This book is a study of the first thirty years of the life of Julius Kambarage Nyerere – or ‘JUKANYE’, as he signed off in a newspaper piece on African socialism about six months into his studies at Makerere College in Uganda. The time period covered is mainly from his birth in Mwitongo in 1922 until his graduation from the University of Edinburgh in 1952. It was after his return to Tanganyika from Edinburgh that Nyerere formally entered politics. He went on to lead the efforts of many others in delivering Tanganyika Territory to independence, and then served as President of Tanzania until his retirement in 1985. The book aims to deliver an original portrait of Nyerere’s early life and to provide a fresh insight into his character. This helps to see his later political life in a new light.

To date, much of the biographical work on Nyerere tends to lack depth, frequently relies on familiar sources, and can sometimes be described as ‘hagiographic’. The term hagiography is often now used pejoratively, to mean an account which only describes the good and positive aspects of a life, and which neglects criticism. This is an accurate description of some of the works claiming to cover Nyerere’s entire life. But it would be a harsh label to attach to any study that details the young, first third of any person’s life – during which, in Nyerere’s case, he was still receiving a formal education. The much rarer contemporary use of the term hagiography is its sensu stricto: in the Christian sense, the attention to the lives of those canonised by, among others, the Roman Catholic church.