| New African Elites: A Tanzanian Profile | Send to a friend |
| Tuesday, 17 August 2010 23:12 |
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This is a synopsis of a larger project of sketching the biographical journey of a class constituting the African elites. It is a self-imposed attempt to make sense of ‘who is who’ in Tanzania – for what and for whom? In other words, it is about how and why new elites (re)shape our society. As a group, African elites have nationally been influential culturally, intellectually, politically and even economically across four generations. Of course, they do not necessarily constitute a class in the Marxian sense so eloquently analysed in Prof Issa Shivji’s seminal book on ‘Class Struggles in Tanzania’. Rather, in a loose Gramscian sense, it is a slightly differentiated class of traditional vis-à-vis organic intellectuals who contentiously chart the country’s direction(s). It is not by accident that a son of a pioneer church planter in Tanganyika becomes a leading medical institutional builder in Tanzania and his son, a key civil society organiser. Similarly it is not by ‘political accident’ a son of a civil servant becomes a president and his son, an upcoming legal broker-cum-political strategist. Indeed it is not by ‘accident of birth’ we talk of ‘political families’ with siblings who run ministries, embassies, universities – and even the United Nations. Probably wary of ad hominem we no longer systematically study the African elites. This could be due to the fact that, regardless of Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere’s success in containing the exclusive growth of this group through an egalitarian primary education system, African intellectuals are reproducing themselves as the educated elite. Yes, we are this privileged group. And it is not fun to critically study ourselves. So we study others – those we call the ‘poor’ and ‘marginalised’. As the famous Kiswahili adage goes, ‘mkuki kwa nguruwe mtamu, kwa mwanadamu uchungu’! In his yet unpublished PhD thesis entitled, ‘Socialist Ideology and the Reality of Tanzania’, Prof Seithy Chachage dedicated a whole chapter to the study of the first of these African elites. He aptly periodised their time as that of the ‘Systemisation of African Civilisation.’ It contains a biographical analysis of the likes of Paul Bomani who, as I came to know later, was fondly called Kishamapanda – the Trailblazer – by members of a co-operative movement that he led. Chachage thus describes one of the “modern Tanganyikans”: “Martin Kayamba, a tall, powerful man, elegantly dressed and well-educated, widely travelled and with a fluent command of English; whose father was the first Tanganyikan to be educated in Britain before the German invasion of the country, was a model of ‘sophistication to which the young men aspired’ in the 1920s.” The same source thus quotes Dr E. F. Mwaisela from whom we get the name of the famed ward at our Muhimbili National Hospital: “The general outlook at present [in 1943] as far as my life is concerned is very gloomy. I have been brought up to such a level in life that I can neither cope with my own people’s life, nor that of a civilised man. To get married to a girl of any reasonable standard, for instance, in order that I should maintain that standard of education I enjoyed in school, is literally to commit suicide.” Indeed, the educated had started to single themselves out. When one of the first batches of post-independence educated elites marched to the State House in 1966 in protest against the then National Service scheme they met this stern rebuke from their fellow elite, Mwalimu Nyerere: “We belong to the same class of exploiters. I belong to your class. Where I think three 380 pounds a year (the minimum wage that would be paid in the National Service) is prison camp, is forced labour. We belong to this damned class on top”! He thus continued to rant: “Everybody in this country is demanding a pound of flesh. Everybody except the poor peasant. How can he demand it? He doesn’t know the language. Even in his language he can’t speak of forced labour. What kind of country are we building?” What happened afterwards is history. He slashed his presidential salary by 20 per cent. Then he sent students home to their villages/towns. This action remains debatable but the point made is still well taken. The children of this generation of yesteryear protestors are now holding business roundtables to chart the future of the ‘market economy’ in Tanzania. Others are running for parliamentary seats with eyes glued to ministerial posts if not the presidential post. Yet others are in policy dialogues in what we mistake for the civil society busy daydreaming of ushering a mass social movement. What we are seeing now in Tanzania is a systematic consolidation of new African elites. The passing of the mantle or baton from the previous generations of elites to the current one is more pronounced now than ever especially in the corporate world and the political arena. But will this (re)production of the educated – indeed, the business and political – elite as the driving ‘middle class’ force propel us into the concert of ‘developed countries’? Or will it continue to enrich the few at the expense of the majority and thus further widen the gap between the rich and the poor? This is what we need to study closely – the nature and purpose of new African elites. If we want to understand the marginalised lets first understand the privileged. It’s two parts of the same coin. © Chambi Chachage Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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