The Sunday News
Opinion Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu
ON 27 January 2016, Zimbabwe’s President, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, was a guest-of-honour at a well-organised function to launch a book on the late Tanzanian national leader, “Mwalimu” Julius Kambarage Nyerere. The occasion was attended by Zimbabwe’s two Vice-Presidents, Cde Emmerson Mnangagwa, Cde Phelekezela Mphoko, several Cabinet Ministers, members of the diplomatic corps, service chiefs and prominent government personalities.
Hosted by a well-known prolific writer, Phyllis Johnson, and one or two other people, the occasion was briefly told about Mwalimu, whose contribution to the African liberation struggle was highly historic.
President Mugabe gave a very pellucid narrative of Mwalimu Nyerere’s role in the political mobilisation of Southern African liberation movements that were based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, from the early 1960s up to 1994 when South Africa attained a democratic dispensation.
That apart, Mwalimu Nyerere belonged to a very rare breed of leaders in that in him were combined the virtues qualities of humility, mercy and honesty.
Unlike many leaders who like pomp, colour and pageantry, he was for simplicity in attire, speech and action.
It was primarily because he was merciful that he virtually devoted his entire adult life to the liberation of Africa.
President Mugabe said Mwalimu Nyerere decided as early as 1959 that Tanganyika would place a “freedom candle on top of Mount Kilimanjaro from where it would spread freedom to every oppressed African country”. Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest mountain.
Born and bred in a country that was for many years the hunting ground of Arab slave traders, he must have heard when he was growing up agonising stories about how some of his people were brutally captured and cruelly driven to the Indian Ocean coast from where they were sold and bundled like animals into ships’ holds to be taken abroad as slaves.
These stories most probably indelibly remained etched in his mind, and shaped a part of his disposition towards oppression of one person by another.
About three years after his country, Tanganyika, became independent on 9 December 1961, in January 1964, the army mutinied, resulting in Nyerere’s Government asking the British to intervene militarily to restore order.
A commission was set up later to find out what the army’s grievances were. It established that one of the soldiers’ complaints was that their salaries were incomparably lower than those of Cabinet Ministers.
Mwalimu publicly announced that he agreed with that observation, and drastically reduced his salary and allowance and those of his Cabinet Ministers. Elsewhere in independent Africa (and even abroad), the practice and norm were to increase the allowances and salaries of heads of state and their ministers.
What he did showed that he appreciated the army’s grievances. He was able to pluck himself out of his and implant himself in other people’s shoes, a very very rare quality in leaders of high status. He did not regard himself as an infallible leader, and he was not, for he was human and down to earth. He, however, had a practical and not theoretical intellectual approach to life.
On another occasion, the University of Dar es Salaam students went on strike for one reason or another. His son was one of them. They were expelled. His son took his bags and baggage and went to State House where his parents were of course living.
Mwalimu, who was the chancellor of that university, told the boy that State House was not his home, but a residence for the family while at work. Their home, he said, was in the rural areas. He put the boy on a bus bound for his village at Butiama.
When the island of Zanzibar became independent on 10 December 1963, under an Arabic administration, Mwalimu Nyerere’s government realised that relations between Tanganyika and the island could not be friendly in that the Zanzibar Arabs were virtually feudalistic, and treated black people with disdain, a legacy of the slave trade period.
A 600-strong contingent of black people led by a Ugandan, John Okello, overthrew that regime on 12 January 1964, and a black government took over state power. That led to the coming together of Tanganyika and Zanzibar to form Tanzania later.
Had the Zanzibar revolution not occurred, Zanzibar would most likely have leaned towards Asia, particularly towards Oman with which the island’s administration had long standing historic and ethnic relations.
That would have seriously affected Mwalimu Nyerere’s programme for the liberation of Africa. That programme’s origins were in the late 1950s when Mwalimu and Kenneth Kaunda formed what they named the Pan-African Movement for East and Central Africa (Pafmeca) as President Mugabe narrated. It later changed its name to the Pan-Africa Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa (Pafmesca) when the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa joined that organisation whose founding chairman was Mwalimu Nyerere, with Kaunda as the secretary-general.
Pafmesca’s offices, for what they were, were in Dar es Salaam, and its conferences were held in that friendly city. Incidentally, Dar es Salaam means “Haven of Peace” an Arabic name for the local harbour.
It was to be in that “Haven of Peace” that all Africa’s liberation movements were to establish their offices, and where the continent’s Organisation of African Unity was to base its Liberation Committee.
The liberation organisations represented Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, the Comoro Islands, and the Seychelles. In the early 1960s, some of these countries were represented by more than one organisation.
Mwalimu tried to unite them because, he said, unity creates strength.
A country whose achievement of independence was doubtlessly accelerated by unity among its liberation movements is Mozambique which in 1962 had about six African-led political parties: Uniao Democratica, Nacional de Mocambique (Udenamo), the Mozambique African Nationalist Union (MANU), the Uniao Africana do Mozambique Independente (UNAMI), the Mozambique African National Congress (MANC) and one or two others.
On 25 July 1962, UDENAMO, MANU and UNAMI met and agreed in Dar es Salaam to merge as the Frente de Libertacao de Mozambique (Frelimo) under the presidency of Dr Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane. That organisation relentlessly fought and Mwalimu Nyerere’s government supported it to hilt until Mozambique became free on 25 June 1975, exactly 13 years after UDENAMO, UNAMI and MANU came together to form Frelimo because of Mwalimu Nyerere’s wise advice.
