This society offers you just the rightful ‘stage’ on which you can rehearse your political performances […] The eyes of East and Central Africa are looking to us for leadership. […] I believe that the solution to international understanding in East and Central Africa todays [sic] lies in our hands. […] If we are to prove our worth we have to show it here and now under University atmosphere.
E. D. Sawe’s insistence that his Makerere peers were pivotal actors in East and Central African political developments was more than simply a display of bravado by a freshly elected student president.Footnote 1 Sawe spoke at a moment, during the early 1950s, when education institutions and party politics came into unprecedented dialogue in this region – most dramatically so at Makerere University College in Kampala. As Sawe addressed his peers, the buzz of a recent student strike could still be felt. Between monthly dances and formal dinners, Makerere students were launching political clubs, societies and publications, taking up correspondence with schoolteachers, party leaders and faraway allies.Footnote 2 It was in this space of cross-fertilisation between the spheres of formal education and party politics, elaborated in this chapter, that the notion of a region encompassing Zambia, Uganda, Malawi and mainland Tanzania came into focus (Map 0.1). So too did a role, imagined in historic and global terms, for a generation of this region’s political actors. That this role was exaggerated – a performance in Sawe’s words – was itself critical to the emergence of an anticolonial culture that championed activism abroad.
As this chapter explains, young people in East and Central Africa carved out this role as they looked to the region’s edges and beyond them. The years 1952 and 1953 witnessed twin regional crises in the form of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and the imposition of the Central African Federation, governed from Salisbury. In the face of widespread African opposition to the amalgamation of Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia, and following a transnational campaign against it, the Federation officially came into existence in August 1953, almost a year after the declaration of a State of Emergency in Kenya. Both crises directed international press interest towards East and Central Africa. The region appeared poised between a future of settler rule along the lines of South Africa, under apartheid since 1948, and one of democratic reform along the lines of Ghana (then the British Gold Coast), where elections under universal suffrage in 1951 placed self-government on the horizon.
Within East and Central Africa, these crises provoked discussions about forms of protest in the face of white settler incursion and about the imperative of maintaining, in practice, the distinction between protectorate and colony. One thing that Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Uganda (protectorates), and Tanganyika (a UN Trust Territory), had in common was the absence of settler populations with the demographic, economic and political strength of those in the colonies that bordered them: numbers of white settlers increased from 30 000 to 50 000 between 1948 and 1952 in Kenya and from 82 000 to 135 000 between 1946 and 1951 in Southern Rhodesia; in both cases, these settlers controlled disproportionate expanses of cultivable land.Footnote 3
The role that schools, colleges and students – as well as formal learning itself – would play in anticolonial organising was shaped by changes within the education sector and by an open question about what these meant in a global context. The early 1950s witnessed significant, if uneven, expansion of a complex, inadequate, sexist and racially segregated education system in this region.Footnote 4 Primary schooling was overwhelmingly under missionary management, with attempts to start independent African-run schools stifled; junior and senior secondary schools were few in number and included mission, government and government-assisted institutions.Footnote 5 In Northern Rhodesia, for example, by 1958, only around two per cent of those who began primary school proceeded to secondary school, despite the almost tenfold increase in secondary school enrolment in the previous decade.Footnote 6 Most secondary schools did not provide enough years of classes to sit the standard School Certificate, let alone the Higher School Certificate necessary for most foreign degree courses.Footnote 7 Numbers of African students taking and passing the School Certificate grew during the early 1950s – from 57 in 1951 to 170 in 1958 in Tanganyika – but these figures nevertheless remained in the tens in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland and in the hundreds in Uganda; the Higher School Certificate was generally unavailable, or only taken by pupils of South Asian heritage, until later in the decade.Footnote 8 Teacher training and technical training colleges struggled to recruit from the inadequate school system, while Makerere was the only institution in the region to award university degrees.
Demands for improved school and training opportunities, including those specifically for women, had been a key terrain for interwar political mobilisation, typically predating national-level political organisations.Footnote 9 These demands had distinct, new resonance in an era of UN-driven colonial development policies.Footnote 10 Petitions from Tanganyika to the UN, for example, were dominated by the issue of education facilities.Footnote 11 Pressure to respond to such demands ushered in the birth of international development as a policy field and the arrival of ‘development governors’ in East and Central Africa.Footnote 12 Education, then, was brought into the fold of development discourses, but the slow pace of educational investment and expansion laid bare the contradictions and failures of colonial development thinking: administrations were wary of creating an intellectual proletariat of young people who were overqualified for the work (or lack of work) that racist colonial employment opportunities allowed them to pursue.Footnote 13
The relationship between education and the expansion of political rights thus remained unclear. As Zambian postal worker Eliphas Darius Lungu wrote to the Northern Rhodesia African National Congress (NRANC) in 1955, ‘how[ever] highly, moderately or little an African may be educated under the white rule, he/she shall never be respected to any extent. The Europeans will still continue saying an African is a barbarian’.Footnote 14 Emerging political parties were wary of reiterating a colonial discourse of formal education as a political rite of passage. Uganda National Congress (UNC) co-founder Ignatius K. Musazi warned that a lack of qualified Africans was a colonial excuse and strategy to delay independence: political rights, he insisted, must precede the growth of educational infrastructure.Footnote 15
It was in this context that a regional cohort of educated young people attempted to pin down their own role, developing modes of expression and practices of publication that freely crossed the increasingly blurry divide between the realms of party politics and student life. Exploring this process is not about reifying the centrality (long since robustly challenged) of a university-educated elite in anticolonial politics.Footnote 16 Instead, it is about scrutinising the construction of this very narrative.Footnote 17 These students’ initiatives, as we shall see, were not about aspirations for nationalist leadership: they responded more than anything to perceived regional and global imperatives. Far from being an isolated hotbed, Makerere, the institutional thread of this chapter, was a central node in a much broader political and educational world that is intrinsically beyond the scope of histories of nationalism. This web of actors and institutions encompassed secondary schools across the region, student associations further afield in South Africa, publications within and beyond universities, and emerging political organisations yet to settle on the responsibility that the young and educated should hold.
Questioning the Constitutional at the Makerere Strike
In August 1952, two months before Governor Baring declared a State of Emergency in Kenya, and several hundred kilometres from the centre of the Mau Mau uprising, almost the entire student body at Makerere College in Kampala went on strike. Mau Mau and the Makerere strike were not just simultaneous episodes. They were linked – if largely indirectly. By the middle of 1952, students were well aware of escalating tensions surrounding militant trade unionism in central Kenya and probably (by way of Gikuyu students at Makerere) of the intentions of Mau Mau to launch a full-scale rebellion.Footnote 18 They could not have known, of course, that the uprising, and the violent British response of the Emergency period, would act as a reference point for discussions of violence and counterinsurgency for years to come.Footnote 19 But, like Mau Mau fighters, striking students confronted the fundamental limits of ‘constitutional’ protest – of protest according to the rules. For Abu Mayanja, the strike also marked the beginning of a decade of transnational activism that this book follows.
