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’Mwalimu with a whole country as a class
2006-07-21 08:56:10
By Prof. Haroub Othman University of Dar es Salaam
Mwalimu Julius Nyerere has been characterised in many ways. A BBC TV programme once called him ’An Idealist in Power’; Professor Ali Mazrui had a book on him titled ’The Titan of Tanzania’; U.N. Secretary General referred to him as ’’a 20 Century giant’’; and in a Memorial Lecture last year at the University of Cape Town, I labelled him ’An Intellectual in Power’
The Catholic Church in Tanzania has even started the process of beautifying him into a Saint. I strongly feel that if he were asked what he would like his epitaph to be, he would say simply ’Mwalimu’ (the Teacher).
Definitely Mwalimu Nyerere, even in death, continues to attract the attention of scholars and ordinary people the world over. And as Ambassador Eva Nzaro points out in the volume under review, Nyerere’s legacy will endure for generations to come.
In January 2000, a few months after Mwalimu Nyerere’s death, the Institute of African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, organised a conference in memory of Mwalimu under the theme: ’’Julius Nyerere - Humanist, Politician, Thinker’’.
The conference was addressed by Russian scholars, diplomats and the Tanzanian ambassador then accredited to Moscow. The present volume consists of papers presented at the conference.
The sub-title of the book refers to Mwalimu as a politician. But was he really one? Ali Mazrui, in the book referred to above, states that ’’the mystique that Nyerere has had for Western intellectuals is that he had not really been a politician’’.
It is a fact that many intellectuals tend to despise the game of politics because of deception, the quest for popularity, the intrigues, the broken promises, all these making people to see ’’politics as a dirty game’’.
Mwalimu was a statesman. Politicians come and go. Statesmen live on and the impact of their presence is felt for many years after their death.
If I can paraphrase William Shakespeare, the good they do live after them.
Most of the contributors to the volume are people who did meet and knew Mwalimu.
Three of them (Vladimir Aldoshin, Arkadi Glukhov and Vyacheslav Ustinov) served in the former Soviet Embassy in Dar es Salaam, and therefore had personal contact with Mwalimu.
Vyacheslav Ustinov, who was one of the first Russians to arrive in the then Tanganyika immediately after independence, narrates a trip into the rural areas that he and other diplomats made accompanying Mwalimu. ’’Nyerere proved to be a brilliant public speaker who knew his people.
The speech frequently switched off to an open dialogue with the audience. Indeed, it seemed that the teacher (Mwalimu) was talking to his pupils’’.
Ustinov recalls that once during the trip, they were sitting on the veranda of a house having dinner with Mwalimu when Mwalimu confided to them his cherished dream: if Tanganyika by the turn of the century could have achieved the then standard of living of one of the poorest of the European countries, he would be happy. He had named Portugal and Greece as examples.
Vassili Solodovnikov, one of the most experienced of the present-day Russian Africanists, writes on his chance meeting with Mwalimu in Mauritius in 1974 when they were both attending the anniversary of Mauritian Independence.
Mwalimu, on the spot, invited Solodovnikov and his delegation to visit Tanzania on their way back to Moscow. Solodovnikov obliged and came to Dar es Salaam.
What I find very interesting, though some might consider irrelevant now, is Nikolai Kosukhin’s contribution.
Kosukhin has been a long time Russian analyst of political and ideological trends in Africa. Even though in the volume there is a very strong denial that Soviet ideologists were not the ones who imposed in the debates of the 1960s and 1970s the concept of ’’countries of socialist orientation in Africa’’, the fact of the matter is that they did. In fact Kosukhin was on the forefront among the proponents of this thinking.
I remember once when he visited the University of Dar es Salaam, we had a very heated but comradely discussion on this issue.
Borrowing from Lenin’s notion that it was possible for some countries to by-pass capitalism and move straight to socialism thanks to the existence of socialism in some countries, some Soviet ideologists embraced every African country that said it was building socialism into the community of ’countries of socialist orientation’.
