 African political thought, part three. You've got to remember the context of the 1960s. There was a great movement and expectation of African independence, and it all being promised in many countries as the 60s began to enter into its early years. The timetable was greeted with great, great anticipation, but also with great resistance. Howard McMillan had gone to South Africa and had talked about the wind of change to no effect. The apartheid regime remained very, very much in place in South Africa. And in Rhodesia, the white minority government resisted granting majority rule to Rhodesia. Never in a thousand years was the refrain that Yen-Smith and the white minority government trumpeted in defiance of the rest of the world. And the idea of racial discrimination was very much based on the notion that black people were inferior, could not run governments. The reaction particularly in the northern hemisphere was one which lurched almost to an opposite extreme. So that rather than believing that black people could not run governments, those who were designated to be the new black leaders of the new black nations were revered almost as philosopher kings. And in fact, writers, members of the House of Lords, people associated with the new statesmen, people like John Hatch, used the term very consciously, philosopher king, for people like Kenneth Kowanda, for people like Julius Nyerere, who became the leader of Tanzania. We began talking about Kenneth Kowanda last week. He came from a country in which there were only 99 university graduates at independence. The British had not done a particularly good job of trying to bring up an educated elite that could take over the reins of power. So someone like Kowanda who had trained as a teacher was in the forefront of an intellectual as well as a political movement that was leading towards independence. He had gained his education not only from missionaries and from school, but also very, very much from his own reading, very deeply influenced by Indian philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Gandhi. While he was hiding from the British, he was given safe shelter in Indian houses during this time, and also, of course, from the new currents that were abroad in Europe at that point in time to do with social democracy. The whole post-war effort in Europe, particularly in Britain, to build a social welfare state, he was very deeply influenced by that. People like Harold Lasky, people like Tony, people who met a lot to the British social democratic left, also were huge influences on Kowanda, so that it was very, very easy for the British left in particular, particularly the Fabian society within the Labour Party, to regard someone like Kenneth Kowanda as one of their own. And the elevation of people like Kowanda to the ranks of philosopher King often belied the true ability of Kowanda to translate his intellectual ideas into action. And indeed he found it extremely difficult, not only because of internal conditions in the new country, Zambia, with more than 70 different ethnic groups and 70 different languages trying to build a united nation out of all of that, but one year after independence, then Rhodesia to the south unilaterally declared independence on the basis of white minority rule. And immediately there was a confrontation between the two states. Immediately there was the prospect of a standoff in terms of all kinds of leverage that the white states of the south could apply against Kowanda. In the days of Cecil Rhodes, all of the transport networks, the railways, the road networks all went south through white ruled Rhodesia and apartheid ruled South Africa. Liberation movements exiles from Rhodesia and South Africa, fled their countries, came to Zambia, used it as a rallying point. Zambia became not only host to liberation movements, but also became a country under siege on the part of those who supported the white governments to the south of Zambia. So that Kowanda's national project immediately became an international project in the sense of defying white rule to the south, but also supporting the advancement of black rule in the south while trying to build a very divided society into a united nation. Because of these strains, the sympathy of western thinkers towards them grew even more. And Kowanda wrote a very great number of books, very often in co-authorship with Canon Collins. And these were a curious set of books. They were works on political and social philosophy, how to build a nation, how to build a society, very much built around principles of non-violence, very much built around principles of communalism, and very much pointing towards a mixture of Gandhian thought, Christian thought, social-democratic thought borrowed from Europe, and also Kowanda's own reading of what he thought traditional thought in Africa might be. This is this last part, which is very, very problematic, because if you're trying to rule a country with 70 different ethnic groups, then what is this traditional thought? Is there one single strand of thought that represents all 70 different groups, for instance? So that really what Kowanda put into the frame was a construction. And he found that trying to apply this construction to a new society was very, very difficult. It was a society under siege, as I said, and in 1973 when he formulated what he called was a coherent philosophy embodying all these different influences into what he called humanism, it was also the prelude to the announcement of a one-party state. So that what began as an experiment in thought and a certain idealism very quickly elided into an authoritarianism that lasted until 1991, when multi-party democracy by force of citizen demonstrations was able to return to the scene in Zambia. People, however, kept up their admiration for Kowanda, people on the outside, just as they kept up their admiration for Julius Niereri, who became the leader in the same year as Zambian independence, the leader of independent Tanzania, 1964. And Niereri too had his British audience and his supporters. He'd taken a master's degree from the University of Edinburgh. He'd shown himself to be very, very adept at parading his cross-cultural credentials. He'd translated Shakespeare into Swahili, and the whole idea of a cultivated, gentle person, an image was created around Niereri, almost as if it were created by the spin doctors of today. But Niereri also had all kinds of interests in creating a new society, in creating the new African person, and his experiments were to be extremely bold and they were going to be extremely adventurous. He was going to create an African socialism. He was going to base it on traditional values, he said, but the actual application of these values required huge social upheaval and huge social engineering. In other words, he took a certain mantra from the Northern Hemisphere, the social engineering of the 1960s, here in Britain for instance, and tried to apply it to the wholesale relocation of rural communities into what were called Yujama villages. These were villages that were meant to be built around self-reliance, built around serving the people by producing their own goods and based on a communalistic sense of governance. And it was, in economic terms, a spectacular failure. One might think it was a heroic failure or one might think it was a stubborn failure, because Yujama, the whole idea of communalism, the whole idea of new model villages lasted for a very long time in Tanzania. The great accomplishment of Niereri was to have in his country the smallest differential between the richest people and the poorest people. But that meant that there were many, many poor people and very, very few rich people. It meant a nation that relied very, very heavily on foreign aid, particularly from the Scandinavian countries. And people wonder why it was that what seemed to be such a noble experiment, in fact, in the end failed. Henry Bynen, who chronicled Niereri's life, probably hit upon it almost incidentally in one of the pages of his major book on Niereri. He spoke about Niereri campaigning in the countryside, and Niereri was campaigning in Swahili. So Henry Bynen asked the audience, what do you think of this? And the members of the audience replied to him saying, we can understand it. We don't agree with it. And when asked, why do you not agree with it? The audience members replied to him because he's speaking in our languages and we can understand the dissonances, the disconnects and the lack of logic in what he is saying. We will agree with him out of politeness, but this is not going to work. We believed that in the West, Niereri's own people did not think he was quite such a philosopher king. Niereri Bynen