The Makerere of the early 1950s was a truly regional institution: most of its growing student body were men from Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika, with fewer from Zanzibar, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Ethiopia. There were very few women and rarely students from West, North or Southern Africa.Footnote 20 In this respect, five students who passed through the college in this period and will reappear throughout the book – Abu Mayanja, John Kale, Kanyama Chiume, Arthur Wina and Sam Kajunjumele – were typical. Opened as a colonial technical college in 1922, Makerere had recently expanded to become a higher education institution in line with late colonial development plans: in 1949 it was granted the status of a University College, affiliated to, and soon able to award degrees from, the University of London (alongside preliminary courses to compensate for lacking senior secondary provision).Footnote 21 It remained the only institution with this status in the wider region until the opening of the ‘multiracial’ (and overwhelmingly white) University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1956.Footnote 22 As such, a notable proportion of cabinet ministers in independent East Africa, and to a lesser extent Central Africa, were ‘Makerereans’, as Makerere graduates were known. The institution’s reputation as a training ground for future leaders crystallised in the immediate post-independence period, around Kampala’s flourishing transnational literary scene.Footnote 23
The strike of August 1952 – the most disruptive protest in the institution’s pre-independence history – was called following ‘A Mammoth petition for a better diet’.Footnote 24 The petition, signed by 206 of Makerere’s 270 students, was anonymously posted on the college noticeboard in mid-August. It demanded an improvement in the food served in the ‘mess’ (canteen) which it deemed to lack ‘foresight, knowledge of preparation, interest, sympathy and imagination’. Alleging that complaints published in the student newsletter Current News and submitted to the mess committee had been ignored, the petition demanded that these complaints were ‘given attention within 7 days’.Footnote 25 The college principal, Bernard De Bunsen, removed the petition, deeming it in ‘bad taste’ and told the student body that there seemed to be ‘some misunderstanding as to the channels through which undergraduates should bring their views to the Principal’, given the existence of an elected Student Guild.Footnote 26 Students boycotted canteens and lectures, forcing Makerere to close for the holiday a week early. Six were expelled.Footnote 27
During the week that followed, letters written by students, from family homes across the region, travelled to De Bunsen in Kampala. In order to return to Makerere, students were required to agree in writing that, in relation to the strike, ‘the methods employed were wholly wrong’ and that, in relation to the six students expelled in its aftermath, ‘authority resides wholly with the college’.Footnote 28 Most students agreed, many wished the Principal a pleasant holiday, and ultimately only one Gikuyu student chose to stay at home rather than reply.Footnote 29 Nevertheless, around one in ten responses expressed reluctance to agree that the calling of a strike and the petition that had preceded it were ‘wholly wrong’. One student, Mr Muthiga, wrote that the college had ‘created a condition where students had to resort to such means’, and Mr Okova said that he had felt ‘driven to [these methods] by imperative circumstances’. Another student maintained that the ‘idea’ of the strike was defensible, even if the methods were wrong. Mr Aley agreed that the methods were ‘unconstitutional and, in that sense, wrong’, constitutionality being not the sole measure.Footnote 30 The letters opened up an array of questions about how far ‘normal channels’ and constitutional methods could be effective and what was left when they were not.
The student expelled for orchestrating the strike (five others were dismissed for intimidating fellow students) was Abubakar K. Mayanja, a well-known name in histories of Ugandan and Bugandan nationalisms with a relatively unexplored biography beyond this.Footnote 31 When Mayanja arrived at Makerere in 1950, he was one of only two Muslim students to have entered the university.Footnote 32 More typically for the Makerere intake, Mayanja had attended Buganda’s elite protestant secondary school King’s College, Budo, a key ‘feeder’ schools for Makerere. Baganda students had a reputation at Makerere for being academic and politically active.Footnote 33 Not incidentally, British investment in Ugandan education had been focused on the historically powerful kingdom of Buganda since the 1900 Buganda Agreement: in 1951, almost half of all Ugandans attending secondary school were in Buganda, despite the fact that the Baganda accounted for only seventeen per cent of the Ugandan population.Footnote 34 Makerere was fittingly built in Buganda’s capital, and numbers of Baganda at Makerere had always been disproportionately high.Footnote 35
With this in mind, despite Mayanja’s expulsion, he was invited to participate in the ‘staff-student discussion group’ set up to review the strike. Here, the issues that students had raised in correspondence with De Bunsen, about channels of complaint that were ‘constitutional’ or ‘wrong’, came into focus. Certainly, staff (who were overwhelmingly European) acknowledged that there was a material basis for the strike: a report written two years earlier concluded that food quality was poor, the beans were ‘riddled with weevils’ and students were forced to ‘take their tea in a miscellaneous collection of vessels’ for want of sufficient cups.Footnote 36 One staff member insisted on the decisive nature of food in the ‘peasant community mind’ and suggested an anthropologist revise the menu.Footnote 37 Most, however, took an approach that chimed better with students’ letters to De Bunsen. Staff highlighted students’ ‘dissatisfaction with the channels of communication’, institutional failure to respond to complaints issued through ‘normal channels’ and a system that failed to clarify where students stood in relation to college authorities.Footnote 38 Discussion of resolutions also fixated on what was appropriate and constitutional, rather than notions of justice. Councillors of the Student Guild, including Kanyama Chiume from Nyasaland and Arthur Wina from Northern Rhodesia, signed a letter asking De Bunsen to reconsider the expulsions, given that all students agreed with the actions at the time.Footnote 39 De Bunsen replied that he admired the ‘form’ of this letter, but would not reconsider. Nor would he adopt the suggestion of a Muganda intellectual (and Makererean) to employ an African headmaster to work under him.Footnote 40 Instead he invited Student Guild councillors to join him for a weekly lunch, an outcome that reflected one staff member’s suggestion to give students ‘proof that constitutional methods can work’ – of which students appeared doubtful.Footnote 41 The strike allowed students to disrupt the categories of protest presented to them and, A. B. K. Kasozi argues, it had long-term repercussions for student participation in university management.Footnote 42 Most of all, the episode made clear that ‘normal channels’ were not effective if the constitution or rulebook precluded genuine participation.
This framing of the strike around questions of form over content was not simply a quirk of institutional discipline but a discussion that went to the heart of political upheaval across East and Central Africa. The ‘unconstitutional’ methods of Mau Mau fighters loomed in the background, with De Bunsen fearing that Gikuyu students would form a coordinated response to his letter, despite having identified Mayanja as the organiser.Footnote 43 In Buganda, where, for the Baganda, petitioning their ruling elite had been the norm for the first half of the twentieth century, demands were shifting to participation through elections.Footnote 44 In Central Africa, channels of protest were being urgently discussed too. The campaign against the Central African Federation brought official delegations of African representatives to London and produced one memorandum after another, in the hope that this was more effective than direct action in the form of a strike – or a popular uprising. The international press placed the anti-Federation campaign in direct dialogue with Mau Mau, with the Baltimore Afro-American warning that the imposition of the Federation ‘could sow seeds for second Mau Mau’.Footnote 45 This was a moment when the form of protest was under urgent discussion, beyond any simple moderate-radical divide and before (non-)violence took on diplomatic might in pan-African circles later in the decade.Footnote 46
The strike’s relationship to these wider debates had at least one direct link in the form of Abu Mayanja. Not only had Mayanja co-founded the UNC (Uganda’s first nationally framed African political party) five months before organising the strike, he was also in touch with Peter Wright, a teacher in a school for Asian pupils in Nairobi who was embroiled in events surrounding Mau Mau.Footnote 47 In July 1952, Wright was planning his resignation from government employment in Kenya, in order to play a more active role in regional politics, specifically by starting an institute to collect and disseminate information across East and Central Africa.Footnote 48 Wright was already a member of the Kenya Study Circle, the research vehicle for the Kenya African Union (KAU) that was soon to be banned under emergency regulations.
