The Africans

by David Lamb

  At his modest beach front home, built with the help of a bank loan, he entertains guests on the veranda without the slightest touch of pomp. Flies buzz about and servants in shabby jackets serve warm orange soda. Nyerere kicks off his sandals and begins his discourse on Africa. His tone is teasing and his conversation is broken with frequent giggles and jokes. He makes his point gently, directly, in flawless English. Few visitors leave his presence without being spellbound.

  “The way in which President Nyerere has dominated African affairs by the sheer power of his intellect and leadership is nothing short of miraculous,” the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, once said. “His domination is something you would expect from the leader of a nation of great wealth or military strength. Tanzania has neither.”

  Nyerere was born in 1920, the son of a Zanaki chief and his eighteenth wife, Mugaya. He was an inquisitive, bright youngster, one of the few in his village of Butiama to attend school. He scored high grades and at the Government Secondary School in Tabora was appointed a prefect. He soon discovered that a prefect’s privileges included double rations. He agitated against such inequalities and they were dropped.

  After receiving a degree in education at Makerere University in Uganda, he taught history and biology in Tanganyika until 1949; then, with the help of missionary Catholic priests, he obtained a scholarship to Edinburgh, where he studied British history, English, moral philosophy, political economy, social anthropology, constitutional law and economic history. There, he has said, his political philosophy evolved.

  Back in Tanganyika in 1952 with a master’s degree, he resumed teaching. He also became active in political affairs, remodeling an African social organization into a political association known as the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and laying the foundation for independence, which came peacefully on December 9, 1961. One month later he startled everyone by resigning as premier to concentrate on rebuilding TANU for the postcolonial struggle. He also wanted to prepare for the 1962 elections—which were to earn him 97 percent of the votes and the presidency of Tanganyika.

  As impeccable as his credentials were, as graced with charm, intellect and humor as he is, Nyerere has one glaring weakness: he does not always practice what he preaches. And what he does practice has brought Tanzania few visible benefits. His 17 million people have adhered to his socialistic doctrine for two decades and at the end of the rainbow have found only an empty pot. Though Nyerere’s image has remained remarkably untarnished, there now seems sufficient reason to question the wisdom of his motives. Consider:

  No other African president has ever overthrown a neighboring country’s government. Nyerere has helped topple three: the Comoros in 1975, the Seychelles in 1977 and Uganda in 1979. He used 60,000 troops to rid Africa of Uganda’s Amin, but his army of liberation quickly turned into an army of occupation, looting and killing. Nyerere, in an attempt to make sure that the puppet government in Kampala adopted a socialist course, became the de facto president of Uganda. When Amin’s two successors began to act independently, Nyerere arranged for their removal from office and had them put under lock and key.

  Although Nyerere has been quick to condemn tyranny in black- as well as white-ruled Africa—he refused, for instance, to attend an African summit in Uganda in 1975 because Idi Amin was its host—Nyerere held until 1979 more political prisoners than South Africa. (He granted amnesty to 6,400 prisoners that year, and freed another 4,436 in 1980.) Nyerere tolerates no dissent and long ago brought the newspapers under government control and closed all avenues of opposition and free expression. His own re-election every few years is something of a sham: he won 99 percent of the “yes” votes in 1970, 93 percent in both 1975 and 1980. The electorate can only vote for or against Nyerere, who is the only presidential candidate.

  Nyerere complains (quite correctly) that the West uses foreign aid as a lever for influence, but he accepts more of it than any president in black Africa. In 1980 alone, Tanzania received $600 million in grants and low-interest loans from the West and because Nyerere and Tanzania are what Western liberals think Africa should be all about—nonaligned, socialistic, poor, idealistic—donors from Australia to Geneva and Washington beat a path to Dar es Salaam with fistfuls of money.

  Despite the injection of aid, few countries in Africa have made such modest progress in the independence era. Agricultural production is dropping, factories are limping along at 40 percent capacity, Dar es Salaam grows shabbier by the day, a listlessness engulfs the land and the people are perhaps the most dispirited and unmotivated on the entire continent.

