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This made me laugh out and remember why back in the days, there was slogan that goes as ....Nyerere was indignant. He went public with his attack on Nkrumah. He referred to people who pretended that they were in favour of African continental union when all they cared about was to ensure that 'some stupid historian in the future' praised them for being in favour of the big continental ambition before anyone else was willing to undertake it
"Nyerere Kaunda Banda Azikiwe Nkrumah"
Another piece of fine reading!Kumekuwa na plots mbalimbali za kumundoa Mwalimu Nyerere alipokuwa raisi. Kuna ambazo zimejadiliwa hapa Jamiforums. Zilianza miaka ya sitini, hasa tangu 1964.
Mojawapo ambayo imejadiliwa ni ile ya 1982. Plotters walikuwa karibu sana kutimiza lengo lao wakati ule. Afisa mmoja wa jeshi aliyehusika na mpango huo wa kumpindua Nyerere, in an excerpt I posted earlier, alisema hakukuwa na mpango wa kumuua Mwalimu ingawa suala hilo lilijadiliwa.
Ninavyokumbuka, kulikuwa na mpango huo, as one of the options to accomplish the mission of overthrowing the government. According to intelligence sources, kortini, during the treason trial, sababu kubwa kwa nini coup plotters waliamua vingine is the respect many people around the world had for Nyerere. The coup plotters decided not to assassinate the president not because they simply wanted to spare his life; they decided not to, because they were worried their new government would not be recognised by most countries after killing such a highly respected leader. According to the same sources, contrary to some reports, there was no evidence a British or an American warship was going to be near Dar es Salaam during the coup with troops ready to interevene to help the coup makers in case something went wrong.
Turudi nyuma kuanzia miaka ya sitini kuhusu mipango ya kumpindua Nyerere. Ukweli ni kwamba Nyerere was targeted by other enemies as well, not just by those in Tanzania. Baada ya Nkrumah kupinduliwa 24 February 1966:
"Americans' only real regret about the wave of African coups was that Sekou Toure and Julius Nyerere were not among its victims....The United States came to hold the view that 'under the mercurial and fiercely independent leadership of Nyerere, Tanzania is the bastion of radicalism in East Africa.'" - (Larry Grubbs, Secular Missionaries: Americans and African Development in the 1960s, University of Massachusetts Press, 2009, p. 157).
That was an assessment by the CIA, documented in the book I have cited above. There are a lot of other details in the book about the CIA's clandestine operations in many parts of Africa, including disparaging remarks made by a number of Americans - CIA agents, ambassadors to African countries - about Nyerere, Nkrumah and Sekou Toure, leaders they did not like.
Coincidentally, Nyerere and Sekou Toure were close friends; Sekou Toure was also a close friend of Kwame Nkrumah. Nyerere and Nkrumah had an adversarial relationship although they also worked together. All these leaders were strong Pan-Africanists and strong supporters of the liberation movements in southern Africa and Guinea-Bissau. And they were all targeted by the CIA. Nyerere himself said in 1966:
""We have twice quarrelled with the US Government; once when we believed it to be involved in a plot against us, and again when two of its officials misbehaved and were asked to leave Tanzania." - (Julius Nyerere, "Principles and Development," in Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism: A Selection from Writings and Speeches 1965 - 1967, Oxford University Press, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 1968, pp. 202 - 203).
In his book, Dark Days in Ghana, Nkrumah also wrote about American plots to undermine Nyerere; which was hypocritical of him because he supported Oscar Kambona when Kambona wanted to overthrow Nyerere and did everything he could to block Nyerere from forming an East African federation with the leaders of Kenya and Uganda. Nyerere was the strongest supporter of the proposed federation.
Speaking at a press conference in Nairobi in June 1963 after the three East African leaders - Kenyatta, Nyerere and Obote agreed to form a federation before the end of the year - Nyerere responded to Nkrumah's opposition to formation of such a union and other regional federations by stating:
"We must reject some of the pretensions that have been made from outside East Africa. We have already heard the curious argument that the continued 'balkanisation' of East Africa will somehow help African unity.... These are attempts to rationalize absurdity." (Julius Nyerere, quoted by Richard Cox, Pan-Africanism in Practice: An East African Study, Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 77; Ali A. Mazrui, Towards A Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition, Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 71).
