Download Nyerere Speech

Mwalimu would probably be angry as well but also sad to see his successors prefer a closed society to an open one and to look to the past rather than to the future. After all, Nyerere often argued that Tanzanians should not be afraid to challenge authority. He also spoke out strongly for freedom of speech.

In his speech during the Commonwealth conference on June 23, 1965, Nyerere focused on African relations with the Western bloc and their commitment to democracy. He thanked England for their support during their independence movement. Upon being asked about his relations with the East, Nyerere admitted to accepting help from communist countries, mainly China. He also challenged England and other European countries that challenged his commitment to liberal democracy. Nyerere turned the question back on England and pointed out their continued support of Portugal in their racist colonial regime in Southern Rodesia.

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The ICAE was then formally set up in 1973, and the first Secretary was Roby Kidd, who established the headquarters of the Secretariat in Canada, where it remained for the first 30 years before moving to Uruguay. Delegates were invited to a first World Assembly in Dar es Salaam in 1976, where the President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, made a ground-breaking speech subsequently widely published as the Dar es Salaam Declaration under the titles "Adult education and development", "Development is for man, by man, and of man" and "Liberated man - the purpose of development". Nyerere became the first Honorary President of the ICAE, followed later by Paulo Freire.

This speech, which we reprint here, is an important historical document that is still completely relevant, stressing that "the first function of adult education is to inspire both the desire for change, and an understanding that change is possible". And since recognition and support are often meagre, it ends:

Nyerere wrote no books. But his many speeches fill several, especially his three-volume collection entitled "Freedom and Unity; Freedom and Socialism; Freedom and Development", which contains all his major politicy Statements up until 1972. These include "Ten Years after Independence", the "Arusha Declaration", "Socialism and Rural Development" and "Education for Self-Reliance".

In his speeches on education he dealt explicitly with school, university and adult education. In all these fields he stressed the vocational aspect. Schools needed to give children and young people skills, principally for work in agriculture: primary schooling should therefore Start at seven and last for some years, being complete in itself and not merely a means of selection for secondary schools. Universities must always provide preparation for a career.

However, it is worth pointing out that Nyerere valued universities, of-ten castigated in the post-colonial era as ivory towers, and expected them to support education and development. At first, Tanzania had no university of its own, Makerere College in Uganda serving all three countries in the East African Community. The University of Dares Salaam was formally inaugurated in 1970, and in his opening speech, "Relevance and Dares Salaam University", Nyerere spoke of what he saw as two great dangers and three important functions:

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