Godfrey Mwakikagile

He takes an interdisciplinary approach in his works combining history, political science, economics, philosophy, cultural and international studies and other academic disciplines in his analysis of a wide range of issues focusing on Africa, especially during the post-colonial era. He has also written some books about the African diaspora, mainly Black America and the Afro-Caribbean region including Afro-Caribbean communities in Britain and the United States. His books on race relations include Across The Colour Line in an American City, On the Banks of a River, In the Crucible of Identity and Reflections on Race Relations: A Personal Odyssey, published in 2021, which is a work of comparative analysis between colonial Tanganyika and the United States in terms of race relations that also focuses on problems in race relations in the American context in contemporary times.

Godfrey Mwakikagile goes on to state that conquest of the mind was the worst form of imperial subjugation, a position he articulates in his works, Life under British Colonial Rule: Recollections of an African and Conquest of the Mind: Imperial subjugation of Africa which was published on his birthday in 2019 and its extended version, Colonial Mentality and the Destiny of Africa published in 2020, in which he examines the negative impact of colonial mentality on Africa's well-being as a continental crisis and how it impedes Africa's progress and the quest for an African renaissance. Colonial mentality is known as kasumba in Kiswahili, the most widely spoken African language, and one of the official languages of the African Union (AU) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Another one had to do with Godfrey Mwakikagile himself when, as a six-year-old walking to school with other boys, he was severely injured after being chased and bitten by a dog owned by a white couple who lived in a house the children went by everyday, on a public road, on their way to and from school. Decades later, he stated in his autobiographical writings, Life under British Colonial Rule: Recollections of an African published in 2018, that he still had a highly visible scar on his right knee where he was bitten by the dog. It was a large dog and it could have killed him.

Colour is immaterial but it carries a lot of weight." - (Godfrey Mwakikagile, Life under British Colonial Rule, New Africa Press, 2018, p. 108; G. Mwakikagile, Black Conservatives in the United States, 2006, p. 96).

The premier of Western Cape Province in South Africa, Helen Zille, in her speech in the provincial parliament on 28 March 2017, also cited Godfrey Mwakikagile's analysis of the impact of colonial rule on Africa in defence of her tweets which her critics said were a defence of colonialism and even called for her resignation. She said her analysis was the same as Mwakikagile's and those of other prominent people including Nelson Mandela, Chinua Achebe, Ali Mazrui, and former Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and wondered why she faced so much criticism when she made exactly the same point they did.

In 2016, his statue was removed from the University of Ghana in Accra because he did not deserve to be honoured as an icon in the struggle for racial equality and justice when he despised blacks. His statues sparked similar outrage in South Africa.

In his book Mlinzi Mkuu wa Mwalimu Nyerere (Swahili edition) which means Chief Bodyguard of Mwalimu Nyerere published in 2015, Peter Bwimbo wrote about Benjamin Mwambapa as one of his colleagues in the police department in Mwanza since 1953. It was a decade that marked the beginning of the end of colonial rule in Tanganyika. Coincidentally, Peter Bwimbo's younger brother, Patrick Bwimbo, was a classmate of Godfrey Mwakikagile at Tambaza High School in Dar es Salaam.

"The British turned Tanganyika into an undeclared apartheid state that was socially divided between divided Africans, Europeans and Asians....It was British-style apartheid - their secret was never to give racial segregation a name." - (Trevor Grundy, "Julius Nyerere Reconsidered", review of Thomas Molony, Nyerere - The Early Years, africaunauthorised.com, 4 May 2015).

It is a position that led one renowned Afrocentric Ghanaian political analyst and columnist Francis Kwarteng to describe Godfrey Mwakikagile as a "Eurocentric Africanist" in his article "End of the Dilemma: The Tower of Babel," on GhanaWeb, 28 September 2013, in which he discussed the role and the question of race, religion, and ethnicity in Ghana's politics and, by extension, in a Pan-African context including the African diaspora; which is a wrong characterisation of Mwakikagile since all his works are written from a purely African, not a Eurocentric, perspective.

