Kambona and his attempts to overthrow Nyerere
after the 1969 abortive coup
After the 1969 attempt to overthrow the government was foiled by the Tanzanian intelligence service, Tanzania's former minister of external affairs and defence, Oscar Kambona, was still determined to overthrow – and even eliminate – Nyerere in collaboration with the South African apartheid regime and the Portuguese authorities operating from Mozambique. He also forged links with Idi Amin in pursuit of the same goal. As George Roberts states in his doctoral thesis, “Politics, Decolonisation, and the Cold War in Dar es Salaam c. 1965 – 72,” the University of Warwick:
Oscar Kambona, Tanzania’s enemies, and the June 1972 bombings
While Nyerere fought fires within Tanzania, he remained concerned by threats from the country’s enemies abroad. After the failure of the coup plot of 1969, Oscar Kambona had sought out new avenues for usurping the Nyerere regime. In 1970, he was introduced to Jorge Jardim, the Mozambique-based businessman who, as shown in chapter 4, was implicated in the assassination of Mondlane. Jardim, in close contact with Portuguese prime minister Marcelo Caetano, identified Kambona as a potential figurehead to overthrow Nyerere and then cast FRELIMO out of Tanzania. With the consent of the South African minister of defence, P. W. Botha, Jardim established
Operação OK. This planned the formation of a Tanzanian government-in-exile and military forces which would infiltrate southern from bases in Mozambique. In June 1971, Jardim began to channel funds to Kambona, which reached $8.4 million by the end of the year and $42.4 million by the time of the Carnation Revolution in 1974.
Kambona also turned to Nyerere’s newly established
bête noire in Uganda, Idi Amin. In March 1971, a group of exiled Kambona supporters in Kampala asked Amin for aid to liberate Tanzania ‘with the mercy of god from the hands of communism.’ According to Jardim’s biographer, the Portuguese businessman also had a hand in facilitating this meeting. On 6 April,
Ngurumo reported that Kambona himself was currently in Uganda. In the anxious climate which followed the Uganda coup, the appearance of such rumours in the Dar es Salaam press stoked fears of an anti-Nyerere alliance between his most outspoken Tanzanian critic and his most dangerous opponent abroad. The day after the
Ngurumo story, Kambona published a letter in the
Guardian – a newspaper usually staunchly pro-Nyerere – in which he accused Nyerere of crushing the party in merging it with the apparatus of the state. On this occasion, Nyerere declined to respond to Kambona’s criticism.
A more serious indication of the threat facing Nyerere came in October 1971, when Godfrey Binaisa, a Ugandan lawyer, approached the American embassy in Kampala. Binaisa had previously defended several of the accused in the treason trial in Tanzania. He explained that a plot had been prepared, involving groups in Britain and Tanzania, to overthrow Nyerere. The Ugandan foreign minister, Wanume Kibedi, had been informed of these plans. Binaisa asked Ross whether they might arrange a cover job for Kambona – perhaps with an American oil firm – in order to permit his passage to Uganda. Although Ross immediately rejected the idea, the United States did not warn the Tanzanian government about the plot.
Further evidence of Kambona’s deepening relationship with Portugal was provided by a propaganda stunt on 9 December 1971. Two aircraft, flying north from Mozambique, dropped pamphlets written in English and Swahili over the Saba Saba fairground in Dar es Salaam, where crowds had gathered to celebrate Tanzania’s Independence Day. The leaflet was an open letter to Nyerere from Kambona, in which the latter attacked the president’s ‘shameful’ record since independence. ‘The Party and the Militia are under oppressive control of a tyranic [sic] minority working against people’s interest and wellfare [sic]’, Kambona wrote. ‘In [sic] this tenth anniversary of independence Tanzania faces a stage of near civil war’. Kambona implored Nyerere to call free elections and declared his willingness to return immediately to Tanzania to stand as a candidate.
While the government maintained a public silence about the pamphlets, security in Dar es Salaam was visibly increased. The police established checkpoints on the city’s major road arteries and placed a night guard on the Selander Bridge. The impunity with which the aircraft had infiltrated Tanzanian airspace was an embarrassing reflection on the country’s defence capabilities. Although neither explicitly mentioned the incident, Nyerere and Kawawa both made speeches in the following days which criticised those ‘bad leaders’ and ‘self-seekers’ who sought to derail Tanzania’s socialist revolution. An editorial in the
Standard said that the party and government were ready to ‘listen to genuine complaints and grievances’, and that ‘those who have chosen to indulge in murmur, rumour, grumbling or leaflets have done so not for want of ways to get their views heard. They have chosen the latter in order to feel free to distort facts to suit their own sinister ends.’ On 16 December, Edward Sokoine, the minister of state in the second vice-president’s office, broke the government’s silence on the pamphlets at a regional TANU meeting in Dar es Salaam. He said that citizens should be on guard against attempts to subvert them and that the leaflets were intended to foment discontent.
