Conclusion

Summary

By the mid-1970s, much of the wind had gone out of the sails of Tanzania’s socialist project. Economic crisis, political authoritarianism, and the collapse of the Portuguese empire meant that Dar es Salaam ceased to be a major centre of anticolonial revolution in Africa. This concluding chapter briefly traces this demise and then sets out the book’s major findings and their implications. It finishes with a short reflection on the legacy of Dar es Salaam’s revolutionary past for Tanzania today.

Willy Gamba did not appreciate being awoken by a ringing telephone at five o’clock in the morning. Especially not on a Sunday. Especially not after returning home from a night out in Dar es Salaam just a few hours earlier.

But when Gamba lifted the receiver, his ears pricked up. On the other end of the line was his boss, the head of Tanzanian intelligence. Gamba was told to report to the office immediately. Leaving the clutches of his latest girlfriend, Gamba left his Upanga apartment and headed for the intelligence headquarters. Driving through the city’s deserted streets, Gamba noticed that he was being followed. When Gamba arrived, he found his boss shaken. There had been an armed break-in at a liberation movement office on Nkrumah Street: a guard was dead; more seriously, secret papers outlining the guerrillas’ plans had been stolen. The intruders had reportedly escaped to Kenya, where they aimed to sell the documents to Portuguese agents. Tasked with saving the African revolution and granted a license to kill, Gamba jetted off for Nairobi in hot pursuit.¹

Willy Gamba belonged to the same Dar es Salaam as Julius Nyerere and Eduardo Mondlane, as A. M. Babu and Frene Ginwala, and all the other characters who have populated the pages of this book. The only difference was that Willy Gamba did not actually exist. He was the fictional star of Elvis Musiba’s series of spy thrillers – in this instance, Kufa na Kupona (‘Life and Death’). Yet the urban landscape painted by Musiba would have been instantly recognisable to his readers: spies, guerrillas, secret papers, rumour, and the risks shouldered by Tanzania in supporting the liberation of southern Africa. The conspiratorial tropes of the Cold War and anticolonial struggle suffused not just the reality, but also the fiction of Dar es Salaam – though, as this book has shown, the two were often difficult to separate.²

However, just as Musiba’s novel hit the bookstalls of Dar es Salaam in 1974, the world was changing, and fast. The spark was a military coup in Lisbon. In April, a group of Portuguese officers overthrew the creaking Estado Novo. Among the new regime’s priorities was to negotiate an exit from Portugal’s expensive and unpopular colonial wars in Africa. The following year, Angola and Mozambique became independent. With the collapse of the Portuguese Empire, the frontiers of liberation in Africa shifted further south. Lusaka and Luanda replaced Dar es Salaam as staging-posts for the struggle against the surviving white minority governments in Rhodesia and South Africa. Although Tanzania continued to host the OAU Liberation Committee until the end of apartheid, Dar es Salaam’s moment in the global spotlight came to an end.

Over the course of the 1970s, the Cold War paranoias of foreign powers in Tanzania also faded away. As other postcolonial states succumbed to cycles of military coups, Tanzania appeared a model of sturdiness in Africa. This image of political calm, as well as ujamaa’s grassroots-focused development schemes, encouraged donors to swing behind Tanzanian socialism. In 1973, the World Bank praised Nyerere’s government for being ‘seriously committed to development in a climate of political and social stability’.³ Britain and the United States came to regard Nyerere as a known quantity: a reliable if stubborn negotiating partner on the endgames in southern Africa. After the end of the war in Vietnam, the United States experienced an upturn in its relations with Tanzania. China’s retreat from the Third World in the mid-1970s eased not only Western fears, but also those of Moscow. While the Soviet Union’s approach to Africa became increasingly interventionist, it concentrated on supporting the Marxist regimes in Angola and Ethiopia. Nonetheless, its relationship with Tanzania also improved: when the TPDF entered Uganda in 1979, it did so with Soviet arms.