In another article on GhanaWeb, 15 October 2013, Francis Kwarteng also stated:

Africans of all ideological stripes agree corruption is one of the biggest problems African countries face. It is even acknowledged by some leaders. And a number of African scholars including Godfrey Mwakikagile have addressed the problem, proposing solutions to a seemingly intractable problem. As Francis Kwarteng stated in "A Political Coin of Three Sides: What Do We Actually Want?", GhanaWeb, 8 November 2013:

As he stated in another article, "Africa Must Practice Its Own Democracy: A Moral Necessity," GhanaWeb, 17 October 2013:

Professor Edmond J. Keller, chairman of the political science department at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), director of the UCLA Globalization Research Center-Africa and former director of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center at UCLA, described Godfrey Mwakikagile as a "public intellectual" and an "academic theorist" in his review of Professor Guy Martin's book, African Political Thought. The review was published in one of the leading academic journals on African research and studies, Africa Today, Volume 60, Number 2, Winter 2013, Indiana University Press.

In his book African Political Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Professor Guy Martin has described Godfrey Mwakikagile as one of Africa's leading populist scholars and thinkers who refuse to operate and function within the limits and confines of Western ideologies – or any other external parameters – and who exhort fellow Africans to find solutions to African problems within Africa itself and fight the syndrome of dependency in all areas and create a "new African."

Professor Ryan Ronnenberg who wrote an article about Godfrey Mwakikagile as a prominent African scholar and writer in the Dictionary of African Biography, Volume 6 (Oxford University Press, 2011) covering the lives and legacies of notable African men and women since ancient times, edited by Harvard University professors, Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., stated that Mwakikagile has written major works of scholarship which have had a great impact in the area of African studies and continue to do so. He went on to state that Mwakikagile embraced Tanzania's independence, and the independence of the African continent as a whole, with fierce pride. 'I was too young to play a role in the independence movement, but old enough to know what Mau Mau in neighbouring Kenya was all about, and who our leaders were: from Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana to Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika; from Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria to Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya and Patrice Lumumba in Belgian Congo' (Africa and the West, 2000).

Mwakikagile has also written about race relations in the United States and relations between continental Africans and people of African descent in the diaspora in his titles such as Black Conservatives in The United States; Relations Between Africans and African Americans; and Relations Between Africans, African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans. Professor Kwame Essien of Gettysburg College, later Lehigh University, a Ghanaian, reviewed Relations Between Africans and African Americans: Misconceptions, Myths and Realities, in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2011, an academic journal of Columbia University, New York, and described it as an "insightful and voluminous" work covering a wide range of subjects from a historical and contemporary perspective, addressing some of the most controversial issues in relations between the two. It is also one of the most important books on the subject of relations between Africans and African Americans.

Such insults were the last thing that could be tolerated in newly independent Tanganyika. And President Nyerere, probably more than any other African leader, would not have tolerated, and did not tolerate, seeing even the humblest of peasants being insulted and humiliated by anyone including fellow countrymen." - (Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, Fifth Edition, New Africa Press, 2010, pp. 501 – 502).

Another of the silly aspects of the Mau Mau situation was that the colonial ladies took to carrying small pistols and had different coloured holsters to match whatever outfit they were wearing." - (Nicholas Edmondson, UK, interviewed by Godfrey Mwakikagile, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, Third Edition, New Africa Press, 2010, pp. 258 - 259, 260 – 263, 264 - 265, 266).

Mwakikagile has also written a book entitled South Africa in Contemporary Times (2008) about the struggle against apartheid and the end of white minority rule in South Africa and on the prospects and challenges the country faces in the post-apartheid era.

There were many incidents of racism in Tanganyika during British colonial rule. In his book Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, Mwakikagile wrote about the British settlers he interviewed - then living in different parts of the world - and what they said about life in Tanganyika in those days. One of them stated the following in an interview in 2006:

He is known for his book Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, published not long after Nyerere died. The book brought Mwakikagile into prominence in Tanzania and elsewhere. He is considered by many experts to be an authority on Nyerere and one of his most prominent biographers. Professor David Simon, a specialist in development studies at the University of London and Director of the Centre for Development Areas Research at Royal Holloway College, published in 2005 excerpts from the book in his compiled study, Fifty Key Thinkers on Development. Mwakikagile's book was reviewed by West Africa magazine in 2002. It was also reviewed by a prominent Tanzanian journalist and political analyst, Fumbuka Ng'wanakilala of the Daily News, Dar es Salaam, in October 2002, and is seen as a comprehensive work, in scope and depth, on Nyerere. The same book was also reviewed by Professor Roger Southall of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), formerly of Rhodes University, South Africa, in the bi-annual interdisciplinary publication, the Journal of Contemporary African Studies (Taylor & Francis Group), 22, No. 3, in 2004. Professor Southall was also the editor of the journal during that period.

