The Nobel Peace Prize 2010 is for J.K. Nyerere?
Chambi Chachage
By Navaya ole Ndaskoi <nava...@gmail.com> June 12, 2009
ONE of the greatest puzzles in my life is the Nobel Committee pretending that the late Julius K. Nyerere, founding President of the United Republic of Tanzania, never existed.
I do not have qualifications to nominate Nyerere for the most prestigious award on earth. Even then I will not fold my hands and sit transfixed as if everything is fine.
I can write at least. I hope that this note will trigger his nomination process. It is therefore inevitable for me to exhume the extraordinary life and time of Julius Nyerere.
Julius Kambarage Nyerere was born in March 1922 and educated at Tabora School, Makerere College and Edinburg University. In 1960 Nyerere was leader of the opposition in what was still the Trusteeship Territory of Tanganyika. He went to the United Nations several times as a petitioner to pressurize the British to grant Tanganyika independence.
Tanganyika became independent in 1961. Nyerere abolished racial segregations in all sectors. Tanzania had over 120 tribes as well as racial minorities like Asians, Arabs and Europeans. He created a nation free from tribal loyalties with Kiswahili as its national language. To be sure, Nyerere himself a Catholic, left a Muslim as President of Tanzania. Government officials were from all spectra of life. One of his Prime Ministers was from the nomadic Maasai community. By any standard this is no small triumph.
Poorly informed critics, many of them economists and unsurprisingly their flag bearer magazine called The Economist of London, claim that Julius Nyerere ruined the Tanzanian economy with socialism policy as if he inherited something from British predators. Gerry Helleiner, a rare breed economist at the University of Toronto Canada, tells them to eat their hearts out. The most damaging economic policy errors Nyerere’s Government ‘had little to do with socialism per se. They came relatively late in his Presidency and were on the relatively non-ideological issue of exchange rate policy; they were errors shared by many other low-income countries in the early 1980s.’[1]
Nyerere inherited a legacy of poverty, racism and oppression. Prof. Chachage S.L. Chachage agued that at independence in 1961 there were hardly any university graduates, doctors and other experts in Tanganyika. There were hardly any industries either.[2]
By 1982, children irrespective of their families' economic background were going to school through universal primary education program. More than 95 percent of adults could read and write due to literacy campaigns. It took the independent Government to build the first university and most of the industries. Ujamaa system boosted agricultural output and by 1978 Tanzania had a positive balance of foreign exchange payments.
Nyerere turned down foreign aid when there were heavy political strings attached. He refused the Germany offer to build a sugar factory in the Kilambero Valley in exchange for a naval base on Zanzibar. Secondly, East Germany wanted Tanzania to give diplomatic recognition to her, and West Germany wanted Tanzania to ignore the existence of the German Democratic Republic and pretend that there is no such administration over the Eastern part of Germany. West Germany threatened Tanzania that it would withdraw aid if Tanzania did not change her policies. Tanzania refused to do this and told the West Germans to withdraw all their federal Government aid immediately.[3]
President Nyerere, like President Kwame Nkrumah, was one of the brightest intellectuals Africa has ever seen. It is no wonder that he welcomed great thinkers of all shades and from all corners of the world to the University of Dar es Salaam making it one of the greatest think tanks in the world.[4] These included those rejected by, as well as those fleeing, oppressive regimes in their own countries. In 1968 the Government of Jamaica banned Dr. Walter Rodney from re-entering the country, after a trip abroad. Tanzania welcomed him. He wrote his famous How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in Tanzania. Che Guevara too wrote his ground breaking Congo Diaries in Dar es Salaam. The university attracted unconventional thinkers like A.M. Babu, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Professor Wamba dia Wamba and more.
Nyerere was harsh with his critics but never acquired notoriety for human rights abuses. In 1964, for example, the army mutinied. After the mutiny had been suppressed, the mass of the soldiers were discharged ignominiously. Certain of the mutiny leaders, however, were charged before a special court. The mutineers were allowed civilian advocates, and the trial was conducted in public. The heaviest sentence passed was fourteen years.
The Government of Nyerere had followed egalitarian policies at home, with a stress on rural development. Nyerere lived simply, avoided pomp and elaborate security.
In 1961, Nyerere was ready to delay the independence of Tanganyika if that would facilitate the federation of East Africa. This did not materialize. Even then Tanganyika and Zanzibar united in 1964 to form the United Republic of Tanzania. Clear faults and genuine criticisms apart, this is the only union in Africa so far since 1884.
