It was like Arusha all over again. On 21 February 1971, a week-long meeting of the TANU National Executive Committee came to an end in Dar es Salaam. President Nyerere stepped into the late afternoon sunshine and addressed the crowd that had gathered outside the party headquarters at Lumumba Street, Kariakoo. His purpose was to introduce a new party document – the ‘TANU Guidelines’ or Mwongozo. To cheers and applause, Nyerere narrated a history of Africa which emphasised the catastrophic impact of centuries of European domination, from the slave trade through colonial occupation to the neo-imperial support provided to the white minority regimes. He argued that Mwongozo was a means of finally breaking with these legacies. TANU’s task was ‘to wipe out oppression in our country, to wipe out the exploitation of man by man in Tanzania, and to create a new African, an African who utterly refuses to be exploited, oppressed, and humiliated’.Footnote ¹

This chapter tells the story of TANU’s attempt to reload Tanzania’s socialist revolution and revive Africa’s flagging liberation struggles in the early 1970s. In contrast to the Arusha Declaration, Mwongozo has received little attention from historians. Yet it was a key turning point in the course of the ujamaa project. Mwongozo emerged from a moment of acute domestic and continental crisis. The development path set out in Arusha was failing to yield the anticipated economic growth. Tanzania seemed no closer to fulfilling its goal of national self-reliance. The elite continued to be divided as to the way forward. The uneasy union with Zanzibar was creating a headache for the mainland government. Meanwhile, the forces of Tanzania’s white minority enemies and their allies had regrouped. To Tanzanian eyes, they appeared to be on the counteroffensive. A failed attempt to topple the government in Guinea was followed by a successful coup in Uganda, which Tanzanians attributed to outside interference by ‘imperialists’, including Britain and Israel, rather than the Cold War superpowers.

In these circumstances, TANU’s radical wing gained an upper hand over the government’s moderates. Having previously resisted certain popular economic interventions on the basis that they would be too disruptive and divisive, Nyerere now relented. But the outcome of Mwongozo was a situation in which TANU’s dominance and the ideological doxa of ujamaa precluded serious discussions about political economy. We have seen in previous chapters how the party-state increasingly exercised greater top-down control over youth politics and the press in Dar es Salaam, justified by the language of unity and vigilance against the imperialist threat. This chapter takes these conversations into the sphere of high politics, picking up the story which we left off in Chapter 2. Social scientists working on the magnetic topic of villagisation have identified the source of Tanzanian authoritarianism in the modernising visions of bureaucrats and TANU officials.Footnote ² Yet, as Priya Lal argues, there is a teleological element to these arguments, which attribute the failure of Tanzanian socialism to ‘fundamental flaws in the ujamaa experiment’.Footnote ³ Moving from the village to the seat of state power, this chapter understands the authoritarian turn in Tanzanian politics via a context which is simultaneously local and global, rooted in Dar es Salaam but stretching beyond the country’s frontiers.

The Strains of Self-Reliance

At the start of the new decade, the Nyerere government was strained by the pressures of implementing the Arusha programme while snuffing out internal threats and managing the unsteady relationship with Zanzibar. First, fulfilling the promises of the Arusha Declaration tested the capacity of the government to build a democratic socialist state. The pursuit of self-reliance stretched the sinews of the economy. Debates over the future direction of economic policy and the role of TANU in a one-party democracy proved divisive. Meanwhile, the uncovering of a coup plot against the government showed the residual threat posed by high-profile dissenters, as well as the dangers Tanzania assumed by hosting exiled revolutionaries. The hastily devised union with Zanzibar was increasingly unstable. Nyerere looked on with embarrassment from Dar es Salaam as the excesses of the Karume regime attracted negative international attention.

Following a burst of activity after the Arusha Declaration, economic growth had plateaued out by 1970. These years witnessed the rapid expansion of the parastatal sector, despite senior voices within government warning that they were placing dangerous stress on Tanzania’s underdeveloped manpower resources. As Amir Jamal, the minister for finance, told parliament, the parastatals and nationalised banks were mutually dependent upon each other. The failure of one would trigger a chain reaction that affected the others, spilling over into the entire economy.Footnote ⁴ This strain was increased by the Second Five-Year Plan of 1969–74, which was funded by overseas borrowing, contra the Arusha Declaration’s warnings. The State Trading Corporation (STC) responded to shortages of consumer goods by importing them in large quantities, draining precious foreign exchange. A trade surplus of 135 million shillings in 1967 became a deficit of 519 million shillings by 1970. The balance of payments crisis was aggravated by the decision taken in early 1970 to nationalise import-export houses and wholesale trade, against the counsel of the government’s expatriate advisors.Footnote ⁵ This was something Nyerere had previously warned against. Among the reasons for the decision was the need to purchase around 250 million shillings’ worth of goods from China in each of the five years which it would take to build the railway to Zambia. The contradictions of the search for self-reliance were becoming sharper.Footnote ⁶

Different politicians and economists offered different solutions to the difficulties of implementing socialism. Nyerere continued to prioritise development through rural transformation and accelerated efforts to roll out ujamaa villagisation. A. M. Babu, the minister of commerce, shared the view that socialist development could not come about while Tanzania remained dependent on unequal relationships of foreign trade. However, as we saw in Chapter 2, Babu differed from the president in calling for intensive industrialisation rather than agricultural revolution. The pair clashed over the contents of the Second Five-Year Plan. Nyerere also objected to Babu’s Marxism. He reportedly threw one of Babu’s cabinet papers out three times for being too theoretically esoteric.Footnote ⁷ Yet despite his reputation as an ‘extremist’ abroad, Babu demonstrated a strong pragmatic streak. In 1970, Nyerere instructed Babu to draw up plans for nationalising Tanzania’s wholesale trade by the end of the year. Babu refused to carry out these instructions. He believed that the current system of internal commerce, while not necessarily congruent with socialist ideals, was cost effective. Babu argued that the state should not be ‘a seller of bread and butter’.Footnote ⁸ Nyerere reacted angrily. He established a separate task force on the issue, which bypassed Babu’s own ministry.Footnote ⁹ After November’s general election, Babu was shifted from the ministry of commerce to the ministry for economic affairs and development. Much later, as Tanzania’s socialist project became an indisputable economic disaster, Babu declared himself vindicated. ‘The Tanzanian example has shown that indiscriminate nationalisation of the private sector … may turn into a destructive move which hampers rather than accelerates development’, he reflected.Footnote ¹⁰

Just as they had done at the time of the Arusha Declaration, more moderate ministers and bureaucrats also urged for caution in moving forwards.Footnote ¹¹ They included the likes of Amir Jamal and the governor of the national bank, Edwin Mtei, as well as a number of European expatriate advisors. While still committed to the goals of Arusha socialism, their technocratic education and cosmopolitan experience led them to prioritise accepted economic logic above political exhortation or rigid Marxist categorisations in setting out a development strategy.Footnote ¹² For example, they advised Nyerere against pushing ahead with a ‘frontal’ approach to ujamaa villagisation, arguing that working within the existing structures of small-scale peasant farming would be far more effective.Footnote ¹³ They maintained that Tanzania must continue to export goods in order to sustain foreign exchange reserves in an interconnected global economy. ‘We shall not pretend that self-reliance and self-sufficiency are one and the same thing’, Jamal told parliament in 1969. ‘We recognise that they are not, and we know we are increasingly part of an interdependent world.’Footnote ¹⁴ Mtei similarly used the press to explain why Tanzania had to preserve its foreign currency reserves if it was to succeed in implementing socialism.Footnote ¹⁵

At the opposite end of the scale to these economists were many TANU leaders and members of parliament, who eschewed conventional strategies of development through economics and instead advocated for development through politics. That is not to say that the former lacked a political basis or the latter economic justification. Rather, the TANU radicals came to emphasise that development could only be achieved through popular mobilisation under the banner of the party. Their interventions were driven by political principle, especially regarding complete Africanisation, rather than economic calculation. They thus called for not just the nationalisation of internal trade (to which Nyerere eventually acceded), but also housing. These calls also came with a racial edge, as many Tanzanians continued to resent the prominence of Asians in the retail sector and their role as a property-owning rentier class. At the radical tip of TANU, Youth League leaders agitated for party cadres to serve as a ‘vanguard’ in order to mobilise the workers and peasants in pursuit of the goals of ujamaa, much as had occurred in Mao’s China. The TYL declared that Tanzania’s most pressing task was to transform TANU into ‘an ideological streamlined nerve centre of the revolution’.Footnote ¹⁶ Debate about development policy was therefore not just a case of alternative strategies, but also a question of whether political mobilisation rather than economic calculation offered Tanzania the best route forwards.

