JE YAWEZEKANA Oscar Kambona KAMA ANGEKUWA RAIS MAMBO YASINGEKUWA HIVI TANZANIA..?

Oscar Selathiel Kambona was the first, Education, Foreign Affairs Minister, MInister for Regional Administration of Tanganyikaand the first Chairman of the Liberation Committee of the OAU. Kambona was the second most influential and most popular leader in the country after President Julius Nyerere. He was born in August 1925 nearSongea, Southern Tanganyika, and died in London in July 1997.
Oscar Selathiel Kambona was born on the shores of Lake Nyasa in a small village called Kwambe near Mbamba Bay in the district of Mbinga, Songea Region in 1925. He was the son of the Reverend David Kambona and Mrs Miriam Kambona. Reverend David Kambona belonged to the first group of African priests to be ordained into the Anglican Church of Tanganyika.
When Oscar Kambona was a child, his father would tell him about his dream for independence of his country and Kambona grew up with a burning desire to be of service to his country. Kambona received his primary education at home under the mango tree, (which is still standing today) in his village by both his parents and uncle, all of whom were teachers.
He was then sent to St Barnabas Middle School in Liuli and then Alliance Secondary School in Dodoma, which was paid for by the European Anglican Bishop because his father couldn’t afford the school fees of 30 Pounds a year. Kambona tells of how he convinced the Anglican Bishop to pay for his school fees by reciting the ‘Lords Prayer’ in English.
He was then selected to attend Tabora Boys’ Senior Government School where he first met Nyerere, who was already teaching at a Catholic School. On completing his secondary education, Kambona returned to his former Alliance Secondary School to become a teacher and was finally appointed the Schoolmaster.
It was at a National Teachers’ Conference in 1954 when the two, Kambona and Nyerere met again. Kambona offered his services to the newly formed TANU movement. Nyerere replied that TANU could not employ him as it had no funds. Kambona answered that TANU had no funds because it didn’t have an Organizing Secretary and offered to give up his teaching post to work (without pay) to build up the party as its Organizing Secretary, living only off his saved up teaching salary for 6 months. During this time, Kambona traveled the country visiting chiefs and elders in a recruitment drive. At the end of 6 months, Kambona had successfully recruited 10,000 members. By the end of a year, TANU had over 100,000 fully paid up members. With the subscriptions Kambona opened the first bank account of TANU. He returned to Butiama to convince Nyerere to take up the leadership full time.

Contents
[hide]
1 Political career
2 Exile
3 Coup Leader
4 Return of the "prodigal son"
5 The beginning of the end
6 End of his life
7 References
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[edit] 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 munity in January 1964 when President Nyerere and Vice President Rashid 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). 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 enforced establishment of ujamaa villages, roughly equivalent to communes, 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, curiously when interviewed shortly after Kambona's death, Kawawa made the public statement that " He had no disagreement with Kambona and worked well with him as a colleague throughout." Interview by Radio Tanzania, 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, 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 opposed to the way socialism was being implemented along Chinese communist lines. In an interview with DRUM magazine published by 'Mkuki na Nyota' Kambona explains his misgivings, " When Nyerere visited China, he was impressed with the glorification of Mao Tse Tung. I think the seeds of a single, all powerful individual, an autocrat, were sown on this trip. And when he came back he wanted a one party state." However Kambona was defeated in Parliament and The Arusha Declaration was adopted in February 1967 and socialism became Tanzania's official policy.
[edit] Exile
A few months later, in July 1967, Oscar Kambona left Tanzania with his wife and children and went into "self-imposed" exile in London.
It was first reported that he sneaked out of the country and drove all the way to Nairobi, Kenya, a neighbouring country. But it is highly unlikely that the members of the Tanzania's intelligence service were not aware of his departure. The government simply let him go. They could have stopped him, and could even have arrested him, if they wanted to.
