The Sixties
My Life as an African: Autobiographical Writings
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 424 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (10 November 2009)
ISBN-10: 9987160050
ISBN-13: 9789987160051
The Sixties
IT WAS a decade of triumph and tragedy, of wars and assassinations, and much more. It was also the dawn of a new era for both Africa and America.
In Africa, we witnessed the end of colonial rule. In America, legal segregation was consigned to the dustbin of history following the triumph of the civil rights movement.
For us in Africa, the sixties ushered in the dawn of a new era in more than one way. While we celebrated the end of colonial rule, we also witnessed wars in the Congo which became the bleeding heart of Africa; and in Nigeria where a civil war became the bloodiest conflict in modern African history threatening the survival of Africa's most populous nation and one of the richest.
The Nigerian civil war was also one of the bloodiest in modern world history. And there were other conflicts on the continent.
But while the end of colonial rule signalled the dawn of a new era of independence under which we would be masters of our own destiny, the democracy we were supposed to enjoy was compromised by the emergence of a new phenomenon on the African political landscape: military coups which led to the institutionalization of militocracy, and dictatorship even under civilian rule, as the most powerful institution in most countries on the continent for almost three decades well into the nineties.
We also had a rude awakening to the harsh realities of nationhood, as we struggled to build our nations and consolidate our independence.
In America, around the same time, the nation's commitment to democracy and racial equality was severely tested in the streets and in the courts as the civil rights movement gained momentum throughout the decade, reaching its peak in 1968 with the passage of one of the most important civil rights laws in the country's history: the Opening Housing Act. Two others had been passed earlier, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Together they constituted the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the nation's history.
The triumph of the civil rights movement coincided with the achievement of independence in Africa. By 1968, most African countries had won independence. The countries which had not won freedom by then included South Africa, the bastion of white rule and supremacy on the continent; the British colony of Rhodesia; the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe; and the Seychelles, the Comoros, and French Somaliland which became Djibouti.
It was a decade of triumph and tragedy, of hope and despair. In America, it was also the decade of the Vietnam war which bitterly divided the nation; of the counterculture, and much more. But above all, it was a decade of optimism.
In Africa, we were highly optimistic of the future after we won independence. And in America, many people saw the triumph of the civil rights movement as the dawn of a new era for the nation in which people would "not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character," to quote Dr. Martin Luther King.
And from a personal perspective, the sixties were for me a period of political awakening as I followed the struggle for independence and other political developments in Africa and for racial equality in the United States. I grew up in the sixties. I was then in my teens.
When our country, what was then Tanganyika, won independence from Britain at midnight on 9 December 1961, I was 12 years old. I was born at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, 4 October 1949, in the town of Kigoma, a port on Lake Tanganyika in western Tanganyika which for decades especially after independence has been a haven for refugees from neighbouring Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.
I was baptised Godfrey on Christmas day, 25 December 1949, as a member of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) but grew up as a member of the Moravian Church in my home district of Rungwe where German missionaries established themselves in the 1880s.
Twelve years after being baptised, I witnessed the end of British colonial rule and the birth of a new nation, Tanganyika, the first in East Africa to attain sovereign status.
One of my mother's elder brothers, uncle Johanne Chonde Mwambapa who was a primary school teacher, took me on his bicycle to see fireworks and witness the lowering of the Union Jack at midnight at a soccer stadium in Tukuyu, four miles away from our home.
The town was founded in the 1890s by the German colonial rulers who preceded the British and named it Neu Langenburg. It was destroyed by an earthquake in 1910, and again by another earthquake in 1919, but was rebuilt by the Germans and the British.
The town was renamed Tukuyu after German East Africa -Deutsch Ostafrika - became a British colony called Tanganyika following the end of World War I.
Throughout colonial rule, German and British, the small town was and still is the capital of Rungwe District, my home, in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania in Mbeya Region in the southwestern part of the country on the border with Malawi, formerly Nyasaland, and Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia.
