Aspects of Conception and Implementation of Education in Tanzania

Historical Outline 

 To write about 'The Tanzanians' is somewhat difficult. The 15 million inhabitants of Tanzania comprise many different communities and groups which in the past constituted more than 120 differing societies, each with a number of unequal strata. In modern times there was little or no political or social communication between them. This constellation was the result of geographical, ecological and political circumstances that had conditioned the process of societal development for the last two centuries. Tanzania, a tropical country with a very humid coastal strip and temperate highlands consisting of different vegetative zones—stretches of very fertile land with lush vegetation within semi-arid woodland—had seen constant population movements as far back as human history in that part of the world is known. The pressure on areas with good soil and sufficient regular rainfall led to the separation and splitting of tribal groups and the scattered structure of indigenous societies. Intensive communication and cultural exchange between the inhabitants of East Africa and other peoples living at the edges of the Indian Ocean can be traced back to the seventh century A.D. Even earlier there had been trade relations with countries such as China, and contacts of an unknown nature with other foreign peoples, such as the inhabitants of legendary 'Azania'—as the Greeks called the interior behind the East African coast. The history of armed struggle by the local inhabitants of this part of East Africa against foreign invaders dates back to the early sixteenth century, when the Portuguese were trying to conquer the coast. Although the Portuguese managed to rule these people for about two centuries, mey never succeeded in subjugating them completely, not even after they had destroyed most of their cities and towns. The Portuguese were defeated by Arabs from Oman, who in 

