In 1943 Julius Kambarage Nyerere joined Andrew Tibandebage in a student political group at Makerere University in Uganda, where they discussed how Tanganyika might gain its independence by making a claim to the United Nations Trusteeship Committee. After finishing studies at Makerere University in 1945, Nyerere took up a teaching post at St. Mary's Secondary School in Tabora, Tanganyika and threw himself happily into his duties. With Tibandebage, Nyerere coached a debating team at St. Mary's and made a deep impression on an upcoming generation at the neighboring Tabora Boys’ School. Rashidi Kawawa, Job Lusinde, and Oscar Kambona all became leaders in the independence movement, in large measure inspired by this enthusiastic young teacher and his debating club. Nyerere kept in close touch with friends back home, including James Irenge, his teacher from Mwisenge Native Authority School who saw his leadership potential and quietly nurtured Nyerere's political ambition during his former pupil's regular visits home.

In 1949 Nyerere traveled to Edinburgh University in Scotland, as one of a small group of East Africans who were given scholarships to study in the United Kingdom. A university education abroad was the final step in a colonial educational track reserved for a small group of top students that would help transform African society into a more European one—or so officials hoped. They were trained as teachers, doctors, and social workers. Nyerere was a typical member of the independence generation described by Frederick Cooper: “Leaders—western educated, but rarely more than one generation removed from their milieux of origin—saw themselves as choosing the best of what Europe and Africa had to offer.” While local ideas nourished their hearts, the driving philosophy of the colonial education they imbibed was British Utilitarianism. Probing Nyerere's educational journey offers insight into the broader intellectual discourse that offered young African elites the means to pierce metropolitan prejudices and transform the justifications of colonial rule into a rationale for independence.

Nurturing a Political Vision

Born in 1922, Nyerere grew up in a small hilltop village called Butiama, some miles inland from the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, on the edge of what is now the Serengeti National Park.

The second half of 1964 brought continual contention with signs of intervention, spycraft, and planted rumors. Cold War powers enhanced their own freedom of action by sowing confusion that constrained the ability of other countries to ascertain the necessary intelligence to react. Eastern and Western powers used secrecy and misdirection to distract their rivals for both defensive protection and offensive tactics. Such deliberate distraction served to make the “Third World” countries they fought over look naive and irresponsible. For countries like Tanzania, this meant operating amid uncertainty, compelled to act even when confronted with evidence that beggared belief.

A key insight of discursive analysis is the idea that communication is a two-way street, where the speaker never quite knows how the hearer will interpret the message. In diplomacy and spycraft, this ambiguity is an asset deliberately deployed. Lies and secrets are not only a way of hiding information but also, as Luise White proposed, ways “to make certain information so charged that its value and importance is unlike that of other information.” In such a kaleidoscopic crucible, Tanzanian leaders struggled constantly throughout 1964 to divine superpower intentions and preempt foreign intervention, which from their perspective seemed imminent. In the Union Treaty, the Tanzanian leadership showed that they could respond to Cold War intrigue in kind. But the Union radicalized Tanzanian foreign policy, and brought with it a new awareness of the risks its ideology entailed. Tanzania successfully defended its autonomy during a year in which its newly constituted United Republic faced numerous inscrutable challenges to its sovereignty.

During this period, Tanzania's internal search for competent leadership could easily have been derailed by external actors, as had happened in the Congo. Abdulrahman Babu's intelligence, idealism, and organizing ability impressed Nyerere and many others, but as elsewhere in the Cold War world, these very abilities became a hindrance to his advancement. Frank Carlucci reported, with typical theatricality, “Babu most dangerous of group because … he most able man in government.” Karume, whom American diplomats underestimated as “ignorant and inept,” was a safer and preferable choice. The promotion of mediocre leadership by Cold War powers provided an attractive means to restrain postcolonial autonomy and tended to produce dictators of limited political creativity.

A City of Rumors

On January 19, 1964, Tanganyika's president, Julius Nyerere, lingered at the statehouse, confident that the immediate crisis of the previous week's revolution in Zanzibar had passed. Most of his cabinet and several of the Zanzibari revolutionary leaders lounged on the terrace in the cool ocean breeze on this warm tropical evening. They drank beer, thinking big and making plans, the dream of revolution and the taste of freedom that it offered alive in their imaginations. “Nyerere seemed in no hurry to return to this pledge session and we talked for almost an hour.” He relaxed with Ambassador William Leonhart in the living room at the former colonial governor's mansion, sizing up the situation. They gossiped. Leonhart motioned through the terrace doors to the silhouette of self-proclaimed “Field Marshal” John Okello, the clueless young hero of the island putsch, who had been recruited into action by the Youth League of the fractious Zanzibari nationalist party, the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP). In the clipped cadences of American diplomatic reporting, the ambassador narrated: “Asked Nyerere whether he was sane. Nyerere said yes. He quickly added that he had ‘no depth.’ He was ‘common policeman’ who had suddenly found himself in middle of Zanzibar situation and had no idea of what to do next. They would keep him in Tanganyika for a few days, cool him off, and try to give him some useful ideas.”

For all their fire and fearlessness, the Zanzibari revolutionaries, like new parents, suddenly had responsibilities. A little bewildered, they sought assurance from a trusted authority. They “kept turning to Tanganyika. Karume had been here once; Hanga, Babu and others several times during the week. They needed help, guidance, and emergency supplies.” Tanganyika under Nyerere had established an orderly government comprising Europeans, Indians, and Africans, its grassroots political party woven into local society throughout the nation.

