In apartheid South Africa, the Soweto uprising of 1976 was a pivotal moment of Black South African student resistance to the planned implementation of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools. Afrikaans, the Dutch creole language associated with the white Afrikaner population, was seen as the language of the oppressor. Its proposed implementation by the apartheid government led to mass resistance among young people in Soweto and beyond. In response to a march on June 16th, 1976, the South African police unleashed violence against young people, resulting in hundreds of casualties. As the domestic situation unfolded, many young people – some in their teens, others older – were forced into exile for their own safety. Dar es Salaam and Morogoro, both in Tanzania, were key points on their maps of exile.
In Tanzania, the African National Congress (ANC) took in thousands of refugees after the uprising. Both the ANC and the rival South African liberation movement, the Pan African Congress (PAC) had a military and civilian presence there from 1960 into the early 1990s. By tracing the everyday exile life of South Africans in socialist Tanzania, I present a different story about the uprising – and the intertwined histories of African liberation and development – from post-colonial East Africa. Doing so demonstrates the important links between post-colonial African nation-building and the anti-apartheid struggle.
Much of the literature on the Soweto uprising debates its causes and the influence of Black Consciousness and the ANC on student organisers. Generally, this story is told from the perspective of the domestic anti-apartheid struggle, and the role of the uprising in fermenting the global anti-apartheid movement. More recently, scholars of the Soweto uprising have contested the existing historiography by centring student activism and student voices; using first-hand perspectives to trace ‘counter-memories’ of the events; and writing revisionist histories of the ‘“road” to the Uprising’. Writing two years after the uprising, Archie Mafeje, a South African anthropologist and activist living in exile, pointed out that the global attention that the uprising attracted led South Africa’s exiled movements to reconsider their links to domestic politics within South Africa.
The young South African exiles in Tanzania shook the status-quo, carrying their energetic experience of anti-apartheid political organising with them. At the same time, however, they absorbed fertile, socialist ideas from post-colonial Tanzanian politics: namely, kujitemea, the politically salient idea of self-reliance. I am particularly interested in the projects of self-reliance implemented at the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO) – a school founded in 1978 in Morogoro to educate young ANC refugees – for what they reveal about the intertwined nature of liberation, self-reliance, and development. The presence of such projects reveals the enduring impact of African socialist ideas: self-reliance (kujitemea) had a lasting resonance in the ANC exile community in Morogoro at a time when Tanzania’s socialist (ujamaa) national project was in decline.
Understanding Tanzanian socialism (ujamaa) and self-reliance (kujitemea) requires a look at the Arusha Declaration (1967). In the Declaration, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the political party led by Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, put forward its vision of ujamaa na kujitemea (socialism and self-reliance). The Arusha Declaration heralded the launching of TANU’s project of agrarian national development. It emphasised the need for Tanzania to be self-reliant – meaning not dependent on foreign aid – in its development projects, but it also pushed for individual responsibility. Indeed, developing Tanzania required that everyone ‘work and live on his own labour’. As an African-led socialist development project, ujamaa took shape through the nationalisation of industry, and, beginning in the 1970s, forced collective villagisation in rural Tanzania. Yet, even as ujamaa villagisation ultimately failed by the late 1970s due to local factors (resistance to villagisation, drought) and global factors (the 1973 oil crisis), the project had a lasting political resonance that buttressed Tanzanian political thought through Nyerere’s presidency. The nostalgia embedded in rural Tanzanian memories of ujamaa have been artfully traced by Priya Lal, who reminds us that its application on the ground was uneven and contested. Ideas of self-reliance also echoed through everyday exile life.
How did South African exiles arriving in Dar es Salaam, on the Indian Ocean coast, experience Tanzania as a post-colonial nation? In the wake of Soweto, Tanzania offered young people a space to live without fear of repression from the apartheid police. It gave youth the opportunity to have access to an education unhindered by white supremacy. But this new life, borne out of necessity, did not come without its difficulties. Life in exile engendered novel desires for self-sufficiency away from home. To access this valence of exile life, I employ oral histories conducted by Hilda Bernstein for her book The Rift (1994), transcripts of which are available at the Mayibuye Archives at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa.
Whether they chose to further their education or to take up arms against apartheid, the young people who decided to join the ANC in exile in the wake of the uprising faced weeks, and sometimes months, of waiting. Oral history transcripts I’ve read show the varied experiences of both young people and older exiles. As they recall their experiences of living in a liberated African country, an interesting, positive, picture emerges of Tanzania from the perspective of young people who previously lived under apartheid. Zoleka Dalimeni recalled, ‘Tanzania, it’s a free country…the system they are having I think it’s better than South Africa’. Duncan Manzini felt similarly: ‘we find that things were normal in Tanzania’. South African feminist scholar Linzi Manicom highlights this period as a time of ‘intellectual ferment…at home and abroad’. For her, the young refugees were ‘vibrant with ideas, vigorous in their analysis and freshly imbued with ‘struggle’ experience’.
