JULIUS NYERERE: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF (UN)DEMOCRATIC

SOCIALISM IN AFRICA

John S. Saul
(York University, ON., Canada)

For purposes of brief argument I would suggest that the career of Julius
Nyerere as public actor can best be evaluated on three fronts:
a) as a nationalist,
b) as a socialist
c) as a democrat,
although, as we will see, these three strands of his theory and practice
cannot be readily disentangled.

I will say least about Nyerere as nationalist, although it is
perhaps too easy to forget that dimension of his undertakings, so much has
happened since to the original project of anti-colonial and anti-racist
nationalism in Africa. But let us remember that Nyerere was a key player
in that first generation of successful African nationalist leaders who, in
the postwar period refused to accept the refusal of the likes of Winston
Churchill, that quintessential Colonel Blimp, to "preside over the
dissolution of the British Empire." Let us also recall how seriously
Nyerere took the "unfinished business" of southern Africa, placing
Tanzania squarely in the middle of the thirty-years war for southern
African liberation, as essential rear-base for many liberation movements
and as the most active of protagonists of such essential Pan-African
initiatives for liberation as PAFMECSA and, subsequently, the OAU
Liberation Committee.

As suggested, the nationalist moment in post-colonial Africa tends
now to be consigned to the back-pages of the history books. No doubt this
is in part the case because its denouement, as prophetically foreseen by
Frantz Fanon, was to prove so lacking in purpose and promise for the vast
mass of Africans ostensibly liberated under its banner, and this has
proven to be as true for Southern Africa, including, most notably and most
dispiritingly, South Africa, as it has been for Africa north of the
Zambezi. Where Nyerere saw further than most, however, was in the fact
that he complemented his nationalism -- and this is my second point --
with his own version of a socialist analysis and a socialist vision.

In saying this I tend, up to a point, to discount Nyerere's own
professions that he was not so much realizing socialism in Africa as he
was realizing "African Socialism":

[Socialism ... is an attitude of mind ...[he famously asserted]. We in
Africa have no need of being 'converted' to socialism ... [it is] rooted
in our own past -- in the traditional society which produced us.]

When he is speaking in this way, it might almost be possible to now view
Nyerere as addressing himself to a post-modern audience, honouring the
integrity of indigenous culture against the pull of more Eurocentric
leftist formulations. And yet this whole "African Socialism" discourse, so
often associated with Nyerere (and others, like Senghor), seems to me too
vague, even flaccid, in its practical implications and, in any case, for
Nyerere, to be rather less central to his thought, in the long run, than
the (relatively) hard-nosed analysis that actually came to provide the
underpinnings for his own socialist practice. For Nyerere's overall
project was actually, in the end, quite modernist and developmental (not
swear-words in my vocabulary, incidentally, but words that nonetheless
flag ambiguities to which I will return). More important to note at this
point in the argument is the fact that, in consequence, his analysis of
the realities of actually-existing Africa proved to be at least as much
Fanonist as Senghoriste, if not more so.

Take, for example, Nyerere's observations as to the nature of the
new class already all too visible across the continent in its rush to
power and in its naked self-interest. Of his many statements on this
issue, a speech I myself heard him give in 1967 in Dar es Salaam (as
summarized in The Nationalist newspaper) captures particularly clearly the
issue at stake:


[President Nyerere has called on the people of Tanzania to have great
confidence in themselves and safeguard the nation's hard-won freedom. He
has warned the people against pinning their hopes on the leadership who
are apt to sell the people's freedom to meet their lusts.

[Mwalimu [i.e. Nyerere] warned that the people should allow their freedom
to be pawned as most of the leaders were purchasable. He warned further
that in running the affairs of the nation the people should not look on
their leaders as 'saints or prophets'

[The President stated that the attainment of freedom in many cases
resulted merely in the change of colours, white to black faces without
ending exploitation and injustices, and above all without the betterment
of the life of the masses.

[He said that while struggling for freedom the objective was clear but it
was another thing when you have to remove your own people from the
position of exploiters.]


Or, as he added in another 1967 speech: "African leaders have their price
these days. The moment one becomes a minister, his price also gets
determined. The prices are not even big; some are bought for only 500, or
a simple house."


Or take his statement in Education for Self-Reliance as to the
likely impact of an untransformed education system on such processes of
class formation:


[...the educational system introduced into Tanzania by the colonialists
was modelled on the British system, but with an even heavier emphasis on
subservient attitudes and on white-collar skills. Inevitably, too, it was
based on the assumptions of a colonialist and capitalist society. It
emphasized and encouraged the individualistic instincts of mankind,
instead of his cooperative instincts. It led to the possession of
individual material wealth being the major criterion of social merit and
worth.

