PRESIDENT JULIUS NYERERE

President Julius Nyerere’s eight-day state visit to the People’s Republic of China in February 1965 came at a decisive moment in Tanzania’s early nationhood. The union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar was barely a year old and the country had only recently adopted a one-party structure under TANU. With limited resources, an overwhelmingly rural population and a tiny educated elite, President Nyerere was searching for a development path rooted in African realities. By then, Nyerere had already developed a worldview rooted in African communal life, enriched by Catholic moral teaching and the Fabian socialism he had studied in Edinburgh. What was missing was a convincing organisational model. China appeared to offer one.

When Nyerere arrived in Beijing on February 16, 1965, he was received by Premier Zhou Enlai, Vice Premier Chen Yi, and senior Communist Party officials. Over the next week, he toured communes around Beijing Municipality, agricultural schemes near Tianjin, factories in Shanghai, and people’s communes modeled on Mao Zedong’s rural transformation campaigns. Everywhere, he observed tightly coordinated mass mobilisation: young people in the Communist Youth League, cadres in village committees, and peasant cooperatives that formed the backbone of China’s development drive.

On February 20, Nyerere addressed thousands at Peking Square (Tiananmen), praising the Chinese people’s achievements since 1949 and declaring that Tanzania’s friendship with China would not be dictated by Western anxieties. He noted the “discipline and unity” with which China pursued national reconstruction, qualities he increasingly believed Tanzania needed.

Several impressions from the trip later shaped Ujamaa. First was China’s elevation of the peasantry as the anchor of socialist transformation. This resonated with Nyerere’s belief, already hinted in his 1962 “Ujamaa” pamphlet, that development must begin in the villages. Second was the moral example set by the Chinese leadership. Nyerere admired the frugality of officials like Zhou Enlai, which reinforced his conviction that African leaders must avoid elitism. Third was the doctrine of self-reliance. China’s determination to build with its own labour despite poverty deeply influenced Nyerere, eventually appearing in the 1967 Arusha Declaration as a foundational principle.

Still, he did not return a Maoist. Nyerere rejected Marxist class struggle, arguing that pre-colonial African societies lacked rigid classes. He insisted, in later essays collected in Freedom and Unity (1966) and Freedom and Development (1973), that Tanzanian socialism must be authentically African. China provided inspiration, not ideology: a working example of how a poor nation could mobilise its population for collective development.

The effect was visible almost immediately. From 1965 onward, Nyerere’s speeches increasingly emphasised communal production, leadership humility, and nationwide mobilisation for development. By 1967 these ideas were consolidated in the Arusha Declaration, which set out the blueprint for Ujamaa Vijijini, the villagisation programme that expanded between 1969 and 1973 under TANU and later CCM.

The 1965 visit also forged strategic ties. China became Tanzania’s most reliable partner, culminating in the TAZARA Railway (1970–1975), built by Chinese engineers and linking Dar es Salaam to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia, then the largest foreign aid project in Chinese history.

In retrospect, Nyerere’s journey to China was not an ideological conversion but an ideological crystallisation. It confirmed that Tanzania could craft a modern, self-reliant socialism grounded in African values while drawing practical lessons from other post-colonial nations. China showed him what disciplined, rural-centred development could look like, and Tanzania adapted that vision to its own history and aspirations.

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