Acknowledgements
This book has taken me to many places, but it started life as a doctoral thesis at the University of Warwick. As my supervisors, David Anderson and Dan Branch were prepared to offer a wide-eyed twenty-something a lengthy tether to roam the archives in pursuit of Dar es Salaam’s revolutionaries. I am grateful for all their help during my PhD and then in navigating the academic world beyond the thesis. Special thanks are also due to Emma Hunter, who introduced me to East African history as an undergraduate and has supported me on many occasions since. Across the Atlantic, James Brennan has been an unfailing ally throughout the book’s development. He’s shared all sorts of archive files, read multiple drafts, pointed me in surprising directions, and filled the smallest niches in my knowledge. This work would have been far poorer without his input and I can only hope I’ve returned his generosity as best I can.
I have many debts in Tanzania. I started my PhD in the company of Max Chuhila, who has remained a crucial source of encouragement and friendship ever since. He and his colleagues at the History Department of the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) have always provided a welcoming host academic community on my visits to Tanzania. I am grateful to all of those who took time to share their memories with me and put me in contact with other eyewitnesses to Dar es Salaam’s revolutionary politics. Several have sadly since passed away. In particular I would like to thank Ian Bryceson, Salim Msoma, Juma Mwapachu, and Mohamed Said, as well as Muhammad Yussuf at the Zanzibar Institute for Research and Public Policy. I enjoyed talking with Mejah Mbuya, whose enthusiasm for Dar es Salaam’s revolutionary heritage is unparalleled. The city street plan in this book is his work as much as mine. On several visits to Dar es Salaam, Natalie Smith was a very welcoming host and even more generous friend. Hanifa and her family provided a home-from-home while I studied Swahili in Iringa. I learned much from talking contemporary Tanzanian politics with then doctoral researchers Michaela Collord, Cyrielle Maingraud-Martinaud, and Dan Paget. I would also like to thank Peter Bofin, Blandina Giblin, James Giblin, Allison Goforth, and Julie Santella for their help and friendship in all sorts of ways while in Tanzania. Research in the country would not have been possible without the support of the Commission of Science and Technology and Oswald Masebo at UDSM. I am thankful to the staff at the Tanzanian National Archives in Dar es Salaam, the National Records Centre in Dodoma, the basement room of the National Library, and the team led by Dr Kassim Mohamed at the East Africana Collection at UDSM.
Writing global and international history is a necessarily collective enterprise. I am extremely grateful for having colleagues who have shared documents, suggested archival collections, answered highly specific questions, and bounced ideas back and forth. In London, I have spent many long afternoons drinking chai and talking East African history with Ahmed Rajab, who has been a constant source of enthusiasm for this project. For feedback on various parts of the manuscript, I am indebted to Emily Bridger, Kate Bruce-Lockhart, Eric Burton, Sebastian Gehrig, Sacha Hepburn, Ismay Milford, Gerard McCann, and Simon Stevens. Miles Larmer was an exacting but generous doctoral examiner, and this book is much stronger for his comments. John Iliffe, who taught History at the University of Dar es Salaam during the years covered here, read the whole dissertation in astonishingly quick time, and provided cogent feedback as I began to revise it into the book. The final version was produced amid the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic and I am grateful to colleagues and librarians who answered calls to provide materials at short notice. In addition to those already mentioned, I would particularly like to acknowledge the help of Emily Callaci, Chambi Chachage, Kevin Donovan, Dan Hodgkinson, Trevor Grundy, Julia Held, Zoe LeBlanc, Andrew Ivaska, Sebabatso Manoeli, Jamie Miller, Graham Mytton, Anna Ross, Jodie Yuzhou Sun, and Natalia Telepneva.
Research for this book would not have been possible without the guidance of my language teachers, from secondary school to my doctoral studies. I am especially grateful for the sympathetic help afforded to me by archivists who put up with my efforts in German, Portuguese, and Swahili. In Warsaw, Paweł Pujszo interpreted and translated with great patience at the archives of the Polish Foreign Ministry. In Lisbon, Filipa Lima Félix transcribed a Portuguese-language documentary film. Pranjali Srivastava helped with preliminary research at the Indian National Archives in Delhi, which prompted me to submit a request for the digitalisation of relevant files there. On a slightly different linguistic note, I am indebted to John Hargreaves for teaching me about the power of English. In turn, I have been fortunate to have taught classes of engaging undergraduates, especially on my ‘Africa and the Cold War’ course at Warwick. Their questions, comments, and energy helped to shape this work.
The journey from PhD to this present book took place while I was a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. John Lonsdale, another former member of the History Department in Dar es Salaam, has been a staunch supporter of my work as my mentor. I am grateful for the friendship of a community of early career historians in Cambridge, especially Arthur Asseraf, Cécile Feza Bushidi, Merve Fejzula, Nicki Kindersley, Emma Stone Mackinnon, Hannah Shepherd, and Partha Pratim Shil. Julienne Obadia helped me keep my head down in our coffee shop working sessions. There are a number of people whom I have not (yet) met in person, but who were instrumental in shaping these pages as the book neared completion. Maria Marsh and Atifa Jiwa at Cambridge University Press guided the project towards publication. Four reviewers provided incisive comments on the manuscript, which helped me to sharpen the overall argument. The brilliant Kate Blackmer designed and produced the maps of East Africa and Dar es Salaam, accommodating even the most arcane requests for fine-tuning. The cover photograph comes courtesy of Salim Amin and the team at the Camerapix archives in Nairobi.
This research was supported by a doctoral scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and travel funding from the Royal Historical Society, the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations, the Lyndon Baines Johnson President Library, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, the German History Society, and the Society for the Study of French History. I am grateful to Taylor & Francis for granting permission to use material that forms the basis of Chapter 4, which was published in an earlier form as ‘The Assassination of Eduardo Mondlane: FRELIMO, Tanzania, and the Politics of Exile in Dar es Salaam’, in Cold War History, 17 (2017), 1–19.
Perhaps my greatest thanks are due to those people who haven’t read any of the words which follow in this book, but whose friendship and warmth have sustained me as I’ve written them. I couldn’t have a more supportive group of friends, who came together at university over a decade ago and have kept close even as we are now scattered around the world. Despite being an exceptionally talented bunch of people, none of them take themselves too seriously; their humour and self-deprecation have been a welcome reassurance away from academic life. Over the last few years, Anna’s love, advice, and encouragement have kept me on track as I completed this book. Now that this is done, I look forward to new adventures together. Finally, I would like to thank my family for all their support along the way. As a child, my parents taught me the importance of self-respect and of saying ‘thank you’. It’s therefore only fitting that I end these acknowledgements by expressing my deepest gratitude to them.
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