Meanwhile, the TANU leadership constricted space for dissent among the party’s ranks. In October 1968, the National Executive Committee expelled nine members from TANU. They included the exiled Oscar Kambona, as well as Eli Anangisye, who was under preventive detention after his failed attempt to subvert the armed forces in July 1967.Footnote ¹⁷ This disgraced pair were joined by seven MPs. The reasons for their expulsion all differed slightly and, in some cases, remain murky. But several had questioned party policy, especially regarding the state of democracy in Tanzania. F. K. Chogga, the MP for Iringa South, had criticised Tanzania’s foreign policy and called for democratic elections to be held in Zanzibar. Fortunatus Masha, the former TANU publicity secretary and Kambona associate, had long been among the more critical voices in parliament. He alleged that the party press and Radio Tanzania were vilifying dissenters like himself.Footnote ¹⁸ This mass expulsion served as a warning to any would-be dissenters that criticism of fundamental policy would no longer be tolerated. The Nationalist asserted that the nine were not expelled from TANU for being ‘vocal and outspoken’, but rather because they were opposed to the party and ‘contemptuous’ of its principles and ideology.Footnote ¹⁹ Nyerere’s own message was clear. ‘A leader who disagrees with the policy of Tanu and destroys people’s unity cannot be our friend; he is our enemy and we must take necessary steps’, he warned.Footnote ²⁰ At the NEC meeting, he described the dissenters as being ‘in league’ with ‘imperialists’ in undermining the Arusha Declaration. The incident served as further confirmation of the increasing concentration of power in the hands of the party leadership, rather than in parliament (or, for that matter, in central government).

Further evidence of the subversive threat facing Tanzania came via a high-profile treason trial case the following year. In September 1969, the government announced that it had unearthed a plot against it, orchestrated by Kambona in London and involving several army officers, plus former TANU heavyweights Bibi Titi Mohammed and Michael Kamaliza. Both held grievances with Nyerere. From Chapter 2, we will recall that Bibi Titi, a long-time Kambona ally, had resigned from her role as head of TANU’s women’s movement in 1967 due to ‘back trouble’, which many took as a coded rejection of the leadership conditions attached to the Arusha Declaration. Bibi Titi was also embittered by the marginalisation of the East African Muslim Welfare Society, of which she was vice-president, as the government sought to extend its control into religious life in Tanzania.Footnote ²¹ Kamaliza had been dropped as minister for labour in the post-Arusha fallout of 1967 and then was replaced as secretary-general of NUTA in 1969. The arrests followed rumours of discontent among the armed forces. The dramas of the subsequent treason trial captivated Dar es Salaam’s public throughout 1970. It exposed secretive meetings held between conspirators in upmarket hotels like the Twiga and Palm Beach, as well as letters smuggled between Kambona and his associates in Eastern Africa. It culminated in four defendants, including Bibi Titi, being found guilty of treason in January 1971. While the trial was further grist to the mill of those in Tanzania advocating for greater national vigilance, it was an uncomfortable affair for Nyerere. One defendant accused him of presiding over a dictatorship, with no freedom of the press.Footnote ²²

While rumours about the roles of various Cold War powers fluttered around the trial, it was more closely tied up with the politics of Dar es Salaam’s African liberation movements. The prosecution’s case depended on the testimony of Potlako Leballo, the acting president of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), a rival South African movement to the ANC. Leballo claimed that he had been approached by one of the plotters, who requested the PAC’s cooperation in a coup, in return for a more favourable relationship with a post-Nyerere government. Leballo had much to gain from the success of a plot. His leadership had been divisive within the PAC, which was a particularly fractious organisation even by the standards of the liberation movements. The PAC lacked an international profile, especially after the coup in Ghana in 1966 deprived the movement of its main sponsor in Africa. The support it received from China was meagre in comparison to the ANC’s strong connections with Moscow. But rather than siding with Kambona and his conspirators, Leballo instead sensed an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the present regime. He reported the approach to the Tanzanian authorities, who instructed him to act as a mole within the movement. Despite concerns over his credibility as a witness being raised in the trial, Leballo subsequently drew on the government’s support to suppress resistance within the PAC.Footnote ²³

More generally, the trial exposed the dangers that were inherent in providing the liberation movements with a support base in exile and the extent to which they had become enmeshed in Tanzania’s domestic affairs. As outlined in Chapter 4, the Tanzanian government was concerned about the presence of armed and often idle guerrilla cadres in the country. Politicking between the movements – in this case, the South African contenders – plus their dire financial situation were believed to increase their sense of venality. An array of liberation movement leaders became dragged into rumours surrounding the plot. They included Oliver Tambo, who allegedly failed to report an effort to recruit the ANC into the conspiracy to the Tanzanian authorities. He then refused to testify at the trial, on the grounds that the ANC should remain neutral vis-à-vis Tanzania’s internal affairs. Tambo’s association with the plot may have triggered a sudden Tanzanian decision to close down the ANC’s training camp at Kongwa in July 1969, ostensibly on the grounds of national security.Footnote ²⁴ To complicate matters further, there were reports that Frene Ginwala, editor of the recently nationalised Standard and an ANC supporter, was supplying evidence to the defence lawyers, which they redeployed in court to besmirch Leballo’s character. An employee of a government newspaper was thus seeking to undermine a state prosecution of a treason trial.Footnote ²⁵ However unlikely it was to have succeeded, Kambona’s plot supplied the government with an illustration of the serious threats which it faced from conspirators. It therefore provided justification for clamping down on dissent in its calls for unity and vigilance. But it also underlined the degree to which disaffection among the liberation movements provided a source of potential support for opponents to the regime.

Meanwhile, Zanzibar continued to pose a headache for Nyerere’s government. By 1968, four years after the revolution and union with Tanganyika, Zanzibar had sunk into an economic and political malaise. Whereas the mainland embraced the flexible concept of ‘self-reliance’, Karume’s regime pursued economic autarky. Ill-conceived policies led to food shortages. The racial persecution of Zanzibaris of Arab, Indian, and Comorian descent continued. Africans were scarcely better off. They may have benefited from the land redistribution scheme which followed the revolution, but their everyday freedoms were significantly curbed. The government restricted travel to the mainland. The Stasi-trained security services clamped down on any signs of dissent. Power became concentrated in a cabal of hardliners, who could call on support bases inside the government, the armed forces, and the Afro-Shirazi Party’s youth wing. Nestled within the structure of the union, this situation in Zanzibar was largely shielded from the gaze of the rest of the world.Footnote ²⁶

However, the ‘disappearance’ of two high-profile Zanzibari politicians in 1969 could not simply be brushed aside by the mainland government. In August, Karume asked Nyerere to approve the extradition of Kassim Hanga and Othman Shariff to Zanzibar. After initially refusing to grant this request, Nyerere acquiesced when Karume returned with firm ‘evidence’ of a plot. Hanga and Shariff had both played key roles within the Afro-Shirazi Party prior to independence but had subsequently fallen out with Karume. Hanga, as we saw in Chapter 2, had joined Kambona in London in the political turbulence which followed the Arusha Declaration and was then imprisoned almost immediately after his ill-considered return to Tanzania in late 1967. Since his release from detention in December 1968, Hanga had been living quietly in Dar es Salaam. Shariff had served as Tanzania’s first ambassador to Washington, but at the time of his arrest he was working as a veterinary officer in Iringa. Both men were unlikely conspirators; no evidence surfaced that a coup was being planned. In October, Zanzibar’s armed forces explained that a plot had been uncovered, naming a number of conspirators and stating that four of them had been sentenced to death. Although the names of those who were executed were not given, Hanga and Shariff were never seen again. Nyerere was reportedly furious. At a time when Tanzania routinely condemned the execution of political activists in Rhodesia and South Africa, the executions left Nyerere open to charges of hypocrisy. In response, Nyerere and several union ministers held meetings with Karume. They told him that he was embarrassing Tanzania in the eyes of the world.Footnote ²⁷

