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.