6 - Decolonising the Media: Press and Politics in Revolutionary Dar es Salaam

Summary

What was the relationship between a revolutionary African state and the postcolonial media? This chapter analyses the evolution of the press in Dar es Salaam after independence. By the mid-1970s, Tanzania had just two national daily newspapers, one of which was owned by the party, the other by the state. But this was not the outcome of a teleological slide from an independent to a muzzled media, as liberal Cold War-era conceptions of the ‘freedom of the press’ would have it. This chapter shows how the press became a contested site of socialist politics in Dar es Salaam’s internationalised media world. Stakeholders debated questions of who should own newspapers, who should work for them, and what they should write in them. Even when the government nationalised the country’s only independent English-language newspaper, it placed it under the control of a radical, foreign editor and emphasised the need for it to serve as a critical voice. However, when this editorial independence transgressed Tanzania’s foreign policy, the state moved to bring the press under closer control, justified by Third World trends towards ‘development media’.

Around the turn of 1966, there was a new addition to the radical literature available in Dar es Salaam’s bookshops and bookstalls: a slim pamphlet entitled The African Journalist, authored by Kwame Nkrumah. Sam Kajunjumele, who we encountered in his failed attempt to stand for election in 1965 at the end of Chapter 1, wrote a short preface in his capacity as the president of the Tanganyika Institute of Journalists. He declared Nkrumah’s work to be an ‘inspiring message’ not just to journalists, but ‘to all African peoples, young and old, men and women, who are engaged in a struggle for Liberation, Defence and Reconstruction of Africa’. Kajunjumele concluded that the pamphlet would ‘sharpen your vigilance and political consciousness and embolden you with courage to meet the challenges of international imperialist conspiracies which undermine our efforts to unite and create a Continental Union Government for Africa’.¹ Kajunjumele, as we saw, was closely associated with China’s propaganda activities in Dar es Salaam, not least as the editor of Vigilance Africa. China likely funded the booklet’s publication.²

The pamphlet reproduced Nkrumah’s address to a Conference of African Journalists, held in Accra in 1963. His speech set out a radical blueprint for the role of the press in postcolonial Africa. A former journalist himself, Nkrumah first attacked the premise of a capitalist press. Journalists who worked for privately owned media houses, he argued, were beholden to the commercial interests of their employers. Then he moved on to what African newspapers should be. ‘Just as in the capitalist countries the press represents and carries out the purpose of capitalism, so in Revolutionary Africa, our Revolutionary African press must present and carry out our revolutionary purpose’, Nkrumah exhorted. Channelling concepts of a socialist press first propounded by Lenin, he declared that the newspaper should be ‘a collective organiser, a collective instrument of mobilisation and a collective educator – a weapon, first and foremost, to over-throw colonialism and imperialism, and to assist total African independence and unity’.³

What sort of press did an African socialist state require? How ‘free’ could it be? What did such ‘freedom’ even entail? These were questions which preoccupied journalists, intellectuals, and politicians in Dar es Salaam. Their responses are the subject of this chapter. As the interventions by Kajunjumele and Nkrumah indicate, the implications of these answers extended beyond the printed word. They spoke to the fundamental challenges of the struggle against ‘neoimperialism’, as Nkrumah put it. African stakeholders advocated a press which contributed to the building of nation-states and fostering continental unity. Nkrumah’s words captured the feeling that independent Africa needed not simply to take control of its own press, but to comprehensively reconsider the role which the media played in society. However, some saw this rethinking as nothing more than an ideological gloss to justify the muzzling of the press. Nkrumah himself drew criticism for introducing repressive censorship laws, banning dissenting newspapers, and creating a state monopoly on the press.⁴ In revolutionary Dar es Salaam, these questions were bound up in the international networks of the city’s political economy of information, as the involvement of Kajunjumele and his Chinese associates in the publication of Nkrumah’s speech demonstrated.

Social scientists at the time had much to say about these matters, too. But their analyses of the African press suffer from serious defects. Western communications specialists, operating through in-vogue modernisation paradigms, connected the growth of the Third World’s media with socio-economic development. Inflected with Cold War liberalism, this literature held dear to concepts of the ‘freedom of the press’, associated with democratic government and the rise of a free-market capitalist economy. It argued that this freedom had been extinguished in independent Africa, when an energetic late colonial press was inevitably brought into the repressive orbit of the one-party state and then put to work as an instrument of regime propaganda.⁵ Many African intellectuals responded by arguing that the ‘freedom of the press’ was mere ideological camouflage for the dissemination of ‘imperialist’ propaganda via private newspapers. They advocated a state-owned press that would be able to bring about the genuine decolonisation of Africa’s media and contribute to the nation-building cause. By the late 1970s, this had crystallised into a media ideology known as ‘development’ or ‘developmental’ journalism.⁶ Yet both these positions failed to capture the nuanced realities of the politics of the African press after independence. They are better understood as normative world views regarding communications which framed debates, but were confounded by political realities, especially given the international circles in which the newspaper business operated in Dar es Salaam.

The recent boom in interest among historians in newspapers in Africa has tended towards a focus on the colonial era, rather than the press after independence.⁷ This is despite historians frequently turning to newspapers as a key source in light of the spotty nature of the postcolonial archive in Africa.⁸ Indeed, newspapers have already featured prominently in the footnotes of preceding chapters, providing transcripts of official speeches and snippets of information. But we have also heard a lot from newspapermen themselves, who shaped debate about ujamaa at home and weighed in on the global stories of the day via editorial columns or feature articles. Newspapers did not simply reflect the opinion of the party or the government. Editors and writers were active participants in the city’s revolutionary political landscape. They intervened on questions of international diplomacy and the affairs of liberation movements. Sometimes, as this chapter shows, these interventions impressed neither foreign officials in Dar es Salaam nor the top level of the Tanzanian government, including President Nyerere himself.

By the mid-1970s, Tanzania’s media was essentially in the hands of the TANU party-state. Just as in the case of the youth movements explored in the previous chapter, the party came to monopolise a particular aspect of Tanzanian political life. Yet the path towards a pared-down newspaper sector under tight control of the party-state was not a straight one. After setting out the contours of Dar es Salaam’s media landscape, this chapter turns to the running battle between the party-owned Nationalist and the independent Standard. This brought together disputes about foreign capital, Africanisation, and Cold War and anti-imperial agendas, which were all channelled into a debate about the ‘freedom of the press’. Through a study of the short-lived, yet explosive experiment which followed the nationalisation of the Standard, the chapter then highlights how debate shifted towards the tension between the demands of the ujamaa revolution at home and a more cosmopolitan socialist internationalism.