In April 1952, between founding the UNC and calling the Makerere strike, Mayanja travelled to Nairobi at the invitation of the Study Circle, where it seems Wright was his host.Footnote 49 After the strike, Wright wrote an article in the East African Standard (Kenya’s largest newspaper) suggesting that the episode was a response to colonial policy more broadly, not just college food. His claim attracted debate in British parliament.Footnote 50 In September, Wright wrote at length to an anticolonial sympathiser in London about the situation in Kenya, closing with the promise he would follow up with a separate letter on ‘the Makerere affair’ which he thought ‘deserves serious attention’ – astonishingly so given he wrote from the apex of the Mau Mau uprising.Footnote 51 Soon, Mayanja was describing the strike to the same London contact.Footnote 52
Schoolteacher-Activists and the Squeezed Space of Political Life
Despite colonial attempts to maintain the Makerere strike as an internal, college episode, it became the subject of legend for new students arriving from secondary schools.Footnote 53 This enmeshed the event in wider discourses of the educational strike as an anticolonial symbol. The late 1940s witnessed a wave of labour strikes across West and East Africa, including in Kampala and Dar es Salaam.Footnote 54 While strikes in higher-education institutions in British-governed Africa were not commonplace (one occurred in Khartoum in 1947), they were frequent in secondary schools across East and Central Africa.Footnote 55 The fact of having taken part in a school strike, or led one as a teacher, is a common motif in (auto)biographical accounts of political figures. Henry Chipembere organised a food strike in 1950 as a pupil at Blantyre Secondary School, where pupils also were part of a Nyasaland-wide boycott of coronation events in 1953; John Tembo organised a school strike when he was the only African teacher at the recently opened Robert Blake Secondary School in Central Nyasaland; Oscar Kambona and Kanyama Chiume (who took part in the Makerere strike) were forced to resign as teachers at the Dodoma Alliance Secondary School, Tanganyika, in September 1954 after encouraging a student strike.Footnote 56 The term ‘strike’ became an umbrella for all sorts of political activity: Kavuma-Kaggwa and his classmates at Namilyango Catholic College near Kampala were given permission to miss lessons to welcome the returning Kabaka in 1955, an event that he later described as a strike.Footnote 57
These strike stories suggest the extent to which African schoolteachers, especially those few working at senior secondary schools, came to play an important role in the networks that linked higher-education institutions like Makerere, nascent political parties and the construction of a regional cohort in the early 1950s.Footnote 58 The political role of schoolteachers, like that of other professional groups who mediated between the colonial state and ordinary people, has been recognised as an ambivalent one in contexts across the twentieth-century colonial world.Footnote 59 Even where teachers were direct employees of the colonial state and took no active role in politics, they nevertheless, in pursuit of upward social mobility, participated in a larger social process that political mobilisation relied upon.Footnote 60 Equally, close contact and familiarity with the colonial state could enable teachers to target effective political demands.Footnote 61 The Uganda African Teachers Association, for example, held among their aims: ‘To make representations to the Government […] for safeguarding and promoting the moral, social and economic life of [its] members’.Footnote 62 The colonial state in early-1950s Northern Rhodesia attempted to clamp down on what it described as ‘politician-teachers’ in government employment – the same sorts of figures who proved pivotal to the community leadership that Kate Skinner has described in the context of Togoland.Footnote 63 Nevertheless, the degree of independence from the state afforded by missionary schools was not missed: ‘Everything should be concentrated on schools’ wrote London-based sympathiser Thomas Fox-Pitt to Kenneth Kaunda in 1956 in relation to the NRANC campaign in rural Northern Rhodesia.Footnote 64
The role of schoolteachers takes on greater specificity when we turn to the relatively small number of East and Central African teachers working in senior or higher secondary schools in the 1950s. This distinction was important: in 1953, a rift formed in the Uganda African Teachers Association, between the majority of members who taught in primary or junior secondary schools and those few graduate teachers working in senior secondary or teacher training schools – who had disproportionate power in the Association.Footnote 65 While (vernacular language) primary schools throughout the region had been staffed by African teachers for decades, the 1950s saw significant numbers of African teachers take up employment in secondary schools, often still under European head teachers.Footnote 66 In Uganda in 1955, for instance, fifty-seven new junior secondary teachers entered the profession, more than double the figure in any previous year.Footnote 67 The numbers were smaller, but still growing, for senior secondary teaching. Crucially, these teachers were now being recruited from the ranks of African secondary and university graduates who themselves had experienced the education system during the post-war period. During the early 1950s, a critical mass of these teachers coincided with the consolidation of political parties and developmentalist language in the colonial and international spheres, lending a self-awareness to the teaching profession.
Such self-awareness is clear in Kanyama Chiume’s account of his teaching career. Following his graduation from Makerere (and his request to De Bunsen to reconsider the expulsion of the striking students), Chiume took up a teaching post at Dodoma Secondary School, Tanganyika:
The political heat that had been generated in us through the Makerere College Political Society, the gallantry of the Mau Mau freedom fighters and the anti-African stand of the European settlers both in East and Southern Africa, made many of us feel that we could not join the government service. We were looking for posts in schools where we could, within the limitations imposed by conditions then, air our views and get an opportunity to do some political work.Footnote 68
Written amid the radical pan-Africanism of 1970s Dar es Salaam, Chiume’s autobiography describes a politically ambitious ‘we’ and ‘us’ that had already coalesced before taking up employment in schools – a counterpoint to the unnamed others who were content to work for the colonial government, complicit in settler incursions.
