United States
United Nations
Saints and Presidents:
A Commentary on Julius Nyerere
by Stanley Meisler
American foreign affairs writer and author of United
Nations: The First Fifty Years
At a Korea University conference in Seoul a few months ago, I was
placed next to Julius Nyerere of Tanzania at
dinner. For those of us who covered Africa more than a quarter of a
century ago, Nyerere was like a saint.
Incorruptible, frank, good- humored, intellectual, he could charm the
most suspicious and doubtful questioners
into following the flow of his logic as he expounded the need in Africa
for socialism, one-party democracy,
self-reliance, non-alignment. He always made sense, at least in theory,
and, since we knew he did not line his
pockets with gold or pander to tribalism and racism, we always wished
him and his poor country well. I turned to
him at the Seoul dinner and said, "Mr. Nyerere, when I was a young
correspondent, and you were a young
president, I interviewed you." "Well," he replied with a laugh, "I got
out of my business. I hope you got out of
yours."
In fact, the 74-year-old Nyerere is one of the few African leaders to
get out of the business peacefully and
voluntarily. He gave up the presidency in 1985 and retired to a farm in
his native village of Butiama near Lake
Victoria. Tanzania coins honor him in Swahili as Baba (Father) of the
Nation and First President, and he still
wields a good deal of influence in national politics and in the
settlement of international crises. But, as I discovered
in a recent visit to Tanzania, most educated Tanzanians, though they
have no bitterness, look on his reign as a
failed one. The headmaster of a secondary school near Moshi took down a
couple of volumes of Nyerere's old
essays from a bookshelf after I asked about them. "I'm sorry," he said
as he handed them to me. "They are very
dusty now that we have a multiparty state." No one reads Nyerere any
more.
A return to Tanzania after an absence of 25 years left this visitor
with an uncanny sense that little had changed.
Foreign aid donors had improved some of the roads, and new, monstrously
powerful buses hurtled down these
roads at criminal speed. Swahili had helped unify the disparate tribes
and geography into a nation. The country
now had more than 25 private newspapers to supplement the two bland
government and party newspapers. But
the country remained dirt poor and devoid of development. France and
China had built two textile plants for the
government but neither functioned. Women bought kangas - cotton
wraparounds with bright, flashy designs and
Swahili slogans - that were imported from Kenya and India. Nyerere used
to exhort his people, "We must run
while they walk." But most people had stood still.
What went wrong? It is clear now that while Nyerere spun his ideas a
quarter of a century ago, few of his people
understood these ideas well enough to implement them. In 1967, Nyerere
wrote a paper, "Education for
Self-Reliance," that was a masterful critique of the ills of African
education. School systems were creating an elite
class of graduates who refused to work with their hands and soon lost
touch with the societies that spawned them.
Tanzania's Chief Education Officer that year quoted huge gobs of the
paper to me by heart. But, when I asked
him for an example of how he intended to wipe out elitism in the
schools, he replied, "Oh, yes, elitism is one of our
problems in the schools. But it is not a major problem. There are
always a few students who come to school and
fool around and refuse to study. We must deal with those few students.
We must discipline them - cane them or
expel them." He had missed the whole point of the paper.
When I repeated this to Nyerere later that day, he laughed and said,
"There can only be one missionary in this
country, and I am the missionary. But I can not tell them how to carry
out my ideas. If I put in examples (in the
paper), the Ministry of Education will follow those and do nothing
else. I want them to think of examples by
themselves."
The noted French agronomist Rene Dumont, author of "False Start in
Africa", warned Nyerere in those days that
Tanzania was at too primitive a level of development for its leaders to
talk about sophisticated economic theories
like socialism. But Nyerere did not listen. He nationalized the foreign
banks, plantations and manufacturing plants
when he did not have trained personnel to run them. He pushed out Peace
Corps and missionary teachers from
the secondary schools when he did not have enough Tanzania teachers
with adequate English to replace them. He
pressured farmers into ujamaa villages even though Tanzanians found the
idea of collective farming abhorrent. He
undercut one of Africa's most remarkable cooperatives - the coffee
marketing association near Mt. Kilimanjaro -
because it did not fit into his theories. He broke relations with
Britain, Tanzania's chief aid donor, because the
Organization of African Unity had set down a ridiculous ultimatum on
Rhodesia and he wanted the rest of the
world to take Africa's word seriously.
There is a new optimism in Tanzania today. Evidently with Nyerere's
acquiescence, his heirs have adopted
multiparty democracy and the free market system and have engaged in a
war on corruption. The old Swahili
translation of free market - soko huria - had a negative air in the
Nyerere era; it connoted uncontrolled capitalism,
in short, capitalism at its worst. So the leaders are using different
Swahili words - soko huru - which is supposed
to mean free market with limits.
In an upcountry town like Mbeya in the breathtaking highlands of
southern Tanzania, when you sip Safari beer
with local journalists, mostly stringers for the mushrooming newspapers
in Dar es Salaam, you find them eager,
enthusiastic, hopeful and grateful for advice. But their training is
inadequate, their English kind of halting, and their
poverty obvious. My own optimism for Tanzania is tempered by the memory
of similar scenes with eager
Tanzanians a quarter of a century ago. They were just as enthusiastic
then for African socialism as they are now
for soko huru. Tanzania is at so low a level of development that
capitalism may be no better as a panacea than
socialism was.
I do not want to belittle Nyerere. His Tanzania is warm, calm, gentle
and united. Standing still in Tanzania was a
healthier experience than going backwards in neighboring Zaire, Burundi
and Rwanda. Tanzania was far better off
with a benign saint for a president than a rapacious tyrant. I still
admire Nyerere a great deal. But the Tanzanian
experiment offers good evidence that saints do not really make very
good presidents.
December 17, 1996
featured on the OneWorld News Service December 19, 1996
OneWorld News Service - Tanzania
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>From: "Mambuna O. Bojang" <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
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>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: The Death of Former Prez NYERERE!
>Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 11:37:00 -0400
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>African Independence Leader, JULIUS NYERERE, who voluntarily gave up
>power in 1985 died in London at age 77. Detail of the story can be
>obtained at the site below:
>
>
>http://cnn.com/WORLD/africa/9910/14/nyerere.obit.01/
>
>
>God speed!
>Pa Mambuna
>
>************************************************************************************
>
>I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on
>earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he
>has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming,
>with a goal in front and not behind... George Bernard Shaw,
>Playwright, 1856-1950
>
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