Making News in a Cold War City

In the late 1960s, most residents of Dar es Salaam received news about the world over the airwaves. One survey found that three-quarters of the city’s inhabitants listened to the radio on a daily basis.⁹ Prior to independence, foreign services such as Radio Cairo had provided an alternative feed of news and political invective to the blanched offerings of the colonial Tanganyika Broadcasting Corporation (TBC). However, the nation-building spirit of the post-uhuru years encouraged a turn towards the TBC, as an ‘African’ voice. In 1965, the government formally conscripted national radio to its efforts. The TBC was nationalised, brought under the auspices of the Ministry of Information, and renamed Radio Tanzania Dar es Salaam.¹⁰ Even so, foreign broadcasts continued to provide an alternative source of news, opinion, and entertainment to state-controlled media. The BBC was highly regarded, especially among the elite: Nyerere half-joked that he listened to it himself in order to find out what was going on in Tanzania.¹¹ The Cold War powers responded to this appetite for radio in Africa by expanding their output. By the late 1960s, communist states were broadcasting fifty-seven hours of Swahili-language programming per week.¹²

Even as the radio became the main tool for accessing news, newspaper culture was an important marker of urban life in Dar es Salaam.¹³ The most popular newspaper at the time of the Arusha Declaration was the Swahili tabloid Ngurumo, meaning ‘Roar’ or ‘Thunder’. The newspaper had been founded in 1959 by Randhir Thaker, the Asian owner of a local printworks. Around half of its estimated 14,000 daily copies circulated in Dar es Salaam.¹⁴ Consisting of just a single sheet folded into four pages and costing just ten cents, Ngurumo was a shoestring production, run by a small number of African journalists and printed on a slow, hand-driven letterpress. Its parlous financial situation meant it transcribed foreign news from radio broadcasts rather than use expensive wire services.¹⁵ Ngurumo augmented its meagre revenue by accepting paid content from foreign powers, particularly North Korea, which regularly took out jargon-heavy supplements that ran to a dozen or more pages long (thus sometimes increasing the length of the newspaper fourfold). As Emily Callaci and Andrew Ivaska have shown, Ngurumo’s columnists and correspondents were participants in a print forum in which questions of public morality and urban society sat adjacent to Swahili poetry and gossip gleaned from the beat of Dar es Salaam’s streets.¹⁶ Although, as we have seen in previous chapters, Ngurumo was not afraid to weigh in on international stories, it was generally more oriented towards local issues of urban life than the high politics of the Cold War.

The emerging work on Dar es Salaam’s postcolonial print media mainly focuses on its consumption at the level of the street. But newspaper stands and cafés were not the only important sites of news discussion. In government offices, at embassy desks, and on the terrace bars of upmarket hotels, Dar es Salaam’s political elite also perused and debated the contents of the press. Their preference was for English, rather than Swahili newspapers. While complaints about potholes, noise, and dirtiness were still a perennial feature of readers’ published letters to the editor, the English newspapers were strikingly outward-looking, engaging in the global questions of the day. Liberation movement leaders gave interviews to their journalists. Members of the Tanzanian intelligentsia wrote long treatises on socialism and imperialism as guest columnists. For the politics of the press, we must therefore turn to Tanzania’s two English-language newspapers, the Nationalist and the Standard.

The Nationalist launched in April 1964. It was published by the Mwananchi News Company, which also produced Uhuru, the party’s Swahili newspaper. ‘This newspaper is the baby of the Tanganyika African National Union and for that matter of the Government’, stated the Nationalist’s inaugural issue. ‘We will speak authoritatively for Tanganyika, but that does not prevent us making constructive suggestions wherever we deem them necessary.’¹⁷ The Nationalist’s primary purpose was the development of the postcolonial nation. On its first anniversary in April 1965, the newspaper congratulated itself for ‘assisting in constructive nation building and wiping out imperialist and neo-colonialist propaganda’.¹⁸ Yet at a time when the language of Tanzanian high politics was beginning to shift away from the colonial medium and towards Swahili, the decision to publish an English newspaper also demonstrated the party’s desire to reach beyond the local African population. Explaining the rationale behind the creation of the Nationalist, TANU’s Publicity Department stated it would ensure that ‘the truth about our country will be disseminated to various parts of the world’.¹⁹ President Nyerere himself took a keen interest in the newspaper’s activities and on occasion penned unattributed editorials when he sought to make a particular point, especially in the field of foreign affairs.

The Standard was founded in 1930 as a colonial newspaper of record. It was part of the Nairobi-based East African Standard Group, which was then bought by the Lonrho multinational in 1967. The Standard’s staff contained a large number of Europeans, including the editors Ken Ridley (1964–67) and Brendon Grimshaw (1967–70). The considerable space which the newspaper devoted to business affairs and international news, plus the advertisements for high-end hotels and foreign airlines, were indicative of its audience: an estimated 70 per cent of its readership was either Asian or European, primarily members of Dar es Salaam’s business community.²⁰ The Standard had initially been opposed to TANU, but recognised the changing winds as uhuru became imminent and was then broadly supportive of the postcolonial government. Its criticism tended to be indirect, in calling for caution moving forwards, rather than outright opposition to state policy. As Ridley admitted, ‘you cannot bang the table about the more sensitive issues’.²¹ He recognised that, in a state committed to the Africanisation of its economy, an independent newspaper which was owned and edited by foreigners like the Standard could not speak entirely freely.

An outward-looking media required international sources of news. Tanzanian newspapers, like their counterparts across the Third World, could not support an expensive network of foreign correspondents. They therefore relied on words purchased from foreign news agencies. Tanzania’s information officials and newspaper editors were not short for options, yet the choices were loaded with Cold War ideological and geopolitical implications. Despite Tanzania’s general suspicion of the Western media, Reuters, the British agency, emerged as the most popular international source. In 1965, Reuters’ Dar es Salaam correspondent estimated that his firm provided up to 80 per cent of the foreign news material to the Nationalist and the Standard. Material from the communist agencies was less popular.²² The Standard editor said that Reuters was essentially the only agency the newspaper used. Other press agencies sent ‘a lot of bumf, but most of it goes in the waste-paper basket’.²³ This dependence on foreign agencies was routinely bemoaned in the Tanzanian media. In January 1966, a Nationalist editorial attacked Western news agencies for spreading ‘pernicious propaganda’ to make Africans ‘the intellectual slaves of the Capitalist press’.²⁴ Meanwhile, the government’s efforts to create its own Tanzanian news agency stalled.²⁵

Just as news of distant developments arrived at Dar es Salaam’s press offices via wire services, foreign journalists and agency stringers found the Tanzanian capital a fertile site for information gathering. They clustered around tables in offices on Nkrumah Street as Mondlane or Tambo gave updates on their struggles, packed out Nyerere’s press conferences at State House, and spent long evenings at the bars of the Kilimanjaro and New Africa hotels. As journalists operated outside of the official protocol that governed the activity of diplomats, many served as informal or formal intelligence agents. Both the French and the Portuguese identified the representative of Četeka as a key intermediary between African liberation movement leaders and Eastern Bloc diplomats in Dar es Salaam.²⁶ We saw in Chapter 3 that the correspondent of the East German agency, the ADN, played a similar role with certain Tanzanian politicians. The Western powers had no such recourse to state-owned news agencies available, but they did utilise informal press connections. In 1973, the British high commissioner reported that the Reuters correspondent was ‘cooperative and tries to get for us any material we require from the liberation movements’.²⁷ The insider knowledge provided by David Martin, a Standard journalist, was valued especially highly by Western diplomats. According to one British official, Martin had ‘excellent access to State House’ and often brought ‘morsels of information’.²⁸

Diplomats and foreign agents also attempted to influence the content and outlook of the local media. They took out articles extolling the virtues of their own societies and generous aid policies or besmirching the reputations of their rivals. Money could buy column inches: one Soviet correspondent remembered being instructed by the KGB rezident in Dar es Salaam to place an article in the Tanzanian press exposing United States’ Peace Corps volunteers who were alleged CIA agents. An editor agreed to print the article without reference to the source for 1,000 shillings.²⁹ Foreign diplomats also sought to influence journalists directly, either at newspaper premises or in more informal locations on Dar es Salaam’s social scene. Jenerali Ulimwengu recalled his experiences as a Tanzanian journalist in the 1970s:

I would be approached by representatives of the Soviet Union, of China, of Vietnam, of the US. They would all give me their immediate views, hoping to influence me. … Every time I met the American diplomats, they would tell me, ‘no, no, you don’t understand what we stand for.’ … If I wrote something that was against the Chinese, the Chinese would come and tell me, ‘that’s not true, it’s not like that.’ … It was a Cold War setting.³⁰

Whether advances of this type made much of a difference is difficult to assess. African journalists were generally less pliant than foreign observers expected. As Chapter 3 showed, the GDR’s representatives had little to show for the time they invested in ‘publicity work’ in Dar es Salaam. A more productive approach, as shown here, was for diplomats to complain directly to the Tanzanian government about what they felt was misleading media coverage.

