Oscar Kambona - Coup Leader

Coup Leader

Not long after Kambona got ample publicity during his lecture tour of Nigeria in 1968 denouncing Nyerere, he was again in the news in Tanzania and other African countries and elsewhere. He was accused of masterminding a coup attempt to overthrow Nyerere1.

The coup was to take place in October 1969. But all the alleged conspirators were arrested before the fateful date, except Kambona who was living in London.

The alleged plotters were charged with treason. The chief witness for the prosecution was Potlako Leballo, president of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), a South African liberation group based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Leballo took over the leadership of the organisation after its first president, Mangaliso Roberto Sobukwe, were imprisoned by the apartheid regime.

Leballo had gained the confidence of the coup plotters while he was working for Tanzania's intelligence service. His testimony proved critical in securirng a conviction of the accused during the treason trial presided over by Chief Justice Phillip Telfer Georges, a Trinidadian. The leading government attorney, besides Attorney-General Mark Bomani, was Nathaniel King, also from Trinidad.

Kambona was the first accused and was charged in absentia.

There were reports that he would be extradited to Tanzania but he never was. The Tanzanian government did not seek his extradition. It is also highly unlikely that the British government would have sent him back to Tanzania even if the two countries had an extradition treaty.

And since he did not appear in court during the treason trial, he was not convicted. He could not have been convicted in a fair trial without himself being there to defend himself.

During the trial, prosecuting attorney, Nathaniel King, said the coup plotters also intended to assassinate President Nyerere. He asked one of the accused, John Lifa Chipaka, what he meant when he said - in their secret communications obtained by the Tanzania intelligence service - they were going "to eliminate" Nyerere. Chipaka responded by saying, "Eliminate him politically, not physically."

Chief Justice Phillip Telfer Georges asked him the same question and was not convinced that Chipaka was telling the truth.

Also the Chief Justice said the list of names found on the younger brother of John Chipaka, Eliya Dunstan Chipaka who was a captain, was not the kind of list one would expect to be a list of guests invited to a wedding. It was a list of army officers, potential participants in the planned coup, who were going to be approached or had already been approached by the conspirators to see if they could take part in the plot to overthrow the government. The list included officers from both sides of the union: Tanzania mainland and Zanzibar.

The Chipaka brothers were cousins of Oscar Kambona.

The court proceedings were reported in the newspapers and on the radio and they were open to the public. The records of those proceedidngs can be obtained from different sources, including newspapers from that period, and many documented works. They quote what the accused, the prosecuting attorneys, and the chief justice said during the trial.

The transcript of the court proceedings, reported in Tanzanian newspapers and elsewhere, is also reproduced in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era.

While his co-conspirators were languishing in prison after being convicted of treason, Oscar Kambona continued to criticise Nyerere from his safe haven in London through the years, while nurturing ambitions to return into the political arena in his home country where he once was a bright star in the 1960s before he fled to London.