East Africa: Up from Grass Roots

Not all the emerging leaders of Africa are as pretentious as Ghana's Nkrumah or as meddlesome as Egypt's Nasser. Across the continent from Casablanca, Tanganyika's Chief Minister Julius Nyerere sat in his sun-splashed and flyspecked capital of Dar es Salaam and contentedly contemplated his steady progress toward the day when Britain's East African possessions—his own mandated Tanganyika, plus Uganda and Kenya to the north and the offshore islands of Zanzibar—will be able to form a self-governing, independent Federation of East Africa.

An ex-mission schoolteacher whose sawed-off front teeth indelibly record his pagan tribal upbringing, Nyerere views federation as a far better solution to Africa's problems than fragmented independence. "The proliferation of independent states in Africa means a waste of manpower and money," he says. "It means weak economies and delays in development, and it will also mean the weakening of African influence in world affairs."

Then Freddie. Overall, British East Africa is almost as big as the U.S. east of the Mississippi, has vast mineral resources (iron and columbite), a flourishing agriculture (coffee, sisal, cotton), and more than 20 million people (all black except for 400,000 Asians and Arabs, 96,000 Europeans). By Nyerere's reckoning, the federation could be functioning as a political entity by early 1962.

In Zanzibar, where 75% of the world's fragrant clove supply is bought and sold, the British protectorate was pushing ahead to hold elections for a new government that will govern its own internal affairs. Kenyan and Ugandan politicians were already campaigning for their elections, which will enable both territories to claim the rights of self-government. There was a minor check a fortnight ago when Buganda's Frederick ("King Freddie") Mutesa II seceded from Uganda and declared Buganda's independence. Nobody noticed much change. Yawned one official: "The Baganda seem to be pretending that they have independence, and the Colonial Office seems to be pretending that they haven't."

Rocky Road. The road toward federation has been long and rocky. As early as the 1920s Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, suggested federation of East Africa. But fearing domination by Kenya's white settlers (whose stubborn opposition to the winds of change was later to provoke the Mau Mau), black nationalists said no. Their opposition deepened when Britain federated the neighboring Rhodesias and Nyasaland in 1953 in a forced union which the blacks said served only the interests of Southern Rhodesia's white settlers. Last year Nyerere became the first East African to espouse publicly the inescapable logic of federation and to differentiate between "bad" federation imposed from above (as in Central Africa) and "good" federation that "grows upward from the grass roots."