As we have seen throughout previous chapters, the Tanzanian government was highly sensitive to its image in the international media. The Western press regularly carried articles that portrayed the country as being absorbed within the spheres of influence of the communist powers in Africa. The Nationalist regularly rebutted these accusations. But the government was also concerned at the aggressive tone of these refutations, which at times only seemed to illustrate the point that the jaundiced articles in the Western press were making about Tanzania’s extremism. Voices within the Tanzanian state also drew attention to the need to make a positive impression on visiting journalists. In August 1965, an official at the Tanzanian high commission in London wrote to the Ministry of Information in Dar es Salaam. He conveyed complaints from British journalists that they no longer received the same levels of cooperation when they were in Tanzania as they previously received and were therefore being discouraged from visiting the country.³¹ Once again, maintaining a balance between staying true to Tanzania’s anti-imperialist credo and creating a positive international image was a difficult act to pull off.

Dar es Salaam’s Newspaper Wars

The Nationalist was founded in part as a means of ensuring that TANU’s message reached an audience beyond Tanzania. However, this message was not always to the president’s tasting or deemed conducive to the country’s diplomatic and development prospects. In April 1965, the British minister of overseas development, Barbara Castle, paid a visit to Tanzania to discuss foreign aid. She received a warm reception. But, in a private meeting with Nyerere, Castle complained about an article attacking British foreign policy which had appeared in the Nationalist on the day of her arrival in Tanzania. Nyerere told Castle that he was increasingly embarrassed by the Nationalist.³² This was a sensitive period in Tanzania’s relations with Britain, especially as the situation in Rhodesia continued to deteriorate. The Western press was already awash with claims that Tanzania was a springboard for communist penetration of Africa. As previous chapters have shown, Nyerere recognised that aggressive anti-imperialist polemics risked tarnishing Tanzania’s international respectability, the credibility of its non-alignment, and its chances of securing aid. The article’s (British) author, Richard Kisch, was expelled from the country shortly after.³³

The incident was embarrassing for Nyerere, but it was not an isolated case. After its foundation in 1964, the Nationalist quickly gained a reputation as a hotbed of radicalism. The newspaper’s staff consisted of a cosmopolitan crowd of revolutionaries with ideological horizons that stretched from Havana to Hanoi. Its managing editor was Jimmy Markham, a Ghanaian who had worked at Nkrumah’s Evening News in Accra and then for the Anti-Colonial Bureau of the Asian Socialist Conference in Rangoon.³⁴ At least two staff members worked for Vigilance Africa, the Chinese propaganda magazine: Sam Kajunjumele and Kabenga Nsa Kaisi. Kajunjumele was the Nationalist’s business manager. Nsa Kaisi had studied at a GDR trade union school, though he was closer to China than the Eastern Bloc. A. M. Babu, the government minister and former Chinese news agency correspondent in Zanzibar, wrote a weekly column under the pseudonym ‘Pressman’. The Portuguese suspected that the Nationalist received financial help from the Chinese embassy: there is no evidence that this was the case, but the belief reflected just how pro-Beijing the newspaper was.³⁵ Finally, the Nationalist was closely associated with Oscar Kambona.³⁶ Together, these figures ensured a stream of anti-imperialist articles that attacked the United States, Britain, and their allies and called out misleading reporting about Tanzania in Western newspapers.

By late 1965, Nyerere decided that the Nationalist needed reining in. He invited Benjamin Mkapa, a Makerere graduate and young civil servant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to a meeting at the president’s beachfront house. Nyerere explained that he was unhappy with the management of the Nationalist and wanted Mkapa to take over as editor. Mkapa protested that he had no experience in journalism. This would not be a problem, Nyerere responded: he would arrange an apprenticeship at the Daily Mirror, a left-leaning British tabloid – ironically via the help of Barbara Castle, whose complaints about the Nationalist had helped to trigger this reorientation. This allowed Mkapa to spend five months training in Britain in preparation for his new role.³⁷ Mkapa assured an American diplomat that he had ended ‘the virulent, anti-Western hyperbole of his predecessor’ and would ‘pursue a more truly non-aligned policy less dependent on communist propaganda handouts’.³⁸ Nsa Kaisi, who remained at the newspaper, complained to the East Germans that these changes had been encouraged by conservative members of the government, who considered the newspaper ‘more Vietnamese than the Vietnamese’.³⁹ Even so, an expatriate tutor at Kivukoni College told a researcher that Nyerere and other government ministers were still concerned about the Nationalist’s interventions on international matters and when it was ‘rude to other countries’.⁴⁰ Mkapa himself privately wished for a ‘leftist’ newspaper in Tanzania, which would take away the charge that the Nationalist was too ‘bourgeois’, even as its politics continued to be more radical than the government.⁴¹

For all its criticism of Western neo-imperialism, the Nationalist reserved its sharpest invective for its direct competitor, the Standard. This took three interconnected lines of attack. First, the Standard was deemed a colonial relic, which had been hostile to TANU and the independence struggle until the late 1950s, when it finally acknowledged the changing winds. Second, the Standard was owned by foreign capitalists and therefore served as an expression of their vested class interests. Third, the Standard was the vehicle for imperialist intrigue, which relayed the subversive lies of Western newspapers about Tanzania to a local audience in order to stir up trouble. Babu’s ‘Pressman’ column was originally conceived as a space for exposing, condemning, and dismantling such mendacious stories in the ‘imperialist’ press.⁴² In June 1966, the Nationalist picked up on calls in parliament for legal action to be taken against the Standard, arguing that ‘some newspapers selling in Tanzania remain in the throes of a colonial hangover. … They still think of news in the same way as they reported the sundowner gossip during colonial days.’⁴³ The Nationalist alleged that the Standard had failed to accept the changing responsibilities of a newspaper in independent Africa and instead continued to serve as a mouthpiece for its capitalist owners and their imperialist allies.

An example of this confrontation came in the aftermath of the appearance of a magazine entitled Revolution in Africa in Dar es Salaam in March 1965. It claimed to have been published in Albania and had an unmistakably pro-Chinese editorial line. ‘If anyone should be in doubt about the extent of the Communist effort to subvert Africa’, commented the Standard, ‘we would recommend the first edition of a booklet entitled “Revolution in Africa”’.⁴⁴ But on closer inspection, something did not seem quite right. At a time when China was growing closer to Tanzania, the magazine’s articles seemed intended to stir up discontent and uncertainty inside the country. It described African socialism as ‘a clumsy attempt to rationalize the primitive mumbo-jumbo of a backward Africa that still dances to the colonialist tune’. Another article speculated that ‘Babu and his enlightened cadres are now poised to capture control of the united front in Tanzania just as they did in Zanzibar.’⁴⁵ These were apparently efforts to stain China’s reputation in Africa. The Nationalist therefore seized on the Standard’s decision to reprint extracts from the magazine as evidence of its imperialist sympathies. ‘If anyone should be in doubt as to who the agents of subversion in Africa, and in particular Tanzania, they can find out from those who reproduce and disseminate sedition under false colours’, it stated, mimicking its rival’s wording.⁴⁶ Meanwhile, the Chinese embassy stated that Revolution in Africa was an ‘out-and-out forgery’, attributed it to an imperialist plot, and praised the TANU press for its ‘helpful’ exposure.⁴⁷ The magazine’s origins remained a mystery. Cold War ‘black literature’ thus became co-opted into Dar es Salaam’s newspaper wars.

