Those were the turbulent sixties when the Congo was in the news everyday. Besides the radio broadcasts coming directly from Leopoldville and Elisabethville everyday about the war, we also got ample news about the same events on our national radio, TBC (Tanganyika Broadcasting Corporation), Dar es Salaam, later renamed RTD (Radio Tanzania, Dar es Salaam). The conflict in the Congo was one of the dominant stories even in Tanganyika, almost everyday. But there were other crises in the region.

Uganda, another neighbour of Tanzania and Congo, also had to contend with separatist threats by the Buganda kingdom; although not as serious as those in the Congo but serious enough to prompt Prime Minister Milton Obote to use military force to contain the danger. In May 1966, he swiftly deposed Kabaka (King) Edward Frederick Mutesa II (who was Uganda’s president, but only as nominal head) and declared a state of emergency in Buganda kingdom. And in June 1967, he abolished all four kingdoms and declared Uganda a republic. That was when he also became president.

The other traditional centres of power in the kingdoms of Toro, Ankole, and Bunyoro, and in the princedom of Busoga - as well as the region of Teso - had their own well-established political institutions like the Buganda kingdom and were equally suspicious of the national government which wanted to centralize power under a unitary state; thus stripping traditional rulers of authority over their own people. But they did not pose as big a threat to national unity as Kabaka Edward Mutesa did.

Another neighbour, Kenya, under the leadership of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, had just emerged from Mau Mau, and the Kikuyu were consolidating their position as the dominant tribe across the spectrum at the expense of their rivals, the Luo, and other tribes; culminating in the assassination of 39-year-old Tom Mboya, a Luo and Kenyatta’s heir-apparent, in July 1969. I remember the day he was assassinated in broad daylight in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. It was Saturday afternoon, and I was at work then, as a reporter at the Standard, Dar Es Salaam. The assassination is still vivid in my memory because of the magnitude of the tragedy itself. It was also one of the major assassinations in East Africa and, indeed, in the entire continent in the post-colonial era.

Tom Mboya’s assassination threatened to plunge Kenya into chaos, a country already rife with ethnic tensions and rivalries. No one knew how members of his tribe, the Luo, and other Kenyans opposed to Kenyatta’s leadership and domination by the Kikuyu, would react. Nashon Njenga Njoroge, a Kikuyu and the man arrested and accused of shooting Tom Mboya, said after he was captured: “Why don’t you go after the big man?”

The implication of who exactly “the big man” was, besides Kenyatta himself and other Kikuyu political heavyweights of national stature such Mbiyu Koinange who was also close to Kenyatta, added to the confusion as tempers flared especially among the Luo, Mboya’s fellow tribesmen. Large-scale violence was a distinct possibility.

Fortunately, nothing of the sort happened, much of this domestic tranquility attributed to Kenyatta’s dominant personality as the revered father of the nation and to his tight grip on the nation he ruled with an iron fist.

But from then on, a cloud hung over Kenya, and prospects for peaceful co-existence between the country’s two main ethnic groups and their allies remained bleak.

The problem was compounded by the mistreatment of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, another prominent Luo politician of international stature who resigned as Kenya’s vice president under Kenyatta and in March 1966 formed the opposition party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU). But he was effectively neutralized as an opposition leader.

His passport was withdrawn, preventing him from going to the United States in 1968 to deliver a lecture at Boston University, entitled, “Revolution As It Affects Newly Independent States.” He was also denied permission to go to Tanzania where he had an ideological compatriot, President Julius Nyerere.

On October 27, 1969, Oginga Odinga was put under house arrest following an anti-government demonstration by KPU supporters and, three days later, the KPU was banned, leaving the Kenya African National Union (KANU) led by Kenyatta as the only legal party in the country. And on November 11, 1969, Kenyatta was re-elected to a second term. All this took place only about three months after Mboya was assassinated in July. Yet, Oginga Odinga was one of Kenya’s most revered politicians.

He was also one of the most prominent leaders of the independence movement, not only in Kenya but in Africa as a whole. And it was he who led KANU when Kenyatta was in prison and could have very easily become Kenya's first president had he decided not to step aside when Kenyatta was released. It was also Oginga Odinga, together with Tom Mboya, who led the Kenyan delegation to the constitutional talks in London on Kenya’s transition from colonial rule to independence.

Many Kenyans and others also remember him as the author of the best-selling book, Not Yet Uhuru,³ meaning “Not Yet Freedom or Independence” (uhuru means freedom or independence in Kiswahili), which he wrote after he resigned as Kenya’s vice president. President Julius Nyerere wrote the introduction to the book, as he did years later to that of President Yoweri Museveni who said he considers himself to be a disciple of Nyerere. But although Odinga was silenced, he remained a highly respected leaders in Kenya. And he remains a revered figure in Kenyan politics even today on the same level with Kenyatta.

There were more crises in the region. In Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia before independence, just across the border from my home region in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, violence also erupted on a significant scale. The country had just won independence from Britain on October 24, 1964, highly optimistic of the future under the leadership of Kenneth Kaunda, a former school teacher and an apostle of non-violence and author of a book, Zambia Shall Be Free.⁴

Yet, just before and after independence, the country was rocked by violence instigated by members of an anarchist independent church movement known as the Lumpa Church led by a prophetess, Alice Lenshina, which claimed hundreds of lives and disrupted the lives of thousands of people. The church members refused to pay taxes and rejected secular authority. They clashed with the government and fortified their villages, and refused to surrender to security forces. And they invoked the Scriptures to justify their defiance and refusal to submit to temporal authority.

The Lumpa Church and its leader Alice Lenshina became “household” names. And clashes between government forces and the church members was one of the major stories in the early sixties in that part of Africa, with the short-wave radio as an indispensable medium. Zambia also had to contend with separatist threats in the western province, also known as Barotseland, which was and still is a powerful kingdom, and in the southern part of the country, which was also the opposition stronghold of Zambia’s main opposition leader Harry Nkumbula of the African National Congress (ANC).

Maluniko Mundia, leader of the United Party (UP), was another prominent opposition figure. He came from Barotse Province - Barotseland - where he was allied with the powerful traditional rulers including the king of the Barotse people. His party was banned in 1968 because of its sectarian politics, threatening national unity.

And just 30 miles from my home in the misty blue mountains of Rungwe District in the Great Rift Valley, across the border in Malawi (known as Nyasaland until July 6, 1966, when it won independence from Britain and changed its name), Life-President Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda had instituted a reign of terror, persecuting and killing his former compatriots, including leading cabinet members some of whom sought asylum in Tanzania. They included Yatuta Chisiza, Malawi's former home affairs minister in Banda's cabinet, who was assassinated in October 1967 by security forces. Malawian officials claimed he entered the country from Tanzania in order to subvert the government with the help of the Tanzanian authorities.

Another one was Malawi’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Kanyama Chiume who also sought asylum in Tanzania. When I was a reporter at the Daily News in Dar es Salaam, Kanyama Chiume was at The Nationalist, a daily newspaper owned by the ruling party TANU (Tanganyika African National Union), where he worked as a features writer and editor, together with Ben Mkapa who was the managing editor before President Nyerere appointed him editor of the Daily News. Years later, Mkapa himself was elected president of Tanzania for two five year-terms from 1995 to 2005.

In fact, Kanyama Chiume spent his early years in Tanganyika. He came to Tanganyika when he was a young boy to live with his uncle in Morogoro. He later moved to Dar es salaam. He also attended school in Dar es Salaam and later went to Tabora Secondary School in Tabora, western Tanganyika, and finally to Marerere University College in Uganda.

His children also grew up in Tanzania. Two were born in Nyasaland but came to Tanzania when they were small. The rest were born in Tanzania and are Tanzanians.

Kanyama Chiume himself was, for all practical purposes, a Tanzanian since he spent most of his life in Tanganyika and later Tanzania. He returned to Malawi following the introduction of multiparty democracy after living in Tanzania for more than 30 years since he left in 1964. And he had, of course, lived earlier in Tanganyika as a young boy and as a young man. He also spoke perfect Kiswahili, product of the many years he spent in Tanganyika and later Tanzania. He was also very close to President Nyerere.

Under Nyerere, Tanzania became a haven for asylum seekers and refugees from many African countries and others; and I attended Songea Secondary School in Ruvuma Region in the southern part of the country with some of the sons and relatives of these exiled cabinet members from Malawi, such as Henry Chipembere, who was minister of education under President Banda.

Other students at the school included the nephews of former Tanzanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Oscar Kambona who came from that region and who himself went into exile in Britain in July 1967 where he continued to be a fierce critic of Nyerere until his death in 1997. He returned to Tanzania in 1992 to form an opposition party after the introduction of multiparty democracy but did not get much support. He was already a spent force, having lived in exile for so many years.

