Institutional Choice, Nation- State Building and the Politics of Youth Activism in Postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania

BUILDING NATIONS, MAKING YOUTH: INSTITUTIONAL CHOICE, NATION- STATE BUILDING AND THE POLITICS OF YOUTH ACTIVISM IN POSTCOLONIAL KENYA AND TANZANIA

Jonathan Luke Melchiorre

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science University of Toronto

Building Nations, Making Youth: Institutional Choice, Nation-State Building and the Politics of Youth Activism in Postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania

Jonathan Luke Melchiorre

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Political Science University of Toronto

2018

ABSTRACT This dissertation explains why, while societies in both postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania were undergoing similar socioeconomic and demographic pressures during the initial decades of independence (1961-1989), university students’ responses to these changes strikingly diverged across these two cases. Eschewing explanations of youth activism that prioritize socioeconomic or demographic variables, this study opts for a historical institutional explanation, situating these divergent trajectories of student activism within broader histories of postcolonial nation-state formation. My analysis reveals that the different institutional choices and arrangements, which undergirded Kenya and Tanzania’s respective nation-state building strategies, harnessed and channeled the energies of young people (i.e. university students) into systems of power in significantly different manners, legitimating and de-legitimating certain forms of political participation and violence among youth in the decades following independence, with lasting implications.

The first part of this study explores the historical origins of divergent strategies of nation-state building in Kenya and Tanzania, explaining institutional origins primarily in relation to societal constraints that confronted these new African regimes on the ground at independence. Here I

ii argue that distinctive colonial political economies and institutional architectures produced different spaces of possibility for these countries’ respective postcolonial nation-state building projects.

Part II examines how these distinctly configured states opted to incorporate the university and its students into their nation-state building projects differently. In Kenya, the relationship between the state and university students was marked by the ruling party’s unwillingness to institutionalize party control over the university throughout the 1960s and 1970s, enabling university students to organize and operate politically on campus beyond the realm of state or party control. As a result, when students became increasingly discouraged by the authoritarian political direction of the ruling party during the 1980s, levels of protest, unity and anti-regime sentiment within this group reached their height.

In Tanzania, the TANU state utilized a different set of co-optative institutional implements in managing their university students. As a result of these institutional strategies, the Tanzanian state was better prepared to manage and limit overt student dissert during the decade of the

1980s, because the state had effectively usurped university students’ organizational autonomy.

iii

DEDICATION Dedicated to Maria Fernanda Moreno “But only with you”

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation has been written on three continents over too many years. As far and wide as I have travelled in the process of its completion, the University of Toronto has always been my home base, a place where I have felt comfortable and frequently inspired.

During my over a decade at this institution, across three different degrees, I have had the pleasure and privilege to work and learn from a number of incredible scholars.

First and foremost, I need to thank my supervisor, Dickson Eyoh, who I have known since I was a 19 year old kid. Dickson taught me the third class that I ever took at the

University of Toronto as an undergraduate, Introduction to African Studies. His brilliant lectures opened my mind and challenged me to think differently, more critically. There is no doubt that much of my interest and passion for African politics, literature and history is a direct by-product of the countless hours that I spent learning from him in University of

Toronto lecture halls. Being his student has been an honour and no one has had a greater influence in shaping my thinking and development as a scholar. I will always be grateful to him for his patience, critical feedback, and all the work he put in during the last year of my degree to help me bring my project to completion.

I also need to thank Courtney Jung, who since she agreed to be on my committee, has repeatedly gone above and beyond the call of duty in working to assist me. Her presence throughout the research and writing of my dissertation provided me with much insight, perspective, and welcome levity. Often when things appeared to be at their lowest ebb or in their most dire state, Courtney was the first person that I would reach out to. In those desperate moments, she never failed me. She always made herself available. For these reasons and many others, I am very lucky to have had her on my committee.

v Like Dickson, Antoinette Handley has also been a reliable mentor for me since my days as an undergraduate. She was the first person to give me the opportunity to lecture a class when I was her Teaching Assistant and she was my advisor for a reading course I took during my M.A. Throughout all of this time, she has been an endless source of sage wisdom and steady support and for that I thank her very much.

In addition to my committee, I would like to thank Sean Hawkins, Simone Chambers,

Wilson Prichard, Stanley Doyle-Wood, Aggrey Wasike, Richard Sandbrook, Judith

Teichman, Joe Carens, Abbas Gnamo, Debra Thompson, Richard Simeon, Edward Schatz, and Lucan Way for the role they played in enriching my education during my years at the

University of Toronto. I also need to thank my internal reviewer, Jacques Bertrand, and my external reviewer, Stephen Brown, for their incisive comments and generous feedback on my dissertation. The final product is better on account of their interventions.

At the outset of this dissertation, there was much that I anticipated correctly. I knew the experience of writing it would be a long and arduous one, which would require me to confront many of my own intellectual limitations and most deeply held insecurities. What I failed to recognize was the opportunity that the PhD would give me to meet people who would change my life for the better. I thank Abraham Singer, the best roommate I ever had and a constant source of sound advice, insightful conversation and endless laughs. Abe was playing chess, while most of the rest of us were playing checkers. I learned a great deal from watching him work. I thank Kate Korycki, one of the most brilliant scholars I know, for providing me with a bottomless supply of great conversation, brilliant feedback, patient challenging, and profound friendship. Our long conversations about literature, music, cinema, and love were often the only thing that kept me sane during some of the darker times of the degree. To Noaman Ali, one of the most incisive minds and patient listeners that I have ever

vi come across. Our relationship, which blossomed during unwelcome study sessions for our comparative exam, has become one of my most cherished friendships. Noaman has always pushed me to think differently and more deeply about politics. His commitment to action in support of his own beliefs continues to serve as an inspiration for me. I thank Matt Lesch, who, since our time together in Christopher Cochrane’s stats class, has been one of my best friends in the department. Time spent with Matt always provided me with a welcome respite from the stresses of dissertation writing and I consistently benefitted from his wise advice and warm support. I also need to thank Melissa Levin for her friendship, guidance and great book recommendations. Melissa provided a wonderful model for the kind of probing, interdisciplinary work on African politics that I hope to one day emulate.

To Milena Pandy, Joey Rice, Khalid Ahmed, Semir Teshale, Omar Sirri, Dragana

Bodružic,́ Heather Millar, Carmen Ho, Izabela Steflja, Jaby Mathews, Igor Shoikhedbrod,

Janis Yi-Chun Chien, Jordan Guthrie, Jessica Soedirgo, Alesha Porisky, Craig Smith, Andrew

McDougall, Alejandro Garcia Magos, Marie Gagne, Larissa Atkinson, Joelle Dumouchell, and Alex Paquin-Pelletier, who all in one way or another made the process of researching and writing this dissertation more bearable/enjoyable/memorable than it otherwise would have been.

I will also be forever indebted to Carolynn Branton for her expertise, patience and boundless generosity in answering my myriad of clueless questions and always making time for me no matter how inundated she was with her other work. Specifically, I will always be grateful to her for her kindness and support in some of the more harrowing moments of my degree. I also need to thank Louis Tentsos for his assistance in all matters administrative.

Like Carolynn, I cannot imagine how I would have navigated the treacherous administrative waters of a PhD without his knowledge, patience and support.

vii Before embarking on my fieldwork, which would end up allowing me to live and research in East Africa for approximately 7 months in 2013 and 2014, Dickson encouraged me to try to regain a “sense of wonder” before entering the field, which three years of course work, comprehensive examinations’ preparation and proposal writing had slowly sapped out of me. It was great advice and it was made easy to follow both because of the beauty and richness of the countries that I was able to visit and live in and also, more importantly, because of the wonderful people that my research brought me into contact with.

It is for this reason that I want to thank everyone in Kenya and Tanzania who helped me with this project: friends, colleagues, and interviewees. With special thanks to Mwongela

Kamencu, for his expertise and research assistance; Ado Shaibu, for providing initial contacts and endless encouragement; Willy Mutunga, Katumanga Musambayi, and Mohammad

Bakari, for their insight, feedback and support; Tausi Mnubi, for being like a mother to me during my time in Dar; Rose Akinyi Onyango, Michael Onsando, Kenne Mwiyka, Wairimu

Gitau and Eunice Nyambu, for their friendship and for all the laughs; Renee Akitelek Mboya, for always making me feel that I had a friend in Nairobi that understood me and who I could rely on. Lastly, Wambui Mwangi for her guidance and incredible hospitality. As long as

Wambui was in town, I always felt that I had a place in Nairobi where I was I welcome. Her brilliance, intellectual curiosity and unparalleled generosity of spirit continue to provide me with a role model of how one should aspire to be a scholar and human being in this world. In addition, I would also like to thank Anne-Marie Di Lulio, Nick Sierra, Jerry Riley, Isaac

Amuke, Mwandawiro Mghanga, Wafula Buke, Sabatho Nyamsenda, Wangui Kimari, Jacob

Rasmussen, Goodlucky Bayser, Dan Hodgkinson, David M. Anderson, Gabrielle Lynch, John

S. Saul, Colin Leys, Taras Barak and Walter Bgoya, for providing me at different stages of this process with feedback, friendship, insight, inspiration and/or support.

viii As noted, this dissertation was researched and written on three different continents and I would be remised, if I did not acknowledge my academic home during the latter stages of my writing. Beginning in January of 2017, the Department of Political Science at

Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, generously provided me with office space and the opportunity to teach in the Department. Even more importantly, my time at Los Andes gave me access to a supportive and engaging intellectual community within which to finish writing. In particular, I want to thank Isaline Bergamaschi, Laura Otero Wills, Felipe Botero,

Jean-Marie Chernou, and Fabricio Chagas-Bastos for their encouragement and support in the latter stages of this process. It proved invaluable in helping me to get this project over the line.

I also would like to acknowledge the financial assistance provided by the International

Development Research Centre, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the Tom Easterbrook

Scholarship, New College at the University of Toronto, the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the School of Graduate Studies. The financial support offered by these institutions and donors enabled me to do the kind of extensive fieldwork that

I sincerely believe this project required.

I also need to thank my extended family both in Toronto and Bogotá. To my mother and father, Jane and Gianni, whose love and support throughout this process, whether it was giving me a place to live on short notice, helping me out with expenses, or just providing me delicious dinners and great conversation, made this project possible. I hope its completion has made them both proud. I love them very much. I also need to thank my brothers, Cristian and Jordan and my sister, Jessica, whose successes have inspired me throughout this process and whose solidarity and love repeatedly fortified me.

ix To my family in Colombia, Isaac Sr, Consuelo, Isaac, and Jimena, your patience and kindness during my time in Bogotá, provided me with the kind of love and support that only a family can give. In completing this project, I hope to have been able to, in some small way, repay their patience and faith in me.

Finally, while I am grateful to the University of Toronto for many things, the greatest gift it has given over all these many years was the opportunity to meet my wife, Maria

Fernanda Moreno, in Professor Teichman’s International Development class on a snowy,

January morning in the second year of my PhD. It is not an overstatement to suggest that if

I had not met Maria, I may not have ever finished this damn thing. Her patience, love, support and editing skills have been essential throughout these last years. She believed in me when I had serious doubts. For these reasons and many more, this project is dedicated to her.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ...... iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... v TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... xi ACRONYMS AND ABBRIEVIATIONS ...... xii CHAPTER ONE BUILDING NATIONS, MAKING YOUTH: INSTITUTIONAL CHOICE, NATION-STATE BUILDING AND THE POLITICS OF YOUTH ACTIVISM IN POSTCOLONIAL AFRICA ...... 1 CHAPTER TWO A FREER HAND: INSTITUTIONAL CHOICE AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NATION-STATE BUILDING IN POSTCOLONIAL TANZANIA ...... 45 CHAPTER THREE GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE: INSTIUTUIONAL CHOICE AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NATION-STATE BUILDING IN POSTCOLONIAL KENYA ...... 81 CHAPTER 4 “FOR SERVANTS THEY MUST BE”: STUDENT ACTIVISM AND THE STATE AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, DAR ES SALAAM, 1961-1970 ...... 125 CHAPTER 5 ‘LEAVE POLITICS TO THE POLITICIANS’: EXPLAINING POLITICAL QUIESSENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI, 1963-1978 ...... 164 CHAPTER SIX “UNDER THE THUMB OF THE PARTY”: THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF PARTY CONTROL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DAR ES SALAAM, 1970-1989 ...... 194 CHAPTER 7 “A MONSTER ON HIS HANDS”: STUDENT ACTIVISM AND STATE REPRESSION IN MOI’S KENYA, 1978-1990 ...... 234 CHAPTER EIGHT CONCLUSIONS ...... 281 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 300

xi ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

ANC African National Congress (Tanzania) ASP Afro-Shirazi Party AMNUT All-Muslim National Union of Tanganyika BAKITA Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa (National Swahili Council) CCM Chama cha Mapinduzi CBD Central Business District CIA Central Intelligence Agency DARUSO Dar es Salaam University Students’ Organization DRC Democratic Republic of Congo DUSO Dar es Salaam University Students’ Organization EAA East African Association ERB Economic Research Bureau ERP Economic Recovery Program ESR Education for Self-Reliance FFU Field Force Unit FRELIMO Frente de Libertação de Moçambique GDR German Democratic Republic GEMA Gikuyu, Embu, and Meru Association GSU General Service Unit HELB Higher Education Loans’ Board IFI International Financial Institution IMF International Monetary Fund KADU Kenya African Democratic Union KAMATUSA Kalenjin, Maasai, Turkana, and Samburu KANU Kenya African National Union KASA Kenya African Socialist Alliance KASA Kenya African Study Association KAU Kenya African Union KPU Kenya People’s Union KIST Kiambu Institute of Science and Technology KUSO Kenya University Students’ Organization KYW Kenya African National Union Youth Wing LEGCO Legislative Council of Kenya LNC Local Native Council MAS Million-Acre Scheme MP Member of Parliament MUWATA Muungano wa Wanafunzi Tanzania NAUTS National Union of Tanzanian Students NCCR National Convention for Construction and Reform NEC National Executive Committee NGO Non-Governmental Organization

xii NUSO Nairobi University Students’ Organization NUTA National Union of Tanganyikan Workers NYS National Youth Service NYSPUT National Youth Service Pre-University Training Program OAU Organization of African Unity OP Office of the President PDP People’s Democratic Party PLO Palestinian Liberation Organization RDA Ruvuma Development Association SAP Structural Adjustment Program SONU Students’ Organization of Nairobi University SUNU Student Union of Nairobi University TAA Tanganyika African Association TAG Tanzania Advocacy Group TANU Tanganyika African National Union TAPA Tanzania African Parents’ Association TFL Tanganyika Federation of Labour TPDF Tanzania People’s Defence Force TYL Tanganyika African National Union Youth League UASU University Academic Staff Union UCD University College, Dar es Salaam UCN University College, Nairobi UDI Unilateral Declaration of Independence UDSM University of Dar es Salaam UEA University of East Africa UNISA United Nations’ Students Associations USARF United Students’ African Revolutionary Front USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics USUD University Students’ Union, Dar es Salaam UTP United Tanganyika Party UWT Umoja wa Wakawake wa Tanzania VIJANA Umoja wa Vijana, CCM Youth League WUS World University Service WWI World War I

xiii CHAPTER ONE

BUILDING NATIONS, MAKING YOUTH: INSTITUTIONAL CHOICE, NATION- STATE BUILDING AND THE POLITICS OF YOUTH ACTIVISM IN POSTCOLONIAL AFRICA

The growing disproportion of young people as a percentage of the overall adult population, commonly referred to as a ‘youth bulge’ has, in recent years, come to be associated with political instability, violence and criminality. In such depictions, (male) youth belonging to large age cohorts, almost exclusively situated in the Global South, have come to be represented as an imminent security threat to the global social order (Kirschner 2009: 369; Diouf 2003a, 2003b;

Huntington 2003; Kaplan 2000). With the world’s fastest growing youth population, with over 200 million people between the ages of 15-24, commentators have suggested that African states seem poised to realize many of the most dire ‘youth bulge’ predictions (Agbor et al, 2012; Cincotta 2008;

Cincotta et al 2003; Goldstone 2011, 2016).

There is no denying that the explosion of youth in African public spheres in the 1980s

“provoked an unprecedented moral and civic panic” (Diouf 2003a: 9), corresponding as it did with

a critical conjuncture for African states. Mired in dramatic economic decline, confronted in many

cases by an HIV/AIDS epidemic and/or the outbreak of armed conflict, and undergoing relentless

neoliberal restructuring of their weakening state apparatuses and economies, many African

governments faced a serious crisis in the 1980s of popular legitimacy that demanded profound

reconfigurations of the bases of their political power. These crises decisively exposed the

shortcomings of these states’ strategies of economic development and nation-state building, the

consequences of which were felt most severely by hundreds of millions of African youth (Burgess

and Burton 2010: 3; Abbink 2005; Comaroff and Comaroff 2005; Diouf 2003a: 4, 2003b; Honwana

and De Boeck 2005: 1; Gavin 2007).

1 Once celebrated as “chief agents” of independent African states’ ambitious nationalist

projects of economic and political transformation (Diouf 2003a, 2003b), over the final twenty five

years of the twentieth century, a rapidly expanding population of African youth, increasingly cut

off from employment in the formal labour market and marginalized in national systems of

education and health care, experienced formidable obstacles in their transition to the status of

social adulthood (Seekings 1993: 1; Diouf 2003a, 2003b; Comaroff and Comaroff 2005: 20;

Honwana 2012). During this period, these same youth came to be characterized as a ‘menace’ or

‘threat’ to their respective states, capable of undermining the precarious political orders of these

societies (Diouf 2003a, 2003b; Burgess and Burton 2010: Abdullah 1998, 2005; Comaroff and

Comaroff 2005: 24; Boas 2007; Cooper 2008).

Such pervasive anxieties about ‘the crisis of youth’ both justified their increasing

“criminalization” and “trivialization” by African states (Kirschner 2009: 369) and tended to obscure the many different, “highly specific forms” that youth politics took across the continent during this period (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005: 29; Abbink 2005: 17). So while African youth did, at times, engage in violent activities that facilitated descents into state failure or collapse in some cases (see

Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia), they also actively contributed to processes of democratic political change in others (see Senegal, South Africa, Mali) (Honwana and De Boeck 2005; Burgess and

Burton 2010: 5). The remarkable diversity of African youths’ political activities in the critical decade of the 1980s, in response to a generalized crisis of African states and political economies, critically challenge singularly posed demographic explanations of youth politics. They also focus our attention on the differences in youth political activity in Africa.

To date, the existing literature on youth politics in Africa has not been able to convincingly account for such divergence. Both demographic explanations, which emphasize the deleterious political consequences of youth bulges and predict ominous outcomes, and those

2 approaches emerging out of the culturalist turn in African studies, which concentrate primarily on the agency and creativity of African youth, their modes of alienation, and the emergence of new youth subjectivities, tend to neglect the politico-institutional context of nation-state building within which the politics of African youth have been critically formed. As such, their analyses tend to reach overly generalized conclusions, which are unable to persuasively explain cross-national variation in patterns of youth politics in Africa.

This study seeks to address this lacuna in the literature, by examining divergent patterns of political mobilization and engagement among youth in two East African cases, Kenya and

Tanzania during the crucial first decades of the post-colonial period. Both cases are commonly cited as examples of countries that are especially vulnerable to the perils associated with youth bulge demographics (Perullo 2004; Cincotta et al 2003; Urdal 2006).1 The pair share very large youth cohorts, an experience of endemic economic crisis from the late-1970s and much of the 1980s, and high levels of youth un(der)employment (Stren et al, 1994: 175), which have obstructed youths’ pathways to economic accumulation and political power and representation (Perullo 2004;

Honwana and De Boeck 2005; Argenti 2002; Abbink 2005). Yet, in spite of these similarities, patterns of youth political engagement and mobilization have been starkly divergent between these two cases since independence (Abbink 2005; Maupeu, 2010; 365).

Before discussing these differences further, it is important to clarify the definition of youth.

In this study, youth is defined, following Mshai Mwangola (2007: 137), as “the transitional stage of life between childhood and adulthood characterized by the transfer of societal responsibilities affirming the change of status from the former to the latter.”2 Such a definition recognizes that the

1 In their highly influential report, The Security Demographic, Cincotta et al (2003: 74) included Kenya and Tanzania in a list of the 25 countries (out of the 180 that the report analyzed) with “very high levels of demographic risk of civil conflict.” 2 The fact that definitions of ‘youth’ among government agencies and non-government organizations (NGO) vary so consistently attests to the difficulty in defining the concept

3 boundaries of youth are not biologically determined, “self-evident data,” but rather, that youth is a

“socially constructed” category (Bourdieu 1993: 96-97). Indeed, it is precisely because “the cultural meanings and social attributes ascribed to ‘youth’ have varied a great deal across time and space”, that one cannot provide a universal, trans-historical definition of this term (Comaroff and Comaroff

2005: 19). It important to recognize, therefore, that this category is by no means a homogenous one (Bourdieu 1993: 95; Comaroff and Comaroff 2005: 20; Ivaska 2015; Honwana 2012; Honwana and De Boeck 2005), mediated as it is by class, race, gender, and ethnicity. Moreover, as the

Comaroffs (2005: 20) point out, “youth is not born”, but is “made by historical circumstances.”

In colonial Africa, the historical development of state administrative apparatuses and political economies meant that African youth were broadly conceived, within national imaginaries at independence, as being divided into two distinct types (Waller 2006: 80).3 On the one hand, there was a déclassé/lumpen category of youth (Rashid 1997: 19; Abdullah 1998, 2005; Fourchard

2005; Kirschner 2009). These youths, who migrated to urban centers often in search of employment opportunities and upward social mobility, were portrayed by the colonial state and, later, its postcolonial successor, as “dangerous and disorder[ly]”; antithetical to these states’ prized objectives of economic development and social order (Waller 2006: 84; Burton 2006; Fourchard

2006: 117). Such a perception related to the fact that this lumpen category of youth’s proclivity for

authoritatively. So while the Kenyan government’s 2006 National Youth Policy defined ‘youth’ as ranging from 15-30, the Tanzanian government’s 2007 National Policy of Youth Development and the African Union defined ‘youth’ as ranging from 15-35 (United Republic of Tanzania, 2007: 1). Some NGOs, such as Youth Agenda, one of Kenya’s most prominent youth- centered NGOs has even gone as far as to suggest that youth should be defined as those people between the ages of 15-40. As Honwana notes “The fluidity of age categories defining youth reflects its social and cultural nature, which is context-specific” (Honwana 2012: 13). 3 Richard Waller (2006: 80) acknowledges this distinction when he notes that “[c]olonial rule [in Africa] did not create youth rebelliousness, but it did force it into new channels. For one thing, it presented a future sharply divided and tightly controlled within the colonial hierarchy of opportunity. While for some young men colonial rule offered an accelerated path to wealth and status, to others it seemed to deny a future altogether”

4 outmigration from rural areas was seen to negatively impact African states’ economically important agricultural sectors (which could no longer depend on their labour). Moreover, these youths’ presence in urban centers was expected to both exacerbate the growing problems of rapidly expanding informal sectors, in which migrant youth commonly worked, and crime and violence, in which they were perceived to be primary perpetrators (Burton 2006).

To explore these durable differences in youth activism between postcolonial Kenya and

Tanzania, however, this study will focus on the second, more privileged category of African youth: university students. At independence, newly established African universities were expected to be the “intended parents of national development” (Young 1981: 145), responsible for the self- conscious production of a new national political elite (Hodgkinson and Melchiorre, n.d.). As such, the students of these institutions of higher learning, the vast majority of whom came from rural, peasant backgrounds, 4 were considered indispensable to African states’ projects of economic development, providing much needed high-level manpower, which enabled these states to meet one of their most pressing commitments to their new national publics: the rapid Africanization of state bureaucracies. It is precisely for this reason that “universities came to be considered a necessary ingredient in the ‘development’ logic of th[is] period” by postcolonial African states’, which

4 Students recruited to postcolonial African universities “came from a broader section of the population in Africa than at any time in Europe (ibid).” For example, in East Africa, approximately 90 percent of students came from a peasant background as late as the early 1990s (Omari and Mihyo 1991: 10; Balsvik 1998: 308). As R.R. Balsvik (1998: 308) notes, in contrast to universities in the West, in postcolonial Africa in the first decades of independence, “[t]he state provided…for lodging, feeding and allowances for pocket money, books and travels of students. This was considered necessary because an overwhelming number of the students could not be supported by their families.” Perhaps, this helps to explain why the hard distinction between youth and university students often clearly delineated in scholarly writings about industrialized societies (Bourdieu 1993) has not been as prescient in Africanist writings. Indeed, the reinvigoration in Africanist research on youth has commonly included university students as an important sub-section of this social category (see Seekings 1993; Diouf 1996; Rashid 1997; Abdullah 1998, 2005; Argenti 2002; Cruise O’Brien 2003; Abbink 2005; Konings 2005; De Boeck and Honwana 2005; Ivaska 2011, 2015; Mwangola 2007; Honwana 2012, 2013; Waller 2006).

5 believed that they “must have a key role in the very management of th[ese] university[ies]”

(Mamdani 1994: 3).

Commonly venerated as ‘leaders of tomorrow’ (Mwangola 2007), these university students’ educational socialization was seen to be a key component of these states’ nation-state building projects. Within broader national contexts, where the power of civil society organizations vis-à-vis the state was increasingly limited, and where the vast majority of the population lacked extensive formal schooling, university students’ privileged status as elites-in-waiting, a by-product of their rarefied educational credentials, enhanced their national reputations and bestowed upon them, in contrast to the vast majority of their youthful counterparts, the authority to exercise their voice and influence on the national political stage (Balsvik 1998; Waller 2006: 80; Hodgkinson and

Melchiorre n.d.). In short, as Waller (2006: 80) notes, the education of this “privileged few” provided them with “the skills and knowledge…to both understand and confront authority.”

Throughout the 1960s, that is exactly what many of these students did, as a host of disruptive university protests across the continent alerted postcolonial African states’ to the challenges posed to their emergent nation-state building projects by their population of national university students (Mazrui 1995; Zeilig and Dawson 2008: 2). In response, some of these states began to initiate concerted efforts to better discipline and manage the student bodies of their national universities. Whether through the creation of campus party youth wings, as in Siaka

Stevens’ Sierra Leone (Rashid 1997; Abdullah 1998), or through the appointment of high-ranking party officials to prominent positions within the university administration, as in Nkrumah’s Ghana

(Burawoy 1976), many of these states sought to implement institutional reforms designed to more effectively “incorporate the university under the surveillance of dominant political organs” (ibid:

94).

6 So while much of the most influential recent work about African youth has centered on the ‘lumpen’ or ‘disenfranchised’ section of this category living in precarious urban settings (Ivaska

2011; Abdullah 1998, 2005; Sommers 2006, 2011;), it is important to recall, as Andrew Ivaska notes, that privileged categories of African youth, like university students, posed some of the most formidable, early challenges to state power and political authority in Africa’s initial postcolonial decades, especially when these youth’s efforts to move up the “latter of generational hierarchy” were “frustrated" (Ivaska 2011; Balsvik 1998).5 As such, a focus on the ways in which African states endeavoured to incorporate this critical category of African youth into their nation-state building projects during this period can provide important insights into the political origins of youth activism on the continent and the political effects of incipient processes of nation-state building in postcolonial African states.

In Kenya and Tanzania, the differences in trajectories of student activism at the University of Nairobi and the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) during these decades were particularly stark. Indeed, between 1965 and 1989, while University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) was closed only twice on account of student unrest (in 1966 and 1978, and not once during the decade of the 1980s), the University of Nairobi and its constituent, Kenyatta University College, were closed

5 There are multiple examples of such early challenges. Student protests in Sudan in October of 1964 at Khartoum University contributed to the fall of the military government of General Ibrahim Abboud (Argenti 2004: 129). In Senegal, between March and June of 1968, striking students organized a series of demonstrations that focused on national issues, which inspired the country’s trade uninonists, who eventually joined with the students, adopting the latter’s protest slogans. These protest actions eventually forced the country’s President Leopold Senghor to flee the capital and very nearly brought his regime down (Cruise O'Brien 2003: 169, Bianchini 2016, Gueye 2018; Nugent 2012: 200-201; Zelig 2007; Becker 2018). In 1969, security forces in both Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia and Mobutu’s Zaire murdered student leaders on campus in response to their role in leading protests against those respective regimes (Monaville 2013; Balsvik 1985). Perhaps, most notably, African students’ protracted struggles against repressive state apparatuses in Ethiopia and South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s played a crucial role in the toppling of these respective regimes (Magaziner 2010; Bundy 1987; Seekings 1993; Zewde 2014).

7 approximately 25 times. This was more than any other university in Africa (Balsvik 1998; Oanda

2016: 73; Omari and Mihyo 1991) and, significantly, the vast majority of these closures occurred after 1975, as the country began to descend into political and economic decline.

These divergent trajectories of student activism are particularly puzzling, when one considers the state of both institutions as recently as the late-1960s, when the roles of these universities appeared to be inversed. In Kenya, the relationship between university students and the state was initially marked by “indifference” on both sides (McKown, 1975: 216), with students at University College, Nairobi (UCN) “pursu[ing] their studies with little active attention to the political world” (ibid: 215-216). By stark contrast, at University College, Dar es Salaam (UCD), beginning in 1967, following the Arusha Declaration, UCD became a “significant nodal point for the internationalist left”, when a small, but vocal group of students from Tanzania and beyond, who were “well informed on developments in Vietnam, African liberation struggles, and the activities of the [Central Intelligence Agency]”, became committed to “building a fledgling campus movement that was broaching some early critiques of the postcolonial state” (Ivaska 2011: 126).

The central research question of this doctoral project is, therefore, why, while universities in both countries were undergoing similar socioeconomic and demographic pressures during the late-1970s and 1980s, did university students’ responses to these changes strikingly diverge? In other words, why had students at the University of Nairobi transformed from relatively apolitical, elites-in-waiting in the 1960s to important agitators for political change on the national stage by the early 1980s? Conversely, why had UDSM students gone from engaging vibrantly in internationalist Leftist politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s to becoming increasingly depoliticized, apathetic and compliant by the early 1980s? And what do the answers to such questions reveal about the political origins of youth activism in Africa and the nature of these postcolonial African states?

8 In examining variations in patterns of youth politics, I seek to identify their key political roots, which have to this point largely been ignored in the existing literature. Variations in trajectories of youth activism in Africa cannot be explained solely or primarily in relation to demographic or socioeconomic factors. In order to provide a more political explanation of trajectories of youth activism, this study contends that these patterns need to be situated within the broader history of postcolonial nation-state formation and these states’ subsequent strategic responses to the challenges posed to them by the critical juncture of the 1980s. It is this study’s central argument that the different institutional choices made by postcolonial state elites in the era of decolonization, which came to undergird Kenya and Tanzania’s respective nation-state building projects throughout the postcolonial period, harnessed and channelled the energies of youth (in this case, university students) in fundamentally distinct ways, creating different modalities of youth politics. In attempting to manage political opposition and competition, Kenya and Tanzania’s postcolonial states chose to discipline and incorporate youth into systems of power in significantly different manners, legitimating and de-legitimating certain forms of political participation and violence in the decades following independence, with lasting implications.

To explore the dynamics and causes of youth activism in both of these cases, my research adopts a comparative historical approach that relies primarily on secondary source material and archival research6, which includes government reports, newspapers and magazines, letters to the editor, student journals and correspondence, university records, and personal archives. 7 In an

6 Archival research in Kenya was conducted for this study at the Kenyan National Archives, Nation House (where the archives of the country’s main daily newspaper, the Daily Nation, are held) and at Jomo Kenyatta Memorial Library on the campus of the University of Nairobi. In Tanzania, I conducted archival research at National Central Library in Dar es Salaam and the East Africana Collection at the Julius Nyerere Library at the University of Dar es Salaam. I also conducted additional archival research at the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library, where I used the microfilm to access The Standard’s (Tanzanian daily) 1960s publications. 7 I was able to access the personal archive of former University of Dar es Salaam Professor, John S. Saul

9 effort to supplement these primary and secondary sources (Richie 2003: 26), I have, utilizing a snowball sampling technique, also carried out 150 semi-structured, cross-sectional interviews8 with university students (including student leaders and activists), faculty and administrators from both the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Nairobi, national politicians from both case countries and members of Kenyan and Tanzanian civil society, all of whom were politically active at some point during the period covered by this study between 1965 to 2000. These interviews have enabled me to address “blind spots” (ibid: 26) in the primary and secondary materials, such as the absence in official government and mainstream media sources of the voices of oppositional actors and former student activists, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s. These interviews and my archival research were primarily collected over the course of seven months of fieldwork carried out over three research trips to Kenya and Tanzania between August of 2013 and

December of 2014. In what follows, I spell out my argument in theoretical terms by engaging both the literature from political science and economics on youth bulge and the culturalist literature on

African youth primarily generated in Africanist history, anthropology and political science.

Beyond ‘heroes’ and ‘villains´: theoretical approaches to the study of youth politics in Africa

In the late-1980s, questions of youth and generation, previously a central preoccupation of Africanist anthropologists of the 1940s and 1950s, once again became central to the study of

African politics and societies (Burgess and Burton 2010: 1; De Boeck and Honwana 2005: 5; Diouf

8 With respect to the interview material on offer here, given the “imprecision” of memory, subject as it is to “alteration over time” (Richie 2003: 27), and the fact that many of my respondents have been asked to recall events dating back four or five decades, in this study, I utilize a triangulation research methodology. By triangulation, I refer to the “use of a combination of methods of investigation, data sources, or theoretical frameworks”, which provide a “process of verification that increases validity by incorporating several viewpoints and methods” (Yeasmin and Rahman 2012: 156; Jick 1979, Cresswell 2014; Ayoub et al 2014). This method has enabled me to test and corroborate respondents’ recollections of past events against other forms of evidence. In those instances where disagreement or serious ambiguity exists, I have tried to document this as faithfully as possible.

10 2003a: 2; Gavin 2007: 69; Honwana 2012: 14; Kirschner 2009: 369; Straker 2007: 299). Over the last three decades, African Studies has produced a voluminous, interdisciplinary literature on youth identity, culture, and politics (Abdullah 1998, 2005; Argenti 1998, 2002; Bayart et al, 1992; Brennan

2006; Burgess and Burton 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2005; De Boeck and Honwana 2005; Diouf

1996, 2003, 2005; El Kenz 1996; Honwana 2012, 2013; Ivaska 2011; Kirschner 2009; Richards 1995,

1996; Seekings 1993; Waller 2006). Much of the best of this work has been produced in the disciplines of history and anthropology.

By contrast, within the discipline of political science, what little comparative work exists on African youth has tended to view this topic through the narrow prism of the continent’s large intergenerational demographic imbalances, fixating on the security ramifications of Africa’s historically unprecedented youth bulges 9 for African states’ processes of development, democratization and state consolidation (Huntington 2003; Goldstone 2001, 2016; Cincotta et al

2003). While some of these scholars have noted that under the right economic conditions,10 a large proportion of young workers could provide “a demographic bonus” to the economic growth of their societies (Cincotta et al 2003: 42), a more prominent contingent warns that, under the prevailing conditions of much of Africa,11 where unemployment remains high and young men subsequently

9 Youth bulge scholars’ method of measuring youth bulges have varied depending on the study. Fuller and Pitts (1990), for example, measured ‘youth bulges’ as “a period of time in the history of a population when the third or fourth age cohorts (ages 15-19 and 20-24) reach a proportion of 20% or more of total population” (Fuller and Pitts 1990: 9). Later studies have provided different measurements of youth bulge. For example, Cincotta and Doces (2012: 100) measure the “youth-bulge proportion” as “the fraction of young adults aged 15 to 29 within a country’s total working-age population (ages 15 to 64), with “youth-bulge proportions rang[ing] from 0.50 to above 0.60 with the most youthful populations…and below 0.30 in the most demographically mature countries.” Other scholars have looked at the ratio of young adults to only the older adults (Mesquida and Weiner 1991) or the proportion of children and young people, 0 to 29, in the total population (Leahy et al 2007). 10 Where the majority of young adults can procure adequate education and training and where young people’s skills can be put to use by willing employers 11 Where an estimated 97% of population growth will occur between 2015 and 2050 (Walker 2016)

11 struggle to acquire sustainable livelihoods and the status of social adulthood, youth bulges present these societies with a major “social challenge and political hazard” that could lead to “the outbreak of political violence and warfare” (ibid: 42).

During the 1990s, Youth Bulge12 theory came to be popularized following the publication of two controversial works: Robert D. Kaplan’s 1994 essay for The Atlantic, “The Coming Anarchy”

(later included in a collection of essays of the same name authored by Kaplan and published in

2000), and Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of a New World

Order. In “The Coming Anarchy”, though Kaplan did not explicitly reference ‘youth bulge’ by name, he did forward an explicit causal link, tying dire predictions about West Africa’s growing security concerns with its rapidly expanding population. According to Kaplan, in a broader social context characterized by “[d]isease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels”, young West

African men were key agents contributing to their societies’ disintegration. 13 For Kaplan, therefore, Africa’s demography foreshadowed the continent’s catastrophic destiny, which would be, he believed, characterized by “an anarchic implosion of criminal violence” (ibid, 12).

12 It is important to take note of the geopolitical context out of which youth bulge theory emerged and came to be popularized. In 1987, an American geographer, Gary Fuller, first coined the term during his spell as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (Interview, Gary Fuller, September 27th, 2017, via telephone). Utilizing his unprecedented access to the Agency’s population census data from around the world, some of which was classified (ibid), Fuller’s research became useful to the Agency as a means of “provid[ing] US intelligence analysts with a tool to predict unrest and uncover potential national security threats” (Hendrixson 2004: 2). Writing at a historical moment, near the end of the Cold War, when US foreign policy attention increasingly turned to a focus on potential security threats emanating from the Global South, Fuller’s work proved exceedingly valuable. 13 Kaplan famously described these youth as being “like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid…on the verge of igniting” (Kaplan 2000: 5).

12 Two years after the publication of Kaplan’s essay, in 1996, Huntington forwarded similar polemical arguments in his controversial book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World

Order, about the deleterious impacts of rapid population growth on political stability in, what he referred to as, the ‘Muslim world’.14 Contending that the resurgence of Islamist organizations across the Middle East and North Africa from the 1970s onwards could be primarily attributed to the fact that “the proportion of youth (that is, those fifteen to twenty-four years of age) in major

Muslim countries rose significantly and began to exceed 20% of the total population” (Huntington

2003: 118) during that period. The “demographic explosion” witnessed across these countries generated an “availability of large numbers of often unemployed males between the ages of 15 and

30”, which had become, in Huntington’s echoing of youth bulge principles, “a natural source of instability and violence both within Islam and against non-Muslims” (ibid, 265). It was the presence of these large cohorts of young males, according to Huntington, which went “a long way to explaining Muslim violence in the 1980s and 1990s” (ibid).

While Kaplan and Huntington’s work had brought unprecedented popular attention15 to bear on the supposed consequences of rapid demographic expansion for politics and the central role that (particularly male) youth were expected to play in producing such destabilizing political outcomes, they were certainly not the first scholars to identify these correlations, nor was youth bulge theory only applicable to contemporary cases. Indeed, for decades prior to the publication of

14 Unlike Kaplan, however, Huntington explicitly used the term ‘youth bulges’ and cited the work of Fuller (Huntington 2003: 259). 15 Kaplan and Huntington’s arguments proved to be incredibly influential in American foreign policy circles. By early 2000s, in the aftermath of 9/11, youth bulges were being referred to in cover stories of popular American newsmagazines, like Newsweek (Zakaria 2001) and referenced in public speeches by the high-ranking officials in the CIA, including their director, George Tenet (Sommers 2006: 138). In the space of less than three decades, the political consequences of youth bulges had gone from being a new and relatively marginal theory within the social sciences “into what [now] passes…for common knowledge” (Goldstone 2016: xxxiii).

13 their work, a host of studies (Moller 1968; Cohn and Markides 1977; Gillis 1974; Esler 1974;

Choucri 1974) demonstrated that the existence of disproportionately large youth cohorts tended to coincide with “times of political crisis” (Goldstone 2001: 95) or “cycles of rebellion and military campaigns” (Cincotta et al 2003: 44).

In the over two decades since the publication of Kaplan and Huntington’s work, the popularization of the youth bulge thesis has inspired a slew of large-N studies, which have argued that while youth bulge demographics do not make revolution and rebellion inevitable, they do increase “the risks of political turmoil and revolt” under certain conditions (Goldstone 2012). These studies have hypothesized that youth bulge demographics are a structural cause of a number of such destabilizing political outcomes, including mass political protest (Hart and Lakin Gullan 2010;

Fuller and Pitts 1990; Huntington 2003; Cincotta et al 2003: 45-47), low-intensity political violence

(Huntington 2003; El Kenz 1996; Goldstone 2001; Urdal 2006), civil and ‘ethnic’ conflict (Cincotta et al 2003; Kaplan 2000; Wagschal and Metz 2016; Esty et al 1995; Goldstone 2001: 95), revolution

(Goldstone 2001, 2016; Urdal 2006), terrorist recruitment (Zakaria 2001; Huntington 2003; Lia

2005) and repressive authoritarianism (Cincotta and Doces 2011; Weber 2013).

Much of the ‘youth bulge’ literature places heavy emphasis on the importance of macro- structural variables, such as rates of economic growth, unemployment and urbanization, regime type and other development indicators. Explanations of the relationship between youth and political instability and violence within this literature vary. While most scholars agree that youth’s common participation in political violence, activism and revolution is in part related to their attraction to new ideas and their lack of familial and professional responsibilities, which make them

14 easier to mobilize in social and political conflicts (Moller 1968; Goldstone 2001), the driving factors behind such mobilization remain disputed.16

Scholars emerging out of the grievance school of political violence, for example, argue that youth bulges are significant because individuals in large youth cohorts are more likely to confront intense competition and institutional bottlenecking in the labour market and education system, political and economic marginalization in the public sphere and overcrowding in urban centers. As a result of these combined pressures, they will be more prone to engage in dissident or violent activity, particularly in societies undergoing political transition or economic stagnation (Choucri

1973; Cincotta et al 2003: 42-47; Goldstone 2001, 2016; Moller 1968; Renouvin and Duroselle,

1967; Urdal 2006). Scholars who subscribe to greed understandings of political violence offer a contrasting explanation for the significance of youth bulges to the outbreak of violence. They argue that the existence of massive youth cohorts means that there are a large number of potential recruits for warfare, rebellion or other subversive political activities (Collier et al 2008; Wagschal and Metz 2016: 61), who are naturally more predisposed to violence than older age cohorts (Collier et al. 2009: p. 22; Fearon and Laitin 2003: 86). In this framing, the abundant supply of youth with low opportunity costs can provide violent entrepreneurs with the necessary recruits to wage war

(Collier et al, 2009: 10). This makes the possibility of rebellion more feasible and, thus, more likely to occur (ibid).

Regardless of differences in explanation, the majority of these studies are, broadly speaking, similar in three important ways. First, though the measurement of the youth bulge varies across the literature, they generally define the category of youth in rigid, biological terms (usually

16 One of the principal theorists of youth bulge, Gunnar Heinsohn argues that “surplus young men nearly always lead to bloody expansions or the creation and destruction of empires” (Heinsohn 2006: 11 as quoted in Wagschal and Metz 2016: 56)

15 as the cohort between 15-24 or 15-29). Second, in these studies, youth politics is often examined through a security lens, which tends to forward a narrative of youth as potential security threat.

In such studies, therefore, young people (particularly young men) in African states are commonly depicted one-dimensionally as agents of radicalism or violence (Weber 2013; Austen 2011). Third, the majority of these scholars have predicted that African countries, dogged by economic crisis, rapid urbanization, derelict state institutions, ethnic divisions and material scarcity, are particularly vulnerable to the deleterious impacts of youth bulge demographics (El-Kenz 1996; Goldstone 2001,

2016; Urdal and Hoelscher 2012; Huntington 2003; Cincotta et al 2003).17

Youth bulge studies should be commended for attempting to identify “broad comparative patterns” in their research (Venkatesh and Kassmir 2007). Moreover, in the more nuanced of these demographic studies, scholars like Goldstone (2016) and Urdal (2006) have persuasively highlighted some of the structural challenges that youth bulge demographics, under certain sociopolitical conditions, can pose to states and societies. Indeed, it is important to stress that that demography matters politically and that the continent’s massive population of young people will play a central role in shaping the political futures of their respective societies. Still, the assumptions, methods and findings of many of these youth bulge studies have received persuasive critiques from a robust, interdisciplinary Africanist literature on youth emerging primarily in the disciplines of anthropology and history. This Africanist literature highlights three of the major problematic features of the youth bulge theories.

First, these scholars reject the notion that youth is a biologically determined,

“transhistorical, [and] transcultural category” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005). Instead, they see youth as a historically constructed and contingent social category, which is constituted distinctly

17 In their study for Population Action, Cincotta et al (2003: 74) found that 17 of the 25 states that they deemed to have “very high levels of demographic risk of civil conflict” were in Sub- Saharan Africa.

16 in different historical times and places (Christiansen et al 2005; Venkatesh and Kassimir 2007; De

Boeck and Honwana 2005; Honwana 2012; Kirschner 2009: 372) and which is mediated by “[a] myriad of factors” including “gender, class, race, ethnicity and political position” (De Boeck and

Honwana 2005: 3). As such one of their main research contributions has been to highlight the need to interrogate the factors and forces that have historically shaped the social construction of youth

(Seekings 1993; Comaroffs 2005; Cruise O’Brien 2003).

Second, as Marc Sommers notes, youth bulge thesis has a tendency to “stai[n] all youth in certain places –most frequently those in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa—with the mark of danger” (2006: 141). Africanist studies of youth politics have sought to problematize such one- dimensional conceptions of youth, which present African youth as a deviant or problematic category (Seekings 1993; Durham 2000; Argenti 2002; Kirschner 2009). In an effort to contest such problematic depictions, the culturalist literature in African Studies on youth emphasizes young people’s agency and creativity and the variability of their everyday life experiences (Argenti 2002;

Biaya 2005; Honwana and De Boeck 2005; Honwana 2012; Seekings 1993). Far from being portrayed as simply passive victims or violent perpetrators, this literature has alerted us to the importance of viewing African youth as active, but not completely autonomous, social agents, who, while they, at times, may be perpetrators of violence and disorder, can also be responsible for making important cultural contributions and initiating profound political change (Argenti 2002;

Diouf 2003a; Honwana 2012, 2013; Burgess and Burton 2010).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, critics have pointed to the bias in youth bulge theories’ case selection, which has often focused disproportionately on war-torn cases (Sommers

2011: 296; Gavin 2007). They demonstrate that the predictive power of youth bulge theory when taken into consideration all African cases is “weak” and “inexact” (Sommers 2011: 297) and that cohort size, in and of itself, does not increase the propensity for conflict (Collier and Hoeffler 2004).

17 In fact, in many of the African countries with youth bulge demographics, recent civil conflicts have not ensued and even where those conflicts have occurred, “the vast majority of young men do not get involved in violence” (Baker and Ricardo 2006: 181), nor do these conflicts generally take place in densely populated urban settings (Sommers 2011: 296).

A serious consequence of youth bulge theory’s common preoccupation with violence and instability is not simply that it is not a very accurate predictor of political outcomes, but that such theories are actually obscuring the remarkable variation in African youth politics (Gavin 2007: 74).

As noted, in the last few decades, the explosion of youth in the public sphere in African states has taken many “new avenues of political action and expression that may be violent or non-violent, formal or informal” (Diouf 2003a: 3; Comaroff and Comaroff 2005: 20; Mwangola 2007). So while it is true that youth have often engaged as primary protagonists in armed conflicts (see Liberia,

Sierra Leone, DRC), often as child soldiers, or in criminal networks, as members of vigilante bands, protection rackets or criminal gangs (Abbink 2005; Abdullah 1998, 2005; Anderson 2002; Arnaut

2005; Boas 2007; Dorman 2005; Hoffman 2011; Honwana 2005; Meagher 2007; Kagwanja 2005;

Kirschner 2009; Richards 1995), this does not come close to encapsulating the totality of their activities. Youth have also played a crucial role in resisting or opposing postcolonial authoritarian states, most prominently by helping to organize and lead broad-based social movements (Bundy

1987; Cruise O’Brien 2003; Diouf 1996, 2003a; Honwana and De Boeck 2005; Gavin 2007;

Honwana 2012; Seekings 1993). They have also actively taken the lead in informal mediating institutions (i.e. transportation, food services in parallel markets, etc.), or what Christian Lund refers to as “twilight” institutions (Lund 2006) that help to provide services to people that the state is no longer willing or able to perform (Kassimir and Flanagan 2010; Rasmussen 2012). Finally, youth have been instrumental in many of the continent’s burgeoning transnational religious (i.e.

18 the rise of Pentecostalism) (Argenti 2002; Gavin 2007; Marshall 2009) and cultural movements

(Fredericks 2014; Perullo 2004; Schulz 2012).

The diversity and dynamism of African youths’ engagement in the public sphere, therefore, has crucially demonstrated some of the prime limitations of youth bulge theorizing.

Namely, in their emphasis on demographic and socioeconomic factors and their construction of youth as security threat, youth bulge theories within political science have tended to evacuate the social category of youth of its political and historical content. In so doing, they often mistakenly portray African youth, commonly the biggest victim of state-led violence in African societies, disproportionately as the continent’s most violent perpetrators, a pressing problem that needs to be managed, controlled and disciplined.

For their part, while the culturalist literature in African Studies has been better at recognizing that youth is a heterogeneous social category and emphasizing the creativity and agency that African youth have utilized in confronting their precarious social circumstances, it has fared no better in attempting to explain variation in youth politics than their youth bulge counterparts. In fact, in some ways, they have shown themselves to be even less equipped analytically to grasp comparative patterns. This is because the culturalist literature’s studies have typically been smaller in scale, approaching questions of youth culture and politics from a micro perspective, which emphasizes social dynamics in highly localized settings (Venkatesh and

Kassimir, 2007). While such works have successfully contributed textured narratives of single case studies, rich in empirical detail about the everyday life experiences of young Africans, they have not sought to offer theoretical or methodological tools necessary to advance our understanding of the historical and political origins of youth engagement and mobilization as it varies across cases.

19 Historical institutionalism, middle-range theory, and the comparative study of youth politics in Africa

To pursue this important research objective, in an effort to both counter the youth bulge

literature that has become predominant in political science, and in order to further the

comparative study of youth politics, we must rely on middle-range theory that can identify

variations in institutional contexts, which have been important in politicizing the social category

of youth. Middle-range theory, which substantively focuses on a delimited universe of case studies

and uses systematic comparative methods to highlight and analyze variation among these cases

in a fine-grained manner, is better able to “capture the complexities of empirical reality” (Kang

2014: 223) and can “serve as a bridge between structural and agent-oriented analysis” (Rothstein

1992: 51). Such an approach does not aspire to create grand theories with universal applicability,

but rather aims to build historically and contextually grounded theory, which generate

“cumulative knowledge that lies between all-encompassing universal truths…and empirically

rich, atheoretical context-specific details” (Kang 2014: 222). Indeed, one of the major blind spots

of both the youth bulge literature and the culturalist literature in African Studies on youth in this

regard is their neglect of middle-range variables like “the basic institutions that organize the lives

of young people” (Venkertash and Kassmir 2007: 11). For these reasons, attempting to explore

the ways in which institutions shape or mediate the preferences, interests, and strategies of

African youth, while also structuring their relations to the state, can provide powerful, new

insights into the political origins of youth activism in Africa, in a way that the grand, macro-

theorizing of demographic approaches, or the more micro-level culturalist studies simply are ill-

equipped to capture. In order to appreciate the origins and consequences of these institutional

choices, which have helped to shape youth politics, we must first engage with the historical

institutionalist literature emerging out of the discipline of political science, which has much to

contribute theoretically and methodologically to this research agenda.

20 Institutions-- broadly defined as a set of shared norms, rules, or conventions, both formal and informal, which help to structure interactions within a society (Thelen and Steinmo 1992;

Knight 1992; Thelen 2003; Immergut 1998; Helmke and Levitsky 2006)-- have always been a central preoccupation of political science (Immergut 1998: 5). In the 1970s, as the Behaviourist school’s dominance of the discipline subsided, a new body of literature emerged, known as the New

Institutionalism, which reinvigorated political scientists’ interest in historical analysis of institutions, their origins, development and relationship to policy and political behaviour (Sanders

2007: 40; Thelen and Steinmo 1992; Hall and Taylor 1996; Hall 2010; Hacker et al 2015). This literature, in its multiple manifestations,18 is interested in focusing in on the role institutions “play in defining the constellations of incentives and constraints faced by political actors in different…contexts” (Thelen and Stienmo 1992: 6; Sanders 2007; Djelic 2010: 17). While the multiple strands of this approach disagree on definitional matters, institutions’ relationship to the preference formation of individual actors, and explanations of institutional formation and change, they generally agree on the proposition that institutions play a critical role in shaping political strategies of individual actors, structuring power relations among competing social groups, and, ultimately, influencing political outcomes (Thelen and Steinmo 1992; Thelen 1999: 358; Mahoney and Thelen 2015).

Perhaps the most influential of these variants of institutionalism within the discipline of political science has been historical institutionalism, which has since the late-1970s produced an innovative and robust scholarly literature (Berger 1981; Hall 1986; Epsing-Andersen 1990;

Immergut 1992; Steinmo 1993; Pierson 1994; Tarrow 1994; Marx 1998). While historical institutionalism remains a “messily eclectic genre” (Sander 2007: 44; Hall and Taylor 1996: 939),

18 Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor (1996) identify three types of new institutionalism including historical institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism and sociological institutionalism

21 there is no doubt that it shares some basic “family traits” (Katzenstein 2009: 100). First, historical institutionalists hold a guiding interest in topical issues of broad popular concern. Second, they are primarily invested in understanding the ways in which institutional contexts and processes shape social and political action. Third, they focus on the character and specificities of state-society relations. Fourth, historical institutionalists often favour comparative research based on the construction of comparable and divergent cases. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes, historical institutionalists have an abiding belief in the importance of history and its constitutive role in shaping political outcomes and thus they tend to forward arguments that are attentive to temporally specified processes (Katzenstein 2009: 100; Sanders 2007; 39; Skocpol and

Somers 1980; Pierson and Skocpol 2002). As Elizabeth Sanders (2007: 53) notes “[i]f historical institutionalism teaches us anything it is that the place to look for answers to big [political] questions…is in institutions, not personalities, and over the larger landscapes of history, not the here and now.”

A historical institutional approach to the study of youth politics in Africa, thus offers a number of important advantages. As Bratton and van de Walle (1996: 43) note, in prioritizing “a set of simple political variables at an intermediate level of explanation”, scholars are able to “close the gap between causes and outcomes by focusing on explanatory factors that are proximate to the object of study; to illuminate the regularities and variations across countries; and to account for both continuities and changes across time.” This emphasis within historical institutionalism, in its multiple iterations, on historical analysis (Thelen 2003; Orvis 2006; Katzenstein 2003: 282;

Arthur 1995: 65), whether expressed in a language of “path dependency” (North 1990; Mahoney

2000; Pierson 2001; Greif and Laitin 2004), “critical junctures” (Capoccia 2015; Mahoney and

Thelen 2015), “structural contingency” (Karl 1990), or “punctuated equilibra” (Krasner 1984), and its investment in middle-range analysis, provides some of the nimble theoretical tools necessary to

22 be able to appreciate variations in the institutional arrangements that undergirded processes of

African nation-state building. In the next section, we will explain the importance of nation-state building vis-à-vis youth politics and discuss the study of the former within Africanist political science.

Flattening the landscape: the study of nation-state building in postcolonial Africa There is no denying that postcolonial projects of African nation-state building were confronted, at independence, by a host of acute challenges. At the root of these trials was the fact that colonial partition, near the end of the 19th Century, “involved the haphazard and often brutal amalgamation of diverse communities within artificial boundaries”, which resulted in the creation of territories with multiethnic populations (Eyoh and Sandbrook 2003: 233; Berman et al 2004: 12;

Brubaker 1996: 81; Eriksen 1999: 49; 2016: 222; Keller 2014: 3; Mkandawire 2005: 12). As such, unlike in much of Western Europe, where nation-state building projects involved constructing the nation-state around the dominant language, culture and history of the majoritarian ethno-cultural group (Kymlicka 2004: 65; Smith 1986: 241), in postcolonial Africa, where such dominant groups were largely absent, the concept of nation came to be conceived almost wholly in territorial terms

(Brubaker 1996: 81; Davidson 1992; Markakis 1999: 77; Kymlicka 2004: 65; Smith 1983: 55, 1986;

Neuberger 1977: 204; Breuilly 1994: 199; Robinson 2014). A by-product of these historical circumstances was that, in the words of the Father of Guinean independence, Sekou Toure, in postcolonial Africa “the state exist[ed] before the nation [wa]s shaped” (Toure 1963: 126).

To compound African nationalists’ nation-state building difficulties further, in many

African countries, colonial states had done all they could -- often through the official categorization and administration of African publics along lines of ethnicity-- to politicize ethnic and regional divisions. These attempts effectively established practical obstacles to the fostering of a national ethic (Nugent 2012; Berman 1998; Berman et al 2004; Mamdani 1996; Smith 1986: 252; Posner

2005; Lonsdale 1981: 201; Ranger 1983). Given these challenges, a pivotal question for the first

23 generation of postcolonial African nation-state builders, therefore, was how to best foster incipient processes of nation-building19 within these fragile new states.

In answering this question, African nationalists were deeply informed by the predominant

literature on ‘nation-building’ and ‘national integration’ emerging out of modernization theory in

the West in the 1950s and 1960s (Deutsch 1953; Sklar 1967; Rokkan 1975). From this

perspective, national unity was venerated as being a crucial prerequisite for the flowering of

Western-style economic development and democracy (Rustow 1970; Sklar 1967: 2; Mkandawire

2005: 13). These scholars argued that such unity could only be achieved in recently decolonized,

multiethnic states, through the combined forces unleashed by state-driven processes of

modernization (i.e. economic development, social mobilization, and improved access to education,

communication, transportation, etc.), which would facilitate the progressive unification of

culturally diverse citizenries, as, it was hoped, Africans shed their “primordial” ethnic

attachments, for a growing commitment to a “new, nationally-oriented consciousness” (Vail 1988:

1; Doorbnos 1990: 182; Connor 1972).,

While some scholars were quicker to recognize the challenges that would accompany such

state-orchestrated efforts at national integration than others (Geertz 1963: 128; Sklar 1967;

Connor 1972), they were virtually unanimous in declaring, that in the postcolonial African

context, processes of state formation and nation-building would have to be conjoined (Eyoh 1996:

43; Doornbos 1990: 182; Aminzade 2013).20 In other words, in postcolonial Africa, as elsewhere

19 By nation-building, I refer to the transformation of postcolonial societies into coherent national communities, wherein citizens come to identify with political entities “coincident with the territorial boundaries inherited from colonialism” (Eyoh 1996: 44). 20 This is because, on the one hand, fragile, new states would have to rely on nations to provide them with the external legitimacy necessary to achieve an internationally recognized status. Moreover, internally, a sense of national belonging among citizens would help states to establish the domestic legitimacy needed to tax their citizens and have them participate in the important political and military duties that the state would require from its national citizenry.

24 (Anderson 2006: 83-111; Gellner 1983: 3-7; Calhoun 1997: 67; Tilly 1985), nation-building projects were expected to be ‘state-led’, that is dependent “on the institutional transformation of the state apparatus into an effective nation-building organization” (Aminzade 2013: 124; Chabal

1992: 69; Keller 2014: 4; Smith 1986: 240; Berman 2013: 359; Neuberger 1977: 204; Kaunda 1966:

82; Toure 1963: 126; Senghor 1964: 25, Eyoh 1996: 43; Eyoh and Sandbrook 2003: 235).21 While the imperative of a state-led nation-state building strategy was unanimously accepted across

Africa, how states went about institutionalizing these projects took “different forms in different

African countries” (Kymlicka 2004: 71; Berman 2013: 359-360) and these institutional choices proved to have long lasting political effects.

One ideal space within which to chart the political effects of these different institutional strategies of nation-state building during the initial postcolonial decades is in the realm of youth politics. This is because, as noted, in postcolonial Africa, youth were expected to be crucially important to the success of such nation-state building projects. As Mamadou Diouf notes, however, perhaps on account of their interdependence, the relationship between African states and their population of young people was a highly ambivalent one. For, while newly independent

African states venerated youth as key actors “in African societies’ struggle against underdevelopment, poverty, misery and illiteracy” (Diouf 2003a: 3-4) and relied on them as a key source of high-level manpower, they also, at the same time, sought to control them,

“maintain[ing] the frontier between elders and juniors that characterized traditional African values” (ibid: 4). The desire to mobilize young people in the service of these newly created nation-

On the other hand, the nation would depend on the state to use its coercive and bureaucratic powers to demarcate and protect its international boundaries and to facilitate “internal processes of integration and homogenization” (Calhoun 1997: 68). 21 In recognition of the conjoined nature of these two processes in postcolonial Africa, for the remainder of this doctoral study, I will refer to these twin processes using the single term nation-state building.

25 states was tempered and often obstructed by the imperative to control youth and harness their energies in pursuit of state-sanctioned objectives (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005; Waller 2005: 77;

Kirschner 2009: 373; Ismail and Alao 2009: 4; Burgess and Burton 2010; Panzer 2009: 806; Ivaska

2011: 164).

It is the central argument of this study that the institutional choices and arrangements designed and implemented by postcolonial states in their efforts to foster nation-state building during the critical conjuncture of decolonization had subsequently profound effects in shaping trajectories of youth politics in postcolonial African states thereafter. In attempting to elucidate the institutional determinants of divergent patterns of nation-state building and youth politics in

Kenya and Tanzania, however, this study is at odds with much of the predominante writing on the African state and contemporary African politics in two important respects. First, there has been a tendency in much of this literature to make broad generalizations about the character of the African state on an almost continent-wide basis. As Chris Allen (1995: 301) notes “many case studies of African politics are written as if their conclusions automatically apply to all or most

African states.” Second, and closely related to the former point, much of this work has reinforced the perception that in African contexts, supposedly marked by “strong socities, [and] weak states” (Migdal 1988), there is a “tendency…to reject the idea that formal institutions…are of any relevance at all” to the study of African politics (Erdmann 2013: 59; (Erdmann 2013; Nugent

2010; Boone 2014, 2018: 61; Cheeseman 2006, 2018; Pitcher 2012; Riedl 2014, 2016, 2018).

Indeed, as Catherine Boone (2018: 61) notes, “[t]he idea of the state [and society] in sub-Saharan

Africa as ‘institutionless’ underlies much contemporary theorizing about African politics.”

These twin tendencies, which have served to obscure important cross-national institutional variation across postcolonial African states, are most commonly associated with, what Nic Cheeseman (2018: 17) has aptly referred to as, the “institutionles literature” in Africanist

26 political science. Emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, as faith in African democracies and their related institutions rapidly waned across the continent (ibid.), this literature’s portrayal of African states, as almost uniformly neopatrimonial, increasingly became the conventional wisdom in

Africanist political science (Boone 2018: 61; Orvis 2006; Wai 2012; Mkandawire 2015).

According to this approach, politics in Africa is, as Jackson and Rosberg (1984: 421) suggest,

“shaped less by institutions or impersonal social forces, than by personal authorities and power.”

As such, the predominance of high levels of clientelism, in conjunction with the absence or weakness of formal institutional constraints, is said to produce a personalized politics, which sees state power centralized in the hands of a single ruler and/or a small coterie of elites, who are able to manipulate the apparatus of government to benefit their own private interests. According to the ‘institutionless’ school, the omnipresence of such neopatrimonial practices in African states made political systems in these countries perpetually vulnerable to state weakening, failure or collapse (Wai 2012: 31).

At its most extreme, proponents of this approach, such as Patrick Chabal and Jean Pascal

Daloz (1999: 16), even go as far as to argue that the African state is “no more than a décor, a pseudo-Western façade masking the realities of deeply personalized political relations.”

Ultimately, this “institutionless” literature on neo-patrimonalism and state failure tends towards presenting a deeply pessimistic, “uniform vision of African states” as being characterized by

“political decay, incompetence, and disintegration” (Allen 1995: 302). So whether they represent state institutions as “largely absent” (Jackson and Rosberg 1984: 424), “patrimonialized”

(Callaghy 1984: 33), or “[s]ultan[istic]” (Sandbrook 1985: 89-90), scholars from this literature tend to suggest that the neopatrimonal character and institutional weakness of African states is a reason to focus less on the institutional bases of African politics and more on the neo-patrimonial

27 strategies of these states’ ruling elite (Bayart 1993; Bayart, Ellis and Hibou 1999; Callaghy 1984,

1987; Chabal and Daloz 1999; Jackson and Rosburg 1984; Wai 2001).22

While the “institutionless” school is certainly right to point out that many African leaders throughout the initial decades of independence “relied more on personal networks and their

‘traditional authority’ than on the formal structures of the state to retain control (Cheeseman

2018: 17)” over their polities, these scholars’ inclination to ignore the political effects of formal institutions is misguided. This is because, as Paul Nugent (2010: 35) notes formal institutions in

Africa “are not elaborate fictions or a cover for something else, but help to inform the behaviour of official and non-state actors alike in fundamental ways” (Cheeseman 2018; Riedl 2014, 2018;

Erdmann and Engel 2007; Pitcher 2012; Boone 2003, 2014, 2018, Arrieola 2018). Moreover, in ignoring the significance of such formal institutions, this “institutionless” paradigm has often struggled to recognize or “explain variation in either African regimes’ stability or their preservation of some political space, except as the result of individual leaders’ personal idiosyncrasies and political skills” (Orvis 2006: 96; Cheeseman 2018: 19).23

It is important to note that, throughout this period, in spite of the ascendence of the

‘institutionless’ school in Africanist political science, an impressive strand of scholarship which placed more analytical importance on the historical institutional legacies of colonialism also materialized (Young 1994, 2004, 2012; Mamdani 1996; Herbst 2000; Englebert 2002). Inspired by the onset of persistent economic and political crisis in the 1980s across Africa, Crawford Young

(1994; 2004; 2012), Mahmood Mamdani (1996), and Jeffrey Herbst (2000) all delivered bold and

22 Even Jean-Francois Bayart’s much celebrated text, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, for all of its provocative insights into the ways in which state power is exercised in Africa, provides precious little insight into the institutional bases of the African state (Orvis 2006: 96; Nugent 2010: 35; Cheeseman 2018). 23 Though it should be noted that there are, of course, important exceptions to this tendency (see, for example, Bratton and van de Walle 1997, Allen 1995)

28 innovative theorizations of the African state, which aspired to explain the pervasiveness of its failure. While these scholars may disagree profoundly with the “institutionless” school about the relative strength and significance of the institutional foundations of the African state, however, they too share a common inclination to overgeneralize across cases.

