The very welcome appraisals of Julius Nyerere which appeared in the previous edition of “The Bulletin” have been matched by a special interview with the President, broadcast by Channel Four TV in which the interviewers were Tariq Ali and Darcus Howe.
It provided an altogether fascinating insight into the nature of both the politician and the man. It also gave him a chance to look back over his years in power, and to provide at least a few clues to the historians who will later be trying to assess the importance of Julius Nyerere, not only as President of his own country, but also as one of the principal architects of emergent Africa.
It was therefore a natural starting point to ask him first what he thought was the greatest achievement in Tanzania’s development during the last twenty years. Nyerere was absolutely clear in his reply. “The greatest achievement is that we are a united nation; a nation with a purpose.” He took his main illustration from the field of education, pointing out that when the British left there were only 300,000 children in primary education for four years. Today in Tanzania there are three and a half million children receiving primary education and each child is able to stay in school for seven years. Nyerere conceded that there were many things his Government had not been able to do, and many social advances were still to be made, but he obviously took enormous pride from the fact that between eighty five and ninety per cent of the people of Tanzania were now literate. “We have virtually wiped out illiteracy in our country”, he declared confidently, and there is little doubt that for him this single fact is more important than any other social development in the independent life of his nation.
The President was then asked to comment on part of the Arusha Declaration – that every government leader must be a peasant or a worker, and must in no way be associated with the practices of either capitalism or feudalism. He affirmed that despite all difficulties this had been achieved. The main problem, of course, had been to educate an entire nation to accept priorities quite different from those which many other newly independent countries had made. Normally the populace wanted quick wealth and a very rapid rise in the standard of living. It had been necessary in Tanzania to show that the proper development of the country could not be attained by the easy grabbing of riches and the smooth acceptance of easy capitalist criteria.
Throughout the whole interview Nyerere returned again and again to the terrible contrast between poverty and wealth which continually plague the world. He had obviously been very impressed by the huge response which many individuals in the Western world had made to the tragedy of the Ethiopian famine. And yet the governments of the Western world had on the whole failed to match this response. Instead their statesmen had tried to put the blame on their democratic systems, defending themselves by claiming that in a democracy ‘it is very difficult to transfer wealth from their systems to poorer nations.’ Here President Nyerere was at his most passionate and eloquent. “I accept that; I know that it is difficult. But why did those statesmen stop there? They are refusing to educate their own people. And yet those same people, as individuals, responded. It was the governments that failed.”
The President conceded, however, that African governments and statesmen were by no means free from blame. They should be truly responsible to their own people. “I don’t think we are educating our own people enough.” In countries where there were no political parties, and only armies held control, there were inevitably very big problems. “It is very difficult for armies to mobilize their people.” It was in the many comments of this sort, dotted about the interview, that Julius Nyerere showed quite plainly that little escapes him in African affairs, and the behaviour of certain countries make him unhappy.
In the last two minutes of the interview after lengthy discussion on relations with the IMF and South Africa, Julius Nyerere talked whimsically about his own future. Yes – he would stay on for a further two years as Chairman of his Party, but then he would leave public life. With a broad smile on his face he denied that it was a unique event. “It is not unique. Leopold Senghor did it before me. I am doing it because it is time to do it. My country has allowed me to lead it for thirty years. If you gave me another thirty I could not do more.”
And so the man who more than any other statesman has become the image of Tanzania for the world outside will, when his two years as Chairman have come to an end, “retire to my village, to keep my six cows, and help with the village farm”. And at the very end of the interview, having reviewed the problems of his own country and of the world, and nailed once more his colours uncompromisingly to the mast, he was still smiling.
Noel Kennedy Thomas