And at our newspaper, the Daily News, we also had reporters from other countries including South Africa, Rhodesia (renamed Zimbabwe at independence in April 1980), Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria (from former Biafra), and Britain.

Dr. Banda also claimed substantial parts of Tanzania, including my home district - Rungwe - and the rest of Mbeya Region in southwestern Tanzania, as Malawian territory. He also claimed the entire Eastern Province of Zambia, provoking a curt response from Zambia’s president, Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, who challenged Banda to “Go ahead and declare war on Zambia.”⁵

And President Nyerere dismissed Banda’s claim to large chunks of Tanzanian territory as “expansionist outbursts, which do not scare us, and do not deserve my reply.” The outlandish claim also drew a sharp response from Nyerere who said Dr. Banda was “insane.” But, he warned, “Dr. Banda must not be ignored; the powers behind him are not insane.”⁶

So, that was the situation in these neighbouring countries in the sixties when I was in my teens, and thereafter.

The situation in Mozambique, another neighbour, was somewhat different but equally explosive. Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony, and, because Tanzania gave full support to the freedom fighters who used our country as an operational base and headquarters of their liberation movement FRELIMO (Portuguese acronym for Mozambique Liberation Front), the Portuguese attacked parts of southern Tanzania, especially Mtwara Region, as well as Ruvuma Region where I attended Songea Secondary School from 1965 to 1968. But the attacks only strengthened our resolve to support the freedom fighters; an unwavering commitment that continued until Mozambique finally won independence on June 25, 1975, after almost 500 years of Portuguese colonial rule.

One of the casualties of this liberation struggle was Dr. Eduardo Mondlane, founder and first president of FRELIMO, who was assassinated in Dar es Salaam on February 2, 1969, when he opened a parcel, rigged with a bomb and mailed to him from Japan. The bomb, hidden in a book of Russian essays, was traced back to the Portuguese secret police in Lisbon.

I was then a student at Tambaza High School (formerly H.H. The Aga Khan High School) in Dar es Salaam. I was in standard 13 (Form V) that year. Our high school system had two grades, standard 13 and standard 14 (Form V and Form VI), covering two years, what Americans would call grade 13 and grade 14, after completion of secondary school in standard 12. This is roughly equivalent to what Americans call junior college, but with a concentration in three subjects, after which you went to university if you passed the dreaded final exams in standard 14. It was patterned after the British school system we inherited from our former colonial masters.

Many students, including myself, attended Mondlane’s funeral at Kinondoni Cemetery within walking distance from our high school. President Nyerere was at the grave-site, together with Mondlane’s widow Janet and their two little children, a boy and a girl. Leaders of all the African liberation movements based in Dar es Salaam and members of the diplomatic corps also attended the funeral, one of the saddest moments in our history.

But the assassination of Dr. Mondlane did not in any way interfere with the liberation struggle. President Nyerere, who had asked Mondlane to come to Tanganyika and establish an operational base in our country for the liberation of Mozambique when the two met at the United Nations where Mondlane worked and when Nyerere argued our case for Tanganyika’s independence (he went to the UN for the first time in February 1955), vowed to continue supporting the freedom fighters until Mozambique was finally free. Mondlane returned to Africa in 1962 and settled in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, where he went on to unite the various Mozambican nationalist groups to form FRELIMO, one of the most successful liberation movements in colonial history. Nyerere’s invitation to the freedom fighters was typical of him. As he stated in his address to the Tanganyika Legislative Council (LEGCO) on October 22, 1959, even before our country became independent:

“We the people of Tanganyika, would like to light a candle and put it on top of Mount Kilimanjaro which would shine beyond our borders giving hope where there was despair, love where there was hate, and dignity where before there was only humiliation.”⁷

And he went on to fulfill that pledge. Without Tanzania functioning as a rear base and as a conduit for material support to the freedom fighters, Mozambique would probably not have won independence when it did, and the liberation of other countries in southern Africa including the bastion of white rule on the continent, South Africa, would have been equally affected, only in varying degrees. In spite of her poverty as one of the poorest countries in the world, Tanzania still contributed a significant amount of resources to the liberation struggle far more than many other and richer African countries did.

Many people used to say that Tanzania contributed far more than its share; let other countries play their part. For instance, I remember talking to a Malawian surgeon, Dr. Geoffrey Mwaungulu, in Detroit, Michigan, in the United States when I was a student there in the early seventies, who said “Tanzania is doing too much,” overburdening herself, while many other African countries - including his, Malawi - are doing nothing or very little to support the liberation struggle in southern Africa and Portuguese Guinea (Guinea-Bissau) in West Africa. A graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he worked at Ford Hospital in Detroit, and was one of a large number of African immigrants living in Detroit, including professors, lawyers, engineers and other professionals in the city and other parts of the metropolitan area.

There were even some people in Tanzania who said President Nyerere was devoting himself too much to the liberation struggle and pursuits of other foreign policy goals while overlooking domestic problems. Yet there was no contradiction between the two. His commitment to the well-being of Tanzania was not in any way compromised by the active role he played in the international arena.

And he could not have succeeded in the pursuit of his foreign policy objectives - including support of the liberation movements - without the unwavering support of the vast majority of Tanzanians. As David Martin, a renowned British journalist with The Observer, London, who was the deputy managing editor of the Standard, Tanzania, and the one who first hired me as a reporter in June1969 when I was still a high school student, stated in December 2001, two years after Nyerere died:

“I arrived in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam as a journalist on 9 January 1964. Three days later there was a revolution in Zanzibar by the African majority against the Arab minority put in power by the retreating British colonialists just one month earlier. An African-driven union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar followed three months later and the country’s name was changed to Tanzania. Despair, hate and humiliation had begun the painfully slow process of retreating.

Dar es Salaam in those days was the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Liberation Committee. Living in the city were the leaders of the liberation movements of southern Africa such as the ebullient Eduardo Mondlane from Mozambique, more taciturn poet, Dr. Agostinho Neto, and a host of others. Nyerere was their beacon of hope.

He was uninhibited by the paranoid attitudes that gripped the east and west at the height of the Cold War. And although he was not adverse to using westerners to achieve his vision, he sought for the continent to have African solutions created by African people. He did not tolerate fools and was a masterly media manager. He could go for months without seeing the press. But, when he had something to say, as he did in 1976 during two visits by the US Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger, he astutely ensured that his version of events got across.

I remember one day sitting in his office questioning that a number of African countries had not paid their subscriptions to the OAU Liberation Committee Special Fund for the Liberation of Africa. He looked at me for some moments, thoughtfully chewing the inside corner of his mouth in his distinctive way. Then, his decision made, he passed across a file swearing me secrecy as to its contents. It contained the amount that Tanzanians, then according to the United Nations the poorest people on earth, would directly and indirectly contribute that year to the liberation movements. I was astounded; the amount ran into millions of US dollars.

It was the practice among national leaders in those days to say that their countries did not have guerrilla bases. Now we know that Tanzania had many such bases providing training for most of the southern African guerrillas, who were then called ‘terrorists’ and who today are members of governments throughout the region.... Tanzania was also directly attacked from Mozambique by the Portuguese. But, in turn, each of the white minorities in southern Africa fell to black majority political rule and Nyerere saw his vision for the continent finally realized on 27 April 1994 when apartheid formally ended in South Africa with the swearing in of a new black leadership.”⁸

Mozambique was the first country in the region to win independence by armed struggle, six years after Dr. Mondlane was assassinated. His assassination in February 1969 was one of the two major political killings in the region that year, followed by the assassination of Tom Mboya only a few months later in July, about a month after I was first hired as a news reporter of the Standard, renamed Daily News in 1970. I started working full-time on the editorial staff in 1971 after completing high school and National Service.

As a reporter, I used to go to the headquarters of the Mozambique Liberation Front, FRELIMO, on Nkrumah Street in Dar es Salaam for the latest developments on the guerrilla war in Mozambique and to pick up press releases. The office of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa was also on the same street, on the opposite side, not far from FRELIMO’s, just a few minutes’ walk, probably not more than five minutes. The person I always spoke to when I went to FRELIMO’s office was Joaquim Chissano who became president of Mozambique after the tragic death of President Samora Machel in a plane crash in October 1986.

