The death of Julius Nyerere, former president of Tanzania, sees the passing of one more of that extraordinary generation of African leaders who brought their countries to independence at the end of the 1950s. He is also the only one to have voluntarily retired from office, and to have retained his personal reputation for honesty, honour, and principle on a continent where these qualities are not axiomatic amongst a leadership more frequently associated with short-termism and corruption.
Tanzania - a union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar - was always peripheral to the British imperial project. A former German colony, it was mandated to the British at the end of the first World War, and was never technically a colony. But the 1950s saw the growth of a small but determined educated stratum convinced that Africa's political and economic development could only take place if power was transferred to Africans; Julius Nyerere, among the first Tanganyikans to graduate from a Western university, quickly monopolised positions of strategic importance and, supported by a disaffected peasantry, led the push for independence. In contrast to its neighbour, Kenya, which was undergoing the ravages of the rural warfare known as Mau Mau, Tanganyika's path to Uhuru - freedom - was benign.
In the 1960s and early 1970s Tanzania embodied the hopes of post-colonial optimism, both in Africa and in the wider world. Aid came from both sides of the cold war divide; Julius Nyerere was a world figure, and a recognised spokesman for the Third World. The Catholic son of a minor chief in Butiama, he seemed to personify the subordination of ethnic, religious, and class divides to a greater African identity. He pioneered the road to a specific form of African socialism that saw its origins in particularly African ways of life, and eschewed the more Marxist approaches of some other African intellectual politicians.
Thus during the 1960s he created the policy of Ujamaa. There is no precise English translation of this Swahili word, though villagisation or familyhood are used. Julius Nyerere, a linguistically sensitive man, was implying there was no precise non-African equivalent, though his policy of creating rural villages with a large element of co-operative production had parallels in contemporary China.
A peasantry that had resisted the coercive efforts of colonial agricultural policy, and saw itself as autonomous, with production resting on available resources and rainfall rather than state initiative, was disinclined to welcome the new bureaucrats sent into the villages to oversee the introduction of new measures. Any increases in production were temporary, while the landscape was littered with abandoned and unusable machinery. By the mid-1970s, Tanzania was importing huge levels of food aid, as it had at the time of independence. By the end of the decade, foreign aid donors were taking a direct part in designing and implementing rural development schemes.
In other sectors, inefficient cash-crop production was unable to bear the burden put on it by the rapacious policies of taxation and marketing boards; production stagnated and bureaucracy ballooned. The oil price increases and a war to dislodge Idi Amin in Uganda sent Tanzania into a balance of payments crisis in the late 1970s. In 1981, Julius Nyeyrere turned down an invitation to attend the royal wedding; he couldn't justify the expense to a country which was bankrupt, and in little mood to celebrate.
The need for alternative economic policies was now clear, and Tanzania was vulnerable to the demands of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund who were pursuing free-market solutions with the zeal associated with the Thatcher and Reagan era. Julius Nyerere and the old political guard in Tanzania held out until the mid-1980s, but in 1985 he retired from the presidency, unwilling to implement policies that were anathema to his own, independent, African vision of how society could be ordered. It is a mark of the man that even though his economic policies were far from successful, he never lost the esteem of the Tanzanian people. More than many African states, he did create a sense of unity that overcame factional or ethnic identities. Tanzania always had a reputation for being a peaceful place, no small achievement on a continent frequently wracked by violent dissent.
Retired did not mean removed, and even after leaving office Julius Nyerere was the single most important person in Tanzanian politics. He chose his successor, Ali Hassan Mwyini, and made it clear he would oppose any candidate in the 1995 presidential election who did not meet his approval. This effectively gave him a veto, and the leading political party did nothing to incur his wrath. Internationally, he worked ceaselessly to a find a solution to the crisis in Burundi.
State socialism, state capitalism, and frequently state penury, were the routes chosen by the newly independent African polities. Julius Nyerere chose the former, only to find that the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. Yet he created a durable and stable political edifice that has avoided severe internal repression and earned the genuine respect of its citizens. Julius Nyerere was known universally as Mwalimu - teacher. It is a word that conveys the regard in which he was justifiably held. He is survived by his wife Maria and eight children.
Julius Nyrere: born 1922; died October, 1999