Statecraft & Independence
Peerless
Julius Nyerere
1922 – 1999
Mwalimu — Tanzania's founding president
Peerless is level 1 of 4 in the Tanzania Hall of Fame: changed the field itself. Tell the country's story without them and the story breaks. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He led Tanganyika to independence, joined it with Zanzibar to create Tanzania, and then did the thing almost none of his contemporaries did: retired from the presidency voluntarily.
Julius Kambarage Nyerere was born at Butiama in 1922, the son of a Zanaki chief, and did not start school until he was twelve. He went to Makerere and then to Edinburgh, the first Tanganyikan to study at a British university, and came home to teach — which is where Mwalimu, the teacher, comes from, and what he was called for the rest of his life.
He built the Tanganyika African National Union from a small welfare association into a mass movement in five years and took the country to independence in December 1961 without a shot fired. In 1964 he joined it with Zanzibar to create Tanzania, a union that has held for sixty years where most such unions have not.
His central achievement at home was a nation. Tanzania has more than a hundred and twenty language groups and has never had an ethnic war — the contrast with almost every neighbour is stark, and it is not an accident. Nyerere made Swahili the national language and the language of instruction, so that Tanzanians could talk to each other without using the coloniser's tongue or a rival's; he refused to let the parties organise on ethnic lines; and he set out the argument for it in writing, at length, in Ujamaa and the Arusha Declaration. Adult literacy went from around ten per cent to over seventy, and primary enrolment to near universal.
Abroad he mattered more than Tanzania's size. Dar es Salaam housed the liberation movements of Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa and the OAU's Liberation Committee, at heavy economic cost and under real military threat. He invaded Uganda in 1979 to remove Idi Amin, when the rest of the continent said sovereignty forbade it, and paid for the war himself.
In 1985 he resigned the presidency, alive, in good health and unbeaten, and went home to Butiama to farm. He later admitted publicly that the economic policy had failed. He died in 1999.
He built the Tanganyika African National Union from a small welfare association into a mass movement in five years and took the country to independence in December 1961 without a shot fired. In 1964 he joined it with Zanzibar to create Tanzania, a union that has held for sixty years where most such unions have not.
His central achievement at home was a nation. Tanzania has more than a hundred and twenty language groups and has never had an ethnic war — the contrast with almost every neighbour is stark, and it is not an accident. Nyerere made Swahili the national language and the language of instruction, so that Tanzanians could talk to each other without using the coloniser's tongue or a rival's; he refused to let the parties organise on ethnic lines; and he set out the argument for it in writing, at length, in Ujamaa and the Arusha Declaration. Adult literacy went from around ten per cent to over seventy, and primary enrolment to near universal.
Abroad he mattered more than Tanzania's size. Dar es Salaam housed the liberation movements of Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa and the OAU's Liberation Committee, at heavy economic cost and under real military threat. He invaded Uganda in 1979 to remove Idi Amin, when the rest of the continent said sovereignty forbade it, and paid for the war himself.
In 1985 he resigned the presidency, alive, in good health and unbeaten, and went home to Butiama to farm. He later admitted publicly that the economic policy had failed. He died in 1999.
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