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