The Road to Tanganyika's Independence
In 1945 neither the colonial government nor the relatively few Africans with a national—as opposed to a parochial—perspective foresaw independence in sixteen years. In 1954, however, when Julius K. Nyerere and the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) burst upon the scene, the issue was drawn, and the question was how quickly the Colonial Office in London and the colonial authorities in the territory, particularly those at the highest levels, would adapt to the new situation.
In fact the Colonial Office and territorial officials were by no means always in concert in their initial perspectives on political, economic, and social development or in the way they reacted to specific stimuli in Tanganyika or in Great Britain. In addition a change in the international status of Tanganyika provided a new framework for the plans formulated by the colonial authorities and for the expression of internally generated political expression.
In 1946 Great Britain reluctantly agreed to place Tanganyika under the trusteeship system established under the UN, reluctantly because several features in Chapter 12 of the United Nations Charter stipulated changes in the old mandate system of the League of Nations: among other things, representatives of the trust territory were to sit on the Trusteeship Council, and missions were to visit each territory every three years. However reluctant Great Britain may have been, international opinion immediately after the war seemed to demand trusteeship.
Once under the system the territory was not only subject to periodic visiting missions but to questionnaires concerned with political and constitutional matters. Moreover nationalists could find a forum at the Trusteeship Council, and petitions for redress of grievances could be submitted to it directly. Tanganyika Africans took advantage of these opportunities at one time or another. Nevertheless the direct impact of Trusteeship Council suggestions to the Tanganyika government was not very great.
In the late 1940s senior officials at the Colonial Office supported by the then Secretary of State for the Colonies, anticipated the growth of nationalism in the colonial areas and sought to persuade the authorities in the African territories to take account of the educated Africans already in place, to bring more Africans into the civil service, including its higher reaches, and to make provision for more popularly elected members even if still a minority in the legislative and executive councils.
Moreover it was suggested that representative local governments replace the Native Authorities who were either traditional chiefs or modeled on the notion of chieftainship. It was assumed that such elected local governments could not only provide experience in self-government for rural Africans but would have a better chance of gaining the support of local populations for economic development. This view turned out to be prescient.
The East African governors rejected these proposals. They and many of their senior subordinates distrusted the educated Africans and persisted until very late in seeing the chiefs as the only legitimate representatives of the African. The Tanganyikan authorities were also extremely slow in preparing Africans (and for that matter, Asians) for the administrative service, that is, as district officers. Moreover local government reform, which did take place little by little was intended first to make the colonial regime more effective rather than to prepare for its demise, and then to be a harrier to the effectiveness of TANU and as a way of retaining a substantial voice for Europeans and Asians.
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