Africa: Who Is Safe?

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At Tanganyika's Tabora Secondary School, he got good grades and was converted to Roman Catholicism, but never made "head boy"—his teachers found him not enough of a disciplinarian. At Uganda's Makerere University, he won first prize in the regional literary competition. His essay: an application of John Stuart Mill's arguments for feminism to the tribal societies of Tanganyika. After three years of teaching biology, he won a scholarship to Edinburgh, and in 1949 became the first Tanganyikan ever to study at a

British university. There he whipped his white friends at word games, studiously subdued the crossword puzzles in the Scotsman, and whetted the "politics of complaint," which would lead him to the presidency of Tanganyika. Then he went home.

Forging a Party. On July 7, 1954, Nyerere converted a social club into the Tanganyika African National Union. TANU was his from then on. Off into the back country he went to recruit members and cut tribal bonds. Wearing green bush shirts, slacks and leather sandals, waving an ivory-topped cane and chain-smoking Clipper cigarettes (he has since stopped), Nyerere began touring Tanganyika in a battered Land Rover. "I still remember the license—DSK 750," he reminisces. "We had to push so often over the mudholes that I will never forget it." A low-key speaker who never talked down to his audiences, Nyerere interlarded his membership pitches with dry humor and nonviolent philosophy. Yet the British considered him a dangerous rabble-rouser, as they did anyone pushing for ii/ntru. Nyerere also courted danger with his own people. "I will never be a member of any government that discriminates against non-Africans," he said—and meant it.

By 1960, TANU was 500,000 strong and unquestionably the best-organized party in East Africa. In elections that summer, party candidates won 70 of 71 seats in the Legislative Council, and a month later Nyerere was asked to form a government. By December 1961, the country was fully independent. A torch was lighted on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, and Julius Nyerere became the first East African leader to have achieved uhuru.

Rumbles of Disorder. The crises that Nyerere had always expected developed quickly. First came the threatened resignation of 600 British civil servants, desperately needed to run the government until Africans could be trained to replace them. They were angry because their "golden handshake"—the severance pay of up to $28,000 a man—could not be paid in lump sums. Nyerere's government simply could not afford it. Turning on the earnest charm that had welded his party, he talked 300 of the British into staying on. But then another disaster struck. Droughts and floods in 1962 ruined the maize crop, forcing 500,000 Tanganyikans onto the famine rolls, gobbling up $6,000,000 earmarked for national development. Nyerere already had help from Britain and the World Bank, including a $67 million three-year plan designed by his British Finance Minister, shrewd, brilliant Sir Ernest Vasey. Nyerere also instituted a "selfhelp" program under which Tanganyikans donate one day a week to urgently needed projects.