Word: africanization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Victim to Dry Rot. Another source of African unrest has been the extravagance and economic naivete of some of its new leaders. The Brazzaville Congo's Abbe Fulbert Youlou, a Roman Catholic priest turned President, ordered mauve cassocks from Dior, quaffed champagne and built himself a luxury hotel. Meanwhile, his country's timber-based economy fell victim to dry rot. Crowds of New Class labor union members, with the aid of the army, politically defrocked him last August. A similar fate befell Dahomey's President Hubert Maga, who built himself a $3,000,000 palace and shrugged...
...austerity can be just as dangerous. No West African leader was more reluctant to part with a franc than Togo's strapping Sylvanus Olympio. Then one night he woke to find his house aswarm with mutinous soldiers. Next morning he was found dead near the U.S. embassy, with lizards scuttling near his body. The soldier who shot him said he had not meant to kill. It was just that the troops wanted a bigger army...
Suited for Freedom. Tanganyika came to independence in 1961 no better off economically than any other African nation. Though huge (362,688 sq. mi.) and harshly beautiful, the country was not wealthy. Average income was $55 a year, and fully half of its exports were in three crops: sisal, cotton and coffee. Tanganyika's mineral wealth was scanty, consisting of some gold and the Williamson diamond mine near Lake Victoria in the north. With its game-thick Serengeti Plains aswarm with trophy heads, and soaring Mount Kilimanjaro to attract all the Hemingway buffs, it had tourist potential...
...Tanganyika had three things working for it that made the country seem ideally suited for uhuru. Of its 10,000,000 population, 98% is African. And although the people are divided into 120 separate tribes, the majority are of Bantu stock, and all share the Swahili lingua franca. Thus, unlike neighboring Kenya and Uganda, Tanganyika has no basic conflicts between rival tribes or kingdoms, nor had it a large white-settler population to fight against independence and give rise to black Mau Mau-type terrorism. What whites there were mostly stuck to the cool, green coffee-and-banana highlands...
...from Tribalism. These two preconditions needed a third, however, to make Tanganyika a successful independent state. That ingredient-leadership-is provided by Julius Nyerere. A slender, soft-eyed man with a Chaplinesque mustache, Nyerere is the antithesis of most African leaders. Where others affect high-flown nicknames like "Redeemer" (Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah) or "Lion of Malawi" (Nyasa-land's Kamuzu Banda), Nyerere is content to be known as Mwalimu-Swahili for teacher. Where other leaders use their high-powered, government-owned radios for propaganda messages, Nyerere uses his to broadcast casual eco nomic lessons. Recently he translated...