In Zimbabwe’s case, Mwalimu Nyerere never gave up advising the country’s two liberation movements, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and the Zimbabwe African Nation Union (ZANU), to unite.
It was a result mainly of his advice that the two liberation movements came together as the Patriotic Front, whose formation was first announced at the Kilimanjaro Hotel on 9 October 1976, three weeks before the Geneva Conference on Zimbabwe opened in Geneva on 28 October.
Mercy was one of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s qualities. He showed it at home and on other politico — social and cultural developments abroad.
At home, he refused to authorise the extradition of 18 people from the mainland to Zanzibar to be tried for their alleged involvement in the 7 April, 1972 assassination of Sheikh Abeid Karume, chairman of the Zanzibar Revolutionary Council.
Sheikh Karume had become Zanzibar’s president after the 12 January, 1964 revolution that replaced the Arab-dominated administration comprising two political parties, the Zanzibar and Pemba People’s Party (ZPPP) and the Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP) with the African-led Afro-Shirazi Party (AZP) headed by Sheikh Abeid Karume himself.
His revolutionary government immediately introduced radical cultural, social and economic reforms many of which dispossessed Arabs of their ill-gotten wealth, including land their ancestors acquired during the days of slavery.
One of the reforms banned the teaching of the Koran in schools. Another, enforced inter-African-Arab marriages, a social practice formerly prohibited by the fallen Arab administration.
The introduction of the social and cultural reforms was ruthless, leading to the deaths of many prominent Arabs. One of them was Mohamed Humud whose son, Humud Mohamed Humud was a lieutenant in the Zanzibari army.
It was that young man who shot dead Sheikh Karume at the Afro-Shirazi Party headquarters. That led to the arrest of several scores of suspects 81 of whom were tried. Of those people, 18 were tried in absentia because Mwalimu Nyerere would not send them from the mainland to Zanzibar.
The Zanzibar court found 44 of those tried guilty and sentenced them to death. Fourteen of the 44 were on the mainland and included a former Cabinet Minister Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu and at least two journalists, Ali Hafidh and Hassan Said Mzee.
Mwalimu Nyerere later used his presidential powers to parole the 14 accused. Meanwhile, the 30 on the island had been executed, Zanzibar having used its constitutional powers and limited autonomy to do so.
Abroad, Mwalimu Nyerere’s government took great exception not only to the violent removal from office of Milton Obote of Uganda by General Idi Amin Dada on 25 January 1971, but more so to the resultant murderous campaign by Amin against everyone he suspected to be either opposed to his regime or to be disaffected by its disastrous economic policies.
His government campaigned diplomatically for the world at large and Africa in particular not to accord the Amin dictatorship official recognition. As is usually the case in such situations, cultural sentiments came into play, leading to that regime getting official recognition particularly by Islamic states such as Libya and Saudi Arabia.
The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) also agreed that Amin become its 1975-76 chairman. That was in spite of Tanzania’s very strongly worded reservations which were supported by not only General Amin’s tragico-comical public behaviour and pronouncements, but also by concretely provable murderous deeds.
When Uganda hosted the 12th OAU summit in Kampala in June 1975, the Tanzanian government boycotted the occasion and gave the following reasons: “The refusal to protest against African crimes against Africans is bad enough.
“But until now Africa at least refrained from giving public support to the worse perpetrators of such crimes. Now, by meeting in Kampala, the Heads of State of the OAU are giving respectability to one of the most murderous regimes in Africa.
“For this meeting will be assumed to have thrown the mantle of OAU approval over what has been done, and what is still being done by General Amin and his henchmen against the people of Uganda. Tanzania is not attending the OAU meeting in Kampala.
“It is not withdrawing from the OAU, nor reducing its support for the OAU. On the contrary, Tanzania will do everything to help the organisation recover from the damage it will be doing to itself in the coming week, by resuming our full and active participation in all OAU as soon as the meeting is over.”
That was an expression of practical solidarity with the then fear-ridden people of Uganda. It was international diplomacy with a humane conscience, Mwalimu Nyerere’s.
On the Atlantic Ocean’s coast, Equatorial Guinea, which had become independent on 12 October 1968 with Macias Nguema as president, had been going through a nightmare as President Nguema was eliminating anyone thought, believed or suspected to be a threat to his atrociously totalitarian rule.
The author of this article was in that period actively involved in most African continental political conferences on behalf of Zapu, and is not aware of any African leader except Mwalimu Nyerere who publicly criticised President Macias Nguema’s obviously inhuman treatment of his country’s (as well as some foreign) people.
Mwalimu Nyerere must have breathed a long and deep sigh of relief when on 3 August 1979 the international media announced that a military coup had ousted Macias Nguema and replaced him with people opposed to his criminal deeds. The coup was led by the then Vice-Defence Minister, Lt Col Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the current Equatorial Guinea Head of State and close friend of President Mugabe and Zimbabwe.
He replaced the heartless Macias Nguema (a close relative of his) in answer to the heartfelt prayers not only of the people of Equatorial Guinea but also of Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere, a man whose African continental political aspirations had a human heart, and deserve to be written in indelible letters of gold.
As Tanganyika’s first black university graduate (he held a masters degree in literature) Mwalimu decided to use his education to help to free Africa, and he did. He left the black people more self-respecting, more dignified, and more globally respected because they had all become masters and mistresses of their destiny.
n Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo- based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email. [email protected]
