Reading history backwards with Mwalimu

Looking back on the events of the 1960s in the early 1970s, Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere at some point said in an interview that he usually looked back on earlier events in the light of what he had learned recently: “If there is something I don’t understand,” he told the interviewer, “I begin to read history backwards.”(Smith 1973: 191) Mwalimu Nyerere understood that history can tell us something about the present; that people learn from the past.

Mwalimu Nyerere was a teacher of biology and history at St Mary’s College in Tabora after completing his studies at Makerere in 1945, with a diploma in education. By this time, he had already acquainted himself with some philosophical works that sharpened ideas and thinking in general. He had already read even the essays of the British economist-philosopher, “John Stuart Mill, on representative government and on the subjugation of women” which had a great influence on him (ibid 47).[1] At Edinburgh University where he graduated in 1952, Mwalimu Nyerere had studied history, economics and philosophy.

Therefore, Mwalimu Nyerere understood very well that “although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it relives different aspects of the past" (Hill 1978: 15). It was within the spirit which was succinctly summarized by Michael Banton (1977: 3): “…people interpret their own time in the light of their beliefs about the past, and if they misunderstand the past they cannot properly understand the present. In human affairs there is a continuous interrelation between the present and the past….”

ON THE NECESSITY OF HISTORY

If history is important, the basic questions that befuddles one when examining the present are: How do we stand in regard to the past? What are the relations between the past, present and future? What have we actually learnt from the past experience of attempts to build a free and egalitarian society, which is self-reliant? Does the past still stand as a model for the present and the future?

Is there anything like wisdom that was represented by Mwalimu Nyerere, which can be considered to be part of a collective memory of how things were and should be done and therefore ought to be done? In sum what have we learnt from the past in the course of adopting the neo-liberal policies since late 1980s apart from feeling proud or celebrating some arbitrary choice of landmarks such as “unity and togetherness” or what we consider to be the “good” heritage left by the Father of the Nation?

Obviously, although the present is an offshoot of the past, it stands quite far apart from it. It was the problems of development and equity that preoccupied Nyerere throughout his life. The recognition that the country’s majority were rural dwellers made him concentrate on rural development – a term almost unheard of in contemporary political and economic discourse. As a leader, he had respect for Spartan living that took frugality seriously and consciously because he stood for the defence of the poor and the marginalized.

In his thinking then, corruption was one of the biggest dangers at the top. He considered it to be “the silent scramble for Africa. Make yourself rich as quickly as possible!” This was not desirable: “But the big scramble for personal wealth in Africa is not going to help. There is not enough wealth on this continent. It will all be at the top, and the people will be left with nothing.” (Smith op cit: 22)

The 1960s and early 1970s were years of high enthusiasm, optimism, hopes and dreams of a bright future society devoid of all forms of arbitrariness, domination, exploitation, oppression, etc; unlike in the contemporary times when we are invited, day in day out, to celebrate the present as the best of all possible worlds. Many of the concepts, in circulation then, which expressed the relations of inequality between the Mammonites[2] and Lazaruses[3] of this world and rebellions against such relations, are no longer chic in contemporary times. Most of us shirk from using them for fear of being labelled politically incorrect or at worst, mavericks and old-fashioned or dinosaurs.[4] In those times, statements such as the following, made by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere to the Maryknoll Sisters in New York on 10th October 1970, were simple and straightforward:

Poverty is not the real problem of the modern world. For we have the knowledge and resources which would enable us to overcome poverty. The real problem—the thing which creates misery, wars and hatred among men—is the division of mankind into rich and poor.

We can see this division at two levels. Within nation states there are a few individuals who have great wealth and whose wealth gives them great power; but the vast majority of the people suffer every degree of poverty and deprivation….

And looking at the world as a collection of nation states, we see the same pattern repeated. There are a few wealthy nations which dominate the whole world economically, and therefore politically; and a mass of smaller and poor nations whose destiny, it appears, is to be dominated. (Nyerere 1974: 82)

Such erudition and elucidation! Contemporary ‘conceptualisation’ of poverty, its history, causes and remedies, is done imprudently, lacking organic links with the accumulated knowledge and experiences of our societies. People from Iringa have an adage which goes: “Ikitele ikilovela sa kisunga kikavaandikilwa’’ – “An old pot may be used again to keep milk.” This ancient wisdom has been completely buried today!

The people’s enemies then were conceptualised in terms of poverty, disease and ignorance, resulting from historically evolved forms of inequalities, domination and exploitation. Then it was understood that the poor were poor because they were exploited, powerless, dominated, persecuted and marginalized, while the rich were rich because they lived off the sweat of others! That is, human constructed social economic relations induced poverty for majority of the people, while enriching a few.

In practice during that period, the assault on poverty was premised on the belief of possibilities of poverty eradication.[5] It was believed that democracy as a form of practice was more or less linked to the whole question of poverty eradication and access and control of productive resources that enable people’s self-reproduction socially as well as to ensure more equal and equitable social development, rather than simply the existence of a multiparty system and their competition for manning state power.

