In the first instalment of a two-part interview, Chinedu Chukwudinma speaks to ROAPE’s founding editor, Peter Lawrence, about his political trajectory as a left-wing activist. The interview explores Lawrence’s involvement in the anti-Apartheid movement at the University of Sussex in the 1960s—most notably alongside South Africa’s future president, Thabo Mbeki, as shown in the attached video. The conversation then shifts to his experiences and reflections on living and teaching in Tanzania under Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa socialist experiment.
Start telling me about yourself and your political trajectory?
My father was a very active Labour Party member from back in the days when the Labour Party actually talked about socialism. He even flirted with the Communist Party at some point. At a very early age I was involved in politics, walking with him around the council estate on which we lived in Manchester, collecting subscriptions from individual members. There was always politics in the house. There were newspapers, there were weekly magazines, there were all sorts of things from the left. So, I was surrounded by all these left-wing influences.
But his background also influenced me quite a lot because he was a Jewish refugee from Poland. He became a refugee because he came to England just before the war as a student and then never went back. When the war broke out, he visited his family and never saw them again. My mother was also a kind of economic refugee from Austria. She wasn’t Jewish – I was brought up a Catholic.
So that’s where I found my fundamental attachment to equality and the struggle against racism because there was racism and xenophobia. At school in sixth form I was always having arguments. Already as foreigners there was this feeling of not being part of the system or part of the country. Before I went to the University of Sussex, I was a little bit involved in the Young Socialists, which was the Labour Party’s youth wing, and with some anti-Salazar group.
I went to Sussex to study history. Sussex had this common course in the School of Social Studies in the first two terms modelled on Oxford called the economic and social framework, which was taught or lectured by a Hungarian professor of economics, Tibor Barna. People would laugh at that nowadays. But the economics course had very little algebra and econometrics. We weren’t encouraged to do that. It was really about the social and political aspects of economics and economic policy. It was much more about the structure of society than about the market. We were being given a kind of heterodox view of economics. So that got me interested in economics, so I decided to switch to economics for the next two years. At Sussex you were trained to not accept what you’re told. The idea that everything that you say must be backed up through inquiry and evidence became very important.
What kind of activism did you get involved in when you went to Sussex University?
Because there were no halls of residence, the University farmed out students to bed & breakfasts in Brighton. So, I ended up in one with a second-year student who had been sent to this guesthouse on disciplinary grounds. He knew all the active political second-year students. I got introduced to them at the University common room. There was only one left-wing society called the Socialist Society, which of course I joined. It encompassed all the Socialists, whether they were flirting with the Labour Party or in the Communist Party or Trotskyist.
There was always a battle within that society between the Trotskyists and everybody else because of one active Trotskyist militant called Alan Woods who came to Sussex. He was immensely intelligent, very clever at arguing, and he knew his history — or at least he knew the history of the Russian Revolution. He got together a group of left-wing people including the father of Owen Jones, the Guardian columnist. All of a sudden they had this militant (Trotskyist) tendency within the Labour Party that was very influential in the Socialist Society. I was totally confused because it was all new to me. And I was then a Labour Party member.
We were active in all kinds of things. In my first year, there was the 1964 general election, which brought a Labour government committed to things like nationalisation of steel after thirteen years of Conservative government. So, we went out canvassing for Labour. In 1963–64 the events in South Africa were a big catalyst for pretty much everything that went on at Sussex because that was the end of the Rivonia Trial in spring 1964. We had a South African student at Sussex called Thabo Mbeki (ANC militant and future president of South Africa), whose father was one of the accused in the Rivonia Trial. He was a very popular student. I mean, the idea that he had no charisma was a little bit far-fetched, because certainly as a student he did.
This story is indicative of the solidarity. Two to three weeks after we’d started the term, this Black guy walks into the common room and everybody goes up to greet him. I’m thinking, “Who is this guy!?” Somebody said, “Oh, Thabo’s back.” Thabo Mbeki had come back late that year because he actually wanted to go back to South Africa to fight, but the leadership wouldn’t let him. The leadership told him to go back to university and eventually he did what he was told. Then I got to know Thabo very well and got very active in the anti-Apartheid movement. There was also an Anti-Racialist Society, of which eventually I became chair. Between the time the Rivonia Trialists were found guilty of treason and the time they were sentenced to death, there was a huge international promotion campaign of solidarity and a campaign to get the sentence commuted to life.
We organised an overnight march from Brighton to London. It started off with hundreds of students. There had to be hundreds of students when most of the university students marched at least a little bit of the way out of Brighton, and then there was a hardcore of 100 or so that carried on marching — most of whom were the political activists that I was associated with. Ironically, I didn’t do much marching because I was one of the few people who could drive.(A rare student with a car couldn’t join us so lent us her car). I ferried students who couldn’t walk any further, or had blisters, or needed some kind of help or needed to go back because they were only going to march so far.
