The Africans (14 page)

What had Kenyatta done differently than other African presidents? Almost everything.

While Zaire’s Mobutu was chasing away the whites, expropriating their plantations and businesses, Kenyatta had been encouraging Kenya’s whites to stay because they had the technical and managerial skills that Africans had not yet learned. The result was that Kenya operates far more efficiently than most African countries, and foreign investment and tourists from the West have poured into the country, providing great economic stimulus. While Zambia’s Kuanda was exploiting his mineral wealth (copper) and forgetting about other sectors of the economy, Kenyatta knew that Africa’s future was on the farms and gave top priority to agricultural development. While Uganda’s Amin was spending 50 percent of his budget on the military—not a single school or hospital was built in Uganda during Amin’s eight years in power—Kenyatta devoted less than 7 percent of his financial resources to defense, leaving sufficient funds to construct scores of classrooms and health clinics. While Tanzania’s Nyerere pursued socialistic ideals, nationalizing the economy and curtailing all individual economic incentives, Kenyatta followed a capitalistic course in which those with initiative received monetary rewards. Tanzania’s production decreased; Kenya’s increased.

The interesting aspect of all this is that Kenya is not a rich country. It has no significant mineral reserves, and less than 20 percent
of its land is suitable for farming. But Kenyatta evaluated what assets Kenya had and then set out to make the most of them. Almost any country in Africa could have done at least as well as Kenya if it had had a Jomo Kenyatta.

Perhaps nowhere in the world do individual countries mirror the character of their presidents as much as in Africa. What a country is often depends solely on who the president is. A new man takes over and the country may move in an entirely different direction. Although heads of state still impose their view of the world on their people, presidential ideologies are less in fashion these days, having been moved aside by men of more pragmatic persuasions. The theorists proved themselves unable to adapt to unexpected pressures when their ideals of what Africa should be were challenged by the realities of what it had become. Tanzania, on Kenya’s southern border, offers a striking illustration.
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In foreign capitals they call President Julius Nyerere “the conscience of black Africa.” At home in Dar es Salaam he is known simply as Mwalimu, the Swahili word for “teacher.” Scholars and statesmen from both East and West seek his advice; Moscow and Washington analyze his every word. For more than twenty years Nyerere has commanded a position of respect unique among African heads of state. His blueprint for socialism is a textbook model of Third World development. His salary as president is only $6,000 a year and on state visits he often travels in the economy section of commercial airlines. He was educated at Makerere University in Uganda and Edinburgh University in Scotland, and has translated
Julius Caesar
and
The Merchant of Venice
into Swahili. He gives no special favors to members of his own tribe, the Zanaki,
^†
and his socialist dreams are tempered by the harsh realities of leading one of the world’s twelve poorest countries.

“Let others go to the moon,” he has said. “We must work to feed ourselves.”

Certainly no one could fault the society Nyerere wanted to create. Tanzania, he said, would be a country without an army. Foreign
policy would be based on neutrality in the Cold War and on promoting African unity, particularly among neighbors. The economy would be founded on agriculture, and domestic affairs would center on fighting “the three enemies: poverty, ignorance and disease.” The gap between rich and poor would be narrowed, and to prove his point in 1966, he slashed all middle- and high-level government salaries, including his own. As his foreign partners, he brought in the Chinese and they built a gleaming $400-million railroad from the Dar es Salaam port to the copper fields of Zambia. Over and over, he told his people they must be self-reliant; begging missions abroad, he said, would lessen Tanzania’s respect in the world community. Tanzania would be a country where every man walked proud, where no man rose too far above the crowd.

At his modest beach front home, built with the help of a bank loan, he entertains guests on the veranda without the slightest touch of pomp. Flies buzz about and servants in shabby jackets serve warm orange soda. Nyerere kicks off his sandals and begins his discourse on Africa. His tone is teasing and his conversation is broken with frequent giggles and jokes. He makes his point gently, directly, in flawless English. Few visitors leave his presence without being spellbound.

“The way in which President Nyerere has dominated African affairs by the sheer power of his intellect and leadership is nothing short of miraculous,” the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, once said. “His domination is something you would expect from the leader of a nation of great wealth or military strength. Tanzania has neither.”

Nyerere was born in 1920, the son of a Zanaki chief and his eighteenth wife, Mugaya. He was an inquisitive, bright youngster, one of the few in his village of Butiama to attend school. He scored high grades and at the Government Secondary School in Tabora was appointed a prefect. He soon discovered that a prefect’s privileges included double rations. He agitated against such inequalities and they were dropped.