  In overstaffed government offices, drowsy secretaries rouse themselves only long enough to mumble, “Gone out,” when a visitor enters, meaning that the boss has already come and gone for the day, even if it is not yet 10:30 A.M. In the Israeli-built Kilimanjaro Hotel the phone may ring twenty or thirty times before the operator bothers to answer it, and the last time I bought a plane ticket at the airport in Dar es Salaam, the clerk behind the desk asked me to fill in the coupon myself. He would return after his tea break, he said, to collect my money.

  One Tanzanian student tells about attending an all-African party at a university in the United States. The room was packed with laughing students, dancing, drinking beer and trading stories from home. The Tanzanian looked around the room for a moment and headed directly for two young men, sitting morosely and alone in a corner. “As soon as I saw them there with those long faces I knew they were Tanzanians,” he said.

  At independence in 1961 Nyerere, to be sure, did inherit a country that was going nowhere in a hurry. Unlike neighboring Kenya, it had not been a “favored” British colony, and London had devoted little attention to its development. There were no significant resources and only one major export crop, sisal. University graduates numbered 120. Nyerere’s eventual response, in January 1967, was to issue the Arusha Declaration, a Chinese-style masterplan for socialism. The economy was nationalized, as was all rental property valued at more than $14,000. Taxes were increased to redistribute individual wealth. Hundreds of ujamaa (the Swahili word for “familyhood”) communal villages were established, populated in many cases by people who had been trucked by soldiers out of cities in military convoys. And Nyerere began spreading his gospel: work hard, forget personal gain, grow more. Then there will be a Tanzania for all Tanzanians.

  Many critics contend that Nyerere’s albatross is his own country, that he is an eloquent expostulator (though not a deep thinker) who simply deserved a better country to experiment with. Today all but the die-hard romantics agree that Nyerere’s experiment is a failed one, that China’s revolution has no more relevance to Africa of the 1980s than a glass of salt water has for a thirsty man. Mass mobilization is only possible when a homogeneous people believe that a shared goal is both worthy and obtainable: Nyerere’s people are no longer believers—if indeed they ever were in the first place.

  What Nyerere primarily has accomplished is to eliminate all incentives in Tanzania (anyone earning more than $30,000 a year is in the 95 percent tax bracket) and as a result nothing happens at all. The railroad to Zambia breaks down due to lack of maintenance and the theft of cargo, and the Chinese are called back to run it, having to replace the Africans in virtually every job from switchman to locomotive engineer. Day by day the country grows poorer, more lethargic, surviving as an international ward, the people clinging to little other than Nyerere’s promise of a better life. On the nearby island of Zanzibar, once the most prosperous place in black Africa, there is no electricity most of the time and the shelves of stores are almost empty. Zanzibar’s treasury, stuffed until the late 1970s with a hefty income from cloves, is barren, drained to support Nyerere’s government on the mainland.

  Nevertheless, Nyerere insists that his is the only path for his people. His leadership has spanned three decades and his doctrine has remained inflexible. The rest of Africa has changed during that time, yielding to new pressures, trying new systems, adjusting t
o new realities. Nyerere and Tanzania, though, are not much different than they were in 1961. They are anachronisms.

  “People who think Tanzania will change her cherished policy of ujamaa and self-reliance because of the economic difficulties are wasting their time,” Nyerere says. “We shall never change.”

  And that is precisely Tanzania’s problem.

  Revolution is a popular—and an overworked—word in Africa. Almost every president likes to think he is either the product or the producer of one. Even Idi Amin, as he went about Uganda killing his countrymen, once said, “As a revolutionary leader, I am too busy to rest.” But carrying a gun does not make a revolutionary. Nor does repeating rhetoric. Nor does overthrowing a government. To be a revolutionary one must at least have a vision of the future and a plan to effect fundamental changes. Few African presidents have.

