ShwariJF-Expert Member
Ni dhahiri kwamba mapokezi ya Mwalimu Nyerere Uingereza yanaonyesha jinsi alivyokuwa anaheshimiwa sana hata nje ya bara letu la Afrika. Hakuwa kiongozi wa kawaida. Nimefanya makusudi kuwanukuu watu mbali mbali – viongozi na wengine - ambao hawakukubaliana na Nyerere katika masuala mengi badala ya wale ambao walikubaliana naye kuonyesha kwamba hata wapinzani wake walikuwa wanamheshimu sana. Ningewanukuu wengi waliokubaliana naye, kuna watu ambao wangesema wanampendelea wanapomsifu.
Ni muhimu pia kujua Nyerere alikuwa na vision gani ya bara letu: liwe la aina gani na lielekee wapi. Lakini hakuwa peke yake kuwa na fikra hizo miongoni mwa viongozi wa bara la Afrika. Kiongozi mwingine aliyejulikana sana kuhusu suala hilo ni Nkrumah.
Licha ya Nyerere na Nkrumah, kulikuwa na kiongozi mwingine ambaye anatajwa nyakati mbali mbali kuwa ni mmoja wa viongozi wa Kiafrika ambao walikuwa na vision ya bara letu liwe bara la aina gani na liwe na identity gani katika jumuia ya kimataifa. Kiongozi huyo ni Leopold Sedar Senghor.
Lakini miongoni mwa viongozi wote wa Kiafrika wanao heshimiwa sana, ni Nyerere ambaye alikuwa na imani sana na uwezo wetu kuimairisha na kuendeleza utamaduni na identity yetu ya Kiafrika kama alivyothibitisha na uwezo wake kueleza philosophically kuwa kuna hata kitu ambacho ni African socialism. Alisisitiza sana utu na Uafrika wetu.
Nkrumah alikuwa ni tofauti ingawa naye anatajwa, pamoja na Nyerere na Senghor, kuwa ni kiongozi aliyetaka kutekeleza sera za African socialism. Ukweli ni kwamba Nkrumah alikuwa ni Marxist-Leninist. Senghor alikuwa ni Mfaransa mweusi, na hakuwa mjamaa halisi, ingawa alijulikana pia as a leading proponent of Negritude. Pia Senghor alijulikana kuwa ni mtu mwenye akili sana kama Nyerere.
Kuhusu suala la ukombozi wa bara letu, Nyerere ndiyo kiongozi aliyekuwa mbele kuliko viongozi wengine katika ukombozi wa nchi za Afrika kusini. Hakuna kiongozi mwingine, hata Nkrumah, aliyemzidi Nyerere katika juhudi na jitihada yake ya kusaidia kuwakomboa ndugu zetu wa nchi za kusini mwa Afrika waliokuwa wanakandamizwa na wakoloni pamoja na makaburu wa Afrika kusini.
Mmoja wa viongozi wa Kimarikani, Henry Kissinger, alipotembelea bara letu mwaka 1976, alikutana na Nyerere mara tatu mwaka huo kujadili suala hilo la ukombozi wa nchi za Afrika kusini.
Kissinger alisema kuna viongozi wawili wa Kiafrika ambao walimvutia sana alipokutana na viongozi mbali mbali wa bara letu mwaka ule. Mzee Jomo Kenyatta alikuwa ni mmoja wa viongozi aliokutana nao. Pia alikutana na Kenneth Kaunda, Joaquim Chissano, na viongozi wengine. Lakini kati ya viongozi wote wa Afrika ambao alikutana nao, Kissinger alisema viongozi waliomvutia sana walikuwa ni Nyerere na Senghor – as superb intellectuals and because of their different and competing visions of Africa.
Kissinger also acknowledged Nyerere was independent-minded and very influential as a leader. As he stated in his book, Henry Kissinger: Years of Renewal, in a section entitled, "Julius Nyerere and Tanzania: The Ambivalent Intellectual":
"Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere proceeded to arrange an official reception that could not have been more cordial. The motive, however, was altogether different from Kenyatta's. Nyerere...was, at heart, deeply suspicious of American society and American intentions.
