East Africa: On the Mend

Under the flame trees that line Dar es Salaam’s breezy waterfront esplanade, the 45th Royal Marine Commando band tootled a medley of marches. Carefree Tanganyikans of all races sauntered under sunny skies, staring at the great British warships at anchor outside Dar’s tidy harbor or simply listening to the music. But the holiday mood was superficial. All through East Africa, worried government leaders were busy patching the flimsy fabric of their infant nations, torn by a week of armed mutiny and racial violence.

Tagging the Sheep. First job that faced the leaders was pulling the firing pins of the rebellious Rifles who had risen against them. Tanganyika’s President Julius Nyerere took the most direct approach: he announced that both battalions of his Tanganyika Rifles would be disbanded and the aberrant askaris replaced by members of his party’s militant Youth Wing. Uganda’s Prime Minister Apollo Milton Obote arrested 20 ringleaders, then loaded 500 more Uganda Rifles aboard buses, had them dropped off in the back country to make their way—hopefully in disgrace—back to their home villages.

Kenya’s Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta took a harsher line. In the shade of a wild fig tree near Nakuru, where the 11th Battalion of his Kenya Rifles had mutinied, a military tribunal sorted out sheep from goats. Each of 500 suspects was trotted out at British bayonet point, briefly but intensely quizzed, then adjudged either “black” (an active, armed mutineer), “grey” (doubtful) or “white.” (Worried about the color code’s racial implications, the tribunal first tried a red-green-yellow system but found it too confusing.) All told, the tribunal tagged 100 black sheep. Kenyatta promised his worried countrymen that they would be brought speedily to courts-martial, where the maximum sentence could be death.

Easing the Sting. Even as British helicopters fluttered over the bush back of Dar es Salaam, rounding up the last of Tanganyika’s mutineers, Julius Nyerere was taking steps to ease the sting of shame his cry for assistance had caused. He called for a meeting of 34 African foreign and defense ministers in Dar es Salaam this week to consider “the implications for African unity and our nonalignment policies of the happenings in East Africa.” A longtime booster of East African federation, Nyerere hopes to lay the groundwork for a mutual defense agreement that would eliminate the need for non-African help in putting down future insurrections.

But whether or not he succeeds with his plan, Nyerere took his own precautions last week against repetition of the riots that nearly cost him his government. He arrested many top leftist trade union leaders, whom he charged with planning a general strike lu support of the mutiny. He forbade distribution of the Aga Khan’s Nairobi-based newspaper, the Nation, which had reported accurately but too zealously the near-toppling of the government. To lessen potential dissent, he replaced British army commanders with Africans. At the same time, he appointed a commission to consider constitutional changes that would make Tanganyika “a democratic one-party state” in law as well as fact.

Though none of the three shaken governments was willing to accuse Communism—either the international variety or the home-grown sort sprouting on nearby Zanzibar—of direct responsibility for the mutinies, they all decided to spare themselves an unnecessary contretemps. Nyerere, Obote and Kenyatta canceled their invitations to Red China’s Premier Chou Enlai, who had been planning to wind up his seven-week African tour with visits to their countries.

With 5,200 British troops guarding airports, army posts and government buildings from Entebbe to Dar es Salaam, Chou wisely rerouted himself to Ethiopia and Somalia.