The straight line that Chiume narrated, between the Makerere Political Society and a generation of schoolteacher-activists, conceals the contingency of the many mechanisms that connected schoolteachers to the wider political context. Strike leader John Tembo talked in broad but animated terms about the political potential of secondary schools and their teachers, but did not remember ever having decided to train as a graduate teacher, at Pius XII Catholic University College in Roma, Basutoland, and then at the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in Salisbury.Footnote 69 Similarly, A. D. Lubowa recalled that it was simply assumed that he would go into teaching, and only after three years at Bikiira Teacher Training College in Uganda did he realise that he was not interested in the profession at all.Footnote 70 There were, in the end, few options for highly educated young people. Science graduates might find work in agriculture or veterinary, but careers in journalism, law or higher up in the civil service, for example, were near impossible for East and Central African graduates in the early 1950s: even in the period 1955–1960, half of Makerere’s arts graduates entered the teaching profession.Footnote 71
If the choice to teach was not always as politically charged as Chiume implied, then, institutions and courses for higher teacher training did create space for building links between schools, universities and political parties. Teacher trainers were increasingly themselves African graduates. M. A. Chongwe, for example, was expecting to spend the summer of 1953 in Britain, having completed a course at the London Institute of Education, with a scholarship through the Colonial Development and Welfare Fund. But he was called back early because his labour was ‘urgently needed’ at Domasi Teacher Training College, a Nyasaland government institution opened in 1949.Footnote 72 There, he joined other teacher trainers, including Nyasaland African Congress (NAC) member Orton Chirwa.Footnote 73 Domasi quickly became a political hub – one that was less exclusively male than elite boys secondary schools and many Makerere clubs.Footnote 74 Men who trained at Domasi were often accompanied by their wives, who were taught ‘housewifery’ on site, while a handful of women undertook teacher training in their own right. Catherine Chipembere was one of six women trainee teachers around 1954. This was a default path, she suggested, for a woman who hoped to earn a living, in her case to support elderly parents. When she passed her School Certificate, ‘the principal suggested: “ok, we’re going to send you to Domasi”, which was very lucky, for teacher training. Not that I wanted to be a [teacher]’.Footnote 75 The structures around teacher training were thus one way in which educated women participated in the conversations around political campaigns – even if, like Catherine Chipembere, they did not later join the Malawian ‘Amazon Army’ of women who toured the country rallying popular support.Footnote 76 Even at Blantyre Secondary School, NAC members had expected her to attend meetings, she recalled; the same individuals coalesced at Domasi, including her future husband Henry Chipembere, who was working for the local Assistant District Commissioner.Footnote 77
In early 1950s East and Central Africa, secondary schoolteachers were neither colonial middle (wo)men nor nationalist party servants. They were themselves highly educated school and university graduates who became enabling cogs in wider networks of political engagement: they encouraged political discussions of the sort that students would continue at Makerere, like those that Edwin Mtei remembered having with future Makererean Mark Bomani at Tabora Secondary School in Tanganyika; they provided students with newspapers that were otherwise difficult to get hold of, like Kavuma-Kaggwa remembered happening at Namilyango College in Uganda.Footnote 78 It is Chiume’s remarks on the ‘limitations’ and ‘opportunities’ of the teaching profession that chime best with the condition of squeezed space for political work in East and Central Africa. Across the region, new political parties were thinking about the potential that schools presented.Footnote 79 But the push for the politicisation of education institutions – and the practices that accompanied it – came not from party leadership but from within these institutions themselves.
The Nyasaland Students Association and the Makerere TANU Club
In 1958, Stephen Mhando, a Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) member who himself trained as a schoolteacher, wrote a ‘semi-official’ letter to the TANU Club at Makerere.Footnote 80 Mhando had recently returned from South Asia and told the club how impressed he had been by the role of students in the ‘struggle for freedom’ there:
Students in Colonial Territories are watched very carefully because their political potential is tremendous. But you, ladies and gentlemen, are free to form political societies and political clubs at Makerere. You could use this concession to pass the idea onto your friends in the various Secondary Schools. I know from personal experience how difficult and almost impossible it is to form a pseudo-political body in a Secondary School; but such unions can exist under apparently harmless names and constitutions; the pupils need pass no resolutions; they need to have no subscriptions or entrance fee; meetings could be arranged in town during the weekends … The main thing is to plant the idea … This is your job. It must come from you – and we here especially through the [party mouthpiece] Sauti [ya TANU] – will fan the fire.Footnote 81
Mhando described a unique role for Makerere students: using their relative freedoms of political organisation (being both inside a university and outside Tanganyika) to mobilise young people through secondary schools, in dialogue with political publications too. He assumed strong links between Makerere students and their former schools and knew that many students would soon be teaching in schools across the region.
But Mhando’s ideas were not news to Makerere students, who had been advocating for the importance of educated young people in this wider picture for the past decade. Student clubs dedicated to supporting political parties, such as the TANU Club at Makerere and the Nyasaland Students Association, were one mechanism through which this happened. In the early 1950s, these were not directed from above: they were born from student determination to take on party concerns. It was often only later that party officials recognised, like Mhando did in 1958, the advantageous position of these students. Links across the region – and evoking these links – was critical to the process.
The Nyasaland Students Association formed at Fort Hare, Eastern Cape, South Africa in 1949. At the time, Fort Hare was an important institution of higher education for African students from across the continent, as well as from South Africa; it gained a reputation, like Makerere, for its production of ‘future leaders’.Footnote 82 This was a more important destination for students from Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia than for those from Uganda and Tanganyika, given its relative proximity and the fact that fewer scholarships for studying at Makerere, or in India or Britain, were available for these Central African territories. In the early 1950s, the university presented – fleetingly and precariously – a radical break from the racist politics that surrounded it. But Fort Hare struggled to retain independence from the encroaching apartheid state: Central African students like Sikota Wina were active in anti-apartheid protest, for example against the 1953 Bantu Education Act, which ultimately saw Z. K. Matthews removed as director of the African Studies department in 1957 and the university nationalised in 1959.Footnote 83 Students arriving from Central Africa experienced a fierce contrast between the segregated train journey through Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, and Matthew’s lecture hall – Wina’s notebook from his Fort Hare years contained ‘political notes and remarks on most African countries’.Footnote 84 It was in this context that a small group of Malawian students, including Henry Chipembere (school striker, husband of Catherine), were responsible for starting the Nyasaland Students Association and its newspaper Nyassa.Footnote 85
The Association’s members were conscious of the uniqueness of this opening in the early 1950s. Graduating from Fort Hare, Chipembere remained one of the Association’s central figures, soon making direct appeals to the colonial administration from within the Central African Federation. In October 1955, he wrote a letter on behalf of the Association to the Nyasaland Director of Education, expressing concern about shrinking scholarship opportunities for Malawian students, particularly at Makerere and Fort Hare. In 1951, Makerere raised fees for new students from outside of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika, usually paid by individual governments in the form of scholarships, from £120 to £500 per annum.Footnote 86 Appeals could be made to London to help cover these fees, but in 1955, as Chipembere wrote in his letter, not a single Nyasaland student entered Makerere.Footnote 87 Meanwhile, there had been increasing concern at Fort Hare since the South African Department of Education had announced, in 1950, its intention to prevent the attendance of Africans from outside of South Africa, due to limited capacity.Footnote 88 The ban was partially effected in 1953 and only one Nyasaland student was sent to Fort Hare in 1955.Footnote 89 The closing down of these international study routes directly paralleled the 1953 imposition of the Federation, widely understood to represent the northward ‘spread’ of apartheid.Footnote 90 The awarding of scholarships and bursaries for higher education, under an all-white scholarship board, became a Federal responsibility. Alert to the resulting isolation of the region from the rest of the continent, Chipembere advised that students who could no longer be sent to Makerere or Fort Hare should be found places at Roma (like Tembo was), or elsewhere on the continent at Achimota (Accra), Ibadan or Khartoum.Footnote 91
Form, both that of the organisation and of its written appeals, was central to the significance of the Nyasaland Students Association. It was as a member of the ‘Uganda branch’ of the Association that Kanyama Chiume wrote (from Makerere) directly to the colonial secretary in London in January 1953.Footnote 92 His letter outlined the Association’s ‘uncompromising opposition’ to the planned Federation, especially the prospect of Southern Rhodesia’s ‘Liberal Apartheid’ being enforced in Nyasaland. Rather than receiving a reply from London, however, Chiume was contacted by the chief secretary in Entebbe (via a government official in Buganda) to ‘remind him of the correct channel for communication with the Secretary of State’ – that is, through the chief secretary rather than directly to London.Footnote 93 Again, closed channels of protest were described in terms of proper procedure, while the existence of the Students Association Uganda branch lent a certain (limited) weight to what was seemingly Chiume’s personal initiative. Nevertheless, there were moments when the NAC benefited from the existence of this additional, representative – and constitutional – body, for example when both submitted memorandums to the visiting Colonial Secretary in 1957.Footnote 94
For a brief few years, the Students Association looked something like the party’s political vanguard, pushing a distinctly regional and global perspective. At its peak in 1955, the Association had branches in secondary schools across Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Tanganyika, as well as in Bombay and London.Footnote 95 Members made frequent comparisons with East Africa, where higher education opportunities for Africans were perceived to be more numerous, especially with Chiume back from Makerere and a pivotal figure in the Association.Footnote 96 By 1957, however, the Association appeared to have been mainly absorbed into the party – where Chiume and Chipembere were now prominent voices without the need of a student mouthpiece.Footnote 97 The small generation of highly educated young people, in their early twenties as Federation was imposed, had maintained both the Association’s outward-looking political agenda and its independence from the NAC.