President Machel and his entourage were on their way back to Mozambique from Harare, Zimbabwe, when the plane crashed just inside the South African border not far from Maputo, the Mozambican capital. The South African government was immediately implicated in the crash, and subsequent investigations showed that the “accident” was an act of sabotage by the apartheid regime. The South African government was also behind the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme on February 28, 1986. Palme, who was shot by a gunman as he was walking home with his wife from a movie theater, was a strong supporter of the African liberation movements in southern Africa, as was his country, which - especially under his leadership - reportedly contributed more than $400 million to the liberations struggle in terms of financial and non-military support.

Chissano was in charge of the FRELIMO office in Dar es Salaam, and became Mozambique’s minister of foreign affairs after his country won independence. He held the same ministerial post until he became president after Samora Machel was killed. Marcelino dos Santos who also used to live in Tanzania during the struggle for Mozambique’s independence, remained vice president, under Chissano, as he was under Samora Machel.

Our interaction with the FRELIMO office in Dar es Salaam as reporters was facilitated by Chissano because he also spoke English, besides Portuguese. He also learned and spoke Kiswahili, our national language. So, it was easy for us to communicate with him, as much as it was with most of the freedom fighters from other countries at their headquarters in Dar es Salaam who also spoke English, and some of them Kiswahili.

Dar es Salaam during those days was the center of seismic activity on the African political landscape and beyond. The list of the names of those who came to the city, who lived there, and those who just passed through during the liberation wars, is highly impressive to say the least. It was here, in Tanzania, where Nelson Mandela first came in 1962 to seek assistance for the liberation struggle in South Africa. And Nyerere was the first leader of independent Africa he met. Tanganyika was also the first country in the region to win independence, in 1961.

Mandela also had his first taste of freedom after he arrived in Mbeya, a border town in southwestern Tanzania (then Tanganyika) and the capital of the Southern Highlands Province (later split into Mbeya and Iringa Regions) where, as he states in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, he was not - for the first time in his life - subjected to the indignities of colour bar as he automatically would been in his native land.⁹ He was met by John Mwakangale who was the most prominent leader of Tanganyika's ruling party from that region which was then known as the Southern Highlands.

Almost all the leaders in southern Africa who waged guerrilla warfare to free their countries from white minority rule, lived or worked in Tanzania at one time or another. Thabo Mbeki, who became vice president and then president of South Africa, first sought asylum in Tanganyika when he fled the land of apartheid in the early sixties. So did others, including many leaders in South Africa today besides Mbeki. They include the Speaker of the South African Parliament Dr. Frene Ginwala who once was editor of our newspaper, the Daily News, appointed by President Nyerere before Sammy Mdee replaced her. She lived in Tanzania for many years and is the person who received Mandela in Dar es Salaam when he first came to Tanganyika in 1962.

President Robert Mugabe also lived in Tanzania and Mozambique during Zimbabwe’s liberation war. So did Dr. Agostinho Neto, the first president of Angola, and Sam Nujoma, president of Namibia, and many of their colleagues in government. I remember interviewing Sam Nujoma in 1972 at the office of his liberation movement, the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), on Market Street in Dar es Salaam, only a few minutes’ walk from our newspaper office on Azikiwe Street and from the offices of three other liberation movements: Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) of South Africa.

I talked to Nujoma just before he left for New York to address the United Nations Decolonization Committee and speak in other forums in his quest for Namibian independence. Looking very serious, and highly articulate on the subject, he was very optimistic about the future. He was, of course, vindicated by history. But little did he or anybody else back then know that it would be almost 20 years before Namibia would be free.

Many other leaders found sanctuary in Tanzania. They include those from the Seychelles and the Comoros, two island nations on the Indian Ocean east and southeast of Tanzania, respectively; and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda who attended the University of Dar es Salaam and lived in Tanzania for many years and who - after he became president - continued to express profound respect and admiration for Nyerere whom he acknowledged as his mentor.⁷ When he was a student at the University of Dar es Salaam, Museveni was a member of a study group led by Dr. Walter Rodney. Mwalimu Nyerere even wrote an introduction to one of President Museveni’s books, What Is Africa’s Problem?¹⁰

The late President Laurent Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo also lived in Tanzania for more than 20 years since the sixties after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, his hero, and even owned houses in Dar es Salaam where he was also known by different aliases, prompting his neighbours and other people to suspect that he was a government agent. His son Joseph Kabila who succeeded him as president was born and raised, and attended school in Dar es Salaam and in Mbeya, Tanzania.

In fact, many Congolese refused to accept him as their leader when first became president because they saw him as a foreigner, a Tanzanian, who did not even speak Lingala or French, the main languages spoken in Congo, but instead spoke only English and Kiswahili, Tanzania’s national language, although Kiswahili is also widely spoken in Congo.

Even President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia forged ties with Tanzania early in his life. He spent some time in Mbeya in the southwestern part of what was then Tanganyika, and with his friend Simon Kapwepwe who also spent some time in Mbeya and later became his vice president, used to dream of the day when Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) would be free one day. The two were childhood friends in Chinsali - their hometown and district in the Northern Province - in Northern Rhodesia renamed Zambia.

The list of people who found asylum in Tanzania goes on and on. They include many who became leaders in Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Congo, Zambia, besides those in southern Africa - Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, South Africa - and other countries.

Even Che Guevara spent months in Tanzania.

He was in Dar es Salaam for about four months from November 1965 to February 1966, besides the time he spent in the western apart of the country during his Congo mission. And it was when he was in Dar es Salaam that he wrote his famous book, the Congo Diaries,¹¹ while staying at the Cuban embassy during those critical months. In fact, before he embarked on his Congo mission, it was Che Guevara himself who recommended Pablo Ribalta - his friend and compatriot since their guerrilla war days in the Sierra Maestra during the Cuban revolution - to be Cuba’s ambassador to Tanzania because he felt that Ribalta’s African ancestry would facilitate his mission to the Congo.

And during his military engagement in the Congo, Che sometimes used Kigoma in western Tanzania as one of his sanctuaries. But he had a very low opinion of Laurent Kabila - whom he said had no leadership qualities and lacked charisma - and other Congolese nationalist leaders including Gaston-Emile Sumayili Sumialot. He accused them of abandoning their troops in eastern Congo preferring, instead, to live in comfort in Dar es Salaam.

But in spite of the fact that Tanzania was the headquarters of all the African liberation movements, and a place which attracted many liberals and leftists from many parts of the world including black militants from the United States such as the Black Panthers (among them Black Panther leader Pete O'Neal and his wife Charlotte who have lived in Tanzania since 1972), and Malcolm X who also visited Tanzania and had a meeting with President Nyerere and attended the OAU conference of the African heads of state and government in Cairo, Egypt, in July 1964 (where he almost died when his food was poisoned, probably by CIA agents who followed him throughout his African trip); our country still enjoyed relative peace and stability, not only during the euphoric sixties soon after independence, but during the seventies as well, when the liberation wars were most intense in southern Africa, with Dar es Salaam, our capital, as the nerve centre.

Therefore, besides the raids by the Portuguese from their colony of Mozambique on our country; a sustained destabilization campaign by the apartheid regime of South Africa whose Defence Minister P.W. Botha said in August 1968 that countries which harbor terrorists - freedom fighters in our lexicon - should receive “a sudden knock,”¹² a pointed reference to Tanzania and Zambia, and by the white minority government of Rhodesia (Prime Minister Ian Smith called Nyerere “the evil genius” behind the liberation wars), all of whom had singled out Tanzania as the primary target because of our support for the freedom fighters; the influx of refugees from Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo into our country; and Malawian President Banda’s claims to our territory; in spite of all that, Tanzania was, relatively speaking, not only an island of peace and stability in the region but also an ideological center with considerable magnetic pull, drawing liberal and radical thinkers from around the world, especially to the University of Dar es Salaam which became one of the most prominent academic centres in the world with many internationally renowned scholars who strongly admired Nyerere and his policies.

Among the scholars drawn to Tanzania was the late Dr. Walter Rodney from Guyana who first joined the academic staff at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1968 and, while teaching there, wrote a best-seller, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa;¹³ the late distinguished Professor Claude Ake from Nigeria who died in a mysterious plane crash in his home country in 1996; Professor Okwudiba Nnoli, also from Nigeria (secessionist Biafra); Professor Mahmood Mamdani from Uganda and one of Africa’s internationally renowned scholars; Nathan Shamuyarira who - while a lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam - was also the leader of the Dar-es-Salaam-based Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI) headed by James Chikerema, a Zimbabwean national leader. Shamuyarira went on to become Zimbabwe’s minister of foreign affairs, among other ministerial posts.

