During a recent visit to Tanzania I made a stopover at the TPH Bookshop on Samora Avenue in downtown Dar es Salaam. The orange-painted building, with its large glass display windows and a wide glass-and-wood entrance, evokes nostalgia for a bygone era. The signboard above the entrance proudly proclaims: “TPH Bookshop. Since 1966. Indigenous. Independent.”
Established in 1966 as a parastatal, Tanzania Publishing House holds a unique place in the intellectual history of Dar es Salaam. It was here that Walter Rodney’s seminal work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, was first published in 1972. The TPH bookstore, in its 70s heyday, served as a hub for pan-Africanists, attracting luminaries such as Walter Rodney, Yash Tandon, Dani Nabudere, and a young Yoweri Museveni. The bookstore’s owner, Walter Bgoya, is a retired diplomat who has been with TPH since 1972 and who recalled in conversation with me that a young Museveni in his Dar es Salaam days “often used to take calls from the telephone in my office.” Most of the titles on display at the bookstore are published locally by Mkuki na Nyota, an indie publisher that’s owned by Bgoya and which has survived declining sales and rising costs to stay in business as an almost mythical remnant of the city’s intellectual charm.
Upon entering the bookstore, I was struck by the wealth of material on display. New titles included a series of biographies of Julius Nyerere and collections of his speeches, in addition to volumes tackling Nyerere’s successors. I was impressed by the presence of a Kiswahili language version of Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise. This is akin to discovering in Kampala a Luganda version of Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu.
For the generation of Africans coming of age today, it’s hard to fathom the larger-than-life influence Tanzania once had on intellectual life and the direction of African liberation throughout the 60s and 70s. Ali Mazrui, writing of “the romantic spell which Tanzania casts on so many of those who have been closely associated with her,” described this feeling as Tanzaphilia, and behind this spell, no doubt for many, was Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere, who, according to Mazrui, combined both intellectual leadership and a sense of mission. Nyerere died in October 1999, plunging the country into a government-ordered period of thirty days of mourning, an astonishing amount of time if one considers the fact that Nelson Mandela and Queen Elizabeth II were honored with ten days when their time came. But there had been important reasons to continuously mourn the man most Tanzanians referred to simply as Mwalimu, their teacher. The architect of a united and stable Tanzania, in retirement for fourteen years at his death, Nyerere had witnessed the peaceful transition in 1985 from himself to Ali Hassan Mwinyi and then, a decade later, from Mwinyi to Benjamin Mkapa. While neighboring Uganda and Kenya were constantly plagued by wide-ranging political discontent, it seemed Tanzania had found its footing and was on its way to achieving a durable, if imperfect, democracy.
In death Nyerere’s halo has continued to grow, and there have been no damaging revelations about him. Now there are growing calls for his canonization as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 declared Nyerere a “Servant of God,” the first step in the possible beatification of Nyerere, a devout Catholic who even in retirement attended Mass every day and sometimes could be seen in long lines for Holy Communion.
Nyerere’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi party remains on the same course he set for it: the smooth transition of power within the ruling party, for as long as possible, so that even when John Magufuli died unexpectedly in office, his deputy Samia Suluhu was inaugurated without incident in 2021 as Tanzania’s first female president. Thus, in a narrow political sense, Nyerere has had enough followers to cement his legacy at home. What’s in doubt is his relevance for Africans elsewhere, among leaders like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni who may praise Nyerere while having little use for Nyerereism.
The most obvious difference between Museveni and Nyerere is that Museveni has built a mass party somehow less powerful than its chairman. Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM), Uganda’s ruling party since 1986, doesn’t even have a permanent home. “Individuals do get transformed once they get into power. A very good example is our own [Yoweri] Museveni, who was a militant, a Fanonist actually, during his student days and what he has become subsequently,” the Tanzanian scholar Issa Shivji, a contemporary of Museveni’s at the University of Dar es Salaam, wrote of the Ugandan leader in 2012.
Yet Museveni not long ago said of Nyerere that he was “the greatest Black man” to ever live. “Nyerere is my parent, and Mama Maria is my mother,” Museveni said in 2019, speaking respectfully before Nyerere’s widow during Martyrs’ Day prayers at Namugongo, where the faithful regularly pray for the beatification of Nyerere. In 2022, speaking at Makerere University’s centennial celebration, Museveni, perhaps to the disappointment of many Makerere alumni in attendance, said that as a secondary school student he applied only to the University of Dar es Salaam “because I wanted to be near Nyerere,” then an advocate of the kind of East African integration that Museveni now treats as a matter of urgency.
