Mwalimu’s Mission: Julius Nyerere as (Adult) Educator and Philosopher of Community Development

Abstract

Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Tanzania’s late president and philosopher‑statesman who passed away in 1999, was born on April 13, 1922, in Butiama, a village in Northern Tanzania. As a young boy growing up in the open plains of East Africa, Nyerere and his peers, in both occupational and socioenvironmental categories, absorbed unstructured clusters of informal education from family, relatives, and other educated members of their society, in addition to certain age-based rituals that were common to their cultural and political situation. After he attended the Tabora government school, he went on to Makerere University in Uganda, and eventually received a Master’s of Arts degree from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The simple points about Nyerere’s early upbringing are important in regard to one primary (perhaps unanswerable) question: What would have Nyerere’s life looked like had colonialism never came to Tanzania? Indeed, a very hypothetical question, but one that remains relevant to his long struggle for Tanzania’s freedom, educational attainment, and overall social development.