UNION AT 50: 50 years of Tanganyika, Z’bar philosophy

Dar es Salaam. On April 22, 1964, the  presidents of   the  then  Republic of Tanganyika and the  then People’s Republic of Zanzibar  are  said to have signed  Articles of Union declaring that  the  two sovereign republics were  to unite and form  one united sovereign republic that was initially  called the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar. 

Four days later, on April 26, 1964, the peoples of these two republics were publicly informed that a Union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar had been formed and that the Articles of Union had been ratified by, at least the Parliament of the Republic of Tanganyika.  April 26 has since been marked as the Union Day.

The philosophy of the Union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar would seem to be symbolised by a very important ritual associated with a celebration of this Union.  This ritual is none other than the picture of the then President of the newly inaugurated United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, witnessed by his two vice presidents, Sheikh Abeid Amani Karume, who was also the President of Zanzibar, and Mzee Rashidi Mfaume Kawawa, who had previously been the Prime Minister of Tanganyika, take two sets of soil, and pouring the soil in the two calabashes into a third empty container.

“The ideology of Pan African nationalism further asserted that if all peoples of African descent, past and present, united, decolonised the continent, and then proceeded to unify the continent into a United States of Africa, they could become great again.”Dr Azaveli Lwaitama

The two sets of soil,  one  scooped and put in a calabash in Zanzibar and the other put in a calabash in Tanganyika,  were poured into a container that was  jointly held  up together by a man and woman hailing from both Tanganyika and Zanzibar.  This was meant to symbolise the mixing of the soils of these two up to then sovereign states into one set of soil, implying that Tanganyika and Zanzibar were from then on one soil, thus, perhaps, one country (‘nchi’ in Kiswahili), one nation (‘taifa’ in Kiswahili), and, in international legal terms, one united sovereign state (‘dola yenye mamlaka kamili’ in Kiswahili).

This philosophy of the Union is reflected in the ideological leanings of the two leaders, Julius Nyerere and Abeid Karume, who signed the Articles of Union, supposedly on behalf of the peoples they both happened to lead.

Both leaders subscribed to and were firm and uncompromising believers in the ideology of Pan African nationalism. Pan African nationalist ideology was a philosophical world view that asserted that in world history being African had emerged as a political identity assumed by people whose ancestry was the African continent.

Most of these were of the so-called of Negro or Black  racial extraction, with kinky hair and dark skin, and had been condemned  as sub-human by pseudo-scientific anthropological  scholarship inspired and  funded for material gains derived and engaging in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade as well as the colonisation of the continent by  19th and 20th century European imperialist powers.

White supremacist pseudo-scientific rationalisations  for the trading  of  Africans like cattle  during the slave trade era  and  the colonial occupation of  Africa  was meant to influence  the peoples of African ancestry  to believe  that they were sub-human  and that  their  sole  calling in life was to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.

In contrast,  the  Pan African nationalist ideology,  first articulated by descendants of  peoples indigenous to the African continent who found themselves ( as slaves, workers, students) in the Americas, the Caribbean Islands off the Americas and in Europe and those made aware  of  the traumatic  experiences  in  the diaspora of peoples of African ancestry,  asserted that peoples indigenous to the African continent were once a great people  who had contributed immensely to human civilisation .

The ideology of Pan African nationalism further asserted that if all peoples of African descent, past and present, united, decolonised the continent, and then proceeded to unify the continent into a United States of Africa, they could become great again.

In a speech delivered  by Mwalimu  Julius Nyerere at Wellesley College, in  the UK,  in 1960, he summarised the  Pan  African  national  utopia sketched out on the basis of  the belief in  Pan African nationalist ideology  by asserting that:  “The Africa that we must create must be an Africa, which the outside world will look at and say: If you really want to see free people who live up to their ideals of human society, go to Africa. That is the continent of hope for the human race.”

The then presidents of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, sharing this philosophical ideological leaning of Pan Africanism, to the advantage of the geopolitical and strategic situation  that prevailed in their two countries  to translate age-old trade and social interactions between the peoples of these two countries into a political Union that has now lasted 50 years.  Sheikh Abeid Karume and Mwalimu Julius Nyerere were two among the very few post-colonial African leaders of their generation who did not suffer from the political malaise that,  Mwalimu Nyerere alluded to in his now famous speech in Accra, Ghana, on March 6, 1997: “the glorification of the nation states (that) we inherited from colonialism, and the artificial nations we (have been) trying to forge from that inheritance.”

