On 5 February 1967, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 people gathered at the Mnazi Mmoja grounds in Dar es Salaam. For two-and-a-half hours, they listened to President Nyerere explain a new landmark party document, quickly dubbed the Arusha Declaration. ‘Ndiyo! Ndiyo!’ shouted the crowd – ‘yes! yes!’ – as Nyerere extolled the virtues of TANU’s policies of socialism and self-reliance.Footnote 1
The full text of the Declaration was carried by the following day’s press. ‘The policy of TANU is to build a socialist state’, it began. The tone was polemical:
We have been oppressed a great deal, we have been exploited a great deal and we have been disregarded a great deal. It is our weakness that has led to our being oppressed, exploited and disregarded. Now we want a revolution – a revolution which brings to an end our weakness, so that we are never again exploited, oppressed, or humiliated.Footnote 2
To escape the constraints of a global order which subordinated the Third World’s developing economies to Europe and North America, the Arusha Declaration called upon Tanzanians to build a state which was ‘self-reliant’, rather than dependent on foreign aid or investment. The Declaration eschewed industrial growth in preference for agricultural development. This principle would later underpin a campaign of mass resettlement of the peasantry into centralised ujamaa villages. In the meantime, the immediate effect of the Declaration was electrifying: thousands of Tanzanians joined marches in support of its goals. It became a banner around which Tanzanian nationalism rallied.
However, this popular image of socialism and unity masks the heated politics that surrounding the drafting of the Arusha Declaration and the deeper fissures which it brought about. The Arusha Declaration, as Lionel Cliffe recognised on its twentieth anniversary, sent ‘shock waves’ through the political elite, but this is ‘scarcely acknowledged’ in official statements or scholarship.Footnote 3 He bemoaned the tendency to consider the politics of Arusha only in abstract terms. ‘Tanzania seems to have class forces, policies and programmes, but no debates and no in-fighting’, he argued. As this chapter shows, the politics of the Arusha Declaration involved ideological differences, factional rivalries, and the pursuit of personal self-interest. These developments have been understood in earlier political science literature through institutional structuresFootnote 4 or the forces of class struggle.Footnote 5 This chapter restores the agency of individual politicians to the contested politics of Arusha.
The years between the upheavals of 1964 and the beginning of 1967 featured intense debates about the direction of Tanzania’s economic development. Sluggish growth and murmurs of popular unrest presented cause for concern, which received a sense of urgency from events elsewhere in Africa. The rise of the military coup demonstrated the fragility of postcolonial governments and impelled Nyerere to avoid the same fate by driving forwards a socialist plan of action. By the end of 1967, Nyerere seemed to have reasserted his authority over the Tanzanian state. But in the process, he had created several powerful opponents and stirred fears abroad about the aspirations of his regime. More generally, the Arusha Declaration became installed as the non-negotiable basis for political debate in Tanzania. If the introduction of the one-party state provided the apparatus for the authoritarian turn that later followed, then the enshrinement of the ideological principles of the Declaration in Tanzanian nationalist discourse made dissenting voices easier to dismiss and castigate, often as neo-imperial collaborators.
The Arusha Declaration was not only a response to a national set of problems, but among the most coherent of the Third World’s ripostes to the global predicament of decolonisation. Political independence had not meant economic emancipation from relationships of dependency to wealthier states.Footnote 6 Indeed, as the Arusha Declaration argued, full political sovereignty was impossible while the underdeveloped economic sector of African states remained dominated by foreign capital and propped up by external aid. In theory, the achievement of the goal of self-reliance would mean Tanzania no longer had to enter into agreements with stronger powers that used aid to press their own agendas. It therefore was an effort to transcend the Cold War rivalries which had infused political life in Dar es Salaam, as the previous chapter showed. But the paradox, as recognised by a number of more pragmatically minded politicians, was that Tanzania continued to require external support in order to pursue these objectives. Nyerere and other senior ministers emphasised that the country remained open for foreign investment and donor aid, even as TANU cadres agitated for more radical change. Western onlookers proved more difficult to convince. Escaping the Cold War order was no easy task, as Tanzania’s revolutionaries were to find out.
Politics in the Time of Ujamaa
We saw in the previous chapter that foreign commentators, especially Western diplomats and journalists, regarded Tanzania’s willingness to engage with the socialist world as evidence that it was drifting down the path of communism. The government flatly denied these claims, and rightly so: its aid-seeking policies and socialist inclinations were bound up in its own brand of state-making. Like other Third World capitals, Dar es Salaam’s public sphere contained lively debate about the future of the nation and its path to development.Footnote 7 While we cannot speak of clearly defined factions competing against each other for influence, we can detect the presence of loose groupings of politicians. Their different understandings of the state of affairs were influenced by their own backgrounds. Even when they had links with external powers, these views did not map onto the Cold War spectrum through which many outsiders interpreted Tanzanian affairs. We should rather think about debates concerning development and economic policy in socialist Tanzania as being characterised by a scale of speed: the politics of fast change versus the politics of slow change.
Nyerere’s ideological agenda was profoundly shaped by his formative experiences in East Africa and abroad. Born in 1922 in the village of Butiama on the shores of Lake Victoria, Nyerere was the son of a Zanaki chief. He attended Tabora Boys School, which was the territory’s elite school for educating Africans to staff the colonial bureaucracy. After concluding his secondary education, Nyerere trained to be a teacher at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, which at the time was the only higher education institution in East Africa. Nyerere then gained a colonial scholarship to study at the University of Edinburgh, where he attained a master’s degree in 1952. Beyond the moral, ideological, and political influences which this education had on him, Nyerere’s trajectory left him with a network of personal connections among a rising Tanganyikan elite, many of whom had trod similar paths, at least as far as Tabora and Makerere. As one of the most educated, articulate, and well-connected politicians in the territory, Nyerere was drawn into nationalist circles. In 1954, he was instrumental in the transformation of the Tanganyika African Association into the more robust and explicitly anticolonial TANU.Footnote 8
Nyerere’s concept of African socialism crystallised around the idea of ujamaa (‘familyhood’). His first full exposition of this concept came in a pamphlet issued in 1962. ‘Socialism, like democracy, is an attitude of mind’ rather than ‘the rigid adherence to a standard political pattern’, Nyerere argued. He criticised the acquisitive behaviour of capitalists and the parasitical earnings of landowners. But Nyerere consciously sought to establish a distance between ujamaa and ‘European socialism’. He argued that there had been no class struggle in Africa and therefore set its societies outside of Marx’s evolutionary model of history. Ujamaa, he concluded, was ‘opposed to capitalism, which seeks to build a happy society on the basis of exploitation of man by man; and it is equally opposed to doctrinaire socialism which seeks to build its happy society on a philosophy of inevitable conflict between man and man’. He reiterated this point again and again over the following years, mainly to ward off his Cold War critics. Instead, his socialism was located in the familyhood of ‘traditional African society’, prior to the ruptures of colonialism, in which everyone ‘could depend on the wealth possessed by the community of which he was a member’.Footnote 9
Nyerere’s pamphlet was an eloquent meditation on socialist ethics, but an imprecise statement of intent. As Emma Hunter argues, ujamaa was a ‘polysemic’ idea which drew substance from vibrant debates in late colonial Tanganyika’s public sphere.Footnote 10 In the hands of ordinary Tanzanians, it represented a fluid language for the articulation of social issues, such as the problem of inequality. Some politicians opposed the idea of ‘African socialism’ with calls for ‘scientific socialism’, although the addition of another nebulous term only muddled matters further. From the grassroots membership to the party leadership, among cabinet ministers and bureaucrats, socialism meant different things to different people at different times. Translating the abstract set of morals which were bound up in the concept of ujamaa into economic policy was therefore a contested and contentious process.
