Category: Academic Analysis

Source: The Conversation – Africa (2) – By Michelle Moyd, Associate Professor, Department of History, Michigan State University

Tanzania has long enjoyed a reputation as a peaceful country. In contrast to most of its neighbours, this east African nation of 67 million people has largely avoided large-scale violence within its borders.

That didn’t seem likely in the early years after independence from Britain in December 1961. A little over two years into independence – in January 1964 – the founding president, Julius Nyerere, faced two political crises. The first started on 12 January 1964 in the form of the Zanzibar Revolution. Weeks of violence and destruction by Afro-Shirazi Party members followed. As many as 16,000 Zanzibaris were killed or forced into exile.

Then the country’s military, the Tanganyika Rifles, mutinied. Its soldiers were incensed over inadequate pay, loss of privileges, and poor prospects for upward mobility. A rattled Nyerere needed British military support to quell the mutiny. He ordered the arrests of its leaders, and effectively dismantled the entire force.

Nyerere then faced the dilemma of leading a new nation-state with no army and few resources to build one. His socialist agenda (Ujamaa, in Kiswahili) had prioritised other aspects of nation-building, especially education and public health. Nonetheless, with assistance from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the willingness of some of its member states to provide troops, the Tanzania People’s Defence Force was established in September 1964.

In his new book, Ujamaa’s Army: The Creation and Evolution of the Tanzania People’s Defence Force, 1964-1979, Charles G. Thomas, a scholar of post-colonial African military history, skilfully narrates this complex and absorbing history. The book covers the formation and transformations of the defence force through the new nation’s first 15 years as it shed its connections to the colonial past and charted a new path.

Unlike other writing on African armies – particularly the body of work on colonial armies – this one does not centre rank-and-file troops. Instead, Thomas’s analysis is based on rich interviews with high-ranking officers who led and moulded the force in its first two decades. This has enabled him to offer a top-down view of the construction of the army.

A rocky start

Nyerere undertook the work of unifying Tanganyika and Zanzibar in the first few months of 1964 with an eye to the region’s security. The Zanzibar revolution and the Afro-Shirazi Party’s Marxism had called attention to the island as a potential Marxist outpost. Violence against the island’s ruling party and those perceived as wealthy elites seemed to bolster this perception. In the context of the cold war, this fuelled western fears of Zanzibar becoming the “Cuba of east Africa”. An influx of Soviet and Chinese military advisers to Zanzibar made western powers nervous.

Nyerere and foreign minister Oscar Kambona worked with Afro-Shirazi Party leader Abeid Karume to unify Tanganyika and Zanzibar to reassure westerners.

The rollout of the defence force in September 1964 thus included members of the Zanzibari People’s Liberation Army. This signalled that the initial 1,000-man army would serve the larger interests of socialist Tanzania.

A regional role

Throughout the 1960s, Tanzania became, alongside Zambia, Botswana, Lesotho, Angola and Mozambique, a supporter of southern African liberation struggles. The OAU formally recognised this group of nations as the “frontline states” in 1975.

Nyerere convinced the OAU Liberation Committee to set up its headquarters in Dar es Salaam in 1963 because Tanganyika was already hosting many southern African exiles. Also, conflicts in neighbouring states, such as Mozambique, were spilling over into Tanganyika. It became the nerve centre for coordinating African liberation efforts.

Liberation organisations from across southern Africa also established offices in Dar es Salaam. These included the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress from South Africa; the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA); Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) and Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu); South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) from Namibia; and Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo).

The Tanzanian defence force took on a key role in frontline liberation struggles. In 1964 it established the Special Duties Unit, which provided a logistics pipeline to serve liberation armies.

The defence force also established training camps for liberation armies within Tanzania. And it took on a protective and support function in southern Tanzania, where Frelimo’s operations against the Portuguese embroiled communities.

Tanzania’s involvement in struggles against the white settler states of southern Africa intensified in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After Portugal retreated from its colonies, Nyerere sent the defence force to help stabilise the new Frelimo government in Mozambique against the South African- and Rhodesian-backed guerrilla force Renamo.

At the same time, the book explains, Tanzania was contending with the disruptive politics and threatening military actions of its northern neighbour, Uganda.

Uganda gained independence from Britain in 1962. In 1971 Idi Amin seized power in a military coup that ousted Uganda’s first president, Milton Obote.

