Oscar Kambona - Political Career

Political Career

Kambona became the secretary-general of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) during the struggle for independence and worked closely with Nyerere who was president of TANU, the party which led Tanganyika to independence. Tanganyika won independence from Britain on 9 December 1961. The two were the most prominent leaders of the independence movement in Tanganyika in the 1950s.

Oscar Kambona was a charismatic leader who also had great influence among the leaders of the African liberation movements based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, second only to Nyerere, after the country won independence.

He was a shining star in the constellation of Tanganyikan (later Tanzanian) politicians and it was widely believed that he would be the next president of the country if Nyerere no longer ran for office or stepped down for whatever reason. His stature as Nyerere's heir apparent or successor was enhanced when, as defence minister, he calmed down soldiers who could have overthrown the government.

That was during the army mutiny in January 1964 when President Nyerere and Vice President Rashidi Kawawa were taken to a safe place by the members of the intelligence service in case the soldiers wanted to harm them.

It was Oscar Kambona, alone, who confronted the soldiers and negotiated with them. He drove himself to the army barracks to talk to the army mutineers and listen to their demands. The soldiers wanted their salaries increased and British army officers replaced by African officers.

There was, however, suspicion that some elements in the government and in the labour movement secretly worked with the soldiers to create a tense situation in an attempt to overthrow President Nyerere.

Kambona obviously was not one of them. Had he wanted to, he could have used the opportunity to seize power. He was popular with the soldiers and they trusted him. He was also, during that time, minister of defence.

Soldiers in neighbouring Kenya and Uganda also mutinied around the same time, within the next two days after Tanganyika's army mutiny which took place on 20 January, and made the same demands their counterparts did in Tanganyika.

The army mutinies in the three East African countries were suppressed by British troops who had been flown from Aden and Britain at the request of the three East African leaders (Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, and Milton Obote of Uganda). Other British troops came from neighbouring Kenya. The mutinies were over in only a few days.

After Nyerere came out of seclusion, he publicly thanked Oscar Kambona, whom he called "my colleague," for defusing a potentially dangerous situation.

In fact, when the soldiers remained defiant, it was Oscar Kambona who persuaded Nyerere to seek immediate assistance from the former colonial power, Britain, to suppress the mutiny.

The two leaders had been close political allies and personal friends since the days of the independence struggle when they were the main leaders of the independence movement. In fact, when Kambona got married to a former Miss Tanganyika at a cathedral in London, Nyerere was his best man.

But the two leaders started drifting apart a few years after independence. The first rift occurred in 1964 during the army mutiny, and then in 1965 when Tanzania officially became a one-party state.

As a cabinet member, Oscar Kambona supported the transition to a one-party state but did so reluctantly, only as a team player.

He was opposed to the change because he said there was no mechanism guaranteeing change of government by constitutional means in a country dominated by one party. He also contended that there were no constitutional safeguards to make sure that the country did not drift into dictatorship.

The next split with Nyerere came in February 1967 when Tanzania adopted the Arusha Declaration, an economic and political blueprint for the transformation of Tanzania into a socialist state.

Kambona was opposed to this fundamental change and argued that the government should first launch a pilot scheme to see if the policy was going to work on a national scale.

Tanzania's socialist policy was mainly based on the establishment of ujamaa villages, roughly equivalent to communes or the Kibbutz in Israel, so that the people could live and work together for their collective well-being and make it easier for the government to provide them with basic services such as water supply, medical treatment at clinics, and education by building schools which could be within short distance from the villages.

Oscar Kambona argued that it was important, first, to show the people that living in ujamaa villages, or collective communities, was beneficial and a good idea. He said that could be done by establishing a few ujamaa villages in different parts of the country as a pilot scheme to demonstrate the viability of those villages and show the people the benefits they would get if they agreed to live together and work together on communal farms.

The debate, conducted mostly in private when the delegates of the ruling party TANU were discussing in a public forum the document of the Arusha Declaration, was between Oscar Kambona on one side and Julius Nyerere as well as Vice President Rashid Kawawa on the other side.

They were the country's three main and most powerful and most influential leaders and met privately away from the delegates at the conference in Arusha to resolve their differences.

The private meeting and debate went on for quite some time during the duration of the conference and whenever the subject came up, whether or not Tanzania should adopt socialist policies and establish ujamaa villages, Kawawa always supported Nyerere against Kambona.

The two (Kambona and Kawawa) became bitter enemies thereafter. In fact, they started going separate ways even before then because Kambona saw Kawawa as no more than a "puppet" of Nyerere, manipulated at will, and who agreed with everything Nyerere said and wanted. However, when he was interviewed shortly after Kambona's death, Kawawa made a public statement that he "had no disagreement with Kambona and worked well with him as a colleague throughout." The interview was broadcast by Radio Tanzania in 1997.

Kambona was the only cabinet member who challenged Nyerere and stood up to him and saw him as his equal. There was probably another cabinet member, Chief Abdallah Said Fundikira III, Tanganyika's first minister of constitutional affairs, who not long after independence left the cabinet over disagreements with Nyerere. Fundikira had known Nyerere since their student days at Makerere University College in Uganda in the early 1940s.

But the differences between Kambona and Nyerere were fundamentally ideological and more than just a dispute over the way ujamaa villages should be established.

Kambona was opposed to socialism. He was not a socialist like Nyerere. He was a capitalist. He was also opposed to Chinese communist influence in Tanzania and believed that Nyerere's brand of socialism would be patterned after Chinese communist policies. He also believed that Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung had undue and profound influence on Nyerere. He attributed that to Nyerere's first visit to the People's Republic of China in 1965, contending that it was after this trip that Nyerere decided to establish a one-party state after he returned to Tanzania.

But Kambona lost. The Arusha Declaration, Tanzania's socialist manifesto and political blueprint, was adopted in February 1967 and socialism became Tanzania's official policy.