Young (1994; 2004; 2012), for example, argues that the prevalence of state crisis on the continent was related to the continent’s imported, colonial origins, “moulded”, as it was, in the image of the predatory, extractive bula mutari (the “crusher of rocks”), its highly coercive colonial antecedent (1994: 9). Similarly, Mamdani sought to explain contemporary African state crisis in relation to its colonial institutional legacies. He postulates that -- whether referring to apartheid in South Africa, indirect rule within the British colonies, or direct rule in French Africa -- all of these systems represent a form of what he referred to as “decentralized despotism” (ibid, 8). This form of governance’s enduring legacy is “institutional segregation”, wherein the colonial state operated a bifurcated legal structure over “a racially defined citizenry (ibid, 41)”. While Mamdani, more than Young, does acknowledge a basic divergence in postcolonial political trajectories in the early decades of independence between “radical” and “conservative” regimes (ibid, 25-27), he does not examine the sources of these differences (Boone 2003: 14-15).24 As such, the overarching institutional legacy of decentralized despotism continues, albeit in its dual manifestations, to shape the institutional bedrock of African states in the postcolonial period in common and predictable ways.

Finally, Jeffrey Herbst (2000) also seeks to provide a theory of the African state, which provides an explanation for its crisis. He argues that the primary cause of the weakness of African states does not lay in their colonial inheritances, but rather is a product of their “political

24 As Boone (2003: 14-15) notes: “many accounts resting on this distinction trace it to post- independence ideologies.”

29 geographies.” In Herbst’s estimation, the continent’s abundance of land, in conjunction with their low population densities and “inhospitable physical setting[s]” represent the main obstacles to nation-state building in Africa, as it had made it difficult for regimes, from the precolonial period all the way to the present, to broadcast their power to the periphery of their territories. In the post-independence period, this “contradiction” between states that “only [have] incomplete control over their hinterlands but full claims to sovereignty” posed obstacles to African states’ ability to adequately govern the entirety of their territories, which, Herbst (2000: 254) argues, greatly contributed to the “problem of state failure” across the continent.

While there is no question that scholars like Young, Mamdani, and Herbst have contributed foundational insights to our understanding of the history of incipient processes of nation-state building in colonial and postcolonial Africa, their desire to forward ambitious theories that illuminate some of African states’ common features also, perhaps inadvertently, serve to obscure both the historical origins of, and important variations in, these postcolonial states’ strategies of nation-state building, at times offering instead, as Frederick Cooper (2008:

173) notes, a “generic” rendering of the postcolony. As a result, such approaches do not adequately explain important differences in the institutional arrangements and legacies that these strategies have helped to produce over time and space.

Young’s (2012) most recent work, for example, offers a historical narrative of the postcolonial period, which presents independent African states’ political trajectories, prior to

1990, as “strikingly similar”, marked by a series of common phases.25 In presenting the 1980s and early 1990s as a watershed moment characterized by a new diversity of state trajectories, Young is guilty of vastly overstating the homogeneity of political trajectories across African states in the

25 He identifies 6 phases: 1) the euphoria of independence 2) single-party/military rule 3) state expansion 4) decline and state crisis 5) democratization 6) Divergent Pathways (Young 2012: 10-31)

30 initial postcolonial decades and, more importantly, of neglecting the ways in which earlier differences in the institutional choices of postcolonial African nation-state builders account, in large measure, for the later “striking divergence of itineraries” that he identifies. Similarly,

Mamdani’s work demonstrates an inclination toward “overgeneralizing the dynamics of decentralized despotism, implying a uniformity of institutional arrangements linking state and countryside in Africa” (Guthrie 2014: 12). As a result, his analysis, like Young’s, fails to fully grasp the significant variation in the initial institutional choices of postcolonial Africa’s first generation of nation-state builders. Moreover, he does not adequately grapple with the political consequences produced by such variation (Boone 2003; Guthrie 2014: 12).

For his part, Herbst does not adequately recognize the import of the diversity of political- economic conditions, which exist across Africa’s hinterlands. He, therefore, assumes that state leaders’ inability to project their power evenly across the totality of their territory can be reduced primarily to geographical constrains. In his argument, therefore, variation in strategies of nation- state building can be traced to differences in the political geographies of these hinterlands, specifically the proximity of these areas to the core of state power. This approach is flawed, because it ignores the spatial variations in political-economic structures (i.e. class and communal structures, relative power of local elites, ecological conditions, strength/weakness of commercial agriculture) within these rural areas and, therefore, neglects how these political-economic differences foundationally shape the choices that state elites can make when institutionalizing their power across different localities (Nugent 2010; Boone 2003; Guthrie 2014: 12-13). A consequence of such an approach is that Herbst’s geographical explanation, like Young and

Mamdani’s institutionalist arguments, cannot convincingly account for important spatial variations in processes of nation-state building across and within African states.

31 To better appreciate this variation, therefore, we must consider the ways in which historical institutional legacies, themselves forged within the crucible of different colonial histories and political economies, have helped to shape later variations in political outcomes in postcolonial African states. Ultimately, such a task requires a more systematic consideration of processes of institutional continuity and change from the colonial to the post-colonial eras (Orvis

2006: 96; Burton and Jennings 2007: 3; Nugent 2010). To achieve such an objective, as Nugent notes, what is required today is an analysis of African politics, which both focuses in on “the role of the state in mediating the production and reproduction of social inequalities” and “a comparative approach that does not conflate experiences, but opens up the possibility of understanding a range of phenomena across African countries as well as a mechanism for understanding the salient differences” (Nugent 2010: 37; Cheeseman 2006; Orvis 2006;

Cheeseman 2017). Such an approach lends itself to generating the fine-grained theoretical tools needed for investigating the specific, historical trajectories of nation-state building that have shaped governance and the links between state and societal institutions across and within African states (Guthrie 2014: 11; Lonsdale 1981: 202).

Since the turn of the century, inspired by the reinvigoration of multiparty politics on the continent, Africanist political science has witnessed an institutionalist turn, whereby scholars like

Nugent (2010), Cheeseman (2006, 2018), Catherine Boone (2003, 2014, 2018), Rachel Beatty Riedl

(2014, 2016, 2018), Anne Pitcher (2012), Daniel Posner (2005) and Leonardo Arrieola (2012,

2018) have all made a concerted effort to “bring the state (and its organizational structures) back in[to]” an analysis of contemporary Africa politics (Cheeseman 2018: 4). This emergent literature has emphasized the importance of formal institutions in shaping both their informal counterparts and in enabling and constraining the choices made by African leaders, past and present, democratic and authoritarian (Cheeseman 2018: 18-19; Riedl 2014, 2018; Erdmann and

32 Engel 2007; Kohli 2004; Pitcher 2012; Pitcher and Teodoro 2018; Posner 2005; Posner and

Young 2018; Boone 2003, 2014, 2018, Arrieola 2018). In so doing, these scholars have both demonstrated the considerable variation in African states’ institutional arrangements across time and space and persuasively illustrated the ways in which historical institutional legacies shape contemporary political outcomes. As Riedl (2018: 56) notes charting “[v]ariation over space (by country and by party) and time (across regime periods) is critical to our understanding of how past legacies of power contestation, social mobilization and identity representation shape the possibility of future politics [in Africa].” Moreover, this literature also attests to the ways in which “a historical approach to institutions corrects the perceived dichotomy between an era of weak formal institutions –ruled by the informal throughout the 1970s and 1980s [in Africa] – and an era of multiparty politics that has seen a ‘resurgence’ of formal politics” (ibid: 42). As such, these works offer key insights to advance the research agenda proposed in this chapter.

Perhaps the best example of the strengths of this rich, emergent literature is presented in the work of Catherine Boone (1994; 2003, 2014, 2018), specifically her book, Political Topographies of the African State. Before assessing some of the main contributions this seminal text, it is first important to briefly highlight two of the main weaknesses of the literature on institutional choice, which Boone’s work is, at least in part, responding to. First, historical institutionalism, particularly in its earlier iterations, had trouble explaining moments of “substantial institutional change” (Hall and Taylor 1996: 432) and choice. Emerging in opposition both to macro- structuralist and behaviouralist approaches, the first generation of historical institutionalists tended to see institutions as unchanging, independent variables. As their primary interest was in charting the political effects of these institutions cross-nationally (Boone 2003: 17; Hall 2010: 204;

Hacker et al 2015: 180), these scholars were inclined to neglect important questions about institutional origins, change and failure, such as: where and why did actors find the incentives to

33 create new institutions, or alter existing ones? Moreover, why did some institutions fail or collapse over time (Boone 2003; Hacker et al 2015: 180; Hall and Taylor 1996: 942; Pontusson

1995: 137-38)?

A second, related criticism of earlier iterations of historical institutionalism is their neglect of political economy. Lacking an “underlying theory of conditions or forces that reproduce institutional structure”, earlier historical institutionalists often attributed process of institutional choice and change to external factors such as new ideas, theories, preferences, and visions among political leadership (Boone 2003: 17). 26 While such an approach assumes unmitigated state autonomy, it does not provide the theoretical tools necessary to convincingly explain the preferences of key individual actors. As a result, earlier historical institutionalist studies tended to produce theories that were overly voluntaristic, failing to “employ macrosociological theory in an explicit manner to specify features of social context that define the parameters and players in institutional choice” (ibid: 19). Boone’s work, along with that of scholars like Kohli (2004), represent important examples of more recent historical institutional research, which this study seeks to build upon, that have effectively incorporated a “range of economic-structural variables that lie beyond the conventional confines of institutional analysis (Pontusson 1995: 143; Cammack

1992)” into their explanatory frameworks.

Theoretical framework: nation-state building, youth politics and the political effects of institutional choice

My dissertation offers a two-pronged argument. In Part I, composed of chapters 2 and 3,

I seek to explain the colonial origins of divergent trajectories of nation-state building in postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania. Such comparisons between these neighbouring countries

26 Though it is important to acknowledge that more recent historical institutionalisr work by scholars like Thelen (2004), Hacker (2010), and Mahoney and Thelen (2010) have refined theories of endegonous institutional choice and change.

34 became “standard in Africanist literature” during the initial postcolonial decades (Nugent 2012:

141; Barkan and Okumu 1979; Barkan 1994; Hyden and Leys 1972; Miguel 2004). Two related features are common in these comparative analyses. First, they often present the two countries as a “natural-paired comparison” (Barkan 1994) or a “parable of the two brothers” (Nugent 2012).

Such comparisons often emphasize these two cases’ similarities in geography, history, precolonial social composition and colonial institutional legacy (Lonsdale 1981: 204; Miguel 2004; Nugent

2012; Barkan and Okumu 1979; Okumu 1979: 43; Barkan 1994; Allen 1995). Some of these analyses even go as far as echoing Joel Barkan’s (1979: 4) conclusion that “conditions in the two countries at the time of independence were basically the same.”

A second feature of these comparative analyses primarily attribute these two countries’ distinctive post-independence political trajectories to the ideological differences that existed between their founding fathers, Julius Nyerere and Jomo Kenyatta (Miguel 2004; Aminzade 2013:

16-20; Bjerk 2015). In such formulations, therefore, Tanzania’s egalitarian project of nation-state building and development is attributed primarily to Nyerere’s socialist commitments and leadership abilities, while Kenya’s more capitalist approach to development and less ample investment in nation-building is seen as a product of Kenyatta’s capitalist leanings and subnational proclivities.

Relying on Boone’s (2003) work on institutional choice as a theoretical guide, I seek to offer a more complicated rendering of these historical outcomes, challenging both of the aforementioned assumptions. In Political Topographies, Boone (2003: 15) rightly cautions against such state-centered approaches to analyses of institutional origins and change, which “trace

[differences in institutional choices between countries] to post-independence leaders’ ideologies.”

While she acknowledges that ideology was often, as was certainly the case in Kenya and Tanzania, a “political variable that differentiated regimes in striking ways” (ibid) in postcolonial Africa, she

35 concludes that, while “[a]nalysis of ideology can provide clues about moves or postures in political game…[ideology] in itself is too blunt an instrument for explaining institutional choice”

(ibid).

In her search for a more ‘systematic’ and ‘political’ explanation of institutional choice,

Boone adopts a political-economic approach, which seeks to elucidate the micro-foundations of nation-state building in West Africa, “specify[ing] the political and socioeconomic context that define the parameters and players in institutional choice” (ibid, 19). Such an approach focuses on communal and class structures and modes of production, while also paying attention to “informal power relations, community divisions or solidarities and underlying economic arrangements”

(ibid, 4-5). Within Boone’s theoretical framework, therefore, strategic actors’ decisions to choose or change institutions are situated within the “pervasive systems of constraint and incentive within which [these] rulers are forced to operate” (ibid, 19). In this way of thinking, institutional outcomes are not reduced simply to leaders’ ideology or colonial institutional legacies, but rather are “viewed as the product of political bargaining and conflict amongst social groups with differing bargaining power (resources and capacity for coordinated political action) and interests”

(ibid, 20).

Boone’s study reminds us that institutional choices taken by leaders are never unbounded, but instead are shaped by the political and socioeconomic environment in which they are made.

As such, her work encourages us to move beyond a simple focus on the personal and ideological predilections of post-independence African leaders, like Nyerere or Kenyatta, to a more systematic consideration of the “historical and political circumstances [that] constrained the practical realizations of ideological visions” (ibid, 15). In the case of African post-independence states,

Boone’s insight suggests focusing in on the different societal constraints placed on postcolonial projects of nation-state building in Africa.

36 Nation-state building, like development, was after-all, a “statist and elitist project” that

“presupposed the pre-eminence of the elites in both its elaboration and implementation”

(Mkanwadire 2005: 17). A far more prescient factor, therefore, in explaining divergent nation- state building projects in Africa is considering not just “what type of elites controlled the process”

(ibid: 17), but also, following Boone, what was the historical and political-economic context in which these elites came to be produced? What institutional arrangements did they inherit? And what sets of interests were postcolonial ruling elites most beholden to when making institutional choices about nation-state building?

In adopting this approach, I argue, in contrast to scholars like Barkan, that the conditions in Kenya and Tanzania at independence were not “the same.” In fact, a careful analysis of the histories of colonialism and decolonization in Kenya and Tanzania reveals considerable variations in these two countries’ colonial political economies and institutional legacies. These differences are evident in these two colonial states’ approaches to political administration, the regimes of accumulation that prevailed in each colony, and the intensity of processes of class formation that unfolded in both cases. It is the different combination of these factors in Kenya and Tanzania that help to explain the distinctive constellations of socio-political forces that came to drive their respective anti-colonial nationalist movements. Indeed, once they ascended to power following independence, these distinctive indigenous political elites, conditioned by their own unique political economies and sets of institutional incentives and constraints, were confronted with significantly different parameters of choice and, as such, adopted very divergent approaches to the challenges of nation-state building.

37 In Tanzania,27 the colonial political economy was characterized by “a relatively even spread of cultivable land throughout the territory” (Green 2011: 226), a weak population of

European settlers and indigenous rural capitalists, and a unique colonial institutional legacy (on account of it being first a colony of Germany until the end of WWI, and then becoming a League of Nations’ mandated territory under Britain). These factors produced a colonial state that was small and weak by Kenyan standards (both in its size and its penetration of the rural periphery), which sought during the interwar years to discourage capitalist development.

At independence, Tanzania’s nationalist elite was, therefore, far more homogenous and unified, lacking the deeply entrenched class and ethnic divisions, which bedevilled the efforts of anti-colonial mobilization among their Kenyan neighbours. As a result, unlike in Kenya, where the Kenyatta regime had to negotiate with and accommodate powerful, international actors (the

British and international capital) and entrenched local interests to keep its fragile governing coalition together, in Tanzania, the TANU government was relatively unfettered by such societal constraints and, thus, able to pursue dramatic institutional reforms, investing heavily in an egalitarian project of nation-state building and the construction of a party-state with little opposition from international or domestic forces.

In Kenya, the colonial political economy was, in contrast to Tanzania’s, marked by low levels of cultivable land, a strong presence of European settlers and the rapid development of settler capitalism, which produced uneven regional variations in capitalist penetration, an acceleration of processes of indigenous class formation and a robust colonial state apparatus. This colonial state imposed administrative policies that distinguished them from their Tanzanian counterparts, dividing African populations into ethnic reserves, expropriating the best African

27 Tanganyika united with Zanzibar in 1964 to form the Republic of Tanzania. To avoid confusion, I will refer to colonial Tanganyika as Tanzania for the rest of this study.

38 land for European settlers, banning Africans from growing lucrative crops, like coffee, and suppressing their ability to organize at a territory-wide level. The combined effects of these colonial state policies produced, by the 1940s, a socio-political situation fraught with high-levels of socioeconomic stratification and politicized, communal differentiation, which were largely absent in Tanzania.

Beginning in the late-1940s, as the post-war upswing in the Kenyan economy exacerbated social inequality, particularly in Central Province, the Kenyan colony saw the emergence of the

Mau Mau revolt, led by disenfranchised Kikuyus, fighting for land and freedom. The protracted nature of this violent conflict in Kenya’s deeply divided society for much of the 1950s produced two key outcomes with major implications for nation-state building. First, it served to further strengthen the Kenyan colonial state’s capable and expansive colonial state apparatus, characterized by a powerful Provincial Administration, which effectively penetrated the vast majority of the colony’s territory. Second, during the State of Emergency of the 1950s, the colonial state opted to deliberately empower a group of loyalist Africans to assume unprecedented prominence within leadership positions in the colony’s political institutions (including the

Provincial Administration and eventually local elected government).

As a result of these outcomes, by the time of Kenya’s independence, a British-friendly, conservative indigenous ruling elite took control of a powerful (by East African standards) state apparatus. This elite, composed of a group of strong, local ethnic barons and confronted by radical nationalist opposition forces (some of whom were ex-Mau Mau detainees), sought to ensure political and economic continuity, using the formidable institutional apparatus of the colonial state to consolidate and reproduce their dominance, through the preservation of the colonial state structure and the marginalization of popular forces and the ruling political party, KANU, which sought to represent those marginalized constituencies (Branch 2009; Cheeseman 2006; Branch

39 and Cheeseman 2006). The historical institutional legacies of colonialism in Kenya, therefore, shaped the class character of the postcolonial ruling elite and circumscribed the space of possibility for nation-state building within the postcolony, which came to rely on not just on that strong Provincial Administration to govern, but also an elaborate patronage system and the routine deployment of violent repression (reminiscent of their colonial predecessors) in order to ensure the legitimacy and stability of the Kenyatta state.

The second tenet of my argument, explored in Part II of this dissertation, and laid out in

Chapters 4 to 7, considers how these very differently configured postcolonial states set out to institutionalize their power over their national universities, incorporating (or excluding) university students into their broader nation-state building projects in the process. Here, I focus in on the ways in which trajectories of political mobilization among university students were crucially shaped by the different institutional settings that were fostered by Kenya and Tanzania’s respective ruling parties at their national universities during the first decades of independence.

In Tanzania, particularly following the National Service Crisis of October 1966, the

TANU regime sought to introduce dramatic institutional reforms (including changes to the curriculum, the creation of a Development Core course for all UCD students, and the introduction of party youth wing on campus), which were designed to produce socialist graduates of the university committed to acting as loyal ‘servants’ of Tanzania’s new nation. A by-product of these reforms was the politicization of a small, but committed student left at UCD, whose increasingly strong presence on campus began to make TANU officials uncomfortable by the early 1970s.

In response to the challenges posed by this student left, the TANU government proved far less reliant on repressive violence to maintain control and authority over the university than their Kenyan counterparts. Instead, beginning in the early 1970s, they adopted a different set of tools to rein in student dissent that was more co-optative than repressive. Specifically, as with

40 their management of trade unions and the army following the failed January 1964 mutiny

(Brennan 2005), and the TANU Youth League (TYL) in the early 1970s, at UDSM, the government responded to episodes of student dissent, by implementing institutional reforms designed to undermine the organizational autonomy of university student unions, often eliminating independent associations or incorporating these organizations into the pre-existing apparatus of the ruling party. The strong presence of the ruling party on campus, through the existence of the Vice-Chancellor (normally a high-ranking party official) and the creation of party youth branch and party office on campus, effectively institutionalized TANU/Chama Cha

Mapinduzi’s28 control over the university, for most of the 1970s and 1980s. As a result of these institutional strategies, when economic and political crisis intensified during the critical juncture of the 1980s, and the CCM’s ideological hegemony began to seriously wane at the university, the

Tanzanian state was better prepared to direct student dissent through the institutional channels of the ruling party than their Kenyan counterparts, because the state had already effectively usurped university students’ organizational autonomy. In this way, the TANU/CCM regime’s different approach to managing dissent at UDSM produced a student body that was far more obedient and politically disengaged than their Kenyan colleagues.

In Kenya, university students’ progressive alienation from the ruling party was, in part, a product of KANU’s unwillingness to institutionalize party rule on campus for much of the 1960s and 1970s. The government’s initial depoliticizing approach to university administration, inspired by the Kenyatta’s state desire to keep radical elements of the ruling party isolated from their national university, allowed for the creation of an “arena of student politics,” which existed outside of the realm of state and party control, making it “one of the only arenas of genuine

28 TANU united with the Zanzibar’s Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) in February 1977 to form chama cha mapinduzi (‘party of the revolution’)

41 political debate [in the country]…[e]ven during the repressive years of KANU rule [under

Moi]” (Mwangola 2005; Ajulu 2000).

KANU’s inability to successfully institutionalize their power over the University of

Nairobi during the 1960s and 1970s meant that when unprecedented demographic expansion and mounting economic and political crisis emerged in the late 1970s, Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi, was unable to manage and control his population of university students, as successfully as his Tanzanian counterparts did during the same time period. While initially committed to coopting his student leadership into his reconfigured ruling coalition, the Moi regime eventually had to resort to repression, when these cooptive attempts to reassert their control over the

University of Nairobi failed. Instead, beginning in the 1980s, the KANU regime increasingly responded to student protest through heavy-handed measures, such as relying on frequent closures of the university, the banning of the student union and academic staff union, the imprisonment of student leaders following the aborted 1982 coup d’état, and later the introduction of a mandatory of National Youth Service Pre-University Training (NYSPUT) program, designed to discipline all university students and inculcate in them a sense of loyalty to the KANU government. The Moi regime’s more repressive, authoritarian approach to the management of their university for much of the 1980s only served to further politicize the cleavage between university students and the state, contributing to the growing levels of student protest and state repression. By the late-1980s, levels of unity, militancy and anti-regime sentiment among Kenyan university students had reached their historical zenith and the Kenyan student movement had become during this period one of the most powerful in all of Africa.

Organization of the Study

The organization of this doctoral study reflects my research design. My analysis begins with a focus on the historical origins of postcolonial projects of nation-state building in my two

42 cases, Kenya and Tanzania. It then examines the ways in which these two countries’ national universities and their students were incorporated into (or excluded from) the institutional frameworks of the Kenyan and Tanzanian states, with some consideration given to how university students, subsequently, responded to these state-implemented strategies.

In Part I, which consists of chapters 2 and 3, I explore the historical origins of Kenya and

Tanzania’s divergent approaches to nation-state building. In these chapters, the research question is framed as a problem of institutional choice: why did state elites in Kenya and Tanzania decide to pursue such different strategies of nation-state building? And how did these strategies differ in practice over the course of the first decade of independence? And, ultimately, what were the most important historical institutional legacies of these choices? Rejecting common explanations of these differences that stress ideological variables, I argue that emphasis needs to be placed instead on the political and socioeconomic context of institutional choice.

In Part II, which consists of chapters 4 to 7, I shift my focus to the site of both countries’ respective national universities, contrasting divergent trajectories of early postcolonial university student activism at both institutions. In short, in these chapters, I am interested in explaining contrasting historical moments of political acquiescence at the University College, Nairobi for much of the Kenyatta years and intensive activism at the University College, Dar es Salaam, particularly following the publication of the Arusha Declaration in February 1967. Why did university students at these two campuses adopt such different relationships to national politics and their respective postcolonial states? How can we explain political disengagement in one context and activism in the other? In answering these questions, I highlight the profoundly different ways in which the Kenyan and Tanzanian states’ institutionalized their control over the university and its students.

43 In the latter half of Part II (chapters 6-7), the focus of my study shifts to examining inverse trajectories of student activism during the critical conjuncture of the late 1970s and 1980s. In these chapters, I seek to understand why university students in both cases responded so differently to mounting demographic pressure, socioeconomic decline, and the politics of presidential succession. As in the previous section, I argue that the answer to this query lies in the different institutional strategies and arrangements that these respective East African states employed to manage their national universities.

Chapter 8 concludes my analysis. I draw together findings from my historical case studies on the origins of nation-state building in these two countries and the relationships that developed between these postcolonial states and their national university students. Furthermore, I go on to explore implications of my argument that trajectories of student activism are determined by state strategies of postcolonial nation-state building.

44 CHAPTER TWO

A FREER HAND: INSTITUTIONAL CHOICE AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NATION-STATE BUILDING IN POSTCOLONIAL TANZANIA

Introduction

Tanzania has long been hailed in Africanist circles as a phenomenal nation-state building

“success story” (Young 1976: 11, 216; Hastings 1997: 165; Mwakikagile 2002: 335; Miguel 2004;

Green 2011; Aminzade 2013; Bjerk 2015: 11-12). Unlike 6 of its 8 neighbours (including Kenya),

Tanzania has not had to endure civil wars, coup d’états or national elections marred by widespread political violence in her over fifty years of independence (Green 2011: 225; Bjerk 2015: 63; Phillips

2010: 121). Moreover, in contrast to many of her African counterparts, the turbulence of combined processes of economic and political liberalization of the 1980s and 1990s did not serve to significantly undermine its population’s sense of national identity or cohesion (Green 2011: 225;

Boone 2007; Bates 2008).1

1 The generalizations noted above apply to the Tanzanian mainland (formerly known as Tanganyika), which will be the focus of this chapter, not Zanzibar, which formally joined Tanganyika in the United Republic of Tanzania in April of 1964, following a revolution on the islands in January of that year. Within this new Union, Zanzibar was granted semi-autonomous status, with its own President, Council of Ministers and House of Representatives. This enabled the Zanzibari government to retain executive, legislative, and judicial authority over all non- Union matters within its territory and to actively maintain a distinctive political culture and national identity (Roop et al 2018: 247). Even when TANU and Zanzibar’s ruling party, the Afro-Sharazi Party (ASP) merged forming Chama Cha Mapinduzi in Februart of 1978, “the two camps within CCM remained distinct” (ibid). As such, it is important to stress that political elites in Zanzibar pursued a different approach to nation-state building than their counterparts on the mainland, often working to “politicize ethno-regional identities in order to claim legitimacy to rule.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, “struggle[s] for control of the state [in Zanzibar]…ha[ve] been intense, deadly and zero-sum” (Killian 2008: 99) in a way that they have not been on the mainland. Given these differences, in stark contrast to mainland Tanzania, Zanzibar has, since the return of multiparty politics in the early 1990s, held elections in 1995, 2000, and 2005 that were “accompanied by violence and accusations of rigging” (Wilson 2013: 100; Roop et al 2018, Bjerk 2015; Green 2011; Killian 2008: 99-101) and in 2015 the contested result of the Presidential election was ultimately annulled. In this chapter, therefore, it is

45 The country’s long-standing political stability and durable sense of national identity has often been attributed to the success of its nation-state building initiatives (Aminzade 2013; Bjerk

2015; Mamdani 2012; Miguel 2004; Tripp 1999; Young 1976: 225). In this regard, scholars have routinely pointed to a number of policies introduced by the Tanganyikan African National Union

(TANU) regime during the first decade of independence to explain her “legendary” political stability (Green 2011: 224). These policies include: their effective dismantling of the institutional basis of the Native Authority System; their creation of the legal foundations for a universal, non- racial citizenship; their adoption of Swahili as the country’s official national language; and their creation of genuinely national political institutions, like the National Service and Tanzanian

People’s Defence Force (TPDF). On the continuum, therefore, of nation-state building in postcolonial Africa, Tanzania, with its emphasis on the importance of “collectivist African tradition” and the “state-led…suppress[ion of] expressions of ethnic politics”, has routinely been contrasted with Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya, where the postcolonial state sought to construct a

“multi-ethnic national commonwealth…firmly grounded in the ethnic patronage networks of colonialism (Berman 2013: 360).” How can we account for these profound differences in these two countries’ postcolonial strategies of nation-state building?

Over the next two chapters, I will frame this research question as a problem of institutional choice. While in later chapters I will consider the implications of these divergent nation-state building strategies for the creation of young citizens within the space of these countries’ national universities, over the next two chapters, I am more interested in asking first:

important to specify that the focus of my analysis will be confined to a discussion of the colonial origins and primary historical institutional legacies of mainland Tanzania’s nation-state building project, not Zanzibar’s. As such, all references to Tanzania refer strictly to the mainland, where the University of Dar es Salaam is located.

46 why did postcolonial ruling elites2 in Kenya and Tanzania decide to pursue such divergent strategies of nation-state building to begin with? How did these strategies differ in practice during the first post-independence decade? And what were the ultimate historical institutional legacies of these divergent nation-state building strategies?

Rejecting common explanations of these differences that stress ideological variables, in what follows, I argue that an emphasis needs to be placed instead on the political and socioeconomic context of institutional choice. While it is undeniable that both countries’ founding fathers, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, held profoundly different ideological visions of what their nations should look like and how to go about building them, and while there is no question that both of these figures were incredibly influential in shaping these respective projects of nation-state building, their ability to realize their visions was greatly

“shaped by the societies that they s[ought] to govern” (Boone 2018: 61). For, as John Lonsdale

(1981: 204) notes, explaining variation in trajectories of postcolonial African nation-state building requires not only a recognition that “[c]olonial history matters”, but also that “[h]ow dominant classes behave actually matter” as well. As such, explaining variation in postcolonial African state trajectories requires “situating Africa’s [postcolonial] rulers in their specific histories…to explain the limits on what…[wa]s possible and rational for them as one class to do in relation to others”

(ibid.). Following Boone and Lonsdale’s insights, over the next two chapters, I seek to embark on a comparative historical analysis that elucidates the societal constraints that played a critical role in determining the space of possibility for these ruling elites’ projects of nation-state building in both cases.

2 By ruling elite, I refer to the governing elites who controlled the critical institutions of the state. These elites were responsible for making the key decisions related to the management of the nation-state building project in their respective cases. As we shall, over the next two chapters, the composition of these two countries’ ruling elites differed considerably.

47 In Tanzania, the focus of this chapter, particularly following its transfer from Germany to

Britain as a mandated, League of Nations’ territory following WWI, the stifling of capitalist development and the delayed and incomplete imposition of indirect rule throughout the territory during the inter-war period, engendered less socioeconomic differentiation and inter- regional/communal disparities than in Kenya. In contrast to Kenya, therefore, the relative weakness of both Tanzania’s population of European settlers and its indigenous class of rural capitalists, in conjunction with Britain’s relative indifference to the mandated territory (at least in relation to Kenya), meant that the Tanzania’s post-independence nationalist leadership, primarily composed of petite bourgeois elements, like teachers, traders and clerks (Iliffe 2005:

169), was not beholden to powerful, entrenched interests, be they domestic or international. In other words, the TANU government was not forced to bargain with, or accommodate, the same set of international actors and powerful local ethnic and regional elites that Kenyatta had to contend with in postcolonial Kenya (Barkan 1994: 11). As a result, therefore, Nyerere was given greater latitude of autonomy than his Kenyan counterparts enjoyed, with which to realize his more radical vision of socialist development and egalitarian nation-state building.

Subsequently, in the first decade of independence, the institutional choices made by the

TANU regime generated a distinctive conduct of politics and produced a different set of historical institutional legacies to that which existed in Kenya. This manifested itself in two important ways. First, whereas the Kenyan state promoted institutional continuity, shunning serious nation- state building efforts, and relying instead on repressive tactics against opponents and a clientelistic system that effectively served to consolidate its inclusive coalition of ethnic elites as clients; in Tanzania, the state avidly invested in nation-state building, actively pursuing dramatic institutional reform that worked to neutralize competing ethnic and local sources of political power, and thus incorporated different social groups (women, students, trade unions) into the

48 ruling party’s apparatus as categories of national citizens. Second, whereas Kenya relied heavily, like their colonial predecessors had, on a strong civil service, marginalizing and dismantling the ruling party, the Kenyan Africa National Union (KANU), in Tanzania, the TANU regime opted for the opposite route: dismantling the institutional foundations of indirect rule, while investing time and resources in building a party-state, which created robust party structures at the local level and played a central role in policymaking and implementation (Aminzade 2013; Okumu

1979; Barkan 1994). As a result of this radically different approach to nation-state building, in the initial postcolonial decades, in stark contrast to KANU in Kenya, TANU/CCM developed into one of the most robustly institutionalized political parties in all of Africa (Riedl 2018: 42; Saul

1973: Okumu 1979: 61).

This chapter will be divided into two parts. In part I, I will consider the colonial origins of nation-state building in Tanzania, focusing on the predominant institutional arrangements of colonialism, the prevailing regimes of accumulation and describing the constellation of social forces that existed at independence. In Part II, after explaining how these variables conditioned the TANU regime’s postcolonial institutional choices, I will shift to a discussion of the specificities of those choices in relation to nation-state building in the postcolonial period, analyzing how state power came to be institutionalized within the country and considering the lasting historical institutional legacies of those choices.

PART I: HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF NATION-STATE BUILDING IN TANZANIA Colonial institutional legacies: political administration, language and land Policy

There is no denying that Tanzania had “distinct advantages over many of its neighbors

[including Kenya]” (Smith 1971: 63) in relation to its prospects for nation formation at independence. First, Tanzania lacked the kind of entrenched ethnic divisions that existed in other

African states. While, as in Kenya, during the precolonial period, individuals in the territory now known as mainland Tanzania did not belong to “fixed and clearly identifiable ethnic groups”

49 (Weber et al 2016: 53; Eyoh 1995), with the onset of colonialism, the sociocultural ecology of

Tanzania was markedly different from that which existed in Kenya.

At the time of independence, Tanzania had 125 ethnic groups that contained 1000 or more people.3 None of Tanzania’s largest ethnic groups enjoyed the numeric, economic or political superiority needed to impose their will on their neighbors (Coulson 2013: 145; Miguel 2004: 334;

Smith 1971: 63-64; Saul 1973: 262; Tripp 1999: 42). Moreover, six of the nine largest ethnic groups in Tanzania were situated along the country’s borders, away from the capital of Dar es

Salaam (Tripp 1999; Iliffe 1979; Coulson 2013), meaning that none of these groups were in a geographically advantageous position to assert national political dominance and that their populations were often fragmented by international boundaries. 4 Furthermore, most of the territory’s larger tribes, which may have been expected to be the most likely mobilizers of politicized ethnicity, were, like the Sukuma, “recent, loosely knit federations, not historic kingdoms with strong central rulers” (Bienen 1967: 33; Tripp 1999: 42).

The subsequent depoliticization of ethnicity in Tanzania cannot, however, be reduced solely to Tanzania’s unique sociocultural ecology. It is important to recall that the colonial administrative approach adopted by both the Germans and the British in Tanzania had “some distinctive features” (Boone and Nyeme 2015: 71), which differentiated it from Kenya, and which

“led to much lower salience of ethnic identities during the colonial period [than that which existed in Kenya]” (Weber et al 2016: 57). First, while, under the Germans, who administered the colony from 1885 until the outbreak of the First World War, natives were classified into different ethnic groups, “their approach was less vigorous than that of the British in Kenya” (ibid, 54). For

3 Tanzania’s 1967 census estimated that the country consisted of 126 ethnic groups of over 1,000 people (Green 2011: 230) 4 like the Maasai, Kuria and Jaluo who live along Tanzania and Kenya border and the Makonde, who live on the border of Tanzania and Mozambique

50 example, while German administrators strove to maintain relatively homogenous ethnic entities

(Jerman 1997: 188-190), these entities were not governed by local tribal elites, as in Kenya, but instead were administered by maakida: well-educated Muslims from the coastal area who spoke

Swahili and who oversaw locally recruited headmen or chiefs (Tripp 1999, 38; Yeager 1989: 9-

10).

When the British took over power following the First World War, they removed the

Germans’ maakida system, believing that it would accelerate the disintegration of “tribal customs” and produce natives that were ‘detribalized’ and ‘Europeanized’ (Austen 1967: 587; Yeager 1989).

Instead, they decided to implement a system of indirect rule, whereby local ethnic leaders, now greatly empowered with autonomous legislative authority, were placed in charge of ethnically homogenous administrative units. In practice, however, the complex cultural geography of

Tanzania perplexed British colonialists and undermined their attempts to reorder these political societies into distinct tribal political communities, as they earlier had in Kenya (Iliffe 1979: 490).

Indeed, the colonial state often found it difficult to locate genuine chiefs and, in such situations, they had to appoint local figures that lacked traditional legitimacy (Spear 2005: 70; Yeager 1989:

13). These combined historical circumstances undermined attempts at ethnic mobilization in colonial Tanzania, thus “prevent[ing]”, Iliffe notes, “most tribal improvement societies [in

Tanzania] from achieving anything significant, which in turn made their members more receptive to nationalist politics” (Iliffe 1979: 409).

In fact, considerable tensions rarely existed between local and nationalist organizations in colonial Tanzania. On the contrary, the emboldening of tribal associations at the local level proved to aid the fortunes of nationalist mobilization (Tripp 1999; Weber et al 2016; Iliffe 1979).

It is fair to say that much of TANU’s success as a mass nationalist movement was derived from the fact that it was effectively able to draw on the support of the various religious communities

51 and tribal unions (Tripp 1999: 42). In this way, nationalism in Tanzania can be said to have “not only [grown] up alongside other political tendencies to a considerable extent it grew out of them”

(Iliffe, 1979: 487).

Another factor that played a key role in the success of the nationalist movement was the presence of the language of Swahili and “the existence of a Swahili Society with a recognizable culture of its own” (Lonsdale 1968: 131; Coulson 2013; Geiger 2005; Kaniki 1974: 13; Saul 1973:

262). From the early nineteenth century, Swahili language and culture in Tanganyika spread from its presence in isolated settlements on the coastal belt to its expansion throughout much of the interior of the territory by the early twentieth century (Lonsdale 1972: 25).5 By then, the language of Swahili had become the language not only of Islamic mission and colonial education, but more importantly, “of popular political expression” (Geiger 2005: 281; Kaniki 1974: 13). Indeed,

Tanzania’s Swahili society had a “geographical mobility and…network of intercommunication”, which lacked a precedent among its neighbours like Kenya and Uganda (Lonsdale 1968: 131).

Part of this was related to the way in which the territory had been administered. As noted, the imposition of foreign Tanzania leaders who spoke Swahili by the Germans, together with the adoption of Swahili as the administrative language in Tanzania, helped to make Swahili a uniting factor for the country’s diverse ethnic groups (Weber et al 2016: 54-55; Kaniki 1974: 13).

Moreover, Swahili was attractive to Tanzanian nationalists for a variety of reasons. First, it had an “egalitarian connotation” (Blommaert 1996: 248) as it was not closely associated with any one particular ethnic group or region and could thus be seen to be a “neutral” (Weber et al

2016: 58) or “unethnic’ language” (ibid: 252). In promoting its usage, therefore, TANU could

5 This expansion was spurred on by the extension of the pre-colonial Zanzibar-based trade in slaves and ivory; the promotion of Swahili as an administrative language by the German colonialists and, subsequently, to a lesser extent, by the British; and coastal resistance against the Germans beginning in the 1880s, which utilized Swahili as a primary language of communication.

52 not be accused of practicing ethnic or regional favouritism. Second, during the struggle for independence, the language had become “a rallying instrument” for the nationalists. Indeed,

TANU had “elevated the language to being synonymous with Tanzanian ‘nationalism’” (Tripp

1999: 54). Finally, while used in an administrative capacity by the Germans, Swahili was not seen to be as tarnished by colonialism as English had become.

The political implications of the widespread usage of Swahili for the development and ultimate success of the nationalist movement in Tanzania cannot be dismissed. The common usage of the language in rural areas enabled nationalist leaders to communicate directly with the masses with greater ease than in Kenya, aiding in their efforts to raise support for the nationalist cause, particularly within the countryside (Kaniki 1974: 13). As J.E. Smith (1973: 64) notes,

“[o]nly twice during the seven years he stumped the country working for independence,” did

Nyerere recall being “unable to speak directly to the people.”6

Another crucial difference between Kenya and Tanzania related to the way that the colonial state managed African politics. Unlike in Kenya, where African political organizations were banned, beginning in 1922, until very late into the colonial encounter, in Tanzania, the existence of the Tanganyikan African Association (TAA),7 which TANU would eventually grow out of, dated back to the late 1920s. While initially started as a “private welfare agency and social club for minor civil servants and coastal urban workers” (Yeager 1989: 15), the TAA became increasingly political, particularly in the post-war years, utilizing connections with tribal unions, in mobilizing against issues of land alienation and colonially-imposed rural development reform

(Bienen 1967: 24; Yeager 1989: 15).

6 Iliffe suggests that Nyerere only needed to use an interpreter in Usukuma, Mbolu, and Maasailand (Iliffe 1979: 530) while speaking at hundreds of nationalist gatherings in the over seven-year lead-up to independence 7 Ethnically diverse in its composition, the TAA was an African organization, which emerged out of the cities of Tanga and Dar es Salaam between 1927 and 1929 (Yeager 1989: 15).

53 Specifically, the TAA’s efforts at rural mobilization were greatly assisted by draconian colonial measures designed to promote agricultural change that were implemented by the Native

Authorities between 1946 and 1957. These measures --which included anti-erosion initiatives, cattle-culling, disease prevention, inspection of crops, and compulsory production of certain crops

-- proved deeply unpopular throughout the rural areas (Bienen 1967: 25; Cliffe 1972: 17-18;

Yeager 1989: 17; Pratt 1976: 27-28). In districts across the country, the coercive tactics employed to impose these rural reforms, often implemented by Native Authorities, helped to profoundly undermine the popular legitimacy of the Colonial Administration and the local chiefs who were seen to be doing their bidding (Omari 1987: 67; Pratt 1976: 27-28; Yeager 1989: 17) and drove rural dwellers within the colony into the nationalist camp.

This was best demonstrated in the rapid expansion of the TAA’s membership. In 1940, the organization only had 100 members and a single branch in Dar es Salaam. Less than a decade later, in 1948, the TAA had rapidly become a territory-wide association with 39 local branches, a membership that exceeded 1780 people, with a central committee of 30 individuals (Bienen 1967:

27; Aminzade 2013: 64). While the TAA’s links with local tribal unions, religious organizations, and cooperative societies varied in their intensity depending on the region, and at times could be tense, the TAA provided TANU with an organizational foundation from which to build a strong nationalist movement that was fuelled by popular discontent with colonial government and local indigenous authority (Yeager 1989: 15). With the unsuccessful implementation of these agricultural reform policies, “an alliance between rural peasantry and the nationalist movement had been forged” (Jennings 2007: 75; Yeager 1989: 15; Pratt 1976: 28). In sum, with the existence of the TAA, the links between local grievance and national organization could be established and solidified much earlier in Tanzania than among its neighbors in Kenya and Uganda (Lonsdale

1967: 135).

54 In the early 1950s, the TAA leadership was taken over by a group of young educated

Africans. In April of 1953, Nyerere, the leader of this group of ‘young turks’, was elected

President of the organization and in July of the following year, TANU was created to replace the

TAA. Over the next 7 years, as TANU’s leadership skillfully used rural discontent to fuel nationalist ambition, the organization would see its membership rapidly expand from 40 000 in

1955 to “over a million dues-paying members by independence in 1961” (Bjerk 2017: 46; Pratt

1976: 35). In subsequent years, the party would emerge as one of the most effective in all of Africa

(Saul 1973: 304). These outcomes were only possible because of the colonial state’s administrative approach to the issues of African political organization, land, and language, which all contributed to facilitating a much more unified, cohesive nationalist elite in Tanzania than that which existed in Kenya.

Regimes of accumulation: Tanzania’s fine balance

The success of Tanzania’s nationalist movement was also closely tied to the country’s unique political economy. Unlike in Kenya, where the colonial state played an active role in promoting the development of settler capitalism and industrialization; in Tanzania, during the interwar period, the colonial state worked to both stifle capitalist penetration in the territory and limit the power and influence of the territory’s population of European settlers. In the end, British colonialism in Tanzania did not follow the settler capitalism model of Kenya and Rhodesia, nor did it strictly follow the path of peasant production witnessed in Malawi and Uganda, but instead, it “maintained a balance between peasants, settlers, and plantations” (Coulson 2013: 74; Brett

1973; Saul 1973: 258). As a result, the kind of socioeconomic differentiation, which had emerged in Kenya, was markedly absent in Tanzania (Mueller 1981; Shivji 1976). This helps to explain both the lack of a violent process of decolonization within the territory and why social groups

55 with the political power and economic capital to constrain the autonomous actions of the country’s postcolonial political elite failed to materialize at independence.

While under the Germans, Tanzania had an impressive range of industrial production, this “ended when [they] were driven out and was not equaled [again] until the 1960s” (Coulson

2013: 104). The reason for this was simple: the British colonial state, for a variety of reasons, explicitly pursued an economic strategy designed to stifle the growth of capitalism in the territory during the inter-war years. In this respect, Tanzania was markedly distinct from Kenya. This strategy of deindustrialization was related to a number of factors. First, at the time of Tanzania’s entry into Britain’s colonial universe, Britain was strapped for cash, and hence, had limited resources with which to invest in their colonies (Green 2011). What little capital there was available for investment in East Africa was disproportionately directed towards developing

Kenya, long considered Britain’s “strategic center” in the region (Weber et al, 2016: 55; Saul 1973:

259). 8 In addition, in its initial years as a mandated territory, Britain’s primary concern in

Tanzania was to consolidate its control and re-establish political order (Mueller 1981: 465). This meant that, during a period of rapid growth in Kenya, in Tanzania, economic matters temporarily took a back seat, as the colonial state addressed a wide-range of political issues (Mueller 1981;

Spear 2005: 76-77).9

The terms of the mandate also placed limitations on Britain’s authority within the territory. As well as stipulating that Britain must “respect the rights and safeguard the interests

8 Indeed, in 1927, Tanzania formally joined the customs union with Uganda and Kenya, which meant that “[e]ffectively there were no tariffs coming on Kenyan goods into Tanganyika from 1923 to 1967” (Coulson 2013: 104). While this arrangement greatly aided Kenya’s process of industrialization, it cost Tanganyika millions of shillings in revenue and handicapped their prospects for industrial development (ibid). 9 Including the transfer of German property, the revamping the colonial administrative apparatus, and the normalizing of relations with Germany, a task that was not completed until 1925.

56 of the native population” (Austen 1967: 580; Harlow et al, 1965: 692), the mandate also placed restrictions on land alienation and required the British to prepare Tanzania for self- determination. As Ronald Aminzade (2013: 38) notes, these measures “prevented the colonial power from enacting policies favouring British nationals”, and hence discouraged investment.

This was compounded by the fact that the mandate also accentuated the uncertain nature of

Britain’s relationship to Tanganyika throughout the interwar period. The uncertainty created by

German imperialists’ increasing desire to reclaim their former colony during this time, also played an important role in deterring further investment from international capital (Coulson 2013: 74;

Mueller 1981; Green 2011). All of these factors helped to place Tanzania “at the bottom of

[Britain’s] imperial pecking order” (Iliffe 1979: 302), and made the prospect of it developing in a fashion similar to Kenya next to impossible (Mueller 1981: 465; Shivji 1976: 63).

The stifling of the growth of Tanzania’s colonial political economy had profound implications for the development of the territory’s social classes. First and foremost, it impacted the mandated territory’s population of European settlers. Initially, under German rule, while the colonial state refrained from providing direct official support for European settlement, by 1914, as the World War that would end Germany’s hold on the colony was commencing, a little less than one percent of Tanzania’s land had been settled by Europeans (Iliffe 1979: 145). Still, in terms of population, these settlers equaled Kenya’s numbers at that time. Moreover, in comparison with their Kenyan counterparts, European settlers in Tanzania were better organized, and wielded greater economic and political power (ibid, 151).10

10 As Iliffe (1979: 151) notes, “[i]t is more likely than not that if Tanganyika had remained under German rule it would have become a white man’s country like Kenya or even Southern Rhodesia.”

57 With the arrival of the British, however, the new colonial state adopted policies which halted the immigration of settlers to Tanzania and also opposed the alienation of land and, as such, the acceleration of capitalist accumulation (Mueller 1981: 468; Weber et al 2016). For example, the first head of the new Tanzanian colonial government under the British, Sir Horace

Byatt, “showed himself even harsher than the Germans had been in limiting settler rights…allow[ing] [European settlers] no legislative assembly of any kind…[and deciding to] return to African hands [a portion of German land which] slightly exceeded the total of new areas granted to British planters” (Austen 1967: 579). In addition, the colonial state did not provide new European immigrants with the incentive of technical assistance, nor did they prohibit

Africans from growing the same crops as their European counterparts, as had been done in Kenya

(Mueller 1981; Brett 1973; Weber et al 2016).

The colonial state’s reluctance in this regard may have been related to the fact that they were still recovering from wartime damages, which meant they were lacking in administrative capacity (Brett 1973: 223; Mueller 1981). By the 1930s, however, it was the combination of the effects of the Depression in conjunction with the possibility of Tanzania being transferred back to the Germans that worked to inhabit the growth of European settlement until the end of the

Second World War (Brett 1973: 231; Mueller 1981). When the end of the war did arrive, and conditions for European settlement had improved, “settler colonies were viewed as expensive, troublesome propositions” (Mueller 1981: 468). By 1953, the handiwork of British colonial policy towards the settlers was plain to see: only 0.49% of total land in the territory had been alienated for settlers (Pratt 1982: 269). As a result, by 1961, while Tanzania’s expatriate population had risen to 22 000, a full 89% of those Europeans were not landed (Mueller 1981; Iliffe 1979).

Ultimately, the colonial state’s ambivalent approach to European settlement in Tanzania played a major role in shaping what the settler population in the territory became by independence in

58 1961: relatively small in size, of mixed nationality, 11 living in areas far removed from the administrative capital of Dar es Salaam, and cut off from each other (Mueller 1981: 471).

Politically, their relative weakness was reflected in the fact that, in spite of their best efforts, European settlers twice failed to get the area of Kilimanjaro transferred into Kenyan hands during the 1920s (Mueller 1981: 469). Economically, while their contribution to Tanzania’s export economy was significant, these settlers commanded a smaller portion of the best land than their Kenyan counterparts, and were, subsequently, unable to drive processes of primitive accumulation and industrialization along Kenyan lines (Mueller 1981: 471; Shivji 1976). Whereas in Kenya, settler agriculture had produced widespread landlessness for many African peasants, in

Tanzania, land alienation was far more rare, and, as such, the majority of African workers did not transform into an agricultural proletarian dependent on wages for cash, and compelled to work on settlers’ land (Green 2011). These factors help to explain “the inability of the expatriate community in the forties and fifties to exert any decisive impact upon the process of political change [in Tanzania]” (Brett, 1973: 232; Saul 1973: 259).

Tanzania’s postcolonial ruling elite’s broad latitude of autonomy was also closely related to the fact that in Tanzania no “genuine independent rural bourgeoisie…developed” (Shivji 1976:

113). Like their European settler counterparts, African rural capitalists in Tanzania were relatively weak and small by Kenyan standards, composed of no more than a few hundred at independence, who were scattered far from the capital, and did not act as a cohesive political force capable of constraining the independence movement (ibid: 113). Not only did they not exhibit the same urgent desire to dominate Tanzania’s emerging nationalist movement, as their counterparts in Kenya had, but when Nyerere rejected the colonial state’s proposal for freehold land tenure in

1958, they did not unite in opposition to him, as might have been expected.

11 By 1938, of 9,345 settlers, only 4,054 were British and 3,205 were German

59 Part of their lack of organizational cohesion is related to the land policies implemented by the colonial state, which were designed “to expand commodity production [among African peasants] without inducing capitalist relations of production” (Mueller 1981: 475). As a result, the development of productive forces was obstructed, and Tanzania’s class of rural capitalists

“remained small, insecure, [and] undercapitalized” (ibid: 475). This class’ weakness also reflected the relatively favourable (in relation to Kenya) conditions they were living under: unlike in Kenya, where widespread landlessness and prohibitions on the planting of cash crops had inspired African planters to mobilize politically as early as the 1920s; in Tanzania, as mentioned, the colonial state did not alienate rural capitalists’ land, prohibit them from growing lucrative cash crops, nor were they confronted with a powerful, well organized group of white settlers. As such, at independence, this emerging class of African rural capitalists was unable or unwilling to apply serious constraints on the ambitions of Tanzania’s ascendant nationalist leaders.

In the industrial sector too, a credible indigenous proto-capital elite did not materialize in

Tanzania, as they had in Kenya. After World War II, the colonial government did try to foster capital accumulation in the territory by enacting tariff policies that allowed for the growth of certain protected industries, such as textile factories, and encouraging British multinational corporations to open subsidiaries. Still, the end result of these policies was not to foster a strong

African commercial elite, but rather to consolidate “an externally oriented, dependent, agrarian capitalist economy subject to volatile world market prices for agricultural exports and dominated by foreign multinationals and Asian merchant capital” (Aminzade 2013: 36).

At independence, therefore, the postcolonial economy reflected these racialized socioeconomic divisions. Foreign (mostly British) and Asian capital dominated the banking,

60 insurance, and industrial sectors. 12 In the end, the possibility of the creation of a strong indigenous capitalist class in Tanzania had been systematically obstructed by an Asian capitalist elite, which had been cultivated by the colonial authorities to “provide a socioeconomic buffer between them[selves] and the African community” (Yeager 1989: 18). At independence, this

Asian economic elite posed little challenge to the political ambitions of Tanzania’s African nationalist elite.

A final group who potentially could have posed a formidable challenge to Tanzania’s postcolonial elite’s nation-state building ambitions was the territory’s indigenous chiefs. In other parts of Africa, elites at the top of rigid rural hierarchies, in areas with high levels of social cohesion, enjoyed enough economic autonomy (i.e. Asante in Ghana and Buganda in Uganda), to pose serious political challenges to the initiatives of postcolonial African political elites (Boone

2004; Nugent 2012). In Tanzania, indigenous chiefs’ ability to do so was also greatly compromised for two reasons. First, as noted, Tanzania lacked highly centralized historic kingdoms and the strong leaders that were associated with them (Bienen 1967: 33; Tripp 1999:

42; Aminzade 2013: 127; Okumu 1979). Indeed, the majority of Tanzania tribes were, in fact,

“relatively loose and decentralized political organization[s]” and, as noted, the territory lacked

“one numerically dominant tribe within the nation” (ibid.). For the most part, therefore, these chiefs did not have the political power and economic might to pose a serious threat to the control of TANU’s nationalist elite.

12 For example, three British banks held 77% of all banks, and 72% of industry were owned by either foreigners (40%) or Asians (32%) (Aminzade 2013: 37). In the territory’s sisal industry, one of the main drivers of growth during the colonial period, Europeans owned 69% of production, Asians 27% of production, and Africans only 4% (ibid, 48). These socioeconomic racial divisions were also reflected in the average income totals of these three groups at independence: in 1961, Europeans earned an average annual income of 1, 546, compared to 586.12 for Asians and only 106.20 for Africans (ibid.).

61 The second factor related to the consequences of these indigenous chiefs’ collaboration with the colonizer. It is important to recall that in the post-war years, the British colonial government routinely “used chiefs as a shield, to be held between the aggressions of nationalists and the[ir own] defensive position” (Feierman 1990: 223). As one former chief recalled, many chiefs in Tanzania had become “too closely identified with British authorities” (Smith 1973: 110), often carrying out the colonialists’ dirty work within local communities: prohibiting public meetings, imprisoning local rebels, and enforcing unpopular agricultural directives (Feierman

1990: 223; Pratt 1976: 25-28; Yeager 1989: 18; Cliffe 1972).

This close association was best exemplified by the fact that many of these same chiefs had chosen to collaborate with the United Tanganyika Party (UTP), a creation of the colonial state, which had advocated the maintenance of tripartite, multiracial system and which was badly defeated during the first national tripartite elections of 1958 and 1959 by TANU candidates. Not surprisingly, the colonial authorities attempts to make the chiefs “a political counterweight to

TANU” (Pratt 1976: 39) during this period had only succeeded in further sullying these local headmen’s already tarnished reputations and, therefore, destroyed any popular legitimacy that they may still have clung to (ibid: 28). Following independence, therefore, TANU used this popular dissatisfaction towards the chiefs to justify and legitimize their assault on their authority.

As such, the chiefs’ potential to form a political counterforce to the postcolonial elite following independence was also severely curtailed.

In the absence of one dominant social group to exert its control and interests on the process of state formation (Kiondo 1988: Havernik 2010), the nationalist movement came to be guided by a tiny group of petty bourgeois, which lacked a strong economic base (Saul 1979; Omari

1987: 70; Shivji 1976: 64). This European-educated, often youthful, Tanzanian elite was

62 supported by a formidable mass of poor farmers and a well organized, if small labour force.13

Backed by this coalition, at independence, Nyerere and TANU had come to be the new state’s dominant personality and political party, respectively, enjoying a stature and popularity among the masses in Tanzania that was unrivalled within the country.

The exiting colonizer also preferred the Nyerere wing of TANU, which they viewed as relative moderates in relation to many of their more radical colleagues in the nationalist movement. Indeed, the British’s support of Nyerere was largely predicated on their belief that he

“would keep…in check” those more extremist elements within the ruling party (Pratt 1982: 280).

As Britain’s last Colonial Governor of Tanzania remarked: the idea of “Nyerere…quickly be[ing] displaced as a leader”, if he did not receive British support, threatened the dire possibility, from the perspective of the outgoing British, of Tanzania being run by “a group of hairy men demanding ‘Africa for the Africans’” (Iliffe 2005: 190). In the end, the British’s decision to exit

Tanzania in December 1961, in the face of TANU’s overwhelming popularity, demonstrates, at least in part, their confidence in Nyerere’s moderation. Ultimately, the colonial state’s approach to political administration and economic policy had shaped a political and socioeconomic context, where no sources of opposition could realistically be expected to derail or seriously constrain

Nyerere’s egalitarian vision for nation-state building. This left the Tanzanian political elite at independence with, as Shivji notes, a “much freer hand” to govern than their Kenyan counterparts had (Shivji 1976: 64).

13 By 1961, Tanganyika had fourteen registered African trade unions, little inter-union rivalry, and a membership of 200,000 or 42 percent of the total wage labor force (compared to 8% in Kenya and 11% in Uganda) (Aminzade 2013: 65)

63 PART II: NATION-STATE BUILDING IN POSTCOLONIAL TANZANIA: THE CASE OF UJAMAA

In postcolonial Africa, the near ubiquitous movement across the continent toward regime consolidation through excessive centralization of power and the reliance on neopatrimonial networks, often expressed in the institutional form of single party rule, were routinely justified in the name of nation-state building. The argument being that by inhibiting the institutional arenas where ethnic politics was likely to be inflamed, single-party rule “offered a formula for sidetracking ethnicity” (Young 2012: 138; Kasfir 1984), in the interests of forging a united nation and facilitating economic development (Elischer 2013: 47; Berg-Schlosser 1984). In this way,

Africa’s founding fathers typically argued that nation-state building required the marginalization or elimination of all sources of political opposition. Like many of their African counterparts, both the Kenyan and Tanzanian states ascribed to this logic, pursuing a course of rapid centralization of political power in the early postcolonial years.

While this rhetoric was commonly deployed, however, and while state power in both contexts came to be personalized to some degree (Cheeseman 2018: 20), the ways in which single- party rule came to be institutionalized in practice within the first decade of independence varied considerably across these cases (Allen 1995). While in both Kenya and Tanzania, the first decade of independence was marked by relative political stability and a rhetorical emphasis on the importance of unity and self-reliance to the attainment of national development, processes of nation-state building in both countries differed in two profound ways. First, in Tanzania, the absence of powerful, countervailing social forces meant that the TANU government found it far easier to implement dramatic institutional reforms, which concentrated state power in the hands of the ruling party and created a type of politics that was far less accommodating to the distribution of patronage and ethnic favoritism. Second, unlike in Kenya, in Tanzania, the state was avidly invested in egalitarian nation-state building, actively working to neutralize competing

64 ethnic and local sources of political power. Moreover, their efforts to foster a homogenous national culture were far more robust than anything practiced in Kenya. To appreciate, the nation-state building project in Tanzania, therefore, we must first understand better Nyerere’s political philosophy.

The philosophy of ujamaa

One of the key areas where Tanzania’s nation-state building project differed from its

Kenyan counterparts was in relation to the issue of ideology. Whereas in Kenya, Kenyatta’s ideological framework was far less explicitly articulated (Barkan 1994: 16), in Tanzania, Nyerere’s egalitarian concept of ujamaa came to be central to justifying his government’s radical economic and social policies. First introduced to the Tanganyikan public in April of 1962 with the publication of the pamphlet ‘Ujamaa – The Basis of Socialism,’ ujamaa refers to Nyerere’s unique brand of African socialism, which both rejects capitalist modes of development and exploitation and doctrinaire socialism’s emphasis on the inevitability of class conflict. Nyerere argued that the experience of colonialism had introduced profound inequality and selfishness into African societies that had previously been classless. Ujamaa, therefore, strives to regain traditional

African society’s socialist ‘attitude of mind’, whereby all able-bodied men and women, regardless of race or ethnicity, are conceived to be members of the same extended family. As such, they are expected to hold property in common, to share in the work of the nation, and the wealth that such work generates. In sum, ujamaa sought to balance the conferment of social and economic rights to citizens with an expectation that those same citizens had a duty to work and participate in the building and development of the nation (Bjerk 2015). In constructing such a national ethic,

Nyerere sought to transcend the communal divisions that marked Tanzania. Under ujamaa, the basis of one’s citizenship was not related to their race, region, ethnicity or religion, but rather to

65 their commitment to serve the nation and uphold and respect ujamaa’s main values of equality, democracy, hard work and self-reliance (ibid: 99-102).

The institutionalization of one-party rule

The creation of an ostensible national family required the state to intervene in a number of ways “to eliminate [regional] differences and compress physical distances between Tanzanian citizens” (Lal 2015: 78). Initial postcolonial state initiatives focused on building a unified nation by consolidating state power, ending discriminatory racial practices and depoliticizing ethnic relations (Aminzade 2013: 129). While most of Tanzania’s African counterparts espoused similar rhetoric about the importance of building a new nation, “Tanzania was unique amongst the former

British territories for the lengths to which the government was prepared to go in neutralising competing sources of loyalty” (Nugent 2012: 131).

The primary example of this related to their pursuit of institutional reform at the local level. Whereas in Kenya, the colonial system of centrally appointed tribal chiefs remained intact in the post-independence period (Miguel 2004), in Tanzania, shunning British recommendations, the Tanzanian state dismantled the institutional structures of the Native Authority system almost immediately after independence. The traditional nature of the chiefs’ authority and its hereditary basis was perceived by Nyerere to contravene the values of equality and participatory democracy, which were at the heart of the nation that he was striving to build (Feierman 1990: 226-227). In

September of 1961, he made this concern clear. At a meeting of the Chiefs’ Convention, a body created in the postwar period to discuss issues related to native administration policy, he informed members that the traditional authority of the office of the chiefs’ would not be recognized in modern Tanzania, and, as such, all chiefs would be replaced by government officers (Bienen 1967:

66; Brennan 2012: 161).

66 Over the next few years, Nyerere made good on this promise. His government actively sought to strip the powers of the chiefs through a series of formal and informal measures.

Throughout 1960 and 1961, local councils in Tanzania began to remove the most ardent, anti-

TANU chiefs from office. By 1962, the juridical and security powers of chiefs were taken away and a series of ordinances were passed which furthered the destruction of the basis of chiefly authority (Schneider 2006: 102). Finally, in February 1963, Nyerere opted to completely dismantle the institutional framework of Indirect Rule, eliminating all chiefly offices with the abolition of the Native Authority System (Omari 1987: 67-68; Schneider 2006: 102).

Subsequently, all powers were transferred to the District and Village Councils, though it is important to note that under the new system, many of these same chiefs were subsequently appointed to new executive posts within local government at the district, divisional and village levels. 14 That said, as Mamdani notes, TANU’s efforts during this period represented the beginning of “the most successful attempt [on the continent] to dismantle the structures of indirect rule through sustained but peaceful reform” (Mamdani 2012: 107). So, whereas in Kenya,

Kenyatta’s regime continued to resemble a “federation of tribal barons” (Lonsdale 2004), where local leaders’ power remained undisturbed by the state, and the distribution of patronage became a fundamental aspect of the maintenance of the political system; in Tanzania, these government reforms at the local level meant that “the possibilities of patronage politics” were profoundly diminished, as local elites were subordinated to the ascendant structures of the ruling party (Tripp

1999: 47).

This relates to another component of the Tanzanian process of nation-state consolidation that differentiated it from its Kenyan counterparts: namely, the relationship that was established

14 The justifications for these appointments were that “there was a scarcity of trained administrative personnel or, in some cases, because local people insisted on former chiefs as executive officers” (Bienen, 1967: 67-68).

