Baba Wa Taifa

By LANCE MORROW

WE MUST RUN WHILE THEY WALK: A Portrait of Africa's Julius Nyerere

by WILLIAM EDGETT SMITH

296 pages. Random House. $7.95.

Julius Nyerere is in some ways an improbable haba wa taifa (father of a nation). A scholarly and somehow puckishly Gandhian man, he led Tanganyika to remarkably peaceful independence from Britain in 1961 and then presided over its union with the island of Zanzibar in 1964, when the two together became Tanzania.

"I think I remained much more philosophical than political," Nyerere has said. "I wouldn't tackle things like discrimination. I just said, 'It is wrong for one people to govern another, and everything else fell into place. So they called me a moderate."

An East African correspondent for TIME during the 1960s, William Smith has written a study that is less of a treatise on African nationalism and politics than a fond, informal portrait of one of postcolonial Africa's most engaging leaders. Nyerere, now 50, the son of a chief of Tanganyika's relatively minor Zanaki tribe, was raised in a cluster of mud huts and sent off to a government school at twelve. He became a teacher of biology and history, and studied for three years at the University of Edinburgh. Back in Tanganyika, he was increasingly drawn into the campaign for independence. Characteristically, however, as he traveled the vast colony by Land Rover to proselytize for TANU (Tanganyika Africa Nationalist Union), he had a gentleman's agreement with the police who tailed him everywhere: they stopped to help fix each other's flat tires.

Any passionate nationalist is open to a charge of demagoguery. But when he had a chance to earn his martyr's credentials in 1958 by going to jail on a criminal libel charge, Nyerere chose to pay the fine instead, in order to avoid precipitating a crisis for the new colonial governor. Throughout the long transfer of power, he insisted: "We are fighting against colonialism, not against whites."

Because of its friendship with China, Tanzania in years past has run afoul of U.S. policy. "I understand the U.S. as a power with global responsibilities and views," Nyerere said in 1966. "But what I cannot understand is the policy based on the idea that one way of assuring world peace is to ostracize China. This yellow disease!" (Richard Nixon would now agree.) As for Communism, Nyerere wonders: "What is its application to Africa? How do you preach it in Sukumaland [a district of Tanzania]? In a peasant country, without feudalism, how do you do it? From a distance, Africa may look like a classical Communist situation. But, in reality, it's a Sukumaland situation."

Instead of a proletariat, Tanzania has a tribal communalism that Nyerere believes should be converted to a workable form of self-reliant socialism. Roughly a Fabian Socialist, Nyerere would like to see Tanzania develop an economy similar to Sweden's, with cooperatives that would harmonize modern industry with traditional African tribal life. Above all, he is coaxing and badgering his people into the 20th century--even though some other men who have arrived at that century's high technological reaches sometimes wonder if the trip is entirely worth it. "People tell me," says Nyerere stubbornly, " The Masai are completely happy' . . . I'm not trying to make them happy. But there is a difference between clean water and dirty water."

Smith suggests Nyerere's special charm: a lucid decency and humor. He tells about a British journalist who supposedly asked Nyerere to rephrase a point in more colorfully African language. "Oh, I don't know," said Nyerere. "You do it. You're good at that sort of thing." The reporter quoted Nyerere as saying that unless African leaders could find ways to meet the aspirations of their people, "we shall fall, as surely as the tickfly follows the rhino," a line widely quoted thereafter. "Not bad," commented Nyerere.

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