The Makerere TANU Club had a very different relationship with its ‘parent’ party during this period. The founding of TANU in 1954 was widely publicised and almost immediately Tanganyika students at Makerere sought to establish contact with party headquarters. The interest of Makerere students in politics ‘at home’ was nothing new: TANU’s predecessor, the Tanganyika African Association (TAA), had a so-called ‘branch’ at Makerere from at least 1946, with whom it intermittently corresponded.Footnote 98 Students repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with TAA communication in the late 1940s, however, claiming to feel ‘entirely neglected by the stem to which we attached ourselves’ because TAA had failed to send replies, news and publications.Footnote 99 Students pointed out that others at Makerere had better links with national political organisations, such as the Kenya Study Union.Footnote 100 The same students were, nevertheless, well aware of Kenya’s separate trajectory. In July 1946, they wrote a memorandum to Arthur Creech-Jones (soon to become Labour Colonial Secretary) in response to a petition by European settlers to give Tanganyika ‘colony status’ like Kenya. Students stated that ‘[i]nstead, we would highly desire, either, to be under the United Nations Organization, or to be a protectorate’.Footnote 101 Despite the students taking it upon themselves to make direct appeals to London, TAA seemed not to imagine the Makerere branch to be of particular value, and relations soon dissolved.
Communication problems persisted in the immediate aftermath of TANU’s 1954 formation, when a group of Makerere students rallied around the new party. One student had written three times by May 1955 to ask for the TANU constitution: ‘Of course, we hear of you through the press’, he wrote, ‘but the press usually distorts matters’.Footnote 102 Between colonial press permit regimes, censorship and border controls, news travelled unevenly. Miscommunication was frequent across such distances (Kampala was a two-day journey from Dar es Salaam): TANU officers became confused between this group of students, now calling themselves the ‘TANU Club’ and the Tanganyika Student Discussion Group, which had existed since 1949.Footnote 103 The Club zealously distanced themselves from the discussion group, alleging that the latter had invited to Makerere the (multiracial, pro-government) United Tanganyika Party.Footnote 104
Later, individual relationships shaped and legitimised the TANU Club more than party interest. The club president M. Sanga, for example, made direct contact with TANU’s Oscar Kambona, who he may have met as a school pupil while Kambona was teaching (with Chiume) at Alliance in Dodoma. Sanga regularly contacted Kambona personally instead of TANU headquarters, given the party’s poor response rate. The Club sought to prove its worth by raising donations for party campaigns and, when they asked for literature, they enclosed fees – Sanga sent money for the TANU mouthpiece Sauti ya TANU to Kambona directly.Footnote 105
To legitimise the Club’s position, Sanga, like the Nyasaland Students Association and TAA students before him, made regional comparisons: he told TANU headquarters in 1955 that E. M. K. Mulira, who had recently founded the Progressive Party in Uganda, was visiting Makerere to talk to Ugandan students and therefore asked that TANU president Julius Nyerere would do the same.Footnote 106 Sanga then pushed to register the club as an official TANU ‘branch’. Kambona promised to look into this, but presumably with no outcome, as the Club continued to refer to itself as such beyond independence.Footnote 107
Kambona’s response to Sanga indicated growing respect for the Makerere TANU Club among TANU officials (many themselves graduates) – echoing Mhando’s letter. ‘It is upon the emancipated youth of Tanganyika that we depend for a lead in the struggle’, Kambona wrote, bolstering the students’ sense of self-importance that was characteristic of this East African generation.Footnote 108 Asserting its independence from the party, like the Nyasaland Students Association in its early days, the Club began to submit regular memorandums to TANU: a 1956 memorandum applauded the idea of a TANU newsletter (the Sauti ya TANU they would soon subscribe to) as a ‘step forward in political development’ and warned that the newspaper should operate on a small scale to avoid any need for external funding.Footnote 109 A two-page ‘commentary’ on TANU policy earned the Club an invitation to TANU’s landmark Tabora meeting in 1958.Footnote 110
The fruits borne, for the Club, from these exchanges had foundations in students’ repeated efforts to involve themselves in politics as far back as 1946, the successes of which were felt when Makerere students knew TANU members personally, often through educational networks. Eventually, Nyerere did accept the Club’s invitation to visit Makerere.Footnote 111 Students were asked to arrange a meeting between Nyerere and the Ugandan politician Mulira – the same figure that students had used to convince Nyerere to come (the importance of this meeting will resurface in Chapter 3).Footnote 112 The Club thus served as a link to Ugandan politics for leaders based in Tanganyika – a role that students had carved out for themselves in the preceding years. The same was true in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, where a handful returning Makerere students were the primary source of information on developments in Uganda for activists in the early 1950s.Footnote 113
The Nyasaland Students Association and the Makerere TANU Club played comparable roles to those fulfilled by party youth leagues in later years, providing the party with a future workforce or an alternative mouthpiece when that of the central committee was not appropriate, and performing the work of mobilising support.Footnote 114 However, these organisations were not directed from above: students’ determination to remain involved in national politics when they left to study drove (and often predated) the attention paid to them by party officials, who were more focused on building support within the territory, sometimes alongside full-time work outside of the party (often as schoolteachers). The comparative, regional lens through which these students constructed their relationship to the party, however, did not preclude the idea of a regional student cohort with a particular relationship to the colonial state – an idea that took hold most visibly at Makerere.
