In January 1964, a little known Ugandan immigrant named John Okello, led a group of Africans dissatisfied with the domination of economic and political life in Zanzibar by an Arab minority to seize a police station. They overpowered the police, succeeded in arming themselves with guns and went on a violent rampage in which more than 5000 Arabs lost their lives. This revolution brougt to an end the brutal rule by Arabs over the African majority; a rule that was supported by the British who continued to treat Zanzibar as an Arab colony. The Revolutionary Council that was set up was led by Karume and included the legendary Abdulrahman Muhammed Babu.

 

The Zanzibari Revolution was swiftly followed by a chain reaction in Tanganyika, Kenya, and Uganda. Officers from both the army and the police mutinied for general resentment against the continuing presence of British army officers and for better pay. The governments were alarmed and Nyerere himself went into hiding for a couple of days as the mutineers had seized State House and the airport at Dar es Salaam. The situation was only brought under control after he appealed for assistance from the British.

 

Meanwhile, Marxists were effectively in power in Zanzibar. Western countries witheld recognition of the new state but China, East Germany and the Soviet Union were swift in their offer of aid and support, and without delay commuinist technicians arrived in Zanzibar.

Nyerere became alarmed and feared for Zanzibar being drawn into the Cold War, while loosing any possibility of influencing the course of events there. So he proposed a union with Zanzibar.  Together with the island of Pemba, the result of that union became known as Tanzania. Briefly, this is the historical setting that defined the ideolgical process laying the foundation of what became known as Ujaama.

 

In Europe, like many other African leaders, Nyerere experienced the horrors of capitalism at first hand. The gross exploitation of the workers and peasants by an elite ruling class, racism,  and the humiliation of having to see fellow Africans being brutally exploited by colonial governments even as many of these lost their lives in fighting to liberate Europeans from the horrors of German fascism, were for many of them, as powerful an indictment of capitalism as was imaginable.

So African leaders like Nkrumah, Modibo Keita, Amilcar Cabral, Agostino Neto, Sekou Toure and others, (many of them trained in the West) became ardent Socialists. Added to this is the fact that capitalism produced nothing attractive to Black Africans.

 

Colonial governments were dictatorial, autocratic and brutal. Not only were the educational systems they designed geared towards serving their own interests, but the economic infrastructure was destructive of African indegenous industries, and discouraged competition with their metropolitan counterparts, this to the extent that African states were reduced to producing nothing but primary products. Also, colonial policy did not create ethnicity in Africa but it promoted ethnic consciousness and helped stratify society on those lines.

Eventually, while African colonies were waging bitter and bloody struggles to liberate themselves from colonial domination (the Portuguese colonies in particular) many Western Governments were helping these colonialists to remain in power as a pretext to ward off Soviet interests in the continent. Their policies sharply contrasted with the solidarity and material support offered by socialist/communists states to people struggling and yearning for freedom.  

 

So clearly, the ideological lines were visibly drawn and it appears to me as a matter of common sense as to what choice many of the leaders made. The choice for socialism was not so much of a case of pitting Marxist economic organisation of society against the free market system. It was more of an instance of putting up cultural resistance against and constructing a psychological distance from a system which first enslaved Africans for centuries before subjecting them to the horrors of imperial colonial rule. Besides, socialist theory with its emphasis on an egalitarian ethic fitted very well with the urgent question of addressing the social and economic injustices apparent everywhere in the newly independent countries.

 

Nvertheless, Nyerere's case was a rare instance of uncommon wisdom. The union with Zanzibar brought under his control a tiny island that the West feared was becoming an African Cuba. He brought Abdulrahman Babu and Kassim Hanga into his government and thereby retained the support of their international friends, China and the Soviet Union. (Babu earlier worked for the New China News agency and Hanga who studied in Moscow had married a Russian woman). Yet he exercised moderacy in his committment to socialism by refusing to link up his ideological persuasion as a version either that of Marx and Lenin or that of Mao-Tse Tung. Instead, he polished

his socialist ideals and cloaked them with a primitive African communalist reality, all of it laundered and ironed into an originality he called Ujaama. He loosely translated this to mean "familyhood" in English; and everybody got happy. Mwalimu the theoretician, was born and in his vision was an African country where colonial neglect of the rural areas, especially, came to an abrupt end. This way Julius Nyerere became the darling of both East and West and firmly placed his country outside the cold-war theatre, getting massive aid from everyone and everywhere, and the CIA had therefore, no cause to plot his overthrow - a fate met by  many African radical leaders who sat squarely in the Soviet camp. Consequently, Tanzania enjoyed a long period of political stability.