Suggesting that Tanganyika should have a single-party system for at least fifteen years after independence, Nyerere argued that the key to a sustainable democratic system was not to be found in constitutional safeguards, no matter how ingeniously devised. He had come to the conclusion that any electoral system could be easily manipulated into dictatorship, and that for a democratic system to work at all there had to be a consensus, shared among people and leaders alike, about the constraints on political decisions within the nation-state. Nyerere introduced the idea of a “national ethic” while endorsing the new republican constitution and the powerful executive it envisioned:

Given the shallow constitutional tradition in the newly independent country, Nyerere sought a popular philosophy of basic civil and economic rights balanced by an ideology of citizen obligation that would define what it meant to be Tanganyikan and thus designate the limits of legitimate politics. Moreover, a philosophy of state articulated with an identifiably “African” sensibility would represent an integrative route to Africanness, as opposed to a divisive racial route. During his travels in 1962, Nyerere composed a language and logic for a national ethic that would make sense as both grassroots and cosmopolitan discourse.

Without a popular democratic tradition in place, Nyerere believed it would take time for people to learn the rhythms, pitfalls, and limitations of democratic politics, and make the necessary commitment to maintain democratic principles despite their weaknesses.

Within a week of the Zanzibari Revolution in January 1964, Oscar Kambona reported that the new Zanzibari leader Abeid Karume, together with Kassim Hanga and the influential Abdulrahman Babu, expressed interest in the idea of a “union or federal relationship with Tanganyika in the near future.” After the mutiny on the mainland, which had ironically left Nyerere in a strong position both internally and externally, Tanganyika entered into a tense period of diplomatic jockeying over the fate of revolutionary Zanzibar. In the Union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, the East African leadership found a solution that satisfied all sides enough to restrain an outside intervention, and so retain East African control over the islands. As Kambona explained, the key issue was to maintain local autonomy from foreign interference: “Our first concern was the growing Communist presence, and second, the danger of the Cold War coming in. The Cold War was in the Congo already—it would have been a straight line across Africa… . The problem was how to isolate Zanzibar from the Eastern countries, yet not be used by the West for its own purposes.”

The details of this account largely agree with those of Issa Shivji, Thomas Burgess, Ian Speller, Frederick Jjuuko, and Godfrey Muriuki, but my analysis suggests that both Nyerere and Karume were concerned about increasing superpower interference in Zanzibar and sought to minimize it, fearing that it would fuel further violence. Western diplomats worked to retain a friendly government in Zanzibar as a strategic asset in the Indian Ocean, and Eastern countries made great efforts to cultivate the strong communist element in the Zanzibari leadership to create an ideological ally in East Africa. The Tanganyikan leadership sought only to keep Zanzibar from becoming dependent on either side. To accomplish this, Nyerere and Karume agreed to end revolutionary Zanzibar's tenuous sovereignty and place it within the ad hoc framework of a new sovereign state that came to be known as Tanzania.

Zanzibar, as petite as Congo was grand, was another key Cold War prize. East African leaders fought to maintain regional control over the course of events there.

TANU Youth League settlement schemes were constantly praised by Nyerere and other government ministers, and their ideological force only continued to increase in official rhetoric. In his inaugural presidential speech on December 10, 1962, Nyerere made reference to “the work being done by the people themselves through self-help schemes” while, ironically, also emphasizing that rural development would be “directly under my control.” Placing the work of these model citizens in a generational framework of family, he told the gathered parliamentarians, “It will be from their children and their grand-children that they will in the end receive the thanks they deserve.” Village development was a major theme of the speech:

A divisional executive officer in northern Tanganyika used TANU rhetoric to encourage the populace to support “self-help” settlements, “for the sake of fighting our enemy ‘poverty.’” These schemes also served a national security purpose modeled on an optimistic understanding of the moshav settlements in Israel. Nyerere's new Department of Development Planning was an institutional expression of Ujamaa's merging vectors of patriarchal land allocation in local discourse and foreign prescriptions for economic development. The new villages represented not only attempts to enact modernist ideas of development but also pragmatic strategies to secure borders for national defense. Government-directed village settlement was only partly an economic development policy; it was also a locally legible effort to establish sovereignty at the grass roots.

State-directed rural development in Africa has been characterized as an “anti-politics machine” by James Ferguson, who argued that the language of “developmentalism” suppresses political debate and so authorizes unidirectional state action toward rural farmers. James Scott saw villagization as an aspect of a broader disciplinary trend that he called “high modernism,” marked by a Utilitarian inheritance that Michel Foucault identified as panopticism.

Among TANU's leaders, a regional vision to safeguard nationalist politics took form even before independence. Nyerere and his colleagues were aware of the internal and external weaknesses of the new state they governed, and they charted a realist course within these limits. Tanganyika's limited military and economic resources, its nonexistent diplomatic corps, and its newly minted statehood made any independent policy goal somewhat improbable, and its leaders were certainly overly optimistic in many regards. Nevertheless, their ideals were meant to stabilize the TANU government and to broadcast its influence abroad, both of which were fundamentally realist policy goals. Their strategy accords with current conceptions of realism that take into account the “multitiered nature of threat assessment.” Rashidi Kawawa recalled an international strategy that was a necessary complement to TANU's domestic goals.

Tanganyika's early approach sought to use ideological power in concert with its limited diplomatic force in the interest of sovereign autonomy. After the founding of the TPDF in 1964 and the arrival of military aid from China, the newly renamed Tanzania began to exercise significant military force through the liberation movements it supported. However, until the first incursions into Mozambique in September 1964, its influence existed almost entirely in its fluent engagement of diplomatic discourse. The position taken by TANU was that the nation would not be truly free unless neighboring countries were also free, and that a bigger political unit would wield more clout in the international realm. While ideological in its analysis of global political dynamics, it was no less realist in its orientation than the ideologically driven policies of the superpowers.