Remembering Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere

Remembering Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere

“Neo-colonialism is being fought more effectively, I think, with a new leadership in Africa. And I believe the one region which can lead this fight is our region. With the end of apartheid and South Africa having joined SADC, this area of Africa is a very solid area.”

– Julius Nyerere (Cape Town, 16 October 1997) –

On 14 October 1999, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere died in a London hospital of leukaemia and was buried in his home town, Butiama, Tanzania. Julius Kambarage Nyerere was born on 13 April 1922 in Butiama village, next to Lake Victoria, in Tanganyika, a name given to the British colony in Tanzania’s territory from 1919 until 1961. Julius was the son of Chief Nyerere Burito and his 22nd wife, Christina. He went to missionary schools in Tabora and later on studied education at Makerere University College, Uganda. In 1946, Nyerere got his degree and returned to Tabora to teach and was in 1949 selected, as the first Tanganyika citizen, to do his master’s degree in history and economics at Edinburgh University.

Nyerere returned to Tanganyika in 1952, having graduated with a Master of Arts degree, and began to teach at a high school in Pugu, near Dar es Salaam. During his period when he was teaching at Pugu, he joined the Tanganyika African Association, which later became the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), an anti-colonialist African nationalist party. After being elected president of TANU in 1954, he worked to bring a number of different nationalist factions into one grouping. Based on the colonial constitutional arrangement, Nyerere entered the Legislative Council in 1958, and became a chief minister in 1960.

Following the obtaining of independence from the United Kingdom on 9 December 1961, Nyerere became a prime minister of the self-governing territory of Tanganyika in May 1961. When Tanganyika was declared a republic a year later, Nyerere was officially elected as the first president of the independent nation in 1962. After signing the Articles of Union on 22 April 1964 and passing an Act of Union on 25 April, Tanganyika unified with the People’s Republic of Zanzibar as the United Republic of Tanzania, on Union Day, 26 April 1964. Nyerere’s integrity, ability as a political negotiator and organiser, and readiness to work with different groupings, became a significant factor in independence being achieved without bloodshed.

As the President of the United Republic of Tanzania, Nyerere had to steer a difficult course, since the post-colonial entity was one of the world’s poorest countries. Like many other post-colonial territories, it was suffering from a severe foreign debt burden, a decrease in foreign aid, and a fall in the price of commodities. Nyerere’s solution was the collectivisation of agriculture, wherein people were encouraged to live and work on a co-operative basis in organised villages or ujamaa – meaning ‘socialism’ in Kiswahili – and large-scale nationalisation, which became a unique blend of socialism and self-reliance (communal life).

The vision was set out in the Arusha Declaration of 1967, which was envisaged as a project and theory to recover local traditions of community ways of working, producing and relating to the land, as well as a process of the nationalisation of land and private companies, combined with the promotion of new ways of workers’ organisation of labour. According to Nyerere, “The objective of socialism in the United Republic of Tanzania is to build a society in which all members have equal rights and equal opportunities; in which all can live in peace with their neighbours without suffering or imposing injustice, being exploited, or exploiting; and in which all have a gradually increasing basic level of material welfare before any individual lives in luxury.”

For Julius Nyerere, the Arusha Declaration became a statement of commitment to transformation for the party, TANU, and the entire nation. Within the Declaration there was a commitment to raising basic living standards and an opposition to conspicuous consumption and large-scale accumulation of private wealth. The socialism he believed in was ‘people-centred’. Humanness in its fullest sense rather than wealth creation had to come first. Societies became better places through the development of people rather than the gearing up of production. This was a matter that Nyerere took to be important both in political and private terms. Unlike many other politicians, he did not amass a large fortune through exploiting his position.

