SPECIAL REPORT: How mutiny gave rise to the TPDF

After a few days, the Royal British Army offered me a number of jobs at the defence headquarters, which I declined because they involved sitting in the office and doing administrative work which had included, among others, keeping records of military items in their respective stores.

I told them if they really wanted to help me, then what I wanted to do was what I had trained for at Sandurst and practised back home in Tanganyika and that was anything that related the infantry.

As an all round sportsman, I was a man of action full of energy and I did not therefore like the job of sitting in the office. Back home in Tanganyika, the President had holed himself up in the house of Judge Mustapha who would later become one of the senior and well known judges.

While at Judge Mustapha’s house, Mwalimu had since the start of the mutiny been toying with the embarrassing idea of seeking military assistance for putting down the mutiny in his country from the very people he had barely three years back told that after ten years, Tanganyikans would be able to do in ten years what the colonialists (in the latter case, the British) had failed to do in four decades they had ruled since taking over from Germany colonialists after the end of the First World War in 1918.

Although Nyerere lived up to the vow he had made to the British during his country’s independence day, it was now difficult to face the same people for assistance. After what had happened in Dar es Salaam, especially to the British army officers in the Tanganyika Rifles, word had not only reached the British government, but also the top British military brass and had already prepared for action in case Nyerere invited them.

Mwalimu finally swallowed his pride and requested the British government for assistance. An aircraft carrier, HMS Centaur that had at the time anchored at Aden, motored to Tanganyika’s coast with a number of helicopter gunships and troop carriers on board.

By the third day of the mutiny, the aircraft carrier was already in the Indian Ocean off the East African coast. And in the morning of the fourth day, both Dar es Salaam residents, and in particular, the mutineers who had, for three days, terrorized the city, witnessed what some people had until then only seen in films.

Four helicopters that hooked land rovers, which hang precariously under their bellies, flew into the city and descended to the ground. Commandoes from troop carrier choppers alighted and straightaway ran to a waiting vehicle that sped off into the city in search of armed mutineers.

Meanwhile, at the Colito Barracks, helicopter gunships flying over tree tops and armed with bazooka machine-guns, strafed at all sentries of the barracks, sending mutineers in disarray. By midday, the mutiny was over. For several days, the newly, installed administration at the Colito Barracks received, from surrounding villagers, weapons that had been abandoned in their farms by mutineers who found both weapons and uniforms too heavy to carry with them as they ran to where God knew!

In March 1964, while still living in Britain, I was asked to report to the defence headquarters in London and was shown a telex message from the Vice-President, Rashid Mfaume Kawawa who was then also the minister for Defence of the Tanganyikan government. It stated that since I had been sent by the mutineers and not the Tanganyikan government, the army in Dar es Salaam still required my services.

The British sought my opinion. I told them they already knew my answer, that I wanted to go back home. However, I requested them to tell the Vice-President that since I had applied for a three-month military commanders’ course and had a positive response, I wished to complete the course and return home thereafter.

The Vice-President agreed. I flew back home after completing the course and was received at the Dar es Salaam airport by Alexander Nyirenda.

At the army headquarters which was then located at Magogoni, Colonel Sarakikya appointed me to the military rank of Assistant Adjutant and Quarter Master General (AAQMG) which nowadays is referred to as the Chief of Logistics and Engineering (CLE) which I would revert to later after the restructuring of the TPDF and modernizing of the army.

My work in the new army was both daunting and challenging because it literally involved the rebuilding of a modern army, almost from scratch, complete with its new structures that were in the form of building new barracks, revamping others, purchasing new equipment and armaments that included, among others, artillery pieces, tanks and military trucks.

It is important to note that during this time, countries under British rule or protectorate ordered their military supplies through a British company, the Crown Agency. Therefore orders would be channelled through Crown Agency and the company would secure whatever a country needed.

However, because of problems we sometimes encountered, in getting military supplies promptly and adequately, we later decided to devise our own systems of getting whatever military hardware we wanted from countries other than through the British company.

For instance, during the time, standard military vehicles in East Africa were the three-ton British-made Bedford trucks.

I sought Bedford trucks from Britain and was told they were only producing a few units for the British army and that they would usually sell to developing countries like Tanganyika when they had surplus. At this point, I approached the permanent secretary in the ministry of defence, Mr Bernard Mulokozi, and told him the need for the country to look for suppliers of military trucks elsewhere instead of continuing to depend on the British company which had failed to deliver.

Following my discussions with Mr Mulokozi, I flew to Sweden, in search of trucks for the TPDF and was told they were still working on a prototype which would come out of their assembly line five years later! Of course, it would have been ludicrous for us to wait for five years.

At this juncture, I decided to go to West Germany’s Mercedes Benz truck manufacturing plant in Stuttgart. This time I was accompanied by four other officials from the TPDF and the ministry of Finance and we were this time lucky to get what we wanted. At the Stuttgart Mercedes Benz factory, company officials demonstrated to us the use of various military vehicles including what we wanted for our use. We placed the order of 460 Mercedes-Benz trucks and 150 trailers which would be delivered a few months later through the DT Dobie Mercedes Benz branch in Dar es Salaam. The West German Mercedes-Benz trucks cost us at the time a whopping 34 million Deutsche marks which was quite a sum during those days.

My work as Chief of Logistics and Engineering at the time was made very easy by the presence, in the army, of a very hard working and understanding chief of defence forces, Sarakikya, and a very supportive commander-in-chief, Mwalimu Nyerere.