For what has been happening over recent years is quite different. We have not been enlarging and modernizing our traditional family unit as much as abandoning it in favor of small-scale capitalist farming. Many of our most dynamic and energetic farmers, especially those with the most initiative and willingness to learn new techniques, have been branching out on their own as individuals. They have not been enlarging their farms by joining with others in a spirit of equality, but by employing labor. So we are getting the beginnings of the development of an agricultural laboring class on the one hand, and a wealthier employing class on the other. Fortunately, this development has not gone very far; we can arrest the trend without difficulty. But we must not make this change by persecuting the progressive farmers; after all, we have been encouraging them in the direction they have been going! Instead we must seek their cooperation, and integrate them into the new socialist agriculture by showing them that their best interests will be served by this development. For energy and initiative such as these farmers have displayed will be very important to our progress. We need these people.
This is something new in the history of political thought. The cooperative villages aimed at are called Ujamaa and Dr. Nyerere has called the whole new attempt to create a new society Socialism. In our view he is entitled to do so, and a proper respect for what the Tanzanian Government is doing demands that it be related to traditional and contemporary concepts of socialism.
First of all, no one today believes that what exists in Russia and Eastern Europe is, in any sense of the word, socialist; that is to say, a society having achieved and aiming at even more comprehensive stages of liberty, equality and fraternity, social relations higher than those achieved by the most advanced parliamentary democracy. That is socialism, or it is worse even than capitalist decay being then a deliberate and conscious fraud. Worse still, most unfortunately, certain of the new African states, anxious to rid themselves of the capitalist stigma, have invented a new category labeled African socialism. Worthy of repetition is the exposition of this African socialism by one newly independent state.
Adaptability
15. African Socialism must be flexible because the problems it will confront and the incomes and desires of the people will change over time, often quickly and substantially. A rigid, doctrinaire system will have little chance for survival. The system must:
(i) make progress towards ultimate objectives; and
(ii) solve more immediate problems with efficiency.
16. No matter how pressing immediate problems may be, progress toward ultimate objectives will be the major consideration. In particular, political equality, social justice and human dignity will not be sacrificed to achieve more material ends more quickly. Nor will these objectives be comprised today in the faint hope that by so doing they can be reinstated more fully in some unknown and far distant future.
Whenever was there a state, beginning with the state of Adam and Eve, that did not, could not, proclaim that it had in mind ultimate objectives while paying attention to immediate needs? That is not socialism. It is nonsense. It is not African. It is bureaucratic balderdash, to which we are now well accustomed in advanced as well as in underdeveloped fakers—a bold attempt by newcomers to dress the old reality in new clothes.
Far more important than this fakery is the recognition by President Kaunda of Zambia that the attempt merely to ape European ways, which has brought such wide fields of disaster to Africa, must not only be rejected but that there are new African paths to be explored. In his significantly named “Humanism in Zambia” President Kaunda says:
This is a key point, for if the distribution of wealth is not done properly, it might lead to the creation of classes in society and the much-valued humanist approach that is traditional and inherent in our African society would have suffered a final blow. If this happened the world as a whole, and African in particular, would be all the poorer for it. For you would then have the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Politically you would be creating room for opposing parties based on “the oppressed” and “the oppressor” concept which again would not be in keeping with the society described above; a society in which the Chief as an elected or appointed leader of the people held national property like land in trust for the people, and he was fully aware that he was responsible to them. He knew, too, that his continuing to be their head depended on his people’s will.
President Kaunda wants to show how important it is for Africans to break cleanly with the ideas of European well-wishers, that African progress depends on educating first a small number of Africans and then an increasing number who will gradually (without undue haste) educate more and more African natives to capitalist energies and the moderate mastery of parliamentary democracy. His rejection of this concept is total.
Now we must ask again what effects will persistently increasing levels of specialization have on our much valued traditional society in our country. This field of specialization drives people to resort to new groups in society. In other words, people with common interests group together, partly because of the community of their interests and partly as the means of promoting and protecting the welfare of their group. For example, a carpenter will find his own interests are not the same as those of the commercial farmer. The teacher finds that his interests differ from those of the mine worker. And so the whole list of different interests can be outlined. This point is, all this gives birth to a new disintegrative tendency. This, as can be seen, cuts right across the traditional society which has been described above as a mutual aid society which was an accepting and inclusive community.
Despite the low-level of economic development in African states, this new African conception of the future of Africa lays claim not only to a future, but also to deep roots in the past.
