Thursday 13 April 2017

95th birthday of Julius Nyerere

(Born 13 April 1922, Butiama, Tanzania)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

MWALIMU! 

Head of the Tanganyika African National Union, beginning 1954, which spearheads the restoration-of-independence movement in Tanzania that successfully frees the country in 1961 from 80 years of dual German and British conquests and occupations...

Southern Africa/Biafra freedom

President of the freed Tanzania republic, October 1964-November 1985, provides rearguard bases for education, medical care  and military training (in Tanzania) for numerous southern African restoration-of-independence movements especially from Mozambique,  Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa (1960s-1990s) – focussing on the latter, South Africa, students and scholars of this conjunctural epoch of African history, 30-40 years ago, watch, presently, usually incredulously as one can imagine, as hundreds of African émigrés in South Africa from Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and elsewhere from Africa are murdered in premeditated campaigns clearly organised by groupings in the country with tacit and at times active support from personnages within the South Africa state and émigrés’ residents and businesses destroyed and thousands of survivors sent into horrid South Africa refugee camps or forced to return to their various countries; one of the very few leaders in Africa who unequivocally condemns the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, during which Britain and client state Nigeria murder 3.1 million Igbo people, 25 per cent of this nation’s population, in this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, supports the Biafra freedom movement.

East Africa

Finally, Mwalimu plays a key role in the 1978 termination of the Idi Amin Dada (who had earlier on in the 1950s/60s served the British military across the border in Kenya in savage expansive operations to suppress the Mau Mau freedom movement) murderous islamist military junta in neighbouring Uganda which the British government in January 1971, under Prime Minister Edward Heath, participated centrally in installing to power principally over Uganda’s democratically elected government Milton Obote’s principled opposition to the Heath administration’s impending arms sales to the European-minority occupation regime in South Africa, expressly contrary to the existing UN comprehensive arms embargo on the regime to which British is a signatory – another consequence on rest of Africa of these “close encounters” with this country South Africa manifesting so dramatically (and brutally) yet again...
(George Russell Sextet, “Honesty” [personnel: Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet; Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; Steve Swallow, bass; Joe Hunt, drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, US, 8 May 1961])
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe


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