Relations between Zanzibar and the mainland became increasingly fractious. In the economic sphere, Zanzibar declined to provide the Bank of Tanzania with details of foreign exchange reserves held in the archipelago, despite the mainland government having constitutional control over currency matters. Jamal observed to Nyerere that, short of ‘actually printing their own currency’, Zanzibar could have done little more to declare its ‘monetary independence’.Footnote ²⁸ The Karume regime’s behaviour continued to create public embarrassment. In September 1970, four teenage girls of Iranian descent were forced into marriages with senior ASP figures, attracting international press coverage and widespread revulsion.Footnote ²⁹ Nairobi’s East African Journal asked readers to ‘consider how many Africans (including Zanzibaris) would support the idea of abducting Joshua Nkomo’s teenage daughter and forcing her to marry Ian Smith on the grounds of national unity?’Footnote ³⁰ This was precisely the sort of embarrassment that piqued Nyerere’s anger and exposed him to accusations of double standards. When he condemned apartheid at the UN General Assembly in November, Nyerere acknowledged that he could not ‘claim that Tanzania is faultless, or that offenses against human rights never take place in my country’.Footnote ³¹ Despite the routine fanfare about the pan-African spirit of the union, Zanzibar appeared more and more as a millstone around the Tanzanian government’s neck, endangering its claim to the moral high ground in the struggle against minority rule in Africa.

The Imperialist Offensive

Africa’s 1960s had begun with high hopes: independence had arrived across most of the continent; armed struggles were soon launched to liberate those territories where colonial rule remained resilient. By the end of the decade, much of this optimism had evaporated. The liberation movements were riven with internal divisions, as the assassination of Mondlane had all too tragically shown. The ‘frontline states’ also seemed to have become pessimistic about the potential of anticolonial war. The Lusaka Manifesto of 1969, which revived the prospect of peaceful negotiations with the white minority regimes, was decried by the liberation movement leaders. African leaders were increasingly at odds over their tactics towards the anticolonial struggle. South Africa attempted to capitalise on this disunity by cultivating diplomatic relationships with independent governments. But alongside these olive branches came more violent warnings of the threat posed to progressive African states from the white minority regimes and their supporters.

In June 1970, Edward Heath’s Conservatives swept to power in the British general election. The new administration immediately signalled its intention to reconsider the policy of its Labour predecessors to refuse to sell arms to South Africa. It drew attention to the Simonstown Agreement of 1955, which provided Britain with access to naval facilities in South Africa, although it contained no obligation for the supply of arms in return. The rationale for renewing the export of military hardware to Pretoria was couched in the terms of the Cold War. When the British foreign secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, was challenged on the strategic logic for his government’s stance, he emphasised the expanding communist influence in the Indian Ocean region, including Tanzania’s recent decision to receive arms exclusively from China. In response, Labour’s shadow secretary for defence, Denis Healey, argued that the Conservative decision would fuel a ‘pitiful arms race’ in Africa, with China and the Soviet Union acting as the major suppliers. ‘Can we blame the countries of black Africa if in this matter they take the line that their enemy’s enemy is their friend?’, asked another Labour MP.Footnote ³²

However, the more significant opposition to Heath’s decision came not from within parliament, but from within Africa. In particular, he misjudged Nyerere’s resolve. On 18 July, the British high commissioner, Horace Phillips, met the president in Dodoma. Nyerere stated that should Britain resume arms sales to South Africa, he would feel obliged to withdraw Tanzania from the Commonwealth. Phillips urged London to reconsider its stance. He said that it was a sign of the strength of the Commonwealth that Tanzania had remained a member, despite the previous rupture with Britain over Rhodesia’s UDI.Footnote ³³ ‘None of the eager-beaver communist governments represented here who have assiduously wooed Nyerere have managed to break the link’, Phillips wrote. ‘It grieves me that they may soon be able incredulously to rejoice that we ourselves have taken the step that breaks it.’Footnote ³⁴ Nyerere’s objections forced the British government into backtracking on their initial plans. No immediate decision was to be announced on the matter of arms sales. Instead, Heath committed only to respecting the terms of the Simonstown Agreement. But this postponement did not put an end to African concern. At the request of Milton Obote, the Ugandan president, the leaders of the so-called Mulungushi Club, which also comprised the leaders of Tanzania and Zambia, met in Dar es Salaam on 22 July. They told Phillips that they believed that Britain was free to identify its own defence interests, but also thought Heath had come to the wrong conclusions regarding Soviet activity in the Indian Ocean.Footnote ³⁵

Recognising that they were not going to drop the issue, Heath consulted further with the Mulungushi leaders. He invited Nyerere to his country residence in October, when the Tanzanian leader passed through London en route to the UN General Assembly in New York. The talks ended in deadlock. Nyerere rejected Britain’s assessment of its own defence interests in southern Africa and the Indian Ocean. He was resistant to the Heath government’s Cold War logic. In exchanges with Heath’s special advisor on African affairs in Dar es Salaam in September, Nyerere had already argued that – whatever the scaremongers in the British press wrote about China – Tanzania had no ‘big brother’.Footnote ³⁶ Now he pointed out to Heath himself that Britain’s Cold War policy in Africa had yielded little success. ‘If the West really believed that Communism was a danger’, Nyerere said, ‘they should re-examine their policies in the light of the results they had achieved’, rather than ‘act in a way which encouraged the spread of Communism’.Footnote ³⁷

Shortly after Nyerere returned from New York, events in Guinea reminded Tanzania of the visceral threat that came with supporting African liberation movements. On the night of 22–23 October, a force of Portuguese officers, colonial troops, and exiled opponents of Sékou Touré’s regime invaded Guinea-Conakry by sea. The failed attack sought to free Portuguese prisoners of war and destroy the assets of Amílcar Cabral’s PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), which had been given shelter in Conakry while it waged guerrilla war against Portugal in neighbouring Guinea-Bissau. The invaders also unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Touré. Although Portugal denied any involvement, the invasion sparked international outrage. In Africa, it was received as another white imperialist intrigue against the continent’s independent states.Footnote ³⁸

Ever since FRELIMO launched its guerrilla war in Mozambique in 1964, the Tanzanian government had warned of the risk of a Portuguese invasion. The dangers which Tanzania voluntarily assumed by housing the guerrillas were fresh in the memory after the assassination of Mondlane, which was followed by another parcel-bombing at the FRELIMO offices in July 1970.Footnote ³⁹ Events in Guinea redoubled the authorities’ warnings to remain vigilant against neo-imperialism. The relationship between Nyerere and Touré, once strong, had soured somewhat after the latter hosted the disgraced Kambona and Hanga in Guinea in late 1967. But the threat to the African revolution overrode such misgivings. The Tanzanian government pledged 10 million shillings in assistance to Guinea.Footnote ⁴⁰ Rashidi Kawawa, as second vice-president, addressed a demonstration by the TANU Youth League from the balcony of the Guinean embassy. In a defiant speech, he warned Portugal from perpetrating similar acts against Tanzania. ‘Let them cross the [River] Ruvuma into Tanzania and they will see’, he said. ‘Let them land in Dar es Salaam and they will see.’Footnote ⁴¹

