God of Hunger

by John Coutouvidis

  What went wrong? In 1967, when Nyerere set out his vision in the Arusha Declaration, he advocated a type of socialism, allegedly African in origin. It was a notion based on collectivized agriculture which would provide surpluses for industrialization, fuelled also by a programme set to achieve universal literacy. The key element was ‘villagisation’ which in practice meant that over two million people were forced into collective farming; into collective living. Now, you may ask how did this differ from life in any rural community prior to the great experiment? Mainly in the fact that the village changed from being a homogenous entity in clan-tribal terms into something quite different through tribal mixing.

  Moreover, in creating an economy of self reliance, Tanzania amassed huge debts.

  Economically untenable, the country was saved from mass starvation mainly by well meaning Scandinavia which poured in huge amounts of cash to keep the project afloat. And China stepped in with capital projects such as the Tanzam railway, linking Dar-es-Salaam to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia.

  In round figures one third of Tanzania’s economy was supplied by foreign aid. Remedy for a coup you may think?

  Yes. Early on Nyerere survived an attempt to oust him by a mutinous detachment of the Army, still largely the KAR in spirit. He fled Dar-es-Salaam for protection by the eminence grise of Tanganyika politics, a man called Kokopoulos about whom I know little. But I hope to remedy this in the history which I hope soon to complete.’

  He looked at his audience hoping to register that fact; the marketing of academic texts was notoriously difficult, so why not give his intended book it a plug?

  ‘ … Nyerere not only survived, but attained a devoted following amongst his people. Because of him, there was free schooling, virtually free medicine ; like the NHS in the UK, free at the point of delivery but all paid for by taxpayers; in Tanzania’s case, mainly by Nordic ones.

  Despite this vital assistance, Tanzania became poverty-stricken. The mainly white owned estates were confiscated and became collectivized wastelands. What was not communally owned was offered in patches for the millions of unemployed and dispossessed to scratch out a meagre existence.

  Yet Nyerere stayed in power until 1985 when he did the unique thing in Africa; he retired from politics.

  So how should we rate him? Is there a redeeming feature that sets him apart from the other Gods of Hunger? ….

  What is undeniably his greatest achievement is that Nyerere prevented tribal conflict; all Tanzanians speak the same language and because of the ethnic mixing implied in policies hatched and announced in Arusha, which also included eradicating the political power of tribal chiefs, the reply to the question, ‘Who are you?’ put to any Tanzanian, perhaps with the exception of the mountain tribes of Meru and Kilimanjaro, is almost always, ‘I am Tanzanian’.

  This question of identity, perhaps the most vital in the political history of any state, and I am thinking here as much of Weimar Germany as of Rwanda and Burundi, is answered well in Tanzania and will surely save the nation from sliding into bloody chaos.

  If that is his greatest gift to it, the nation, it was bought at the cost of millions of blighted lives.

  What was his chief weakness?

  Like all Big Men he over-played his hand.

  The monolithic architecture of his ideas ran away with him. The construction of his revolution ground the people into dust. He thought of humanity in terms of his own wishes, in the image of an historic self. He lived in a world of his own. He forgot how to gauge others.

  True democracy, which allows a plurality of opinions and views and remedies, was never practiced in Tanzania which was born a one party state and remains a one party state. As an aside, I have discovered that it was proposed to call it Tanunya; after TANU; an honest name for a one party state; a state of that party … but back to my Pantheon.

  You maybe surprised to find included in this mausoleum of my construction Milton Obote alongside Idi Amin. …

  Obote was installed in power by Nyerere who, in power, became a poor judge of human nature: Obote proved to be more dreadful than the last king of Scotland.’

  (Laughter.)

  The Tanzanian Army invaded Uganda to depose the mad dictator. …

  On the face of it, this was a triumph beyond all expectation. But also a tragedy in its singularity: It was a unique event born of a unique individual, never again born. …

  His mission on earth proved a failure. And, short of a second coming it could never, would never, be repeated. …

  The Teacher’s lesson was simply too simplistic, too unrealistic, too unworldly. … Had he unleashed wholesale pillage in Uganda the campaign would have made more sense to his materially deprived people. …. But he was in spirit and in praxis a saintly man who refused to bow to Mammon and expected the same of his nation.

  ‘So where do we place Nyerere?

  I wish to do him justice and to honour the memory of this decent and honest individual.

  For saving his country, by personal example, from Africa’s endemic problems of obscene corruption. And from the ever present threat of ethnic violence. …. For these two reasons I would not propose him for my pantheon of Gods of Hunger.

  Should I do so for impoverishing his nation or for blighting the lives of an entire generation or for sustaining a one party system and thus ignoring dissenting opinion?

  No, because all the other gods were more than autocrats. They were heartless dictators and cold blooded murderers at that.

  To my knowledge no one went, by order of Julius Nyerere, to certain death, be it by impossibly hard labour in lagier or in concentration camps or by Dornier or famine by design or by plunder or Third Brigade or through torture by state security.

