Islam’s role in Tanzania’s freedom struggle

What is saddening about the history of Tanganyika’s struggle for independence is the fact that, more than four decades after achieving freedom, that important period of the people’s resistance to foreign domination has yet to be written about.

The few attempts made so far to write that history have focused on hero worship and idolising Nyerere.

What we thus have is a one-sided official history full of distortions and even half-truths.

Meanwhile, vital documents and photographs of the times still remain in private hands and will soon be destroyed or lost for ever.

It is now 50 years since the Tanganyika African National Union made the historic decision in Tabora in 1958to take part in the first general election to the Legislative Council under extremely discriminatory conditions — an ultimately wise decision that came to be known as Uamuzi wa Busara.

In that election, seats were contested not only along racial lines but also saw the locking out of candidates who did not have a formal education or were not employed in a recognised profession.

But what incensed the people most was the condition that Africans would have to vote for a European, an Asian and an African. Mohamed Said’s new book tells the story of that election.

The conditions set by the colonial government seemed on the face of it unacceptable for Tanu.

The conference deliberations in Tabora, a small town in the then Western Province, threatened to split the party into two camps —moderates in favour of participating in the elections; and radicals calling for a total boycott.

But Tanu and indeed Nyerere survived an internal crisis that swiftly took on religious and racial undertones.

Radicals like Sheikh Suleiman Takadir, chairman of the Tanu Elders, and Zuberi Mtemvu, then Tanu organising secretary, were all set to stage a coup against Nyerere and take over the party.

And they would have succeeded were it not for the ingenuity of Mwalimu and a group of Tanu members from Tanga handpicked by Nyerere to confront the onslaught.

There are no existing records to give us an insight into Nyerere’s own position on the tripartite voting nor is there any indication that he even discussed the issue at the headquarters privately with Sheikh Takadir and Mtemvu, or close associates Idd Faiz, Haidar Mwinyimvua, Dossa Aziz, Bibi Titi Mohamed and the Tanu propagandist Ramadhani Mashado Plantan, owner of the radical paper Zuhra – Nyererere’s mouthpiece. Indeed, it would seem Nyerere played his cards close to his chest right up to the voting.

So, what was Nyerere’s strategy — the one he never revealed even privately in later life?

The book attempts to solve this mystery through interviews with Tanu veterans, fleshing out a picture of Nyerere “riding” the wave of opposition within Tanu and neutralising radicals like Mtemvu and Sheikh Takadir.