In those years, the contemporary mythology of what has become trendy now – globalization, was explained in terms of a world system of capitalist relations, which had become more interlinked than ever before as a result of the communication and technological revolutions. But for Mwalimu Nyerere and those who stood for emancipation modes of politics nationally and continentally, this was resulting into an intensification of the exploitative relations; and, rather than the emergence of one world the process was resulting into the fragmentation of the world nationally and internationally between the poor and the rich – the former being the majority and the latter the minority. In his words:

The world is one in technological terms. Men have looked down on the Earth and seen its unity. In jet planes I can travel from Tanzania to New York in a matter of hours. Radio waves enable us to talk to each other – either in love or abuse – without more than a few seconds elapsing between our speech and the hearing of it. Goods are made which include materials and skills from all over the world – and are then put in sale thousands of miles from their place of manufacture.

Yet at the same time as interdependence of man is increased through advance of technology, the divisions between men also increase at an ever increasing rate…So the world is not one. Its people are more divided now, and also more conscious of their divisions, than they have ever been. They are divided between those who are satiated and those whoa re hungry. They are divided between those with power and those without power. They are divided between those who dominate and those who are dominated; between those who exploit and those who are exploited... (Nyerere op cit 86-7)

For him, “Free enterprise” between dwarfs and giants was considered to be an illusion. “Injustice and peace are in the long run incompatible; stability in a changing world must mean ordered change towards justice, not mechanical respect for the status quo.” (ibid: 84) In 1977, he was to explain to the Press in Atlanta (USA) that, what was needed to overcome poverty was “a system of trade which does not have a built-in mechanism, which transfers wealth from the poor to the rich. This is what happens now. At present, there is a built-in mechanism which transfers wealth from the poor to the rich. We want this changed.” (Nyerere 1978: 56)

Rather than “governance” (that is to govern or rule and not to lead), as it is fashionable now, in those times, the prerequisite for development was people, land, good policies and good leadership (Nyerere 1968 op cit: 243). Mwalimu Nyerere told the Maryknoll Sisters that development had to be accompanied by equitable distribution of wealth. It was not “simply an increase in the national income figures of the poor countries, nor listing of the huge increases in the production of this or that industry,” new roads, factories, farms etc – which were quite essential: these were not enough in themselves.

The economic growth must be of such a kind, and so organized, that it benefits the nations and the peoples who are now suffering from poverty. This means that social and political development must go alongside economic development – or even precede it. For unless society is so organized that the people control their own economies and their own economic activity, then economic growth will result into increased injustice because it will lead to inequality both nationally and internationally...Political independence is meaningless if a nation does not control the means by which its citizens can earn their living. (ibid: 88)

For Mwalimu Nyerere, societies were supposed to be organized in such a way that they served “social justice in what has been called the ‘revolution of rising expectations.’”

In the pre-liberalization years, the government used to commit its resources in the service of ordinary working people. In practice, the government used to collect tax for purposes of public provision of social and developmental services in a bid to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor and fight against poverty, disease and ignorance. Thus, by 1982, there were schools in virtually all villages in the country and all children were going to school through universal primary education program – whether poor or rich on public financing.

More significant was the fact that more than 95 percent of adults could read and write due to literacy campaigns that had been conducted over the years. Even medical services were being provided through public financing. There were no landless rural dwellers either, so to speak of. These were not “free services” as it is purported by the ideologues of the current dispensation who champion the virtues of private provisioning of such services: these were paid for collectively through taxation. It is such policies that were the really foundation of Tanzania’s unity, peace and togetherness.

The post-independence government took over the provision of education, health and other social and economic services. The post-independence state became the sphere of moral “universalism”; with a development model whose tendency was towards economic development and social welfare policies. It was money from taxation that paid for the services – social and developmental. It was the poor who were being protected and not the rich and the powerful (the ‘investors’) as it is contemporarily done.

As Mwalimu Nyerere pointed out to the Press in Atlanta (USA) again in 1977, “You can’t end poverty through charity. Within a single nation, you don’t end poverty through charity. You get people to work, you allow them to work, you get jobs for them, you get them trained and they work…. You tax people…” he illustrated. “Even in this country where I think the gap between the rich and the poor is very large,” he further observed “you still tax the rich more in order that you may get money…. But I’m saying the theory is accepted, that the rich are taxed in order that you may try to reduce the gap between the poor and the rich. They are taxed. They are not asked to pay voluntarily.” (Nyerere 1978 op cit: 55-6)

Within the attempts to build an egalitarian society, Mwalimu Nyerere then championed the position that Tanzania’s identity was Africa. In the early 1970s, when asked about what sort of a country he expected Tanzania to be in 20 years time, he answered: “I hope there won’t be a Tanzania. If there is not an Africa, then at least I hope there will be an East Africa. But if we have failed to use African nationalism; if we have failed to take another step toward Pan-Africanism during that period; we should at least have a Tanzania that is committed to Pan-Africanism itself.” He summed up: “And by that time we should have a society of which the people are very proud; we should really have built a classless society. So, if there should still be a Tanzania twenty years from now, I hope it will be a classless society very committed to an African goal.” (Smith op cit: 202-3)

Such a simple clarity is almost lacking contemporarily! In current times, a new mode of logic is hammered into our heads: “Mtaji wa maskini nguvu zake mwenyewe” (the poor person’s capital is his/her own efforts or, put in other words, the poor are poor because they are work-shy, and thus a problem for the rest of the society, since they cannot budget, save and invest). In other words, the problem with the poor is, they have low intelligence and will always be with us: thus the talk about poverty alleviation instead of eradication, as it was understood then. The underlying assumption is that there are individualist solutions to problem of poverty, couched in terms of competence, rational calculations and efficiency, within which there are winners and losers – nationally, regionally or internationally.