  In comparison to the others, permanently set in my pantheon, I would say that Mwalimu, the Teacher should rest alone. In peace.

  One last point: should he be canonized? I have learnt that moves are afoot at the United Nations to confer on him the title ‘World hero of Social justice.’ St. Julius? Stranger measures have been mooted at the General Assembly!’

  *

  KK was startled at what he had heard said of the friend by whose favours he had survived the rigours of Ujamaa and by whose policies he became wealthy.

 

  Before independence, KK spent much energy on a battle of wills with the paramount chief of the Dongo who opposed KK’s wish wanted to divert the headwaters of the Karumeru River to irrigate his new farm.

  He lost the case in court. And lost access to the water when he tried several times to divert it illicitly in channels blasted through the rock by dynamite because he never could lay the last charge. The Dongo guarded the remaining granite barrier by day and by night. The chief prevailed. But only until the earliest days of Uhuru: one of the Teacher’s first acts, almost straight after independence in 1961, was to abolish the role of tribal chiefs and village headmen and elders; KK had successfully made the case for removing the chief agents of reaction; ‘the enemies of progress’.

  *

  In London Daudi read things differently. He identified himself with members of that uniquely nineteenth century Russian phenomenon, the disaffected intellectual; he came to identify himself as a member of the Russian intelligentsia which felt at once alienated from the ruling elite and isolated from the rest of society with which it so ardently wanted communion.

  The trouble was that he, like the intelligentsia in Russia, had no coherent plan of action. He, like they, wanted to change society at home. But was it to be through gradual reform or swift counter-revolution? And, were these changes to be Western in orientation, or were they to be directed towards the realization of a liberal form of political and economic Africanisation?

  The beginnings of an answer to his question came in Isaiah Berlin’s lecture, Fathers and Children:

  "Critical turning-points in history are reached when a form of life and its institutions cramp and obstruct the most vigorous productive forces alive
in a society - economic, social, artistic, intellectual - and it is worn out in resisting them. Against such a social order, men and groups of very different tempers and classes and conditions unite. There is an upheaval - a revolution - which, at times, achieves a limited success. It reaches a point at which some of the demands or interests of its original promoters are satisfied to an extent which makes further fighting on their part unprofitable. They stop, or struggle uncertainly. The alliance disintegrates. The most passionate and single-minded, especially among those whose purposes or ideals are furthest from fulfilment, wish to press on. To stop half-way seems to them a betrayal. The sated groups, or the less visionary, or those who fear that the old yoke may be followed by an even more oppressive one, tend to hang back. They find themselves assailed on two sides. The conservatives look on them as, at best, knock-kneed supporters, at worst as deserters and traitors. The radicals look on them as pusillanimous allies, more often as diversionists and renegades. Men of this sort need a good deal of courage to resist magnetization by either polar force and to urge moderation in a disturbed situation. Among them are those who see, and cannot help seeing, many sides of a case, as well as those who perceive that a humane cause promoted by means that are too ruthless is in danger of turning into its opposite, liberty into oppression in the name of liberty, equality into a new, self-perpetuating oligarchy to defend equality, justice into crushing of all forms of nonconformity, love of men into hatred of those who oppose brutal methods of achieving it. The middle ground is a notoriously exposed, dangerous, and ungrateful position.’

  Daudi was well aware that he occupied that position and, in that position, what was it he wanted to do for Africa?

 

  It was Marisha who asked him the question. And suggested an answer.

  ‘Read what I have recently completed on Poland. It may be a guide. Poland between the wars is, in my view, analogous to East African today; I think that your new hero Museveni is Uganda’s Pilsudski; perhaps even East Africa’s Pilsudski as East Africa seems to me very Polish.

  The statement interested Daudi very much. He had done work on Pilsudski when lecturing on the decline of liberal democracy in Europe between the wars. Yet the line of enquiry suggested to him by Marisha had not, then, crossed his mind.

  He took her advice and read, through the night, the papers on her desk:

  ‘The new Poland was a classic example of underdevelopment; her social and economic structure was predominantly rural. Of 27.2 million inhabitants, three-quarters lived in the countryside and 63.8 per cent derived there livelihood from the soil. The creation of a surplus in agricultural products for the purpose of trade, income from which could pay for capital investment in the process of modernization, was hampered by several factors. Fecundity (15.3 births per 1,000 inhabitants), illiteracy (32.7 per cent) and inefficient farming practices created limitations which were compounded by runaway inflation. This was itself partly a consequence of the war; making good the physical devastation created enormous demands which the economy was inadequate to meet. The need for new markets and the legacy of three disparate imperial economies were further factors in an inflationary spiral which continued uncurbed until 1924. There was so much to be done and so little with which to do it.

