Origin and Inheritance of the Tanganyika African National Union

On July 7, 1954 (the day known as Saba Saba — the seventh day of the seventh month), TANU was founded in Dar es Salaam. Within four years, it had become overwhelmingly the dominant non-governmental political organization in the country. In 1960, TANU formed a "responsible government" with Julius Nyerere as chief minister; on December 9 of the following year, Tanganyika gained its independence, and Nyerere led the new TANU government as the first Prime Minister of Tanganyika. A new Constitution was framed at the end of 1962, and Julius Nyerere was elected the first President of Tanganyika. Thus in eight years, the President of TANU had become the President of an independent Tanganyika.

Tanganyika's progress to independence under the leadership both of TANU and of Julius Nyerere is one of the most dramatic stories of African postwar history. Tanganyika's evolution in the 1950's has generally been described against a background of earlier political quiescence. However, as more information is gathered on the history of political organizations which predate TANU, it appears that before World War II there was greater political activity among Tanganyika Africans than had been assumed.

Pre-TANU Political Organizations

Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika, did not become the major administrative, political, and economic center of Tanganyika until well into the period of British rule. Under German rule, which lasted from the late 1880's until the defeat of Germany in World War I and the subsequent loss of her colonial territories in East Africa, it was merely one among several centers. The Germans in East Africa looked West towards the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi and set up a large administrative center in Kigoma on the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika which was intended as the great railhead for German East Africa. (The outbreak of the First World War disrupted German plans for this.) Tabora in central Tanganyika was also a major center and railhead under both the Germans and the British. Tanga, in the extreme northeastern part of Tanganyika, was another city equally as important as Dar es Salaam in German times; an advanced government school was located there, in which the German East African administration trained its African civil servants. Tanga was more exposed than the capital to the influences of missionaries and white settlers; and it was nearer to the more economically developed areas of Kenya and the cluster of sisal plantations and coffee estates in northern Tanganyika.

Because the capital city did not overshadow all other towns, political activity was not concentrated within it. In fact, the first voluntary association founded by Africans — the Tanganyika African Civil Servants Association — was formed by government employees in Tanga in 1924. This Association pursued the interests of African government employees and introduced into public life some of Tanganyika's educated Africans. Although a few of these people reappeared later in the Tanganyika African Association (TAA) from which TANU itself was formed, none of them figures prominently in the current Tanganyikan political scene.

Two other significant voluntary associations were formed in the interwar period; both were based in Dar es Salaam. The Tanganyika African Welfare and Commercial Association (TAWCA) was formed in the mid-1930's. Despite its title, which suggested non-political aims, it was considered by the British administration to be more political than the TAA, which began sometime between 1927 and 1929 and at first seemed to have no political ambitions. Sir Harold Mac-Michael, British governor from 1934 to 1938, referred to TAWCA members as "semi-literate, politically minded, mission trained youth"; but he allowed the organization to operate because he realized that it would be a mistake to stamp on all such activities. Attempts were made to merge it with the TAA before World War II, but they were largely unsuccessful; and TAWCA never did emerge as the parent of a major political organization.

The TAA'S history was quite different. For some time it functioned chiefly as a mutual benefit organization for urban Africans. Sir Donald Cameron, Governor from 1925 to 1931, described the TAA to the Colonial Office as happily "a social rather than a political organization" whose members constituted "some of the better-educated natives who are employed in Government service or engaged in business and trade in Dar-es-Salaam." There were about 120 members "many not Tanganyika nationals ... and though a reasonable and respectable society it did not profess to be representative." But no organization could hope to have a national impact in Tanganyika if it remained solely an urban phenomenon; in order to succeed, it was essential to make contact not only with the small towns, but with the villages as well. After World War II, the TAA became increasingly political, as it extended its sphere of influence into the rural areas. From an urban-based interest group, the TAA was developing into a national movement. Its new connection with the countryside had apparently been effected through tribal unions.

Tribal unions developed among the Chagga of Kilimanjaro, the Haya of West Lake around Bukoba, the Zaramo of the Coast and Dar es Salaam, the Sukuma of East Lake Region, and the Sambaa in northeastern Tanganyika, close to Tanga. These tribal unions usually had little connection with one another, but some were acquainted through membership in the TAA. In some instances, the tribal unions even competed with the TAA. In 1951, for example, the colonial government accepted the demand of the Kilimanjaro Chagga Citizens' Union (KCCU), a tribal union of the Chagga, for the election of a paramount Chagga chief. At that time, a branch of the TAA in Moshi, the capital of the region inhabited by the Chagga, took the name of the Chagga Congress, both to indicate its local affiliation and in order to compete with the KCCU. The tribal union dominated the election nonetheless; and after the KCCU'S winning candidate, Thomas Marealle, became paramount chief, the TAA branch was absorbed into the KCCU.

