Julius Nyerere
By Paul Bjerk
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With vision, hard-nosed judgment, and biting humor, Julius Nyerere confronted the challenges of nation building in modern Africa. Constructing Tanzania out of a controversial Cold War union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar, Nyerere emerged as one of independent Africa’s most influential leaders. He pursued his own brand of African socialism, called Ujamaa, with unquestioned integrity, and saw it profoundly influence movements to end white minority rule in Southern Africa. Yet his efforts to build a peaceful nation created a police state, economic crisis, and a war with Idi Amin’s Uganda. Eventually—unlike most of his contemporaries—Nyerere retired voluntarily from power, paving the way for peaceful electoral transitions in Tanzania that continue today.
Based on multinational archival research, extensive reading, and interviews with Nyerere’s family and colleagues, as well as some who suffered under his rule, Paul Bjerk provides an incisive and accessible biography of this African leader of global importance. Recognizing Nyerere’s commitment to participatory government and social equality while also confronting his authoritarian turns and policy failures, Bjerk offers a portrait of principled leadership under the difficult circumstances of postcolonial Africa.
Paul Bjerk
Paul Bjerk is an associate professor of African history at Texas Tech University, and was recently a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Iringa in Tanzania. He is the author of Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960–1964.
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Julius Nyerere - Paul Bjerk
Julius Nyerere
OHIO SHORT HISTORIES OF AFRICA
This series of Ohio Short Histories of Africa is meant for those who are looking for a brief but lively introduction to a wide range of topics in African history, politics, and biography, written by some of the leading experts in their fields.
Steve Biko
by Lindy Wilson
Spear of the Nation (Umkhonto weSizwe): South Africa’s Liberation Army, 1960s–1990s
by Janet Cherry
Epidemics: The Story of South Africa’s Five Most Lethal Human Diseases
by Howard Phillips
South Africa’s Struggle for Human Rights
by Saul Dubow
San Rock Art
by J.D. Lewis-Williams
Ingrid Jonker: Poet under Apartheid
by Louise Viljoen
The ANC Youth League
by Clive Glaser
Govan Mbeki
by Colin Bundy
The Idea of the ANC
by Anthony Butler
Emperor Haile Selassie
by Bereket Habte Selassie
Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary
by Ernest Harsch
Patrice Lumumba
by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
Short-changed? South Africa since Apartheid
by Colin Bundy
The ANC Women’s League: Sex, Gender and Politics
by Shireen Hassim
The Soweto Uprising
by Noor Nieftagodien
Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism
by Christopher J. Lee
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
by Pamela Scully
Ken Saro-Wiwa
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South Sudan: A New History for a New Nation
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Julius Nyerere
by Paul Bjerk
Thabo Mbeki
by Adekeye Adebajo
Julius Nyerere
Paul Bjerk
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
ohioswallow.com
© 2017 by Ohio University Press
All rights reserved
To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).
Printed in the United States of America
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Cover design by Joey Hi-Fi
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bjerk, Paul, author.
Title: Julius Nyerere / Paul Bjerk.
Other titles: Ohio short histories of Africa.
Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2017. | Series: Ohio short histories of Africa | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017004209| ISBN 9780821422601 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821445969 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Nyerere, Julius K., 1922–1999. | Presidents—Tanzania—Biography. | Nation-building—Tanzania. | Tanzania—History—20th century. | Tanzania—Politics and government—20th century.
Classification: LCC DT448.25.N9 B542 2017 | DDC 967.8041092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004209
Contents
List of Illustrations
1. Mwalimu Nyerere: A Study in Leadership
2. Coming of Age in an African Colony, 1922–53
3. TANU and Tanzanian Independence, 1954–64
4. Ujamaa and the Race for Self-Reliance, 1965–77
5. Confronting a Continent in Crisis, 1978–90
6. An Unquiet Retirement, 1991–99
Notes
Index
Illustrations
Figures
1.1. The independence cabinet, 1961
1.2. President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania with President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, 1965
3.1. Chief Minister Julius Nyerere with Bibi Titi Mohamed, Umoja wa Wanawake (UWT) chairperson Sophia Kawawa, and Maria Nyerere
3.2. The Constitutional Conference, March 1961
3.3. Second Vice President Rashidi Kawawa, in his office, mid-1960s
4.1. President Julius Nyerere with Premier Zhou Enlai of China, 1965
4.2. President Julius Nyerere greets a member of the Ujamaa Group in the Junior TANU Youth League, ca. 1975
4.3. President of Zanzibar and First Vice President of Tanzania Sheikh Abeid Karume, ca. 1965
4.4. President Julius Nyerere greets Coretta Scott King in the United States, 1977
6.1. Retired president Mwalimu Julius Nyerere with his personal secretary, Joan Wicken
Map
1.1. East Africa
1
Mwalimu Nyerere
A Study in Leadership
In January 2006 a delegation from the Vatican held a mass in the Tanzanian village of Butiama to begin investigating the life of Julius Kambarage Nyerere for beatification.¹ This is usually the first step toward sainthood. But it is an unusual honor for a socialist dictator.
Neither saint nor tyrant, Nyerere was a politician who kept his integrity and vision in a harsh and changing world. He taught high school upon graduating from college in 1943, and for the rest of his life he was happiest to be called Mwalimu, the Swahili word for teacher.