After receiving a degree in education at Makerere University in Uganda, he taught history and biology in Tanganyika until 1949; then, with the help of missionary Catholic priests, he obtained a scholarship to Edinburgh, where he studied British history, English, moral philosophy, political economy, social anthropology, constitutional law and economic history. There, he has said, his political philosophy evolved.

Back in Tanganyika in 1952 with a master’s degree, he resumed teaching. He also became active in political affairs, remodeling an African social organization into a political association known as the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and laying the foundation for independence, which came peacefully on December 9, 1961. One month later he startled everyone by resigning as premier to concentrate on rebuilding TANU for the postcolonial struggle. He also wanted to prepare for the 1962 elections—which were to earn him 97 percent of the votes and the presidency of Tanganyika.

As impeccable as his credentials were, as graced with charm, intellect and humor as he is, Nyerere has one glaring weakness: he does not always practice what he preaches. And what he does practice has brought Tanzania few visible benefits. His 17 million people have adhered to his socialistic doctrine for two decades and at the end of the rainbow have found only an empty pot. Though Nyerere’s image has remained remarkably untarnished, there now seems sufficient reason to question the wisdom of his motives. Consider:

No other African president has ever overthrown a neighboring country’s government. Nyerere has helped topple three: the Comoros in 1975, the Seychelles in 1977 and Uganda in 1979. He used 60,000 troops to rid Africa of Uganda’s Amin, but his army of liberation quickly turned into an army of occupation, looting and killing. Nyerere, in an attempt to make sure that the puppet government in Kampala adopted a socialist course, became the de facto president of Uganda. When Amin’s two successors began to act independently, Nyerere arranged for their removal from office and had them put under lock and key.

Although Nyerere has been quick to condemn tyranny in black- as well as white-ruled Africa—he refused, for instance, to attend an African summit in Uganda in 1975 because Idi Amin was its host—Nyerere held until 1979 more political prisoners than South Africa. (He granted amnesty to 6,400 prisoners that year, and freed another 4,436 in 1980.) Nyerere tolerates no dissent and long ago brought the newspapers under government control and closed all avenues of opposition and free expression. His own re-election every few years is something of a sham: he won 99 percent of the “yes” votes in 1970, 93 percent in both 1975 and 1980. The electorate can only vote for or against Nyerere, who is the only presidential candidate.

Nyerere complains (quite correctly) that the West uses foreign aid as a lever for influence, but he accepts more of it than any president
in black Africa. In 1980 alone, Tanzania received $600 million in grants and low-interest loans from the West and because Nyerere and Tanzania are what Western liberals think Africa should be all about—nonaligned, socialistic, poor, idealistic—donors from Australia to Geneva and Washington beat a path to Dar es Salaam with fistfuls of money.

Despite the injection of aid, few countries in Africa have made such modest progress in the independence era. Agricultural production is dropping, factories are limping along at 40 percent capacity, Dar es Salaam grows shabbier by the day, a listlessness engulfs the land and the people are perhaps the most dispirited and unmotivated on the entire continent.

In overstaffed government offices, drowsy secretaries rouse themselves only long enough to mumble, “Gone out,” when a visitor enters, meaning that the boss has already come and gone for the day, even if it is not yet 10:30
A.M
. In the Israeli-built Kilimanjaro Hotel the phone may ring twenty or thirty times before the operator bothers to answer it, and the last time I bought a plane ticket at the airport in Dar es Salaam, the clerk behind the desk asked me to fill in the coupon myself. He would return after his tea break, he said, to collect my money.

One Tanzanian student tells about attending an all-African party at a university in the United States. The room was packed with laughing students, dancing, drinking beer and trading stories from home. The Tanzanian looked around the room for a moment and headed directly for two young men, sitting morosely and alone in a corner. “As soon as I saw them there with those long faces I knew they were Tanzanians,” he said.

At independence in 1961 Nyerere, to be sure, did inherit a country that was going nowhere in a hurry. Unlike neighboring Kenya, it had not been a “favored” British colony, and London had devoted little attention to its development. There were no significant resources and only one major export crop, sisal. University graduates numbered 120. Nyerere’s eventual response, in January 1967, was to issue the Arusha Declaration, a Chinese-style masterplan for socialism. The economy was nationalized, as was all rental property valued at more than $14,000. Taxes were increased to redistribute individual wealth. Hundreds of
ujamaa
(the Swahili word for “familyhood”) communal villages were established, populated in many cases by people who had been trucked by soldiers out of cities
in military convoys. And Nyerere began spreading his gospel: work hard, forget personal gain, grow more. Then there will be a Tanzania for all Tanzanians.