67 between the state and the ruling party. At independence, both countries inherited a Westminster

Parliamentary system (Hyden 1994: 89; Okumu 1979), in which political parties were not expected to be central to policy making. Particularly after 1965, however, “[b]oth countries…made radical departures from the Westminster model, but [took] opposite paths”

(Okumu 1979: 51). In Kenya, the post-independence government continued to rule, like their colonial predecessors, through the Provincial Administration. In so doing, the Kenyatta regime worked to marginalize an increasingly weak and fragmented ruling party. In Tanzania, the role assigned to the ruling party was much different from that of Kenya. Here, TANU developed strong, unified institutional foundations during the anti-colonial struggle, and, therefore, the

TANU regime believed it would be advantageous to establish it as the “supreme institution in

Tanzanian society”, directing all other institutions, public and private, toward the goals of socialism, particularly after 1967 (Barkan 1994: 16; Okumu 1979; Hyden 1994).

In a precarious historical moment, in which opposition parties, like the African National

Congress (ANC) and Christopher Tumbo-led People’s Democratic Party (PDP) were trying to mobilize popular supporters, and dissident trade unions were advocating a racialist brand of nationalism in Tanzania, TANU’s ascendance was justified in the name of national unity.

Following an abortive army mutiny in January of 1964, led by trade union leaders, in collaboration with disgruntled soldiers, TANU responded decisively: formally abolishing opposition parties, subordinating independent associations to the ruling party, emboldening the power of TANU and the office of the President and bringing the trade union movement under the control of the newly created, TANU-controlled National Union of Tanganyikan Workers

(NUTA) (ibid: 88). Most importantly, the failed mutiny provided the justification for the appointment of a Presidential Commission designed to propose the adoption of a new constitution.

68 In 1965, following the approval of this new constitution by the National Assembly, Tanzania was officially deemed a one-party state.

The establishment of this new constitution represented a “turning point” in party-state relations in Tanzania, as state power was restructured making the ruling party and the office of the president the dominant political forces within the country (Hyden 1994: 93). Significantly, the new constitution granted both TANU and its National Executive Committee (NEC) constitutional status, and this latter actor subsequently saw the scope of its responsibilities and its power greatly enhanced, especially vis-à-vis Tanzania’s National Assembly (ibid; Okumu

1979).15 In subsequent years, particularly until the late-1980s, the ruling party and its NEC would exert unprecedented influence over the creation and implementation of public policy. As

John J. Okumu (1979: 53) notes, the major role played by the NEC in devising and implementing key policy innovations -- including the promulgation of the Arusha Declaration (which was announced without consultation with parliament or Nyerere’s Cabinet), the government’s Second

Five-Year Plan for Social and Economic Progress, the decentralization of government in 1972, and the movement of the capital to Dodoma in 1973 – all attest to the fact that, by the early 1970s,

“the party had become the most important locus for policy decisions” in the country (Okumu 1979:

53).16

15 Indeed, under this new constitution, the NEC “would not only continue to lay out broad policy but also would have the right to summon witnesses and call for papers, which had been the exclusive prerogative of the National Assembly” (Hyden 1994: 93; Okumu 1979). Moreover, NEC members would be granted the “same status as parliamentarians and receive the same pay as them.” Finally, in 1968, seven Members of Parliament who sought to challenge the party’s growing power and reassert the legislature’s supremacy were expelled from the party for being disloyal to TANU principles and they subsequently lost their parliamentary seats (Okumu 1979: 53; Aminzade 2013: 90). In the aftermath of this decision, the NEC ruled that it “had to approve all major policy plans before they were submitted to parliament for enactment into law” (Aminzade 2013: 90). 16 Nyerere acknowledged this in 1973: “under One-Party Constitution, TANU is supreme. It is able to give directions to Government about the general policy which must be adopted for

69 The introduction of the one-party state constitution also eroded the civil service’s remaining autonomy, giving the President the freedom to “appoint, demote, transfer or fire any one in government services, including Cabinet Ministers” (Brennan 2012: 212). Moreover, just prior to the enshrinement of the constitution, the government began to coerce civil servants and police officers to join the party, denying medical care or crop selling privileges to those who refused. Finally, at the end of 1964, the TANU government introduced a system of ten-house cells for urban areas organized through ward development committees (Aminzade 2013: 88). This reform increased the ability of the party to survey political opposition at the grassroots level

(Brennan 2012; Tripp 1999: 44).

The ascendance of TANU was, therefore, achieved through the establishment of “an extensive [party] apparatus that paralleled all state institutions down to the village level”

(Barkan 1994: 16). Through this system, all Tanzanians acquired basic political representation through party organs, emanating from the neighbourhood cell of ten households at the local level all the way to the National Executive Committee (NEC). The creation and implementation of party policy was, subsequently, determined by party organs from the cell up through the ward, division, district, region, and, finally, the NEC, who routinely met to attend to these matters (ibid).

It is is impossible to deny that Nyerere’s power in postcolonial Tanzania was to some degree personalized (he almost always had the last say on key issues) and that his regime relied to a certain degree on patrimonial practices. Still, in devising and implementing policy, Nyerere’s decisions and actions were, to a far greater extent than most of his African counterparts (including

Kenyatta in Kenya), informed and, at times, constrained by the institutional apparatus of the ruling party.

national development, and it has the power to give instructions about priorities of action in any aspect of national life” (quoted in Okumu 1979: 54).

70 Within five years of the attainment of independence, therefore, the state and ruling party had effectively removed alternative institutional sources of political authority (i.e. ethnic welfare associations, labour unions, religious organizations, etc). Such organizations, which had often played an instrumental role in helping TANU rise to power, were now represented as potential threats to the party leadership’s ability to exercise that power (Bienen 1967: 70). In their crackdown on competing political parties, independent labour unions, local, rural participatory organizations, and in their elimination of the Native Authority System and banning of ethnic welfare associations (which we will discuss in the next section), TANU was, in the name of nation- state building, removing some of the primary actors and organizations that could act as obstacles in their attempt to assert the authority of the party over Tanzania’s expansive territory and the dispersed and ethnically diverse population that lived within it (ibid.).

While tensions both within the party between “ideological” and “pragmatic” socialists and between party leaders and state bureaucrats over the country’s political direction would persist, from the late-1960s until the late-1980s, the more leftist, socialist elements of the party leadership would exercise the greatest influence over Nyerere’s policy decision-making (McHenry 1994: 17-

20; Aminzade 2013; Okumu 1979). Moreover, it is important to note that the strength of the ruling party and TANU’s ability to impose major socialist reforms like the Arusha Declaration meant that the kinds of intra-elite competition that characterized Kenyan politics were limited in

Tanzania, with the Nyerere regime exercising greater control over the national elite at the center, through the apparatus of the ruling party and measures like the Arusha Declaration’s Leadership

Code. In such a context, the national political elite came to be domesticated by TANU, becoming more or less aligned, or at the very least, amenable to Nyerere’s socialist vision. This nation-state building project, therefore, effectively blocked pathways of accumulation for Tanzania’s political

71 elite. As such, the links between control of state power and economic accumulation, which drove the Kenyan political economy, were far less significant in Tanzania.

So, as we shall see in the next chapter, whereas the Kenyan state depended on a clientelistic system that effectively served to consolidate its inclusive coalition of ethnic elites as clients, in

Tanzania, the state actively worked to incorporate different social groups (women, students, trade unions) as categories of national citizens. This represents another one of the major differences in terms of the political effects of institutional choices in both countries and it is closely related to the political party that Nyerere and his colleagues constructed during the first postcolonial decade.

Nation-state building and the depoliticization of ethnicity

Another area in which the Kenyan and Tanzanian nation-state building projects diverged dramatically was on the issue of ethnicity. The dismantling of the institutional bases of Indirect

Rule, was, as Steven Feierman (1990: 226) notes, part of “a larger policy aimed at keeping ethnic politics out of the political arena.” As one TANU MP noted in 1963, the aim of these measures

“was to remove all that tribal business to be citizens of a single nation” (ibid). In this way, the

TANU government far exceeded the efforts of their Kenyan counterparts. Already, following their election victories in 1958 and 1959, TANU were actively discouraging ethnic associations and the usage of vernacular languages. Indeed, as one observer noted, just prior to independence, tribal associations in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam “seemed to disappear overnight

(Brennan 2012: 161).” In the immediate aftermath of the achievement of independence, the new

TANU government put existing ethnic associations across the country under tight, government- directed surveillance. In addition, they made it increasingly difficult for new ethnic associations to acquire registration (Brennan 2012: 161; Feierman 1990: 230).

72 In 1961, TANU made their intentions in relation to ethnic political organization crystal clear, when Vice-President, Rashidi Kawawa, announced that the suppression of “any tribal or religious societies with a political background” was now official TANU policy, and named the All-

Muslim National Union of Tanganyika (AMNUT), the Hehe and Chagga Democratic Parties, and the Masasi African Democratic Union as threats to national unity (Brennan 2012: 161). By

June of that year, TANU’s executive committee asked all tribal parties to voluntarily disband or face proscription within two months (Biennen 1967: 66; Brennan 2012: 161).17 Moreover, the

TANU government also went onto forbade any mention of any particular ethnic groups in public fora, publications or newspapers (Tripp 1999: 43).

Concerns about the potential dangers of ethnic politics also inspired their land policy. In the post-independence period, TANU used its land policy as a means of promoting nation-state building. Whereas in Kenya, where “biased access to land was one of the major forces that increased ethnic politicization [in the postcolonial period]” (Weber et al, 2016: 58), in Tanzania, the postcolonial state almost immediately eliminated ethnic elites’ administrative control over land tenure, replacing them with direct state agents. Since the late-1950s, Nyerere had identified land as central to the national Tanzanian identity that his regime was cultivating. As Paul Bjerk

(2015: 102) notes, access to land in Tanzania, as in much of Africa, was seen to be both an “emblem of political rights in a community, and its allocation an attribute of authority.” For his part,

Nyerere was both a staunch opponent of freehold land tenure, which he believed would quickly lead to foreign ownership of land and the creation of a society divided between propertied and landless classes, and to the system of customary leasehold, in which ethnic authorities who administered land, would continue to wield expansive powers at the local level.

17 This included the banning of many organizations, like the Meru Citizens’ Union and the Sukuma Federal Council, who had been key allies of TANU in the fight for independence (Feierman 1990: 230; Tripp 1999: 43).

73 Instead, in 1962, Nyerere decided to revise the Colonial Land Ordinance, vesting all ownership of land into the hands of the President (Boone and Nyeme 2015: 71). In so doing, the

Tanzanian government shifted from a neocustomary land tenure regime, in which land was administered by local tribal elites and land-access and land-use rights were to be determined by one’s ethnic status, to unified system of statist land institutions, whereby land was to be administered uniformly by state agents across all subnational regions of the country (Boone and

Nyeme, 2015: 67-70). In effect, as Nyerere himself noted, with the revision of the Land Ordinance,

“land became national instead of tribal” (Bjerk 2015: 104). As Catherine Boone and Lydia Nyeme

(2015: 83) persuasively demonstrate, the detribalization of rural power that the shift to a statist land tenure regime initiated ensured that no ethnic group received privileged access to land and, thus, played “a significant role in the on-going forging of national citizenship and nation-[state] building [in Tanzania].”

In addition, the implementation of Nyerere’s contentious policy of villagization, for all of its flaws, endeavored to regroup rural populations into state constructed villages with sufficient infrastructure and communal farmland. Through this policy approximately 80% of the Tanzanian population was relocated (often coercively). In this process, no ethnic group was favoured and, indeed, revenues generated in productive cash-crop areas were redistributed to lesser-developed areas (Weber et al 2016).

Efforts to depoliticize ethnic attachments also informed the government’s decisions related to personnel appointments. The TANU government took very deliberate steps to make sure that their political appointments offered “something for everyone” (Tripp 1999: 44), by maintaining a balance of representatives from a broad cross-section of Tanzanian society. For example, in his first cabinet in 1960, Nyerere included an Asian, a European, an indigenous chief, rural activists from the cooperative movement, and a labour leader (Tripp 1999: 44). While ethnic

74 favouritism was reflected in sensitive positions within the upper echelons of the military, field forces, police, prisons and secret intelligence organizations (Omari 1987: 74; Tripp 1999: 44;

Aminzade 2013: 125), where Nyerere relied on a network of loyal officers from his own Zanaki ethnic group; within his cabinet, Nyerere consistently maintained a concern for ethnic and regional balance throughout his tenure.18 This represents a stark contrast to Kenya, where

Kikuyus (Kenyatta’s ethnic group) appointment to a disproportionately high number of positions within the upper echelons of the military, cabinet, and civil service was a constant source of controversy and resentment among non-Kikuyu ethnic groups.

A further means through which national integration was promoted in Tanzania was through a policy of placing civil servants outside of their home regions. For example, in 1960s, in Newala, a predominantly Makonde district in Mwtara, some of the top governmental positions of area commissioner and district secretary were occupied by individuals from Kilwa, a predominately Lindi district, bordering the Indian Ocean, located over three hundred kilometers away from Newala (Tripp 1999). This type of rotation of government officials, which would have been inconceivable in Kenya during this period, was routine in Tanzania and it both contributed to the enhancement of bonds of national solidarity between government representatives and constituents of different ethnic groups and ensured the further development of Swahili as a national language, as it became indispensable for communication in such interactions (Weber et al 2016: 58).

The postcolonial government also promoted national integration through the initiation of institutional changes in the sizes of electoral constituencies, which were purposefully made large

18 By December of 1983, for example, his 26 minister positions were relatively evenly divided with eight coming from the Southern Zone, seven from the Lake Zone, six from the Eastern Zone, four from the Northern Zone and one from the Central Zone (Omari 1987: 74; Tripp 1999: 48).

75 enough to ensure that multiple ethnic groups were included. In 1965, for example, the constituency of Arusha Rural was expanded to include both the Wameru and Warush. This change (which made the constituency the second largest in the country with 75 000 people) and others like it were designed to ensure that in order to achieve electoral success, candidates needed to appeal to multiple ethnic groups (Tripp 1999: 45; Weber et al, 2016: 60). In addition, the

TANU government also prohibited any discussion of ethnicity or religion during the duration of electoral campaigns and took it upon themselves to consider issues related to religion and ethnicity in their screening of potential party candidates (Samoff 1987: 157; Tripp 1999: 46).

Additionally, and especially following the Arusha Declaration, the government made a concerted effort to focus development in areas that had been traditionally neglected by colonial authorities. In practice, they attempted to “provide water, schools, health services and agricultural inputs throughout the country” (Tripp 1999: 67). This was done with the aim of minimizing the kinds of income disparities and imbalances in access to resources in different regions across the country, which were rife in Kenya, and which helped to produce conflict along ethno-regional lines.

Efforts to foster national unity and integration, however, were not limited to attempts to depoliticize ethnic and racial cleavages. Tanzania also sought to develop a national culture in a far more rigorous way than their Kenyan counterparts. While some of the measures they pursued, like the establishment the Ministry of Youth and National Culture in 1964, were commonplace among their African counterparts, on the issue of language policy, Tanzania far exceeded their contemporaries, making their promotion of the Swahili as a national language one of the

‘cornerstones’ of their national cultural project (Weber et al, 2016: 57; Laitin 1992; Barkan 1994;

Miguel 2004).

76 Within the first decade of independence, particularly after 1966, the Tanzanian state promoted Swahili “to a status it never had before [with the country]” (Blommaert 1996: 247).

The Tanzanian government made Swahili the official language of politics/administration. In addition, by the late 1960s, the use of ethnic vernaculars was limited in political and professional spaces and strongly discouraged in government offices and national businesses (Tripp 1999;

Weber et al 2016). While under the British, English and vernacular languages were used as the language of instruction in primary schools, in March of 1967, shortly after the Arusha

Declaration, Tanzania replaced these languages with Swahili. Moreover, just a couple of months later, in August 1967, Tanzania’s parliament established the National Swahili Council (BAKITA) to further promote the development and usage of the language. These efforts yielded impressive results: whereas, at independence, approximately half of Tanzania’s spoke the language, by the end of the 1960s, “about 90% of the population spoke Swahili with varying degrees of fluency, and it had become the primary language in national institutions, including the legislature, primary schools, national service camps, and army and police barracks” (Aminzade 2013: 163).

Given the constellation of formidable social forces that Kenyatta had to balance in Kenya, it is difficult to imagine that his regime would have been able, even if they had wanted to, to implement the far-reaching changes that the TANU regime introduced in the first decade of independence in Tanzania. That such changes could be introduced in the Tanzanian context during this period cannot, however, be solely reduced to Nyerere’s political acumen or the persuasiveness of his ideology. The fact of the matter remains that such changes need to be understood in relation to “breathing space…permitted [the Tanzanian ruling elite] by historical circumstances” (Saul 1973: 266), outlined in this chapter, which provided the space of possibility for a socialist nation-state building project, undergirded by dramatic institutional reform.

Conclusion

77 In this chapter, I have suggested that to understand Tanzania’s distinctive path of nation- state building, we must move beyond the common, primary focus on the unique ideological predilections of its founding father, Julius Nyerere. Instead, I have argued that these institutional choices need to be understood in a more ‘systematic’ and ‘political’ manner, paying attention to the “historical and political circumstances [that] constrained the practical realizations of

[Nyerere’s] ideological visions” (Boone 2003: 15). In colonial Tanzania, the country’s complex sociocultural ecology, in conjunction with the German and British colonial states’ approach to political administration meant that the territory lacked the kind of entrenched, antagonistic ethnic divisions that existed elsewhere in Africa.

The British colonial state’s approach to capitalist development and industrialization during the inter-war years produced populations of settlers and rural capitalists that were small, relatively weak, and subsequently poorly organized. Moreover, the industrial sector lacked a strong African commercial elite, and had come to be dominated by Europeans, including British stakeholders, and Asians. For their part, local chiefs, who lacked strong, historically centralized kingdoms and significant independent economic wealth, and whose reputations had been marred by their association with the unpopular colonial regime, were also severely enfeebled by the time of independence. As such, none of these groups had sufficient political capital to seriously constrain the policy choices of TANU’s postcolonial ruling elite during the first decades of independence (Hyden 1994: 80).

In constructing post-independence nation-state building policy, therefore, Nyerere was not forced to bargain or contend with the same constellation of formidable social forces, both international and domestic, which confronted and constrained Kenya’s post-independence nationalist leadership. As such, as Saul (1973: 257) presciently notes, the “open-endedness of

Tanzania’s conjuncture” at independence “provided conditions which were permissive of

78 experimentation and the launching of radical development strategies.” The ease with which

Nyerere was able in the first years of independence, to incorporate, marginalize or eliminate sources of political opposition (i.e. opposition political parties, trade unions, ethnic welfare associations and religious groups) and implement his socialist, egalitarian vision of nation-state building reflects the weakness of these oppositional groups and supports the validity of Saul’s interpretation.

Subsequently, the institutional choices made by the TANU regime during the critical juncture of decolonization generated a distinctive kind of politics in Tanzania and produced a different set of historical institutional legacies to that which developed in Kenya. The two primary differences that were noted in this chapter were, first, whereas Kenya would pursue political continuity, relying heavily on a strong civil service, while marginalizing and dismantling the ruling party; in Tanzania, the TANU regime opted for dramatic institutional reform, investing in building a party-state, which created robust party structures at the local level. As a result of these choices, state power in Tanzania came to be institutionalized in a specific manner, unique in sub-Saharan Africa among states that did undergo wars of liberation. Indeed,

TANU/CCM developed into one of the most robustly institutionalized and powerful political parties in all of Africa, able to exert a great deal of influence on the policy-making process of the

Nyerere regime (Okumu 1979; Saul 1973; Riedl 2018). Second, whereas the Kenyan state shunned egalitarian nation-state building efforts, relying instead on state repression and a clientelistic system that effectively served to consolidate its inclusive coalition of ethnic elites as clients, in

Tanzania, the party-state avidly invested in nation-state building, actively working to neutralize competing ethnic and local sources of political power, thus incorporating different social groups

(women, students, trade unions) as categories of national citizens.

79 In the next chapter, we will see that the situation was not as straightforward in Kenya, where a combination of the country’s very different colonial history, political economy and sociocultural ecology, constrained the latitude of autonomy of its nationalist elite. In a situation in which Kenyatta had to confront and negotiate with a powerful set of international and local actors, his parameters of choice were far narrower, and, therefore, the kind of reforms pursued by

Nyerere in Tanzania would have been incredibly unlikely in Kenya, regardless of Kenyatta’s whims or ideological commitments.

80 CHAPTER THREE

GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE: INSTIUTUIONAL CHOICE AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NATION-STATE BUILDING IN POSTCOLONIAL KENYA

In December 2007, Kenya’s incumbent President, Mwai Kibaki, was declared the winner of a hotly contested Presidential election, in which his opponent, Raila Odinga, and Odinga’s supporters believed that the election result had been fraudulent. In the days and months that followed the election, a wave of post-electoral violence swept through the country in a manner

“reminiscent of the 1994 Rwandan genocide” (Kagwanja and Southall 2009; 259). By the time a resolution was reached in late February of 2008, between 1 500-3 000 people had been killed, 600

000 displaced and the losses to the economy were estimated at approximately 100 billion Kenyan shillings ($1.5 billion) (Kagwanja 2009; Kagwanja and Southall 2009; Anderson and Lochery

2008: 328).

For some observers, the scope and nature of the violence, which brought the Kenyan nation-state to the “brink of collapse and failure” (Kagwanja and Southall 2009: 260), were surprising given the country’s previous reputation as an African “model of stability” (Mueller

2008: 185). In the aftermath of the violence, a plethora of academic articles have attempted to make sense of what transpired in Kenya. While most scholars acknowledge that the dubious and contested nature of the election acted as an important trigger for the post-electoral violence that followed, they have also, by and large, rejected journalistic explanations, which emphasized the

“atavistic vein of tribal tension” that supposedly drove the violence (Gettleman 2007). Instead, these observers tried to situate the post-electoral violence within a “longer sequence of historical decisions and political actions” (Anderson and Lochery 2008: 326). In reviewing this history, they pointed to the state’s gradual relinquishment of a monopoly on the means of coercion, the erosion

81 of the credibility and autonomy of key political institutions (i.e. the Election Commission and the

Judiciary) which were increasingly deferential to the demands of the Office of the Presidency, and the rise of political parties, which practiced ethnic politics and lacked ideological or programmatic commitments as all being key contributing factors to the violence (Mueller 2008; Kagwanja 2009;

Kagwanja and Southall 2009; Branch and Cheeseman 2010).

At a deeper level, however, the current political crisis can also be understood as an indictment of the historical failings of Kenya’s attempts at nation-state building (Anderson 2010:

24; Branch and Cheeseman 2010: 244), a project that the country’s foremost historian, Bethwell

Ogot, declared dead in 2006 (Ndii 2016). Depending on one’s interpretation, post-colonial

Kenyan leaders are seen to either have “betrayed” the “objective of nation-[state] building”

(Nasong’o 2016: 165) or to have refused to ever “take [it] seriously” (Branch and Cheeseman

2010: 244) to begin with. Either way, what is clear is that this failure manifested itself in a variety of ways: in the Kenyan postcolonial regime’s seeming inability or unwillingness to create an inclusive political system; in the increasing politicization of ethnicity within the postcolony; in the persistence of popular contestations related to distribution of land and of wealth; and in the regime’s continued dependence on patronage and extra-legal violence as a central method of mobilization (ibid.).

As a result of this failure, as David Anderson notes, “the relationship between region and nation remains the critical feature of Kenyan politics” (Anderson 2010: 24). The tensions that questions about this foundational relation provoke remain capable, as witnessed in 2007-2008, of producing horrific violence and profound political and social disorder. The continued fragility of the Kenyan nation-state has even prompted one prominent commentator to suggest in early 2016 that it was “time [that Kenyans] talk divorce” (Ndii, 2016). In this chapter, I am interested in explaining institutional choice, as it relates to Kenyan nation-state building efforts. Why and

82 how did the Kenyan state’s approach to nation-state building differ so markedly from their

Tanzanian counterparts in the first decade of independence? And what was the conduct of politics and ultimate historical institutional legacies that these initial institutional choices helped to produce within the country? In order to answer these questions, we must first consider: what are the predominant historical and societal factors that helped to shape Kenya’s fragmented anticolonial movement?

In addressing this question, I argue that the Kenyan ruling elite that assumed the levers of state power at independence came to be beholden to “an emerging capitalist bourgeoisie”

(Mueller 1981: 460), which was both conservative and committed to consolidating its dominance.

This elite had been shaped by the territory’s specific experience of colonialism, which differentiated it from their Tanzanian counterparts, in a number of important ways, including: the administrative policies pursued by the colonial state, which implemented extensive alienation of

African land and the creation of ethnically homogenous native reserves. This, in conjunction with the state’s continued insistence on stifling of African nationalist political organizations for much of the crucial period between 1922 and 1959, laid the foundations for the politicization of ethnicity in the Kenyan context. In addition, settler capitalism, which prevailed in the colony, spread unevenly, leading to significant regional variations in capitalist penetration and an acceleration of processes of class formation (at least in relation to Tanzania). The nature of this growth served to introduce significant class divisions both within and between ethnic groupings. Finally, the outbreak of violence of the Mau Mau uprising beginning in the late-1940s, itself a response to the rapid socioeconomic differentiation experienced in Central Province, inspired the government’s counterinsurgency efforts for much of the 1950s. These efforts served to expand the power and reach of the Kenyan colonial state into the periphery of its territory and to empower a new,

British-friendly ruling class at independence composed, for the most part, of former loyalists.

83 Upon their arrival in power, therefore, this elite approached the twin challenges of nation- state building and development in a dramatically different way than their Tanzanian counterparts.

In meeting these challenges, this newly enriched elite placed an emphasis, not on radical egalitarian reform as in Tanzania, but on economic and political continuity. As such, they endeavoured to further consolidate their hold on power, through the preservation of important elements of the colonial state structure and the marginalization of the popular forces of radical political mobilization (that ultimately included the ruling party), which represented the last vestiges of Mau Mau. In order to preserve the unity of President Jomo Kenyatta’s fragile coalition, therefore, the Kenyan state relied heavily on an elaborate system of patron-client relations and routine deployments of state repression against opponents, both real and perceived.

In short, the Kenyatta regime sought to institutionalize state power in a very different way from their Tanzanian counterparts. These differences need to be understood in relation to the country’s distinctive colonial history and political economy, which shaped a much narrower space of possibilities for nation-state building in the postcolonial period than that which existed in

Tanzania (Branch and Cheeseman 2010: 11).

In Part I of this chapter, I will examine the historical origins, both political and socioeconomic, of Kenya’s ruling elite, identifying the major societal constraints that confronted the Kenyatta state at independence. In Part II, I will outline the specific institutional choices of the nation-state building project in Kenya during the first decade of independence and examine their political consequences.

84 PART I: THE HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF NATION-STATE BUIDING IN KENYA

Political administration and the nature of the colonial state

Kenya did not share many of the ‘distinct advantages’ that facilitated a united nationalist movement in Tanzania. First, whereas, as noted in the previous chapter, Tanzanian society at independence contained over 120 ethnic groups, of which none had the numeric, economic or political superiority needed to impose their will on their neighbours, Kenya was home to far fewer ethnic groups (approximately 40), of which the largest five accounted for approximately 70% of the country’s total population by the early 1990s. These largest five groups did not only consist of a greater proportion of the overall population than their Tanzanian counterparts, but they also came, as we shall see, to dominate Kenyan politics and its economy in a way that had no analogue in Tanzania.

The sole fact of Kenya’s fewer ethnic communities does not adequately explain why ethnic identities came to acquire more political significance in Kenya than they did in Tanganyika. To understand this, one needs to appreciate the role that British colonial administrative policy in

Kenya and settler capitalism played in helping to construct and politicize these ethnic cleavages.

It is important to note that, as in Tanzania, prior to colonialism in Kenya, ethnic groups were not

“watertight”, but were generally smaller in size, with fluid boundaries that were malleable in accordance with intermarriages, trade and warfare (Weber 2016: 29). With the arrival of the

British in 1895, many of these ethnic groups came to expand through the amalgamation of smaller groups, and these identities came to be more durable and sharply demarcated.

Much of this related to colonial state’s approach to political administration. First, the arrival of European settlers in 1902 necessitated the expropriation of the most fertile African lands (which came to be known as the White Highlands) for settler agriculture. As part of the colonial state’s efforts to make the settlers’ presence in Kenya economically viable, divisions

85 between European and African land were consolidated. In 1926, the colonial state created African reserves along tribal lines, bifurcating land in Kenya into ‘native reserves’ for Africans and

‘scheduled land’ (i.e. the white highlands) for European settlement (Kanyinga 2009: 327;

Anderson 2005: 21; Ndegwa 1997). This policy produced the creation of larger tribes, “through the uniting [of] formerly unassociated smaller tribes” (Weber 2016: 30) within single Native

Reserves. Through the imposition of these administrative boundaries between ethnically homogenous native reserves, the colonial state was able to obstruct inter-ethnic political interactions and thus lessen the potential for cooperation between different ethnic groups and, therefore, the possibility of fostering of anti-colonial resistance on a national level (Kanyinga

2009: 328). As such, these reserves facilitated the sharp “ethnicization of Kenyan society”

(Kanyinga 2009: 328) by emphasizing “the district as a separate unit,” and “isolat[ing] tribal groups from each other” (Gertzel 1970: 5).

Another method that the colonial state in Kenya used to deter the possibility of a unified nationalist, anti-colonial movement related to language policy. In contrast to Tanzania, where

Swahili was used in an administrative capacity by both the Germans and the British, in Kenya, the language was seen as a “threat,” which the British recognized could be used as a facilitator for pan-tribal organization (Weber 2016: 31). In recognition of this danger, the British emphasized the use of local vernaculars as the language of instruction within the educational system (Miguel

2004; Weber 2016: 31). In addition, as John Lonsdale notes (1968; 1972) Kenya did not have the extensive, trans-ethnic Swahili cultural networks that existed across Tanzania. All of this meant that the potential for Swahili, as a language and trans-ethnic culture, to further the nationalist cause in the Kenyan case, as it had in Tanzania, were severely diminished.

The Kenyan colonial state also differed from her Tanzanian neighbours in their approach to African nationalist organizations. As noted in the preceding chapter, in colonial Tanzania, the

86 existence of the Tanganyikan African Association (TAA) dated back to 1927. Through the TAA,

Africans were able to organize politically at the national-level and this organization, which would become TANU, became increasingly influential in organizing for the nationalist cause in the post- war years. In Kenya, by stark contrast, the British colonial authority, pressured by the settler population, continually stymied national African political organizations. This practice dated back to the early 1920s, when Kenya’s first pan-tribal political organization, the East African

Association (EAA), was banned following its memberships’ demonstrations in protest against the arrest and deportation of three of their leaders in March of 1922. Following the proscription of this group, which had pioneered protests against the hut tax, forced labour and the kibande (the pass book), the colonial government set out to discourage nation-wide political activity among

Africans throughout Kenya (Ajulu 2002: 255). Instead, they promoted the creation of tribal or district-based organizations, introducing in 1924, Local Native Councils (LNCs). As Bruce

Berman (1990: 310) notes: these LNCs “conscious political intention…[was] the containment of

African politics at the district or tribal level.”

In effect, they served this purpose, as these councils meant that Africans acquired access to government institutions at the local level 30 years before they could express their political demands nationally (Gertzel 1970: 5). Colonialists believed that in undermining Africans’ ability to organize nationally in this way, the state could thwart any threat that potential African challengers posed to them at colony-wide level (Berman 1990: 310). Largely as a result of these efforts, over the next two decades, Africans were compelled to direct any and all of their political grievances through these grassroots organizations and their local administrative chiefs. With their emphasis on local issues, these Councils served to effectively strengthen and further politicize individuals’ attachment to their tribal community and identity (Gertzel 1970: 5).

87 In 1944, an African national political organization, the Kenyan African Union (KAU), was formed.1 The KAU was home to nationalist moderates and, at least initially, the organization’s executive was ethnically diverse. Following the appointment of Jomo Kenyatta as President of the organization in June of 1947, however, a Kikuyu elite increasingly came to dominate the leadership of the KAU. By early 1950, the organization was “virtually moribund” (Berman 1990:

332; Muigai 2004): with its membership frustrated with the organization’s failure to win concessions from the colonial regime, its financial capacity dwindling and, as a result of Kikuyu’s dominance of the organization, its “pan-ethnic credentials…[were] in tatters” (Anderson 2006:

30).

To compound the KAU’s difficulties, at this very moment, a far more radical, militant component of Kikuyu society was emerging. This section of the population, which would form the basis of the Mau Mau revolt, was comprised of predominantly young squatters and the urban poor, who were increasingly frustrated with what they perceived to be the impotence of the KAU’s moderate constitutionalist approach.

Following the colonial authority’s Declaration of Emergency in October 1952 (which will be discussed later in this chapter), the entire KAU leadership was rounded up and arrested, along with some of its most militant activists. In June of 1953, the organization was proscribed, with colonial officials arguing mistakenly that the KAU had been the initiator of the violence and heightened political militancy that had inspired the State of Emergency (Ogot 1995: 52). In response to the Emergency, which lasted from 1952 to 1959, the colonial state once again prohibited all national political parties from operating in Kenya. Two years later, in 1955, the colonial state began to re-allow African political organizations, but only at the district-level with

1 Originally started as the Kenya African Study Association (KASA), KASA was created by the state to act as an advisory group to Eliud Mathu, the first African to sit on Kenya’s Legislative Council. It soon gathered momentum and was reconstituted as the KAU in 1946.

88 the discretion of the colonial officers. As a result, a number of local parties with ethnically homogenous constituencies emerged (Anderson 2010: 25) in areas across the colony, with the exception of Central Province, where such organizations continued to be prohibited.

In 1957, continuing their efforts to suppress and undermine the development of nationalist sentiment, the colonial state decreed that Africans would be allowed to vie for public office within the Legislative Councils (LEGCOs), but that this would only be permitted at the district level for those African candidates that had passed a loyalty test. While this shift in policy opened the space for more expansive and formal African representation, it also “nourished the seeds of latent tribalism” (Ajulu 2002: 256), as Africans continued to be only be able to organize politically within their ethnic groups at the district-level.

By 1959, the colonial state finally removed the barriers to the formation of African national political organizations within the colony. By that point, however, the consequences of the colonial state’s long-term efforts to stunt the development of territory-wide nationalism in Kenya were readily apparent. As Ogot and Zeleza (1988) note, such policies had resulted in the “introversion of national concerns to local ones and the emergence of local powerful figures that would resist the attempts at political centralization of KANU [following independence].” This resulted in the creation and development of ‘one-party districts’, where ethnic organizations headed by local ‘big men’ came to dominate grassroots politics, solidifying strong linkages with their co-ethnic supporters. As Cheeseman (2006: 13) notes: “[t]he strength of [these] local political bosses and the tension between ethnic communities created a powerful check on the integration of local political machines into a national party structure.” As such, in the Kenyan case, the structure of

KANU, even after the elimination of opposition parties like Kenya African Democratic Union

(KADU) and the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), remained “more fragmented and internally divided than in Tanzania” (ibid.).

89 An additional by-product of these historical developments was that it served to consolidate ethnicity as the key source of political mobilization in Kenya (Orvis 2006: 101), which was most vividly reflected in the creation of two distinct, mutually antagonistic African political parties just prior to independence. Kenya’s two major political parties, KANU and its rival the KADU, were faced with the common challenge of trying to bring together different political district organizations and leaderships into united national coalitions that could successfully vie for national political power (Hornsby and Throup 1998: 9).

Regimes of accumulation: Kenya’s settler capitalism

As in Tanzania, the evolving political economy in colonial Kenya also had a great deal of bearing on the type of nationalist elite that emerged at independence. To appreciate these differences, we must discuss both the history of European settlement and its implications for the prevailing regimes of accumulation within the colony. As noted, Tanzanian settlers were a small community, of mixed nationality (both British and German), who lived in areas relatively far removed from the administrative capital of Dar es Salaam and from each other. As a result, therefore, they lacked sufficient political power and economic capital to shape Tanzanian politics.

In these respects, they greatly contrasted with their Kenyan counterparts.

Unlike in Tanzania, where colonial state policy towards European settlement, particularly after the First World War, “ranged haphazardly from active discouragement to only mild encouragement” (Mueller 1981: 468), in Kenya, right from the start, European settlement was supported and facilitated by the administration of the colonial state. While it would be an overstatement to suggest that the settlers controlled the colonial government (as their counterparts in Southern Rhodesia did), or to deny that serious tensions continued to exist between the settlers and both the Colonial Office and the Kenya Administration for most of the colonial period, there is no denying that the settlers were able to acquire “a dominant influence

90 over the middle range of policy especially relating to public finances and taxation, public services, immigration, land and labour” (Berman and Lonsdale 1992: 236). Moreover, the colonial state in

Kenya, in spite of their reservations about the settlers’ treatment of Africans, still devoted a great deal of resources and effort to ensuring that settler agriculture in Kenya remained economically viable (Brett 1973: 166).

In order to establish a thriving settler agricultural sector in Kenya, Europeans settlers were initially almost wholly dependent on state support and interventions to grant them access to land, labour, transport, marketing facilities and technical information (ibid: 169). The first and most influential of these colonial state interventions on the settlers’ behalf related to land.

Whereas the British colonial state was often adamantly in opposition to land alienation in

Tanzania, in Kenya, beginning in the early 20th century, the colonial state introduced laws that were designed to legitimize the expropriation of the most fertile land in the territory to European settlers, who were often granted these lands in perpetuity. This area, which continued to expand in the early decades of the 20th century, included significant chunks of central Kenya (in Kiambu,

Murang’a, as well as areas in Nyeri and Nanyuki), a large portion of the Rift Valley and the

Ukambani region in the Eastern province, and came to be known as the White Highlands (Weber

2016: 33; Kanyinga 2009: 327; Morgan 1963: 148; Anderson 2005: 21).2

As we shall see later in this chapter, the expropriation of this land would have profound postcolonial consequences. This is because unlike in Tanzania, where land remained abundant and capital and labour was relatively evenly distributed throughout the territory (Green 2011), in Kenya, the vast majority of the land was too arid for arable farming (89% of the land being deemed ‘unsuitable’) (Nugent 2012: 157; Widner 1992). This lack of suitable land, in conjunction

2 These lands covered the Masaailand and also “overlapped with the northern and southern marches of Kikuyu expansion” (Berman and Lonsdale 1992: 85).

91 with Kenya’s raising population growth and high levels of land hunger, meant that the ‘White

Highlands’, the Rift Valley, and parts of the neighbouring reserves-- which were ideal land for the production of cash crops, a range of food crops, and livestock rearing-- inevitably became the source of intense competition and conflict, which often articulated itself in ethnic terms, even after the settlers’ eventual departure.

Over the course of the next three decades, the colonial state worked to reinforce European settlers’ legal dominion over these fertile areas through the implementation of various pieces of legislation. 3 In continually reaffirming that the land of the White Highlands was legally designated for European settlers alone, the colonial state effectively was preventing Africans from acquiring land outside of their designated reserves. By the 1930s, as Anderson (2005: 10) notes,

“the hardening of the boundaries between settler farms and African lands, combined with African population increase, brought the first real evidence of land hunger and emerging landlessness in central Kenya.”

Another means through which the Kenyan colonial state sought to consolidate settlers’ economic and political dominance was related to their policies regarding African farmers.

Whereas in Tanzania, the government refused to prohibit Africans from growing the same cash crops as their European counterparts, in Kenya, following a difficult period in 1908-1909, when many settlers were driven to the brink of bankruptcy by low world prices, the colonial state banned all Africans from cultivating some of the territory’s most lucrative crops (Kyle 1999: 8;

3 In 1934, for example, the Kenya Land Commission rejected Kikuyus request that expropriated land be returned to their people, thus further confirming Europeans’ existing title over the White Highlands in the Carter Report.

92 Weber 2016).4 Many of these bans would persist for decades5 and came to form the basis of one of the main grievances among African agriculturalists against settlers and the colonial state.

In addition, the colonial state also intervened in the labour market, becoming, by the early

1920s, the primary recruiter of African labourers for undercapitalized settler farmers, who were unable to provide the necessary incentives to draw African labour from the peasant sector voluntarily (Lonsdale and Berman 1992: 111). Whereas in Tanzania, the combination of a large amount of cultivable land, in conjunction with their low population density, made it very difficult for settlers to recruit African labour, in Kenya, the colonial state’s system of recruitment and control of labour “was probably the harshest of any British colony in West or East Africa”

(Berman 1984: 196). These pressures were imposed through a host of measures6 and ultimately achieved their desired effect: by the early 1920s, Kenya had one-fifth of the African male population working as part of the labour force, which represented one of the highest rates in all of Africa during this time (Hornsby 2012: 32). By the 1930s, a “reserve army of the unemployed” had been created within Kenya that was ready and able to meet the wage labour demands of the settler sector (Brett 1973: 190).

An additional way in which the colonial state aided the strengthening of the settler sector in Kenya was through the collection and distribution of tax revenue. As Brett (ibid: 191) notes

4 As such, Africans in Kenya were blocked from competing with settlers in the growing of tea, sisal, coffee and the production of pineapples (Kyle 1999: 8; Hornsby 2012: 39). 5 Progressive farmers in the Kisii, Embu and Meru highlands were allowed to start growing coffee by the mid-1930s, though coffee-planting remained banned in Kikuyu Central Province until 1951 (Hornsby 2012: 36) 6 including: the passing of the Resident Native Labour Ordinance of 1918, which removed African squatters’ rights as tenants; the issuing of kipandes (or labour registration certificates), which monitored (and often restricted) the movement and activities of African labourers; the raising of poll and hut taxes on Africans, which acted as a means of “indirect coercion” compelling Africans into wage labour in order to meet raising taxation requirements; and the introduction of a Native Authority Amendment Ordinance in 1920, which “empowered chiefs and headmen to order ‘compulsory labour’ of up to 60 days a year at wages below that of voluntary workers for state purposes” (Berman and Lonsdale 1992: 110).

93 the “basic assumption of colonial financial policy [in Kenya] was that Africans pay and Europeans receive.” Between 1920 and 1923, for example, Africans’ tax contribution, primarily through the

Native Hut and Poll Tax, accounted for nearly 70% of all tax revenue in the colonial territory

(ibid: 193). In comparison, European settlers in Kenya were not required to pay income tax until

1938. In spite of this gaping disparity between the tax burdens placed on Africans and settlers, the vast majority of this taxation revenue generated by Africans was being distributed to support infrastructural development in, and social services to, the settler communities (Keller 2014: 105;

Brett 1973; Berman and Lonsdale 1992).7 As the Chief Native Commissioner noted in 1930, in

Kenya, “the very large bulk of the expenditure of the taxation derived from both native and other populations has been poured into that 6,000,000 acres [of European land], to the detriment of the reminder” (Brett 1973: 197). By the time income taxes finally came to be levied on European settlers in Kenya in the late 1930s, the outcome of the colonial state’s sustained favouritism of

European settler interests in their economic policy had “effectively placed a near-monopoly of the agricultural resources of the colony in [settlers’] hands” (ibid: 199).

The dividends of this colonial state strategy to favour the settlers were not difficult to discern. In the 1920s alone, buoyed by high world prices for cereals, the settler sector underwent a dramatic transformation: the number of settlers occupying prime farmland doubled. Moreover, the area in which these settlers cultivated expanded by more than three-fold, while the value of the exports that they produced quadrupled (Brett 1973: 176; Anderson 2006: 82).

When the depression hit at the tail end of the 1920s, and world prices for key Kenyan crops like cereals and coffees plummeted, the settler sector was kept afloat by massive state

7 For example, in the building of the railway in Kenya, approximately 347 of the 544 miles of line built after 1920 went through settler territory (Brett 1973).

94 support (Anderson 2006: 82; Spencer 1981).8 During World War II, with continued help from the state,9 the Kenyan settler economy recovered spectacularly, taking advantage of enhanced international and domestic demand and colonial government’s new dependence on their cooperation and production (Spencer 1981: 513). By 1945, emboldened by the wartime economy, settler economic and political power in Kenya had reached its zenith, as white settlers took over primary roles in the management of the colonial economy and increased their control over local and municipal government (Anderson 2005: 3; Ogot and Zeleza 1987: 402). The colonial state played a central role in this process, however, effectively “destroy[ing]” its legitimacy “as a neutral arbitrator [between settler and African interests]” by “clearly identif[ying] it[self] as a servant of one specific interest: the settlers” (Throup 1987: 38).

In Kenya, this more robust presence of European settlers had a number of important implications for the development of Kenya’s political economy and African nationalism. First, these settlers played an increasingly significant role in seeing to it that, unlike in Tanzania,

Kenyan capitalism “matured along rather classic lines, by increasing the productivity of labor without resulting in absolute immiseration” (Mueller 1981: 460). Second, this economic growth within the colonial territory and the rapid, if uneven, process of social change that it initiated also had profound social and political implications for ethnic politics in the colony. As noted, with the introduction of the Native Reserves in 1926, regions in Kenya came to be, by and large, ethnically homogenous. As such, in Kenya, as in much of Africa, “[t]he uneven spread of colonial economic and infrastructure development between cash-crop and labour reserve regions…and centers of urban commerce and industry introduced significant regional differentiation in access to cash-

8 By the end of 1936, the government-sponsored Land Bank “had assisted one in four of Kenya’s white farmers, with loans totalling 631,260 (pounds)” (Anderson 2006: 82). 9 The state provided grants for settlers, guaranteed prices per bag of settler-produced grain (which raised levels of production), loans from the Land and Agricultural Bank at favorable rates of interest, and the assistance of African conscripted labour (Spencer 1981: 502-504)

95 crop production, trade, education, wage labour and state employment amongst different ethnic communities” (Berman et al, 2004: 7). This produced increased competition and confrontation both within and between ethnic groups and it thus enhanced the political salience of these identities.

In Central and Nyanza Provinces, for example, colonialism’s impact had been felt more acutely and processes of capitalist development and class formation were relatively accelerated in these regions (Bienen 1974: 29, 132-133; Bates 2005: 53). As a result, the dominant groups in both of those areas, the Kikuyu and Luo respectively, came to wield unprecedented economic and political power and took over the reins of nationalist, anti-colonial mobilization. In particular, the Kikuyu, whose regions had experienced the closest contact with settler capitalism, were able to acquire more education and economic resources through the ownership of businesses and farms, and thus some of its members were able to adapt much better than other groups to the demands of the modern Kenyan economy (Ajulu 2002: 254).

By comparison, in the less developed regions of the country like parts of the Rift Valley and Coast Province, the Kalenjin, Masai, Turkana, and Samburu (i.e. often later referred to as

KAMATUSA), for example, remained on the periphery of capitalist development until the late

1950s (ibid: 254). As such, their petty bourgeois classes were small by comparison, vulnerable on the national political stage (Ogot and Zeleza 1988: 415) and thus subject to political and economic marginalization. By contrast, in Tanzania, where capitalist development was actively discouraged prior to the Second World War, levels of ethno-regional social differentiation were less acute and thus ethnic identities were less likely to be politicized in the anti-colonial struggle. In sum, the uneven spread of capitalist penetration in Kenya during the colonial period gave ethnic politics its material substance and it made the possibility of a pan-ethnic nationalist movement emerging in Kenya, as it had in Tanzania, more complicated and far less likely. These tensions between

96 ethnic groups over access to land and economic and political opportunities would come, as we shall see, to be expressed antagonistically in the initial struggle between KANU and KADU over

Kenya’s independence political dispensation.

The dramatic changes in the upswing in Kenya’s post-war economy and the increasing strength of the settlers were instrumental in precipitating the outbreak of the Mau Mau Revolt in the 1950s. Indeed, beginning in the 1940s, the colony’s sustained period of rapid economic growth would last for almost two decades.10 These developments exacerbated inequality both among Africans and between them and the settlers, as more of the former entered the monetary economy (Berman and Lonsdale 1992: 243). These changes had the effect of “increasing the scope and intensity of social conflict in the colony” (ibid), particularly Kikuyu areas, where the Mau Mau revolt would emerge.

By the late 1940s, the tensions in Kikuyuland finally came to a head, when colonial officials became aware of a clandestine organization among mostly Kikuyu farm labourers on European farms in the Rift Valley, which they christened Mau Mau. Mau Mau was composed of the landless, urban workers and squatters alike, who resented the increasing social stratification within Kikuyu society that had left them marginalized and excluded (Anderson 2005:10-12). The group emerged from a broader socioeconomic context in Central Province of land hunger, declining soil productivity, escalating social differentiation, and the acquisition of land by a relatively small group of powerful individuals, which was all worsened by the return to Central Province of thousands of recently evicted squatters coming from Rift Valley (ibid: 31).

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Mau Mau began to try to engender solidarity among the Kikuyu through secretive, widespread oathing ceremonies. By early September of 1952, Mau

10 Average growth rate of 6%, with a growth rate of 13% in the years between 1947-1956 (Berman 1992: 242)

97 Mau had escalated its militant tactics: carrying out a wave of arson attacks on farm buildings on

European land, maiming and disemboweling hundreds of settler-owned livestock, and carrying out 23 known assassinations. Following the assassination of the government’s Paramount Chief of Central Province, Waruhiu wa Kungu, the colonial state declared a State of Emergency on

October 20th, 1952 and began to move troops into the colony.

The military phase of the war between the colonial state and Mau Mau militants would last from October 1952 until the final months of 1956, during which between 11,500 to 20,000

Mau Mau fighters, 1,800 African loyalists and 23 European settlers and fewer than 200 hundred members of the British regiment were killed (Anderson 2005: 4; Branch 2006: 32). The rebellion would come to transform into a “civil war” among Kikuyu, Embu and Meru households, which pitted Mau Mau rebels against loyalists, though for both sets of actors there was often an

“ambiguity of allegiances during the conflict” (Branch 2007: 291).

The violent nature of decolonization in Kenya and the methods that the colonial state would use in their counterinsurgency campaign are the final factor that had a profound impact in shaping Kenya’s emergent nationalist elite. With both the Mau Mau militants and KAU moderates sidelined during the emergency, the colonial and metropolitan state, who feared that imminent African self-rule would lead to their loss of “access to military bases, the nationalization of private metropolitan investments, and the seizure of European-owned land [in Kenya]”, also now sought, as part of their counterinsurgency strategy, to advance a new, middle-class, nationalist elite, which would be committed to remaining on friendly terms with the outgoing

British (Branch 2006: 32). A major part of this strategy was the Swynnerton Plan, which, from

1956 until 1960, profoundly restructured Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru societies. In distributing rewards to loyalists in the form of private land titles, which guaranteed them security of tenure, and preferential access to the labour market and cash crop production, the colonial administration

98 hoped to both “break the alliance of middle and lower peasantry in Central Province that sustained

Mau Mau movement, whilst providing the foundation for local loyalist domination” (Branch and

Cheeseman 2006: 19). As a result of these efforts, a landed class of loyalists, sympathetic to foreign capital, had emerged by the beginning of the 1960s (Branch 2006: 42) and would play a prominent role in guiding postcolonial politics in Kenya.

In the final years of colonialism, the British also made a concerted effort to manipulate the electoral system and the provincial administration to further empower the robust and conservative loyalist faction, helping them to come to dominate political structures in the colony.

When, as mentioned, in 1957, the colonial state provided a political opening to Africans, by permitting some to run for public office, they also introduced a number of stipulations designed to promote loyalist interests, while marginalizing more radical elements. For example, between the Embu, Meru, and Kikuyu in those areas most directly affected by the Emergency in Central

Province, only loyalists, who could prove that they had remained faithful to the British during the Mau Mau insurgency (as adjudged by District Commissioners), were permitted to participate in any formal political activities. Furthermore, the more radical sections of Kikuyu society were also further marginalized by the fact that electoral boundaries were designed to penalize centers of Mau Mau support. This was reflected in the fact that within Central Province, the Meru districts were “[r]ewarded for [their] loyalty during the counterinsurgency campaign”, accounting for 26,018 of the total 50,363 Central Province votes (Branch 2009: 155). Due to these and other restrictions on franchise, in 1957, only 7.4% of the total eligible adult population in

Central Province were registered to vote (Branch 2006: 37).

With the Africanization of the Provincial Administration, which was accelerated during the Emergency, loyalists were also given preferential access to the best positions within this important arm of government. Indeed, during this period, the provincial administration came to

99 be seen “as a citadel in which loyalists sought protection from the returning detainees” (Branch

2009: 170). As such, the Africanization of both the legislature and the provincial administration ensured that the post-independent state would come to be dominated by specific, pro-British class interests (Branch and Cheeseman 2006: 20).

Most crucially, as we shall see in the next section, the new elite was adverse to radical proposals related to land reform and economic redistribution of wealth, because these policies would pose a threat to their dominant economic and political interests within the postcolony.

Their emphasis on maintaining good working relations with British and Asian capital, as reflected in their disavowal of confiscating European land and their initial refusal to implement the

Africanization of the economy following independence, attested to their unwavering commitment to economic continuity. As such, it is not surprising that in the postcolonial period, the Kenyatta state’s economic development policy explicitly favoured growth over equity. The path taken by the postcolonial Kenyan state in regards to nation-state building and economic development in the first decade of independence cannot, therefore, simply be reduced to whims and ideology of

Jomo Kenyatta, but rather needs to be understood in relation to the interests of the constellation of social forces that had come to guide the postcolonial state by that time. To better appreciate this course, we need to more closely consider the assemblage of powerful societal constraints that circumscribed Kenyatta’s latitude of autonomy and to examine the specifics of his regime’s institutional choices and their political effects in the first decade of independence.

PART II: THE ‘TRIUMPH OF THE SYSTEM’: NATION-STATE BUILDING IN POSTCOLONIAL KENYA

On June 1st 1963, Kenyans celebrated Mandaraka Day for the first time, in recognition of their attainment of internal self-rule from Britain. At a ceremony held at Nakuru Stadium in the Rift

Valley, future Kenyan President, Jomo Kenyatta, laid out his vision of the nation that Kenyans were about to embark upon creating. At first glance, Kenyatta’s rhetoric in this speech echoed

100 that of Nyerere’s in Tanzania. Indeed, he even invoked the latter’s terminology when he asserted that “if [Kenya was] to prosper [it] must create a sense of national familyhood, ujamaa” (Ogot

1995: 75). A closer inspection of Kenyatta’s remarks from that day, however, suggest profound differences in how Kenyatta believed such a national family should be created and what it would look like in practice. Whereas Nyerere’s vision of the Tanzanian nation explicitly aimed to reconnect Tanzanians with the wisdom and insights of their historical traditions, Kenyatta stressed the importance of forgetting the past. For Kenyans to forge a sense of “national familyhood,” Kenyatta believed that they “must forget all of [their] differences of…the bad old days”, and “work together to build the new Kenya of the future” (ibid.).

The differences between the two countries in the first decade of independence would go far beyond their leaders’ conceptions of the role of history in nation-state building. While Kenya’s first decade of independence, like that of their Tanzanian neighbours, would be marked by a rapid transition to single-party rule, relative political stability, and an official rhetorical emphasis on the importance of unity and self-reliance in the pursuit of national development, the path adopted by the Kenyatta regime to meet these ends “could not have been more different” from their

Tanzanian counterparts (Nugent 2012: 144). In this section, I will demonstrate how the institutional choices made by the Kenyatta regime were conditioned by societal constraints, which manifested themselves in the divided nature of the new ruling elite. In addition, I will outline what the main political effects of these choices proved to be in terms of how Kenya’s conduct of politics played out during the first decade of independence.

Specifically, I will argue both that these institutional choices were made by an elite, who aimed to engineer a nation-state building project to protect and promote economic and political continuity with their colonial predecessors and to reproduce their own dominance (Cheeseman

2018; Branch and Cheeseman 2006; Throup and Hornsby 1998; Hornsby 2012; Branch 2009;

101 Tamarkin 1978). As a result, these institutional choices helped to produce a distinct conduct of politics and a different set of historical institutional legacies in Kenya, which differed greatly from that of Tanzania in two significant ways. First, whereas Tanzania was avidly invested in a civic form of nation-state building, actively working to neutralize competing ethnic and local sources of political power, the Kenyan state shunned serious nation-state building efforts, creating a patron-client system that effectively served to manipulate ethnic divisions throughout the society and routinely utilizing repressive state action against oppositional actors. Second, whereas

Tanzania opted for dramatic institutional reform, investing in building a party-state, which created robust party structures at the local level, Kenya would pursue political continuity, relying heavily, as their colonial predecessors had, on a strong civil service, while marginalizing and dismantling the ruling party. These institutional choices produced a state, whose institutional foundations, far more than their Tanzanian counterparts, closely resembled its colonial predecessor. Independence in Kenya, therefore, came to represent ‘the triumph of the colonial system’ (Throup and Hornsby 1998; Branch 2006, 2009; Branch and Cheeseman 2006), with the continuity desired by Kenya’s loyalist elite trumping the nationalist movement’s radical contingent’s hopes for dramatic, egalitarian reform and transformation.

As noted, at independence in Tanzania, the regime of Julius Nyerere confronted a far more

“homogenous society” than that which existed in Kenya (Widner 1992: 210; Iliffe 1979; Mueller

1981). Due the relative weakness of Tanzania’s population of European settlers, rural capitalists, and local chiefs, the post-colonial nationalist elite was not beholden to powerful and entrenched domestic and international interests. As we established last chapter, it is precisely for this reason that Nyerere was able to more freely realize his socialist vision, pursuing dramatic, institutional reform in Tanzania within the first decade of independence with minimal resistance. In Kenya, due to the relatively high level of social stratification and ethnic division that settler capitalism

102 had helped to initiate and the bloody protracted nature of decolonization, Kenyatta was forced to bargain with a host of competing social forces, which were far more formidable and antagonistic than anything that had existed in Tanzania. This different assemblage of social forces greatly shaped the kind of nation-state building project that the Kenyatta regime ultimately pursued.

Within his native Central Province alone, divisions among his own ethnic group, the Kikuyu, following almost a decade of emergency, were heightened (Muigai 2004: 211). On the one hand,

Kenyatta, who had married into two of the Kikuyu’s most prominent chiefly families, was beholden to the growing influence of agricultural entrepreneurs and the chiefly elite in his political stronghold of Kiambu in Central Province. These two groups were eager to consolidate the power that they had acquired during the colonial period. As “the strongest claimants on the new state”, this Kiambu elite could, if challenged, “credibly threaten to shatter…[Kenyatta’s] governing coalition” (Widner 1992: 53, 41).

On the other hand, Kenyatta was keenly aware that he also had to contend with the growing disenchantment of the landless peasantry among the Kikuyu, approximately 1 000 of whom remained armed at independence in the Aberdare forest ready to fight if their demands for land were not satisfied (Nugent 2012: 163). Complicating matters further still was the fact that

Kenyatta’s regime needed to accommodate the British, who were concerned to protect both their private interests in Kenya and those of the European settlers (Branch 2011: 39). These two groups, along with Kenya’s population of Asians, represented a non-indigenous economic elite that remained capable of obstructing flows of foreign capital, if their demands were not met.

Beyond these pressures, the Kenyatta regime also contended with a fractured realm of

African nationalist politics. As noted, Kenya’s nationalist elite approached uhuru deeply divided, split into two parties, KANU and KADU. The ban on the establishment of nationwide political organizations during much of the colonial period produced national parties that were made up of

103 loose alliances of district-level political organizations, composed of different coalitions of ethnic elites (Muigai 2004: 210; Okumu 1979: 48; Nyong’o 1989; Throup and Hornsby 1998).

KANU, formed first in May of 1960, consisted mostly of Kikuyu, Luo, Embu and Meru members. These ethnic groups, particularly the Kikuyu and Luo, were generally better educated and were in regions that were more robustly developed. Most significantly, these groups were also land constrained. KANU supported rapid decolonization, more expansive social reform, a central role for the state in the management of the economy and a more open competition for land and resources, in which their constituent communities were expected to benefit (Hornsby 2012:

61).

At independence, therefore, KANU was a “convoluted alliance” (Ajulu 2000: 140), incorporating “a number of small, well established, and often highly personalized, power centers within itself” (Good 1968: 116). For this reason, the party remained fragmented within its own organization, relying on different political constituencies depending on the region (Ajulu 2000:

140).11 Significantly, none of these classes or fractions held hegemony over the party entirely and, as such, any attempts to strengthen or democratize KANU ran the risk of tearing it apart (Ajulu

2000: 141; Widner 1992).

By contrast, KADU, which formed two months after KANU in July of 1960, was a

“defensive coalition” (Nyong’o 1989: 236) comprised of five ethnic-based organizations (Muigai

2004: 209). The ethnic groups represented within the party, included the Luhya, Kalenjin and other Coastal ethnic groups, in less developed regions of the country, who feared economic

11 For example, in Central Province, KANU drew support from the aforementioned opposing forces of the province’s emerging class of indigenous capitalists, composed mostly the Kiambu elite, and its community of squatters, landless and ex-Mau Mau detainees residing mostly in Nyeri and Murang’a (Ajulu 2000: 141; Widner 1992: 53; Throup 1987; Nugent 2012). In Nyanza, KANU drew support from the province’s middle classes, working classes, and peasantry, who were predominantly Luo.

104 exclusion, political marginalization and the loss of their historic lands at the hands of the more powerful Kikuyu and Luo alliance. KADU advocated for gradual political reform (actively collaborating with settler political parties), adopted a more conservative political ideology, and embraced the principles of majimboism, which called for a quasi-federal system of government, whereby the central government would devolve substantial powers to the regions. Majimboism, for KADU elites, was conceived as the primary defense against the possibility of Luo-Kikuyu dominance.

Tensions between these two parties were most clearly expressed in their debates over the creation of a new independence constitution. Negotiated over three Lancaster House conferences beginning in January of 1960 in the United Kingdom, the final majimbo federalist constitution thrust upon KANU as a condition for independence in 1963, proved to be one of the main obstacles in KANU’s attempts to centralize their power.12 Following their resounding May 1963 electoral victory, however, KANU worked doggedly to dismantle majimboism, which they deemed ‘anti- nationalist’, unwieldy and liable to be too expensive to maintain (Anderson 2010: 31; Maxon 2016:

26). In an effort to stifle their KADU rivals, the KANU government ordered the delay of the transfer of financial powers and social services to the regional governments for the remainder of

1963 and most of 1964 (Branch 2011: 15; Okumu 1979: 49-50). Moreover, they also worked to manipulate the state bureaucracy to prevent the effective development of regional administration,

12 This constitution strove to empower the smaller ethnic groups, calling for a bicameral legislature comprised of an upper house representing the regions (each of which would elect 7 representatives) and a lower house elected by universal suffrage (Anderson 2011: 29), in which both would be allocated equal powers. Under this constitution, each region would be given an Assembly of their own with legislative powers and an executive headed by a president (Anderson 2010; Maxon 2016). Furthermore, this constitution gave regional authorities control over policies related to land, health services and primary and secondary education, thus, marginalizing the central state in those areas of policy (Maxon 2016: 26; Throup and Hornsby 1998).

105 which enabled the central government to maintain control over these regional agencies (Okumu

1979: 49-50; Gertzel 1970: 203). As David Anderson notes, “[w]ithout authorized funds from central government, and without logistical or technical support, the regions simply could not function in any meaningful sense” (Anderson 2010: 33).

By November of 1964, following its amendment by a two-thirds majority in the House of

Representatives, the majimbo constitution was no more. In its place the KANU regime introduced a republican constitution, which “abolished the regional system of government and created a strong president in place of the prime minister” (Cheeseman 2006: 15; Ochieng 1995: 107). In introducing this reform, the executive regained its direct control over the administration, and it enabled it to remove the regional presidents introduced by the majimbo constitution. In their place, Kenyatta, as President, was able to reintroduce provincial commissioners, directly appointed with his discretion, who were exclusively answerable to the president. These changes enabled the Kenyatta state to continue to rule in a fashion that closely resembled their colonial predecessors.

It is important to note these institutional changes coincided with the end of KADU, which capitulated, as its Members of Parliament (MP) had gradually all defected to KANU. Kenya had in space of less than one year of independence become a de facto one-party state. Yet, the question still remained: how could Kenyatta preserve the unity of his fragmented governing coalition and maintain the legitimacy of his regime in such divided circumstances?

Harambee!: the creation of a patron-client system

As noted in Kenya, by stark contrast to Tanzania, efforts to create a homogenous, unified nation-state were limited during the postcolonial period. Unlike in Tanzania, the Kenyatta regime did not believe, as we shall see in the next section, that it was the ruling party’s job or responsibility to inculcate citizens of the Kenyan nation with a common political ideology, nor

106 did they seek to use KANU as a vehicle to mobilize the population in support of those policies

(Widner 1992: 40). Moreover, at the local level, they decided against implementing dramatic institutional reform, as per Tanzania, opting instead to maintain the colonial system of centrally appointed tribal chiefs (Miguel 2004). Yet, the ruling elite was well aware that the fissures that existed within the country at independence threatened to undermine its political stability and with it, the nation-state’s potential for fostering economic development. As Jennifer Widner

(1992: 54) notes, Kenyatta “feared that unless the spokesmen for important segments of the

Kenyan population all believed they had a stake in the system, the government would become unstable.”

To ensure the regime’s popular legitimacy and the social peace that it ultimately needed to rest upon, therefore, the Kenyan government relied on an elaborate system of patron-client relations, which were rooted in ethnic networks, to generate support across the political spectrum.

The rationale behind this strategy was that local elites were too powerful to be ignored or overrun as they had been by the central state in Tanzania. As such, distributing patronage rewards to subnational elites was the only way that the regime could create and maintain an inclusive coalition out of such a disparate group of ethnic leaders and local ‘big men’. In a context of such grave regional inequalities as existed in Kenya at independence, the Kenyatta regime used patronage as an informal means of ensuring continued political cooperation among elites, making sure that those politicians from marginalized regions and ethnicities remained committed to being members of the Kiambu-led coalition (ibid: 47; Tamarkin 1978: 302; Throup 1987; Throup and

Hornsby 1998). As a result of this strategy, “clientelistic networks”, not the ruling party, became

“the primary structures of representation, linking Kenyans to the state through political patronage” (Widner 1992: 44).

