By Dr Azaveli Feza Lwaitama.
Monday 14 October, a week ago, marked officially in Tanzania as Nyerere Day, observed to mark the date day in 1999 when the First President of post-colonial Tanganyika and later Tanzania died in a London hospital. The author of this think piece marked the day by giving a lecture at the Red Cross Hall in Bukoba Municipality on what Tanzania can learn from the life of Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere.
The guest of honour at the public lecture was the Regional Commissioner for Kagera, Mr Fabian Massawe, who most Kagera residents fondly call ‘Mulokozi’ (a common Haya name that means meaning “the saviour”).
The lessons that the current generation of leaders, especially the young, could take from the life and times of Mwalimu Nyerere would include the fact he lived in times that were characterised by an atmosphere of post-world war human optimism associated with the triumph of the anti-fascist forces over the evil global designs of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Nyerere was at Makerere University in Uganda in the very late 1940s, and at Edinburg University in Great Britain in the early 1950s.
These was the time when the world was witnessing the ascendance to state power in Western Europe and North America of political parties that were mostly social democratic.
This was also the period when, come 1948, the Geneva Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. These were momentous times in world history, which saw the anti-colonial movement and the anti-imperialist socialist forces in particular, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, grow from strength to strength.
It is in this period when communist parties secured a series of earthquake-making victories from China, to Eastern Europe, to Cuba.
Upon Nyerere’s return from further studies in Makerere and Edinburg, he plunged head-on into the then budding anti-colonial nationalist movement in the then Tanganyika,
Initially, he jointed what until then was an ineffective petty bourgeois social welfare club, Tanganyika African Association(Taa), whose members, in 1953 elected him its President.
In 1954 he, together with fellow nationalists, transformed Taa into a full-fledged political party, Tanganyika African National Union ( Tanu). He then used Tanu to popularise the ideology of radical socialist oriented Pan Africanism that was equally championed by Ghanaian first President Kames Nkrumah.
He joined Taa only to transform it from within into Tanu, which he later, in 1977, transformed into CCM. Unlike most politicians we meet these days, especially those from the party he founded of CCM, Mwalimu Nyerere use his speeches to challenge conventional wisdom to which most colonised Africans and the wretched of the world in general subscribed.
He harangued the currently unfairly weak and voiceless to take heart and encouraged them to empower themselves with knowledge and skills to make, once united, of regain Africa’s past glory, even if, initially, all that seemed to be an impossible dream. In speech at Wellesley College, in 1960, he summarised his Pan Africanist nationalism by sketching out the kind of Africa he wished to eventually come to be: “The Africa that we must create must be an Africa which the outside world will look at and say: If you really want to see free people who live up to their ideals of human society, go to Africa. That is the continent of hope for the human race.”
It was then pointed out that if Mwalimu Nyerere was alive today, it is possible that he will be urging Tanzania to join those in the East African region who are advocating for fast tracking the attainment of an East African political federation, as a first step towards continental political unity.
Source: http://www.thecitizen.co.tz/oped/Nyerere-and-the-spirit-of-Pan-Africanism/-/1840568/2043204/-/w6u0xf/-/index.html
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