Makerere Student Publishing, ‘Bad Taste’ and Worldly Responsibilities
The construction of a regional-generational role for students solidified in print. Small-scale publishing not only lent materiality to networks that linked institutions, schoolteachers and political parties (like Makerere students receiving Sauti ya TANU); it could also bring into being new modes of address that were distinct to the printed form, in this case those that evoked (but rarely reached) a global audience.Footnote 115 In the aftermath of the 1952 strike, Makerere students repeatedly engaged in journalistic ventures: a ‘plethora’ of short-lived student publications characterised this period, one staff member recalled.Footnote 116 To some extent, this was a reaction to the strike itself: Joseph Wanyonyi wrote to De Bunsen in March 1953 proposing to write a ‘factual’ article dealing with the strike in the Current News, the organ of the Student Guild, because ‘inquisitive’ new students had been given false information.Footnote 117 At stake was the way in which the strike was narrated – the ownership of its narrative by its participants.
But Wanyonyi, a regular contributor to Current News during 1953, had more expansive visions for the publication. In an article on Kampala’s celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, he described the city as ‘a large bush of ribbons [in which] a black Nationalist felt there was no place for him’. Beer was served at Makerere for the occasion, but Wanyonyi questioned whether he really wanted to drink to the Queen’s health. Instead, he said that if during Elizabeth’s reign ‘Africa is going to suffer further, then honestly I have no wish to say … excuse me. I am stepping on dangerous ground’.Footnote 118 The ground was indeed dangerous: De Bunsen banned the entire Current News publication as a result of the June 1953 issue, which (much like the strike petition) he considered ‘in very bad taste’.Footnote 119 This was partly a question of the subject matter: one author anonymously wrote, of the May holiday, that ‘some [students] wish they never went home to witness the wholesome massacre going on in one particular part of East Africa right now’, referring to the colonial response to the Mau Mau uprising.Footnote 120 Yet De Bunsen was not opposed to student critiques of colonial policy per se: he himself resisted demands from the Kenyan government to officially register all Gikuyu students at Makerere.Footnote 121 Rather, he was sensitive to criticism of policy at Makerere itself, and especially to the suggestion that Makerere was representative of colonial repression rather than a liberal oasis.
What was specific about the articles in the June 1953 issue was their hinting at the limitations of De Bunsen’s ‘tolerance’ (he had issued several warnings in 1952) and at the power of student publications – entirely ‘constitutional’ – to challenge it. Wanyonyi stepped on dangerous ground precisely by implying that dangerous ground existed at all. This was elaborated in the Current News editorial, a condemnation of student ‘individualism’ and ‘indifference’. ‘If I do not write to the current News and You do not write to the Current News and our neighbours follow our example … isn’t that as good as strangling the Current News?’ the editors asked.Footnote 122 While addressing Makerere news for a Makerere audience, the students, simultaneously, were writing about writing.
Conceptions of the region were often a motor for writing and publishing at Makerere. Just as the final issue of Current News was going to press, the Makerere College Political Society launched a monthly magazine, Politica. The Society, as Tanzanian student E. D. Sawe noted, would place ‘special emphasis on East and Central Africa’. The prominent role that Central African students played in its activities was unique to this moment around the imposition of the Federation: the fate of the wider region appeared interdependent, with students debating whether the Central African Federation would be followed by an East African Federation, in which Kenyan settlers would play the role of Southern Rhodesian settlers.Footnote 123 Following in the vein of Current News, Politica’s first editorial encouraged bold contributions from across the university:
Don’t curb your views on important topics, for who knows, you may be right, and through saying what you think, you may change the history of your country and the world. We would like our readers to remember that they have the freedom of speech, and the freedom of the press. By making use of these two freedoms you will share your views with the world.Footnote 124
The sense of responsibility implied in the Current News editorial reappeared here, the effects of failing to express one’s views amplified from a college newsletter stage to a world-historical one. Addressing implausibly large audiences, like in other times and places, performed political work: Politica editors were not simply seeking out self-important writers but were constructing a collective role.Footnote 125 This was a role based on opportunities – cast almost as privileges – of freedom of speech and the press, pre-empting Stephen Mhando’s guidance for the Makerere TANU Club discussed earlier. Makerere became a space between the restrictions of school and the duty of political life after graduation – a ‘stage’ as Sawe called it in his address to the Society. This conviction in the potency of student publications is inflated in personal memories: John Tembo told how he wrote an article around 1954 for a publication at Roma (Lesotho) criticising the racial politics of the liberal National Union of South African Students, which did not admit Black students at Fort Hare until 1945. Tembo recalled that his article was circulated around Cape Town and led to the union’s dissolution – yet the organisation did not face a major crisis until the 1960s and was not dissolved until 1991.Footnote 126
Politica’s allusion to a global readership began to assume concrete form when the Student Guild launched The Undergraduate in April 1954, with the explicit aim of functioning as a mouthpiece for the Guild, where students can ‘express their opinions freely and enable the outside world to gain an insight’.Footnote 127 This was precisely at a moment when the Guild was being invited to send representatives – who could take publications with them – to international student conferences.Footnote 128 Already at the time of the strike, the Guild had noted its intention to ‘establish good relations with organisations of a similar nature’.Footnote 129 The Undergraduate’s content reflected this policy, inviting students to write about trips abroad and reporting on international student issues, for example that the Oxford University Undergraduate had been fined five pounds for publishing a critical article.Footnote 130
The Undergraduate worked to position the Makerere student body in relation to their worldly responsibilities and an international student community. From June 1955, a ‘series of articles on Guild Relations with external students Organisations’ was published, because students were ‘vague’ on the topic.Footnote 131 James Rubadiri, a Malawian who had attended Budo with Mayanja and was the president of the Guild, wrote an article ‘Impressions of European Universities’. He concluded that student freedoms were ‘comparable’ and that students were broadly ‘the same everywhere’, in that they could discuss any subject ‘from Nylons to Marx, Louis Armstrong to Mozart, Olivier to Monroe’.Footnote 132 Higher education appeared to grant entry into a global student community who shared historically specific cultural reference points across race and space – a generation defined by simultaneity and connectedness.Footnote 133
This generational role was flagrantly gendered. Rubadiri closed with the main difference that had struck him: at a dance at Freie Universität Berlin[the Free University in Berlin], female students ‘came in swimming costumes!’. It was not unusual for women’s clothing to feature in discourses constructing the global role of young educated East Africans in this period.Footnote 134 Patriarchal norms and the equation of masculinity with worldliness remained largely intact as this cohort began to construct a role for their own regionally defined generation. Yet, at the same time, a minority of women students were directly addressed, their very presence apparently affirming the claim of a world on the brink of change:
This world of ours is in a state of dynamic transition. There are big political and social waves sweeping through it and we seem to be spectators from another planet looking at the unfortunate victims of the ‘typhoon’. Ladies and gentlemen it is high time we came down to this planetFootnote 135
The early-1950s golden age for Makerere publishing was short-lived. In April 1955, De Bunsen announced a review of all student publications in light of unprecedented expansion. He pledged to ‘secure the maximum possible freedom of thought’ while maintaining a ‘level of discussion and expression which is consistent with [Makerere] standards’.Footnote 136 These fleeting publications were critical to the experience of the cohort of students involved: if we acknowledge that political discussion happened outside of print, over dinner and in dormitories, it remains the case that print signified for students the potential for an audience elsewhere, locating Makerere in a global space, specifically one not constructed solely along colonial lines. The frustrations of keeping a publication alive (in the face of student apathy as well as college rules) were central to the emergence, in these pages, of a sense of the unique responsibility of Makerere students at the intersection of colonial restrictions on freedoms and an international student community. Discussions about newsletters, their potency and the constraints imposed on them were already taking place beyond Makerere.
