Nation state: Nyerere's legacy

Mahmood Mamdani

by Mahmood Mamdani, Mail & Gaurdian

Assessments of Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first president, are conventionally focused on his quest for ujamaa, a just social order based on community solidarity. Whereas supporters hailed ujamaa as a creative adjustment of socialist thought to local realities, critics contemptuously dismissed it as a romantic and unscientific endeavour.

Nyerere’s concern with social justice needs to be understood in the context of his overriding commitment to building a nation state. In his farewell address to the Tanzanian Parliament on July 29 1985, Nyerere recalled: “The single most important task, which I set out in my inaugural address in December 1962, was that of building a united nation on the basis of human equality and dignity.”

Walter Rodney, The Dar es Salaam School and the Current Situation

by Dani Wadada Nabudere, 2006

Walter Rodney made a significant contribution to the African academy, the Pan-African revolution, and human emancipation. This was fully demonstrated in his activist commitment to the cause of the liberation of the people of Africa and those of African descent in the Diaspora and it is this achievement that has brought us here together to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his cowardly assassination in 1980. It is also this commitment that gives us an opportunity to revisit these important historical events on our continent, the African Diaspora and the world at large.