Introduction

In January 1964 some 2,000 men of the Tanganyikan Army mutinied for higher pay. For five days, until British troops intervened at the Tanganyika government's request and disarmed the mutineers, Julius Nyerere and his Cabinet were powerless in the face of this threat, while the thousands of members of his TANU party, along with the rest of the civilian population, simply stood by and watched. Nine years later, the same Julius Nyerere told a TANU conference that all of Tanzania's rural population should be moved into villages, and in the next four years, some 11 million people were uprooted from their ancestral homesteads and settled on new village sites. Although some force was used, Nyerere rightly observed that "11 million people could not have been moved by force in Tanzania; we do not have the capacity for such forced movement."