Within this context, dazzling statistics about the “progress of the country”, given the unravelled investment rates – foreign and local – in commerce, trading, import and export trade, mining, tourism, fishery, natural resources, etc. are eloquently quoted to discredit some of the past experiences that sought to promote egalitarian social relations. In sum, economic growth has taken precedence over everything else, the degeneration of the population and the misery of the working people, as a result of exploitation, slave wages, exploitative terms of trade of rural produce, alienation of land, expropriation of natural and mineral resources, which have increased over the years notwithstanding.

It is claimed that it is economics and not politics, which determine everything else in the contemporary world, since the “Cold War” is over, and the world has become one. Thus even Pan-Africanism is dead: fellow Africans from other countries are considered foreigners or some of those who have been living in the country for many years are declared non-citizens!

Today, we are involved in the celebration of the present, an era in which production is no longer the determining aspect of social life, but the markets and stock exchanges. It is an era when it is said it is possible for the state to withdraw from social provisioning since the market can fill the vacuum created by its withdrawal. To the extent that markets can create conditions for development and human welfare, the state in its current form can only confine itself to management of law and order.

In this regard, it no longer requires social policies for purposes of legitimating itself, as it was previously. Rather than the state playing statistics, it is now the upper class doing so, while the middle class play the stock market and the lower classes await for fortunes from bingo and beauty contests: the best person wins!

These aspects of the past are worth an examination in their own right. What we require urgently are historical forms of knowledge, which can arm Tanzanians and Africans in general to intervene in the present circumstances which are marginalizing the majority of the people on an ever increasing scale. We are living in a period marked by the failure of most of us to think or even conceptualize about the historical possibilities of social transformations in terms of how to achieve/reach a stage of society where a man or a woman’s humanity is not contested. The human desire to live a life devoid of all forms of arbitrariness—whether class, gender, race, communal exclusivity, etc., is no longer problematized and it is taken for granted. Many of us have given up all struggles for search of alternative policy solutions and truths, which would lead to a construction of humane communities.

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BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* The late Seithy Chachage was a professor of Sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam.
* This article is an extract from the introduction to Chachage's forthcoming book entitled "Against Historical Amnesia and Collective Imbecility: Essays on Tanzania’s Contemporary Transformations”.
* This article will be a contributing chapter to a forthcoming Pambazuka Press book entitled [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES
[1] The essay, ‘The Subjection of Women’, first published in 1869 under J.S. Mill’s name was actually written by his wife, Harriet Taylor, given the circumstances under which women found themselves when it came to publishing unconventional ideas.
[2] False gods of riches. From the false God of riches and avarice, Mammon. Riches regarded as an object of worship and greedy pursuit; wealth as an evil, more or less personified. In Mathew vi.24 it is stated: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”
[3] The diseased beggar in Jesus’ parable of the rich man and the beggar: Luke 19-31.
[4] Historically, dinosaurs may be extinct, but in the science fiction fables such as the movie, “The Jurassic Park”, these come back with a vengeance! It may be a fable, but the truth is usually, the ghosts of the past haunt the minds of the living like a nightmare, hence such fables.
[5] Earlier on in February 1967, Nyerere had declared in a combative and militant language that “TANU is in a war against poverty and oppression in our country; this struggle is aimed at moving the people of Tanzania (and the people of Africa as whole) from a state of poverty to a state of prosperity.” Then followed the famous scintillating words which were an inspiration in those days: “We have been oppressed a great deal, we have been exploited a great deal and we have been disregarded a great deal. It is our weakness that has led us to our being oppressed, exploited and disregarded. Now we want a revolution—a revolution which brings to an end our weakness, so that we are never exploited, oppressed, or humiliated.” (Nyerere 1968: 235)

REFERENCES
Banton, Michael (1977): The Idea of Race, Tavistock Publications, London.
Hill, Christopher (1978): The World Turned Upside Down, Penguin, Ayres Bury.
ILO, Towards Self-Reliance in Tanzania, Addis Ababa, 1978
Nyerere, Julius K. (1968): Freedom and Socialism, Oxford University Press, Nairobi.
Nyerere, Julius K (1973): Freedom and Development, Oxford University Press, Dar es Salaam
Nyerere, Julius K. (1974): Man and Development, Oxford University Press, Nairobi.
Smith, William E. (1973): Nyerere of Tanzania, TransAfrica Publishers Ltd, Nairobi.