Amin and Nyerere antagonised each other personally, politically and militarily for the next eight years.

In 1972, Amin bombed Tanzanian border cities in retaliation for Nyerere’s support of the invasion of Uganda by Obote supporters in 1972. In 1978, Uganda annexed the Kagera Salient across its south-western border with Tanzania. In 1979, Tanzania invaded Uganda and ousted Amin from power.

The Tanzanian defence force remained in Uganda for nearly two years, providing security as the new government attempted to re-establish services and governance for post-Amin Uganda.

Catalyst for new inquiries

Thomas’s sustained research is based in large measure on hard-won connections with defence force officers. He also used alternative sources rather than relying heavily on Tanzanian, British and US archives. Canadian military archives, for example, showed how Tanzania’s forces benefited from Canadian training and resources.

OAU archival materials helped with understanding the Tanzania People’s Defence Force as part of African solidarity efforts against apartheid and colonialism.

The book also paints a clear picture of Nyerere’s role in Africa’s postcolonial politics. It shows him as a shrewd negotiator and a “pragmatic pluralist” in a fraught cold war world, where there were many competitors for military aid, but few sources to provide it to a country seeking a non-aligned position. His decision to form the Tanzania People’s Defence Force, and his encouragement of its role in supporting liberation struggles, helped Tanzania stand apart from its neighbours.

Michelle Moyd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Tanzania’s independence leader Julius Nyerere built a new army fit for African liberation: how he did it – https://theconversation.com/tanzanias-independence-leader-julius-nyerere-built-a-new-army-fit-for-african-liberation-how-he-did-it-246688

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Assistant Professor, Harvard University

Zanzibar has long been an island of arrivals for traders, sailors, slaves and, more recently, waves of tourists. I arrived as a wedding guest and a reader of the Zanzibar born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, in search of the literary and emotional landscapes that shape his fiction. For a week, I was part of the tourist economy of this east African island, passively complicit in its curated pleasures.

For all its beautiful images on social media, Zanzibar is a site of difficult memory. It was once a central node in the Indian Ocean slave trade, so its past is carved into the coral-stone buildings that reflect a complex fusion of Swahili, Indian, Arab and European influences in architecture and town planning.

A visit to the Old Slave Market was sobering. You cannot look away once you’ve seen it. And yet, Zanzibar is now overlaid with carefully packaged experiences: boutique hotels with infinity pools, beach picnics with imported champagne, stalls of “African” art mass-produced for western eyes. The art has become so generic that it hurts. All the curio markets on the island look the same.

Even the language has been commodified. Everyone is selling something. Everyone is searching. “Jambo,” (Hello) say mostly young men offering one service or another. “Hakuna matata.” (No worries.) “Pole pole.” (No rush.) These cheerful Kiswahili phrases made famous by the likes of the Lion King movie are repeated like slogans and feel soulless.

Most of the cars on the roads operate as taxis with stickers that say: Private Hire. The tuk tuks, three-wheeled tricycles, weave in and out of traffic because movement is an act of constant negotiation, part of a tourist infrastructure that operates as a regulated service.

Amid the hum of engines and the ceaseless choreography of traffic, I kept searching not just for respite from the heat or wifi or good coffee, but for something literary. I was looking for the celebrated writer Abdulrazak Gurnah. Not the man (he hasn’t lived in Zanzibar for decades), but the essence of his writing, informed by this place: the ache of exile, the weight of history, the restless question of belonging he grapples with.

Gurnah is not just a writer I’ve read; he examined my doctoral dissertation at the University of Kent, where he taught for many years until his retirement. He is an important part of my intellectual development.

As a scholar of African literature, I engage deeply with the traditions, debates and histories that Gurnah’s novels illuminate, so my attempt to map his legacy in Zanzibar carried both personal and professional significance.

Absence of literary memory

Gurnah was born here, on this island of contradictions. He left following the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, a violent outbreak of anti-Arab violence in postcolonial Africa. He was a teenager when he moved to England as a refugee, and has lived there ever since.

I expected, perhaps foolishly, to see a plaque with his name. A mural. Something. But there was nothing, even in Stone Town, where the past feels pressed into every narrow alley. This historical capital is an indecipherable tangle of markets, bathhouses, former colonial offices and palaces. I asked about bookshops at every turn. Locals looked puzzled, amused. “Why?” one asked. “You want to read on holiday?” That is because I can’t imagine a beach without a book.