Nkrumah's interference infuriated Nyerere and Nyerere let him know how he felt about it:
"His meddling became so apparent that on 6th August, 1963, President Nyerere of Tanzania wrote him a very angry letter on this subject." - Donald S. Rothchild, Politics of Integration: An East African Documentary, Institute of Development Studies, University College of Nairobi; East African Publishing House, Nairobi, Kenya, 1968, p. 112).
Nkrumah's failure to unite the countries he wanted to unite in West Africa led to further frustration. He used another argument to sabotage Nyerere's quest for federation in East Africa. He tried to discredit the proposed federation, contending that countries which were far from East Africa would not be able to join the federation, making it discriminatory. Yet when he formed the Ghana-Guniea-Mali Union with his friends, Ahmed Sekou Toure and Modibo Keita, he did not say the union was discriminatory since it would be impossible for countries such as Tanganyika (there was no Tanzania then) and Kenya to join the union since they were so far way in East Africa. Ghana itself does not even share borders with Guinea or Mali the way the latter two share theirs. Yet Nkrumah saw no problem in uniting his country with Guinea and Mali. Nor did he say Ghana's union with Congo which he and Lumumba agreed to form in August 1960, with Leopoldville as the capital and with Nkrumah himself being the driving force behind it, would be impractical or discriminatory. Yet when Nyerere wanted to form an East African federation, it was a different story, with Nkrumah insisting the union of the three East African countries would be discriminatory and divisive:
"Nkrumah pointed out that his own country could not very easily join an East African federation. This proved how discriminatory and divisive the whole of Nyerere's strategy was for the African continent.
Nyerere treated Nkrumah's counter-thesis with contempt. He asserted that to argue that Africa had better remain in small bits than form bigger entities was nothing more than 'an attempt to rationalize absurdity.'
He denounced Nkrumah's attempt to deflate the East African federation movement as petty mischief-making arising from Nkrumah's own sense of frustration in his own Pan-African ventures.
Nyerere was indignant. He went public with his attack on Nkrumah. He referred to people who pretended that they were in favour of African continental union when all they cared about was to ensure that 'some stupid historian in the future' praised them for being in favour of the big continental ambition before anyone else was willing to undertake it." - (Ali A. Mazrui in his lecture "Nkrumahism and The Triple Heritage: Out of the Shadows" at the University of Ghana-Legon in 2002; Ali A. Mazrui in Opoku Agyeman, Nkrumah's Ghana and East Africa: Pan-Africanism and African Interstate Relations, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992, p. 16; Ali Al'Amin Mazrui, Nkrumah's Legacy and Africa's Triple Heritage between Globalization and Counter-Terrorism, Ghana Universities Press, 2004, p. 35).
Nkrumah was opposed to formation of an East African federation for another reason besides his concern that regional federations would be an obstacle to immediate continental unification. He saw Nyerere as a rival and did not want to see him succeed in forming a federation of the three East African countries while Nkrumah himself had failed to form a functional union in West Africa. He formed a union with Guinea (Ghana-Guinea Union) in November 1958 which Mali joined in April 1961 to form the Ghana-Guinea-Mali Union. But the union was more symbolic than functional. His attempt to unite Ghana with Congo in 1960 also failed.
Nkrumah also used Obote to frustrate Nyerere. Obote and Nkrumah were friends. Obote was also Nyerere's friend.
Nkrumah contended that an East African federation - which Nyerere was so determined to establish - would not be in the best interest of Uganda because Uganda would not have the same status in the union as Kenya and Tanzania. She would be a junior member subordinate to Kenya and Tanzania and would be better off retaining her status as a separate independent nation.
