Godfrey Mwakikagile (born 4 October 1949 in Kigoma) is a Tanzanian scholar and author specialising in African studies. He was also a news reporter for The Standard (later renamed the Daily News) — the oldest and largest English newspaper in Tanzania and one of the three largest in East Africa. Mwakikagile wrote Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era — a biographical book on the life of former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere set in the backdrop of Africa's early post-colonial years and the liberation wars in the countries of southern Africa in which Nyerere played a major role.
Growing up in the 1950s, Mwakikagile experienced a form of apartheid and racial segregation in Tanganyika, what is now mainland Tanzania, and wrote about it in some of his works, as he did about the political climate of Tanganyika during the colonial era, in books such as Reflections on Race Relations: A Personal Odyssey, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties and Life under British Colonial Rule. There were segregated schools, toilets, hotels and residential areas. Nyerere was one of the victims when he was denied service – a cup of tea – at a hotel in Mwanza in 1953 and a glass of beer at the old New Africa Hotel in Dar es Salaam in the same year, not long before he became the national leader of the independence movement in 1954. He returned to Tanganyika in October 1952 after earning a master's degree from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. John Malecela, who later became prime minister and vice president of Tanzania, was also denied service in 1957 at the old New Africa Hotel. He stated in an interview "Ana kwa ana na Malecela" with Mwananchi, a Swahili newspaper, on 30 July 2014, that the hotel owner came with a policeman and told him he could not stay there as a black person.
Amir Abedi, the first African mayor of Dar es Salaam in 1960 who went on to serve as Minister of Justice and later as Minister of Education and Culture after independence was denied service at Palm Beach Hotel in Dar es Salaam in 1961. He was told by the hotel owner no blacks were allowed inside. The hotel owner, a Swiss, was expelled from Tanganyika within 48 hours, as Godfrey Mwakikagile stated in his books Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era and Reflections on Race Relations: A Personal Odyssey. Andrew Nyerere, President Nyerere's eldest child and a schoolmate of Mwakikagile, narrated the incident to Mwakikagile in 2002 when Mwakikagile was writing Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era:
'As you remember, Sheikh Amir Abedi was the first mayor of Dar es Salaam. Soon after independence, the mayor went to Palm Beach Hotel (near our high school, Tambaza, on United Nations Road in Upanga). There was a sign at the hotel which clearly stated: 'No Africans and dogs allowed inside.' He was blocked from entering the hotel, and said in protest, 'But I am the Mayor.' Still he was told, 'You will not get in.' Shortly thereafter, the owner of the hotel was given 48 hours to leave the country. When the nationalization exercise began, that hotel was the first to be nationalized.'
The incident is cited in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, pp. 501 – 502.
British journalist Trevor Grundy who lived and worked in Tanzania for a number of years and worked at The Standard during the same time Godfrey Mwakikagile did stated in "Julius Nyerere Reconsidered," 4 May 2015, that the British practised apartheid in Tanganyika and turned the country into an apartheid state but without declaring that it was one. He said it was British-style apartheid and that was their secret: not to give racial segregation a name as if segregation did not exist in Tanganyika. That is what Mwakikagile experienced in the 1950s under British rule, as he explains in his books, in which he recalls using segregated facilities including toilets labelled "Africans," "Asians," and "Europeans." Arabs, a significant minority in Tanganyika, were classified "Asians" in the segregation of facilities. There were no segregated facilities labelled "Arabs." Facilities for Africans were inadequate and substandard.
People of mixed race called half-castes did not have separate facilities. They were classified and treated as a part of the native African population and did not have any special privileges under segregation in colonial Tanganyika. They shared facilities including toilets and schools with blacks, not with Asians and Arabs. Godfrey Mwakikagile has stated in some of his autobiographical writings including Reflections on Race Relations: A Personal Odyssey that he went to school with some of them when he was in middle school from Standard Five to Standard Eight from 1961 to 1964.
There was segregation in Tanganyika even after independence. One of the victims was Ahmed Sékou Touré, president of Guinea and close friend of President Nyerere, who, together with his delegation, was snubbed at the Safari Hotel in Arusha in 1963 when he went there for lunch led by Tanganyika's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oscar Kambona, as Professor Lawrence Mbogoni stated in his article, “Racism and Racial Discrimination In Early Independent Tanzania,” AWAAZ Voices Magazine, Volume 17, Issue 2, 2020. Mwakikagile has written about many incidents of racial discrimination and segregation in Tanganyika, later Tanzania, in his books during the colonial and post-colonial period.
Even as late as the early 1970s, ten years after independence, Forodhani Hotel and New Palace Hotel in Dar es Salaam still had signs saying “Europeans,” although they were open to people of all races after the end of colonial rule but not right away. The hotel owners were slow in removing the signs because there was still resistance to racial integration even after independence. Mwakikagile has stated in his writings that he saw those signs when he was a student at Tambaza High School and when he was a news reporter in Dar es Salaam and has been cited in the writings of other writers, among them, Echoes of the Savannah: The Life and Works of Godfrey Mwakikagile.