So, most of that march, I drove this car. That came in very useful because halfway through, we were close to Gatwick Airport and there was a huge thunderstorm and everybody got soaking wet. So, I was getting people to the airport. In the middle of the night, there’s a whole bunch of marchers soaking wet, occupying the airport lounge — apparently upsetting passengers who were somewhat surprised to go into the toilets and see these half-dressed people who weren’t flying anywhere.
When the weather cleared, we marched into London. And in those days you could go right up to the steps of Downing Street. There were no gates. You knocked on the door and nobody stopped you. A policeman came to the door. And we said, “We have a letter for the Prime Minister.” Thabo, somebody else and I handed this letter in. We can say that we and all the others around the world who campaigned for the commuting to life were successful. And the rest, as we know, is history.
We then had protests against the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1965. So there we were, back on the street, demonstrating in Brighton, getting ourselves into the newspaper because we had a friend who was on the Brighton Evening Argus. I stayed at Sussex to do a Master’s in 1966–67 in African Studies, specialising in economics. It was also a very interesting year because we had people who would come from South Africa after going into exile because they were against apartheid, including the Pahad brothers, Essop and Aziz. I became quite interested in Africa as a consequence of supporting Thabo during his university period and learning about the injustices, the oppression and colonialism.
How did you end up living in Tanzania under Nyerere?
Having done the Master’s at Sussex, I then was thinking what to do next. The obvious thing was to do a PhD where I could do fieldwork in Africa. It so happened that Leeds University were advertising something called Junior African Fellowships. These were sponsored by the Overseas Development Ministry — so very well paid, tax-free, with all your fieldwork expenses paid, including being given a car. So, I applied to Leeds and got one of the two fellowships. That was interesting because Leeds at the time had a very strong Communist Party and a very strong university Communist Party branch.
I spent the first 8–9 months deciding where I was going to go. I was sharing an office with a woman who I think had worked in Ghana and was in the Communist Party. She knew Jack Woddis, who was the Communist Party’s expert in Africa. She also knew people like Oscar Kambona, who was exiled from Tanzania by Nyerere and was close to the Communist Party. I think it was through her that I got to know about Nyerere, Tanzania and Ujamaa. I read about the Arusha Declaration because that was 1967. I’m in Leeds thinking, “I’d like to go to Tanzania. It sounds like they’re doing something.”
As an MA student, I did my Master’s dissertation on the Ghana cocoa industry and was shaken, as everybody else was, by the overthrow of Nkrumah. I thought, maybe this time it’ll work better in Tanzania. Walter Newlyn, who ran the fellowship, wrote to the head of the Economics Research Bureau at the University of Dar es Salaam, who was a Canadian called Gerald(Gerry) Helleiner. Gerry wrote back with a list of things to do, and on this list was the sisal plantation industry.
I thought that would be interesting because the big question is what to do with them. Now, sisal was at that time Tanzania’s most important export. Sixty percent of export earnings were from sisal. But it was threatened by the rise of synthetic substitutes. My thesis was then going to be about rationalisation and diversification, as the government now had control of either 100% or 60% of these estates, now managed by the parastatal Tanzania Sisal Corporation. The estates had to be managed. But Tanzania in 1968 had very few people qualified to do anything at that level.
I went to Tanzania and visited the Sisal Corporation, and I go to see the general manager. I’m assuming that I’m going to be attached to the general manager’s office and work as an economist while doing some research. However, he doesn’t know what to do with me. He tells me that he’s already got a resident economist who turns out to be a Canadian volunteer.
I then got connected to the Ministry of Development Planning, who were looking for economists to build the five-year regional plan, having heard that there was this economist on the loose with nothing to do. It was part of the national five-year plan. I joined a team of four economists to visit four regions of the country and write the regional plan for those regions. I was only 23 going on 24. I got to visit the key seats of government of these four regions, and the smaller towns and farms and small farmers and estates of the area where I was going to do research. The opportunities were huge.
Tell me about your experience at the University of Dar es Salaam? What were your impressions of it? Who did you meet?
It was incredible. You’d have a cup of coffee in the morning; there you will be sitting with Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul. There were very few Tanzanian staff at that time, so it was mainly expatriates. There were also people visiting like Emmanuel Wallerstein and an economics Professor Edith Penrose from SOAS, who was a no socialist at all. But people like that came to see what was going on and talk to the academics.
