Of Julius Nyerere, African Politics and myself

Published on 13/07/2008

By Ali Mazrui

When he was President of the United Republic of Tanzania, Julius K Nyerere’s vision was bigger than his victories, his perception was deeper than his performance. In global terms, he was one of the giants of the 20th century. And like all giants, he had both great insights and great blind spots. While his vision did indeed outpace his victories, and his profundity outweigh his performance, he did bestride this narrow world like an African colossus.

It is also the ironies of my life, that Julius Nyerere and I first met neither in his country (Tanzania) nor mine (Kenya) but in Uganda. I first met Mwalimu Nyerere at what was then Makerere University College in Uganda. That was more than 30 years ago.

Long before I became a professor at Makerere. Nyerere had himself been a student there. He later went to the University of Edinburgh for his masters’degree. Makerere and Edinburgh prepared him for the title of mwalimu which he was subsequently to carry for the rest of his life. Young Julius Nyerere entered the gates of Edinburgh in October 1949.

Being influenced by Makerere were not the only bonds that Julius Nyerere and I shared. After our first encounter at the Makerere campus, a complicated relationship developed.

Politician cum scholar

As personalities, what did Julius Nyerere and I have in common? He was a politician who was sometimes a scholar. I was a scholar who was sometimes a politician. Indeed President Obote once asked me in exasperation whether I knew the difference between being a political scientist and being a politician. Some of my public pronouncements in Uganda during Obote’s first administration amounted to direct participation in the politics of Uganda. Nyerere shared some of Obote’s exasperation with my political intrusion into matters of public policy.

Nyerere and I had other areas of shared concern. He translated into Kiswahili two of Shakespeare’s plays—Julius Caesar and the Merchant of Venice. By so doing, he was making available to Africa the genius of another civilisation.

“Edmund Burke and Reflections on the Revolution in the

In another scholarly article, I also ‘Africanised’ the French Philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) by applying his ideas to African affairs. Nyerere and I were trying to build bridges between Africa and great minds of Western civilisations. While Nyerere Swahilised Shakespeare, I Africanised Burke and Rousseau.

With his concept of Ujamaa, Nyerere also attempted to build bridges between indigenous African thought and modern political ideas. Ujamaa was turned by Nyerere into a foundation for African socialism. Ujamaa became the organising principle of the entire economic experiment in Tanzania from the Arusha Declaration to the mid-1980s.

Ujamaa

Nyerere’s relations with the Kenyan political elite deteriorated steadily. He found the then Attorney-General Charles Njonjo particularly distasteful and arrogant as a person and reckless in his attitudes towards Kenya’s neighbours. Nyerere was fond of Mzee Kenyatta, but he thought that Njonjo exercised disproportionate influence on the old Man.

Nyerere was not sure whether to be amused or outraged when Njonjo turned any discussion of Kenyatta’s mortality into something close to a capital punishment! Nyerere was against turning rulers into gods, “like the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt.” Making Kenyatta immortal was to turn him into a god.

Nyerere and I remembered the proposal which was made in 1964 to celebrate annually the day of Kenyatta’s arrest by the British as ‘the Last Supper.’ But there was such a strong negative reaction from the Christian community in Kenya against using the concept of the ‘Last Supper’ in this way that the idea was dropped.

My strongest disagreement with Nyerere concerned Zanzibar and Nigeria. Did Tanganyika unite with Zanzibar to form Tanzania under pressure from President Lyndon Johnson of the United States and Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home of Britain who did not want Zanzibar to become another communist Cuba? Nyerere bristled when it was suggested that the union with Zanzibar was part of the Cold War and not a case of Pan-Africanism.

Nyerere’s recognition of Biafra in the middle of the Nigerian civil war was another hot subject. I personally did not share the suspicion that Nyerere recognised Biafra because the Igbo were fellow Roman Catholics claiming to be threatened by Muslim Northerners in Nigeria. But I did believe in one Nigeria and therefore disagreed with Nyerere’s policies. Nyerere also bristled if it was suggested that he was ungrateful to Nigeria which had helped him with his own army in 1964, and wanted to create a new force.

—The writer is chancellor at Jomo Kenyatta University