107 One aspect of Kenyan politics, which made using patronage an attractive option for the

Kenyatta regime was that, with the departure of the settlers and the expansion of the national economy, the postcolonial Kenyan state acquired access to new economic and political resources that it could distribute to political clients, and this meant, “distributional politics w[ould] not

[have to be] a zero-sum game” (ibid: 47; Throup 1987). Patronage rewards, in form of government contracts, loans or jobs, whether they were provided through the election of MPs or local councilors, appointments to the Civil Service, or positions within parastatal companies, were readily available. Moreover, as we shall discuss later, the Kenyatta state was also able to provide access to prized land in the White Highlands to clients in “unprecedented abundance” (Throup

1987: 41).

Still, while the Kenyatta regime believed that there was a great need to use patronage as a means to maintain internal political stability and legitimacy, and while there were a plethora of resources to be shared, the deeply divided nature of Kenyan society meant that the prickly issue of how best to divide the expanding ‘national cake’ remained contentious. Kenyatta believed that stability of his position as Father of the Kenyan Nation, depended on his ability to consolidate his base of support among the Kikuyu, especially the most powerful sections of Kiambu society

(Muigai 2004; Throup 1987; Nugent 2012). From the onset of independence, therefore, he remained “largely beholden” to the whims and desires of the Kiambu political and economic elite

(Muigai 2004: 215) and, as a result, the Kikuyus were given pride of place within Kenyatta’s patronage system.

The power that these Kiambu stakeholders wielded and the preferential governmental treatment that the Kikuyu received in general manifested itself in a myriad of ways in the first decade of independence. First, descendants of prominent Kiambu Kikuyu families, like Charles

Njonjo, Arthur Magugu, and Mbiyu Koinange were given prized positions within Kenyatta’s

108 ‘inner cabinet’ and came to be the ‘chief architects’ of the Kenyan state under Kenyatta (Muigai

2004: 211). In addition, Kikuyu business interests were provided with some of the best land in

Rift Valley, favourable loans, and attractive business and political opportunities, and Central

Province continued to receive the “lion’s share of state expenditure” (Nugent 2012: 167). In addition, by the early 1970s, Kikuyus had come to dominate the upper echelons of the state apparatus, accounting for 4 out of the 8 Provincial Commissioners, 11 of the 25 Permanent

Secretaries, and nearly half of the 222 highest-paid, African earners in the Civil Service (Branch

2011: 99). Moreover, in 1969, 1974 and 1979, the Kikuyu accounted for 30% of total Cabinet positions in the regimes of both Kenyatta and Moi (Nugent 2012; Tamarkin 1978; Throup 1987).

The Kenyatta regime was keenly aware that such ethnic favouritism ran the risk of undermining the stability of the regime. In response to this danger, the state established a system known as harambee, which ensured that resources continued to funnel to non-Kikuyu regions and elites. Kenyatta consistently stressed in the early years of independence that the government was incapable of providing all of the necessary resources and services that Kenya’s citizenry required and, as such, that private citizens would be expected to pick up the slack through self-help schemes. Though private citizens often voluntary raised funds for these schemes, the primary mechanism of fundraising in this system were harambee rallies, wherein politicians came to be expected to both attend these rallies and contribute substantial financial resources for local development both within their own constituencies and in those of their colleagues. This system depended on the distribution of funds from Kenyatta, as chief patron, and other high-ranking politicians and state bureaucrats, such as Cabinet Ministers, Permanent Secretaries and Assistant

Ministers to aspiring politicians of different ethnic groups. As such, the end result of this system was to create a network of links of patronage from remote rural localities all the way to center of power within the Kenyatta state in Nairobi (Nugent 2012: 161; Widner 1992), which enabled

109 Kenyatta to “bypass the KANU [party] apparatus and develop his own informal patron-client hierarchies, of which he served as the head” (Hyden 1994: 90).

From the perspective of the regime, this system produced a number of positive benefits.

First, the harambee institution provided a means through which, regardless of levels of state investment in their sometimes-neglected localities, Kenyan citizens would be able to see evidence of development within their home communities. Second, politicians came to be assessed by their constituents largely on their ability to provide funds through harambee rallies. On the one hand, from the perspective of citizens, this introduced a degree of accountability in their relationships with their local politicians, who were regularly voted out of power in the late-1960s-early-1970s, if they failed to materially deliver to their constituencies. On the other hand, from the perspective of the regime, the pressure to raise funds for local development, shifted politicians’ focus from national issues to local ones, and alleviated pressure on the central state to allocate funds for development to local communities. Third, the harambee system ensured compromise between politicians from different ethnic groups, who now, given their need to raise money, had a vested interest in cooperating with each other and the central regime. This was especially the case for politicians from underfunded regions, who were frequently rewarded with patronage to make up for their constituencies’ lack of state funding. In this way, the harambee system came to informally undergird ‘political order’ within Kenya in the first decade of independence, serving as a key facilitator of compromise between competing factions and incentivizing “an essential tool for facilitating compromise and encouraging politicians to limit their bids for control of party offices and platform” (Widner 1992). Finally, the extent of Kenyan citizens’ participation in harambee projects and their popularity among local constituents no doubt lent meaning to Kenya’s electoral politics and much-needed legitimacy to the KANU regime (Cheeseman 2006: 18).

110 That said, it also produced a host of negative consequences. Due to the expectation that

MPs would consistently give generously to their local constituencies through harambee rallies, the system also “reinforced the tendency towards private accumulation, by fair means or foul”

(Nugent 2012: 160) in Kenyan politics. Moreover, as many aspiring politicians relied on their connections with high-ranking government officials for access to patronage rewards, the harambee system fostered dependence of MPs on the central state and, thus, increasingly limited the autonomy of the institution of parliament. Ultimately, this aided the further centralization of the power of the executive.

It is important to note that land reform, more than any other issue fuelled subnational tensions in Kenya, and, therefore, remained at the “center of distributional politics” during the

Kenyatta years (Widner 1992: 47). With claimants from different ethnic backgrounds desperate to acquire land, the Kenyatta regime recognized that these claims needed to be judiciously balanced. As noted, in colonial Kenya, land had been divided into two distinct forms of land tenure regimes. The KANU government opposed KADU’s proposition that land redistribution should be overseen by regional governments even in the ‘scheduled areas’, arguing instead that due the country’s serious problems with landlessness, the central government needed to exploit the “land frontier” that had emerged in the ‘scheduled land’ of the Rift Valley. They wanted to use this territory to “relieve excruciating land pressure, mostly among the Kikuyu, that was so manifestly fuelling radical nationalism in Kenya” (Boone 2014: 142). The Kenyatta state, therefore, insisted that because customary rights have been eliminated by the colonial regime in the Scheduled Areas, it was only right that government control over land allocation in these areas be maintained. As such, while customary land tenure regimes would remain intact in the former ethnic reserves, in the scheduled areas, the government worked to develop and expand an open land market that was to be, at least in theory, open to Kenyans of all ethnicities (ibid.).

111 In redistributing this land in ‘scheduled areas’, the government devised the Million-Acre

Scheme (MAS), which came to be a “cornerstone of the decolonization settlement” (Nugent 2012:

156). Under the auspices of the MAS, with loans from the World Bank, West Germany, and

Great Britain, land was split up into those areas that were deemed appropriate for large-scale plantation agriculture and ranching, which would continue to be farmed as before, often now by

Africans, and those mixed farming zones, which were seen to be appropriate for resettlement.

While the scheme was successful in resettling a total of 35,000 households on 1.176 million acres throughout the 1960s (Widner 1992: 50), the way in which the MAS was undertaken reveals much about the Kenyatta state’s desire to secure political and economic continuity and it also demonstrates the powerful social forces that the state had become most beholden to.

Prime among the victors of this land reform were the settlers, who were given the option of remaining on their land or selling it for a favourable price, which even applied to those areas of land that would otherwise have been unmarketable. While the radical strand of KANU argued that the new regime should not have to take out loans and repay the settlers for land that the latter had stolen, the government opted to do just that on the basis that not doing so, could undermine the country’s industrial and agricultural production which was seen to depend heavily on Europeans’ continued presence (Wasserman 1973: 162). Ultimately, therefore, while the scheme wanted to publicly appear to be dealing with the issue of land hunger, the MAS’s biggest priority was “spread[ing]…rural capitalist relations to include Africans who had previously been seen as merely fit for labouring jobs” (Nugent 2012: 156).

In keeping with this objective, the MAS was also designed to consolidate and strengthen a group of middle-class farmers in the ‘scheduled areas’. This too was part of a strategy to promote continuity. If given a stake in the system, it was thought that middle-class African farmers would be more likely to defend private property rights and the land reform program itself.

112 Moreover, with their access to better land and bank credit, these farmers were also expected to be able to contribute to the economy, by producing prized crops for export like coffee, tea, and pyrethrum (Nugent 2012: 157). This support was offered by the state, because it was believed that this emergent class of African farmers could act as a powerful “buffer against agitation by the rural masses” (Wasserman 1973: 135). Moreover, in establishing the very visible presence of

African commercial farmers throughout the Highlands, it was hoped that the outrage about the continuing presence of the European farming system would be diminished among the popular masses.

A third group that was favoured in the MAS scheme was the Kikuyu. At the elite level,

Kenyatta wanted to secure the support of both loyalist Kikuyu factions and those Kikuyus of the

KCA who had wanted to achieve independence through constitutional means. At the mass level,

Kenyatta knew that a failure to meet the demands of landless Kikuyus in the immediate term could lead to a re-emergence of insurgency and opened the door to the possibility of squatters driving out the settlers, which would have been disastrous for the Kenyan economy. A big part of this strategy, therefore, prioritized the Kikuyus in land reform, giving this group between 40-

45% (Bienen 1974: 161; Nugent 2012: 157) of the resettlement land under the MAS, even though they made up only 20% of the total population.

The Kikuyu gains in the area of land reform had been achieved at the expense of other ethnic groups and this produced resentment among other sub-nationalities that could jeopardize political stability. To appease non-Kikuyu groups, therefore, the MAS, particularly after 1964, used large-scale land transfers as means of securing the loyalty of political elites from overlooked ethnic groups (Wasserman 1973: 140). In particular, Z-plots, wherein former European houses with 100 acres of farmland were set aside for large-scale farming, were reserved for high-ranking party leadership. Ministers, MPs, Ambassadors, Permanent Secretaries, and Provincial

113 Commissioners, who often came from non-Kikuyu ethnic groups, were frequently given these Z plots by the Kenyatta state. In effect, by bestowing these large-scale farms to political allies, these

Z-plots were expected to both secure these non-Kikuyu elites’ loyalty to the regime and to ensure their support of the scheme, “since any free distribution or seizure of land would also involve their holdings” (ibid: 146). For example, in the Rift Valley, members of the Kalenjin elite were allowed to acquire large landholdings with help of government-sanctioned bank loans. By appeasing some leaders from minor ethnic groups, the KANU regime sought to prevent conflicts over land from producing local violence. As Paul Nugent (2012: 158) notes, “[w]hereas Tanzanian socialism was supposed to solidify attachment to the nation, it was opportunity to pursue material gain that was counted on to smooth ruffled feathers…[among] Kenya[‘s political elite].” The distribution of large landholdings to strategic allies from non-Kikuyu ethnic groups in Kenya played a major role in preserving Kenyatta’s inclusive coalition in the first decade of independence. In sum, while Kenyatta’s clientelistic strategy proved effective at preserving Kenya’s “multiethnic commonwealth” (Berman 2013) in the first decade of independence, it ignored the dangers of ethnic politics altogether. Moreover, it failed to foster the sense of Kenyan national belonging that Kenyatta had promised (Muigai 2004: 215). The fragility of this patron-client system would become increasingly exposed in the 1970s, as the country’s economic fortunes worsened and the competition over diminishing former settler land increased. During this period, as we shall see in later chapters, the Kenyatta state would come to increasingly rely on state repression to silence and marginalize its critics.

The death of the party: party-state relations in postcolonial Kenya, 1964-1978

By the end of 1964, Kenya had transformed into a de facto one-party state, but what kind of state would it be? One of the key features of the postcolonial Kenyan politics, which differentiated it from Tanzania, was the role that the ruling party played. Throughout the first

114 decade of Kenyatta years, KANU remained a weakly organized party, without an ideologically coherent platform, containing within it a diverse mixture of political viewpoints. For all their rhetorical celebration of African socialism, Kenyatta’s conservative faction of the party primarily made up of former loyalists was stanchly committed to a pro-Western, capitalist approach to development. This approach, with its emphasis on the importance of growth over equity, contrasted sharply with the radical wing of the party, led by Oginga Odinga, Bilidad Kaggia, and

Achieng Oneko, who all sought to build a more egalitarian nation-state, committed to radical land reform, in which settler land was appropriated without compensation, nationalization of foreign companies would be implemented, and a foreign policy more open to collaboration with the communist East would be pursued. As such, as Widner (1992: 75) notes, the party was “never sufficiently cohesive or imbued with sufficient authority to help resolve local conflicts or to serve as reliable conduits for information to and from central government.” Instead, at the national and provincial level, Kenyatta sought continuity with the colonial state apparatus, relying, as his predecessors had, on the civil service, not the party, to both create and implement policy.

The marginalization of KANU in policymaking and the eventual elimination of the radical wing of the party were not achieved by accident, but instead reflected the deliberate actions of the

Kenyatta state elite, which demonstrated the power of the conservative faction of this group. It also revealed that, in the end, Kenyatta was most beholden to the wishes of his Kiambu Kikuyu elite. As Rok Ajulu (2002: 141) notes, the demise of KADU in 1964, and the incorporation of its conservative members within the KANU party fold and state apparatus, “bolstered the right wing within KANU and created an environment in which the long running battle between the radicals and the conservatives could now be brought to a conclusive end”. Following this event in

December 1964, the Kenyatta state actively sought to do just that: sidelining the ruling party from decision-making processes and, in particular, working to isolate the party’s radical wing.

115 These efforts were carried out through a number of different measures, which intensified throughout 1965. Three particular incidents are worth noting. The first relates to the Lumumba

Institute, a school created with funding from the Soviet Union (USSR) to reinvigorate the KANU party by providing training for its operatives. At its official inauguration in December 1964,

President Kenyatta, who along with Odinga was a joint trustee of the institute, declared that the school aimed “to define, teach, and popularize African socialism” (Good 1968: 119). Almost immediately, however, as Daniel Branch (2011: 51) notes the Kenyatta “government’s conservatives feared that the institute would become a production line for pro-Odinga activists, who would monopolize the local and national structures [of the ruling party].” As such, they actively worked to drum up public consternation against the Institute, pointing to both to its employment of Russian teachers and the disruptive political behaviour of its students as evidence of its subversive, communist tendencies. In the middle of 1965, just months after its first classes had been commenced, parliament voted for the government to take over the school’s running and, shortly after that, the Institute was closed.

The Kenyatta government’s assault on the institutional basis of the ruling party’s power and influence did not cease there. Their next target was the parliamentary backbenchers’ group, which remained throughout 1964 a “viable party entity for influencing government policy” (Good

1968: 122). By early 1965, the group’s success in achieving this objective had made relations with

Kenyatta’s inner circle increasingly tense. In March of 1965, Wariithi’s publicly criticized the

Kenyatta government for failing to meet its election promises. In July of 1965, just months after

Wariithi’s public challenge, a unanimous resolution was passed by MPs in Kenyatta’s office to disband the backbenchers’ group altogether (ibid.). As with fears about the Lumumba Institute, the perception that the backbenchers’ group could serve as an institutional refuge for radical critics of the government, ultimately led to its demise.

116 Finally, throughout the later half of 1965, the conservative faction of KANU went in for the kill. During this period, candidates of KANU who were linked to Odinga’s radical faction were one-by-one defeated in party elections at the branch and sub-branch level. This included prominent radicals like Kaggia and Oneko. The ‘rigged’ nature of these party elections, which removed members of the KANU radical faction from party posts across the country was no doubt a product of the government’s active interference (Throup and Hornsby 1997: 13; Goldsworthy

1982: 234-247; Gertzel 1969: 54-72; Odinga 1968: 297-300) and again demonstrated the power of the conservative faction of the elite to narrow the available political space for the radical contingent within the party.

By early 1966, the government efforts to both marginalize the ruling party and isolate its radical members had clearly borne fruit. Speaking in January of that year, the party’s Organizing

Secretary, John Keen, described the condition of the ruling party as “appalling.” In an open letter to Kenyatta, he noted that the party had not held a delegate conference since October of 1962, nor had they had a Secretariat meeting since February of 1964. Even more troublingly, Keen publicly stated that the party was 20 000 shillings in debt, had its telephones cut off within its headquarters, and had been unable to pay its staff for almost seven months (Good 1968: 124).

When in March of 1966, at a hurriedly scheduled KANU delegate conference in Limuru, the party decided to replace the singular post of Vice-President of the party with 8 regional Vice

President Positions, thus demoting Odinga, who had been the acting party VP, Kenyatta’s fragile coalition was finally no more. In the immediate aftermath of this seismic event, radical KANU leaders like Odinga, Oneko and Kaggia left KANU to form an opposition party, the KPU. During the brief existence of the KPU, which spanned just over three years, the Kenyatta government

117 would utilize both formal and informal measures,13 which at times utilized outright repression, to stifle the emergent opposition party’s ability to compete in Kenya’s electoral politics. In late-

1969, Kenyatta finally decided to ban the KPU and arrest much of its leadership. Interestingly, while the regime did actively work to sideline the KPU during the latter half of the 1960s, this oppositional challenge to the ruling party did not inspire Kenyatta to change course with regards to KANU. Until his death in 1978, the Kenyan state would continue to neglect the increasingly moribund ruling party.

This raises an important question: why, as TANU became more assertive in decision- making in Tanzanian policy matters, did one-party dominance in Kenya not similarly produce the creation of a "party-state", but instead witness the reverse: the progressive marginalization of the ruling party from matters of state? To appreciate the rationale for this deliberate strategy, one needs to highlight the institutional legacies of colonial state in Kenya and the class character of

Kenya’s ruling elite.

The first and, perhaps, most powerful explanation for these developments relates to

Kenya’s colonial institutional inheritance. A common generalization about African states at independence was that these colonial constructions were strongly concentrated in their capitals, but unable to extend their authority to the peripheral areas of their territories (Zolberg 1964;

Jackson and Rosberg 1984; Herbst 2000). In this respect, the Kenyan postcolonial state

13 KANU’s response to the creation of the KPU in 1966 was harsh and decisive. As Suzanne Mueller (1984: 408) argues the Kenyatta regime utilized “its country-wide monopoly of sanctions and resources inherited from the colonial period to suppress the KPU.” This included “refusing to register many of [the KPU’s] branches and sub-branches…prohibiting it from holding public meetings, and…passing a number of laws having to do with elections and detention that worked to disadvantage the opposition, either to refuse to register a society and its branches, or to cancel this status at any time” (ibid.). In addition, the Provincial Administration, in collaboration with the KANU Youth Wing (KYW) also routinely harassed KPU leadership and membership and violently interrupted their meetings (Throup and Hornsby 1998: 14).

118 represented an “outlier” (Branch and Cheeseman 2006: 11; Mueller 2004; Tamarkin 1978: 306;

Branch 2009; Orvis 2006: 96) in sub-Saharan Africa because, during the colonial era, “a vast array of officials, including provincial and district commissioners, district officers and locational chiefs, effectively penetrated the rural areas” (Mueller 1984: 402; Lonsdale 1981: 202).

In part, this was a product of the territory’s large white settler population’s desire to closely regulate African political space (Cheeseman 2006: 12). Following the declaration of

Emergency in 1952, this imperative intensified with the initiation of an era of ‘closer administration’, as the provincial administration came to be central to the counterinsurgency effort. In this capacity, the service expanded to meet the demands of forced villagization programs, the enhancement of security forces and the elaboration of general administration for an expanding population, particularly in Central Province (Bienen 1974; Mueller 1984; Branch and Cheeseman 2006; Berman and Lonsdale 1992: 253; Branch 2009: 182). During this period, the provincial administration’s effective control over law and order reached unprecedented levels, enabling the state to establish a strong presence in parts of the country where their presence had been weak prior to the emergence of Mau Mau, (Mueller 1984: 182; Branch 2009: 182). By the late 1950’s, the Provincial Administration was responsible for the day-to-day management of government (Gertzel et al 1969: 368), taking charge of local tax collection, the regulation of election, and the running of African courts (Cheeseman and Branch 2006: 18).14

At independence, therefore, the Kenyatta regime was confronted with an important choice between governing through this existing, formidable state apparatus or through KANU, the

14 This escalation in the power and responsibilities of the provincial administration during the Emergency was reflected in its expanding size. From 1951-1962, the number of administrative officer posts increased from 184 to 370 (Branch 2009: 165; Cheeseman and Branch 2006: 18; Berman 1990). To put the size of the Kenyan state in comparative perspective, at independence, its civil service was one-third larger than the one in Tanganyika, although the latter had a larger population by 10% (Bienen 1974: 30).

119 fragmented nationalist party that the majority of Kenyans had voted for (Tamarkin 1978: 304).

Given their commitment to the principle of political and economic continuity, the new Kenyan nationalist elite sought to continue to use the provincial administration, which came to be the

“backbone of the new unitary state” after 1964, acting as the main agent of the executive in the countryside (Throup and Branch 1998: 19; Gertzel 1966: 201). The results were striking. As

Cheryl Gertzel (1970: 171) notes, “by the middle of 1968 the executive in independent Kenya enjoyed a position very similar to that of the executive during the days of colonial rule…both in the scope of [their] powers and in the manner in which [the executive] could call upon the provincial administration to ensure Central Government control.”15 Indeed, both Provincial and

District Commissioners continued to be directly responsible to the Office of the President during this period, as their predecessors had been to the colonial Governor (Gertzel 1966: 201)

As a result of these institutional choices, in postcolonial Kenya, the ruling party remained marginalized from the business of policy-making. Unlike in Tanzania, where, as we saw last chapter, Nyerere had to consult and contend with the institutional apparatus of the party and its leadership when making critical governmental decisions, in Kenya, Kenyatta’s power remained far more personalized, often stretching beyond the realm of formal institutional politics. So while he continued to rely heavily on the Provincial Administration to enact his will in practice within the countryside, as Mordecai Tamarkin (1978: 302) notes, “[p]olicy-making and [government] decision-making” came to be “the prerogative of the President who br[ought] into the process a small group of advisors comprised of Ministers, high-ranking civil servants, relatives and friends,

15 Indeed, by 1968, “the scope of the [Provincial] Administration has been greatly enlarged” taking on a number of additional responsibilities, including the assessment and collection of personal taxes, selection of settlers for the settlement scheme, control of land transfers, greater responsibility in local agricultural matters, and advising Ministry of Commerce and Industry on loans for small traders (Gertzel 1970: 166-167).

120 all [of whom were] members of the Kikuyu tribe.” While this ‘inner cabinet’ did not represent a

“formal [governmental] body”, they played a far more influential role in controlling the critical institutions of the state and making key decisions related to the management of the nation-state building project in Kenya than either the party leadership or the formal Cabinet (Hyden 1994: 90;

Tamarkin 1978; Muigai 2004).

Locating where the centre of power in the Kenyatta regime resided still does not explain why they decided to institutionalize power in this specific manner. To better understand why the

Kenyatta regime preferred to continue to rule through the provincial administration, we need to consider three important points. The first relates to political expedience: the composition of

KANU continued to depend on the power of local political bosses. These local bosses could pose obstacles to the executive’s ability to impose its will throughout the country and the diverse set of views contained within the party meant that reaching any kind of consensus through the party organization about policy matters would be incredibly difficult. In deciding to rule through the administration instead of the party, therefore, Kenyatta could continue operate above the party fray (Okumu 1979; Hyden 1994), opting to rely instead on an institution that had proven itself to be “more effective, professional, and loyal” (Tamarkin 1978: 304) to the executive than the ruling party had been. In short, therefore, ruling through the Provincial Administration gave the

Kenyatta regime “the capacity to [more effectively] reproduce [their] dominance” (Cheeseman

2006: 17-18).

The second factor, closely related to the first, is connected to the potential for disruption that existed within KANU. It is important to recall that the provincial administration and the ruling party drew their membership from very different sections of society. As noted, the provincial administration was staffed heavily with loyalists, who had gained their apprenticeship during the last years of colonialism. This meant that the new postcolonial state had “a vested

121 interest in protecting [them]” (Branch 2009: 192). The party, on the other hand, particularly within its local branches in Central Province, was “dominated by former Mau Mau activists” (ibid:

192), who supported a more radical political agenda. The leadership of the Kenyatta state, thus, feared that emboldening the party organization could lead to the eventual popularization and implementation of more radical policies that would threaten economic and political continuity that served their interests. By contrast, Kenyatta knew that he could control the “more docile instrument” of the provincial administration in a way, which would have been impossible had he opted to rule through the party (Bienen 1974: 40). In this way, the provincial administration also

“represented the path of least resistance to the extension of executive control” (Cheeseman 2006:

22).

Finally, one needs to understand this decision in relation to the Kenyatta regime’s economic priorities and development strategy. By marginalizing the ruling party and the radical elements that it contained within and, thereby, relying primarily on the colonial administration with its “loyal and trustworthy African personnel”, the Kenyatta regime sought to “allay the worst fears of the settlers” and other international capitalist interests, who worried that those nationalists may try to implement a radical project of economic redistribution. By relying on the conservative, provincial administration, as their colonial predecessors had, the Kenyatta regime sought to reassure the settlers and foreign capital that the country was still a reliable place to conduct business in (Tamarkin 1978: 306). Ultimately, Kenya’s different colonial institutional legacy and the elitist nature of the decolonization settlement shaped the Kenyatta’s regime’s approach to nation-state building, which differed markedly from that of Nyerere’s Tanzania.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that the institutional choices made by the Kenyatta regime in the first decade of the postcolonial period were not simply a product of his ideological

122 commitments. Instead, following Catherine Boone’s (2018: 61) assertion that institutional choices of postcolonial African leaders regarding nation-state building were crucially “shaped by the societies they s[ought] to govern”, I have argued that due to the constellation of social forces driving Kenya’s ruling elite at independence, the Kenyatta state opted for political and economic continuity, deliberately seeking to stifle radical politics through the creation of an elaborate system of patron-client relations, the routine deployment of state repression and the deliberate marginalization of the ruling party. Moreover, I have suggested that these decisions cannot be understood in a historical vacuum, but must be appreciated in relation to Kenya’s unique experience of colonialism, which differentiated it from its Tanzanian counterparts in variety of ways. In short, these factors meant that Kenya’s ruling elite was confronted at independence with a very different space of possibility for nation-state building than that which existed in Tanzania.

In the second half of this chapter, I have sought to outline the conduct of politics and historical legacies that these institutional choices helped to produce. In Kenya, in contrast to

Tanzania, the Kenyan state promoted institutional continuity, shunning serious nation-state building efforts. As a result, the ruling party proved unable to “integrate the country’s [diverse] ethnic communities” (Elischer 2013: 47), instead, relying on repressive tactics against opponents and a clientelistic system that effectively served to consolidate its inclusive coalition of ethnic elites as clients, not citizens. Moreover, like their colonial predecessors, the Kenyatta state sought to institutionalize their power through a heavy reliance on their civil service, the Provincial

Administration, while at the same marginalizing and enfeebling the country’s ruling party,

KANU. As a result of this radically different approach to nation-state building, in the initial postcolonial decades, in stark contrast to TANU, KANU developed into a moribund, marginalized

123 organization, with little influence in policy-making or government decision-making (Riedl 2018:

42; Okumu 1979: 61).

In the next chapter, we will examine how Kenya and Tanzania’s post-colonial states’ engaged and managed their national universities in distinct manners, helping to produce differing trajectories of university student activism

124 CHAPTER 4

“FOR SERVANTS THEY MUST BE”: STUDENT ACTIVISM AND THE STATE AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, DAR ES SALAAM, 1961-1970

But this means that university studies, and the university itself, are only justified in Africa if they - and it - are geared to the satisfaction of the needs of the society, the majority of whose members do not have any education. Work at the university must, therefore, be so organized that it enables the students, upon graduation, to become effective servants. For servants they must be. And servants have no rights which are superior to those of their masters; they have more duties, but no more privileges or rights. And the masters of the educated people are, and must be, the masses of the people – Julius Nyerere (1974: 11)

Introduction

In July of 1968, future Kenyan Chief Justice, Willy Mutunga, arrived as a student at

University College, Dar es Salaam (UCD), at a time when the city had become, in his estimation:

the Mecca of all liberation movements in Southern Africa. ANC was there. [Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO)]…P[alestinian] L[iberation] O[rganization], Black Panthers…Not to mention that within the faculty [at UCD] there were very…radical people…Walter Rodney, Clive Thomas, the Canadian, John Saul, who were all…active. [UCD] for me during that period was a great place to be…a student, because of the ideological and political debates that were taking place in the world. They were reflected in Dar es Salaam and there was a country trying to come up with their own vision of socialism, ujaama…So the campus was…busy. Almost every week we had somebody, a politician, or somebody from the revolutionary movements coming to talk to us.1

As Mutunga’s quote suggests, and Andrew Ivaska’s (2011, 2015) research confirms, by the late-

1960s, Dar es Salaam had become a “key nodal point for transnational activism”, populated by

“different strands” of youth activists, which included “thousands of refugees” closely connected to

Southern African liberation movements in Mozambique, Angola, South Africa and Namibia, and

“well over a thousand African American activists, including scores of Black Panthers” (Ivaska

2015: 188-189). A crucial section of youth that were central to this “Dar scene” were the emergent

1 Interview, Willy Mutunga, Nairobi, Kenya, July 8th, 2014

125 student left at UCD (Ivaska 2010, 2015; Hirji 2010). This was no coincidence, as during these years, the College developed an international reputation as one of the leading bastions of Third

World socialist thought in Africa, and perhaps the world. Inspired by the Arusha Declaration of

February of 1967, and increasingly populated by an influx of prominent Leftist, expatriate faculty,2 UCD was able to attract a number of young students, like Mutunga and future Ugandan

President Yoweri Museveni, from across East Africa, who were keen to engage with socialist ideas and practice. Out of this group of students, a vocal, leftist minority “emerged as a significant force on campus” (Bourbonniere 2007: 110), committed to “building a fledgling campus movement that was broaching some early critiques of the postcolonial state” (Ivaska 2011: 126). For these students, the university campus came to be a “radicalizing space” (Bourbonniere 2007: 111), where their politics were foundationally shaped and refined.

Yet, it is important to recall, that just years earlier, students at UCD had come to international prominence for a very different set of reasons. In October 1966, they had protested in the streets of Dar es Salaam against the introduction of their mandatory involvement in the

Tanzanian National Service, in which these students were expected to devote, upon their graduation, the first two years of their lives to nation-state building activities at a reduced rate of income. Concerned about the elitist attitudes that the student protesters were conveying, which were seen to be at odds with the Tanzanian African National Union (TANU) government’s egalitarian project of nation-state building, Tanzanian President, Julius Nyerere, decided to expel approximately 400 of the protestors and introduce a host of major reforms at the university, designed to better align the University College with the country’s growing commitment to its special brand of African socialism.

2 including Walter Rodney, Giovanni Arrighi, and John Saul

126 It is the main argument of this chapter that the emergence of a vibrant student left at

UCD in the late-1960s and early-1970s needs to be understood, in large part, as a product of the institutional reforms introduced by the ruling party, in the aftermath of October 1966, which were designed to transform UCD, perceived by the TANU regime to be an elitist institution of higher learning prior to the end of 1966, into a university college which would be better able to produce

Tanzanian socialist graduates and “efficient servants” to the Tanzanian nation-state. These institutional reforms were also intended to, as Ivaska notes, “harness youth into a potent but pliant political force”, which TANU could control (Ivaska 2015). By 1970, as the University of

Dar es Salaam was being inaugurated, the TANU government’s efforts to produce socialist graduates began to compromise their ability to retain control over the campus. The unintended consequences of these institutional reforms will be explored in Chapter 6.

In this chapter, we will chart these developments historically. In section one, I will briefly outline the role of youth and specifically university students in the TANU government’s nation-state building project and then briefly discuss the history of UCD. In section two, we will examine both the build-up to, and the implications of, the National Service Crisis for student activism at UCD and Tanzanian national politics more generally. In section three, we will discuss the major reforms introduced by the TANU government both nationally through the introduction of the Arusha Declaration and, specifically, at UCD, which were designed to bring the University College more in line with TANU’s socialist priorities. Finally, in section four, we will discuss the activities of the student left at UCD in the late-1960s, following these reforms.

Higher education and the nation in Nyerere’s Tanzania, 1961-1966

From its outset, the Tanzanian government’s nation-state building project was guided by their leader, Julius Nyerere’s philosophy of ujamaa (literally meaning ‘socialism/familyhood’).

Fundamental to Nyerere’s conception of socialism was the notion that Tanzanian society should

127 come to resemble an extended national family (Lal 2010: 2). In conceiving of Tanzania’s socialist nation-state building project in these terms, the Tanzanian state explicitly invoked “a generational/patriarchal order” (Schneider 2015: 6) that utilized “paternal metaphors” (Phillips

2010: 111), positioning Nyerere as the Father of the Nation (Schneider 2015: 6; Schatzberg 2001;

Chabal 2009: 40), thus also providing a “means through which…[TANU/CCM] secured its own legitimacy…[as] father of the government” (Phillips 2010: 111; Schatzberg 2002). As Leander

Schneider notes, this both “authorize[d] and obligate[d]" the Tanzanian postcolonial state to steward the life of its citizens (Schneider 2015: 6). This rhetoric, thus, positioned Tanzania’s youth as subordinate juniors of an emergent nationalist order, who were required to serve their nationalist elders as readily as they had served their parents or village elders (Burgess and Burton:

2010: 12).

While the Tanzanian state was not alone in postcolonial Africa in praising the importance of youth to nation-state building in the first decade after independence, they went further than many of their African counterparts, in attempting to harness the energies of their national youth through the institutional channels of TANU. In the first decade of independence, the TANU government established the Ministry of Youth and National Culture, created organizations, like the TANU Youth League (TYL) and the National Service, established TYL chapters at the

University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), and implemented youth-led programs like Operation

Vijaana, which were all efforts designed to institutionalize the role of youth as “indebted servants of the new nation,” while simultaneously excluding those youth who they felt may conflict with their official nation-state building objectives (Ivaska 2011). In so doing, TANU hoped to direct young people, particularly young men, towards the defense and consolidation of the ruling party’s hegemony (Lal 2010: 5).

128 Perhaps no one category of youth was burdened with more responsibility in this nation- state building project than that of students at UCD. As in Kenya, the postcolonial Tanzanian state, which had invested heavily in their new national university, was deeply reliant on their university graduates as a source of high-level manpower, which could assist these states in

Africanizing their bureaucracies. Unlike their Kenyan counterparts, however, who simply sought to produce graduates that would be obedient custodians of the political status quo, Nyerere aimed to disrupt certain conventional expectations of higher education. Specifically, the idea that the provision of university education could be reduced to a simple transaction between students and the state, whereby, in exchange for the acquisition of much-needed skilled labour on the part of the state, university graduates were to enjoy the conferment of elite status, ample salaries and pampered post-graduation lifestyles. In Nyerere’s thinking, entry into the university for

Tanzania’s educated youth should not grant these students certain special ‘rights’ or ‘privileges’.

To the contrary, the educational opportunities afforded to these young people were seen to bestow upon them significant ‘responsibilities’ and ‘duties.’ As Nyerere himself put it, these students were expected to use their education to become, upon graduation, “efficient servants” to the

“nation”, whose “masters” were to be “the masses of the people.”

Throughout the early 1960s, Nyerere reiterated this central message in many of his speeches about the university. In his remarks to commemorate the opening of the new UCD campus in 1964, for example, Nyerere compared the role of university students to that of a bus driver leading a stalled bus, with a large number of passengers, up a steep hill:

The brute force of our people’s strength alone will not be sufficient to reach the top. That strength has to be combined with the scientific use of every atom of skill in steering, in coaxing the engine, in changing gear and in applying the brakes and the accelerator at the right moment. If effort relaxes or if the thought about the best way round the obstacles is not applied, then the bus will roll back—crushing under it not just the driver and those who claimed to know the way forward but, worse still, masses of those who have humbly applied such knowledge and such power as they have to the overall purpose. (Quoted in Ivaska 2011: 131)

129

Later in June of 1965, at a World University Forum hosted at UCD, Nyerere articulated a similar point, reminding the students in attendance that the TANU government did “not build sky- scrapers here [at ‘the Hill’] so that a few very fortunate individuals can develop their own minds and live in comfort” (Morrison 1976: 241). On the contrary, Nyerere argued, “[w]e tax the people to build these places only so that young men and women may become efficient servants to them”

(ibid). Still, in spite of Nyerere’s ideological commitments, in the early years of UCD, the College came to resemble “[a] very conventional, English university set down in Tanzania”, where

“students were being encouraged to think of themselves as an academic cum social elite.”3

University College, Dar es Salaam: a historical background

While discussions about the need for an institution of higher education in East Africa date back to Ormsby-Gore Commission Report of 1925, concrete planning for the creation of such a college in Tanzania was not initiated until after the Second World War (Furley and Watson

1978). A 1956 colonial government report initially selected 1964 as the desired opening date for a university college in Tanzania, but upon taking over the duties of responsible government near the end of 1960, TANU endeavoured to move this commencement date forward. As a result,

UCD was eventually opened in October of 1961, approximately eight weeks prior to independence, with 14 students in one faculty, East Africa’s first faculty of law (Coulson 2013:

269). Established as a college of the University of London,4 UCD was originally housed in the then TANU party headquarters on Lumumba Street (ibid). While this temporary location was not, as the UCD’s first Principal, Cranford Pratt acknowledged a “natural habitat of students”

3 Interview, John Saul, Toronto, ON, September 19th, 2017 4 University of London formally had jurisdiction over admissions, examinations, and granting degrees

130 (Quoted from Bourbonniere 2007), its use, “testifies to the urgency of its founding and its prominence in [the] national priorities” (ibid: 44) of TANU’s leadership.

In 1964, a year after becoming a constituent college of the University of East Africa, UCD moved to a new campus built on Observation Hill, overlooking the Indian Ocean, with the aid of funding from British, Scandinavian and American grants. Located 16 km northwest of the city centre (Mkude et al 2003: 1), ‘the Hill’, as the campus of UCD came to be known, represented a major change in many students’ living conditions. Housed in four tower blocks, students were given individual rooms and were serviced by university staff, which was responsible for cooking students’ meals, washing their clothes and cleaning their rooms (Ivaska 2011: 129). For many of these students, coming from villages “where sometimes there was no water, no[r] electricity”, these transitions from “secondary schools…where you are sleeping thirty to a dormitory” to a university “with [your] own room, [your] own bed” was a major “luxury”5, or as one former student recalls, being at UCD in the mid-1960s felt “like living at a five-star hotel” for incoming students.6

A main by-product of the location of the university on a hill, away from the city center, and the relative lavishness of the accommodations was that it left no doubt that the university college was an elite institution (Coulson 2013: 270; Ivaska 2011). Indeed, by 1964, the state was spending 1000 British pounds per year per university student at UCD (The Standard, October

24th, 1966). This was approximately 50 times Tanzania’s per capita income at that time (Ivaska

2011: 129).

The opulence of ‘the Hill’ and the relatively pampered lives experienced by students on campus created concerns for TANU’s leadership that the university could become a space where

5 Interview, Issa Omari, Dar es Salaam, November 5th, 2014 6 Interview, Gelaise Mutahaba, Dar es Salaam, November 6th, 2014

131 elitist attitudes, antithetical to Nyerere’s egalitarian project of nation-state building, were fostered among the student body. Indeed, there is no denying that an inherent tension existed between

Nyerere’s goal of creating a classless society and the state’s imperative to educate university students so that they could become the primary practitioners of modernization and economic development in Tanzania (Ranger 1971: 139; Carthew 1980: 547). As Terrance Ranger notes,

“high level manpower” is a “phrase which…is difficult to infuse with egalitarian content” (Ranger

1971: 139). This is because, on the one hand, while the TANU government’s rhetoric emphasized the duties and responsibilities that higher education placed upon university students, these same students were also consistently reminded “of the ‘precious’ nature of their personal contribution” to nation-state building and thus they became “persuaded of their likely indispensability” (Saul

1971: 100; Ranger 1971: 137; Coulson 2013: 270). This produced a situation at the Hill, where, as John Saul contends, “the logic of the market and the rhetoric of manpower planning…combine[d] into a heady brew of nascent elitism” (Saul 1971: 100).

By the mid-1960s, there was evidence both that university students had become increasingly alienated from TANU and that their elitist attitudes on campus had become predominant.

Reinforcing these perceptions was the fact that, by mid-1960s, UCD students remained

“lukewarm” towards the ruling party (Brennan 2005: 237). Indeed, during that year, the TANU

Youth League (TYL) had tried and failed to establish a branch of its organization on campus.

Moreover, it was reported that, by 1965, out of 500-odd Tanzanian students at UCD, only ten were formally committed to TANU (ibid.).

Even more troubling for the TANU leadership, given their emphasis on the importance of service, was the apparent disinterest that university students demonstrated toward the newly established National Service. Formed in 1963, with Israeli assistance, the National Service was a voluntary nation-state building organization and a paramilitary training program that operated

132 separate from the armed forces, which was intended to be a “centrepiece of youth development”

(Brennan 2005: 237; Morrison 1976: 238). This program was originally designed to provide TYL leaders and other young people, often with little formal education, with an opportunity to contribute to national development through participation in nation-building projects like road building and construction (Bjerk 2015). Following the army mutiny of January 1964, the importance of the National Service’s was enhanced, as it came to be the “principal route for entry into the reconstituted Tanzania People’s Defence Force” (Morrison 1976: 238).

In its initial years, the scheme, which provided recruits with room and board, a steady wage, and skills’ training was hugely popular among youth who lacked formal education. By 1965, however, TANU leaders, including Nyerere and Vice-President, Rashidi Kawawa, were concerned by the fact that Tanzania’s most educated youth appeared to be disinterested in voluntarily participating in the program (Ivaska 2011: 135). Indeed, proposing an amendment to the 1964 National Service Act, Kawawa conceded that the government had failed to sell students on the idea of National Service, with “[o]nly 25%...join[ing] the voluntary scheme” (Peter and

Mvungu 2005: 224). A 1965 National Service Report explained this reluctance on the part of the country’s most highly educated youth, noting that the scheme had developed the reputation as being “a dumping pit for those unlucky ones who failed in other spheres of life, notably those who for one reason or another could not go beyond primary school level” (Ivaska 2011: 136).

Concerned about the problem of student elitism that they felt was developing at UCD, the

TANU government announced in November of 1965, following their resounding electoral victory and the formalization of the country as a one-party state, that the National Service would become compulsory for all university graduates, Form VI leavers, and most professional college graduates

(Morrison 1976: 238). In the plan outlined by Kawawa, the program, which recruited both men and women, was to last for two full years, consisting of three months of training in military

133 instruction and short courses in politics, history, bookkeeping, Swahili and physical education, followed by 20 months of work in nation-building schemes, where young people were expected to work in youth camps, the armed forces, the prison service, or the police. During these 20 months of work, university graduates would be remunerated at 40% of their regular salary. The last part of the scheme consisted of a final month-long course and a passing-out ceremony

(Morrison 1976: 238; Ivaska 2010: 136; Barkan 1975: 14).

In justifying the decision to make the scheme mandatory for better educated youth, the government argued that including them in such a program would afford these students the opportunity to repay the state for the latter’s investment in students’ education. In addition, as

Cranford Pratt notes, “[the National Service] requirement was seen as a healthy corrective to the socially exclusive character of their education…and a reminder to them of the poverty of most of their fellow citizens” (Pratt 1976: 233). Moreover, such an experience would also give this privileged group of young people the chance to interact and work together closely with less educated youth in the common cause of nation-state building work, with the hope that this would foster camaraderie and solidarity among these recruits (Morrison 1976: 238; Bourbonniere 2007:

56). Ultimately, it was hoped that such an experience would prove to be “transformative” for educated youth, one “that would not only inculcate [them with] national values but also eliminate elitism” (Brennan 2005: 237).

Students’ reaction to Kawawa’s proposal was immediately disdainful (Pratt 1978: 233). As

Joel Barkan (1975: 14) notes, “[a]s the only compulsory participants in the National Service programme, the students felt that they were being singled out for unfair treatment” (Pratt 1976:

233). This sense of grievance was closely tied to the tensions, which had developed between the country’s political leaders and its university students. Specifically, the university students felt that they were being made “scapegoats” by the government for the increasing socioeconomic

134 stratification which existed in Tanzanian society, while TANU ‘big men’ in the party and civil service continued to enjoy their ‘big houses’ and ‘magnificent cars’, but were not required to “make any similar sacrifice” (Pratt 1976: 233; Morrison 1976: 243). If such sacrifices needed to be made, university students questioned, why wasn’t the political elite of the country taking the lead in this regard?7

This was not the only point of emphasis made in the student leadership’s very public campaign against the National Service scheme. While some representatives of student organizations, like NAUTS (National Union of Tanzanian Students) and the Dar Unit, did meet privately with government officials in the Vice President’s Office in the hopes of negotiating alterations to the government’s proposal, a number of prominent UCD student leaders decided to air their grievances about the scheme in public. The most prominent of these critics was Boniface

Kimulson, the President of University Students’ Union (USUD). In a series of public letters,

Kimulson, reflecting the views of many of his UCD student colleagues at the time, articulated two main grievances about the scheme. The first related to students’ salaries during their time in the program. Kimulson rejected the government’s proposal that student-recruits receive only 40% of their normal wage while in the National Service. He argued that because many students’ had heavy financial obligations to their families in the rural areas, this reduction in salary would be untenable for them (Ivaska 2010; Morrison 1976: 240).

His second grievance, which related to the conditions that university students would experience while at the camp, was far more problematic from a public relations perspective. Here,

Kimulson reasoned that, because university students could be said to “constitute a special category” of youth, it was paramount that “the conditions and regulations governing National

Service for [these] student graduates should reflect and march with some of their basic

7 Interview, Gelasie Mutabaha, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 6th, 2014

135 educational and social standards” (Quoted in Ivaska 2011: 136). As such he expected that “decent uniforms, respectable meals, and sensible discipline” be provided for students during their stay in the program (Morrison 1976: 240).

Far from being persuaded by such public criticisms of the scheme, the perceived elitism of students’ concerns “only hardened the resolve of [TANU’s] political leaders[hip]” (Morrison

1976: 240) to push through the program. By and large, these political elites were outraged by the way in which they believed students had come to see “themselves a class apart, out of touch with the material hardship of the vast majority of Tanzanians” (Ivaska 2011: 138). Significantly, this was a perception shared by Nyerere. As Pratt recalls, the students’ protestations against the scheme “offended [the President’s] most central, deeply felt ethical belief, which was that

Tanzania must avoid the development of a self-centered, selfish, grasping elite” (Quoted in

Bourbonniere 2007: 56).

Not surprisingly, therefore, in late September of 1966, just two months after the release of the National Service White Paper, the TANU government confirmed the final terms of the scheme. This White Paper stipulated that university graduates would receive a take-home income of only 23% below their regular net salary after tax (not the 40% figure which was originally cited). On other contentious issues, however, such as the specific content of the programs offered at the National Service, the duration of the program, and the uniforms that trainees would be required to wear during the work portion of the scheme, the government’s positions remained firm (Morrison 1976: 242).

The fact that the government’s announcement about the final terms of the scheme had come while students were on vacation, and just a day after Kimulson had been removed as

President of the USUD, under circumstances orchestrated by the university administration which violated the organization’s constitution, only further angered UCD students (Ivaska 2011: 139-

136 140). In response, student organizations decried what they saw as “anti-democratic” manoeuvring on the part of the TANU government in their rushed passage of the program in Parliament

(Morrison 1976: 243). Furthermore, they argued that this course of action on the part of the government made the “whole idea of the National Service repugnant and unacceptable to students” (ibid). Moreover, the NAUTS executive publicly rejected the notion that “discipline and a sense of responsibility” could “be obtained from” students through, what they referred to as,

“forced labour” (Quoted in ibid: 242).

The escalations of these tensions between university students and the state, which would culminate in student protests the following month, would prove be a key moment both in the history of Tanzanian nation-state building and in the development of the relationship between the university and the post-colonial state. In the aftermath of the protests, the state would fundamentally alter the nature of its relationship to the university college. To appreciate the consequences of these developments, we must first examine the events that transpired during what has come to be known as the October 1966 National Service crisis.

The October 1966 National Service Crisis

While there is no question that by October 1966 tensions between university students and the state over debates related to the National Service scheme had reached a fever pitch, it is important to understand that students’ eventual decision to protest was, at least in part, inspired by events unfolding around them internationally (Ivaska 2011). Throughout the 1960s, university students across the world were engaging in unprecedented protests, which nakedly challenged political authority and the social mores of the time (Morrison 1976: 237). These protests were fuelled by the rapid post-war expansion of student enrolment at institutions of higher learning, in conjunction with unprecedented technological advances that facilitated the increase in transnational flows of ideas and information (ibid: 237; Judt 2005: 394-395). In the

137 latter part of 1965 and for much of 1966, as debates about Tanzania’s National Service intensified, the world witnessed a series of significant student protests in international capitals like Dehli,

Cairo, Jakarta, Tel Aviv and Algiers. As Andrew Ivaska (2011: 142-144) notes these protests,

“consistently appeared on [the] front page [of newspapers] in Dar” and “emboldened the students of [UCD] as they returned from vacation [in September 1966] and contemplated marching.”

It was within this political context that, on October 22nd, 1966, approximately 400 students, the vast majority of them from UCD, took to the streets of Dar es Salaam, to protest against the government’s plan for National Service. Dressed in their red graduation gowns, and holding placards, which read things like, ‘Terms are Harsh: Colonialism was Better’, students marched along Morogoro Road from University College on the Hill to the Vice-President’s residence in the city center. Once there, they were re-routed to State House, where Nyerere,

Kawawa and fourteen of his ministers were waiting for them out front.

At State House, a representative of the students read a petition of the National Service to the government officials assembled, which argued that students deserved to be “paid their ‘full right of earning’ while participating in the National Service, or salaries of the President,

Ministers, M.P.s and top civil servants should [also] be reduced” (Barkan 1975: 15). The student representative’s remarks concluded with an ultimatum for the TANU regime:

Unless the terms of reference and the attitude of our leaders towards students change we shall not accept the National Service in spirit, let our bodies go but our souls will remain outside the scheme. And the battle between the political elite and the educated elite will perpetually continue. (Quoted in Morrison 1976: 244; Ivaska 2011)

In his response, Nyerere began calmly, but as his speech progressed, he grew increasingly agitated, until, as Pratt notes, “his despair tumbled forth in a…rage” (Quoted in Bourbonniere

2007: 56). Nyerere rejected the students’ suggestion that the program represented “forced

138 labour”, but made it clear he was “not going to spend public money to educate anyone who says…National Service is a prison camp” nor would he “accept anyone [into the National Service] whose spirit is not in it” (Morrison 1976: 244; Pratt 1976: 234). Moreover, he refuted the notion that the state should have to negotiate the terms of students’ participation in such a scheme, arguing, “the meaning of National Service is that the nation is asking its youth for its services,”

Nyerere asserted, “[t]he youth does not turn around to the nation and say ‘how much’ and then sit down to bargain!” (Quoted in Morrison 1976 244; Bjerk 2017: 78; Carthew 1980: 544; Smith

1971: 30-31).

On the issue of salaries, Nyerere initially seemed to be more conciliatory to the students’ position:

You are right when you talk about salaries. Our salaries are too high. You want me to cut them?...I’m willing to slash salaries. Do you want me to start with my salary? Yes I’ll slash mine. I’ll slash the damned salaries in this country. Mine, I slash by twenty per cent, as from this hour. (Ivaska 2011: 144)

While accepting the students’ critique of salaries, however, Nyerere rejected their characterization that the main fault line in the National Service debate was between the “educated elite” and the “political elite.” In his view, the “educated people” of Tanzania all “belong[ed] to a single class of exploiters”. He then went onto muse:

Is this what the country fought for? Is this what we worked for? In order to maintain a class of exploiters on top?...You are demanding a pound of flesh; everybody in this country is demanding a pound of flesh. Everybody except the poor peasant. How can he demand it? He doesn’t know the language…What kind of country are we building? (Quoted in Edgett Smith 1971: 27-30; Coulson 2013: 221)

139 In concluding his remarks, Nyerere again affirmed his intention to “revise salaries permanently” and then ordered all of the students to “go home” (Coulson 2013: 221).8

In the aftermath of the protest, Nyerere made good on his word. All of the 412 students present at State House, who had declared that their “souls remain[ed] outside the [National

Service] scheme”, were immediately exempted from the program. They were also, however, indefinitely rusticated from their schools. Of that number, 338 came from UCD, this made up two-thirds of Tanzanians at the University, approximately 80% of which hailed from the faculties of arts and social sciences and law (Ivaska 2011: 144). After being taken to the police station to be fingerprinted, all of these students were made to travel back to their home communities, often accompanied by police escorts; once there they were instructed to “not go around town without the permission of the [Party] Village Chairman” (Ivaska 2011: 144; Morrison 1976: 244-245).9

On the issue of salaries, Nyerere also kept his promises: starting on November 1st, less than two weeks after his confrontation with students, all civil servants earning 1900 shillings or more had their gross pay reduced by 10%, while all Regional Commissioners and Permanent Secretaries saw their salaries slashed by 15% (The Standard, October 27th, 1966: 1).

Across the country, pro-government marches, rallies and demonstrations were held to show support for Nyerere’s decision (The Standard, October 26th, 1966: 7; Morrison 1976: 245;

Carthew 1980: 545). In Dar es Salaam, in the days that followed the student protest, TANU and

TYL branches, the UWT, and the National Service jointly organized a series of large pro- government rallies (Morrison 1976: 245; Ivaska 2011: 145). In one notable counter- demonstration, hundreds of National Servicemen symbolically reversed the students’ protest

8 Interview, Gelaise Muthaba, Dar es Salaam, November 6th, 2014; Cranford Pratt claims that David Martin, a newspaper man who was present at Nyerere’s speech, told him that TANU senior officials did not know “whether Nyerere meant by ‘home’ the university of their home districts (Pratt 1976: 234) 9 Interview, Gelaise Muthaba, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 6th, 2014

140 march, moving from State House through Magomeni to University College, where they then undertook a demonstration on campus, urging “students to take part in the work of building the nation” (The Standard, October 24th, 1966: 1; Ivaska 2011: 145). On that same day, Nyerere made an address to the country, in which, castigating the students, he reminded his audience that “the meaning of socialism is that people live together and work together for the benefit of all and not that the majority work in order to be exploited by the few” (Morrison 1976: 246). Ultimately,

Nyerere’s stand against the students was widely celebrated among the Tanzanian public. In the weeks that followed the crisis, Nyerere and TANU received “messages of loyalty and support…for his firm handling of the National Service issue” from regional commissioners, district committees, administrators, parents and secondary school students (The Standard,

October 25th, 1966: 1; Ivaska 2011: 145).

For their part, following the protests, students quickly realized that “the average

Tanzanian was against [them]”.10 As such, student leaders began quickly back-pedalling in the aftermath of the dispute. In late October, less than a week after the showdown, the Vice-President of NAUTS claimed that students were happy to serve in the National Service, as long as the minor points of disagreement about the program, which he claimed “had been exaggerated”, were resolved (Morrison 1976: 248). Furthermore, he went onto to state that while “students might oppose TANU, the Afro-Shirazi Party, or the President…they would never oppose the nation and the people” (Quoted in Morrison 1976: 248). Facing accusations that this message was intended to put ordinary Tanzanians against the ruling party, NAUTS released a more emphatic, unqualified public apology just a week later, this time accepting full responsibility for the crisis:

What happened recently between the students and our government was [a] misunderstanding between father and son. It is clear that the son was wrong and so the son today apologizes to his father. Kind father, pardon us your children…Our co-operation

10 Interview, Gelaise Muthaba, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 6th, 2014

141 between father and son should continue. (Quoted in Carthew 1980: 545; Ivaska 2011: 145; Schneider 2015: 63)

As John Carthew (1980: 547) notes, in responding to the confrontation in this manner, students were “not simply…surrender[ing] to [the] superior force [of the state],” they were “revert[ing] to the traditional relationship between old and young, parents and children, government and governed.”

It is important to note that TANU government’s response to student dissent in the aftermath of October 1966 was remarkably similar to their handling of the failed army mutiny of

January 1964. In that instance, after mutiny was put down by British forces, and it emerged that mutineers had began to devise a coup plot with trade unionists (Aminzade 2013: 87; Bjerk 2015:

151), the government used this event as an opportunity to restructure the state, consolidating the power of the ruling party and the presidency and marginalizing sources of dissent. So while part of their response consisted of cracking down on the suspected coup plotters, arresting over 500 such people, they also made decisive moves designed to eliminate the autonomy of dissident, independent organizations, through the incorporation of these groups into the ruling party’s apparatus. For example, following the mutiny, TANU decided to completely disband the country’s army, the Tanganyika Rifles, and discharge all of its rank-and-file members, even those that were not arrested (Coulson 2013: 151). In its place, TANU created the Tanganyika People’s

Defence Force (TPDF), composed only of TYL recruits, 600 graduates of Tanzania’s National

Service and 300 recruits from Zanzibar. Moreover, in June of 1964, the government announced that all soldiers and police officers could participate in politics and implemented a new law that stipulated that being a TANU member would now be a prerequisite for those who wanted to join the army (Bjerk 2015: 156).

142 The mutiny’s other main plotting culprit, Tanzania’s labour unions, was also dealt with in a similar fashion. Prior to the mutiny, the TANU regime had strategically appointed certain powerful union leaders to cabinet posts within its government (this included the Vice-President,

Kawawa), while at the same time detaining those union leaders, like Christopher Tumbo and

Victor Mkello, who refused these attempts at co-optation. In the aftermath of the mutiny, however, their tactics shifted slightly. While approximately 200 trade unionists were arrested in the short-term, the government’s more significant response centered on their dissolution of the

Tanganyika Federation of Labour (TFL) and their subsequent placing of all unions in the country under the umbrella of the newly created National Union of Tanganyika Workers (NUTA), which would be state-controlled, with its Secretary-General appointed by the President. Subsequently, workers’ membership in NUTA was made mandatory (Bjerk 2015; Brennan 2005: 267-268;

Coulson 2013: 178).

By October 1966, the TANU government’s previous altercations with dissident civil society elements provided the state with a ready-made blueprint for how to respond to dissent at

‘the Hill’. Following the National Service Crisis, the government response to student dissidents followed an almost identical pattern, capitalizing on the crisis to immediately implement reforms that undermined the organizational autonomy of the student body. On November 20th 1966, the

Minister of Home Affairs, Levi Sijaona announced the banning of NAUTS, with its “assets turned over to the TYL”. The government also decided to dissolve the TANU club at UCD, which had publicly opposed the National Service reform, introducing in its place a campus branch of the

TYL instead, which had previously been resisted by students. At its inauguration, Sijoana implored students to join the TYL “to show that they were real Tanzanians” (The Standard,

November 21st, 1966: 1). While in that same month, Nyerere publicly stated that expelled students would be forgiven, he made it clear that their expulsions would be upheld for two years

143 (later reduced to one), during which these students would be expected to “work the land” in their home communities (The Standard, November 26th, 1966: 1). Moreover, he stipulated that students’ readmission to the university would only be considered if the students in question wrote a formal letter of apology to the President and obtained a letter of support for their readmission from their parents (ibid; Morrison 1976: 248).11

As with the January 1964 army mutiny, therefore, TANU’s response to the ‘crisis’ of

National Service protests betrayed what James Brennan has referred to as their “paradoxical talent…in co-opting dissent while pursuing authoritarian techniques to ensure its containment”

(Brennan 2005: 251). As we shall see, in the aftermath of October 1966, the government would continue to make efforts to marginalize pockets of student dissidence and further institutionalize party control on campus. Unlike their Kenyan counterparts, however, these efforts did not rely solely or primarily on the routine deployment of state repression.

In the end, the National Service Crisis produced two key outcomes that helped to shape the evolving relationship between university students and the state in postcolonial Tanzania.

First, in expelling the protesting students and subsequently delaying their progression through the university by a year, the Tanzanian state made it clear that such students’ paths to upper- level positions within the state bureaucracy were not inevitable. Contrary to what students had suggested in their protestations against the National Service scheme, their expulsions demonstrated that, for the Tanzanian state, students were not as indispensable to the nation-state building project, as the former had suspected, especially if these students appeared to be reluctant to act as “efficient servants” to the nation, at least as defined by TANU.

11 Interview, Gelaise Muthaba, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 6th, 2014).

144 In this sense, to use the parlance of the protestors, the “political elite” had won a clear victory over the aspiring “educational elite” in the minds of the public. As Ranger (1971: 137) notes, university students in “miscalculat[ing] their political strength…trading upon their assumed indispensability…[and] claim[ing] a position of special privilege” had been soundly

“defeated.” In the face of the real possibility of political exile, most students, expelled or not, quickly fell back into the party line, as the NAUTS’ apology trumpeting the importance of “cooperation of father and son”, just two weeks after the crisis, affirmed (Ivaska 2011: 147). This swift and decisive action on the part of the state produced a legacy, which was not soon forgotten, and which continued to shape students’ relationship to anti-regime protests for decades.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, unlike their Kenyan counterparts, who, in the aftermath of the Odinga protests in 1969, would change very little about their approach to managing their national university, in Tanzania, the depth of the National Service crisis made

Nyerere recognize that if the Tanzanian state aspired to produce university students who would become “efficient servants” to the nation, something profound needed to be altered in the educational system offered by the state. As Saul, a Canadian UCD professor from this period, recalls, after the National Service crisis, Nyerere recognized that “the university had in effect failed”, as it had “made no impact of a positive kind in creating a national spirit of solidarity and…sacrifice [among students], let alone [familiarizing them with] anything remotely connected to socialism”.12 An editorial in the Government-owned newspaper, The Nationalist, reflected this deep sense of the government’s disappointment in UCD in the aftermath of the

National Service protests:

[w]hen students who have so openly benefited from the reclamation of our political birthright of independence, so earnestly tell the world that they would rather live under colonialism, there must be something wrong with their educational institutions and methods. (Quoted in Morrison 1976: 246).

12 Interview, John S. Saul, September 19th, 2017, Toronto, Canada

145

The question for Nyerere and his government now became what was the source of the problems of student elitism at UCD and how best should the state go about better aligning students with the increasingly socialist needs of the nation-state. What became very clear to the

TANU regime by the end of 1966 was that to produce university graduates willing to be “efficient servants” of the nation-state, the ruling party would need to begin to play a far more active role in the management and running of the university. Over the next couple of years, dramatic political and economic reforms through Tanzanian society would come to be reflected in institutional reforms introduced at ‘the Hill’. It is to those developments that we now turn.

A brave new world: the Arusha Declaration

Nyerere recognized that the National Service crisis had won him a great deal of public support. It also provided him with, as Joel Barkan notes, “a pretext to launch a series of long- desired reforms” (Barkan 1975: 16). On February 5, 1967, at a party meeting in Arusha, just months after the National Service protests, Nyerere delivered a policy speech, which came to be known as the Arusha Declaration. The Declaration signalled Tanzania’s move into a brave new socialist direction. In the document, Nyerere outlined that TANU’s primary intention was to now

“build a socialist state” (Nyerere, 1968: 231-232). The rationale for the shift was that in order to

“ensure economic justice” in Tanzanian society, the state would have to set out to acquire

“effective control over the principal means of production.” In so doing, the state could now

“intervene actively in the economic life of the nation…to ensure the well-being of all citizens, and so as to prevent the exploitation of one person by another or one group by another” (ibid). Within a week of its release, all commercial banks, eight grain-milling firms, six of the country’s largest foreign-owned import-export houses had all been nationalized. The government also purchased

146 controlling interests in the sisal industry, seven multinational corporation subsidiaries, two brewing companies and Tanganyika Portland Cement (Coulson 2013: 217).

These nationalizations were only one aspect of the reforms. In addition, the government adopted a non-aligned foreign policy, stressing the importance of self-reliance and the agricultural sector in their plans for economic development. In the absence of sufficient funds from foreign donors to assist industrialization, Nyerere argued that the country needed to shift its economic priorities, moving their focus away from a capital-intensive, industrial-oriented development policy, to a more labour intensive approach to development centered on the agricultural sector.

Once the country had succeeded in developing a solid agricultural economic base, Nyerere reasoned, they would have sufficient local capital to initiate industrialization. In the short term, however, Nyerere argued that Tanzanians had to rely upon their own “hard work” if they wanted to make economic gains.

In order to create the socialist society that he envisioned, Nyerere also believed that the country’s leadership would have to live in accordance with socialist precepts. To ensure this, the

Arusha Declaration, in its final section, introduced a leadership code, which was explicitly designed to guard against the development of acquisitive tendencies among Tanzania’s political elite. Specifically, the leadership code stipulated that no TANU or government leader13 was permitted to be the recipient of more than one salary, hold the directorship or shares in a company, or own property which (s)he rents to others.