This local détente in Dar es Salaam was encouraged by Tanzania’s foreign policy. After the ‘crises’ of 1964–65, Nyerere sought not only to diversify Tanzania’s sources of aid, but also to disconnect political disputes from economic agreements. Take the example of the ‘German Cold War’: irritated by the GDR and recognising the potential of West German aid, Nyerere looked to rebuild Tanzania’s donor relationship with Bonn, despite the latter’s ties with Lisbon and Pretoria. Conscious of the negative implications in some quarters of Tanzania’s close relationship with Beijing, Nyerere continually emphasised his non-aligned credentials. Although cognisant of the domestic propaganda value to be reaped from attacking superpower imperialism abroad, he refrained from allowing issues like Vietnam or Czechoslovakia from affecting his own diplomatic endeavours. Members of government recognised that unbridled polemic risked undermining the credibility of Tanzania’s international stance, deterring potential aid partners, and placing members of a cosmopolitan elite in awkward situations with aggrieved diplomats.

This approach worked. By the mid-1970s, Western reporters travelling to Dar es Salaam no longer reported the same nightmarish image of communist encroachment that had prevailed a decade earlier. ‘Chinese “influence”, never strong, is if anything on the wane in Tanzania’, reflected Africa Confidential in 1973.⁴ In the same year, browsing the notorious, Chinese-owned Tanganyika Bookshop, the South African writer Nadine Gordimer noted that there was ‘only the voice of the muezzin of the street to disturb the solitary peace in which I contemplated the mounds of the Little Red Book curling at the edges’. Elsewhere, she reported, it was Nyerere and Nkrumah that filled bookshelves, rather than Lenin, Marx, or Mao.⁵ Western diplomats came to accept that Tanzania was not about to become a Chinese client state or a bastion for communism in Eastern Africa. They were joined by their Indian colleagues, who observed that ‘relations with China are no longer quite as euphoric as they appear on the surface’, citing tensions over the implementation of the railway loan arrangements.⁶

Over time, Nyerere’s experience of Cold War politics and Tanzania’s development struggle led him to recognise the limits of political self-determination and to view non-alignment in primarily economic terms. Nyerere realised that genuine uhuru was impossible without economic ‘self-reliance’, as the Arusha lexicon put it. ‘The real and urgent threat to the independence of almost all the non-aligned states thus comes not from the military but from the economic power of the big states’, Nyerere told a non-aligned meeting in Dar es Salaam in 1970. ‘It is poverty which constitutes our greatest danger, and to a greater or lesser extent we are all poor.’⁷ He recognised that Tanzania’s project of national self-reliance was swimming against the powerful currents of the global economy, dominated by capital from the North. In the 1970s Nyerere was therefore at the forefront of calls for a ‘New International Economic Order’, which sought to redress the needs of the developing world by restructuring global trade relations.⁸

Tanzania’s internationalism, based on the ideas of non-alignment and Third World solidarity, helped it to diversify its aid arrangements over the course of the 1970s. Ujamaa was an attractive development agenda for European social democratic countries, as the example of Brandt’s West Germany demonstrated in Chapter 3. Scandinavian states became major aid partners. The poorer states of the Third World had less to offer in terms of material aid, but emerging economies still represented new outlets for Tanzanian trade, as well as technical cooperation. An agreement between the National Development Corporation, Tanzania’s largest parastatal, and its Indian counterpart noted that the former sought to ‘learn from the experience of other developing countries which have faced problems to those facing Tanzania’.⁹ Similarly, an NDC delegation travelling to Pakistan presented itself as a ‘younger brother’ asking for assistance from its ‘elder brother’.¹⁰ Tanzania cultivated stronger trade connections with the Third World, extending the idea of self-reliance beyond its own borders. ‘This kind of reorientation of trade is an advantage to the Third World as a whole as well as to ourselves, for it makes the poor countries less dependent on the rich states’, stated Nyerere.¹¹ These relationships all helped to disentangle Tanzania from the Cold War imbroglios which had characterised the early years of independence.

