Statecraft & Independence
Landmark
Rashidi Kawawa
1926 – 2009
Twice Prime Minister, and Nyerere's closest lieutenant
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Tanzania Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He held the country together as Prime Minister when Nyerere stepped back in 1962, and returned to the office for five more years in the 1970s. Before any of it he was a film actor and the man who organised Tanganyika's unions.
Rashidi Mfaume Kawawa was a welfare officer and a film actor — he appeared in one of the first Swahili-language features — before he became the central figure in Tanganyikan trade unionism, building the Tanganyika Federation of Labour and bringing its weight behind TANU in the years before independence.
In January 1962 Julius Nyerere resigned the premiership to go and rebuild the party in the country, and handed the government to Kawawa, who ran it until Tanganyika became a republic that December. He was prime minister again from 1972 to 1977 and second vice-president, and he was the man who executed what Nyerere designed — the Arusha Declaration, the nationalisations, and the villagisation programme, which he drove hard and which is the most criticised part of his record.
He was also, by common account, the organisational spine of the movement: Nyerere had the argument, Kawawa had the machinery. He held senior party office into the 1990s and died in 2009.
In January 1962 Julius Nyerere resigned the premiership to go and rebuild the party in the country, and handed the government to Kawawa, who ran it until Tanganyika became a republic that December. He was prime minister again from 1972 to 1977 and second vice-president, and he was the man who executed what Nyerere designed — the Arusha Declaration, the nationalisations, and the villagisation programme, which he drove hard and which is the most criticised part of his record.
He was also, by common account, the organisational spine of the movement: Nyerere had the argument, Kawawa had the machinery. He held senior party office into the 1990s and died in 2009.
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