[This meant that colonial education induced attitudes of human inequality,
and in practice underpinned the domination of the weak by the strong,
especially in the economic field.]


Other punchy and provocative statements about the potential costs of class
formation are to be found in abundance in such writings as Socialism and
Rural Development.


There is, however, a second dimension of his move to complement
nationalism with socialism that is of at least equal importance, one that
marks the interpenetration of these two projects even more overtly. Here a
particularly pungent formulation is one to be found in his essay,
"Economic Nationalism":



[The question is not whether nations control their economy, but how they
do so. The real ideological choice is between controlling the economy
through domestic private enterprise or doing so through some state or
collective institution.

[But although this is an ideological choice, it is extremely doubtful
whether it is a practical choice for an African nationalist. The
pragmatist in Africa ... will find that the choice is a different one. He
will find that the choice is between foreign private ownership on the one
hand, and local collective ownership on the other. For I do not think that
there is a free state in Africa where there is sufficient local capital,
or a sufficient number of local entrepreneurs, for locally based
capitalism to dominate the economy. Private investment in Africa means
overwhelming foreign private investment. A capitalist economy means a
foreign-dominated economy. These are the facts of the African
situation. The only way in which national control of the economy can be
achieved is through the economic institution of socialism.]


Moreover, as Nyerere completed his argument:

[To Tanzanians this inevitable choice is not unwelcome. We are committed
to the creation of a classless society in which every able-bodied citizen
is contributing to the economy through work, and we believe that this can
only be obtained when the major means of production are publicly owned and
controlled. But the fact remains that our recent socialist measures were
not taken out of blind adherence to dogma. They are intended to serve the
society.]


"To serve the society." A moral imperative, then, but also a
necessary development strategy: and all the more relevant now if Colin
Leys and I are right to think, as we have argued in a recent essay, that
what we now see is the further "relegation [of Africa] to the margins of
the global economy, with no visible prospect for continental development
along capitalist lines" and that the crucial bottom-line of African
renewal must therefore be a "renewed socialist thrust." As for Tanzanian
socialism itself, debate will continue (including here today) as to
whether, on the one hand, lack of clarity in its self-definition and lack
of subtlety in its  practice were most responsible for undermining its
prospects, or whether, on the other hand, such a project had little chance
of success in any case under the conditions global capitalism offered
Africa at the time (or even now). Still, whether we agree or not with Cran
Pratt's position (in an eloquent obituary we have recently published in
Southern Africa Report) regarding Nyerere's socialist programme -- that
"Few would now claim that many of these [the reference is to Nyerere's
socialist policy measures] were appropriate instruments for the
development of a poor country, especially one whose public service was
already overextended" [I do not agree, as it happens,, but we can save
that for the round-table!] -- it is difficult to quarrel with the
correctness of Nyerere's basic premise that the global capitalist system
did not, does not, serve Africa well.


It is a theme he returned over and over again both while he was
still President of Tanzania and equally vigorously after he had stepped
down from that position and continued to play the role of international
gad-fly on development issues, as for example when he once sought to
strike back at the strictures of structural adjustment with the charge
that the IMF


[has an ideology of economic and social development which it is trying to
impose on poor countries irrespective of their own clearly stated
policies. And when we reject IMF conditions, we hear the threatening
whisper: "Without accepting our condition, you will not get our money, and
you will get no other money.' Indeed, we have already heard hints from
some quarters that money or credit will not be made available to us until
we have reached an understanding with the IMF. When did the IMF become an
international become an International Ministry of Finance? When did
nations agree to surrender to it their power of decision-making?]


Here is the "spirit of Seattle" well avant la lettre surely, a spirit of
proto-socialist critique that, interestingly enough, also continues to
inspire Nyerere's daughter who, only a month after her father's death, was
to be found speaking at a Jubilee 2000 workshop in Johannesburg and
invoking, as part of an on-going struggle against the African debt, her
father's attack of the early 1980s upon what he then called the
"international debt cartel." It is the emphases and actions Ms. Nyerere
was here invoking that, I would argue, make Nyerere's writings so
important a resource for a new generation of Africans. like his daughter,
as they reactivate their struggle for social, political and economic
transformation along, dare I predict it, socialist lines.


But what, finally, of Nyerere as democrat? Much has been written
of Nyerere's political and constitutional innovations, and, indeed, Cran
Pratt, in his obituary, seems prepared to grant Nyerere far higher marks
on this front than for his socialist endeavours. And yet, in my judgment
and in the long run, it is in the political realm that the most dramatic
flaws in Nyerere's progressive practice are to be found.

