Lionel Cliffe arrived in Dar es Salaam in April 1962 to take up a job as a tutor at the one-year-old Kivukoni College. Kivukoni College was run by the Tanganyika Education Trust, of which Mwalimu Nyerere was the president and Joan Wicken the executive secretary. The College was designed for adults after Ruskin College, Joan Wicken's alma mater. Griffiths Cunningham was its principal.
Lionel got his first introduction to Nyerere very early when Wicken took him to Nyerere's modest house in Oyster Bay, where he was living after resigning from the premiership. Nyerere's resignation was shrouded in mystery, which it still is. Lionel expected to get some hints. Instead, he ended up listening to Nyerere talking about his translation of Julius Caesar in Kiswahili, which he had just finished (Cliffe 2013, 28).
Cliffe taught for several years at Kivukoni before he moved to the then University College of Dar es Salaam. One of the early papers of Cliffe, jointly written with Cunningham, which I read as a student was ‘Ideology, Organisation and the Settlement Experience in Tanzania’ (Cliffe and Cunningham, originally written in 1968, reprinted in Cliffe and Saul 1973, 131). It made a great impression on me. Grounded solidly in empirical research, it was a formidable critique of the World Bank guided village settlement programme based on the so-called transformation approach. Since then Cliffe wrote many papers, many of them on rural development, including co-editing with John Saul two volumes of Socialism in Tanzania (Cliffe and Saul 1972, 1973) and with Saul and others Rural Cooperation in Tanzania (Cliffe et al. 1975). Both of these works have become standard references for any student of that early, tumultuous period in the political history of the country.
My next acquaintance with Lionel was in my very first year at the University College, 1967–68 academic year. Lionel was coordinating the university-wide Common Course. He also gave guest lectures in ‘Social and Economic Problems of East Africa’, a first-year mandatory course in the Faculty of Law, coordinated by a brilliant young Marxist Sol Piccioto. The genesis of these courses is interesting.
1966 had been a traumatic year for the University College. In October, after a long tussle between students and the government on the introduction of compulsory national service, the students demonstrated condemning the government move. Some demonstrators were carrying provocative placards like ‘Colonialism was better’, which incensed Mwalimu. The police led the demonstrators to the compounds of the State House, where they met face to face with Nyerere and some of his senior cabinet ministers (Peter and Mvungi 1986). After listening to their prepared statement, Mwalimu, in his characteristic style, began in low tones rising to a crescendo thus:
Your are right when you talk about salaries. Our salaries are too high. You want me to cut them? (some applause) … Do you want me to start with my salary? Yes, I'll slash mine (cries of ‘No’.) I'll slash the damned salaries in this country. Mine I slash by twenty per cent as from this hour …
The damned salaries! These are the salaries which build this kind of attitude in the educated people, all of them. Me and you. We belong to a class of exploiters. I belong to your class. Where I think three hundred and eighty pounds a year [the minimum wage that would be paid in the National Service] is a prison camp, is forced labour. We belong to this damned exploiting class on top. Is this what the country fought for? Is this what we worked for? In order to maintain a class of exploiters on top? …
You are right, salaries are too high. Everybody in this country is demanding a pound of flesh. Everybody except the poor peasant. How can he demand it? He doesn't know the language. … What kind of country are we building? (Quoted in Coulson [1982] 2013, 221)
Over 300 students were expelled, causing intense soul-searching among the young expatriate and national faculty of the University. A few months later, in February 1967, TANU, the then ruling party, announced its intention to build Ujamaa through the historic document, the Arusha Declaration. Only a month later, from 11–13 March 1967, the university administration, faculty and representatives from the party and its mass organisations as well as senior government people met to discuss ‘The Role of the University College, Dar es Salaam in a socialist Tanzania’.
A group of nine lecturers, among whom were Walter Rodney and John Saul, Sol Piccioto and Giovanni Arrighi, Grant Kamenju and Catherine Hoskyns, presented detailed proposals on reconceptualisation of the curriculum and reorganisation of the university administration generally. Their starting point was that the University should play an important role in the development of socialism in Tanzania. The University had an obligation ‘to produce committed intellectuals; men and women who share a distinctive and unified world outlook, a particular way of perceiving, comprehending, and understanding man's social universe’ (University College, Dar es Salaam 1967, 117).