The leaflet drop gave rise to an exceptional spate of wild rumours in Dar es Salaam, including stories that various officials had disappeared or been arrested, that Nyerere was gravely ill, that a British warship had been seized by the Tanzanian navy, that a coup was imminent. ‘There is no doubt that there is a jittery atmosphere here and if this is what Kambona wished to achieve by the leaflet raid, then he seems to have succeeded’, noted the British high commission. The assassination of Wilbert Klerru, the regional commissioner for Iringa, by disaffected locals on Christmas Day furthered a sense of disquiet. Klerru’s role in the local implementation of
ujamaa villagisation had met widespread resentment.
In June 1972, just as Nyerere was bringing Zanzibar to heel, Tanzania’s enemies moved from paper-based propaganda to state-sponsored terrorism. At 2.10am on 12 June, residents of Upanga and Oyster Bay were woken by an explosion, followed by another blast fifteen minutes later. Daybreak revealed damage to supporting pillars of the Selander Bridge, the main artery into the city centre from the northern suburbs, closing it to traffic. An electricity pylon had also been brought down, which caused a power cut for several hours.
At 5am, a third explosion occurred, when a bomb wrecked a car owned by a Swiss expatriate worker. Another car bomb went off at 3.25pm, on Independence Avenue, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare. This, the British high commission reported, caused ‘near pandemonium among shoppers’. Later that evening, at 7.15pm, a car belonging to a junior member of staff at the British high commission exploded. Although there were no casualties, the scattergun effect of the bombings elicited anxiety among the city’s population. An emergency meeting of TANU’s regional branch on 13 June decided that the militia should be deployed to guard industrial premises and residential areas. The
Daily News decried the architects of the bombing as ‘enemies of our revolution and the African revolution’. The explosions were not just ‘acts of destruction’, but had a ‘political purpose’, to ‘deflect us from our chosen path of revolution, of total liberation of the African in Tanzania and on the Continent. They aim to create an atmosphere of insecurity, of fear, of panic.’
The security services calculated that on the night before the explosions the three bombed cars had all been parked outside the same apartment block near the Selander Bridge. A fourth device was found attached to another vehicle there, primed to explode several days later. According to a junior Tanzanian diplomat at its London embassy, a further seven bombs were found under the Selander Bridge, with fuses set for a two-week delay.998 The Tanzanian police established that the bombs were of a ‘NATO make’, which suggested a potential Portuguese hand. In Dar es Salaam, the usual rumours abounded, with much speculation about the role of Kambona. Although the government had no evidence linking Kambona to the attacks, his brothers – who had been released in an amnesty in February, along with Anangisye and Bibi Titi – were re-imprisoned as a precautionary measure. Some made connections between the bombings and a second drop of pro-Kambona leaflets, which had taken place on 31 May over provincial cities in Tanzania.
After the end of apartheid, members of the South African special forces claimed responsibility for the bombings. The Lisbon-Pretoria axis had hoped to undermine the Nyerere regime by demonstrating the militancy of Kambona’s supporters. ‘There was a need to stage incidents on an escalating basis to, hopefully, stir the fires of insurrection’, writes military historian Peter Stiff in his exposé of the operation. A crack squad of troops travelled to Dar es Salaam by submarine, paddled into the city by canoe, and planted their devices on Selander Bridge and a series of vehicles. Stiff’s account suggests that the explosives attached to the car which detonated on Independence Avenue was originally intended to have been affixed to the British high commissioner’s car.
Although Nyerere claimed to be unconcerned by the bombings, telling one inquirer that this was not the way a coup would take place in Tanzania, foreign observers testified to a heightened sense of insecurity in Dar es Salaam over the following weeks. The British high commission reported that certain areas were ‘bristling with armed soldiers in combat dress, who have not hesitated to stop, search and pick up quite innocent passers-by, particularly those with white faces’. Connections were made by the Zambian state press – and relayed by its Tanzanian equivalent – between the Dar es Salaam bombings and a recent parcel-bomb attempt on the life of Kaunda. Elsewhere in Africa, Tanzania’s enemies gloated. The Zairean newspaper
Elima set to the bombings against a backdrop of the assassinations of Mondlane and Karume, as evidence of a ‘serious malaise, to which the leadership in Dar es Salaam must provide an urgent solution’. If not,
Elima warned, Tanzania would ‘lose its reputation as an island of stability in an African ocean boiling over’. According to Portuguese representatives in Kinshasa, Mobutu’s Zaire was also rumoured to be subject of an inquiry by Tanzanian security forces regarding relations between its ambassador in Dar es Salaam and one of Kambona’s principal agents in the city.
The June bombings provided substance to the language of vigilance which had dominated the government’s rhetoric since independence and especially since the Arusha Declaration. By sheltering the liberation movements, Tanzania had created enemies in Lisbon and Pretoria.
