Dar es Salaam. As Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya marched toward independence in the early 1960s, the moment was widely celebrated as the pinnacle of African nationalism. Flags were raised, anthems sung, and new governments installed.
But for Tanzania’s founding president, Julius Nyerere, the celebrations carried a shadow of regret — the region had missed its best chance to become a united East African state before the seal of sovereignty set in.
For decades, Nyerere argued that the decision to prioritise individual independence over political federation was a historic miscalculation.
In his speeches at Makerere in 1960, Arusha in 1963, and multiple OAU meetings echoed the same message: East Africa had a fleeting window of extraordinary political openness in which a union could have emerged naturally from existing realities.
Once independence was achieved separately, that window snapped shut.
Today, as the East African Community (EAC) once again speaks of political federation, Nyerere’s warnings feel prescient.
A region separated before it could unite
In the late colonial period, discussions about East Africa’s future often placed federation before independence.
Leaders envisioned a sovereign East African state that would take its place in the world as a single entity. But when independence became imminent, the political incentives shifted dramatically-and as many have remarked, selfishly so.
Nyerere argued that once leaders assumed control of their own governments, constitutions, armies, and borders, they became “prisoners of their own authority.”
The power, symbolic value, and autonomy of nationhood became too valuable to trade for a higher regional ideal.
Sovereignty, in effect, overshadowed solidarity.
Nationalist parties had built political machinery that thrived on domestic identity. Cabinet appointments, military command, and new bureaucracies created elites who now had something to lose.
The personal and institutional sacrifices required to dissolve these national structures into a federation were too great for many leaders to accept.
Public desire for unity — ignored
Contrary to today’s assumption that federation lacked popular support, evidence suggests the opposite.
Throughout the 1950s, newspapers articles, trade unions, labour movements, and student groups in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika championed the idea of a united East Africa. Political rallies often featured calls for federation. Nyerere insisted repeatedly that “the peoples of East Africa wanted unity, but their leaders failed to deliver it.”
Independence enthusiasm simply drowned out the regional impulse. Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting Nyerere’s lament lies in the colonial-era systems that once made East Africa the most integrated region on the continent. Historians have described British-controlled East Africa as having the “administrative architecture of a ready-made federation.” The key institutions included:
The East African High Commission (EAHC)
From 1948 to 1961, the EAHC oversaw customs, railways, harbours, taxation, postal services, telecommunications, and even regional education policy. It had its own civil service, its own budget and a legal mandate binding all three territories. In practice, it functioned like a regional cabinet.
A post-independence federation could have simply replaced the EAHC with an elected authority and retained the institutional machinery intact.
Instead, each country absorbed or replaced the shared organs.
The shilling
The East African shilling, issued by the East African Currency Board, created monetary cohesion, harmonised financial policies, and smoothed cross-border trade.
This could have been the natural foundation of a federal central bank.
But by 1966, each state had launched a national currency, accelerating economic divergence.
Railways and harbours
The East African Railways and Harbours Corporation managed, the Mombasa–Nairobi–Kampala railway, Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika shipping routes and port operations at Mombasa
This single transport network gave East Africa a shared logistical backbone.
Nationalisation after independence fragmented the system into three competing entities, weakening regional trade and long-term infrastructure coherence.
Postal and telecommunications system
Through the East African Posts and Telecommunications Corporation, the region shared one postal service, one telephone system, and centralised communications management.
Breakup of the EAPTC created divergent technological pathways and eroded decades of harmonisation.
Shared education and legal systems
The University of East Africa — through Makerere, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam — produced a generation of leaders trained under the same curriculum. Legal codes, civil service practices, and professional standards were closely aligned.
After independence, each state redesigned its own systems, slowly diluting intellectual and administrative unity.
The East African Customs Union created the common external tariffs, free movement of goods and coordinated tax collection. It was a fully functional common market long before similar blocs formed elsewhere.
Tariff reintroductions after independence contributed to economic tensions and later to the collapse of the first East African Community in 1977.
Easier before independence
Federation requires harmonised laws, trust, interconnected infrastructure, and shared identity. All these conditions already existed before independence. What independence did was reverse them by creating national entities in the process the integrated colonial architecture was dissolved. Recreating similar structures would require political will, money, and trust that became harder to muster with each passing year. Nyerere often remarked that “a federation is easiest before nations grow apart, not after.”
What East Africa lost
Nyerere believed a united East Africa would have offered a stronger global bargaining position, a larger internal market for industrialization, greater stability than small, fragile states and a shared identity to reduce ethnic tension
He called the failure to federate “a step backward” and “the tragedy of lost courage.”
And just like Mwalimu Julius Nyerere many analysts believe independence fractured what colonial administration had inadvertently unified.
As the EAC once again revives a political federation agenda, the region faces a harder road — one requiring deep negotiations, financial commitment, and political boldness.
Nyerere’s message still resonates: East Africa once had unity by default. To reclaim it, leaders must now build — deliberately and purposefully — what was once already in place.
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