Rungwe District lies in the Great Rift Valley and is ringed by misty blue mountains except the southern part which is bordered by Lake Nyasa, also known as Lake Malawi.
In Tanzania, we still call it Lake Nyasa as it was during colonial rule because part of the lake belongs to Tanzania. The border runs in the middle of the lake and was established before 1914 between the British colony of Nyasaland and German East Africa (Tanganyika). It was never changed or disputed by the British who ruled both Tanganyika and Nyasaland which was renamed Malawi after independence, although they put the lake under the jurisdiction of Nyasaland for administrative purposes since there was no separate administration for the Tanganyika portion.
And since the boundary between the two countries was established by two colonial powers, Germany and Britain, Britain alone had no legal authority to redraw the map and change the border. They were in control of both countries after the end of World War I and they knew the boundary that was agreed upon by both Germany and Britain ran in the middle of the lake.
It's the government of Malawi under President Kamuzu Banda which renamed the lake, Lake Malawi, contending that the entire lake belongs to Malawi. Tanzania contends otherwise and has done so since colonial times. The lake belongs to both Tanzania and Malawi and to Mozambique as well.
Colonial rule caused a lot of problems for us and this is just one of them. Before colonial rule, the people on both sides shared the lake without any problems. There was no such thing as German East Africa (Tanganyika) or British Nyasaland. There was just Africa, and Africans, free to migrate anywhere and share the resources – including fish in Lake Nyasa – without hindrance or being accused of taking what did not belong to you. It belonged to all of us.
And unfortunately, when colonial rule ended, many of the problems which had been caused by colonialism remained with us – including border disputes.
As I witnessed the end of colonial rule on 9 December 1961, little did I realise that I would be living in a new country only about two-and-a-half years later. It was the new nation of Tanzania formed after Tanganyika united with Zanzibar on 26 April 1964. The new country was called the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar and was renamed Tanzania on October 29 the same year.
The leader of the newly independent country was Julius Nyerere. When he led Tanganyika to independence in 1961, he was 39 and the youngest leader in the world. He became the country's first prime minister.
On 9 December 1962 on the country's first independence anniversary, Tanganyika became a republic. And Julius Nyerere became president.
A towering intellectual yet a humble leader committed to equality for everybody, especially to the well-being of the masses probably more than anybody else, he tried to transform Tanzania into a classless socialist society, although not with much success, and even sent his children to local schools instead of sending them overseas as was the case with many other leaders and other highly privileged members of society across the continent.
I went to school with his eldest son, Andrew. And he lived in the same student hostel with the rest of us when we were at Tambaza High School in Dar es Salaam where I completed standard 14, or Form VI, which would be equivalent to the 14th grade in the United States had the American school system been structured to go that far before one goes to college or university.
More than 30 years later, Andrew contributed generously towards completion of a project I was working on and which had direct bearing on his family. I wrote a book about his father, President Nyerere, entitled Nyerere and Africa: End of An Era, and he answered all the questions I asked him and helped me with other things. He also wrote quite a few comments on different subjects which I included in the second edition of the book published in January 2005. The book has now gone through four editions.
And a strange coincidence occurred when I started writing this book: Africa and America in The Sixties: A Decade That Changed The Nation and The Destiny of A Continent. Just one day after I started writing the book, I learnt that one of my former colleagues at the Daily News in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in the early seventies had died. His name was Stanley Kamana.
He was the first journalist with whom I covered President Nyerere for the first time not long before I started working full-time as a reporter at the Daily News which was Tanzania's largest and oldest newspaper and one of the four largest and most influential in East Africa together with the Daily Nation and the East African Standard, both Kenyan newspapers based in Nairobi; and the Uganda Argus, based in Kampala, Uganda.
A veteran journalist since the late sixties, Stanley Kamana was one of the best and most seasoned news reporters and political commentators Tanzania has ever produced and will be sorely missed.