In international forums, Tanzania's ministers frequently castigated us. Nyerere would not have described friendship with the United States as a national priority; instead, he tended to think of relations with us as a necessary evil....
Brilliant and charming, Nyerere had an influence in Africa out of proportion to the resources of his country, proof that power cannot be measured in physical terms alone....Because Tanzania was involved in the armed struggle that was taking place in Rhodesia, and because of Nyerere's intellectual dominance, Nyerere would be a key to any solution....
Many of Nyerere's American admirers thought he and his colleagues were the embodiment of American values and liberal traditions. By contrast, his American critics viewed Nyerere as a spokesman for Communist ideology. Neither view was accurate. Nyerere was his own man. His idiosyncratic blend of Western liberal rhetoric, socialist practice, nonaligned righteousness, and African tribalism was driven, above all, by a passionate desire to free his continent from Western categories of thought, of which Marxism happens to be one. His ideas were emphatically his own....
For our first meeting, Nyerere, a slight, wiry man, invited me to his modest private residence. It was a signal honor, and he introduced me to his mother and several members of his family. He was graceful and elegant, his eyes sparkling, his gestures fluid.
With an awesome command of the English language (he had translated Julius Caesar into Swahili), Nyerere could be a seductive interlocutor. But he was also capable of steely hostility. I had the opportunity to see both these sides during my three visits to Dar es Salaam....
Nyerere was the key to the front-line states....
The two most impressive leaders I encountered on this trip, Nyerere and Senghor, were at opposite ends of the African spectrum. In a sense, they represented metaphors for varying approaches to African identity.
Nyerere was a militant who used ideology as a weapon; Senghor was an intellectual who had taught himself the grammar of power.
Nyerere considered himself as a leader of an Africa that should evolve in a unique way, separate from the currents in the rest of the world which Africa would use without permitting them to contaminate its essence. Senghor saw himself as a participant in an international order in which Africa and négritude would play a significant, but not isolated, role.
When all is said and done, Nyerere strove for the victory of black Africa while Senghor sought a reconciliation of cultures within the context of self-determination." - (Henry Kissinger, Henry Kissinger: Years of Renewal, New York: Touchstone, 1999, pp. 931 – 932, 936, 949 – 951).
After his meeting with Nyerere, Kissinger was asked at a press conference in Dar es Salaam:
"Mr. Secretary, we've just come from a press conference with President Nyerere which was, to say the least, not encouraging for your mission. On both the Namibian and the Rhodesian questions, he said he received nothing of encouragement. In fact, on the Namibian question he said he is now less hopeful than before. Does this reflect your views on the future?...Isn't the fact alone that nothing has changed since last week an unhopeful sign?"
In his response, Kissinger said, among other things:
"The purpose of my visit here was to get clear about the views of Tanzania." - (Henry Kissinger, at a press conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in Hanes Walton Jr., Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Bernard Rosser Sr., eds., The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A Documentary Analysis, Lanham, Maryland, USA: Lexington Books, 2007, p. 243).
Nyerere had earlier stated at a separate press conference:
"A mission of clarity is not a mission of failure."Last edited: Dec 28, 2015Kissinger said Nyerere was deeply suspicious of American intentions towards Africa. But it was not just the United States Mwalimu was suspicious of; he was suspicious of world powers, especially Western, which wanted to perpetuate imperial domination of Africa.
Therefore he had reasons to be suspicious; for example, given America's track record - from supporting white minority regimes in southern Africa to undermining governments the United States did not like including engineering and supporting military coups and assassinations of African leaders, and so on.
Behind all these plots and schemes was the CIA - as is still the case today - which Kissinger himself used in pursuit of American interests in Africa and elsewhere.
The CIA even sponsored African students to study in the United States. The scholarship programme was administered by the African-American Institute based in New York City and was funded by the CIA. Many African students, including some from Tanzania, were beneficiaries of the programme, although they probably did not know they were sponsored by the CIA. All they knew was that they got scholarships from the American government to study in the United States.
The African-American Institute was established by the American government in 1954 to promote American interests in Africa. But the institute was funded by the CIA.
