2023/12/19 by Shivji, Issa
paper · doi:10.57832/02f7-pk91
I entered the University of Dar es Salaam, then a university college of the University of East Africa, in 1967. We were the first post-Arusha Declaration generation. As you know, the Arusha Declaration on Socialism and Self-Reliance was the ruling party’s blue-print to build a socialist country under Julius Nyerere. The Campus was vibrant with debates and discussions - both inside and outside the lecture room - on socialism and the role of the University and intellectuals in it. Significantly, this debate was happening in the international context of world-wide struggles. There was the struggle of the Southern African liberation movements against Portuguese colonialism, and white settler regimes in Zimbabwe, Namibia and apartheid South Africa. Many of these movements were based in Tanzania and fully supported by Nyerere’s party and the state. The civil rights movement in the US was at its height. All over the world there were demonstrations and protests against the United States’ carpet bombing of Vietnam. In 1968, French students almost toppled De Gaulle’s government. China was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. Elsewhere there were vociferous debates on Marxism and generally left politics. In short, the revolution was at the zenith, as Samir Amin would have put it.