I read the news of his death in a Tanzanian newspaper on the Internet when I was in the United States. The story was published in the Guardian, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 13 October 2005, with the headline, "Kamana Laid to Rest":
"Hundreds of people attended the burial ceremony of veteran journalist, the late Stanley Kamana, yesterday at Kinondoni cemetery in Dar es Salaam.
Relatives, friends, and journalists from various media houses had earlier tearfully paid his body the last respects at his house in Tandika, Dar es Salaam.
The IPP (a Tanzania media company) Executive Chairman Reginald Mengi, former Prime Minister Joseph Sinde Warioba, Habari Corporation Chairman, Jenerali Ulimwengu, CCM Union presidential candidate Jakaya Kikwete (now president of Tanzania), NCCR-Mageuzi presidential candidate Sengondo Mvungi, were among the many dignitaries who attended the burial ceremony.
James Mpinga representing the staff from the IPP said the death of Kamana was a hard blow to the media fraternity: 'He was a hard working man. I don't think that his gap will be easily replaced. His contribution was of great impact on the development of the country.'
Reverend Samson Kameeta of the Tanzania Assemblies of God (TAG), Tandika Mabatini Parish, in his sermon, told the mourners that they should invest in the kingdom of God by committing good deeds.
Many people described Kamana as a man of the people.
He left behind six children and a widow Zakia Kamana.
Kamana died of a heart attack at Temeke Municipal Hospital in Dar es Salaam last Thursday aged 58. Until his death, he was working for IPP Media as a sub-editor."
Kamana was one of the reporters with whom I worked closely at the Daily News, as I did with many others.
But long before I became a news reporter, I had other career ambitions which had nothing to do with journalism.
I wanted to be a doctor but changed my mind when our American Peace Corps biology teacher at Songea Secondary School, Mrs. Gallagher whose husband taught history at the same school, showed us how to dissect a frog.
That was in 1968 when I was in standard 12, my final year, before I went to Tambaza High School (standard 13 and standard 14, usually known as Form V and Form VI) after passing the dreaded final exams taken by all the students in all the three East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. We took the same exams, on the same day, throughout East Africa.
I also wanted to be a lawyer and then a writer, goals I felt I could easily achieve now that we had won independence from Britain and would be masters of our own destiny, especially with the free education for everybody provided under the leadership of President Julius Nyerere all the way to university. Medical service was also free for everybody under Nyerere as were other social services.
I was 13 years old when our country became a republic on 9 December 1962, and had no idea where I was headed in life. Ten years later, I ended up in the United States as a student after working as a news reporter at the country's largest newspaper, the Daily News, formerly the Standard, and briefly as an information officer at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in the nation's capital Dar es Salaam.
President Nyerere became our editor-in-chief after the Standard was nationalized in 1970 and renamed Daily News. But he did not serve in any executive capacity and played only a ceremonial role as the head of this government-owned newspaper and public institution.
The executive role was played by our managing editor, Sammy Mdee, who later became President Nyerere's press secretary. He was succeeded by Benjamin Mkapa, whom we simply called Ben Mkapa. Mkapa also became President Nyerere's press secretary and held other high government positions through the years, including ambassadorial and ministerial posts. He once served as Tanzania's ambassador to the United States in the eighties and later became Tanzania's minister of foreign affairs.
When I left for the United States, Mkapa was our editor at the Daily News. And it was he who helped me to go to school in the United States. He later became president of Tanzania and served two five year-terms from 1995 to 2005.
I left Tanzania for the United States on a flight from Dar es Salaam to London around 8 a.m. on Friday, 3 November 1972, and arrived in New York around 4 p.m. the next day. It was the first time I had set foot on American soil. I was 23 years and exactly one month old when I landed in New York on November 4th.
I have lived in the United States since then and longer than I did in Africa, which partly explains why I have decided to write about America during her turbulent years in the sixties.
But I have done so mainly from an African perspective and in relation to the events which unfolded in Africa during the same period where comparative analysis is warranted in the study of the events on both sides of the Atlantic during those tempestuous times.