There is a problem here. I have used the phrase "Nyerere's
socialism" -- and we speak of "Nyerere's political initiatives" -- as if
these were relatively unproblematic formulations. But such undertakings
were refracted through the real world of Tanzania's nationalist
politics. Even Nyerere could not make policy just as he wished, some will
emphasize, and see in this fact an explanation for some of Nyerere's
apparent failings, especially in the sphere of democratic practice. After
all, the world of African nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, like so many
other political worlds, was a hard world, filled, albeit not exclusively,
with hard and ruthless men (and I also use the latter word
advisedly). Nyerere, it could be argued,  was a good man surrounded by
many who did not quite share his vision or his high sense of moral
purpose. And there is something in this. Certainly I recall, from
reasonably close at hand. the struggle in the late 1960s over the
succession to Mondlane with FRELIMO, the Mozambican liberation movement
still primarily domiciled on Tanzanian soil. The outcome, that saw the far
more worthy Samora Machel defeat the Simango faction, was won primarily
because Nyerere had the political will and craft to back down the
"cultural nationalist" triumvirate, so strong within TANU at the time, of
Munanka, Sijaona and Maswanya, a group who sought, initially, to have the
Tanzanian state guarantee Simango's ascendancy.

But this example also demonstrates the kind of power Nyerere could
exercise when he cared to do so. The fact remains that if Nyerere is to be
granted much of the credit for Tanzania's accomplishments he must also
take his fare share of the blame for its more unsavoury by-products. But
what blame? It has been argued (by Cran Pratt most eloquently perhaps and
quite recently, in his essay with Hevina Dashwood in Bob Mathews and
Taisier Ali's Civil Wars in Africa) that Nyerere's political project was a
judicious initiative that found, at least momentarily, in the so-called
"democratic one-party state" a way of staving off the divisive tendencies
-- ethnic, regional, religious -- that elsewhere have torn African
polities apart. I even recall the theoretical acrobatics that Jonathan
Barker and I performed in trying to make a related point about the
judicious balance between the simultaneous imperatives of leadership and
mass action that defined the 1970 Tanzanian election. I think in
retrospect, as I shall suggest in a moment, we probably tried a little too
hard to make that argument -- although it also behooves me, before now
making some more critical points about Nyerere's undemocratic practices
than I was inclined to make in the late 60s, to also acknowledge the
importance of the manner of his eventual departure from politics: his
charms, like Prospero's, all o'erthrown, he retired gracefully to the
sidelines, opening the way to his successor while also sanctioning the
transition to an electoral process far more open, at least in formal
terms, than the one he had himself fostered.

And yet there is something missing from an account so structured,
if one allows for the moment the cold wind of reality to blow through
it. I myself have very personal memories of the invasion of the campus at
the University of Dar es Salaam by the field-force unit in 1970 and my
student, the Kenyan leader of the University Student Council, Akivaga,
being dragged at gun-point down the steps of the central administrative
building, then being tossed like a sack of old clothes in an army vehicle
and sped away to expulsion both from the university and from the
country. Nor can one forget first hand accounts -- but by then I wasn't
there, having, with many others, not had our contracts renewed at the
university -- when protesting students were savagely beaten by security
forces as they marched down the Morogoro road to town in 1978. Or take the
case of my colleague Arnold Temu, the Tanzanian historian (Ph.D. from the
University of Calgary, incidentally), first humiliated, even though an MP,
for being one of a mere handful of Tanzanians who spoke out at the time of
Akivaga's expulsion, and who, having rehabilitated himself sufficiently to
become Dean of Arts at the time of the 1978 protest, was then summarily
dismissed, sent into effective exile as an itinerant historian moving from
Nigeria, to Swaziland, to the University of Western Cape in South
Africa. Is it a kind of paternalism, or perhaps a certain brand of
residual Stalinism, that made it so difficult for many of us on the left
to take full account of the import of such actions?

Or perhaps something else was behind this undemocratic tick, at
least in the case of Nyerere himself. Years ago, I introduced a review of
a volume of Nyerere's writings by citing Lenin's statement about George
Bernard Shaw: "a good man fallen among Fabians." I meant to refer to the
studied blandness of some of his least convincing statements about
"socialism as an attitude of mind" and the like. But there may be another
way of thinking this bon mot with reference to Nyerere, as I was reminded
yesterday by an e-mail from a friend, himself once a Dar es Salaam
academic, who reflected on what he chose to term "Nyerere's
authoritarianism." How to explain it? He refers to the missionary
influence and suggests, too, that "the notion of 'mwalimu' of the nation
has always seemed to have a particularly missionary resonance: the
shepherd and his flock, etc, perhaps combining with certain aspects of
patriarchal authority in indigenous culture (more commonly remarked)." "My
feelings about this aspect of Nyerere [he continues] also draw on
observation of his style on certain occasions at UDSM when I was
there: the way he handled 'critical' questions from the left, etc. -- very
much in the manner of the tolerant but potent teacher/leader, adjudicating
what could be said and how." Interestingly, in looking back over some of
my own early writings in preparation for this session I found that I had
made almost precisely the same point thirty years ago about the style of
Nyerere in his visits to the Hill.

