The Issue of Africanization and the Role of TANU
Even before independence and more strongly after it, many TANU activists and other Africans had looked forward to rapid Africanization of government service. Beginning at the end of the colonial period provisions had been made to introduce Africans into mid- and high-level jobs if they met the standards, but those standards remained very high—with Nyerere's acquiescence. Moreover no effort was made to institute an accelerated program to train Africans. Nyerere himself was persuaded of the need to retain high standards, and he also disliked the odor of self-aggrandizement in the insistence of many Africans that jobs he opened to them. In addition Nyerere's principled antiracialism was affronted by the anti-Asian implications of some African pressures.
Whatever Nyerere's personal views, he found it necessary to give way a little to the demands pressed upon him. He began in October 1960 by conceding that Tanganyika African candidates for new appointments should have preference, and he followed it up in December 1960 by stating that Tanganyika Africans should have preference for promotion over non-African Tanganyikans. Senior British civil servants opposed these changes although they did not significantly change either the composition of the service or satisfy the TANU rank and file.
Just as Nyerere was making these concessions two specialists from the Ford Foundation were called in as advisers on the question of Africanization. Their two reports (in November 1960 and May 1961) took a quite different position from that strongly held by the expatriates and accepted in good part by Nyerere. In their view rapid Africanization was hound to occur, and the real issue was how to provide for it with minimal damage to effective administration. Nyerere, impressed hut uncertain, did not act on their recommendations, and it was not until 1962, after he had resigned from the prime ministership, that the recommendations were implemented.
Closely linked to the issue of the Africanization of the higher civil service was the Africanization of rural administration and the status of the chiefs. Most provincial and district commissioners in the period of self-government and immediately after indepen-dence were former British colonial officers, and chiefs still held their offices even if their status and power had been somewhat diminished. The rank and file of TANU who had fought the chiefs and supported Nyerere in his struggle for independence had no significant role. Nyerere was aware of the situation in late 1961 hut was not yet ready to do anything about it.
In 1960 and 1961 Nyerere therefore found himself defending a program that he accepted and even felt necessary. Sometimes he was almost alone in doing so, and he was criticized in the party and in the National Assembly for his failure to speed up Africanization. When some of these criticisms took on strong anti-European and anti-Asian overtones, he responded, often acerbically, to them.
In several cases only his intervention in debates in the National Assembly prevented the defeat of a government-sponsored law. The clearest instance of this was the debate over the citizenship law in October 1961. Many in the assembly spoke bitterly against the law as proposed, which made no distinctions between Africans and non-Africans in their eligibility for citizenship. Nyerere's reply was equally bitter, denouncing the racialism explicit in his opponents' arguments and, finally, threatening to resign if the law as drawn was rejected. He carried the day, hut the basic hostility toward the patterns prevailing to that point had not been dealt with. Something had to be done about TANU and Africanization.
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