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Read more:
Abdulrazak Gurnah: what you need to know about the Nobel prize-winning author

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Eventually, I found Gurnah’s famous novels in a souvenir shop that mostly sold skin-care products. They sat beside cookbooks and Swahili language guides. The only other meaningful literary encounter came via the mainland: a newly published Tanzanian literary journal, Semi za Picha, sent by ferry.

That little package was the most precious thing I took away from Zanzibar. It’s described as “a film journal” and edited by Jesse Gerard Mpango and Dismas Sekibaha, who are members of an audio-visual collective, Ajabu Ajabu, based in Dar es Salaam.

It’s not that Zanzibar lacks intellectual life. There is a State University. A global centre for Swahili Studies. Museums and Unesco heritage sites.

But there are no visible monuments to literature. There is no street named after Abdulrazak Gurnah. And yet, his imagination haunts the island. Reading his fiction made me more aware of the surfaces I was treading on, all the stories hiding under sand and souvenirs here, or submerged in the waters of the Indian Ocean.

Gurnah’s novels are known for their moral precision and speak to the legacies of colonialism and displacement along the Swahili coast. His characters often inhabit spaces between languages, continents and allegiances. In many ways, the disjuncture Gurnah explores, especially the fraught layering of history, is what unfolded before us.

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Read more:
Why the work of Abdulrazak Gurnah, the champion of heartbreak, stands out for me

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We criss-crossed Zanzibar by car, drove through villages with crumbling schools and no paved roads in search of the perfect beach. Then the ocean would appear, in its glimmering glory, and there were always many people taking pictures, as if the world was just a beautiful pose. But there’s something repugnant about turning people’s homes into backgrounds for entertainment. In our swimsuits, we were trespassing through communities, not just beautiful landscapes.

Zanzibar is not local anymore. It is a mesh of immigrants and itinerants: its service industry jobs are all occupied by people from many places. Local Tanzanian hotel staff, Kenyan chefs, French and South African restaurateurs, Belgian and German landlords. Whether you’re walking, or sitting at the beach, you can hear a babel of languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Italian, Shona, Swahili, Zulu.

Maybe my search for Gurnah and for literature was a search for an ethical place to stand. In Zanzibar, billboards of Tanzanian president Samia Suluhu Hassan are prominently displayed, projecting an image of calm authority. Once welcomed as a reformer, Hassan now faces growing criticism over alleged human rights abuses. But beneath the façade lies a more contested reality.

Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous archipelago with its own president and parliament, yet remains politically tethered to the mainland of Tanzania. This union has long been marked by tension over power, identity and representation as many Zanzibaris continue to assert a distinct cultural and political identity.

At the wedding, we didn’t speak of any of this. There was music, speech-making and laughter. This island, beautiful and bruised, is the backdrop of the absurdity of overtourism. And I still can’t get over the fact that in Zanzibar I could find no bookshops.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Abdulrazak Gurnah: searching for signs of Zanzibar’s most famous writer, all I found was trinkets and tourists – https://theconversation.com/abdulrazak-gurnah-searching-for-signs-of-zanzibars-most-famous-writer-all-i-found-was-trinkets-and-tourists-262886

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Garhe Osiebe, Research Fellow, Rhodes University

In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial and creative capital, food is doing something unusual. It’s keeping alive the spirit of a musician.

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, one of Africa’s most influential artists, was the architect of Afrobeat (not to be confused with today’s Afrobeats, which was born from it).

Fela pioneered his politically charged, musically expansive sound in the early 1970s by blending jazz, highlife, funk and Yoruba rhythms. He paired these with lyrics that took aim at corruption, oppression and postcolonial disillusionment. His songs were as much rallying cries as they were works of art.

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Read more:
Fela Kuti is more famous today than ever – what’s behind his global power

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Today, dishes named after Fela’s protest anthems – and restaurant soundscapes steeped in Afrobeats – are making dining in Lagos a journey through African music history.

As a musicologist involved in African Studies, I research the legacy of Fela Kuti and how it manifests in new forms today, in music, political life and even food. I first raised Fela’s legacy in food in a 2022 article for the book that accompanied a major exhibition in France called Fela Anikulapo-Kuti: Rébellion Afrobeat.