Based on principles he was fighting for social justice in South Africa way back in the 1950s. The same principles led him to threaten to withdraw the soon-to-be-independent Tanganyika from the Commonwealth if South Africa was allowed in.[5] South Africa was excluded.[6] According to the former Speaker of the National Assembly of South Africa, Frene Ginwala, Nyerere nominated Albert Luthuli for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960.
Tanzania, like many other African countries, sacrificed enormously to defeat apartheid. It was in Tanganyika that Nelson Mandela felt for the first time in his life that he was a free man. Nyerere gave him a private aircraft and a travel document when he toured Africa 1962. They talked ‘at his house, which was not at all grand, and I recall that he drove himself in a simple car, a little Austin.’[7] Tanzania dismantled diplomatic relations with Portugal after independence[8] due the colonial occupation of Angola, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique by Portugal. In 1962 Nyerere welcomed Dr. Eduardo Mondlane to Dar es Salaam where he formed FRELIMO which dwelt a resounding defeat to the over 500 years of colonial occupation by the poorest of all European countries, Portugal.
Others lived in Tanzania were President Joachim Chissano of Mozambique as did the late President Samora Machel before him, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Angolan first President Agostinho Neto, President Sam Nujoma of Namibia. The late President Laurent Kabila and his son, President Joseph Kabila, of DRC also lived in Tanzania since the days of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba by insensitive imperialists from Belgium in 1961. The oppressed people from Zambia, Malawi, Seychelles, Comoros, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, United States and other countries also looked for, and were given, protection in Tanzania.
Nyerere believed in peaceful struggles. Let him speak for the Norwegians at the Nobel Committee to hear. 'I did try in many years to get settlement in southern Africa without a fight. When I believed that negotiations, even on their own, could bring about majority rule, I urged negotiations. I have spoken to South Africans. President [Kenneth] Kaunda has gone as far as talking to [John] Voster, so whenever we have believed that it is possible to achieve the objectives without firing one bullet, we have encouraged this.'[9]
At the time, Rhodesia now Zimbabwe, was a British colony with an entrenched White minority Government which rebelled against the British Crown. Namibia was a United Nations Trusteeship Territory, illegally occupied and governed by South Africa.
South Africa was legally an independent and sovereign state. In South Africa the principle of human equality was denied by constitution, by law and in practice since 1948. Apartheid was the official philosophy of the South African state. South Africa was also the only country in the world whose Government was openly based upon race.
With minor variations apartheid was applied in Namibia by the occupying force, South Africa. In Rhodesia apartheid was not the official philosophy; the whites preferred to talk of Government by 'civilized men.' The oppression was not unsimilar.
Mwalimu J. K. Nyerere wrote quite convincingly in his earth-shattering Crusade for Liberation, 'Those political and economic structures of the three countries were rejected by the majority of the people of those countries. There was a long history of political protest, of petitions, demonstrations and appeal for justice. All peaceful agitations had been ruthlessly smashed while the oppression got greater than ever before.'
Tanzania trained and provided a rear base for fighters. African states did not manufacture weapons of war. As the Freedom Fighters cannot battle with bows and arrows against guns, tanks and aeroplanes, Front Line States provided transit facilities for the arms.
Nationalist fighters got the arms from the communist countries like Russia, China and Cuba. The United States thus claimed that communism was spreading in Africa. Racist South Africa and Rhodesia skillfully played on this misinterpretation by the United States to rally American support for continued racist and minority rule in southern Africa.
Nyerere spoke bitterly on this. 'I said, and I repeat it, once we have come to the conclusion that an armed struggle is necessary, and since we don't make arms I will get arms from anywhere. I think there is a realization here [in United States] that although in 1776 there were no communists on the scene, the urge for independence still remains the same. And if you were helped by the French it is not because you wanted to be French. If we are helped by the Russians or the Chinese it is not because we want to be Russians.'
In the United Nations discussions about apartheid in South Africa, about freedom in Namibia and about international opposition to Ian Smith Regime in Rhodesia, the United States and its allies have time and again shamelessly supported South Africa.
In August 1977 Nyerere flew to the United States to insist on the Americans to STOP supporting racialism in southern Africa and instead to help the oppressed people and independent states like Zambia and Mozambique which were badly hit by it.
He went to urge the US and the West to come to their senses and stop supporting racists in southern Africa. On August 5, 1977 he told the press conference in America, 'We can defeat Smith alone without the support of the British and without the support of the Americans. We did defeat the Portuguese without support of the British and Americans.'