President Kaunda insists on this:
The traditional community was a mutual aid society. It was organized to satisfy the basic human needs of all its members and, therefore, individualism was discouraged. Most resources, such as land, might be communally owned and administered by chiefs and village headmen for the benefit of everyone. If, for example, a villager required a new hut, all the men would turn to forests and fetch poles to erect the frame and bring grass for thatching. The women might be responsible for making the mud-plaster for the walls and two or three of them would undoubtedly brew some beer so that all the workers would be refreshed after a hot but satisfying day’s work. In the same spirit, the able-bodied would accept responsibility for tending and harvesting the gardens of the sick and infirm.
This new recognition so characteristic first of Tanzania and now of Zambia does not turn its back on the modernization necessary in the modern world. Once more let the African President speak: from what has been said above, it is clear that we cannot ourselves expect to achieve once again the Man-centered society without very careful planning. And in this direction nothing is more important than institutions of learning.
Here the model is or will have to be that so clearly delineated by Dr. Nyerere. That is the essence of the matter. And the newly independent African states are in such crises that success in Tanzania and real strides forward in hard-pressed Zambia can initiate a new road for Africa—the mobilization of the African people to build an African society in an African way.
It would be a great mistake not to make clear how reality corresponds with—and indeed carries further—the highest stages so far reached by Western political thought. Lenin had no illusions about the Russian Revolution. He knew that socialism in the Marxist sense was impossible in the Russia he knew, and in 1923 was leaving behind. In the last days he increasingly drew attention to two important aspects and needs of the Russia which he insisted on calling Socialist Russia, despite the fact that the great majority of the Russian population consisted of illiterate peasants. The Soviet State, he insisted in those last days, was not new. Behind the Marxist terminology and proletarian window dressing was the same old Czarist state, not even a bourgeois state but a
“bureaucratic-serf state.” His proposals to alter these we need not go into. It is sufficient to know that Dr. Nyerere has seen through the reactionary, bureaucratic colonialist state which he inherited, and has gone further than anyone in the determination to break it up and make a new type of state.
Lenin also knew, none better, that the Soviet official had to leave high-flown theorizing and personally go to work among the backward Russian peasants. In perhaps the most moving of his many statements of what the people needed from the Marxist officials of the Government, he says:
Less argument about words! We still have too much of this sort of thing. More variety in practical experience and more study of this experience! Under certain conditions the exemplary organization of local work, even on a small scale, is of far greater national importance than many branches of the central state work. And these are precisely the conditions we are in at the present moment in regard to peasant farming in general, and in regard to the exchange of the surplus products of agriculture for the manufactures of industry in particular. Exemplary organization in this respect, even in a single volost, is of far greater national importance than the “exemplary” improvement of the central apparatus of any People’s Commissariat; for three and a half years to such an extent that it has managed to acquire a certain amount of harmful inertness; we cannot improve it quickly to any extent, we do not know how to do it. Assistance in the more radical improvement of it, a new flow of fresh forces, assistance in the successful struggle against bureaucracy, in the struggle to overcome this harmful inertness, must come from the localities, from the lower ranks, with the exemplary organization of a small “whole,” precisely a “whole,” i.e. not one farm, not one branch of economy, not one enterprise, but the sum total of economic exchange, even if only in a small locality.
Those of us who are doomed to remain on work at the center will continue the task of improving the apparatus and purging it of bureaucracy, even if in modest and immediately achievable dimensions. But the greatest assistance in this task is coming, and will come, from the localities.
Note in particular one of his last sentences: “We who are doomed.” Lenin wanted to go and work among the peasants. The great Marxist would have understood the profoundly socialist and human conception which has moved Dr. Nyerere to break to pieces the old system of education and substitute a genuinely socialist and humanist procedure for the youth of Tanzania. In a conversation with Dr. Nyerere, the present writer (having previously read his writings) drew his attention to this particular passage from Lenin and what Lenin was striving to teach as far back as 1923. The African leader said that he did not know it—he had arrived at his conclusion by himself and with his people.
It is sufficient to say that socialist thought has seen nothing like this since the death of Lenin in 1924, and its depth, range and the repercussions which flow from it, go far beyond the Africa which gave it birth. It can fertilize and reawaken the mortuary that is socialist theory and practice in the advanced countries. “Marxism is a Humanism” is the exact reverse of the truth. The African builders of a humanist society show that today all humanism finds itself in close harmony with the original conceptions and aims of Marxism.
52. A few words here were omitted from earlier editions. See Publisher’s Foreword.
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A History of Pan-African Revolt (The Charles H. Kerr Library) Page 15