Africa: Who Is Safe?

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Suited for Freedom. Tanganyika came to independence in 1961 no better off economically than any other African nation. Though huge (362,688 sq. mi.) and harshly beautiful, the country was not wealthy. Average income was $55 a year, and fully half of its exports were in three crops: sisal, cotton and coffee. Tanganyika's mineral wealth was scanty, consisting of some gold and the Williamson diamond mine near Lake Victoria in the north. With its game-thick Serengeti Plains aswarm with trophy heads, and soaring Mount Kilimanjaro to attract all the Hemingway buffs, it had tourist potential.

But Tanganyika had three things working for it that made the country seem ideally suited for uhuru. Of its 10,000,000 population, 98% is African. And although the people are divided into 120 separate tribes, the majority are of Bantu stock, and all share the Swahili lingua franca. Thus, unlike neighboring Kenya and Uganda, Tanganyika has no basic conflicts between rival tribes or kingdoms, nor had it a large white-settler population to fight against independence and give rise to black Mau Mau-type terrorism. What whites there were mostly stuck to the cool, green coffee-and-banana highlands.

Secondly, Tanganyika has had no bitter experience with colonialism in recent years. Its brief encounter with the Germans is almost forgotten today. In 1884, the fast-moving explorer Karl Peters swung through Tanganyika and in six weeks made treaties with twelve chiefs to make Tanganyika a German territory. Harsh administrators, the Germans put down rising after rising, the most serious being the Maji-Maji rebellion in 1905, repressed the people so cruelly that any colonial power to follow could only have seemed gentle by comparison. After World War I, when the British threw the Germans out, Tanganyika became a British mandate, first under the League of Nations, then the United Nations.

Up from Tribalism. These two preconditions needed a third, however, to make Tanganyika a successful independent state. That ingredient—leadership—is provided by Julius Nyerere. A slender, soft-eyed man with a Chaplinesque mustache, Nyerere is the antithesis of most African leaders. Where others affect high-flown nicknames like "Redeemer" (Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah) or "Lion of Malawi" (Nyasa-land's Kamuzu Banda), Nyerere is content to be known as Mwalimu—Swahili for teacher. Where other leaders use their high-powered, government-owned radios for propaganda messages, Nyerere uses his to broadcast casual eco nomic lessons. Recently he translated Shakespeare's Julius Caesar into Swahili, and although after Caesar's assassination Cassius shouts "Uhuru, uhuru!", Tanganyika's Julius was careful to avoid equating himself with Rome's.

Julius Kambarage Nyerere was born 42 years ago near Musoma, on the shores of Lake Victoria, into a pagan, tribal world. His father was a chief of the Zanaki, a small (40,000 members) Bantu tribe that filed the teeth of their young and fought the fierce, blood-and-milk-drinking Masai. Herding goats as a boy, Julius, at twelve, wrapped himself in a piece of trade cloth and hiked off to begin his education.