  Agricultural reform was a priority. Lack of mechanization, servitude and medieval-style strip farming persisted among the peasants. Their crop yields were low and the quality of their stock was poor. Of the 15.5 million peasants the majority worked holdings of 5 hectares or less on 15.3 per cent of the land. Such units were barely self-sufficient. At the other extreme 1 per cent of holdings were over 50 hectares and occupied 52.9 per cent of the land. Of this over 70 per cent was privately owned and over half was in estates over 1,000 hectares. A redistribution of land was seen as a social necessity and was put into effect by the Land Reform Bills of 1920 and 1925. However, implementation was slow and the annual parcelization of 200,000 hectares barely kept pace with the rapidly rising population, so that by 1939 the agriculture problem was further from solution than it had been in 1918.

  Between the wars the distorted vestiges of feudal values permeated Polish society as a whole. The noble owners of the largest estates had, until the eighteenth century, played a dominant role in Polish history. The parliament (Sejm) was formed from their nominees and their policies, which largely served their interests as grain-producers and landowners, included extreme exploitation of the peasants and little or no hope of agricultural reform. Interpersonal quarrelling amongst the nobility and a system of 'Liberum Veto' which meant that any member of parliament could veto a law favoured by all the rest, also made government extremely difficult.

  During the nineteenth century the intelligentsia, and the officer corps which came into being during the Napoleonic Wars, emerged as influential social groups. They adopted certain of the landowners' prejudices against trade and industry, while variously supplanting the former aristocratic egotism with the democratic values of their century embodied in liberalism, nationalism and socialism.

  The intelligentsia comprised a very broad membership drawn from the bureaucracy and the professions - it was the dominant urban class. Poland lacked both a strong bourgeoisie and a strong proletariat.

  The political system of the new Polish State was fragmented. No party or grouping was strong enough to provide a firm basis for stable government. In the period of 1918 to 1926, when Pilsudski overthrew the parliamentary regime, no fewer than 14 governments held office.

  Crisis followed crisis, culminating in Pilsudski's coup d'etat in May 1926.

  *

  Daudi realized that there was no point in his devoting his life to advocating liberal democracy in East Africa. A few days after his epiphany saw an advertisement in the Times Higher Education supplement (THES) which attracted his interest. It was a senior lectureship in European History at Rhodes University in South Africa.

  He decided to apply. And was accepted. Work there started in January which barely gave him time to work out a term’s notice at his London college but enough time to convince Marisha that it was something he wanted to do with or without her.

  ‘Look, Marisha, you can see that I am not fully settled in London and that my hopes of a political career at home have receded thanks to you. South Africa is surely the place for me. Post-apartheid, it is the beacon of hope for the entire continent. I really want to get in on the ground floor of that edifice and, as an African, play my part in converting the dream of a rainbow nation into some sort of reality. Given my make-up, neither black nor white, I reckon I should fit in well.’

  Marisha cried and begged for days on end that he should stay with her until the pleas and tears dried away in the heat of his resolve to depart. For him, their affair was at an end for some considerable time. For her, the end was cruel in its suddenness; she had not been expecting it.

  They parted amicably enough early one evening at Heathrow.

  The next morning he was in Johannesburg. By midday, in Port Elizabeth where he was met by a car sent from Grahamstown which took him to the university to be there by tea time.

  Daudi was made very welcome. Especially by the many divorced women on the faculty and in town; every second white woman was second or third hand. Many still in their physical prime. Only their eyes showed the strain and sadness of rejection and loneliness. So adept did he become in the facial physiognomy of a rejected woman that just one direct gaze was sufficient in determining his line of approach to bed: attentiveness, commiseration, reassurance, gentleness, flattery and bed.

  Extracting himself from a relationship founded entirely on the mores of an opportunistic amateur psychologist always proved infinitely more difficult than ever he thought possible. His catch was invariably an octopus; she would cling on with a resolve matched only in nature by the eight armed leach from the deep.

  Once free of several such encounters he decided to fish in shallower waters to be found in and about the students union.

  The he
ight of student pleasure came with Festival. Held in July it started as a student rag week and, through a series of ever more generous sponsors, from Five Roses Tea to the First National Bank, it has gained considerable popularity. Which is not really surprising, especially in explaining its appeal to visitors from abroad.

  The Festival is now on the tourist trail. When all the animals in the Eastern Province are in bed for the night there is very little to do but drink; in Grahamstown at least, there is carnival. And culture. Lots of it of every kind.

  On the first evening of Festival, Daudi chose to go to the poetry event at which readings by local and national wordsmiths were advertised. His choice was based entirely on the interests of a willowy blonde EngLit student he had met earlier that day at a bar half way down main street.

  Samantha was refreshingly unsullied by life and rather typical of the white undergraduates at the university; children from wealthy homes sent away to what was considered by security conscious parents in Johannesburg as a safe university campus. And that, it was. There was very little about it of the rough and tumble of the metropolitan colleges. This was a white enclave which was only just beginning to open its doors to other races and even then the new intake was also rather precious; sons and daughters of a new black middle class which also wished to guard their offspring from the realities of urban sprawl and maul.