Others who reviewed the book include Professor A.B. Assensoh, a Ghanaian teaching at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, in the United States. He reviewed the first edition of Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era in the African Studies Review, an academic journal of the African Studies Association, in 2003.

Still, Mwakikagile belongs to a group of African writers and the African elite who believe that the primary responsibility of transforming Africa lies in the hands of the Africans themselves, and not foreigners, and that acknowledgement of mistakes by African leaders is one of the first steps towards bringing about much-needed change in African countries; a position he forcefully articulates in his writings. For example, Political Science Professor Claude E. Welch at the State University of New York-Buffalo, in his review of one of Mwakikagile's books – Military Coups in West Africa Since The Sixties – published in the African Studies Review (Vol. 45, No. 3, December 2002, p. 114), described the author as being merciless in his condemnation of African tyrants.

His advocacy for fundamental change is articulated in many of his writings including The Modern African State: Quest for Transformation, which was published in 2001 and which is also one of his most well-known books.

Godfrey Mwakikagile's 2000 book Africa and the West was favourably reviewed in a number of publications, including the influential West Africa magazine by editor Kofi Akosah-Sarpong, who described Mwakikagile as an author who articulates the position of African Renaissance thinkers. The book has been described as an appeal to Africans to respect their cultures, values, and traditions and take a firm stand against alien ideas that pollute African minds and undermine Africa. A strong condemnation of the conquest of Africa by the imperial powers, it is also a philosophical text used in a number of colleges and universities in the study of African identity, philosophy, and history.

But the materialism of the West, which has found its way into Africa with devastating impact, must be counterbalanced with the spirituality and sense of sharing of the African which animates his culture, indeed his very being." - Godfrey Mwakikagile, Africa and The West, Huntington, New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2000, pp. 14 – 15; Madeira Keita, "Le Parti Unique en Afrique," in Presence Africaine, No. 30, February – March 1960; and Madeira Keita, "The Single Party in Africa," in Paul E. Sigmund, ed., The Ideologies of the Developing Nations, New York: Praeger, 1963, p. 170. On the African uprising and war of resistance against German colonial rule in Tanganyika, see, among other works, G. C. K. Gwassa and John Iliffe, eds., Records of the Maji-Maji Rising, Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1968).

Mwakikagile's first book, Economic Development in Africa, was published in June 1999. He has maintained a steady pace since then, writing more than 70 books in 20 years as his bibliography shows, mostly about Africa during the post-colonial era. He has been described as a political scientist and as a historian although his works defy classification. He has written about history, politics, economics, as well as contemporary and international affairs from an African and a Third World perspective.

His experience also inspired his thinking regarding Africa and its relationship to the Western world, which led to several academic works dedicated to the subject. Professor Ronnenberg further stated that Mwakikagile's early works focused on pressing issues in African studies, particularly the theory and realisation of development in Africa. Economic Development in Africa (1999) uses the rich case study of Tanzania's transition from socialism to free-market capitalism as a foundation for broader conclusions concerning the continent's development failures.

He ran for Parliament in 1995 when NCCR-Mageuzi was the strongest opposition party in Tanzania and had a formidable presidential candidate with populist appeal who once served as Deputy Prime Minister and whose vice presidential candidate - later disqualified through legal manipulations by the government-controlled National Electoral Commission - was Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, a Marxist intellectual and renowned revolutionary thinker who was Zanzibar's Minister of External Affairs before Zanzibar united with Tanganyika to form Tanzania and who was later appointed by President Nyerere as Minister of Economic Planning in the government of the United Republic of Tanzania. It was the first multi-party election in 30 years since 1965 when Tanzania became a one-party state and ushered in a new era of multi-party politics.