Pan African ‘national unity’  prompted one to seize every opportunity that presented  itself  to  construct ‘united  nation- states’ across  the artificial territorial state borders that  the post-colonial African leaders had inherited at independence from colonial rule such as Tanganyika , or  those inherited from post- popular insurrectionary  states such as post-Revolution  Zanzibar. 

Believers in Pan Africanism like Julius Nyerere and Abeid Karume take the view that the boundaries   of often geographically and ethnically senseless territorial states that were inherited at independence had no future in a globalised world.

To post-colonial African leaders who subscribed to the Pan African nationalist ideology, to paraphrase the late Mwalimu Nyerere in his 1997 Accra, Ghana, speech referred to earlier: “African nationalism outside Pan Africanism is tribalism on an international scale.”  No wonder, Julius Nyerere and Abeid Karume, in April 1964, may as well have been thinking of uniting Tanganyika and Zanzibar into one unitary sovereign state that later was called Tanzania and whose single state political parties, one for Zanzibar, the Afro-Shirazi Party, and the other for mainland Tanzania, Tanganyika African National Union (Tanu), they also merged into one single political state party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) in February 1977!

Fifty years, the Union that aforementioned great Pan African leaders, Julius Nyerere and Abeid Karume formed, is facing some serious challenges. Sheikh Karume is more than 40 years long dead and it is about 15 years since Mwalimu Julius Nyerere passed on.

The Pan African nationalist integration ethos fostered in Tanzania during the Karume and Nyerere era have gradually waned.  Neo-liberal economic structural adjustment programmes have been embraced with gusto and these have intensified the integration of the Tanzania economy, on the Tanzania Mainland and in Zanzibar, into the globalised world.

Globalisation, which is the most advanced form of capitalist imperialism characterized financialisation,  and militarisation, has  worsened the  pauperisations of masses of middle class people, and  with accentuated  de-industrialisation  and together  with  the  denudation of basic social services provision, ethnic economic imbalances have increased.

The emerging  equity challenges,  coupled with the intensification of  the competition for natural resources by the advanced and newly advanced capitalist powers, Unions  such as the Tanzanian one  scripted in period  immediately after in independence  in 1960s,  characterized,  as it was  by  raw Pan African  nationalist euphoria, have begun to find themselves under a lot of political strain. 

All the efforts spent, in the last 50 years, on what Mwalimu Nyerere characterized as,  “Africans trying very hard to be Ghanaians and Tanzanians,” seem to have gone to waste.  This is partly because, to paraphrase Mwalimu Nyerere again: “Fortunately,  for Africa, we (the first generation of African political elite) have not been completely successful. The outside world hardly recognizes our Ghanaian-ness or Tanzanian-ness. What the outside world recognizes about us is our African-ness.”

Fifty years on, the philosophy behind the Union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar on April 26,1964, still seems  to be  Pan African nationalistic but  of a more democratic  and transparent kind.  The current constitutional wrangling seems to demand that the philosophy of Pan African nationalism needs to be reviewed and re-interpreted in the context of twenty-first century globalisation. Perhaps, in the twenty-first century, it is time Pan African nationalism raised its spectrum and embraced a more federalist but wider scope of the boundaries of Pan African nation building.

Perhaps it is time to think more in terms of unifying peoples in the wider Eastern and Central African region in federalist fashion, instead of thinking in terms unifying merely two states like Tanganyika and Zanzibar, whose diversity management configuration may be complicated by viewing the two territories in terms of one being large while the other small in geographical and population terms.

This complication may be eased by having many members seeking to work together in a federal state structures with several being large and several being small! The philosophy seems still to be the right one, Pan Africanist nationalism,  but perhaps the scale and scope of integration  needs to be widened but in a more democratic and consensus-building manner ! Perhaps it is time Tanganyikan and  Zanzibari  Pan African nationalist decided to abandon  trying to build “Tanzania-ness” as a Pan African nationalist  end in itself  and instead sought to transfer their Pan African nationalist passions to the building a people-centred democratic  East African Federation! Only time will tell!

Dr Lwaitama is a lecturer at Josiah Kibira University College of Tumaini University Makumira in Bukoba, Tanzania, East Africa Email: [email protected]