  One legitimate revolutionary, though, deserves mention: President Samora Moisés Machel of Mozambique. As much as any head of state in Africa he is the creation of the struggle against colonialism. He is a man who is easy to hate or to love but impossible to ignore. To the Eastern bloc, he is the golden boy of Africa. To the West, he is a tough and uncompromising Marxist ideologue. To white-ruled South Africa, Mozambique’s next-door neighbor, he is the symbol of radicalized arrogance. But regardless of from what perspective he is viewed, Machel’s scorecard is consistent and uncontestable: his political personality was forged during the ten-year war of liberation against the Portuguese (1964–1974) and to him, the ongoing revolution is everything and all energies must be devoted to it.

  Machel, who was born in 1933 to peasant parents, trained in Algeria and Tanzania for the war against Portugal. He was among the first 250 combatants to cross the Tanzanian border into Mozambique, launching an attack on September 25, 1964, against a colonial outpost to begin the war of independence. Before long he was commander in chief of the guerrillas, then president of the liberation movement. Whether on the battlefield or in the president’s office, Machel remained an austere and disciplined man who demanded as much of himself as he did of others.

  Just after the war, in a treaty that brought victory to Machel’s guerrillas, the young president-to-be decided to take the first vacation of his life. He chose Tanzania, hardly a garden spot for tourists, because his guerrilla movement, called Frelimo, had been headquartered there and numerous liberation leaders still congregated there. On the first morning of his vacation, he was up at five-thirty, marching through the corridors of the shabby hotel like an army general, pounding on the doors of his small entourage. His colleagues stumbled out wearily and Machel directed them to the beach, where he led them on a ten-mile run. Then there was a protracted self-criticism session and each night there were lengthy meetings with various liberation leaders to discuss the futures of Rhodesia and South Africa. “Machel never slowed down,” said one of his staffers. “We all went back to Mozambique exhausted.”

  Unlike most African leaders, Machel leads his 10 million people by deed, not just words. He eschews ostentatious living and personality cults, is honest beyond temptation—indeed, Mozambique is a country with virtually no corruption—and often travels around the nation, visiting factories, farms, hospitals and prisons, jotting down notes as he listens to the people’s grievances. “It is necessary to know the temperature inside,” he once said, “and the people are the thermometer.”

  A bearded, fiery orator who will deliver speeches that last four or five hours, Machel neither smokes nor drinks and frowns on his people engaging in wasteful activities such as dancing and partying, which, he says, drain energy that should be devoted to the revolution. In one angry May Day speech he ordered “popular vigilance groups” to shave bald the heads of long-haired young men, banned women from wearing tight jeans and shirts (“They only cause temptation,” he said) and attacked the Christian church as an imperialistic institution “recruiting people against us, using its cassocks as disguise.” One day his father, a Baptist preacher, took issue with his son’s remarks and Machel stormed out of the family dining room, slamming the door behind him. It was a display of disrespect toward an elder almost unheard of in an African family.

  Though his single-minded dedication to create black Africa’s first authentic Marxist state does make Machel frequently belligerent and insensitive, he cuts an impressive figure and, once separated from the rhetoric delivered in packed stadiums, he speaks in articulate, measured tones, commanding both attention and respect.

  The carpeted reception room to his office is barren except for a sofa, an easy chair and two large wall photographs: one of a teen-age Mozambican boy in an army uniform, the other of a small child, perhaps six years old, holding a rocket launcher. Machel is a short, almost elfin man, wiry and muscular. He enters his office with a flourish, dressed in neatly pressed jungle fatigues, a visored field cap and expensive European boots.

  In a moment he is talking about the revolution, as if mesmerized, eyes closed, his voice singsong as he rocks back and forth in his chair. When he comes to a point that particularly excites him he will jump up, prance across the room and slap his visitor’s knee to make a point.

