coup by Africans overthrew the Sultan’s govern-
ment and put in its place a revolutionary council
which, in April 1964, announced union with
Tanganyika, now renamed Tanzania. Africans had
constituted four-fifths of the population of
Zanzibar, and many Arabs and Asians now fled.
On the mainland in the same year Nyerere faced
his own troubles when the army mutinied for
higher pay and better promotion, but with the
help of British troops he defeated the challenge.
For twenty-eight years from 1962 Nyerere was
the undisputed father and ‘teacher’ of the nation,
until he retired in 1990 of his own free will. His
was an authoritarian paternalism that owed much
to Mao, whom he admired. Like Mao, Nyerere
was a scholar–leader, writing tracts to explain his
own socialist ideology to the people. His author-
itarian rule was motivated by a humane utopian
vision, which so often can lead to coercion and
control over the mass of the people who need
‘improving’. He justified the one-party state as
necessary to overcome class and ethnic division so
that everyone could strive together to overcome
ignorance, hunger and disease. ‘War’ on these
evils, together with African self-reliance, were
what Nyerere propounded in his Arusha Decla-
ration of 1967. Economic development would
focus on basics – on agriculture rather than on
grandiose industrial projects. Tanzania would
not make itself dependent on foreign invest-
ment. Following communist models, land was
collectivised and peasant families were brought
together into Africa ‘family villages’, often at
some distance from their land. When volun-
tary exhortation proved inadequate, millions of
peasant families were relocated. The concentra-
tion on agricultural development and illiteracy
was sound enough, but everywhere in the world
peasants fail to produce when the land they cul-
tivate is no longer their own. Nyerere’s new
society did not raise standards of living. His major
success was the spread of elementary education
and literacy; another great plus was that his
country was not marred by political executions or
massacres.
Authoritarian and visionary, Nyerere in retire-
ment was held in respect and affection. His suc-
cessor President Ali Hassan Mwinyi, however,
began to move away from the ideology of the
one-party state. The US, indirectly the chief
provider of finance through the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund, made its hos-
tility to one-party states felt. In the early 1980s
the corruption of the one-party state and social-
ist planning were ruining the economy, including
agriculture, which employed 90 per cent of the
population and earned 80 per cent of foreign
exchange. Julius Nyerere, in a fashion typical of
black independence leaders imposing their ideol-
ogy, voluntarily stepped down from the presi-
dency but declared that he would continue to
guide the country as chairman of the ruling party.
In 1990 he gave up the chairmanship as well.
Under its new president, Ali Hassan Mwinyi,
Tanzania began to move away from its ruinous
socialist experiments and turned to the West, to
the International Monetary Fund in Washington
for loans, and after 1986 had to accept the reme-
dies prescribed. Nyerere disapproved, but Mwinyi
became increasingly his own man and was re-
elected for a five-year term as president in 1990.
In 1991 cautious steps were taken to explore
whether Tanzania should liberalise politically as
well as economically.
Kenya’s road to independence was very different
from Tanzania’s peaceful progress. Kenya was the
one East African colony where a widespread and
bloodily suppressed insurrection preceded inde-
pendence. But this was not the only difference.
Kenya also had a significant white settler pop-
ulation that increased in size after 1945. With
a population at the time of independence of
nearly 10 million Africans, the 45,000 Europeans
were, of course, significant not in numbers but
in political clout. There were far more Muslim
Arabs (35,000) and Indians (188,000), originally
brought in to build the Ugandan railway, but
Asians and Arabs were not significant in Whitehall
in the way the politically powerful white settlers
were.
The foundations of colonial government were
undeniably racist. But the white settlers could
claim that they had worked hard to make their
farms productive and had invested their lives
and those of their families in becoming white
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