Given the life-changing difficulty of this task, the competition and temptations of power and global political realities, leadership in postcolonial Africa was a perilous responsibility. Leaders held on to power by intimidating, often eliminating, those who would question them, by controlling the distribution of the nation’s wealth, and by setting segments of society in conflict with each other. A number of his peers were overthrown, sent into exile, or assassinated. Nyerere survived to step down of his own accord and live out his life as an active citizen of his home country. Such an accomplishment in the context of postcolonial Africa was never a saintly one.
Historical and Political Context
In the 1800s, as Britain led the effort to end the Atlantic slave trade, trade in slaves across the Indian Ocean grew and extended across East Africa. Where the Atlantic slave trade had been dominated and justified by Christian capitalists, the Indian Ocean slave trade was dominated by Muslim traders with roots in Africa and the Middle East. From the mid-1800s, increasingly aggressive strategies to capture slaves and ivory brought violence and disruption to farming societies, among whom the benefits of trade had traditionally outweighed costs of conflict. Seeking protection, villagers submitted to warlords like Tippu Tip, the slave trader and clove planter whose political influence stretched from Zanzibar to the Congo River, or warrior kings like the Hehe leaders in Iringa, Muyigumba and his son Mkwawa, who built up standing armies with taxes levied on conquered peoples.
Map 1.1 East Africa. Adapted from United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations. © United Nations.
The interior was a diverse place harboring both hierarchical and decentralized societies as well as scores of distinct languages and cultural traditions. In political and economic terms, the export of slaves—as well as ivory, decorative woods, and cloves—meant that the coast and the interior became linked more intimately than they had been in the past. Not only did Islamic culture spread inland, but also the coastal Swahili language, with its heavy load of Arabic vocabulary superimposed on an African grammar.8
Toward the end of the century, European countries entered a heated global competition for colonies, and the antislavery cause gave them a convenient justification for seeking influence in Africa. In East Africa, a missionary named David Livingstone witnessed the devastation caused by the slave trade and advocated the antislavery movement’s concept of “commerce, Christianity, and civilization” as a means to its end. He was the first of many missionaries who followed the paths of Muslim caravan traders to establish Christian communities throughout the region.9 The early missionaries met with little success at first. Following in their path, however, were businessmen and soldiers who colonized Africa for European settlement and the production of raw materials in high demand because of industrialization in Europe.
By the mid-1900s, a generation had grown up under colonial rule in Africa. Some had witnessed aspects of the devastating European wars, others became familiar with European practices of business and governance, and a precious few gained a European education. In East Africa, the British had welcomed immigration from India because the immigrants could help administer colonial rule and expand commercial trade across the territory. European rule became a familiar presence, bringing significant benefits and a host of new problems. People resented the racial hierarchy that came with it, which set aside innumerable privileges for Europeans, offered Indian immigrants favorable advantages, and generally treated Africans as children. This prejudice was part and parcel of the paternalist justification for colonial rule.10
The independence and bloody partition of India in 1947 was a sign that the era of European colonialism was coming to an end, and inaugurated a global movement to end colonial rule. European powers found that their colonies were not very profitable, and colonial residents found ways to demand a greater voice in colonial administration.11 In Africa, a nominally independent kingdom in Egypt was overthrown by a group of military officers in 1952, and the new government under Gamal Abdel Nasser carved out a secular socialist compromise with a heavily Muslim population. Sudan negotiated its independence from Britain in 1956 and quickly fell into a pattern of military takeovers, echoed elsewhere as young officers saw themselves as modernizers, often with the encouragement of Cold War powers seeking allies. They learned that the Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union had created a rift in global politics that gave newly decolonized countries a role to play in the balance of power.
In coastal West Africa, a growing class of Africans with a European education began to push for independence with a logic the European overlords found difficult to ignore. The educated class argued they were fully “civilized” according to European norms and capable of running their own government. Workers on large European-owned farms, loading docks, and railways learned how to use labor actions like strikes and slowdowns to push for better pay and conditions. Rural farmers and urban dwellers sought access to the advantages held by European plantation holders and foreign minorities.
The ideology of pan-Africanism linked these struggles, emphasizing that the borders between African countries were recent and the presence of Africans in the Americas was the result of the slave trade. These circumstances supported an ideology that crossed ethnic, geographic, and religious boundaries. Pan-Africanism argued that the interests of all people of African descent were best served by uniting their efforts and erasing the divisions that racist European institutions had imposed. The poet-philosopher Léopold Senghor in Senegal, the scholarly journalist Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria, the firebrand mobilizer Sékou Touré in Guinea, and the charismatic politician Kwame Nkrumah all espoused pan-Africanism and the end of colonial control.
Figure 1.2 President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania with President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana during the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) heads of government meeting held in Accra in 1965. © Tanzania Information Services/MAELEZO.
Nkrumah became the model and in many ways the prophet of independence for sub-Saharan Africa. He created a nationalist movement in the British colony of the Gold Coast and pushed for negotiations that led to its independence under a British-style parliamentary government, with him as its prime minister. Nkrumah renamed the country Ghana after a medieval kingdom and sought to industrialize it through a socialist economic policy, but his rule became increasingly dictatorial as he marginalized both rival politicians and traditional authorities.12 He was overthrown in a military coup in 1966 that he claimed was engineered by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.13
In East Africa, aspects of Ghana’s independence trajectory took different forms in each territory. Kenya faced the most violent episode, when a grassroots movement that became known as Mau Mau launched a militant campaign on behalf of landless peasants.14 British colonial authorities declared a state of emergency and imprisoned thousands in brutal reeducation camps. More conventional anticolonial activists, Jomo Kenyatta most prominent among them, were jailed for suspected ties to Mau Mau. Eventually the British looked to Kenyatta and his colleagues to negotiate a peaceful path to Kenyan independence. Kenyatta became president after independence, managing a political system based heavily on ethnic patronage until his death in 1978.15
Political activism in Uganda was more muted because there were very few European settlers, and because leaders of the Buganda kingdom at the heart of the territory saw themselves as partners in governance with the British. But a northerner, Milton Obote, emerged out of a convoluted competition between political parties to become prime minister at independence. Obote set an ideological course inspired by Nyerere’s socialism. However, his effort to suppress Buganda’s royal house led to dictatorial methods that eventually brought his overthrow at the hands of an unpredictable sergeant named Idi Amin in 1971.16
Long before