Julius Nyerere. Paul Bjerk

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СКАЧАТЬ degree, she returned to become a political assistant to Nyerere. For the next thirty years, Wicken led an austere life in Dar es Salaam as Nyerere’s loyal aide, critic, and speechwriter.

       Taking Stock Back Home

      Nyerere completed his master’s degree at Edinburgh in 1952 and fixed his mind on getting involved in politics when he got home. When he arrived in Dar es Salaam in October, Maria was there to meet him, and they made their way back to Butiama. His first task, as much a practical one as a means of settling back into the soil of his homeland, was to build a house for Maria. It was a time to reconnect with his childhood friend Oswald Marwa while slapping mud mortar between the wood-fired bricks. “I had to take off my Edinburgh suit . . . and with my bare feet mix the sand and cement.” Nyerere claimed this was Maria’s way of making sure he hadn’t changed too much in Scotland. They were married on January 21, 1953, at the Mwisenge Roman Catholic Church in Musoma.

      They traveled back to Dar es Salaam, where Nyerere had a job at St. Francis High School in Pugu, near where the airport now stands. Pointing to his master’s degree, he insisted on a yearly salary of 9,450 shillings rather than 6,300 shillings (equivalent to $8,200 versus $5,400 per year in today’s dollars). This was still less than a similarly educated expatriate British teacher would make.

      Within a few months he again got involved in the TAA, to get acquainted with the accelerating political developments in the territory. As opposed to prominent educated chiefs like Thomas Marealle and David Makwaia, Nyerere was willing to work with the reticent civil servants and businessmen of the TAA who had much to lose by their political activity. Unlike the chiefs, Nyerere set his sights on the whole diverse territory, not just the ethnic boundaries within which the British preferred to contain local politics.

      Things began to move very quickly after that. In 1954 Nyerere and the young leaders of the TAA drew up a new charter for the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), in preparation for the visit of a delegation from the United Nations Trusteeship Council. The UN delegation made a positive report, recommending independence by 1980 at the latest. TANU members received word of the report during the wedding of George Patrick Kunambi in January 1955, cutting the celebrations short as the overjoyed guests prepared to press their case for independence.²²

      In March, Nyerere was invited to New York to speak to the Trusteeship Council. Leading TANU members like Dossa Aziz and Paul Rupia contributed to his travel expenses, and Father Walsh helped clear the way for a visa. Nyerere told the Trusteeship Council that TANU’s objective was to prepare people for independence, a task that required them “to break up this tribal consciousness among the people and to build up a national consciousness.”²³

      Upon returning he was told he no longer had a job at St. Francis High School, as the colonial government had informed the Catholic leadership that they would not countenance a salaried teacher openly involved in oppositional politics. Nyerere then moved his young family back to Musoma, to the house of Oswald Marwa, and there he found time for a welcome rest. Father Art Willie, a new Catholic priest in town, hired Nyerere to teach him the Zanaki language for seven hundred shillings a month. Every day Nyerere walked into town to work with Father Willie on language and translation. He translated catechisms, hymns, and pieces of the New Testament into the Zanaki language.

      Meanwhile, TANU activity in Dar es Salaam was bubbling up, with new organizers like Oscar Kambona, who sold TANU cards like a seasoned salesman, and Bibi Titi Mohamed, who had a large group of women from the African quarters singing the praises of TANU. Bibi Titi became a minister of parliament after independence but was later accused of treason in a plot linked to Kambona, who became Nyerere’s opponent in the late 1960s. Kambona had risen quickly to prominence in TANU and later served in several ministerial positions before falling out with Nyerere and going into exile.

      In mid-1955, though, he traveled all the way to Musoma to urge Nyerere back to the fight. “When I got to Musoma,” Kambona later recalled, “I found him sitting on the floor reading a book about Gandhi.”²⁴ (Throughout his career Nyerere continued to take yearly vacations in his home village during the rainy season, removing himself from Dar es Salaam politics while he took stock of himself and his country.) In this intensely diverse territory, how could they bring independence without stoking the fires of racial hatred, ethnic division, and religious prejudice?

       3

       TANU and Tanzanian Independence, 1954–64

      “Since my return to Tanganyika,” Julius Nyerere wrote in 1955 to George Shepperson, his former lecturer in Edinburgh, “a few things have happened both to me personally and to the Territory.” Nyerere delighted in wry irony and found humor in downplaying the impact his political activities had already brought in Tanganyika. He had finished at Edinburgh in 1952 and returned home soon after. Now he had catapulted to prominence and was known across the territory as a standard-bearer of the burgeoning independence movement.

      But in this letter he wrote more about his marriage with Maria and the birth of his first two children. He blandly mentioned his election the previous year as president of the Tanganyika African Association (TAA), “a sort of socio-political organisation,” he explained. “In July last year we transformed this into the Tanganyika African National Union [TANU], a fully fledged political organisation which pledged itself to work for self-government.”¹

      TANU’s birth on July 7, 1954, is now regarded as a momentous occasion, and the date is still celebrated as Tanzania’s preeminent national holiday, known as Saba Saba (or “Seven Seven”) Day. It seemed less impressive at the time. That sunny Wednesday morning in the dusty town of Tabora just happened to be the day that an African lobbying group changed its name. But within ten years TANU would control an independent African country, arm liberation movements in Southern Africa, and fend off Cold War intrigue in Zanzibar by annexing that island territory to create a new nation, called Tanzania.

      Nyerere went on to explain in the letter that, “as a result of the visit to New York, I lost my job and am now [a] jobless gentleman organising TANU.” His modesty here served a purpose. He knew that TANU’s birth and its future fortunes were not his alone to claim. The growth of TANU was the work of a large group of dedicated men and women who saw themselves not as colonial subjects, but as citizens of a future nation. Muslims and Christians from various parts of the territory, their ethnic and religious differences were of little concern. They set their sights on gaining an African voice in territorial politics. Without these colleagues, Nyerere might well have become an influential educator in Tanganyika, maybe even a politician, but not its transformative first president.

       The Birth of TANU

      In the early 1950s a group of “Young Turks” took over the leadership of the TAA, a twenty-year-old organization representing the interests of a tiny African middle class of educated civil servants and businessmen. They were anxious to communicate their concerns about the colonial government’s proposals for political reform, which seemed designed to keep African influence to a minimum for decades to come. The new TAA leadership consisted of recent Makerere graduates like Vedastus Kyaruzi, who had been involved in student politics, and older World War II veterans who were now Dar es Salaam businessmen and civil servants like the Sykes brothers, Ally and Abdulwahid.² Compared to their elders, both groups were much more sophisticated in dealing with European thought and culture, and much less intimidated by the colonial state.

      Channeling the activism of its upcountry branches, the new leadership submitted a memorandum to the government protesting any attempt to develop the Tanganyika political system in a way that would give different rights to different racial groups. They proposed a process that would lead to a freely elected government in control of internal affairs by 1962. Through patient negotiation and СКАЧАТЬ