Lament for
Independent Africa's Greatest Leader
By JONATHAN
POWER
Oct. 6. 1999
LONDON- Tanzania in East Africa has long been one of the
25 poorest countries in the world. But there was a time when
it was described, in terms of its political influence, as
one of the top 25. It punched far above its weight. That
formidable achievement was the work of one man, now lying
close to death in a London hospital.
How it came to be so is one of the more interesting
political histories of our age. A man born of peasants in a
remote village climbed the educational ladder of the local
Catholic missionaries, went to Edinburgh university, became
a teacher and then blossomed into being the leader of
Tanganyika's (as it was then called before its union with
Zanzibar in 1964) budding independence movement. His
extraordinary intelligence, verbal and literary orginality
(he later translated Shakespeare's Julius Caesar into
Swahili) and apparent commitment to non-violence made him
not just an icon in his own country but of a large part of
the activist sixties' generation in the white world who, not
all persuaded of the heroic virtues of Fidel Castro and Che
Guevara, desperately looked for a more sympathetic role
model.
Measured against most of his peers, Jomo Kenyatta of
Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sekou Toure of Guinea,
he towered above them. On the intellectual plane only the
rather remote president of Senegal, the great poet and
author of Negritude, Leopold Senghor, came close to him.
Not only was Nyerere financially open, modest and honest,
he was uncorrupted by fame or position. He remained
throughout his life, self-effacing and unpretentious. Above
all, he inspired his own people to resist the tugs of
tribalism and to pull together as one people. To this day
Tanzania remains one of the very few African countries that
has not experienced serious tribal division. (Its
continously fraught relationship with the Arab-dominated
off-shore island of Zanzibar is another matter.)
Later, discarding his earlier more pacifist convictions,
he was to become the eminence grise of the southern African
liberation movements in Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South
Africa extending a wide open embrace to their operations.
For this his country paid a heavy price, both in material
terms but also because Nyerere's role as interlocutur with
the West demanded enormous amounts of time and energy that
often led him to neglect his domestic responsibilties. It
also pushed him to take short cuts in judicial procedures
that ended up incarcerating without trial in miserable
conditions opponents of the leadership of these
movements.
Indeed, the liberation struggle brought out a weakness
that had showed itself soon after independence- a conviction
that he did know better than anyone else, that elections for
his position were not necessary and that those for members
of parliament be circumscribed by allowing only balloted
competition within the party not between parties. Yet
whenever he met foreign visitors who offered criticism he
defended himself with charm and humour. Nyerere was not an
egomaniac who banged the table and surrounded himself only
with sycophants. He was simply the self-assured headmaster
that he had been since his teaching days and thought he knew
best. But it was this flaw that has been part of the undoing
of his country. Tanzania remains one of the very poorest
countries in the world. The Nyerere era is over and his
legacy as far as ordinary people working in the towns or out
on the fields in the countryside are concerned is not
self-evident apart from rapid progress made, with the use of
aid money, in the spread of primary education and pure
drinking water in remote villages. Whereas a once equally
poor nearby country, Botswana, has progressed rapidly to the
point where it is bearly recognizable as the impoverished
backwater it was only thirty years ago, Tanzania remains
mired in the rut of underdevelopment and only recently,
since Nyerere voluntarily retired in 1985, has begun to make
up for lost time.
For most of Nyerere's long period in office his country
was in economic difficulties. Inherited poverty, appalling
weather, world recessions, crazed neighbours and war in
southern Africa were all parts of the problem, but in there
end there was not a good excuse for such continuous
failures.
The hard grind of ensuring what little there was ran
well, be it an agricultural extension service inherited in
good working order from the colonial administration or the
Tanzam railway that the Chinese built as a gift, was
sacrificed to grandiose ideas. Not useless prestige projects
in Nyerere's case, but the more insidious ideas of
ideology.
Nyerere's Christian socialist ideology dreamed of new
ways of organizing society when there were hardly the
rudiments of modern structures. He held that Tanzanians, of
whom only a handful had more than a few years of
professional experience, could run, transform and propel
their country into a new orbit in which old habits,
traditional or British-imposed, could be jettisoned
wholesale. Tanzania became riddled with state industries,
state banks, state plantations, state marketing boards which
lost money hand over fist.
His biggest mistake of all was what he called "ujamaa"- a
kind of African, Israeli kibbutz-inspired collectivisation.
From his early days he had visions of an earthy village
socialism in which modern techniques, such as the use of
tractors and fertilizers, could be managed by village teams
and used in communal fields, with the village selling and
buying from the outside on a coooperative basis.
He began his experiments in the early 1960s. By the early
1970s he decided he had preached enough. The order was given
that the peasants were to move. It was a momentous exercise,
uprooting people whose families had farmed the same
scattered plots for hundreds of years. Many moved
voluntarily, persuaded by Mr Nyerere's rhetoric. Others had
to be pushed. The planning was shoddy. Villagers were herded
together and yet often there was no running water, no good
agricultural land and no road.
Later Nyerere was to admit that even in his home village,
which he often liked to visit, ujamaa had not really taken
hold. In the end he was forced to put ujamaa on a back
burner, but the damage had been done.
Many of us will mourn Julius Nyerere when he is gone. He
was, without any doubt, second only to Nelson Mandela, the
most inspiring African leader of his generation. Yet, when
all is said and done, it was not enough to be truly
remarkable, to leave an imprint that will go down in
history. Alas, he too often inspired the wrong things.He was
too beholden to his own self-righteousness and strong
convictions. And since his opinions, sometimes good, too
often wrong, could never be tested or seriously queried by
ballot or by a fiesty, free press, his ideas were never
effectively challenged. That did him, as a person, probably
no good and it did Africa less.
Copyright © 1999 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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