John Saul was somebody I met first at Makerere University in Kampala. He was another guy who walks into a room, and everybody goes up and says hello to him. He had literally come from the ‘bush’ where he’d been researching cooperatives somewhere in northern Tanzania, crossed Lake Victoria and arrived in in Kampala to a conference on marketing cooperatives.
All these big shots talked about is politics, political theory or Marxism. I mean the head of economics was a Hungarian, called Tamás Szentes who I remember because I arrived in Dar in 1968, and in August 1968 the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia. Szentes is part of the more progressive Hungarian Communist Party wing. He fought the Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956. 1968 is a huge shock to him because he didn’t think the Soviet Union were going to do that anymore.
I met Lionel Cliffe at the coffee table where you met everybody else, Lionel suddenly appears; he’d been in East Africa for quite a long time already. He was somebody I got to know eventually and shared a house with and ended up sharing a car. But I was there for about 16 months from 1968 and then went back to Leeds for about 8 or 9 months to write up my thesis officially while actually getting too involved in student politics, and then came back to Tanzania to lecture in 1970.
Walter Rodney spoke publicly quite a lot during that period, and he was just a very impressive figure. He spoke without notes. But I didn’t know him until I came back to teach in 1970. But I can’t say that we were close. We did talk occasionally. But unfortunately, we found ourselves on the other side of the barricades. (For more on this see Leo Zeilig’ A Revolutionary for our time: the Walter Rodney Story, 2021 chapter 8)
In those days we used some of the chapters of what became How Europe Underdeveloped Africa for the common course on development and underdevelopment : East African Society and Environment. So pre-printed copies of this book were available. but if I remember right, it was How Europe was published in 1972, by which time I was no longer teaching.
What was the economics course like ?
What was interesting on the economics course was that I had a colleague, an East German lecturer called Hans Wienhold who was teaching the first-year economics course. He was using a book, Political Economy, by somebody called Nikitin – It was the Soviet first-year economics textbook on Marxist economics The students don’t like it, and they write to the newspaper. They write to the Daily News, and they say, “what is this Marxist economics? We want to do proper economics”.
I met Tamas Szentes one day when he’s coming out of lecture that Hans has given and he was fuming. “it’s all wrong!” Tamas said, “it all based on this stupid book”. Then he says to me, about a day or two later, “Can you take over the economics course and teach them bourgeois economics”. So, I give principles of economics as it is taught in the UK and there are a few very simple equations. But then the students write in the newspaper saying “What is this bourgeois economics? We don’t understand any of it. It’s much too complicated.” I can’t remember how this issue go resolved.
The students, in the majority, were not particularly radical. For example, I remember one meeting with Lionel Cliffe where we were looking at development studies test answers because I was also teaching development studies as well as economics. I was thinking these students were not really being honest about their answers, which involved discussing the benefits of Ujamaa or something like that. The political answers about Ujamaa looked a little bit too rehearsed for me.
We mustn’t forget that that the students who came to university in Tanzania came from much better off families in the rural areas. They had been sent away to boarding school. They were being educated out of the rural areas to get jobs that pay. This is in the context of the government making all those students work for the government for five years to do national service. Following other events at the university in the 1960s where they rebelled so against national service. These are students who know what the score is and, in some ways, have accepted that, but they have not necessarily internalised it. So they’re not necessarily going to be big fans of ujamaa and of socialism.
I think that applies to Tanzania generally that population was in favour of ujamaa only insofar as it would improve their situation. But they saw that the better off farmers in Ujamaa villages would always be in control especially of the allocation of work. Whereas land was pooled, the equipment and all the rest of it remained in private hands. The powerful farmers with the farmers who owned the means of production and the less powerful were the ones who didn’t. So, the class question was never really considered by Nyerere because it was a bit too dangerous to touch. This question came out in in the assassination of a regional commissioner in 1970 ( I think) That then led to the more compulsory elements of Ujamaa because what Nyerere and TANU really had to come to grips with the class question. And they didn’t really want to do that. But there was of course a small group of very radical students. When I arrived in 1968 it was evident there was this group of students– Museveni, Hirji and Shivji and so on. They were very important when it came to the 1971 events.
How do you understand role of the TANU bureaucracy? Because in a lot of leftwing criticism of Ujamaa in the works of Shivji and people like Henry Mapolu and Phillipson, the main contradiction seems to be between the bureaucracy and the masses
Well, yes and no. I think it’s a bit more complex than that. We shouldn’t forget that the Tanzanian bureaucrats still had rural connections. Via their education, they would have come from the better-off members of the rural bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie– the richer farmers. Not all of them – I am making a mechanistic interpretation.
