Julius Nyerere. Paul Bjerk

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to decide is itself a decision: quite frequently refusing (or being unable) to make a decision is worse than making the one which time will prove to have been wrong! For the absence of any decision leads to confusion and opens the door to exploitation by crooks.” Nyerere had a scholar’s mind, but did not have the luxury to wrestle with ideas in the abstract. A politician’s ideas affect people’s lives. “To plan means to choose,” is the way Nyerere described the challenge of governance at the height of his presidency, and after his retirement he noted that he did not always make perfect choices.⁶

      Whether in the fight to wrest a colony away from the clutches of an imperial power or the fight to guide the direction of an independent country, politics entails the competition for power. Political systems are designed to manage and contain the conflict inherent in this struggle. But systems fail, and politics can easily turn violent. Newly established political systems are especially prone to violence where there is little consensus over rules and norms, where there is little respect for the rights of those who don’t wield power, where there is little faith that those out of office will ever peacefully come into office. Peaceful politics requires compromise, tolerance, and benevolence.

      Nyerere engaged in this competition for power in order to establish a peaceful political system. He trusted his vision and considered his leadership essential to establishing such a system. His tools were his ability with words and his management of political institutions. He knew that success would entail a system that could function without him and he made it his goal to step down from power of his own accord. Establishing such a system during his time in office, however, required power, and power is difficult for anyone to manage. By the 1970s, Nyerere was overseeing a creeping police state, administered by officials whose habits even he could not fully control.

      His peers, the presidents and prime ministers of the newly independent countries of Africa, faced the same challenge. All of them sought power. All of them had visions, some more selfish than others. All of them faced challenges and opposition. In basic ways, Nyerere was like his peers. Most of them were only a generation removed from a village society of hand tools and family authorities. They were among the first from their colonized peoples to receive a European education. They saw their task as one of combining the best of their African cultural roots with those aspects of the colonizer’s culture that could benefit African society.⁷

      Given the life-changing difficulty of this task, the competition and temptations of power and global political realities, leadership in postcolonial Africa was a perilous responsibility. Leaders held on to power by intimidating, often eliminating, those who would question them, by controlling the distribution of the nation’s wealth, and by setting segments of society in conflict with each other. A number of his peers were overthrown, sent into exile, or assassinated. Nyerere survived to step down of his own accord and live out his life as an active citizen of his home country. Such an accomplishment in the context of postcolonial Africa was never a saintly one.

       Historical and Political Context

      In the 1800s, as Britain led the effort to end the Atlantic slave trade, trade in slaves across the Indian Ocean grew and extended across East Africa. Where the Atlantic slave trade had been dominated and justified by Christian capitalists, the Indian Ocean slave trade was dominated by Muslim traders with roots in Africa and the Middle East. From the mid-1800s, increasingly aggressive strategies to capture slaves and ivory brought violence and disruption to farming societies, among whom the benefits of trade had traditionally outweighed costs of conflict. Seeking protection, villagers submitted to warlords like Tippu Tip, the slave trader and clove planter whose political influence stretched from Zanzibar to the Congo River, or warrior kings like the Hehe leaders in Iringa, Muyigumba and his son Mkwawa, who built up standing armies with taxes levied on conquered peoples.

      Map 1.1 East Africa. Adapted from United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations. © United Nations.

      The interior was a diverse place harboring both hierarchical and decentralized societies as well as scores of distinct languages and cultural traditions. In political and economic terms, the export of slaves—as well as ivory, decorative woods, and cloves—meant that the coast and the interior became linked more intimately than they had been in the past. Not only did Islamic culture spread inland, but also the coastal Swahili language, with its heavy load of Arabic vocabulary superimposed on an African grammar.⁸

      Toward the end of the century, European countries entered a heated global competition for colonies, and the antislavery cause gave them a convenient justification for seeking influence in Africa. In East Africa, a missionary named David Livingstone witnessed the devastation caused by the slave trade and advocated the antislavery movement’s concept of “commerce, Christianity, and civilization” as a means to its end. He was the first of many missionaries who followed the paths of Muslim caravan traders to establish Christian communities throughout the region.⁹ The early missionaries met with little success at first. Following in their path, however, were businessmen and soldiers who colonized Africa for European settlement and the production of raw materials in high demand because of industrialization in Europe.

      By the mid-1900s, a generation had grown up under colonial rule in Africa. Some had witnessed aspects of the devastating European wars, others became familiar with European practices of business and governance, and a precious few gained a European education. In East Africa, the British had welcomed immigration from India because the immigrants could help administer colonial rule and expand commercial trade across the territory. European rule became a familiar presence, bringing significant benefits and a host of new problems. People resented the racial hierarchy that came with it, which set aside innumerable privileges for Europeans, offered Indian immigrants favorable advantages, and generally treated Africans as children. This prejudice was part and parcel of the paternalist justification for colonial rule.¹⁰

      The independence and bloody partition of India in 1947 was a sign that the era of European colonialism was coming to an end, and inaugurated a global movement to end colonial rule. European powers found that their colonies were not very profitable, and colonial residents found ways to demand a greater voice in colonial administration.¹¹ In Africa, a nominally independent kingdom in Egypt was overthrown by a group of military officers in 1952, and the new government under Gamal Abdel Nasser carved out a secular socialist compromise with a heavily Muslim population. Sudan negotiated its independence from Britain in 1956 and quickly fell into a pattern of military takeovers, echoed elsewhere as young officers saw themselves as modernizers, often with the encouragement of Cold War powers seeking allies. They learned that the Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union had created a rift in global politics that gave newly decolonized countries a role to play in the balance of power.

      In coastal West Africa, a growing class of Africans with a European education began to push for independence with a logic the European overlords found difficult to ignore. The educated class argued they were fully “civilized” according to European norms and capable of running their own government. Workers on large European-owned farms, loading docks, and railways learned how to use labor actions like strikes and slowdowns to push for better pay and conditions. Rural farmers and urban dwellers sought access to the advantages held by European plantation holders and foreign minorities.

      The ideology of pan-Africanism linked these struggles, emphasizing that the borders between African countries were recent and the presence of Africans in the Americas was the result of the slave trade. These circumstances supported an ideology that crossed ethnic, geographic, and religious boundaries. Pan-Africanism argued that the interests of all people of African descent were best served by uniting their efforts and erasing the divisions that racist European institutions had imposed. The poet-philosopher Léopold Senghor in Senegal, the scholarly journalist Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria, the firebrand mobilizer Sékou Touré in Guinea, and СКАЧАТЬ