Julius Nyerere

Julius Kambarage Nyerere was born on 13 April 1922 in Butiama, a village by Lake Victoria in what was then the British colony of Tanganyika. He was a son of a chief of the small Zanaki people, and his middle name, Kambarage, was drawn from a rain spirit of Zanaki tradition. He finished a four-year primary course in three years, went on to Tabora and to Makerere College in Uganda, and then to the University of Edinburgh — the first Tanganyikan ever to study at a British university. He came home not to rule but to teach biology and English, and the name stuck for life: everyone called him Mwalimu.

In 1954 he helped found TANU, and through patient, peaceful organising he led Tanganyika to independence in 1961, becoming first its prime minister and, after union with Zanzibar, the first president of Tanzania in 1964. His great idea was Ujamaa — Swahili for 'familyhood' — set out in the 1967 Arusha Declaration: an African socialism built on cooperation and self-reliance, in which a nation would care for its people the way a family cares for its own. He nationalised key industries, asked his ministers to live simply, and poured the country's energy into schools and clinics.

The honest record is mixed, and Nyerere himself came to admit it. His education and literacy campaign was a genuine triumph, admired across Africa — but the forced villagisation of the 1970s, which moved roughly eleven to thirteen million people into planned ujamaa villages, disrupted farming, productivity fell, and by the time he left office Tanzania was poor and dependent on foreign aid. What never wavered was his character: a devout, frugal man who shared a home in Tanzania with liberation movements fighting apartheid, who helped found the Organisation of African Unity, and who — to prove that an African language could carry the world's literature — sat down and translated Shakespeare into Kiswahili.

In 1985 he did the rarest thing of all: he stepped down willingly, the first African head of state to retire voluntarily, and went back to his childhood village of Butiama to garden and write. He died in London in 1999. The Catholic Church has since opened a cause for his sainthood, naming him a Servant of God — but for millions of children across East Africa he is, and always will be, simply the Teacher.