1846 moved their capital to Zanzibar. In the interior of the country there had been constant moves by Nilo-Hamitic groups from the north invading the highlands between Mount Meru, Mount Kilimanjaro, the Pare Mountains, Lake Victoria and the Central Plains around Dodoma. They are reported to have settled down at the beginning of the nineteenth century—just in time for the next invasion. Zulu groups, called Ngoni, who had been defeated by the British and the Boers in South Africa, fled to the north fighting the peoples who had been living on fertile ground in eastern Africa. They finally settled to the east of Lake Nyasa, with their centre at Songea. Some of their groups or families moved up to the forests of Ifakara waging wars against other societies in that region. Slave raiders and traders profited from this so called 'tribal' warfare. Some of them may even have partially financed it. At any rate they encouraged it and bought the captives, though they also engaged in slave hunting of the kind known in West Africa. From the beginning of the nineteenth century at least half the population of this area was thus taken as slaves to the islands of Zanzibar, Pemba, Mauritius and the Seychelles or killed during the slave raids, or perished on their way to the slave market. Slaves carrying ivory from the interior to the coast provided big business in the decades up to 1873, when the slave market of Zanzibar was closed. The German colonizers arrived on the shores of East Africa in the early 1880s. A few years later, the area between the Indian Ocean and Lake Tanganyika, between Ruvuma River and Lake Victoria, which was then called Tanganyika and is now mainland Tanzania, became a German protectorate. Germans fought for nearly three decades to pacify the country- At least two fifthso f it was, for instance, involved in the supratribal Maji Maji rebellion against German colonization (1905-1907). Very harsh methods were applied to put down this insurrection. The colonizers destroyed not only the villages they suspected of harbouring guerillas, but also the fieldsa nd entire harvests, in order to make it impossible for the population to offer further resistance. Thus they depopulated formerly flourishing regions and let fertile cultivated areas revert to bushland or deserted plains. The resulting famine was the most serious in the history of the people. The Germans tried to prepare the country for colonial development. But before they had reached their goal, World War I put an end to their efforts. Nearly all of the newly created infrastructure was destroyed by the war. Two other factors contributed to the decline of the legendary high civilization of the olden days. The first is an implicit one. When all of the small surplus gained by communities living mostly in a subsistence economy is needed for defence purposes, little if anything is left in terms of capital or unused labour to promote social progress. Moreover, when defence is the main occupation of a population of peasant farmers, as it was in the East African hinterland in the late eighteenth century, agricultural output is bound to be minimized. The second reason for the decay of East African agriculture in those areas was a change in the climate and the sudden occurrence in the last decades of the nineteenth century of cattle diseases such as rinderpest. This is reported to have almost annihilated Tanganyikan livestock so that even rich families who had owned thousands of head of cattle found themselves on the verge of starvation. Thus, at the end of World War I the population of Tanganyika was really underdeveloped in several respects. The surviving human beings lived in scattered homesteads hidden in the bush. Most of them had accepted apathy and political indifference as their way of life in order to avoid trouble with the rulers lesson their long history of surrender had taught them. During the mandate period (1919-1961) the British had little interest in any development activity that did not bring them profits in simple economic terms. They continued to pursue the policy of exploitation to which the inhabitants of Tanganyika had been subjected by all their invaders for the last four and a half centuries. Since Tanganyika was rather poor, all colonial activities concentrated on agriculture. But, as John Iliffe observed, after a period of growing prosperity just after World War II, 'by the 1950s, Tanganyika's farmers were more ready to resist than they had been since 1905'. Owing to increasing demand for their products on the world market, Tanganyika's farmers tended to oppose obvious economic exploitation by British and Asian traders and the governmental marketing boards. They formed co- operative unions in order to profit as much as possible from their own surplus. When their natural rights were seriously violated, as they had been, for instance, in the Maru land case where the mandatory power expelled local inhabitants from their own grounds to sell their land to European settlers, they organized themselves in political groups together with young African entrepreneurs. And the educated elite, previously organized in debating clubs, demanded for themselves and all African inhabitants of this territory the rights which, as they had learnt from the missionaries, were human rights. These three roots of the independence movement combined in 1954 into one central political organization, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), under the leadership of Julius Kamberege Nyerere. Unlike independence movements in other African countries, TANU was able to take its complaints against the British Mandatory Power to the UNO Trusteeship Council and the General Assembly and thus draw the world's attention to events in Tanganyika. TANU's president Nyerere did so several times in those years. Step by step TANU won more constitutional rights for Tanganyika and international support at the UN level. It proved to be a mass movement when it won all the elections that were gradually permitted by the British administrators. At the first general election in i960, victory seemed to be complete : TANU got all but one of the seats in Parliament—and this remaining seat was won by an old TANU member who had been standing for election independently for local reasons but later rejoined the party. On 9th December 1962 Tanganyika finally became a sovereign state, after only seven years of struggle for independence : a battle without violence, a very diplomatic fight, fought mainly on the international scene and led by the representatives of TANU, a true mass movement that had united all the different political streams under the banner of independence. Nyerere became Prime Minister, but after two months he resigned: once national independence had been achieved, the unifying political factor had gone. He preferred to tour the country, to work and talk with the peasants about their problems, and so to reorganize TANU as a government party instead of an independence movement. He was elected President of the Republic by 97 per cent of the votes, and has since been re-elected in 1966, 1970 and 1974. 

MAP OF TANZANIA

The road to independence had been so short and the colonial administrators' policy of keeping the African population down so effective, that there were not enough qualified Tanganyikan citizens to take over the posts held by foreign managers and administrators immediately after independence. Africanization of the government machinery thus created problems. As the people had suffered too much from the discrimination practised by their European governors to accept the old staff in the posts of the new state for any length of time, a long- range manpower programme was designed to speed up the Africanization of senior positions. But, since there was a discrepancy between the technical and administrative competence of the new civil servants and their political mandate, many of them had initial difficulties in decision-making. They needed advice and they obtained it from international experts who, although they tried their best, also lacked the political competence needed in Tanganyika in those days. Some of the new Tanganyikan civil servants had inherited from their colonial predecessors not only their posts but also their attitudes. A few years after independence TANU's officials recognized that the principles of an egalitarian social structure were not becoming effective and that the social development tended to create a class structure divorcing the peasants and workers from the managers, administrators, government employees and politicans, with a few big landowners on their side. In the mid-sixties there was a real danger that a national 'parasitic bourgeoisie' with neo-colonial attitudes might establish itself. The gap between the five per cent town dwellers and the mass of the tax-paying rural population had grown so wide that it became obvious even to an uninformed peasant in the remotest area that officials and managers, landowners and employees were living at the expense of the poor masses. The turning point was reached when Dar es Salaam students organized a protest demonstration against a planned government regulation that every student was to do a period of National Service at the beginning and after the end of his or her university education. On seeing this demonstration the President was struck by the students' elitist attitude and expelled all of them from the university, had them sent back to their respective places of origin and ordered them to spend their time working hard in the fieldst ogether with their relatives. However, their uneducated fathers applied for their re-enrolment at the university, and after one year nearly all of them were readmitted. On the very day on which the students had been expelled the President decided to cut all higher salaries in the country, including his own, by 20 per cent. Together with his party colleagues he then worked out the principles embodied in the 'Arusha Declaration' and the subsequent policy statement 'Education for Self-Reliance'. The first of these documents was adopted by the National Committee of TANU at their annual meeting in February 1967 at Arusha, and the second was published only one month later. 