When I first arrived in America, Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated only four years earlier in April 1968; the civil rights movement reached its peak in the same year when Congress passed the Fair Housing - also known as the Open Housing - Act of 1968; and memories of riots in more than 120 cities across the nation which had been sparked by King's assassination were still fresh in the minds of most people, including my sponsors in Detroit where I attended Wayne State University.
I was sponsored by the Pan-African Congress-USA, an organization founded in 1970 by a group of African Americans in that city to forge and strengthen ties between Africa and Black America, among other things. Sponsoring African students was one of the ways of achieving this goal.
The first student to be sponsored was Kojo Yankah. He attended Wayne State University during the same time I did and later the University of Michigan. He returned to Ghana where be became a member of parliament and a cabinet member under President Jerry Rawlings.
We arrived in America as students at a time when the country was still going through dramatic changes as a result of the civil rights movement and the reaction to the racial injustices black Americans had been subjected to for centuries. Many of them, especially the young, had reacted by rioting in the sixties.
Detroit itself had been the scene of some of the worst riots in the nation's history which erupted in 1967 soon after Newark exploded only a few days earlier, and not long after Watts went up in flames in 1965. It was badly scarred and gutted buildings were a common sight in many parts of the city including the area where I lived, not far from 12th Street where the riots started.
In 1975, 12th Street was renamed Rosa Parks in honour of "the mother of the civil rights movement" whom I had the chance to meet in the same year, together with US Congressman Charles Diggs from Detroit, at an African event at Wayne State University where a member of the Pan-African Congress, the organization which sponsored me, showed a documentary he had filmed in Angola showing the brutalities perpetrated by the Portuguese colonial forces against innocent civilians in villages during the liberation struggle.
The film had many gruesome scenes, including gaping wounds, I will never forget. One old man had virtually been scalped. Others were burnt with napalm.
And there was much more that we saw in that documentary.
Rosa Parks, her husband Raymond, and her mother Leona McCauley moved from Montgomery, Alabama, to Detroit in 1957 at the urging of Rosa's younger brother Sylvester and amidst death threats - they also lost their jobs - because of her refusal to give up a seat to a white man on a city bus on 1 December 1955; an act that precipitated the modern civil rights movement but whose spirit had been harboured in the hearts and minds of most blacks across the nation for years.
Her courageous act also catapulted a little known Baptist minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, into the spotlight after she and others sought some help from him.
Dr. King was her pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and was new in Montgomery. Only 26 years old, he was chosen to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, a new organization formed to direct the nascent civil rights struggle in that city.
It included a bus boycott by blacks because of the city's refusal to treat them as full citizens with the same rights as whites to whom they were routinely forced to give up their seats on the city buses; an act of injustice and humiliation they could no longer tolerate. The boycott lasted for 381 days.
In December 1956, one year after the boycott started, the United States Supreme Court outlawed segregation on city buses, declaring it unconstitutional. The ruling gave momentum to the battle against segregation laws which were enforced throughout the southern states in public accommodations and businesses.
Rosa Parks died years later at her home in Detroit on Monday, 24 October 2005, at the age of 92 and was buried in the same city. Her husband Raymond also died in Detroit before her in 1977. Her mother also died before her in Detroit. And both were buried in the same city.
Rosa Parks' long life and commitment to racial equality and dignity remained a source of inspiration to many people of all races who continued to carry on the struggle for justice across America and elsewhere. It is a struggle I have witnessed through the years.
For more than 30 years, I have been an integral part of American life and have had the opportunity to observe and study events in this country just like millions of other people have and continue to do; but with one exception in my case and of many others whose background is similar to mine as an African. I also look at those events from an African perspective. It is a perspective that goes way back to the sixties. And I have seen a lot as a part of that history myself as an observer and as a participant like millions of others.
My Life as an African: Autobiographical Writings
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 424 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (10 November 2009)
ISBN-10: 9987160050
ISBN-13: 9789987160051