The formulation of Tanzania’s development strategy after independence was overseen by a small coterie of economically minded cabinet ministers. All of them had received education abroad and had experience in running capital-intensive operations, as businessmen, cooperative managers, or agriculturalists. They were conversant in the language and practices of economic planning, which was then in vogue among postcolonial states. They travelled the international conference circuit, acting as spokesmen and ambassadors for the new nation. Crucially, they retained the confidence of Nyerere himself, even if their politics did not always align with the more vocal wings of TANU. That is not to argue that these men were neither African nationalists nor less committed to principles of ujamaa. But they were all, to a lesser or greater extent, concerned that the drive towards socialism must be underpinned by sound economic thinking, as opposed to development via political mobilisation. This led them to adopt a more cautious approach towards development policy. They were supported in their jobs by a number of foreign technocrats. Together, they set out the parameters of Tanzania’s planned economy.
Amir Jamal was perhaps the most astute of this group of men. Born into a prominent Asian family in Tanganyika, Jamal received a degree in commerce in Calcutta. Back in Tanganyika, he pursued a career in his family’s business. Jamal then entered public life through the Asian Association in Dar es Salaam. Unusually for an Asian, he developed close links with TANU and Nyerere. After independence, Jamal held a number of key financial ministerial portfolios and became the president’s economic guru, even as heated debate about the status of the Asian minority rumbled on in Tanzania.Footnote 11 Derek Bryceson, a European, was another enduring presence in Tanzania’s post-independence cabinets. He had arrived in East Africa as a settler farmer but aligned himself with TANU as uhuru loomed on the horizon. Bryceson established himself as a reliable minister for agriculture.Footnote 12 Paul Bomani was the most business-friendly member of this group. He owed his rise to the success of the cooperative movement in his home region of Lake Victoria, which he used as a springboard for a prominent role inside TANU.Footnote 13 Nsilo Swai also built his reputation in the cooperative movement, following a university education at Makerere and in India. His experience representing TANU abroad led to his appointment as Tanganyika’s first permanent representative to the UN.Footnote 14 Finally, Edwin Mtei was another well-travelled Tanzanian who had trod the well-worn path from Tabora Boys to Makerere and into the colonial civil service. He represented Tanzania at meetings of the International Monetary Fund, worked for the East African Common Services Organisation, and was then appointed the first governor of the Bank of Tanzania in 1966.Footnote 15 Jamal, Bryceson, Bomani, Swai, and Mtei were senior figures in the Tanzanian state apparatus who prioritised sound economic and fiscal management above political revolution. Bomani and Jamal, in particular, were highly regarded by Nyerere for their economic acumen, especially when dealing with international trade and aid. When Bomani suffered a shock defeat in the 1965 elections, Nyerere restored him to parliament as a presidential nominee, on the basis that his skills were ‘badly needed in the immediate future’. Bomani became minister for economic affairs and planning.Footnote 16
The First Five-Year Plan, which covered the period from 1964 to 1969, was broadly representative of the political outlook of this group. Swai oversaw the formulation of the plan, although its content was largely the work of a French expatriate expert. Following the launching of the plan, Nyerere created a new Directorate of Development and Planning, headed by the triumvirate of Swai, Jamal, and A. M. Babu, the Zanzibari who was moved to the mainland cabinet after the union. In comparison with the radical economic policies pursued after the Arusha Declaration, the plan was a relatively conservative document. It gave a considerable role to foreign investment, both in terms of donor aid and private capital. The plan also sought to preserve the role of the private sector in internal trade, which remained dominated by Tanzania’s Asian population.Footnote 17 This did not satisfy certain revolutionary voices inside government. The Moscow-trained Kassim Hanga, as minister for industries, attempted to introduce what one political scientist called a Stalinist ‘storm economy’, including large-scale farming and heavy industrialisation. His proposals received short shrift from Nyerere. In a cabinet reshuffle in November 1964, Hanga was moved to the position of minister for union affairs.Footnote 18
There were no real analogues of either Babu or Hanga, the two Zanzibari Marxist revolutionaries, in mainland Tanzania, at least not in central government. Yet there were a number of senior TANU figures whose own trajectories had taken them into the socialist world. Oscar Kambona was widely considered as an ardent socialist by observers from across the Cold War’s divisions, but he represents a much more slippery character for the historian. He met Nyerere at Tabora Boys, trained as a teacher, and then studied in London, with the assistance of TANU. There Kambona formed a number of friendships with other African nationalists, including Hanga. On returning to Tanganyika in 1959, he became a leading TANU organiser. After uhuru, Kambona held several powerful ministerial portfolios and in 1963 he was appointed as minister for foreign affairs. Kambona also chaired the OAU Liberation Committee, which was established in Dar es Salaam in 1963. One of the most popular politicians in the country, he emerged as a hero after negotiating with the mutinying troops in January 1964, even though rumours circulated about his own involvement in the uprising.Footnote 19
In the process of leading a liberation struggle, TANU had established a sprawling apparatus of branches across the country. However, the party’s ideological direction was provided by a smaller set of powerbrokers at the centre. As TANU’s chairman, Nyerere’s voice carried particular weight across the party’s various bodies, but it did not go unchallenged.Footnote 20 A National Conference, which met biennially from 1965 onwards, was the ultimate source of authority within the party, but in reality power was concentrated in a National Executive Committee of elected officeholders, which met around once every three months to discuss high-level matters. The NEC’s meetings were pivotal moments in the development of ujamaa socialism and often politically fraught. A Central Committee met regularly at the party’s headquarters in the Kariakoo area of Dar es Salaam to oversee the day-to-day running of TANU. In addition, the party’s women’s and youth wings provided avenues for ambitious Tanzanians to pursue their own political ambitions outside of the central party and government structures.