It would be a mistake to see this election, and the growth of the tribal unions, as a victory for tribal traditionalism over a modern political movement. The tribal unions grew in opposition to both the British administration and its chiefly agents. Within their ranks were leaders opposed — in varying degrees — to traditional tribal leaders, who were thought to have a previously established right to rule based on clan and lineage. In the Chagga election, the TAA supported a chief who was a representative of the native administration and associated with the Chagga Council of Chiefs formed by the British administration.

It is important to note these facts because the history of the tribal unions has a tendency to be distorted now that TANU needs operative myths, TANU spokesmen now trace TANU'S roots to the TAA and to cooperative societies, denying a share in its parentage to the tribal unions, which are described as tribalistic and disruptive of national unity. For example, Edward Barongo, one of the founders of TANU in Buhaya, West Lake Region, said in 1965 that the Bukoba Buhaya Union was tribalistic and that the TAA , not the Bahaya Union, was the forerunner of TANU in Bukoba, the capital of West Lake. He asserted that most of the leaders of the Bahaya Union did not even reside in Bukoba or its environs, but were in the capitals of Kenya or Uganda. This last point calls attention to the fact that the men who were active in the Union were certainly not traditional elders since they lived outside their home areas. But Mr. Barongo's version ignores the fact that the Bukoba Bahaya Union changed its name to the African Association after contact with the TAA. One historian of West Lake Region says that the Bukoba Buhaya Union was formed in 1924 and developed like the TAA through official patronage and successful petition on minor issues. Furthermore, the tribal unions in general and the Bahaya Union in particular fed on reactions against British efforts to enforce unpopular agricultural policies, just as the TAA did.

The British administration, like other colonial regimes in Africa, imposed regulations as it tried to promote rural change. These regulations were first introduced in the late 1920's and became widespread by the late 1930's. From about 1946 to 1957, laws enforcing agricultural change — which were concerned with anti-erosion measures, cattle-culling, disease prevention, and the inspection of crops — constituted the main plank in the government's efforts for agricultural improvement. Reaction against these regulations was sometimes led by the tribal unions. The most celebrated single case of opposition, the Meru Land Case, which was debated in the General Assembly of the United Nations, was crucial in stimulating the creation of TANU. Meru opposition to forcible alienation from their land in 1951 (to make way for the expansion of a settler area) gave rise to explicit links between a tribal union and the TAA — which later became TANU. The Meru Citizen's Union, a tribal union led by Kirilo Japhet, was formed in protest against land alienation. 15 In 1953, Japhet toured Tanganyika under the auspices of the TAA. (He later became the first TANU chairman of Northern Province.) TANU representatives in 1954 always raised the Meru Case to the UN Visiting Missions. The widespread discontent arising from the Meru Land Case and the publicity attendant on Kirilo Japhet's appearance in 1952 as the first Tanganyika African to address the UN broke the ground for the formation of a national movement.

Yet in 1961, the TANU Deputy Secretary General, Edward Barongo, announced that the Meru Citizen's Union had been closed down, and TANU leaders launched attacks against organizations based upon tribal or religious affiliations. In order to understand this policy shift, it is necessary to examine further the growth of political organizations predating TANU.

The TAA was able to make contact with rural people partly because political consciousness developed among farmers as the issues of land alienation and enforcement became aggravated. Cliffe writes:

In most areas, even if the rural peasantry was not part of the formal membership, the [Tanganyika African] Association's officials represented them in the sense that they received and took up complaints and were thus, among other things, concerned with the very regulations [on agricultural enforcement] with which we are concerned.

But there had to be people to follow up these complaints; and in 1940 Lord Hailey reported that the TAA had less than 100 members and only one branch outside Dar es Salaam (in Dodoma, central Tanganyika). By 1947, however, membership had increased substantially in the towns, due no doubt to growing unrest in the countryside; Lord Hailey now reported TAA branches "in a considerable number of places in the Lake, Northern, Eastern and Tanga Provinces." Furthermore, membership was extending to new categories of people: the early TAA had been made up almost entirely of junior government officials and teachers; by 1948, traders and African farmers were joining as well as government and Native Authority employees. In 1948, the TAA told the UN Visiting Mission that it had 39 branches, 1,780 members, and a central committee of 30. The next Visiting Mission in 1951 found TAA branches in practically every town of importance they visited. By then, the TAA claimed to have 5,000 members, and a member paid a subscription fee of six shillings a year.