But what of the "fallen among Fabians" reference?

[Are you familiar with the Cowen and Shenton thesis on "Fabian
colonialism"? [my correspondent asks].It gives a new and interesting twist
to colonial paternalism/benevolent authoritarianism -- the need to deliver
to Africans the benefits of bourgeois civilization while "protecting" them
from its costs (above all, divisive class formation), not least, of
course, by 'adapting' African custom to the new circumstances and other
modes of state intervention in and regulation of the conditions of social
(and "moral") existence. I suspect that these factors/forces of liberal
colonialism/missionary endeavour have been overlooked in the formation of
both Nyerere's ideas and practices.]

I would suggest, then, that these ingredients and others helped produce an
often unattractively undemocratic edge to Nyerere's politics. Nor can I
ignore other evidence of Nyerere's fist beneath the velvet glove well
beyond the Hill in Dar es Salaam. For example, in studying the evolution
of the hard, authoritarian practices that characterized the politics of
SWAPO in exile and that culminated in the night-marish torture and
killings in SWAPO's camps in Angola in the 1980s, it is difficult to lose
sight of Nyerere's finger-prints all over the history that produced this
outcome, in the Tanzanian state's incarceration of SWAPO cadres who dared
to ask embarrassing questions of the SWAPO leadership at Kongwa in the
mid-1960s, for example. Even more dramatic was the transfer from Zambia to
Tanzania of the eleven most prominent spokespersons of the democratic
movement that had sprung up in Zambia to, once again, question a corrupt
and unresponsive SWAPO leadership. Rounded by the Zambian army they were
eventually spirited away, at SWAPO request, to Dar es Salaam where they
could be unceremoniously left to rot in jail: precisely because Tanzania
did not have the nuisance factor of Zambia's habeus corpus
provisions. Here was Nyerere presiding, not very benignly, over what Colin
Leys and I came to term the "Club of Presidents," a Club that linked
national leaders and liberation movement leaders around a common desire to
block off, often in the most brutal possible way, the seeds of any dissent
that led outside a very limited circumference of acceptable discussion.

I'm also struck, more anecdotally, by the story that I once heard
the late, estimable Zanzibari/Tanzanian politician Mohamed Babu tell at a
public forum during his years of effective exile from his home country, a
story about his own arbitrary detention during the 1970s and his own
languishing, without benefit of hearing or trial, in a Dodoma prison for a
number of years. One night (on his account), as the radio played on
loud-speakers through the darkened prison, a BBC-interview with Nyerere
was broadcast, an interview in which, answering a direct question, the
President stated that there were no political prisoners in
Tanzania. Instantly, through the darkness, the voice of a fellow detaine,
ex-army officer, Ali Mafoudh, rang through the prison to the delight of
the others: "Nani sisi? Mbuzi?" Amusing at one level, of course, but it is
also the kind of textural specificity to the reality of "one-party
democracy" that is to often missing from our discussions.

Even more important, however, is the way in which this discussion
can and must be brought back to further illuminate our evaluation of
Nyerere's socialist project. Of course, the manner, outlined above, in
which the students were dealt with was emblematic enough: they were, after
all and on both occasions when force was used against them, asking that
the leadership act more effectively to implement the democratic
injunctions and anti-corruption rules that were ostensibly in place within
the national polity. And the workers, without effective unions in the
first place and then crushed -- arrested, shipped off to the rural areas
-- at the Mount Carmel Rubber Factory in 1973, were also making, in the
spirit of Mwongozo, the TANU Guidelines, much the same democratic
demands. But Mount Carmel was, in any case, merely the most extreme
example of the tight stranglehold that TANU held over the organization of
workers, women and the like on Nyerere's watch.

There is, finally, an even more emblematic moment with reference
to which I will close my presentation: the shutting down of the Ruvuma
Development Association in 1969. This is not a moment that finds much
resonance in most writing about Tanzania, although fortunately Andrew
Coulson in his book on Tanzania does include an extended and extremely
insightful appendix that gives the RDA and its demise its due weight. I
say that I find the moment emblematic, although, to be honest, I'm not
quite certain whether it marked a turning point in and of itself or
instead merely epitomized clearly the limits on the vision --
Nyerere's? TANU's -- that underpinned the ujamaa project in the first
case. In any case, the incident does warrant a great deal of thinking
about.