But just as the Third World rallied to the cause of the New International Economic Order and built ‘South-South’ relationships, the global economic climate took a turn for the worse. Alongside the Portuguese revolution, the other seismic shock from abroad that hit Tanzania in 1974 was the impact of oil price increases introduced by the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. The cost of petrol in Tanzania soared and there were widespread shortages of goods, aggravated by drought. The oil crisis exposed the fragile state of the Tanzanian economy, particularly the unwieldy parastatals which had mushroomed after the Arusha Declaration. The villagisation policy, which was enforced sometimes violently from 1973 onwards, proved an economic disaster. The government struggled through on a drip of foreign aid. However, the donors’ embrace of the socialist project cooled as the situation deteriorated and Nyerere resisted pressure for economic reform. ‘Dar es Salaam stood rooted in a morality that warmed many a revolutionary heart’, a Nigerian journalist reflected, ‘but broke the hearts of international bankers’.¹²

This collapse was not simply the result of misguided policy or the harsh realities of the global economic order – though these were certainly key factors. It was exacerbated by political choices. First, during the period after the Arusha Declaration and especially after Mwongozo, Tanzanian socialism became more and more dogmatic in conceptualisation and authoritarian in implementation. The development agenda was increasingly put in the hands of party mobilisation. Once the regime began the coercive resettlement of the rural population, TANU found itself at war with the same peasantry which it idealised as the inspiration behind its socialist project. The doctrine of party supremacy replaced the dynamic debates about development of the pre-Arusha years with an unbending loyalty towards Nyerere and ujamaa. As Issa Shivji reflected during the democratisation debates that accompanied the end of the Cold War, the idea of ‘national unity’ was ‘an ideological euphemism for imposed unanimity’. TANU and its successor, CCM, had ‘managed successfully to suppress any organised expression of diversity and differences’.¹³

Second, Nyerere’s decision not to recognise the regime of Idi Amin culminated in a fatal blow to the Tanzanian economy. In 1971, Nyerere broke with his well-established policy of accepting military usurpers, even as he lamented the rash of coups. By offering shelter and support for Milton Obote, Nyerere initiated a feud with Amin that rumbled on throughout the 1970s. On a regional level, these tensions fuelled an expensive arms race. Nyerere’s refusal to compromise with Amin hastened the demise of the EAC, which collapsed in 1977. When a Ugandan barracks mutiny in the following year spilt over into a haphazard invasion of northwest Tanzania, Nyerere took the opportunity to unleash a counteroffensive. This drove Amin into exile in April 1979. However, Tanzania enjoyed only a pyrrhic victory, as the crippling financial cost of the war further depleted its scarce foreign exchange reserves.¹⁴ After resisting the structural adjustment reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for so long, Nyerere finally acknowledged there was no alternative. Rather than swallow the bitter pill himself, he stepped aside as president in 1985. The socialist dream was over.

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The demise of ujamaa socialism sketched out here is very much a state-centred narrative. However, as this book has shown, the politics of the ujamaa era cannot be fully appreciated when confined to the framework of the Tanzanian nation-state. Equally, histories of Tanzanian foreign relations or liberation movements like FRELIMO overlap not just with one another, but innumerable other transnational, international, global, and local dynamics, which converged and collided in Dar es Salaam. ‘The problem with historical events which are inextricably interwoven is that, the better to understand their constituent elements, we have to pull them apart’, remarked Tony Judt. ‘But in order to see the story in its plenitude, you have to interweave those elements back together. … Separatism falsifies one party of the story; its absence has a comparably distorting impact on something else.’¹⁵ Although this book has merely dipped its toes into the many historical currents which winded through Dar es Salaam in the time of ujamaa, by analysing them through the lens of the city, it has sought to offer a partial answer to Judt’s dilemma.

Dar es Salaam’s emergence as an epicentre of Cold War politics and revolutionary anticolonial struggle was the consequence of the provocative foreign policy of Nyerere’s government. Tanzania’s support for African liberation led to exiled movements setting up offices in the city. This attracted the interest of the Cold War powers, who turned the city into a propaganda and intelligence-gathering battleground. Nyerere signalled the depth of Tanzania’s commitment to African liberation by snapping its relations with Britain in the aftermath of Rhodesia’s UDI. At the same time, the government confronted local and regional upheavals. The mutiny of January 1964 laid bare the fragility of the postcolonial state and informed subsequent responses to domestic dissent. The Zanzibar Revolution simultaneously propelled East Africa into global headlines and brought the Cold War uncomfortably close to Nyerere’s doorstep. His response – the act of union – was a qualified success. However, it also saddled the mainland government with the troublesome Karume regime.