It was during a period when agitation for independence in Africa was at its peak; it was a continental phenomenon. American leaders knew that it was the dawn of a a new era. Colonial rule was coming to an end. Therefore, it was important for them to be on good terms with the leaders - and the people - of the countries which were emerging from colonial rule, especially at a time when the United States was locked in an ideological competition with the Soviet Union for influence in Africa and other parts of the Third World during the Cold War.
Like the United States, the Soviet Union also provided scholarships to many African students during the same period. The Soviet government even established the People's Friendship University in Moscow in 1960, renamed Patrice Lumumba University in 1961, to provide education to students from Africa and other parts of the Third World in an ideological rivalry with the West which reached its peak in the sixties, the decade of African independence. Most countries across the continent had won independence by 1968.
In the case of the United States, the African-American Institute which was in the forefront of this ideological war against the Soviet Union for influence in Africa, also published an influential magazine, Africa Report, to provide favourable coverage of the continent in pursuit of American interests. It was the CIA which paid for the publication of the magazine.
By providing scholarships to African students through the African-American Institute, the CIA, hence the American government, hoped that once the recipients of those schorlaships returned to Africa after finishing their studies, they would help to promote American interests in their home countries, especially if they occupied high government positions, as many of them eventually did; although not all worked as stooges of the American government and the CIA. But there were those who did, including some who were not even beneficiaries of the CIA scholarship programme and who did not even go to school in the United States.
The US State Department worked closely with the African-American Institute. For example, the American ambassador to Nigeria, Donald Easum who was very close to Henry Kissinger when Kissinger was the secretary of state, later on became head of the African-American Institute and maintained close ties with African diplomats at the United Nations. The institute had its headquarters just across the street from the UN.
Tanzania itself under Nyerere was of great interest to the CIA. Neighbouring Kenya was also of great interest to the CIA but for different reasons. Some of the CIA operations against Tanzania were directed from Nairobi where the agency had a large contingent, especially during the Cold War. Kenya was unabashedly pro-Western even at the expense of African interests. The CIA even paid Mzee Jomo Kenyatta a lot of money for being a loyal servant of the United States and for doing whatever the agency asked him to do. Tom Mboya was another leader who was given some money by the CIA.
Besides being a CIA stooge like Mobutu and a number of other African leaders, Kenyatta was also a tribal chauvinist who ruled Kenya with an iron fist at the expense of non-Kikuyus. He instituted a Kikuyu ethnocracy during his reign and the Kenyan state became synonymous with Kikuyu power dominated by the Kiambu Mafia. He was such an unreconstructed tribalist that he even turned down an offer by Nyerere and Obote to be president of an East African federation because he felt that he and his people, the Kikuyu, would not have as much power and influence in such a large political unit as they had in Kenya under their ethnocratic regime. As Nyerere stated in an interview with Ikaweba Bunting of the New Internationalist in December 1998:
"I respected Jomo immensely. It has probably never happened in history. Two heads of state, Milton Obote and I, went to Jomo and said to him: 'Let's unite our countries and you be our head of state.' He said no. I think he said no because it would have put him out of his element as a Kikuyu Elder."
Also, Kenyatta did not support the freedom fighters in southern Africa and Guinea-Bissau the way Nyerere did and was virtually in the same camp with Kamuzu Banda in spite of being hailed as the Grand Old Man of the Kenyan – and even the African – independence movement. Even after independence, Kenya remained British property, subservient to the neocolonial master unlike Tanzania under Nyerere.
Britain, where Nyerere was given a cordial reception during his visit in 1975, did not view Tanzania favourably mainly because of its strong support for the liberation struggle in southern Africa, threatening Western interests in the region.
Nyerere will go down in history for his principled stand on a number of issues vital to the wellbeing of Africa as a whole, including his decision to sever diplomatic ties with Britain - Tanzania being the first country to do so - when the British government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson refused to use force to oust Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, when he unilaterally declared independence for Rhodesia to maintain white domination of the country. Coincidentally, Mwalimu's visit to Britain took place almost ten years after Rhodesia declared independence on 11 November 1965.
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