Washington DC — Toward the end of the 1960s, many of us who had been involved in the southern civil rights movement were looking for ideas. New ideas seemed scarce in America just at the moment we needed them most.
The political establishment -- integrating rapidly -- was saying "enough" to the talk of poor people taking control of their own destiny, this idea that they could make decisions about their lives. Their message was: "Learn to think like us and act right and we'll make a place for you."
Africa seemed to be the direction to point ourselves to find the ideas we needed. Just Africa -- nothing more specific than that. Down there struggling on Mississippi back roads and plantations, we knew very little about the continent. For some of us, Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of Ghana, was the president of all of Africa.
There were other words that meant Africa to us as well. Lumumba. Mau Mau. Sharpeville. Freedom fighters. Fanon. We didn't know very much, in truth. "Ujamaa," along with "uhuru". Those were words that meant Africa to us too.
It was Nyerere's Tanzania that reached out to my generation, demanding that we think about this Africa that Africans were trying to fashion. Although, necessarily, there were ideas and processes specific to Tanzania underway, it was the Africanness that reached through to us. Something larger seemed to surround local Tanzanian efforts.
Self reliance, a term that reached many of us via President Nyerere's important writings on Education for Self Reliance, seemed bigger than Tanzania. And relevant to my neighborhood, too. Ujamaa seemed more than a Swahili phrase defining rural cooperative efforts in Tanzania. These two terms, "ujamaa" and "self reliance," became for a time part of the African American political lexicon.
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Tanzania's streets and roads housed much political opinion -- liberation movements, opponents of neocolonial African regimes, and, yes, Afro-America. There is a straight line connecting the liberated nations of southern Africa and President Nyereres commitment to their freedom. And there are few conversations in Africa that I hold more important than those many of us held with Tanzanians, patient with what surely must have seemed to be a strange and confused lot of distant cousins from America who washed up on their shores.
Benjamin Mkapa, the current president of Tanzania, then a newspaper editor, was one of those Tanzanians. I have long felt that we owe Julius Nyerere some thanks for opening instead of locking the doors to his house.
It was in Tanzania, a crossroads of Africa and Africans, that a lot of us learned that political struggle was necessarily about more than color. And that political struggle was about more than being against something. The essential discussion in Tanzania was how human resources were mobilized. For me anyway, it was the first time seeing what it meant for a state, a government, to commit to all of its people.
In this respect, I should add, judging Tanzania now in terms of its successes and failures in this regard is less important than applauding Tanzania -- the Tanzania of Nyerere's vision -- for its commitment. For Africans in America like myself, the value of seeing an African effort like this was sustaining. And the final chapter on the effort has not yet been written.
