Independent consultant and blogger in Dar es Salaam
Before we were so rudely interrupted by one Regional Commissioner’s heartless dismissal of the importance of safe birthing in Dar es Salaam, we were having a conversation about how the Cult of Personality has replaced the Cult of Character in the 21st Century.
This new reality is emanating most strongly from the US, a country in whose wake so many of us are dragged whether we like it or not.
Take President Trump, who is happening to us all right now.
Mr Trump is not an unknown quantity, he has been famous- or infamous—since at least the yuppie heydays of the 1980s. He’s been in films, he has named numerous buildings after himself, he has made dedicated enemies out of public prosecutors, and he has lived a full life.
In all the information available about him, there isn’t much to recommend him in terms of nobility of character. There is nothing to suggest an awareness of, let alone care for, ‘the greater good.’ And yet he has been elected not once, but twice, as President of his country.
A public office in which the ‘greater good’ is the whole point. I think this could only happen in the 21st century where celebrity trumps frumpy old values.
As we practice it now, democracy’s greatest weakness is how it has turned leadership into the prize of a popularity contest. This is what elections have been reduced to, dressed up as fair contests between groups and ideas.
We can’t dismiss politics entirely, people are still voting according to what they believe to be desirable. But packaged in that ‘desirability’ is the hard selling of personas.
We have my industry to blame for this. Media has been driving this phenomenon very hard since the advent of broadcast. If we hadn’t messed with the division between entertainment and politics, things might have been fine.
The digital world is even more manufactured for our consumption pleasure, feeding us the drug of highly stimulating content that drives sales and leaves our minds distracted and undernourished.
While we Africans, especially the conservatives, wring our hands about the cultural pollution of ‘The West’ and how they’re trying to turn our children queer, we are making our transition into the Cult of Personality.
That is the actual cultural export that worked on us, and it is unfortunate because it pairs all too well with our monarchic tendency for the Big Man.
When I suggested that From Julius to Jakaya in Forty Years: One Generation in Tanzanian Politics would be a valuable project about the arrival of the cult of personality, I did so because I lived it.
It was an interesting transition: Nyerereism is built on the old-school belief in ‘nobility of character’—however manufactured—as it’s flavour of Bigmanism whereas President Kikwete’s 2005 campaign took a provincial Tanzania and thrust us into the bright world of celebrity endorsements and huge billboards of him smiling down at us.
We haven’t recovered, and the ruling party knows it. One of the consequences of this transition from character to personality is that Tanzania was led down this most terrible of American paths. We too got a head of state who had a well-documented life in public service.
We elected him anyway. The rest is history. The question in 2025 is: are we planning to lean back and learn from this recent history or not? By the looks of it, opening the conversation about character is not only desirable: it is necessary.
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