In Ruvuma, after all, was to be found grass-roots empowerment of a
very real and tangible kind -- in the rural development sphere, in the
education sphere, even in the sphere of local-level industrialization -- a
perfect example of the kind of "street-level democracy" (albeit the
"streets" were a few dusty roads in one of the most economically backward
parts of the country) whose importance Jonathan Barker has highlighted in
his powerful recent book of that title. The RDA also embodied a process
that Nyerere himself, for a time, seemed to take strength from as he
developed his overall socialist project, and, centrally, his specific
vocation for rural socialism, in the late-1960s. Let me, to make a long
and crucially important story short, merely quote the conclusion of Andrew
Coulson's account:

 [Given this support, the decision to disband the Association [RDA] could
only be taken at the national level. In 1969 the Central committee of TANU
was reformed, to include a majority of members elected by regional party
branches. Thus professional politicians from the regions suddenly achieved
power at the centre of the Party. In July 1969 the new Committee met in
Handeni to discuss ujamaa for a whole month, and decided that its members
would spend five weeks living in some of the most advanced villages in the
country, including four of the RDA villages. These visits confirmed their
worst fears: the RDA was an autonomous organization receiving funds and
personnel from abroad, and promoting a form of socialism which did not
depend on a strong central party. If RDA organizations became the norm
nationally, the professional politicians would be in a far weaker
position. Moreover, by 1969 another model was available, much more
attractive to them: good reports were coming in from the Rufiji valley,
the first large-scale movement of all the people of an area into planned
villages. This was organized by party officials (rather than by any
grass-roots organization of the peasants) and gave the officials an
obvious sense of achievement. It was soon to become the policy nationally,
and it was entirely incompatible with the existence of groups of
independent, politicized peasants, such as those of the RDA villages,
which would be small, voluntary and might well oppose central
direction. On 24 September 1969 the Central Committee met in Dar es
Salaam, under President Nyerere's chairmanship, and 21 out of its 24
members voted in favour of disbanding the RDA.

[There was little or no planning as to how this decision would be
implemented. On 25 September the Minister for Rural Development and
Regional Administration flew by government plane to Songea, with members
of the Central Committee, to announce the decision to the people. The
assets of the Association were confiscated -- the grain mill, the sawmill,
the mechanical workshop, vehicles and equipment. The police were sent to
take away any Association property in the villages. The expatriate staff
left quietly within a few days. The villagers got on with their work as
best they could. Within a week the teaching staff in the school was
transferred to posts throughout the country -- to Mara, Kigoma, Mbeya,
Dodoma, and Singida regions. The model for Freedom and Development and
Education for Self-Reliance had been destroyed.]

I was reminded, just last week, by my friend from Tanzanian days, and then
colleague for over twenty-five years at Atkinson College, Grif Cunningham,
who is here today, that, just as the events described by Coulson were
building up, he (Grif) had been appointed, from his post as principal of
Kivukoni College, to be special presidential advisor to the President on
ujamaa villages. A first-hand student of Tanzanian rural development for
many years, and not least of the whole Ruvuma experience, Grif was on a
brief leave in Canada when the decision to close the RDA was taken. He
arrived back in Tanzania to find that, with the decision to close down
grass-roots democracy as an essential building block of rural
transformation his job was, as he was told upon his return to Dar, now
pretty much null and void. He spent the two years of his contract more or
less in limbo as the disastrous policy of forced villagization gathered
steam, tolling, as we can now see, the death knell of any democratic
socialist aspiration in the country.

For me the lesson is clear, albeit, speaking personally, it has
been a painful and difficult one for me to learn over the years, and I
learned it perhaps even more as a fellow traveller of FRELIMO's
post-liberation left-developmental socialist project than I did in
Tanzania. A socialist aspiration of some kind -- a challenge to the
illogic of actually-existing capitalism, both globally and as it works it
malign purposes on the African continent itself -- must, it seems to me,
be at the core of any meaningful response that Africa is eventually to
make to the crisis in which it finds itself. We learn that positive lesson
from, amongst others but not least, Julius Nyerere. But, as that
aspiration reemerges politically, it must be a far more democratic project
than anything Africa has witnessed in the name of socialism heretofore. In
the end, and with all necessary qualifications, we learn that negative
lesson, too, from, amongst others but not least, Julius Nyerere.