In contrast to government figures, many TANU MPs and senior cadres tended to favour direct political solutions to economic problems. They were by no means parochial figures, but their engagement with questions of socialism had a quite different slant: this was socialism as politics, rather than socialism as policy. This was in part a consequence of their different formative trajectories. They lacked the more technocratic education of many of the government ministers or expatriate bureaucrats. Instead, their political rise was owed mostly to their involvement in TANU. But they were also vulnerable to the preferences of their constituents or other party members, on whose votes they depended. If the details of economic planning were beyond the comprehension of many TANU officials, then ordinary Tanzanians were even less well informed. They expected uhuru to bring tangible benefits to their own daily lives. The high numbers of incumbents defeated in the 1965 elections showed that MPs had to be responsive to these expectations. As the sociologist Ronald Aminzade writes, the TANU radicals were therefore ‘less concerned with technical rationality and problem-solving expertise than with mobilizing ideological commitments and competing for political constituencies’.Footnote 21 Though there were rarely clean-cut lines of division, the party generally agitated for development through political mobilisation, while the bureaucracy and key ministers alike pressed for the prioritisation of political economy.Footnote 22
Throughout the first half of the 1960s, the issue of Africanisation was the major source of debate in Tanzanian politics. Europeans had dominated the colonial bureaucracy even as small numbers of Africans were brought into lower-level positions as independence approached. The pace of this transformation quickened after uhuru. Africans occupied just 26 per cent of mid- and high-level civil service posts in 1961; by 1966, this proportion had risen to 72 per cent. By the time of the Arusha Declaration, the Africanisation of the bureaucracy was no longer a real political problem, even if there was still criticism of the government’s reliance on expatriate experts at the top end of policy formulation and implementation.Footnote 23 However, the Africanisation of private trade was much more complicated and controversial. Party activists called for the expansion of the cooperative sector or even nationalisation to displace private traders, where European and particularly Asian capital continued to predominate. This meant that questions of economic justice and the redistribution of private capital became bound up in debates about racial belonging in the postcolonial nation. In parliamentary debates, party meetings, and newspaper columns, TANU activists called for trade to be brought into the hands of the state.Footnote 24 These frictions were felt most acutely in Dar es Salaam, where Asians dominated commercial life in the city centre, which had been designated an Indian zone under colonial rule.Footnote 25
The government’s policy was much more cautious. The Five-Year Plan was premised on the continued investment of foreign and private capital in Tanzania. Even if in theory it supported the expansion of cooperatives, the government warned that there was not enough trained manpower to enact such swift change responsibly. Jamal, for example, drew parliament’s attention to the ‘stark economic facts staring us in the face’ and advised that ‘to have revolutions just for the sake of having them is to commit a deception on our people’.Footnote 26 Clarifying its policy on Africanisation in 1965, the government emphasised the need to ‘gradually extend the collectively-owned sector of the economy and thus ensure both growth itself and the capability of our economy to serve the national interest at all times’. The government argued that Africanising the management of firms with ‘untrained’ staff ‘would be as disastrous to the economy as the Africanisation of hospitals with witchdoctors would be to the health of the nation’.Footnote 27
Even Babu cautioned against hasty intervention. The Western depiction of Babu as a communist extremist and a conduit for Chinese influence in East Africa was always a caricature. Yet his revolutionary credentials could not be doubted. While Nyerere tried to carve out a distinct ideological concept of ‘African socialism’, Babu adhered to the teachings of Marxism-Leninism. Nonetheless, he maintained a pragmatic streak that militated against counterproductive, politically motivated disruption to economic structures, which would drain resources away from more fundamental tasks. ‘I want to remind you that if we undertake to do something very rapidly we can fall’, Babu told parliament in 1964, when arguing against displacing private trade with cooperatives without adequate trained manpower.Footnote 28 In private, he argued that the nationalisation of Tanzania’s limited industrial sector would only involve obstructive bureaucratisation and paralyse the ‘spontaneous creative energies of the people’.Footnote 29 As we will see, this became a recurring theme in Babu’s economic thinking even as the ujamaa revolution entered a more radical phase.
Nyerere shared these concerns and was reluctant to meet the clamour for mass nationalisation. He believed that Tanzania lacked enough trained manpower to run major commercial assets. However, his position was made more difficult by examples set elsewhere in Africa. In September 1966, Gamal Abdel Nasser paid a fêted state visit to Tanzania, where he explained how the United Arab Republic had struck out at ‘strongholds of feudalism and corrupt capitalism’ to restore the ‘the ownership of national wealth’ to the workers.Footnote 30 Babu told Eastern Bloc diplomats that Nyerere had expressed his concern at Nasser’s speech. ‘Nasser has given me a great headache’, Nyerere reportedly said at a cabinet meeting. ‘Our people will also want [nationalisation], but how can I do that?’Footnote 31 Even as Nyerere incanted that ‘we must run while others walk’, his government cautioned against hasty change. In this view, Tanzania had to move swiftly, but not recklessly.
By late 1966, there was rising discontent at the lack of clear direction for socialist state-building in Tanzania. Michael Kamaliza, the secretary-general of NUTA, the country’s sole trade union, called for the appointment of a commission to study the question of socialism.Footnote 32 He found support from the Nationalist, TANU’s newspaper, which pointed out that ‘every leader has at present his own interpretation of socialism’.Footnote 33 Babu, on the other hand, used his pseudonymous column in the same newspaper to savage NUTA for simply pointing fingers and shirking responsibility rather than proposing solutions itself.Footnote 34 A secret TANU paper on the ‘Policy for the Transformation of the Party’, produced by Kambona, argued that the problem was not that there were different interpretations of ujamaa, but that the party’s leaders had not fully grasped Mwalimu’s teachings.Footnote 35 For all the expanding institutional apparatus of a party that increasingly exercised greater influence than cabinet, a heterogeneous elite therefore was yet to agree on a path forwards. ‘There is no party at all’, Babu told the East German consul-general. ‘There are only large groups and small groups and individuals with different and often contradictory attitudes to the same problems.’Footnote 36
In the period before the Arusha Declaration, Tanzania’s future path to development and the policies it required were fiercely debated. Onlookers turned to the labels of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in order to understand this postcolonial elite. But this spectrum was a poor guide. Writing in 1970, the political scientist Immanuel Wallerstein acknowledged that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ were tricky categories to employ when talking about African politics. They bundled together positions on foreign affairs, economic policy, anticolonial liberation, and continental unification. In an attempt to extricate the terms from their Cold War associations, Wallerstein proposed returning to the nineteenth-century French idea of ‘right’ and ‘left’. This pitted a more conservative ‘party of order’ against a ‘party of movement’.Footnote 37 The latter term is particularly helpful here. Tanzanian politics in the time of ujamaa was a question not so much of alternative ideological visions of the future, but about the speed, means, and intensity of the journey to get there.Footnote 38 On the one hand, senior ministers, bureaucrats, and planners, all well-versed in international theories of political economy, urged caution. On the other, TANU cadres and MPs looked to the party as an engine of transformation. They wanted socialism at speed.
Storm Clouds
The rumbles of thunder elsewhere in Africa seemed to amplify the sound of ticking clocks in Tanzania. As the lustre of liberation wore off Africa’s postcolonial governments and the challenges of meeting the expectations of independence became starker, a wave of military coups toppled elected leaders. In January 1966 alone, the governments of Nigeria, Upper Volta, and the Central African Republic were swept away. International reputation provided no security: the previous June, Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella had succumbed to a palace coup. Deteriorating economic conditions fuelled popular discontent with civilian regimes. Weak postcolonial democratic institutions proved flimsy opposition for disaffected militaries. There was suspicion that the coup makers received external support. In his pseudonymous Nationalist column, Babu pointed to parallels with Latin America, where the United States’ reputation for engineering the end of left-leaning governments had already been established. ‘Is there any doubt as to who is the master-mind in this African version of the Latin game?’, asked Babu.Footnote 39 Political instability closer to home aggravated Tanzanian fears, as both Kenya and Uganda were wracked with cabinet crises. In Dar es Salaam, the mutiny loomed large in recent memory.