Anti-Federation Newsletters at a Global Crossroads
African-managed nationalist newspapers, like Nnamdi Azikiwe’s famous West African Pilot or Kwame Nkrumah’s Accra Evening News, did not exist in early 1950s Malawi, Zambia, Uganda or mainland Tanzania.Footnote 137 The reading public instead found space for political engagement through missionary and government-funded newspapers, many circulating in particular towns or provinces in vernacular languages.Footnote 138 There were occasional, commercially successful and openly political press ventures – one of the best known, E. M. K. Mulira’s Luganda-language Uganda Empya, was described as ‘wild, irresponsible, [and] frequently near-seditious’ after its 1953 founding.Footnote 139 Nevertheless, activists frequently identified the absence of an African-owned or -managed press as an obstacle in the campaign for self-government. Kenneth Kaunda stated that the lack of an African newspaper in Northern Rhodesia had been a ‘serious blow’ to the anti-Federation campaign, while colonial control of the press (alongside the education system – Kaunda grouped these together) gave Federal proponents an ‘immeasurable advantage’.Footnote 140
The threat of Federation – like the Kabaka crisis in the case of Luganda newspapers – was galvanising in this respect, prompting attempts to circumvent the hurdles of permits and financial backing through non-commercial, informal publications. Two such publications were Freedom Newsletter in Northern Rhodesia and Kwaca in Nyasaland, both of which illustrate the overflow of ideas about a regionally defined generation from education institutions into the wider political sphere.Footnote 141 In the process, their editors capitalised on a global debate that posited Federation as a crossroads in the trajectory of ‘multiracial’ empire in Africa.
The anti-Federation campaign was the direct impetus for Freedom Newsletter, which was launched in January 1952 largely at the initiative of Simon Zukas, a resident Jewish-Lithuanian supporter of African self-government.Footnote 142 Following the publication of the White Paper on ‘Closer association of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland’ in June 1951, Zukas was involved in an Anti-Federation Action Committee made up of African civil servants and union leaders in the Copperbelt town of Ndola. Freedom Newsletter was the committee’s mouthpiece. When, in April 1952, Zukas was imprisoned and deported on the grounds that he was ‘a danger to peace and good order’, Nephas Tembo and Justin Chimba, two young NRANC members (who will appear later – in Cairo), took over its editorship.Footnote 143
In Nyasaland, NAC president James Sangala expressed the need for a nationalist organ as early as 1943, and briefly published Kwaca (‘dawn’ in several languages in the region, also spelled kwacha) in 1952, during the anti-Federation campaign.Footnote 144 Kwaca was relaunched in 1955, when the return of Makerereans to Nyasaland saw the newsletter assume a distinctly regional lens. Those involved included Kanyama Chiume (who had disputed Mayanja’s expulsion), Arthur Bwanausi (one-time treasurer of the Makerere Political Society) and Dunduzu Chisiza (who attended Aggrey Memorial College on Makerere’s doorstep).Footnote 145 They began to contribute to Kwaca at a moment of generational conflict in the NAC: Sangala’s presidency was under question due to his participation in the Federal legislature. He stepped down following the March 1956 general election (under a severely restricted franchise) – at the peak of Kwaca’s publication.Footnote 146
Under the influence of the graduate generation, Kwaca, like the party clubs at Makerere, thought in regional terms. Chisiza wrote to NRANC in Northern Rhodesia asking if they would receive and publicise Kwaca, adding that statements of support from leaders in East, Central and South Africa were being requested to print in the newsletter. He contrasted Kwaca to ‘the “We know what is good for the African” type of policy pursued by European owned papers in East Africa’, casting Kwaca as a vanguard African newspaper, despite East Africa’s more prominent history of African journalism.Footnote 147 During 1955, this group of young activists frequently compared the Nyasaland situation to that in East Africa and especially Uganda, where the 1955 Constitution had made it possible for African members to participate in the Executive Council. In February 1954, Uganda’s governor described the future of the country as ‘a primarily African state’ in contrast to a ‘plural society’, with Central African leaders looking on from the ‘multi-racial’ Federation.Footnote 148 Kwaca pointed out that both Uganda and Nyasaland were Protectorates (not colonies like Kenya) and published a small article ‘Do You Know What a Protectorate Is?’.Footnote 149 Arguing for these protectorates to share a fate that excluded the colonies of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia cut across the imposed boundaries of the Central African Federation.Footnote 150
Narratives about interdependent regional fates formed in dialogue with allusions to a global anti-Federation community. Freedom Newsletter, at its 1952 launch, had less ambitious claims of intended readership than Makerere publications. It hoped ‘to reach all corners of the protectorate – and Nyasaland’, pledging to print Chibemba- and Chinyanja-language articles to make it accessible to readers across this space.Footnote 151 The idea was instead that readers within the region would learn about support for their cause from outside of it: the editors sought to demonstrate that ‘we are not alone in this struggle’.Footnote 152 The first issue included statements supporting the anti-Federation campaign from the British New Statesman and the New York-based American Committee on Africa. The young NRANC editors elaborated:
The fight against federation is a world wide [sic] subject. We African people are not by ourselves, but we have other people in full agreement to our opposition. The people of the world cannot fail to see the truth, our fears and rejections of the proposed federation are justifiable.Footnote 153
The article noted support in London from Michael Scott’s newly formed Africa Bureau (which reappears in Chapter 2), detailing the Bureau’s involvement in the campaign against South African pressure to dethrone Bechuanaland kgosi Seretse Khama following his marriage to white British woman Ruth Williams. Indeed, the Khama affair created an interested (if small) audience for debate about race and empire in Britain, who were then receptive to the debate around Federation.Footnote 154 Declaring their solidarity with ‘our people of Bechuanaland’, Freedom News editors used the affair to build a picture of a global anticolonial movement that stretched beyond national borders, and in which Northern Rhodesia had a place – the same sort of rooted worldliness identifiable in contributions to the contemporaneous government press in the region.Footnote 155
Activists quickly recognised that Federation was part of a larger debate across the colonial world about race and empire in Africa. There was, as Freedom News claimed ‘agreement to [their] opposition’: support (if not necessarily active or influential) existed from the Soviet Union to India.Footnote 156 Federation was indeed a worldwide subject: in this post-war ‘federal moment’, similar structures were being discussed across the colonial world, in Dutch and French colonies alike.Footnote 157 This particular Central African Federation was also understood to be decisive for the future of the African continent. As the English-language press in Hong Kong said of the Federation: ‘the two great cross tides surging across modern Africa – white racism from the South and East and a Black awakening from the North and West – are bound by very geography to meet here in the centre’.Footnote 158 Emergency-era Kenya was thus increasingly understood in the same terms as South Africa, while democratic reforms in the Gold Coast, reported in the colonial press, appeared to offer an alternative path for those East and Central African countries with less powerful white settler populations.
