By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
Julius
K. Nyerere, the founding father of Tanzania
who used
East Africa as a pulpit from which to
spread his socialist philosophy
worldwide, died
Thursday in London. He was
about 77 and was being
treated for leukemia, and
he suffered a major stroke last
week.
An uncharacteristically humble
and modest national
leader whose preferred honorific
was Mwalimu, the
Swahili word for teacher,
Nyerere led his country into
independence and guided
it for nearly three decades.
Idealistic, principled, and
some would say naïvely
misguided, Nyerere became
one of the most prominent
of the first generation
of politicians to head newly
independent African states
as colonialism ebbed,
playing a leading role in
the debate over economic
inequalities between the
Northern and Southern
Hemispheres.
When he guided what had been
the British Trust
Territory of Tanganyika
into sovereignty in 1961, he
was the youngest of the
continent's triumphant
nationalists, a group that
included Kwame Nkrumah of
Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of
Kenya, Kenneth Kaunda of
Zambia and Félix
Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast.
When he stepped down as President
24 years later, he
was only the third modern
African leader to relinquish
power voluntarily on a continent
that by then included
50 independent states. He
went neither to jail nor into
exile, but to a farm in
Butiama, his home village, near
the shore of Lake Victoria.
Nyerere ascended to power
without a single shot being
fired, becoming Prime Minister
and then President of a
land that at the time contained
nine million people
affiliated with more than
120 tribes, stretching from
Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika
down to the Indian
Ocean.
It was one of the poorest
countries in the world. Its
mostly illiterate citizens
were scattered over remote
regions, often unable to
find a common language,
although they shared ample
rigors as they wrested a
meager subsistence from
the soil or the sea.
Early Progress, Enduring Debate
By the time Nyerere gave
up the last vestiges of
political power in 1990,
when he retired as chairman
of the single political
party, Tanzania had undergone
staggering, often traumatic,
changes.
The population had doubled,
to more than 20 million. It
had merged with Zanzibar
in 1964. Almost 70 percent
of the people had been prodded
to move from
traditional lands into paternalistically
planned villages
-- ujamma -- in what became
Africa's largest and most
debated example of social
engineering.
After vast investment in
education, literacy rose
phenomenally, and 83 percent
of Tanzanians were able
to read and write. Nyerere
also succeeded in promoting
Swahili so that it superseded
dozens of tribal tongues to
become a true national language.
Some Western countries, notably
the Scandinavians,
were so impressed that they
provided billions of
dollars, making Tanzania
one of the 10 largest
recipients of foreign aid
per capita.
But it was still one of the
poorest countries in the
world.
The year he left his party
post, the World Bank reported
that Tanzanians were surviving
on a per-capita income
of $200 a year, and that
the economy had shrunk on
average half a percentage
point a year between 1965
and 1988.
The debate over Nyerere's
leadership extended beyond
his tenure, with academics,
politicians and
development strategists
often dividing sharply over his
legacy.
His domestic and international
defenders, generally
people of the left, praised
his emphasis on social
investments and his egalitarian
economic policies,
crediting them with creating
a culturally cohesive
nation that avoided ethnic
conflict while life
expectancy, literacy and
access to water increased.
His Tanzanian supporters
took pride in Nyerere's
reputation as one of the
most prominent proponents of a
new economic order that
would benefit the developing
south in economic relations
with the industrial north.
Nyerere also gained international
prestige for his
principled support of the
struggles for majority rule in
South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe,
Mozambique and
Angola, and for Tanzania's
military counter offensive
against Idi Amin of Uganda,
which routed the dictator
and sent him into exile.
The third world honored him,
and he won the respect of
such Western leaders as Olof
Palme, Pierre Trudeau, Willy
Brandt and Jimmy Carter.
Still, his critics, who included
free-market liberals and
conservatives, condemned
him for adopting
paternalistic and coercive
policies like ujamma. They
deplored his insistence
on one-party rule and price
controls, which they said
stultified Tanzania's economy,
shrank agricultural production,
encouraged corruption
and led to vast squandering
of foreign aid.
From a Modest Home to a Master's Degree
The distance Nyerere traveled
from his birth to
political power and to the
center of an international
polemic on development was
enormous, spanning ages
as well as years.