Mwakikagile says exactly the opposite in Africa is in A Mess. In fact, the title, although not the sub-title, comes from President Julius Nyerere who used exactly the same words in 1985: "Africa is in a mess." Mwakikagile explicitly states that he got the title from Nyerere's statement and felt it was appropriate for his work, although the tone and content might be disturbing to some people. He is brutally frank about the continent's deplorable condition.

Godfrey's father Elijah was a first cousin of one of Tanzania's first commercial airline pilots, Oscar Mwamwaja, who was shot but survived when he was a co-pilot of an Air Tanzania plane, a Boeing 737, that was hijacked on 26 February 1982 and forced to fly from Tanzania to Britain. Elijah's mother was an elder sister of Oscar's father.

The hijacking incident was widely covered by the Tanzanian press and other media outlets including BBC, The New York Times and American television networks CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS. It was one of the major stories during that time because of threats by the hijackers to blow up the plane and kill all the hostages when they were held captive for a number of days at an airport near London and because of the hijackers' demands which included the resignation of President Nyerere. Headlines in The New York Times included “Hijacked Jetliner Arrives in Britain,” 28 February 1982, and “4 Tanzanian Hijackers Surrender; 90 Hostages Are Freed in Britain,” 1 March 1982.

Oscar Mwamwaja was also featured in an article by Leonard Levitt, “Tanzania: A Dream Deferred,” in The New York Times Magazine, November 1982, which he wrote after he revisited Tanzania and Mpuguso Middle School where he taught almost 20 years earlier. A schoolmate of Mwakikagile, Oscar was also one of Levitt's students at Mpuguso, a school whose alumni include some of the prominent figures in Tanzania, among them Brigadier-General Owen Rhodfrey Mwambapa; Harold Nsekela, a law lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, later judge at the High Court of Tanzania and at the Court of Appeal of Tanzania, also judge and president of the East African Court of Justice with jurisdiction over six East African countries constituting the East African Community (EAC); James Mwakisyala, the Tanzania editor and bureau chief of The EastAfrican, a major weekly newspaper covering the countries of the African Great Lakes region who was a nephew of Brown and Weidi Ngwilulupi Mwasakafyuka and schoolmate of Mwakikagile; Daimon Mwakyembe, Director of the Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS) and schoolmate of Mwakikagile and Mwakisyala at Mpuguso and an elder brother of Harrison Mwakyembe, a cabinet member under two presidents; and David Mwakyusa, also a cabinet member and Member of Parliament (MP) and the last personal doctor of President Nyerere who was with him when the Tanzanian leader died in a London hospital in October 1999.

The American ambassador to Tanzania, James W. Spain, described Weidi Mwasakafyuka in the following terms, according to a "Public Library of US Diplomacy" report, 5 May 1976:

After completing his studies at Wayne State, Mwakikagile progressed to Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1976. One of his professors of economics and head of the economics department at Aquinas was Kenneth Marin who once worked as an economic advisor to the government of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam on capital mobilisation and utilisation from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Before he went to Tanzania, Professor Marin was a member of the White House Consumer Advisory Council where he served on Wage and Price Control in the mid-1960s, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1966, Professor Marin was a member of a U.S. State Department evaluation team that was assigned to review various performances in the economic and political arena in six South American countries. After he left Tanzania, he returned to his home town, Grand Rapids, to teach at Aquinas College, his alma mater. He was also a graduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Kenneth Marin also taught another student from Tanzania at Aquinas College, Enos Bukuku, in the sixties, who became a professor of economics, an economic advisor to President Nyerere, chairman of the Board of the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA), Deputy Governor of the Bank of Tanzania and Deputy Secretary-General of the East African Community.

In the United States, Godfrey Mwakikagile served as president of the African Students Union whilst attending Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He graduated from that university in 1975. He is listed as one of the "notable people" in academia among all of the alumni of Wayne State University in an article in Wikipedia about the school.

