Julius Kambarage Nyerere, former president of Tanzania, died on October 14th, aged 77
HE BORE the title of mwalimu or teacher. But perhaps the clearest lesson of his life was that of
Julius Kambarage Nyerere, former president of Tanzania, died on October 14th, aged 77
HE BORE the title of mwalimu or teacher. But perhaps the clearest lesson of his life was that of unintended consequences. A deeply principled man, Julius Nyerere was that rare—and not always fortunate—sort of idealist who had a chance to put his ideals into practice. His philosophy was a mix of Fabian socialism and Catholic social teaching. He was a preacher as much as a politician.
On Tanganyika's independence from Britain in 1961, Mr Nyerere became prime minister and was later president. In 1964 the new nation absorbed Zanzibar to become Tanzania. He ruled until 1985.
No one questioned his sincerity, and his integrity was widely admired. Unlike many African leaders of his generation he lived simply and was not corrupt. He gave Tanzania stability and unity. Under his one-party rule it was politically peaceful and it was spared civil war.
His social experiments, on the other hand, drove the country towards economic ruin. Though honest himself, his moral example was not enough to prevent the widespread theft of foreign aid. A believer in justice, he nonetheless had political opponents and people accused of “economic” crimes held without trial, some of them for many years.
He was born in 1922, one of 26 children of a poor chief from a small community near Lake Victoria. He went to school, barefoot and wearing an old piece of cloth. He won a place at the country's only secondary school and was the first person from Tanganyika to go to a British university.
On return, he took to teaching but was soon caught up in the nationalist ferment sweeping Africa. Independence for Tanganyika, a former German colony mandated to Britain after the first world war, came without struggle. Mr Nyerere's Tanganyika African National Union was the only nationalist movement and the British encouraged independence. Mr Nyerere was their man. (He even offered delay in the hope that Tanganyika might join a federation with Uganda and Kenya.) When two years later he fled a threatened coup, British soldiers arrived to restore him to power.
Surprising to the last
Tanzania is a huge, empty country with a vibrant trading tradition on the coast and a poor interior. The south-west has potentially good farmland but is cursed by drought. As keen on equality as on economic growth, Mr Nyerere felt that, if Tanzanians were to be poor, they should at least be poor together. He was against handouts. Yet national self-reliance had a puzzling consequence: aid donors so admired it that Tanzanians were soon getting more aid per head than any other Africans. As elsewhere, much of it was wasted or stolen.
Mr Nyerere did not want socialism from above on the Soviet model. Instead he tried to foster a spirit of local community—ujamaa in Kiswahili, meaning family togetherness. People were encouraged to move into villages where schools and medicine were more available and where they could work together on communal fields.
He kept the Soviet Union at arms length but took help from Mao's China. In practice, a mixture of ujamaa and top-down socialism was imposed. Land was nationalised and huge state institutions controlled the economy from factories to shops. An army of petty officials bullied people into communal villages.
Tanzanians were loth to share land. Villages were often in bad places. What's more, this social engineering coincided with the 1970s rise in oil prices, when prices for Tanzania's own commodities were low. Nor did the neighbourhood sit still: in 1979 Mr Nyerere sent his army into Uganda to remove Idi Amin, a well-meaning venture that did Uganda little good in the end and finally bankrupted Tanzania.
Compared to some of his neighbours, Mr Nyerere was an angel. But Tanzania was a one-party state from 1965 until 1992. In theory, openness was encouraged. In practice those who spoke out were locked up under draconian presidential powers.
Although late in life Mr Nyerere did acknowledge that his socialist experiments had failed, his idealism never left him. In retirement, he even tried to reform the ruling party. Finding it inert and ineradicably corrupt, he changed his mind about one-party rule.
Admirers will say that Julius Nyerere was too idealistic for this world and that bad implementation does not negate his dream of equality. To critics, his moral approach to politics masked an arrogance and a refusal to listen to those with shrewder views of what was best for his country.
Tanzanians abandoned ujamaa as soon as they could. Yet Mr Nyerere himself remained extraordinarily popular. His policies had failed, but people admired his sincerity and his ascetic life. His warm and engaging style—in conversation and from a platform—was irresistible. Few could remain immune to the burst of laughter which preceded his musings—for example, on whether poor Tanzanian peasants needed electric toothbrushes. He was a magnificent teacher: articulate, questi