Although noble and humanistic in its articulation, the policy met with significant political resistance, especially when people were forced into rural communes, with little economic success being realised. Approximately, 10 million peasants were moved, and many were effectively forced to give up their land. The idea of collective farming was less than attractive to many peasants, as they were not appropriately oriented towards the methods and benefits of such farming were concerned. A large number found themselves worse off and productivity dwindled. However, the focus on human development and self-reliance did bring some success in other areas notably in health, education and in political identity.

Julius Nyerere is also known as one of the main thinkers and creators of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), together with Kwame Nkrumah, within which his government’s support was crucial for the progress of socialist liberation movements across Southern Africa. As a committed pan-Africanist, Nyerere provided a home for a number of African liberation movements including the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) of South Africa, FRELIMO and MPLA which were seeking to overthrow Portuguese rule in Mozambique and Angola respectively, ZANU and ZAPU in their struggles to unseat the white racist regime in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and SWAPO, which was intending to reverse the illegal occupation of their land by the apartheid South African regime in South West Africa (now Namibia).

Tanzania’s support for South Africa’s liberation struggle needs to be understood as part of its broader opposition to colonialism, and commitment to the achievement of independence in the entire African continent. In 1958, Nyerere helped establish the Pan African Freedom Movement of Eastern and Central Africa (PAFMECA) to coordinate activities in this regard, which was extended to the Pan African Freedom Movement of Eastern and Central and Southern Africa (PAFMECSA) at a conference in Addis Ababa in 1962. Nelson Mandela addressed the conference with the aim of arranging support for the armed struggle in South Africa and for military training and armed support for the newly formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). These efforts eventually led to the creation of the OAU in 1963.

James Hadebe of the ANC and Gaur Radebe of the PAC opened an office in Dar es Salaam in February 1961, representing the South African United Front (SAUF). It was the first external structure set up by the two liberation movements under the pressure of both Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah to establish a united effort against the apartheid government. Their unity was short-lived. But, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital, grew into a centre of anti-colonial activity after independence from the United Kingdom in December 1961. At independence, Tanzania faced a shortage of nurses as British nurses left in droves rather than work for an African government. On President Nyerere’s request, ANC President Oliver Tambo arranged the underground recruitment of 20 South African nurses (aka “the 20 Nightingales”) to work in Tanzanian hospitals.

In the early 1960s, Tanzania was the southernmost independent African country from which armed operations could be carried out into colonised and white racist-ruled territories in southern Africa. Its capital was chosen as the operational base of the OAU Liberation Committee. The committee provided financial and material assistance to liberation movements. Its archives remain in Tanzania. In 1963, the ANC officially established its Tanzania mission, with headquarters in Dar es Salaam. A military camp for guerrillas of its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), who had returned from training in other African and socialist countries, was opened in Kongwa in 1964, based the land donated by the Tanzanian government.

In 1964, the PAC also moved its external headquarters to Dar es Salaam after it was pushed out of Lesotho. It established military camps near Mbeya and later in Mgagao, and a settlement in Ruvu. Both the PAC and the ANC held important conferences in Tanzania, in Moshi in 1967 and in Morogoro in 1969, respectively. In spite of Tanzania’s support for the liberation movements, their relationship was not without its contradictions or moments of ambivalence. For example, in 1965, the ANC had to move its headquarters from Dar es Salaam to Morogoro, which was far from international connections. Nyerere’s government had decided that only four members of each liberation movement would be allowed to maintain an office in the capital. This reflected Tanzania’s anxiety over the growing numbers of revolutionaries and trained guerrillas it hosted.

Following the issuing of the Lusaka Manifesto in 1969, which was drafted by Nyerere and was adopted by Tanzania, Zambia and 12 other African countries, including the OAU, tensions began to emerge between these countries and the national liberation movements. The Manifesto expressed preference for a peaceful solution to the conflict in South Africa instead of armed struggle, without consulting these movements. During the same period, rumours surfaced of ANC involvement in an attempted coup against Nyerere, which soured relations with the Tanzanian government. Within that tense climate, the ANC had to evacuate its entire armed forces to the Soviet Union, where they had no other activities except to undergo further military training and to pursue academic programmes. Its soldiers were allowed back in the country a couple of years later.

