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Coming of Age in an African Colony, 1922–53

The green hills overlooking the eastern shore of Lake Victoria are covered in massive granite boulders. Climbing to the top of one, you can see the shimmering blue of the lake through the misty air. Looking the other way, the dry plains of the Serengeti vanish into the distance.

People have lived on the shores of this lake since time immemorial. Two thousand years ago they cleared entire forests to make charcoal for smelting iron into steel hoes and spears.¹ Certain families held the honor of guarding sacred forests atop the highest hills. A well-regarded man could act as a leader. He consulted with the local elders and made decisions about what to do if the rains were late, the cattle were dying, or villages came under attack. For hundreds of years, young teenagers were initiated in the wild hills beyond the village to face their fears, learn the rules of adult life, and prepare for parenthood. When their household chores were done, young people socialized at village dances. Once every twenty years or so a new generation of elder men would walk the territory occupied by their people, mapping it out, laying claim to it, and assuring its fertility.²

The people of these hills came to be known as the Zanaki, a small group whose politics were built around a council of elders, prominent family men with a knack for oral argument.³ They had nothing like the royal house of Buganda on the other side of the great lake, with its king and council of representatives. In the 1800s Maasai cattle herders invaded, stealing Zanaki cattle and grazing their herds on Zanaki farms. While their parents were cowed by Maasai military might, Zanaki youth admired the Maasai warriors and tried to copy their styles and their age-graded fraternities. Fashionable young men wore their hair in long elaborate braids, and young women collected colorful beaded jewelry.⁴ Zanaki elders cooperated with Maasai demands, but proudly held to their own traditions of ensuring the fertility of the land.⁵

German missionaries, and soon German armies, arrived in East Africa in the late 1800s. They bought off some chiefs, conquered others, and assigned coastal Muslim agents to administer where there were no chiefs. They established a handful of colonies in Africa, the largest of them being a land known as Tanganyika, bounded by the Indian Ocean in the east and the Great Lakes in the west, Mount Kilimanjaro in the north, and the Ruvuma River to the south. German rule could be harsh, but it was spread thin, and they paid little heed to Zanaki lands. In the south the Hehe people under their king Mkwawa were battle hardened from decades of war with Ngoni and other southern people. They fought a guerrilla war with the Germans for five years.

Ten years later, the whole southern part of the territory broke into a violent uprising against German rule known as the Maji Maji Rebellion. Its leader claimed to have a medicine (maji maji, meaning “magical water”) supposed to render the German bullets harmless. The medicine may not have had much effect on German bullets, but it did organize a diverse rebellion across the south, where German labor demands had disrupted the local agrarian economy. Another ten years later, in a distant battlefield of the Great War in Europe, African troops under German and British officers fought battles across the territory.⁶ Very little of this touched Zanaki people, whose biggest security worry was still cattle rustling.

In 1922, Tanganyika was taken from Germany, together with its other colonies, and given over to the League of Nations as a mandate territory. The League handed Tanganyika to the British, who already governed in neighboring Kenya and Uganda. This horse trading was all done with European maps, and only a few literate people in Tanganyika knew much about why one set of European rulers had been replaced with another speaking a different language. Zanaki country was a backwater just beyond the newly opened diamond mines on the southern side of the lake. The British focused their attention on the fertile slopes of Kilimanjaro, where coffee grew well; the southern highlands, where tea and lumber seemed like promising products; and the hot plains stretching in from the coast, where top-quality sisal could provide ropes for British ships. These industries were desperate for workers. Young men from landless families traveled to these areas for work, hoping to bring home enough cash for a respectable marriage, or at least help their families pay the colonial “hut tax” that was designed to push them into wage labor.

The British set themselves to the task of governing the territory, and they looked for people who could serve in a more official manner as “chiefs” administering colonial policy. In Zanaki land the closest thing to a chief had been a respected rainmaker, which really meant a charismatic religious leader. The British preferred more innocuous men and found a few congenial elders to serve as chiefs, among them Nyerere Burito. British officials described him as “a gentleman of the old school . . . who dearly loves to chat about old times.”⁷ They put him on the colonial payroll and depended on him to ensure that people in his area remained cooperative, just as they did with similar “chiefs” across the territory.