He was born into the Zanaki
people, a small tribe of
40,000 in the hills southeast
of Lake Victoria. His
mother, Mugaya, was 15 years
old. She had been the
fifth wife of Burito Nyerere
(pronounced
nyuh-RARE-ee), a village
headman, who was 61 years
old when the boy was born.
Later, as the village chief
prospered, he took more
wives, and when he died at
81, he had 22 wives and
26 surviving children.
Mugaya's son was named Kambarage,
for a rain spirit,
for it had rained on the
day of his birth (though the year
is uncertain, 1922 or '23).
Years later, after he attended
mission schools, he became
a Roman Catholic and
chose Julius as his baptismal
name.
He lived the life of a Zanaki
child, weeding his
mother's garden and going
off on bow-and-arrow hunts
with the older men. But
all that changed when the
village chief, with some
reluctance, agreed to send his
child to board at a school
at Musoma, 30 miles from his
home.
Quickly, as he learned Swahili
and English, he was
spotted as an exceedingly
bright child by the White
Fathers, the priests who
ran the school, and in 1936 he
placed first in the entire
territory on an entrance exam
for a school in Tabora.
At the school, which was
patterned on private schools
in Britain, a native elite
was to be trained to help
administer their homeland
under British rule.
He spent six years at Tabora,
in central northwestern
Tanganyika, graduating in
1943. He went on to
Makerere University in Uganda,
and after being
baptized and teaching for
two years in a church school,
he won a scholarship to
Edinburgh University, where
he earned a master's degree
in history and economics.
Soon after he went away to
school, his father paid a
lobola, or bride price,
to the family of a girl from his
home area as a traditional
deposit on a future marriage.
But at Makerere, Nyerere
met a Christian girl named
Maria Magige. In 1948 he
asked her to marry him, and
when she agreed, the six
cows that his father had given
to the family of the prospective
child bride were
returned to the Nyerere
family and were passed on to
Maria's parents.
Maria Magige Nyerere bore
him five sons and a
daughter. Mrs. Nyerere and
the six children were in
London when he died, Reuters
reported.
A state funeral is expected
to be held in Dar es Salaam
next week before Nyerere
is buried in Butiama, his
home village, in northern
Tanzania.
Mrs. Nyerere was the head
of the country's major
women's organization, the
United Women of Tanzania,
and she ran a poultry business
for some years while her
husband was President. But
she gave it up when
Nyerere imposed a leadership
code that forbade
government officials from
involvement in a private
business in order to discourage
corruption.
New Teacher Offers a Socialist Lesson
On his return from Scotland,
Nyerere worked as a
teacher in a government
school. He also won election
as president of the Tanganyika
African Association, an
elite social organization
that he quickly transformed
into a political party that
later led the struggle for
independence.
That new group, the Tanganyika
African National
Union, was formed on July
7, 1954, a date now
celebrated as a national
holiday known as Saba Saba,
the seventh day of the seventh
month.
When Tanganyika became independent
on Dec. 9,
1961, Nyerere became its
first Prime Minister, but six
weeks later he suddenly
resigned. He remained
president of his party,
Tanu, and spent nine months
traveling throughout the
country, meeting ordinary
people and preparing a document
that he issued under
the title "Ujamma -- The
Basis of African Socialism."
This was the first of two
defining proclamations by
which Nyerere sought to
blend the major influences of
his life: the cooperative
forces he had observed in
tribal life, with their
emphasis on a constant search for
consensus; the ideal of
a Christian brotherhood, to
which he had been exposed
at school, and the goals of
welfare-state socialism
that he had absorbed from
British Labor Party teachings
while he lived in an
Edinburgh housing project.
In "Ujamma" he declared:
"In acquisitive societies,
wealth tends to corrupt
those who possess it. It tends to
breed in them a desire to
live more comfortably than
their fellows, to dress
better and in every way to outdo
them."
He then depicted traditional
African society as
providing sustenance to
all members of a community.
He wrote that in contrast
to Europe, where socialism
had arisen in opposition
to capitalism, Africa had never
known either class division
or class struggle. He then
concluded: "Ujamma, or 'familyhood,'
describes our
socialism. It is opposed
to capitalism, which seeks to
build a happy society on
the basis of the exploitation of
man by man, and is equally
opposed to doctrinaire
socialism, which seeks to
build its happy society on the
philosophy of inevitable
conflict between man and
man."
