OBITUARIES

SYDNEY HERBERT CLAGUE-SMITH (87) died on November 20 last year. He was in Tanganyika from 1936 to 1962, first in teacher training at Usoke, Tabora Region and then at the Alliance Teacher Training Centre at Kinampanda, near Singida. He later became Education Secretary General for the non-Roman missions in Tanganyika stationed in Dar es Salaam. (Thank you Betty Wells for letting us have this information -Editor).

ARCHIE FORBES CBE (86) was the very dynamic Director of Agriculture and Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Natural Resources as Tanzania approached and achieved independence in the late fifties and early sixties. He first came to Tanganyika from Malawi in 1951 to deal with the problem at Nachingwea, where the groundnut scheme had just failed spectacularly. A large number of expatriates had to be sent home and it was necessary to develop a new system of agriculture. The main crop became soya beans rather than groundnuts; eventually it became a profitable crop. He later undertook a major reorganisation of agricultural research, dividing Tanganyika into four zones. He initiated several new programmes in fisheries, wildlife and agricultural education and extension. The massive agricultural training programme which he launched eventually had over 1,000 students studying outside the country. He raised, from the Rockefeller Foundation, the first $100,000 for the planning of a college in Morogoro which later became the Sokoine University. At the well attended memorial service in St Leonards Church, Bledington, Oxfordshire on February 27, his nephew Guy Francis described him thus: He was a workaholic, a perfectionist, a man of high principals, a visionary, courageous, stubborn, didn’t suffer fools gladly …. Some who worked with him considered him too dictatorial; others (including me -Editor) spent some of the most stimulating years of their lives serving under him. In his final years, though wracked with pain, he brought his energy to bear on the little village of Bledington. He became popularly known as its mayor!

DR. JENNIFER HIGHAM (62) who died of cancer on November 15 was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages at Dar es Salaam University from 1976 to 1974 and a VSO volunteer teacher at the Institute of Foreign Languages in Zanzibar from 1986 to 1990. After this she was a tutor on several education courses for teachers from Tanzania in Edinburgh. Donations in her memory may be sent to the Provincial Overseas Mission, Scottish Episcopal Church, 21 Grosvenor Crescent, Edinburgh EH12 5EE.

PROFESSOR HUBERT KAIRUKl (58) the Vice-Chancellor of the Mikocheni International University and formerly Consultant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Dar es Salaam died in February from liver cancer. Dr Kairuki was famed for the free services he provided for the poor, often performing operations all night long. One thousand people attended the funeral.

Father of the nation Mwalimu Nyerere’s physician, Prof. WILLIAM MAKENE (67) died while being treated in London on December 31. Parliamentary Speaker Pius Msekwa led a large contingent of government and opposition leaders at the funeral at Kinondoni, Dar es Salaam.

MURIEL PELHAM-JOHNSON, OBE (95) died on December 18. Latterly Assistant Director of Education (Women and Girls) ‘pr as she was commonly known, supervised the expansion of girl’s education in Tanganyika between 1939 and 1959. A formidable personality and an intrepid traveller she was a memorably outstanding figure in the pre­independence (Thank you Bill Dodd for this news -Editor)

SIR RICHARD TURNBULL GCMG
(89), Tanganyika’s last Governor died on December 21. In 1958 the British Colonial Office decided that Governor Sir Edward Twining’s confrontational style of government was out of touch with the mood of constitutional advance then under way and Sir Richard became governor. He stayed on as Governor General of the newly independent state from 1961 to 1962 when it became a republic. Soon after his arrival in Dar es Salaam, Sir Richard, who was possessed with boundless energy, was seen cycling round Dar es Salaam at sunrise which began to endear him to the city’s inhabitants. He received orders to accelerate the process of independence. He recognised the strength of the local nationalist movement TANU and soon developed a sound personal relationship with Julius Nyerere so that Tanganyika’s transition from colonial dependency to the status of an independent state was, according to the London Times, a model of peaceful and orderly change. It was described in the Daily Telegraph as ‘smooth, swift and successful’. At the end of his time in Tanganyika he was cheered by a great crowd as he stood in full feathered regalia on the quarter deck of a naval frigate sailing slowly out of Dar es Salaam harbour. At the Service of Thanksgiving at Minchinhampton, where Mr Simon Mlay represented the Tanzanian Government, the Revd. Canon Michael Irving said that when Sir Richard spoke first to the senior civil servants at Government House he told them that he had come to see off the colonial power. He had a gift of gaining confidence on all sides on any given issue, gaining respect and trust though not necessarily always agreeing with everyone. Julius Nyerere once said “My most serious complaint against the British was that they never locked me up. A reasonable governor is a sufficiently rare phenomenon to unsettle even the most orthodox of nationalists!” When Sir Richard left Tanganyika he wrote: ‘Colonialism is going in Tanganyika, not because it is discredited but because its mission is completed. Colonialism is out of fashion these days and it’s natural that it should be ….. but it has indeed a splendid job to its credit and we could no more have done without it in our earlier days than we could have dispensed with the homely disciplines of our youth’ . Some years later Mwalimu Nyerere invited Sir Richard and his wife to return for a fortnights holiday with him in the company of Archbishop Huddleston and they toured again the country they knew and loved so well.

Amongst former administrative officers in Tanganyika who have died recently are BRIAN WINSTANLEY (77) who was DC Tukuyu (Rungwe) and died on March 12 in Melbourne, Australia, P J (Sam) HUMPHRIES OBE, who was the DC in Korogwe and Iringa and who died in New Zealand and G T L (Jock) SCOTT MC who has been described as the ‘genial and idiosyncratic’ DC in Mafia, Mwanza and Songea and who was a witness at the trial of Mwalimu Nyerere. (Thank you Nigel Durdant-Hollamby and Bill Dodd for letting us have this information -Editor).

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