It is a sentiment echoed more than 100 years later in contemporary times by many people including British historian Arnold Toynbee who died in 1975. As he put it:

Mwakikagile also worked as an information officer at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (now known as the Ministry of Information, Youth, Culture and Sports) in Dar es Salaam. He left Tanzania in November 1972 to go for further studies in the United States when he was a reporter at the Daily News under Mkapa. He has stated in some of his writings including Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era that without Mkapa, he may never have gone to school in the United States where he became an author and an Africanist focusing on post-colonial studies.

After finishing high school in November 1970, Mwakikagile joined the National Service in January 1971 which was mandatory for all those who had completed secondary school, high school and college or university studies. He underwent training, which included basic military training, at Ruvu National Service camp when it was headed by his former primary school teacher Eslie Mwakyambiki before he became a Member of Parliament and Deputy Minister of Defence and National Service under President Nyerere. Mwakikagile then progressed to another National Service camp in Bukoba on the shores of Lake Victoria in the North-West Region bordering Uganda.

He also seems to be "trapped" in the past, in liberation days, especially in the 1970s when the struggle against white minority rule was most intense. But that may be for understandable reasons. He was a part of that generation when the liberation struggle was going on and some of his views have unquestionably been shaped by what happened during those days as his admiration for Robert Mugabe, for example, as a liberation icon clearly shows; although he also admits in Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era that the land reform programme in Zimbabwe could have been implemented in an orderly fashion and in a peaceful way and without disrupting the economy.

The Standard, the largest English newspaper in Tanzania and one of the largest and most influential in East Africa, served Mwakikagile well, not only in terms of providing him with an opportunity to sharpen his writing skills but also – after it became the Daily News in 1970 – in helping him to attend school in the United States, where he became an author many years after he graduated from college.

While still in high school at Tambaza, Mwakikagile joined the editorial staff of The Standard (later renamed the Daily News) in 1969 as a reporter. He was hired by the news editor, David Martin, a renowned British journalist who later became Africa correspondent of a London newspaper, The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday paper, covered the Angolan civil war for BBC and for CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and was a close friend of President Nyerere. Mwakikagile credits David Martin for opening the door for him into the world of journalism and helping him launch his career as a news reporter when he was still a high school student. In addition to his position as news editor, David Martin also served as deputy managing editor of the Tanganyika Standard. Founded in 1930, The Standard was the oldest and largest English newspaper in the country and one of the three largest in East Africa, a region comprising Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

It was a turning point in Mwakikagile's life. That was in June 1969 when he was a student at Tambaza High School in Dar es Salaam. He was 19 years old and probably the youngest reporter on the editorial staff at The Standard during that time.

Yet, he has not explicitly stated so in his writings concerning this problem of African intellectuals; a dilemma similar to the one faced by the black intelligentsia in the United States and which was addressed by Harold Cruse, an internationally renowned black American professor who taught at the University of Michigan for many years, in his monumental study, The Crisis of The Negro Intellectual. The book was first published in 1967 at the peak of the civil rights movement, five years before Godfrey Mwakikagile went to the United States for the first time as a student.

John Mwakangale was also a Member of Parliament (MP) and served in the cabinet as Minister of Labour under Nyerere in the early part of independence. Professor John Iliffe in his book A Modern History of Tanganyika described John Mwakangale as a "vehement nationalist." He did not even want American Peace Corps in Tanganyika and accused them of causing trouble. He was quoted in a news report, "M.P. Attacks American Peace Corps," which was the main story on the front page of the Tanganyika Standard, 12 June 1964, stating: "These people are not here for peace, they are here for trouble. We do not want any more Peace Corps."

American Peace Corps were some of Godfrey Mwakikagile's teachers in middle school and secondary school. One of them was Leonard Levitt, his teacher at Mpuguso Middle School in Rungwe District in 1964 who became a prominent journalist and renowned author. He wrote, among other works, An African Season, the first book ever written by a member of the Peace Corps, and Conviction: Solving the Moxley Murder, about a homicide which received extensive media coverage because it involved a member of the Kennedy family.