The Tanzanian government was concerned about the possibility of political unrest abroad emboldening would-be conspirators at home. On 10 February 1966, Nyerere addressed members of the TPDF and police at the Police Officers’ Mess in Dar es Salaam, where he spoke about the coup in Nigeria. With dark humour, Nyerere said that if the army and police were thinking of doing the same in Tanzania, he hoped they would do so without bloodshed.Footnote 40 Then there were unverified reports that, on 23 February, Nyerere told a meeting of MPs that there was a plot to remove him and appealed for their vigilance. The text of his draft speech, passed by an expatriate journalist to the Americans, contained the allegation that there were ‘some people who are cooking up plans to overthrow the government’. The same journalist said that Nyerere had several plotters under surveillance, including Oscar Kambona and Job Lusinde, the home affairs minister.Footnote 41
The following day, news reached Dar es Salaam that Kwame Nkrumah had been overthrown in a military coup in Ghana. The effect in Tanzania was predictable. By this time, relations between Nkrumah and Nyerere had smouldered into animosity. Yet both men were high-profile, progressive African leaders committed to the unification and liberation of the continent, even if they disagreed as to how this was best achieved. The American ambassador described Dar es Salaam as being in ‘a high state of edginess’ with an ‘audible buzz’.Footnote 42 There was suspicion of CIA involvement in the coup. Nyerere expressed disbelief. ‘What is happening in Africa? What are all the coups about?’, he asked a press conference. ‘What is behind all this?’ Pretoria and Salisbury were now ‘jubilant’.Footnote 43 Nyerere was right: Tanzania’s enemies did indeed lick their lips. Portuguese intelligence claimed that there existed ‘an atmosphere which would greatly facilitate an action aimed at fomenting serious disturbances’ in Tanzania, that would ‘doubtlessly benefit the interests of Portugal in Africa’.Footnote 44
On the international stage, the coup presented the Tanzanian government with a dilemma: should it recognise the military usurpers in Accra or not? On the one hand, Nyerere abhorred the fall of a progressive, elected African head of state. In March, he told the press that ‘the gun or the revolver should not take the place of the ballot box’. On the other hand, given the emphasis in the OAU charter on non-interference in the internal affairs of member states, what choice did Tanzania have, other than to recognise the new regime? ‘Do we organise subversion in Ghana? Do we promote or provoke civil war in Ghana?’, Nyerere asked.Footnote 45 The answer, of course, was no: African unity had to take priority. As Jeffrey Byrne observes, ‘alarming as coups d’état were to postcolonial elites, they were becoming too common to ostracize those governments that came to power in that fashion; otherwise, Third Worldist conferences would become increasingly poorly attended events.’Footnote 46 Tanzania’s decision to recognise the new Ghanaian regime, along with numerous lower-profile examples of coups in Africa, set an important precedent. As Chapter 7 explains, when Nyerere refused to recognise the military government of Idi Amin in Uganda, he broke with previous policy and in doing so destabilised East Africa’s political landscape.
Nyerere’s public deliberation on the question of recognising the military government in Ghana was a response not just to a dilemma of international politics, but complications thrown up by the apparent insubordination of Oscar Kambona. Shortly after the coup, Kambona led a Tanzanian delegation to an OAU conference in Addis Ababa. There was disagreement among the member states as to whether to seat a delegation from the new Ghanaian military regime.Footnote 47 When the new representatives were accepted, Kambona led a walkout. Nyerere was furious with Kambona, who apparently acted without the president’s approval. Kambona had already been removed from his position of foreign minister after the 1965 elections and moved to the position of minister for regional administration. The CIA thought that his relationship with the president had broken down. ‘We believe that Kambona has been on the skids for some time, but his unauthorized OAU walkout provided new grease’, it filed.Footnote 48 Soon after his return from Addis Ababa, Kambona travelled to the Netherlands for medical treatment. His leave came with Nyerere’s blessing, although rumours held that Kambona had essentially been sent into exile.Footnote 49
Meanwhile, Dar es Salaam was gripped by a period of heightened attention to the phenomenon of rumourmongering. The gossip about Kambona was picked up abroad. His trip to the Netherlands featured in an article in the London-based newssheet Africa, which summarised the flurry of rumours circulating in Dar es Salaam. Alongside Kambona’s illness, it contained talk of coups, the dissolution of the union, Babu’s attempted resignation, and food riots in Pemba.Footnote 50 The article was reprinted and then denounced in the Nationalist. An editorial described the ‘filthy sheet’ as evidence of ‘the evil designs’ of foreign plotters.Footnote 51 Babu himself used his column in the Nationalist to launch a furious attack on Africa, a publication which sowed discord by pitting ‘hypothetical groups’ against one another in a ‘literary Punch and Judy’. He sketched out the spread of such rumours via Dar es Salaam’s embassies. ‘The public can now see the source of the recent spate of rumours and counter-rumours which made Dar es Salaam regain its reputation of a lively, gossipy town.’Footnote 52 Launching an explicit campaign against rumourmongering, Nyerere himself claimed that certain ambassadors were at fault for spreading malicious gossip.Footnote 53 Uhuru, TANU’s Swahili newspaper, warned that if this was found to be true, it would ask Nyerere to shut down their embassies.Footnote 54
These developments came against a backdrop of slow economic growth, widening inequality, and growing social tensions in Tanzania. By 1966, it was apparent that the prospects of growth in both Tanzania’s agrarian and industrial sectors were poor. In rural areas, uhuru had brought little material progress to the peasantry, whose disposable income had scarcely altered since independence. This contrasted with significant gains for urban workers. The Five-Year Plan was not generating the desired growth: foreign capital investment failed to match expectations, manpower demands overstretched limited resources, and government ministries failed to coordinate their approaches. Nor, as Tanzania’s disputes with Western donors had demonstrated, was dependence on external aid a solution. Meanwhile, the number of Tanzanians leaving school with a secondary education outstripped the capacities of the labour market to absorb their expectations of a middle-class career. Internal discontent mounted. There was growing criticism of a governing class – the wabenzi, ‘those who own Mercedes-Benz’ – that appeared to be benefiting from the fruits of the Africanisation of the bureaucracy.Footnote 55
A confrontation between Nyerere and the students at University College epitomised these tensions.Footnote 56 In November 1966, students staged a demonstration in which they declared their unwillingness to participate in a programme of compulsory national service for all university graduates. Pointing to the high salaries that civil servants and politicians earned, the students claimed they were being unfairly treated. Nyerere met the demonstrators outside State House. He reacted angrily. ‘You are demanding a pound of flesh; everyone is demanding a pound of flesh except the poor peasant’, he railed.Footnote 57 A total of 412 demonstrators – around two-thirds of the student body – were rusticated. The incident shook Nyerere. Not only had he faced a rare instance of significant, outspoken opposition, but the issues highlighted by the students’ demands tallied with the president’s own judgement. While the students’ rejection of national service could be presented as unpatriotic, their critique of the current state of Tanzanian society exposed fundamental problems. Student complaints were mirrored by discontent among the workers, whose rising income since independence had only whetted their appetite for further gains. They were therefore unhappy with the government’s decision to hold wage increases at 5 per cent per annum and called for the introduction of fixed prices.Footnote 58 In a prevailing climate of political uncertainty and economic disillusionment, Nyerere concluded that a major intervention was necessary.