Many other prominent scholars from many countries around the world, and from all continents, were also attracted to the University of Dar es Salaam. C.L.R. James from Trinidad & Tobago, one of the founding fathers of the Pan-Africanist movement who knew Kwame Nkrumah when Nkrumah was still a student in the United States, and who introduced him to George Padmore when he went to Britain for further studies before returning to Ghana (then the Gold Coast) in 1947 with Ako Adjei, was also attracted to Tanzania. So was Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, disenchanted with the Kenyan leadership, and Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah, an admirer of Nkrumah and Nyerere, who has also called for the adoption of Kiswahili as the continental language just as Wole Soyinka has.

Besides Malcolm X, other prominent black American leaders who came to Tanzania included Stokely Carmichael (originally from Trinidad) who as Kwame Ture lived in Guinea for 30 years until his death in November 1998. When in Dar es Salaam, Stokely used to stay at the Palm Beach Hotel, not far from the Indian Ocean beach and our high school hostel, H.H. The Aga Khan, in an area called Upanga; while Malcolm X and Che Guevara used to go to the New Zahir restaurant. But while Malcolm X was in Tanzania only for days, Che spent about four months in Dar es Salaam. Angela Davis of the Black Panther Party and others in the civil rights movement including Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and Robert Williams who organized some blacks for self-defence in North Carolina, also came to Tanzania.

I also remember when Robert Williams came to our editorial office at the Daily News in Dar es Salaam. I saw him again in 1975 when I was a student at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He came to Detroit and spoke to Wayne State University students who were members of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). I was at that meeting as an observer and reminded him of his visit to our newspaper office in Tanzania, which he remembered very well, as we went on to talk about a number of subjects including the influence of President Nyerere in a Pan-African context. He lived in Baldwin, Michigan, and died in 1996.

Some of the prominent leaders in the American civil rights movement who lived in Tanzania for a number of years include Charlie Cobb and Robert (Bob) Moses. They were active in Mississippi and other parts of the Deep South during the turbulent sixties when they almost got killed. Bob Moses was one of those who got a thorough beating in Mississippi for trying to organize blacks to vote. The White Citizens Council, founded in Greenville in Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups could not tolerate that. Cobb had similar close calls. Both eventually moved to Africa. After they returned to the United States, they continued to be involved in civil rights activities and organizing communities for their collective well-being.

They co-authored Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights and developed an algebra curriculum also designed to mobilize communities to achieve common goals. Launched in 1982, the Algebra Project now operates in many cities and communities across the United States, and their book, Radical Equations, describes the project's creation and implementation.

The project involves entire communities to create a culture of literacy around algebra, a crucial stepping-stone to college math and opportunity, especially for blacks and other minorities who lag behind in preparation for college work because of the low quality of education they get in inner-city schools. Bob Moses, who was a secondary school teacher in Tanzania, began developing the Algebra Project after becoming unhappy with the way algebra was taught to his teen-age daughter. He saw algebra as a major obstacle for black students trying to go to college.

Charlie Cobb was a field secretary for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNNC), once headed by Stokely Carmichael, in Mississippi from 1962 to 1967 where he developed the idea for the Freedom Schools that SNNC operated. The schools taught basic literacy skills to black children and became a model for many new approaches to education still used today across the United States. He also helped found the National Association for Black Journalists and became a senior writer for allafrica.com, the web site of AllAfrica Global Media. The site posts hundreds of news stories about Africa everyday from more than 80 African media organizations and its own reporters.

The years the two civil rights activists and many others spent in Tanzania helped strengthen ties between Africa and Black America, and is strong testimony to Tanzania's hospitality to oppressed people from around the world who found sanctuary in Tanzania during Nyerere's tenure. The relationship between Tanzania and Black America has also been demonstrated in many other ways. For example, when Malcolm X returned to the United States from Africa, FBI agents were waiting for him at the airport in New York.

He was seen going into a car with a diplomatic license plate which was traced to "the new African nation of Tanzania." The car took him to the residence of the Tanzanian ambassador to the United Nations, trailed by FBI agents the same way Malcolm X was followed by CIA agents throughout his African trip.

President Nyerere also forged ties with Black America soon after independence when he instructed the Tanzanian ambassador to the United States to recruit skilled African-Americans to work in Tanzania to help the country meet its manpower requirements and as act of Pan-African solidarity. There are also schools and other institutions in black communities in the United States named after Nyerere and other African leaders such as Nkrumah, Lumumba and Mandela.

And Kiswahili, Tanzania's national language, is the most popular African language among African-Americans; much of this popularity attributed to the influence and stature of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere as an eminent Pan-Africanist who was embraced by the African diaspora as much as Nkrumah was. Many African-Americans came to Tanzania because of Nyerere and his policies. Others viewed their trip as a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey, and a return to the motherland in the spirit of Pan-African solidarity.

One of the African-Americans who was among the earliest to settle in Africa was Bill Sutherland, like Dr. W.E.B. DuBois and George Padmore, both of whom he knew and worked with in Ghana where they also lived and died. He came from Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and lived in Tanzania for decades. He knew and worked with Nyerere and was still in Tanzania when Nyerere died. Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi as a youth, he became a pacifist and worked for the Quaker-affiliated American Friends Service Committee after he graduated from Bates College in Maine. From 1942 to 1945, he was in a federal penitentiary as a war resister.

He first went to Africa in 1953 and settled in Ghana where he worked closely with Kwame Nkrumah. And through the years, he met or worked with many other African leaders including Nyerere, Kaunda, Lumumba, Tom Mboya, Mandela; others in the diaspora such as Frantz Fanon, and Malcolm X whom he interviewed extensively; as well as the leaders of the liberation movements in southern Africa, all of whom were based in Tanzania. In his book he wrote with Matt Mayer, Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan-African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation in Africa, Sutherland has a lot to say about Nyerere whom he knew and worked with for more than 30 years.

He moved to Tanganyika after he fell out with Nkrumah and left Ghana following his criticism of Nkrumah's increasing dictatorial tendencies and abandonment of nonviolence in the struggle for African liberation. When he settled in Dar es Salaam, he became involved in politics - as he had always been - and worked in the office of Prime Minister Rashidi Kawawa who became vice president of Tanganyika under Nyerere, and later second vice-president of Tanzania; with the president of Zanzibar, Abeid Karume, serving as first vice-president as stipulated by the constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania.

As with Nkrumah, Bill Sutherland also disagreed with Nyerere on the same subject of non-violence and quotes him in his book. As Nyerere explained his support for armed struggle to liberate southern Africa: "When you win, the morale of the African freedom fighters will go up and the morale of their opponents throughout southern Africa will go down. I said that's what we should do, demonstrate success, which we did." Sutherland also quotes Nyerere as saying that although the struggle for Tanganyika's independence was non-violent, he was not opposed to the use of violence if that was the only way to win freedom.

Therefore his opposition to violence or support of armed struggle was not based on principle but dictated by circumstances. As Nyerere told Sutherland about the non-violent struggle for Tanganyika's independence: "The nonviolence of our movement was not philosophical at all...My opposition to violence is [to] the unnecessary use of violence." And Zambian President Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, once a pacifist himself, asked Sutherland and co-author Matt Meyer if they had ever run a country on pacifist principles. As he put it: "Have you tried running a country on the basis of pacifist principles without qualification or modification, or do you know anyone who has?" As Sutherland states in the book, the discussion went well into the night, "but the upshot was that nobody had a clear and definable answer. We were not really able to respond to Kaunda."

I remember talking to Bill Sutherland in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, in the summer of 1977 when he spoke about the liberation struggle in southern Africa. He also talked about other African subjects including Idi Amin, saying Amin did what he did in many cases just "for a little bit of publicity," as he put it. He also happened to know well some of the people, including national leaders, I knew in Tanzania. I was still a student then, in the United States, following closely the events in Africa including the liberation wars in southern Africa. We agreed on almost everything except the armed struggle. I supported it. But even he as a pacifist was ambivalent about it, especially in the context of southern Africa.

He understood the necessity of armed struggle but, as a pacifist, could not as a matter of principle support the use of violence. I saw it as the only viable option; a concession he grudgingly made in conversations with the freedom fighters in Tanzania and elsewhere, and even with Nyerere and Kaunda, although they also agreed to disagree.

Yet he also realized that he could not really oppose the use of violence in southern Africa, considering the nature of the situation. Nor could he justify the use of non-violence in a situation where the oppressor did not have the slightest compunction shooting and killing unarmed, defenceless, and innocent men, women and children for no other reason than that they were demanding basic human rights, including the sanctity of life pacifists themselves invoke to justify non-violence.

Yet, he was a dedicated Pan-Africanist who made Tanzania his home, a country which became the most relentless supporter of armed struggle in southern Africa. And he settled in Tanzania because of Julius Nyerere who was already, even back then in the 1950s, becoming increasingly influential in African affairs, especially in the liberation of our continent from colonialism and imperialism.

