Too appalling this letdown, Ndugu Mkapa 

What do Ndugu Benjamin Mkapa, Ndugu Jenerali Ulimwengu and I have in common? In the early seventies, we worked for Julius Kambarage Nyerere as editors of The Daily News, then Tanzania's most vital English-language newspaper. Ben (if I may still be familiar) was our Managing Editor, a man of culture, intelligent, well educated, good natured, full of mirth.

Jenerali – much younger than Ben and I (who are agemates) – had just graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam, just as intelligent and with equal bonhomie and love for laughter. 

Both he and Ben were Nyerereists, supporters of Ujamaa – defined in Azimio (the 1967 Arusha Declaration) loosely as "socialism and self-reliance", implemented in urban areas as nationalisation of trade and industry and in rural areas as collectivisation of peasant farming.

I was also a Nyerereist. For Nyerereism and Nyerere the person (humble, brilliant, audacious in his simplicity) was what had attracted restless minds from all over the world to make Dar es Salaam Africa's intellectual Mecca for a whole decade.

Yet by 1972, many Tanzanians, including Jenerali, were parting the ways with Nyerereism and edging towards Marxism. Ben, however, was much more conservative, representing the right wing of the Ujamaa forces, even though, like Nyerere, he was equally simple, self-effacing, morally strong (apparently!)

Thus, as I prepared to leave Tanzania, at the beginning of 1973, it was to Jenerali that I bequeathed The Way I See It, a commentary I wrote every week, along with a satirical sketch called Ochieng on Sunday. 

The point is that these ideological differences were driving a wedge into the editorial body politic. And my increasingly left-wing writing began to elicit much hostility, with sporadic demands that, if I was so revolutionary, I should go and revolutionise my own country. Fair enough. So I scrammed.

But where could you tell Jenerali to go? He was as Tanzanian as Ben. Despite their growing ideological rift, both appeared staunchly patriotic.

Both went on to serve Tanzania on the diplomatic front with dedication, Ben as ambassador to many countries, before being appointed Foreign Minister; Jenerali as the party's envoy to a pan-African youth organisation based in Algiers, before being named Tanu's Director of Youth. 

Tanu was the acronym of the Tanganyika African National Union, which ruled the mainland until 1977, when it merged with Zanzibar's Afro-Shirazi Party into Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) to rule the whole United Republic.

That, with the advent of multi-partyism, Jenerali should venture into capitalist newspaper publishing and television station ownership and use those media vigorously to make what are purely liberalistic demands on a government now run by Ben Mkapa is hardly surprising. 

Marxism is not an ideology easy to sustain in the mind, leave alone in practice, unless you learn to subordinate completely its more exciting practical component ("scientific socialism") to its less exciting but much more important philosophical underpinning (the dialectics of history). So, like C. Wright Mills before them, as soon as what seemed (quite wrongly) to be its political prop – Stalinist Sovietism – crumbled, most of those who claimed to be Marxists simply despaired, lapsing totally into liberalism.

That's why certain Kenyans who used to swear by the word "Marx" – like Paul Adhu Awiti, Gibson Kamau Kuria, Peter Anyang'-Nyong'o, Apollo Njonjo, Willy Mutunga, Mukhisa Kituyi, Michael Chege, Micere Mugo and Shem Migot-Adhola – are now some of the most vehement devil's advocates, demanding everything that they used to condemn as "imperialism".

What is perhaps surprising is that Ben Mkapa, who, as editorial pontiff in the seventies, was the champion of these same liberal ideals, should now be the chief persecutor of those same ideals, now in the hands of Jenerali Ulimwengu and others.

Were he persecuting from the left, it would be much more poignant. But it remains ironical that a man of letters of his calibre should now so singularly block his ears totally against the news broadcasts of history, broadcasts which emerge most clearly through literature, a study in which he once excelled.

It is extremely irksome to me that such a man, when the vicissitudes of history have put him at the helm of power, should resort to the most uneducated, most uncouth, most uncultured methods of silencing his critics. When he declares that Jenerali Ulimwengu and a number of compatriots who have served their country with total commitment and exemplary creativity are not Tanzanians and could be deported just because they have subjected Ben's new barbarism to the pillory, he has sunk to the intellectual and moral abyss of many a Frederick Chiluba.

Does he know how dangerous the precedent he may be setting? What of it if Jenerali's parents came from Rwanda? Isn't Ben Mkapa himself a Ngoni, an offshoot of South Africa's Zulu people? How can a man of his intelligence, education and experience seek, in this way, to pull the rug from under his own feet? How can such an intellect be so determined to prove right all the Western stereoytpes about Africa's statesmen? 

* ochieng@nation.co.ke