Julius Nyerere (Ohio Short Histories of Africa) by Paul Bjerk

Author:Paul Bjerk [Bjerk, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2017-05-14T18:30:00+00:00

Figure 4.2 President Julius Nyerere greets a member of the Ujamaa Group in the Junior TANU Youth League, ca. 1975. © Tanzania Information Services/MAELEZO.

The Burdens of Leadership

An external measure of Ujamaa and its pan-Africanist ideals was Tanzania’s commitment to aiding African rebel movements in the white-dominated states of Southern Africa. This effort stemmed from Nyerere’s long-standing view that freedom in his own country was only guaranteed when the entire continent was free from minority rule.

Most visibly, the settler governments in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and the allied Portuguese colonies in Mozambique and Angola were insults to African pride in an era of decolonization. Tanzania’s leadership in support of the liberation movements bolstered Nyerere’s militant credentials and helped him outflank those who criticized his good relations with Western countries. The liberation struggle was key to Nyerere’s ability to forge an independent foreign policy amidst the superpower rivalries of the Cold War. Beyond Southern Africa, however, he was a prominent voice against militarism, criticizing American action in Vietnam as well as the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In both cases he urged the withdrawal of forces and a negotiated settlement.34

Nyerere was more restrained in his criticism of the indigenous dictators and military governments that sprouted across the continent during this period. Although he bitterly denounced the separatist leader of the Congolese state of Katanga, Moise Tshombe, who hired mercenaries from South Africa and elsewhere, Nyerere tolerated his corrupt successor Joseph Mobutu, who controlled the Democratic Republic of the Congo (or Zaire, as he renamed the country in 1971) for thirty years with American backing. He remained a firm friend to Uganda’s Milton Obote, whose Common Man’s Charter closely followed Tanzania’s ideological path, despite Obote’s attempts to consolidate dictatorial power.35 When the brutal military leader Idi Amin pushed Obote from power in 1971, Nyerere refused all relations with his new nemesis. Nyerere accused Amin, who expelled the entire Asian (mostly Indian) population from his country, of being an African fascist, just as racist as the white South African government.

Yet anti-Asian sentiment continued to bubble in Tanzania as well. Nyerere spoke forcefully against Amin’s action and against racial scapegoating at home.36 But when a boatload of Asian refugees from Uganda approached Tanzanian shores, the government refused to take them in.37 Nyerere struggled to balance his inclusive principles against populist voices. A letter published in the government-controlled national newspaper described Asians as questionable citizens who “need[ed] tough handling.”38 In order to contain anti-Asian sentiment, Nyerere agreed to a law nationalizing all buildings worth more than one hundred thousand shillings in order to eliminate “landlordism.” On its face, it was not a racially directed policy, but in effect it was an attack on the Indian commercial community, who owned most of these buildings. Nearly fifteen thousand Asian citizens and residents left within months. In the first decade of Tanzanian independence, the African population of the country had doubled, while the Asian population had fallen by half, to less than sixty thousand. Those who remained felt bitter, betrayed by a leader they had trusted but who now seemed to be acting like an Idi Amin in disguise.

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