Nguruvi,
Nami nakuletea zawadi kutoka Kipata.
Huku Nyamwezi na huku Swahili No. 32.
Karibu na nyumba ya Mama Nambaya na Shabaka.
Kule Swahili kwa Mama Kilindi mbele kwa Mashaka
Lumelezi pembeni kwa Hassan Machakaomo (Mzulu).
Mbele kabisa kwa Mzee Mtamila na mbele kabisa kabisa
New Street kwa Mzee Kleist Sykes:
[TABLE="class: MsoNormalTable"]
[TR]
[TD]
In Dar es Salaam at the Kitumbini Mosque a hawli (prayer of remembrance for a departed Muslim) is held each year in the month of October to remember Abdulwahid Kleist Sykes. It is more or less a family affair with only relatives in attendance. Apart from the obligatory duty of praying for the departed as is the custom in Islam, Abdulwahid is accorded this respect for other reasons. In his short lifetime he used to pray regularly at the mosque and it was from this mosque that Abdulwahid made his last journey to meet his Creator. Abdulwahid was an important personality in the Muslim community. He had for many years been active in Al Jamiatul Islamiyya fi Tanganyika (The Muslim Association). He had also been Secretary of the Tanganyika African Association (TAA) and later its President. Although historians so far have not acknowledged his political achievements, Abdulwahid was the brains behind the formation of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the political party which united the people of Tanganyika for their independence struggle against the British.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Many of Abdulwahids contemporaries are still living and pray at the same mosque. They cherish this yearly occasion. Most of these are TANU veterans of the 1950s. They are now old and for bitter reasons they have lost interest in the Party. Apart from a small circle of relatives (now comprising of his grandchildren), close friends and former TANU members , nobody in the Party which he founded in 1954 seems to remember him. Abdulwahid has been completely forgotten. His name is hardly associated with the Party or with the political history of Tanzania. Yet this person was the main driving force in Tanganyikas independence movement.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
A team of party historians, commissioned by the Party-Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) to research and write an official history of TANU, did not even mention Abdulwahids name in the entire book.[1] The dominant school of thought in the book is the assertion that before the emergence of Julius Nyerere in April 1953, when he was elected TAA President, the African Association leadership did not articulate any concrete political thought. This premise has denied many patriots a place of honour in the political history of Tanzania and also eroded the status of the Association as a political movement. Local historians and post-independence party bureaucrats do not want to credit the African Association with a political identity. Kambona referred to the African Association as a debating society:
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
It is just a little over one year since the inception of the Tanganyika African National Union and during this period it has grown from strength to strength, sometimes in the teeth of great opposition. As you are well aware it superseded the former Tanganyika African Association which was little more than a debating society.[2]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Ulotu has referred to the organisation as a welfare association.[3] Others have referred to the Association as a social organisation: Nyerere (1966),[4] Japhet and Seaton (1966),[5] John Hatch (1976).[6] In other places it is referred to as a semi-protest movement: Kaniki (1974),[7] as a semi-political movement: Nyerere (1953).[8] Julius Nyerere appearing in an oral hearing at the Trusteeship Council at the United Nations, New York, on 7 th March, 1955, shifted his position and referred to the Association as a semi-political movement:
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
The Tanganyika African National Union is, in one sense, a new organisation, but in another it is an old organisation. It was taken over from what was formerly called the Tanganyika African Association, which was founded in 1929, largely as a social organisation. The Tanganyika African National Union, which took over from the African Association about ten months ago, is a new organisation in the sense that it is a political organisation, where as the former was semi-political.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Other scholars have reduced the association to the level of club: Mwenegoha(1976) writes: In 1954, after 25 years of inertia, Nyerere remodelled TAA from a social club into a formidable political organisation called the Tanganyika African National Union. [9]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Abdulwahid as one of the main actors in the modern history of political parties in colonial Tanganyika referred to the association as a political party (1951).[10] Among writers and scholars who have analysed the African Association, it is only Nyerere and Hatch who have shifted their positions.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Nyerere, writing to Edward Twining the Governor of Tanganyika on 10 th August, 1953, referred to TAA as a political party.[11] Nyerere has for a very long time maintained this view which has appeared in all his subsequent writings and speeches on the African Association.[12] But recently he qualified his earlier statements on the subject referring to the association as a political party without a political constitution. Hatch (1976) refers to the association in one place as a social organisation [13] and as a serious political party in another. [14]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