Early life and family Mwakikagile was born on 4 October 1949 into a middle class Tanganyikan family at Kilimani Hospital, a government hospital in the town of Kigoma, Western Province of Tanganyika – what is now mainland TanzaniaGodfrey Mwakikagile, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, , New Africa Press, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 2009, p. 19. See also, G. Mwakikagile, My Life as an African: Autobiographical Writings, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: New Africa Press, 2009, p. 21. . – his sister Maria at a Catholic hospital in nearby Ujiji on 1 April 1951, his brother Lawrence at a government hospital in Morogoro in Eastern Province, a coastal region, on 29 September 1952. Besides Kigoma and Morogoro, Tanga and Muheza, his father also worked as a medical assistant in Kilosa, Eastern Province. And his brother Lawrence years later became a captain in the Tanzania People's Defence Forces (TPDF).
His parents moved from Tanga to Kigoma in May 1949 five months before he was born. They lived in Muheza and Tanga where his father worked as a medical assistant in the late 1940s. His paternal grandfather Kasisika Mwakikagile who came from Mwaya (Mwaja) in what is now Kyela District, also lived and worked in Tanga first, then in Muheza, years earlier in the 1930s. He died in Muheza in 1937 and was buried at Power Station, Muheza, Eastern Province, the year after his son Elijah started school in 1936 in Standard One at Tukuyu Primary School in Rungwe District in the Southern Highlands Province also simply known as Southern Highlands.
His son Elijah Mwakikagile was also born in Kyela – Lwangwa, Busale ward – but grew up in Rungwe District of which Kyela District was once a part. He had an older son William Mwakikagile who was also born in Kyela and moved to Northern Rhodesia, renamed Zambia, in 1943 and never returned to Tanganyika. He died in Zambia in the 1990s. His grandson Godfrey who lived in different parts of Tanganyika since birth also spent some of his early years in Rungwe District. He also lived in Kyela – Kandete, Itope ward – for some time when he was a child, according to his autobiographical writings. Godfrey's paternal grandmother Laheli Kasuka Mwaibanje, who also once lived with her husband in Kyela where their son Elijah was born, came from Mpata village in the ward of Kabula in Selya, Busokelo, in the eastern part of Rungwe District.
Godfrey's paternal great-grandfather, the father of his grandmother Laheli Kasuka, was Kasofu Mwamwaja (Mwaibanje) from Masoko, the heartland of Rungwe District. Kasofu Mwamwaja named his daughter Kasuka (Mwakasuka) after his mother who was Godfrey's great-great-grandmother. She was named after her paternal grandmother according to custom, a practice common among members of their ethnic group. Kasuka was the mother of Kasofu Mwamwaja.
Godfrey's other paternal great-grandfather was Mwakalinga from Mwaja, Kyela. Mwakalinga's other family names were Mwapwele and Mwamanyeta. Mwakalinga was the father of Godfrey's grandfather Kasisika Mwakikagile.
His paternal great-grandmother, Mary Iseke (Mwaiseke) from Makete in Rungwe District who was the mother of his grandmother Laheli Kasuka, was among the earliest Christian converts in the district. She was married to Kasofu Mwamwaja.
Godfrey's father Elijah Mwakikagile, who once worked at the world-famous Amani Research Institute in Muheza District in the late forties, was a medical assistant during the British colonial era. He worked in different parts of Tanganyika and was one of the few medical assistants in the entire country of 10 million people. As Professor John Iliffe stated in his book East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession, there were fewer than 300 medical assistants and fewer than 10 doctors in Tanganyika in the forties and fifties and only 12 doctors at independence from the United Kingdom on 9 December 1961. Medical assistants underwent an intensive three-year training after finishing secondary school and worked as a substitute for doctors and were even called "madaktari" - doctors - in Kiswahili (Swahili).
Godfrey's mother Syabumi Mwakikagile (née Mwambapa) who came from Kyimbila in Rungwe District was a pupil of Tanganyika's British feminist educator, and later Member of Parliament, Mary Hancock, who taught her at Kyimbila Girls' School in the Southern Highlands Province in the early 1940s. Mary Hancock was a friend of Nyerere and his family since 1953 and supported him during the struggle for independence.Kyoso, David E, Godfrey Mwakikagile: Biography of an Africanist, Intercontinental Books (2017), pp. 8-9, (last retrieved 10 November 2018) She was also the founder of Kyimbila Girls' School near the town of Tukuyu and of Loleza Girls' School in the town of Mbeya, capital of the Southern Highlands Province. Loleza Girls' School had its origin in Kyimbila Girls' School.