The British called this setup Indirect Rule, and spent no little time congratulating themselves for how well they knew their subjects. It was an effective, if exploitative, mode of government. Its deeper impact was to use ethnicity as the basic organizational principle of governance. The policy in effect established “tribes” as political units, and left a divisive legacy that created conflict in many countries. The British felt themselves to be more civilized than everyone else and granted themselves all the privileges of overlords. But, at least officially, they did not see Africans as innately inferior. They believed their African subjects could benefit from education, especially the sons of chiefs, who could be expected to provide loyal leadership if they got a little British education under their belts. They educated the sons of chiefs for free.

An African Child

Chief Nyerere Burito had numerous wives, as was typical for men who had a bit of status in a culture that valued family, farming, and fertility. Burito sent more than one of his sons to school, but it was not immediately apparent that the second son of his fifth wife would be worth educating. The boy was born on April 13, 1922, in the midst of the long rainy season. Mugaya Nyang’ombe, his mother, named the baby Kambarage after a mythical ancestor who brought rain. The name was an auspicious one for a chief’s son, as rain was a sign that he should take on his father’s role. For the British, however, such local beliefs were less important than that he become a pliant administrator of the colonial order. Pliancy was the one trait they would not find in young Kambarage Nyerere.

Kambarage grew up on his father’s hilltop homestead at the heart of the chiefdom known as Butiama. Running a homestead was a shared labor, under the nominal direction of a patriarch. Adults produced food and gradually incorporated children into productive tasks. Girls worked with their mothers, who grew and prepared almost all the food the home needed. Boys were generally given a few head of cattle to care for, and groups of boys from various families would wander up into the hills to pasture their little herds. Thus engaged, they could spend much time scrambling among the rocks, playing and roughhousing. Kambarage had a close friend in his age-mate, Bugozi Msuguri, who later took a Christian name, David. With bows and arrows, they hunted pimbi (rock hyrax), rabbit-sized rodents that lived under the rocks.⁸

All the cultures on the eastern side of Lake Victoria initiated children into age-sets of one form or another. When a group of children reached the age of initiation, their parents sponsored their participation in a camp where they were taught how to function in adult society, how to face fear, and how to deal with the opposite sex. Boys were generally circumcised. Although Msuguri was a little younger, he was placed in the same age-set as Kambarage. That year, initiates also faced another test of courage, apparently for the sake of “fashion.” An elder expert filed their front teeth into points—a painful passage, and one that gave Kambarage’s ready smile a distinctively upcountry character. At that age they could then accompany older siblings when they heard the sound of a drum announcing a dance in a neighboring village. Sometimes a generous family would donate a cow to be slaughtered for the occasion, and the young people could stay up the whole night, dancing, flirting, and feasting.⁹

Zanaki people have a reputation for being argumentative, probably as a result of their political system, which privileged the most convincing speakers among the elders. Long before he went to school, Kambarage had already learned to think and to speak. He was also a sharp player of the game orusoro (known elsewhere as bao or mancala), a popular pastime in the village. To play the game, you pick up stones from one of the holes on your side and drop them one by one into the following holes, all the way around to your opponent’s side, where eventually you can collect them back. Requiring the forethought of chess, the game taught a lesson more appropriate to the politics of extended families than to the combative politics of opposing parties: in order to gain favors, you have to distribute them.

Between cattle herding, village debate, and orusoro, Kambarage learned lessons in responsibility, critical thinking, and strategy. A neighboring chief, Mohamed Makongoro Matutu, told Chief Burito that it would be worth sending Kambarage to school, at least as a companion for another of Burito’s sons, Wambura Wanzagi, who already knew Swahili. Sons of chiefs were given spots at the newly built Mwisenge Primary School in the nearby town of Musoma, two days’ walk from Butiama. In early 1934, a school vehicle carried Wambura and Kambarage to Musoma to learn how to read and write.¹⁰

A Colonial Education

Mwisenge Primary School offered Standards one through four. It was a basic education in reading, writing, and arithmetic in Swahili, which was a foreign language for young Kambarage. The books drew him in, and teachers remember him reading in quiet corners at all hours. Nyerere also began to accompany his friend Mang’ombe (later Oswald) Marwa to religious instruction in Roman Catholic Christianity, reluctantly at first and then with increasing interest. “There wasn’t enough to learn,” Nyerere remembered about those years of voracious interest in his expanding world. In only three years, he was the highest-achieving student in the Lake Region on the territorial exams.

