mbita. The intrigues that went on inside the committee are legendary, and Tanzania’s ability to continue to host it year after year was a great credit to the inspiration provided by Nyerere.
Nyerere was one of the first African leaders to demonstrate that, however wise he was, he was not indispensable. When I went to Dar es Salaam for the first time, he had just replaced himself with Rashid Kawawa as prime minister, while he concentrated on reorganising the Tanganyika African National Union (Tanu).
Later, he was to exhibit modesty by resigning as president, in favour of Ali Hassan Mwinyi – while Kamuzu Banda of Malawi and Felix Houphouet-Boigny of Cte d’ Ivoire, for example, were clinging to office, becoming walking dis-advertisements for gerontocracy.
Nyerere was also a simple man. I remember seeing him at a reception held by the South Foundation in London in the late Eighties. One simply walked up to him and began to chat. It was as if one had known him personally one’s whole life. Although well-educated and of a literary bent, he never lost the ability to use language from the peasant stock from which he hailed. His people never stopped calling him “Mwalimu” (teacher), although he left the teaching field many years ago to concentrate on politics.
Okay, so his attempt to adapt the Chinese people’s communes into Tanzania’s “Ujamaa” villages was a flop. But look at the intention. What he had intended was to gather several villages together, build on their spirit of co-operation (which would enable them to cultivate the land together) and then offer amenities like pipe-borne water, schools and health clinics to larger groups, instead of to small scattered villages.
Nyerere’s Ujamaa experiment was defeated by two phenomena: one, his misunderstanding of the attachment of the African farmer to his ancestral area of origin; and two, the inability of Tanu’s urban party apparatchiks to relate meaningfully to the rural people they were supposed to serve. If you push a policy down the throats of people, instead of giving them what they actually want, you shall be defeated.
Thus it was that Ujamaa became a disaster. But Nyerere must be given full marks for trying something new in post- colonial Africa, where many people wanted to copy the same old methods.
Additionally, Nyerere was an eloquent advocate of peaceful co-existence between East and West; of North-South dialogue with a view to reversing the unequal world trade arrangements; of South-South co- operation; and of debt relief for poor countries.
Oh yes, Africa has lost not just a sharp mind, but the best of its kind anywhere in the world.