TANGANYIKA: Hymn to Bwana Julius

After repeated assurances that his mark on the ballot would neither give his enemies a hold over him by witchcraft nor make his wives sterile, the clan leader thrust his spear shaft into the ground, strode into the mud-and-wattle hut and voted. Among the fertile coffee plantations on the lower slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, lounge-suited leaders of the progressive Chagga tribe queued up at polling stations alongside white planters in khaki shorts and Asian shopkeepers in dhotis.

In the eastern plains, one polling place stayed open the statutory nine hours to allow the three registered voters in the area (100 sq. mi.) to cast their ballots. On the palm-fringed shores of the Indian Ocean to the south, British district officers took to dugout canoes to ferry the black metal ballot boxes up crocodile-infested rivers to obscure villages where natives would choose from such party symbols as a clock, a cockerel, a lion.

One for Three. Thus, twelve centuries after Arabs from Oman colonized their land, the peoples of the East African territory of Tanganyika (where Stanley found Dr. Livingstone) voted last week in their first election. Taken over by the Germans in 1884 in a fast deal with twelve tribal chiefs, Tanganyika passed under British mandate after World War I, and in 1946 became the U.N.’s largest trusteeship (362,688 sq. mi.). For a decade the British administrators prepared the way for last week’s “experiment.”

Because Tanganyika’s 95,000 Asians and Arabs and its 25,000 Europeans (chiefly British and Greek) comprise only 1.5% of the territory’s population of 8,800,000, the British wisely made no attempt to maintain absolute white supremacy as European settlers had tried to do in neighboring Kenya and the Central African Federation. Instead, in a bid for racial harmony, the British allotted each constituency three council seats, one for each of the three major racial groups —Asian, European and African. Every voter, regardless of his color, voted for his choice in all three seats.

To be eligible a voter had to be over 21, have eight years of schooling or an annual income of $420, or have served as a chief headman or clan leader. In the five constituencies that balloted last week, only 28,500 citizens who met the qualifications registered. The remaining five constituencies will vote in February.

Reformed Troublemaker. At week’s end, as the returns came down the mountains by mulepack, slight, mustached Julius Nyerere, 36-year-old head of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), slapped his knees with joy. In every reported result, his TANU African candidates and the Asians and Europeans backed by TANU had swept into the council over the white-led United Tanganyika Party, headed by Sisal Millionaire Stephen Emmanuel.

A former schoolteacher with an M.A. from Edinburgh University and a preference for Scotch and soda, Nyerere is the son of a tribal chief, once frankly described himself as a “troublemaker.” But, dreaming of the day when he might be Tanganyika’s first black Prime Minister and needing the cooperation of the Europeans, he has moderated his views recently. London says that independence is a long way off, and the British have assured their continued control of the 67-man council by retaining a majority of seats for their own appointees. But as his followers sang a little hymn to “Bwana Julius Nyerere, that you may continue to seek freedom on our behalf,” Nyerere called for responsible self-government in Tanganyika next year, predicted confidently: “Independence will follow as surely as the tickbirds follow the rhino.”