Nyerere would not be intimidated even by the nuclear weapons. He challenged Boers to make good their threat of drop a nuclear bomb on Dar es Salaam. 'South Africans have to be told that, however many nuclear bombs they make, we are not going to be deterred. We will go on fighting, and we will win. If they want to drop a nuclear bomb on Dar es Salaam, they can. But to defeat opposition to apartheid they will have to drop nuclear bombs in Johannesburg and Cape Town and Durban, and that they will not do.'
Nyerere fought fearlessly for the oppressed. Tanzania had a diplomatic row with France. The French Foreign Minister, M. De Guiringuad, cancelled a visit to Tanzania in 1977 after the Dar es Salaam University students staged a protest at the airport against the supply of arms to the racist South Africa by the French Government.
Nyerere told the crazy Guiringuad to stay out; far away from Tanzania. ‘Of all the Western countries, France is now the biggest supporter of racialism in southern Africa. France has many friends in Africa. It is very difficult to criticize the French at the O.A.U. because they have so many friends there. But France is arrogant. France is defiant. France is mercantile in its relations with Africa...Our students are simply asking in posters. The French cannot tell me that they are not used to posters asking these questions. Then the French ask the Government of Tanzania to apologize. It is not the French who are going to apologize to us for selling deadly weapons to South Africa where there is a racist regime which is killing our people daily!...I think really it is going a little bit too far.’[10]
In 1975 Angola and Mozambique were freed. Zimbabwe was liberated in 1980. In 1990 Namibia won its independent. Apartheid was defeated in South Africa in 1994. Those who committed crimes were forgiven. Did Nyerere play any role in the reconciliations?
The struggle for social justice in Africa was quite frustrating. On 16 October, 1997 Nelson Mandela invited Nyerere to address the South African Parliament in Cape Town. Nyerere reminded the parliamentarians: ‘When we were struggling here, South Africa still under apartheid, and you being a destabiliser of your neighbours instead of working together with them to develop our continent, of course that was a different thing. It was a terrible thing. Here was a powerful South Africa, and this power was a curse to us. It was not a blessing for us. We wished it away, because it was not a blessing at all. It destroyed Angola with a combination of apartheid; it was a menace to Mozambique and a menace to its neighbours...When we had the Cold War, boy, I tell you, we couldn’t breathe.’
He supported justice everywhere on earth. Tanzania quarrelled with Britain when it refused to support proposed Commonwealth Peace Mission to Vietnam on the grounds that it was neither practical nor genuine.[11] At the 26th General Assembly of the UN in 1971, Tanzania championed restoration of legitimate rights of China in the world body.
In November 1976 South Africa sent massive military personnel into Angola to assist UNITA troops in an effort to prevent the M.P.L.A. from coming to power. In response to this aggression, the M.P.L.A. sought and got Cuban military assistance to swart the South African invasion of their country. The United States threatened Cuba.
Nyerere came out to support Cuba. He told President Jimmy Carter in his face. ‘I find an incredible obsession with Cuba. Frankly, I really don’t understand this at all. Cuba is a tiny little island country, ninety miles off the coast of the United States. I think nine million people, and yet, there is a tremendous amount of obsession with Cuba, including, I think, some indications that United States relations with Cuba will not be normalized until the Cubans have removed their troops from Angola. This I don’t understand. We need arms. We don’t make arms in Africa. Little Cuba has some arms. We go around to see where we can get arms and little Cuba can give us arms…Incidentally, the Angolans won their war against the Portuguese without the slightest assistance from a single person from Cuba. They won their independence on their own. The Cubans were needed to fight against the invading South Africans, and also the Americans.’[12]
Tanzania facilitated the removal of killer fascist Idi Amin in 1979, while the West had not only supported Amin, but remained indifferent when he slaughtered Ugandans.
In 1985 Nyerere voluntarily stepped down as Tanzanian President. He broke the record as the first President in Africa to step down. President Quett Ketumile Masire of Botswana, A.k.a 'The Clever Baboon' from whom we hear less, followed the footprints of Nyerere by voluntarily stepping down in 1998. Mandela merely followed their examples in 1999.
The Mwalimu remained active in issues of liberation, South-South Cooperation and mediation of conflicts in the continent and else where up to the end of his life. In the year before his death he was instrumental in negotiating an end to the civil war in Burundi.