In Dar es Salaam, there was a sense that the African revolution was facing an all-out assault of unprecedented danger. This consisted not just of the sort of violence witnessed in Guinea, but also attempts by South Africa to cultivate diplomatic and economic relationships with independent African states. It was not just Hastings Banda’s Malawi which was now deliberating a modus vivendi with Pretoria. The Ivorian president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, declared his interest in entering into a dialogue with Pretoria.Footnote ⁴² Ghana made similar noises. These developments elicited words of caution in Dar es Salaam. The Tanzanian executive secretary of the OAU Liberation Committee, George Magombe, warned that leaders who grasped South Africa’s poisoned olive branch would ‘be walking into a Boer trap’.Footnote ⁴³ Nyerere himself remained resolute. Addressing the UN, he dismissed any possibility of Tanzania signing a non-aggression treaty with South Africa. An ‘African Munich’, he declared, ‘would no more bring peace than did that of Europe in 1938’.Footnote ⁴⁴

In this spirit, Nyerere went with Kaunda and Obote to the Commonwealth Heads of State Conference in Singapore in January 1971. The summit had been identified as a crunch meeting ever since Heath had decided to delay finalising his government’s position on arms to South Africa in July. Writing in London’s Times ahead of the conference, Nyerere set out Tanzania’s position. ‘The sale of arms to South Africa means support for the enemies of the African people’, he stated.Footnote ⁴⁵ Obote travelled reluctantly, fearing for the security of his regime at the hands of a disgruntled military; he made the trip only under the persuasion of Kaunda and Nyerere. Obote was right to be concerned. On 25 January, word reached Singapore from Kampala that General Idi Amin had seized power in a military coup.

—

The news from Kampala sent shockwaves through political circles in Dar es Salaam. For all the fury that had accompanied the Portuguese intervention in Conakry, Guinea was a distant state in West Africa. Uganda, on the other hand, shared a common border with Tanzania and was a member of the East African Community. The Nationalist condemned the ‘rightest, reactionary coup’ as ‘the saddest and most shameful thing that could befall Uganda, East Africa, and Africa as a whole’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Obote immediately flew back from Singapore to East Africa, with the intention of crushing the coup. He first stopped in Nairobi but found the Kenyan government unreceptive. Invited to Tanzania, Obote arrived at the airport in Dar es Salaam on 26 January with all the trappings of a state visit. At a press conference at State House, Obote insisted that he would return home, denied that Amin commanded popular support in Uganda, and accused Israel of engineering the coup. Nyerere himself cut short a visit to India, arriving back in Dar es Salaam on 28 January to a rapturous reception which betrayed local anxieties.Footnote ⁴⁷

The Tanzanian response to the Ugandan crisis was defined by the close relationship between Nyerere and Obote. The Ugandan president was only the latest in a litany of African heads of state to be overthrown in a coup. Despite much hand-wringing in the press, the Tanzanian government had hitherto followed other African states in recognising usurping juntas rather than risk splitting the front of continental unity. But Obote was different. He was Nyerere’s ally and friend. Nyerere had supported Obote’s ‘Move to the Left’, under which the Ugandan government proposed the nationalisation of key sectors of the economy, following the course of the Arusha Declaration. Nyerere was also wracked with guilt, having persuaded Obote to travel to Singapore in spite of his own – evidently justified – fears.Footnote ⁴⁸ Nyerere therefore asserted that Tanzania continued to regard Obote as the president of Uganda. ‘We do not recognise the authority of those who have killed their fellow citizens in an attempt to overthrow the established government of a sister republic’, read a Tanzanian government statement, in contradiction to its usual position.Footnote ⁴⁹ The matter of non-recognition was complicated by Uganda’s and Tanzania’s common membership of the EAC. But Nyerere declared that he would not work with Amin. ‘How can I sit at the same table with a killer?’, he told a mass rally at the Jangwani grounds. ‘Jomo [Kenyatta] is speaking for the people who elected him. I am speaking for you. Whom will Amin be representing? I cannot sit with murderers.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Nyerere’s decision to reject Amin and provide shelter for Obote was motivated by a personal relationship instead of political calculation. In the long run, it had costly consequences.

Britain’s swift recognition of the military regime in Kampala, together with rumours of Israeli involvement in the coup itself, fuelled allegations in Tanzania that Amin’s seizure of power was a neocolonial conspiracy intended to smash anti-imperialism in Africa. Britain had quietly welcomed the coup: London’s relationship with Obote had soured as a result of his attitude towards arms sales to South Africa and his ‘Move to the Left’, which threatened the nationalisation of British business assets in Uganda.Footnote ⁵¹ A TANU Youth League statement declared that the coup had been ‘engineered by imperialism and international Zionism in collaboration with servile internal reactionary forces’.Footnote ⁵² Press commentary portrayed the putsch as an imperialist plot to break ‘an axis of progressive states that runs right from Cairo through Khartoum to Dar es Salaam and Lusaka’.Footnote ⁵³ This talk of a pan-continental imperialist assault reflected a pervasive atmosphere of anxiety in Dar es Salaam. ‘The commotion produced by the Ugandan rebellion is of exceptional gravity’, remarked the French ambassador.Footnote ⁵⁴ ‘We are all concerned’, reflected a sober Standard editorial. ‘For if a gun toting soldier in Kampala is allowed to get away with undermining everything we are trying to build up – is there any security for any one of us?’Footnote ⁵⁵

By early 1971, a concatenation of events elsewhere in Africa created a sense of crisis in political circles in Dar es Salaam. The forces of white minority rule seemed to be on the offensive. As South Africa made diplomatic inroads with independent African regimes, it also appeared to be consolidating its military strength via the new government in London. Pressure from progressive African leaders had stalled these developments. But in taking the fight to Britain at the Commonwealth meeting, Nyerere had assisted in propping open the door for Amin’s coup in Uganda. In tackling one threat, he inadvertently helped to precipitate another. Meanwhile, events in Guinea remained fresh in the mind and reminded Tanzania of a more direct military threat from across its southern frontier. Nyerere remained bullish. ‘I can be assassinated, but there will never be a coup d’état’, he told the Jangwani rally. ‘This [an assassination] is possible because it can be done by any maniac, but not a coup d’état in Tanzania.’Footnote ⁵⁶ His hubris echoed Obote, who had once stated, ‘I am perhaps the only African leader who is not afraid of a military takeover.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Against the background of domestic economic strife, this international crisis propelled TANU into a major intervention – Mwongozo.

Creating the ‘Guidelines’

In December 1970, Kingunge Ngombale-Mwiru led a TANU Youth League delegation to a meeting of the Pan-African Youth Movement (PAYM) in Dakar. Ngombale-Mwiru was the TYL’s secretary-general and a rising intellectual influence within the party. His politics were informed by his exposure to key Marxist texts and association with leading African radicals. He was well-travelled, having studied in Monrovia, Dakar, and Paris, where he met African luminaries including Amílcar Cabral. Ngombale-Mwiru then taught at Kivukoni College, TANU’s training school in Dar es Salaam. All these formative experiences left their mark on Mwongozo, as did Ngombale-Mwiru’s trip to West Africa for the PAYM meeting.

