Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era: Biography of Julius Kambarage Nyerere, 1922-1999, President of Tanzania

SYNOPSIS

This work looks at the legacy of the late President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, one of the world's most influential leaders, and Africa's most revered stateman besides Nelson Mandela. One of the first books written after his death, it is also a critical study of some of Nyerere's major policy initiatives in a Pan-African context, including events in which he played the most prominent role influencing the course of African history. As Professor Ali Mazrui described Nyerere: "In global terms, he was one of the giants of the 20th century....He did bestride this narrow world like an African colossus.

FROM THE CRITICS

Fumbuka Ng'wanakilala - Daily News Tanzania.

One comes to this new book by Godfrey Mwakikagile, a Tanzanian author who once worked with the Daily News in the 70s, hoping for insights into the host of complexities that Nyerere embodies. One finishes the book with a considerably expanded knowledge of the documented life - details of family history, recollections of friends and associates widely interviewed, ample citations from Nyerere's published letters and occassional writings and numerous quotations from others' letters and memoirs that characterize the leader.

Mwakikagile gives his readers an extensively researched life of the Father of the Nation with a breadth of detail about his history and early years. For a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the interior narrative of Mwalimu Nyerere, one needs not look elsewhere.

Kofi Asokah-Sarpong - West Africa Magazine

In his much praised work Africa and the West, Tanzanian journalist-turned-academic Godfrey Mwakikagile, who has overtime demonstrated his thorough grasp of the forces emanating inside and outside Africa towards the continent's progress, said to understand Africa, there is the need to psychoanalyse the African personality in relation to the world. For this reason, Africa and the West (reviewed in West Africa, 21st - 27th January 2002) evokes an enlightened and erudite page-turner, a book that stands out in this year's African publications. And it is unsurprising that Mwakikagile's latest book, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, invokes its predecessor, demonstrating how Julius Nyerere struggled painstakingly to show the true African personality in his drive to develop Tanzania and Africa....

Writing about a leader of Julius Nyerere's (1922 - 1999) stature is no small matter, and looking through him to read his mind about what motivated him to devote his entire life to the people of Tanzania and Africa, sometimes at a great discomfort, is a giant enterprise....In this context, Mwakikagile, who worked with the Tanzanian mass circulation Daily News, examines Nyerere's policy initiatives, and achievements, in wrestling with forces that he was confronted with throughout his life. That Tanzania had Nyerere as captain of its affairs...saved it from going through the bloody events that visited other African states with less astute and balanced leaders....Other African leaders did not care about what was happening to other African states or peoples and just paid lip service....

What Mwakikagile has done is to write a book that is food for Africa's progress, for, progress is informed by the quality of a state's leader(s). More so in a continent crying for role models and publications of Africa's men of distinction to inspire development.

Pan-African Books