Habits of Modesty and Strict Ethics
On the first anniversary
of independence, Tanganyika
became a republic. Portraying
ujamma as the national
goal, Nyerere was easily
elected President.
One element of his position
paper that he adopted
quickly and adhered to for
the rest of his public life
was his disavowal of pomp
and perquisites.
He never received more than
$8,000 a year as
President. A slight man,
standing 5 foot 6 and weighing
125 pounds, he appeared
both abroad and at home
wearing a gray or black
safari shirt over his trousers
and a white crocheted skullcap
of the sort worn on
Zanzibar.
In contrast to many African
leaders, who often raced
through their capitals in
motorcades with phalanxes of
motorcycle outriders, he
moved around Dar es Salaam
in an old car with just
his driver, who stopped for red
lights. In his spare time
he had translated "Romeo and
Juliet" and "Julius Caesar"
into Swahili.
The second of Nyerere's proclamations
was delivered
in 1967 and came to be known
as the Arusha
Declaration, after the northern
town where Nyerere
read it to party leaders.
It called for a commitment to
self-reliance and established
the leadership code,
which obligated government
and party officials to give
up all sources of income
but their salaries.
But the most most important
provisions established
rural development as the
country's chief priority.
In the following months,
in town and village meetings,
Nyerere expounded on this,
calling upon peasant
farmers to voluntarily relocate
and pool their labors in
collectively harvesting
common fields. As he
repeatedly explained, Tanzanians
were too scattered
for services to be brought
to them. Only if they gathered
in villages would they be
able to benefit from schools,
clinics, libraries.
Befitting the teacher he
was, he often resorted to
didactic slogans, which
party stalwarts were quick to
paint all over the country.
Decades later the fading
mottos can still be read
on public buildings or small
village shops: "Work Is
the Foundation of Progress."
"A Poor Country Cannot Rule
Itself if It Relies on
Foreign Help." "We Must
Run While Others Walk."
All too often, the slogans
faded in an atmosphere of
lassitude.
Seven years after the Arusha
Declaration, only some
1,000 ujamma villages had
been established and only 2
million of Tanzania's then
14 million people were
living in them. Virtually
none involved successful
collective farming.
A Rocky Descent Into Economic Gloom
Nyerere displayed growing
impatience, and in
December 1973 he addressed
his people on the radio in
a scolding tone.
He said that while the Government
had abolished poll
taxes, ended school fees
and extended water supplies
and health clinics in rural
areas, the people had done
almost nothing in return.
While the Government could
not turn people into socialists
by force, he said, it could
insure that everybody lived
in a village, and he wanted
the entire country to be
living in planned settlements by
1976.
What followed were campaigns
of persuasion,
intimidation and coercion.
People were told that famine
relief would be provided
only to those who moved
peacefully. Because transport
was provided by militias
and the army, party stalwarts
told peasants that if they
did not pull down their
houses and load them on
government trucks, the houses
would be demolished.
Many homes were burned,
and there were a few cases
in which people were killed.
Nyerere deplored the violence,
attributing it to overly
zealous local officials,
but he insisted that such
mistakes should not obscure
the success of a program
that, he said, had led more
than 13 million people to
move into ujamma communities
by 1976, a movement
of close to 70 percent of
the population in three years.
The evaluations of more detached
observers were far
less enthusiastic. James
C. Scott, a Yale agronomist,
studied the Tanzanian experience
for a book titled
"Seeing Like a State: How
Certain Schemes to Improve
the Human Condition Have
Failed" (Yale University,
1998).
Scott noted that in contrast
to Soviet collectivization,
the Tanzanian campaign was
not conceived as an
all-out war of appropriation.
He wrote: "The
disruptions and inhumanities
of Nyerere's program,
however serious for its
victims, were not in the same
league as those inflicted
by Stalin. Even so, the ujamma
campaign was coercive and
occasionally violent. It
proved, moreover, a failure,
ecologically as well as
economically."
With people moved from their
traditional fields, food
production plummeted. Moreover,
according to outside
scholars, 60 percent of
the new villages were on
semiarid land unsuitable
for long-term cultivation.
Attempts were made to dictate
the growing of certain
crops, notably fire-cured
tobacco, to be sold at what
villagers saw as confiscatory
prices set by government
agencies. Peasants resisted
this, and they also ignored
annual work plans and production
targets. With people
having left their old cashew
trees behind, a huge share
of that once-important crop
went ungathered.