A number of revolutionary thinkers from Latin America, Europe, and Asia were equally drawn to Tanzania and lived in Dar es Salaam which was the center of ideological ferment and provided an environment conducive to cross-fertilization of ideas stimulated by Nyerere’s policies and ideological leadership. And Tanzania’s prominent role in the African liberation struggle and world affairs because of Nyerere’s leadership put the country in a unique position on a continent where few governments looked beyond their borders, with most of them content to pursue goals in the narrow context of “national interest,” which really meant securing and promoting the interests of the leaders themselves.

Tanzania was therefore an anomaly in that sense, on the continent, as a haven and an incubator for activists and revolutionaries from around the world. And it remained that way as a magnet throughout Nyerere’s tenure. It was also his leadership more than anything else, which played a critical role in forging and shaping the identity of our nation and in enabling Tanzania to play an important role on the global scene, far beyond its wealth and size, especially in promoting the interests of Africa and the Third World in general.

The fact that Nyerere himself was chosen as chairman of the South Commission, a forum for action and dialogue between the poor and the rich countries on how to address problems of economic inequalities in a global context, is strong testimony to that. And it was in this crucible of identity, a country that would not be what it is today had it not been for Nyerere that my own personality was shaped.

In some fundamental respects, it is an identity and an ethos like no other on the continent: an indigenous national language, Kiswahili, transcending tribalism and not claimed by any particular ethnic group as its own - all the tribes and racial minorities contributed to its creation and growth, a unique phenomenon; social equality as an egalitarian ideal implemented by Nyerere through the decades; national unity - and stability - that has virtually eliminated tribalism and racism as major problems in national life, and in a country where speaking tribal languages in front of other people who don’t understand those languages is frowned upon. Kiswahili helped Tanzania’s 126 different tribes and racial minorities - Arab, Asian, mostly of Indian and Pakistani origin, and European - to develop a sense of national unity and identity which has remained solid through the years regardless of what the country has undergone since independence in 1961.

And the egalitarian policies of President Nyerere reduced social inequalities across the nation and guaranteed equal access to health, education, and other services on a scale unequalled anywhere else on the continent.

But probably more than any other asset, it was Nyerere’s leadership which proved to be most useful at a time when we needed it most to forge a true sense of national identity, maintain national stability, and consolidate our independence; as much as Mandela’s magnanimity and wisdom proved to be an indispensable asset in South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy at a time when the country could have exploded, engulfing it in a racial conflagration.

The pundits and laymen alike who predicted this were proved wrong largely because of Mandela’s astute leadership, like Nyerere’s. Therefore it’s not surprising that they are the only two African leaders who are favourably compared to each other with equal international and moral stature - hence Nyerere’s honorific title, “The Conscience of Africa.” There is nobody else in their league.

I remember Nyerere well. Cordially known as Mwalimu, which means Teacher in Kiswahili, he led by example; his humility equalled by his commitment to the well-being of the poorest of the poor, yet without ignoring the rights of others. And he asked all to make sacrifices for our collective well-being. As he put it, “It can be done. Play your part.”

His dedication and identification with the masses, and his passion for fairness, were evident throughout his tenure as the nation’s leader. When he became president, he worked and lived with them in their villages, slept in their huts, and ate their food. He spent days, and weeks, working with them in the rural areas in all parts of the country. He mingled with the peasants so well that you wouldn’t even know who the leader was in the group, let alone be able to identify him as president of a country if you didn’t know how he looked like. I know this because I worked as a news reporter in Tanzania.

No other African leader lived the way he did, and worked in the rural areas as much as he did, clearing and tilling the land for hours with ordinary peasants. He was one of them and, they said, “He’s one of us.” Not a detached, arrogant leader and intellectual who felt it was beneath him to soil his hands like the poor, illiterate peasants did. I also know how humble he was, because of what I witnessed years before I even became a national news reporter, first at the Standard, next at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting as an information officer, and then at the Daily News.

I remember Nyerere when he was campaigning for independence. It was in the late 1950s when I first saw him. He had already been to the United States, and even appeared on American television with Eleanor Roosevelt in 1956 when he was interviewed by Mike Wallace, a prominent American television journalist and interviewer who was still on the air in 2003 and beyond, although in his eighties.

Nyerere went to the United States to present our case for independence at the United Nations where he appeared more than once in the late fifties, and before American audiences including academic gatherings such as the one at Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1960 where he participated in a symposium and delivered a lecture, “Africa and the World.”

I was just a little boy then, under ten, when he came to our home district in the late fifties more than once. I first saw him around 1958. He was about 36 years old. But in spite of my age - I was born on 4 October 1949 - what I saw then remains vivid in my memory as if it happened only yesterday. I was a pupil at Kyimbila Primary School, about two miles from Tukuyu. Founded by the German colonial rulers and named Neu Langenburg, Tukuyu was our district headquarters for Rungwe District.

The town was destroyed by earthquakes in 1910 and in 1919 but was rebuilt. It had been the district headquarters since the German colonial rulers built it when they first came to the area in the early 1890s.

When the British took over Tanganyika - then known as German East Africa which included Rwanda and Burundi as one colony - after the Germans lost World War I, they continued the tradition and kept the town (whose name was changed from Neu Langenburg to Tukuyu) as the headquarters of Rungwe District headed by a British District Commissioner, simply known as DC, who lived there.

Nyerere came to Tukuyu one afternoon and our head teacher, who also happened to be a relative of mine, led us on a trip from our school to Tukuyu to listen to him. As life was then, and as it still is today across Africa for most people including children, we walked the two miles to Tukuyu to hear him speak; a man who, we were told, was our leader and who was going to be president of Tanganyika in only about three years, replacing the British governor.

I was then too young to understand the complexities of politics and political campaigning all of which to us at that age seemed to be expressed in esoteric terms. Yet we were old enough to understand what Nyerere was saying in general; a message delivered in his usual simple style everybody, including children my age, was able to understand. And he knew there were children at the rally. He saw us.

He arrived in an open Land Rover, standing in the back, waving at the crowd. The people were just as jubilant. He stepped out of the Land Rover and walked to the football (soccer) field to address the mass rally. He wore a simple short-sleeved light-green shirt and a pair of long trousers (pants), and started speaking, using a megaphone.

It was a cloudy afternoon and, after he spoke for only a few minutes, it started raining. The leading local politician of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), Mr. Mwambenja, a formidable personality and relentless campaigner for independence, who welcomed Nyerere at the rally tried to hold an umbrella over him. But he refused to accept it and continued to speak. He even joked about himself implying that he was a non-entity, an insignificant personality, and said something to the effect that the colonialists and other detractors were now, with all that rain saying, “Just let him get soaked and washed away.”

The subtle message in this self-deprecating humor was that he was not going to fade into oblivion and give up the struggle for independence. And it kept on raining. But the rain did not dampen his spirits. We also stayed as almost everybody else did, impressed by his humility and simplicity despite his status as the most prominent and acknowledged leader of Tanganyika, besides the British governor Sir Edward Twining who was later succeeded by Sir Richard Turnbull, the last governor. He got soaked in the rain just like the rest of us and continued to speak until he finished addressing the rally.

It was such humility, devotion and simplicity, which remained the hallmark of his life and leadership. And it was evident even among some members of his family. I attended school with his eldest son, Andrew, at Tambaza High School, the former H.H. The Aga Khan High School which had been exclusively for students of Asian origin, mostly Indian and Pakistani, almost all of whom were Tanzanians. There were also some Arab students. And there were only a few of us, black students. We were among the first to integrate the school as mandated by the government under Nyerere. In fact, Mwalimu himself had experienced racial discrimination, what we in East Africa - and elsewhere including southern Africa - also call colour bar. As Colin Legum states in a book he edited with Tanzanian Professor Geoffrey Mmari, Mwalimu: The Influence of Nyerere:

“I was privileged to meet Nyerere while he was still a young teacher in short trousers at the very beginning of his political career, and to engage in private conversations with him since the early 1950s.

My very first encounter in 1953 taught me something about his calm authority in the face of racism in colonial Tanganyika. I had arranged a meeting with four leaders of the nascent nationalist movement at the Old Africa Hotel in Dar es Salaam. We sat at a table on the pavement and ordered five beers, but before we could lift our glasses an African waiter rushed up and whipped away all the glasses except mine.

I rose to protest to the white manager, but Nyerere restrained me. ‘I am glad it happened,’ he said, ‘now you can go and tell your friend Sir Edward Twining [the governor at the time] how things are in this country.’ His manner was light and amusing, with no hint of anger.”¹⁴

Simple, yet profound. For, beneath the surface lay a steely character with a deep passion for justice across the colour line and an uncompromising commitment to the egalitarian ideals he espoused and implemented throughout his political career, favouring none.

