A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964-1974
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A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964-1974
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611862522 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2017 |
| Series: | Ruth Simms Hamilton African Diaspora |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Malcolm X, A. M. Babu, and the Seeds of Solidarity
I wanted to show our brothers ... the necessity of us forming a coalition, a working community, with our brothers of the African continent ... I feel it is necessary for those of us who were taken from the African continent and who today are suffering exploitation and oppression in the Western Hemisphere to reach out our hands and unite ourselves with our brothers and sisters again, wherever we are, and then work in unity and harmony for a positive program of mutual benefit.
— Malcolm X, founder of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU)
The speed with which the dismantling of colonialism occurred in Africa was cause for celebration among African Americans. Between 1957 and 1963, approximately twenty-six independent nations in Africa came into being. For African Americans eager to identify and connect with African states and their leaders sympathetic to and supportive of their struggle for racial justice, Tanzanian President Nyerere's pro–civil rights and pan-Africanist positions put forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s left a favorable impression. Although he may not have received the same amount of veneration and media coverage as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Nyerere's actions in both the domestic and foreign policy realms managed to convince African Americans of his genuine pan-Africanist credentials. However, African American civil rights and trade-union leaders evaluated African decolonization through an ideological lens that lent itself to anticommunism and multiracialism. While this may have been the dominant trend, even among most African American journalists, the civil rights philosophy of nonviolence, and its agenda of racial integration at home and informal international ties abroad, did not entirely capture the sentiments and attitudes of black radicals. Hints of ideological differences within the black freedom struggle became more pronounced when a revolution broke out in Zanzibar, Tanganyika's neighboring country, in January 1964, followed by a series of army mutinies throughout East Africa.
Just thirty miles east off the coast of mainland Tanganyika lies Zanzibar, a Swahili island with a rich history of economic interaction and cultural exchange with the Indian Ocean world. A British colony since 1896, largely administered by an Arab ruling monarchy, Zanzibar was granted independence by the British in December 1961. Over the next two years, a coalition government between the island's two major political parties, the Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP) and the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), tried to provide political stability to an island characterized by rivalries between Indians, Arabs, and Africans as well as between peasants, urban workers, petty traders, and big merchants. But the conservative factions within each party pursued repressive policies against trade unions, youth leaders, urban youth, and other progressive forces that marginalized a growing faction of Zanzibar leftists affiliated with ZNP and ASP. In September 1963, the Umma (People's) Party was formed by ZNP's former secretary general, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, and led by a Marxist cadre of educated, urban youth. In the face of mounting racial animosities, the Umma Party pushed to mobilize the working class, peasants, and youth across racial and ethnic lines. On January 11 and 12 of the following year, an uprising led by these political forces, including marginalized ASP youth members and enraged unemployed youth, had commenced. With the assistance of Umma Party members, who had received guerrilla warfare training in Cuba during the early 1960s, what had begun as an act of spontaneous revolt quickly transformed into a socialist revolution. In a matter of hours, the prison, the police station, and the radio station were under the revolutionaries' control, and the sultan, his entourage, and members of his coalition government were fleeing the island. When the revolution was over, a new revolutionary government was created, calling itself the Revolutionary Council, an alliance between the ASP and Umma Party. ASP leader Abeid Karume was designated Zanzibar's new president while Babu was appointed the minister of foreign affairs.
Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu was born in 1924 and raised by his great-aunt after the deaths of his father and mother in 1925 and 1926, respectively, at a time when Zanzibar was a British protectorate. At the age of twenty, Babu worked as a "weighing clerk" and later as an assistant to the accountant at the Clove Growers Association, a colonial state corporation that exported the colony's primary commodity. In 1951, he set out to Britain to further his studies in accountancy, philosophy, and English literature. Moved by the Chinese revolution in 1949, Babu's professional interests shifted towards politics. "In the 1950s, it was almost obligatory for young radicals to read as much as possible about the Chinese revolution and its successes in 1949," Babu later wrote in the outline to his memoir. "This revolution had inspired many African and Asian youths who saw in it a promising way to alleviating the mass poverty in their respective continents."
For the next six years, he was a fixture in London's radical political communities, drawn to the politics of anarchism, Marxism, and pan-Africanism. As a budding anticolonial nationalist, Babu went to great lengths to build a solidarity movement between Africans and Asians as well. Acting under the auspices of the East and Central Africa Committee for the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), he helped launch African Outlook, a monthly journal dedicated to exploring the questions pertinent to the Bandung generation, those of national liberation, nonalignment, pan-Africanism, and socialism. At the same time, he also was an editor for the Afro-Asian-Latin American Revolution, a leftist magazine based in Paris. The revolutionary movements in Vietnam, Algeria, and the Gold Coast provided him with further inspiration and hardened a commitment to mass party political action.