After he left and when his departure was reported in Tanzania's newspapers and on the radio, President Nyerere himself at a public rally in Dar es Salaam, the capital, talked about Kambona and said "Let him go." He also said Kambona left with a lot of money and wondered how he got all that money which did not match his salary.
There were rumours that one of the ways he enriched himself when he was in office was by taking some of the money which was intended to go to the liberation movements based in Tanzania.
He was during that period also chairman of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Liberation Commttee overseeing liberation movements based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in addition to his ministerial position as minister of external affairs.
The allegations that he misappropriated some of the funds intended for the liberation struggle in Southern Africa, and got more money from other sources illegally or by unscrupulous means, was repeated on 12 January 1968, when President Nyerere challenged Oscar Kambona to return to Tanzania and testify before a judicial commission that he had not deposited large sums of money in his account, and explain where he got it from since it far exceeded his salary.
Kambona responded to the allegations by requesting the Tanzanian government in a press conference in London 1968 to hold a public investigation into his personal wealth and publish the findings. Something that the government did not do. It is also highly unlikely that Kambona misappropriated wealth since he spent most of his life in exile living in subsidised council housing for poor income families. Tony Laurence's book "the Dar Mutiny of 1964", published by Book Guild Publishing confirms that "in 1967 fearing for his life [Kambona] went into exile in Britain where , lacking any financial support, he took a series of low paid jobs in London while continuing to act with dignity and humour as a friend of exiles more fortunate than he."
Nyerere's challenge was reported in Tanzania's newspapers and by Radio Tanzania Dar es Salaam (RTD) during that time. It has also been documented by Jacqueline Audrey Kalley in her voluminous work, Southern African Political History: A Chronology of Key Political Events from Independence to Mid-1997.
There was also disagreement on the way Kambona's exile was described.
Reports in Tanzania said he went into "self-imposed" exile but, to Kambona and his supporters as well as other observers, he was forced to leave Tanzania because he had fallen out with Nyerere and did not feel that he would be safe or lead a normal life in a hostile political climate.
Speculation that he may have been in imminent danger just before he left was somewhat confirmed when his house in Magomeni, Dar es Salaam, was destroyed by the security forces and the soldiers of the Tanzania People's Defence Forces (TPDF) although not demolished. The destruction is shown in a photograph on the web site of the Kambona Foundation.
The destruction of the house, after Kambona left, seemed to have been some kind of warning or simply a scare tactic and it probably achieved its purpose, especially with regard to Kambona's supporters in Tanzania. It probably meant, "this is what we have in store for you," or "this is what you are going to get," if you continue to support Kambona. And "this is what would have happened to him had he stayed."
That may be just one of the interpretations - why his house was destroyed. There may be other interpretations of the government's motives for sanctioning that.
But fear for his security and freedom was real, further confirmed when his two younger brothers, Mattiya Kambona and Otini Kambona, were arrested around the same time he fled to London. They were detained for many years until President Nyerere released them after many petitions from Amnesty International and a final intervention from Robert Muldoon, the Prime Minister of New Zealand.
From his sanctuary in London, Oscar Kambona became a bitter critic and opponent of President Nyerere and his policies.
He was even invited by the Nigerian military government of Yakubu Gowon in June 1968 to go and lecture in Nigeria after Tanzania recognised Biafra (the first country to do so in April that year), thus infuriating Nigerian leaders for supporting the secession of the Eastern Region of the Nigerian Federation.
During his lecture tour of Nigeria in June 1968, Kambona denounced Nyerere as a dictator and accused the Tanzanian government of supplying weapons to Biafra.
In a lecture in Lagos on 14 June 1968, he also said weapons and ammunition sent to Tanzania for the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) freedom fighters had been diverted by Nyerere and sent to Biafra; and went on to say that Tanzania's recognition of Biafra as a sovereign nation had damaged the country's reputation in Africa and elsewhere.