Politics aside, the Nationalist’s confrontational stance towards the Standard was sharpened by commercial rivalry. A survey carried out in 1967 found that the Standard sold 16,000 copies per day against the Nationalist’s claimed 7,000 copies.⁴⁸ In part, this was a consequence of the Nationalist’s editorial line. Both the Standard and the Nationalist were competing for a similar target market, the city’s anglophone business community, which was unlikely to have taken kindly to the Nationalist’s daily harangues. The Standard, with its coverage of international commodity markets and European political affairs, was far more attractive. Indeed, the Standard’s editor, Ken Ridley, said that the Nationalist served as a ‘kind of foil’ for his newspaper. ‘We’d like to see the Nationalist keep going; it is no competition, the reverse in fact.’⁴⁹ The Nationalist’s TANU ideologues gritted their teeth at their rival’s comparative success. When an American journalist visiting Dar es Salaam in 1968 asked Nsa Kaisi about the newspaper’s circulation figures, he received a cold response. ‘If you insist on asking such questions you will no longer welcome in Tanzania’, Nsa Kaisi said.⁵⁰

Losing the competition with the Standard meant that the Nationalist was beset with financial difficulties. TANU had acknowledged that the expense of producing an English-language newspaper was beyond the party’s own funds and placed the newspaper inside its commercial arm, the Mwananchi Development Corporation.⁵¹ Even so, TANU had originally anticipated that the Nationalist would reach a circulation of 30,000 copies per day.⁵² The issue of poor sales was noted at a meeting of TANU’s National Executive Committee in 1966, which decided that government offices must prioritise buying the Nationalist ahead of other newspapers.⁵³ In 1968, the Nationalist’s printers demanded that the party newspapers pay off their significant debts, which essentially amounted to two-thirds of the company’s annual revenue. Parliament hurried through extra funding to keep the TANU newspapers afloat.⁵⁴ They only survived through government subvention. According to one estimate, this amounted to 7 million shillings between 1965–66 and 1968–69, equivalent to one third of the entire grant to Radio Tanzania. The size of these subsidies demonstrated the significance which TANU’s leadership placed on publishing an English-language newspaper, but at the same time represented an expensive drain on central government resources.⁵⁵

However, as Tanzania moved down a socialist path, the success of private businesses like the Standard became a problem rather than an asset. As TANU unleashed its strategy for socialist revolution in 1967, the Standard’s foreign ownership and less partisan editorial line came under renewed scrutiny. The Arusha Declaration included ‘news media’ in its definition of ‘the major means of production and exchange in the nation’ which were to be brought ‘under the control of the workers and peasants’.⁵⁶ When Nyerere addressed a crowd in Dar es Salaam in February, a voice called for the Standard to be brought under public ownership. ‘Can you edit it?’, shouted back Nyerere, highlighting the shortage of experienced journalists in Tanzania at the time, but not challenging the principle that a major newspaper should be in Tanzanian hands.⁵⁷ Although the sweeping nationalisations spared the Standard, the new order made the newspaper stick out as a vestige of colonial rule. These arguments came to a head soon after, as the government tightened its control over the press.

The ‘Freedom of the Press’

As one African regime after another moved away from multiparty democracy towards single-party or military rule, the question of the ‘freedom of the press’ became increasingly fraught. Colonial regimes had not hesitated to ban publications which revealed uncomfortable truths. By the mid-1960s, many in Africa and the West feared that postcolonial states were exhibiting similar tendencies, outlawing newspapers that displeased their leaders, replacing independent newspapers with state- or party-owned titles, introducing restrictive legislation, and generally discouraging debate via self-censorship. A normative concept of the ‘freedom of the press’ became a yardstick by which especially Western observers judged the success or failure of the development of the media in Africa. This was often bound up in a Cold War theory of modernisation, whereby the ‘freedom of the press’ was seen as accompanying the success of capitalist development, following Euro-American experiences (and often overlooking the questionable degree of ‘press freedom’ in their own historical trajectories). State-owned newspapers, on the other hand, were believed to be little more than propaganda organs for authoritarian governments, with comparisons drawn with the situation in Eastern Europe.⁵⁸

The Tanzanian government contended otherwise. Employing similar logic to that which justified ‘one-party democracy’, it argued that the press could not be allowed to disrupt the country’s development by concentrating on divisive stories about political infighting. Instead, the press was tasked with acting as an integrating force, communicating the party’s policies and soldering together a nation. In 1967, the director of Tanzania’s Information Services, Abdulla Riyami, wrote that the job of African journalists as ‘patriots’ was to both inform and educate the reader. The journalist would ‘contribute towards the nation’s unity, economic and general progress’, rather than ‘create destructive propaganda’. He noted with alarm that ‘some journalists have fallen into the snares of press freedom’.⁵⁹ Speaking in the heated parliamentary debates described shortly, Babu distinguished between the people’s ‘freedom to be informed’ and the ‘freedom to publish’, which was limited to just a handful of individuals with the requisite capital means.⁶⁰ The ‘freedom’ of the reader was to be prioritised over the ‘freedom’ of the writer or publisher. Whereas foreign- or privately owned newspapers were believed to be instruments for imperialist or capitalist manipulation, an Africanised, state-owned media would be ‘free’ to inform and educate. The approach taken by Tanzania later became known as ‘development’ or ‘developmental’ journalism.⁶¹

These debates had simmered in Tanzania since independence, but came to a boil in May 1968, when the government brought a Newspaper Ordinance (Amendment) Bill before parliament. This empowered the president to close down any newspaper when he or she considered it in the public interest to do so. The bill was prompted by the difficulties which the government had encountered in January in attempting to shut down Ulimwengu, which was published by Otini Kambona, the brother of Oscar. Ulimwengu had called for people who had been arrested under preventive detention measures to be brought to trial.⁶² In the context of the detentions of Oscar Kambona’s supporters which followed the Arusha Declaration, the government regarded this as an inappropriate, subversive intervention. Announcing the subsequent ban on Ulimwengu, the Nationalist stated that while constructive criticism of the government was welcome in Tanzania, unconstitutional attempts to change it were not.⁶³ However, the government possessed no legal instrument for closing the newspaper and therefore had banned it on a spurious technicality relating to its registration.

