After our meeting in Dar-es-Salaam, Haroub wrote to both of us exploring the possibility of coming to
the Nordic Africa Institute to complete an important project. His May 12 letter begins, ‘As I told you
in Dar es Salaam, Mwalimu Nyerere was reluctant until few months before he died to writing his
Memoirs.
I discussed with him this issue a number of time. By the time he was ready and asked me
to help him, it was five months before his death. I feel his history must be written. There could be
others who could write it, and perhaps much better, but I feel I have a moral obligation to do it. It is
in this regard that I am writing to request a fellowship at your Institute so that I could develop ideas
and a program of how to go about it.
This is going to be a major exercise, involving extensive reading,
a lot of interviews, visits t many places and viewing of a lot of pictures and films. In early June, the
Nordic Africa Institute granted him one of the five African Guest Scholars positions, and Haroub was
planning to start his fellowship in Uppsala in early February 2010. This was never meant to be. Along
with Haroub’s death, so also went out of the window the biography of Julius Nyerere. This is a double
loss for Africa, for his family and friends who loved him so much.