In these papers TANU had drafted a concept of political development towards socialism. It was the signal for the beginning of a new era: after the epoch of decolonization and Africanization these documents marked a positive approach to development, with the main emphases on land, the people, good policies, and good leadership (Nyerere. See Chapter 2.) It is within the context of such major political changes that the educational reform of Tanzania was conceived, discussed and gradually implemented.

 Aspects of Conception and Implementation 

The conception of education If one looks at some aspects of education in Tanzania within the overall developmental process, one will find that education and society are seen as being dialectically related to each other. On the one hand, die structure and content of the education system depend on the stage of socio-economic development the society has reached : '. . . education cannot be considered apart from society. The formal school system cannot educate a child in isolation from the social and economic system in which it operates . . . the truth is that education is unavoidably part of society' On the other hand, education is looked upon as one of the key variables in the growth of the human potential to influence the process of development of a society in accordance with the needs and aspirations of the people living and working within it. 'We must change our conditions of life ourselves ; and we can learn how to do this by educating ourselves. This again relates education to a concept of development in which 'development means the development of people' a process which is meaningless without an educational element. The general purpose of education is seen to be 'to transmit from one generation to the next the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the society, and to prepare the young people for their future membership of the society and their active participation in its maintenance or development'.In view of the present situation of Tanzania and most African countries, their colonial past and the many new kinds of international dependency, Nyerere adds to his definition : 'the primary purpose of education is the liberation of man'.5 Thus, education in Tanzania is purpose-oriented. Nyerere describes and profoundly analyzes what education for self-reliance, for liberation, and for development means in the Tanzanian context. But in his overall educational conception he adds another dimension that stems from the lifelong process of development, the struggle for liberation and self-reliance, from human life itself: '. . . education is something that all of us should continue to acquire from the time we are born until the time we die. This is important both for individuals and for our country as a whole.'6 His conception thus includes all forms and all stages of education covering virtually the entire life-span of the individual—more informal ones when the child is very young, predominantly formal ones during the time of schooling or training, and all the different kinds of learning in adulthood, be they informal, formal or non-formal. The following figure showing some aspects of the relationships of formal and non-formal education and training for youths and adults in Tanzania may give an impression of the potential role all kinds of adult education play within a conception favouring lifelong education for all, whether on a basic or on higher levels. 

The need for integrating education with living and working is another cornerstone for innovations in the Tanzanian system of education. But in contrast to a 'one after the other' or 'from time to time' approach Nyerere stresses the need for lifelong integration of education, working and living. Taking adult education as an example he said: 'If we are to make real progress in "adult education", it is essential that we should stop trying to divide up life into sections,  in one of which is for education and another, longer one which is for work—with occasional time off for "courses". In a country dedicated to change we must accept that education and working are both parts of living and should continue from birth until we die.'7 Integration of work with education and of education with work or, better, with all aspects of life, is seen to be both a prerequisite for and a fruit of education for self-reliance and for liberation. 

Educational resolutions and laws within the conceptual framework The Tanzanian conception of education evolved within, and as a part of, the overall national policy of socialism and self-reliance. Hence its various aspects were not elaborated nor introduced into the educational system simultaneously by means of a new and comprehensive educational law, but gradually. Over a number of years several laws, resolutions and recommendations, mostly dealing with specific parts of the whole and catering for diverse modes of implemen- tation, were issued by the government and its representatives, by TANU, or by President Nyerere. The following brief overview may be useful to the reader. 