John Kabudi has referred to the Association as a private civil organisation of a nationalistic character.[15] It is worth noting that even the pioneers of the organisation are not referred to as politicians. Kaniki, for lack of an appropriate word with which to refer to the pioneers, gave them quotation marks:
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Nyerere, hitherto almost unknown to the majority of politicians in Tanganyika, was then schoolmaster at St. Francis Secondary School, Pugu, near Dar es Salaam, and he had been elected Territorial President the previous year. [16]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Iliffe (1968)[17] indicated that the written history of TANU was incomplete and went further in his analysis of the association perceiving its direction and membership as being political.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Kandoro and Japhet, [18] the two TANU founder members who came to prominence while Abdulwahid was TAA president in 1952 were the only pioneers who worked closely with him during the Meru Land Case. Kirilos visit to Dar es Salaam and the engagement of Seaton to represent Meru Citizens Union in the conflict was very much facilitated by the intervention of Abdulwahid and the TAA leadership. It was Abdulwahid who helped Kirilo obtain a passport in Dar es Salaam after he was denied one in Arusha. Kirilo and Seaton, as well as Kandoro, have written their colonial experience, but no where in the two works is Abdulwahid mentioned, even in passing. The two try to link the Meru Land Case with Nyerere although prior to 1954 Nyerere had not yet made any impact on the politics of Tanganyika. In fact when the Meru Land Case went before the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations in New York, Nyerere was at Edinburgh University in Scotland studying for a masters degree.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
An exception to this omission of Abdulwahid is Judith Listowel (1965)[19] who, although only in passing, mentioned Abdulwahid in her book as one of the leading TANU pioneers.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Of late there has been interest in Tanzanias political history and Abdulwahids name has been coming up every now and then in journals,[20] newspapers, [21] international magazines,[22] and books.[23] These publications vary in their perception of Abdulwahid. There are some which shed light on the centrality of Abdulwahid in the founding of the Party and in initiating Julius Nyerere into politics. In these publications Abdulwahid appears as a revolutionary. Tandon called Abdulwahid and other patriots like Chege Kibachia, Makhan Singh, Fred Kubai, James Kivu, I.K. Musazi, Erika Fiah and Gama Pinto as veteran leaders of the struggle of the peoples of East Africa... whom our recent historians have forgotten. [24] There are also those who have dismissed him as being petty bourgeois.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Professor Shivji has accused Abdulwahid of cooptation, classifying him as a petty bourgeois who did not belong to the working class. In his analysis of the relationship between Abdulwahid and the pre-independence dockworkers movement Shivji concluded that:
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
...the government intrigued to foist a petty-bourgeois leadership on the union. Around February 1948 Abdul Sykes, son of a well-known African businessman, was asked by the government to become secretary of the dockworkers union. Abdul Sykes did not come from among the dockers nor even from the working class. [25]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
This was in reference to his nomination in 1948 as the first ever General Secretary to lead a trade union in Tanganyika. Probably not knowing who Abdulwahid was and what he stood for throughout his life, or perhaps fired with Marxist zeal, Shivji has allowed himself to use wrong tools of analysis. Engels defines the term bourgeois to mean the class of modern capitalist, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour. [26] However, Sklar has observed that the bourgeois concept has undergone evolution thus transforming its original meaning:
