TANU, Independence
A mere seven and a half years elapsed between the formation of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in July of 1954 and the independence of Tanganyika in December of 1961. During that brief period the party went from a small initial base to a mass membership of over one million; established Julius Nyerere as a figure of continental importance; swept several elections; and helped make Tanganyika the first independent nation of East Africa.
A prenationalist tradition of political organization in Tanganyikan history was represented by the African Association. Founded in 1929, the African Association was more often a social club for urban elites than a rallying point for political protest. Nevertheless, the African Association did create a foundation on which the TANU could later build by bringing together members of such key social groups as African civil servants, professional men, and traders, and by organizing national conferences (between 1939 and 1945) that brought together representatives from around the territory.
In Tanganyika, as elsewhere, World War II was a political watershed. Returning soldiers brought fresh political energy, and the impact of the first cadre of Makerere University graduates was soon to be felt. Wartime privations, though generally accepted before
1945, created a general sense of dissatisfaction. The constitutional future of Tanganyika, formerly a mandate of the now defunct League of Nations, was open to debate. And rural political protest was on the rise, in the northeast as well as in the economically important Lake Province.
The African Association (renamed the Tanganyika African Association after a split with the Zanzibar branch in 1948) was initially incapable of profiting from these conditions. Centrifugal tendencies had long characterized the African politics of the territory, and these increased in the postwar period. Politics remained local. In Pare, widespread popular resistance to the imposition of a graduated tax, the mbiru controversy of
1946, was led by the Pare Union, with no connection to any territorial organization. On Kilimanjaro, the Chagga Union based its politics on the selection of a paramount chief, also in isolation from territorial politics. Governor Edward Twining’s policy of emphasizing local government reform through a new council system reinforced these parochial political tendencies. Coping with rapid change, it seemed that Tanganyikans were opting for an inward-looking neotraditionalism rather than a more expansive territorial nationalism.
However, important changes were occurring. In the Lake Province in the late 1940s, a nascent cooperative union brought together educated men with territorial connections and peasants resisting enforced agricultural schemes and the mandatory culling of cattle. For the first time, local grievances were combined with a call for political independence. The government reacted by prohibiting African civil servants from joining either the Tanganyika African Association. The Lake Province remained tense for most of the rest of the colonial period.
Meanwhile, another local African grievance gave the TAA an issue which it used to gain not only territorial but international publicity. An ill-conceived plan to consolidate settler landholdings in the northeast led the government to dispossess two Meru villages in the early 1950s. The local TAA secretary, Kirilo Japhet, coordinated an antigovernment campaign with the newly formed Meru Citizens Union: an effective interface between a postwar “tribal” society and territorial nationalism had been established.
Two other factors heightened the importance of the Meru Land Case. First, Japhet went to New York and carried the Meru complaint to the United Nations Trusteeship Council. The Trusteeship Council, particularly in the form of Visiting Missions, would present the nationalists with an important forum in the coming years. Second, on a trip to London Japhet met with Julius Nyerere, who was soon to return to Tanganyika and become president of the TAA.
The centrality of the role played by Julius Nyerere in the 1950s can hardly be overstressed. Educated at Makerere and the University of Edinburgh, and a member of the Fabian Bureau, he could articulate grassroots grievances in a language comprehensible to the British. From both his student days at Makerere and his stint as a teacher at Tabora, Nyerere knew virtually the entire rising generation of his educated countrymen. He was familiar with the trends of mass nationalism elsewhere in Africa and the world. And perhaps most important he was a charismatic figure around whom Tanganyikans could unite, since he was not associated with any particular region or social group. In 1950 the TAA had been reinvigorated in Dar es Salaam by the participation of exservicemen and former Makerere students. In 1953 Julius Nyerere became president of the TAA, and the transfer of control to a new generation was complete.
