Third World Historical: Ripping up the Script: Revolutionary Dar es Salaam and the Invasion of Czechoslovakia
George Roberts
Image courtesy of Hajime Narukawa
Third World Historical articulates a research agenda for a project suggestively housed as a special section in the pages of CSSAAME (42.2).The editor’s community webpage on Borderlines features experimental writings that enact the project’s attention to questions of form. Here, the intention is to engage in a collaborative project that is its own form of archive building, a portal that speaks to the wider themes of the Third World Historical. The essays in Borderlines highlight the visceral and the relational as distinct from abstract concepts of revolution as complete breaks. The words in these pieces are never failure, or defeat but stories of complicity, compromise, and fragmentation. By emphasizing relationality, movement, and complicity we aim to think concretely about moving between a world overwhelmed by structural forces that preclude action and an imagined world filled with boundless agents detached from history, an equally self-defeating proposition.
As dusk fell over the Costa Rican capital of San José on 20 August 1968, the evening calm was broken by the drone of air raid sirens—the sign of major breaking news. Anxious, intrigued, excited, crowds gathered at the offices of La República. The message on the newspaper’s bulletin boards outside was succinct: “Czechoslovakia invaded.” Hours earlier, the tanks of the Soviet Union and its allies had rolled across the borders of their fellow Warsaw Pact member, to bring a swift end to the reformist optimism of the Prague Spring.
In much of the Third World, the verdict on the news from Czechoslovakia was scathing. Kenya’s Daily Nation called the invasion “the worst excesses of naked imperialism.” In the Philippines, the Manila Times lamented that the “Soviet dove” had turned out to have “the claws of a vulture.” Argentina’s Clarin called the intervention “juridically false and morally odious.” In India, the government’s abstention from a UN Security Council vote prompted a mass opposition walk-out from parliament. Soviet embassies became the target of angry protests. In Montevideo, students smashed windows. In Buenos Aires, demonstrators torched a Soviet diplomat’s car. In Santiago, they threw paint and tar, dirtying the embassy building, just as Moscow had soiled its own revolutionary reputation.[1]
The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia was an event grounded in the politics of the European Cold War, but it resonated around the globe. As a moment of breaking news, it demanded an immediate response from governments, parties, and other movements. Reactions to the invasion served as a referendum on the Soviet Union’s claim to be at the forefront of the global revolution. European socialists had dealt with these questions much earlier, especially following the invasion of Hungary in 1956. By 1968, the Soviet Union had already ceded much ground to Maoist China, which represented an alternative pole of ideological inspiration and material support for Third World states and anti-colonial movements. Soviet approaches to development in Africa, which tried to press post-colonial trajectories through a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist grid, did not often align with the outlooks of independent governments. After the invasion, therefore, the balance of Third World opinion weighed heavily against the Soviet Union. In particular, post-colonial states cited the sanctity of national sovereignty as the bedrock of the international order. Few political leaders or intellectuals sympathized with Moscow. Those who did found themselves engaged in contorted rhetorical gymnastics to justify the invasion.
Among the most vociferous of these Third World responses came from Tanzania. Within hours of the news reaching Dar es Salaam, its government condemned “a betrayal of all the principles of self-determination and national sovereignty.” It asserted that “Tanzania opposes colonialism of all kinds, whether old or new, in Africa, in Europe, or elsewhere.”, an account found in the Nationalist on 22nd August, 1968. Having made his position clear, President Julius Nyerere turned to a symbolic showing of Tanzanian outrage. He privately instructed student leaders to organize a street demonstration in opposition to the invasion and in support for the Czechoslovakian people.[3] Meanwhile, the headlines in the Tanzanian press screamed outrage. Even the popular tabloid Ngurumo, which usually specialized in gossipy stories told in slangy Swahili, devoted its entire front page to the invasion and backed it up in with a series of stinging editorials.
The strength of the Tanzanian reaction to the invasion was unsurprising. By the late 1960s, Dar es Salaam had gained a reputation as an epicentre of revolution in Africa. Tanzania’s staunch anti-colonial stance and its position on the “frontline” of the struggle against white minority rule led to exiled liberation movements from across the continent establishing offices in the capital, which also hosted the Organisation of African Unity’s Liberation Committee. Revolutionaries from occupied territories like South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, and Comoros became key figures in Dar es Salaam’s vibrant political scene. They brushed shoulders with radical Tanzanian politicians and journalists as well as Cold War diplomats of every geopolitical and ideological stripe. A sense of post-colonial excitement and possibility went hand-in-hand with fear of subversion and suspicion of foreigners, especially after progressive regimes elsewhere in Africa were swept away by coups. Tanzania’s support for the self-determination of colonized peoples and opposition to superpower infringement on the sovereign rights of independent nations drove its forthright response to events in Czechoslovakia.