Six Days in Arusha
In January 1967, Nyerere undertook a tour of provincial Tanzania. In a series of speeches, he reflected on the country’s experience since independence and the economic challenges that it continued to face. Nyerere observed the dangers posed by the forces of neo-imperialism, as demonstrated by the fall of Ben Bella and Nkrumah. He described 1966 as a ‘year of humiliation and shame’ for Africa. To cut loose of its ties of dependency and insulate its sovereignty from imperialist predations, Tanzania required its own revolution. These speeches prepared the ground for the Arusha Declaration.Footnote 59 Over time, the document became directly associated with Mwalimu, as the president’s personal initiative. ‘Where other post-colonial leaders were overthrown in coups or pushed aside by rivals’, writes Emma Hunter, ‘Nyerere was able to create a new narrative which put himself at the centre of the struggle against illegitimate accumulation and corruption in politics, redefining politics as a moral struggle.’Footnote 60 However, as Issa Shivji has argued, the events which prefigured the grand proclamation in Dar es Salaam were a contentious process. Shivji’s account provides much-needed insights on the contested nature of the behind-closed-doors party meetings in Arusha. It highlights that while the text of the Declaration was primarily the work of the president, it was not his work alone.Footnote 61
There were actually two major TANU meetings in Arusha in late January 1967, not one. At the first, from 23 to 25 January, Nyerere explained his proposed course of action to TANU’s regional commissioners. He established an eight-person committee, chaired by Edward Barongo, which drew up a set of recommendations. These were taken up by a meeting of the NEC, which lasted from 26 to 28 January. The NEC debated and ultimately accepted the proposals made by the Barongo Committee – though not without some fierce dissent. The party secretariat then drafted the text that became the Arusha Declaration, to which Nyerere added a lengthy passage on his key theme, self-reliance. The TANU meetings did not therefore simply rubber stamp Nyerere’s proposals. Rather, they contained junctures at which other politicians raised their concerns and sought to influence policy. Critically, these were meetings of the party, rather than the cabinet, which had been sceptical of radicalising Tanzania’s development. Previous proposals to appoint a commission on socialism were abandoned in favour of a swift process that hurried through the Arusha Declaration. Finally, the document was publicly unveiled by Nyerere on 5 February at Mnazi Mmoja in Dar es Salaam.
The central thrust of the speeches which Nyerere made at the Arusha meetings was the theme of kujitegemea (‘self-reliance’). Tanzania might have won its formal independence, Nyerere argued, but it remained shackled to the world’s wealthier states, which exploited the country’s underdevelopment. ‘Did we really take power ourselves?’, he asked the NEC.Footnote 62 Nyerere’s solution to this problem – kujitegemea – was a flexible idea. As Priya Lal argues, self-reliance was simultaneously a method of action and aspirational outcome, operating at multiple scales, from the hard-working family to the nation-state. Economic growth required not foreign capital, but disciplined labour and the full mobilisation of Tanzania’s natural resources, especially in the agricultural sector.Footnote 63 Nyerere’s speeches in Arusha mixed popular local metaphors with references to the inequalities of the international economic order. He deployed the image of ‘straw-sucking’, drawing on the tradition of African elders sucking alcohol from a common pot and thereby living off the hard work of the masses.Footnote 64 But he extended the metaphor beyond Tanzanian society, to highlight the exploitation of the national economy by foreign powers.
To sell his socialist vision, Nyerere set Tanzania’s predicament in a global context informed by contemporary political developments. Powers like Britain, West Germany, and the United States could not be relied upon to provide aid, Nyerere stated. He pointed to the fall in American support to Africa under the Johnson administration. The break in relations with Britain had cost Tanzania £7.5 million in development aid. Worse, the support these states did offer came with political strings attached, as the imbroglio with West Germany demonstrated. Nyerere drew attention to the situation in India, where the United States had attached conditions to food aid to Delhi with an eye to its Cold War objectives in Vietnam. He pointed out that while the Tanzanian government considered the likely international response of powerful Western countries to its decision-making, the same was not true vice-versa. ‘In Britain they decide something in cabinet or within the party without asking whether Julius will like it or not.’ In contrast, Nyerere praised the Third World countries which resisted such exploitation. He spoke highly of China’s anti-imperialism and self-reliant development policies. Turning to the case of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Nyerere suggested that this small, revolutionary state offered guidance in the struggle against neocolonial exploitation. ‘They don’t accept even one mrija [straw-sucker] there’, he said.Footnote 65 Cuba, too, had demonstrated the ability of the weak to stand shoulder to shoulder with the powerful. ‘When Castro coughs, Americans listen’, he told the regional commissioners, to laughter. ‘As for India, they don’t care!’Footnote 66 These international references were central to Nyerere’s pitch at the Arusha meetings, but were absent from the final document.
However, neocolonialists from beyond Africa’s borders were not Tanzania’s sole enemy. According to Nyerere, self-reliance required the ending of exploitation in Tanzania by local businessmen. The egalitarian principles of ujamaa therefore required party and government leaders to not be ‘associated with the practices of capitalism and feudalism’, as the ‘Arusha Resolution’ that was appended to the final document put it. Under what was eventually formalised as a ‘leadership code’, they could not hold shares or directorships in private companies, or own houses for renting out to others. This was Nyerere’s response to the economic disparities which had been exposed by the student protests of the previous November. It was also a predictably bitter pill for the Tanzanian elite to swallow. After Nyerere unveiled his plans in his opening speech to the regional commissioners, his audience had been left, in the words of one eyewitness, ‘stupefied’.Footnote 67
In pushing through this leadership code, Nyerere was forced to concede ground on the question of nationalisation. As explained earlier, the president was wary of the risks of en masse nationalisation. Nyerere told the regional commissioners that there were two methods for putting the economy under the control of the peasants and workers. The first involved the government taking ownership of key economic assets. The second, as in the case of cooperatives, involved the people themselves directly taking control of means of production. Nyerere argued that the first model carried particular dangers, since it placed the government as an intermediary between the means of production and the workers; only if the government was genuinely democratic would workers really control the economy. The Nazis had nationalised a lot, Nyerere remarked, but they had hardly put those assets in the hands of the German people. ‘If there is no democracy, government ownership of the economy can be very unjust.’Footnote 68
However, under the influence of more radical members of TANU, nationalisation became a core plank of the Arusha Declaration.Footnote 69 According to Fortunatus Masha, the party’s publicity secretary, a faction led by Kambona successfully pressured the Barongo Committee to call for the nationalisation of major economic assets.Footnote 70 The previous week, Kambona had told party youth activists that the time had arrived for the government to take over ‘all major industries presently owned by minority groups’, adding an allusion to race to Nyerere’s colour-blind discussions of exploitation.Footnote 71 More circumspect voices at the meeting in Arusha called for caution. Edwin Mtei, the governor of the Bank of Tanzania, urged the NEC members to proceed carefully but decisively. He was especially concerned by the outflow of capital which nationalisation would likely provoke, though recalled that the mood of the meeting prevailed against any detailed exposition of these economic consequences.Footnote 72 Under the influence of TANU leaders, the Arusha Declaration therefore took on a more radical appearance than Nyerere had initially planned. As he stressed, self-reliance, not nationalisation, was intended to be the main theme of the document.Footnote 73 Nonetheless, in the space of a few days – and without consulting his cabinet – Nyerere had his socialist manifesto.
