Julius Nyerere
In his 1962 pamphlet, Ujamaa – the Basis of African
Socialism, Nyerere begins: “Socialism – like democracy – is an attitude of mind.”
This was a few months after the Independence of Tanganyika,
and Julius Nyerere was the country’s first President.
“African Socialism” was mostly a swindle, but here, probably,
and also in the opinion of Ngugi wa Thiong’o as we have seen, Julius Nyerere
was expressing a conviction held in good faith.
Nyerere believed that socialism was an attitude of mind,
perhaps comparable to the imaginary “milk of human kindness”. He believed that
socialism was entirely a subjective condition.
We will ponder, in the case of Thomas Sankara, the assassinated
president of Burkina Faso, whether such a subjective kind of socialism, which
Sankara also espoused, and which is neither rooted in science nor in
international solidarity, is not always doomed to defeat.
Julius Nyerere was respected by relatively-more-scientific
socialists like Ngugi for the remainder of his life, and under Nyerere's leadership
his country played a heroic role as a front-line state against Apartheid, Portuguese
and Rhodesian colonialism.
Walter Rodney also apologised for Nyerere in his 1972 essay, “Tanzanian
Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism” (click here).
Rodney thought that Ujamaa was de facto
revolutionary, if not consciously so.
Tanganyika combined with Zanzibar in 1964 to become
Tanzania. As Tanzania it was host to many liberation movements and from the
late 1970s was host to the ANC’s Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College. As Tanzania
it adopted the famous Arusha Declaration of 1967. These things are major parts
of the dual history of socialist ideas in Africa and of pan-African solidarity.
Read these two documents to discover part of Tanzania’s
struggle with the meaning of socialism in circumstances where almost the entire
population was made up of peasants. For better or for worse, this is a major
part of Africa’s history.
Please download and read the text via this link:
Julius Nyerere, Arusha
Declaration, 1967 (7170
words)
Further reading:
Kwame
Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism, 1965, Compilation (10643 words)
Kwame Nkrumah, African
Socialism Revisited, 1967 (2587 words)
Walter
Rodney, Colonialism, System for Underdeveloping Africa, 1973, 1973
(34211 words)
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