Introducing the Newspaper Ordinance Bill in parliament, the minister for information and tourism, Hasnu Makame, defended the new measures as vital for national security against foreign subversion. He argued that although freedom of speech was protected by the constitution, it could also be abused. ‘Someone can also express subversive ideas with the intention of hindering the development of the country’, Makame said. ‘If such views are published and circulated in a newspaper they can bring danger in the country.’ But parliament received the bill with unusual hostility. Concerned about its consequences for the trade union newspaper, Mfanya Kazi, Michael Kamaliza criticised the government for not making clear the grounds upon which the president would ban a publication.⁶⁴ Lady Marion Chesham, a European MP, told parliament that the bill ‘smells of Fascism’. She feared for ‘the future generations of Tanzania if the power to muzzle and kill the Press is in the hands of the Office of the President’.⁶⁵ Another MP worried that while Nyerere could be trusted with such powers, his successors might not be so responsible.⁶⁶

When the house adjourned on the evening of 2 May, there was some doubt that the bill would pass. The next day, Rashidi Kawawa made a decisive intervention. Referring to the threat to the nation from its imperialist ‘enemies’, the second vice-president rounded on the Standard and its foreign owners. He noted erroneous reports recently published in the Standard that the TPDF had acquired missiles, which might incite a strike from Tanzania’s Portuguese enemies. ‘All [the imperialists] are trying to achieve with this type of propaganda against us is to justify their eventual aggression against our independence and sovereignty’, Kawawa argued. ‘Whose freedom [of the press] is this? Lonrho’s?’, he asked to laughter. ‘The freedom to write that Tanzania is importing missiles? And we are expected to remain quiet and let them ruin our country, for Lonrho to say whatever it wishes about Tanzania on our own soil, and for the Portuguese to come and bomb us? Is that freedom?’⁶⁷ Kawawa’s speech again demonstrated the extent to which Tanzania’s support for the liberation movements and the fear of a backlash from the white minority states of southern Africa had become a touchstone in the shaping of domestic policy – in this case, towards the media. The speech rallied support for the bill, which passed by 107 votes to 19, with 6 abstentions and 51 members absent.⁶⁸

The confrontation continued in the pages of Dar es Salaam’s press. A Standard editorial stressed that it respected the rule of parliament and had never ‘wittingly published anything which could be termed undesirable to the national interest’, referring back to Makame’s speech. It asked for clarification as to what the minister had meant. The newspaper likened the bill to ‘a pistol pointed at the head’.⁶⁹ The government issued a scathing response through Riyami, who claimed that Makame had never used the word ‘undesirable’. ‘This appears to be your own invention’, Riyami wrote, ‘or, perhaps, you have been let down by a poor translation’. This was a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the disjunction between the English-language (read: foreign) Standard and the Swahili-speaking (read: Tanzanian) parliament. ‘Any responsible newspaper would understand what is “subversive” material’, Riyami added.⁷⁰ In the Nationalist, Babu’s ‘Pressman’s Commentary’ delved into the archives to quote several pre-independence articles in which the Standard had expressed its disapproval of TANU.⁷¹

These debates were not confined to parliamentary benches and newsprint in Dar es Salaam but formed part of an international conversation about the media in the decolonising world. A month after Tanzania’s Newspaper Ordinance Act was passed, journalists, newspaper proprietors, and government representatives gathered in Nairobi for the annual conference of the International Press Institute (IPI). Funded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the IPI ran seminars across the decolonising world, including a training school in Kenya which aimed to inculcate Western-style journalism practices.⁷² The Nairobi meeting witnessed a collision between liberal ideas of ‘press freedom’ and voices from the Third World who argued that these Western principles were inappropriate in the context of developing nations. President Jomo Kenyatta and his Zambian counterpart, Kenneth Kaunda, both spoke in favour of the ‘freedom of the press’, but also reminded journalists that a duty to criticise governments had to be balanced with a responsibility to support their state-building efforts. Other African participants expressed their concerns at unrestricted government intervention. Hilary Ng’weno, a Kenyan journalist, warned that ‘Governments cannot be left alone to decide how much freedom the Press can have. … We must keep poking our necks out until we get chopped.’⁷³ Inevitably, several participants cited Tanzania’s new press legislation as an example of the threat to the ‘freedom of the press’ in Africa. In his own address, Riyami defended his government’s actions. ‘Just as the Press is free to disagree with the Government, the Government, too, is free to disagree with the Press on any subject’, he said.⁷⁴ Back in Dar es Salaam, the Nationalist reacted angrily to the ‘audacity and arrogance’ of the conference’s participants. It drew attention to the lack of both black Africans and communists in Nairobi. The Nationalist renewed its calls for the total Africanisation of the continent’s newspapers, ‘manned by Africans, edited by Africans, managed by Africans, sold by Africans, read by Africans’.⁷⁵ In this ideological climate, the days of the Lonrho-owned Standard appeared numbered.

The shift in the Tanzanian government’s treatment of the press was in evidence again in October, when it banned Kenya’s Nation Group of newspapers. The decision was announced soon after the Daily Nation published a story about unrest in Tanzania’s northern Kilimanjaro region. Like the Standard Group, the Nation Group was under non-African ownership – in this case the Ismaili leader, the Aga Khan. The Daily Nation responded indignantly. ‘With newspapers censored, suppressed or muzzled in so many parts of the world (Czechoslovakia and South Africa are examples that spring easily to mind), it is sad indeed that the bright image recorded in Nairobi four months ago has been so quickly tarnished’, it reflected. The editorial drew on analogies that were particularly galling for Tanzania, equating it with both its sworn enemy in Pretoria and Soviet imperialism in the Eastern Bloc, which had been the target of recent protests in Dar es Salaam.⁷⁶ In a tit-for-tat response, in January 1969 the Kenyan government banned the sale of the Nationalist after the newspaper published an ‘extremely hostile’ article about student protests in Nairobi. Taking a swipe at the Nationalist’s Marxist and Maoist revolutionaries, a Kenyan government statement declared that it was ‘not prepared to accept lessons on democracy’ from a newspaper ‘whose pre-occupation is with clichés and slogans borrowed from foreign countries’.⁷⁷ Accusations of corrupting foreign influences, inflected with the politics of the Cold War, could be marshalled in multiple directions.

These tensions stretched beyond abstract principles and government interventions to the streets and newsprint of Dar es Salaam. The trigger for a fresh round of attacks on the Standard was an editorial in December 1968, in which the newspaper expressed its scepticism about the TANU Youth League’s Operation Vijana campaign against ‘indecent dress’.⁷⁸ This dissenting opinion was red rag to the newspaper’s critics. In the Nationalist, Babu called the Standard editorial a ‘blatant sermon in anti-Tanzanianism, racism and subversion’.⁷⁹ In January 1969, Youth League cadres marched to the Standard offices. They shouted ‘slaughter! slaughter!’ and lit a bonfire of copies of the newspaper. Drawing on Chinese motifs, the ‘Green Guards’ affirmed their ‘determination to carry forward the cultural revolution right through to the end’.⁸⁰ Uhuru joined this attack, accusing the Standard of obtaining secret information about the government’s next economic plan by talking to officials in upmarket establishments like the Kilimanjaro Hotel and the New Dar es Salaam Club.⁸¹ This moment of especially acute anti-Standard militancy soon passed. But the underlying notion of a newspaper owned and staffed by Europeans in socialist Tanzania remained deeply problematic.

Frene Ginwala’s Standard

On 5 February 1970, the third anniversary of the Arusha Declaration, the Standard’s front page announced that it was ‘appearing for the first time as the official newspaper of the government of Tanzania’.⁸² Its managing editor was to be directly responsible to the president alone. A statement from Nyerere set out that,

In accordance with the Arusha Declaration, it is clearly impossible for the largest daily newspaper in independent Tanzania to be left indefinitely in the hands of a foreign company. In a country committed to building socialism, it is also impossible for such an influential medium to be left indefinitely in the control of non-socialist, capitalist owners. The reasons for [the] Government’s decision to acquire the ‘“Standard”’ are thus both nationalistic and socialistic; we want Tanzanians to have control of this newspaper, and we want those Tanzanians to be responsible for the people as a whole.