Like many pan-African meetings at the time, the PAYM conference was a stormy affair. More radical participants believed that its Senegalese hosts were not committed enough to the anticolonial struggle and too close to the former colonial occupier, France. In the build-up to the conference, the hosts became embroiled in a diplomatic spat with Guinea, which had broadcast allegations that Portuguese troops and mercenaries were planning an invasion from Senegalese territory. In the end, the Guinean delegation declined to show up. Those which did, including Tanzania and representatives of various liberation movements, sided against Senegal. Rather than follow precedent and offer the chair of the PAYM to the hosts, the conference voted to give it to the absent Guineans. En route home, Ngombale-Mwiru stopped off in Conakry to hand over the reins of the movement. There, he was impressed by stories of the defence of Guinea by its celebrated ‘people’s militia’. These thoughts remained with him as he flew back to Dar es Salaam.Footnote ⁵⁸

Shortly after the coup in Uganda, Ngombale-Mwiru was summoned to a meeting with Rashidi Kawawa. The second vice-president explained to Ngombale-Mwiru that he had been charged by President Nyerere to lead a group of TYL cadres on a training mission to the Ugandan frontier, where they would provide security for the local population. However, with his Guinean experience fresh in his mind, Ngombale-Mwiru also drew attention to the threat posed by the Portuguese from Mozambique in the south. Tanzania faced imperialist encirclement. Ngombale-Mwiru therefore talked up his impression of the civil defence arrangements which he had encountered in Conakry. In response to these recommendations and in a general atmosphere of crisis, Nyerere called an emergency meeting of the TANU National Executive Committee, which convened in Dar es Salaam on 13 February.Footnote ⁵⁹

The NEC meeting was unusually long, lasting a whole week. It was also particularly turbulent. Paul Bomani, the minister of commerce, told the British high commissioner that he and others had criticised Nyerere’s handling of the Ugandan situation, on the basis that it was endangering the EAC. Other NEC members argued for a more radical approach, calling for Tanzania to leave the Commonwealth and sever its ties with Britain again.Footnote ⁶⁰ Amid these disagreements, the NEC discussed the text of a landmark party document, which had been drafted by a committee comprising Kawawa, Ngombale-Mwiru, Babu, General Mrisho Sarakikya of the TPDF, and Hashim Mbita, the TANU executive secretary. This team brought together revolutionary socialist thought, the military top brass, and the key leaders of an increasingly assertive party. Mwongozo discarded the lengthy economic rationale of the Arusha Declaration in favour of thirty-five punchy clauses that spoke directly to the people.Footnote ⁶¹ Four years earlier in Arusha, the party had recognised the challenges posed to development by an unfavourable global economic environment; now Mwongozo presented revolutionary Africa as facing an existential assault from the forces of imperialism.

The imprint of events in Conakry and Kampala on Mwongozo was clear. Both Obote and the Guinean ambassador addressed the NEC meeting.Footnote ⁶² One section of Mwongozo was dedicated to the Guinea invasion, another to the Uganda coup. The ‘big lesson’ of Guinea was the threat to progressive African regimes which supported the liberation movements. ‘For similar reasons the imperialists may attempt to attack Tanzania one day.’Footnote ⁶³ Regarding Uganda, Mwongozo said that the coup showed how, instead of bringing down revolutionary governments by direct invasion, imperialism preferred to employ local stooges to achieve its goals. ‘The people must learn from the events in Uganda and from those in Guinea that although imperialism is still strong, its ability to topple a revolutionary government greatly depends on the possibility of getting domestic counter-revolutionary puppets to help them thwart the revolution’, the section concluded.Footnote ⁶⁴ In his speech introducing Mwongozo, Nyerere referred to a story from Guinea, where a server in a café had reported a suspicious individual to the authorities. When the security services turned up, they found it was a man for whom they had been searching. This example of the virtuous, vigilant citizen again underlined the government’s fears of foreign subversion in Dar es Salaam’s public spaces.Footnote ⁶⁵

In response to these external threats, Mwongozo sought to mobilise and politicise the Tanzanian population through the vehicle of TANU. This involved a renewed emphasis on the role of the party’s leadership. Mwongozo stated that ‘[t]he responsibility of the party is to lead the masses, together with their institutions, in their efforts to safeguard national independence and advance the liberation of the African’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Through this leadership, the party would ‘arouse political consciousness’ to ‘make the people aware of our national enemies and the strategies they employ to subvert our policies, our independence, our economy and our culture’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Finally, since the masses were ‘the nation’s shield’, Mwongozo provided for the creation of an armed ‘people’s militia’, modelled on the forces by which Ngombale-Mwiru had been impressed in Guinea.Footnote ⁶⁸ This satisfied the TYL’s request for the nation’s youth to be armed, which had become a refrain over recent years – calls to which Nyerere had previously been opposed.

Mwongozo was a nationalist call to arms, but it was also intended to rejuvenate Africa’s fight against the forces of colonialism and neo-imperialism. ‘Today, our African continent is a hot-bed of the liberation struggle’, the document opened.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet this ‘hot-bed’ was rife with tension. Pan-African gatherings, like the PAYM conference in Dakar, were marked more by division than unity. There was a loss of confidence in the prospects of armed liberation struggles. Certain African states were responding positively to South African overtures. Mwongozo was very much a document born of this particular moment. FRELIMO described it as ‘exactly what African countries need at this stage’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Juma Mwapachu, who held a string of senior positions within the Tanzanian state apparatus in the 1970s, recalled that Mwongozo was a ‘rebirth’ of TANU’s original principles: ‘Africa is one, Africans are all the same.’Footnote ⁷¹ TANU, as an African liberation movement itself, took the Tanzanian revolution onto the international stage. In the same spirit, Tanzania led its regional neighbours away from the softer position which they had assumed through the Lusaka Manifesto. In October, a summit of East and Central African states issued the Mogadishu Declaration, which reaffirmed their ‘unflinching support for the armed struggles being waged by African peoples against colonialism’.Footnote ⁷² Mwongozo was simultaneously a powerful nationalist statement that sought to radicalise Tanzania’s socialist project, while situating it within a continental landscape of liberation struggles. It showed how domestic nation-building and international revolution were deeply entwined.

—

Mwongozo was the first major party document that did not bear the stamp of Nyerere himself. Moreover, the principles and policies it advocated contrasted with much of his previous approach. Before Mwongozo, Nyerere had previously expressed his reluctance to create an armed popular militia. Now, acting on the advice of Ngombale-Mwiru, he decided otherwise. More controversially, Mwongozo cast TANU as a vanguard party in all but name. ‘The time has now come for the Party to take the reins and lead all mass activities’, it stated.Footnote ⁷³ The idea was celebrated by the more radical sections of Tanzanian political society. ‘For the first time in the history of our glorious Party, its vanguard role has been given new, definite and concrete expression’, enthused the Nationalist. ‘The Party and the Party alone shall exercise the vanguard role of leading Tanzania’s revolution.’Footnote ⁷⁴

The idea of the ‘vanguard party’ had been subject to heated debate in Tanzania. First introduced to Marxist theory by Lenin, the concept was frequently employed by African politicians, though often in ambiguous ways. Among the Tanzanian political elite, vanguardism found support among at least two of the architects of Mwongozo, Babu and Ngombale-Mwiru. The constitution of Babu’s Umma Party in Zanzibar had declared that it would be ‘the dynamic vanguard for removing all forms of oppression, exploitation of man by man and for the establishment of a socialist society’.Footnote ⁷⁵ But the term ‘vanguard’ was used with little precision in Tanzania; it functioned as a signifier for a more militant TANU, not a fleshed-out strategy for socialist transformation. Moreover, support for vanguardism was far from universally shared. In 1965, the presidential commission on the creation of a single-party state emphasised that TANU must remain a ‘mass’ rather than ‘elite’ party. The report asserted that ‘[t]o insist on narrow ideological conformity would clearly be inconsistent with the mass participation in the affairs of the Party which we regard as essential’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Among these sceptics was Nyerere. Even as he affirmed TANU’s preeminent role in the struggle to build a socialist state, the president was uneasy about its radicalisation into a vanguard party. He had used the term in a more general sense when speaking to the TYL, whom he considered to be ‘the vanguards’ of ‘socialist construction in Tanzania’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet in debates about the Arusha Declaration, he had rejected calls for the creation of a vanguard party.Footnote ⁷⁸ Despite the clear shift in the party’s self-conceptualisation in Mwongozo, Nyerere remained sceptical. ‘A vanguard party would need to be a party of angels’, he told an interviewer in 1974, ‘and we are not angels’.Footnote ⁷⁹

The language of Mwongozo led foreigners to draw parallels with Maoism. By the early 1970s, as we have seen, observers in both the Eastern Bloc and especially the West had developed the habit of reading Chinese influence into any socialist initiative in Tanzania. According to the GDR’s Stasi, the central purpose of Mwongozo ‘was to give people the impression that Tanzania had taken a Great Leap Forwards [großen Sprung nach vorn]’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Certainly, Maoist ideas were popular among party circles, especially in the TANU Youth League. But the document’s ideological origins were much more cosmopolitan than that. Babu and Ngombale-Mwiru drew their influences not only from Lenin and Mao, but also their experiences travelling and studying more widely. Mwongozo drew on the ideology and praxis of revolutionary movements from across Africa, as well as elsewhere in the Third World. It was a nationalist manifesto, based around the mobilisation of the Tanzanian people in the building of socialism, yet it framed its thirty-five clauses in the context of an international struggle against imperialism.