John Mwakangale was also the first leader Nelson Mandela met in newly independent Tanganyika in January 1962 - just one month after the country emerged from colonial rule - when Mandela secretly left South Africa on 11 January to seek assistance from other African countries in the struggle against apartheid and wrote about him in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. Tanganyika was the first independent African country Mandela visited and the first in the region to win independence. He went to other African countries using a travel document given to him by the government of Tanganyika. The document stated: "This is Nelson Mandela, a citizen of the Republic of South Africa. He has permission to leave Tanganyika and return here." Tanganyika was chosen by other African leaders in May 1963 to be the headquarters of all the African liberation movements under the leadership of President Julius Nyerere when they met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to form the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

“The deportation of Felix Arensen, a Swiss hotel manager, was the first in a series of punitive expulsions of Europeans that came as the TANU executive committee met in the first weeks of 1962. They evinced a bitter debate between racial moderates and extremists in the party. Nyerere spoke in support of the deportations, placating the extremists, saying that even if immediate economic change was not possible, Africans had a right to respect from other races and that the government’s patience on this matter was exhausted. Arensen had failed to recognize Amri Abedi as the new mayor of Dar es Salaam and ejected him from the hotel....The following day, three more foreign motel owners were served with deportation notices for refusing lodging to Jacob Namfua, a former TFL (Tanganyika Federation of Labour) official recently become parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Finance (in the early seventies, he was appointed by President Nyerere as Minister of Information and Broadcasting). Given the bitter strikes in the sisal industry, the political change had only heightened the sense of antagonism between white business owners and African workers—and their youthful and newly empowered representatives. The next day, another Swiss sisal plantation engineer was expelled for pinning a TANU pin on his dog.

'It is time for the people in England to realize that the white man in Africa is not prepared and never will be prepared to accept the African as an equal, either socially or politically. Is there something in their chromosomes which makes them more backward and different from peoples living in the East and West?'" - (Godfrey Mwakikagile, ibid., pp. 9 – 10, 69; Colin M. Turnbull, The Lonely African, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962, pp. 89, 21, 90, 97).

As he states in Nyerere and Africa, he was first hired by renowned British journalist David Martin who was the deputy managing and news editor of the Tanganyika Standard. The managing editor was Brendon Grimshaw, also British, who bought Moyenne Island in the Seychelles in 1962 and became its only permanent inhabitant. Brendon Grimshaw also played a major role in recruiting Mwakikagile as a member of the editorial staff at The Standard.

Godfrey Mwakikagile attended Kyimbila Primary School - founded by British feminist educator Mary Hancock and transformed into a co-educational institution - near the town of Tukuyu, and Mpuguso Middle School in Rungwe District, Mbeya Region, in the Southern Highlands. The headmaster of Mpuguso Middle School, Moses Mwakibete, was his math teacher in 1961 who later became a judge at the High Court of Tanzania appointed by President Nyerere. Mwakikagile also attended Songea Secondary School in Ruvuma Region which was once a part of the Southern Province. His current affairs teacher at Songea Secondary School, Julius Mwasanyagi, was one of the prominent early members and leaders of TANU who played a major role in the struggle for independence and worked closely with Nyerere. And his headmaster at Songea Secondary School, Paul Mhaiki, was later appointed by President Nyerere as Director of Adult Education at the Ministry of National Education and after that worked for the United Nations (UN) as Director of UNESCO's Division of Literacy, Adult Education, and Rural Development. After finishing his studies at Songea Secondary School in Form IV (Standard 12), Mwakikagile went to Tambaza High School in Dar es Salaam, formerly H.H. The Aga Khan High School mostly for Asian students (Indian and Pakistani), where he completed Form VI (Standard 14). One of his classmates at Tambaza High School was Mohamed Chande Othman, simply known as Chande, who became Chief Justice of Tanzania appointed to the nation's highest court by President Jakaya Kikwete after serving as a high court judge and as a UN prosecutor for international criminal tribunals.