The Revolution and Its Discontents
Although the Arusha Declaration established many principles, it had little to say about their implementation. It committed the government to bringing ‘all the major means of production and exchange’ under the control of the workers and peasants, but it set out no policy measures for achieving this goal. The first move came on the day after Nyerere’s Mnazi Mmoja speech. On the morning of 6 February, Nyerere held a short cabinet meeting at which he presented the imminent nationalisation of the banking sector as a fait accompli.Footnote 74 That evening, Nyerere announced that all foreign banks operating in Tanzania had been nationalised, prompting jubilation across the city. Bars overflowed with people who drank to ‘the success of Socialism and Self-Reliance’.Footnote 75 After nationalising the banks, the government turned its attention to other economic sectors. Every day, Nyerere revealed the details of nationalised businesses to huge crowds in Dar es Salaam. The government either totally nationalised or took controlling shares in eight grain-milling firms, six import-export houses, all insurance businesses, plus seven subsidiaries of multinational corporations. It assured that it would pay ‘full and fair’ compensation.Footnote 76
The feverish reception of the Arusha Declaration contrasted with the sense of uncertainty among Dar es Salaam’s business community, dominated by Tanzanian Asians and foreigners. A cautiously worded editorial in the Standard, their preferred newspaper, asked whether ‘the same end’ might have been achieved with ‘less shock to the commercial and industrial sector and to foreign confidence?’Footnote 77 These concerns were shared by the ‘political economists’ in the government. The nationalisation of the banks caused particular alarm. Mtei as governor of the Bank of Tanzania, was reportedly distraught by developments and tendered his resignation, which Nyerere did not accept.Footnote 78 Amir Jamal, the finance minister, was less ideologically opposed to the nationalisation of the banks, but the news still caught him off guard. At a dinner hosted by the East German consul-general on the same day as the decision was announced, Jamal admitted to the Soviet ambassador that he had not been consulted about the takeover.Footnote 79 Both Mtei and Jamal were worried about the danger of serious capital flight. They quickly introduced currency controls to prevent Tanzanian shillings from being converted into their Kenyan or Ugandan equivalents.Footnote 80 In anticipation of a potential run on the banks, armed police were dispatched to guard their premises across the city.Footnote 81 Other ‘moderate’ ministers shared this anguish. Paul Bomani told a foreign journalist that ‘Julius is out of his mind’ and that ‘we will not live under a crazy Nyerere dynasty’.Footnote 82 Derek Bryceson informed the Canadian high commissioner that he considered Arusha socialism to be idealistic and impractical, and that he had even contemplated resigning.Footnote 83 Meanwhile, Jamal resolved himself to the task of negotiating the nationalisation terms and compensation arrangements.
Then, as suddenly as the wave of nationalisations had begun, Nyerere brought them to an abrupt halt. In an article in the Sunday News on 12 February, he announced that there would be no further takeovers. While the idea of ‘self-reliance’ meant many things in Tanzania, economic autarky was not among them. The ‘political economists’ in central government recognised foreign aid and private investment would be vital in driving forwards Tanzania’s socialist revolution. Nyerere clarified that self-reliance meant an end to neither aid nor investment, but that Tanzania would accept both as a ‘catalyst’ towards economic progress.Footnote 84 He argued that ‘it would be as stupid for us to assume that capitalists have horns as it is for people in Western Europe to assume that we in Tanzania have become devils’.Footnote 85 Government representatives continued to court private capital. Babu gave the Joint Chambers of Commerce of Tanzania a ‘categorical assurance’ that the ‘limited nationalisation programme’ was over. He encouraged his audience to see the measures as ‘sharp swords of deliverance’, rather than ‘clumsy boulders designed to stifle enterprise and initiative’.Footnote 86 Nyerere used an interview with the New York Times to call for investment in Tanzania on a ‘partnership’ basis.Footnote 87 Quite clearly, the government wanted to reassure the West that Tanzania remained open for business.
Nonetheless, the Western response to the Arusha Declaration was predictably critical. Again, it was framed by Cold War precepts. From London, a Daily Telegraph editorial under the headline ‘Building Marxania’ predicted ‘a sharp recession’ in Tanzania.Footnote 88 Several observers incorrectly jumped to the conclusion that the Arusha Declaration was the product of external influence. ‘Tanzania is to attempt a “great leap forward” on Sino-Zanzibari lines’, stated the Times.Footnote 89 One Nairobi financier described the Arusha Declaration as a ‘Nasser-inspired take-over by decree with Chinese encouragement’.Footnote 90 British diplomats echoed this unease, sharing similar pathological ideas about the ‘spread’ of communism in the African body politic. The high commissioner to Kenya feared that Nyerere would be ‘drawn inexorably’ towards the communist camp. A meeting of British diplomats in Nairobi judged that it was preferable for Arusha socialism to fail, ‘to prevent the infection spreading to neighbouring countries’. It concluded that Britain should therefore ‘avoid doing anything to cushion the Tanzanian Government from the full economic consequences of their actions’.Footnote 91 Nyerere bristled at the charge that he was under foreign influence. He used a set-piece speech in Cairo in April to put clear distance between ujamaa and Marxism-Leninism. Criticising the ‘theology’ of socialism, he stated that ‘this idea that there is one “pure socialism”, for which its recipe is already known, is an insult to human intelligence’.Footnote 92
These crude Cold War assumptions misinterpreted both the content of debate in Arusha and realities in Dar es Salaam’s corridors of power. The Arusha Declaration, as we have seen, was driven neither by the communist powers nor the more revolutionary members of the Tanzanian elite. For example, the Sunday Times in London noted that some observers considered the nationalisations ‘a triumph for the Chinese-inspired Zanzibar Communist Commerce Minister Mohamed Babu’. This was well wide of the mark.Footnote 93 In fact, Babu was privately unconvinced about the new policy. As he propounded in his later writings, Babu was sceptical about the Arusha Declaration’s emphasis on the intensification of agricultural production. Instead, he had favoured an industrialisation policy geared to transforming Tanzania’s economic base.Footnote 94 In particular, he felt mass nationalisation was reckless and premature. Babu feared that the government was overextending its operations beyond the limited capacity of the state. He had already clashed with Nyerere on these grounds: shortly before the Arusha Declaration, Babu had rejected the president’s request to develop plans for a price control mechanism in Tanzania, arguing that it would be expensive and bureaucratically cumbersome.Footnote 95
On 22 February, Nyerere used a minor government reshuffle to switch Babu from the ministry of commerce and cooperatives to the less economically pivotal position of minister for health. Babu told the East Germans that this was a purely tactical move by Nyerere, designed to reassure Western investors by putting the portfolio into the hands of the moderate Paul Bomani.Footnote 96 On the face of it, this would not seem an unlikely scenario. However, snippets of intelligence suggest that this was more than a public relations matter. Both Oscar Kambona and his close ally, the civil servant Dennis Phombeah, informed Eastern Bloc officials that Babu had been moved due to his failure to draw up a list of foreign firms for nationalisation.Footnote 97 (Another casualty of this reshuffle was Nsilo Swai, the minister for industries, who also objected to mass nationalisation.) Undeterred, Babu used a speech in Nairobi to warn against overreliance on agricultural exports, which were vulnerable to fluctuations in the global marketplace. East Africa could not afford to become a region of ‘banana republics’, Babu argued, and therefore had to develop its heavy industry.Footnote 98 This was in direct contradiction to the message of the Arusha Declaration. This ideological friction between Nyerere and Babu would remain concealed at the heart of government for the next half-decade. Among the Tanzanian cabinet, responses to the Arusha Declaration did not therefore follow any ‘left-right’ split. If anything, its most revolutionary member was critical of the new policies, even as he defended them in public.