Thus Ethiopia under Mengitsu, Somali under Siad Barre and Congo Brazzavile under Nguesso were put together with Angola under Neto, Mozambique under Samora and Tanzania under Mwalimu! Fortunately enough, African Marxists themselves bombarded this notion and exposed it as a misrepresentation of Lenin.
But what was Mwalimu’s socialism? If one goes through Mwalimu’s ideological development, one can see that his belief in socialism did not emerge with the Arusha Declaration, but long before.
Some attribute it to his interaction with Fabian socialists while he was in Britain for higher studies. But from his writings immediately after he left Makerere one can see the beginning of socialist convictions.
The important thing though is that until the end of his life, Mwalimu Nyerere was faithful to his socialist convictions.
Vladimir Shubin is a well-known Soviet, and now Russian, Africanist. He has written extensively especially on the liberation movements.
His contribution in this volume consists of his reminiscences of two meetings he had with Mwalimu, at both of which I was present.
One was at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1997 during an international conference commemorating Mwalimu’s 75 Birthday, and the second in Mwalimu’s own village, Butiama, in 1999, few months before his death. I will quote extensively on the second meeting:
Our discussion ….. was continued a year and a half later, when Professor Haroub Othman of the Dar es Salaam University and I were visitors to Mwalimu’s native village Butiama in Northwest Tanzania.
The trip from the centre of … Mwanza to Butiama deserves a separate story (it took us seven hours to overcome the distance of about 200 kilometres long, since it was necessary to repair our motor vehicle seven times.
Haroub asked me, ’’Is the magazine Ogonyok still alive? So you would venture to write an article about our trip)’’.
We arrived in the evening, and the conversation with Nyerere took place the next day. The talk was short, but it was followed with long lunch, during which we discussed many questions: from the aggression of NATO against Yugoslavia (’absolutely illegal war’, such was Nyerere’s judgment) up to the necessity of resistance to dictatorship by one ’superpower’ and international financial institutions.
Mwalimu was interested also in the reasons of the Soviet Union’s collapse, and about the present situation in Russia.
I remember Nyerere saying in the 1986 Party Congress Gorbachev has made a deep analysis of the situation in the country, but he turned off the chosen road.
This meeting with Mwalimu was fruitful in one more respect. Professor Othman confessed to me later that he has spent almost seven years of futile attempts to urge Nyerere to start writing his Memoirs and finally has succeeded.
’’Earlier I refused’’, said Nyerere to me, ’’but now I think that the time has come to start this work. The doctors advised me to lower the activity, but I hope to accomplish my mission of intermediary in Burundi by the end of this year and then I shall be glad to accept here, in Butiama, the Tanzanian historians, which (sic) will help me in this new venture’’.
Seeing us off and bidding me farewell near his old house, Mwalimu has noticed: ’’The Army have constructed for me the new house, too large.
I do not hurry to move in. At first, it is necessary to transfer there my library, but now I shall have the space to host the visitors’’.
Then he asked me, when I should come to Tanzania again. I was sure, that we should meet again, maybe, at the future presentation of his Memoirs. Mwalimu looked much younger of his 77 years and nothing threatening that it had been our last meeting.
When launching this book on 9 June 2006 at the Russia-Tanzania Cultural Centre in Dar es Salaam, Dr Salim Ahmed Salim, the Chairman of the Mwalimu Nyerere Foundation stated:
What is remarkable about the book is that relatively brief as it is, it gives the reader, even the uninitiated, a succinct picture of the man - his struggles and achievements as well the problems that he encountered’’.
I stated elsewhere that Nyerere’s presence would continue to be felt in Tanzania’s and Africa’s intellectual debates; and that the agenda set by him will continue to dominate Tanzania for many years to come despite the diktats of the ’Washington Consensus’ and the compradorisation of our elite.
Moreover, the moral ethics he exemplified will continue to be the standard against which leadership in Africa will be judged.
And his quest for justice and equality in the world will continue to light the road for millions of the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised in their struggles for a world free of poverty, war and tyranny.
The book contains rare pictures of Mwalimu laying a wreath at the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow and visiting Lenin’s room in the Smolny Palace in the then Leningrad. Mkuki na Nyota Publishers of Dar es Salaam must be congratulated for bringing out this valuable edition.
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