Heaven On Earth by Joshua Muravchik

Author:Joshua Muravchik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2010-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

December 9, 1961 was the day of Uhuru, the Swahili word for “freedom.” A team of climbers did in fact scale Kilimanjaro and plant a torch on its summit. Then, six weeks later, Nyerere abruptly resigned as prime minister. He called in one of his close disciples, Rashidi Kawawa, and said, “Look, Rashidi, you are the prime minister from right now. Take the chair.” The whole nation was as stunned as Kawawa, who insisted that he was only sitting in for “the father of the nation.”

Nyerere explained that he was leaving the government in order to give “full time to the work of TANU.” This was the first indication that he was moving away from the democratic ideas of his British teachers. In Communist regimes the top man was ordinarily the general secretary of the party, rather than the official head of state or government. Nyerere was not a Communist, nor did he want to model TANU after the Communist parties, but he wanted to reshape it from a movement of mass struggle to a governing apparatus.

And in other ways, Nyerere’s decision to step back contained hints that he did not believe he could implement socialism in Tanganyika by the democratic means he had learned at Edinburgh, yet he did not want to compromise his standing as hero to Europe’s social democrats, so he let someone else do the dirty work. With his encouragement, a sweeping law on preventive detention was enacted, giving the government complete discretion to throw people in jail, and this was coupled with tight restrictions on trade unions. Since Kawawa had himself been a labor leader, he was the ideal front man for such action.

Nyerere also was in a bind over racial preferences. Little would be gained, he said, by the “replacement of non-African landlords, employers and capitalists by African ones.” He had opposed those who would have restricted Tanganyika citizenship to blacks, likening their approach to the policies of Hitler and Verwoerd, the architect of South Africa’s apartheid. He was, moreover, painfully aware of the country’s dearth of trained Africans. According to a government study of the skilled professions in Tanganyika just after independence, 16 of the nation’s 184 doctors were black, as were 9 of the 45 veterinarians, and 2 of the 57 lawyers. There was 1 black civil engineer, 1 surveyor, 1 zoologist—and not a single black architect, mechanical engineer or geologist. As a demonstration of Nyerere’s nonracialist conviction, TANU for the first time opened its doors to non-blacks. Nonetheless, he recognized that his views ran counter to an overwhelming tide of public opinion. How could Africans feel they had become masters in their own house so long as society’s elite positions continued to be filled almost entirely by whites and Asians? Better to let Kawawa, who shared little of Nyerere’s delicacy, “Africanize” the civil service.

After a year Nyerere returned to government, winning Tanzania’s first presidential election with more than 98 percent of the vote. Soon thereafter he adopted the sobriquet “Mwalimu.” It

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