Babu returned to Zanzibar in 1957 and became the secretary general of the Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP), a position he held until 1962. As Babu mobilized workers, peasants, and youth, he also continued to pursue broad-based alliances with Africans and Asians beyond the island. He was a founding member of the PAFMECA (Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa) and participant at the 1958 All-African People's Conference in Accra, Ghana. In late 1959 he accepted an official invitation to visit China, where he met and held discussions with Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and Foreign Minister Chou en Lai, among other Chinese communist leaders. It was a visit that led him to take on the position of African correspondent for the China News Agency, Hshinhu, which, in his words, gave him "an opportunity to contribute to their understanding of our continent and its complex politics." This connection with communists also compelled the colonial government in Zanzibar to imprison him for two years for sedition. After he was released, the ZNP's radical shift to the right, particularly its role in fomenting racial tensions between Africans and Arabs, convinced Babu to go his separate way and form the Umma Party in 1963. Under his guidance, the Umma Party secured educational scholarships and military training for its members from independent Third World nations such as Cuba and Algeria, and went on to play a prominent role in the revolution in January 1964. The historian Thomas Burgess points to the significance that Babu and the Umma Party had on Zanzibar politics in the aftermath of the revolution:
The prominence and activity of Umma youth during the "100 days" of the People's Republic of Zanzibar represented the temporary realization of Babu's theories of a vanguard generation bringing about socialist development. Umma merged with the ASP [Afro-Shirazi Party], and Umma youth came to occupy influential positions in the new army and bureaucracy, as officers and junior ministers. Their overseas training and education were essential to a new government absolutely serious about replacing as soon as possible a colonial civil service overwhelmingly staffed by British expatriates, Arabs, and Asians.
Back on the mainland, President Nyerere recognized the extent of Babu's influence on the island. However, in the days after the revolution, Nyerere had little time to respond to what was transpiring politically off the coast of his newly formed nation.
On January 20, a week after the revolution, African soldiers staged a mutiny in Tanganyika, which spread to Uganda and Kenya as well. In Tanganyika, soldiers of the 1st Battalion Tanganyika Rifles stationed at the Calito barracks in Dar es Salaam demanded that Nyerere implement a policy of Africanization to ensure higher wages and promotions to replace expatriate British officers. To see that their demands were taken seriously, mutineers imprisoned their officers, set up roadblocks, and seized control of key government institutions in the city. Forced into hiding, Nyerere was only able to subdue the mutiny, which had spread to the towns of Tabora and Nachingwea and later to the countries of Uganda and Kenya, by calling for British military intervention. It was a decision that weakened Nyerere's credibility among pan-Africanists even after he tried to justify his actions at an emergency meeting of foreign ministers of the fledgling Organization of African Unity (OAU) held in Dar es Salaam on February 12. "The presence of British troops in Tanganyika is a fact which is too easily exploited by those who wish to divide Africa, or to dominate Africa," he told OAU member states.
With the East African army mutinies suppressed, the world's attention again shifted back to Zanzibar. The leftist ideology of the post-revolutionary government stoked Western fears about the spread of communism in Africa. At first, a frantic round of memos by the U.S. State Department speculated that Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union were directly involved in the revolution. By February, however, the United States was forced to look to Zanzibar and the Revolutionary Council, mostly notably Babu, Zanzibar's new foreign minister. Described as the "prime mover in the coup," Babu was the "leading Zanzibar nationalist" and "the most outspoken critic of the West on the island." By targeting Babu, the U.S. government had found its primary communist threat to peace and democracy in Africa. When Babu expelled the U.S. consul in Zanzibar in January, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) regarded it as a "significant victory for the Communists." The U.S. press followed this line of Cold War thinking and set out to discredit the new regime by targeting Babu. Stories of Babu's anti-West, leftist ideologies soon alternated with stories of government authoritarianism under Babu's leadership. Between January and April, over fifty articles on Zanzibar's "drift to the left" and Babu's consolidation of power littered the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
African Americans did not see eye to eye on these political events in East Africa. African American anticommunists refused to endorse the revolution for its communist overtures evidenced in the coverage it received in leading black-run newspapers. In the Chicago Defender appeared two briefings that suspiciously questioned Zanzibar's ties to Cuba and China. Accompanying one of the briefings was a photograph of Babu and Karume with a caption that read, "friends of Red China?" The conservative African American journalist George Schuyler shifted attention away from Asia's impact on Zanzibar onto the United States' primary Cold War rival. Writing for the Pittsburgh Courier, Schuyler saw the revolution as a victory for the Soviets, who were "fast infiltrating the Dark continent" through communist ideology and military aid from other Eastern Bloc countries. He took the coverage further by morally condemning government-led executions of overthrown leaders with ties to the ZNP opposition. In the opinion of another journalist, the revolution was a "massacre of still uncalculated thousands," which made it difficult to support from afar. The army mutinies that broke out in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya in the revolution's immediate aftermath proved to heighten their concerns over Nyerere's power and affirm their anticommunist outlooks.
