Pan-Africanism or Pragmatism: Lessons of the Tanganyika-Zanzibar Union

3. THE UNION

Chapter Three THE UNION THE CONTEXT: EAST AFRICAN UNITY Julius Nyerere was a great believer in African unity but as a pragmatic politician, he was also prepared for a step-by-step realisation of that unity. It did not matter to him if the process began by regional integration, whether political or economic. In this, he seriously clashed with Nkrumah who argued forcefully for continental political unity based on the ideology of Pan-Africanism. We shall return to this controversy in our Conclusion. It is sufficient for the present to record that during the time of independence of the mainland East African countries (1960–1963) and the revolution (1964) there were intense discussions and political controversies over the issue of East African Federation (EAF). The first meeting of the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) in Mwanza, Tanganyika, held in September 1958 came out with a ringing call against imperialism and colonialism. It was a militant stand of African nationalists and freedom movements. Among other things, PAFMECA committed itself to fight for and ‘establish in each territory, in East and Central Africa, a government of Africans by Africans on Pan-African lines’. This was essentially a call for independence and self-determination. It also pledged that ‘The movement shall fight white racialism and black chauvinism.’ It adopted a ‘Charter on Racial and Religious Discrimination’, which declared that human rights were based on the precepts of justice, equality and democracy not on race or culture. Recognising that no country was racially homogenous, it assured people of foreign origin residing in Africa that as long as they were 69 citizens and accepted the rule of the ‘Governments of the Majority’ and upheld the principles of ‘true parliamentary democracy, social justice and equality, they would enjoy all the rights and protection of a citizen’.1 The PAFMECA brought together the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) and Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP) resulting in the formation of the short-lived Zanzibar Freedom Committee.2 Both in PAFMECA and All Africa People’s Conferences held in Ghana and later Tunisia and Cairo, the ZNP, through Ali Muhsin and Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, took a militant Pan-African and anti-imperialist stand.3 But the Freedom Committee, as we saw in Chapter One, did not last long. After the break-up of the Committee, both the ASP and ZNP went down the road of narrow African nationalism and Zanzibari cultural nationalism. Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the nationalist movement in Tanganyika under Julius Nyerere, threw its lot unreservedly behind ASP, helped it materially and politically in election campaigns thus fuelling the anti-mainland sentiments of ZNP–ZPPP (Zanzibar and Pemba People’s Party) coalition who were haunted by the spectre of domination of mainlanders just as the ASP were haunted by the spectre of Arab domination. In the process, the ideals of Pan-Africanism to which all three parties (that is, ASP, ZNP and TANU) had pledged themselves were severely compromised. As Tanganyika was approaching independence, Nyerere who had always been in the forefront of African unity, circulated a paper at the second conference of Independent African States in June 1960, proposing an EAF of the four countries, namely, Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar. The proposal was accepted in principle at the second PAFMECA conference held at Mbale, Uganda, in October 1960. The question was how to bring it about, on which there seemed 70 Pan-Africanism or Pragmatism? 1 The ‘Freedom Charter of the Peoples of East and Central Africa’ is reproduced in Zanzibar Nationalist Party n.d. 70-74, Appendix C. For a detailed narration of PAFMECA and EAF, see Nye, Jr. 1966. 2 See supra pp. 29 - 32 3 See, ZNP op. cit. appendices for speeches. to have emerged differences. Nyerere strongly argued that the East African countries should form the Federation before their full independence . The opponents, mainly, it seems, the Ugandans, argued for forming the federation after the countries had achieved their independence. We need not be detained by the pro and contra arguments at this stage.4 Suffice it to say that all the four countries got their independence without having first established the Federation. Nonetheless, the mainland territories who got their independence before Zanzibar kept the federation project alive by setting up a Working Party to examine the proposal for an EAF. Meanwhile, as Zanzibar approached independence, the division in the ZNP between the Right headed...