Julius Nyerere

Julius Nyerere, known in East Africa as Mwalimu, "teacher", led Tanganyika to independence from Britain in 1961 and then governed it, and from 1964 the united republic of Tanzania, until he stepped down in 1985. His philosophy of Ujamaa, a village-based African socialism, shaped the country for a generation. Admired for keeping Tanzania peaceful and united and for supporting liberation movements across southern Africa, he is also criticised for a one-party state that detained opponents without trial and for economic policies that failed.

Nyerere was born on 13 April 1922 at Butiama in Tanganyika's Mara Region, one of 25 surviving children of Nyerere Burito, chief of the small Zanaki people. He did brilliantly at school, went on to the elite secondary school at Tabora and in 1943 entered Makerere College in Uganda. By then a Roman Catholic, he read John Stuart Mill there and in a 1943 newspaper letter already argued for an "African socialism". After teaching at a mission school in Tabora, he won a scholarship to the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1952.

Back in British-ruled Tanganyika, Nyerere was elected president of the Tanganyika African Association in 1953, and on 7 July 1954 turned it into a political party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, he insisted on non-violent campaigning and on equal citizenship for the country's European and Asian minorities. TANU swept the colony's elections of 1958–59, and in August 1960 won 70 of 71 seats. Nyerere became chief minister, and Tanganyika became independent on 9 December 1961.

Nyerere briefly stepped down as prime minister in 1962 to rebuild the party, then won the presidential election that November with 98.1% of the vote and took office when Tanganyika became a republic in December. His government replaced chiefs with state officials, Africanised the civil service and introduced detention without trial. In January 1964 an army mutiny drove him into hiding for two days; he asked for British troops to end it. That April, after the revolution on Zanzibar, he and the island's leader Abeid Karume agreed to unite their countries, which took the name Tanzania later that year. His hope of a wider East African Federation with Jomo Kenyatta's Kenya and Uganda came to nothing, a failure he later called the greatest of his career.

The Arusha Declaration of January 1967 committed Tanzania to socialism and self-reliance. Banks and major firms were nationalised, leaders were barred from holding company shares or renting out houses, and Nyerere drew inspiration from Mao Zedong's China. Peasants were urged into cooperative ujamaa villages; from the early 1970s police forced reluctant farmers to move, until some 13 million people were registered in about 7,000 villages. Production was badly disrupted, and food imports rose sharply. Health and education fared better: by 1978 about 80% of children were in school. Tanzania was formally a one-party state, and in 1977 TANU merged with Zanzibar's ruling party to form Chama Cha Mapinduzi.

Nyerere gave bases and support to movements fighting white-minority and Portuguese rule in Mozambique, Rhodesia and South Africa. When Idi Amin seized power in Uganda in 1971, Nyerere sheltered the ousted president, Milton Obote. After Ugandan forces invaded north-western Tanzania in October 1978, he sent his army into Uganda, which took Kampala and overthrew Amin in 1979. The war cost Tanzania about US$500 million and deepened its economic crisis.

Nyerere stepped down in 1985, one of the few African leaders of his era to give up power voluntarily, though he chaired the party until 1990. He then backed the move to multi-party politics and mediated in Burundi's civil war, a task later taken up by Nelson Mandela. He died of leukaemia in London on 14 October 1999 and was buried at Butiama. Tanzanians call him the Father of the Nation; his biographer Paul Bjerk judged that he did become a dictator, though one who kept power without mass violence.

Our 1960 map shows Tanganyika on the eve of independence, and the 1985 map shows Tanzania at the end of his presidency.