Education

Such thinking blended well with the form of Christianity Nyerere learned from the Catholic missionaries who ran the primary schools which he attended. The Christian notion of an omnipotent God, the creator and benefactor of mankind, fitted smoothly with tribal concepts of nature as a force whose benign workings gave shape and unity to the life of the individual and the community. The moral and social values which Julius Nyerere had inherited from these sources, he later made the basis of his political principles.

By the African standards of the time, Nyerere had a privileged upbringing. As the son of a chief, he had from his earliest days an elevated position in local society. He attended Tabora, a school that was reserved for the sons of Tanganyika's elite and which Nyerere himself referred to as being 'as close to Eton as you can get in Africa'.

University

After Tabora, Nyerere attended Makerere University, a British foundation in Uganda, where he qualified as a teacher. Back in Tanganyika, he taught in schools for a number of years before taking up a scholarship at the University of Edinburgh. By the time he graduated, he had been considerably influenced by the socialist ideas to which he was introduced while there. The brand of socialism which particularly impressed him was Fabianism, a movement whose advocacy of nationalization, democracy and the end of privilege appealed to him as providing the principles upon which a nation could best be built. He was already beginning to think in terms of Tanganyikan independence. He saw an accord between Western Fabianism and the traditions of African tribal communalism.