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A Potted History of Tanzania
?The world is both united by technical knowledge and separated by mutual ignorance. People have landed on the moon, and they saw our planet as a small ball in infinite space.
All too often, however, we on earth behave as though our lives had nothing to do with the lives of other people living beyond a mountain range or a desert, or who are separated from us by an ocean.?
Julius Nyerere
(National President of Tanzania, 1962 - 1985)
About the History of Tanzania
According to World Bank statistics, Tanzania is one of the five poorest countries in the world. At almost one million square kilometres, the East African state is approximately 25 times as big as Switzerland. Its total population is presently 30 million.
After nearly a hundred years of European colonial rule (from 1885 to 1918, Tanzania belonged to German East Africa; after the defeat of the German Reich in World War I, it passed into the British Empire), Tanzania was recognized as an independent country on December 9, 1961. The green, black and gold flag (green represents the country, black its population, gold its natural resources) symbolized its newly won freedom. After union with the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba (which were British protectorates until 1963), a blue band (symbolising the sea) was added to the flag and the United Republic of Tanzania was founded.
Nyerere was extremely popular on account of his modesty and absolute integrity. He was faced with the difficult and protracted task of leading Tanzania towards genuine political and economic independence after its long period as a European colony.
Apart from the years in which sisal production provided a boost for the economy, Tanzania remained the ?poor relation? of other east African states, with virtually no schools or education. On the other hand, Tanzania's ethnic diversity (the population is composed of about 120 different tribes) did not emerge as a serious political problem, as over 90% of the population belongs to the Bantu group of linguistically related peoples. One factor that helped unite the country was the common language Kiswahili. This was deliberately disseminated following independence, enabling it to establish itself as the national and administrative language.
Nyerere did certainly chalk up some successes which were the envy of countries such as Uganda or Kenya. The basic needs of the population, such as clean water, schools and hospitals, were met. Everybody is equally poor; the imbalance between the towns and the countryside was reduced; there were remarkably few tribal conflicts for a vast country with over 100 different ethnic groups. It is largely Nyerere, the "teacher" of the nation, whom Tanzania has to thank for the fact that even today there is a sense of national identity and an absence of tribal problems.
As a spokesman for the Third World, he advocated a new world economic order to take greater account of the needs of developing countries. His political concept earned considerable respect abroad, but it remained controversial domestically because he never managed to achieve an economic breakthrough. There were many reasons for this failure:
Despite setting a personal example, Nyerere was unable to prevent the emergence of an incompetent state bureaucracy and an idle caste of officials. The belief that it would be possible to avoid dependence on the global market and the industrial nations (an understandable ambition) proved to be misconceived. The lack of responsibility within the socialist production strategy was counterproductive, as was the way that co-operative structures were foisted upon farmers, many of whom were still too conditioned by individualism and private enterprise. Thanks to the bountifulness of nature, some of the newly founded Ujamaa villages were indeed able to produce a yield, but others were founded in dry areas and soon had to be abandoned. Whilst landless farmers welcomed the state initiative, nomadic tribes of cattle-breeders such as the Massai were hostile to it.
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