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Recently, the term has been used by Marxists and others to identify dominant class in societies that maintain market economies and allow capitalist accumulation as a consequence of private property in the means of production. [27]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Had Shivji been exposed to Abdulwahids life history chances are that he would have used a different yardstick to gauge and judge him. But since a wrong premise was applied, a wrong conclusion was the result. No African enterprise under colonialism could qualify to be put under this category, let alone have the capability to employ wage-labour in the sense of labour-capital relationship as defined by classical or neo-Marxists. This is the kind of confusion surrounding the personality of Abdulwahid and indeed the whole history of nationalism.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Among the TANU founding members, it is only those from the headquarters who could give a correct account of the formation of the Party. These are: John Rupia, Dossa Aziz, Tewa Said Tewa, Julius Nyerere, Dome Budohi, Abdulwahid and Ally Sykes. The two Sykes brothers, Abdulwahid and Ally, have a family connection in the African Association, their father Kleist Sykes having been founder Secretary of the Association in 1929. The Sykes files make very interesting reading for any researcher in the political history of colonial Tanganyika. These records contain information on Nyereres early political career and it is surprising that when Party historians were researching, these records, which have so much information about Nyerere, and the party itself, were not consulted. No member of the family, including Ally and Abbas Sykes, the two surviving members of the three Sykes brothers, were interviewed.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
In the late 1960s, when John Iliffe from Cambridge University, then at the Department of History, University of Dar es Salaam, began his research on Tanzanias history he obtained a lot of information on the African Association from one of his students, Aisha Daisy Sykes, Abdulwahids daughter. Although Daisy informed Iliffe that it was her father who provided her with additional primary information articulated in her history seminar papers on Tanzania, it is very strange that Iliffe, interested as he was in the modern history of Tanzania, did not bother to meet Abdulwahid.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 752, bgcolor: transparent"]
Iliffe, however, realising the potential in the Sykes records encouraged Daisy to write a biography of her grandfather, Kleist Sykes[28] which she did. When Abdulwahid died in 1968, Daisy, encouraged by the success of her previous work, wanted to work on the biography of her late father. Daisy was fired by the passion to write after realising that history had been unfair to her father and it was time she put the record straight. Daisy had in her possession Abdulwahids files and diaries. Iliffe, for reasons probably unknown to Daisy at that time, discouraged her from writing on the grounds that the timing was inappropriate, and that the subject should be given time. There was no doubt in Iliffes mind that Abdulwahid was a reliable source of information on TANU and its history; and any work on his life history would have been a great contribution to the political history of Tanzania. Following Iliffes negative response Abdulwahids biography was never to be written by her daughter.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[1] Kivukoni IdeologicalCollege, Historia ya Chama Cha TANU 1954-1977,Dar es Salaam, 1981.
[2] Oscar Kambona to Baldwin Rogers, 18 th October, 1955 Party Archives, Fabian Colonial Bureau File No.202.
[3] Ulotu A. Ulotu, Historia ya TANU, (1971) p. 11.
[4] Julius Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, Dar es Salaam, 1966, p. 38.
[5] Kirilo Japhet and Earle Seaton, The Meru Land Case, Nairobi, 1966, p.16.
[6] John Hatch, Two African Statesmen, London 1976, p.17.
[7] M.H.Y. Kaniki, TANU, The Party of Independence and National Consolidation in G. Ruhumbika (ed) Towards Ujamaa, Twenty Years of
TANU Leadership,Nairobi, 1974, pp.1-2.
[8] Julius K. Nyerere, TanganyikaAfrican Association, to Governor Edward Twining, 10 th August, 1953. Sykes' Papers.
[9] H.A.K. Mwenegoha,Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Nairobi, 1976, p. 5.
[10] Secretary Tanganyika African Association to Chairman and members of the African Association 7 th January, 1951. Sykes' Papers.
[11] Julius K. Nyerere President Tanganyika African Association to Governor Edward Twining, 10 th August, 1953. Sykes' Papers.
[12] Nyerere, op. cit. p. 38.
[13] Hatch, op. cit. p.17.
[14] Ibid. p. 91
[15] John Kabudi, The Party System and Socialism in Tanzania(1986 Seminar Paper).
[16] Kaniki, op. cit. Also see Uamuzi wa Busara, Idara ya Habari ya Chama, p. 2.
[17] John Iliffe, The Role of the African Association in the Formation and Realization of Territorial Consciousness in Tanzania.Mimeo.
University of East Africa Social Sciences Conference, 1968, p. 24.
[18] S.A. Kandoro, Mwito wa Uhuru, Dar es Salaam, 1981.
[19] Judith Listowel, The Making of Tanganyika,London, 1965.
[20] Yash Tandon, In Defence of Democracy Inaugural Lecture Series No. 14, Dar es Salaam, 1979, pp. 47-48.
[21] Daily Nation, 16 th April, 1986.
[22] New African, London, June, 1985; Africa Events,London, March/April, 1988, September, 1988.
[23] John Cartwright, Political Leadership in Africa,New York, 1983, p. 164. Also I.G. Shivji, Law State and The Working Class in Tanzania,
London and Dar es Salaam, 1986, p.174.
[24] Yash Tandon, op. cit. pp. 47-48.
[25] I.G. Shivji, Law, State and the Working Class in Tanzania,London and Dar es Salaam1986, pp. 174.
[26] F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party,1848.
[27] Richard L. Sklar The Nature of Class Domination in Africa in JMAS Vol. 17 No.4, 1979, p. 544.
[28] Daisy Sykes Buruku, The Townsman: Kleist Sykes, in Iliffe (ed) Modern Tanzanians, Nairobi, 1973, pp. 95-114.