For me the new Lagos trend raises a question: do these culinary tributes preserve the radical edge of Fela’s art – or do they dilute it by commercialising it?

From protest songs to plated specials

In May 2025, The Afrobeat opened at EbonyLife Place, a high-profile entertainment and hospitality complex in Lagos. It markets itself as

The world’s first restaurant dedicated to celebrating Africa’s vibrant music genre.

The Afrobeat offers not just meals but a fully curated cultural experience. Yet it was not the first to blend food and Fela.

That distinction belongs to Kuti’s Bistro, launched in 2019 by the family of Seun Kuti, Fela’s youngest son. It’s currently closed for diners but still delivers meals.

Positioned as a pan-African eatery, the bistro’s dining area was steeped in Afrobeat imagery and sound, with walls adorned in Fela-inspired art. Its dishes draw on regional African culinary traditions, from Nigerian staples to cross-continental flavours.

Like so many restaurants in Lagos today, its playlist was dominated by Afrobeats, the electronically driven pop music now dominant across west Africa and its diasporas. Afrobeats owes much to Fela’s pioneering spirit.

The menu is where the homage becomes striking. Meals at Kuti’s are named after some of Fela’s most famous songs: breakfast plates called Yanga, starters like Shakara, hearty mains such as Feast for Nation, Roforofo Fight, and I No Be Gentleman. Even desserts bear provocative titles like Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am and Expensive Shit.

These are not just playful references. They’re a way of transforming Fela’s work into living memory.

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Read more:
The daughters and sons of Fela in African Pop

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The pairing of food and music creates a layered cultural experience. The textures and spices of the food evoke place and tradition; the music anchors the experience in a living, evolving sound. Diners are invited to consume Fela’s legacy with all their senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and even memory.

In this way, these restaurants function as more than dining spaces. They are cultural archives. They stage a performance of history and identity every time a plate leaves the kitchen.

Preserving or packaging the radical?

Still, the shift from protest anthem to menu item raises questions.

Can a song like Expensive Shit, originally a razor-sharp satire on state harassment, retain its political bite when it is served as a dessert on a polished ceramic plate? Does turning Roforofo Fight into a main course preserve its cultural meaning? Or does it risk reducing it to a quirky marketing hook? This tension is not unique to Fela’s legacy.

Around the world, radical art often undergoes a process of “heritagisation” and commodification. It becomes a celebrated cultural product, sometimes losing the confrontational edge that defined it.

Yet this transformation does not necessarily strip away its significance. It can create new pathways for engagement. For younger diners, who may know Fela only as a name in music history or a face on a T-shirt, a menu item can become a spark of curiosity. It might prompt a search for the original song, leading to a deeper encounter with his music and the politics behind it.

A legacy that adapts

Fela’s artistic and political vision was always about creating spaces where African identity could be expressed on its own terms.

In the 1970s and 80s, that space was his nightclub, the Afrika Shrine, where music, conversation and resistance flowed freely. In 2025, it might be a restaurant table in Lagos, where I No Be Gentleman arrives as a sizzling platter of suya-spiced beef.

These spaces also speak to the adaptability of Fela’s legacy. His music has inspired entire genres; his persona has been invoked in theatre, literature, political protests, art exhibitions, films, and now dining.

Each iteration, like the opening of the New Afrika Shrine in 2000, reinterprets him for new audiences, keeping his name and ideas in circulation.

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Read more:
Detty December started as a Nigerian cultural moment. Now it’s spreading across the continent – and minting money

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Today’s blending of food and music illustrates how cultural memory works in Africa. Artistic legacies can be preserved not just through direct performance, but through symbolic transformation into other mediums; mediums that engage the senses, draw on tradition, and thrive in the global marketplace.

The Afrobeat-themed restaurants of Lagos are not just curiosities for tourists or novelties for locals. They are living experiments in how to honour a cultural icon while making him relevant to the present.

Whether these spaces ultimately radicalise or simply entertain, they ensure that Fela Anikulapo-Kuti remains part of the city’s sensory landscape; not only heard, but tasted. And in a rapidly changing Lagos, that may be one of the most enduring tributes possible.

Garhe Osiebe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Fela and food: how Lagos restaurants are serving up the music star’s legacy – https://theconversation.com/fela-and-food-how-lagos-restaurants-are-serving-up-the-music-stars-legacy-262994