  “There is a song we sing here about the communal village,” he says, “about the village where hunger is defeated, where there is no intrigue, where there is no crime, where disease is fought and conquered, where life is collective and productive, where schools end ignorance, superstition and illiteracy, where the New Man is born, where there is real unity among men of all races …”

  Machel is a dreamer and his dream is a big one: he wants to liberate the Third World and he supports virtually every liberation movement known to man. Whether it is the Katanga rebels in Angola or the advocates for independence in Puerto Rico, Machel stands squarely on the underdog’s side. His is a dream buoyed by the success of his own liberation struggle. He won a war and inherited an economically crippled country that was $640 million in debt at independence. He set out to create the New African Man and to bring education, health services and a political awareness to a long-oppressed people, and has had some successes. Whether Mozambique’s socialist dream can be realized and the pitfalls of other African revolutions avoided probably depends on just one element—Machel himself, who, like his peers, has learned it is a great deal easier to run a guerrilla movement than a government.

  There was, I thought, much to admire in Machel’s style. Unlike Libya’s Muammar Qaddafy, he was not an exporter of revolution and he had set sensible priorities at home. School enrollment had tripled since independence, half the population had been inoculated against cholera, not a beggar or prostitute was to be seen on the streets of Maputo. Machel traded openly with South Africa, and having been brushed aside by the West, worked closely with Moscow without becoming a Soviet satellite. He was willing to take help wherever he could find it.

  But Machel insisted that his was the only way. “When a class imposes its will,” he once said, “those who refuse to accept this imposition must be forced to conform. Those who oppose this will be repressed.”

  Such words don’t leave much room for compromise, and for just that reason Machel is unlikely to be typical of the presidents who will lead Africa into the twenty-first century. In the years ahead Africa will need more compromise and consensus, not less. And it will need far more room to maneuver than his rigid Marxist system allows.

  Despite Machel’s accomplishments, Mozambique was in dreadful shape in 1984, and Marxism had retarded, not stimulated its development. As in Tanzania, there were no economic incentives and the Mozambicans responded by producing little besides a small crop of cashew nuts. The two hundred “people’s stores” set up in the countryside, though relatively effective in controlling prices and black marketeering, were pitifully short of goods. In the cities, women had to stand in lines for hours to buy a pint of milk or a loaf of bread. Agricultural production had fallen 70 percent since independence, and factories were limping along at 30 percent of capacity. The tourist industry, once worth millions
of dollars every year, no longer earned the country a single nickel.

  Additionally, the mountain of regulations and restrictions affecting every Mozambican often made life intolerable. To change his place of residence, a Mozambican needed a dozen permission slips. To buy a ticket for a flight within the country, he needed authority from the ministry of immigration and had to wait for hours at the country’s single, nationalized travel agency. To hire, say, a lathe operator, an employer needed approval from five levels of worker committees. During the days it took them to decide if that particular individual deserved the job, the lathe stood idle.

  “The thing that history will record as the principal contribution of our generation,” Machel said during the liberation war, “is that we understand how to turn the armed struggle into a revolution, that we realized it was essential to create a new mentality in order to build a new society.”

  But recognizing the need for change, and finding the means to effect it, are, as Machel must have discovered by now, very different challenges.*

  The evening is breathless with heat, and vultures huddle in the mango trees overhead. From a distant mosque the singsong call to prayer rolls across the White Nile, but the dozen Europeans sitting on the veranda of Juba’s only hotel pay no attention. They are drinking beer with ice and swatting at the flies and cussing the inattentive service, and they give nary a glance at the procession of seven-foot-tall Dinkas moving silently through the shadows nearby. The Dinkas have shed the shirts and pants they wore to their daytime jobs, and now they are nearly naked, their bodies smeared with cattle dung and red ochre. Drums throb in the darkness. The Dinkas-slip toward them, just as they have for centuries. Once they reach the field where the drums are pounding, they will work themselves into a melodic trance, dancing until dawn, bodies glistening in the moonlight, jumping and writhing amid a guttural chorus that fills the night with a thousand voices: “Umppah, umppah, umppah.”