Years later his son, Andrew Nyerere, told me about an incident that also took place in the capital Dar es Salaam shortly after Tanganyika won independence. Like the incident earlier when Julius Nyerere was humiliated at the Old Africa Hotel back in 1953, this one also involved race. As Andrew said in a letter to me when I was writing this book:

"As you remember, Sheikh Amri Abeid was the first mayor of Dar es Salaam. Soon after independence, the mayor went to Palm Beach Hotel (near our high school, Tambaza, in Upanga). There was a sign at the hotel which clearly stated: 'No Africans and dogs allowed inside.' He was blocked from entering the hotel, and said in protest, 'But I am the Mayor.' Still he was told, 'You will not get in.' Shortly thereafter, the owner of the hotel was given 48 hours to leave the country. When the nationalization exercise began, that hotel was the first to be nationalized."¹⁵

Such insults were the last thing that could be tolerated in newly independent Tanganyika. And President Nyerere, probably more than any other African leader, would not have tolerated, and did not tolerate, seeing even the humblest of peasants being insulted and humiliated by anyone including fellow countrymen.

And his passion for equality was legendary. For example, he sent his son Andrew to a local school - with the sons of peasants and workers - when he could have sent him abroad, as was customary among most leaders across the continent. They either sent their children to exclusively private and expensive schools within their own countries, or flew them overseas, and still do.

All this was in keeping with his commitment to social equality for all Tanzanians. He said we are not going to build a society based on privilege; we are going to narrow the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and abolish classes which accentuate cleavages and define some human beings as better than others.

At our high school, many people knew that President Nyerere’s eldest son was one of the students. Yet he got no special favours. He was treated just like the rest of us, and we saw him as just another student like us.

And he saw himself that way, and acted that way. You wouldn’t even know he was the president’s son because of the way he behaved and carried himself, just as an ordinary student, and the way the rest of us treated him. We lived in the same hostel, most of whose students were Tanzanians of Asian origin; ate the same food at the same table, and worked on the farm together, tilling the land, as true sons of a nation of peasants and workers.

Our school in Dar es Salaam had a farm near Muhimbili National Hospital where we were required to work to instill egalitarian values in our minds. We walked to the farm, about two miles round trip, carrying hoes and sickles and other agricultural implements; a strong reminder that we were no better than ordinary peasants and workers simply because we had acquired some education and were destined to become part of the nation’s elite. And Nyerere’s son also walked around the city with fellow students and other friends, just like the rest of us, when many people would probably have expected him as the president’s son to ride in a Mercedes Benz. But that was not the kind of society based on class and privilege President Nyerere was trying to build. And to his son’s credit, he was just as humble and friendly with everybody.

Mwalimu Nyerere did not even force his children to toe the party line. One of his sons, Charles Makongoro - different from another Makongoro who attended school with us at Tambaza and who was sometimes mistaken for President Nyerere's son - left the ruling party founded by his father and, with the blessings of his family, joined what then was the country's leading opposition party on Tanzania mainland; the Civic United Front (CUF) was the main opposition party in Zanzibar, not on the mainland, as it still is today. In 1995, Charles Makongoro Nyerere was elected as one of the few opposition members of parliament, but lost his seat following a court ruling before his five-year term expired. He then rejoined the ruling party.

He returned to parliament in February 2004 after President Benjamin Mkapa appointed him a member; one of the 10 members the president is empowered to appoint to the national legislature at his discretion as stipulated by the constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania.

President Nyerere's eldest son Andrew also joined one of the opposition parties, the Tanzania Labour Party (TLP), in 2005 and said at a meeting in Dar es Salaam when he joined the party that he had never been a member of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM).

Our school was also fully integrated. We lived in the same hostel with Asian and Arab students. We also had African, Asian and European teachers, most of them Tanzanian citizens. Other schools across Tanzania were also fully integrated - student and faculty. At our school, students came from all parts of the country and from many different tribes. We were not encouraged to attend school - except at the primary school level - in our home districts, which were usually inhabited by members of our own tribes. We were, in fact, assigned to schools and jobs after graduation far away from our tribal homelands in order to live and work with members of other tribes.

It was a deliberate effort by the government to break down barriers between members of different tribes and races in order to achieve national unity. And it worked. This was probably Nyerere’s biggest achievement - the creation of a cohesive political entity unique on a continent rife with ethnic tensions and torn by conflict caused and fuelled by ethno-regional rivalries in the struggle for power and for the nation’s resources. Our schools were a microcosm of what Tanzania became: a united, integrated, peaceful and stable nation.

It was also when I was in high school at Tambaza that I first got hired in June 1969 as a reporter by the Standard, which became the Daily News the following year. I started working full-time in 1971 after I finished high school (Form VI or standard 14) the previous year. Our managing editor was Brendon Grimshaw, a British, and the news and deputy editor was David Martin, also British, who also worked for the London Observer for many years after he left Tanzania. David Martin also worked for the BBC and even covered the Angolan civil war. I remember listening to him in a live report from Angola on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Toronto) radio when I lived in Detroit, Michigan, USA, in the seventies.

President Nyerere was our editor-in-chief. But he never served in an executive capacity at the Daily News. As an overall guardian of this publicly owned institution - the paper, the Standard, was renamed Daily News in 1970 when it was nationalized - he gave us the freedom to say what we wanted to say and even encouraged us to criticize the government and its policies. And he meant what he said. We wrote what we wanted to write without any fear of retribution or censorship. Others also testify to that. As Philip Ochieng', probably Kenya’s best known journalist and political commentator who was attracted to Tanzania by Nyerere’s leadership and policies and joined our editorial staff at the Daily News, stated in a tribute to Mwalimu, “There Was Real Freedom in Mwalimu’s Day,” in The East African, 26 October 1999:

“I never really covered Mwalimu Nyerere. By the time I got to Tanzania to work for The Standard Tanzania, I had been an editorial pontiff in Nairobi’s Sunday Nation for upwards of two years.

And that was what I continued to do in Dar-es-Salaam, fulminating like Ezekiel from my armchair.

But one thing is true. Working for the president, between September 1970 and January 1973 was probably the most enjoyable period of my entire journalistic career. There were at least two reasons for this. The first was that ours was a community of ideas. The second, contrary to what was constantly claimed here in Nairobi and by the Western press, was that the Dar-es-Salaam newspapers enjoyed a high level of freedom to publish. This reflected the fact that Tanzania enjoyed an unprecedented freedom of speech. But it was never licentious freedom of the kind with which Nairobi’s alternative press assails our eyes every morning.

Following the Arusha Declaration of 1967, Julius Kambarage Nyerere had, early in 1970, nationalised The Tanganyika Standard from Lonrho and rechristened it The Standard Tanzania as the official print organ of the government.

The Nationalist and its Kiswahili sister Uhuru already existed as the organs of the ruling Tanganyika African National Union (Tanu), with Ben Mkapa as its editor. Brought in from London as Managing Editor of The Standard was a tough-talking South African woman of Asian origin called Frene Ginwala.

Ginwala, who is now the Speaker of the South African Parliament in Cape Town, was a woman of strong left-wing convictions. She very soon collected around her men and women from the international community with equally strong socialist views.

This was the context in which I left Nairobi for Dar-es-Salaam, invited by Ginwala. Mwalimu Nyerere acted as our (non-executive) Editor-in-Chief. And yet every Friday I published an opinion column highly critical of his system.

I waxed critical especially of the recently nationalised commercial and industrial houses: the corruption that was beginning to invade them and their umbrella organisations, the ineptitude, the apparent absence of development ideas.

Yet never once did Ginwala or myself receive a telephone call from or a summons to Ikulu (State House), complaining about anything we had written. Of course, there were many murmurs in the corridors of power against us. They accused us of being a bunch of communists, though we never were. But they dared not call a press conference to attack us. Nyerere simply would not have allowed them to do so.

Were we really a den of communists? To be sure, Frene Ginwala herself and Tony Hall were members of Joe Slovo’s Communist Party of South Africa and Iain Christie was a member of the British Communist Party.

There were were two other British imports – Richard Gott and Rod Prince – but they were self-confessed anarchists. There was also myself. But, though I would soon be introduced to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, my leftism continued to be subsumed under liberalism. The rest of our newsroom – the corps of reporters and sub-editors, practically all of them native Tanzanians – was solidly right-wing, paying lip service to Nyerere’s Ujamaa tenets but either cynical about them or ignorant of their social import.