A headstrong young teacher named James Irenge saw Kambarage’s potential. Irenge invited Kambarage and a few other students to his cramped teacher’s quarters in the evenings for a “special subject of politics, of history, of things of the past and how they were, and how we would be able to govern for ourselves.” The teacher told the children parables of how a sparrow chased off the crows preying on her chicks, of the owl who scared off the other birds by just opening its eyes. “I was telling them we should remove the foreigners. . . . Guns by themselves, and cannon, we can’t use. We are not experts with them. . . . We’ll use another way, of just the lips. ‘We don’t want them!’ All of us, ‘We don’t want them!’ They’ll leave.”¹¹

His political consciousness thus awakened, Nyerere found his way to the elite school in the territory, the Tabora Boys School, where European teachers expected their students to meet the highest standards of British education and disciplined them to respect the colonial social order. Colonial Tanganyika mobilized the labor of Africans for the sake of a tiny European population, and allowed a small class of Indians and Arabs to act as merchants. Within this structure they needed a small class of literate Africans as both clerks and chiefs to help administer the sprawling territory. This new class of aspiring chiefs at the Tabora School were taught to be prefects, whose authority was not to be questioned by their charges in the dormitories. Nyerere recalled trying to defend a fellow student from physical mistreatment at the hands of a prefect. The headmaster punished both by calling on Nyerere to cane the mistreated boy under the gloating eye of the prefect. Nyerere was eventually appointed a prefect himself.

Nyerere started a debating club, with some of his classmates, as an outlet for his truculent mind. They debated things like the tradition of bride-price, which was the transferring of cattle from the groom’s family to the bride’s as a means of sealing the marriage. Nyerere knew something about this, as his father had already arranged a marriage for him with a slightly older girl in Butiama named Magori Watiha, giving fourteen cattle lest he should die without providing a wife for this promising young son.

Informally, he and his schoolmates also debated other issues of interest to these sons of chiefs, such as whether patterns of decentralized chiefships across linguistic regions could be turned into something like small centralized kingdoms, a development that their British education taught was a step toward a higher civilization. He explored religion through his friends. Andrew Tibandebage was Catholic; Emanuel Kibira was Lutheran; Ali Abedi was Muslim. Chief Nyerere Burito died in 1942, and, after finishing at Tabora the next year, Kambarage went to Nyegina Mission near Musoma to be baptized into the Catholic Church. He took the name Julius, and for a brief time he considered becoming a Catholic priest.¹²

Upon graduating from Tabora, Nyerere was offered a place at Makerere College in Uganda to train as a science teacher. This was the only institution of higher learning in East Africa, and there he was surrounded by inquisitive children from chiefly families and mission schools throughout the region. He and Andrew Tibandebage led a Catholic student group and went on to organize the Tanganyika African Welfare Association as a secular gathering point for political debate. Eventually they made it a branch of the Tanganyika African Association (TAA), a lobbying group for civil servants and businessmen that had branches throughout the territory.

Nyerere took a great interest in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, not least because Mill’s thought provided a point of entry into the logic of British rule and a means to question it. By this time, Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign was having a notable effect in Britain’s most prominent colony by appealing to modern humanist values while mobilizing Indian masses with the guise of the common man. Nyerere also discovered Karl Marx and within a year of arriving in Uganda wrote a letter to the Tanganyika Standard endorsing socialism as the basis for the East African economy, insisting that African people were “naturally socialistic.” All his debating practice had taught him the art of argument, and he twice won regional Swahili essay competitions. In 1944 his essay drew on Mill’s philosophy to argue for a more equal place for women in African society and slyly used this logic to build a case for Africans to exercise a more equal status in colonial society.¹³

Catholic priests at the newly established St. Mary’s Secondary School in Tabora bragged that Nyerere chose to work at the Catholic school rather than at his alma mater across town. He later said that he chose St. Mary’s because of an insulting letter from the government warning him that he would lose salary and pension benefits if he chose St. Mary’s. Throughout his life, such threats infuriated Nyerere, and his adult personality appeared in his adamant refusal of the government’s offer: “If I ever hesitated, your letter settled the matter.”¹⁴

The deeper reason was the pull of Father Richard Walsh, the headmaster at St. Mary’s, who became a mentor to him. Walsh was a progressive-minded member of the Missionaries of Africa (known as the “White Fathers”) who believed that “every man’s work has an economical value equivalent at least to what he needs to live decently.”¹⁵ His views conformed closely to Nyerere’s own egalitarian ideals. He encouraged Nyerere’s political ambition and rallied support for him in the Catholic establishment, with the hope that a Catholic political leader would defend the Church under an independent government.