If the reaction of the ‘political economists’ to the Arusha Declaration was concern about the country’s stability, some party members believed that Tanzania’s socialist revolution did not go far enough. These criticisms generally took two forms. First, they called for a more radical, interventionist approach to Africanisation. For example, Michael Kamaliza, the minister of labour and NUTA secretary-general, urged Nyerere to nationalise all industries and farms in Tanzania.Footnote 99 Second, radicals argued that the party must play a more active role in spearheading the implementation of socialism. At a TANU special conference held in late February, the MP Joseph Kasella-Bantu called for the development of an ideologically committed vanguard party.Footnote 100 The TANU Youth League (TYL), packed with party radicals, was particularly vocal in demanding an accelerated drive to socialism.Footnote 101 In one instance, this enthusiasm descended into reckless behaviour. In March, the MP and TYL secretary-general, Eli Anangisye, was accused of inciting an attack on the recently nationalised General Bank of the Netherlands, in which a portrait of the Dutch Queen Juliana was defaced. Nyerere apologised to the Dutch government for this ‘act of hooliganism’. The incident was particularly embarrassing as the Dutch government had just given Tanzania £100,000 towards a fish processing plant. For a state wishing to reassure foreign donors, this was hardly a good look. Anangisye was quickly stripped of his TYL role but became an embittered backbencher in parliament.Footnote 102
In response to demands for further radicalisation, Nyerere stressed the need for moderation over recklessness. He flatly rejected the idea of turning TANU into a vanguard party. Nyerere again employed the language of slow change. ‘It would make us adventurists and opportunists not revolutionaries’, he said. ‘We cannot go “full speed” into socialism.’Footnote 103 Rebutting calls for the nationalisation of local capital at the TANU special meeting, he made a comparison with the typical arrangement whereby Asians ran shops and Masai raised cattle. ‘Now to move an Asian and ask him to raise cattle and a Masai to run a shop’, he told laughing TANU delegates, would be for ‘self-amusement’ alone. He urged Tanzanians to keep one eye on the direction of the path to socialism, and the other on the ‘mud, thorns, termite-mounds, and hills’ along the way.Footnote 104 As we will see in Chapter 7, these arguments remained unresolved as TANU sought to navigate the implementation of the Arusha agenda into the 1970s.
For all the clamour for more radical action, the bulk of discontent with the Arusha Declaration arose from the leadership code, which threatened the personal wealth and property of the elite. An NEC meeting held in Iringa between 29 May and 1 June affirmed that TANU leaders must either abide by the code or step down.Footnote 105 Some felt that the terms had been imposed unjustly, without adequate discussion or warning. Again, this reflected the ‘top-down’ nature of the Arusha Declaration, which was imposed from above without discussion in parliament or lower party ranks. When Nyerere solicited questions from MPs about the Arusha Declaration, he was disappointed by their priorities. In the icy preface to a booklet carry a selection of his responses, Nyerere expressed his displeasure that almost all those received concerned the leadership qualifications, and none socialism or self-reliance.Footnote 106 However, open criticism remained muted. The 1965 elections had been highly competitive, with several high-profile incumbents losing their seats. For any MP to dissent in public to these popular measures would have been political suicide. One former MP recalled that the conditions were ‘like someone holding a sharp knife to one’s side in such a way that it could not be pulled away without getting hurt’.Footnote 107
Although the vast majority of the elite therefore eventually relinquished their private assets, a few chose otherwise. One high-profile case was Bibi Titi Mohammed, the most prominent female member of the party, who resigned as the head of the Tanganyika Women’s Union and from the TANU Central Committee. In 1967, she ascribed her decision to stand down from her party positions to back pains; later, in an interview with a researcher, she made no mention of any injury and explained her opposition to the hasty and undemocratic adoption of the Arusha Declaration. But at the time, popular gossip held that she simply did not want to give up her private properties.Footnote 108 In some cases, TANU leaders who had previously championed accelerated Africanisation now baulked at giving up their own assets. Ali Saidi Mtaki, a junior minister who was once referred to as the ‘Karl Marx of Tanganyika’, chose not to comply with the leadership code. He relinquished his government and party offices to take up a managerial position in a British tobacco multinational.Footnote 109
More seriously for Nyerere, the leadership code jarred with an even bigger figure in Tanzanian politics: Oscar Kambona. In public, Kambona talked up the Tanzanian revolution – indeed, he tilted towards a more radical approach. Interviewed in Jeune Afrique after the Arusha Declaration, he stated that there was no such thing as ‘African socialism’, only an undefined ‘scientific socialism’.Footnote 110 At the Iringa NEC meeting, he presented a report calling for the reorganisation of TANU into ‘the revolutionary vanguard of the people’, thus setting him at odds with Nyerere, who had already ruled out the idea.Footnote 111 Kambona later cited the Iringa meeting as being the moment when he believed that Nyerere intended to crush TANU’s freedom through the apparatus of the state.Footnote 112 As we have seen, Kambona’s relations with Nyerere were already strained. Yet Kambona’s chief complaints about the Arusha Declaration appear to have arisen not from its insufficient radicalism, but the consequences it had for his personal assets and wealth. Job Lusinde, another cabinet minister, recalled receiving a telephone call from Kambona immediately after the pivotal NEC meeting in Arusha. Kambona seemed panicked about the implications of the leadership code for his numerous private properties.Footnote 113 Rumours fluttered around diplomatic circles. According to the Polish embassy, for example, Kambona had three houses in Tanzania and large sums of money stashed away in European bank accounts.Footnote 114 Even as the country rallied to the Arusha Declaration, the socialist revolution seemed to be opening cleavages within the Tanzanian elite rather than soldering it together.
Reshuffle and Rupture
On 7 June, Nyerere announced a long-anticipated cabinet reshuffle and restructuring of central government. He rung the changes for various reasons. Tensions between the state and NUTA saw Michael Kamaliza replaced as minister of labour. Kassim Hanga was dropped as minister for union affairs, almost certainly due to pressure placed on Nyerere by Karume, with whom Hanga had experienced a troubled relationship since the union three years earlier.Footnote 115 Babu switched positions again, becoming minister for lands, settlement, and water development. Derek Bryceson (agriculture and cooperatives) and Amir Jamal (finance) kept their posts. Paul Bomani reverted to being minister for economic affairs and planning, resuming the role he had occupied prior to the minor February reshuffle. The retention of Bomani, Bryceson, and Jamal in portfolios with key economic responsibilities demonstrated Nyerere’s prioritisation of competent administration over political revolution and desire to maintain the confidence of foreign donors and investors. In the end, the loyalty of these ‘moderates’ to Nyerere, plus the element of compromise built into the Arusha Declaration, ensured their continued support for the government. The reshuffle reassured Western onlookers. The French ambassador’s snap judgement was that Nyerere had placed in key economic positions men ‘who were not suspected of colluding with extreme-left subversion’ and ‘capable of inspiring confidence after the quirks [foucades] of the Arusha Declaration’.Footnote 116
However, the most significant development came after Nyerere’s decision to appoint Kambona, previously minister for regional administration, to the newly created portfolio for local government and rural development. Kambona promptly resigned both from his new ministerial role and as secretary-general of TANU. At a press conference, in the company of Hanga, Kambona announced that he had resigned on health grounds.Footnote 117 The previous year, Kambona had indeed travelled to the Netherlands for treatment for high blood pressure. However, by mid-1967, he was cured: the real reasons lay in a series of disputes with the president and his supporters. On 11 June, Kambona, again flanked by Hanga, addressed his constituents in Morogoro, where he made veiled criticisms of Nyerere’s authoritarian tendencies.Footnote 118 Dar es Salaam swirled with rumours about Kambona’s connections with the Eastern Bloc. In May, Lady Marion Chesham, a Nyerere confidante, told an American official that the president had proof that Kambona was receiving money from the Soviet Union and would ‘take strong action’ against Kambona.Footnote 119 It is difficult to establish any solid factual ground here, but Kambona did turn to the East Germans for assistance, without success, as the next chapter reveals. When MPs passed a motion calling for Kambona to explain his decision to resign, he declined to attend parliament.Footnote 120