The ANC headquarters moved to Lusaka, in Zambia, in the 1970s, and Umkhonto we Sizwe training facilities were moved to newly independent Angola, with Mozambique as a frontline operational zone, following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. Nevertheless, Tanzania remained a significant place of settlement for South African exiles, as additional land donations from the Tanzanian government enabled the ANC to open a school and a vocational centre near Morogoro in the late 1970s and 1980s. The Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO) in Mazimbu and the Dakawa Development Centre were set up address the outflow of young people from South Africa following the June 16 Soweto 1976 Uprisings. Its other aim was to counter the effects of Bantu Education, an inferior and segregated education system for black South Africans.

Nyerere also opposed the brutal regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. Following a border invasion by Amin in 1978, a 20,000-strong Tanzanian army along with rebel groups, invaded Uganda. It took the capital, Kampala, in 1979, restoring Uganda’s first President, Milton Obote, to power. The Uganda-Tanzanian War, known in Tanzania as the Kagera War – following the invasion of the Kagera Salient in northern Tanzania in October 1978 by Ugandan forces – and in Uganda as the 1979 Liberation War, was fought from October 1978 until June 1979 and led to the overthrow of Ugandan President Idi Amin. The battle against Amin became an expensive exercise and placed a strain on the Tanzanian government’s finances.

In 1985, after being President of Tanzania for almost 30 years, Nyerere stepped down voluntarily but remained as chair of the Party – Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). Since then, he developed an international career as an African thinker and leader wherein he was involved in many international projects that aimed to focus on the Developing World. He gradually withdrew from active politics, retiring to his farm in Butiama. In 1990 he relinquished his chairmanship of CCM but remained active on the world stage as Chair of the Intergovernmental South Centre. One of his last high-profile actions was as the chief mediator in the Burundi conflict, as a United Nations facilitator on Burundi’s peace negotiations between 1994 and 1999.

According to Elias. C. J. Tarimo and Neville Z. Reuben, “Tanzania’s most significant legacy to the liberation of Africa is that southern Africa is free from colonial domination and the apartheid system is dead and buried. South Africa is now a democratic state. Tanzania’s commitment to South Africa’s liberation struggle, in a certain sense, also consolidated Tanzania’s freedom. Secondly, Tanzania’s outstanding contribution to liberation has left a lasting imprint on the history of Africa as the most essential protagonist and a rear base of the southern African liberation struggle.”

In 1985, Mozambican and FRELIMO President Samora Machel, maintained that “to speak of Nyerere is to speak of the liberation of Africa”. He “is a symbol that cannot be substituted” (quoted in Tarimo and Reuben, 2013). Nyerere remained a source of inspiration and the symbol of solidarity in the anti-colonial struggle for justice, equality and human dignity in Africa and the world, until his death in 1999.

Sources:
Wikipedia.
South African History Online (SAHO).
Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere, “Speech by the Late Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere to Members of the South African Parliament, Cape Town, 16 October 1997”, Nyerere Centre for Peace Research, East African Community Peace and Security, 01 November 2010.
Prolific S. Mataruse, “Julius Nyerere’s Enduring Definition of the Global South”, The Thinker, Vol. 93, 2022.
Ayanda Madyibi, “Biography: Julius Kambarage Nyerere”, Marxism in Africa, 1999.
Britannica Editors, “Julius Nyerere: President of Tanzania”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10 October 2025.
Arianna Lissoni, “Tanzania-South Africa: Deep Ties Evoke Africa’s Sacrifices for Freedom”, The Conversation AFRICA, 3 April 2023.
Elias. C. J. Tarimo and Neville Z. Reuben, “Tanzania’s Solidarity with South Africa’s Liberation”, The Thinker, Vol. 56, 2013.

Castro Khwela
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