At the heart of Dar es Salaam’s revolutionary networks were the liberation movement leaders, who operated in the city’s diplomatic margins but were central to its political life. Disaggregating a movement like FRELIMO and locating its politics in cosmopolitan Dar es Salaam renders visible all sorts of intersecting divisions and alliances. In the years preceding Mondlane’s assassination in 1969, FRELIMO fractured along multiple fault lines: ideology, ethnicity, race, class, personality. A study of the city’s numerous other movements would have exposed similar dynamics. Rival liberation movements – and rivals within liberation movements – jostled for support from the Cold War powers, as well as the Tanzanian government and the OAU Liberation Committee. They exploited the city’s international media networks to spread their messages of resistance. But Dar es Salaam also provided cover for agents of white minority rule to disrupt anticolonial solidarities. Once the experience of the guerrilla leaders is viewed through the perspective of exile in the Tanzanian capital, the usual nationalist narratives appear particularly misleading.

The presence of the liberation movements brought the Cold War powers running to Dar es Salaam. By the mid-1960s, the city was a focal point of diplomatic activity in Africa south of the Sahara. Among the Cold War subplots which played out in the Tanzanian capital was the bitter, shadowy rivalry between the two German states. By shifting between the perspective of presidential diplomacy and everyday iterations of this rivalry in Dar es Salaam’s political life, we see how propaganda wars and interference in local affairs played an important role in shaping the perceptions and responses of state actors. Ideological positions – non-alignment, Ostpolitik, and competing concepts of socialism – informed these relationships. The global politics of Willy Brandt’s turn away from Cold War confrontation to a constructive position, which blended détente in Europe with a more sensitive commitment to Third World development, improved the Federal Republic’s relations with Tanzania. To further the ujamaa project, Nyerere responded positively to these endeavours, even as West Germany retained dubious arrangements with Tanzania’s white-minority enemies. Meanwhile, the GDR’s support for Africa’s liberation movements was not enough to dispel Nyerere’s belief in its fundamental illegitimacy. This was aggravated by the GDR’s track record of clumsy, ideologically misinformed interventions in Tanzanian politics. Hence Tanzania, with the liberation of Africa as the cornerstone of its foreign policy, refused to recognise a state which supported this goal. The Cold War in Africa was rife with such contradictions.

Seen from a Tanzanian perspective, the Cold War looked very different altogether to the zero-sum game of East-West politics. Relationships with the superpowers and their allies came with significant baggage, whether in the forms of strings attached to material aid or smears from rival powers that Tanzania was too close to a particular state. From the vantage point of the Third World, the Cold War order appeared to many observers as the wolf of imperialism dressed in the sheepskins of modernisation. Tanzanian commentators and politicians tended to interpret global affairs not through East-West dichotomies, but via a Manichean scheme that pitted the forces of imperialism against those of Third World anticolonialism. This increasingly mapped onto an alternative hemispheric geography of ‘North’ and ‘South’. Tanzanian politics defied simplistic interpretations that classified ideological positions along a Cold War left-to-right spectrum. The dynamics of the Cold War were certainly a significant influence on post-independence developments in Dar es Salaam. But they cannot – and did not – make an effective guide for understanding them.