Firecracker Socialism

The tocsin of Mwongozo echoed across the nation but did little to settle nerves in Dar es Salaam. A public surge of enthusiasm for the new measures masked private unease among government circles at this gear-shift within TANU and its implications for government policy. The threat from abroad, especially the sabre-rattling in Uganda, had not disappeared. The capital swirled with rumours once again. One held that Nyerere had suffered a mental breakdown and was going to Switzerland for treatment.Footnote ⁸¹ In an attempt to calm this foment, Nyerere convened another meeting of the NEC, at which the party leadership would translate the aims of Mwongozo into practice. He tactically chose to hold it in Kigoma, near the border with Burundi, between 16 and 20 March. This was, as the British high commissioner recognised, ‘to put it about as far away from the capital – and cocktail gossip – as possible’.Footnote ⁸²

In Kigoma, the NEC discussed the problems surrounding the implementation of the ujamaa villagisation programme and sketched out arrangements for the creation of the people’s militia. It also discussed the so-called karadha system, which allowed for civil servants to take out low interest loans to pay for luxury goods, such as cars. The NEC determined that ‘our country cannot tolerate playing with our foreign currency for the enjoyment of some individuals’.Footnote ⁸³ More significantly, it agreed on the nationalisation of all houses worth over 100,000 shillings and not primarily occupied by their owner. This was a popular move since it largely affected Asian landlords. According to Issa Shivji, a clause about housing had initially featured on the draft of Mwongozo, but Nyerere had removed it since the nationalisation of buildings was a one-time measure rather than a political principle. Government lawyers raised objections to it. They suggested that a better, less confrontational measure would be to tax landlords. Nyerere replied that some actions were political and so had to be taken regardless of their rationality.Footnote ⁸⁴ The policy was hurried through, with little scrutiny in parliament and apparently no discussion at all in cabinet. Nyerere had been resistant to acting on the housing matter before; now he gave way to the radicals in the party. This drastic measure propelled another exodus of Tanzania’s Asian population and capital, at a time when foreign exchange resources were scarce.Footnote ⁸⁵

The ultra-radical path taken by TANU was difficult for the ‘moderate’ members of cabinet to stomach. Much like the case of the nationalisations after the Arusha Declaration, they had been given no opportunity to discuss the Buildings Act. Reports reached the diplomatic community that Derek Bryceson and Amir Jamal had both tendered their resignations from cabinet.Footnote ⁸⁶ Paul Bomani told a representative of the British business lobby in East Africa that he was ‘absolutely against’ the nationalisation of buildings. Bomani recommended that the British government should warn Nyerere of the dangerous consequences which it could have on foreign confidence in Tanzania.Footnote ⁸⁷ Mwongozo did not represent a sudden power shift in itself: the cabinet’s strength vis-à-vis the party elite had long been in decline. Still, the loss of faith in the direction of Tanzanian socialism which Bomani, Bryceson, and Jamal apparently experienced was problematic for Nyerere. These ministers were not just experts at running technocratic departments, but also faces of Tanzania’s economic diplomacy who commanded respect from foreign partners. East German intelligence understood that Jamal had only withdrawn his resignation after Nyerere persuaded him that it would have disastrous effects on Western investment in Tanzania.Footnote ⁸⁸

Just as the issue of speed had been a major point of contention in debates about Tanzanian political economy before the Arusha Declaration, Mwongozo emphasised the need to quicken the pace of development. Clause two of Mwongozo asserted that ‘revolution means the rapid transformation of society’. John Malecela, a Tanzanian representative to the East African Community, argued that Mwongozo’s commitment to involve the people in development through the party machinery meant that the speed of transformation could now be quickened. Opening a conference of East African administrators and planners in Arusha in September, Malecela accepted that there was a need to avoid the extremes of either ‘over-zealous’ or ‘over-cautious’ policies. But he believed the time was ripe for an acceleration of the ujamaa programme. ‘As long as people know that change will be in their interest the speed of change can be as revolutionary as one may wish’, Malecela argued. ‘Already we have lost a lot of time in the process of speeding up development’, he concluded. ‘The people’s impatience can everywhere be seen.’Footnote ⁸⁹

Not everyone agreed. At the same conference, Knud Erik Svendsen, a Danish economist and a personal assistant to Nyerere, reminded participants that the president himself had warned against turning ujamaa into doctrine and stressed the need to learn from experiences of other countries. This, Svendsen said, was ‘an internationalist credo of non-alignment vis-à-vis ideological schools’.Footnote ⁹⁰ In private, he was far more critical of TANU’s new approach. In November, Svendsen conveyed his fears about the acceleration of the Tanzanian revolution in an extraordinary letter to Nyerere. He warned that the pursuit of socialism was becoming dogmatic. ‘A policy of socialization is not just a matter of principle. If it is handled as such, it turns into doctrine.’ He felt that there had been no proper deliberation by cabinet or parliament on major initiatives, such as the expansion of the STC’s activities or planned new decentralisation policies. ‘The jumping of issues has in a way become your special style of presidential leadership’, Svendsen wrote. Mwongozo claimed to empower the Tanzanian people by bringing them into the decision-making process, but Svendsen felt that current practice risked alienating senior bureaucrats and cabinet ministers.

Svendsen stated that Tanzania was ‘faced with serious problems of speed’. Like Babu, he called for the private sector to continue to play a role in a gradual transformation to socialism. Svendsen wrote that the economic consequences of the ‘rushed’ acquisition of buildings had not been properly considered and that ‘references to this problem’ had been ‘carefully deleted’ from a government economic survey. ‘There has emerged here and there a wrong sense of urgency, as if everything will be lost if we do not push ahead on all fronts at the same time, trying to change the whole structure of the economy in a matter of years. More and more people feel that this is the problem at the top.’ He feared that rash development of policy and its reckless implementation would sap popular confidence in ujamaa. ‘I sometimes ask myself: why this dangerous hurry, this socialist brinksmanship?’, Svendsen asked. ‘Are we faced with mounting enemies abroad and inside, strong enough to stop a socialist policy which moves ahead steadily, so that we must rush with the risk of losing everything?’ As we have seen, Nyerere and especially the TANU ideologues did believe that the country faced powerful enemies from within and without. Svendsen did not share this view. He warned against the celebration of the upcoming tenth anniversary of independence with ‘firecracker’ policies. ‘Would it be better to celebrate with some cautioning words about not rushing ahead with little regard for realistic implementation?’ The letter was an astonishing critique of Nyerere’s leadership style and policy.Footnote ⁹¹ Perhaps the rift proved impossible to bridge, as Svendsen left Tanzania the following year.

Mwongozo was a disruptive document. Its aftermath is usually associated with a period of labour unrest in Dar es Salaam, in which workers appropriated Mwongozo’s language to challenge the exploitative behaviour of their superiors in the workplace. This triggered a wave of wildcat strikes, which the government only brought under control through heavy-handed measures, including the dismissal of workers and their ‘repatriation’ to the countryside.Footnote ⁹² However, Mwongozo also marked an important turning point in elite politics in Tanzania. The Arusha Declaration had been a compromise package designed by Nyerere to bring about a socialist transition without provoking major political rupture. Like Arusha, Mwongozo electrified the masses. But its revolutionary rhetoric and the dramatic economic interventions which followed raised serious concerns inside government circles. Mwongozo, as Jeannette Hartmann argues, represented the subordination of Tanzanian development policy to the instruments of political activism rather than more studious economic reasoning.Footnote ⁹³ As Mwongozo set out ‘it is not correct for leaders and experts to usurp the people’s right to decide on an issue just because they have the expertise’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Whereas previously radical clamour had been moderated by the trust placed in cabinet ministers and trained economists to formulate economic plans, now faith was placed in the political mobilisation of the masses.