There are probably a lot of details on these intrigues by Nkrumah stored in the national archives in Kampala. As Philip Ochieng stated in his article in The East African, Nairobi, Kenya, 28 March 2009, "Did Nkrumah Kill Off the First EA Community?":
"In the late 1960s, when Yoweri Kaguta Museveni was the leader of the 'revolutionary' wing of the University of Dar es Salaam's student movement, he and his group militantly rebuked the governments of Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya for failing to federate as they had promised.
The Ugandan leader still appears passionate about that union. Last week, he told a news conference that, instead of fighting over an island smaller than a football pitch, Nairobi and Kampala should fight to make Kenya and Uganda one political entity.
Topical again after a lull of many years, one East African republic was a nationalist, pre-Independence theme. Indeed, a treaty of commitment to it was signed by Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere and Milton Obote just before Kenya's independence.
So what happened? Why hasn't that great idea panned out for us nearly 50 years after the Uhuru fanfare of the early 1960s? I ask this question because, in truth, Museveni may be in a better position than any of the present East African leaders to answer it....In the Ugandan capital's archives, now controlled by his government, there may lie documents that can enlighten us.
Let me jog the president's memory. He and I were in Dar es Salaam in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He will have heard Obote, whom he still deeply admired, being publicly accused as the chief saboteur of the proposal to federate. Official Tanzania was, of course, mum about this accusation. But it came from top-level academics known to enjoy direct links with Mwalimu's State House. The certainty is that it was Nyerere who was feeding them with the lowdown on Kampala.
What did Mwalimu Nyerere and his Cabinet know about Dr Obote that we did not know? The accusing finger I constantly saw whenever I visited the campus at Ubungo was explicit.
Somebody else, far away from East Africa, was extremely unhappy about an East African union and worked tirelessly, mostly through Kampala, to nip it in the bud, so the story went. No, it was not the British (though they would play a central role in frustrating the federation).
So who could it be? The answer: None other than the great Kwame Nkrumah.
This may sound paradoxical because that redoubtable intellectual and nationalist was the father of the pan-Africanist movement. So you would have expected him to be the chief sponsor of all the regional initiatives that might lead to a pan-African government. That again was paradoxical.
According to the story that I kept hearing, it was because Dr Nkrumah wanted to be the father figure of all the regional initiatives, that he sabotaged the East African chapter....
Nkrumah himself sponsored a West African initiative similar to the proposed East African federation...composed of his Ghana, Ahmed Sekou Toure's Guinea and Modibo Keita's Mali....As long as he was the paramount leader of such an initiative, there was no problem.
In East Africa, Nyerere was also taking serious steps to restructure his society. Tanzania (under Nyerere), indeed, is the African country that has gone farthest in dismantling the political, economic and intellectual pillars of colonialism....
Nkrumah...wanted to be the dominant figure in every regional initiative. Like Joseph Stalin for all of the world's non-Maoist communist parties, Nkrumah wanted to be chief policy-maker and policy implementer for every one of the regional groupings. The probable idea was that, if all those regional groupings decided to unite into a single continental government, no individual would be in a position to vie with the Ghanaian leader to be its first president.
That was why Nkrumah could not trust Mwalimu Nyerere as the intellectual spirit behind the East African proposal. For, although they seemed like ideological comrades, the old Tanganyikan schoolteacher was completely independent-minded and would never have been prepared to act as Nkrumah's regional poodle.
With Nyerere thus dismissed and Mzee Kenyatta accused of having surrendered Kenya as a backyard of corporate Britain, the Ubungo intellectuals explained that, in Nkrumah's eyes, Obote now appeared as the only one not too committed one way or the other. That was why, according to the story, it was Obote that Nkrumah latched onto to frustrate all the plans to federate."
Nkrumah's interference in East African affairs to block Nyerere from achieving his goal of establishing an East African federation tarnished Nkrumah's image. As Basil Davidson states in his book, Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah:
"Some, like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, chastised Nkrumah for his interference. East Africa, Nyerere believed, could best contribute to continental unity by moving first towards regional unity. Although knowing little about East Africa, Nkrumah not only disagreed but actively interfered to obstruct the East African federation proposed by Nyerere.... It was one of Nkrumah's worst mistakes." - (Basil Davidson, Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah, Allen Lane, London, 1973, cited by Geoffrey Mmari, "The Legacy of Nyerere," in Colin Legum and Geoffrey Mmari, eds., Mwalimu: The Influence of Nyerere, Africa World Press, Trenton, New Jersey, 1995, pp. 179 - 180).