The Arusha Declaration was among the Third World’s most powerful ripostes to the Cold War order. Ujamaa socialism was an original and innovative attempt to pursue a non-aligned path to development. In contrast to studies that analyse the Arusha Declaration through a narrow Tanzanian framework, this book has set its genealogy and aftermath in a transnational and international context. Like TANU’s Mwongozo of 1971, the Arusha Declaration was a response to not just domestic socio-economic strife, but also the fate of progressive independent governments elsewhere in Africa. The downfall of Lumumba in Congo and Nkrumah in Ghana demonstrated the vulnerability of postcolonial elites to local opponents who claimed support from powerful interests outside of the continent. The presence of the liberation movements in Dar es Salaam enhanced the Nyerere government’s sense of insecurity, especially after the failed Portuguese attack on Guinea in 1970. Tanzania’s socialist revolution was a political and economic rejoinder to these mounting pressures from outside the country, as well as internal state-building challenges. At the same time, more economically minded members of the Tanzanian government argued that the country could not simply isolate itself from the global economy to pursue ‘development from within’. They also recognised that Tanzania paradoxically still required foreign aid to attain its goal of ‘self-reliance’.

The book has argued that a fresh analysis of Tanzanian politics in the time of ujamaa requires us to look beyond the figure of Julius Nyerere. This political scene was marked by ideological diversity. For all that, Nyerere still retains a prominent, even central place in this history of revolutionary state-making. How can he not? It remains difficult not to write about Nyerere ‘saying this’ or ‘doing that’. This becomes particularly clear in the field of formal foreign policy, where Nyerere maintained a strong hand until his departure from power. He was happy to use the ideological proclivities and international connections of his government ministers – A. M. Babu with China, Stephen Mhando with the Eastern Bloc, Paul Bomani with the West, Amir Jamal with just about anyone – but that did not translate into their influence over the direction of Tanzania’s foreign policy. Nyerere’s subordinates claimed that they needed little guidance. Ibrahim Kaduma, who became foreign minister in 1975, recalled that Nyerere rarely provided instructions on policy, since the principles were so well established that even a student could have represented Tanzania at the OAU.¹⁶ To a large extent, this was true. The cardinal principles of anticolonial liberation, non-alignment, and pan-Africanism were made clear from an early stage, even if their application changed in subtle fashion over time. However, non-alignment in particular was a slippery concept involving many moving parts and therefore tricky balancing acts, which were often upset by more junior ministers, party spokespersons, and journalists.

In other spheres of government, Nyerere’s authority requires greater qualification. Liberation movement leaders, operating in the grey areas of informal diplomacy and entangled in local power struggles, continually resisted control from above. More generally, Nyerere’s concept of ujamaa may have provided the underlying ethos of Tanzanian politics, but its actual elaboration as policy was the product of conflict and concession. Twice, through the Arusha Declaration and Mwongozo, Nyerere compromised with an increasingly assertive radical wing of TANU to take steps against which he had previously advised. On both occasions, Nyerere eschewed the advice of more cautious government ministers. On both occasions, this brought about splits in the elite, which Nyerere redressed through a mixture of political guile, like ministerial reshuffles, and the use of repressive tools, like preventive detention or party expulsions. The minimisation of political space which these processes involved closed off avenues for fresh ideas to revive the flagging ujamaa project.

The problems of snuffing out dissent were most acute in Dar es Salaam, where a kaleidoscopic mixture of local and foreign actors came together. This gave rise to concerns at the potentially destabilising entanglements of discontented Tanzanian elites, Cold War diplomats, guerrilla leaders, and a host of other intermediaries who joined together the city’s internationalised political networks. As the mutiny of 1964 made clear, if a strike at the state was to occur, it would come in the capital. Bar gossip and anonymous flyers unsettled a party-state bent on setting the terms of political discourse. In an era where externally-backed coups and conspiracies seemed ubiquitous, this public sphere assumed a subversive character – the hallmark of the ‘Cold War city’, or, as Nyerere had it, ‘Rumourville’. In this light, Nyerere’s announcement in 1972 that the capital would be moved to Dodoma, a dusty provincial town, was unsurprising. This was a pragmatic decision, which resituated the seat of power in the centre of the country in order to be more accessible for all Tanzanians. It was a cultural intervention, too, since it sought to replace a cosmopolitan capital associated with a history of foreign domination with an authentically ‘African’ city. Yet it was also consistent with Nyerere’s anxieties about external subversion in Dar es Salaam.¹⁷