It is important to note that these changes had not been introduced on a whim, nor can they solely or primarily to be attributed to the fallout from the National Service crisis. Rather, a number of factors informed Nyerere’s decision to push the Tanzanian state to the left, including

13 be it senior party officials, MPs, senior parastatal managers, or middle-to-high-ranking civil servants, were permitted to hold shares or directorships in a company

147 mounting economic challenges by the mid-1960s14 and deteriorating relations with Tanzania’s most important foreign donors.15 While these developments certainly pushed Tanzania toward a

14 By the end of 1965, the economic challenges facing the TANU regime were more acute than they had initially anticipated at independence. The country’s First Five Year Plan, adopted in 1964, had only produced minor accomplishments, with industry and cash crop production generating meager 1.5% growth rates (Nugent 2012: 145; Pratt 1976: 230). Such limited growth was simply not sufficient to permit the TANU government to make good on many of the promises they had made to dramatically improve the living conditions of their citizens (Nugent 2012: 145). While the fact that the price of one of Tanzania’s primary exports, sisal, dropped dramatically between 1964 and 1967 did not help matters, much of these underwhelming economic outcomes were critically tied to the paucity of foreign investment within the country. The government’s First Five-Year Plan was dependent on the sustained influx of foreign capital. Indeed, the TANU government budgeted that 33 million of the 40 million pounds necessary to fund the plan was to come from external sources (ibid: 144). 15 By the end of 1965, these influxes of foreign private investment had not materialized at anywhere near the levels that the TANU government had expected (Coulson 2013: 19). Part of investors’ reluctance to invest was related to the episodes of political instability, including the Zanzibar Revolution and the failed army mutiny of January, which had dogged Tanzania in the 1964 and effectively turned off international investors. Not surprisingly, largely as a result of these events, Tanzania experienced massive capital flight of approximately 290 million shillings during this period (Aminzade 2013: 96-97). By the mid-1960s, Tanzania’s ability to procure foreign aid and investment only further deteriorated after a series of diplomatic confrontations with its three biggest donors. The first of these donors was West Germany. The Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR) had been the first country to recognize the new People’s Republic of Zanzibar after the revolution and the first to station an ambassador in the newly independent country. Following the union of the United Republic of Tanzania in April 1964, Zanzibar’s official relationship with East Germany presented Nyerere with a diplomatic problem, as any recognition of East Germany was likely to have profound consequences on the relations between Tanzania and West Germany, who was their third biggest donor of foreign aid in 1965. When Nyerere finally convinced his Zanzibari counterpart, Abeid Karume to open an ‘unofficial’ East German Consulate in Dar-es-Salaam (a compromise which many had believed the West Germans had suggested), it looked as though a crisis had been averted. In February of 1965, however, when the ‘unofficial’ East German Consulate-General in Dar es Salaam was formally announced, West Germany decided to cut off all aid to the TANU government, withdrawing their military personnel from the country.15 To makes matters worse, relations with the United States had also gone sour by early 1965. Nyerere’s persistent criticisms of American involvement in Viet Nam and Congo had not endeared him to his US counterparts. Moreover, dubious rumours about US-supported coup plot in Zanzibar only served to fuel growing mistrust between the two countries (Mwakikagile 2014: 178; Coulson 2013: 181). This led to the expulsion of US diplomats from Dar es Salaam on 15 January 1965 (Pratt 1976: 141; Coulson 2013: 181; Aminzade 2013: 96-97; Bjerk 2015: 246-249). In the aftermath of this decision, both the US and Tanzania withdrew their respective ambassadors from Dar-es-Salaam and Washington (Pratt 1976: 142). Not surprisingly, between 1965 and 1968, there was a significant decline in bilateral aid from the US to Tanzania (Aminzade 2013: 96-97).

148 more non-aligned foreign policy, which depended on donors, like China, Sweden and Canada, it also made Nyerere contemplate the dangers of economic dependency on Western allies and his government’s increasing need for self-reliance (Nugent 2012: 145). The Arusha Declaration was, therefore, conceived as a move away from such dependence.

It is also important to reiterate that another factor, which enabled the reforms of the

Arusha Declaration to be passed without obstacle, was the constellation of class forces in

Tanzania. As noted in Chapter 2, Tanzania’s poor, underdeveloped colonial economy meant that that the “economic and social classes which might have been expected to oppose socialist measures were economically and politically weaker than their counterparts in many African states [such as

Kenya]” (Pratt 1976: 240). As such, these social forces, including Tanzania’s small classes of urban entrepreneurs and African farmers, in conjunction with its unsettled and weakened officer corps of the army, particularly after the failed mutiny, were not in a position to effectively resist such socialist reform (ibid).

Finally, as Paul Bjerk suggests, “Nyerere’s emotional confrontation with the students stemmed from more than just their resistance to national service” (Bjerk 2017: 79). Indeed,

Nyerere was also very aware that the problems of growing socioeconomic stratification within

Finally, and most significantly, near the end of 1965, Tanzania’s relationship with its closest Western ally, Britain, also became strained. Initially, at independence, Nyerere had envisioned his government’s relationship with Britain would remain a close and important one. By 1965, 44.5% of Tanzania’s foreign aid was still provided by Britain (Aminzade 2013: 97) and 400 British officers remained employed within the Tanzanian state bureaucracy (Nugent 2012: 144). Yet, in November of 1965, following Britain’s acceptance of Ian Smith’s Universal Declaration of Independence (UDI) in Rhodesia, Tanzania joined only five other African countries in making, what Nyerere referred to as, a “worthwhile sacrifice” by breaking off diplomatic relations with Britain in protest (The Standard, November 9th, 1965: 1). In the immediate aftermath of this decision, Tanzania immediately lost out on 7.5 million pounds in British development assistance loans (Pratt 1976: 149; Coulson 2013: 181; Nugent 2012: 145). Given Tanzania’s dependence on Britain in the early years of independence, most clearly demonstrated in Britain’s pivotal military assistance in putting down the January 1964 army mutiny, the loss of British aid and expertise was profoundly felt (Coulson 2013).

149 Tanzanian society and the attitudes of acquisitiveness, corruption and greed that accompanied that stratification among the elite, stretched far beyond the confines of ‘the Hill’. By the mid-

1960s, there was widespread evidence that income equalities, particularly between the urban and rural areas, had rapidly increased in the first five years of independence (Aminzade 2013).

Moreover, by this time, it was common knowledge that Tanzanian civil servants were abusing their government allowances and enriching themselves by straddling the public and private spheres, and, commonly, building homes in Dar es Salaam and then renting them for exorbitant prices to international tenants (Pratt 1976: 235; Coulson 2013: 222). Concerned that such developments were an anathema to the goal of social equality that Tanzania’s nation-state building project was attempting to foster (Pratt 1976: 235; Nugent 2012: 145), Nyerere’s decision to alter the rules of the game through the Leadership Code was meant as a means to curb these negative trends.

At least in the short term, the Arusha Declaration proved to be a political masterstroke for Nyerere. As Nugent notes, in “astutely…playing the nationalist card in order to secure the acceptance of socialist goals” (Nugent 2012: 145), Nyerere, who had routinely been criticized for his opposition to racialist populism and for his supposed penchant for a gradualist approach to radical policy reform, was able to both outflank his critics on the left within TANU, while also

“clip[ping the] wings” (ibid) of the country’s increasingly acquisitive political elite, who were not pleased with the introduction of the leadership code (Pratt 1976: 238; Nugent 2012: 145; Coulson

2013: 222). The popularity of the Arusha Declaration with the average Tanzanian, particularly the nationalizations, solidified Nyerere’s position as the unquestionable leader of the country and it enabled him the time and political capital “to promote new policies in rural development, education and industry” (Coulson 2013: 223).

Socialism comes to the ‘Hill’: education for self-reliance and the March 1967 conference

150 For many at ‘the Hill’, following the Arusha Declaration, the question now became what would this shift towards socialism within the broader society mean for educational provision at the university. They did not have to wait long to find out. In March of 1967, just weeks after the announcement of the Arusha Declaration, Nyerere released a corresponding document entitled

Education for Self-Reliance (ESR). Inspired, in part, by the National Service Crisis, ESR aimed to dramatically reform the Tanzanian educational system, to make it more aligned with the socialist society that the TANU government was trying to create. In the document, Nyerere reasoned that given that the vast majority of students in Tanzania would not progress beyond primary school and would ultimately return to work in the agricultural sector following the completion of their schooling, the Tanzanian educational system should provide these students with practical knowledge and inculcate them with values that would better prepare them for these eventualities.16 In the system Nyerere envisioned, secondary students would also be expected to participate in nation-state building work during their school vacations, and contribute to the cleaning and upkeep of the schools that they attended. It was hoped that the latter reforms would help to better align secondary school and prospective university students with the ethos of self- reliance and national service that ESR was trying to foster (Ivaska 2011: 148). Ultimately, in so doing, such reforms were expected to “counteract the temptation of intellectual arrogance” and

“inculcate [students with] a sense of commitment to the total community” (Nyerere 1968: 52).

While its concern with “counteract[ing]…intellectual arrogance” was clearly inspired by the National Service Crisis,17 ESR did not devote a lot of time to outlining what specific reforms would best promote the cause of socialism and self-reliance at the university itself (Bourbonniere

16 These reforms included rising the entry age for primary schools, downgrading the importance of examinations, and creating schools that were self-reliant communities, which would contain cooperative farms that students would be expected to work on. 17 ESR acknowledged that “the events of 1966…suggest[ed] that a more thorough examination of the education we are providing must be made”

151 2007: 66; Ivaska 2011: 148). On 13-14 March 1967, just two days after the release of ESR, a conference was held at the UCD entitled ‘Role of University College, Dar es Salaam in a Socialist

Tanzania’ to address these very issues. It is important to note that even before Nyerere published

ESR, the university administration, working closely with government and party officials had already made plans to discuss what reforms should be implemented, in the aftermath of the

National Service protests, to produce students that were better aligned with national, socialist objectives. In releasing ESR in close proximity to the scheduled conference, which would be the

“first major interaction between the university and the state since Tanzania’s socialist recommitment” (Bourbonniere 2007: 71), Bourbonniere speculates that Nyerere sought to

“influence the socialization of the university indirectly” (Bourbonniere 2007: 66).

Attended by members of the university faculty, TANU and government officials, including Kawawa and the educational Minister of S.N. Eliufoo, and various members of the East

African academic community, the conference itself proved to be a hotly contested affair, which exposed the serious ideological rifts that existed within the university college’s faculty in the aftermath of the October 1966 protests. Of these factions, the most liberal consisted of a small group of mostly British expatriate faculty, which included Terrance Ranger. This group was

“terrib[ly] shock[ed]” by the TANU government’s intervention on campus during the National

Service protests, which they believed had unfairly made students “scapegoats”.18 More than anything, they feared that the conference and TANU’s move to socialism ran the “great risk” of ushering in an era at the university, where UCD would be transformed into “senior version of

[TANU’s ideological institute] Kivuoni [College]…a rubber stamp for the state”19 and academic freedom would be compromised. As such, while they were deeply invested in limiting the

18 Interview, Terrance Ranger, London, United Kingdom, unspecified date 19 Interview, Terrance Ranger, London, United Kingdom, unspecified date

152 government’s interventions on campus, their message and the group itself came be marginalized at the conference

A second faction, on the far left, was led by a group of nine expatriate, Marxist lecturers20 who came to be known as the Committee of Nine. They approached the question of university reform from a far more radical vantage point than many of their colleagues, calling for UCD’s transformation into a socialist institution. This was not surprising, as from its inception, largely on account of Nyerere’s socialist rhetoric, UCD attracted international lecturers with socialist credentials, particularly in their Faculty of Arts and Sciences (Coulson 2013: 271). Among this group were up-and-coming darlings of the international left, including Walter Rodney, who would write his classic tome How Europe Underdeveloped Africa while at UDSM, James Mellen, who would go on to help found the Weather Underground upon his return to the United States after leaving Tanzania, and Giovanni Arrighi, who with Rodney and Immanuel Wallerstein, would come to be a key progenitor of world-systems analysis, to name just a few.

Upon arriving at the conference, the Committee of Nine handed out a working paper with their proposals for university reform at UCD (they were the only group to have prepared such a document). Not surprisingly, given their superior preparation, the Committee of Nine came to wield a “major influence” over the proceedings (Barkan 1975: 18; Bourbonniere 2007: 89).21 In their working paper, they argued that “the University College must produce people who think and act as socialists” (Hoskyns et al, 1967: 117). Furthermore, they argued that the “organization of the [University] College along lines inherited from Western models” had served to produce students that were “elitist, technocratic, [and] devoid of socialist perspective or creativity” (ibid).

20 Including Catherine Hoskyns, Frances Livingstone, James Mellen, Sol Picciotto, Walter Rodney, John S. Saul, Herbert Shore, Giovanni Arrighi, Grant Kamencu 21 Interview, Gerry Helleiner, March 30th, 2015, Toronto, Canada

153 To rectify this situation, they contended that College needed to “re-evaluat[e]…the inherited disciplinary organization and structure [of the University College]” (ibid: 118).

They provided a series of recommendations to guide such reform. First, they called for expanded recruitment and importation of a larger percentage “socialist teachers” within existing disciplines “from the socialist countries, from among socialists in the capitalist countries and, from other developing nations” (ibid: 122), identifying East Africa as “[t]he most important source of future staff” (ibid, 124). Second, in order to strengthen the state’s influence over university’s

“overall direction”, the working paper recommended a change in the composition of UCD’s main decision-making bodies, “to include more direct political representation from TANU, TYL, etc., and also the President of the Students Union and the Chairman of the Workers Council” (ibid:

127). Third, with the objective of “remov[ing] elements of privileges and servility at [UCD]”, the working paper suggested a series of reforms designed to increase student participation “in the administration and control of their own lives” on campus, which were also designed to create more egalitarian relationships between staff, students and faculty (ibid: 129-131).

Their most important and ultimately contentious contribution to the conference, however, revolved around their recommendations for the reformation of UCD’s Common Course. Arguing that the University College needed to do away with its fragmented, anti-ideological approach to the study of the social sciences, the Committee of Nine called for the creation of an autonomous

Department of Social Analysis and a “revolutionized conception of Common Course”, which would provide students with a “a coherent rigorous socialist orientation towards the process and problems of development in Tanzania, in East Africa, and in Africa” (ibid: 121). As conceived by the Committee of Nine, the Common Course would be a mandatory part of all students’ course load for their first three years of study, “occupy[ing] no less than 1/3 of the student’s time in each of the three years” (ibid: 119). During that period, students would carry out, in their first

154 and third years, a social analysis of the dominant social formations in Africa and the continent’s most pressing problems of underdevelopment, with a specific focus on Tanzania, with their second year being devoted to an examination of the development of capitalism in the international system and the viability of socialist alternatives (ibid: 119-121).

While the Committee of Nine came to dominate many of the conference’s panel discussions, and while their proposal certainly garnered a lot of attention, their radical approach to university reform was not shared by the majority of the conference’s attendees. Indeed, the conference’s far less vocal majority was comprised of a third group of more moderate socialists, who came to be situated somewhere between the far left faction led by the Committee of Nine and the aforementioned more liberal faction. While this group believed it was necessary for the university to, as Kawawa noted at the conference, look to contribute to “fostering the development of socialist attitudes among students” at the Hill, many of this group, disapproved of the

Committee of Nine’s far-reaching, radical plan for achieving this objective.

Some, like the Canadian economist, Gerald Helleiner, even believed that the “expatriates

[of the Committee of Nine]…[had] no business…intruding upon a domestic political issue.” In proposing such radical university reform, he believed that, as did some of his UCD faculty colleagues, the radical expatriates “had stepped over the line”. 22 So while aspects of the

Committee of Nine’s proposal were eventually accepted – including an agreement to depend less on hiring faculty from overseas agencies, TANU’s stronger presence on campus, and the reformation of the Common Course—on the whole much of the Committee of Nine’s

22 Interview, Gerald Helleiner, Toronto, Canada, March 30th, 2015; For his part, Saul objects to such a characterization: “There was no one of us, who thought we could put something over of our own devising on a Tanzanian institution…We had no cards to play for one, except for our ideas, so how we could we possibly quote ‘take over the university’ as a small group of nine people, none of whom were Tanzanian?” (Interview, John S. Saul, Toronto, Canada, September 19th, 2017)

155 recommendations were significantly diluted (Ivaska 2010). For example, in the aftermath of the conference, curriculum reform proved limited, matters related to the Common Course’s length, content and methodological approach were left undecided and continued to be under the university administration’s future discretion, and the instruction of the Common Course remained under the control of the existing departments, which the Committee of Nine had recommended be disbanded” (Ivaska 2011: 151; Bourbonierre 2007: 100).

The more moderate socialists, perhaps unsurprisingly, given their numbers and the prominence of some of their members in government, had come out on top. While the Committee of Nine’s proposals were in no way fully endorsed and while the group would increasingly come to be a source of concern and consternation for the TANU government, their vocal presence at

UCD helped to foster a reputation for the college as a Third World hub of socialist thinking in the late 1960s.

The emergence of UCD’s student left, 1967-1970

Given the atmosphere that pervaded UCD during these years, it is unsurprising that the campus saw the emergence of a thriving student left in the late-1960s that increasingly became a force in campus politics. This in no way should be taken to suggest that students united around a common radical political agenda during these years. Far from it, as one student from this period recalls:

[During the late 1960s] The Hill became a battlefield of competing ideas. New pro-socialist and anti-imperialist visions of the world confronted the old business as usual, pro-Western, pro-capitalist ideology permeating the conceptualization and teaching of the social sciences and law. Rightist students and academic staff battled, on the ideological plane, with leftist students and staff. (Hirji 2010: 7-8)

A key protagonist in these emerging campus struggles was the student left. Consisting of approximately 40 to 100 of UCD’s nearly 1600 students by 1970 (Saul 1972: 289; Ivaska 2011:

156 152), this relatively small group of students became active in organizing political events and actions on campus. Inspired by Nyerere’s call for university students to place their desire to serve the nation ahead of any careerist ambition, this group’s influence on campus soon far exceeded their modest numbers.

The progenitor of the student left was a group called the Socialist Club, which was formed in the aftermath of the Arusha Declaration in 1967. Originally founded by UCD faculty members, including Rodney, in collaboration with radical students, from Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda

(including future Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni), Malawi, Sudan, Ethiopia and Tanzania

(Shivji 1980: 30; Mvungi and Peters 2014: 230), the Club was, as one of their members recalls,

“more a study group than…an action front” (Museveni 1970: 13) and members quickly became dissatisfied with solely devoting their energies to theoretical exercises like organized debates and discussions.

A key event, which helped to accelerate the radicalization of UCD’s student left and inspire them to political activism, was a talk delivered by Stokley Carmichael at UCD in early November of 1967. During the latter half of the 1960s, Carmichael was just one of a group of radical political activists and intellectuals, which included Malcolm X, Angela Davis, C.L.R. James, and Samir

Amin to visit UCD. During his speech, Carmichael reminded UCD students that they were “the bearers of the revolution” and, in so doing, restored to these students, in the words of Ranger, who attended the lecture, “their revolutionary credentials”23 after the fall out of the National

Service protests of the previous year. While, Carmichael’s “uncritical transference of the slogans of Black Power” did increase racial animosities on campus, its “long term impact was progressive”,

23 Interview, Terrance Ranger, London, United Kingdom, unspecified date; Museveni also credits Carmichael for inspiring the formation of USARF

157 as in Saul’s estimation, “political enthusiasm and radical awareness was given a substantial impetus by [Carmichael’s] visit” (Saul 1972: 289; Coulson 2013: 272).

Not long after Carmichael’s appearance, militant students within the Socialist Club, like

Museveni, who wanted to engage more directly in political activism at the Hill, created the

University Students’ African Revolutionary Front (USARF). Over the next three years until the organization’s controversial banning in late 1970, USARF, working in close collaboration with the campus branch of the TYL, came to be the driving force behind the resurgence of radical leftist politics on campus. Aiming to, in the words of its first Chairman, Museveni, “encourage revolutionary activities at the College, and to transform the college from being a center of reaction…to a hotbed of revolutionary cadres” (Museveni 1970: 14), USARF initially organized public lectures and frequently issued statements, distributed through their leaflets and pamphlets, which provided analysis of the major political developments of the day, including the Soviet

Union’s invasion of Prague in January of 1968, Kenya’s banning of its sole opposition party, the

Kenyan People’s Union in October 1969, and the United States’ continued intervention in

Southeast Asia. In addition, USARF did not shy away from commenting on domestic issues: criticizing, for example, the TANU government’s karadha scheme, which called for the issuance of state-sponsored loans to political elites to help them purchase personal effects (like cars).

Moreover, the organization also held discussions on socialism and imperialism, conducted teach- ins and adult literacy classes, participated in communal self-help projects in Ujamaa Villages, and raised money for African liberation movements.

Significantly, however, while USARF never “engage[d] in any form of violence, illegal acts, or subversive activity” (Hirji 2010: 8), they did increasingly precipitate provocative political actions on campus, which placed them in direct confrontation with the powers-that-be at UCD.

For example, in November of 1968, USARF sabotaged UCD’s annual ‘Rag Day’ event. Sponsored

158 by the World University Services (WUS), Rag Day encouraged students to assemble in some of

Dar es Salaam’s wealthier neighbourhoods, “put on [brightly coloured] rags…and march in town…collect[ing] money for [the] poor”.24 The proceeds for the annual event were to be given to Mzimbazi Children Centre, with its slogan being ‘Help Us to Help Them, Help Themselves’.

Though members of USARF’s leadership had attended Rag Day organizational meetings in the lead-up to the event, on the evening before the event in late 1968, USARF members gathered to discuss “the question of the role of charity and philanthropy in bourgeois society”

(Shivji 1980: 32). They concluded that Rag Day made a “mockery of the masses”, representing a type of philanthropy, which was, they reasoned, “a euphemism for those who plunder by the ton and give back by the ounce” (ibid: 32). At the close of this meeting, USARF members committed themselves, as one member recalls to “put a stop to [Rag Day]” (Interview, Zakia Hamdani

Meghji, Dar es Salaam, October 6th, 2014) the next morning.

On the following day, November 9th, 1968, USARF and campus TYL members “woke up early” and “[b]efore any [Rag Day participants] had a clue as to what was happening”, they

“deflated the tires of the vehicles that would carry students to town for Rag Day” (Meghji 2010:

78). They also proceeded to erect barricades around the square where the lorries and tractors were being parked to ensure that they could not pass. When university guards, and later the police, attempted to intervene, USARF and campus TYL members justified their actions to both parties, outlining their criticisms of the event. Apparently persuaded by their arguments, the police, after an hour of consultation, withdrew permission for the event and Rag Day was subsequently cancelled.

While this action certainly brought USARF to national prominence for the first time, it also drew a lot of public criticism and debate. Some UCD students suggested that USARF and

24 Interview, Zakia Hamdani Meghji, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 6th 2014

159 TYL members “were really nothing more…[than] self-seekers conducting their misdeeds under the popular cover of ‘aspirations of the workers and peasants of Tanzania’” (The Standard, Friday

November 15th, 1968: 2). Others were more concerned both by the “conspicuously non-

Tanzanian” membership of USARF (The Standard, November 11th, 1968: 2) and the “thug[gish]” manner that these self-proclaimed ‘revolutionaries’ had “tak[en] the law into their own hands”

(The Standard. Tuesday November 26th, 1968: 4). These critics worried that, with USARF and campus TYL members’ “subversive ambitions”, this faction could “one day…take serious steps against the government when it happens to disagree with it” (The Standard, Tuesday November

26th, 1968: 4). The fact that the government tacitly condoned such behaviours, opened up the possibility, some feared, that Tanzania could see destabilizing “student acts similar to those in

Indonesia, France and Mexico” (The Standard, Wednesday November 20th, 1968: 4). In spite of these critiques and concerns, by cancelling the event and not punishing USARF and campus TYL students for their actions, the university administration (read the TANU government) appeared to silently endorse the students’ intervention.

While some USARF members, like Museveni, publicly responded to these criticisms with resort to sanctimonious rhetoric: “Rag Day is a product of bourgeoisie [sic] hypocrisy in a decadent society where the individual’s Coca-Cola values count more than the society” (The

Standard, Monday November 18th, 1968: 2), other members of the anti-Rag Day faction, such as

B.G. Choka, more explicitly evoked the language and ideas used by Nyerere after the National

Service Crisis:

The majority of people in this country dress in what may be called rags not because they enjoy it but because forces beyond their control have pushed them into such a situation. The university student in this country is one of the smartly dressed and privileged citizen [sic]. It is not by chance he belongs to that group. The poor people have paid taxes to remain with nothing for his family and it is this money that pays for the students’ education…How come, then, that the same student and an ‘intellectual’ chooses to mock the same people who have [sic] paid for his education and all the luxurious privileges he gets? By celebrating Rag Day, we are being ungrateful to those who have suffered for us…forgetting that the

160 education we receive is a means of preparing us for helping the poor. If we choose to mock the poor today, how can we help them tomorrow? (The Standard, Wednesday November 20th, 1968: 4)

USARF and the campus TYL’s collective victory following Rag Day represented only the beginning of their increasingly bold activities on campus. Indeed, the academic year of 1969-

1970, proved to be “particularly eventful…for the student left” (Saul 1972: 290). In addition, to hosting successful demos on campus in support of the FRELIMO and the Vietnamese National

Liberation Front (NFL) (Coulson 2013: 272) and participating in practical activities, like cashew picking on Korosho farm near campus, and making voluntary visits to work on ujamaa villages,

USARF and campus TYL members also challenged an American Visiting Professor, Kenneth

Singleton, over remarks he made in class about Frantz Fanon, which they deemed “offending” and “reactionary” (Shivji 1992: 36; Saul 1972: 290). In the aftermath of the dispute, the student left organized a public symposium on the latter’s work, extending an invitation to Singleton (who declined to attend) and eventually donating the proceeds from the event to African liberation struggles.

In February and March of 1969, the student left created a vigilance committee, which successfully opposed the introduction of a new syllabus of the Faculty of Law, which had come to be known as a “stronghold of militant conservatism” at the Hill (Shivji 1980). In rejecting the syllabus, which they argued contained “marked features of American liberalism” (Shivji 1980),

USARF and TYL members contended that “[w]e cannot train bourgeois lawyers and expect to have a socialist legal system” (Shivji 1980: 40). As part of that same protest, this Vigilance

Committee put forward a set of demands to the university administration, which echoed some of the Committee of Nine’s recommendations: they called for the East Africanization of staff, the recruitment of lecturers from socialist countries, and the increased participation of students in

161 decision-making at the university (Shivji 1980: 36). Ultimately, as with Rag Day, USARF students’ efforts proved successful, as the new syllabus was never introduced.

While their forays into political activism on campus were bearing fruit, another key element of the student left’s presence at the Hill related to their work to strengthen the ideological foundations of UCD’s student body. In this regard, the student left made two key contributions: first, students organized and led Sunday morning ideological classes, which proved to be, as Issa

Shivji remembers, “hotbeds of vigorous discussions” (Shivji 1980: 38; Ivaska 2011: 153). Perhaps, even more significantly, USARF and the TYL created a theoretical journal called Cheche. Cheche, meaning ‘The Spark’ in Kiswahili, which referenced the name of Nkrumah’s journal borrowed from Lenin’s Iskra (Shivji 1980: 34), was run entirely by UCD students. Strongly influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon, the journal was designed by its creators to be a “fighting paper”, which aimed “to further the cause of peoples’ revolutions in Africa and the world through the spread of revolutionary consciousness” (Shivji 1980: 34-35). While the majority of contributors were students, Cheche also contained reprinted articles of revolutionary luminaries, like Amilcar Cabral, and pieces written by UCD faculty members, including Saul and Rodney. Over the course of their publication of three issues and one special issue, Cheche articulated an internationalist socialist ideology, which, as with the Committee of Nine conference proposal, clashed with Nyerere’s more moderate, Fabianist brand of socialism.

Though they clearly disagreed with aspects of Nyerere’s socialist ideology, as Museveni notes, much of the student left believed whole-heartedly “in the wise leadership of [the]

President”, and felt “[t]he flourishing of youth groups like USARF and the possibility of further radicalization of youth meant that the President may move further to the left” (Museveni 1970:

14). In fact, as Museveni recalls, the student left felt they were working in concert with Nyerere, who had said, “youth should always be on his left” (ibid). In their view, therefore, the student left

162 simply felt that they were answering Nyerere’s call to “drag [the President] in a progressive direction rather than [Nyerere] dragging the country” (ibid). In many ways, therefore, though they disagreed with aspects of TANU’s ideological program, TANU’s reforms at the UCD seemed to have, at least in part, produced the desired outcome: members of USARF and the campus TYL seemed to aspire to diligently follow Nyerere’s repeated calls to youth for commitment to

Tanzanian emergent brand of socialism and service to the nation.

Conclusion

In the first decade of independence, particularly following the October 1966 National

Service Crisis, the TANU government, disappointed with the political orientation of their university students, made dramatic interventionist reforms at the Hill, which were designed to produce a student body more committed to TANU’s nation-state building project and more socialist in their ideological orientation. While these reforms helped to produce a more vibrant political environment on campus, which encouraged the development of increasingly committed leftist activists at UCD, by 1969, as the gap between TANU’s state-sanctioned socialism and that being promoted by those very same student activists on campus was expanding, the TANU government, increasingly uncomfortable with the assertive actions of the university left, made clear and concerted efforts to undermine them. In Chapter 6, we will turn to focus on the various strategies employed by the TANU government, which were designed to contain student activism at UDSM and to more assertively institutionalize the control of the ruling party over the newly inaugurated national university.

163 CHAPTER 5

‘LEAVE POLITICS TO THE POLITICIANS’1: EXPLAINING POLITICAL QUIESSENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI, 1963-1978

Introduction

In the last chapter, we examined the case study of student activism at University College,

Dar es Salaam (UCD). As noted, during the latter half of the pivotal decade of the 1960s, the

campus of UCD was transformed into an international hub of Third World socialist thought and

activism, as a small, but influential student left made their presence felt on Tanzania’s national

political stage. In this way, in Tanzania, like in many other countries across the world, the late-

1960s was a time of heightened student radicalism, where political engagement reached its

historical zenith on the campus of UCD.

In this chapter, we will tell a very different story, shifting our focus to examining the

political role of university students at UCD’s sister campus, University College, Nairobi (UCN)

(and later, after 1970, the University of Nairobi). During the 1960s, in stark contrast to their

counterparts at UCD, UCN students appeared, as Rebecca Mckown notes, “immune” to

opposition politics, “pursu[ing] their studies with little active attention to the political world”

(McKown 1975). So pronounced were Kenyan university students’ perceived uniqueness in this

regard throughout the 1960s that “a certain literature developed to explain why Kenyan students

were so much less politicized than their counterparts elsewhere in Africa” (Savage and Taylor

1991: 311). This was not simply a perception shared by outside analysts. Indeed, writing as late

as July of 1972 in the University of Nairobi’s student newspaper, University Platform, Nairobi

1 “Students warned to leave politics to politicians.” Thursday June 28th, 1972. Daily Nation, pg 32.

164 student, Joshua D. Olwe Nyunya, wondered why “[t]he history of the University of Nairobi has been one of passivism and apathy compared…with her sister Universities [i.e. Dar es Salaam and

Makerere]” (University Platform, July 28th, 1972: 3).

In this chapter, we are interested in addressing two related questions. First, how can we explain not political activism at UCN in the 1960s, but rather its opposite, political quiescence?

And, second, how and why did University of Nairobi students come to be, by the late-1970s, one of Kenya’s leading national voices of political dissent and one of the most influential groups of student activists in all of Africa?

To answer these questions, we need to situate the history of student activism at Nairobi within the broader context of Kenya’s incipient processes of nation-state building during the initial postcolonial decades. As noted, in Chapter 3, at independence, the postcolonial Kenyan state closely resembled its colonial predecessor. Driven by their deep investment in ensuring political and economic continuity, the political elite actively sought to repress opposition actors and to demobilize potentially radical popular forces throughout society, which may question the social and economic conditions that existed in the post-colony (Branch and Cheeseman 2010: 16).

At UCN, these imperatives shaped the state’s relationship with university students. In short, the overarching message of the regime to university students in Kenya throughout Kenyatta’s rule was to, in the words of University of Nairobi’s first Vice-Chancellor, Josiphat Karanja, “leave politics to the politicians.”

In order to ensure the achievement of this objective, and in an effort to neutralize potentially radicalizing political forces on campus, the Kenyan state, unlike their Tanganyikan

African National Union (TANU) counterparts, did not institutionalize party control of UCN.

Instead, they actively worked to block any attempts by Kenya’s main opposition party, the Kenya

People’s Union (KPU), to interact with students. Throughout the 1960s, this depoliticizing

165 strategy, in conjunction with the relatively advantageous material conditions that existed on campus, ensured the preservation of political quiescence among UCN students. The government’s initial hands-off approach to university administration, and their unwillingness or inability to institutionalize party rule over the campus, however, eventually allowed for the creation of an

“arena of student politics,” which existed outside of the realm of state and party control, making it “one of the only arenas of genuine political debate [in the country]” (Mwangola 2007: 152).

Following the 1969 Odinga Crisis, the government’s increasingly heavy-handed approach to managing campus matters, characterized by state repression on campus, periodic closures of the university, and the banning of student organizations, in conjunction with the state’s progressively authoritarian and corrupt rule of Kenyan society at large, produced a student body that was alienated from the ruling party and more willing than ever to engage in nationally-oriented political protests. By the time of Kenyatta’s death in August of 1978, the relationship between university students and the Kenyan state had reached an all-time low.

In this chapter, we will examine these developments historically. In section one, I will briefly outline the role of youth and specifically university students in the KANU government’s nation-state building project, contrasting it with TANU’s approach. In section two, I will discuss the creation of UCN, the conditions that facilitated political quiescence on campus, before examining the relationship between university students and the state in the build-up to the

Odinga Crisis of January 1969. In section three, we will discuss the government’s increasingly authoritarian and repressive approach to the management of the university during the 1970s, explaining why student activists at the University of Nairobi became progressively more politically active and nationally oriented during this period.

“No country for young men”: Mzee and the making of youth in postcolonial Kenya

166 As in much of the rest of East Africa, the “tension between elders and youths in Kenyan politics has a long historical pedigree”, which stretches back to the pre-colonial period (Kagwanja

2005: 88; Mwangola 2007; Burgess and Burton 2010). Notably, during the latter years of colonialism, disgruntled Kenyan youth played an important role both in labour union unrest of the 1940s and 1950s and, more significantly, in the Mau Mau uprisings of the 1950s. As such, at independence, the notion, forwarded by Tom Mboya, that the “energies [of young people in

Kenya] must be channelled to useful and productive purposes” in the post-colony was deeply rooted in the historical experience of the Kenyan state’s colonial predecessors and became a primary preoccupation, at least rhetorically, of Kenya’s postcolonial political leadership

(Mwangola 2007: 129-130).

Not surprisingly, therefore, like many of his African counterparts, including the TANU regime in Tanzania, the Kenyan postcolonial state frequently publicly venerated the importance of youth to the country’s twin projects of development and nation-state building in the first decade of independence (Burgess and Burton 2010). For example, addressing the Youth Council of

Kenya’s Annual General Meeting at State House in late October of 1965, Kenyatta proclaimed that:

The greatest asset in any country is its youth. All our strivings are so that the youth of our country may inherit a better…home…It is for the youth that we fought imperialism so that our children may grow up in an atmosphere that guarantees the full development of all of their talents…Now that we are independent we want to be sure that our youth grow up to be true Kenyans. (Kenyan National Archives [KNA], MSS/126/67)

In some respects, like their Tanzanian counterparts, the Kenyatta state’s rhetoric about the importance of youth was backed by efforts on the part of the KANU government to incorporate the country’s young people into its nation-state building project. For example, in

1963, in one of the first acts of parliament passed by the newly independent KANU government, the country’s National Youth Service was formed, beginning its operations in April of 1964. This

167 program, which recruited predominantly single, young men, preferably between the ages of 16-

22, “who [we]re unemployed and [had] no immediate prospects for employment” (KNA,

DC/KMG/2/27/399 – (ADM/1/22) (21))2, offered these young people a chance to provide their labour for national development projects, in exchange for a small wage, food, clothing and shelter during their 2-years of service in the NYS. In addition, they were also provided training in

English, mathematics, and civics from primary to post K.P.E. standard, which it was hoped would prepare them for the labour market (Coe 1973, 31).

Still, for the most part, in the first decade of independence, the Kenyatta state developed a very different, more disinterested relationship with its population of young people than that which existed in Tanzania over the same period. Four important distinctions deserve highlighting here.

The first, and perhaps most oft-noted difference relates to Kenyatta’s personal approach to engaging youth in Kenya, which diverged markedly from that of Nyerere. In some respects, as

Colin Leys notes, this difference is best captured in the nicknames that both leaders were assigned by their respective publics.3 While Nyerere, who came to be known as Mwalimu (the teacher), could be, as we witnessed in the previous chapter, stern with his population of young people, his relationship with them was also characterized by relatively open dialogue, critical engagement and an earnest attempt on his part to teach these youth how to be socialist citizens of the

Tanzanian nation. In Nyerere’s view, the job of the university was to create, as noted, “efficient

[national] servants.” By contrast, Kenyatta, popularly known reverentially as Mzee (the grand old man), showed far less of an interest in engaging directly with his population of young people.

Indeed, Kenyatta believed that university students, for example, should refrain from political participation, brandishing those that “dabble in politics” as deviants in January of 1969 (Hanna

2 By the end of 1965, the average age of these recruits was 20 year old. 3 Interview, Colin Leys, Toronto Ontario, October 5th, 2017

168 1975: 17; Bienen 1969: 10). Whereas, the TANU regime opened up space for political debate on campus and encouraged the political participation of university students in party activity,

Kenyatta’s message was one of consistent warning that any political engagement on the part of youth would be seen by the state as “subversive” and would be stamped out accordingly. As Leys notes, Kenyatta’s more remote and authoritarian relationship to the management of the university should not come as a surprise, as from “the grand old man, you don’t expect anything except commands”.4

Significantly, Kenyatta’s more aloof, disinterested relationship to his country’s population of youth during the first decade of independence was reflected in the weakness of the institutional arrangements that the state created in relation to these populations. Whereas in Tanzania, the

TANU Youth League (TYL) developed into a strong and active organization, with a well-defined leadership structure and a relatively clear set of tasks (Brennan 2005; Bjerk 2015), in Kenya,

KANU’s Youth Wing (KYW), much like the party itself, had fallen into disrepair by the mid-

1960s. Indeed, it was only really active during electoral periods and, even then, their primary role was as agents of harassment against the party’s political opponents. One anecdote, which details the extent to which the KANU ruling party lacked a coherent organizational base, comes from Kingunge Ngombale-Mwiru, a former Secretary-General of the TYL, who travelled to

Nairobi in that capacity to visit his Kenyan counterparts in 1965:

I went to Nairobi…[to visit] the [KANU] party headquarters, I couldn’t reach anybody. You had some messengers [in the office] there, you know, everybody was gone, because the elections were over. No one was in the office. In Kenya, I couldn’t find any leader of the [party] youth movement, because there was none. 5

4 Interview, Colin Leys, Toronto, Canada, October 5th, 2017 5Interview, Kingunge Ngombale-Mwiru, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 23rd, 2014

169 This relates to a third important difference between the two countries’ approach to youth: to a far greater extent than in Tanzania, the Kenyan postcolonial state’s relationship with youth was characterized by violence. This manifested itself in a couple of different ways. On the one hand, the primary task of the KYW in the first decade of independence was to carry out state- sponsored violence, generally during electoral periods, which targeted KANU’s main political opponents. For example, during the years that Kenya’s main opposition party, the Kenya People’s

Union’s (KPU) was operating, on multiple occasions KYW members were tasked by high-ranking government officials, including Minister of Education, Julius Kiano, and Minister of Cooperatives and Social Sciences, Ronald Ngala, with attacking opposition supporters and destroying KPU local offices (Hornsby 2012: 163). On some occasions, these KYW attacks led to fatalities, including in 1967, in Bildad Kaggia’s constituency of Kandera, “where seven people were killed amid intimidation by KANU Youth Wingers” (ibid.). In this way, as Mshai Mwangola (2007:

147) notes, the KYW became “notoriously associated with [KANU’s] abuse of power, which confirmed local associations of youth with violence when it came to political issues.”6

On the other hand, Kenyan youth, particularly young leaders also became the victims of state-sponsored violence during this period. There is no denying that the Kenyatta state routinely used violence to “to discipline and punish errant youth politicians” (Kagwanja 2005: 90), in what Mwangola (2007: 146) has referred to, a “seek-and-destroy mission against precocious young individuals who threatened to lead a generational transfer of power.” Examples of this included the political assassinations of Pino Gamo Pinto, a major figure of Kenya’s burgeoning left in February 1964 and the murder of Tom Mboya, the Secretary-General of KANU in mid- day in Nairobi in July of 1969, in which a KYW member, Isaac Nahashon Njenga Njoroge, was

6 The role of youth as ‘foot soldiers’ of Kenya’s political elite is one that would only intensify in the country, particularly following the return of multiparty politics.

170 ultimately convicted of the crime. In both cases, these assassinations, popularly believed to have been carried out by the state, “deprived the country of its best crop of youthful leaders and blazed the trail for the complete marginalization of the younger generation in politics” (Kagwanja 2005:

90). While the TYL in Tanzania was also known for, at times, engaging in violent behaviour, and while Nyerere too sought to marginalize youthful politicians that posed a threat to his regime, there is no question that the level of violence used to achieve these objectives in Kenya was of a much greater frequency and intensity to anything that transpired in Tanzania over the same period of time.

A final key difference between the two countries’ approach to youth related to the dissemination of ideological training or political education. In Tanzania, this became, particularly after 1967, a main preoccupation of the TANU regime, which provided political education to youth through the National Service and which also attempted to dramatically reform the educational system through Education for Self-Reliance (ESR) in the postcolonial period, establishing TYL branches at secondary schools and at UCD and providing political education at every level of schooling (Morrison 1976). In the Kenyan case, not surprisingly, given the

Kenyatta state’s emphasis on political and economic continuity and its investment in the demobilization of popular forces, political or ideological education of youth was not something that was encouraged and was rarely provided. For example, Kenya’s NYS, in contrast to

Tanzania’s National Service, explicitly excluded any political education or ideological training from their program. Moreover, as noted in Chapter 3, the ruling party’s Lumumba Institute, which did provide political education to young KANU trainees briefly in the mid-1960s, was closed down in 1965, following these students’ increasing participation in political demonstrations (Good 1968).

171 As these differences demonstrate the Kenyan state’s approach to the management and incorporation of youth into the country’s nation-state building project diverged radically from that of Tanzania. In what remains of this chapter, we will explore how all of these four distinctive characteristics of the Kenyan state’s relationship with their population of youth: Kenyatta’s more distant, authoritarian relationship with his country’s youthful population, the absence of a strong organizational base for party youth organizations, the prevalence of violence in the Kenyan state’s relationship with youth, and the lack of political or ideological education for young people were all reflected in the relationship that developed between the Kenyan state and its population of university students in the first 15 years of independence.

Student activism at the University College, Nairobi, 1963-1970

Officially established in 1970, the University of Nairobi, Kenya’s oldest and most august institution of higher learning is a relatively recent creation (Savage and Taylor 1991; Klopp and

Orina 2002; Kamencu 2013), which has gone through many different incarnations. The idea of creating a university in East Africa was first officially mooted in a report written by the colonial

Ormsby-Gore Commission in 1925, though serious discussions about the establishment of such an institution in Kenya were not initiated until after the Second World War (Furley and Watson

1978: 294). In 1947, seeking to create a much-needed source of indigenous skilled labour, the

Kenyan colonial Government’s plans to establish a technical institute, concurred with plans for the creation of an ‘Indian university’, to merge with the Ghandi Memorial Academy, a commercial college for Asians (ibid, 325). The colonial government created the Royal Technical College based in Nairobi in 1951 (though students were not formally admitted until 1956), as an interracial, inter-territorial college for higher education, designed to offer professional and vocational

172 training, which specialized in commerce, engineering and architecture (Furley and Watson 1978:

325; Kamencu 2013: 1).7

In June 1961, this site was rechristened the Royal College, Nairobi, and made a constituent college of the University of London. Just two years later in June of 1963, in an effort to “harmonize higher learning programs in the region by constituting a common administration for all the colleges” (Kamencu 2013: 1), the Royal College, Nairobi became University College, Nairobi

(UCN), a constituent college of the University of East Africa (UEA), along with Makerere

University College in Uganda and the University College, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. UEA remained intact until 1970, when its constituent colleges disaggregated, each becoming independent, fully-fledged universities in their own right.

In spite of their common institutional origins, the University of Nairobi contrasted with

UDSM in many ways. For one, as noted, for much of the 1960s, UCN was a “relatively tranquil” space in relation to UCD, where “opposition was slow to emerge” (Savage and Taylor 1991: 311;

Klopp and Orina 2002; Amutabi 2002; Bienen 1969; McKown 1975). While smaller protests about the quality of campus accommodation and road safety around the university did occur at UCN in the early 1960s (Kamencu 2013), for the most part, the college’s students seemed to be “apolitical”

(in contrast to their UCD counterparts) (McKown 1975; Bienen 1969; Savage and Taylor 1991).

For example, while African university students were often noted for their proclivity to support opposition parties (Balsvik 1998), at UCN, this did not appear to be the case initially. Following the emergence of a new opposition party in Kenya, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU) in early 1966, in the lead up to the Little General Election in June of that year, UCN student leaders publicly

7 Constructed on approximately 20 acres of land in the heart of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi University remains distinct to this day, as one of the few universities in tropical Africa situated, at least in part, within a city centre (Furley and Watson 1978: 325; Bienen 1969)

173 expressed concern that, with the return to multiparty politics, the “nation will be plunged back to the wasteful and regressive pre-independence squabbles” (Branch 2011: 59).

Many factors contributed to this type of “apolitical” climate on campus. First, it reflected, as one UCN student from this period recalls, the “mood of excitement and expectation”, which was pervasive at the university during those early years, where students believed that “the departure of…the colonial government would usher in heaven on earth”.8 This optimism was reinforced by the pampered existence that university students enjoyed on campus. During this period, the government provided university students with a free education, clean and comfortable living accommodations, and generous allowances (Amutabi 2002: 162; Klopp and Orina 2002: 48).

Moreover, the ample source of post-graduation employment, no doubt also contributed to “a state of political quietude” on campus (Amutabi 2002: 162-163), as students knew that in order to secure their desired, top-level jobs in the civil service, they relied on maintaining good relationships with the ruling elite (Klopp and Orina 2002: 48; Amutabi 2002: 163).9 All of these factors gave the

Kenyatta state leverage in their attempt “to socialize university students into accepting the

[political] status quo” (Klopp and Orina 2002: 48).

It is important to note that this “politically quiescent” atmosphere on campus was also cultivated by design by a Kenyan state, which managed UCN for much of the 1960s in a manner that lacked the “clear ideological position” of TANU at UDSM (Ajayi et al, 1996; Furley and

Watson 1978: 356). Whereas, as demonstrated in the last chapter, TANU sought, particularly after 1967, to inculcate UCD students with socialist ideology and mobilize them in support of the ruling party’s nation-state building project, at UCN, the Kenyan state was driven by their deep investment in ensuring political and economic continuity and stability, which was predicated on

8 Interview, Godfrey Muriuki, Nairobi, Kenya, July 23rd, 2014 9 In a 1969 survey, 20% of UCN students listed the civil service as their preferred career. This was second only to teaching (Bienen 1969: 12).

174 an active attempt to repress opposition and demobilize potentially radical popular forces that could question the social and economic conditions that existed in the post-colony (Branch and

Cheeseman 2006: 16). This imperative, reflected in the atrophied nature of the ruling party by

1966 (as discussed in Chapter 3) shaped the postcolonial Kenyan state’s relationship with university students. Given the internal disarray of KANU by 1966, and the party’s inclusion of radical elements in the early 1960s, in conjunction with the Kenyatta state’s distrust of potential sources of popular protest, like university students, the party was in no position, nor did the state have any interest in enabling KANU to develop and consolidate an institutional presence at the university, which might encourage students’ politicization or serve to empower the radical wing of the party. Put simply, to encourage political mobilization of university students into the ruling party’s organization went against the operating logic of the Kenyatta state.

Not surprisingly, therefore, this commitment to ensuring an ‘apolitical’ campus was a driving preoccupation, which influenced a number of key decisions in the management of UCN.

For example, in appointing UCN’s first African Principal in 1964, Kenyatta opted not for a high- ranking party official, but rather, for Dr A.T. Porter, a Sierra Leonean with no party affiliation.

Moreover, as noted, Kenyan university students were excluded from the country’s National

Youth Service scheme, which was designed to enable Kenyan youth to participate in nation-state building projects, and KANU did not establish any official “organizational base” on campus, be it in the form of party branches or youth wing chapters during this period.10 This demonstrates that little effort was made by the ruling party to popularly recruit university students into the party’s organizational structure or to mobilize university students in support of the KANU government’s overarching nation-state building objectives or policy decisions.

10 Interview, Colin Leys, Toronto, October 5th, 2017

175 In the mid-1960s, conditions on campus began to shift in accordance with broader political changes within the Kenyan state and society and university students gradually became more involved in national politics as a result. One of the key events in spurring these changes was the formation of the KPU. After the marginalization of the radical wing of KANU at the party’s

Delegate conference in March of 1966 in Limuru, Odinga and his allies formed the KPU. In response to this act of defiance, over the next three years, the Kenyatta state used “its country- wide monopoly of sanctions and resources inherited from the colonial period to suppress the

KPU” (Mueller 1984: 408). These efforts, included prohibiting the KPU from holding public meetings, refusing to register many of the KPU’s party branches and sub-branches, and disqualifying 1800 KPU candidates from running in the local 1968 elections on the grounds that the specific candidates’ papers had been incorrectly filed (ibid).

This shift towards a more repressive, authoritarian political environment in Kenya had implications within the space of UCN. From the onset of the KPU’s creation, the Kenyatta state kept a close eye on the opposition party’s activities on campus. For example, on April 27th, 1966, less than a month after the creation of his new party, Odinga addressed the dining hall at the

University of Nairobi, with a speech, entitled ‘Non-Alignment and the new affairs in Kenya.’ On this occasion, he accused the postcolonial leaders of Kenya of allowing the country to become a

“neocolony”, where old colonial masters had returned “in the cloak of advisers to enslave Kenyans’ way of thinking” (Kamencu 2013: 27). In spite of the fact that Odinga’s remarks received a mixed reaction from UCN students, his appearance drew formal criticism from KANU, which scolded the KPU leader for “trying to involve the students in partisan politics” (ibid: 27). In this same

KANU press release, the party ridiculed Odinga, suggesting that students were not “likely to pay much attention to ideas which are put across to them in a manner which is so divorced from the intellectual level and critical standards to which they are accustomed” (ibid, 28).

176 In spite of the supposed low, unappealing quality of Odinga’s discourse, over the next two- and-a-half years, the KANU government would, on three separate occasions, block the KPU’s leader from speaking at UCN and Kenyatta College (Bienen 1969: 10).11 In addition, in March of that same year, the Minister of Education, Julius Kiano, sent a circular out to all secondary school headmasters “instructing them to clear speaking invitations to politicians…to the permanent secretary of the Ministry” (ibid: 10). In this way, the Kenyatta state’s strategy to prohibit “Odinga

[and his KPU colleagues] any forum [to address the Kenyan public] outside of Parliament” extended to the realm of educational institutions, including and, perhaps especially, UCN (ibid).

Following a cancellation of an Odinga speech at Kenyatta College in November of 1968, the KPU leader was once again scheduled to speak at the Political Science Club at UCN on

January 10th 1969. As with the speech of the previous year, Odinga’s appearance was cancelled at the last minute on account of a supposed technicality: namely, that “the students had failed to comply with certain college regulations in scheduling the talk” (ibid). Odinga left the venue peacefully and promised the students that he would return if they extended him another invitation. Taking the university administration at its word in their explanation for the previous event’s cancellation, UCN students once again invited Odinga to speak at the university two weeks later on January 24th and this time took special care to file the paperwork for the event correctly. When this speech was also cancelled, following direct instructions from the Ministry of Education to Principal Porter on January 23rd (University Platform, 1969, Vol. 7, No. 4: 27),

“there was no disguising the fact that the cancellations were coming from a higher authority”

(Bienen 1969: 10). These continued interventions on campus on the part of the Kenyatta state against Odinga perhaps reflected KANU’s increasing concern about the strength of the KPU,

11 Once in November of 1968 at Kenyatta College and twice at UCN over the span of two weeks in January of 1969

177 after the latter’s surprisingly successful performance in the Little General Election in June of

1966, and given the opposition party’s growing popularity on campus among students (Branch

2011). Indeed, university students’ continued desire to have Odinga speak at UCN was read by the KANU government as evidence of “latent student support for the opposition” (Kamuncu 2013:

28; Bienen 1969: 12).

In response to this perceived violation of their academic freedom, students asked to meet with Kiano to discuss his controversial decision to obstruct Odinga’s speaking engagements at

UCN (University Platform, 1969, Vol. 7, No. 4, 27). When this request was denied, UCN students decided to boycott their classes, until Kiano agreed to meet with them (ibid.). Following their boycotts on the 24th and 25th, the students defied a government order to return to class on the

27th. Viewing this student boycott to “be a violation of governmental, indeed presidential, authority”, the KANU government responded harshly on the 27th, by closing down the college and sending in anti-riot police and the General Service Unit (GSU) to forcibly remove students from their halls of residences (Bienen 1969: 10). In the aftermath of these demonstrations, five students were suspended for their alleged involvement in the strike and the reminder of students, if they wished to resume their studies, were forced to sign a formal apology to the President.12

Ultimately, the 1969 Odinga crisis was significant in shaping the relationship between the state and university students in Kenya for a couple of important reasons. First, and perhaps most significantly, by banning Odinga from speaking on campus, and then by using UCN and its

12 In this apology, students affirmed that they would “abide by all the laws, regulations and directives of the Kenya Government…obey all the regulations and instructions issued by the College Authorities…disassociate [them]sel[ves] from any demonstration or processions for which permission has not been given by the College or the Kenya Government…attend all classes and lectures…[and] recognize that all decisions or rules of any student organization in the College are subordinated to the College Authorities and the laws of the Republic of Kenya” (ibid: 11)

178 students as an easy target for “a government show of strength” (ibid: 13), the state served to alienate university students from Kenya’s government and the ruling party. Specifically, “by insisting on defining [students’ defense of Odinga’s right to speak at UCN]”, as a “full-blown challenge to [the Kenyatta state’s] authority”, instead of as a demonstration of students’ commitment to academic freedom, the KANU government served to “politicize” the UCN campus

(ibid: 12; McKown 1975: 246). In this way, as one University of Nairobi Professor from this era recalls, it was the Kenyatta government that actually initiated

the…conflict [with] University of Nairobi students...[in which the] students [subsequently] got involved in national politics… form[ing] an important segment of the youth who were opposed to the government… But unlike Tanzania, where [students] were incorporated, where they [became] part and parcel of the Tanganyika African National Union, in Kenya…[students, excluded from KANU, moved]…to the opposition.13

Students’ distaste for the regime would only become more heightened in subsequent years following two key events. The first of these events was the assassination of Mboya in July of

1969. While never very popular among students on account of his “capitalist leanings”, Mboya was admired for his intellect and university students were outraged by the gruesome and brazen nature of his public murder, and the state’s suspected involvement in its carrying out. The second key event was the banning of the KPU and the detainment of many of its key leadership (including

Odinga), which occurred in the aftermath of a public riot that greeted Kenyatta at a hospital opening in Kisumu, a KPU stronghold, in October 1969. In banning the KPU, the government was eliminating a party that had come to be supported by many students. In addition, the

“detention of its leaders…also invoked [further] sympathy from students and heightened anti- government sentiment [among them]” (Kamencu 2013: 32).

Second, it is important to note that the Kenyatta government’s response to the Odinga crisis differed in important ways from their Tanzanian counterparts. While in Tanzania, after

13 Interview, Godfrey Muriuki, Nairobi, Kenya, July 23rd, 2014

179 the National Service Crisis of October 1966, the Nyerere government did resort to expelling protesting students from the university and closing the institution down, they also subsequently pursued dramatic reform in their management of the university. In the aftermath of the October

1966 protests, they placed a heavy emphasis on the importance of institutionalizing party control over the university, introducing a party branch on campus, appointing TANU’s former Executive

Secretary as Vice-Chancellor and making the National Service mandatory for all university students. At UCN, the Odinga protests were greeted primarily by force. In terms of institutional reforms, in the aftermath of the protests, the only change introduced by the Kenyan government was to make it mandatory for all political meetings on campus to be officially licensed by the state

(Bienen 1969: 12). In other words, the Kenyatta state did not use the crisis as a justification for seeking to re-evaluate its relationship with its university students nor as an opportunity to adopt a different strategy towards the management of UCN. On the contrary, as Savage and Taylor

(1991: 311) note, the repressive state response to student dissent in January of 1969 would provide a blueprint, which “would be repeated many times over the next twenty years” and, thus, the

Odinga crisis offered the first example of the “sledgehammer approach” (Bienen 1969: 12) to student protest, which the Kenyan state would refine over the coming decades.

A key component of this “sledgehammer approach” to student protest was that, unlike

Nyerere in Tanzania, the Kenyan state repeatedly demonstrated an unwillingness to explain the state’s management of UCN to students themselves (Bienen 1969: 12). A classic example of this was, as noted, Kenyatta’s famous speech in Mombasa on January 26th, just two days after the students’ boycott had begun, in which he included “university students and their lecturers who dabble in politics” in a group of what he described as “political deviants” (Hanna 1975: 17; Bienen

1969: 10). Kenyatta concluded those remarks with a thinly veiled threat: “if [UCN students] think they are important and that they can play about, they will be dealt with accordingly” (Hanna

180 1975: 17). Kenyatta’s message and the response of the Kenyan state to university students most tentative steps towards political engagement in January of 1969 was clear: UCN students were to, under all circumstances, avoid any kind of political participation, as a failure to do so would be met with the most naked repression of the state. They were not to behave as citizens, as the state intended to continue to treat them as subjects of the postcolony.

“A political watershed”14: the awakening of student activism at the University of Nairobi, 1970-1978

Following the Odinga protests, the assassination of Tom Mboya and the banning of KPU in 1969, relations between university students and the state would progressively deteriorate over the last eight years of Kenyatta’s rule and the political acquiescence that had marked most of the

1960s would gradually wilt away. By 1975, in spite of the Kenyatta state’s repressive efforts,

University of Nairobi students would become increasingly oriented towards national politics, with their voices of dissent becoming some of the most prominent in the country. To understand why this shift began to occur in the latter years of Kenyatta’s rule, we have to explain how broader political changes in Kenyan society and in the nature of the Kenyatta state began to impact the university and its students.

There is no doubt that some of the students’ increasing politicization in these years can certainly be attributed to, as Maurice Amutabi (2002) suggests, changes in the quality of life of students at the university, which undermined the material comforts that had, to some extent, undergirded campus tranquility during the 1960s. Astronomical population growth, which reached a world-leading rate of 3.8% in Kenya by 1978, placed a heavy burden on Kenya’s tertiary educational system, as the Kenyatta state decided to rapidly expand the number of university

14 This is how Muga Kolale, a former University of Nairobi student and later labour organizer, described the effects of the death of JM Kariuki on campus at the University of Nairobi (Interview, Muga Kolale, Nairobi, Kenya, June 20th, 2014)

181 enrolments. The University of Nairobi’s student population nearly doubled between 1970 and

1977, expanding from 2800 to 5400 during that period (Hornsby 2012: 265). These changes led to students privileges being curbed, introducing more congested lecture theatres, overcrowded hostels, and worsening sanitary conditions on campus (Amutabi 2002).

The expansion of the student body also increased the cost of the universities for the state.

These changes were used to justify the implementation of a new loan scheme program, which was officially launched in July of 1974. This scheme replaced grants designed to cover university students’ living costs with loans that students were expected to pay back once employed (Klopp and Orina 2002). This reform furthered bitter resentment among students toward the state and served as a new cause of protest.

That being said, one cannot fully appreciate the spike in student activism beginning in the mid-1970s, particularly university students’ increasing preoccupation with national politics, solely in relation to changes in demographic or material conditions. It is essential to view these shifts with reference to important political changes, which were occurring in the country during these years. First, the growing dominance of the Kikuyu over the political and economic life of the country was consolidated in the early-1970s. During this time, the widespread perception that the Kikuyu had uniquely benefitted from the country’s land reform program and that the ruling party had come to be “for Kikuyu only” was a source of growing resentment among other ethnic groups (Branch 2011) and was empirically supported by the Kikuyus’ concrete dominance over the upper echelons of the state apparatus. By November of 1971, Kikuyus occupied 9 of 22

Cabinet posts, including key ministries, like finance, defense, foreign affairs, agriculture, and the

Attorney General. Moreover, Kikuyus made up 4 of the 7 Provincial Commissioner positions, 11 of the 25 Permanent Secretary posts and over half of the 222 highest earning jobs in the Civil

Service (Branch 2011: 103; Hornsby 2012: 256; Tamarkin 1978: 307). In the aftermath of the

182 foiled Luo-led coup plot in June of 1971, Kenyatta’s instinct to prioritize his sub-nationality was only strengthened.

The Kikuyu dominance of the state was reflected in the space of the university, where

Kenyatta appointed Josephat Karanja as University of Nairobi’s first Vice-Chancellor in 1970.

Karanja, hailing from Kiambu was a member of Kenyatta’s inner circle and made sure to appoint

Kikuyus to all of the key administrative positions within the university (Branch 2011: 99).

Moreover, as early as 1970, rumours circulated among lecturers suggesting that students from

Central Province made up approximately 75% of the University of Nairobi’s annual student intake

(Hornsby 2012: 256). Among the lecturers and student leaders at the university, many of whom hailed from Luoland, these imbalances were duly noted and often were the source of controversy and speculation of ethnic discrimination.15

A second key feature of politics during this period was the issue of government corruption, which, by the early 1970s, had become a major problem (Hornsby 2012: 256). Through the land transfer scheme, particularly the Z-plots, Kenya’s political elite had been able to amass huge fortunes and expansive ownership of territory. Among this elite, there was no worse culprit than the Kenyatta family itself. By 1974, the High Commission reported that meetings with the president required a donation of GB£5,000 for a ten-minute audience, to be paid to a charity of

Kenyatta’s choice (Hornsby 2012: 263). Upon being told by the American gas and oil company,

Esso that he would have to begin to pay for the fuel used on his various farms, Kenyatta deported the American managing director of the company (ibid: 263). Such egregious examples of corruption were well known and served to embolden a similar ethos among Kenyatta’s allies within the political elite. Given this prevailing culture of graft, by the early 1970s, the incidences of fraud were reported to have doubled during the post-colonial period (Branch 2011).

15 Interview, Colin Leys, Toronto, Canada, October 5th, 2017

183 Finally, following the banning of the KPU in October 1969, Kenya became essentially a de facto one-party state. For most of the 1970s, as Branch notes “[a]uthoritarian restrictions on opposition politics prevented public and organized expressions of dissent” (Branch 2009: 204).

While parliament still contained radical critics of the regime in the early 1970s, the Kenyatta state gradually made efforts to silence those dissenters. Apart from jailing the KPU leaders, like

Odinga, Otieno Mak’Onyango, Ochola Achola, and Achieng Oneko, who remained in prisons for years following their party’s banning, between 1971-1973, five dissident MPs were jailed for minor offences (Hornsby 2012: 225). Moreover, prior to the 1974 election, MPs who were particularly critical of the government, like JM Kariuki, were prohibited from being allowed to hold public meetings to campaign (Branch 2011: 108; Kihoro 2004: 165). In spite of these efforts,

50% of sitting MPs were defeated in the General Elections of 1974, including Kenyatta state insiders, like Njoroge Mungai and Peter Nderi. The fact that in this same election, noted government critics, like Kariuki and Seroney, “enjoyed unprecedented support” in spite of having their campaigns obstructed by the state, reinforced “a sense of crisis within the upper echelons of government” (Branch 2011: 110). Finally, Kenyatta’s Presidential Decree banning all strikes or boycotts in 1974, exposed the regime’s increasingly repressive actions against any type of popular mobilization.

These factors provided the political context in which university students became increasingly engaged with national politics in the early 1970s. Indeed, beginning in these years, clashes between university students and the authorities became commonplace, with the government’s responses being consistently brutal. For their part, students at the University of

Nairobi were now being influenced both by “the activist role of the students at the University of

Dar es Salaam” and Makerere, who were far more engaged in their countries’ respective national politics than their Nairobi counterparts, and their growing sense that “that [the] Kenyatta

184 [state] had betrayed the freedom that the nationalists [i.e. Mau Mau] had fought for”.16 All of this was exacerbated by the fact that, as with their response to the Odinga crisis, the Kenyan state continually proved unwilling to facilitate dialogue with Nairobi students or to tolerate any kind of political organization or dissent on campus, even that which was not explicitly directed at national politics.

A perfect illustration of this occurred in July of 1972, when students conducted a demonstration, which blocked traffic along State House Road, protesting against motorists’ indifference to the safety of university students and asking “for the construction of a bridge across or a tunnel beneath the road” (University Platform, July 27th, 1972: 1). In response, the protestors were met by “a contingent of steel-helmeted police…armed with long batons and submachine guns, who [began]…attack[ing] the students without provocation or warning” (ibid.). After students retaliated by throwing stones at the officers, the student newspaper, University Platform, reported that the police “pursued the students right into their rooms [on campus], breaking down doors and attack[ing] the helpless students mercilessly, clubbing them on the head, chest and back, without discrimination…between the innocent and the guilty” (ibid, 14). In the aftermath of these clashes, the police arrested 56 of the student protestors (Daily Nation, June 20th, 1972:

1).

In response to this police brutality, the leadership of SUNU wrote an open letter to

Kenyatta, the University’s Chancellor, entitled the ‘The July 19th Memorandum.’ In it, the SUNU leadership implored the Chancellor “to use [his] good office in condemning the grievous and deplorable police invasion [of campus], and to caution the imperialist and neo-colonialist flunkeys in the [Kenyan] press”, whom the students felt had covered their protests unfairly (University

Platform, July 27th, 1972: 3). In addition, they asked Kenyatta to “initiate a Commission of Inquiry

16 Interview, Wanyiri Kihoro, Nairobi, Kenya, July 17th, 2014

185 into the problems facing the University”, to review the employment of Nairobi’s Police

Commander, James Myles Oswald, who had presided over the police’s response to the protest

(ibid.), and, most significantly, they “demand[ed] th[e] unconditional release [of detained student protestors]” (ibid, 7). In response, the university administration met none of these demands, deciding instead to expel some of SUNU’s leadership, including its Vice-President,

Speaker and Minister of Foreign Affairs, for their suspected role in organizing the action.

