Mutinies and After
From KEITH KYLE
DAR-ES-SALAAM
frtie most striking feature of the Tanganyika mutiny was its lack of political content. In the early hours of Monday morning last week the mutineers from the 1st Battalion controlled all means of communication from Dar-es-Salaam— the radio station, the airport, the post office and the cable and wireless office. They dominated the town completely. By blocking the road to the air- port (which goes past the radio station) they had access to the Presidential State House, They frustrated Brigadier Sholto Douglas's emergency plan of flying DC4s up to Tabora to bring the 2nd Battalion to the government's aid by cutting aircrews off from their planes. Yet they had nothing to say.
In marked contrast to what happened in Zanzibar, there was no attempt to proclaim a rival government, nor any clear voice imposing a new programme on the existing government. Hingi Ilogi, a young education sergeant, was the apparent leader of the mutiny in Colito Barracks. Although he proclaimed himself a colonel, and his dispositions in the city showed him to have had enough tactical skill to have seized political power, this was evidently not his object. He con- fined himself to locking up officers, British and African, And senior NCOs (Mostly African), pushing British officers off by plane to Nairobi and then offering Brigadier Douglas's captured hat as a symbol of 'office to Lieutenant Elisha Kavana, the only university graduate among the African officers, and who was in any case about to be promoted to high rank. Kavana thought it prudent to accept (for which he is not now held up to any reproach). He was confirmed as army commander by the government during the phase of appeasement and is now, with the mutiny crushed, a major and second-in-command of the Tanganyika Rifles. Quite clearly, llogi was no Nasser, since he would hardly have created a Neguib who, after accepting 'election' as military commander by his troops, took no step whatsoever against the established regime. Envoys to Colito Barracks during its occupation by the mutineers heard much grumbling against President Nyerere's recent idealistic decree ending discrimination in favour of black Africans—As compared to other Tanganyika citizens—in recruitment to govern- ment service and promotion within it. But nothing has been heard of any formal demand that the government should rescind this order even when the mutineers were at their strongest; in any case, the British officers whom they wanted replaced are not citizens. There seemed to be only two demands: pay and promotion (the latter involv- ing the departure of the British). The sad fact is that senior British officers and the Ministry of Defence (headed by the Secretary- General of the TANU Party, Oscar Kambona) were already working out, on the initiative of the British officers, a plan for the complete African- isation of the officer corps by the end of 1964. Brigadier Sholto Douglas had come back from the Kenya independence celebrations impressed by the promotion of the first African lieutenant- colonel in Kenya and by the strong view of British officers in Kenya that the holding of com- mand positions by non-Africans (as opposed to being less conspicuous advisers in mufti) would not be tenable for long in the new East Africa.
The Tanganyika GoVernment was asked if it wanted to speed up the Africanisation of the force. It hesitated for a few days, said 'Yes' and
received from the Brigadier a complete list of suggested. African appointments to all positions including that held by Sholto Douglas himself. At the time of the mutiny the military council had not made any final decision on this plan, which was not, therefore, known to the troops. Even so, the Tanganyika Rifles were by no means in the position of the Force Publique on Independence Day in the Congo. There were already thirty-five African, as opposed to twenty-nine British officers. Before the mutiny started, Brigadier Douglas had already put in recommendations for three promotions to major, including two bat- talion commanders, several for captain and eleven promotions from the ranks.
To the question of whether there was any sort of common origin to the plots in Zanzibar and in Tanganyika, the answer looks at present to be that there was not. All observers tended to leap to conclusions when 'Field-Marshal' Okello turned up in Dar-es-Salaam two days before the rising. But this was a genuine coincidence. He had been invited by President Nyerere at the request of President Karume of Zanzibar so as to get his incessant voice off the island for a time while Karume consolidated his authority. It is not sufficient to say that either there must have been a 'presumably Communist' plot to trigger off the whole succession of risings by the Zanzi- bar coup, or that they must have followed each other by scarcely credible coincidence. There is a third hypothesis which looks the most sensible. This is that the Zanzibar coup was a plot, which though accepting readily proffered Chinese and Cuban help, was probably not initiated by Com- munists, and that the mutineers had not been privy to it. It is more likely that they had for some time been planning some kind of 'indus- trial' action, were then struck with the ease with which men in command of an arsenal were able to take over Zanzibar and decided that the absence of a large contingent of the Tanganyika police in Zanzibar gave them an unexampled opportunity. The mutinies in Kenya and Uganda could be explained as reactions to news of the Tanganyika Government's initial appeasement.
But that such rapid advantage was taken of the Zanzibar coup does suggest that the seeds of a mutiny had for some time been germinating within the Tanganyika force, and that it was only awaiting an occasion. The possibility remains that the mutineers did have political allies who were not part of the Zanzibar plot and' were not, therefore, alert to the timing, and that the failure of the political side to function last week was due- to the mutiny going off prematurely when the soldiers decided to take advantage of Zanzibar. If this were so, who could these political allies be? Hardly Communists, since they knew about the Zanzibar plot. The name that sprang to many people's suspicious minds, that of Oscar Kambona, the Minister of Defence, can surely be ruled out by the outstanding energy, courage and loyalty to the President he showed in the first critical days of the mutiny when almost all other Ministers disappeared from public view.
This leaves one-class of people who have been
in chronic conflict with the regime since before independence—an important section of trade unionists. The■Tanganyikan leaders have for a long time seemed exceptionally nervous about threats from this quarter. All along they have behaved as if Christopher Tumbo, the former union leader who was once sent into glorified exile as High Commissioner in London and who has recently been trying to organise a rival political party from Mombasa, were a serious and sinister threat. Labour leaders have been
deported to remote areas and an attempt was made by the Ministry of Labour to take over the trade union movement as a branch of gov- ernment. And surely no one has forgotten that in the Congo, Brazzaville and Dahomey it was the combination of army and trade unions that overthrew the government. Again, if Tumbo or any of his former union colleagues had been in- volved in intrigues with soldiers before the mutiny, they were obviously not prepared for the timing, since none of them turned up when the radio, post office and State House were in the mutineers' hands. The possibility remained, how- ever, that as long as 'Colonel' llogi was the effec- tive power in the Colito Barracks, discontented union elements might get in touch with him and suggest political uses of their new-found power. It was not at all surprising that the suppression of the mutiny by the British should be followed by raids on trade unionists' houses.
The President and the Vice-President must have believed at first that the mutiny was a political coup, otherwise they would scarcely have disappeared. One would dearly like to know who, in that initial moment of shock, they thought were involved. Like many highly in- telligent and conscientious men, Dr. Nyerere does not find tough decisions easy—though he sticks to them and their logical consequences once he has made them. The prolongation of the crisis was due to his extreme and very understandable reluctance to call in British troops. Obote, fol- lowed shortly afterwards by Kenyatta, did East Africa a very great service by making the first decision to appeal to Britain. He did so without hesitation once trouble broke out in the Jinja Barracks. This undoubtedly helped Nyerere to reach the end of his personal crisis and to accept Kambona's advice to approach the acting British High Commissioner last Friday afternoon.
What happens next? The Tanganyika crisis is by no means resolved, since an early British de- parture would leave the country without an army. Nyerere's present idea is to rebuild the army from the bottom out of the TANU youth wing. But quite apart from the doubts which this proposition must arouse on •its own merits, the training of such a force from the outset would be a formidable and lengthy task. Are the British to be asked in the meantime to stay?
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