A few years later, Kambona devised a plan to overthrow Nyerere.
Therefore, Nkrumah's approval of Kambona's plan to overthrow Nyerere - Kambona wrote Nkrumah about it and Nkrumah knew Kambona also wanted to assssinate Nyerere - was one way of trying to get rid of a rival whom he considered to be the biggest threat to his ambition to rule Africa when he was president of Ghana, if African countries were to unite. Although he was no longer in power, and was living in exile in Conakry, Guinea, Nkrumah continued to entertain hopes that he would one day return to Ghana and regain the presidency. If he were to regain power, he felt he would continue to be a great African leader of continental stature he once was or that he perceived himself to be. And it was probably in 1967 - not longer after he had serious disagreements with Nyerere and Kawawa over the Arusha Declaration - when Kambona decided to overthrow Nyerere, about a year after Nkrumah was overthrown. During the OAU summit in Accra in 1965, which Nyerere attended, Nkrumah even had the rooms of the Tanzanian delegation bugged. It was said that officers of the Tanzanian intelligence service found the listening devices. The spying that was done by Ghana's intelligence service on the Tanzanian delegation is also one of the subjects addressed by W. Scott Thompson in his book, Ghana's Foreign Policy 1957 - 1966: Diplomacy, Ideology, and the New State (Princeton University Press, 1969).
Emilio Mzena, the intelligence chief, also went to Accra as one of the Tanzanian delegates to the OAU summit:
"Special attention was devoted to some of these delegates who were thought to be critical of Nkrumah....Chalet C-4, one of the largest on the grounds of the Star Hotel, also housed Emilio Charles Mzena, a delegate from Tanzania....At the conference President Nyerere was attended by his personal physician, Dr. A. Nhonoli, who was also an occupant of Chalet C-4." - (Nkrumah's Subversion in Africa: Documentary Evidence of Nkrumah's Interference in the Affairs of Other African States, Ghana's Ministry of Information, Accra, Ghana, 1966).
Although Nkrumah wanted to exert his influence on the entire continent, he also focused on some areas, especially East Africa where his nemesis, Nyerere, was the most influential leader in the region and one of the most respected across Africa. He even tried to undermine him from within:
"East Africa was high on Nkrumah's list of subversion priorities. At one point, early in 1965, an attempt was made to recruit two sources close to Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere to 'exploit the political contradictions in the East African area.'" - (Atlas, a journal, Worley Publishing Company, New York, 1966, p. 22).
One of them was probably Oscar Kambona. He already had close ties to Nkrumah. And when Nkrumah was overthrown, he sent Nkrumah some money in Conakry, a fact acknowledged by Nkrumah himself in his book Dark Days in Ghana. It was only a small amount but of great symbolic significance in terms of friendship between the two leaders.
So, Nyerere also had some African leaders who wanted to undermine him, Nkrumah being the most prominent one.
It was also in the same year of the Accra summit that Mobutu seized power, in November 1965, after eliminating his rivals with the help of the CIA.
The Americans had already intervened in Congo-Leopoldville and tried to use lame excuses to justify their intervention and racist attitude towards black Africans:
"When Lyndon Johnson ordered a U.S. airlift to rescue Belgian paratroopers from Kisangani in November 1964, he privately explained, 'We just couldn't let cannibals kill a lot of people.' Instead, the CIA sponsored mass violence over the next year as Mobutu regained the city and other rebel areas, resulting in numerous atrocities. If 'cannibals' must not rampage, South African mercenaries could." (L. Grubbs, ibid., p. 147).
And they did. The rest is history.