Ujaama was officially launched in 1967 and that was a particularly euphoric year in modern Tanzanian history. Nyerere did not just get massive international backing and support. The majority of Tanzanians were firmly behind him and there were genuine hopes that Nyerere's African socialism would serve as a ready model for developing otherwise undeveloped African countries. None other than Ali Mazrui labelled the contagious euphoria as "Tanzaphilia"!

 

True, Nyerere threw away and gave up the ideals of a democratic society as stipulated in the Tanzanian constitution. But so did almost everyone else.

The reasons for this development seems to me quite simple:

The Westminster model of constitutions that independent African states authored for themselves had no basis in African political traditions. That colonial governments that helped shape them were themselves insiduously autocratic, meant these constitutions were literally alien.

Secondly,  democracy as a system of rule emerged through a process of long continuous struggle everywhere. The concept of Western democracy has meaning only in the presence of a loyal opposition. i.e a necessary condition for a democratic state is the presence of a dialectically opposite counterpart that lays claim to improve conditions by criticising the party in power. This, I would dare stick out my neck, is also alien to Africa. It is true as Nyerere himself would later say, that "the men would sit under a tree and argue until a consensus is reached". But as soon as agreement is made, dissent becomes taboo. Our own historian, Patience Godwin-Sonko has written about this. But this formula fits more with the modern understanding of a one-party state rather than the constitutionally sanctioned presence of a loyal opposition, which by fiat, need not keep silent only because a consensus had already been  reached on a particular issue.  I think investigating our concept of a loyal opposition is of particular importance. What indeed are the Mandinka, or for that matter Wollof or Fula words for a political opposition?

Infact, Joseph Diescho writes "....Africans experimenting with democracy...have no experience with the kind of opposition necessary to strengthen a republic"  and the "whole practice of opposition is alien to the universe of thought in African societies". He goes so far as to say that there is no neutral word for opposition in existing African languages; that in Southern African languages the words that approximate to the Western notion of an opposition do not contain the element of loyalty; that its meaning borders on destroying and eliminating the one being opposed.

Is it too surprising then that we see all the leaders readily silencing opponents and throwing journalists into  jail? Have they not been champions at eliminating opponents, feeding some to crocodiles?

 

[ To this day, the educated elite is subscribing to this confusion of cultural political alienation by  naming political parties for PPP, NCP APRC, PDOIS, UDP, etc. All these names together with their "magic" acronyms are not only unpronounceable by the great majority of Gambians, it is only with great difficulty that  common illiterates can remember whatever notions of idealist visions lie behind them. Instead of worrying about these meanings they simply replace the messenger for the message. This way the politicians themselves aid in introducing a politics of personalities instead of issues. The acronyms are duely appropriated as symbols for the party].

 

Thirdly, that proponent of liberal democray, the bourgeiosie was absent in many countries; and where it existed it was weak, embryonic and tiny, and not infact truely bourgeois. Where it evinced a courageous political and economic alternative, it ran the risk of passing as an antiliberationist force especially in countries where memories of the liberation struggle and institutionalised racism were so deep.

 

For these and other reasons it is understandable that Nyerere and other leaders  threw away the democratic ideals which they swore to defend and uphold immediately after assuming power.  Most of Africa, with its internal schisms and searing poverty and chaos, was simply waiting to be controlled by a strong man at the helm - either through the military apparatus or by controlling the system of distribution - preying upon a very weak state structure. Of course, many of the leaders were just callous idiots!

 

 

A few bright sides are that 40% of villages were provided with running water while three out of ten had clinics. Adult literacy grew from ten to ninety-five percent while average life expectancy rose from 41 to 51 years. School attendance soared from 25% of the children to 95% while infant mortality felt to half of what it was in 1960.

 

These were by all means modest achievements by a country that was the most helped. Ujaama failed terribly, without question. But in contrast to what Ayyiteh and Sharima wrote, Nyerere was very honest in admitting failure even before he resigned as President in 1984. He did not seek to lay the blame on Mwinyi, his succcessor.

 

Given that other leaders who chose the capitalist path towards economic organisation of their countries failed almost equally miserably, but perhaps less dramatically, it was incredible that the authors chose to argue against Nyerere being a saint without telling us the concrete historical circumstances that presented him with an alternative course of action which could have prevented him from becoming a knave.

 

Did he have a more reasonable choice, say, other than in 1973 when he could have changed course, instead of stubbornly declaring ".....we shall never change"?  Was there anyone, anywhere, who advised or opposed "Ujaama" from the beginning?

My belief is that in spite of similarities of experience with other colonised and oppressed peoples, there were no blueprints anywhere in the world, at the dawn of independence, that correctly could tell Africans what road to take towards social progress.

 

Sorry, It became just too long, but well that's it!

 

Momodou S. Sidibeh,

Stockholm/Kartong