A love letter to Tanganyika: What a glorious nation!

It is a strange sensation to celebrate 50 years of your country’s Independence when you are only two decades younger than it is.

In many ways it is the perfect arrangement: Just far enough away from colonial experience to be fascinated by it, and young enough to hope to see the centennial.
In the past month or so public conversations have focused on 50 years of independence. What does this mean, we have asked ourselves, are we happy?

Have we done well, what do we need to fix, where are we going?

What hasn’t been talked about quite so is where we are coming from, and why we care. What is so important about celebrating 50 years of self-rule?

There are many sophisticated answers to these questions, but having spent as much time as I could this year talking to my elders from Generation Independence, I have come to embrace the notion that nationalism is a very personal experience.

A sense of nationalism is often inseparable from a person’s history.

With a surname that regularly encourages complete strangers and immigration officers to ask me if I come from Nigeria or Japan or if perhaps I am Jewish, this has been an issue that I have thought about.

The answer to all of the above is No.

Anyways, in order to answer the question of why it is important to celebrate 50 years of Independence, sometimes it is necessary to start by answering the “who are you” question.

I am a child of East African soils, a fourth generation Tanganyikan as far as I know.

I say East African because in the not-so-distant past one of my forefathers moved south to what would end up becoming Kagera after leaving his job at the Kabaka’s court.

There is yet another forefather who was a loyal supporter of his German colonial masters, something which makes me sympathise somewhat with the descendants of people who picked the wrong side of a conflict in history.

Civil service has been part of the family trade for a long time, leavened with a streak of principled disobedience that others might call something less noble.

My parents have served the government of Tanzania their whole lives, as did most everyone who had ever held a job in their generation. While I wasn’t lucky enough to spend my childhood in Tanzania, the country was never far away.

If it wasn’t my mother teaching us Kiswahili by the age-old “immersion” method of speaking it at us until we finally caught on, it was parties with other Tanzanian families living abroad and of course the obligatory return to the motherland for Christmas.

Those holidays are when I learned what it can mean to love your country. Far from shielding their decidedly bourgeois offspring from the harsh realities of Tanzanian poverty in the 1980s, my proudly Tanzanian parents made us stuff all of our older clothes in our suitcases wherever there was space left over from the oversized cans of powdered milk, toothpaste and other basic goods that we would squirrel into the country under the cover of diplomatic passports.

This great bounty was then shared — along with every other possession we had — in true Ujamaa style with every relative or non-relative who was in need, sometimes against our wishes.

Christmases meant landing at Dar es Salaam fully loaded and leaving from Bukoba with jigger-scarred feet and perhaps one item of clean clothing left. It was a form of indoctrination that worked. I fell desperately in love with Dar es Salaam first, and ultimately with the whole country.

I grew up determined to follow in the footsteps of Mwalimu and my mother and become an educator/development worker/politician/civil servant.

It took a long time to learn my country’s soul. Tanzania doesn’t give up her secrets easily, and rarely within her borders. After my first frustrating stint as a development worker, I had to go to England, of all places, to try to get to the bottom of things.

What was supposed to have been a globally minded degree in development studies turned into a feverish obsession with everything Tanzania. I managed to work it into every assignment, argued stridently with professors over what they thought they knew about my country and ultimately spent several blissful weeks chained to a thesis designed entirely around Tanzania.

It wasn’t enough. I had come to the realisation that there are two Tanzanias: One which exists in print, in PR campaigns and formal politics and statistics, and one that lives in the hearts and minds of Tanzaphiles.

The second Tanzania is closer to reality and far more interesting than the first.
Love of one’s country has got to be one of the strangest forms of passion that exist considering that countries are, at core, imaginary entities.

However, this love is also one of the keenest sensations there are, and utterly rewarding on an intellectual, physical and perhaps even spiritual level. Like most loves, though, it cannot withstand the harsh glare of rationality and performance-driven concerns. If you need your country to be the best at something in order to love it, you’re not much of a nationalist at all.

In the love of Tanzania, I have found intellectual companionship and challenge in conversation with fellow Tanzaphiles. I have found history that not only anchors my present, but salves a pride that has been bruised by the world’s brutish ignorance of Africa. I have found individual liberty and respect, even as a feminist among men.

I have found challenges worth overcoming, and reward for hard work and passion. I have found complexity enough for three lifetimes, and opportunity enough to satisfy the fiercest ambition.

More importantly, I have found that this is a polity that I can believe in, along with millions of others.

This sense of fellowship is easily traced from a First President whose true brilliance is yet to be fully understood, right through to the present administration. Tanzania has always been far from perfect as a democracy and it will continue to be so long as we ourselves are humanly imperfect. But what a glorious, glorious national project it is!

Celebrating Tanzania’s 50 years of independence, therefore, means several things to this citizen.

It means libating my ancestors in gratitude for this life, and acknowledging the work of those who built my country.

It means working hard to make sure that our elders have worthy inheritors to carry the Uhuru Torch. It means working hard to ensure that Tanzanian children present and future stand a chance to receive everything that is good in the world.

Simply, it means building the Tanzanian Dream, one day, one sweet jubilee at a time.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com.