Postcolonial realism: Tanganyika's foreign policy under Nyerere, 1960-1963

The triumphs of the year were won abroad. Internationally, the prestige of Tanganyika and Nyerere had never been higher; the accolades of Addis and the triumph for moderation in the OAU charter; the forefront of African liberation and the capital of the Committee of Nine; the mid-year prospects for an East African Federation and the wider vistas that lay beyond; the containment of Southern Rhodesia by the prevention of the majority's government-in-exile and the minority's unilateral independence through the skillful marshalling of Commonwealth influence; the Kennedy visit, the Scandinavian tour, the processions to Algiers and Conakry ... the passion for development within the promise of non-racialism.1 This year-end report by the American ambassador William Leonhart for 1963 captured the stature Tanganyika had gained through its activist foreign policy during its first years of independence, before its union with Zanzibar that created the new nation of Tanzania Tanzania has been one of the most influential countries of independent Africa, taking a leading role in the effort to overthrow white minority rule in Southern Africa, and defining the ideals of African non-alignment. Yet as with many African countries, the beginnings of its foreign policy orientation remain obscure in political science studies lacking archival material.2 Because of this, Tanzania's formative impact on the liberation movement in Southern Africa from 1960-63 has been largely ignored in recent scholarship.3 While Tanzania's foreign policy goals were prominently proclaimed, their implementation was highly secretive, and its documentation still publicly unavailable.4 By carefully sifting the diplomatic correspondence and intelligence reports of American and British observers, supplemented by the memories of Tanzanian participants and Portuguese reports, one can reconstruct a portrait of this formative period. From 1960-1963 Tanganyika instituted a realist foreign policy that established the new nation as an effective sovereign power on the international stage despite its military and economic weakness. Tanganyika extended a sphere of influence into Eastern and Southern Africa while cultivating international prestige to sustain its regional strategy. Realism, Idealism, and Scholarly Silences Okwudiba Nnoli's foundational analysis of Tanzanian foreign policy is nearly silent on this early period, going on to describe the events of 1964-1966 as "a series of diplomatic frustrations which portrayed the shallow limits of Tanzanian power."5 While Nnoli's analysis is fundamentally persuasive, his contradicting assertion that Tanzania exercised a vigorous foreign policy and credible non-aligned posture despite its weakness blurs his assessment.6 For this formative period Nnoli makes mention of major public issues and offers an insightful analysis of economic activity and foreign aid flows, but otherwise has almost no detail about foreign policy from 1960-1963. Nnoli argued that Tanzania's foreign policy from 1961-1967 was marked by a profound deficiency of "positive" or assertive power, and that it exercised "negative" power at best, obstructing the offensive policies of larger countries. By embarking on a new path of "self-reliance" in 1967, Nnoli proposed, Tanzania sought to enhance is sovereign autonomy and so increase its ability to project positive influence on the world stage. The general thrust of Nnoli's analysis is reinforced in an informative volume edited by K. Mathews and S.S. Mushi that likewise has very little to say about the foreign policy of Tanganyika before 1964 beyond the broad outlines of the liberation struggle and East African Federation.7 Godfrey Mwakikagile offers an anecdotal account of Tanzania's foreign policy but no archival documentation.8 Joseph Nye's early analysis of efforts towards regional integration provides a partial portrait, featuring information drawn from interviews with prominent actors in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika Nye argued that the desire for East African Federation drew on the proto-national idealism of Pan-Africanism, with the implication that federation failed because it did not accord with the interests of the individual nations. …