Nyerere stressed that although the Standard would be expected to support the government’s policies, it would also be free to criticise their implementation. The newspaper would be ‘guided by the principle that free debate is an essential statement of true socialism’. The Standard’s commitment was to the res publica, rather than to the government.⁸³

Not everyone in Dar es Salaam’s media world greeted the announcement with unqualified praise. Ngurumo, now the only privately owned Tanzanian daily, warned of the dangers to the free circulation of news. In an editorial that made no direct reference to the Standard’s nationalisation, Ngurumo complained about problems caused by the lack of knowledge about the scarcity of consumer essentials like beans or maize. Citizens needed reliable information to make such informed everyday choices. ‘If the freedom to be informed equally about the news is not exercised, people will not be able to exercise their equal freedom to choose and act, and the result will be complaints about the government’, it argued. In other words, citizens would not be able to make informed judgements about their leaders’ decisions if alternative sources of news dried up.⁸⁴ Here, Ngurumo adopted the ‘freedom to be informed’ arguments which had become one plank of the TANU retort to accusations that Tanzania did not uphold the freedom of the press. Meanwhile, the government hinted that it was not trying to stifle all independent newspapers in Tanzania by simultaneously lifting the ban on the Daily Nation.⁸⁵

Given the government’s acquisition of the Standard was justified on ‘nationalistic’ grounds, Nyerere’s choice of its new managing editor seemed odd. Frene Ginwala was a 38-year-old South African ANC member of Parsi-Indian descent. She possessed the CV of a Third World revolutionary par excellence but had a mixed history with the Tanzanian authorities. Following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Ginwala had joined Oliver Tambo in establishing the ANC’s ‘external mission’ in exile. From Dar es Salaam, she had edited the movement’s magazine, Spearhead. Ginwala had served on the editorial board of the Algiers-based journal Révolution africaine and worked as a stringer for London’s Guardian. She was also rumoured to be a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP). However, in 1963 Ginwala was suddenly declared persona non grata in Tanganyika, for reasons which remain unclear.⁸⁶ Her expulsion may have been linked to a Spearhead editorial which condemned early initiatives to create a one-party state in Tanganyika as the work of a self-entrenching ‘privileged élite’.⁸⁷ By the time she returned to Dar es Salaam in 1970, her identity as an Asian in a position of authority was even more problematic in the eyes of the TANU radicals than it had been at the time of her departure. Moreover, the ANC’s relationship with the Tanzanian government was in ruins due to its alleged connections with Oscar Kambona’s failed coup plot, as explained in the next chapter. Ginwala was, in her own words, ‘an identikit picture of who should NOT be the editor of a Tanganyikan [sic] newspaper’.⁸⁸

The appointment of Ginwala was therefore a surprising move from Nyerere, particularly given the eclectic editorial team which she then assembled using her contacts among the international socialist world. In London, she recruited Richard Gott, a British national who had written on revolutionary movements in Latin America, to the position of foreign editor. Other members of staff included Iain Christie, who developed a close relationship with FRELIMO’s leadership; Tony Hall, another ANC supporter; Rod Prince, the former editor of the British pacifist magazine Peace News; and Philip Ochieng, a talented and outspoken young Kenyan columnist.⁸⁹ The international composition of the staff reflected Dar es Salaam’s reputation as a mecca of revolution. Yet it was also at odds with the nationalist vein that ran through Tanzanian politics at the time. In parliament, one MP complained that Ginwala had overlooked the local ‘youth’ in composing her team and questioned whether ‘this woman has a Tanzanian heart’.⁹⁰ But, as Nyerere had previously pointed out, there remained a serious shortage of trained manpower in the journalism sector in Tanzania.

Ginwala immediately signalled her intention to meet Nyerere’s call for the Standard to be critical of his government where it failed to meet its own standards. On 13 February, it broke the alarming story about the detention of Cornelius Ogunsanwo, a Nigerian doctoral student at the London School of Economics. Ogunsanwo had been conducting research on Chinese activity in Tanzania when he was imprisoned without trial for thirty-nine days. After his release, Ogunsanwo gave an interview to the Standard, in which he described the ‘animalistic and inhumane’ conditions inside the prison and gave details of a number of other inmates detained for political reasons, including many foreign nationals.⁹¹ The Standard’s sister paper, the Sunday News, presented this incident as indicative of a broader malaise. ‘There is today an atmosphere of fear and intimidation which prevents people from raising and exposing illegal actions’, it remarked. It also instructed people to draw attention to such abuses of power when they encountered them. ‘If the people allow themselves to be intimidated, and by their silence act as if they are living in a police state, they will run the danger of creating one.’⁹² Another Standard editorial was explicitly supportive of China, but criticised the ‘air of secrecy’ which surrounded its activities in Tanzania.⁹³ The incident showed Ginwala’s willingness to speak out on particularly controversial issues, such as the detention of political prisoners and Tanzania’s relationship with China. The latter point was particularly sensitive, given Ginwala shared the ANC and SACP’s preferences for Moscow over Beijing.

The Standard’s critique of imperialism was apiece with the line taken in TANU’s newspapers. Both Ginwala’s Standard and Mkapa’s Nationalist were engaged with global affairs and ideological debates about socialism. Yet the Nationalist’s priority, as its name suggested, was nation-building. In contrast, many of the Standard’s foreign staff considered themselves as international revolutionaries. The newspaper’s offices were cluttered with Marxist texts and propaganda. Andy Chande, a Tanzanian Asian businessman who remained on the board of the newspaper after its nationalisation, recalled that to celebrate the centenary of Lenin’s birth in April 1970, the Standard published a supplement so bulky that it was ‘jettisoned into the gutters of the city’ by delivery boys struggling under the weight of paper, causing a blockage in Dar es Salaam’s storm drains.⁹⁴ Ginwala and Gott immediately sought to diversify the Standard’s news sources, in spite of financial constraints.⁹⁵ Ginwala took communist news from the New China News Agency and the Soviet Union’s Tass, while Gott made use of Cuba’s Prensa Latina and the Liberation News Service, a Harlem-based underground agency which connected the American New Left into global circuits of counterculture and revolution.⁹⁶

The Standard’s sharp, anti-Western tone predictably caused confrontations with diplomatic representations in Dar es Salaam. It was a government, rather than a party newspaper, even if the distinction between the two institutions was increasingly blurred. For this reason, it was much harder for state officials to distance themselves from arguments made in the Standard than comments emanating from TANU organs like the Youth League or Nationalist. In November 1970, the Standard published two articles by Walter Rodney, a lecturer at UDSM, in which the Guyanese academic extolled the kidnapping of diplomats and the hijacking of civilian aircraft as a form of revolutionary violence.⁹⁷ The British high commissioner, Horace Phillips, responded by asking the Ministry of Foreign Affairs what place such articles had in a government newspaper.⁹⁸ His note was leaked to Ginwala, who replied through an editorial in the Sunday News. This accused Phillips of ‘gross interference’ in Tanzania’s internal affairs and suggested that the letter was part of a British attempt to distract attention from London’s plans to sell arms to South Africa.⁹⁹ At a diplomatic reception, she told Phillips that the editorial was an attempt to establish her right to publish as she wished. Phillips then raised this conversation with Nyerere himself. The president, he noted, ‘raised his eyebrows in incredulity’ and stressed that the matter would have no impact on Tanzania’s relations with Britain.¹⁰⁰ Other Western states lodged complaints with the Tanzanian government. The West German embassy identified that a number of articles were essentially identical to the GDR’s propaganda handouts.¹⁰¹ The American ambassador described editorials in the Standard as ‘indistinguishable in tone, content, and general animus from what might have appeared in Moscow and Peking’.¹⁰²

Just as Nyerere had previously warned the TANU Youth League and the Nationalist journalists against unnecessary provocation, he now moved to clamp down on the Standard’s editorial line. In June 1971, Nyerere summoned local newspaper and radio editors to State House, where he lectured them over their ‘inaccurate’ reporting. In a tone which recalled his Argue Don’t Shout pamphlet, discussed in the previous chapter, the president ridiculed the media’s excessive use of terms like ‘imperialism’, ‘stooge’, and ‘puppet’. This ‘nonsense’, he said, was ‘becoming something of a disease in Tanzania’, so much so that he was getting ‘afraid to use the word “imperialism” once in a two hour question and answer session, because it will be presented with such headlines that the people will imagine I talk about nothing else’.¹⁰³ The American ambassador noted that this intervention came after a Standard editorial had misrepresented Nyerere’s views on ongoing negotiations over peace in Vietnam, by describing the talks as Washington’s ‘search for an honourable, but cowardly, retreat’. According to Joan Wicken, Nyerere’s personal assistant and occasional source of information for the American embassy, the president had rebuked Ginwala the day after the story’s publication.¹⁰⁴ Again, where Tanzania’s anti-imperialism strayed into antagonistic territory, Nyerere prioritised good relations with foreign powers.

