Word: uhuru
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...saying has it that in Africa "there is no past, no future, only the present." For the time being, the present means ambition and anarchy, poverty and political intrigue. Upheaval will follow uhuru for some time to come. Slowly, gradually, economies will harden, a middle class will emerge, political activity will coalesce into forces that can be accommodated by democratic techniques. Then, and only then, will any African be safe...
...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...
...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 Shakespeare's Julius Caesar into Swahili, and although after Caesar's assassination Cassius shouts "Uhuru, uhuru!", Tanganyika's Julius was careful to avoid equating himself with Rome...
...seats in the Legislative Council, and a month later Nyerere was asked to form a government. By December 1961, the country was fully independent. A torch was lighted on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, and Julius Nyerere became the first East African leader to have achieved uhuru...
...good. But then-only 44 days after independence-Nyerere's well-tuned ear caught rumblings of dissent within TANU. With uhuru an accomplished fact, party discipline was crumbling. Says former Governor General Sir Richard Turnbull: "TANU was like a 100-horsepower engine which had been building up its power before independence, then had the load lifted." Nyerere feared that TANU might turn against him. So he resigned...