Yet, to me, Nyerere’s greatness does not lie in his Ujamaa ideology. Though this ideology was what attracted most of us into Tanzania, it was what was to prove the economic bane of that country. Nationalised property only fell into the jaws of a deeply venal class of vibwanyenye. The word, which means petty commodity owners, was a "technical translation" by Tanzania’s Swahili Academy of the Marxist term petty bourgeoisie, namely, the peasants and the classroom-created urban elite.

The Ujamaa Village institution itself proved nothing more than a stratagem for settling rural people together so as to facilitate such social services as water, education and seed distribution by collectivising them. It, too, would soon be vitiated by graft and lack of commitment.

Very soon, production would come to a standstill and distribution of what was produced would go haywire. Nyerere, who was genuinely persuaded by and committed to the system, had included a leadership code in Azimio. It banned corruption and prohibited a certain level of politicians, civil servants and parastatal employees from owning personal businesses. But it did not cut much ice. And things went from bad to worse. From time to time, the president would hit back through widespread sackings, decentralisations and shuffles. But he only succeeded in bringing in leeches more ravenous than those he had sacked or decentralised.

Nyerere’s failing, then, stemmed both from objective conditions and from subjective weaknesses. Objective because he never really came to grips with the forces – national as well as international – which he was setting out to defeat. Western individualism had been internalised by practically all Tanzanians through the classroom and the church. The African extended family system, which he was trying to reinstitute, had long been done to death by cash payment and individualist callousness.

Mwalimu Nyerere just couldn’t see the vital link of this habit of thought with the very same Western institutions whose property he was trying to socialise. Socialism, he claimed, was an attitude of the mind and so he hoped to convert people merely by moral preachifying.

Like most other Third World petty-bourgeois radicals – Josip Broz Tito, Jawaharlal Nehru, Cheddi Jagan, Kwame Nkrumah, Agostinho Neto – Mwalimu vehemently rejected the Marxist class analysis.

And this was the subjective aspect of his position. According to its founders, socialism can be genuine only as an ideology of a class without any producer property, namely, the industrial proletariat and the agricultural labourer. It stands to reason that no social group with any property can be interested in sharing it with everybody else. Both the peasantry and the urban elite are propertied classes. As individuals, of course, they may, as Lenin hoped, be converted into socialism. But, as a class, you can only force them into collectivisation with disastrous consequences. That was the lesson the world should have learned from Stalin’s forced collectivism, in which tens of millions perished.

Yet, despite all these failings, Kambarage Nyerere remained one of Africa’s quintessential men of the 20th century. His personal probity was unequalled. In Africa, he was equalled only by Muammar Gaddafi in his refusal to use his immense power to enrich himself or his family.

It was his intellectual strength and moral fibre that enabled him, when he saw that his experiment could not succeed, to admit openly that his life career had been a failure. When he nationalised The Tanganyika Standard, he gave us a charter which expressly challenged its new editors to criticise all social failings by whomever they are committed. I had never been and would never be freer than when I worked in Dar.

This freedom of the press, as I say above, was only a mirror-reflection of the much more important freedom of ideas throughout the country. Though Nyerere believed more than 100 per cent in Ujamaa, he never tried to force it down anybody’s throat.

Nor did he ever issue The Standard Tanzania, The Nationalist or the latter’s Swahili daily and weekly counterparts Uhuru and Mzalendo, with any instruction to print only Nyerereist ideas or to slant news in favour of that ideology and its exponents.

If that had been the case, Tanzania’s amazing pluralism of ideas at that time would not have reached the world. Yet it did reach the world, attracting into that country hundreds of intellectuals from all over the world.

The University of Dar-es-Salaam at Ubungo was Africa’s, perhaps the world’s, intellectual Mecca. Dar-es-Salaam harboured all the radical liberation movements in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Ireland, South-East Asia, even the the United States. It was a crossroads of such celebrated freedom fighters as Agostinho Neto, Samora Machel, Marcelino dos Santos, Jorge Rebello, Janet Mondlane, Yoweri Museveni, Sam Nujoma, Thabo Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, Gora Ebrahim, Amilcar Cabral, Angela Davis and others, changing ideas with us, often hotly. For these were not uniform minds. There were intellectuals – both native and alien – who expressed ideas so far to the right that they bordered on fascism. Others expressed ideas so far to the left that again they bordered on fascism.

The humdinger, however, was that all these ideas were expressed freely and printed in the party and government newspapers with little attempt at editorial slanting and chicanery.

In 1972 came the only time Nyerere intervened in The Standard Tanzania. Somebody had tried to overthrow President Gaafar al-Numeiry of the Sudan, who had himself staged a coup with the help of the Communist Party the previous year. He responded by killing hundreds of leaders of the same Communist Party.

In an editorial commentary, drafted by Richard Gott, The Standard accused Numeiry of horrendous murder. At a Tanu meeting in Dodoma the next day, the right-wing, led by Prime Minister Rashidi Mfaume Kawawa, was up in arms. Editor Ginwala was made to accept very many nasty names: including communist, woman and Mhindi (Asian). They demanded her sacking on the spot because Numeiry, they said, was a good friend of Tanzania. Nyerere had to give in.

That was the end of Ginwala’s regime. It was about that time, too, that The Nationalist married The Standard to beget the present Daily News, with such successive editors as Sammy Mdee, Ben Mkapa, the present President, Ferdinand Ruhinda and Joseph Mapunda. The merger was necessitated by a reorganisation of the government’s information structures, with a party-based Press Council chaired by Daudi Mwakawago, Tanu’s then Director of Information.

Composed totally of right-wingers, including Ben Mkapa, Information Minister Daniel Namfua, Uhuru editor Costa Kumalija, Nationalist editor Ferdinand Ruhinda and Radio Tanzania Director Paul Sozigwa, it signalled the end of radicalism and free expression in the press. It was then that I resigned to study in Germany.

Until his death, Nyerere, who was humble, self-effacing and selfless, continued to serve humanity on many capacities – particularly his promotion of mutual South-South assistance to reduce dependence on Western alms and his attempt to help bring about order in Burundi.

An intellectual of immense stature, a man of great personal integrity, a paragon of humanism, Julius Kambarage will be hard to replace in Tanzania, in Africa and on the globe. I was privileged to know and work with such a man. That is why, as I mourn, I ask, with Marcus Antonius, whence cometh such another?”¹⁵

Members of the entire editorial staff were fully aware of the kind of freedom we had to criticize the government, although we worked for a government-owned newspaper. But the government owned it on behalf of the people, wananchi. Therefore we were free to criticize leaders and policies and express our views across the spectrum without being censured. President Nyerere established that as a policy.

Our editors, first Sammy Mdee who later became President Nyerere’s press secretary, and next Ben Mkapa who was elected president of Tanzania in 1995 and won a second five year-term in 2000, did not violate this policy which was adopted after the newspaper was nationalized. They sometimes even invited reporters to write or contribute to editorials. Self-criticism was also routine. Every morning before we went out on assignments, we had a post-mortem of the paper presided over by the editor, dissecting the stories we wrote the previous day.

Such was the camaraderie, the ambiance and egalitarian disposition, and freedom, we enjoyed at our newspaper; the largest English daily in Tanzania and one of the three largest and most influential in East Africa.

Although we were independent and wrote whatever we wanted to write, we were also at the center of a maelstrom because of the ideological ferment that the country was undergoing during that period in its quest for socialist transformation in pursuit of the egalitarian ideals of Ujamaa (which means familyhood in Kiswahili) espoused by Nyerere: a political theorist and philosopher, scholar and politician, without an equal on the continent in terms of intellectual depth and prowess and pursuits among leaders with the exception of President Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, a poet-philosopher - “I feel, therefore I am,” he mused, reminiscent of Rene Descartes, “I think, therefore I am”; and Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, president of Ghana and revolutionary thinker and theoretician.

But Nkrumah was overthrown in February 1966 in a CIA-engineered coup before Nyerere enunciated his socialist ideology in the Arusha Declaration almost exactly one year later in February 1967 after the Ghana coup. So, with Nkrumah gone - he died in April 1972, six years after he was overthrown - only Nyerere and Senghor remained on the scene as the leading political thinkers among leaders on the continent.

I remember when Nkrumah died. I was at work on that day at the Daily News when the bulletin about his death came in on the telex in the evening in our editorial office. One of the first persons to express profound shock was Karim Essack, about whom more later, but Dr. Nkrumah’s death equally affected the rest of us who read the news bulletin that evening. The other reporters were gone by then.