The pressure on Ginwala from above was accompanied by discontent from within her newspaper’s staff. The editorial staff were divided by their own squabbles as much as united by their revolutionary socialism – ‘packed with political and ideological nitroglycerine’, as Chande put it.¹⁰⁵ Trevor Grundy, another expatriate journalist, described Ginwala herself as ‘a pin-less hand grenade in a sari’. The Sino-Soviet split played out in microcosm in the Standard newsroom. Ginwala, a member of the ANC, which had close relations with Moscow, clashed with Gott, who sided with the Third World radicalism of Mao and Castro. One heated confrontation ended with Ginwala allegedly shouting at Gott, ‘[y]ou get your politics from Peking and your arrogance from Winchester’, referring to his somewhat unproletarian private education in Britain.¹⁰⁶ Ginwala’s ANC membership also caused rifts in Dar es Salaam’s world of revolutionary politics. The PAC, the ANC’s rival in the South African liberation struggle, protested about the lack of coverage they received in the Standard. This followed complaints from Potlako Leballo, the PAC’s leader and the chief state witness in the treason trial in 1970, that Ginwala had sought to ‘destroy him’ by supplying evidence to the defence lawyers.¹⁰⁷ These tensions were entwined with racial friction between Ginwala’s predominantly non-black editorial board and the Standard’s African journalists. A group of staff members found Ginwala’s attitude towards African employees patronising. They called for the full Tanzanianisation of the newspaper.¹⁰⁸

The radical ‘Guidelines’ issued by TANU in February 1971 provided a political framework through which these grievances gained expression. As explained in the following chapter, the Guidelines (Mwongozo) encouraged workers to challenge managers who abused their power, which unintentionally led to a series of strikes and lockouts. These developments were not confined to factory floors. At the Standard, the staff formed a ‘Worker’s Council’ and accused Ginwala of various charges, including racialism. The workers aired these complaints during a marathon meeting, which lasted three days, including the whole of a weekday night. Reuters’ correspondent in Dar es Salaam reported that Gott sided with the Africans present, while brandishing a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book.¹⁰⁹ The Standard ran an editorial about these ‘sometimes acrimonious and bitter’ internal debates. ‘Newspapers do not normally publicise their internal activities’, it noted. ‘But we are not living in normal times.’ Ginwala was not mentioned by name and the debate was spun in a positive light, as an example of Mwongozo in action.¹¹⁰ Nonetheless, the episode demonstrated how Ginwala no longer commanded the confidence of her own workers. In particular, the tension between Ginwala and Gott reached breaking point. Both appear to have approached Nyerere to complain about the other. Nyerere responded by informing Gott, Hall, and Prince that they would have to leave the country within a month.¹¹¹

Having already lost the respect of her team, Ginwala finally exhausted Nyerere’s confidence. The breaking point came when the Standard imperilled Tanzania’s attempts to build international solidarities against Idi Amin, who seized power in Uganda in January 1971. Among Nyerere’s few allies in this situation was Gaafar Nimeiry, the president of Sudan, whose own rule was in a precarious state. On 19 July, Nimeiry’s government was briefly toppled from power in Sudan in a left-wing coup. After being relieved by loyal troops, Nimeiry carried out a violent purge of the Sudanese Communist Party. Shortly afterwards, a Standard editorial accused Nimeiry of a ‘senseless witch hunt of people whose only crime is to share an ideology with countries like the Soviet Union and China’. It condemned him for practicing ‘a form of ideological intolerance which in Africa has been hitherto the preserve of Mr. Vorster and Mr. Houphouet-Boigny’, the Ivorian leader who had entered into a diplomatic ‘dialogue’ with South Africa.¹¹² Unbeknown to Ginwala, the editorial was published shortly before Nimeiry was scheduled to visit Tanzania. While Nyerere could not have approved of the bloody purges in Sudan, geopolitical circumstances meant that he turned a blind eye. The new government in Uganda threatened both Sudan and Tanzania, which were among the few African states not to recognise Amin’s regime.¹¹³ Ginwala, Gott, and the other foreign editorial staff were immediately relieved of their jobs. Sammy Mdee, a Tanzanian who had led the anti-Ginwala faction among the Standard staff, was appointed as the new editor.¹¹⁴ Once again, Nyerere showed that foreign policy was a delicate matter. He had previously intervened directly in the press when he deemed its attacks on the West counterproductive. When Ginwala and Gott unwittingly placed their ideological solidarities ahead of questions of national security, Nyerere concluded that the experiment could go on no longer.¹¹⁵

Ginwala’s turn at the helm of the Standard lasted less than eighteen months but serves as a window onto dynamics in Tanzanian political society which stretched beyond the media sphere. Nyerere sought to harness Dar es Salaam’s cosmopolitan revolutionary energy to the decolonisation of the Tanzanian media, but the plan backfired. The socialist credentials of Ginwala and her fellow expatriates could not be questioned, yet they remained outsiders in the eyes of Tanzanians who prioritised the accelerated Africanisation of institutions like a state-owned newspaper. The paradox of a nationalised newspaper run by foreigners, whose interests did not necessarily line up with those of the state, collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. Inside the newsroom, racial, personal, and ideological tensions created rifts among the staff. Outside of it, the Standard’s internationalist Marxism rubbed up against Tanzania’s geopolitical priorities, as the ujamaa revolution took on a more defensive outlook.

Inward Turns

The end of Ginwala’s reign at the Standard marked a decisive moment in the inward turn of the Tanzanian media. Less than a year after she lost her job, the newspaper ceased to exist. As party and state became more closely aligned, the duplication of news in the Nationalist and the Standard was deemed a waste of resources. In April 1972, the government merged the two newspapers to form the Daily News, which became the sole English-language newspaper published in Tanzania. Benjamin Mkapa was named as the new managing editor. A party-based Press Council, headed by TANU’s director of information, oversaw this reconfigured media arrangement. Echoing both Lenin’s conception of the press and Nkrumah’s speech from 1965, the first edition of the Daily News set out that in a socialist country, the press must act as a ‘collective mobiliser, collective educator, collective inspirer and an instrument for the dissemination of socialist ideas. … Like all true revolutionary activities, such a task for the press begs of no liberalism.’¹¹⁶

But the ‘dissemination of socialist ideas’ increasingly meant the dissemination of a particular type of socialist ideas: ujamaa. The revolutionary Marxism of some of those Africans who remained on the staff of the government newspaper after the departure of Ginwala and the creation of the Daily News jarred with the regime’s ideological message. Philip Ochieng’s radicalism proved too much for this new order. After he made a wholesale defence of Marxist-Leninist ‘vanguardism’ in the Daily News, Mkapa and the Press Council made clear that Ochieng’s presence was no longer welcome at the newspaper. He resigned in January 1973 and then went to study in the GDR.¹¹⁷ Another young journalist, Jenerali Ulimwengu, joined the Daily News shortly after graduating from UDSM and initially shared a column with Ochieng. Two years later, he was also pushed out. ‘The reason I was removed was because I was perceived as not being totally compliant with the party line, maybe seen to be a bit too radical’, Ulimwengu reflected. ‘I was working with people who criticised the government too much, too often. It was quite tense.’¹¹⁸