By this time, Dar es Salaam was a febrile city. Despite the fact they all belonged to the same party, the session of parliament was characterised by the trading of insults between MPs. The budget passed by just 69 votes to 37. Paul Bomani implored members to show self-restraint in order to ‘to prevent [the] imperialist press from exploiting disagreements between Parliament and Government, thereby sowing confusion among the public’.Footnote 121 That was just the open disagreement: the precise details of the behind-the-scenes disputes remain hazy. It seems that on 15 July, Nyerere called a meeting of MPs at State House. He warned them that neither opposition to the Arusha Declaration nor the spreading of rumours would be tolerated. Anangisye, the disgraced former TYL leader, then went immediately to the Lugalo barracks, where he tried to incite troops into agitating against the government.Footnote 122 He was arrested, along with Hamisi Salumu, who was formerly Hanga’s bodyguard.Footnote 123 On 23 July, three more men – all known Kambona associates – were arrested on charges of subversion.Footnote 124
Recognising that his room for manoeuvre was narrowing, Kambona fled Tanzania. He drove first to Kenya, probably with the knowledge of Tanzanian intelligence. In Nairobi, his friend Oginga Odinga tried to persuade Kambona to return home and even spoke to Nyerere on the telephone. But Kambona refused to turn back and flew on to London.Footnote 125 The Tanzanian government remained silent about the issue until 1 August. Finally, it stated that Kambona had fled to Kenya ‘with a lot of money’ and without paying his income tax.Footnote 126 In London, Kambona gave an interview in which he alleged that there was a plot to remove Nyerere, involving the upper ranks of the Tanzanian security services and army.Footnote 127 Nyerere responded by calling Kambona a liar. ‘Anybody who believes in this talk of conspiracy can well believe that his parents are donkeys’, he told a rally in Dar es Salaam. ‘If you accept these lies you can well accept anything.’Footnote 128 When a Dutch associate of Kambona, Ernst van Eeghen, tried to mediate between the ‘sick’ Kambona and Nyerere, the president rejected any attempt at reconciliation. He described Kambona as ‘a renegade and traitor to my country … He can’t wriggle out of the mess he has created for himself.’Footnote 129 The rupture was irreversible. By September, Kambona had been joined in London by two close allies, Hanga and Phombeah.Footnote 130 The verbal spat between Kambona and Nyerere carried on intermittently over the following years. As Chapter 7 explains, Kambona was later accused of masterminding an amateurish conspiracy to overthrow Nyerere’s government in a plot orchestrated from London. He became a convenient bogeyman through which the TANU party-state whipped up support for its message of national vigilance.
If there was any remaining doubt about Kambona’s pariah status in Tanzania, it was dispelled by Hanga’s ill-fated return to the country. Since joining his friend in exile, Hanga had travelled backwards and forwards between London and Conakry, where his wife lived. In conversations with acquaintances in London, Hanga seemed oblivious to the consequences of his association with Kambona and the dangers awaiting him should he return to Tanzania.Footnote 131 But Hanga would not be deterred. On 21 December, he flew back to Dar es Salaam. He claimed that he had been sent by the Guinean president, Sékou Touré, to patch up the split between Kambona and Nyerere. Just ten days after his return, Hanga was placed in preventative detention, alongside Kambona’s brothers, Otini and Mattiya. This prompted further heated exchanges. From London, Kambona branded Nyerere a ‘dictator’. At a rally in Dar es Salaam to mark the anniversary of the Zanzibar Revolution, Nyerere responded with a blistering attack on Kambona, dubbing him a ‘traitor’, a ‘thief’, and a ‘prostitute’. Nyerere humiliated Hanga by parading him before the crowd and calling him an ‘idiot’ who had accomplished nothing as a minister. Nyerere said that Hanga was detained after claiming that he had been asked by the Zanzibari TPDF to lead a coup.Footnote 132 In an unconvincing and defensive interview given from prison, Hanga protested his innocence.Footnote 133 Hanga remained in preventative detention until December 1968. The following year, he met a grim fate at the hands of the Zanzibari authorities, as Chapter 7 explains.
More generally, the idea that the Arusha revolution was being undermined by ‘mercenaries’ in the pay of nefarious foreign governments became a staple of government rhetoric. In a speech on 7 July 1967 at the Jangwani grounds, Nyerere declared that ‘the biggest danger facing Africa today is that leaders can be bought. There are known and unknown Tshombes, some are very big and other [sic] are small.’Footnote 134 He later privately admitted that he already had Kambona in mind.Footnote 135 The president’s language caught on. The Nationalist piggybacked on a speech made by Nasser, in which he warned of the neocolonial threat. ‘Wananchi [citizens] must beware’, the editorial stated. ‘The imperialists may try to use local “politicians” to lure you with money.’Footnote 136 The concept of an ‘enemy within’, who sold out to neocolonial subversives, became commonplace in Tanzanian discourse. It connected the long-standing local idiom of the ‘exploiter’ with a Cold War political culture of insecurity and subversion. The trope became a powerful charge that could be levied at all sorts of dissident figures in years to come.
Conclusion
The Arusha Declaration represented a decisive answer to the tensions of decolonisation which drew a line in the sand of Tanzanian politics. The language of ujamaa, now backed up with tangible policies, fleshed out the structural bones of the one-party state. As Lionel Cliffe reflected, through ‘the development of an “official” ideology with some concrete content … it is now possible to sort out the sheep from the goats far more rigorously than was the case when leaders at various levels could make up their own orthodoxy so long as they related it to a handful of slogans’.Footnote 137 The confused debate about the direction of socialism was replaced by a clear development strategy. Yet clarity also allowed the establishment of sharper lines of division between rival groups. Figures who challenged the precepts of the Arusha Declaration could be marked out as enemies of the Tanzanian revolution, working in cahoots with the country’s imperialist enemies. In codifying the ethics of ujamaa into a socialist manifesto, the Arusha Declaration formed a blueprint for bringing about genuine decolonisation while also providing the ideological foundations for TANU’s turn towards authoritarian rule.
The genesis of the Arusha Declaration was not a straightforward process. Amid the insecurities brought about by the encroachment of the global Cold War into postcolonial African politics, as well as rising socio-economic tensions within the country, Nyerere compromised between the two rough power groupings inside the Tanzanian state. His morally charged ‘leadership code’, which assuaged popular complaints about the elite’s self-enrichment, was sweetened by concessions to mass nationalisation. More moderate government ministers, who favoured the politics of slow change, were far from content at the hasty imposition of the nationalisation measures. But they were at least reassured by the pragmatism which Nyerere showed in not conceding too much ground to those TANU members who called for more radical change – for the meantime, at least. In the longer term, the events of 1967 marked a general shift of power from the ‘political economists’ inside government to an increasingly assertive and vocal group of party leaders, shrinking the latitude for debate.
The Arusha Declaration was a manifesto for national development, but one forged in a context that stretched beyond Tanzania’s borders. As governing elites watched their fellow liberation heroes elsewhere fall to military coups, with disconcerting rumours of foreign complicity, they recognised the need to regain a sense of momentum as the lustre of uhuru wore off. The irruption of Cold War crises over the course of 1964–65 convinced Nyerere that genuine political sovereignty required economic decolonisation rather than flag independence. Although Nyerere drew on the examples of China, Vietnam, and Cuba in justifying the case for a policy of self-reliance, it was not the direct influence of communist states or their allies in the Tanzanian elite which galvanised the shift towards a socialist development agenda. As the ripples which the Arusha Declaration sent through the Western diplomatic and business community demonstrate, it also had global implications and posed new questions of Tanzania’s foreign policy. Some onlookers perceived Arusha as an opening for expanding their influence in the country, including the states of divided Germany. The next chapter shows how Tanzania navigated the whirlpool of the ‘German Cold War’.
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