At St. Mary’s, Nyerere and his college friend Tibandebage started a debate team and made a profound impression on a new generation of students, not only at St. Mary’s but also among their debating opponents at Tabora Boys. Several members of Nyerere’s future government first encountered him in Tabora. He also took his first journey to Dar es Salaam in 1946, to attend a TAA conference called to oppose a proposal by the British Colonial Office to create a legislative assembly for the whole of East Africa. TAA leaders feared a regional assembly would be dominated by Kenyan settlers.

Back in Tabora, the government assigned Nyerere, who was then the secretary of the local TAA branch, to report violators of postwar price controls. “When I reported a violation,” he recalled, “nothing happened. So I lost interest.” Anxious to challenge colonial prejudices, he also set up a cooperative store in town to compete with the Indian merchants who ran nearly all the shops. The short-lived store never really got off the ground, evidence of how the social habits and networks cultivated in the colonial racial hierarchy lent themselves to stubbornly different roles in the economy.

On his visits home, he still stopped in to talk politics with James Irenge, his primary school teacher from Mwisenge. With Irenge’s encouragement, Nyerere met with Zanaki chiefs to advocate for the creation of a “paramount” chief, as other ethnic groups were attempting to do in colonial Tanganyika. The idea gained some traction, and many thought Nyerere would be well qualified for the office. Around the same time, Richard Walsh had successfully lobbied for a government scholarship for Nyerere to study science at Edinburgh University in Scotland. The application was delayed a year because the scholarship board did not accept Nyerere’s claim that Swahili should count as his second language. During the intervening year, Nyerere was torn between a patriotic urge to serve his people at home and the desire for the unknown horizons of a foreign education. Irenge told him to go abroad, “so that when he would return, without doubt he would lead all of Musoma and not just Zanaki country.”¹⁶ With some hesitation, Nyerere finally took the advice of both his mentors to go to Scotland.

Around this time he was also introduced to Maria Waningu, a young teacher at Nyegina Primary School. She was the daughter of Gabriel Magige, a leading Catholic convert in a village not far from Butiama. Although reluctant to engage in bridewealth customs, Nyerere was able to recover the cattle paid to Magori Watiha’s family and use them to cement an engagement with Maria. When he went to Scotland, Maria continued to study and teach, partially at the urging of Father Walsh, who thought she would be better matched to her fiancé if she knew a bit of English.

Exotic Scotland

Upon arriving in the United Kingdom in April 1949, Nyerere began lobbying to change his course of study from biology to political science, telling the program’s administrators about a former teacher who advised that for him to study science “was like doing sculpture with a pen.”¹⁷ These could be the words of Father Walsh, who had arranged the scholarship, but they sound a lot like his cantankerous teacher at Mwisenge, James Irenge. He also lobbied to increase the stipend for his fiancée and family back home, who were facing rising food prices. The issue turned into a two-year bureaucratic fight, with Nyerere suggesting they could just provide him a loan to send money to his family. The issue finally found partial resolution a few months before his departure. His concern for his family may have betrayed a sense of guilt for leaving them behind, because he enjoyed the rest of his time there immensely, despite the cold Scottish winds in Edinburgh.¹⁸

He studied British history and philosophy, economics and political theory, and a history of the Chinese peasantry. Reading widely in classical, radical, and rationalist political philosophy, he found means to confront John Stuart Mill’s thinking, which had helped justify British colonialism in the twentieth century by advocating liberty for “mature” people, but “despotism . . . in dealing with barbarians.” Even so, Mill’s observation of history’s “cruel” lesson that the “earthly happiness of any class of persons, was measured by what they had the power of enforcing” was one that stuck with Nyerere throughout his career. He was also drawn to Thomas Hill Green’s political philosophy, which aimed at a consensual resolution of Mill’s contradictions based on the reciprocal obligations between citizen and state.

The entire experience in Edinburgh, intellectual, social, and political, offered a means to reflect on Africa’s future at a distance, removed from its everyday challenges under colonial rule. “As a result of my choice of subjects I found I had ample time to read many other things outside my degree course, and I did. I also spent a great deal of time arguing with fellow students about everything under the sun except Marxism (which is above!). I did a great deal of thinking about politics in Africa.”¹⁹

Many were impressed with his good-natured intelligence, and he took on a far more global view of politics than had been the case in his upcountry home. Scotland was an exotic place for a young African, filled with new landscapes and social customs. His political activity eased his longing for home, while new friends like Sidney Collins, his Jamaican tutor in moral philosophy, helped him find a new identity in a world as wide as the British Empire.²⁰