In 1967 'Education for Self-Reliance' was published. It aimed at making the education provided more relevant to Tanzania by merging the educational needs and aspirations of the individual with those of the community, thus integrating education and society. Primary schooling was to become a complete basic cycle of learning, instead of being regarded, as it used to be, as mainly a preparatory stage and an instrument for selecting the lucky few who would go on to secondary education. At the same time, those receiving secondary school education would be expected to render more service to the communities financing their education. The school curriculum was to be changed so as to make the content of all subjects more relevant to Tanzanian children, to introduce productive activities such as work on farms and in workshops, to relate the lessons very closely to the daily life and work of the pupils, and to merge theory and practice. The parents were to take part in the school activities, and farmers and agricultural extension workers could act as teachers.8 Education would thus become supportive of the overall develop- ment of the country.' 

The Second Five-Year Plan (1969—1974), envisaged changing the primary schools into 'community educational centres'9 which, in addition to providing education by functioning as primary schools, would take care of the educational needs of out-of-school-youths and of adults. In this way formal and non-formal education would be integrated at the village level. 

In 1969 the Education Act was passed. It provided, with immediate effect, 'for the development of a system of education in conformity with the political, social and cultural ideals of the United Republic'.10 The government took over the responsibility for all schools, employing all teachers as government servants. The Ministry of Education was renamed Ministry of National Education and had henceforth to co-ordinate all educational matters on a national level. 

In 1971 the 15th Biannual TANU Conference passed two major resolutions 

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concerning education. The firstc alled for an extensive functional literacy campaign so as to make everybody in the country literate ; this was seen as an important part of basic education for those who had received no education under colonialism or thereafter. The second stressed the necessity ofmerging work with education in adult life, so that 'education should be an integral part of any work programme throughout the nation'.11 

In 1973 the Prime Minister took up again the aim of the second resolution. He demanded that 'Workers' Education must involve ALL WORKERS, starting with the illiterate worker up to the university graduate worker or those holding high posts in leadership, and that this education and training must take place 'during normal working hours for a duration of not less than one hour every day'.12 This circular has opened wide perspectives for the development of general and professional education on all levels. It provides for continued education after completion of the basic cycle of learning and perhaps some more formal education throughout life covering the whole life- span of the individual in accordance with the needs of the society. 

Another 1973 event was the establishment of the National Examinations Council of Tanzania. One of its major objectives is 'to formulate examinations policy in accordance with the principles of education for self-reliance accepted by the people of Tanzania'.13 

In 1974 the TANU National Executive Council reviewed the progress that had been made in transforming the educational system. On the basis of the findings it passed further resolutions, generally called the 'Musoma Resolutions', to the effect that universal primary education should be realized by 1977. To make this possible, very flexible methods should be employed. For instance, older pupils should teach younger ones; there should be shift lessons in the morning and afternoon; and parents, teachers, and pupils should construct classrooms in self-help activities. In respect to secondary education the TANU resolutions stated that it should be regarded as another cycle of education complete in itself and not as an instrument of preparation and selection for university education. All secondary school leavers should start to work or to be trained for work; this would be facilitated by diversified secondary education in the fields of technical education, agriculture, commerce, and home economics. These provisions resulted in the abolition of direct entry to university education. In future, candidates would be selected from people who were already working, and their work performance as well as their academic ability would be taken into consideration in the selection. The existing examination system was criticized for being incompatible with die guiding principles of education for self- reliance. For instance, primary school leaving examinations were still not conducted in the perspective of assessing the pupils' competence to live and work in their communities and to contribute to the development of socialism and self-reliance ; the criteria used were still those suitable for selecting a small number of students for secondary education, the others being regarded by society and themselves as failures. To correct this mistake, primary schooling should either finish without any final examination or the old mode should be replaced by one assessing pupils' capacities for life, education and work, i.e. their academic progress, productive work, and social responsibility shown during school years. 

The purpose of the foregoing outline of the Tanzanian conception of education as expressed in some important official statements has been to sketch the framework for the transformation of the education system. Some aspects of implementing educational innovations in Tanzania will be discussed in section.