Years later his son, Andrew Nyerere, told me about an incident that also took place in the capital Dar es Salaam shortly after Tanganyika won independence in 1961 near the school he and I attended and where we also stayed from 1969 - 1970. Like the incident earlier when Julius Nyerere was humiliated at the Old Africa Hotel back in 1953, this one also involved race. As Andrew stated in a letter to me in 2002 when I was writing this book:

Years earlier, John Malecela was District Commissioner (D.C.) of Rungwe District in the early part of independence, appointed by President Nyerere, and knew Brown Ngwilulupi and Elijah Mwakikagile in the early 1960s when they worked in the town of Tukuyu, the district capital during British colonial rule and after independence. The town was founded by the German colonial rulers who named it Neu Langenburg and served as the capital of Rungwe District when they ruled the country then known as Deutsch-Ostafrika (German East Africa, 1891 – 1919) and renamed Tanganyika in 1920 by the British when they took over after the end of World War I.

The white man who was deported from Tanganyika soon after independence when he insulted the black mayor of the nation's capital Dar es Salaam at Palm Beach Hotel was Felix Arensen, the hotel's owner and manager. As Professor Paul Bjerk states in his book Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and The Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960 – 1964:

(Leaders of the ruling party TANU and government officials) began compiling a list of eighty-seven whites and Asians to be expelled....Even moderate members of the TANU government like Paul Bomani and Rashidi Kawawa (who became vice president) issued warnings that 'anybody who cannot adjust himself to this (racial equality) should pack up and go because this Government will not tolerate the behavior of those who live between two worlds.'.” – (Paul Bjerk, Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and The Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960 – 1964, Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2015, p. 75).

Arbitrary seizure of land, depriving Africans of their only means of livelihood, was simply seen as a white man's right exercised at will in what had become a white man's possession. In his book Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, Godfrey Mwakikagile has given one example of this kind of imperial arrogance demonstrated by what happened to Tom Mboya who, together with Oginga Odinga, was one of the leaders of the Kenyan delegation to the constitutional talks in London in 1960 on Kenyan independence. Mboya stated in his book Freedom and After that when he was walking on a street in London, one old English lady stopped him and asked him:

In his seminal work Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, he has written extensively about the liberation struggle, and the liberation movements in Southern Africa in what is probably one of the best accounts of that critical phase in the history of Africa, as well as an excellent analysis of the Congo Crisis during the turbulent 1960s.

David Martin, when he worked at the Tanganyika Standard and at the Daily News, and thereafter, was the most prominent foreign journalist in Eastern and Southern Africa in the 1960s and '70s, and wrote extensively about the liberation struggle in the region for the London Observer and the BBC. In Nyerere and Africa, Mwakikagile has written about the role Martin played as a journalist during the liberation struggle in Southern Africa. But Martin was also instrumental in opening the door for Mwakikagile into the world of journalism, writing every day, after which both became successful writers.

The French in West Africa also introduced forced labor. Some of the leaders of independent Africa toiled in those labor camps. Madeira Keita, a native of Mali who was active in the politics of Guinea before it won independence in 1958 and collaborated closely with Sekou Toure in founding the Democratic Party of Guinea, was one of them. In April 1959, he became Interior Minister of Mali, and in August 1960, he also became Minister of National Defense, holding two ministerial posts under President Modibo Keita. He related his experience as a conscripted laborer:

A few months after Princess Margaret visited Tanganyika, the Gold Coast became the first black African country to emerge from colonial rule as the new nation of Ghana in March 1957, blazing the trail for the African independence movement; while Tanganyika blazed the trail in East Africa four years later.

That was in 1956 when Godfrey Mwakikagile was in Standard One in primary school in Rungwe District in the Southern Highlands Province, as he stated in his books Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, My Life as an African, Life under British Colonial Rule and Tanzania under Mwalimu Nyerere: Reflections on an African Statesman.

Godfrey Mwakikagile also stated in his works, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties and Life under British Colonial Rule among others, that it was in the same year he was bitten by the white couple's dog on his way to school that Princess Margaret visited Mbeya and Sao Hill in his home region, the Southern Highlands Province, as well as other parts of the country, in October 1956; a visit that symbolised British imperial rule over Tanganyika but also at a time when the nationalist movement was gaining momentum in the struggle for independence. The party that led the country to independence, Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), had been formed just two years before, in July 1954, and within months succeeded in mobilising massive support across the country in its quest to end colonial rule. Independence was inevitable.