Tanzanians would later celebrate Saba Saba Day (Seven Seven Day) in commemoration of the TAA annual conference held on July 7, 1954. On that day a new constitution was approved, and the name of the organization was changed to the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). The new constitution both enhanced central control over policy by creating a National Executive Council which would meet between annual delegates’ conferences and facilitated greater contact with the provinces by making a provision that trade unions, cooperative societies and tribal unions could join as affiliates. Youth and women’s sections were formed, with the leader of the women’s section, Bibi Titi Muhammad, proving a powerful organizing force at the territorial level. The goal of the organization was now explicitly stated: to fight for independence.
It was a time of great possibilities, but also of potential danger. The Mau Mau emergency in neighboring Kenya made mass nationalism in East Africa a high-stakes game. Official policy in both Kenya and the Central African Federation was to reconcile colonialism with nationalism through “multiracialism.” This ideology was represented in Tanganyika by Twining (1949-1958). Portraying the TANU and Nyerere as “racialist,” the administration appointed ten unofficial members from each race (European, Asian, and African) to the Legislative Council, and from this nucleus sponsored the creation of the United Tanganyika Party (UTP) as an alternative to the TANU. Nyerere’s counterformulation was that Tanganyika, while indeed multiracial in population, was “primarily African.”
In the mid-1950s the TANU quickly developed its mass base. The government responded by scaling back some of its more unpopular schemes of agricultural compulsion and seeking allies for its “multiracialist” policy. The inevitable confrontation between government “multiracialism” and the TANU’s nationalism came when Governor Twining announced that a semirepresentative Legislative Council would be formed in 1958, with each eligible voter to cast one ballot for a candidate of each race. The question was whether the TANU should participate in elections conducted in a format to which it was opposed on principal. Although there was a great deal of disagreement about that question at the conference held in Tabora in January 1958, Nyerere carried the day with his argument that participation was necessary. The TANU agreed to support (though not to nominate) Asians and Europeans in the election. To balance this concession, the delegates voted to mount a “positive action” campaign unless responsible government were implemented before the end of 1959. A dissident faction which disapproved of participation in the elections broke away to form the African National Congress. This party, under Zuberi Mtemvu, had virtually no electoral impact.
In the first phase of the voting in October 1958, The TANU won 68 per cent of the vote and thirteen of fifteen seats. By the time the second phase was completed in February of the next year, the UTP had collapsed and the TANU won all fifteen seats. The TANU’s power was now a fait accompli, and it was clear that the country could not be ruled without Nyerere’s cooperation. By now the Suez Crisis had come and gone, Ghana was independent, Harold MacMillan was sensing the “winds of change,” and Richard Turnbull had replaced Edward Twining as governor of Tanganyika. In a concession that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, the 1959 East Africa Governors Conference approved of responsible government for Tanganyika in 1963-1964 and independence by 1970. But events were moving too quickly for the British to control. Riots in Nyasaland helped bring an end to official insistence on gradualism and multiracialism. The colonial secretary acceded to the demand for responsible government after the 1960 elections, and on December 9, 1961, Tanganyika became independent, with the TANU as the party of government and Julius Nyerere as prime minister.
In 1964, a union with postrevolutionary Zanzibar produced the new nation of Tanzania. In 1967, a TANU conference passed Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration, transforming the country from a de facto to a de jure one-party state. The end of the Tanganyika African National Union came in 1977 when it was integrated with the Afro-Shirazi Party on Zanzibar to form the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Revolutionary Party).
Kenneth R. Curtis
See also: Nyerere, Julius.
Further Reading
Iliffe, John. A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Kaniki, H. M. Y. (ed.), Tanzania under Colonial Rule. London: Longman, 1980.
Lisotwel, Judity. The Making of Modern Tanganyika. London: Chatto and Windos, 1965.
Maguire, G. Andrew. Toward “Uhuru” in Tanzania: The Politics of Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
McHenry, Dean. Limited Choices: The Political Struggle for Socialism in Tanzania. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1994.
Pratt, Cranford. The Critical Phase in Tanzania, 1945-1968: Nyerere and the Emergence of a Socialist Strategy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
World History
