African Revolutionary Writers, Part 10a
Julius Nyerere
In his 1962 pamphlet, Ujamaa – the Basis of African Socialism,
Nyerere begins: “Socialism – like democracy – is an attitude of mind.”
This was a few months after
the Independence of Tanganyika, and Julius Nyerere was the country’s first
President.
“African Socialism” was
mostly a swindle, but here, probably, and also in the opinion of Ngugi wa
Thiong’o as we have seen, Julius Nyerere was expressing a conviction held in
good faith.
Nyerere believed that
socialism was an attitude of mind, perhaps comparable to the imaginary “milk of
human kindness”. He believed that socialism was entirely a subjective
condition.
We will ponder, in the case
of Thomas Sankara, the assassinated president of Burkina Faso, whether such a
subjective kind of socialism, which Sankara also espoused, and which is neither
rooted in science nor in international solidarity, is not always doomed to
defeat.
Julius Nyerere was respected
by relatively-more-scientific socialists like Ngugi for the remainder of his
life, and under Nyerere's leadership his country played a heroic role as a
front-line state against Apartheid, Portuguese and Rhodesian colonialism.
Walter Rodney also apologised
for Nyerere in his 1972 essay, “Tanzanian Ujamaa
and Scientific Socialism” (click here).
Rodney thought that Ujamaa was de facto
revolutionary, if not consciously so.
Tanganyika combined with
Zanzibar in 1964 to become Tanzania. As Tanzania it was host to many liberation
movements and from the late 1970s was host to the ANC’s Solomon Mahlangu
Freedom College. As Tanzania it adopted the famous Arusha Declaration of 1967.
These things are major parts of the dual history of socialist ideas in Africa,
and of pan-African solidarity.
Read these two documents to
discover part of Tanzania’s struggle with the meaning of socialism in
circumstances where almost the entire population was made up of peasants.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: Julius
Nyerere, Ujamaa - The Basis of African Socialism, 1962, and Julius Nyerere, Arusha
Declaration, 1967.