In the following month, the students’ newspaper, the University Platform, was closed and its editors, Ochieng Konyango and Chelegat Mutai, were also expelled for their coverage of the government and police’s handling of the crisis in the paper’s reporting and editorial commentary

(Daily Nation, August 3rd, 1972: 1). This should not have come as a surprise, either, as the paper argued that the protests were less about the “State House Road issue” and had more to do with

University of Nairobi’s students “opposition to the [Kenyan] Government and the University

Administration” and Kenya’s “fascist police” (University Platform, July 27th, 1972: 2, 7). Still, by banning this student paper, which had provided a space “for the students to articulate their views not only on University issues, but also national [ones]”, the university administration were effectively further limiting students’ freedom of expression (Kamencu 2013: 37).

In October and November of that year, Attorney-General, Charles Njonjo, took the drastic measure of banning the entire SUNU organization on the grounds that it was an “unlawful society” (November 17th, 1972, Daily Nation: 1). In defending this decision, Njonjo argued that he considered SUNU to be “dangerous to the good government of Kenya” (Kamencu 2013: 37).

Furthermore, he later asserted in Parliament that until University of Nairobi students demonstrated that they could act like “grown-ups and not like thugs (November 17th, 1972, Daily

Nation: 1)” they would continue to be made to go without a student union.

186 As with the Odinga Crisis, just three years before, the massive crackdown on students’ sole political organization had been initiated for a protest that was, at least on the surface, squarely focused on, what most students’ perceived to be, a campus issue. Whereas the TANU regime in

Tanzania often used moments of discord to initiate dialogue with protesting students, or to integrate student organizations more deeply into the ruling party apparatus, in Kenya, the state’s routine response was to utilize repression and to eliminate those student organizations that could articulate student grievances to government representatives. The message from the university administration and the government to students in these instances was clear: as Vice-Chancellor,

Josephat Karanja advised them in the aftermath of the protests, students were expected to “leave the politics to the politicians” (Daily Nation June 28th, 1972: 32). Any attempts by students to organize politically in the pursuit of any objective, even those issues related to student welfare, would be interpreted by the state as subversive threat to political order and would be met by requisite force that such a threat entailed.

If such harsh measures in January 1969 and July 1972 were designed to eliminate dissent, they failed to meet this objective. In 1974, the University of Nairobi experienced its most turbulent year of student protest yet (Kihoro 2004: 164). During this period between February of 1974 and late-March 1975, the University of Nairobi and its constituent Kenyatta University

College were closed an unprecedented three separate times by the state for almost seven months.

On the first two occasions that led to closures, however, these protests were related to campus issues. In February, Architecture students stormed a university building, protesting the high fail rate among students in their Department. They later boycotted their examinations and demanded the resignation of the Head of the Department, Professor Jorgensen, which he delivered on March 17th, 1974.

187 Having returned to classes in April, students at the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta

University College once again resorted to protests in August against many of the “old grievances over congestion in the catering unit, lack of accommodation, the loan scheme [and] the price of books” (Weekly Review, February 8th, 1975: 19). In particular, students were outraged over the introduction of the loan scheme in July of 1974 (Klopp and Orina 2002: 49). Following a ten-day class boycott at the University of Nairobi and a seven-day class boycott at Kenyatta College, the university was once again closed, this time for approximately 5 months, with rumours circulating that the duration of the closure was designed to ensure that “students [would be] scattered all over the country to prevent them participating as a pocket of opposition when at the university

[during the October election]” (Kihoro 2004: 164; Kamencu 2013: 46).

It is important to note that growing student unrest during this period was greatly exacerbated by the fact that university students in Kenya continued to be operating without a union.17 As such, as Mwongela Kamencu (2013: 44) notes, they were unable, for example, “to negotiate the loan scheme with the Ministry of Education”, and this made finding a compromise with the university administration next to impossible. Upon returning in January of 1975, students who wished to continue their August boycotts were threatened with expulsion and prominent student leaders of the student Coordinating Committee (which had acted as a de facto student union), like Kenneth Kariuki, were arrested and detained by the Kenyatta regime (ibid.

45). There is no question that the heavy-handed tactics of the Kenyatta regime during the early

1970s had effectively compelled students to accept both “the terms of their readmission [in

January of 1975]” and “[t]he loan scheme…without any adjustments or compromises” (ibid: 45-

46).

17 As Kamencu (2013: 45): “[i]n the absence of a centrally elected student leader, however, the students’ rights were championed by the chairman of United Nations Student Association (UNISA), Ben Ooko Ombaka.”

188 While these tactics against students certainly contributed to the sense that the University of Nairobi student body had become disenchanted with the Kenyatta government and its management of the university, it was the murder of JM Kariuki in March of 1975, which proved to be a “political watershed” that changed the nature of state and university student relations and reoriented student activism towards national politics.18 On March 11th, 1975, Tanzanian radio reported that Kariuki, the Kenyatta regime’s most popular and vocal critic, had been found murdered in the Ngong Hills. The news, which arrived after a week of contradictory reports about

Kariuki’s whereabouts following his disappearance on March 2nd, was greeted by unprecedented protests across Kenya.

In the years leading up to his murder, Kariuki had become popular both as an ardent critic of the Kenyatta regime and as a staunch defender of Kenya’s growing population of ‘have-nots’, especially among the Kikuyu poor. He was widely considered to be an attractive choice to succeed

Kenyatta as president. That said, his populist views on land reform, his Kikuyu ethnicity and his persistent critique of the corrupt nature of Kenya’s political class, made him a real threat to the ruling class, and, therefore, “a better assassination prospect”, as one MP remarked “than a presidential one” (Branch 2011: 106). Not surprisingly, therefore, in the aftermath of the discovery of his mutilated body, the common suspicion was that Kariuki, who was last seen before his death with GSU commander, Ben Gethi, was murdered at the behest of the Kenyatta regime.19

This news was devastating for Kenyatta’s dwindling popularity and legitimacy. As Daniel Branch

(2011: 118) notes, such were the levels of outrage in the aftermath of Kariuki’s murder, that “[t]o many Ministers and diplomatic observers…it seemed as if the [Kenyatta] government…was in danger of collapse.”

18 Interview, Muga Kolale, Nairobi, Kenya, June 20th, 2014 19 Interview, Godfrey Muriuki, Nairobi, Kenya, July 23rd, 2014

189 On the frontlines of these anti-regime protests, acting for one of the first times as the primary, national voice of explicit dissent against the Kenyatta government was University of

Nairobi’s student body. To appreciate the anger of university students at Kariuki’s murder, it is important to recognize two facts. First, that, as Branch notes, Kariuki had “diligently cultivated his support within the University of Nairobi and the Kenyatta University College over a number of years, using on-campus speaking engagements to talk openly with students at both establishments” (ibid: 106). For his efforts, Kariuki had subsequently come to be seen as the students’ “best friend”. Second, as Wanyiri Kihoro notes, for the vast majority of university students, “there was no doubt [that the government was responsible for Kariuki’s death]” and so they came to see the Kenyatta state as one “which w[ould] stop at nothing” to eliminate dissent.20

In their relationship with the state, therefore, with Kariuki’s murder, Nairobi’s student body had crossed the Rubicon.

In response to the assassination, university students made explicitly anti-regime, public gestures. At Kenyatta University College, students tried to remove Kenyatta’s name from the university college’s signboard (Kamencu 2013; Branch 2011: 117). At the University of Nairobi, students endeavoured to boycott their classes for five days, “until…the body of their ‘best friend’ was laid to rest” (Daily Nation: March 14th, 1975: 3). During that period, students held vigils on campus in memorial, and demonstrated both within and outside of the university, even at one point leading marches to the Parliamentary buildings and the City Mortuary, which was holding

Kariuki’s corpse, holding placards that read ‘Yu-Killed JM” and “T. Mboya – Then JM’, which explicitly implicated the government in the murder (Daily Nation: March 14th, 1975: 3).

Kariuki’s funeral, held on 16th March, came to be the “climax of the student’s five day demonstration” (Kamencu 2013). Arriving in red gowns to signify mourning, students heckled

20 Interview, Wanyiri Kihoro, Nairobi, Kenya, July 17th, 2014

190 Simon Nyache, a Provincial Commissioner tasked with reading Kenyatta’s message of condolence.

When student leader, Kihoro “eulogised JM on behalf the student community and youth of Kenya” at the funeral, he “called on the Kenyatta government to resign so as to create room for…a responsible government of national unity” (Kihoro 2004: 167). Ultimately, as former Kenyatta

University College Professor, Edward Oyugi, recalls Kariuki’s death represented:

A turning point [for student activism in Kenya]…[and] played a very significant…catalytic role in terms of providing a platform to mobilize students against a very specific event, which turned out to be the manifestation of the rot in society…student associations…found a reason to rally and support around a critique of government that was bent on suppressing free speech…[and] killing dissidents.21

Following Kariuki’s murder, the levels of repression against opposition voices in Kenya only intensified. During this period, the Kenyatta government took a number of drastic measures to wipe out any form of dissent. They ordered the KANU Chairmen to remove any critics of the government from the party, fired an associate editor at the Standard newspaper, hastily initiated a plan for a punitive National Youth Service program for university students and, perhaps, most significantly, arrested dissident MPs, including Peter Kibisu, Martin Shikuku and Jean-Marie

Seroney (Branch 2011: 120).

Still, in spite of this growing authoritarian context, the university, in general, and student politics, in particular, remained one of the only spaces in the country, where criticism of the government could still be publicly articulated, and where political debates and ideas, which would have been deemed seditious in almost all other public spaces, could still be openly discussed

(Mwongola 2007: 151-152). As former University of Nairobi Professor, Willy Mutunga, recalls of the political climate in the late-1970s:

21 Interview, Edward Oyugi, Nairobi, Kenya, June 9th, 2014

191 Parliament had been silenced. The unions had been silenced. There were no civil voices to talk about. So [in the late-1970s,] with the [Academic Staff] union[,]…student activism in the University…became the real center for dissent in the country.22

Indeed, in spite of the growing repressive context in Kenya, in September of 1975, the university administration even allowed the creation of a new student organization, Nairobi University

Students’ Organization (NUSO), which was registered with the Registrar of Societies.

In the aftermath of Kariuki’s assassination, state-university student relations entered “a state of permanent confrontation” (Savage and Taylor 1991: 310), which would persist for decades. Increasingly, students became more defensive of protecting their own autonomy and the university from any outside interference. In May of 1975, for example, the government closed the university again, following students’ protests against both the government’s new plan to create a mandatory National Youth Service scheme for all university students, which students believed was designed to “cow Kariuki supporters in the university” (Branch 2011: 119), and efforts by the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru Association (GEMA), an organization representing the

Kikuyu political establishment, to create a branch of their organization on campus (Weekly

Review: June 16th, 1975: 27-28). In both instances, students’ protests appeared to be successful, as the NYS scheme was temporarily shelved and the GEMA branch never materialized.

Moreover, university students continued to be one of the only, and certainly the loudest, voices calling for the perpetrators in the murder of Kariuki to be brought to justice. In March of

1976 and 1977, student demonstrations to memorialize his passing led to violent clashes with police. By January of 1978, following the arrest of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, one of the University of

Nairobi students’ most beloved professors, it is fair to say that university student-state relations had reached an all-time low.

22 Interview, Willy Mutunga, Nairobi, Kenya, July 8th, 2014

192 Conclusion

By the time of August of 1978, news of the death of Kenya’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta, was greeted with cautious optimism by students, who hoped his predecessor would usher in a more democratic era of politics at the University of Nairobi (Kamencu 2013). As demonstrated in this chapter, over the preceding 15 years of Kenyatta’s rule, the Kenyan state had actively sought to maintain an ‘apolitical’ atmosphere at the University of Nairobi. While this was initially promoted through the obstruction of the development of party politics on campus, as students began to engage in politically dissident activity following the Odinga Crisis of January of 1969, the Kenyan state began to use repression and a closing of institutional channels of student representation as its primary means of containing student dissent. These often violent tactics

(which included university closures, the expulsion and arrest of student leaders, the violence of security forces against students on campus, and the banning of student unions) served to effectively alienate the student body of the University of Nairobi from the KANU regime and close down political space on campus. It also played a central role in politicizing these students, who increasingly became involved in explicitly anti-regime protest by the mid-1970s. In Chapter

7, we will explore how this tense relationship between university students and the state only worsened following the arrival of Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi.

193 CHAPTER SIX

“UNDER THE THUMB OF THE PARTY”: THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF PARTY CONTROL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DAR ES SALAAM, 1970-1989

Introduction

Writing shortly after the inauguration of the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), in the latter half of 1970, a Canadian UDSM professor of political science, John Saul, identified “one problem of the old University College[, Dar es Salaam]” that had been carried over to UDSM: while the campus had witnessed the emergence of a small group of “promising” students with a

“radical political posture” committed to building Tanzanian socialism, the student body in general at UDSM remained conservative, “unmobilized and uncommitted” to Tanzania’s socialist project.

In Saul’s estimation, given the TANU government’s avowed commitment to building socialism, the university administration needed to grapple with two key questions: “how best to contain (and if possible transform) the preconceptions and the activities of the bulk of the [conservative] students[?]” And “how best to guide and encourage the enthusiasm of the more militant minority[?]”

If the TANU government was serious about their desire, expressed in March 1967, to transform the university into a socialist institution, Saul argued that “the[ir] challenge…d[id] not lie in the 40 or 50 radicals on the Hill but in the infinitely larger number of nascent conservativ[e] students.” In short, he believed, these radical students needed

“guid[ance]…along certain lines”, which should be provided “without discouraging these admirable…militants from…playing the role of ‘revolutionary intellectuals’”, nor without “giving aid and comfort to those [conservative students] whose own views require even more severe scrutiny” (Saul 1972: 289-292).

194 Little could Saul have known at the time of his warning that the days of student radicalism at UDSM, which he was documenting, were nearing their zenith. Indeed, just over a decade later, by November 1981, a professor of political science, Issa Shivji, who had attended the university as a student in the late 1960s, was bemoaning “the present malaise of the [UDSM]” characterized by “apathy” among academic staff and students and the increasing “[b]ureaucratization” of the institution (Shivji 1992: 64). By 1985, the year that Julius Nyerere stepped down as President of the country, as their counterparts in Kenya were intensifying their efforts to challenge the Kenyan state and bring about political change both within the University of Nairobi and Kenyan society- at-large, “[t]he torch of…revolutionary activism” at UDSM had, in the words of two of its professors, “finally [been] extinguished” (Maina Peter and Mvungu 2014: 243).

What had happened? Why had the fledgling “radicalism” that Saul had noted among

UDSM students in late-1970, died out so quickly just 15 years later? These questions are made even more confounding when one considers that Tanzanian university students’ growing disengagement from national politics occurred at a time, when similar political, economic and demographic pressures to those facing Tanzania had reinvigorated student activism against authoritarian regimes among many of their African counterparts on university campuses across the continent.

In this chapter, I set out to answer these questions, rejecting the common argument that growing apathy among the student body at UDSM simply needs to be understood as a by-product of the university’s deteriorating material conditions (Shivji 1992). It is true that in both Kenya and Tanzania during this period, as across much of Africa, the quality of higher education and accommodation at national universities was greatly undermined by economic crisis, demographic expansion and the early stages of the imposition of austerity educational reforms (Caffenzis 2000;

Federici 2000; Zeilig and Dawson 2008; Zeilig 2007; Boyer 2002; Nyamnjoh and Jua 2002). While

195 UDSM was certainly profoundly impacted by all of these factors, in order to appreciate the profound shift in the political activism of university students at UDSM over this period, we need to more closely examine the political determinants of these outcomes. In so doing, I will argue that, far from “nurtur[ing]” the radicalism of UDSM students, as Saul had advised, the TANU government, dating back to 1970, adopted the opposite approach, taking a number of measures designed to harness and direct student’s political energies on campus and further institutionalize the ruling party’s control over the university. This was achieved through the introduction of a number of institutional reforms explicitly aimed at ‘containing’ the actions, not of the student body’s conservative majority, but rather of the university left, which had proved to be the most radical and vocal critics of the TANU regime on the UDSM campus.

These reforms, included the creation of a TYL branch on campus, the repeated appointment of high-ranking TANU/Chama cha mapinduzi (CCM)1 officials to the position of

Vice-Chancellor, the introduction of the Musoma Resolution in 1975, which changed admission requirements (making political loyalty to the ruling party an informal condition of entry), the removal of leftist professors, and the creation of Muungano wa Wanafunzi Tanzania (MUWATA) in 1978, which placed UDSM’s student representative organizations under the control and supervision of the Youth League. These institutional reforms ensured that, even as the ruling party’s ideological hegemony and legitimacy among university students began to wane as early as the mid-1970s, the party was able to insulate itself from the kind of disruptive student protests that would undermine the stability of many of their African counterparts during the decade of the

1980s.

1 The political party, Chama cha mapinduzi (CCM), was established in February of 1977 following the merger of mainland Tanzania’s Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and Zanzibar’s ruling Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP).

196 So, whereas in Kenya, the Kenya African Nation Union (KANU) was never able (and in many instances not interested) in institutionalizing party control and instead relied more on a heavy-handed, repressive approach to managing student activism at the University of Nairobi; in

Tanzania, following episodes of student protest, the Tanzanian state opted to adopt a different set of tools to rein in student dissidence that were more co-optative than repressive. Significantly, as with their management of trade unions and the army following the failed January 1964 mutiny, and the TANU Youth League (TYL) in the early 1970s, at UDSM, the TANU government used moments of student protest to legitimate their attempts to undermine the organizational autonomy of university student unions, often eliminating independent associations or incorporating these organizations into the pre-existing apparatus of the ruling party. Such institutional reforms enabled the ruling party to establish “total control of the university.”2

As a result, when economic and political crisis intensified during the critical juncture of the 1980s, and Nyerere stepped down as President in 1985, the ruling party was better prepared to manage student dissent peacefully than their Kenyan counterparts, because they had effectively usurped university students’ organizational autonomy. The fact that the CCM regime’s repeatedly responded decisively to such episodes of dissidence provided numerous reminders that the need for political order and obedience from youth, in this case, university students, far exceeded, and often conflicted with, the ruling party’s avowed desire to cultivate socialism among the country’s emerging educated elite. In short, when periodically forced to make a choice between these two avowed imperatives, the former was almost always prioritized over the latter.

In many ways, therefore, a by-product of the Tanzanian state’s more co-optative approach to managing dissent among their population of university students was more amenable to the state’s overarching goals than the Kenyan state’s strategy, in that they produced a far more

2 Interview, Chris Maina Peters, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 10th, 2014

197 subservient population of university students, who failed to muster significant challenges to

Tanzania’s ruling party during the 1970s and 1980s. By the latter decade, in spite of their growing list of grievances, Tanzanian university students had become increasingly obedient to the wishes of the CCM government, lacking the organizational capacity to mount a serious and sustained challenge of the postcolonial government, in spite of the economic and political crisis that engulfed it.

Forging a different relationship: ideology, Nyerere and student activism at UDSM, 1970- 1985

Before discussing the specific ways in which TANU/CCM set out to institutionalize party control over the university in the 1970s and 1980s, it is important to acknowledge two aspects of the ruling party’s relationship with their national university students, which strongly differentiated them from their KANU counterparts. First, while the TANU/CCM government did occasionally crack down on university students, utilizing the repressive violence of security forces in October

1966, July 1971 and March 1978, these incidences of violence were mild in comparison to what was deployed by the Kenyan state against university students in Nairobi, and more importantly, such occurrences were very much the exception. Instead, to a far greater extent than the KANU regime in Kenya, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, the TANU government’s power and support among the student body relied less on repression and intimidation than it did on ideological appeals (Bjerk 2017: 100). As a former UDSM student and current UDSM professor,

Chris Maina Peter, recalls, for much of the Nyerere years, UDSM “students were overall in support of [Nyerere’s] project, because the project was for socialism and self-reliance, and…was…anti-imperialist”.3 This is best reflected in the fact that, in some UDSM’s largest student protests, particularly after 1966, students clearly deployed iterations of Nyerere and the

3 Interview, Chris Maina Peter, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 10th, 2014

198 ruling party’s socialist rhetoric, often trying to highlight that the government was not living up to Mwalimu’s high moral expectations. As a result of this ideological basis of support, relations between university students and the TANU state tended to be, even in moments of tension or disagreement, far less antagonistic from what existed among their counterparts in Kenya.

Second, while Kenya’s First President, Jomo Kenyatta, largely ignored his nation’s university students, rarely meeting with them at the University of Nairobi during his time as

President, and while his successor Daniel arap Moi often only concerned himself with periodically consorting with members of the student leadership at Nairobi, Nyerere, throughout his tenure, consistently made an effort to communicate his ideas and defend his decisions directly in front of

UDSM’s student body through frequent speeches, teach-ins and question and answer periods at the university. As one UCD student recalls, unlike “neighbouring nations all over Africa”, where

“heads of state prefer[ed] to converse with students with a show of force”, Nyerere “c[a]me down from his lofty pedestal to talk to us” (Hirji 2010: 41). These frequent visits to campus were hugely successful and helped to maintain Nyerere’s popularity among students.4 Even by the early 1990s, as hostility towards the CCM increased among university students, they continued to consider

Nyerere, their ex-President and Chancellor, a “friend”.5 It was Nyerere’s openness and popularity among students, which helped lessen the tension in the latter’s relationship with the ruling party, making it difficult for them to directly challenge it. As Maina Peters remembers:

Mwalimu, however argumentative you were…could engage [students] in a debate…argue with [them] and you could see an honest leader. He was a person, who preached what he believed in, who lived his speeches...so it wasn’t very easy to attack the government, because at the end of the day [Nyerere] was the head of th[at] government.6

4 As UDSM Economics Professor, Andrew Coulson, who taught at the university in the 1970s, recalls: “Whenever Nyerere came to the campus he was welcomed by huge crowds [of students], and utterly charmed [the students] by his laid back style, acceptance of realities, and sense of humour” (Interview, Andrew Coulson, September 15th, 2015, via email). 5 Interview, James Mbatia, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 1st, 2014 6 Interview, Chris Maina Peters, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 10th, 2014

199 In directing the university administration, Nyerere frequently reminded them that part of their job was to win the consent of the student body in support of their decisions. As UDSM’s first Vice-Chancellor, Pius Msekwa recalls, Nyerere reminded him to be accountable to students:

[Nyerere] said…students are prone to violence if they are unhappy…make sure when you make any decision that you are able…to defend that decision at [UDSM’s] Nkrumah Hall to the students…to their satisfaction…if you are in doubt come and see me, I will help you.7

While these instructions were not always followed, this approach enabled the TANU government to establish a relationship with the country’s university students that, for the most part, lacked the violence and antagonism that had frequently characterized the relationship between the state and the university in Kenya. Still, as we shall see, even as ujamaa’s ideological hegemony began to wane in the late-1970s, and following Nyerere’s departure in 1985, it was the party’s ability to institutionalize their control over the campus and its students that ensured the relative quiescence of UDSM’s student body throughout this turbulent decade.

“TANU is coming to the university”: TANU and the inauguration of UDSM

By the end of the 1960s, as the TANU government became aware of the growing independence and confidence of UCD’s student left, they made concerted efforts to undermine them. Unhappy with the university’s ideological direction, Nyerere now, as Michelle

Bourbonniere (2007: 110) notes, “had the power and inclination to bring the university more closely under the party’s control, administratively and ideologically.” A big part of this campaign to rein in the university’s autonomy was institutional reforms that TANU introduced following the inauguration of UDSM in July 1970.

The break-up of the University of East Africa (UEA) had been prompted by UEA’s reluctance to follow the tenets of Education for Self-Reliance (ESR) (ibid: 110-111). At UDSM, as in other parts of Africa, “[a] common feature of the new institutions [of higher learning]…was

7 Interview, Pius Msekwa, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 1st, 2014

200 their close relation to the political establishment, with the countries’ presidents being installed as

Chancellors of the universities, and therefore having direct role in determining the level of autonomy that the institutions enjoyed” (Oanda 2016: 66). In the case of Tanzania’s national university, in establishing UDSM, the TANU government increased the role of the party on campus in a variety of ways. First, Nyerere, as President of the Tanzanian Republic, was made, through the institutionalization of the 1970 University Act, the Chancellor of the UDSM. This was not simply a ceremonial position, but also afforded the president the opportunity to appoint the other three highest positions within the university administration, which included Vice-

Chancellor, Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Academic Officer (Ngonyani 2000: 42).

Significantly, in the most important role of Vice-Chancellor, Nyerere appointed, Pius Msekwa, the former Executive-Secretary of TANU and a noted close associate of the President. In hiring him, Msekwa recalls that Nyerere intended:

to give a political direction to the university…it is an academic institution [Nyerere] acknowledged…but it should not be an ivory tower…it must fit in the political environment of the country and who was better disposed to do that then the executive secretary of TANU itself.8

There is no question that Msekwa’s appointment was intended to signal to students the establishment of a closer relationship between the ruling party and the national university.

Indeed, upon his formal arrival on campus, students greeted Msekwa by singing, “TANU has come to the University.” As Jenerali Ulimwengu, a UDSM student and campus TYL member at this time recalls, with the arrival of Msekwa, “a clear message was sent out [to students]…the party was liberating this enemy enclave [of the university]”.9

8 Interview, Pius Msekwa, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 1st, 2014

9 Interview, Jenerali Ulimwengu, Dar es Salaam, October 21st, 2014

201 Another sign of TANU’s growing prominence on campus related to the structure of student organizations. As noted in the previous chapter, in the late 1960s, TANU had already dissolved the National Union of Tanzanian Students (NAUTS), established a TYL branch on campus and created a party office at the university. Following the inauguration of UDSM, the university administration introduced an independent student union, the Dar es Salaam University

Student Organization (DUSO). In spite of this reform, students remained excluded from appointment committees, disciplinary committees, and appeals committees and they were also not consulted in processes related to curricular design and examinations (Oanda 2016: 66-67).

Moreover, the “new administration seemed to favour the [campus TANU Youth League (TYL) over DUSO], and this caused continued friction on who from [these two organizations] would serve as the voice of the student body” (ibid, 68).

In the period, therefore, after Msekwa’s appointment, Ulimwengu argues that the campus was “in a very significant way brought under the thumb of the party” (Interview, Jenerali

Ulimwengu, October 21st, 2014, Dar es Salaam). John Saul concurs with this assessment: with the institutionalization of TANU’s power and control at UDSM, the institution became throughout the 1970s, “an official organization to be disciplined rather than a university to be opened”.10 The job of these new government appointees was to, therefore, “bring the university into line with the logic, not of a socialist university, but a one-party state…and an increasingly authoritarian one at that”.11

Nowhere was such a mandate more clearly manifested than in the realm of student politics, where a main goal of the university administration quickly became the desire to “stem the influence of increasingly unwelcome Marxism on campus” (Bourbonniere 2007: 111). Throughout

10 Interview, John Saul, Toronto, Canada, September 19th, 2017 11 Interview, John Saul, Toronto, Canada, September 19th, 2017

202 1969 and 1970, TANU’s institutional reforms at the Hill were coupled with the regime’s more antagonistic rhetoric directed toward the University Left. For example, in March of 1969, speaking at an ambassador’s caucus event, the UCD’s first African Principal, W.K. Chagula expressed his disdain for the Committee of Nine’s 1967 conference report, brandishing their proposals for reform, as:

An illustration…that through an institution of Higher Education, a developing country could have its policies influenced by expatriate lecturers and professors who think they know and understand the problems of the country better than the indigenous people themselves!! Many of the expatriates may have sinister ulterior motives for what they are doing and they could actually be agents of other foreign governments. (My emphasis; Quoted in ibid: 112)

The next overt sign of efforts on the part of the TANU government to publicly discredit the

University left came in December of 1969, following a speech delivered by Walter Rodney at the

East and Central African Youth Seminar held in Dar-es-Salaam. During Rodney’s speech, which would be reprinted in full in the Nationalist the following day, he provided a broadside indictment of the current state of many postcolonial governments in Africa, critiquing their “petty bourgeois” class basis and dismissing them as “Briefcase Revolutions” for the ways in which many of these governments negotiated the end of colonial rule. While Rodney praised Zanzibar as an example of “revolutionary violence” overcoming “neo-colonial exploiters”, he concluded that “armed struggle” was “the inescapable and logical means of obtaining freedom” from African neo-colonial governments, whose claim to socialism was little more than “a bush behind which to hide their exploitative tendencies” (quoted in Ivaska 2011: 157-158).

In response, just two days after Rodney’s speech had appeared in the Nationalist, the paper printed an editorial, entitled ‘Revolutionary Hot Air’, thought to be “inspired from State House”

(Saul 1972: 290). In the masthead editorial, Rodney’s call for “[r]evolutionary violence” to overthrow independent African governments was called “intolerable.” Implicitly assuming that

203 Rodney’s words had been directed at the Tanzanian government, the editorial also warned that

“[t]hose who insist upon indulging in such practices will have to accept the consequences of their indulgence” (Ivaska 2011: 158).

While Rodney would respond in the Nationalist two days later, with a conciliatory letter, which took a step back from his call for ‘revolutionary violence’, and clarified that he did not intend to place “Tanzania in the same bag with those petty-bourgeois governments who have no intention of emancipating their people”, the damage had been done. Moreover, the incident, given

Rodney’s prominent position within the University Left, was seen to signify a major blow to their cause. It also was the most explicit indicator to date of the growing antagonism that existed within TANU toward the increasingly brazen leftist elements on the Hill (ibid: 158).

Far from being an isolated incident, Chagula’s antagonistic remarks and the ‘Rodney

Affair’ proved to be a forbearer of things to come for the student left in 1970. On February 4th

1970, Nyerere visited UCD to conduct his first ‘teach-in’, which consisted of a two-hour question- answer session with UCD students. The session occurred within a broader context of tensions between University Students’ African Revolutionary Front (USARF) and campus TYL members and their fellow UCD students, with rumours circulating from the Hill about the student left’s supposed desire to “form a communist party to oppose TANU” (Museveni 1970: 14). By all accounts, during the teach-in, Nyerere “t[ook] the Hill radicals sternly to task” (Hirji 2010: 41).

In his answers to the students’ queries, Museveni recalls, Nyerere regarded the student left “as spoilt children who did not understand elementary facts about life” (Museveni 1970: 14). At one point, another USARF student recalls, Nyerere even “ridicule[d] the TYL for their ‘silly and immature’ questions” (Hirji 2010: 41).12 While Saul, who also attended the teach-in, found the

12 Both Museveni and Hirji believe that USARF’s “more trivial” questions had been selected to make USARF members look bad, possibly by the Vice-Chancellor, Wilfred Chingula (Hirji

204 student left’s questions to be, for the most part, “reasonable”, his account, which squares with that of students present at the teach-in, concludes that “the tone and tenor of [Nyerere’s] answers were such as to make the radicals look foolish” (Saul 1972: 291). While Nyerere never explicitly denounced the student left (Museveni 1970: 14; Saul 1972: 291; Ivaska 2011: 159), the overriding result of the teach-in was to give them, as one of their members recalls, a “sound political thrashing from the highest authority in the nation” (Hirji 2010: 41) in full view of their student adversaries. Within the space of three months, with both the ‘Rodney affair’ and the UCD ‘teach- in’, the TANU regime had, to employ Saul’s pithy characterization, used “a canon…to swat a fly

– [and] a friendly fly at that” (Saul 1972: 291).

In August 1970, during his address at UDSM’s inauguration, Nyerere continued to direct thinly veiled warnings toward the university left. While his speech, as others given at the

University College in the past, stressed that the university’s primary importance was in

“serving…the needs of Tanzania’s development towards socialism (Nyerere 1974: 101)”, Nyerere also warned “progressive[s]” at the university against “trying to understand, and be understood, by Russian, East European, or Chinese society” (ibid). In following such foreign models of socialism, Nyerere argued that aspiring ‘progressives’ “will be fooling themselves into believing that they are thus preparing themselves to serve African society” (ibid). This was a clear allusion to the internationalist socialist thinking that was developing within the student left (particularly

USARF) and Cheche. In Nyerere’s view, again most likely alluding to the development of internationalist socialist orientation among the student left, “[t]he University of Dar es Salaam has not been founded to turn out intellectual apes whether of the Right or of the Left. We are training for a socialist, self-respecting and self-reliant Tanzania” (ibid.).

2010: 42). In the words of Museveni, “The ground had been prepared” so that USARF members would be embarrassed (Museveni 1970: 14)

205 Initially, in spite of their disappointment at the experience of the teach-in, and the ominous signals emanating from State House regarding the ‘Rodney Affair’, Nyerere’s UDSM ‘teach-in’ and the president’s inaugural USDM address, the student left seemed undeterred. Being a student election year, USARF and campus TYL members campaigned vigorously for leadership places in

DUSO, including that of president of the student union. In July, a TYL College Branch essay on the relationship between tourism and socialism in Tanzania sparked serious debate in the pages of the Standard newspaper (Saul 1972: 291; Aminzade 2013: 187-188). Moreover, in September, a small number of USARF and TYL student activists opted to spend their short vacations working on ujamaa villages in the Dodoma region (Saul 1972: 291), demonstrating an impressive and rare commitment among university students to such nation-state building activities.

Most significantly, in that same month, Cheche published Issa Shivji’s essay “Tanzania:

The Silent Class Struggle”, a Marxist treatise, which offered a class-based analysis of Tanzania’s socialist experiment. Rejecting TANU’s official narrative of socialism in Tanzania’s supposedly classless society, Shivji argued that the Arusha Declaration represented a triumph for Tanzania’s

‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie”. In his view, in order for socialism to flourish in the country, “the nature of the [TANU] Party ha[d] to change” (Shivji 1972: 321).

If, as Saul suggested, perhaps over-optimistically, that the “President’s intentions” following the teach-in in February of 1970 vis-à-vis the student left remained “difficult to gauge”

(Saul 1972: 291), near year’s end, there was no longer any ambiguity. On November 12th, Msewka summoned the TYL executive to his office and declared that the activities of USARF and their journal, Cheche, should cease, in a decision apparently made after consultation with State House.13

The initial official explanation for the dramatic banning was a technical one: TANU argued that due to Cheche’s name, which indirectly referenced Lenin, the journal “g[a]ve the impression that

13Interview, Pius Msekwa, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 1st, 2014

206 Tanzania was building ‘Russian socialism’”(Ivaska 2010: 160; Shivji 1992: 39), which played into the common trope that “Cheche had a hidden agenda to spread communism in Tanzania” (Liundi

2010: 103). The following day, in a masthead editorial published in the Nationalist, an alternative, more fulsome explanation was forwarded:

To enable the youth to play their rightful role in the political life of the country, the Party has its own youth organization – the TANU Youth League…Looked at from this standpoint there was really no need of having another political youth organization at the University whereas TANU Youth League has already a branch there…How much more relevant will this [discussion on the party] be now that all discussions and debates will be channelled through the TYL, the proper political organ of the youth? It should be emphasized that the action…should not be taken as an attempt to stiffle [sic] revolutionary activity of the youth, either at the Hill or elsewhere. Let it be understood that as far as TANU is concerned, the youth of Tanzania can be as radical and as revolutionary as they wish, provided they do this through the institutionalized organs of the party. (my emphasis; Quoted in Ivaska 2010: 160)

What to make of the TANU government’s decision to ban USARF and Cheche? Why had a regime that had, just four years previously, bemoaned the elitist attitudes and careerist ambitions of UCD students during the National Service Crisis, now banned an organization composed of, what Saul referred to as, “the most admirable and dedicated members of the [UCD] student body” (Saul 1972: 290) to the cause of Tanzanian socialism?

To find an answer to this question, it is important to recall that USARF and Cheche’s banning was not without precedent within the Tanzanian politics of this period. In September of

1969, just over a year before these events transpired at ‘the Hill’, the TANU Central Committee had decided to dismantle the Ruvuma Development Association (RDA). The RDA, comprising of 17 villages (at its height in 1969), made up of approximately 400 households, in the southern part of Tanzania in the early 1960s, was one of the country’s most successful examples of communal production, which had provided Nyerere with a blueprint for his ujamaa vijini project

(Schneider 2014: 25-29). In banning the RDA, TANU provided a similar justification to that which would accompany USARF’s prohibition. The Central Committee argued that they were

207 guarding against “the danger…[of] mushroom[ing] of ‘Ujamaa’ villages representing at the most extreme, every shade of [the] idea of socialism” (ibid). As with student politics at the Hill,

TANU was concerned with maintaining a “monopoly of political activities”, in this case, within the ujamaa village development associations, as they believed these could “only prosper if they are

TANU communities, inspired by its principles, politically guided by, and looking up to TANU for assistance” (ibid).

Another similar example of TANU prioritizing the imperative of maintaining a ‘monopoly over political authority’ over the fostering of independent socialist organizations can be seen in the government’s management of the TYL in the early 1970s. Following the resignation of

Nyerere’s brother, Joseph Nyerere, as the head of the TYL in April of 1970, the government began to be preoccupied with the growing influence of Lawi Nangwanda Sijaona, a politician from

Southern province, who subsequently became the most influential leader within the organization

(Brennan 2006: 239). Concerned about Sijaona’s growing power and the possibility that his presence within the TYL could inspire the organization to turn into “a military socialist vanguard”, the TANU government called for a reduction of funding for the TYL in August of

1971 and imposed mandatory age limits of 35 for the organization’s leadership, which effectively removed 31 of 61 of TYL district committee heads (including Sijoana and his allies) (ibid). In imposing these institutional reforms, the TYL lost any of its organizational autonomy and was, therefore, pacified by 1973. Moreover, in manoeuvring to oust Sijaona, the government had removed a figure within TANU who, like the leaders of USARF and the RDA, had too successfully created independent socialist organizations with a popular base of support, outside of the tight parameters of TANU’s accepted power elite (ibid: 241). In the aftermath of these reforms, while the TYL’s rhetoric remained as militant as ever, “independent action [within the organization] became less frequent” (ibid: 241).

208 All of these examples demonstrate the ruling party’s vigilant commitment to protect their

“monopoly on legitimate authority” (Schneider 2014: 59). As Schneider notes, the “underside of th[e] assertion of [TANU’s] all-inclusiveness was that it created its delegitimized exclusions: only TANU politics and policies were legitimate; dissenters, even independent voices, quickly became ‘enemy No. 1’” (ibid: 60). This was certainly true of USARF, the RDA, and the TYL, as in all three of these cases, increasingly independent and mobilized organizations, which demonstrated a strong commitment to Nyerere’s project of socialism, were circumscribed by the state. Significantly, in all three cases, institutional reforms designed to contain and silence independent voices within the country, were achieved using a minimum amount of coercion.

Ultimately, as Shivji argues, while, within USARF,

[t]here was deference to the person [of Nyerere]…there was [not] acceptance of [his] ideology…because students were expounding a different ideology…while [Nyerere] accepted debate…one thing was very clear that debate had to be confined to the university…and it…should not pose a direct, organized challenge to the…political institutions of the state. So when now USARF…started embarking on and truly posing an alternative ideology…it had to be nipped in the bud.14

In the end, as Andrew Ivaska notes, from the perspective of the regime, USARF and Cheche represented the “wrong kind of vanguard, one that posed uncomfortable questions pointing to the

‘hidden class struggles’ of Tanzania’s limited experiment with socialism” (Ivaska 2011: 162). As with the banning of the RDA and the reformation of the TYL, in deciding to ban USARF,

TANU’s aversion to permitting independent organizations to exist beyond the control of the ruling party, superseded, and ultimately suppressed, their desire to cultivate popular socialism.

Mwongozo and the Akivaga crisis at UDSM, 1971-1972

In January of 1971, Milton Obote, the founding President of postcolonial Uganda was removed from power following a coup d’état led by Idi Amin. The following month at an

14 Interview, Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 11th, 2014

209 Emergency meeting of TANU’s National Executive Committee (NEC) set up to discuss the coup, the NEC decided to introduce the 1971 TANU Guidelines (‘mwongozo’ in Swahili). As Dean

McHenry (1992: 20) notes, “prompted by…the overthrow of…Obote…following his adoption of policies that moved the country in a more socialist direction,” the 1971 TANU Guidelines “was a declaration that the defeat of the Ugandan government’s tentative steps toward socialism would not be allowed to spread to Tanzania.” Attacking ‘imperialists’ and ‘local puppets’ for their role in seeking to undermine Tanzanian socialism, and attempting to remove the last vestiges of capitalism, mwongozo placed party officials between workers and management and stressed the importance of the masses’ role in the building of Tanzanian socialism. They were tasked, in part, with a duty to expose ‘enemies of the revolution.’ This included bestowing upon the masses the responsibility of scrutinizing the behaviour of TANU leaders. Government employees in particular were expected to follow the dictates of the Arusha Declaration’s Leadership Code. In sum, the policy shift seemed to ostensibly be encouraging bottom-up, popular mobilization among the Tanzanian masses.

At the Hill, the debates and contradictions that accompanied the release of mwongozo played out in miniature, and, indeed, helped to produce one of the most direct and violent confrontations between the university students and the state in the history of postcolonial

Tanzania. The problems came to a head on July 7th, 1971, when Msewka delivered a contentious speech during UDSM’s graduation ceremony. In his speech, the Vice-Chancellor announced by- laws that had been approved in consultation with the Tanzanian African Parents’ Association

(TAPA), but without discussion with the university’s student body. In making this announcement and suggesting that “very little was left to be done”, Msekwa had “effectively exclude[ed] students from the process” (Bourbonniere 2007: 119).

210 The following day, the Chairman of the DUSO, a Kenyan named Symonds Akivaga, whose election had come at the expense of the “preferred candidate of the administration [and ruling party]” 15 , signed his name to an open letter drafted by his cabinet addressed to the Vice-

Chancellor. Designed as a response to the speech the VC delivered at the previous day’s graduation ceremony, the letter, implicitly referencing the language and themes of mwongozo, took Msekwa to task. Arguing that since the inception of UDSM, the university has been characterized by “general mismanagement” guided by Msekwa’s poor leadership, the letter directed personal attacks at the VC, arguing that Msekwa’s “hastiness reflective of [his] questionable ability results in this university’s inertia, apathy and hopelessness.” Implicitly referencing mwongozo, the open letter portrays Msekwa as an unreliable and dishonest leader, susceptible to making private promises to students that are then publicly disavowed or ignored.

For example, in announcing the by-laws without consulting with students, the letter accused

Msekwa of committing “an abnegation of the responsibility the nation has entrusted to you as a leader of this university and a clear example of your chronic fear of debate with the students.”

Asserting that the “university is like a floating ship without competent leadership to direct it”, the letter concluded by asking for Msekwa’s resignation, stating that “[b]y attempting to blow

[his] trumpet about [his] achievements on [sic] the [H]ill [Msekwa] ha[d] sounded his own death knell” (Akivaga “Open Letter to Vice-Chancellor”, 8 July 1971, 2, JSP C-7-2: 3)

The university administration’s response to Akivaga’s public act of insubordination was unusually harsh. The following day the DUSO president was charged with publishing “libellous statements against the Vice-Chancellor” which attempted to “undermine” student discipline and create “discord and disharmony” (Bourbonniere 2007: 122). The letter asked Akivaga to meet with the university the following morning, where he was given an additional letter that informed

15 Interview Max Mmuya, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 30th, 2014

211 him that he had been found guilty and would be rusticated the next day. On the following day,

Saul, an eye-witness, recalls: “Akivaga…my student, being dragged down the stairs…by [Field

Force Unit] soldiers with guns…[who] literally…toss[ed] him into the back of a military vehicle like a sack of potatoes and dr[o]ve away…and the next thing we kn[e]w he was being sent back to Kenya”.16

In the aftermath of Akivaga’s rustication and deportation, students and staff were shocked by the government’s brutal use of coercive action against the DUSO President. In protest against, what the DUSO Cabinet referred to as, the “uncalled for inhuman and brutal act” perpetrated against Akivaga at the behest of the university administration, students organized a boycott of classes, which was to persist: “unless and until Mr. Akivaga is brought back from his illegal detention” (F.S. Swai to Pius Msekwa, 9 July 1971, 1, JSP C-7.2). In addition, the DUSO Cabinet called on Msekwa to resign.

Three days later, the University Council upheld the rustication order taken out against

Akivaga (Amon J. Nsekela, “Council Resolutions, 12 July 1971,” memorandum, 12 July 1971, 1,

JSP C-7.2). In response, students, in order to get a direct audience with Nyerere, decided to end their class boycott. During their meeting with the Chancellor, Nyerere “expressed his gratitude

[to students] that classes had resumed, [but] he [also] upheld the rustication [order]” (quoted in Bourbonniere 2007: 124), arguing that Akivaga’s “bad language [as a leader]…was the fundamental point in the crisis” (I.M. Dewji and E. A. Moshi, memorandum, 14 July 1971, 1, JSP

C-7.2). In this way, Nyerere was implying that it was Akivaga and not Msekwa who had violated the tenets of mwongozo (Bourbonniere 2007: 124).

Undeterred by students’ anger and mobilization, a month after Nyerere’s meeting with the student leadership, the UDSM appeals committee shocked students and staff once again, when

16 Interview, John Saul, September 19th, 2017, Toronto, Canada

212 they decided to impose a harsher sanction against Akivaga, upgrading his rustication to an expulsion. In response, the DUSO leadership tendered their resignations of the entire student cabinet, and student representatives also resigned from all positions on the council, senate and faculty boards. In addition, the editors of the student paper, The University Echo, also resigned in protest (Oanda 2016: 69; Bourbonniere 2007: 125).

While some students at the time of the Akivaga Crisis optimistically believed that “the upheaval [caused by the Akivaga Crisis] and its aftermath constitute[d] a profound landmark in the development of revolutionary consciousness amongst the University community” (Hirji

1971a: 8), which had succeeded in “br[ea]k[ing] th[e] barrier” between students and the workers, and opening “new vistas” for student activism at UDSM, the concrete outcomes produced by these protests did not bear out such an enthusiastic interpretation of the events. In reality, in the aftermath of the crisis, Msekwa did not resign as Vice-Chancellor, Akivaga was not immediately reinstated to UDSM, and, as a result of DUSO’s mass resignations, “students ceased to be represented in any of the university committees” (Oanda 2016: 69; Bourbonniere 2007: 136).

While eventually, the following February, Akivaga was given official permission to return to the university after sending a formal apology to Msekwa, the Akivaga crisis, as Bourbonniere notes, provides crucial evidence of “a gap between Nyerere’s political theory”, which stressed democratic participation and the development of socialist citizens, “and [his] practice”, which, especially beginning in the early-1970s, used authoritarian means to marginalize those elements of popular forces that attempted to assert their independence or critique aspects of his regime. As one student noted at the time of the Akivaga Crisis, students, who had “shouted in the name of

‘Mwongozo’” were met by a “bureaucracy [who] had responded with guns and more directives”

(Hirji 1971a: 8). In this way, the Akivaga incident demonstrated the government’s unwillingness to allow the tenets of mwongozo to flourish in practice at the university. Nothing signifies this

213 better than the fact that in the end, Akivaga’s primary crime remained that he had “invoke[d] the

Mwongozo directive, with its official encouragement of the exercise of power from below, in criticism of the university’s hierarchy” (Saul 2012).17

The Musoma Resolution and the changing dynamics of the UDSM student body

Far from ushering in a new era of radical political action and collaboration among students, workers and university staff members, as some students had hopefully predicted (Hirji 1971a,

1971b), the Akivaga Crisis was followed by years, between 1972 and 1976, of “comparative peace” at UDSM (Coulson 2013; Maina Peter and Mvungu 2014). While vibrant debates continued to be a feature of campus life during these years, the university administration made concerted efforts to tighten their grip over UDSM and eliminate or marginalize radical, discordant elements. For example, beginning in 1972, the administration used the Akivaga Crisis as “a pretence” to refuse to renew the contracts of key Marxist faculty members, including Saul, Rodney, and Lionel Cliffe,

“who were thought to have at least contributed to the unwelcome shift in student politics”

(Bourbonniere 2007: 111).18 Not surprisingly, in the aftermath of the Akivaga Crisis, political activity among the student left greatly decreased.

During this period, however, student radicalism became a common feature in Tanzanian secondary schools. From 1972 until 1975, secondary school students in Mkwara, Mzumbe, Pugu and Kilakala, inspired by the rhetoric of mwongozo, began to protest against deteriorating material

17 There is certainly debate over the role Nyerere played in the decision to rusticate and deport Akivaga. Msekwa claims that Nyerere instructed him to remove Akivaga and told him “don’t let [Akivaga] come back” (Interview, Pius Msekwa, Dar es Salaam, November 1st, 2014). While Kingunge Ngombale-Mwiru, a former head of the National Service and TYL leader, rejects Msekwa’s characterization, arguing that Akivaga’s expulsion was not authorized by Nyerere, to the contrary, he was, according to Ngombale-Mwiru, “furious” about how the Akivaga situation had been handled by the university administration. In Ngombale-Mwiru’s view, the incident represents a “very unhappy situation in the history of the university” (Interview, Kingunge Ngombale-Mwiru, October 23rd, 2014, Dar es Salaam). 18 Interview, John S. Saul, Toronto, Canada, September 19th, 2017

214 conditions and maladministration within their schools (Maina Peter and Mvungu 2014: 237). The problem of student riots was so severe that, by the end of 1974, the country’s Minister of

Education, Israel Elinawinga announced that teachers thought to be assisting students during the unrest ran the risk of being terminated and that secondary school students involved in such protest activity could be denied entry into the university on account of their subversive actions

(ibid.)

With these concerns squarely in mind, the TANU government decided to make dramatic reforms to the educational system. At a meeting of TANU’s National Executive Committee

(NEC), in January of 1975, the Musoma Resolution, which proved to be a “radical departure” for

UDSM, was introduced (Mkude et al 2003: 3). The Resolution mandated that secondary school students, who had been the source of so much unrest, would now be forced to undergo one full year of National Service and then be required to work for a period of two years prior to their entry into the university. In addition, these students would be obligated to obtain personal recommendations from their local TANU party branch, past employers and their former schoolmasters. While the official justifications for such reforms centered on the TANU government’s desire to merge theory and practice in education, enable prospective university students to acquire skills and workplace experience prior to receiving their university education, and give mature students an opportunity to receive higher education that they may have previously missed out on, there is no doubt that the prime motivation for such changes was

“calculated to forestall student radicalism in post-secondary education” (ibid, 239), as such measures, enabled the state to better obstruct prospective students with a history of political activism from being admitted to UDSM. In practice, while it is true that the Resolution produced

215 a host of unintended consequences,19 it certainly had, as we shall see, a major impact on student activism.

In 1977, Tanzania saw the merger of TANU and Zanzibar’s Afro-Shirazi Party into a single-party known as chama cha mapinduzi, or ‘Party of the Revolution’ (CCM), which declared party supremacy throughout the country. The introduction of changes to admission requirements meant that students accepted to UDSM were now, de facto, required to demonstrate their loyalty to the ruling party, as this was the only way in which they would be able to acquire the necessary documentation from their local party branches in order to qualify for university entry. As one student from this period recalls, after the Musoma Resolution:

[CCM] membership was kind of mandatory, because even to get admission to higher learning institutions, one of the things that one had to fill in was the party membership…Everyone had to be in, whether you liked it or not. By being a member, it’s not that people liked [the party]. Myself, I didn’t like the party, but I only had members[hip], because I had to…if I had an option, I wouldn’t have been a member of CCM.20

Second, with the introduction of a great many mature students through the Musoma

Resolution, the age composition of the student body radically changed and this also had profound implications for student activism. Former UDSM Professor, Andrew Coulson, recalls that the

Musoma Resolution “opened [UDSM] to much older students” who were not always “so well qualified…but…were incredibly grateful to be able to come to the university”.21 This shift in the

19 Maina Peter and Mvungu (2014: 239): “The whole scheme was misconceived…the women’s association UWT [Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanzania] started struggling for exemption of girls from the Musoma resolution due to their special maternal duties…there was not enough candidates eligible to enroll in scientific fields…so the government had to exempt those students eligible to enroll in those fields from the Musoma Resolution. Finally no jobs were available according to specialisations which students would pursue in the University. As a result the two year work period became an expensive waste of time since it delayed skilled manpower for almost three years running, while ineligible mature entrants recorded mass failure in most institutions of higher learning.” 20 Interview, UDSM Student X, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 5th, 2014 21 Interview, Andrew Coulson, via email, September 28th, 2015

216 kind of students admitted to UDSM had implications for student politics, as ‘grateful’, older students were far less likely to become involved in disruptive political activities while at the Hill.

Shivji concedes that “with the Musoma Resolution, the student body had changed…adults [we]re brought in now…[who] had a stake in the system. They wanted to finish their degree and go back [to their life outside the university]…such [students] wouldn’t join student debates and activities, which would threaten their degrees.”22

Former DUSO President, Daudi Mukangara goes a step further: arguing that the introduction of these mature students created new divisions within the student body at UDSM.

In his view, students who came to UDSM through “the adult scheme…from offices…[with] wives and children” often “work[ed] closely with the state” and complained that DUSO “ignored their needs”, in favour of the younger students.23 As Mukangara recalls, some mature students were viewed suspiciously by their younger colleagues, because they were seen as being “part of the system” and therefore unlikely to participate in protests”.24 So, during a time in which the

Kenyan state was rapidly expanding admissions to keep up with Kenya’s unprecedented population growth, the Tanzanian state was becoming far more discerning in the kinds of students that were allowed admission to UDSM.

This also coincided with another new development. Namely, following the Akivaga Crisis, the TYL began to wield a much stronger influence on campus and the politics of this organization became increasingly “commandist”, with leadership making more concerted efforts to impose “the party line”25 on the student body at UDSM. This period also saw the creation of “an almost direct conduit from the university to TANU headquarters” as the TYL, in particular, came to be “catch

22 Interview, Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 12th, 2014 23 Interview, Daudi Mukangara, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 11th, 2014 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid.

217 material for future leaders of the party.” In such a context, students, like future Tanzanian

President Jakaya Kikwete, moved “almost seamlessly from [a TYL leadership position at] the university to the party [headquarters]”, while those students who were “too argumentative” were

“sidelined”.26 As Ulimwengu recalls:

I know people who are passed now, who would not have died if they had felt more comfortable in the party, who at some stage felt things were not going well… Eventually, they went and drank themselves to death or just disappeared into the undergrowth.27

By the mid-1970s, the party had achieved near total supremacy of the running and management of UDSM, but profound shifts in the economy were about to jeopardize its dominance.

Economic downturn, structural adjustment and the crisis of state legitimacy in Tanzania, 1975-1990

In the latter half of the 1970s, African states’ descended into deep fiscal crisis. During this time, GDP per capita growth rates in sub-Saharan Africa fell on average to less than 1% annually

(Eyoh and Sandbrook 2003: 237). For much of the following decade of the 1980s, average growth rates in Sub-Saharan Africa would continue to drop, averaging of -2.8% between 1980 and 1987

(Young 2004: 38).28 The causes of this crisis were hotly contested, with some scholars placing an emphasis on external factors, while others suggested that the economic downturn should be attributed to internal politics (Mkwandawire and Soludo 1999: 22). With hindsight, it is clear that the crisis had been precipitated by a complex combination of both sets of variables.

Externally, African economies were forced to cope with the combined effects of a number of negative developments, including: raising energy prices on account of two oil shocks in 1973 and 1979; a devastating global recession in the late 1970s which lowered demand for primary

26 Interview, Jenerali Ulimwengu, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 21st, 2014 27 Ibid. 28 Africa’s percentage of developing countries’ exports fell between 1975 and 1990 in both manufacturing, machines and equipment exports (from 8% to 1%) and in agricultural and food exports (from 21% to 7.8%) (Eyoh and Sandbrook 2003: 237).

218 commodities in the Global North, including African exports; raising interests rates, particularly after 1979, which made debt repayment among African states increasingly difficult; and severe droughts in 1973 and 1980, which further hurt African countries’ already spiralling agricultural sectors (Eyoh and Sandbrook 2003: 237; Mkandawire and Soludo 1999: 23; Ndulu and O’Connell

1999: 41-44; Bates 2008: 25, 99; Nugent 2012: 328-329; Harvey 2005).

Internally, critics of African political regimes, like World Bank economist, Elliot Berg, placed responsibility for Africa’s mounting economic woes squarely on the shoulders of the continent’s political elite (Harrison 2010: 18; Nugent 2012: 328-329). While placing primary explanatory emphasis on elite economic mismanagement is debatable, there is no denying that

African states’ attempts at import-substitution industrialization had implemented trade and exchange-rate policies that had protected inefficient, infant industry, created corrupt and uncompetitive parastatal sectors that were a drain on government finances, and pursued pricing and tax policies which penalized African peasants and undermined these countries’ prime money- maker, their agricultural sectors (Bates 1981; Eyoh and Sandbrook 2003: 237; Young 2004: 38-

40; Nugent 2012: 329-330). Moreover, the crisis was also deeply connected to the bloated, corrupt, and inefficient character of African postcolonial states, which had become captured by societal forces (Mkandawire and Soludo 1999: 25; Eyoh and Sandbrook 2003: 237-238), and, thus, were often guilty of making economic decisions based on a rationale of political expedience (Bates

1981).

Regardless of what sets of factors one places more emphasis upon in explaining these outcomes, near the end of the 1970s, what was beyond dispute was both that the systematic crisis of African states and economies was remarkably widespread, cutting across geographical and ideological lines (Eyoh and Sandbrook 2003: 237-238; Nugent 2012: 328), and that “economic crisis and political crisis [were] reinforce[ing] each other” (Eyoh and Sandbrook 2003: 237). By

219 the early 1980s, many African states, close to defaulting on their ballooning external debts, were forced to turn to the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) for much-needed bailout loans.

The introduction of these IFI-mandated, structural adjustment programs (SAPs), which were attached to dramatic and non-negotiable neoliberal reform packages, weakened African states’ administrative capacity and popular legitimacy, producing periods of profound social change, which in many cases, led to outright political disorder (Mbembe 2001; Bates 2008; Szeftel 2000).

It is important to note that, though the crisis was virtually omnipresent across African states, how states responded to this critical conjuncture in African politics varied across cases.

Tanzania was in no way spared from the onslaught of economic crisis and neoliberal structuring. By the late-1970s, almost a decade on from the Arusha Declaration, the Tanzanian economy was entering a period of freefell. While Tanzanian socialism had achieved impressive gains in levelling social inequalities,29 and while the TANU government had delivered major improvements in the provision of basic education and health services particularly to previously neglected rural areas, the state had failed to meet many of its other economic objectives.30

In spite of, for example, the Arusha Declaration’s emphasis on the need to overcome economic dependence by increasing export production, by the late-1970s, Tanzania was even more deeply dependent on foreign development assistance (Lofchie 2014: 32), becoming the decade’s largest sub-Saharan African recipient of foreign aid (Nugent 2012: 334). Much of this can be explained by the fact that the government had, largely on account of their overvalued currency, taken on deepening trade deficits, with imports tripling from 1967 to 1976 and exports

29 As the ratio of the highest salary to minimum wage decreased from 50:1 in 1961 to 9:1 in 1976 (Nugent 2012: 148) 30 This was most clearly revealed in the country’s real GDP growth figures, which dropped from an average of 5.2% from 1967 to 1973 to just 2.1% between 1974 and 1978 (Nugent 2012: 151). In addition, between 1967 and 1976, government expenditure as a proportion of GDP increased from 16% to 40% (Bjerk 2017: 105; Coulson 2013: 228). Inflation also rose rapidly from 2.1% between 1961 and 1971, to 22.5% between 1971 and 1977 (Coulson 2013: 228).

220 only growing by half (ibid: 148).31 Part of this decline in exports was also related to the fact that

Nyerere’s experiment with collective farming in the form of ujamaa vijini, which had begun to use coercion in the early 1970s to force Tanzanians to live in state-created villages (Scott 1998), had actually contributed to major declines in agricultural production. So while spikes in oil prices as a result of the OPEC crisis and the severe droughts in 1973/74 had not helped the Tanzanian economy, the depths of its problems were also closely related to the TANU government’s policy decisions.

In Tanzania, as in many other countries on the continent, it did not take long for these economic troubles to start to precipitate a “crisis of ideological hegemony” (Campbell and Stein

1992: 48). By the late-1970s, popular pressures on the regime began to intensify. Much of this popular discontent centered on the “mushrooming racketeering, embezzlement, and accumulation” which was being undertaken by members of the state bureaucracy (ibid: 48).

Largely on account of rapid hikes in inflation, in conjunction with the repeated calls for austerity, civil servants and party officials now resorted to “smuggling and backroom deals that flourished in a dysfunctional and overregulated state economy” (Bjerk 2017: 107) as a reliable means of enriching themselves.32 In short, illicit activity on the part of the political elite, during a period of growing shortages and rationing for the majority of ordinary Tanzanian citizens (Raikes and

Gibbon 1996; Tripp 1997), had begun to make “a mockery of the Arusha Declaration”, and this became a major source of public anger by the end of the 1970s (Aminzade 2013: 238).

During these years, perhaps in response to the growing challenges it faced, the TANU government became less and less willing to tolerate dissent at UDSM. In 1977, for example, the

31 As a result, Tanzanian exports, which had covered the country’s total import payments in 1967, only met approximately 63% of those same costs by 1976 (ibid). 32 According to a Parliamentary Inquiry, government and parastatal losses on account of corruption rose from 10 million shillings in 1975 to 70 million in 1977 (ibid).

221 CCM government took steps to consolidate their power over the campus, appointing a former

Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ibrahim Kaduma, as the university’s new Vice-Chancellor, replacing the outgoing Msekwa. Kaduma “was [more] authoritarian in [his] approach [than Msekwa]” and he “disliked the free-ranging debates about government and party policy which were a feature both of teaching and of public meetings on the campus” (Coulson 2013: 274). Within his first year,

Kaduma twice expelled dissident groups of students in October and November of 1977 and removed 5 left-leaning faculty members, including Arnold Temu, the popular Dean of Arts and

Sciences, who were cryptically said to be “retired in the public interest” (ibid: 274-275).

UDSM students for their part were not insulated from growing levels of popular discontent over the country’s political direction and economic fortunes. When, for example, the

Daily News announced on February 27th, 1978, that MPs had agreed, at a party meeting in Pemba in Zanzibar, to increase their benefits and salaries by 40%, the students’ sprung into action, inspired by public outrage to this decision. After trying and failing to set up a meeting with

Nyerere through Kaduma to discuss these developments, university students organized a protest, which, like its 1966 predecessor, moved from the campus of UDSM to the city centre, where they intended to read a memorandum expressing their grievances at the offices of Tanzania’s English daily newspaper, the Daily News (Ngonyani 2000: 24; Oanda 2016: 70). On this march, however, students travelled through working class areas of Manzese and Magomeni distributing their memorandum, which explained in Swahili their reasons for protesting.33 As they marched, workers, passers-by and the unemployed joined the demonstration, which was eventually

“brutally intercepted by the paramilitary riot police, Field Force Unit, who beat and dispersed

[the protesters]” (Ngonyani 2000: 23). Following the violent intervention of police during this

33 Interviews, Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 12th, 2014; Dedura Kinuthi, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 27th, 2014

222 march, students regrouped and eventually read their memorandum, as planned, at the offices the

Daily News.

In the memorandum, students refrained from the kinds of inflammatory, confrontational statements that had marked their ultimatum to the government during the 1966 National Service

Crisis and Akivaga’s open letter to Msekwa in July of 1971. Instead, the document quoted liberally from mwongozo and CCM’s newly written party constitution. Reminding CCM leaders that the struggle for “complete liberation” from “exploitation, colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism” had not ended, the students highlighted important distinctions between the CCM’s government’s “constitutions, guidelines, resolutions, and declarations…and the actions of the party.” Within the broader context of economic decline, where “standards of living of peasants and workers of lower categories is very low” and “20% of workers have been made redundant”, and in “the grip of the calamity of cholera which is spreading like wildfire”, the students’ memorandum emphasized that “our leaders, our MPs, whom we have elected so that they could safeguard the interests of the workers and peasants, have sat in Pemba and agreed to increase their salaries and fringe benefits.” In light of the government’s decision, the memo raised the following questions:

Do the actions described above really agree with the objectives of safeguarding the interests of the workers and peasants as stated in Section 7 of the Party Constitution? Does the way the nation's resources are spent as has been shown - on fat salaries and fringe benefits for leaders of CCM- emphasize the people's development, especially in efforts to eliminate poverty, ignorance and disease, as stipulated in Section 14 of the Party Constitution? (“Briefings: Tanzanian Students…”, 1978: 104)

Following the reading of the memorandum, students were rounded up by the FFU, some being told that they were being taken to see the President, as protesting students had been in 1966.34

34 Interview, Demere Kitunga, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 27th, 2014

223 Instead, the group of protesting students, which included one of Nyerere’s sons35 (Bjerk 2017:

107), were taken to the police station and arrested, like “criminals”.36 In the aftermath of the

FFU’s violent crackdown on protesting students, 367 of the protestors from UDSM, the Institute of Water Resources Development and Ardhi Institute were expelled and sent to their home communities for, according to the government, “staging an illegal demonstration” without the necessary permit (Daily News, March 6th, 1978: 1; Bjerk 2017: 107; Maina Peters and Mvungu

2014: 243; Shivji 2006: 7; Ngonyani 2000). The following day, the government-owned Daily

News refused to publish the students’ memorandum and a government statement explaining the cause of the protests, suggested inaccurately that students were, at least in part, protesting

“against the Government programme of sending experts into the rural areas (Daily News, March

6th, 1978: 1; Ngonyani 2000: 24).

As other scholars have noted, it is instructive to compare the March 1978 protest with its

1966 predecessor (Bjerk 2017; Shivji 2006; Maina Peter and Mvumu 2014; Coulson 2013: 271).