Scott concluded that the
failure of ujamma was virtually
guaranteed "by the high
modernist hubris of planners
and specialists who believed
that they alone knew how
to organize a more satisfactory,
rational and productive
life for their citizens."
"It should be noted," he
continued, "that they did have
something to contribute
to what could have been a more
fruitful development of
the Tanzanian countryside. But
their insistence that they
had a monopoly on useful
knowledge and that they
impose this knowledge set the
stage for disaster."
Finger-Pointing Taints Search for Aid
In Dar es Salaam in the late
70's, tales of such willful
and miscalculated planning
were widely exchanged by
the same diplomats who complimented
Nyerere for his
concern and decency:
After
a state agency was organized to market fish,
fish disappeared from the market because
fisherman no longer found it worth their while to
go out.
Norwegian-backed
training project to establish
coastal shipping was not permitted to carry cargo
so it would not compete with the state trucking
company.
regulation
banning doctors from treating patients
privately in their homes after their work in
government clinics and hospitals led to the
emigration of many doctors.
An
Italian agronomist developing export crops
promoted strawberries, for which there was a
strong market in Europe, but a party official
declared that unlike beets and potatoes,
strawberries were not a socialist fruit.
Over the years Nyerere would
sometimes acknowledge
that Government mismanagement,
particularly its
abolishment of functioning
producer cooperatives, had
contributed to sharp declines
in staple crops.
But he placed much more blame
on an international
economy in which agricultural
prices had dropped
sharply while the cost of
oil, machinery and other
imports had risen. He noted
that for Tanzania to
purchase a seven-ton truck
in 1981, it had to produce
four times as much cotton,
or three times as much
coffee, or 10 times as much
tobacco as it had five years
earlier.
But whatever the accuracy
of those calculations, it was
also true that farm production
was tumbling, with sisal
harvesting, for example,
dropping to 33,000 tons in
1985 from 250,000 in 1964.
Desperately needing credit,
Nyerere turned to the
International Monetary Fund
and in 1980 began a
five-year struggle with
the fund, resisting its dictates
that he divert funds from
education and emphasize
export crops while allowing
domestic food prices to
rise.
In this skirmishing, Nyerere
became the third world's
most assertive exponent
of the new economic order in
which the economic imbalance
between North and
South would be overcome
through international law
and obligation rather than
through markets or charity.
But he was never able to
reach an agreement with the
I.M.F., and in 1984, when
Tanzania could not meet
interest payments to the
United States, the Reagan
Administration suspended
all aid but emergency food
allocations.
Nyerere reinforced his reputation
abroad by his
steadfast support of liberation
movements in African
countries where majority
rule had not been achieved.
He provided training camps
for the African National
Congress from South Africa
and diplomatic support for
national movements fighting
in Mozambique and
Rhodesia.
And in 1978, after Uganda
annexed a 700-square-mile
section of Tanzania, Nyerere
angrily denounced Idi
Amin, the Ugandan despot,
as a man who had killed
more people than either
Ian Smith, the white leader of
Rhodesia, or John Vorster
of South Africa.
With startling bluntness,
he added: "There is this
tendency in Africa to think
that it does not matter if an
African kills other Africans.
Had Amin been white,
free Africa would have passed
many resolutions
condemning him. Being black
is becoming a certificate
to kill fellow Africans."
Nyerere, who as a youthful
pan-Africanist President
had considered doing without
an army, reasoning that
such a force would be useless
against great powers and
therefore could only fight
African neighbors, sent
Tanzanian soldiers and Ugandan
exile volunteers to
push back Amin's forces.
They routed the Ugandan
dictator, who fled into
exile in Saudi Arabia.
After he retired, Nyerere
was often asked whether he
had any regrets. In a typical
interview, he said he was
pleased that "Tanzanians
have more sense of national
identity than many other
Africans," and he expressed
pride in the nation's high
rate of literacy. As for the
poor economy, it had resulted
from an "a hostile
international environment,"
he said.
"What would I have changed
if I had my time again?
Not much."
The white-haired farmer,
the Mwalimu, then turned to
his attempts to instill
his idea of African socialism.
"They keep saying you've
failed," he mused. "But what
is wrong with urging people
to pull together? Did
Christianity fail because
the world isn't all Christian?"