Shuffling the Pack

In September 1971, TANU’s National Conference unanimously approved Mwongozo. More radical members of government sensed an opportunity for sweeping economic revolution. The document said relatively little about specific policies but noted the shortcomings of the Second Five-Year Plan and the danger of spending foreign exchange on importing manufactured goods. In December, Babu wrote optimistically in London’s Financial Times that recent events marked a ‘decisive shift’ in Tanzania’s development strategy. The country, Babu thought, was beginning to loosen its ties of dependence on the international community. It had accepted ‘the basic premise of the new school of thought – that development stems from within and not from outside’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The moderates were unhappy. In an interview with the Sunday News, Jamal urged Tanzanians to avoid ‘emotional and doctrinaire statements and arguments’. In a clear barb towards Babu, he stated that it was ‘not necessary for a man to be a hermit to be self-reliant nor for a country to cut itself off from international economic relations’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Nyerere’s response, as during the period of tension which followed the Arusha Declaration, was a major reshuffle of central government. Announcing the news in a radio broadcast on 17 February 1972, he acknowledged the stir which it would provoke. ‘Some of the changes are on a familiar pattern, but others – especially as regards Ministers – are more unusual for Tanzania’, Nyerere said.Footnote ⁹⁷ His prediction was correct: the Sunday News described the news as a ‘bombshell’, which ‘quickly became an over-heated talking-point’, triggering ‘an uncheckable flurry of gossip and speculation … newspapers were sold out as soon as they hit the streets’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Five ministers were moved out of the cabinet to become regional commissioners – presidential appointments who acted as the executive’s arm in the provinces. More significantly, three senior figures who had held cabinet portfolios since the inception of the union government were dropped altogether: Babu, Bryceson, and Bomani. Jamal remained in cabinet, but was transferred to the Ministry of Commerce and Industries, where he was tasked with cleaning up the situation at the STC.

The relocation of senior ministers to regional commissioners was expected. The government was committed to decentralising administration in order to implement the socialist programme more effectively, especially villagisation. Nyerere emphasised that increasing the powers of regional commissioners, who were also members of TANU’s National Executive Committee, was intended to strengthen the party vis-à-vis the cabinet.Footnote ⁹⁹ The ‘massive shake-up’, observed the Indian High Commission, ‘was a measure to inject new vigour into the old body-politic and specifically to make the decentralization programme more effective’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Nyerere’s choice of the new regional commissioners, who included Chediel Mgonja and Lawi Sijaona, was carefully calculated. They had proved their value as party activists since independence through the TANU Youth League and their militancy was deemed important in mobilising the provinces in the drive towards socialism. Simultaneously, Nyerere isolated these radicals from the entanglements of politics in Dar es Salaam which had caused the president concern, particularly when they weighed in on issues of foreign policy.

The departures of Bomani and Bryceson came as little surprise. Both men, as we have seen, had profound disagreements with Nyerere about the direction of socialist strategy in Tanzania. Pro-business and friendly to the West, Bomani’s longevity in cabinet had often seemed anomalous. He appeared, as Africa Confidential put it, ‘like a Kenyan Minister on safari in Tanzania’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nyerere had entrusted Bomani with vital economic portfolios in cabinet and valued his role in smoothing the country’s economic diplomacy abroad – something no better demonstrated than by his new appointment as Tanzania’s ambassador to the United States. As a European, Bryceson’s continued presence in government had also been unusual, especially as the racial edge of populist politics sharpened in the post-Arusha years. He became director of Tanzania’s national parks.

Nyerere’s decision to drop Babu was more complicated. When the reshuffle was announced, Babu was leading a delegation to the OAU Council of Ministers in Addis Ababa. To learn about his dismissal in such a manner, Babu later recalled, was ‘embarrassing and humiliating’.Footnote ¹⁰² It can only be understood against the backdrop of events in Zanzibar. At the time, the union was under severe strain. Karume’s regime chafed for greater autonomy within the union, including in the sphere of foreign policy. Karume openly attacked the principles of the Arusha Declaration and resisted attempts by senior ministers in the mainland government to exercise greater control of Zanzibar’s financial affairs.Footnote ¹⁰³ In April 1971, the Revolutionary Council travelled en masse to Dar es Salaam, where they asked Nyerere to cease all intervention in Zanzibari affairs and assume a purely ceremonial role as union president. Nyerere refused.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The economic situation in the archipelago deteriorated further still, drawing criticism in the mainland press. Philip Ochieng wrote in the Standard about Zanzibar’s empty markets, soaring prices, and bread queues which formed from the middle of the night. Ochieng advised both the Zanzibari and union authorities ‘that we are dealing with human beings, and we cannot sacrifice humans at the altar of political considerations and narrow minds’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ By 1972, the future of the union seemed more precarious than at any point since 1964.

When Nyerere came under pressure from Karume to axe Babu from cabinet, he therefore recognised the chance to make a relatively minor concession to Zanzibar. Babu’s Umma networks, officially banned, remained at large in Zanzibar, where the level of paranoia about anti-government activity outstripped even that in evidence in Dar es Salaam. Babu was critical of the self-enriching behaviour of members of the Revolutionary Council.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Further evidence of a Karume-driven crackdown on potential rivals came the day after Nyerere’s reshuffle of the union government, when Ali Sultan Issa and Badawi Qullatein, two former Umma comrades, were sacked from the Zanzibari government. Babu later claimed that Nyerere had caved into Karume’s long-standing demands for his removal from cabinet.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ But there was a second factor: the simmering tensions between Babu and Nyerere. They had disagreed on the matter of price controls, the post-Arusha nationalisations, and the nationalisation of wholesale trade. On all three occasions, Babu, the notorious ‘communist’ of the Zanzibar Revolution, had supported what might seem the less radical option, emphasising the danger of overstretching the limited capacity of the state. Indeed, and contrary to what he later stated in public, Babu told an acquaintance in Dar es Salaam that he believed that his downfall was due to political differences with Nyerere, rather than pressure from Karume.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The February 1972 reshuffle was a clinical political move which confidently asserted Nyerere’s authority after the wobbles of the previous year. In one fell swoop, Nyerere removed three discontented ministers from the upper echelons of power and dispersed their radical colleagues to the provinces, where they could zealously enforce the policies of ujamaa far from the febrile politics of the capital. ‘In our place were appointed some very junior and inexperienced technocrats’, wrote Babu in his memoirs, ‘whose only qualification for such senior appointments was their total and uncritical loyalty to Nyerere personally’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Polish embassy concurred: those who remained inside a weakened cabinet and central bureaucracy comprised ‘specialists and people hitherto unengaged with political games’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Meanwhile, Babu sought to put a positive gloss on his fall from power. In a letter to the Standard, he argued that the relegation of senior ministers to the backbenches would allow greater scrutiny of the government in parliament. But this public expression of support suggested insecurity as much as loyalty. ‘It is curious that he thought this was necessary’, mused the French ambassador.Footnote ¹¹¹ Similarly, Babu wrote in his memoirs that he initially told Nyerere that he was pleased to have been dropped from government, since he could now talk freely about the situation in Zanzibar. ‘That’s very positive’, Nyerere responded ‘but if you criticise me, I will lock you up’.Footnote ¹¹²

Two months later, Nyerere did place Babu behind bars. On the evening of 7 April 1972, Karume was assassinated at the ASP headquarters in Zanzibar. That night, the Zanzibari government began to round up men with Umma connections. Scores were shot dead; hundreds more were detained over subsequent days. On the mainland, the union government sought to keep news of the assassination to a bare minimum. Dar es Salaam was rife with rumour. Some speculated as to whether a foreign hand had been involved – perhaps the Soviet Union, concerned about mounting Chinese influence in Zanzibar? Others suggested that the plot may have had Nyerere’s blessing. There is no evidence for any of these external interventions. The assassination itself was the work of disaffected members of Zanzibar’s armed forces, led by Humud Mohammed, a TPDF lieutenant whose father had been killed in detention by the revolutionary regime. The precise details of a broader, aborted coup plot remain unclear.Footnote ¹¹³