Tanzania recognised Biafra for moral reasons because of the refusal and unwillingness of the local and the federal authorities to stop the massacre of Igbos and other Easterners in Northern Nigeria and other parts of the country, but especially in the North.
Nigerian leaders were also quick to remind Nyerere that it was Nigerian troops who had saved him and provided security and defence for Tanganyika after the army mutiny in Tanganyika in 1964 when Nyerere appealed to fellow Africans for troops to temporarily provide defence while the Tanganyikan government was building a new army. Nigeria, under the leadership of President Nnamdi Azikiwe and Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, immediately responded to Nyerere's request.
Kambona was also quick to remind his listeners in Nigeria, and even in Britain where lived, that it was he who calmed down the soldiers when they mutinied while President Nyerere and Vice President Kawawa went into hiding, "in a grass hut," as he put it.
[edit] 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. They were later acquitted by the High Court of East Africa on the basis of flimsy evidence from the Tanzanian Government's main infiltrator into the ring, a man named a certain 'Lebalo'. However the Tanzanian Government later rounded up all the alleged conspirators and detained them in prison for many years. The most famous of the alleged conspirators was the former nationalist and women's leader Bibi Titi. The information is recorded in excerpts from the Tanzanian Daily Guardian Newspaper published in 2007.
Kambona was the first accused and was charged in absentia, though exonerated by the verdict of the High Court of East Africa.
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.
He continued to criticise Nyerere from his safe haven in London through the years.
[edit] Return of the "prodigal son"
It was not until 1992 after Tanzania adopted multiparty democracy that Kambona returned to lead one of the opposition parties after 25 years living in exile. He was the most prominent figure on the opposition side during that time after he returned to his home country.
And he was in a combative mood. Even before he left London, he challenged the Tanzanian government to arrest him on his arrival in Tanzania, vowing that he was returning to Tanzania regardless of consequences and to clear his name before the people of Tanzania . He was not arrested.
But that was not the end of his ordeal.
[edit] The beginning of the end
A campaign by the government was started to vilify him again. First was the claim that he was not a citizen of Tanzania and had never been one even though he had served as the country's minister of home affairs, minister of defence, and minister of foreign affairs, and even led the struggle for independence with Nyerere in the 1950s.
Yet nothing was said in all those years that he was not a citizen of Tanganyika. It was only decades later, in the 1990s, that the government said he was not a Tanzanian but a Malawian. Others said he was a Mozambican.
The government even withdrew his passport on the same grounds that he was not a Tanzanian citizen. He could not even travel outside the country after his passport was withdrawn.
The vilification campaign against him by the Tanzanian government made the government look bad and it finally relented and gave the passport back to him.
[edit] End of his life
But he was no longer the star he once was, when he was second only to Nyerere in influence and popularity in the sixties.
He died in London in July 1997, almost exactly 30 years after he first went into exile in Britain in July 1967 where he lived for 25 years before returning to his home country in 1992 to spend the last few years of his life.
Despite his political misfortunes, Oscar Kambona will always be remembered as one of the most prominent leaders of Tanzania who also played a leading role in the struggle for independence and who relentlessly campaigned for the adoption of multiparty democracy in Tanzania.
It is, of course, anybody's guess how he would have been, as a leader, had he become president of Tanzania. Even his most bitter opponents cannot prove he would have been a bad leader. He could have been one of the best presidents Tanzania ever had. We will never know. Or to put it another way, Oscar Kambona was one of the best presidents Tanzania never had.
And it is very much possible that under his leadership, Tanzania's economy would probably not have suffered as much as it did under Nyerere during his years of socialist rule. Socialism ruined Tanzania's economy and Kambona was opposed to Nyerere's brand of socialism right from the beginning.
Today, Tanzania is pursuing free-market policies after renouncing socialism, and has adopted multiparty democracy, the same policies and kind of political system Kambona had advocated all along.
He has probably been vindicated by history.
Both leaders Nyerere and Kambona will be judged by history.