Re: [PEN-L:12735] Julius Nyerere dies

["Patrick Bond" <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From:          Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> ...An uncharacteristically humble and modest national leader

This rings absolutely true. My only contact was at a conference
commemorating his 75th birthday in 1997. After he had the first
comment on a paper on post-apartheid S.African subimperialism
(in a huge auditorium whose electricity supply, including microphone,
had just cut out), about a dozen other people (including undergrads)
were allowed to ask questions before the chair recognised a patient
Mwalimu (whose hand had been up steadily) for his second comment.
Nowhere else in Africa would that happen. And he was, at the end,
apparently making serious gestures of reconcilation to the scattered
and battered Tanzanian left, which he had played the key role
in repressing during the 1970s.

There was talk of Mwalimu joining the Jubilee South conference in
November in Johannesburg, where the comrades were expecting to
revisit his 1983 call for a Third World debtors' cartel. His passing
is a great loss to that movement, and to committed African
nationalists.