Additionally, at Makerere University since 2018 there has been a Julius Nyerere Leadership Center, of which Museveni is the patron. The mission of this center, whose home is a historical wooden house along Pool Road, is to provide a platform for scholars and others “to share, nurture, mentor, challenge, and account to the next generation of African leaders.”
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If the new Nyerere volumes on display inside the TPH bookstore prove anything, perhaps it’s the suggestion that there remains intellectual interest in Nyerere’s life as well as his political philosophy. Yet, while Nyerere’s immortality is assured, there are such strong contradictions in his ideas that it’s not easy to pin down Nyerereism.
Nyerere was an honest man who lived a modest lifestyle. In a country of more than 150 ethnic groups, of which his was among the smallest, he destroyed tribalism by entrenching Kiswahili as the national language. He retired voluntarily, a rare event in Africa. He left behind a ruling party stronger than any individual within its ranks. He was a primary articulator of Pan-Africanism in its purest essence, which also meant, of course, that when Idi Amin violated Tanzania’s territorial space in 1979, Nyerere had no option but to intervene militarily. It’s easy to forget that Tanzania’s intervention in Uganda was such a courageous decision for a country that rarely waged war against anyone, the first time in post-colonial Africa that one African country’s army marched across the border and overthrew a sitting government.
Interviewed recently by Pan African Review magazine, the Tanzanian writer Jenerali Ulimwengu said that Africa never produced a leader of Nyerere’s “caliber and force.” Nyerere, he said, “was a very fair man, imbued with a sense of fairness and justice; he was a man who also made mistakes.”
Nyerere’s greatest mistake, of course, also was his most sustained act of leadership: the system of African socialism known as Ujamaa. Nyerere’s village socialism was a failure, requiring “far more state capacity to implement than was available,” the Ugandan academic Frederick Golooba-Mutebi told me. Even Nyerere himself seemed to acknowledge this shortcoming. According to Issa Shivji, writing in Walter A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolution, Nyerere is reported to have said, “If I was to talk about Ujamaa openly I would be considered a fool. I can only whisper about it.”
The collectivization of agriculture and the nationalization of banks and local industries was such a disaster that Nyerere’s critics cite Ujamaa as the top reason not to make any claims for Nyerere’s sainthood. They say too many people suffered under Ujamaa, which Nyerere never renounced. For Nyerere followers like Shivji and Bgoya, the rebuttal is simple: Has the alternative — neoliberalism and free markets — been any better?
It’s hard not to think of Nyerere while passing through Dar es Salaam, whose skyline has significantly changed in the two decades since his death. Shiny glass-box high rises — regional banks, insurance firms, and luxury hotels — dot the central business district, proof of rapid economic growth stemming in no small part from massive foreign direct investment flowing into the country. Not far from Samora Avenue, towards the Clock Tower, by a large thoroughfare to Morogoro I saw distinctive blue buses, part of a rapid transit project that’s funded by the World Bank. The buses have made transport across Dar es Salaam and its suburbs cheaper and more reliable, contributing in no small way to the modernization of Tanzania’s commercial capital.
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It’s in this new Dar es Salaam, full of energy and mobility, that I spoke to Bgoya about Nyerere. Bgoya’s upright posture belies his eighty-one years. A man of witty conversation, he is a self-described Nyerereist who is bitter towards those he feels have betrayed Nyerere’s cause. “I think, consciously or not, [that] there’s been a marginalization of Mwalimu from the mainstream of politics in Tanzania,” he told me.
Museveni and other African leaders who profess admiration for Nyerere and his leadership style are at best hypocrites, according to Bgoya. Or perhaps, he said, when they praise Nyerere they are involuntarily expressing guilt for their failure to live up to his ideals. “All they care about is how much money they are going to make out of the deal,” he said, lamenting rampant corruption, nepotism and the image of African leaders competing “to give the most favorable conditions to investors.”
Listening to Bgoya, it was clear that he didn’t think much of apparent Nyerereists. “That’s the part that perhaps we should have known all along, that when Mwalimu left not many of those people who were saying they were Nyerereists would continue to be Nyerereists,” he said. “As a result, you don’t hear in speeches, you don’t hear in schools, universities, any kind of serious engagement with ideas that were dear to Nyerere: socialism, self-reliance, and the struggle against these multilateral financial institutions which exploit and destroy African economies and African societies.”
While Museveni has adopted Nyerere’s principles of pan Africanism and regional integration, advocating for unity among East African countries, and during his long presidency seeing the expansion of the bloc beyond its three original member states, Bgoya isn’t convinced. He is concerned that this expansion is primarily driven by the desire for a larger internal market to be exploited by outsiders rather than a genuine commitment to pan Africanism.