I remember what the CIA station chief in Leopoldville during that time, Larry Devlin, said about the atrocities committed by the Americans and the Belgians in Stanlyeville. He said if Africans in other parts of the country knew what the Americans and the Belgians had done to Lumumba and about the other atrocities they had committed, "there would not have been a single white person left alive in Congo." Lumumba's compatriots, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, were assassinated during the same time, together with Lumumba, and on the same field outside Elisabethville in Katanga Province on 17 January 1961. They were flown to Elisabethville - from Leopoldville - with their hands tied and were badly beaten during the flight and as they came down the plane. They were bleeding from the injuries they sustained during the beatings. When the plane landed, Lumumba was the first to disembark and was beaten again, as were his colleagues, Mpolo and Okito.
Waliokuwepo miaka ile, nikiwa mmoja wao, wanakumbuka nini kilitokea Congo. Walter Rodney, katika kitabu chake, The Groundings with My Brothers, aliandika yafwatayo kuhusu mauaji nchini Congo:
"The white world in their own way were saying that all these blacks amounted to nothing, for power was white....By being made into colonials, black people lost the power which we previously had of governing our own affairs, and the aim of the white imperialist world is to see that we never regain this power.
The Congo provides an example of this situation....After regaining political independence the Congolese people settled down to reorganise their lives, but white power intervened, set up the black stooge Tshombe, and murdered both Lumumba and the aspirations of the Congolese people. Since then, paid white mercenaries have harassed the Congo.
Late last year, 130 of these hired white killers were chased out of the Congo and cornered in the neighbouring African state of Burundi. The white world intervened and they all have been set free. These are men who for months were murdering, raping, pillaging, disrupting economic production, and making a mockery of black life and black society. Yet white power said not a hair on their heads was to be touched. They did not even have to stand trial or reveal their names." - (Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, The Bogle-L' Ouverture Publications, London, 1969, pp. 18 - 19).
The elimination of Lumumba was also a warning to Nyerere that he could next. And the Tanzanian government was fully aware of that because of the stand our country took on the Congo crisis, supporting Lumumba's followers.
Baada ya kumuondoa na kumuua Lumumba, Wamerika na Wabeligiji walimuweka madarakani kibaraka wao, Mobutu. Hata kabla ya hapo, Mobutu had already been on the CIA payroll when he was a journalist and when he was Lumumba's private secretary. Lumumba later made a fatal mistake when he appointed him head of the army without knowing that he was promoting a CIA agent who was already working against him and who would one day help to get rid of him.
With Mobutu at the helm, the CIA had taken control of the country. In fact, when Mobutu was in power, the largest CIA station in Africa was in Kinshasa. The CIA also had a large station in Nairobi where its agents worked closely with Kenyan leaders including Kenyatta himself. They were on the CIA payroll; Kenyatta himself was. The CIA has always maintained a large staff in Nairobi. And in Ethiopia, the Americans had a large secret military base for years in the southern part of the country. It was exposed and ceased operations after Haile Selassie was overthrown. The Soviets were fully aware of it.
Halie Selassie himself was on the CIA payroll; so was Prime Minister - later President - Forbes Burnham of Guyana who was also responsible for Walter Rodney's assassination after Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania.
Kwahiyo ukiangalia upande wetu wa nchi za Afrika mashariki, utaona kulikuwa na kiongozi mmoja who was targeted by the CIA: Nyerere. Obote also became a target later.
The American government even tried to provide weapons to some groups in Tanzania to underminine Nyerere as far back as 1964, the same year our army mutinied.
Besides his socialist policies, Nyerere also incurred the wrath of the United States and other Western powers because of his strong support for the liberation movements in the countries of southern Africa whose white regimes were Western allies:
"Of all the African leaders who proclaimed their support for the liberation struggle in Africa - Nkrumah, Nasser, Ben Bella, Sekou Toure - he (Nyerere) was the most committed. And by the second half of 1964, spurred by events in Zaire and the obvious failure of peaceful attempts to end white rule in southern Africa, this commitment, and his adisappointment with the Western powers, was increasingly evident.