He got involved in the Fabian Society, a group of democratic socialists inspired by T. H. Green’s philosophy. At Fabian meetings and church lectures, he advocated for an end to racial discrimination in the colonies. The Europeans had only created “inter-racial chaos,” he wrote in an essay for a Fabian publication. “I appeal to my fellow Africans to take the initiative in this building up of a harmonious society.” Some years later a devoted member of the Fabian Society, Joan Wicken, traveled to East Africa to study the independence movements. She traveled with party organizers and decided to contribute to their cause.²¹ After finishing her degree, she returned to become a political assistant to Nyerere. For the next thirty years, Wicken led an austere life in Dar es Salaam as Nyerere’s loyal aide, critic, and speechwriter.

Taking Stock Back Home

Nyerere completed his master’s degree at Edinburgh in 1952 and fixed his mind on getting involved in politics when he got home. When he arrived in Dar es Salaam in October, Maria was there to meet him, and they made their way back to Butiama. His first task, as much a practical one as a means of settling back into the soil of his homeland, was to build a house for Maria. It was a time to reconnect with his childhood friend Oswald Marwa while slapping mud mortar between the wood-fired bricks. “I had to take off my Edinburgh suit . . . and with my bare feet mix the sand and cement.” Nyerere claimed this was Maria’s way of making sure he hadn’t changed too much in Scotland. They were married on January 21, 1953, at the Mwisenge Roman Catholic Church in Musoma.

They traveled back to Dar es Salaam, where Nyerere had a job at St. Francis High School in Pugu, near where the airport now stands. Pointing to his master’s degree, he insisted on a yearly salary of 9,450 shillings rather than 6,300 shillings (equivalent to $8,200 versus $5,400 per year in today’s dollars). This was still less than a similarly educated expatriate British teacher would make.

Within a few months he again got involved in the TAA, to get acquainted with the accelerating political developments in the territory. As opposed to prominent educated chiefs like Thomas Marealle and David Makwaia, Nyerere was willing to work with the reticent civil servants and businessmen of the TAA who had much to lose by their political activity. Unlike the chiefs, Nyerere set his sights on the whole diverse territory, not just the ethnic boundaries within which the British preferred to contain local politics.

Things began to move very quickly after that. In 1954 Nyerere and the young leaders of the TAA drew up a new charter for the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), in preparation for the visit of a delegation from the United Nations Trusteeship Council. The UN delegation made a positive report, recommending independence by 1980 at the latest. TANU members received word of the report during the wedding of George Patrick Kunambi in January 1955, cutting the celebrations short as the overjoyed guests prepared to press their case for independence.²²

In March, Nyerere was invited to New York to speak to the Trusteeship Council. Leading TANU members like Dossa Aziz and Paul Rupia contributed to his travel expenses, and Father Walsh helped clear the way for a visa. Nyerere told the Trusteeship Council that TANU’s objective was to prepare people for independence, a task that required them “to break up this tribal consciousness among the people and to build up a national consciousness.”²³

Upon returning he was told he no longer had a job at St. Francis High School, as the colonial government had informed the Catholic leadership that they would not countenance a salaried teacher openly involved in oppositional politics. Nyerere then moved his young family back to Musoma, to the house of Oswald Marwa, and there he found time for a welcome rest. Father Art Willie, a new Catholic priest in town, hired Nyerere to teach him the Zanaki language for seven hundred shillings a month. Every day Nyerere walked into town to work with Father Willie on language and translation. He translated catechisms, hymns, and pieces of the New Testament into the Zanaki language.

Meanwhile, TANU activity in Dar es Salaam was bubbling up, with new organizers like Oscar Kambona, who sold TANU cards like a seasoned salesman, and Bibi Titi Mohamed, who had a large group of women from the African quarters singing the praises of TANU. Bibi Titi became a minister of parliament after independence but was later accused of treason in a plot linked to Kambona, who became Nyerere’s opponent in the late 1960s. Kambona had risen quickly to prominence in TANU and later served in several ministerial positions before falling out with Nyerere and going into exile.

In mid-1955, though, he traveled all the way to Musoma to urge Nyerere back to the fight. “When I got to Musoma,” Kambona later recalled, “I found him sitting on the floor reading a book about Gandhi.”²⁴ (Throughout his career Nyerere continued to take yearly vacations in his home village during the rainy season, removing himself from Dar es Salaam politics while he took stock of himself and his country.) In this intensely diverse territory, how could they bring independence without stoking the fires of racial hatred, ethnic division, and religious prejudice?