Julius Nyerere: Ideals and Reality

The article is devoted to the memorable date the 25th anniversary of the death of Julius Kambarage Nyerere, a prominent political figure in Tanganyika, Tanzania and Africa as a whole, a participant in the struggle for the independence of African peoples, an intellectual, thinker and humanist, the “father of the nation”, the “architect” of the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, a theorist and practitioner of the policy of non-alignment, Pan-Africanism, African socialism, nationalism. The amount of literature dedicated to J.Nyerere is huge. We will highlight only one block of historiographical and analytical materials. A well-known Tanzanian legal scholar, Professor Issa G.Shivji, one of the leading biographers of J.Nyerere devoted a number of his publications to Mwalimu and touched upon various aspects of his theoretical and practical activities. The author of this article dwells on some of the researcher’s works. The topics covered here are the ways of socioeconomic development of Tanganyika-Tanzania, in particular the problem of village development and the peasant issue in Nyerere’s theory and political practice; nationalism, the national question, the problem of tribalism in Nyerere’s views; methods and ways of building African socialism; Union relations in Tanzania; Pan-Africanism; decisive moments in Nyerere’s life and political activities.

Nyerere, peasant question, socialism, nationalism, national question, Pan-Africanism