Exploiting circumstances of domestic unrest – itself entwined with events in Guinea and Uganda – Portugal and South Africa aimed to destabilise Tanzanian politics. Through the weapons of propaganda and terror, forces committed to maintaining white minority rule in southern Africa sought to use Dar es Salaam’s reputation as a hotbed of rumour to foment opposition to Nyerere. In Kambona, they found an opportunistic and desperate collaborator, who articulated a critique of Nyerere that was rooted in local discontent with the implementation of the
ujamaa programme.
The matter was aggravated by the fact that the Tanzanian security services (and their British colleagues) had lost track of Kambona in late 1971, when he had left London and had last been seen in Rome. In the aftermath of the bombings and leaflet drops, Tanzanian intelligence became increasingly obsessed by his whereabouts. In September, Emilio Mzena, the director of the intelligence services, arranged a meeting with the British overseas police advisor to Tanzania. ‘Time and time again during our conversation Mzena harked back to Kambona and his alleged machinations’, the advisor reported. Around this time, according to David Martin, the Tanzanian government also received dubious reports that a former British army officer had drawn up plans for a joint Ugandan-Portuguese invasion of Tanzania, including the involvement of Kambona.
Border clashes between Tanzania and Uganda had flared up on several occasions since the coup in Kampala, and each side regularly accused the other of plotting an invasion. Then, on 17 September 1972, around one thousand armed supporters of Obote crossed from Tanzania into Uganda, with the secret backing of Nyerere. Amin responded by bombing Tanzanian cities near the border and the invading force was quickly routed. To avoid a wider conflagration, Amin and Nyerere eventually signed a peace settlement, brokered by Somalia’s president, Siad Barre. The Mogadishu Agreement stated that both sides must withdraw ten kilometres behind the border and refrain from supporting forces hostile to the other’s regime.
Kambona was eventually spotted in Lisbon in November 1972, accompanied by Jardim. The American embassy in Lisbon received advanced copy of the text of an interview with Kambona filed to a British newspaper. Kambona explained how Portugal had established and trained an armed group, which infiltrated southwestern Tanzania from bases in Mozambique. The unnamed journalist described Kambona as ‘obviously nervous over the fact his cover had been broken’. On 4 November, the
East African Standard ran an interview with Kambona, datelined London, much of which was then repeated in the Tanzanian press. The
Daily News reported that Kambona’s appearance in Lisbon ‘only lends weight to the belief held by many progressive people that he is anti-Tanzania.’
Having been rumbled, Kambona’s Portuguese contacts offered him a platform for setting out a scathing criticism of Nyerere. In December, Lisbon’s
Diario Popular published a three-part interview with Kambona, supposedly conducted ‘clandestinely along the coast of the Mediterranean.’ The series was syndicated in the
Notícias da Beira, a Mozambican newspaper owned by Jardim. Kambona described Tanzania as a police state, governed by a paranoid regime which had sold out to China. He argued that the struggle against white minority rule, which he had supported so fervently as chairman of the OAU Liberation Committee, had achieved nothing and should be abandoned. But his words were not backed by any effective action. Despite continuing to scheme with the Portuguese until the collapse of the
Estado Novo, Kambona’s attempts to undermine the Nyerere government fell flat.” - ( George Roberts, “Politics, Decolonisation, and the Cold War in Dar es Salaam c. 1965 – 72,” pp. 198 – 203).
I remember very well the day the explosion occurred in Dar's city centre. I was in a building near the Askari Monument that afternoon when we heard the explosion.
On another occasion, also in the afternoon, two cars went round and round the Askari Monument, one pursued by the other. The pursuit continued on Independence Avenue. It was said the occupants of the car being pursued were Kambona's co-conspirators and those in pursuit were members of the Tanzanian intelligence service.
One of the occupants of the car that was being pursued was said to have been John Lifa Chpaka, Kambona's relative and one of the leaders of the 1969 coup attempt. Others said it was one of Kambona's brothers or both or another relative.
I attended the treason trial. When Senior State Attorney Nathaniel King, a Trinidadian like Chief Justice Phillip Telfer Georges, asked Chipaka during the trial in 1970 what he meant when he said they were going to "eliminate " President Nyerere, Chipaka responded, "eliminate him politically, not physically."
Nathaniel King sneered and laughed when Chipaka said that.
Kambona never abandoned his goal to undermine and overthrow Nyerere. And he failed miserably.
Whatever happened to the millions of dollars funnelled into his coffers to finance his diabolical scheme to oust and probably assassinate Nyerere has never been fully explained. He claimed he lived as a pauper in Britain. He obviously travelled to other countries also as a pauper. And he stated in an interview that he still considered Nyerere to be his friend, while at the same trying very hard to eliminate him.