The Emergence of TANU
In July 1954 the TAA became the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) under the leadership of Julius K. Nyerere. TANU's formation and its program told the colonial authorities, in Great Britian and the territory, that some Tanganyika Africans, at least, were prepared to work explicitly for an end to colonial control. At that time and even later, however, TANU did not insist on a timetable for independence.
Nyerere, a member of a small ethnic group (the Zanaki) in Musoma District and son of a minor chief, went to Makerere College and, on a government bursary, to Edinburgh University where he earned a degree in the social sciences. In 1952 he became a teacher at a Roman Catholic secondary school, but his political activities with the TAA led to conflicts with his supervisors and his resignation. In his own words he became a full-time -political agitator."
Initial support for TANU, overt or covert, came from educated Africans and the not very large number of persons, many of them not highly educated hut with a good deal of personal ambition and a fairly strong entrepreneurial orientation, who were frustrated by their inability to make their way in an economic and social hierarchy dominated by Europeans and Asians. Support soon came from others, however, despite government efforts to put obstacles in TANU's way. In 1956 Nyerere claimed 100,000 members. Among the obstacles was the Societies Ordinance of 1954, which gave the governor the power to refuse or revoke the registration of all associations (or their branches). Under the ordinance TANU branches in various places were denied registration.
In the early years efforts by Nyerere and others to develop party organization and discipline notwithstanding, TANU suffered from some of the same problems experienced by the TAA. Local branches engaged in activities not necessarily cleared with the center, and there were entanglements of various kinds with local ethnic political entities.
Moreover there was not always unanimity in TANU. Despite Nyerere's prominence, leadership was not then (or later) his alone, although he wielded a good deal of influence among his colleagues, and he came to have an extraordinary impact on ordinary Africans. Efforts to come to collective decisions on important matters usually succeeded, but there were differences of opinion on tactics and other matters within the Central Committee and the National Executive Committee (the larger, more inclusive body).
The reaction of the governor of Tanganyika, Sir Edward Twining (appointed in 1949 and reappointed to a second term in 1955), and of most of the higher officials in the colonial government to TANU tended to be negative and in many cases remained that way to the late 1950s. Some officials at the district level may have been more sympathetic although others were strongly opposed to it.
As Cranford Pratt suggests, most colonial officials in the territory thought of themselves as selflessly devoted to the ultimate good of the African, but paternalism, no matter how well-meaning, assumes the superiority of those practicing it and tends to ignore the possibility that nationalists might be angered by that sense of superiority and suspicious of the motives of those manifesting it.
The hostility of the colonial authorities to TANU took several forms: the Societies Ordinance, although applicable to all associations, was enforced only against TANU branches. For example, in 1957 TANU could not function overtly in ten districts. In 1955 an amendment to the Penal Code proNbited the printing or publishing or the making to an assembly of "any statement likely to raise discontent amongst any of the inhabitants of the territory."
Some of the specific actions of the colonial authorities were in fact taken because TANU branches directly motivated by local concerns and antagonisms did appear to threaten public order. Thus some branch officials attempted to hear disputes, bypassing the local judiciary; others ignored the jurisdiction of local courts, and some urged people to disobey orders of the Native Authority. In the mid-1950s this sort of behavior was fairly widespread and had its origins not in central TANI' directives or even TANU encouragement but in deeply felt local antipathies sometimes involving European colonial officials but more often directed, in the first instance at least, against the Native Authorities.
Indeed, as Pratt put it, "TANU itself remained ambivalent towards these local protest movements." Nyerere and other national leaders did not care for protests that sometimes became violent and that they could not control. Moreover they were initially ready to accept the technical views of professional officials on agricultural matters.
Although there were reasons for government action in particular instances, the colonial authorities were concerned not only with the preservation of public order but also with the preservation of the existing system. In 1954 Governor Twining told the Legislative Council that -Government will not tolerate such activities which are contrary to the best interests of the people and are designed to damage, if not destroy good government." From Twining's perspective TANU's activities were essentially of that character.
The program set out in TANU's constitution of 1954 was revolutionary: it looked forward to great change in the political and social, if not yet the economic, arrangements in Tanganyika. The question was when the colonial power and the colonial authorities would decide that the time was ripe for them to collaborate in the revolution.
