By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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Tanzania turned 60 this past week. It is an important milestone and one that deserves to be celebrated with pride, and with thought. In other words, it is a celebration that needs to be tempered with celebration.

With pride, I say, because there is very little doubt that a union that has survived this long is as good as it is rare, and one has to be grateful that it has weathered the storms of existence and continues to stay on course. With thought, I say, because of what comes under here.

A lot of ink has been spilt on treatises trying to explain the reasons that presided over this Union, and these have been as varied as they have been numerous, and it is possible to continue with disagreements thereon for many decades to come.

One of the reasons that come to the fore in the attempt to explain the Union is the fact that there is inertia in that sense, people aren’t too busy uniting different countries; disuniting them seems much easier.

It is usually taken as a given that we are what the colonial masters made us to be. It was they who came, beat us into submission and made us to be “one” in their plantations, which they called colonies, units of exploitation set up for the benefit of their economies, and their glory.

It is strange but it is true, that we did not exist except as we were defined by those foreigners, just like the castaway Robinson Crusoe was the creator of his Man Friday.

It is an existential straitjacket we were shoehorned into by our erstwhile masters out of which we have failed to get, and even our independence did not wean us off that umbilical tie.

In that sense, any attempt at undoing the divisiveness of colonialism was/is inherently a rebellion against the old order, and the unification of two neighbouring countries is such a rebellion.

Read: Retelling colonial history of Tanzania through local lives

And it has not been easy; such unions do not come easy and they do not live for very long. On the African continent, early on after independence, a union was attempted between Senegal and Gambia — a very logical idea, knowing the two twin countries — but it was famously stillborn.

Another was between northern and southern Cameroon in 1961, which has limped on ever since and today looks like it is coming unstuck. The so-called United Arab Republic (UAR) between Egypt and Syria was a daring extra-continental thought that employed more imagination than realism, and hardly saw the light of day.

Going back in time and across space, in the 1860s one big union (United States) went to war to maintain itself intact, but in the 1990s another mammoth ensemble ( Soviet Union) could not replicate that feat. In between, unitary states have been torn asunder (India in 1947, Pakistan in 1971, Ethiopia in 1993, and Yugoslavia in the 1990s).

So, though it may seem natural for peoples and countries to long for unification, it does seem like people would rather remain the way they are rather than try something they are not used to, and the fact that Tanganyika and Zanzibar have clocked six decades together is some kind of victory.

Not that it has all been plain sailing, however. The Union has known its difficult times at various epochs of its existence, some of which even threatened to tear it apart, even at the very beginning of its existence. In the middle of the 1960s, one of the co-founders of the Union ( Julius Nyerere) had to live with a bad conscience about the brutal governance style of his counterpart in Zanzibar (Abeid Karume), who infamously authorised forced marriages of young women of Asian descent to his political cronies.

The Shah of Iran, Mohammed Pahlavi, sent Nyerere on an embarrassing diplomatic mission, but there was nothing Mwalimu could do as he tried to grimly shield the Union.

In the early 1980s, The man who had replaced Karume after the latter’s assassination in 1972 (Aboud Jumbe Mwinyi) had to resign after Nyerere accused him of betrayal when Jumbe was caught “surreptitiously” trying to craft constitutional changes Nyerere did not care for.

In the 1990s the Zanzibar government joined the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), setting off a loud furore as to whether Zanzibar had constitutional competence to enter into international agreements and many other instances.

Read: Tanzania opposition holds march against electoral reforms

Some of these dissensions have lost their fire, but ambers continue to smoulder underneath, promising to resurface at some future time. The fact is that whereas Tanganyikans will readily identify as Tanzanians, Zanzibaris almost invariably identify as Zanzibaris, no more, with the Tanzanian label really an afterthought.

As Tanzanians have been celebrating this landmark anniversary, it behoves all involved in the stewardship of the nation’s affairs to minimise the areas of dissension and to encourage more constructive engagement among the citizens on both sides of the Union, which of course cannot be perfect but can be improved and made better.

For example, since 1991, three Tanzanian judicial heavyweights picked by three different heads of state (Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Benjamin Mkapa and Jakaya Kikwete) have recommended a total overhaul of the Union structure (in1991, 1996 and 2014), only to be ignored by the three presidents, for reasons known only to themselves.

Some food for thought.

Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: [email protected]