Haroub Othman Joins the Ancestors in Tanzania

Prof. Haroub Othman of Tanzania has joined the ancestors. He was a longtime Pan-African scholar in East Africa.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

2nd July 09

Death of Haroub Othman: Yet another nail on Pan-African activism

Ani Jozen

Pan-Afrcanism is in a crisis of renewal of its top militant intellectual voices following the death of Dr Tajudeen Abdulraheem, its most visible continental face in a car accident in Nairobi late last month, and now Prof. Haroub Othman.

He was the local representative of Pan-African militancy, a custodian of the records and sentiments of the days of the liberation struggle in southern Africa, and stalwart of the fierce loyalty that African militants had with global revolutionary leadership. It is the close of an epoch.

No one remains at the University of Dar es Salaam and perhaps elsewhere, who knew Soviet and Chinese communist party leaders at the personal level, in like manner as the late Prof. Othman and his mentor, the late Prof. Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu.

While the late Dr Tajudeen was a generation younger than the late University of Dar es Salaam don, completing his doctoral thesis around 1992, he was the movement’s continental face. His outlook was characterized by merging Pan-Africanism with global struggles of NGOs.

At the UDSM the outlook of the late Dr Tajudeen was mirrored quite closely in the career of the late Prof. Seithy Chachage, veteran chairman of the academic staff assembly, and indeed their use of terms paralleled in a number of areas.

One was the penchant for rather aggressive criticism of leaders of major western countries, illustrating their having been raised in a post-1968 kind of environment, where democracy is taken for granted, and their own task is to make things ‘move.’ Prof. Othman came from a different condition.

Those who belonged to his generation were just lucky even to be allowed to speak, and many of the late Prof. Babu’s camp in Zanzibar, namely of the Umma Party which allied with the Afro-Shirazi Party and largely organized the Revolution, were soon eliminated.

The rather lukewarm ASP leadership was envious of the personality cult and intellectual command of things that then Union Minister Babu commanded among youthful and other ordinary Zanzibaris. The Umma Party had to go so as to dominate the Isles field, totally.

Thus there was a much cooler demeanor and sense of presence, more or less seeking the comprehension of the crowd to grasp the democratic argument, and happy that there is at least the freedom to do so.

The period in which the likes of the late Prof. Othman and his colleague Dr Salim Ahmed Salim made their paths into politics, the danger of elimination always hovered above, either by being called a communist as in Kenya - trade unionist Pio Pinto, or Patrice Lumumba in the Congo - or an Arab, as in Zanzibar. This wasn’t a shouting generation, talking of ex-premier Tony Blair as a ‘poodle’ of George W. Bush!

It can in a way be said that Prof. Othman’s manner and discreet silence on substantive controversies clearly laden with a potential for verbal misunderstanding was built in the discipline of activism in the 1960s, partially reflected in the Gospel.

‘I send you as sheep among wolves, so you must be as cunning as a snake, and as peaceful as a dove,’ was what Christ told his disciples, knowing beforehand the sort of reception that awaited them from the law-loving Jews, and idol worshipping Romans. Most of them were massacred.

Many of his followers did not survive the turbulence of Isles politics after 1964, and misplaced trust on the part of Mwalimu helped return activists to the Isles to get a ‘fair trial.’

There is a certain tragic sense in which Prof. Babu and his colleagues in the Umma Party actually fell on their own swords as it were, since the legacy of revolution generally carries a slant of contempt on democracy as such, and accepts violence as a method of handling ‘counter revolutionaries.’

The tragedy with most revolutions since the Great October Revolution in Russia in 1917 is the way in which it consumes its own, and Zanzibar was no exception.

The Umma Party sowed the January 12 Revolution, before reaping the whirlwind of struggle for power with ASP, which the latter won hands down.

Thus the remaining two notable Umma Party militants were special in having found safe havens, with Prof. Othman then joining up the Pan-Africanist critics of the post-colonial situation, meanwhile as he could not set foot in what was in Umma Party sense, shorn of its later regrets, liberated territory.

Vexed in this confused sense of identity is the mirror of activism that he put up since the late 1960s, postulating the same values of revolution that were betrayed by persecution of its enthusiasts in Zanzibar. And a low tone due to it.

The youthful member of this group, Dr Salim was by comparison the most successful in his subsequent integration with a foreign service career in the Union Government, and the practical face of the values of reconciliation which Zanzibar has sorely lacked.

In the run to the presidential election in 2005, he sought to put this career in peacemaking and faith in democracy to use, but the legacy of racist epithets tied up with the 1964 events caught up with him. Thus he has continued working for peace, abandoning politics altogether.

With the exit of Prof. Othman, there is only Prof. Issa Shivji who also represents some of the more careful tone in radical representation, though not as dovish as his deceased colleague, as he underwent a minimum of torment in the 1970s and 80s.

He saw the climate of fear at close range, and once authored a book with a fictitious name when trying to respond to Prof. Dan Nabudere, who appeared to be favored by the state.

But the latter, a Ugandan citizen, and other foreign radicals had their contracts terminated in a hurry by University of Dar es Salaam authorities early 1979. Radicalism is no tea party.

THE GUARDIAN