He became the first prime minister of independent Tanganyika in 1961, its first president in 1962, and brokered a merger with Zanzibar to become Tanzania in 1964. Prior to the presidency he headed a mass movement that skillfully brought Tanganyika to independence without violence. He was an advocate for democracy, but by reasoning that each country built its own style of democracy, he built a one-party state that regularly violated democratic values.
Nyerere pursued ambitious and not always successful policies aimed at building a peaceful and prosperous nation out of an ethnically diverse colonial territory populated mostly by illiterate peasant farmers. His Arusha Declaration in 1967 envisioned a clean government dedicated to economic growth on the basis of his theory of African socialism, or Ujamaa. Although his government gave military support to movements fighting white-minority governments, only the war with Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1978 mobilized the Tanzanian army and population at large. From his retirement in 1985 to his death in 1999, he used his prestige to urge for ethical political choices at home and abroad. Everyone who met him regarded him as a brilliant intellectual, but some of his policies seem disastrously misguided to us today.
As we are apt to do with historical figures, we lay claim to Julius Nyerere as a symbol of our aspirations and our nightmares; of our heroes and our villains. Yet a full-length, researched biography has not yet been written. In this sketch of his life, I seek to claim him instead as a symbol of leadership and its perils. There will be much debate before a scholarly, let alone popular, consensus is formed around these events. My hope is that this portrait can serve as a case study of an African country confronting the challenges of independence, as seen through the life of one of the era’s most creative and thoughtful politicians.
Nyerere laid out an intellectual and political project and then took deliberate steps to organize people in pursuit of that project. He saw decolonization as an opportunity to build a new society: The Africa that we must create . . . cannot be an Africa which is simply free from foreign domination. It must be an Africa which the outside world will look at and say: ‘Here is a continent which has truly free human beings. . . . That is the continent of hope for the human race.’
²
His life and leadership encompassed the contradictions of his age, and those contradictions beguile us long after his death. While the Vatican may eventually find its own grounds for honoring Nyerere, such veneration is highly politicized and robs history of its human reality, where lessons might be learned from both success and failure. With a stubborn streak that easily blocked common sense, he was far from perfect. But by the same token, those who count Nyerere as a villain pursuing a systematic campaign to deny [Muslims] basic rights,
as Aboud Jumbe resentfully put it, only set him up as a scapegoat for more complex social trends.³
Few leaders so assiduously cultivated an inclusive political establishment or so vehemently denounced the prejudices of their own societies. Nyerere made sure his government and his closest associates reflected a cross-section of Tanzania’s diverse society—Muslim, Christian, Hindu, and animist; African, Indian, Arab, and European—inclusive of all the countless ethnic groups of its broad territory. While those who suffered from his economic policies and political repression may cast him in the role of a Third World strongman, any honest account must also acknowledge his humility, his restraint, and his real commitment to a better life for the people of his country.
Figure 1.1 The independence cabinet, 1961. Rear, from left: Minister of Local Government Job Lusinde; Minister without Portfolio Rashidi Kawawa; Minister of Commerce and Industry Nsilo Swai; Minister of Education Oscar Kambona; Minister of Lands, Forests, and Wildlife Tewa Saidi Tewa; Cabinet Secretary Charles Meek. Front, from left: Minister of Agriculture Paul Bomani; Minister of Legal Affairs Abdallah Fundikira; Prime Minister Julius Nyerere; Minister of Finance Ernest Vasey; Minister of Communications, Power, and Works Amir Jamal. Not pictured: Minister of Home Affairs George Kahama and Minister of Health and Labour Derek Bryceson. © Tanzania Information Services/MAELEZO.
Late in life he offered lessons on leadership as the country prepared for its first multiparty presidential elections since independence. A president of our country is chosen based on the constitution of Tanzania. And, upon being chosen, the person is sworn in: if a Christian, upon the Bible; if a Muslim, upon the Koran. We have not yet chosen a candidate who doesn’t believe in God, but when we do, we’ll find some way to swear the chap in!
⁴ He insisted that
a President must be able to lead the country. He is not there simply to execute popular demands if he recognises or believes that the consequences could be disastrous for the people or for the independence of the country. Yet he is responsible to the People; he needs their confidence and support. . . . [The President] needs to be a person of complete honesty and integrity, capable, strong, firm, and with clear principles which he can explain and defend.⁵
This was not mere rhetoric. This was the standard to which he held himself. A President’s decisions are almost always difficult—easier ones can be made by his Ministers or Officials. And failure to decide is itself a decision: quite frequently refusing (or being unable) to make a decision is worse than making the one which time will prove to have been wrong! For the absence of any decision leads to confusion and opens the door to exploitation by crooks.
Nyerere had a scholar’s mind, but did not have the luxury to wrestle with ideas in the abstract. A politician’s ideas affect people’s lives. To plan means to choose,
is the way Nyerere described the challenge of governance at the height of his presidency, and after his retirement he noted that he did not always make perfect choices.⁶
Whether in the fight to wrest a colony away from the clutches of an imperial power or the fight to guide the direction of an independent country, politics entails the competition for power. Political systems are designed to manage and contain the conflict inherent in this struggle. But systems fail, and politics can easily turn violent. Newly established political systems are especially prone to violence where there is little consensus over rules and norms, where there is little respect for the rights of those who don’t wield power, where there is little faith that those out of office will ever peacefully come into office. Peaceful politics requires compromise, tolerance, and benevolence.
Nyerere engaged in this competition for power in order to establish a peaceful political system. He trusted his vision and considered his leadership essential to establishing such a system. His tools were his ability with words and his management of political institutions. He knew that success would entail a system that could function without him and he made it