One of their main recommendations was to introduce an interdisciplinary university-wide course on social analysis. They went further providing a comprehensive outline of the course. The consensus at the Conference was that there ought to be a common course but there was no common perception and vision of what the course would be like and its contents. Eventually, in the academic year 1967–68, beginning in July, a non-examinable Common Course was introduced. It appears the Course was heavily directed from outside by the Party. Joe Kanywanyi's description of the Course some 15 years later is apt:
The mode of organisation of the ‘Common Course’ was itself problematic and, thus, made matters even worse. The Course had initially no coherent and well laid out themes and sub-themes, reliable resource persons and appropriate teaching aids or materials. On the basis of a hodge-podge of ad hoc political, economic, cultural and archeologico-historical topics coughed up from time to time, as it were, by a loose inter-faculty organising committee, political rally-like ‘classes’ (or, rather, meetings) were held for all the College students. Speakers were drawn mainly from outside the College and included Government ministers and other public figures of various callings but a common liberal-conservative outlook. It was, and rightly so, non-examinable and originally, non-compulsory. (Kanywanyi 1989, 1)
One can imagine Lionel's dilemma in running such a course under constraints. He was more at home teaching Piccioto's course. In the same academic year, the Faculty of Law introduced a compulsory first-year course called ‘Social and Economic Problems of East Africa’ under Sol Piccioto. It was very well organised and broadly followed the outline stipulated in the proposals. All the nine authors of that proposal participated in teaching the course. Lionel too gave some guest lectures.
Unlike the Social and Economic course, the Common Course was unpopular with students and the faculty alike. It did not survive long. Within two years, it evolved into a more comprehensive and rigorous Development Studies, thanks to Lionel's efforts, the example of the Social and Economic course and the struggle of militant students.
Lionel left the University sometime in 1972. He often visited the Hill – the University of Dar es Salaam Campus. We again met and worked together in 1994 when I was on sabbatical at the University of Warwick. Lionel drafted me on a United Nations Development Programme mission to Eritrea to make a report on land tenure. Lionel was very popular in Eritrea, having consistently supported the Eritrean struggle. It gave me a great opportunity to see an African country emerging from a revolution, which had acted as a beacon of hope to the African Left.
Unlike Lionel, who could make his point without being excited, I was somewhat sharp in my critique of the Eritrean establishment ideas on development and land tenure. I felt that Eritrea was treading the same path as other African countries – in essence a state-led development from above, inevitably leading to authoritarianism. I said so in a public lecture, which obviously did not go down well. While Lionel agreed with me in private, he was subtler in his public statements. What happened in Eritrea later must have broken Lionel's heart as it did of many of us, including Abdulrahman Babu, who was a great supporter of the Eritrean revolution. Some of Lionel's Eritrean friends and comrades were imprisoned and others exiled. Occasionally, Lionel would talk about them with sadness.
Lionel continued to keep contact with the University of Dar es Salaam and found his way to a number of Nyerere Intellectual Festivals that I organised for five years during my term as the Mwalimu Nyerere Chair of Pan-African Studies. He attended the last Festival in April 2013, which was the last of my tenure. Soon after, I visited England together with two other colleagues involved in the project of writing the biography of Mwalimu. Lionel was very helpful. He spent long hours with us in conversation. We had wonderful couple of days with him and Margaret. Lionel organised a meeting with colleagues at Leeds. He ‘discovered’ Ralph Ibbot for us, one of the advisors to the Ruvuma Development Association. Lionel made it possible for me to visit Ralph, with whom I spent two hours in conversation marvelling at the old man's memory and recollection.
Only later we found out that while we were visiting Lionel, the doctors had done a biopsy. Before we left England, Lionel informed us that the results were positive but his doctors had assured him that his cancer was treatable.
That was not to be.