A Sometimes Home: South African Exiles in Tanzania, 1960-1990

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

First Advisor

Magaziner, Daniel

Abstract

This dissertation evaluates the history of the African National Congress and its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in Tanzanian exile over three decades of transnational anti-apartheid struggle. After becoming free in 1961, mainland Tanzania (then Tanganyika) and its first president, Julius Nyerere, took in exiled members of two South African liberation movements, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). Both movements had been banned by the South African apartheid government a year prior. My narrative reincorporates South Africa’s delayed decolonization into post-colonial African history to demonstrate how contingent forms of solidarity were negotiated between South Africans in exile and Tanzanian citizens and their state over a thirty-year period. Tanzania’s sacrifices in supporting southern African liberation had lasting effects on building trans-regional solidarity. Yet solidarity, whether symbolic or expressed through material and logistical aid, was a constant ebb and flow. I argue that solidarity between South Africans and Tanzanians was contingent on race, class, gender, African socialism, and African nationalism. Using oral history and archival research, I analyze the social connections and frictions that constituted everyday interaction across national lines, even as I seek to understand broader relationships between the ANC and the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and later, Chama Cha Mapinduzi. Ultimately, I demonstrate the lasting effect of Tanzania’s Pan-African diplomacy on the Southern African liberation struggle.The dissertation proceeds in five chapters. The first chapter traces the beginnings of liberation movement infrastructure in Dar es Salaam by examining the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA). Founded by anticolonial leaders Julius Nyerere and Tom Mboya, PAFMECA was intended to help East and Central African states strategize for independence. This chapter shows how Pan-African diplomacy through the support of South African liberation was an important pillar of foreign policy for Julius Nyerere. The second chapter shifts to 1960s Dar es Salaam. It narrates the beginning of a liberation movement infrastructure at a time of intense security concerns for the Tanzanian state. The third chapter, which takes place between 1964 and 1977, moves to the Kongwa camp in rural Tanzania to examine exile-host relationships – especially everyday links – to demonstrate how they represented fraught solidarities forged between Tanzanians and members of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe. Chapter four examines the early 1970s–prior to the Soweto student protests in 1976–to look at the quieter forms of solidarity work that developed in that period, particularly among South African and Tanzanian women, and exiled South African students. Chapter five, which stretches from 1976 to 1990, analyzes exile and host relationships in Dar es Salaam during the period of dramatic global economic downturns in the late 1970s into the 80s. The chapter views these shifts in light of the dramatic shift in the ANC exile with a young generation of refugees leaving after the 1976 Soweto protests.

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