Movement Youth in a Global Sixties Hub: The Everyday Lives of Transnational Activists in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam

Abstract

Writing in a mimeographed student journal in 1970, long before he would become a household name across Africa as president of Uganda, a young Yoweri Museveni reflected on his undergraduate years away from home at the University of Dar es Salaam in neighboring Tanzania. He explained how the choice to leave Uganda for university abroad but not in the West was a natural one at the time for any young East African with leftist political leanings. Tanzania’s capital city, after all, had developed an unparalleled ‘atmosphere of freedom fighters, socialists, nationalizations [and] anti-imperialism’, Museveni recalled, one which he was determined to join ‘at any cost’.1 By the time Museveni arrived in 1967, Dar es Salaam had already seen Che Guevara and Malcolm X come through town on tours of this ‘revolutionary’ capital. Over the course of the next several years, many more leading lights of a ‘global sixties’ left would follow: Stokely Carmichael, C.L.R. James, Angela Davis, Giovanni Arrighi, Eldridge Cleaver, Walter Rodney, Amiri Baraka, Robert F. Williams, Ruth First — to name but a selection. As one of Museveni’s peers at the university would remark, in Dar es Salaam ‘you could not help but be infected by the liberation bug’.2