Tanzanian economic nationalists such as Bgoya see the sharks of multinational capital circling at the smell of blood from a renewed privatization drive by Suluhu’s government. In October her government agreed to lease part of Dar es Salaam port to the Emirati ports operator DP World for thirty years, a deal opposed by Tanzania’s political opposition and rights groups. The decision, according to some Tanzanians who spoke to me during my week-long visit in September, is really an insidious attempt by the ruling elites to “sell” Tanzania’s prized public assets to multinational corporations under the guise of improving the efficiency of loss-making entities. In short, they say, Nyerere wouldn’t approve.
A book published earlier this year — one of multiple Nyerere volumes stocked by the TPH bookstore — asserts that Nyerere foresaw extreme privatization thirty years ago, and promptly warned his successor Mwinyi. In Joan Wicken: A Lifelong Collaboration with Mwalimu Nyerere, Wicken, who was Nyerere’s speechwriter and personal assistant from 1960 until his death in 1999, describes Mwalimu’s strong aversion to privatization:
On privatisation, of course, it was for two reasons. One, the principles of public ownership, but also the fact that we don’t have any people with that sort of capital. If you privatise, you are selling all our assets to somewhere else. It wouldn’t have been to South Africa at that point. Americans, British, anyone who wasn’t Tanzanian. […] He would say, ‘If you want to privatize, then go ahead, but you can’t do this with self-reliance. Without self-reliance you lose everything.
For Bgoya, there is a sense that the old anti-imperialist resistance has fizzled, replaced by something insidious to African affairs. He spoke, for example, of Loliondo, where the Tanzanian government has forcefully evicted thousands of Maasai pastoralists to let a UAE company create a wildlife corridor for trophy hunting and elite tourism. Head tilted forward and now gesturing in a jocular manner, Bgoya wondered, “How do you push people from Loliondo out [and] have people coming from the desert … manage your forests?”
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My time with Bgoya was fast spent and, as he prepared to join a lunch meeting with his wife, I embarked on a prearranged visit in the afternoon to Magomeni Usalaama, the historic location of Nyerere’s first house in Dar es Salaam. The afternoon humidity was unforgiving, and traffic on Samora Avenue had been reduced to a snarl. I was advised to take a passenger motorbike to the Magomeni Usalama station and, when there, ask for Mwalimu Nyerere’s house.
The trip to Magomeni station was short, and my boda-boda driver had little trouble finding the house on Makumbusho Street. Nyerere stayed there during his struggle for Tanganyika’s independence, and among his neighbors were fellow independence icons such as Rashidi Kawawa. The three-bedroom house is in many ways a reflection of Nyerere’s personality: austere and unadorned but striking in its beauty. Its architectural design, very much unlike the prevailing designs of 50s Tanzania, was informed by Nyerere’s travels across the world.
The tour guide said care has been taken to preserve most household items in the state they were in when Nyerere lived there. The walls were decorated with pictures of Nyerere’s meetings with foreign dignitaries. Notably, there was the simple bed in which he slept, a radio set, and a sofa, as well as his wife Maria’s cooking utensils and a copper water pot.
Confronted with this simplicity, the spectacle of modern-day African leaders who live ostentatiously came into sharp focus for me. Nyerere was different, and I wondered how a meeting might proceed between Museveni and the mentor in Dar es Salaam who, warning of the dangers of official pomposity, had this to say back in 1963:
If I were not myself the president, I should by now have taken to ringing up the State House before ever attempting to fix any appointment with a friend; for it is rapidly becoming impossible for anybody in Dar es Salaam to guess how long it will take him to drive from point A to point B without first finding out whether the president also intends to go out on that particular day! And it is not only the public who suffer, but the police themselves. It is difficult, to say the least, for them to live up to the repeated injunctions of TANU and the government to ‘treat the public with consideration and courtesy,’ and at the same time to carry out sudden orders to clear bewildered motorists from the public thoroughfares in a matter of minutes.
The strange thing, of course, is that in Museveni’s Kampala today one has to plan well in advance of any trips to the Kololo airstrip, the airport, or even the national assembly, because one is likely to be met by green military trucks blocking access routes and mean-looking members of the president’s praetorian guard who take over from traffic police. And it is no longer just the president’s convoy one has to worry about. Almost every Ugandan official of some standing — minister, lawmaker, member of the NRM Secretariat, head of a parastatal, or even a well-connected busybody — seems to move with a convoy lately, and almost always on the wrong side of the road. Where Nyerere didn’t want the president of Tanganyika to be seen as a public nuisance in Dar es Salaam, sixty years later we have in Uganda a situation where many Kampalans are constantly inconvenienced by small-time functionaries impatient to go this way and that. ▪