By the time Che arrived, Dar es Salaam had become the Mecca of African liberation movements....Dar es Salaam 'has become a haven for exiles from the rest of Africa,' the CIA lamented in September 1964. 'It is full of frustrated revolutionaries, plotting the overthrow of African governments, both black and white'....In September 1964, Frelimo, the movement against Portuguese rule in Mozambique, had launched the opening salvo of its guerrilla war from bases in southern Tanzania, its only rear guard. Following Stanleyville, Nyerere had thrown his full support to the Simbas, and Tanzania had become their main rear guard and the major conduit of Soviet and Chinese weapons for them. It was also the seat of the Liberation Committee of the OAU. The head offices of Frelimo and a host of other movements struggling against the white regimes in South Africa, Namibia, and Rhodesia were in Dar es Salaam.
The Cuban embassy there was, the CIA reported accurately in March 1965, 'the largest Cuban diplomatic station in sub-Saharan Africa.' The ambassador, Captain Pablo Ribalta, was a close friend of Che Guevara.
In early 1964 Ribalta had been the commander of the Libertad air force base near Havana. 'One day,' he told me, 'Che arrived and said, 'Listen, Fidel wants to send you to Tanzania.' He told me I had to establish good relations with the liberation movements there. So they sent me to the Foreign Ministry to learn about Africa, and especially about Tanzania.'
Ribalta arrived in Tanzania on February 25, 1964, with four trusted aides from Libertad...." (Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959 - 1976, The University of North Carolina Press, 2002, pp. 84 and 85).
Ni mwaka huo huo, 1964, when the American government wanted to provide weapons to some people in Tanzania to undermine Nyerere. The army mutiny took place on 20 January 1964. Some labour union leaders, Christopher Kasanga Tumbo and Victor Mkello, wanted to take advantage of the mutiny to oust Nyerere. They were said to have been in touch with some of the mutineers. Were they some of the people the Unied States wanted to arm to overthrow Nyerere? Halafu baada ya miaka miwili, in 1966, Nyerere mwenyewe alisema kulikuwa na mpango, by Americans, to undermine the government.
Recommendation ya kuwapa silaha Watanzania waliokuwa wanampinga Nyerere ilitoka US State Department in 1964. The Secretary of State during that time was Dean Rusk who was first appointed by President John F. Kennedy and who continued to serve in the same capacity under Lyndon Johnson. As John Prados states in his book, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA:
"The Special Group (at the CIA) reportedly considered a State Department proposal to supply arms to certain groups in Tanzania, where secret-war wizards saw President Julius Nyerere as a problem, in the summer of 1964....Like Nyerere, Washington viewed Ghana's leader Kwame Nkrumah as a troublemaker." - - (John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2006, p. 328).
It was in the same year, 1964, that Holden Roberto went on the CIA payroll, the same year in which the CIA intensified its activities in Angola using their operational base in Leopoldville. And in February 1964, the CIA approved "political action in Somalia," euphemism for sponsorship of covert and violent operations.
In July - August 1964, was the US State Department and CIA plan to provide arms to some groups in Tanzania to undermine and overthrow Nyerere. About two years later, in February 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup engineered and mastermined by the CIA. It was in the same year, 1966, in which Nyerere said there was a plot by the Americans to undermine our government.
Plots against Nyerere have a long history.
Kuna watu waliokuwa serikalini enzi ya Nyerere wanaojua mambo mengi na ambao wanaweza kuandika vitabu kuhusu mambo hayo. Kuna mmoja ambaye nimewahi kumtaja katika mjadala mwingine. Ni Walter Bgoya. Ni mwandishi. Pia ana uwezo wa ku analyse mambo hayo as an insider. He worked with Nyerere.
Kuna wengine. But Bgoya is defintely one of them. Sijui kwa nini watu kama hao bado hawajaandika vitabu vya aina hiyo. I remember Walter Bgoya how he was in the early seventies when he was still at the ministry of foreign affairs. He was a revolutionary intellectual and had one favourite phrase, "katika revolution," he used now and then in conversations as he went on to expound ideas with a socialist bent.