The growth of the TAA received impetus from two other sources in addition to the reaction to enforced rural change. In 1947, the TAA had its first large public meeting to protest the revised proposals for a Central Legislative Assembly in East Africa. Tentative proposals had first been put forward in 1945 by the British Colonial Office members to the Central Legislative Assembly, but had been rejected by European spokesmen. The Colonial Office consequently revised its proposals so that European representation was increased in Colonial Paper 210, which was brought into effect at an Extraordinary Meeting of the Tanganyika Legislative Council on April 17, 1947. Africans, rural and urban alike, feared that this was the first step in tying Tanganyika to an East African Federation which would be dominated by Kenya white settlers; it was to protest this attempt that the TAA called its first meeting. Thus once again, as in the Meru Land Case, racial questions came to the fore, and the TAA was able to exploit them.

The other stimulus to activity came from the colonial administration itself, which appointed a committee on constitutional development in 1949. Educated people and town-dwellers followed these constitutional issues and transmitted them to the rural populace in terms of racial dominance and greater independence for Africans.

Thus by the 1950's, the TAA was firmly involved in the political life of Tanganyika. And it was connected not only with tribal unions, but with other organizations which were not expressly formed to protest against colonial regulations and rule, but became politicized in the course of events. The most significant of these organizations were the cooperative societies, which became especially important in Sukumaland where the cotton cooperatives of the Victoria Federation of Cooperatives Union became the vehicle for the national movement after a TANU branch was banned from Lake Province. But even before TANU came into existence, the cooperatives played a political role.

Although by 1953 the TAA had grown in size and had officers and an executive committee chosen by its branches at an annual conference, coordination between the center and the branches was weak. It was in order to overcome this weakness that Julius Nyerere determined to transform the TAA and reconstituted it as the Tanganyika African National Union in 1954.

Julius Nyerere is the son of a chief of the Zanaki, a small tribe that inhabits the shores of Lake Victoria in what is now Mara Region. Nyerere attended Roman Catholic mission schools (including St. Francis Pugu, one of Tanganyika's most prominent secondary schools), Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, and the University of Edinburgh where he received an M.A. degree. When he returned to Tanganyika in 1952, at the age of 30, he became a teacher at St. Francis Pugu school located twelve miles outside of Dar es Salaam. Nyerere had been a member of the TAA before going abroad; in April 1953, he was made the organization's president. In 1954, Nyerere invited a group of TAA members to Dodoma to discuss his proposals for a new constitution. In July 1954, a four-day conference of the TAA was held at Dar es Salaam to discuss these proposals and their modifications made at Dodoma. On July 7, a new constitution was adopted and the Tanganyika African National Union came into existence.

Cooperation from local TAA branches, which usually turned themselves into TANU branches, and from other organizations facilitated TANU'S development. (For example, a football club was instrumental in popularizing TANU in Dar es Salaam.) While the TAA provided TANU with a nucleus of branch organization, it also left behind a tradition of little central control, lack of communication between branches, domination of the movement by town-based people, and a lack of clearly defined aims. The TAA had absorbed local tribal-based groups, and its local branches often expressed parochial sentiments — a condition which was to prove embarrassing to central TANU leadership on a number of occasions. Individuals who led branches and sub-branches took positions that TANU leadership was not willing to endorse. For example, at Korogwe in Tanga Province the chairman of a TANU sub-branch was convicted of sedition in January 1957, when he maintained that TANU was now the government and the people need no longer obey agricultural rules. Nyerere repudiated and dismissed this man, but the government nonetheless banned the Korogwe TANU branch. As TANU grew rapidly in size and spread across Tanganyika, the problem of controlling the local TANU organizations became acute.

Thus the inherent inadequacies of the TAA were transmitted to TANU, where they took on far greater magnitude. The same problems now became more serious because of TANU'S larger membership and its aspiration to lead an all-out assault against the colonial government to win national independence. Although TANU did achieve its major aim in 1961 by forming an independent government, it did not solve the problem of forging a centrally directed political movement in the pre-independence period. How then did TANU win independence? To answer this complex, multi-faceted question, we must begin with an examination of the nature of heterogeneity in Tanganyika.