Chambi Chachage

The name of Lumumba looms large in Tanzania as it does elsewhere in Africa. Or at least it used to. It kept popping up when I was coming to age many years after his untimely death in 1961.

International diplomacy can indeed be juicy. On Wednesday Egypt kickstarted what it pragmatically calls the Nile Basin Tournament. Interestingly, this tournament will be a yearly one.

Dear Professor Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka,

Greeting from the slums of Dar es Salaam!

It is with a sigh of relief that I key this public letter. As publicly anticipated, you are now our popular minister for lands, housing and human settlement development. Congratulations!

It has been five years since I was introduced to Pambazuka News. Back then it was just one of those newsletters your boss tells you to read and brief him about. Things have changed.

This is a sequel to my article on ‘Election campaigns and the politics of performance’. Therein we looked at the power of performance. Now we look at the power of psychology and personality.
 


I am not a fan of election campaigns. I don’t like attending or analysing them. To me leaders emerge, they don’t sell themselves in the market place.

Today, ironically a day after Tanzania received an award for ‘better achievements in implementing the Millennium Development Goal on education’,[1] I attended the launch of Uwezo’s report 'Are Our Children Learning? Annual Learning Assessment Report - Tanzania 2010'.

'To us, Africa with its islands is just one Africa. We reject the ideas of any kind of partition.

This is a synopsis of a larger project of sketching the biographical journey of a class constituting the African elites. It is a self-imposed attempt to make sense of ‘who is who’ in Tanzania – for what and for whom? In other words, it is about how and why new elites (re)shape our society.

I felt my African fingers itch when I read Ayub Rioba and Peter Muthamia’s recent articles. Yes, ‘African fingers’, for that is how far one can go in defining things African! Well, let me explain.