As more young people arrived in Dar es Salaam, a forum to educate those too young for university was required. The vision for a ‘cadre training school’ was realised with the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO). It was named after Solomon Mahlangu, to honour the young member of the ANC’s armed wing who had been executed by the apartheid government. Construction began in July 1977. The spirit of self-reliance animated SOMAFCO. The college provided not only a formal education but vocational training in making textiles, building furniture, working the piggery, and growing crops on the ‘ANC Farm for Self-Reliance’. Participation in self-reliant projects on the SOMAFCO campus was part and parcel of developing as an ANC cadre. With SOMAFCO envisioned as a self-sufficient campus, community participation in its functioning was seen as a crucial part of everyday life.
Yet, there are interesting contrasts between the Tanzanian vision in the Arusha Declaration and the practical logic of self-reliance evident in ANC projects. The use and meaning of self-reliance varied for both exiles and hosts, due to differences in class positions. The ANC received flows of donations from Europe, in part from the global anti-apartheid movement, in comparison to the economic difficulties faced by Tanzanian citizens. The ‘ANC Farm for Self-Reliance’ had a projected budget of over $3 million USD. It was, as Morrow, Maaba, and Pulumani put it, a vision of ‘agricultural self-sufficiency’ over the ‘frugal self-reliance of the surrounding Tanzanian peasantry’. Villagisation had failed in socialist Tanzania, in part due to resistance to changing existing modes of living in rural areas. On the contrary, a particular vision of a self-reliant agrarian community came alive at SOMAFCO, partly due to the material funds that made it possible.
Materials in the ANC papers at the University of Fort Hare show that self-reliance shaped projects to rehabilitate aging members of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), the ANC’s armed wing, who were housed at a camp near the SOMAFCO campus. In one instance, a proposal was written to provide the camp with pigs as a ‘self reliance scene (sp)…so that the comrades must have something to do’. MK guerrilla soldiers were in Tanzanian exile from the early 1960s, having trained for several years at a camp in Kongwa, in rural Tanzania. After the failed campaign to launch armed struggle from Tanzania in the late 1960s, MK soldiers were left with little to occupy their time. Eventually, some were recruited to help build SOMAFCO. Self-reliance thus provided older cadres, who were at times resistant to the newer generation, with tasks to keep busy in the face of mounting despair in the perceived permanency of their exile. Even as the twilight of ujamaa socialism fell on Tanzania, kujitemea – self-reliance – had a particular hold on the exiled South African community.
The reach of African socialist concepts extended beyond the ANC and SOMAFCO. Historian Leslie Hadfield shows that development projects taken up by Black Consciousness activists in 1970-80s rural South Africa to foster self-reliance were in part inspired by ujamaa. Black Consciousness, an anti-apartheid movement and philosophy arising from Black student organising in the late 1960s, had roots in the Black radical tradition and Black theology. It centred psychological liberation as a step toward achieving Black political consciousness and autonomy. Indeed, Barney Pityana’s ‘Priorities in Community Development’, published in the South African Student’s Organisation’s (SASO) newsletter in September 1971, quotes the Arusha Declaration at length. Pityana, a founding member of SASO, follows his analysis with his iconic words: ‘The message is simple BLACK MAN YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. Like Nyerere we must minimise reliance on external aid’. In an era when the ANC was forced to operate underground in South Africa, the Black Consciousness movement and university student organising was key to the fermenting of radical politics that led to the uprising.
The Soweto uprising made waves within South Africa and globally. By tracing the aftermath of this significant moment in Tanzanian exile, I have highlighted the important links between two African liberation projects: the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and post-colonial nation-building in socialist Tanzania. Living in an independent African country was an important experience for many young people who left South Africa. As they found themselves in the East African nation, they were shaped by Tanzania’s socialist project. The political resonance of ujamaa socialism made its way into ANC life, with self-reliance (kujitemea) taking on a new meaning for South African youth and former ANC guerrillas in exile. By exploring the reverberations of self-reliance from the Tanzanian state and its people to members of the ANC in exile, we access the ways that ideas of African-led development and liberation moved between exiles and hosts. For the Tanzanian state, its citizens, and South African exiles, liberation and autonomy were intertwined.