Julius Nyerere. Paul Bjerk

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      The British called this setup Indirect Rule, and spent no little time congratulating themselves for how well they knew their subjects. It was an effective, if exploitative, mode of government. Its deeper impact was to use ethnicity as the basic organizational principle of governance. The policy in effect established “tribes” as political units, and left a divisive legacy that created conflict in many countries. The British felt themselves to be more civilized than everyone else and granted themselves all the privileges of overlords. But, at least officially, they did not see Africans as innately inferior. They believed their African subjects could benefit from education, especially the sons of chiefs, who could be expected to provide loyal leadership if they got a little British education under their belts. They educated the sons of chiefs for free.

       An African Child

      Chief Nyerere Burito had numerous wives, as was typical for men who had a bit of status in a culture that valued family, farming, and fertility. Burito sent more than one of his sons to school, but it was not immediately apparent that the second son of his fifth wife would be worth educating. The boy was born on April 13, 1922, in the midst of the long rainy season. Mugaya Nyang’ombe, his mother, named the baby Kambarage after a mythical ancestor who brought rain. The name was an auspicious one for a chief’s son, as rain was a sign that he should take on his father’s role. For the British, however, such local beliefs were less important than that he become a pliant administrator of the colonial order. Pliancy was the one trait they would not find in young Kambarage Nyerere.

      Kambarage grew up on his father’s hilltop homestead at the heart of the chiefdom known as Butiama. Running a homestead was a shared labor, under the nominal direction of a patriarch. Adults produced food and gradually incorporated children into productive tasks. Girls worked with their mothers, who grew and prepared almost all the food the home needed. Boys were generally given a few head of cattle to care for, and groups of boys from various families would wander up into the hills to pasture their little herds. Thus engaged, they could spend much time scrambling among the rocks, playing and roughhousing. Kambarage had a close friend in his age-mate, Bugozi Msuguri, who later took a Christian name, David. With bows and arrows, they hunted pimbi (rock hyrax), rabbit-sized rodents that lived under the rocks.⁸

      All the cultures on the eastern side of Lake Victoria initiated children into age-sets of one form or another. When a group of children reached the age of initiation, their parents sponsored their participation in a camp where they were taught how to function in adult society, how to face fear, and how to deal with the opposite sex. Boys were generally circumcised. Although Msuguri was a little younger, he was placed in the same age-set as Kambarage. That year, initiates also faced another test of courage, apparently for the sake of “fashion.” An elder expert filed their front teeth into points—a painful passage, and one that gave Kambarage’s ready smile a distinctively upcountry character. At that age they could then accompany older siblings when they heard the sound of a drum announcing a dance in a neighboring village. Sometimes a generous family would donate a cow to be slaughtered for the occasion, and the young people could stay up the whole night, dancing, flirting, and feasting.⁹

      Zanaki people have a reputation for being argumentative, probably as a result of their political system, which privileged the most convincing speakers among the elders. Long before he went to school, Kambarage had already learned to think and to speak. He was also a sharp player of the game orusoro (known elsewhere as bao or mancala), a popular pastime in the village. To play the game, you pick up stones from one of the holes on your side and drop them one by one into the following holes, all the way around to your opponent’s side, where eventually you can collect them back. Requiring the forethought of chess, the game taught a lesson more appropriate to the politics of extended families than to the combative politics of opposing parties: in order to gain favors, you have to distribute them.

      Between cattle herding, village debate, and orusoro, Kambarage learned lessons in responsibility, critical thinking, and strategy. A neighboring chief, Mohamed Makongoro Matutu, told Chief Burito that it would be worth sending Kambarage to school, at least as a companion for another of Burito’s sons, Wambura Wanzagi, who already knew Swahili. Sons of chiefs were given spots at the newly built Mwisenge Primary School in the nearby town of Musoma, two days’ walk from Butiama. In early 1934, a school vehicle carried Wambura and Kambarage to Musoma to learn how to read and write.¹⁰

       A Colonial Education

      Mwisenge Primary School offered Standards one through four. It was a basic education in reading, writing, and arithmetic in Swahili, which was a foreign language for young Kambarage. The books drew him in, and teachers remember him reading in quiet corners at all hours. Nyerere also began to accompany his friend Mang’ombe (later Oswald) Marwa to religious instruction in Roman Catholic Christianity, reluctantly at first and then with increasing interest. “There wasn’t enough to learn,” Nyerere remembered about those years of voracious interest in his expanding world. In only three years, he was the highest-achieving student in the Lake Region on the territorial exams.

      A headstrong young teacher named James Irenge saw Kambarage’s potential. Irenge invited Kambarage and a few other students to his cramped teacher’s quarters in the evenings for a “special subject of politics, of history, of things of the past and how they were, and how we would be able to govern for ourselves.” The teacher told the children parables of how a sparrow chased off the crows preying on her chicks, of the owl who scared off the other birds by just opening its eyes. “I was telling them we should remove the foreigners. . . . Guns by themselves, and cannon, we can’t use. We are not experts with them. . . . We’ll use another way, of just the lips. ‘We don’t want them!’ All of us, ‘We don’t want them!’ They’ll leave.”¹¹

      His political consciousness thus awakened, Nyerere found his way to the elite school in the territory, the Tabora Boys School, where European teachers expected their students to meet the highest standards of British education and disciplined them to respect the colonial social order. Colonial Tanganyika mobilized the labor of Africans for the sake of a tiny European population, and allowed a small class of Indians and Arabs to act as merchants. Within this structure they needed a small class of literate Africans as both clerks and chiefs to help administer the sprawling territory. This new class of aspiring chiefs at the Tabora School were taught to be prefects, whose authority was not to be questioned by their charges in the dormitories. Nyerere recalled trying to defend a fellow student from physical mistreatment at the hands of a prefect. The headmaster punished both by calling on Nyerere to cane the mistreated boy under the gloating eye of the prefect. Nyerere was eventually appointed a prefect himself.

      Nyerere started a debating club, with some of his classmates, as an outlet for his truculent mind. They debated things like the tradition of bride-price, which was the transferring of cattle from the groom’s family to the bride’s as a means of sealing the marriage. Nyerere knew something about this, as his father had already arranged a marriage for him with a slightly older girl in Butiama named Magori Watiha, giving fourteen cattle lest he should die without providing a wife for this promising young son.

      Informally, he and his schoolmates also debated other issues of interest to these sons of chiefs, such as whether patterns of decentralized chiefships across linguistic regions could be turned into something like small centralized kingdoms, a development that their British education taught was a step toward a higher civilization. He explored religion through his friends. Andrew Tibandebage was Catholic; Emanuel Kibira was Lutheran; Ali Abedi was Muslim. Chief Nyerere Burito died in 1942, and, after finishing at Tabora the next year, Kambarage went to Nyegina Mission near Musoma to be baptized into the Catholic Church. He took the name Julius, and for a brief time he considered becoming a Catholic priest.¹²

      Upon graduating from Tabora, Nyerere was offered a place at Makerere College in Uganda to train as a science teacher. СКАЧАТЬ