The authors of these newsletters were not only aware of this interest but sought, through the circulation of their publications, to harness it against the Federation, even after the anti-Federation campaign had failed and the Federation was imposed in August 1953. The NAC’s application for government permission to print a newsletter in December 1954 stated that expected circulation included the entire Federation, as well as South Africa, Tanganyika and Mozambique, based on the existence of NAC members in these countries.Footnote 159 Articles and letters in Chinyanja increasingly appeared towards the end of 1955, but the bulk of the newsletter continued to use English, with an international audience in mind. This audience existed: copies reached the London Africa Bureau, while the Anti-Colonial Bureau of the Asian Socialist Conference (ASC) in Rangoon (introduced in Chapter 2) listed Kwaca among the ‘sympathetic’ publications with which they exchanged their own.Footnote 160
Kwaca’s international reach was mirrored in content: its January 1955 front-page story reported on the intensification of British counter-insurgency in Malaya, a topic, like Mau Mau, of international press coverage.Footnote 161 The editorial of the same issue insisted on the need to ‘prove to the world that […] Nyasaland can stand on its own two feet and play a part in international affairs’.Footnote 162 E. Alexander Muwamba insisted that from now onwards ‘Nyasaland will be on the map, for, as Kwaca will circulate the world over[,] the voice of Nyasalanders will be heard’.Footnote 163 Given that the NAC’s thirteen-point policy statement of the same year made no commitment to a wider anti-imperial front nor to external publicity, Kwaca was an early sign of the importance of publicity which would, as we shall see in Chapter 4, later become institutionalised.Footnote 164
Belief in the agency of these small newsletters followed from the conviction that press coverage more generally could shape the outcome of the anti-Federation campaign: Freedom Newsletter documented, for readers in Ndola, the British press coverage of (and hostility towards) Central African delegations in London during Federation talks.Footnote 165 Central to the editors’ justification of their newsletter was the fact that colonial newspapers were ‘using their monopoly of the written word to distort the truth’ about Federation.Footnote 166 Like at Makerere, writing a newsletter was itself an act of protest against this ‘monopoly’: Chiume wrote that Kwaca was a ‘thorn in the flesh of Malicious propaganda and falsehood’.Footnote 167 The circulation of these publications was part of the attempt to combat isolation: an article ‘Iron Curtain for Central Africa’ compared the command of Federal Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins for the world to keep their ‘hands off’ Central Africa, to Soviet attempts to stem external criticism.Footnote 168 Ultimately, Kwaca was victim to precisely this colonial attempt to isolate the Federation: in 1956, the printers in the Federal capital of Salisbury refused to continue production.Footnote 169
The question of ‘who knew what’ was attributed increasing weight in the context of the anti-Federation campaign, and the circulation of paper objects was one way to gain some control: in 1956, following the repression of trades unions on the Copperbelt, Zukas wrote to activists from exile urging them to consider the potency of news reaching London of large meetings with strong resolutions passed and appeals to the world labour movement.Footnote 170 Neither Kwaca nor Freedom Newsletter were simply vehicles for solidifying popular support within a nationalist framework. The necessarily transnational character of the anti-Federation campaign, coupled with regional networks through Makerere, Fort Hare and secondary schools, prompted an engagement with how to position a regional generation within an explicitly global struggle.Footnote 171 Newsletters were both a way to work through what this position should be and, sometimes, a means to make it a reality.
Conclusion
Speaking at a celebration of Makerere’s fiftieth anniversary in 1972, Abu Mayanja insisted that Makerere was no ivory tower: it had always been embedded in social change and was the ‘very soul’ of regional integration.Footnote 172 He did not mention his expulsion some twenty years earlier. The student strike of 1952 certainly was about more than poor food, and the political moment in which it happened was about more than new nationalist parties. This chapter has brought into focus shared generational experiences that straddled the spheres of education and party politics – institutional rules, constitutional methods, attempts to launch publications and protests. That these experiences mattered to this cohort – that they were formative to the emergence of an anticolonial culture – is clearest when thinking through a regional lens, rather than in terms of party formation or colonial development policy. Among these activists, the global and the regional, as constructed scales of anticolonial work, developed in dialogue.
First, the events of the Mau Mau uprising and of the unsuccessful campaign against the Central African Federation constituted a turning point in identifying and articulating a region that encompassed Uganda, Tanganyika, Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, and in activists’ attempts to link this region to anticolonial activism beyond its borders. With the hardening of apartheid in South Africa looming in the background, the question of the role of European settlers in stalling democratic reform became central.Footnote 173 Both the brutal colonial response to Mau Mau and the imposition of the unpopular Federation confirmed the idea that settlers in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia were a problem that the countries between wanted to shield themselves from.Footnote 174 This cohort of young, educated people articulated the situation in regional, sometimes comparative, terms. This was made possible through the movements and meetings that often arose from the pursuit of education – most visibly at Makerere. At the same time, these events allowed for new and meaningful connections with external anticolonial sympathisers, from Mayanja’s stay with Peter Wright in Nairobi to Kwaca’s circulation in London and Rangoon – connections that Chapter 2 will pursue. These activists began to call upon a global audience at the very moment when an interested audience emerged: the complex relationship between these two phenomena would become critical to the anticolonial culture that drove transnational work during the rest of the decade.
Second, these events served as the backdrop for specific modes of expression characteristic of this emerging anticolonial culture. Discussions of ‘constitutional’ protest and ‘normal channels’ during the strike were related to understandings of the potency of form which developed around publications both within and outside of education institutions. Assessing and pushing the limits of liberties of expression, in a particular institution or in colonial East and Central Africa more broadly, allowed for the articulation of the (often gendered) duty to use whatever political space existed.Footnote 175 This happened in a context of unprecedented cross-fertilisation between schools, party politics in the region and students.
All of these discussions emerged on the ground in East and Central Africa, in regional institutions and local secondary schools. That this opening chapter is the only one in this book to unfold almost entirely within this region is no coincidence. It deliberately offers a counterpoint to narratives of an education in the metropole as the trigger for thinking in global terms and building international contacts. Fundamentally, what this chapter has described are the conditions for the emergence of a central tenet of this cohort’s anticolonial culture: the conviction that pushing the limits of their freedoms to express and protest would mean not only finding space within the colonial state but moving, physically, outside of it. Mayanja’s expulsion from Makerere was as much a beginning as an end.