Although Nkrumah’s death left on the scene two towering intellectual presidents, Nyerere and Senghor, it was Nyerere who was the far more influential between the two on the continent and in the international arena. Senghor was also seen as a white man in a black skin. But his unabashed Francophilia did not diminish his stature as an intellectual, especially among his admirers, and even among some of his critics who saw him as a black Frenchman who should have been born white and brought up in France. In 1980, he stepped down as president of Senegal and went to live in France where he died in December 2001 at the age of 95.

He was one African leader - and there were many others - who was not admired by many reporters on our editorial staff, anymore than Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the president of Malawi, was. I didn’t know any on our staff who admired Banda.

Our newspaper, like the country itself, attracted not only reporters and revolutionary thinkers from different parts of Africa and beyond but also reporters of different ideological interests within Tanzania itself. There was, for instance, Karim Essack - a Tanzanian of Asian (Indian) origin - who was a leftist revolutionary and, like the rest of us on our editorial staff who were not leftist although some were, also an uncompromising foe of apartheid and other oppressive regimes. He also wrote a book about Dr. Eduardo Mondlane and the liberation struggle in Mozambique and maintained, until his death in 1997, close ties with revolutionaries and radical thinkers around the world including many in Latin America. As the socialist-oriented International Emergency Committee (IEC) - founded to defend the life of Dr. Abimael Guzman, a Peruvian Marxist philosophy professor and leader of the revolutionary group Shining Path, captured and imprisoned in Peru in 1992 - stated in October 1997 in its eulogy, “In Memory of Karim Essack”:

“The IEC coordinating committee was saddened to learn that Karim Essack died this summer. He was a Tanzanian anti-imperialist who, for several decades, actively supported national liberation movements across the world. Karim Essack was a friend of the Peruvian people and a supporter of the People’s War in Peru who dedicated some of his writings to Dr. Guzman and other PCP fighters. He was a signatory to the IEC Call and helped propagate the campaign in Africa. He will be missed.”¹⁶

Karim Essack was just one of the reporters of Asian descent on our staff, which was fully integrated: black African being in the majority; Asian, mostly of Indian and Pakistani origin; Arab; and British. This also reflected Nyerere’s ideals. As Tanzania’s president and editor-in-chief of our newspaper, he would not have tolerated an editorial team that was exclusivist and intentionally did not reflect the racial and ethnic composition of our society - although, for practical purposes, not every tribe could have been represented on our staff or any anywhere else in the country. But the bedrock principle on which our society was built under Nyerere was that no one should be discriminated against. And he meant what he said.

Few countries in the world can match Tanzania’s record of inclusion. And it is not uncommon to hear people from other countries who have lived in Tanzania say, “There is no racism and tribalism in Tanzania”; “Tanzania is the only country in Africa that has conquered tribalism,” as Keith Richburg says in his book Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa;¹⁷ “There is very little tribalism - and racism - in Tanzania”; “Tribalism and racism are not major problems in Tanzania.” The last statement is closest to reality.

And in keeping with Tanzania’s policy of welcoming refugees and promoting Pan-African solidarity as enunciated by Nyerere, members of our editorial staff from other African countries were not only guaranteed equal rights and accorded full protection like the rest of us, but also career advancement like everywhere else in Tanzania. So were other non-citizens from outside Africa.

In fact, in the 1970 general elections, people from other African countries who were not citizens of Tanzania were allowed to vote. President Nyerere allowed that as one of the ways of promoting African unity. And it is possible some of them even voted against him. But his gesture of goodwill was highly appreciated and resonated far beyond our national borders.

At our newspaper, some of the foreign reporters who held responsible positions included Tommy Sithole, sports editor, who returned to Zimbabwe and became managing editor of the state-owned Zimbabwe Herald after his country won independence under the leadership of Robert Mugabe, himself of scholarly bent like Nyerere, although not of the same intellectual stature and influence as a Pan-African leader.

There was also Philip Ochieng’, a Kenyan, who wrote a weekly column, “The Way I See It.” He also served as a sub-editor, one among several, including Felix Kaiza, Pascal Shija, Robert Rweyemamu, Uli Mwambulukutu, Abdallah Ngororo, Kassim Mpenda, Jenerali Ulimwengu, Emmanuel Bulugu, and a few others. The news editor was Nsubisi Mwakipunda. Two senior reporters, Reginald Mhango - originally from Malawi - who later in 2002 became managing editor of the Guardian, one of Tanzania’s leading daily newspapers, and Kusai Khamisa, also served as acting news editors in Mwakipunda’s absence. All these were Tanzanians. Philip Ochieng’ eventually went back to Kenya - after further studies in Germany - and served as editor of the government-owned Kenya Times before returning to the Daily Nation, Nairobi, where he worked before he joined our editorial staff at the Standard, later Daily News, in Dar es Salaam. He also wrote a book, I Accuse the Press: An Insider’s View of the Media and Politics in Africa.¹⁸

We also had sub-editors from South Africa, Nigeria, and Britain. The Nigerian sub-editor came from Biafra and fled his country during the civil war and was one of the many Eastern Nigerians, mostly Igbos, who sought asylum in Tanzania after the Eastern Region seceded from the Nigerian Federation. They included judges and professors, many other professionals and others who came to live in Tanzania during that critical period. And many remained in Tanzania after the war. It was Nyerere who extended such hospitality to them after Tanzania became the first country to recognize Biafra. And in Dar es Salaam even today, there is a place called Biafra Grounds where mass rallies are held. There are also many Nigerian doctors and other professionals in Tanzania.

They would not have been able to live and work in Tanzania in such large numbers had it not been for Tanzania’s track record of hospitality initiated by Nyerere way back in the sixties soon after Tanganyika won independence from Britain on December 9, 1961. And as Dr. M.O. Ene, chairman of the Enyimba Pan-Igbo Think Tank, said about Nyerere when he died: "I saw the legend in 1966, and the memory still lives with me."

His Pan-African commitment and achievements were internationally acknowledged, despite his failed socialist policies. As Professor Harvey Glickman who made a study tour of Tanzania stated in his article, “Tanzania: From Disillusionment to Guarded Optimism,” in Current History: A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs:

“Tanzania’s profile, in the life and career of President Julius Nyerere, was poor, earnest, caring, and honest - at least until 1985, when Nyerere formally stepped aside in a peaceful constitutional transition (which is extremely rare in Africa).

Tanzania’s government was stable while other African governments succumbed to coups and civil wars. The country conducted consecutive national elections at regular five-year intervals. Other one-party states ignored mass participation; Nyerere’s Tanzania devised a system of constituency primaries under the party umbrella, controlled at the center, but offering a voice for localism.

Other African governments extolled the virtues of Pan-Africanism; Nyerere engineered the union of his own country and an offshore neighbour. Other African governments denounced white racist governments on the continent; Tanzania took action, cutting off relations with Britain over the issue of African rule in Rhodesia in 1965 (the first country to do so), and offering shelter to the liberation parties and guerrilla forces of southern Africa.

While most African governments rejected the secession of Biafra from Nigeria in 1967, Tanzania recognized Biafra’s short-lived government on moral grounds (and was the first to recognize the secessionist region), arguing it was an act of self-defense against ethnic pogroms. While other African countries merely denounced Idi Amin in Uganda in the 1970s, Tanzania’s army defeated him in battle in 1979 and drove him from the country.”¹⁹

And Nyerere’s policy of good neighbourliness and Pan-African solidarity was also clearly evident at our newspaper which had an exchange programme with neighbouring Zambia and whose president, Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, was Nyerere’s ideological compatriot and very close personal friend.

A reporter from the Times of Zambia, Francis Kasoma, now deceased, joined our editorial staff while our news editor Nsubisi Mwakipunda went to Zambia to work at the Times. Kasoma covered some of the most important political events in the country just as we did. It didn’t matter he and a number of other reporters were not Tanzanians. After working at the Daily News for quite some time, Kasoma returned to Zambia and years later became a professor and head of the mass communications department at the University of Zambia. He also wrote some books including The Press and Multiparty Politics in Africa.²⁰

Another member of our editorial staff who also wrote a book was deputy editor Hadji Konde, deceased, who was one of the most renowned Tanzanian journalists with vast experience in the profession. He wrote Press Freedom in Tanzania.²¹

His work was preceded only by Karim Essack’s among those written by newsmen who worked at the Daily News, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Another reporter on our editorial staff, Clement Ndulute, also became an author with the publication of his book, The Poetry of Shaaban Robert,²² published in 1994 by the Dar es Salaam University Press. It is a translation of the works of Tanzania’s eminent poet from Kiswahili into English. Ndulute went on to pursue further studies at the University of Indiana in the United States where he obtained his PhD in literature. He returned to Tanzania and became a lecturer in literature at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.