Over time, the party line came to predominate, aggravated by the potential for instability brought about by external danger and then economic crisis. Local news about ujamaa villages or regional commissioners took priority over international stories.¹¹⁹ Mkapa acknowledged that the Daily News contained ‘less controversial coverage regarding the implementation of policy’. Instead, criticism came by way of highlighting the mistakes of individuals.¹²⁰ That is not to say that the Daily News was devoid of any kind of debate about government policy, but the critique that remained tended towards the same limitations as those found among social scientists at the university: increasingly abstract discussions reflective of a rarefied political atmosphere. The radical journalists who had been attracted by the sense of possibilities in the Tanzanian revolution were disappointed by the post-Ginwala media. Ochieng lamented that ‘as the party became more stymied and the government hardened’, the ‘good apparatchiks’ who edited the Daily News sought ‘more and more to conform’.¹²¹

These more doctrinaire positions held that the media’s principal role was to assist in the goal of socialist development and nation-building. Taking a Marxist perspective, they argued that the idea of the ‘freedom of the press’ was a mirage. According to one Tanzanian communications scholar, it was ‘utterly impossible anywhere in our world today’ for newspapers to be ‘free from ideological ties and control’ since the press ‘not only promotes ideology but it is also to be part of it’.¹²² These Tanzanian debates and practices prefigured broader arguments about the role and nature of the media in the Third World in the 1970s. The New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), the media’s corollary of the better known New International Economic Order, represented a fightback from the Third World against what they considered to be the ‘imperialism’ of global communications networks. The NWICO’s advocates rejected the hegemonic influence of international media houses, especially Western news agencies, which inculcated the developing world with neocolonial mentalities. It called for an end to unrestricted ‘flows’ of information, which, much like free markets, perpetuated the dependency of the Third World. In their place, the NWICO proposed a more equitable system which revolved around regional coordination bodies and nationally sourced information.¹²³

Tanzania was an active participant in these conversations, which represented an internationalisation of attitudes to the media that had gestated in the country since independence. In 1976, Mkapa became the first director of SHIHATA (Shirika la Habari la Tanzania, News Agency of Tanzania), putting into practice plans which had been called for regularly in the Tanzanian media since independence. SHIHATA was legally empowered with a monopoly on the collection of local and foreign news, though financial difficulties proved insurmountable obstacles to fulfilling this goal. Much like the broader agenda of the Third World fightback against cultural imperialism through the media, Tanzania’s attempts to break its dependency ties to powerful Western news agencies failed to meet their ambitions.¹²⁴ More broadly, among the various criticisms levelled at the NWICO was that its true motivation was to insulate repressive regimes against media criticism. International collaboration between Third World states over the media paradoxically cemented state sovereignty and introspective politics over transnational cooperation.

The decline of the independent media in Tanzania was not solely a function of a changing ideological landscape, as the financial collapse of Ngurumo shows. Its circulation plummeted to just 2,000, as it struggled to compete with Uhuru, the TANU Swahili newspaper. In a period of economic crisis, the party- and state-owned newspapers were able to fall back on the economic infrastructure of parastatals for access to credit and the supply of essential materials such as newsprint in a time of shortage. Ngurumo had no such security. While the Daily News and Uhuru benefited from investment in efficient, modern presses that produced a relatively slick final copy, Ngurumo remained stuck with primitive colonial-era technology. In 1976, the last issue of Ngurumo rolled over the newspaper’s creaking press.¹²⁵ That left Tanzania’s mass media in the hands of the party-state, in the form of the Daily News, Uhuru, and the radio. This situation continued until the economic liberalisation measures of the late 1980s.

At the same time as the Tanzanian state monopolised the local news media, international journalists found their own room for manoeuvre limited. Dar es Salaam’s foreign press pack (or, more specifically, Western journalists) attested to a shift in the attitude of the Tanzanian state towards their activities. In November 1973, the Reuters correspondent noted that there was a worrying tendency for foreign reporters to be excluded from press conferences in Dar es Salaam.¹²⁶ In the same month as the establishment of the Daily News, the Reuters teleprinter was temporarily removed from the Kilimanjaro Hotel, denying journalists of a critical source of information. Reuters thought that the Kilimanjaro’s unreliable payments for its services were only partly responsible for the decision. More significant, its correspondent believed, was that at a time when the government appeared to be offering greater direction as to what news should be printed in Tanzanian newspapers, ‘it struck them as a bit odd to give everyone access to such stories in the foyer of the city’s leading hotel’.¹²⁷ Yet this only made journalists more reliant on the rumour networks which the government deplored: shortly after the removal of the teleprinter, a reporter for Jeune Afrique reflected that the best way of knowing what was going on in the city was to ‘go for a pint in the pub’.¹²⁸

Conclusion

Making news in Dar es Salaam was an international affair. In striking contrast to today’s press in Tanzania, where international stories seldom make the front page or editorial columns, the newspapers of the early socialist era had broad horizons. In part, this reflected the intellectual climate of revolutionary Dar es Salaam. The Nationalist and Standard drew ideological inspiration from the diverse strands of anticolonial political thought and action that coalesced in the Tanzanian capital. The Cold War, the struggle against minority rule, and Tanzania’s socialist state-making project fuelled friction between newspapers and also within them, as Ginwala’s turbulent experience demonstrates. But a commitment to Third World revolution also became problematic when it clashed with both the momentum towards Africanisation and the regime’s foreign policy priorities, especially Nyerere’s non-aligned position. In such circumstances, the president moved to replace editors and shore up top-down control over newspaper content. Meanwhile, the state’s control over the economic levers of production meant it was increasingly difficult for independent ventures to survive.

At first glance, the state’s de facto monopolisation of the media in Tanzania might seem to be a classic case of an authoritarian regime shutting down the possibilities for dissent. That would be too simplistic a verdict. Dar es Salaam’s newspaper wars were part of a broader ideological landscape in which independent Third World regimes grappled with the challenge of managing a postcolonial media sector. For journalists like Ochieng, government or party ownership did not necessarily preclude a vibrant, critical media, provided the state respected a certain degree of editorial independence. He reflected on his time in Dar es Salaam as ‘years of freedom of expression’, which ‘few other African and Third World countries have ever enjoyed’.¹²⁹ The debates which emerged from these developments reveal just how shallow concepts of the ‘freedom of the press’ are for analysing the politics of the media in Africa, which persist in contemporary studies, often taking the form of a crude opposition between the ‘state’ and ‘civil society’. As Emma Hunter argues, via her analysis of state-owned newspapers in the colonial era, the monolithic concept of ‘civil society’ masks complex entanglements that resist such easy separation.¹³⁰ Similar lessons for today’s African press can be taken from the present study of the contingent politics of revolutionary Dar es Salaam’s newspapers, whose trajectories only make sense once we break down these relationships and address the nature of the tensions – economic, ideological, political, and personal – that defined them.¹³¹ The path to a nationalised, largely toothless press owned by the party-state was not straight, but marked by moments of tension and experimentation. A similar story characterised the radicalisation of Tanzanian socialism through the TANU ‘Guidelines’ of 1971, which form the focus of the final chapter.