Nationalism and pan-Africanism: decisive moments in Nyerere's intellectual and political thought

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Notes

No wonder one of his last works was the translation of Plato's The Republic into Kiswahili. He revealed this to us at a conference commemorating his 75th birthday held at the University of Dar es Salaam. He had just completed the translation but to date unfortunately it has not seen the light of day.

Nyerere came from a small ‘tribe’ from around Lake Victoria called Wazanaki.

This was the nationalist movement which fought for independence and ruled as the only party under the one-party system until 1977. In 1977 TANU and the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) of Zanzibar merged to form Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM).

F. Engels, The part played by labour in the transition of ape to man. 1876. Available from: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/index.htm [Accessed 24 September 2010].

Ironically, Sumbawanga, a remote region in southwest Tanganyika, was considered Tanzania's Siberia by militant students. It is the area to which some of the militant nationalists were exiled by the colonial government. When one of the radical students and a member of USARF wrote a piece critical of Nyerere's Education for Self-Reliance, the over-zealous university administrators transferred him to Sumbawanga to the post of a junior officer.

Interview with Mustafa Amin, Standard, 16 February 1971.

Interestingly this historic document does not appear in the collection of three volumes of speeches and writings of Nyerere from 1952–1973. The documents of the Arusha period, on the other hand, are included.

Question-and-answer session given by President Nyerere to a group of university professors from the USA, 22 June 1983, State House, Dar es Salaam. Recorded by Annar Cassam (in author's possession).

It is interesting that in his interview with the author (Ngombale and Shivji 2009) Ngombale does not directly answer the question as to Nyerere's stand on the 1981 Mwongozo. Ngombale admits though that for unknown reasons Nyerere refused at the last moment to present the draft document to the meeting of the Party Congress and ordered Ngombale to do so (p. 74).

Indeed two of his close expatriate associates, Roland and Irene Brown, trace the origins of the declaration to the need to survive both against external forces and the budding internal elites who would become a bulwark of the status quo (Brown and Brown 1999, pp. 12–13).