Godfrey Mwakikagile

Godfrey Mwakikagile (born 4 October 1949 in Kigoma^[1]) 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.^[2] 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.^[1] 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 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.

British journalist Trevor Grundy who lived and worked in Tanzania for a number of years and worked at The Standard during the same years 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."

There was segregation in Tanganyika even after independence. One of the victims was Ahmed Sékou Touré, president of Guinea and a 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. 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.