Revolutionary violence in East Africa, however, did not fail to dampen the mood of U.S. black nationalists. For those who saw their struggle as one of self-determination in direct opposition to Western imperialism, the Zanzibar revolution was to be commended not condemned. Max Stanford, a leader in the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a black internationalist organization heavily influenced by Marxism and the Third World revolutionary struggles, came out strongly in support of the revolution. In an essay titled "The Relationship of Revolutionary Afro-American Movement to the Bandung Revolution," Stanford praises the revolution for its populist orientation and the post-revolutionary government for its firm stance against U.S. imperialism and its embrace of nonalignment and pan-African unity. As a result, Zanzibar was on the "vanguard of the Bandung Revolution" alongside Cuba and China.
Black radical responses to the army mutinies also challenged the viewpoints disseminated by mainstream black and U.S. newspapers. The Liberation Committee on Africa (LCA), a New York City–based pan-Africanist group, used its local ties to an East African student organization at Columbia University to state its position on the matter. While the LCA found Nyerere's "counterrevolutionary" decision to sanction British military intervention deeply disconcerting, the Nation of Islam (NOI), at the time the largest black nationalist organization in the United States, took an interest in the soldiers' race consciousness. Its media organ, Muhammad Speaks, sympathized with the soldiers' demands and urged Nyerere to promote black Africans to officer positions occupied by British expatriates. In some ways, the Zanzibar revolution and the East African army mutinies brought to the surface a growing ideological divide within the U.S. black freedom movement. In some political circles, Nyerere's image as a nationalist and pan-Africanist was tarnished. The image they held of him in other circles was that of a leader in a highly vulnerable position of power threatened by external and internal communist forces. However, these were two conflicting images not beyond repair. When Tanganyika unified with Zanzibar in April, only three months after the Zanzibar revolution, the perception of Nyerere as a leading, progressive African voice was restored.
In early April, President Nyerere initiated a private meeting with President Karume to discuss unification between their respective nation-states. On April 25, a "special meeting" of Tanganyika's national assembly convened to ratify an "Agreement of Union." The next day legislation was passed unanimously. "In no other part of the world is there so great an urge for unity as we in Africa," Nyerere wrote. "But whilst we are rightly proud of this aspiration, the sentiment of unity, we must remember that meaningful unity will not come simply by talking." Nyerere tried his best to frame unification with Zanzibar as an outgrowth of his pragmatism and expression of his commitment to state-centered pan-Africanism. He refused to entertain any kinds of arguments that claimed he was pressured by the West to curtail Zanzibar's leftward turn. "Unity in our continent does not have to come via Moscow or Washington. It is an insult to Africa to read cold war politics into every move towards African unity."
Nyerere's justification did little to sway the opinions of the U.S. government, which viewed the union as a shrewd act on the part of the Tanzanian president to block Babu and other Zanzibar radicals from a complete takeover of the island. Even though Babu was incorporated into the union government and transferred to work out of Dar es Salaam, mainstream media identified him as the "chief loser" in "Nyerere's coup." The union was met with equal fanfare from liberal and radical pan-Africanists in the United States, who all seemed to welcome any steps toward continental unity. African American anticommunists lauded the union, yet reasons had far more to do with their belief that communism was nothing more than a disruptive force in Africa. The Tri-State Defender, a black-run weekly newspaper based out of Memphis, Tennessee, ran with the headline "Tanganyika, Zanzibar to 'Fight Reds.'" Black nationalists and radicals, however, chose to promote the union because it represented another step towards African unification.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface xi
Introduction 1
Abbreviations 15
Part I Encounters
Chapter 1 Malcolm X, A. M. Babu, and the Seeds of Solidarity 19
Chapter 2 Growth and Conflict in SNCC-Tanzania Relations 43
Part 2 Doings
Chapter 3 Walter Rodney, African Students, and the Struggle to Define University Education 75
Chapter 4 The Drum and Spear Press and the Cultural Politics of Book Publishing 105
Part 3 Undoing
Chapter 5 Convergence and Rejection at the Sixth Pan-African Congress 141
Conclusion 177
Notes 187
Bibliography 223
Index 255