This ‘inward turn’ was exemplified by the politics of the press in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. From the perspective of the party-state, the media was a significant element in its socialist state-building project. It was an international space, in which radical TANU ideologues and expatriate journalists engaged with the global issues of the day. However, the press was also beset with tensions. The Standard was unable to shake off its colonial associations, especially given the pressure for the Africanisation and nationalisation of foreign-staffed and foreign-owned assets. Amid a debate about what the ‘freedom of the press’ might actually mean in the Third World, the government took control of the Standard. The new expatriate editorial team reflected Tanzania’s commitment to Third World liberation, but also exposed the limits to it. Frene Ginwala’s Standard could reconcile its revolutionary politics with neither the foreign policy priorities of an embattled Tanzanian state nor the task of full Africanisation. The idea of ‘developmental journalism’, which informed the government’s approach to the press in the 1970s, typified the tensions in the Third World project, in which an anti-imperialist ethos went hand in hand with an insular politics founded on the nation-state.

Tanzania was not alone in taking this inward turn. Other Third World states exhibited similar tendencies. Based on his study of Algeria, Jeffrey Byrne argues that, faced with external and internal threats to their sovereignty, Africa’s postcolonial elites chose to calcify national borders and abandon much of the radical Third Worldism and pan-Africanism of earlier anticolonial struggles.¹⁸ Tanzania fits into this mould. Even as Nyerere began to question the OAU’s commitment to inherited colonial borders and national sovereignty, the vision he shared of a New International Economic Order was built on the bedrock of the nation-state. Similar dynamics emerged when Dar es Salaam hosted the Sixth Pan-African Congress in June 1974. This witnessed the decision to structure the congress’ organisation around representatives of nation-states, to the exclusion of radicals from the African diaspora who had travelled in large numbers from the Caribbean and North America, as Seth Markle has shown.¹⁹ Moreover, nationalist state-making was not just about the consolidation of external frontiers. The Tanzanian example demonstrates in particularly stark terms how the firming up of borders was often accompanied by the constriction of domestic politics. TANU’s militant nationalism was presented as to counter the threat posed by imperialism from without the country and its ‘lackeys’ from within. Studying the transnational movement of people and ideas might ask us to reconsider the normative adoption of the nation-state as a frame of analytical reference, but these dynamics were not necessarily at odds with the entrenchment of state power. As Chapter 5 demonstrated, the global languages of 1968 were appropriated by the party-state to channel transnational anticolonialism into a more defensive Tanzanian nationalism.

It is tempting, as Miles Larmer does in the case of Zambia, to conclude that the threat from imperialism was ‘frequently distorted or overstated’ to justify the oppression of internal opposition and shore up the power of the ruling party.²⁰ There is certainly some truth in that idea. By the 1970s, the official organs of the Tanzanian state were presenting any kind of internal challenge as an imperialist conspiracy. But any interpretation of the rise of authoritarianism must also appreciate the burden which Tanzania assumed in hosting the liberation movements, while simultaneously fending off Cold War challenges, and maintaining a non-aligned foreign policy. Tanzania’s authoritarianism was shaped by choices by Tanzanian elites which emerged from the interwoven challenges of building a socialist state while unselfishly supporting anticolonial revolution across Africa and beyond. These circumstances opened opportunities for the accumulation of power in the hands of a party elite, which justified their decisions by reference to continental and global developments. Ten years after Tanganyika gained independence, the president was asked by a journalist as to what he considered his greatest achievement. ‘We have survived’, Nyerere answered, grimly.²¹ This might seem a low bar to clear, but it was nevertheless a tough challenge, as the fate of other aspirational postcolonial regimes demonstrated.

Dar es Salaam was one revolutionary city among many – a city, moreover, connected to many others. The struggle against imperialism transcended borders, even as African states became increasingly defensive about guarding them. To return to the vignette which opened this conclusion, although Willy Gamba’s mission begins in Dar es Salaam, the majority of Kufa na Kupona is set in Nairobi. Writing a more extensive exile history of a movement like FRELIMO would involve a multi-sited study that grounds anticolonial politics in cities such as Algiers, Cairo, and Lusaka plus metropolitan and Cold War capitals, like Paris, Beijing, and Moscow. These urban locales, as well as the transnational or international connections which joined them together, constituted a networked geography of Third World liberation.²² If the findings of this book are anything to go by, the history such approaches should reveal will be messy: at times confusing, in places contradictory.