While both involved students, who marched from campus to the city center, that were eventually expelled and forced to return to their home communities, in other respects, the differences between the two could not be starker. Primary among these, as Paul Bjerk (2017: 107-108) notes,

“[i]n the 1966 protest students betrayed a sense of privilege and unwillingness to adhere to socialist values; in 1978 it was just the opposite”, as students were mobilizing in order to demonstrate to the party, the ways in which their leaders’ actions were betraying the values of

Tanzanian socialism. Moreover, students’ decision to march through working class neighbourhoods and distribute leaflets in Swahili demonstrated a genuine desire to foster solidarity and create linkages with sections of the society beyond the purview of the university.

35 Interviews, Demere Kitunga, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 27th, 2014; Chris Maina Peter, Dar es Salaam, November 10th, 2014 36 Interview, Demere Kitunga, October 27th, 2014, Dar es Salaam

224 The warm reception that the students received along the route during their protest march in these areas was no doubt one of the reasons that the protest was met so quickly by police and with such force.37 Moreover, the fact that students yet again decided to articulate their protest grievances using the language of mwongozo and the ruling party’s constitution is yet more evidence that they continued to aspire to adhere to the ideology of Nyerere’s brand of socialism; their protest was against its perceived betrayal on the part of ruling elites, not the tenets of the ideology itself.

Finally, while the Tanzanian state’s reaction to the protest was similar in some respects to the 1966 National Service demonstrations, what one student referred to as the strategy of

“rusticate first and negotiate later”38, it also differed in important ways. First, all but 21 of the

367 students, with the exception of those believed to have organized the protest and those who gave false names to the police when arrested, were pardoned and reinstated to UDSM relatively quickly, by July of 1978 (“University Students Pardoned” Daily News, May 30th, 1978, pg 1).

These expulsions were brief in comparison to the year that the 1966 students were kept out of

UCD.

Second, and more importantly, the moral righteousness that Nyerere had deployed in justifying students’ expulsions and in mobilizing popular support against the students in October

1966 was absent in 1978. In July of that year, Nyerere met UDSM students for a question-and- answer period. When queried about the decision to raise the salaries of MPs, Nyerere conceded that such a reform was “wrong” and that it went “against his philosophy” (Peter and Mvungi

2014: 243).39 Moreover, he “commended students for what [they] had done…saying he was

37 Interview, Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, November 12th, 2014 38 Interview, Demere Kitunga, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 27th, 2014 39 Interviews, Demere Kitunga, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 27th, 2014; Chris Maina Peter, Dar es Salaam, November 10th, 2014

225 looking for more citizens [like them]”.40 Indeed, at one point, when a student accused Nyerere of presiding over a police state, he answered cryptically “you want your freedom on a silver platter. No state will give you that. Freedom must be fought for” (Maina Peter and Mvungu

2014: 243). A number of student accounts of this encounter suggest that Nyerere’s appearance at the question and answer period was a success with students, who appreciated his candour and directness in answering their questions and responding to their criticisms. Nyerere was “cheered” on his departure following the meeting.41

Significantly, in spite of his acknowledgement that the state had erred in their response to students’ protests in March of 1978, there was one issue upon which Nyerere would not budge: he refused to lift the ban, introduced after the protests, on DUSO. To the contrary, the protests in 1978 were again used as a justification for the party to further institutionalize their control over campus. At a party conference in Iringa later that year, CCM announced the introduction of MUWATA, Tanzania’s Student Union. MUWATA was conceived as a national student organization, which was to “oversee all student governments in college and universities”, placing them under the direct control and supervision of the CCM Youth League (VIJANA) (Oanda 2016:

70; Ngonyani 2000: 24; Peter and Mvungu 2014: 243; Kangero 1984). With the introduction of

MUWATA, VIJANA was made part of the governing structure of UDSM, therefore, eliminating all remaining organizational autonomy for UDSM student politics. From its inception, therefore,

MUWATA, whose constitution was developed and implemented without consultation with students, was foisted upon the student community by an intransigent state facing mounting economic and political crisis (Mvungu and Peter 2014: 243). As we shall see, the organization would effectively dominate student politics over the next decade, restricting UDSM students’

40 Interview, Demere Kitunga, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 27th, 2014 41 Interview, Demere Kitunga, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 27th, 2014

226 ability to mount any autonomous political actions. It was the powerful presence of MUWATA, which, more than anything else, insulated the CCM government from the growing ire and dissatisfaction of UDSM students in the 1980s.

The lost decade: student activism at UDSM in the 1980s

At the outset of the 1980s, the Tanzanian economy had reached a new low, with the country’s GDP growth rate dropping to just 0.6% between 1982 and 1984. Tanzania’s war with

Amin’s Uganda in 1978, which ended up costing 500 million US dollars had “dealt [the economy] a death blow” (Bjerk 2017: 118; Nugent 2012: 342). With Tanzanian society having a scarcity of consumer goods, the informal sector rapidly expanded and criminality grew even worse with the demobilization of soldiers following the war (ibid; Tripp 1997). By 1985, four years after opening negotiations with the World Bank, “the government was essentially bankrupt and had little or no choice but to accede [to neoliberal reform]” (Holten 2005: 550). In 1986, a year after Nyerere’s resignation as President, his successor, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, made the country’s first deal with the

International Monetary Fund (IMF) on a three Economic Reconstruction Program (ERP), which was followed by a three-year Enhanced Structural Adjustment Program (Nugent 2012: 343).

With that, Tanzania’s neoliberal era had commenced.

As noted, at UDSM, the dire state of the Tanzanian economy permeated the mood of the university. As Shivji recalls with the growing economic crisis and the imposition of neoliberal educational reforms, UDSM became a “university of a different kind”.42 At the level of student welfare, these changes were reflected in the drastic deterioration of the material living conditions of students on campus. As one UDSM student recalls, by the mid-1980s, the standard of living at the university was “terrible”, with students experiencing crowded accommodations and lecture halls, a “critical shortage of water”, a lack of books and much needed school supplies, and relatively

42 Interview, Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 12th, 2014

227 expensive, poor quality food.43 Moreover, the robust academic freedom of the late-1960s and early-1970s had also taken a hit, now reined in by the state. This was witnessed by the fact that debates, which had previously been held on campus, were now hosted more and more at upscale hotels in the city center.44 Within those debates, students and radical intellectuals became marginalized.

As noted, economic crisis began to “undercut the material basis on which the hegemony of ujamaa was predicated” (Campbell and Stein 1992: 50). UDSM became one of the first spaces where the weakening of CCM’s ideological hegemony was most evident. This shift was clearly reflected in the changing ideological orientation of the university faculty, most prominently in the Department of Economics and the Economics Research Bureau (ERB), where a number of professors began to participate in the World Bank-sponsored Tanzania Advisory Group (TAG).

This group of faculty began to articulate previously heretical neoliberal ideas and to “organize a series of seminars, targeting policy makers, politicians and a few business leaders,” which advocated for economic reform and “prove[d to be] ‘very influential’” (Holten 2006: 560).45 As pro-reformers within the government became more powerful, proponents of neoliberalism in the

Department of Economics were sought after by the new regime of Hassan Mwinyi.46

In spite of these significant changes, UDSM’s student body, which were increasingly dissatisfied with the ruling party and the political direction of the country, did not come to act as vocal proponents of anti-regime sentiment or crucial drivers for political change during the 1980s,

43 Interview, Mohammad Bakari, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 2nd 2014; Interview, James Mbatia, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 1st 2014 44 Interview, Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 12th, 2014 45 Interviews, Justinian Galabawa, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 30th, 2014; Humphrey Moshi, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 3rd, 2014 46 In fact, one such advocate of neoliberalism, UDSM Economics Professor, Ibrahim Lipumba, was even made a high-profile Economic Advisor for the new President (Interview, Humphrey Moshi, November 3rd, 2014, Dar es Salaam).

228 as their Kenyan counterparts were proving to be. Instead, they remained marginalized from

Tanzania’s national political stage. While CCM “no longer had deep roots at the university”47 among the student body, UDSM students did not, at any point, engage in explicit protests against the government of CCM. Moreover, over time, while some students began “to shift toward…neoliberal thinking”48, the undermining of ujamaa’s ideological hegemony manifested itself more commonly in a student body that “lack[ed]…[political] direction” of any kind.49 As a result, most UDSM students became primarily preoccupied just with “finishing school and join[ing] the status quo” (ibid).

Much of the students’ inability to provide a sustained critique of CCM related to the

“pervasive presence” and power of the ruling party on campus.50 As Maina Peter recalls “the government and the party had total control of the university [by this point]…they made sure that the party had the presence with the Vice-Chancellor, with a strong party office [on campus], the administrator of the university was equal to a permanent secretary…so they knew this was a ground where new thinking came from and therefore they wanted to control whatever came from the university.”51

MUWATA’s arrival at UDSM only further solidified the party’s stultifying grip over campus politics, as “[n]ominations for leadership positions [within student organizations] were

[now] conducted by [VIJANA] which vetted all candidates aspiring for positions in the student body, throwing out those who did not show strong allegiance to the party” (Ngonyani 2000: 42;

Oanda 2016: 70). As a result of this tight control over student politics, the leadership of

MUWATA was accused of being government spies and derided as ‘hogs’ (an Animal Farm

47 Interview, Anthony Komu, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 13th, 2014 48 Interview, Mwesiga Baregu, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 7th, 2014 49 Interview, Chris Maina Peters, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 10th, 2014, Dar es Salaam 50 Interview, Mwesiga Baregu, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 7th, 2014 51 Interview, Chris Maina Peter, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 10th, 2014

229 reference) (Mvumu and Peters 2014: 243).52 Under such conditions, while more UDSM students were straying from supporting the ruling party, “to express [anti-CCM sentiment]” could still

“not [be] done openly” on campus, as students knew that “either you stay quiet…abide by what the party wanted…or you faced the consequences [for dissent]”, which students understood, after

“the high costs…their predecessors had paid [for protest in 1978]”, would be severe.53 As a result, as Shivji notes, instead of protesting against CCM rule directly, with “no organizational autonomy…student struggles…bec[a]me much more confined, because now [students] [we]re struggling against MUWATA…internally for an independent organization”.54

While MUWATA was proving effective at containing student dissent against CCM, in their duties in actually responding to some of the serious challenges that students were confronting in the face of economic crisis and neoliberal reform of the university, the organization proved to be “incapable” of adequately addressing issues of “resources and representation”

(Nyongani 2000: 42). In response to both the political strength of MUWATA and their failings in adequately addressing student welfare concerns, the energies of the student body during the

1980s tended to forgo criticisms of the regime, instead, students devoted themselves to trying to

“secure more autonomy from the [ruling] party”55 and this desire came to fuel students’ calls for, by the end of the decade, a new independent student organization.56 Just as importantly, students also began to mobilize “around [issues of] well-being and student welfare, like [improving] the quality of food, the availability of water and other facilities”.57 For example, in August of 1988,

52 Interview, Demere Kitunga, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 27th, 2014 53Interview, UDSM Student X, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 5th, 2014 54 Interview, Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 12th, 2014 55 Interview, Mohammaed Bakari, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 2nd, 2014 56 Interview, James Mbatia, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 1st, 2014; Anthony Komu, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 13th, 2014; John Nyambabe, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania November 11th, 2014 57 Interview, Mohammed Bakari, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 11th, 2014

230 students attempted to overthrow the MUWATA government and “set up an interim government in order to fight for lower food prices in the cafeteria commensurate with their meal allowances”

(Ngonyani 2000: 42). While the MUWATA government remained, these efforts were eventually successful in lowering food prices. Similarly, in October of the same year, 423 students were expelled from the Ardhi Institute following a four-day boycott of classes over the university’s failure to meet their demands for promised book allowances (“Ardhi Institute expels 423 students”, Daily News, October 15th, 1988: 1).

By the late-1980s, even some of the student leadership of MUWATA began to go rogue from their CCM overseers, taking up issues of student welfare that most concerned their constituents. Indeed, in September of 1989, at a VIJANA General Council meeting, MUWATA’s

Chairman and Vice-Chairman, Ardolfe Mkenda and Ludovick Bazigiza, were summarily removed from the organization without consultation with UDSM students, after they were deemed to have disobeyed the wishes of the VIJANA leadership, following their efforts to lead student mobilizations for improved living conditions at UDSM (“Varsity Muwata petitions Vijana

Ruling” October 11th, 1989: 3). By the end of the 1980s, in spite of this increasing inner turmoil within MUWATA, both among the leadership and the rank-and-file, the possibility of removing the organization and replacing it with a more autonomous and democratic student organization was resisted by the CCM government, as such a reform was thought to risk “imping[ing] on the state’s control of politics and student activism at the university” (Ngonyani 2000: 42) at a critical time. Finally, in 1990, under mounting student pressure, MUWATA was abandoned and a new student organization, Dar es Salaam University Organization (DARUSO) was created.

Ultimately, the institutional reforms introduced by the Tanzanian state following the

1978 student protests, particularly the introduction of MUWATA, allowed the CCM government to maintain close control over the university campus and the student body during a critical

231 juncture in Tanzanian politics. Within the history of state-university student relations, these institutional reforms fit neatly into a broader state strategy of responding to student protests, not solely or primarily through violence or repression, but rather through the imposition of institutional measures designed to undermine students’ organizational autonomy. These efforts, more than any other variable, effectively worked in limiting space for student activism at UDSM during the 1980s and, thus, explain university students’ inability to mount a campus challenge against the increasingly unpopular CCM government during this period. Unlike in Kenya, which came to be dominated by anti-regime protest during these years, for the entirety of this critical decade, no equivalent protests took place in Tanzania against the national government and, as such, the university and its students cannot be said to have played as “direct role” in the political liberalization of Tanzania, as their counterparts in Kenya did.58

Conclusion

At the outset of independence, few postcolonial African leaders had loftier, more uniquely defined aspirations for their fledgling generation of educated elites than Julius Nyerere. Indeed, the shock of the 1966 October National Service protests inspired his regime to pursue far-reaching reforms to the country’s institution of higher learning, with the hope of producing a different kind of socialist university graduate. Yet, in spite of such purported ambitions and the TANU regime’s flirtations with educational reform, like their many of their African counterparts, the Tanzanian state prioritized political order and student obedience over any desires for socialist transformation. As Coulson notes, under such conditions, “UDSM could never be a socialist

58 Interview, Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 12th, 2014

232 institution”, as “those who argued for socialism would be tolerated only so long as they did not expose the weakness of the state” (Coulson 2013: 276).

Still, while Tanzania did share this imperative of order with many of their African counterparts, it is important to note that the institutional strategies they employed to achieve this outcome differed markedly from their Kenyan counterparts. Instead of relying on university closures, the detainment and imprisonment of student activists, the banning of student representative organizations and the repeated deployment of violent repression against student leaders, the TANU/CCM government pursued a strategy of cooptation, which aimed to limit the organizational capacity and autonomy of student associations and institutionalize the ruling party’s control over the university and its student body. Over the first three decades of independence, the postcolonial Tanzanian state was able to refine this strategy to such a degree that when it encountered political and economic crisis in the 1980s, university students were unable to organize a sustained challenge of the postcolonial state, in spite of their growing grievances.

233 CHAPTER 7

“A MONSTER ON HIS HANDS”: STUDENT ACTIVISM AND STATE REPRESSION IN MOI’S KENYA, 1978-1990

On March 8th, 1980, at the Kiambu Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), then

Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi made a speech, in which he addressed the issue of growing student unrest at the University of Nairobi. After accusing a group of university students of colluding with lecturers to disrupt the peace on campus, Moi warned that he was “prepared to lose a generation of such students” (The Weekly Review, March 14th, 1980: 12-13). Reflecting on the source of the students’ supposed subversive activities, a puzzled Moi queried: “Why don’t students at the University of Dar es Salaam [UDSM] resort to strikes? They don’t have eggs and a thousand chickens every day” (ibid). Moi’s inference here was clear: by 1980, as demonstrated in Chapter 6, the Tanzanian economy was already in free-fall and this economic downturn was reflected in the living conditions experienced by students at UDSM. As Moi’s reference to “eggs and a thousand chickens” suggests, students at UDSM were facing greater material deprivations than their Kenyan counterparts in their lives on campus by 1980, yet they were not resorting to similar levels of disobedience and protest, and Moi wanted to understand why.

Moi’s query, as we have documented over the last three chapters, accurately highlights a broader contrast that existed in patterns of student activism between the University of Nairobi and

UDSM in the post-colonial period. Indeed, over the course of the turbulent decade of the 1980s, the divergence that Moi identified would only become starker. While, as noted, at UDSM, in spite of mounting political and economic crisis, the campus was characterized by growing student apathy and disengagement from national politics throughout much of the 1980s, in Kenya, at the University of Nairobi, and its constituent Kenyatta College, a much different story unfolded. During this period,

234 student protests against the Kenyan state escalated to unprecedented heights: in August of 1982, students took to the streets to prematurely celebrate the coup against the Moi regime, which was ultimately aborted; in early 1985, a University of Nairobi student was killed by security forces during a clash between students and police at a prayer meeting organized by students on campus; only a month later, near the end of March, students set fire to their government-issued National Youth

Service uniforms at the main gate of Kenyatta College in defiance of a government order that these same uniforms be returned; finally, in November of 1987, students clashed with government security forces following the arrest of six leaders of their student union, after those leaders had publicly criticized the Moi regime, In the aftermath of these protests, the student union was banned, ethnic campus associations were promoted by the government, cost sharing measures were soon introduced by the state and the National Youth Service Pre-University Training program was disbanded. By late 1980s, no university in all of postcolonial Africa had been closed more on account of student unrest than the University of Nairobi (Balsvik 1998).

In this chapter, we seek to explain why levels of protest and anti-regime sentiment among students at the University of Nairobi, already politicized in the latter years of the Kenyatta regime, would reach their zenith during the critical decade of the 1980s. A common explanation for the intensification of student protest in both Kenya and Africa during this period often attributes it primarily to the material ‘crisis’ of the African university, produced by the “combined pressures of increasing population growth and economic stagnation” (Klopp and Orina 2002: 45), in conjunction with the subsequent imposition of structural adjustment programs (SAPs). In this chapter, I forward a different explanation: while there is no question that throughout the 1980s, the University of

Nairobi, like other African universities, came to be growingly characterized by expanding student populations and deteriorating material conditions, such economic and demographic explanations have trouble accounting for the patterns of student activism which unfolded at the University of

235 Nairobi during this period. Especially, when one considers that a similar combination of pressures failed to produce common outcomes at universities in Kenya’s southern neighbour, Tanzania. Such approaches tend to obscure, or fail to grasp, “the political nature” of these crises (Klopp and Orina

2002: 45).

In this chapter, I forward a political explanation for these developments, arguing that the radicalization of student activism in Kenya in the 1980s needs to understood in relation to key institutional reforms introduced by Moi regime, following his ascendance to power in 1978. The Moi regime’s subsequent attempts to reconfigure the basis of state power, in the face of intense economic and political challenges, involved trying to win the support of university students and this required institutionalizing party control over the university. Initial co-optative efforts to achieve this objective centered on formally establishing a KANU party branch on campus and informally trying to integrate student leadership into the Moi regime’s patronage network. These efforts, carried out from August 1978 until October of 1979, were ultimately unsuccessful, but opened up political space on campus, which students were able to take advantage of, beginning in the late-1970s, to foster solidarity and organizational linkages. As a result, they soon became one of the most important national groups espousing oppositional dissent in the country, particularly during a period in which the Moi regime was moving to de jure one-party rule.

Following the failure of Moi’s co-optative approach to the university and, particularly, after the failed coup attempt of August 1982, which students had by and large supported, the Moi regime increasingly used repressive tactics and imposed authoritarian institutional reforms in order to reassert control over the University of Nairobi. These heavy-handed reforms only served to further politicize the cleavage between university students and the state, contributing to the growing levels of student protest and state repression witnessed in the 1980s. In particular, in this chapter, we will focus on how one of these institutional reforms, the introduction of a new, mandatory National Youth

236 Service Pre-University Training program (NYSPUT) spectacularly backfired: instead of fostering obedient and loyal university students as the program intended to do, it served to further alienate these students from the ruling party, helping to politicize a significant portion of them, who, by the time they arrived on campus, confronted the Moi state with some of its most defiant political challenges of this period.

In this chapter, we will begin by situating the Moi regime’s changing relationship with the university in the broader context of political and economic crisis and its attempts at state reconfiguration. In the second section, we evaluate the Moi regime’s efforts at political co-optation of the university during their ‘political honeymoon’. In section three, we discuss how, following students’ rejection of a KANU branch on campus, the regime changed their strategy, increasingly presenting the university, particularly its faculty and students, as an existential threat to the regime, which helped to legitimize their move to a de jure single-party system. In section four, we examine the failed coup attempt of August 1982 and explain how this event was used to justify a host of authoritarian institutional reforms at the university designed to bring university students coercively back under the government’s control. In the final section of this essay, we evaluate the unintended consequences of one of these institutional reforms, the NYSPUT.

The dawn of nyayo: Moi and the political challenges of succession, 1978-1980

In August of 1978, Kenya’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta died at the age of 86. His long- term Vice-President, Daniel arap Moi, succeeded him. With Moi’s ascension to power, Kenya, like many of its African counterparts at this time (as discussed last chapter), were beginning to descend into an unprecedented economic and political crisis. Economically, Moi “inherited a slow- motion…crisis not of his making (Hornsby 2012: 356).” He came to power at a time when the availability of former settler land, central to Kenyatta’s system of distributional politics, was, for all intents and purposes, exhausted. In addition, the collapse of the East African Community in 1978,

237 in conjunction with the dramatic increase in oil prices in 1979,1 and the subsequent onset of a world recession (Branch 2011: 137; Hornsby and Throup 1998: 26-27; Throup 1987: 34), all combined to produce negative consequences for the domestic economy. By 1978, levels of unemployment increased by nearly 20%, external debt levels also rose and overall inflation reached 12.5% (Branch

2011: 137-138; Hornsby 2012: 333; Throup 1987). The situation was so dire that, by 1980, the country’s GDP growth rate had fallen from 8% in 1977 to just 3% (Hornsby 2012: 357) and public spending, by 1981, had come to exceed income by $570 million (Branch 2011: 138). With the steep decline in the international prices of Kenya’s main export commodities of tea and coffee during this period (Throup 1987: 60), the prospects for a quick economic recovery appeared to be grim.

The existence of these grave economic difficulties only further complicated the precarious political position that Moi found himself in. As a leader of a minority ethnic community, the Kalenjin, and a former leader of KADU, Moi, faced oppositional challenges from Kenya’s powerful Kiambu elite, and was decidedly unpopular in Central Province. While some of this group, which opposed him, viewed Moi as a political simpleton, who was out of his depth, others feared that his ascension to power, leading as he did a non-Kikuyu coalition that resented Kikuyu domination, could undermine the latter group’s continued control of the Kenyan economic and political arenas.

This Kiambu elite’s antipathy for Moi was made explicit in the last years of Kenyatta’s life, when Moi’s possible appointment to the position of President was actively opposed by a powerful section of this group (Bedasso 2015; Hornsby and Throup 1997: 26; Berman et al 2004: 8; Tamarkin

1978; Ndegwa 1997: 609). At the center of this anti-Moi lobby was Gikuyu, Embu, Meru Association

(GEMA). Established in 1973, GEMA emerged as an attempt by prominent Kikuyu capitalists to influence and control Kenya’s political process (Nyong’o 1989: 248; Bedasso 2015: 374). The number one issue of concern for GEMA was that of presidential succession. In 1976, this group created the

1 Expenditure on oil rose to 40% of imports

238 ‘Change the Constitution Movement’, which aimed to alter the constitutional stipulation that stated that the Vice-President, Moi, in this case, would automatically succeed the President of the Republic in the event of the latter’s death, for at least 90 days.

To implement these changes, however, this movement needed a majority in parliament.

In the end, they failed in this attempt, largely because, as Peter Anyang Nyong’o notes (ibid: 249), in “identifying their primary constituency so narrowly [along ethnic lines], they isolated themselves from the rest of the nation and could not expect much support from either the bourgeoisie as a whole or popular classes from other ethnic groups.” That said, had Moi not been able to secure and maintain the loyal support of key members of Kenyatta’s Kikuyu elite, including Attorney-General,

Charles Njonjo, and leading technocrat, Mwai Kibaki, a unified Kikuyu front in opposition to Moi may have upended his presidential ambitions (Bedasso 2015: 374; Throup 1987: 53).

So, while the Kiambu elite had not been able block Moi’s eventual march to State House, powerful sections of it continued to work to ensure that his presidency would be but “an interregnum before the real rulers of Kenya, the Kikuyu, reasserted themselves (Hornsby 2012: 331).” Even beyond this ‘sceptical’ majority of the Kikuyu community, among Moi’s supposed Kikuyu allies, like

Njonjo, there was a strong sense that Moi’s presidency had been made possible because of their support (ibid, 350). This precarious political position made the Moi regime vulnerable in its early years.

These challenges, from both within and outside his ruling coalition, were made more problematic by the fact that that the same Kiambu elite that opposed Moi continued to dominate

Kenya’s economic and political spheres, including private business, security forces, the civil service, and the agricultural sector of the economy. In confronting these forces, Moi was in a weakened position. He could not rely, as his predecessor had, on a solid network of co-ethnic businessmen, parastatal directors, and high-ranking civil servants to provide him with a powerful base of support.

239 In fact, the relatively “impoverished” nature of this new Kalenjin political elite meant that their

“economic fortunes” rested heavily on their ability to access state power and resources (Ajulu 2000:

151). As Ajulu (ibid: 151) notes, “[a]ny attempts [therefore] to democratize the post-colonial state would obviously threaten the new political class’ access to the state and the privileges that accrued from such control.” Moi, therefore, had to cope with the twin imperatives of strengthening his own base of support, while at the same time disempowering some of the most dominant sections of the

Kikuyu elite.

To address this issue, his government initiated a process of “gradual de-Kikuyuisation of the administration” (Hornsby 2012: 338). Over the latter half of 1978, Moi pursued a number of measures to undermine the economic and political power of the Kiambu elite: demoting Mbiyu

Koinange, a quintessential Kenyatta insider, from Home Minister to the minor ministry of Natural

Resources (Branch 2011: 139; Hornsby 2012: 332); using his anti-corruption campaign, to selectively target GEMA elites with major fines for financial irregularities; and even retiring several ambassadors with connections to the Kenyatta family, and then replacing them with non-Kikuyus.2

This was just the beginning of his regime’s purge of Kenyatta-era elites. In this regard, the 1979 General Election proved to be a watershed moment. Over the course of the electoral campaign, Moi diverged from the Kenyatta legacy, by campaigning for a slate of political allies nationwide and even directly intervening in approximately 20 separate contests (Hornsby 2012:

338). The nyayo elections, as they came to be known, witnessed the defeat of over 70 incumbents, including four ex-permanent secretaries, two ex-provincial commissioners, and several ex-district commissioners and ambassadors (ibid: 344). In Rift Valley alone, 23 incumbents were defeated, many of who had been closely associated with GEMA, and some, including Jean Marie Seroney, who were

2 Most notably, Moi removed the High Commissioner in London, Ng’ethe Njoroge, the brother of one of his fiercest political rivals, Karanja Njoroge, with a fellow Kalenjin, Shadrock Kimalel.

240 high-profiled Moi rivals. In short, Moi was able to eliminate some key rivals and, thus, to effectively use the elections to strengthen his own political base (Branch 2011: 140).

In subsequent years, Moi would work to remove Kikuyus from the civil service and his cabinet. By May of 1980, only one of Kenyatta’s Provincial Commissioners remained in his job (ibid:

141). Moreover, while during the Kenyatta years, Kikuyus dominated the key cabinet portfolios, occupying 9 of 22 in 1971, under Moi, by 1985, this would drop to just four full cabinet ministers.

Over the same period, the number of Kalenjin ministers almost doubled from 9 to 17 percent of all positions (Throup 1987: 61). Finally, in July of 1980, Moi would even go as far as banning all tribal unions, thus eliminating GEMA, the primary political organization of the Kikuyu and one of his long-time foes. These political realignments of the ethnic composition of the Kenyan state served to antagonize Kikuyu interests and further intensified, however temporarily, the vulnerability of the

Moi regime in their initial years in power (Throup 1987).

In the face of these trials, as noted, while Moi did attempt to empower his co-ethnic supporters, his regime also recognized the imperative to ground their legitimacy in alternative bases of popular support, which required it to establish new political alliances. A key group, which the

Moi regime reached out to in their first year in power, was students at the University of Nairobi, who had persistently opposed his predecessor. In the next section, I will explore the ultimately unsuccessful efforts made by the Moi regime to bring university students, especially their leadership, into his base of popular support. It is my contention that the political opening afforded students and lecturers during Moi’s ‘political honeymoon’, which was designed to help enable the regime to coopt important sections of the university’s student body and faculty, actually facilitated the resurgence of student political mobilization that ultimately came to be directed at the regime.

Moi’s ‘political honeymoon’ at the University of Nairobi, 1978-1979

241 It is important to note that the shift towards the consolidation of authoritarian power under the Moi regime did not seem, at least at the outset of his tenure, to be inevitable. Indeed, in the first months following his ascent to the presidency, Moi enjoyed a ‘honeymoon’ period with the

Kenyan public. Much of the population’s optimism about the new regime can be attributed to the populist rhetoric that was espoused by the new president at this time. While, at the outset of his

Presidency, Moi pledged to follow in Kenyatta’s footsteps (nyayo), “continu[ing]”, as he put it, “with the policies formulated by the founder of the nation” (Branch 2011: 136), some of his early decisions suggested that he was keen to implement reforms that would differentiate himself from his predecessor. For example, almost immediately after coming to power, Moi announced a much- heralded anti-corruption campaign and, in October of 1978, his regime implemented prohibitions on elephant poaching, illegal land transfers and the smuggling of tea (ibid: 138).

In December of 1978, during his speech for Jamhuri Day, Moi went a step further, announcing populist reforms, including the introduction of a free milk program for primary school children, the elimination of school fees for Standard VI students, and the release of all 26 of Kenya’s political prisoners. Among this group included high-profiled and fervent critics of the previous regime, like Koigi wa Wamwere, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, George Anyona, Martin Shikuku, and Marie

Seroney. These public gestures won considerable praise for Moi both at home, among ordinary

Kenyans, and abroad, where Moi was commended by international organizations, like Amnesty

International (Widner 1992: 130).

Nowhere was this strategy more clearly on display than at the university. There too, the

Moi regime experienced a ‘political honeymoon’ with students in the first eight months of his tenure.

In short, Moi appeared eager to bring these university students, who had consistently opposed

Kenyatta in his final years, back into the state fold. Perhaps borrowing some of the tactics of their

Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) counterparts in Tanzania, the Moi regime’s attempts to bring

242 university students back into KANU’s good graces first materialized through their efforts to establish a KANU party branch on campus.

In August of 1978, such a plan was easier said than done, as KANU “had no [official] presence on campus”3, and the organization had come, in the last years of the Kenyatta regime, to be seen by many students as the “enemy”4, an “oppressor party”5, which most students had little interest in associating with. To permit the establishment, therefore, of such a party branch at the university,

Moi knew he had to demonstrate to students that the government’s attitude towards the university and democratic politics had changed. To do this, he initiated a charm offensive with university students, attempting to curry favour with them. So, whereas the Kenyatta government had repeatedly been disinterested in dialogue with its university students, banning their student unions, brandishing them as “thugs” and routinely using violence to crack down on peaceful protests, Moi initially adopted a different tact.

In November of 1978, at his first commencement address as the Chancellor of the

University of Nairobi, Moi called for the initiation of a new relationship between the state and university students, in which he “expected [students] to take a greater and more active interest in public matters than they had in the past” (Weekly Review, October 26th, 1979: 8-9). Moreover, as noted, on December 12th, 1978, Moi seemingly signalled a further change in his government’s approach to democratic politics, by announcing the release of all political detainees. This gesture, particularly as it involved the release of Ngugi, the world-renowned Kenyan author, was widely celebrated by students.

Just two days after Ngugi’s release, university students held a “wild reception” (Daily

Nation, December 14th, 1978: 28) for the freed novelist at Taifa Hall. At this reception, students

3 Interview, Karanja Njoroge, Nairobi, Kenya, July 24th, 2014 4 Interview, Willy Mutunga, Nairobi, Kenya, July 8th, 2014 5 Interview, Josiah Omotto, Nairobi, Kenya, July 21st, 2014

243 demonstrated their gratitude towards Moi, by hoisting portraits of the new President aloft and chanting ‘Moi Juu! Moi Juu’ (Hail Moi! Hail Moi!) (Kamencu 2013: 55). The students’ celebration was “not only a show of support for the release of the detainees but also”, as the Daily Nation noted

“an endorsement of the new President’s leadership” (Daily Nation: December 14th, 1979: 28). As one student from this period recalls, “for the first time” with the arrival of Moi, students believed that they “had a president who would give [them the] time [of day]”.6

Later, the following year, Moi reinforced this perception, by inviting the leadership of the

Nairobi University Student Organization (NUSO) to State House. At this meeting, Moi broached the possibility of establishing a KANU party branch on campus with the student leadership for the first time and implored them to commit themselves to improving relations7 between the student body and the state.8 In March of 1979, in another act of goodwill, Moi granted students permission to peacefully commemorate the murder of JM Kariuki on the fourth anniversary of his death. This was particularly noteworthy because, past commemorations of Kariuki’s death by students, particularly in 1977, had been marked by violent clashes with the police. In 1979, these demonstrations included political speeches made by students that publicly condemned Kariuki’s murder and articulated a number of demands.9 In spite of the controversial nature of these public statements, the demonstration was allowed to occur without any interference from the security

6 Interview, Karanja Njoroge, Nairobi, July 24th, 2014 7 In the aftermath of the meeting, the University of Nairobi’s Student Representative Council responded positively, authorizing a donation of 2500 shillings for a Moi-organized harambee fundraiser for the primary school, St. Peter’s Clever (Interview, Rumba Kinuthia, Nairobi, Kenya, June 13th, 2014). At this harambee event, the NUSO Chairman, Rumba Kinuthia even publicly shared the stage with Moi (ibid.), a further sign of the improving relations between the government and student leadership. 8 Interview Rumba Kinuthia, Nairobi, June 13th, 2014 9 These included “the implementation of the Parliamentary Select Committee report on the murder of [Kariuki], the resignation of any government official connected with the murder and the reinstatement of Ngugi wa Thiong’o as a Lecturer in the University” (Kamencu 2013: 57).

244 forces. This too reinforced the perception that Moi was serious about his intention to foster a new, more open political environment at the University of Nairobi.10

In April of 1979, Moi finally persuaded Kinuthia to set up a KANU party branch on campus (Weekly Review, 26 October 1979).11 Reassured by what he believed was the “thawing of relations between government and students” since the arrival of Moi, Kinuthia was under the

“misconception that there was going to be real change in the running of the government”.12 As such, he accepted a “receipt book” from the new President at State House, which was to be used to collect membership fees from students “for [their] recruitment [into KANU]”.13

When Kinuthia returned to campus and relayed Moi’s offer to the student body at a kamakunji, the students’ reactions were divided. While some of the student leadership, including

Kinuthia and Otieno Kajwang, who had enjoyed close interactions with the new regime’s leadership, gave their endorsement to this course of action, many of the student rank-and-file were sceptical of

Moi’s proposal, believing it may be a “plot [on the part of the Moi government] to strangle their own student union and make the party the students’ voice on all matters” (The Weekly Review,

October 26th, 1979: 8). They feared that “any kind of dalliance with the system would make

10 This was certainly the impression of the Daily Nation at the time, which reported in the aftermath of the event, that the demonstration was powerful evidence of “how times had changed” at the University. Moreover, they suggested that the “demonstration” was a sign that the government was “extending a hand of trust to the students inviting them to share political decision-making in the country.” Identifying the transactional nature of the relationship that Moi was establishing with the students, the newspaper speculated that the President’s leniency in allowing the demonstration to go forward was further evidence that “the foundations of the university KANU wing [we]re well under way” (Daily Nation, March 7th, 1979: 8). In other words, in providing concessions to students, the Daily Nation surmised, correctly it would turn out, that Moi expected to receive something he wanted in return. 11 Kinuthia, the Chairman of NUSO, was unsurprisingly one of the primary targets of the state’s charm offensive. During this period, he had come to be in regular correspondence with both Moi and the Secretary-General of KANU, Robert Matano. 12 Interview, Rumba Kinuthia, Nairobi, Kenya, June 13th, 2014 13 Interview, Rumba Kinuthia, Nairobi, Kenya, June 13th, 2014

245 [students] impotent…[and un]able to criticize the government for subsequent misdeeds”. 14

Others suspected that with the establishment of a KANU party branch on campus, Moi was simply

“tr[ying] to bribe [students] with KANU and cash” and that, in accepting such an offer, the student body would become “compromised by the[ir association with] politicians.”15 In the end, this sceptical faction of students won out and Moi’s olive branch was rejected by the majority of the student body, who believed, ultimately, as one student from this period recalls, that KANU was still “not a party that had the democratic structures that [students] could associate [them]selves with.”16

Subsequently, Kinuthia “had no choice but to take the receipt book back to…[Robert

Matano]”.17 The incident, however, serves to illustrate that by April of 1979, KANU’s failure to institutionalize their control over the University of Nairobi campus during the Kenyatta years, had helped to create a space, where university students within the country were able to operate and organize with more autonomy from the state and the ruling party than their Tanzanian counterparts had ever enjoyed. Kenyatta’s years of repressive violence and neglect had created an environment on campus were the majority of students felt strongly opposed to the regime and willing to cooperate in joint initiatives.

If Moi intended his tolerance of political organizing on the part of students to buy him their obedience and loyalty, he was sadly mistaken. Indeed, university students’ rejection of the

KANU party branch on campus was both an indicator of their continued autonomy, and an ominous sign of things to come. On 4 October 1979, at a meeting of the Governing Council, the Moi regime decided to bar former KPU politicians, including Odinga, George Anyona, and Oneko, among others, from running in the 1979 General Election. While the regime’s motivations for this decision “remain

14 Interview, Rumba Kinuthia, Nairobi, Kenya, June 13th, 2014 15 Interview, Josiah Kimotho, Nairobi, Kenya, July 21st, 2014 16 Interview, Karanja Njoroge, Nairobi, Kenya, July 24th, 2014 17 Interview, Rumba Kinuthia, Nairobi, Kenya, June 13th, 2014

246 obscure”, it certainly represented “the first souring of the romance between Moi and the Kenyan people” (Hornsby 2012: 340).

On campus, the news of Moi’s decision was met with outrage, for what students believed was an “illegal act” on the part of the regime.18 In response, at a kamakunji at the Women’s Hall, intended originally to discuss the drafting of a new NUSO constitution, angry students spontaneously agreed to hold demonstrations in opposition to the government’s banning of the seven ex-detainees the next day. On October 7th, 1979, students marched through the streets of Nairobi, in a massive demonstration, eventually arriving at the Nation House Offices, where Kenya’s primary daily newspaper, the Daily Nation, was published. In addressing a crowd of his student colleagues on that day, Kinuthia demanded an explanation from the government on the recent banning of former KPU leaders from the running in the General Election, called for the re-instatement of Ngugi at the University of Nairobi, and appealed to the university administration to address the growing accommodation problems on campus. Following this speech, students proceeded to march along major streets in Nairobi’s city centre, delivering chants that celebrated banned politicians like

Odinga and Anyona and ridiculed members of KANU’s leadership. During this procession, students were often greeted warmly by their follow Kenyans, while the police, throughout the protests’ three hours, “maintained close supervision [of the students]” (Kamencu 2013: 59).

In demonstrating that day, University students became the first sector of society to publicly protest against the Moi regime (Branch 2011: 144). As one of the student protestors, Karanja

Njoroge, recalls “[b]y the time, [students] came back to campus [following the protest, it] was full of police…the [students’] honeymoon [with Moi] was over.”19

18 Interview, Karanja Njoroge, Nairobi, Kenya, July 24th, 2014 19 Interview, Karanja Njoroge, Nairobi, Kenya, July 24th, 2014

247 In the immediate weeks following the protest, the Moi government resumed the tactics so commonly employed by the Kenyatta regime. They abandoned plans to establish the KANU branch on campus, and announced, on October 13th, the closure of the University of Nairobi, only two weeks following the commencement of the academic year. Moi explained the break away as an “early

Christmas vacation”, intended, he reasoned, “to enable the students and staff to return to their respective constituencies and participate in the forthcoming national elections” (Kamencu 2013: 59).

Just a week later, on October 20th, at commemorations of Kenyatta Day, Moi’s tone in speaking about the university and its students changed dramatically. Gone from his speech were calls for greater student participation in national politics. On the contrary, he now warned, echoing

Kenyatta’ earlier rhetoric, that “[i]rresponsible behavior”, like that of the October protests, “and flagrant disregard of the law, will not be tolerated” and that “firm action will be applied to deal with it whenever it appears” (ibid). In line with this sentiment, following the speech, the six student organizers of the impromptu demonstration, were expelled.20 In the aftermath of this protest, Moi would abandon his co-optative strategy with the university. Increasingly, as his government pursued a more authoritarian approach to governing in Kenya’s wider civil society, a similar line of attack would be adopted in their relationship with the university. It is important to note that, ultimately, the Moi regime’s strategy of cooptation between August of 1978 and October 1979 produced unintended consequences, as this period of brief opening, which Moi’s ‘political honeymoon’ afforded the university community, “encouraged long-repressed dissent” (Hornsby

2012: 355) to come to the surface.

20 The leaders expelled were Rhumba Kinuthia (Chairman), Mukhisa Kutiyi (Secretary for Foreign Affairs), Otieno Kajwang (Secretary-general), Gilbert Okungu (Secretary for Entertainment and Catering), Josiah Omoto (Secretary for Sports) and Karanja Njoroge. Kinuthia would later be detained in early November and remained in police custody for 28 days, where he was one of the first political dissidents to experience torture at the hands of the Moi regime (Interview, Rumba Kinuthia, Nairobi, Kenya, June 13th, 2014). Over the coming years, there would be many more.

248 At the heart of this fledgling campus opposition to the Moi regime was some of the university’s faculty.21 Throughout the 1970s, the University of Nairobi and its constituent Kenyatta

College hired an influx of young, Leftist African lecturers, of whom some had “links with pro-Odinga politicians” (Hornsby 2012: 355). Some of these lecturers, who included Kamoji Wachira, Edward

Oyugi, and Willy Mutunga, were or would come to be important leaders in underground, oppositional politics during their time at the University of Nairobi and their presence on campus inspired increasingly leftist politics among some of their students. While lecturers and students had been involved in underground political movements, like the December 12th Movement, which had existed at the university since at the least the mid-1970s, beginning in 1979, the public political affiliation between university students and their lecturers was allowed to come to light in the more open environment that the Moi regime’s co-optative strategy had facilitated on campus. In such an environment, as Mutunga, the then Secretary-General of Academic Staff Union, recalls, faculty and university students began to work together “very closely”, coordinating political actions. From the perspective of some of the Leftist faculty, “[t]here was no distinction [between students and themselves]. They were part of the [same] movement…we considered [students] as comrades.”22

Two of the clearest iterations of this new public, political collaboration between lecturers and students were led by the Academic Staff Union. Revived in early 1979 and led by Mutunga, this organization represented a visible manifestation of the resurgence of leftist politics on campus.

Members of the Staff Union, working in close collaboration with students, began to organize vigorously, directly petitioning President Moi to reinstate Ngugi (Weekly Review, August 3rd,

1979). Eventually, students, encouraged by some of their professors, would also organize a separate

21 Interview, Willy Mutunga, Nairobi, Kenya, July 8th, 2014 22 Interview, Edward Oyugi, Nairobi, Kenya, June 9th, 2014

249 petition to re-instate Ngugi, signed by 20,000 signatories, which Kinuthia himself handed over to

Matano (Kamencu 2013: 58).

Later in June of 1980, the Academic Staff Union would help students organize a peaceful and licensed protest in opposition to the assassination of Walter Rodney and the apartheid regime in South Africa. Particularly in the latter incidence, the peaceful and orderly nature of the protest, in conjunction with lecturers’ close collaboration with students in organizing the event, sent, as then

University of Nairobi Professor and Academic Staff Union Executive Member, Peter Anyang

Nyong’o recalls “shivers down the spine of the Moi regime.”23 In spite of the combined efforts of students and lecturers, however, by the end of 1979, the Moi regime upheld Ngugi’s ban, but were concerned by the close affiliation that was developing between these two groups.

This was demonstrated by the fact that, beginning in 1980, in the aftermath of the October

1979 protests, the Moi regime began to increasingly portray university students and, particularly their lecturers, as a subversive enemy of the nation. Such depictions served as a justification both for the state’s increasingly repressive tactics on campus and, perhaps more significantly, in its move toward making Kenya a de jure single-party state.

“Spreading the disease”: the University of Nairobi and the move to single party rule, 1980- 1982

By the beginning of the 1980s, changing demographic conditions within the country were certainly playing a role in heightening student unrest at the University of Nairobi. With the world’s fastest growing population rate, by 1980, close to five million children, or a third of the entire Kenyan population were in school (Branch 2011: 146), which resulted in approximately a third of the government’s total spending being devoted to meeting their commitment to provide at least primary education for all citizens (ibid.). As a result, with the influx of students entering the university, the

23 Interview, Peter Anyang Nyong’o, Nairobi, Kenya, June 10th, 2014

250 money budgeted for them had been exceeded by the beginning of the 1980s. This put a heavy burden on Kenya’s expanding tertiary education sector (Cooksey et al 1995; Branch 2011: 146).

The Moi government’s decision to introduce three new publicly funded universities in the

1980s, which doubled the number of university entrants by 1987, only further exacerbated the strains placed on the tertiary educational system, in terms of providing university students with appropriate levels of high quality instruction and accommodation. On top of all of this, by the mid-

1970s, most school leavers were having trouble finding gainful employment in the formal sector of the economy and, by the 1980s, unemployment began to be a growing concern even among university graduates (Cooksey et al 1995: 208-209; Branch 2011). There is no question that these demographic and economic pressures helped to shape the increasingly turbulent relationship that emerged between the state and university students in the 1980s.

Still, to fully appreciate the further disintegration of state-university student relations during this period, we need to again focus in on how the state chose to handle these challenges.

Abandoning the ‘charm offensive’ that had characterized his first 8 months in office, and the strategy of co-optation that had accompanied it, Moi increasingly portrayed the university, its faculty and students, as purveyors of ‘Marxist radicalism’ intent on overthrowing the government. In presenting the university as a pressing existential threat to both his regime and the nation, Moi was able to divert attention away from the economic and political challenges bedevilling his government and also to legitimize their efforts to implement de jure single-party rule.

In March of 1980, following the University of Nairobi’s closure in February, after students rioted over the poor catering services on campus and the intended cancellation of NUSO, Moi, for the first time, suggested that growing unrest at the university was a product of a conspiracy, accusing lecturers and students of colluding with the intention of disrupting peace in the country.

Later that same month, when discussing the condition of secondary schools within the country, Moi

251 asserted that in order to stop the “spreading of the disease” of secondary student strikes, his government was willing to run background checks on prospective university students to ensure that they had not been involved in any strike activity. Moreover, he claimed that those who had participated in such activities may be rounded up and forced to participate in work camps in northern

Kenya to remind those students of “how hard life can be” (The Weekly Review, March 21st, 1980: 9).

Having failed with the carrot, Moi seemed willing to now use the stick.

These statements were not idle threats; they were soon accompanied by concrete action on the part of the state. Over the course of the next two years, the Moi regime implemented a number of key institutional reforms, which included, in February 1980, the cancellation of NUSO,24 the deregistration of the Academic Staff Union in July 1980, and twice the regime pre-emptively closed the university ostensibly to prevent students demonstrating in commemoration of JM Day in March

1981 and at an Organization of African Unity (OAU) meeting being held in Nairobi in June of that year. All told, between 1979 and the aborted coup in August of 1982, the University of Nairobi and

Kenyatta College were closed seven times on account of student disturbances. So while Moi had decided to borrow some manoeuvres from Kenyatta’s playbook, the frequency with which he was resorting to university closures was unprecedented.

Outside of the university, elements of Kenya’s leftist opposition also became targets for repression. In late 1981, seven dissident MPs in parliament, who had persistently criticized the Moi regime, particularly about their close relations with the US, were brought in for questioning by the police on suspicion that they had been making fraudulent mileage claims with the parliamentary authorities. In the aftermath of this questioning, a warrant for the arrest of one of the MPs, Chelagat

Mutai, was filed. While Mutai fled to Tanzania to avoid being detained, a few days later, on

24 This was supposedly on account of a technicality: “the union[‘s]…failure to submit annual returns for June 1977 and 1978.”

252 September 24th, one of her colleagues, Waruru Kanja, was jailed for being found in possession of foreign currency more than 24 hours after an overseas trip (Hornsby 2012). The resurgence of this

Kenyatta-era tactic of detaining political dissidents without trail would continue throughout the rest of the 1980s. It is important to note that a key part of the Moi regime’s rhetorical strategy during this period, was to suggest that there were underground, subversive linkages that existed between

Odinga leftists and university lecturers, which threatened to drive the nation into chaos. Such insinuations provided the pretext for the Moi’s regime’s repressive tactics against the university.

In spite of these authoritarian gestures and antagonistic rhetoric, the pressures emanating from Kenya’s leftist opposition against the Moi regime only intensified. Outside the university, by early 1982, Odinga, frustrated at being locked out of political power and influence under Moi’s

KANU regime over the previous four years, began to take direct aim not only at the party, but also at the nature of Kenya’s political system. In February of 1982, he criticized the government, linking the country’s economic woes to their “corruption, misuse of our foreign exchange, importation of luxury goods, poor planning, over-dependence on and misuse of foreign aid and lack of a comprehensive plan on energy” (Branch 2011). By March, rumours began to swirl that Odinga was planning to launch a new socialist, opposition party to oppose Moi’s KANU.

In May of that year, mere weeks after Moi threateningly reminded Kenyan citizens that detention without trail had not been abolished within the country, Odinga openly criticized his

Kenya’s one-party system in an address to Britain’s Labour Party in London. His assertions that

“[a] ruling class [in Kenya] has arisen out of massive corruption and misuse of power” and that

“[s]ooner rather than later one-party systems become non-party systems” were soon echoed by his close colleague, Anyona, who declared that KANU had become “the biggest threat to democracy in

Kenya today” (ibid:152). By the end of the month Odinga and Anyona would try to register a new

253 political party in Kenya, the Kenya African Socialist Alliance (KASA), which would ultimately be rejected by the Registrar of Society (Lynch 2011: 113).

The intensification of pressure on the Moi regime emanating from the country’s left-wing coincided with, and helped to inform, the growing radicalization of students on the campuses of the

University of Nairobi and Kenyatta College. Far from being cowed into silence by the cancellation of their student union and, in the face of growing state repression both on campus and across Kenya’s civil society, university students became increasingly vocal in their disdain for the state of politics in the country. In May of 1981, for example, with support from the Academic Staff Union, University of Nairobi students demonstrated in solidarity with striking doctors, resulting in violent clashes with police and the expulsion of 18 students. Moreover, during this repressive period, students continued to protest daily for registration of a new student union, which was finally approved by the

Office of the President in February of 1982.

The new union, christened the Students Organization of Nairobi University (SONU), held their first elections in April of 1982 and almost immediately entered the national political fray. As the founding Secretary-General of Student Organization of Nairobi University, Patrick (Paddy)

Onyango, recalls in “[19]80, [19]81…[the atmosphere on campus] was highly radicalized.”25

Students began to practice a “kind of resistance politics…s[eeing] [them]selves as the…alternative to the repressive government of…Moi” (ibid).

One of the ways in which this ‘radicalization’ manifested itself was in the shift in students’ political focus. By May of 1982, SONU had come to see itself as “de facto opposition party”26 within the country. As former SONU Secretary-General of SONU, Ong’wen Odour remembers, during this period, student politics became increasingly “anchored to national issues”, with SONU now

25 Interview, Patrick (Paddy) Onyango, Nairobi, Kenya, June 20th, 2014 26 Interview, Onyango Oloo, Nairobi, Kenya, July 11th, 2014

254 offering public comment “about wider issues…[that] revolved around the shrinking [of] democratic space and the abuse of human rights and serious exploitation of the Kenyan working people.”27 For example, in May of 1982, SONU declared their endorsement of Odinga’s desire to create a new, socialist party. In an official statement, the student union argued, “the Kenyan Constitution belongs to all Kenyans, and should be protected from Fascist-oriented manoeuvres aimed at subjugating our

Freedoms and rights” (Kamencu 2013: 85). In addition, they spoke out against “[a]ny attempts to bulldoze Kenya into a de jure one party state” which they argued could “only be seen as a manifestation of the forces of retrogression at work plotting to kill democracy and plunge us into outright democracy” (ibid.).

The following month, when the constitution was amended and one-party rule was officially declared, students, with some of their lecturers detained by the state, continued to mobilize in opposition to Moi’s growing authoritarianism. SONU organized several rallies which culminated in a presentation of a memorandum to Moi calling for a referendum to ask Kenyans to decide on the issue of one party rule and demanding the release of all political detainees.

In spite of these frontal attacks on the Moi regime, the government appeared more preoccupied with lecturers than they were with their students. By June of 1982, the public war of words that Moi had been waging against university faculty for more than two years was reaching a boiling point. As Mutunga notes, the Moi regime “buil[t] their cases [against university lecturers] very slowly.”28 Following the anti-apartheid demonstration that faculty helped to co-organize with students in June of 1980, Moi asserted, “a neighboring country was plotting to use the university to cause political unrest and carry out assassinations in Kenya” (Weekly Review, July 25th, 1980). In

May of 1981, Moi further accused the University of Nairobi’s “Marxist lecturers” of being the driving

27 Interview, Odour Ong’wen, Nairobi, Kenya, May 26th, 2014 28 Interview, Willy Mutunga, Nairobi, Kenya, July 8th, 2014

255 force behind the recurring strikes that students were waging on campus. He further suggested that for their role in “disrupting the smooth running of the [institution]”, these lecturers should “suffer for their hideous acts” (Daily Nation, May 25th, 1981: 1). Finally, on June 6th, 1982, at Afraha Stadium in Nakuru, Moi claimed that lecturers at the University of Nairobi, guilty of teaching a “politics of subversion through textbooks majoring in violence,” were now plotting to arm secondary school and

University students with the aim of causing chaos in the country. Moi argued that this “chaos” was designed “to coincide with the establishment of a second political party to rival KANU.” He concluded his speech by arguing that “[t]hose who want[ed] more than one party in the country belong to the group which has been causing disturbances at the University of Nairobi and other institutions of higher learning” (Daily Nation: June 7th, 1982: 1).

In equating the return of multiparty politics with national disintegration and suggesting lecturers’ involvement in subversive activity, Moi portrayed them as being part of a vast left-wing conspiracy that was committed to bringing down his government and, thus, to destroying the nation.

Any attempt to democratize Kenyan politics by the middle of 1982 was brandished as subversion.

This legitimized “a wave of arrests”, which targeted academics. By the end of June, Professors Willy

Mutunga, Al Amin Mazrui, Edward Oyugi, Kamoji Wachira, and David Ng’an’ga had all been detained. Within three days of Moi’s Nakuru speech, on June 9th, 1982, Kenya’s 19th Constitutional

Amendment was unanimously passed in parliament, which stipulated in Section 2A that “[t]here shall be in Kenya only one political party, the Kenya African National Union.” As Daniel Branch

(2011: 153) notes, “[w]ith the space for legitimate expressions of dissent shrinking, the most committed of the regime’s opponents began exploring more militant options.” By August of 1982, with both the intensification of opposition outside the government and the increase of dissention within its own ranks, Moi’s hold on political power in Kenya seemed to tenuous.

256 “The dark days of dictatorship” at the University of Nairobi, 1982-1987

In the early morning hours of Sunday 1 August 1982, non-commissioned air force officers initiated a coup against the Kenyan government of Daniel arap Moi. They failed. Their aborted attempt gave Moi the opportunity, and ‘justification’, to consolidate power, and clamp down and isolate opponents (Branch 2011: 157; Throup 1987: 64). Subsequently, the Moi government took a number of different measures to achieve these objectives. It overhauled the leadership of the security forces, including the Army, General Service Unit (GSU) and police, allowing Moi to effectively undermine Kikuyu dominance of those organs, by promoting members from his own ethnic coalition

(Throup 1987: 67). It reconstituted the air force, convicting more than a thousand members of the

KAF on charges of sedition and treason, among other crimes, twelve of whom were eventually executed (Branch 2011).

This was only the beginning. For the reminder of the 1980s, the Moi state’s repressive authoritarianism reached unprecedented heights, utilizing tactics such as torture, arbitrary arrest, detention without trial, and police brutality with a ferocity that was reminiscent of its colonial predecessor (Ajulu 2000: 141). Much has been made about the power Moi invested in KANU and the efforts he exerted to reinvigorate the ruling party during this period (Widner 1992). Yet, as

Gabrielle Lynch notes, while Moi did carry out recruitment drives that increased party membership to 8 million by 1988 and while he did use KANU “to discipline individuals and control political space…[the party] never served as the key means of mobilizing support or of monitoring and controlling the opposition, neither did it dominate the administration nor propagate a distinctive single-party platform” (Lynch 2011: 117-118; Hyden 1994). Instead, the “central locus of state power” remained with the Office of the President (OP) (ibid.).

During this period, the OP carried out a number of crucial tasks. It controlled the election of candidates to high party office, arranging its charges be allowed to run for these positions

257 unopposed (Widner 1992). It established party disciplinary committees, which were given the power to expel members who committed any act that was deemed not in the party’s interest or was seen to undermine the head of state or government (ibid, 1992: 166-167; Lynch 2011: 117). Aside from expelling members, this considerable mandate enabled the committee to withhold bank loans, permits and place people under 24-hour surveillance. In 1986, after asserting KANU’s supremacy over parliament and the judiciary, the Moi regime passed the State Corporations Act, which brought all state enterprises under the regulatory jurisdiction of the OP (Lynch 2011: 115). By the end of the 1980s, Moi had, in the short space of less than 8 years after the failed coup, constructed an

“imperial presidency” (Ajulu 2000: 148), whereby he used “personalized patronage networks and every available arm of state control…to extend and centralize power in the [OP]” (Lynch 2011:

111).

These changes in the nature of state power in Kenya were profoundly felt within the

University. In the aftermath of the August 1st disturbances, as the failed coup came to be known, another central target of Moi’s post-coup crackdown was, not surprisingly, the student body at the

University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University College (Branch 2011: 157-160; Ajulu 2000; Widner

1992; Lynch 2011: 114). While there is still debate over whether, or to what extent, students’ participated in organizing the coup,29 what is beyond dispute is that students’ reaction, upon hearing of the supposed fall of the Moi regime, was jubilant. Indeed, a “carnival atmosphere” (Onyango Oloo

Quoted in Kamencu 2013: 85) pervaded the campus on the morning of August 1st, following the spread of word of the coup. Students initially “celebrat[ed] all over [campus]”30, with some even dancing outside of the housing units of detained faculty at Kenyatta University College. At one point, students even “wild[ly] cheer[ed]” the arrival on campus of two KAF officers, the supposed

29 Some students, like Paddy Onyango, Wahinya Boore and Muga Kolale, concede at the very least that a small group of students were aware of its planning. 30 Interview, George Outa, Nairobi, Kenya, June 5th, 2014

258 architects of the coup (Kamencu 2013: 85). More significantly, prominent student leaders and activists, including SONU Chairman, Titus Adungosi, were seen accompanying KAF members all day, even at one point travelling with them to the Voice of Kenya broadcasting studio, where news of the coup was being delivered over the airwaves. 31 Later in the day, some students would participate in the looting of shops in Nairobi’s Central Business District (CBD). Following intense fighting between KAF officers and pro-Moi forces in Nairobi throughout August 1st, by the early morning of the 2nd, the coup plotters had been comprehensively defeated.

The failure of the August 1982 coup represents another key turning point in the Kenyan state’s relationship with the university and its students. This is because, students’ jubilant reaction to news of Moi’s purported fall, in conjunction with their participation in subsequent looting, and rumours of their possible role in organizing the coup, provided the Moi regime with an ideal justification to take a host of unprecedented punitive measures against the University’s faculty and student body. If in August of 1978, Moi had hoped to seek control over the university and its students through a seemingly benevolent strategy of co-optation, designed to win/buy consent and legitimacy from students, by August of 1982, he was ready and willing to rely more on brute force, seeking not their support, but rather their obedience. In the short-term, this meant the immediate closing of the university, arresting and interrogating hundreds of students and lecturers and ordering those students who were not arrested or detained to return to their home communities, where they were forced to check in twice a week with their local chiefs for the next 14 months.

Ultimately, 68 students were arrested and tortured, including Wahinya Boore, David Onyango Oloo, and Adungosi, the latter of whom eventually died in prison.

Beyond these immediate measures, however, the Moi government was interested in devising a long-term strategy to neutralize the threat that student radicalism posed to the regime

31 Interview, Patrick (Paddy) Onyango, Nairobi, Kenya, June 20th, 2014

259 and to institutionalize its control over the University administration. Moi conceded as much in his annual Kenyatta Day address to the Kenyan nation in October of 1982, just over three months after the coup. In announcing the disbandment of the University of Nairobi, he reassured Kenyans that the University would be re-opened, but first “the present set-up must…be dissolved…[because] we want a new university…with no prospect henceforth that it could lie in our midst as a source or instrument of destruction” (Weekly Review, October 22nd, 1982: 7). In that same speech, Moi singled out university students for criticism, arguing that the university had been “brought into disrepute by a student body which proved itself pathetically vulnerable to the crudest stupidities of dialectical subversion” (ibid.). These remarks suggested that the Moi regime did not simply aspire to remake the University, it also now desired to create a new kind of university student: one that was obedient, unquestionably loyal to Moi’s nyayo government and, therefore, less vulnerable to the kind of radicalism that had permeated campus, which the government feared could undermine the stability of its regime going forward.

With this objective of creating a ‘new university’ in mind, the government introduced a host of institutional reforms designed to eliminate the autonomy of the university administration and its student body. First, Moi tried to enhance the state’s control over the university administration. By the end of 1983, he decided to pass a new educational bill, which divided the

University of Nairobi into five separate colleges, each to be headed by a state-appointed principal, with the hope that this would undermine the autonomy of the university administration vis-à-vis the state and limit students’ ability to mobilize on a campus-wide basis. In 1985, to further these aims,

Moi amended the University Act, thus shortening the term of the Vice-Chancellor from six years to three and enhancing the discretionary power of the President (and Chancellor of the University) to appoint the leadership of the university administration. This reform was intended to further undermine the autonomy of the VC vis-à-vis the state.

260 Second, the Moi regime attempted to coopt sections of the university’s faculty. They began to appoint a growing number of University professors into the upper echelons of the national decision-making machinery. In addition, they also gave lecturers a raise in December of 1984, and strategically dispensed academic employment opportunities as a form of patronage to KANU- supporters (Klopp and Orina 2002: 51). Finally, for students, the Moi regime introduced a number of measures intended to diminish the extent of student radicalism on campus. A first key measure was to introduce, again following the Tanzanian example, the screening of university students looking to gain admission into Kenyan universities. Students’ admission was dependent on the reports provided by their former headmasters, who were encouraged to withdraw support for those secondary students who were thought to have participated in strikes or other subversive activities

(Savage and Taylor 1991: 314). In addition, the government increasingly attempted to gerrymander

SONU elections in order to ensure that the student leadership that was elected was amenable to working with the regime. Furthermore, the Moi regime placed an increasing number of secret agents, who posed as students, on campus. Their tasks were to provide surveillance both of lecturers and students in classes. In addition, by the mid-1980s, as Gabrille Lynch notes, Moi “encouraged the establishment of district associations and issued periodic invitations to student delegates…[wherein he would] promise them jobs, and give them money” in return their for continued support (Lynch 2011: 122). Finally, and most importantly, Moi introduced in May of 1984, after a decade of delays, the NYSPUT, which was made mandatory for all Kenyan university students prior to their arrival on campus. This program, perhaps more than any other of the institutional reforms to Kenya’s system of higher education, had a profound impact on the student movement in the latter half of the 1980s. It to the political effects produced by this institutional reform that we now turn.

Creating a ‘monster’: NYSPUT, student activism and the state, 1984-1990

261 After the Moi regime’s failed attempt to win the consent of students to establish a KANU branch on campus in the late-1970s, the introduction of the NYSPUT32 was an institutional reform, which would now make it mandatory for students to engage with the ruling party. Officially,

NYSPUT33 was conceived as “a special programme of education and practical training” designed to lay “the foundations [among student-recruits] of responsible, committed and responsive leadership for tomorrow” (Moi 1986: 121). The camp was set up with the supposed intention of instilling in prospective university students feelings of “national belonging”, an “appreciation of responsible and committed citizenship,” and a sense of “[l]oyalty to the state” (ibid: 121) prior to their entry on campus.34

32 Before discussing NYSPUT, it is important to distinguish it from the Kenya’s National Youth Service (NYS). The NYS was officially created in April of 1963. The program’s recruitment was confined predominantly to single, young men, preferably between the ages of 16-22, ‘who [we]re unemployed and [had] no immediate prospects for employment (Kenyan National Archive (KNA) DC/KMG/2/27/399 – (ADM/1/22) (21)).’ 32 In exchange for providing their labour for national development projects, including road and dam construction, bush clearing, and earthworks, these young recruits, the vast majority of which had never attended secondary school, were provided not just with a small wage, food, clothing and shelter during their 2-years of service in the NYS, but they also received training in English, mathematics, and civics from primary to post K.P.E. standard (Coe 1973, 31). It was hoped that these recruits’ experiences at NYS would better ‘enable them to compete in the labour market’ upon their completion of the program (KNA COR/7/21). As noted, given these criteria, university students were historically excluded from participation in the regular NYS program. Even with the introduction of NYSPUT, prospective university students trained separately from regular NYS recruits. Moreover, student-recruits also undertook a special program that had been specifically designed for them. 33 The male NYSPUT training camp consisted of three-and-half months of paramilitary training, initially running from the start of May until mid-August. While in its first year, the program produced 1,820 graduates; by 1988, it had expanded to take in approximately 9,000 student- recruits from all four of Kenya’s public universities (Daily Nation, 26 August 1990: 32). With the double-intake of students in 1987-88, the camp eventually had to be divided into two different annual sessions, one taking place prior to students’ entry on campus and the second session commencing with a different set of first-year students after the completion of their first semester. 34 The program’s official itinerary consisted of a regimen of physical fitness exercises, foot drills, first aid training, camp craft, and fire-fighting, with all student-recruits being expected to attend a series of afternoon lectures on national development issues and strategies (Miguna 2012: 45).