Nyerere joined the ancestors on October 14, 1999. Eulogies poured into Tanzania from Cape to Cairo and from Accra to Zanzibar. The world media too was literarily soaked in tears. The saddest obituary was perhaps this one by Jerry Atkin. Atkin wailed, 'I want to know if Nyerere really died of a broken heart. Had he seen too much murder in the name of tribalism? Too much murder wearing the guise of civil war? Was the genocide in Rwanda the stake driven through his heart? Or did he know that he had done the best he could? If President Bill Clinton died, I don’t think I would feel anything.'[13]
Stanley Meisler, an eminent journalist who covered the African continent for over 25 years, wrote way back in 1996 that 'Nyerere was like a Saint.'[14] Less than 10 years after Nyerere had left this world, Cardinal Polycarp Pengo of Tanzania announced the Vatican’s approval that Julius Kambarage Nyerere be called ‘Servant of God.’ Bishops of Tanzania have joined ranks with many Catholics to see Nyerere, one of a few modern day presidents become a saint. Writing in the London-based Catholic magazine, Mission Today of March 4, 2007, retired Fr. Arthur Willie said that 'while we are doing all we can to aid the canonisation process, we already believe [Nyerere] is a saint.'
Let the Christians, the Catholic specifically, go ahead with their Judeo-Christian dogma of turning human beings into saints. Nyerere was human being and will remain thus. It is the strange ways of thinking of the Norwegian Nobel Committee which is under fire.
As far as the struggle for peace is concerned Nyerere performed like, and in many cases excelled, Nobel Laureates such as Dag Hammarskjöld, Willy Brandt, Albert Luthuli, Betty Williams, Mairead Corrigan, Mohamed Al-Sadat, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, F.W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yasser Arafat, John Hume, David Trimble, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Wangari Maathai, Mohamed Albaradei and Al-Gore. Is not amazing that Nyerere never registered in the sentimental radar of the folks at the Norwegian Nobel Committee while they awarded Henry Kissinger, one of the greatest destructors of peace that ever lived, the prize in 1973? Will they even claim that nobody nominated Nyerere for the award?
The website of the Nobel Peace Prize, when I last visited it on June 12, 2009, read in all seriousness, that people like me cannot nominate anybody for the prestigious award.
It says the right to nominate for the prize shall be enjoyed by Members of National Assemblies and Governments of States, Members of international courts, University rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes; Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Board members of organizations who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and Active and former members of the Committee.[15]
Set the ball rolling. Nominate this larger-than-life intellectual. Circulate this note far and wide. Publish it in newspapers, websites, social networking websites, blogs and so on. A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle. Ask those qualified to nominate Nyerere for the Nobel Peace Prize 2010, now. The deadline is February 1, 2010.
References
[1]Helleiner K. Gerry, (2000) ‘The Legacies of Julius Nyerere and Economists’s Reflections,’ Paper to be presented at a conference in memory of Julius Nyerere, Queen’s University, Ontario, February 4.
[2] 'Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere: A Tribute,' presented by Prof. C.S.L. Chachage to the memorial lecture organized by the East African Students Association in collaboration with the Center for African Studies, University of Cape Town, on 22 October 1999 at the Center's Gallery, from 02H30 p.m.
[3] Nyerere K. Julius, (1966) Principles and Development Dar es Salaam: Government Printer.
[4] See Shivji G. Issa, (1993) Intellectuals at The Hill: Essays and Talks 1969-1993, Dar es Salaam: DUP.
[5] See The Observer [of London] of March 7, 1961.
[6] See Nyerere K. Julius (1966). Freedom and Unity, Dar es Salaam: OUP.p.118.
[7] See page 345 in Mandela, N.R.(1994). Long Walk to Freedom, London: ABACUS.
[8] Nyerere K. Julius, (1966) Principles and Development Dar es Salaam: Government Printer.
[9] Nyerere K. Julius, (1978) Crusade for Liberation Dar es Salaam: OUP.
[10] Ibid. page 82
[11] Nyerere K. Julius, (1966) Principles and Development Dar es Salaam: Government Printer.
[12] See page 58 in Nyerere K. Julius, (1978) Crusade for Liberation Dar es Salaam: OUP.
[13] Jerry Atkin is an American. His tribute was published in In Motion Magazine December 19, 1999.
[14] http://www.stanleymeisler.com/news-commentary/nyerere.html accessed on June 6, 2009.
[15] http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/nomination_committee/who-can-nominate accessed on June 12, 2009.