Prof Haroub Othman. Like a one man army, Prof Othman was suddenly on all mediums. On radio, television and newspapers, the Internet, academic circles, politics and in Pan African activism. He was passionate about his beliefs. Photo/LEONARD MAGOMBA
For all intents and purposes, and for a day like that, the night was still young.
It was just after 11pm and we had just attended the official opening of the Zanzibar International Film Festival at the Old Fort and we walked down to Forodhani to have dinner at the informal eateries by the street sides.
We walked back to the Old Fort for a music extravaganza. On entering we saw Prof Haroub Othman chatting with friends.
Fatma Alloo, our host, was excited. We had been looking forward to meeting Prof Othman from early that evening.
I went straight to him and hugged him and Ms Allo informed him that all the board members of the African Research and Resource Forum (ARRF) including Michael Chege, were here and would be delighted to meet him.
As was in his nature, Prof Othman was quietly composed and responded by requesting us to get together with him the following day to chat some more as if to cover lost ground.
He then beckoned to his wife Prof Saida who was standing at a distance with other friends to join us. We promised we would meet Prof Othman the next day at 1pm before departing for Nairobi. It was never to be.
That night of June 27, Prof Othman died suddenly in his sleep in a hotel room in Zanzibar.
Prof Othman, a veteran senior academic at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam, was among the most celebrated academics at the Hill.
Along with close colleagues Prof Issa Shivji of the Faculty of Law, he was at the heart of organisation — with others or alone — virtually everything that the academic staff did at the university, to impact the wider political environment.
There was hardly an event that he wasn’t a part of it.
His days of prolific writing articles for newspapers started when he was published in the first issue of The EastAfrican as a first columnist during the newspaper’s founding in 1994.
Interested as he was in the politics and governance of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, The EastAfrican Dar es Salaam Bureau thought he was best placed to write the weekly column. He did not disappoint.
Like a one man army, Prof Othman was suddenly on all mediums. On radio, television and newspapers, the Internet, academic circles, politics and in Pan African activism. He was passionate about his beliefs.
On the night before his death, I congratulated Prof Othman once more for his excellent tribute to Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu in I Saw the Future and It Works, which he published in Babu’s memory.
On Sunday June 28, at 9am, as I had just finished having breakfast at the Tembo Hotel the ARRF administrative secretary Doreen Ndenda informed me that Ms Alloo had called the hotel urgently looking for me.
When I called her back, she asked me to wait for her at the gate of the hotel.
And that was where I first received the news of the sudden passing of Prof Haroub.
For a moment I just stood there dazed. All of a sudden everything around me seemed empty.
I had an instant flash back to May 2002, when the news of my brother Aggrey’s passing in an accident in Nairobi also reached me in a similar manner. Through a phone call. Such episodes are best not experienced.
Ms Allo arrived looking completely dazed. She simply beckoned me to follow her as she tried to relate the story in staccato.
We were soon in Prof Othman’s hotel room.
His wife Saida was sitting next to his body on the bed they had shared just hours earlier.
Her pain was intense as she wept for her beloved husband. She reached out to us for help. “Peter, Peter! Haroub ametuwacha jameni! Ah, ah, Haroub, Haroub, uko wapi? (Peter, Haroub has left us. Haroub, where have you gone?)
In his book, Intellectuals at the Hill (1993), Prof Shivji describes the late Prof Haroub as “a long time academic activist and sometime chairman of the University of Dar es Salaam Academic Staff Association.”
There can be no better summary of the essence of the political and intellectual contribution of Prof Othman to us than in these words.
He used the pen and his mind to engage people to analyse, explain and understand problems which faced humankind so as to solve them. That was the meaning of his academic activism.
Like his close comrade Babu, Prof Othman believed in making definite and clear statements about the solutions to social, economic and political problems, once he satisfied himself with analysing the evidence and facts before him.
In this regard, his research skills as a historian and his intellectual depth in political economy came in handy.
The book I enjoyed reading most was the tribute to Babu that I have referred to earlier. And with this I would like to appreciate the life of Prof Othman.
I Saw the Future and It Works is the only book that gives us a concise publication of the political thinking of Babu and how his ideas helped shape the politics and future of Zanzibar and Tanzania.
Babu’s other book, African Socialism or Socialist Africa (1981) had a slightly different concern: it was intended to produce the first comprehensive Socialist Programme for Africa and it did.
The first key question that Prof Haroub asks in his introduction to I Saw the Future is still pertinent in contemporary Zanzibar.
The question is: Should a party (like the Umma Party that Babu led) proclaiming itself to be socialist and a vanguard of the working class, maintain its independent status, or should it allow itself to be submerged under a broad alliance, hoping its cadres would be able to influence the course of events? In the case of Zanzibar, the latter did not happen; from that time the initiative was lost to Babu and his comrades.
In other words, the making of a purely Zanzibari socialist revolution was lost first when the Umma Party joined the Revolutionary Council and the Afro Shirazi Party after the revolution of 1964, and second after the Union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar to form Tanzania in April the same year.
It is worth speculating whether Zanzibar would have been another Cuba in the Indian Ocean had Babu and his comrades in the Umma Party succeeded in carrying out the socialist revolution.
Having taken the Spice Trail (the tourist circuit to the spice farms on the island) on the Sunday morning of Prof Othman passing, I am left wondering whether this statement is still applicable to present day Zanzibar.
This rich island that is home to thousands of cherished flora and fauna; this wonderful soil from which sprouts trees of peaches, guavas, mangoes, oranges, bananas and all tropical fruits known to man with little of man’s efforts except to harvest and carouse; this home of bees and butterflies and a weather comfortable to both man and his earthly foes alike; why should this land remain so virgin and so unproductive in this age of technology and fail to put Zanzibar in the league to which it belongs globally — with Singapore and Cuba or both combined?
Prof Othman was passionate about Zanzibar.
He will be remembered for building bridges from the University of Dar es Salaam to the tormented legal terrain of the Zanzibar isles, where he formed the Zanzibar Election Monitoring Committee, the first election body similar in structure to that of the Tanzania Elections Monitoring Committee.
He also supervised the Zanzibar work of the Research and Education on Democracy in Tanzania based at the university, and founded the Isles’ equivalent of the Legal and Human Rights Centre.
His work for peace and democracy in Tanzania is unmatched.
Some of his notable recent works at the university was the “40 years of African Leadership,” in 1997 to mark 40 years of Ghana’s independence, where Tanzania’s founding father Mwalimu Julius Nyerere actively participated.
Just like Babu, Prof Othman was dedicated to his work and the ordinary people.
Ms Alloo had just warned me that morning that she was losing too many intellectual friends and comrades who “work themselves to death!”
Dylan Thomas had made this observation many decades before, and he philosophically thought that the drive to make ideas be heard and to bring change in society almost drive committed intellectuals to this rather “suicidal mission.”
Even when our “words spark no lightening” to awaken society or the powers that be, we soldier on: we do not go gentle into that good world.
The University of Dar es Salaam will be poorer without Prof Othman and with Prof Shivji losing his closest and most able of colleagues and veteran comrade in the long history of activism, life will not be the same again for him.
Prof Othman, soldier on. Do not go gentle into that good world. Rage, rage into the night.
Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o is Kenya’s Minister for Medical Services