But [Ujamaa] certainly did involve issues about control. So that the bureaucrats wanted to be in charge or they were given instructions to be. As I was leaving in the year or months before I was leaving in 1972, there was Operation Dodoma (villagisation) which was a kind of a compulsory Ujamaa- get everybody into villages. The problem with getting everybody into villages a nomadic pastoral area of the country is that nomadic pastoralists are nomadic for a reason.
So, for example, there was a newspaper report that said ‘We’ve established this village. But we can’t allow the animals in because they compete with people for the water’. I’ve never forgotten that. Now, what does that tell you? The people’s livelihoods depend on moving to areas which are more fertile and then allowing other areas to become fertile again. This just was disrupted by this villagization. These people whose life depends on semi-nomadism are being put into permanent villages. Bureaucracies, of course, don’t like people moving around. They like to know where you are. So, what you get is this is a whole contradiction of development.
This wasn’t anything to do with Ujamaa, Years later, I remember being told off in a seminar by Joan Wicken, who was assistant to the president to Nyerere for many years. I gave a talk on Corporation Rural Corporation and I conflated Ujamaa with the villagisation operation in Dodoma and wherever else. She then said this wasn’t Ujamaa. Joan was speaking knowing Nyerere very well and knowing what he meant by Ujamaa, I think, lesson was that Ujamaa was meant to be a bottom-up process, not a top-down process.
In the first stage, Ujamaa was largely voluntary. The Ruvuma Development Association, for example, was an organisation of Ujamaa villages, which was already well-developed. People did it because they thought there were some advantages, and there were also some charismatic socialist cadres pushing it. We also have to remember that Ruvuma was on the border with Mozambique, so it was also a kind of defence mechanism. I think there was also an idea that this would be protection against invasion.
It became top-down because Nyerere was persuaded politically because of what I call the class question. Something had to be done about the richer farmers. Also, there was the economics of settlements – the idea that if you get people together in one place, then it’s much easier to provide electricity and water and all the rest.
How did you experience the Mwongozo area era of the early 1970s, which marked the authoritarian turn of the One-Party Tanzanian state but also pro-democracy protest at the University 1971 following the expulsion of Kenyan student Union leader Simon Akivaga
I remember I was in the social of the social sciences building . We hear some commotion outside. We see the field force, the Tanzanian paramilitary, are on the campus in the courtyard. I remember looking at this guy his gun and his musket fixed bayonet, whatever and thinking, this isn’t looking good. I hope it doesn’t escalate. It was on that occasion that we saw students being escorted out of the administrative building. That was quite a stunning moment because students were doing what they were supposed to, which was to query the management. The students took Mwongozo seriously. They believed the university administration was an obstacle to Mwongozo.
Now the question in my mind, has always been who authorised the field force to go into the university and interfere with the student protest. The Vice Chancellor, Pius Msekwa was the former party secretary. I’m sure he knew the right people to telephone when the students amassed in front of the administrative building. And that the president had to pick that up because then he sends his younger personal assistant Annar Cassam to talk to some of the leading students at the university. This meeting took place in Lionel Cliffe’s house.
What was the reaction of the staff to the exclusion of the young leader of the student union, Simon Akivaga?
There was a boycott of classes. Students are very angry and upset. I remember the atmosphere in classes wasn’t great because it was really good fun to teach the students. They were great students. They participated in class and were very demanding in good way. The best experiences in my life were teaching these students. Some of the staff weren’t very happy either. I thought Its time to go home now. Expatriates staff like John Saul had got his contract renewal request denied.
But, after everything died down a little, I was heavily involved with our new common course East African Society and Environment that had just started in 1971.The students were a lot more fun to teach again. So, I thought I’d quite like to stay in Tanzania. I talked to the head of department, Justin Rweyemamu who said, “great idea to apply we would like you to stay”. so, I did. But I got a letter telling me that unfortunately my post had been filled. When I got back England in early 1972, I saw an advertisement for seven lectureships in the department of economics at the University of Dar Saleem. So, I though “oh I see. It takes seven people to replace me”.
One of my gentle criticisms of expats who saw what Nyerere did in the 1970s with the students and later the workers as a betrayal of Ujamaa is that they never understood the internal politics. We thought like this: “There’s a president who wants to change the country in the Ujamaa direction. Therefore, he must be supported by everybody to do this.” What we then realised was that there were reactionaries, both among the Tanzanians and amongst the expatriates.
I think I’ve said this somewhere else. We (the leftwing expatriates) kind of behaved a bit like colonialists without realising it. We thought we were in the right because we were behind Nyerere, and if Tanzanians weren’t, they were in the wrong. But who were we to talk?! We were going to go back to countries like the UK or Canada or the United State where there was no whiff of socialism. It was important that we recognised who we were.
Peter Lawrence is an editor of ROAPE, a leading member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group, and a founding editor of the journal.