No wonder he was given the task of writing The Mogadishu Declaration, singlehandedly, which was adopted by the OAU. He wrote it in 1971. And The Lusaka Manifesto of April 1969, also adopted by the OAU, was the product of Nyerere himself. Two Tanzanians, authors of two historic documents adopted by the OAU. Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, in his writings, was one of the Tanzanian leaders who gave credit to Nyerere for writing The Lusaka Manifesto.
Walter Bgoya also had a broad Pan-African perspective. I remember what he said when I asked him in 1971 - he was head of the North Africa and Middle East division at the ministry of foreign affairs - what he thought about the membership of the Arab North African countries in the Arab League, which transcends continental boundaries, and their membership in the Organisation of African Unity (OAU); if their membership in the League took precedence over their membership in the OAU and if it compromised their Pan-African credentials. He said there was no conflict between Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism. There was no need to reconcile the two. The membership of the Arab North African countries in the OAU was out of genuine commitment to Africa.
His position on the matter reminds me of what Ali Mazrui wrote about Arabs and Black Africans. In his article, "Black Africa and the Arabs," published in Foreign Affairs in 1975, he stated that leaders such as Nyerere and Nkrumah genuinely considered Arabs in North Africa - Algerians and others - to be fellow Africans:
"There were (several) factors behind black radical identification with the Arabs. One was the mystique of Pan-Africanism, according to which the African continent was viewed as a whole. People like Nkrumah and Nyerere genuinely regarded Algerians, for example, as fellow Africans.
The other stimulus to black radical identification with the Arabs was the place of the Arabs in the vanguard of anti-imperialism in the Third World. Countries like Egypt, Syria, and Algeria have been major participants in movements for Third World liberation. Even Libya - although animated more by Islamic fundamentalism than by modern revolutionary ideology - pursues the cause of greater autonomy for Third World peoples with an impatience that places it in the mainstream of Third World militancy." - (Ali A. Mazrui, "Black Africa and the Arabs," Foreign Affairs, 53, 4, July 1975, p. 733).
In one of his last speeches not long before he died, Nyerere said during a conference at the University of Dar es Salaam on 15 December 1997:
"Nasser was a great leader and a great African leader. I got on extremely well with him."
They were also very close friends.
Kamuzu Banda was different. He did not consider Arabs in Africa to be fellow Africans. He bluntly stated that they were "foreigners and imperialists" just like the whites in South Africa. He even refused to attend the OAU summit conference in Algiers in 1968 because it was being held in an Arab capital:
"In a speech to the Malawi Congress Party in September, 1968, he complained that only a lack of funds prevented him from raising a national army to fight alongside Africans against Arabs in the Sudan because he thought Africans in Southern Sudan were being murdered by the Arabs, yet African leaders did not lift a finger in protest.
'There is no difference whatsoever between the Whites in South Africa and the Arabs in the Sudan. Both are settlers - foreigners and imperialists,' he declared....Dr. Banda declined to attend the OAU Summit Conference in September on the ground of its being held in Algiers." - ( Hasting Kamuzu Banda in Colin Legum and John Drysdale, eds;, Africa Contemporary Record: Annual Survey and Documents 1968 - 1969, Africa Research Limited, London, 1969, p. 179).
Another black African leader who did not accept Arabs as fellow Africans was Chief Obafemi Awolowo, one of the fathers of the Nigerian independence movement who served as vice president of Nigeria under Yakubu Gowon during the Nigerian civil war. He made that clear in his first book, Path to Nigerian Freedom published in 1947,and in his autobiographical work, Awo, published in 1960. And he minced no words about his hostility towards Nasser and accused him of trying to dominate black Africa.
I don't know why Bgoya has not written a comprehensisve book about those days and about Nyerere and even about the Arusha Declaration he supported so much. He still supports it today as one of its prominent theoretical proponents.
Any comprehensive book about Nyerere would also include some details on the plots, hatched within and without, to oust him from power.
Kuna siri ambazo hatutegemei kuambiwa. Lakini pia kuna mengi ambayo siyo lazima yafichwe. Ni wajibu wa wananchi wanaojua mambo hayo kuandika vitabu ambavyo ni vya historia ya nchi yetu.