In 1968, Dar es Salaam’s university was entering its heyday as a hotbed of Third World radical thought. Students, Tanzanian academics, and expatriate lecturers all drew oxygen from the country’s embrace of an “African socialist” development strategy known as ujamaa. But they also cast their ideological horizons more broadly than the nation-state, closely following Marxist debates in the socialist world. The invasion of Czechoslovakia therefore posed a dilemma. Salim Msoma recalled that the news brought about “confusion and bewilderment” among his fellow members of the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front (USARF). Students had spent much of the year castigating the United States for its imperialism in Vietnam. But the Soviet Union, the birthplace of Marxist-Leninist revolution and champion of African liberation? They hesitated about participating in the planned street demonstration. Then a Czechoslovakian lecturer entered the classroom in tears at events in his home country, and their minds were made up.[4]
On 23 September, around two thousand students and youth activists assembled outside the Soviet embassy—a stone’s throw from the upmarket hotel in which Msoma recounted his memories to me. A Reuters cameraman captured the students’ actions. They brandished placards: “To Hell With The Warsaw Pact,” “Russians Are Hitler’s Hench Men.” The protesters brought with them wheelbarrows filled with Soviet literature, which they ripped up and pelted against the embassy building. Police officers watched on, unmoved. Msoma’s USARF branded the invasion “a revisionist betrayal of international socialism as envisaged by Karl Marx and Lenin.” A statement signed by its chairman (and future president of Uganda), Yoweri Museveni, declared that “for quite some time the revisionist clique in Moscow has been steadily corroding the fundamental tenets of Marxism-Leninism on which the first socialist state was built.”, an account found in the Nationalist on 24th August 1968.
The USARF statement articulated the idea that the Soviet Union had reneged on its revolutionary leadership by pursuing Cold War ends at odds with its own ideological pretensions. By bringing the Prague Spring to a brutal end, Moscow had shored up its authority in Central Europe. But the invasion was a public relations disaster in the Third World. The Warsaw Pact embassies in Tanzania received instructions to go on a counter-offensive. The Soviet Union’s local Swahili newspaper, Urusi Leo (“Russia Today”), provided an update on its intervention in Czechoslovakia, beneath a headline story declaring solidarity with the “heroes of Vietnam.”[5] Ngurumo sold column inches to Novosti, the Soviet news agency, to set out its case.[6] If the Soviet embassy thought that this would buy sympathy, it proved mistaken. The next day, Ngurumo compared the Soviet line to stories of chickens that lay seven eggs per day. “We want the truth,” it demanded.[7] The exposure of Soviet “lies” echoed through the condemnations that appeared in the Tanzanian press.
After Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union’s claim to be at the vanguard of a global revolutionary struggle lay in tatters. The shredded propaganda that littered the gardens of the Soviet embassy in Dar es Salaam was deeply symbolic: by ripping up this literature, the students highlighted how the bold ideological claims on these pages were rendered meaningless by Soviet actions. “Russian Aggression: The Highest Stage of Imperialism,” read a protester’s placard, turning the title of Lenin’s tract against the revolutionary state he had founded. The events of 1968 captured the sense of how Third World revolutionaries, brought together in cities like Dar es Salaam, had developed a self-confident critique of a Cold War order that sustained neo-imperialism, not just by the West but also in the name of ideological precepts that seemed increasingly incongruent with the Soviet Union’s own behavior. Dar es Salaam’s students still read and debated Marx and Lenin, but blended their findings with anti-imperialist, Third Worldist perspectives drawn from Fanon, Ho, and Mao.
There was no absolute rupture, of course: those Dar es Salaam–based liberation movements that aligned themselves with Moscow, like Mozambique’s FRELIMO or South Africa’s ANC, kept a tactical silence. The Tanzanian government, conscious of the vital support the Soviet Union provided to the liberation struggle, soon smoothed over relations. Czechoslovakia represented a nadir in the Soviet Union’s reputation in Africa. But by the mid-1970s it seemed resurgent, as Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries who seized power in Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique gravitated towards Moscow, while China turned inwards. Meanwhile, Tanzania’s ujamaa project faltered in the face of severe drought, global economic turmoil, and an inefficient apparatus of bloated parastatals and nationalized firms. Nyerere’s attempts to restructure global trade relations through a New International Economic Order received short shrift from power brokers in the West.
Looking back on the outpouring of public anger at the invasion of Czechoslovakia in Dar es Salaam from the vantage point of today, the images and headlines give an overwhelming sense of a lost world. The demise of socialism in Tanzania has liberalized the country’s global economic connections, but the internationalist solidarities of the ujamaa era are a thing of the past. Foreign stories rarely make the front pages of the country’s press newspapers these days. The idea of students taking to the streets in protest at a geopolitical event taking place in Central Europe is unthinkable—and, at present, impossible: at the time of writing, the government has banned public political demonstrations; “politics” is a matter for election time alone.
***
[1] These vignettes are taken from files in the U.S. and French diplomatic archives, which both assemble in one place reports from embassies around the world and offer a remarkably panoramic, synchronous view of global responses to the invasion.
[2] “Tanzania Deplores Occupation,” Nationalist, 22 August 1968, 1.
[3] Interview with Juma Mwapachu, Oyster Bay, Dar es Salaam, 12 June 2015.
[4] Interview with Salim Msoma, Dar es Salaam, 2 July 2015.
[5] “Tuko pamoja nanyi mashujaa wa Vietnam” and “Hali ya Czechoslovakia,” Urusi Leo, 8 September 1968, 1, 4.
[6] “Mkataba wa kirafiki usioweza kuvunjika,” Ngurumo, 23 September 1968, 3–4.
[7] “Urafiki,” Ngurumo, 24 September 1968, 2.
George Roberts is the author of Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961-1974 (Cambridge University Press). He is currently a research fellow at Trinity College.