Growing up in the 1950s, Mwakikagile experienced a form of apartheid and racial segregation in Tanganyika, what is now mainland Tanzania, and wrote extensively about it in some of his works, as he did about the political climate of Tanganyika during the colonial era.

Benjamin Mwambapa was a police officer since the early 1950s and worked for the head of the Special Branch, an intelligence and security service unit during British colonial rule, for Lake Province surrounding and extending beyond Lake Victoria in the provincial capital Mwanza.

The struggle for independence in Tanganyika in the 1950s, Mwakikagile's formative years, was partly fuelled by such racial injustices which, years later, became the focus of some of his writings.

Godfrey Mwakikagile (born 4 October 1949 in Kigoma) is a prominent Tanzanian scholar and author specialising in African studies. He was also a news reporter for The Standard (later renamed the Daily News) — the oldest and largest English newspaper in Tanzania and one of the three largest in East Africa.

Mwakikagile was born on 4 October 1949 into a middle class Tanganyikan family in the town of Kigoma, Western Province of Tanganyika – what is now mainland Tanzania. His father Elijah Mwakikagile, who once worked at the internationally renowned Amani Research Institute in the late forties, was a medical assistant during the British colonial era and was one of the very few in the entire country of 10 million people. Medical assistants underwent an intensive three-year training after finishing secondary school and worked as a substitute for doctors. They were even called madaktari (doctors) in Swahili and formed the backbone of the medical system in Tanganyika as was the case in other British colonies. There were fewer than 10 doctors in colonial Tanganyika in the forties and fifties and only 12 at independence on 9 December 1961. And there were fewer than 300 medical assistants during those years serving millions of people in a vast country of more than 365,000 square miles. Godfrey's mother Syabumi Mwakikagile (née Mwambapa), a housewife, was a pupil of Tanganyika's prominent British feminist educator and later member of parliament Mary Hancock. She remembered Ms. Hancock, a friend of Nyerere and his family since the early 1950s, as a very strict disciplinarian when she was taught by her at Kyimbila Girls' School in Rungwe District in the early 1940s, one of the very few schools for girls in colonial Tanganyika. Ms. Hancock was the founder of the school, also of Loleza Girls' School which had its origin in Kyimbila Girls' School.

'Before 1945, there was a colonial regime with government by decree, the regime of the indignat. The indignat form of government permitted the colonial administration to put Africans in prison without any trial. Sometimes you were put in prison for two weeks because you did not greet the administrator or the commander. You were happy enough if they did not throw stones at you or send you to a work camp, because there was also forced labor at that time. In 1947, I met French journalists who were very surprised to learn that forced labor was nonvoluntary and not paid for. Transportation was not even covered; nor were food and lodging. The only thing that was covered was work.'

Colonel Ewart Grogan, a leader of the white settlers, bluntly stated: 'We Europeans have to go on ruling this country and rule it with iron discipline...If the whole of the Kikuyu land unit is reverted to the Crown, then every Kikuyu would know that our little queen was a great Bwana.' - (G. Mwakikagile, ibid., pp. 97, 113; E. S. Grogan, in the East African Standard, Nairobi, Kenya, 12 November 1910; Elspeth Huxley, White Man’s Country, Vol. I, London and New York: Macmillan, 1935, pp. 222 – 223, 261 - 262; George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism?: The Coming Struggle for Africa, London: Denis Dobson, 1956, pp. 255, 256).

"In all the African colonies, exploitation went hand in hand with degradation and brutality. In the Congo under the Belgian King Leopold II, Belgians chopped off the hands and arms of Africans who did not collect enough rubber from the forest. In Tanganyika, when it was German East Africa, Germans introduced forced labor and corporal punishment, virtually enslaving Africans, a practice which triggered the Maji Maji war of resistance from 1905 – 07 and covered almost half of the country. The uprising almost ended German rule which was saved only after reinforcements were rushed from Germany.

Godfrey Mwakikagile also stated that the total disregard for the rights and well-being of Africans was earlier demonstrated by the arrogance of the imperial powers at the Berlin Conference in 1885 which led to the partition of Africa. He went on to state that Africans were not even represented at the conference, yet it was their fate that was being determined by Europeans who decided to partition the continent among themselves as if Africans did not even exist.