Julius Nyerere was one of the greatest African thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century, but until now, no one has looked at how his time in the African Association (AA), before he left for Europe, connected him to a whole world of black thought and shaped his intellectual biography. After demonstrating the lessons Nyerere learned about African unity from the AA and figures like James Aggrey, it will demonstrate how he remolded and used these ideas, and how the strands of both practical pan-Africanism and Ethiopianist-inspired redemptive pan-Africanism can be seen throughout his career. It explores how his ideas of umoja shaped both domestic and international policies in postcolonial Tanzania including the relationship between religion and politics. It then examines how Nyerere wrestled with ideas of African identity, unity, and Africanness (Uarikfa) and highlights the inherent tensions between projects of territorial nationalism and political pan-Africanisms such as African nationalism.

An intellectual history approach to the exploration of African identity in mid twentieth-century East Africa provides several insights into unresolved tensions in African political history. Building the African Nation argues that the failure of the Pan-African Movement to politically unify the continent in the heady days of the end of empire in the late 1950s and early 1960s should be partly attributed to the fact that competing nationalisms were at play. African and territorial nationalisms were vying for the loyalty of the people of the continent. Even though the relationship between the two proved to be beneficial to the aims of some territorial nationalists in solving specific problems – coordination of anti-colonial tactics, sharing of information valuable to decolonization projects, etc. – in the end, there were two separate identities aiming for ultimate allegiance. In hindsight, we can see that trying to build two nations simultaneously was bound to create tension or conflict and is one reason African political unity has proven so elusive. When we recognize that much pan-African thinking in the continent was born out of the idea that all Africans were one and should therefore prioritize a continental fealty, it becomes easier to understand how this made pan-Africanism at odds with territorial nationalists’ projects.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how the African Association (AA) utilized the political concept of umoja to build an organizational structure that would create the unity needed to create progress in their various spheres of action: local, territorial, regional, and global. The organizational pinnacle of their African unity were five Association-wide conferences with continental aspirations. However, the continental vision and project of the AA was dramatically altered in the late 1940s and early 1950s due to both changing geopolitics and interassociational feuds that spurred territorial self-interest and the splitting of the Association. Using a framework of competing nationalisms, the chapter demonstrates how the moves from a continental African nationalism to territorial anti-colonial nationalisms were contested and not inevitable. Thus, the creation of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in Tanganyika and the Afro-Shirazi Party in the Zanzibar Protectorate stemming out of the AA were not natural progressions but constituted a shrinking of vision and reengineering of aspirations.