The significant points in TANU's program were: that Tanganyika be prepared for self-government; that tribalism be rejected in favor of nationalism; that a democratic government be established; that all governmental bodies have African majorities; that all forms of racialism be eliminated; and that TANU encourage and cooperate with unions, cooperatives, and other groups, such as tribal unions, if they were sympathetic. In TAN U's view there was no contradiction between its opposition to tribalism and its willingness to cooperate with tribal unions. A number of unions already existed and had shown themselves to be antipathetic to colonially imposed political forms and racialism as well as to chiefs who could sometimes be seen as the embodiment of tribalism.
Racialism had been legally eliminated, but in fact it was pervasive. All Africans, whatever their other views, were opposed to a racialism manifested in European and to a lesser extent Asian dominance, but Nyerere took a wholly principled view of it, rejecting it even when applied to the minorities by the majority.
In principle nobody objected to democratic forms of government. The issue at this time was how fast those forms would be instituted. Later it was to become, for Nyerere at least, a matter of finding democratic forms suitable to an African society.
The major conflict between TANU's program and the program of the colonial authorities, especially Governor Twining's, lay in TANU's opposition to multiracialism and its concomitant insistence that Tanganyika was an African country.
The notion of multi-racialism had been strongly supported by Twining from the time he took office in 1949. Late in that year he appointed the Committee on Constitutional Development that was to examine the entire range of constitutional and political development. The committee's report, delivered in May 1951, dealt with a number of issues, but its basic recommendation was to establish, in Bates' language, "equal representation of numerically unequal racial groups" among the unofficial members of the Legislative Council. Concretely it called for seven members each from the African, Asian, and European communities. Twining had originally called for an equal number of Africans and non-Africans on the council. but he accepted the committee's recommendation. The Tanganyika European Council, formed in 1949, had opposed Twining's initial recommendation, and many of its members opposed the committee's views as well. When these views were accepted the organization came to an end.
African views on constitutional development were also presented to the factfinding subcommittee of the Constitutional Development Committee. According to Pratt, despite a lack of coordination among them, a common element in their presentations was their insistence that there continue to be an official majority and that Africans constitute 50 percent of the unofficial side (Twining's original recommendation). The IAA's Dar es Salaam branch supported that position, suggested the new arrangement continue for twelve years and that it he succeeded by an election using a common roll (as opposed to separate communal rolls) for what was to become an unofficial majority. The fundamental concern of Africans in the late 1940s and early 1950s was that immediate change to an unofficial majority composed of equal numbers of Asians, Europeans, and Africans would result in dominance by the minorities.
The Secretary of State for the Colonies, accepting the committee's recommendations in 1952, strongly indicated that he expected the newly established constitution of the Legislative Council to last for a "considerable time." The Legislative Council was not in fact immediately reconstituted. Instead the governor recommended first the development of multiracial county councils, each of them embracing a number of districts. Because they were not really local entities, had been imposed without reference to African needs or wishes, and tended to he dominated by officials representing the central government and by the Europeans who sat on them, they eventually failed.
A later effort was made to establish such multiracial units at the district level. The government insisted that they include Europeans and Asians even when there was only a handful of them in the area. These too had little success, and even when they worked better than the councils, Africans tended to he suspicious of the motives of government in insisting on them.
Opposition to the government's insistence on multiracialism was a matter on which Africans could agree, for it seemed to them a policy implying continuing European and Asian domination of Tanganyika. Africans also opposed moves toward closer union of Tanganyika, Kenya, and Uganda on the grounds that settler influence in Kenya was so strong that union in any form foreshadowed white dominance in all of East Africa. For TANU and Nyerere it meant that the colonial authorities refused to consider Tanganyika an African country.
In Nyerere's view, the representation of Europeans and Asians on government bodies was entirely legitimate, and for a time in the late 1950s he was willing to accept guaranteed minority representation for the non-African communities. Guaranteed parity, however, he saw as undemocratic and as an effort to entrench the power and status of the minorities.
Much African support for TANU was generated hy the government's own actions—its slowness in changing the system of indirect rule despite Twining's and others' formal intention of doing so. For Africans, among the most important government units were their own Native Authorities, but the introduction of elected councillors into the Native Authority system was slow in coming so that educated and ambitious Africans and ordinary. peasants alike had no place to exert influence or to vent their grievances. Initially the rural African turned to tribal unions (the Chagga Citizens Union is one case). but by 1954 TANU was available and attracted first the more educated persons and, not long after, the peasants.
A second (and related) source of support for TANU was the use of the Native Authorities to impose agricultural and land usage rules on the peasants. TANU's own initial uncertainty about its position on what it saw as technical matters and its lack of control of TANU branches protesting the rules and other matters notwithstanding, these two sources of (sometimes violent) discontent, together with African suspicions of multiracialism, helped to give TANU its mass base.
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