262 While these high-minded objectives were oft-repeated in the Moi regime’s public discussions about the program, Moi himself did not shy away from outlining a more practical justification for the scheme: namely it was also designed to deter future student unrest on campus, or as he put it, to ensure that students were “immunized against developing degenerate tendencies”

(ibid: 121) thus “prepar[ing] [them] to go through the universities in a sensible and mature way”

(ibid). In short, at least officially, NYSPUT sought nothing less than the “deliberate shaping of the ethos and character” of prospective Kenyan university students prior to their arrival on campus

(ibid.).

In practice, however, the scheme yielded unintended consequences: instead of fostering obedient and loyal university students, the program served to further alienate these students from the ruling party, helping to politicize a significant portion of them, who, by the time they arrived on campus, confronted the Moi state with some of its most defiant political challenges of this period.

To understand why this was the case, one needs to better appreciate the experiences of student-recruits within the camp. It is important to note that many had misgivings about the program even before they arrived. This was primarily for two reasons. First, many university students wondered “why [they] ha[d] to go through the basic army training, when [as university students, they] are not going to need it in [their] life.”35 In other words, some student-recruits felt that the training provided at NYSPUT would be inappropriate for the futures that their university education would confer upon them.

Another fundamental complaint about the program among student-recruits, prior to their arrival at the camp, was the belief that it was intended to be punitive in nature.36 As one student- recruit, who attended NYSPUT in 1987, recalls:

35 Interview, Aggrey Wasike, Via Skype, August 29th, 2016 36 This was such a popular belief among students and faculty that in July 1981, Kenya’s Minister of Education, JJ Kamotho felt the need to publicly reject the notion that the scheme was

263 There was definitely a feeling [among student-recruits]…[of] what are we going to gain from [NYSPUT]? They had us at the university first and then after that first semester we went to NYS[PUT]. We were okay that semester. We didn’t do anything [wrong]. There wasn’t any riot…So there was the feeling [among student-recruits] that [NYSPUT] was a punishment and we were a group that didn’t deserve to be punished.37

For many students, once they arrived at the camp, their initial experiences reiterated this common impression of NYSPUT as an unmerited punishment. One of the key sources of the student-recruits’ grievances related to the arduous conditions they had to endure at the camp. Student-recruits with no military experience were expected to wake up at dawn, run through countless drills and military exercises, and participate in exhausting physical workouts, on very little sleep. Nights at the camp in Gilgil were often very cold and student-recruits were given limited time to eat their food, expected to do all of their own washing, and forced to lodge in common living quarters.

To make matters worse, student-recruits also recall being severely mistreated by some of the camp’s afandes, the regular NYS servicemen (that had already graduated from the normal NYS program), who oversaw the student-recruits activities while at the camp. Many student-recruits accuse these afandes of abusing their positions of authority and subjecting them to intimidation, verbal threats and even physical abuse. As one student-recruit recalls, the afandes “were happy to inflict physical damage on…university students…[they] were so devilish in terms of what they did to us that it was just a nightmare being at NYS[PUT].”38 A common reaction among student- recruits to this mistreatment at the hands of the regular servicemen was anger. As former student- recruit, George Gona recalls, “we had accepted the fact that [the program] was a Pre-University

intended to be a ‘punishment’ for misbehaving students (Weekly Review, 31 July, 1981: 9-10). In spite of Kamotho’s denial, this perception continued to be widespread among NYSPUT student-recruits. 37 Interview, Aggrey Wasike, Via Skype, August 29th, 2016 38 Interview, Shadrick Nassongo, Via Telephone, January 17th, 2017

264 entry requirement and we had to be there, but…[the afandes] were humiliating us…I mean we really wanted to burn the place down.”39

At the root of much of these tensions between the student-recruits and the afandes, at least from the perspective of many of the student-recruits interviewed, was the educational gap that separated student-recruits from the regular servicemen. It is important to recall that regular NYS was perceived by many student-recruits to be a program for the unemployed and undereducated.

Indeed, it was certainly true that the vast majority of regular servicemen had never completed secondary school, let alone university, with some of them being illiterate.40 This was a fact that student-recruits were well aware of and this disparity in educational achievement became central to the mutual animosities that grew between these two groups.

Student-recruits contend that the afandes’ ‘envy’ of their educational prospects was at the heart of the mistreatment the former received from these regular servicemen. Indeed, afandes frequently made student-recruits’ educational achievements the source of ridicule within the camp.

Upon entry into the pre-university training program, one student-recruit recalled being told to put his “Form Four Certificate…in [his] boot…[and] forget [about] it”, 41 as such educational credentials had no significance within the space of the camp.42 From the perspective of student- recruits, the abuse suffered at the hands of the afandes was made worse by this educational divide.

As many student-recruits felt that they should not be subjected to the afandes’ authority, because it made them feel as if they were “being punished for passing [the University Entry] examination.”43

39 Interview, George Gona, Nairobi, Kenya, July 1st, 2014 40 Richard Coe found, for example, that from June 1965 to December 1966, 87.7% of NYS recruits had not attended secondary school, with 16.6% being illiterate 41 Interview, George Gona, Nairobi, Kenya, July 1st, 2014 42 For their part, some student-recruits would return this abuse, telling the afandes that ‘”this is the only place that [the government] would accept you. Look what you have around here, it is nothing” (Interview, Aggrey Wasike, Via Skype, August 29th, 2016). 43 Interview, Miguna Miguna, Toronto, Canada, July 29th, 2014

265 Ultimately, student-recruits resented being treated like “school dropouts” by non-commissioned officers who had nowhere near their level of academic qualifications. As one student-recruit and, future Kenyan public figure, Miguna Miguna, recalls:

This was the worst of it…[these afandes] are subjecting you to this sort of dehumanizing treatment and these people did not finish…elementary school. Cannot speak English…All they know is shouting and for them they get satisfaction of having to do this to someone who presumably performed better than them and progressed to A-levels.44

For some recruits, the poor treatment that they received at the hands of the afandes raised more profound questions about the government that had organized the camp and sanctioned its conditions. As one former student-recruit points out “how the afandes treat[ed] [student- recruits]…you just ask what is the point of all of this? Why is the government making you do that?

[NYSPUT] didn’t make [student-recruits] more disciplined. It was actually the opposite…it strengthened [their] anti-government stance.”45

Not surprisingly, these tensions occasionally resulted in violent clashes breaking out between student-recruits and their non-commissioned officers. For example, a former student- recruit, who would later become a Kenyan parliamentarian, TJ Kajwang’, recalls that “sporadic mutinies” carried out by student-recruits against the regular servicemen “happened all the time” at the camp during his spell there in 1988.46 The most famous example of such a clash took place in

October of that year. National news media reported that the Kenya Police Anti-Stock Unit and the

GSU were called in to the Gilgil training camp to break up an altercation between student-recruits and regular servicemen. This violent confrontation resulted in several people being seriously injured and the expulsion of all student-recruits from the training program. Adding to the state’s embarrassment over the incident was the fact that the rioting student-recruits in question were

44 Interview, Miguna Miguna, Toronto, Canada, July 29th, 2014 45 Interview, Aggrey Wasike, Via skype, August 29th, 2016 46 Interview, TJ Kajwang’, Nairobi, Kenya, July 17th, 2014

266 scheduled to represent all university students at the 10-year anniversary celebrations of the Nyayo era later that month.47

The punitive nature of the camp also produced a number of unintended consequences.

First, many student-recruits attested to the fact that the military training at the camp had served to

“harden” them, making them physically stronger and less reluctant to confront the police and other authorities. As NYS pre-university training graduate and former SONU chairman, Omondi Alayoo recalls, NYSPUT made student-recruits “more assertive”, as they realized that “the disciplined forces were not any different from [them].”48 As such, according to Alayoo, when these student-recruits arrived on campus, they felt they could “[g]o head to head with [the authorities]” (ibid.).

As we shall see in the next section, the NYS pre-university graduates’ willingness to fight back against police during protests at the university in November of 1987 and the NYS riot in Gilgil of October 1988 attest to this “hardening” and the newfound bravery and assertiveness that

NYSPUT student-recruits acquired during their experiences at the camp. As one student-recruit recalls:

[after NYSPUT] you felt like you can combat even the police…how the students fought back when [the leaders of SONU] were arrested [in November 1987] had a lot to do with the training they had been through in NYS[PUT], because when you are in NYS[PUT] you are called a soldier… we used to joke [that] what [NYSPUT] ha[d] managed to create is revolutionary soldiers…against the [Moi] state.49

47 While the authorities suggested that the riot had been the result of student-recruits drunkenly trying to make their way into female living quarters late one evening, student- recruits themselves argued that the clashes were actually related to the “animosity between the NYS servicemen and the freshmen [which] had been building up for weeks” (The Weekly Review, 21 October 1988). Moreover, they complained that the camp’s “near inhuman [sic] conditions” with its “long queues for food during meal times and the insufficient accommodation facilities that could not cater for all the 7,000 students” (ibid.), had also played a part in spurring on students’ ire. 48 Interview, Omondi Alayoo, Nairobi, May 28th, 2014 49 Interview, Kaberere Njenga, Nairobi, Kenya May 26th, 2014

267 In addition, the widespread sense of grievance on the part of students in the program also provided an important basis for solidarity among them to blossom. This was compounded by the fact that the program had given student-recruits an unprecedented opportunity to congregate with each other and develop social bonds among themselves over an extended period of time before entering university. As one student-recruit recalled, at NYSPUT, student-recruits had “a lot of time on

[their] hands,” and were given the “opportunity” to “interact [with each other]” and “actually share knowledge in an atmosphere where there is no pressure for reading, [or] for passing exams.”50 The pre-university training program, therefore, proved to be for some student-recruits not only a “good way to socialize before getting to campus”51, but also a space in which student-recruits were able to develop durable social networks that served them well when it came to political organizing once they arrived on campus. Indeed, a common sight at the University of Nairobi throughout the latter half of the 1980s was former student-recruits spontaneously running military marches learned at

NYSPUT on campus.52

Moreover, for some, this time also gave them a chance to refine their political ideas in collaboration with their colleagues. As former student-recruit and legendary student leader, Wafula

Buke, recalls, the NYSPUT camp provided him and other former student-recruits with “an opportunity to establish common ideological ground for future cooperation” (Buke, nd). In his estimation, “the outcome [of NYS] was [to foster] a more critical student mass than [had existed] before”.53 Former student-recruit and SONU ’87 Foreign Affairs Minister, Miguna concurs:

I went to the University of Nairobi. [At NYS-PUT] I met students at Kenyatta [University]. I met students at Moi [University]. I met students at Egerton [University]. Students that I would never have met in a normal school year and we were able to connect. We were able to

50 Interview, Omondi Alayoo, Nairobi, Kenya, May 28th, 2014 51 Interview, Ken Ouko, Nairobi, Kenya, July 11th, 2014 52 Interview, Ken Ouko, Nairobi, Kenya, July 11th, 2014; Godfrey Muriuki, Nairobi, Kenya, July 23rd, 2014 53 Interview, Wafula Buke, Nairobi, Kenya, July 25th, 2014

268 identify strong people, weak people, how to mobilize…It later on [on campus] became a very good experience for some of us, who were interested in mobilizing for change.54

A third and final important by-product of the program related to the political training that was on offer at NYSPUT. As noted, the NYS pre-university training camp, particularly the afternoon lectures, was intended to familiarize students with KANU’s vision for national development. It is important to recall that by the mid-1980s, KANU had become “an alternative instrument of rule” (Hornsby 2012: 399; Widner 1992) for the Moi regime in Kenya, which supposedly ascribed to Moi’s political philosophy of nyayo (footsteps in English). Indeed, as Hornsby notes, “[t]his new stress on the party had little ideological content…apart from obedience to the president (ibid.).” The KANU regime’s lack of a compelling ideological basis for rule was, for some students, fatally exposed during those afternoon lectures.

National politicians, civil servants and party officials typically delivered these lectures on topics ranging from the merits of Kenya’s new educational policy, 8-4-4, to the tenets of Moi’s Nyayo philosophy, to the political history of the ruling party. Yet, as one student-recruit recalls these

“political sermons” were often little more than “Kanu and government big wigs from

Nairobi…shout[ing] themselves hoarse about patriotism, Nyayo philosophy and the need for respect for elders” (Miguna, 2012: 46). While some student-recruits recall using these afternoons as a time to catch up on much-needed sleep,55 for others, these lectures exposed them to the ideological bankruptcy at the heart of the party and the project of NYSPUT itself, and thus, solidified their commitment to oppositional politics. As Buke recalls:

The manner in which the[se lecturers] were packaging their stuff [during the afternoon lectures]…was so bad that we are now poking holes [in it]… So actually it was from that Youth Service that I realized no…if a Professor [giving the lecture at NYSPUT] can reason like this, there is a major problem in this country. I was going to [major in] education. I decided to change

54 Interview, Miguna Miguna, Toronto, Canada, July 29th, 2014 55 Interviews, Aggrey Wasike, via Skype, August 29th, 2016; Kiama Gitahi , Nairobi, Kenya, July 17th, 2014

269 and go do political science [after NYSPUT]. So that I can understand what politics makes a Professor…not reason well…So I shifted from [Kenyatta] College to Nairobi University purely because of the realization that this country has a crisis and that crisis is political.56

The question periods that followed these lectures, also afforded student-recruits the novel opportunity to publicly confront representatives of their government, often for the first time in their lives. As one student-recruit remembers, “students would use [the lectures] to express their displeasure…and become confrontational [with the authorities] (Interview, Aggrey Wasike).” As a result, these question periods, at times, became the site of tense contestation between government representatives or NYS administrators and the student-recruits themselves 57 Following such challenges, student-recruits recall having their microphones taken away by the authorities in mid- sentence, or subsequently being asked to sign statements containing their public critiques of the government or the speaker in question58, presumably so the government could have a record of them.

In some rare cases, student-recruits even report being detained within the camp following their challenge of powerful figures during these lectures.59

These actions on the part of the organizers of NYSPUT lend to credence to Nyong’o’s assertion that NYSPUT was devised to better enable the Moi regime to get insights into “who students were [prior to their arrival on campus]…so that [the state] c[ould] follow them after

NYS[PUT]” and be better able to “track…and control them”.60 As Nyong’o suggests NYSPUT was designed as a mechanism of surveillance, enabling the government to get a sense of who the

56 Interview, Wafula Buke, Nairobi, Kenya, July 25th, 2014 57 Interviews, Wafula Buke, Nairobi, Kenya, July 25th, 2014; Aggrey Wasike, via skype, August 29th, 2016; Ambrose Weda, Nairobi, Kenya, June 10th, 2014 58 Interviews, Wafula Buke, Nairobi, Kenya July 25th, 2014; Ambrose Weda, Nairobi, Kenya, June 10th, 2014 59 Interview, Ambrose Weda, Nairobi, Kenya, June 10th, 2014 60 Interview, Peter Anyang Nyang’o, Nairobi, Kenya, June 10th, 2014

270 “troublemakers” were within the incoming classes of university students prior to their arrival on campus.

That said, by publicly challenging the regime during those afternoon lectures, some student-recruits were also able to get the attention and admiration of their peers, establishing their reputations as firebrands and political leaders prior to arrival on campus. Some of these men would rise to political prominence within student politics, and then later, come to be noted public figures at the national level, like Kajwang’, Buke and Miguna. As such, NYSPUT helped students establish a “pecking order”, which enabled them to know “who was who and who they could follow [politically once they arrived at the university].”61

Far from succeeding in consolidating prospective university students’ loyalty to the state and commitment to the political project of Moi and KANU, therefore, by the end of the camp, the opposite had been achieved for many student-recruits. In practice, many students found that the program was not designed to rear them as leaders of tomorrow or provide them with a useful political education. Rather, it had served to “dehumanize [them], to break [their] spirit, to make [them] feel that [they] were nothing”62, in the hopes that this would make them a more compliant category of youth.

Aside from simply angering students or turning them against the regime, student- recruits’ experiences of NYSPUT also provided them with opportunities for political organization that may not have to come to pass had the camp not existed. As Miguna notes:

What [the experience of NYS] also did, which would not have been achieved if they had not put us in one place, is that it brought unity among students, from the rich to the poor, [who realized] we now had a common enemy to fight[:]…Moi and his [oppressive] system.63

61 Interview, Omondi Alayoo, Nairobi, Kenya, May 28th, 2014 62 Interview, Miguna Miguna, Toronto, Canada, July 29th, 2014 63 Interview, Miguna Miguna, Toronto, Canada, July 29th, 2014

271 This statement captures the fact that for many former student-recruits, the experience of NYSPUT left them feeling more alienated from, and antagonistic towards the state and the ruling party, than they had prior to their arrival at NYSPUT. Moreover, for some, their resolve to fight not just the university administration, but also the regime once they arrived on campus, had only been strengthened. As Kajwang’ recalls, NYSPUT “had aroused in [him] the struggle to rebel against oppressive authority.”64

“Bloody Sunday” and the political life of NYSPUT graduates on campus, 1984-1990

By the mid-1980s, the Moi government had moved towards invigorating the importance of the ruling party, KANU. During this period, as Charles Hornsby notes, “[all] opposition to the government was treated as subversion, and the sole criterion for political success became loyalty to the president” (Hornsby 2012: 398). Not surprisingly, by 1985, freedom of the press became greatly constrained, intellectuals continued to be harassed and jailed and the government initiated a major crackdown on Kenya’s main underground, socialist movement Mwakenya in 1986 (Cheeseman 2006;

Hornsby 2012). Under such conditions, the university became “one of the only remaining spaces were criticism of the government could be articulated” (Mwangola 2007: 152) and Moi through the implementation of his post-coup reforms was eager to eliminate that autonomy.

By beginning of 1985, as the first batch of NYSPUT graduates began to acclimatize to life at the university, Moi’s reforms appeared to be working. Describing the atmosphere on campus as late as January of that year, The Weekly Review noted that “unrest at the University [seemed] like a thing of the past,” where a “new spirit of co-operation [had] prevailed between the university and the authorities for almost two years [since the coup]” (The Weekly Review, 15 February 1985: 3).

It is important to note that in spite of Moi’s heavy-handed tactics throughout his presidency, he never fully abandoned elements of his strategy of co-optation. Even following the coup, amid

64 Interview, TJ Kajwang, Nairobi, Kenya, July 17th, 2014

272 draconian reforms, Moi had made a series of conciliatory gestures towards students: releasing, in

February of 1983, 61 student detainees; inviting student representatives to accompany him on trips to China, India and Tanzania; making periodic visits to campus to share tea with students at the university sports ground; and requesting the company of delegations of varsity students to join him at State House.

Moreover, the Moi government also tried to initiate changes from within SONU, which had also undergone some moderating changes, as the composition of its leadership was far more amendable to cultivating a close relationship with the government than it had been in the past.

These changes were embodied in the figure of the new SONU Chairman, Patrick (PLO) Lumumba, a self-proclaimed “moderate,” who ran for the Chairmanship unopposed in 1984 and was said to have cordial relations with the Moi regime.65

It is precisely for these reasons that the eruption of dissidence on campus in February

1985, which resulted in the death of a student, came as a double shock to the regime. Not only had student unrest unexpectedly returned to the University, but also it soon became clear that the much- praised NYSPUT graduates had played a central role in these disturbances.

The trouble began on the morning of 5 February 1985, when three University of Nairobi students were expelled and another five had their scholarships revoked, though official explanation was not provided by the state for these punitive measures (Daily Nation, 8 February 1985). Included in this group was the popular graduate student and former SONU Chairman, Mwandawiro

Mghanga. In the aftermath of the news, students peacefully gathered at the Great Court daily, boycotting lectures, seeking a high court injunction against the expulsions, and demanding an official

65 In stark contrast to some of his immediate predecessors, Lumumba believed that university students “should not dabble in national politics unless absolutely necessary” (Interview, PLO Lumumba, Nairobi, Kenya, June 4th, 2014).

273 explanation for the government’s decision against the censured students (ibid). These tensions resulted in violence on ‘Bloody Sunday,’ 10 February, when a non-denominational prayer meeting organized by students was disrupted by plainclothes policemen and members of the General Service

Unit (GSU), who proceeded to open fire with their tear gas canisters. The assault by the security forces, undertaken in the presence of the University of Nairobi’s Vice-Chancellor, Joseph Muigai, and the resulting pandemonium left 65 students and 32 policemen injured and resulted in the death of a University of Nairobi student, Jack Wandera.66

While there is much disagreement about the specifics of the events that transpired on that day, the explanation for the security forces decision to attack university students peacefully meeting on campus is less contentious. Numerous eyewitnesses and participants assert that the NYSPUT graduates were planning to perform a Guard of Honour in full NYSPUT uniform following the prayer meeting. Whereas under normal circumstances, such a ceremony would be presided over by the President or other high-ranking military or political officials, former student-recruits had decided that they wanted Mghanga himself to inspect it. By performing such a ceremony, and having it presided over by a recently expelled, dissident student leader, the NYSPUT graduates intended to symbolically challenge the legitimacy of the Moi regime and to assert the autonomy of the student body at the University. As one former SONU Chairman and NYSPUT graduate recalls, for the students, “the symbolism [of having Mghanga lead the Guard of Honour] was…that the university was a State unto itself”.67

In the following days The Standard newspaper reported that “only a handful of students turned up in NYS uniform, and up until the police moved in, no mention was made of the guard of honour” (The Weekly Review, 15 February 1985: 13). Still, in a statement from the Office of the

66 The government’s claim that said students had been throwing stones were rejected by newsman at the meeting, Mungai and other eyewitnesses. 67 Interview, Omondi Alayoo, Nairobi, Kenya, May 28th, 2014

274 President in the days following the incident, the government confirmed the story, contending that the police actions were warranted because university students were trying to “establish their own authority within the University”, as first-year undergraduates were said to have intended to “parade, in National Youth Service uniforms for the purpose of staging a guard of honour to be inspected by the self-imposed student leader, Julius Mwandawiro [Mghanga]” (The Standard, 13 February 1985:

1). In the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, the University was once again closed and 19 students, including Mghanga, were arrested and detained.

This, however, did not succeed in intimidating students into silence. Just over a month after Bloody Sunday a new scandal emerged on campus, which once again grabbed national headlines and centered on graduates of NYSPUT and their uniforms. Following Bloody Sunday, in an attempt to limit future embarrassment, the government released a circular requesting that students return all NYSPUT uniforms prior to being granted re-admission to the university. These same uniforms had only 8 months earlier been “given to students as a token of appreciation for their performance during the [NYSPUT] service” (Weekly Review, 29 April 1985: 6-7). Instead of returning the uniforms as ordered, former NYSPUT graduates decided to publicly burn them at the main gate of

Kenyatta College on the morning of 21 March 1985 (Daily Nation, 22 March 1985). This followed an evening where these same former student-recruits “marched around campus in similar drills they had learned at the [NYS-PUT] scheme” (ibid).

The combination of the proposed Guard of Honour and the student-recruits public burning of their own NYSPUT uniforms provided the first pieces of concrete evidence that the scheme was becoming counterproductive. Indeed, instead of fostering discipline and obedience among its graduates, NYSPUT seemed to be having the opposite effect on students. Mghanga himself acknowledges this:

The [NYSPUT] students themselves took initiative [to plan the guard of honor]…[w]ithout my knowledge…you can see that the [NYSPUT] really radicalized the students, instead of

275 intimidating [them]…Moi saw it as a way…to create [students with] discipline which accepts [sic] dictatorship, but that did not work. [In the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, Moi] thought now the [NYSPUT] is dangerous.68

A number of NYSPUT graduates from that first year of NYSPUT agree with Mghanga’s assessment of the emboldening impact that NYSPUT had on them. Nduma Nderi, a first-year NYSPUT recruit and eventual SONU Chairman contends that after NYSPUT, student-recruits took the lead in planning the Guard of Honour, because they “perceived [them]selves to be leaders of the pack, having come from disciplined training”.69 Alayoo goes further:

[NYSPUT was a space] where you are radicalized… By the time that you were coming out of NYS[PUT]…[you] know who the enemy is [i.e. the Kenyan state]…[After Bloody Sunday, Moi] realized he had a monster on his hands.70

Following these events, however, university students’ attitudes on campus towards activism seemed to become split according to their year. Upper-year students, who had experienced

NYSPUT, but, who in some cases, had had their education delayed by up to two or three years on account of the frequent university closures, were eager to graduate and for many of them “activist fatigue” had set in (Interview, Nduma Nderi). As 1985 SONU Chairman, Nderi recalls:

[w]e lost two years after the coup and then we almost lost another whole year [after Bloody Sunday], so when I became chairman [in 1986], there was a clamour for peace and students wanted to leave…a lot of [upper-year students] became apolitical, not because they had no opinion [or because] they were for the establishment, but there was [a] realization that we needed to get out of the University71

As Mwongela Kamencu (2013: 98) notes, in stark contrast, incoming first-year students, led by Buke, were distinguished from the upper-years by the fact that “unlike their predecessors…the[se] students had not been directly affected by the attempted coup nor had they

68 Interview, Mwandawiro Mghanga, Nairobi, Kenya, May 19th, 2014 69 Interview, Nduma Nderi, Nairobi, Kenya, May 27th, 2014 70 Interview, Omondi Alayoo, Nairobi, Kenya, May 28th, 2014 71 Interview, Nduma Nderi, Nairobi, Kenya, May 27th, 2014

276 been affected by the closure of the University in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday.” As such, they did not feel the same urgency to complete their degrees that the upper-year students did. For these younger students, the main challenge was to, in the words of Buke, “sustain the radicalism that existed before us.”72 Within their very first year, Buke and his allies organized a demonstration against the American bombing of Libya, which garnered national press coverage. Buke credits

NYSPUT for the political intensity of his first year at the university:

I can imagine if you just came straight from home…you can take a little while before you make your way around. But remember I organized a demo in first year. I had never been in Nairobi since I was born. The first time I am landing in Nairobi…I am conscious and confident enough to organize a demo in solidarity with another country out there. The reason [was because] my foreplay had been done in the National Youth Service.73

Following Bloody Sunday, two moderate candidates, Nderi, and Maina Kiranga, perhaps with the help of the university administration (Klopp and Orina 2002), led SONU as Chairmen in 1985 and

1986.74 Still, in the following year, Buke won the SONU Chairmanship in an historic landslide, garnering 3030 (of approximately 4000) votes (Weekly Review, 20 November, 1987). The SONU leadership team of that year featured a number of radical student leaders, who had been through

NYSPUT, including Secretary-General Kaberere Njenga, Vice-Chairman Munoru Nderi and

Secretary of Finance, Miguna Miguna. Almost immediately, at their swearing-in ceremony, the

SONU leadership forwarded a number of militant proposals, which explicitly challenged the wishes of the state. First, SONU called for the disbanding of tribal organizations or district associations on campus, which they argued were a source of exacerbating ethnic tensions that fostered student disunity. Second, SONU called for a ban on all government-funded student trips abroad, in an effort

72 Interview, Wafula Buke, Nairobi, Kenya, July 25th, 2014 73 Interview, Wafula Buke, Nairobi, Kenya, July 25th, 2014 74 Nderi’s victory is still disputed by Buke, who claims that the election was rigged (Interview, Wafula Buke, Nairobi, Kenya, July 25th, 2014)

277 to prohibit one of Moi’s more high profiled methods of dispensing patronage to the student body.

Third, SONU called for students to play a more active role in national political debates (ibid.).

On 15 November, just two days after the kamukunji where student leaders made these defiant public declarations, seven of SONU’s most prominent leaders were rounded up and arrested in an early morning campus raid by the security forces.75 In response, university students, in the absence of their union’s leadership, spontaneously “became riotous, barricading public roads and refusing to attend classes” (Weekly Review, 20 November, 1987: 18). In the “ensuing battles between students and the police…one student [was] shot in the shoulder, [and] many others [were] injured and 40 [were] arrested” (ibid.). Within a few days, the government responded by again closing the university, deregistering the students’ organization and threatening to introduce fees for students attending the university. Following the events of 1987, SONU would be banned for the next ten years.

In many ways, this unfortunate November 1987 incident followed a ‘predictable pattern’ in the ongoing struggle between the state and university students in Kenya during the 1980s. Indeed, with over 20 closings between 1970-1990, no university in Africa had been shut down more during that period (Balsvik 1998: 305). Still, given that for much of the 1970s and 1980s, the campus of

Nairobi University existed, as Mshai Mwongola (2007: 152) notes, as a “location of complicated political contest pitting pro-government positions against pro-opposition ones,” the widespread popularity of the newly elected SONU ‘87 leadership among their student colleagues, in conjunction with that leadership’s explicitly progressive political agenda, demonstrated the unprecedented sense of unity and anti-regime sentiment that had come to mark Kenya’s young generation of university

75 The chariman Robert Wafula Buke, vice-chairman Monuru Nderi, finance secretary Miguna Miguna, foreign-secretary Mbeji Mnameza, secretary-general Njenga Kaberere, academic secretary Amuomo Ngala, and vice secretary-general Margaret Ben.

278 students. The unity and militancy of the student union in Kenya by November of 1987 had been forged in an over-decade long struggle against an increasingly repressive and violent state.

Conclusion

In the aftermath of the November 1987 student protests, perhaps for the first time recognizing the impossibility of coopting the student leadership, the Moi government moved to smash it entirely. The government began to discuss the introduction cost sharing measures immediately following the November 1987 protest, disbanded the NYSPUT, supposedly on account of rising, unsustainable costs, in August of 1990, and in the absence of the banned SONU, began to promote ethnic associations on campus, as a means of splintering the battered student movement and distributing patronage to their student allies. It is the argument of this chapter that the radicalization of student activism in Kenya in the 1980s needs to be understood in relation Moi’s failed attempts to institutionalize party control over the University of Nairobi in the late-1970s and

1980s. Facing profound economic and political challenges, the Moi regime initially tried to win support of university students with a co-optative strategy, opening up political space on campus.

Utilizing the university’s new, more tolerent environment, students were able, beginning in the late-

1970s, to foster solidarity and organizational linkages, in the process becoming one of the most prominent groups espousing oppositional dissent in the country. Subsequently, the Moi regime changed tact, particularly following the aborted coup of 1982. In the aftermath of this event, the government’s repressive attempts to reassert control over the University of Nairobi only served to further politicize the cleavage between university students and the state, contributing to the growing levels of student protest and state repression witnessed in the 1980s.

In particular, as noted in this chapter, the establishment of the NYSPUT provides a illuminating illustration of the ways in which the Moi regime’s institutional reforms backfired, producing a host of unintended consequences, including providing student-recruits with grievances

279 around which to develop collective solidarity, and through which a core of student came to embrace oppositional politics; unwittingly providing space and time for students to construct and nurture durable social bonds among themselves and to refine their political ideas, both which came to be utilized once students began to mobilize politically on campus; and finally, through their confrontations with the regime during NYSPUT question periods, the program exposed the ideological shortcomings at the heart of the KANU’s renaissance under Moi and, in some cases, built up the reputations of future student leaders among their colleagues. By 1987, in spite of, and indeed in many respects because of, Moi’s best efforts, anti-regime militancy and the popularity of student leadership were at an all-time high.

280 CHAPTER EIGHT

CONCLUSIONS

Africa is taking its own shape. The youth bulge is enormous, and [the youth] stopped waiting. And so, they are going to make Nollywood, or they are going to make Boko Haram, and you are not even in that conversation…[Youth in Africa] will define not just the safety of you in Sandton [an affluent Johannesburg suburb], but the fate of all things…For me, for now, I prefer to see the continent as an enormous adventure. Its feature is youth, and youth are bending their bodies in complicated ways to adventure. Binyavanga Wainana, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2015

Over the last decade, political developments across the Globe, including the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS, have fuelled a sense of moral panic about the ‘crisis of youth’, evidenced in frequent popular discussions about ‘youth radicalization.’ These anxieties have emboldened interest in intergenerational demographic imbalances, or youth bulges, to explain political violence and conflict. Underlying this theory is the increasingly widely held assumption that youth, as Samuel Huntington (2003: 265) has noted, is a “natural source of [political] instability and violence.” In spite of its growing prominence, particularly in the discipline of political science, youth bulge theory has often served to evacuate the social category of youth of its historical and political content, providing overly generalized conclusions about youth politics, which obscure the remarkable diversity and dynamism of youth political activity in Africa and beyond.

While there is no question, as both youth bulge theorists and the above quotation by the

Kenyan author, Binyavanga Wainana, recognize, that Africa’s large youth bulge populations will play a profound role in shaping the political realities of African socieites over the coming decades, in contrast to scholars like Huntington, this doctoral project has argued that there is nothing

“natural” about the forms that youth politics will take in African societies. For, as Gary Burgess and Andrew Burton (2010: 2) have noted, while these “population statistics suggest that the young matter…they don’t explain how or why.”

281 In this study, I have sought to focus on explaining variations in trajectories of youth politics in Africa during the initial postcolonial decades. Adopting a historical institutionalist approach, I have postulated that differences in the institutional choices made by Africa’s first generation of nation-state builders in era of decolonization produced long-lasting political effects.

These institutional arrangements ultimately served to mediate the preferences, interests and strategies of African youth and also structure their relationships to postcolonial states. In short,

I have argued throughout this dissertation that political institutions, specifically the institutional strategies and arrangements that have undergirded postcolonial African states’ projects of nation- state building have served to harness and channel the energies of young people in profoundly different ways, shaping trajectories of youth activism that have proven to be strikingly divergent cross-nationally in practice. To substantiate these arguments, I have investigated both the institutional origins of divergent projects of nation-state building in Kenya and Tanzania, and the strategies of incorporation (or exclusion) adopted by these postcolonial states’ in their relationships with their national universities in both cases during the initial postcolonial period.

This study’s findings have a number of important implications. First, by focusing attention on the role of the state in exacerbating or tempering youth engagement with politics and violence, my study has highlighted some of the political origins of youth activism. In so doing, I have hoped to counter the central findings and core assumptions of the youth bulge theory, which has come to be the dominant paradigm in political science in the comparative study of youth politics in

Africa. In addition, this study contributes to the rejection of the normative agenda of securitization that this youth bulge literature is frequently tied to. According to many youth bulge theorists, the “high proportion of young men in the population…is treated not only as a threat to the social order of the country in question but—in the context of a globalized security discourse—as a destabilizing factor for the global social order as a whole” (Kirschner 2009: 369).

282 This particular understanding of youth as a global security problem serves to obscure political factors, which help to determine youth political activity. By attempting to highlight some of the political causes of young people’s marginalization and disenfranchisement, through a careful historical study, I have endeavoured to discredit this conceptualization of youth as inevitable problem and demonstrate the important ways in which the different institutional dynamics and settings of domestic politics crucially shape and channel the political activities of youth differently, often producing durable cross-national variatons. In highlighting this relationship between the state, domestic institutional arrangements and trajectories of youth politics, this study points to presicent questions for future research, which engages with a wider collection of cases in Africa and beyond.

Second, in demonstrating the significant role played by past institutional configurations

(i.e. political parties, state bureaucracies) in shaping later political outcomes in postcolonial Africa, my study makes an important contribution to the emergent institutionalist turn in Africanist political science, which has been driven by the recent work of scholars like Catherine Boone (2003,

2014, 2018), Paul Nugent (2010), Daniel Posner (2005), Nic Cheeseman (2018), and Rachel Beatty

Riedl (2014, 2016, 2018), who have all attempted to place the state and its organizational structures front and centre in their analysis of African politics. As with their recent work, the historical institutionalist approach adopted in my doctoral study has aimed not only to highlight some of the ways in which formal institutions have played a key role in shaping political outcomes in postcolonial Africa, but also to challenge the perceived dichotomy between an era of supposed institutionless, neopatrimonial politics of the 1970s and 1980s and the supposed resurgence of formal institutions in the era of multiparty politics in the 1990s (Riedl 2018).

This relates to a third contribution of this study’s findings, namely, that it has offered a critique of the dominant literature on postcolonial, nation-state building in Africa. I have argued

283 that this literature has demonstrated a proclivity for overgeneralization across African cases, particularly during the initial postcolonial decades. Specifically, by overstating the homogeneity of postcolonial state trajectories across Africa prior to 1990, scholars like Crawford Young (1994,

2004, 2012), have served to “flatten” the early postcolonial African political landscape, neglecting the historical sources and political consequences of divergences in the institutional choices of the first generation of African nation-state builders. In focusing on the origins and effects of such institutional variations, my doctoral project demonstrates the need for more comparative research to be undertaken, which analyzes postcolonial African nation-state building projects cross- nationally, and attempts to chart the historical origins and political effects of variations in institutional arrangements across time and space.

Finally, my doctoral project has sought to fill an important gap in the literature on the history of African university student activism. Over the last decade, this field of historical research has undergone a marked resurgence. While this reinvigorated literature has extensively explored the role of African student activists in anti-colonial, nationalist mobilization of the 1950s and 1960s and the more recent part that university students have played in protests against

World Bank-imposed austerity reforms to higher education and pro-democratization movements, student activism in the era of decolonization both immediately before and after independence has remained underexplored (Hodgkinson and Melchiorre, n.d.). This comparative study of the history of student activism at two of the continent’s most prestigious institutions of higher education has tried to fill this empirical gap in the literature.

In the reminder of this concluding chapter, I bring together my study’s central findings and consider their broader implications. I demonstrate the ways in which colonial political economies helped to shape African postcolonial states’ institutional architectures, which, when confronted by distinct constellations of social forces at independence, were forced to operate

284 within dissimilar spaces of possibility for nation-state building in postcolonial Africa. I identify the political consequences of the different institutional choices that were made by the first generation of African nation-state builders during the critical juncture of decolonization, in my two cases studies; specifically, I show how these choices helped to shape subsequent patterns of youth activism within national universities in Tanzania and Kenya. I conclude by briefly considering the durability of these different trajectories of student activism within my two case studies during the crucial decade of political liberalization in the 1990s.

The political economy of institutional choice

A key debate in the literature on postcolonial African nation-state formation relates to the question of institutional choice: to what extent were the institutions of colonialism, specifically their coercive and extractive capacities, reproduced into the independence era? Moreover, how can we explain continuity and change across cases? Dominant approaches in Africanist political science have tended to focus on state-centered variables to answer these pivotal questions, attributing these outcomes to the ideological predilections of postcolonial African leaders or the differences in colonial administrative inheritances. In this study, relying on the theoretical insights of Catherine Boone’s (2003) work, I have sought to explain institutional origins primarily in relation to “societal constraints” that confronted new African regimes “on the ground” at independence. In other words, I have tried to situate institutional choices within the social and political-economic contexts in which they were made.

In the case of Kenya and Tanzania, I have argued that distinctive colonial political economies produced different spaces of possibility for these countries’ respective postcolonial nation-state building projects. It is the different combination of these colonial legacies in Kenya and Tanzania that help to explain the distinctive constellations of socio-political forces that came to drive their respective anti-colonial nationalist movements and bestowed upon these ascendant, postcolonial

285 political elites very different institutional state architectures with which to reproduce their dominance. Once they ascended to power following independence, these distinctive nationalist elites, conditioned by their own unique set of institutional incentives and societal constraints, were confronted with significantly different parameters of choice and, as such, adopted very divergent approaches to the challenges of nation-state building.

In the case of the Kenyan state, the combination of its colonial political economy and state policy produced a society deeply divided by emergent class and ethnic divisions, where a conservative, pro-British ruling elite took over the reins of state power at independence.

Inheriting one of the strongest state apparatuses in all of Central Africa, this elite, made up of a group of strong, local ethnic barons and confronted by radical nationalist opposition forces (some of whom were ex-Mau Mau detainees), sought to ensure political and economic continuity, using the formidable institutional apparatus of the colonial state (particularly the Provincial

Administration) to consolidate and reproduce their dominance, through the preservation of the colonial state structure and the marginalization of popular forces and the country’s ruling party,

KANU. The institutional and political-economic legacies of colonialism in Kenya shaped the class character of the postcolonial ruling elite and circumscribed the space of possibility for nation- state building within the postcolony, which came to rely on an elaborate patronage system and the routine deployment of violence in order to ensure the legitimacy and stability of the Kenyatta state.

In Tanzania, these variables produced a much different space of possibility for nation-state building. At independence, largely as a product of their different colonial political economy and sociocultural ecology, Tanzania’s nationalist elite was far more homogenous and unified, lacking the deeply entrenched class and ethnic divisions of their Kenyan neighbours. As a result, Nyerere, unlike Kenyatta, did have to negotiate with or accommodate powerful, entrenched local interests

286 to keep his fragile nationalist coalition together. This lack of powerful societal constraints at the local level enabled the TANU government to pursue the kinds of dramatic institutional reforms that would have been unthinkable in Kenya, regardless of Kenyatta’s ideological commitments or political acumen. These very different sets of societal constraints are key in explaining the incredibly distinctive nation-state building projects that each country pursued after independence and the types of states that these processes of decolonization ultimately produced. The kinds of institutional choices made by KANU and TANU regimes during the critical juncture of decolonization had long-lasting political effects and played a key role in shaping the conduct of politics within these respective polities.

Youth politics and the political effects of nation-state building Having established the ways in which distinct colonial economies helped to produce different spaces of possibility for nation-state building in Kenya and Tanzania, my study shifted its focus to a consideration of the consequences of these strategies for youth activism in both countries. In exploring the political effects of these institutional choices, I argued that in Kenya and Tanzania, these newly independent states opted to to incorporate the university and its students into their overarching nation-state building projects in profoundly different ways. In

Kenya, the relationship between the state and university students was marked by the ruling party’s unwillingness to institutionalize party control over the university during much of the

1960s and 1970s. The Kenyatta state’s approach to its management of its national university, dictated by their desire to isolate radical elements of the ruling party from university students, enabled those same students to organize and operate politically on campus, in a space beyond the realm of state or party control.

Throughout the 1970s, as the KANU government was confronted by mounting demographic, political and economic pressures, its tolerance for student dissent lowered and its

287 penchant for repressive violence against any form of student disobedience intensified. While, following his ascent to power in 1978, Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi made initial overtures to bring the student leadership into his reconfigured ruling coalition, students demonstrated an aversion to such a prospect. Instead, they took advantage of the relative openness that the Moi regime briefly cultivated on campus in the late-1970s, to foster solidarity and organizational linkages, in the process becoming one of the most prominent groups espousing oppositional dissent in the country. Realizing that this group could not be easily coopted, the Moi regime increasingly used authoritarian institutional reforms (particularly after the aborted 1982 coup) and violent repression to bring the student movement in line. Discouraged by the political direction of the ruling party and its embrace of authoritarian tactics, levels of protest, unity and anti-regime sentiment among students reached their height in the late-1980s.

In Tanzania, by contrast, from the inception of UCD, the TANU state cultivated a much different relationship with its university students, utilizing a different set of institutional implements, which were much less dependent on the deployment of repressive violence to maintain control and authority over the university. Instead, the TANU regime made a much greater effort to inculcate university students with the party’s ideology and to engage with them directly over issues of policy. That said, the key explanation for university students relative quiescence in comparison to their Kenyan counterparts, relates to the different set of institutional tools that the TANU regime used to rein in student dissent, which were far more co-optative in nature, then they were repressive. Specifically, the TANU government opted to undermine the organizational autonomy of university student unions, often eliminating independent associations or incorporating these organizations into the pre-existing apparatus of the ruling party. The continued influence of TANU/CCM on campus, through the presence of the Vice-Chancellor

(who was often a high-ranking party official), and the creation of party youth branch and party

288 office at the university, enabled the ruling party to establish and maintain a strong grip over the everyday running of UDSM. As a result of these institutional strategies, when economic and political crisis intensified in the 1980s, the Tanzanian state was better prepared to direct student dissent through the institutional channels of the ruling party than their Kenyan counterparts, because the state had effectively usurped university students’ organizational autonomy. As such, the response of student activists at UDSM to the socioeconomic and political turbulence of the

1980s was one characterized by obedience and disengagement from national politics, as this group lacked the organizational capacity to mount a serious and sustained critique of the postcolonial government, in spite of the economic and political crisis that engulfed it.

Durable divergences: student protest in an era of political liberalization

In concluding, it is important to emphasize that the divergent trajectories of youth activism in the first decades of independence documented in this study persisted beyond the 1980s.

Beginning in the final years of that decade, African countries underwent a moment of dramatic political opening, rediscovering competitive electoral politics en masse. While by the end of that decade, only a handful of African states held regular multiparty elections, by the mid-1990s, within just five short years, the continent possessed 16 newly elected national governments

(Berman 2013: 368), and by mid-2003, 44 of sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 states had held “founding elections” (Lynch and Crawford 2011). There is no question that Africa’s “second liberation”, as this moment was christened, failed to meet many of its initial, popular expectations (Young 2004:

43). Indeed, by the end of the 1990s, the reality of Africa’s post-Cold War democratic experiments was, on the whole, decidedly “mixed” (Bratton and van de walle 1997: 97), most often producing

“hybrid regimes” of different varieties. Still, these processes of political liberalization had a profound impact on the conduct of politics within these states, often serving as a source of violent conflict and social disorder (Berman 2013; Berman et al 2004; Eyoh 2004; Nugent 2012).

289 Key participants in these popular struggles for democratic reform were university students themselves. In some countries, such as Benin, Zaire, and Mali, this social group played a central role in protests that led to the toppling of long-standing, autocratic regimes. Moreover, in many African states, the initiation of processes of political liberalization also produced the effect of “unleash[ing] an unprecedented wave of student rebellion on university campuses in West and

Central Africa” (Konnings 2002: 182).

In explaining these developments, scholars have most often stressed the “material roots” of these so-called “new [African] student movements” (Federici 2000: 92). These predominant explanations argue that the escalation in student protests on the continent in the late-1980s and

1990s need to be understood primarily as a by-product of World Bank-led Structural Adjustment reforms to Higher Education. Beginning in the 1980s, in line with the recommendations of the

Berg Report, African states drastically cut their tertiary education budgets and sought to prioritize investment in primary education, which was said to have a higher social return and be a more efficient usage of limited state funds (Zeilig and Dawson 2008: 7; Caffentzis 2000: 3). These major budget cuts in Higher Education resulted in “catastrophic” living conditions for students on university campuses across Africa, which included “[o]vercrowded classrooms, students running on one meal per day, failing water and electricity supplies, collapsing buildings, libraries without journals or books, [and a] lack of educational supplies” (Caffentzis 2000: 8). Proponents of this materialist approach argue that university students’ emergence as “political actors in contemporary Africa is tied to th[is] transformation of higher education…under the auspices of

IMF and World Bank-led reform” (Zeilig and Dawson 2008: 4). These scholars tend to downplay the importance of the political factors driving student activism, suggesting that in the 1990s, changes to the broader political climate, meant that the postcolonial African state was “no longer a player in the academic as well as the economic scene” (Federici 2000: 62) and that their main

290 responsibility had been reduced to “provid[ing] the repressive force necessary for the application of SAP[s]” (ibid, 16).

Durable continuities in patterns of student activism, which persisted at Kenyan and

Tanzanian universities throughout the 1990s, in the midst of these profound political and economic changes, however, suggest that the primary causes of these divergences have deeper political roots, closely connected to the historical relationship forged between the postcolonial

African state and university students during the initial postcolonial decades, which this study has documented.

In the Kenyan case, while the banning of Students’ Organization of Nairobi University

(SONU) and the arrest of its leadership in November of 1987 momentarily derailed Kenya’s student movement, by the early-1990s, as the process of political liberalization was being reluctantly initiated by the KANU government (Brown 2004; Ndegwa 1997), Kenya’s “tradition of student activism [was] reinvigorated” and Kenyan universities (including, but not exclusively, the University of Nairobi) “persist[ed] as…site[s] of resistance and advocacy for democratic change” (Klopp and Orina 2002: 46).

This is not to suggest that Kenyan student activism did not undergo some alterations during this period. Reflecting profound shifts in the geopolitical environment following the end of the Cold War, the ideological vocabularies of socialism and Marxism, which were commonly utilized by student activists in the 1970s and 1980s in Kenya, were no longer a “part of the

University student political menu.”1 Instead, student activists increasingly framed their political grievances in a language of “human rights [and] constitutionalism”2 that had become popular in national political discourse of this period. Moreover, as in other African countries during the

1 Interview, Moses Oburu, Nairobi, Kenya, June 25th, 2014 2 Interview, George Omondi, Nairobi, Kenya, July 1st, 2014

291 1990s, Kenyan university students became more preoccupied with issues of “survival”,3 protesting against the introduction of cost-sharing policies, and becoming increasingly focused on issues related to student welfare (i.e. loans, accommodations, price of food, etc).

Still, it is important to stress that these student activists maintained a fervent national focus and anti-regime stance throughout the 1990s (lacking in their Tanzanian counterparts), which had been a feature of Kenyan student activism since the mid-1970s. This was demonstrated in their mobilizations to protect the Karura forest from state-sanctioned land grabbing in the late-

1990s, their protests against state-sponsored ethnic violence, their primary role in organizing demonstrations which defied the KANU government, calling for, for example, constitutional reforms in July of 1997, and their successful attempts to establish an autonomous national university student organization, the Kenyan University Student Organization (KUSO) in 1995

(ibid, 56).

For the state’s part, far from adopting an enfeebled and marginal role in managing university affairs, as critics like Federici would suggest, the regime of Daniel arap Moi’s continued to wield a powerful influence over Kenyan universities during this decade of political liberalization. While this involved the deployment of familiar old tactics refined by the Kenyan state during the initial decades of independence -- like the banning of SONU from 1987 to 1998 and the deregistering of the University Academic Staff Union (UASU), frequent closures of university campuses (including the closing of all public universities in the latter half of 1995 in response to the UASU strike), the detainment of student leaders and faculty, and, finally, the intensification of state repression against student activists, which resulted in more fatalities in the

1990s than in previous decades4– the Moi regime also utilized new strategies of containing

3 Interview, Moses Oburu, Nairobi, Kenya, June 25th, 2014 4 including the mysterious death of KUSU’s Vice-Chairman Solomon Muruli in his dorm room due to a fire at the University of Nairobi in 1997

292 student radicalism. In addition to introducing cost-sharing measures in June of 1991, in accordance with World Bank recommendations, which required students to pay for their own meals, accommodations, and other expenses, the Moi regime also initiated efforts to sponsor district-based (or ethnic) student associations near the end of the 1980s, providing the student leaders of these organizations with financial support often coming from prominent KANU politicians and civil servants, with the intent of sowing the seeds of divisions within the student movement (Oanda 2016: 73; Klopp and Orina 2002; Kiai 1992; Lynch 2011). Moreover, unlike in the late-1970s, the KANU government was able to successfully establish a presence for their youth organization, Youth for KANU ’92 (YK’92), on campus prior to the 1992 election, often distributing money through this organization to help them recruit faculty and student members.5

In addition, the Moi regime also found novel ways of manipulating WB-imposed reforms to benefit their own domestic agenda. For example, when the Moi regime introduced, in

September of 1995, a new student loan policy, it was to be governed by the newly created Higher

Education Loan Board (HELB), which was in theory expected to independently assess the financial neediness of individual student applicants. While HELB turned out to be dogged by corruption and lacking in institutional capacity, its stipulation that applicants were required to get letters of recommendation from local authorities, enabled the Moi regime to use this new body as “a source of selective patronage and…a convenient political tool to screen out potentially active student leaders” (Klopp and Orina 2002: 66), by denying them loans. In these ways, as Klopp and

Orina (ibid: 64) note, the root cause of Kenyan universities’ crisis throughout the 1990s “lay neither in SAPs or an economy of scarcity”, but rather in the “critical role of a highly repressively structured state and its appointees on campus.”

5 Interview, Chris Wanjala, Nairobi, Kenya, July 9th, 2014

293 By the end of the 1990s, the strength, unity and national orientation of Kenya’s student movement began to dissipate, as troubling trends afflicting the country’s body politic began to intrude upon life at Kenyan universities in a forceful, new way. Much of this was related to the consequences of, as SONU ’98 Chairman, Moses Oburu recalls, “national politics being played out in the university”,6 as political parties began to aggressively vie for the support of student activists. This produced a number of consequences. First, with the formal reinstatement of

SONU in 1998, the student leadership almost immediately became divided along political lines, with some factions of the leadership supporting the opposition, while others, like Oburu, were seen to be firmly in the KANU camp.7

These internal divisions within the student leadership and the increasing influence of national politicians on student politics produced other consequences. For example, politicians from both KANU and Kenya’s multiple opposition parties began to fund the campaigns of prospective student leaders. As a result, campus politics started to resemble national politics, becoming increasingly “commercial[ized]”, as candidates for student leadership positions, as

SONU ’98 Vice-Chairman, Joseph Kiyoko, admits, realized that entry into university politics could provide a means of enriching oneself, in ways that it had not previously.8 The growing importance of money in student politics opened the way for the emergence of corrupt practices on campus, like jackpotting, whereby student leaders, using the powerful leverage of the student movement, would secure money from the university administration for proposed student events.

In organizing these activities, only a small fraction of the funds would be used for the event in

6 Interview, Moses Oburu, Nairobi, Kenya, June 25th, 2014 7 In his case, this was assumed because of his known close relations with Moi. 8 Interview, Joseph Kioko, Nairobi, Kenya, July 10th, 2014; Oanda 2016: 77

294 question, with the remainder being pocketed by student leaders themselves.9. While Kiyoko acknowledges that this type of corrupt behaviour on the part of the SONU leadership began during his year in office, it became common practice in student politics in subsequent years. More recently, “[s]ome [national] political leaders [have even] support[ed] students” with the

“ulterior motives...[of] seeking an outlet for their criminal intent such as distributing drugs on campus or pushing some tribal agenda” (Oanda 2016: 77).

A final by-product of the intrusion of multiparty politics at Nairobi during the first decade of the era of political liberalization was the growing presence of “goon” squads. “Goon” squads were gangs of often co-ethnic, university students, sometimes armed; who were funded by politically connected individuals. These groups behaved as vigilantes in their approach to student politics, harassing student activists, disrupting student campaign events and demonstrations, and terrorizing sections of the student population (Federici 2000: 97). It is important to note that the emergence of such groups at Kenyan universities was also closely related to the national political battles that were unfolding on campus. For example, at the University of Nairobi in the late-

1990s, Oburu, was protected by Kosovo, the most powerful ‘goon squad’ on campus during this period. This group was composed largely of students, like Oburu, from Western Province, who were closely linked to KANU, and were said to be on the ruling party’s “payroll”.10 Kosovo’s main responsibilities “were to disrupt or interfere with the activities of student leaders that they thought opposed the government [and Oburu].”11 The emergence of such violent groups on

9 Interviews, George Omondi, Nairobi, Kenya, July 1st, 2014; Moses Oburu, Nairobi, Kenya, June 25th, 2014; Joseph Kioko, Nairobi, Kenya, July 10th, 2014; Kingwa Kamencu, Nairobi, Kenya, June 26th, 2014 10 Interview, Cyprian Nyamwamu, Nairobi, Kenya, July 23rd, 2014; Indeed, KANU supporters, like the shadowy businessman, Kasmir Patni and Westlands MP and Assistant Minister, Fred Gumo (Interviews George Omondi, Nairobi, Kenya, July 1st, 2014; Moses Oburu, Nairobi, Kenya, June 25th, 2014) were thought to be Kosovo’s primary benefactors. 11 Interview, George Omondi, Nairobi, Kenya, July 1st, 2014

295 campus, which would continue into the 21st Century, reflected a broader trend in Kenyan politics: namely, that the return of multiparty politics in the country had facilitated the unprecedented politicization of youth violence and criminality (Anderson 2002; Mwangola, 2007: 148; Kagwanja

2005), manifesting itself in the creation of numerous criminal gangs and vigilante bands, primarily composed of young people in urban centers, such as Talibans, Baghdad Boys, Jeshi la Mzee (the elder’s battalion), Jeshi la Embakasi (the Embakasi battalion) and Mungiki, who were enlisted by established political factions or elder, prominent patrons, to carry out violent acts against political opponents and rival groups (Anderson 2002: 549-551; Mwangola 2007: 148; Kagwanja 2005). By the end of the 1990s, the fragmentation of the student leadership along party lines, the increasing commercialization of student politics and the emerging presence of ‘goon’ squads, like Kosovo, on

Kenyan university campuses were all evidence of the ways in which university politics continued to be deeply embedded within, and primarily shaped by, the Kenyan postcolonial state and changes within the country’s national political system.

Similarly, in Tanzania, certain broader historical trends continued to persist in the relationship between the national state and university students. Still, it is important to note, that, as in other parts of Africa, the return of multiparty politics did see university students adopting a more openly adversarial relationship with the university administration. Indeed, in April of 1990, just two months after Nyerere called for Tanzania to re-embrace multiparty politics, university students, frustrated with the deterioration of academic standards, the perceived corruption among the university administration, and the poor quality of campus accommodation and student allowances, began a boycott of their classes, which lasted 11 days. During this period, they requested an increase in their student allowances, tried to set up a meeting with UDSM’s

Chancellor, then Tanzanian President Hassan Mwinyi, and demanded the immediate dismissal of the UDSM’s Chief Administrative Officer, Chief Cafeteria Superintendent and Chief Estates

296 Manager, who they accused of embezzling public funds (Daily News, May 3rd, 1990: 3). On May

14th, 1990, Mwinyi responded by announcing the closure of UDSM and ordering students back to their home districts. He justified these dramatic interventions by arguing that students’ were guilty of initiating a “smear campaign against Party and Government Leaders in which [they had] circulated abusive and irreverent literature” against the CCM government (The Daily News,

May 15th, 1990: 1). The University remained closed for almost a year.

As they had in the past, in the aftermath of this campus crisis, the CCM government relied less on violent repression to silence and marginalize dissident students and more on institutional reforms, which aimed to curb the political activities of these student activists. For example, the government introduced the Political Parties Act of 1992 that prohibited the establishment of “any branch, unit, youth or women organization or other organ or any political party in any working place, school, or other place of lea[r]ning [sic]” (Government of Tanzania, 1992). In practice, this act made it illegal for opposition parties to establish any formal political presence on university campuses in Tanzania. Moreover, when the Ministry of Science, Technology and

Higher Education introduced a new loan scheme for university students confronted with the financial burdens of cost sharing, they formally stipulated that “any students…found to be unduly concerned with political issues” could have their loans immediately discontinued (The Guardian,

October 10th, 1996, p.1). According to the Ministry, this requirement was introduced to prevent

“the academic environment” from being turned into “a political scenario (ibid).” In practice, it served as a formidable obstacle, which formally blocked students from organizing on campus around political grievances.

This is not to suggest that Tanzanian university students in the 1990s completely shied way from political activism. For one, they played an important role in creating one of Tanzania’s strongest new opposition parties, the National Convention for Construction and Reform

297 (NCCR),12 with some former student leaders, like James Mbatia, even running on the NCCR ticket for parliamentary seats. Moreover, students also engaged in protracted and bitter “bread and butter struggles”13 with the university administration, filing a High Court injunction in 1996 to bar the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education from “instituting unfair terms and conditions” in relation to student loan forms and continually calling for an increase in student meal, accommodation, stationary and transport allowances (The Guardian, June 20th, 1997: 1).

Still, in contrast to their Kenyan counterparts, and in keeping with broader historical patterns, student activists in Tanzania in the 1990s repeatedly refrained from directing their protests “against the party of CCM”14, even though the party’s ideological hegemony by this time had almost completely disintegrated. Indeed, in October of 2000, during a class boycott calling for an increase in students’ daily allowances, in which students from five Tanzanian institutions of higher learning participated, student leadership went to great pains to stress that “[t]here was no relationship between students’ [protest] demands and politics” (The Guardian, October 29th,

2000; The Guardian, October 30th, 2000: 3). In this way, the leadership of this student boycott consciously “did not want to be associated with the opposition”, which they saw as being weak and fragmented.15 Nor did they seek to “attack CCM” for fear that such attacks would prevent the ruling party from “understand[ing their] concerns.” 16 Tanzanian students’ aversion to express anti-regime sentiment or even engage with national politics directly would have been unthinkable in Kenya during this same period and demonstrates the lasting legacies of relationships forged between the state and university students in the initial postcolonial decades.

12 NCCR placed an admirable second in the 1995 General Elections 13 Interview, Sabotho Nyamsewa, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 3rd, 2014 14 Interviews, Zitto Kabwe, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 2nd, 2014; Omar Ilyas, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 4th, 2014 15 Interview, Zitto Kabwe, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 2nd, 2014 16 Ibid.

298 While the materialist perspective to the study of student activism in Africa correctly point out that the pauperization of the student body of African universities, largely as a result of neoliberal reforms to Higher Education, has had important implications for student activism on the continent, including diminishing the social status of the once illustrious social group of university students, facilitating students’ deeper collaboration in political activities with other elements of the urban constituencies, and directing the focus of student activism more to pressing

“bread and butter” issues related to student welfare than overall concerns of national politics

(Caffentzis 2000; Federici 2000; Boyer 2002; Jua and Nyanjoh 2002; Zeilig 2008; Zeilig and

Dawson 2008), they fail to appreciate the ways in which, in spite of the dramatic political changes of the 1990s, African universities remained deeply embedded in national political processes and struggles (Klopp and Orina 2002: 44). Indeed, as Klopp and Orina (2002: 45) note this “focus on

SAPs” among these scholars has had the effect of “turn[ing] theoretical attention away from the internal political linkages between universities and…[postcolonial] African state[s] and econom[ies]”, thus obscuring the political causes of student activism in Africa, which, as I have argued throughout this study, are crucial to any comprehensive explanation of these phenomenon.

The persistence of durable continuities in the nature of student activism and the relationship between university students and the postcolonial African state in both Kenya and

Tanzania throughout the 1990s demonstrate the lasting legacies of earlier institutional choices forged in the initial postcolonial decades by these respective regimes. Moreover, they confirm one of this study’s central assertions that to understand the source of these divergent trajectories of youth activism we must place them within a broader historical context, which emphasizes the different ways in which these postcolonial African states attempted to incorporate university students into wider systems of political power.

299 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Sources Kenyan National Archives, Nairobi, Kenya Nation House, Daily Nation Archives, Nairobi, Kenya John S. Saul Papers (JSP) personal archives (private collection), Toronto, Canada

Newspapers The Standard (Tanzania) The Daily News (Tanzania) The Guardian (Tanzania) Daily Nation (Kenya) The Standard (Kenya)

Student Papers Cheche (Tanzania) Maji Maji (Tanzania) University Platform (Kenya)

Magazines The Weekly Review (Kenya)

Cited Interviews Omondi Alayoo, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, May 28th, 2014 Mohammad Bakari, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 2nd 2014 Wahinya Boore, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, May May 20th, 2014 Wafula Buke, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 25th, 2014 Andrew Coulson, Interview with author, via email, September 15th, 2015 Gary Fuller, Interview with author, via telephone, September 27th, 2017 Justinian Galabawa, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 30th, 2014 Kiama Gitahi , Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 17th, 2014 George Gona, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 1st, 2014 Gerry Helleiner, Interview with author, Toronto, Canada, March 30th, 2015 Omar Ilyas, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, November 4th, 2014 Zitto Kabwe, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 2nd, 2014 TJ Kajwang’, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya July 17th, 2014 Kingwa Kamencu, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, June 26th, 2014 Wanyiri Kihoro, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 17th, 2014 Rumba Kinuthia, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, June 13th, 2014 Dedura Kinuthi, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 27th, 2014 Joseph Kioko, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 10th, 2014 Muga Kolale, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, June 20th, 2014 Anthony Komu, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 13th, 2014 Colin Leys, Interview with author, Toronto, Canada, October 5th, 2017 PLO Lumumba, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, June 4th, 2014 Chris Maina Peter, Interview with the author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 10th, 2014

300 Mwandawiro Mghanga, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, May 19th, 2014 Daudi Mukangara, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 11th, 2014 James Mbatia, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 1st, 2014 Zakia Hamdani Meghji, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 6th, 2014 Miguna Miguna, Interview with author, Toronto, Canada, July 29th, 2014 Humphrey Moshi, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 3rd, 2014 Pius Msekwa, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, November 1st, 2014 Godfrey Muriuki, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 23rd, 2014 Gelaise Mutahaba, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 6th, 2014 Willy Mutunga, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 8th, 2014 Shadrick Nassongo, Interview with author, Via Telephone, January 17th, 2017 Nduma Nderi, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, May 27th, 2014 Kingunge Ngombale-Mwiru, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, October 23rd, 2014 Kaberere Njenga, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, May 26th, 2014 Karanja Njoroge, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 24th, 2014 John Nyambabe, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania November 11th, 2014 Sabotho Nyamsewa, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 3rd, 2014 Cyprian Nyamwamu, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 23rd, 2014 Peter Anyang Nyong’o, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, June 10th, 2014 Moses Oburu, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, June 25th, 2014 George Omondi, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 1st, 2014 Odour Ong’wen, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, May 26th, 2014 Onyango Oloo, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 11th, 2014 Issa Omari, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 5th, 2014 Josiah Omotto, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 21st, 2014 Patrick (Paddy) Onyango, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, June 20th, 2014 Ken Ouko, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 11th, 2014 George Outa, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, June 5th, 2014 Edward Oyugi, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, June 9th, 2014 Terrence Ranger, Interview with Michelle Bourbonniere, London, United Kingdom, unspecified date (transcript used with permission of the interviewer) John S. Saul, Interview with author, Toronto, Canada, September 19th, 2017 Issa Shivji, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 11th, 2014 Jenerali Ulimwengu, Interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, October 21st, 2014 UDSM Student X, Confidential interview with author, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, November 5th, 2014 Chris Wanjala, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 9th, 2014 Aggrey Wasike, Interview with author, Via Skype, August 29th, 2016 Ambrose Weda, Interview with author, Nairobi, Kenya, June 10th, 2014

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