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A visiting journalist arriving in Dar es Salaam today would encounter a very different city to ‘Rumourville’. The sprawling metropolis is emblematic of Africa’s post-socialist urban landscape. The city centre has been transformed, architecturally and politically. The OAU Liberation Committee headquarters on Garden Avenue, surrounded by securitised embassy compounds, stands dilapidated against a gleaming skyline. The bar at the rebuilt New Africa Hotel is no longer propped up by guerrilla leaders or Cold War diplomats, but businessmen working for multinationals and the ‘experts’ of an expanding number of NGOs, which jostle for influence in a congested development sector.

Look closer, and traces of Dar es Salaam’s revolutionary past remain. As the threat posed to the city’s architectural heritage by the voracious construction of skyscrapers becomes clear, groups are organising to alert residents to the imminent material loss of a rich urban history. African liberation struggles feature prominently in these campaigns. Outside the New Zahir Restaurant on Mosque Street, a small plaque commemorates that, in another time, the freedom fighters took their meals under the same canopied veranda. Beyond the city centre, on the Msasani peninsula, a larger memorial marks the former home of Eduardo Mondlane. Mejah Mbuya, a social activist and co-founder of the Afriroots tour company, runs guided visits of revolutionary Dar es Salaam. He aims to engage not only tourists, but also the local population. ‘I want Tanzanians to know their history’, he says. ‘It’s something that they should know and be proud of.’²³

Yet politically, the Tanzanian state is moving in the opposite direction. Despite these attempts to reclaim the country’s revolutionary past from below, the government has broken with the commitment to Third World liberation that was the paramount feature of ujamaa-era foreign policy. In 2017, Tanzania’s fifth president, John Magufuli, addressed students at the University of Dar es Salaam. Where once liberation movement leaders and visiting radical academics had emphasised their commitment to a global struggle against imperialism, now Magufuli signalled a new approach. ‘We have carried the burdens of other peoples’ conflicts for too long’, he said. ‘Our goal is to focus on the interests of our country – Tanzania first.’²⁴ This came against the backdrop of Tanzania strengthening its relationship with Morocco, a long-time African pariah due to its continued occupation of Western Sahara. Magufuli’s speech was also interpreted as a response to criticism over Tanzania’s decision to open an embassy in Israel. Nyerere had been a supporter of both Sahrawi liberation and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which had operated an office in Dar es Salaam.²⁵ In both cases, the government’s about-turn was based on the calculations of attracting foreign aid.

For some commentators, the Tanzanian government’s new stance was a betrayal of Nyerere’s legacy. Amid a massacre in Gaza in 2018, one MP drew attention to Tanzania’s past role in the non-aligned movement and support for the cause of African liberation and contrasted it with present policy towards Israel and Morocco. ‘I am certain that Mwalimu Nyerere, the “Father of the Nation”, must be turning in his grave.’²⁶ Another opposition politician, Zitto Kabwe, noted that ‘yesterday, the people whom we liberated in South Africa withdrew their ambassador after the massacre in Gaza, while our Foreign Minister sipped wine with Netanyahu, the butcher of the Palestinians’.²⁷ In the press, Kabwe declared that ‘[w]e are no longer Tanzania, which stands with the oppressed. We are being driven by economic gains instead of human rights and dignity.’²⁸ One journalist perceived the shifting policy as nothing less than the surrender of Tanzania’s raison d’être. ‘We brought a torch to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, for the purpose of bringing light to darkness, to bring hope to the desperate around the world’, he wrote. ‘If we no longer have this faith, what meaning do we have as a nation?’²⁹ Such charges might be read as yet another example of the ubiquitous invocation of Nyerere’s memory for political capital or simply dismissed as the fringe views of the intelligentsia. But they also speak of a lost past: a recognition of the fading place of Tanzania – and Dar es Salaam – as the revolutionary heartbeat of Africa.