The involvement of Umma cadres in the assassination naturally meant that suspicion fell on Babu. On 14 April, Babu was arrested and placed in detention in Dar es Salaam, along with several other former Umma comrades. Tried in absentia in Zanzibar, Babu was found guilty of being the ringleader of a botched coup plot against Karume and sentenced to death, alongside forty-three other defendants.Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, Nyerere refused to allow his extradition to Zanzibar. Immediately after Babu’s imprisonment, Nyerere called Ngombale-Mwiru. ‘He explained what had happened to my friends’, Ngombale-Mwiru recalled. ‘He said, “they will be safe here”. It was better than risking other consequences.’Footnote ¹¹⁵ The president also told the African-American activist Amiri Baraka that, although he believed Babu was not guilty, he would not hand him over to the Zanzibaris out of fears for his safety.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Mindful of the fate which had met Hanga and Shariff, Nyerere resisted requests for Babu and his former Umma colleagues to be extradited to stand trial in Zanzibar. In terms of international reputation, Babu was probably Tanzania’s most high-profile politician after the president himself. Should he have been executed, Nyerere would have been confronted with a public relations disaster and pressure to either break the union or seize control of Zanzibar’s affairs. At the same time, letting Babu walk free would have put further, perhaps unbearable strain on the mainland’s relationship with the islands. Nyerere therefore determined Babu’s continued detention a necessary compromise, if an ugly one. While Babu languished behind bars, Nyerere assisted his wife, Ashura, in finding work. Yet Babu and his comrades suffered from appalling physical treatment during their imprisonment. They were not released until 1978.Footnote ¹¹⁷

By the mid-1970s, TANU totally dominated Tanzania’s political landscape. It fortified its institutional authority, fleshing out the expanding structures of the one-party state. Opening the party’s biennial meeting in Dar es Salaam in 1973, Nyerere insisted that TANU was ‘supreme’, with power flowing from the cell meeting to the national conference.Footnote ¹¹⁸ While other African states continued to succumb to military coups, Nyerere’s position seemed secure. Just as Kambona’s efforts to enlist officers in a plot in 1969 had never materialised into a serious threat to the regime, so signs of unrest in the armed forces in early 1974 were quickly snuffed out.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Meanwhile, the situation in Zanzibar stabilised after the assassination of Karume. His successor as president, Aboud Jumbe, arrested the slide in living conditions on the islands. The relationship between the mainland and Zanzibar was consolidated in 1977 by a new constitution, which provided for the merger of the ASP and TANU to form the Chama cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution, CCM).Footnote ¹²⁰ Humud’s bullet proved no panacea for tensions over the union, but ultimately strengthened Nyerere’s political hand.

Ideologically, ujamaa went virtually unchallenged in Tanzania. In an interview in 1973, Nyerere noted that it was ‘very difficult to get a Tanzanian now to attack publicly the ideology of the Arusha Declaration. … One criticises the implementation – not the ideology itself. I think this is important.’Footnote ¹²¹ Ironically, just as Babu lost his place in cabinet, the government embraced the sort of development strategy he had advocated, as the Harvard-trained economist Justinian Rweyemamu experimented with internal growth through industrialisation.Footnote ¹²² Jamal continued to argue against a blinkered approach to development. He stressed the continued need for maintaining strong foreign exchange reserves through exports, rather than focusing on internal development alone. But, amid the increasingly insular world of Tanzanian politics, Jamal found himself a lone voice shouting into the winds of ujamaa.Footnote ¹²³ This consensus only came into question under challenging economic circumstances in the early 1980s, as donor states began withdrawing their support and reform-minded technocrats called for change.

Conclusion

At 2.10a.m. on 12 June 1972, residents of Dar es Salaam’s upmarket neighbourhoods of Upanga and Oyster Bay were rudely awoken by the sound of an explosion. A second blast followed fifteen minutes later. Dawn revealed damage to the supporting pillars of the Selander Bridge, the main route into the city from the northern suburbs. Further explosions punctuated the day. Two bombs wrecked cars owned by a Swiss national and a junior employee at the British high commission.Footnote ¹²⁴ Another caused panic among shoppers on Independence Avenue, the city’s commercial thoroughfare. A further seven bombs were reportedly found attached to the Selander Bridge, with fuses primed for a two-week delay.Footnote ¹²⁵ The Daily News decried the bombings as an attempt ‘to deflect us from our chosen path of revolution, of total liberation of the African in Tanzania and on the Continent. They aim to create an atmosphere of wariness, of fear, of panic.’Footnote ¹²⁶ If this was the case, the bombings seem to have succeeded. Although there were no casualties, their scattergun nature heightened anxieties across the capital. The militia created by Mwongozo was deployed to guard industrial premises and residential areas. Observers testified to an increased suspicion about the activities of foreigners in Dar es Salaam. Two Israeli tourists were shot dead by guards after entering an exclusion zone around an unmarked ammunitions depot.Footnote ¹²⁷ After the end of apartheid, South African special forces claimed responsibility for the June bombings. The intention, it seems, was not to cause significant loss of life, but to remind the Tanzanian government of the powerful enemies it had made in choosing to support Africa’s liberation movements.Footnote ¹²⁸

The bombings took place against a background of murky stories about Kambona’s plotting abroad, in conjunction with both the Portuguese and the Ugandans.Footnote ¹²⁹ However, the real threat to Tanzania’s sovereignty did not emanate from this scheming, but rather from Amin’s own army. After the coup, there had been repeated reports of minor skirmishing in the border area. In September 1972, around one thousand armed supporters of Obote crossed from Tanzania into Uganda, with the secret backing of Nyerere. Amin responded by bombing Tanzanian cities near the border. As the situation developed into a regional crisis, the Somali president, Siad Barre, brokered a peace settlement.Footnote ¹³⁰ Although both Amin and Nyerere agreed to cease supporting forces hostile to the other’s regime, their relations remained acrimonious. Whereas in the mid-1960s, the subversive threat to Tanzania seemed to come from Cold War agents, a decade later it was Ugandan spies who had become a danger to national security in Dar es Salaam. In 1973, the Tanzanian security services arrested forty-eight people and announced that they had broken up a Ugandan ‘spy ring’ in the capital.Footnote ¹³¹ All of these developments provided further justification for the TANU party-state to impress upon the local population the messages of vigilance and unity.

If the Arusha Declaration was a response to the structural dilemmas facing the postcolonial state, then Mwongozo was a manifesto for a crisis. Its introduction was stimulated by events in Uganda, which brought an enemy to the gates in the form of Amin, as Nyerere broke with precedent in refusing to recognise the new regime in Kampala. The coup in Uganda came at a time when Africa’s anticolonial front felt particularly fragile and exposed to violent interventions from their enemies, like the invasion of Guinea. If the Arusha Declaration was informed by the fallout from Tanzania’s Cold War aid entanglements, Mwongozo was aimed squarely at the forces of imperialism, which the TANU leadership presented as being arrayed against the nation. Tanzania was now wracked less by the fears of Cold War subversion which had characterised the mid-1960s and more by an often-unspecified threat from ‘imperialism’ and its ‘stooges’ within the country.

Mwongozo was also representative of a trend in Tanzanian affairs whereby major decisions were taken in the name of political principle rather than economic planning, as demonstrated by the nationalisations of wholesale trade and buildings. Nyerere had been previously resistant to these measures. But, against the advice of senior advisors, he opted for the more radical path. However politically justified TANU’s advocates felt these decisions were, the consequences were economically deleterious. The flight of capital and the inward turn in development strategy drained foreign exchange reserves and made Tanzania even more reliant on external aid. A lack of trained manpower contributed to the mismanagement of an overstretched parastatal sector.Footnote ¹³² Power flowed from the hands of more moderate socialists within the government to party radicals who offered political solutions to economic problems. The path to TANU’s supremacy was not the inevitable consequence of some centralised state despotism, but a response to the challenges of governing and building a socialist state in a tumultuous international environment.