Léopold Sédar Senghor (9 October 1906 – 20 December 2001) was a Senegalese poet, politician, and cultural theorist who served as the first president of Senegal (1960–1980).
Senghor was the first African to sit as a member of the Académie française. He was also the founder of the political party called the Senegalese Democratic Bloc. He is regarded by many as one of the most important African intellectuals of the 20th century.

Léopold Sédar Senghor was born on 9 October 1906 in the small coastal city of Joal, some one hundred kilometres south of Dakar. Basile Diogoye Senghor, Léopold's father, was a businessman belonging to the bourgeois tribe Serer, a minority group in Senegal.

Gnilane Ndiémé Bakhou, Léopold's mother, and the third wife of his father, was Muslim of Peul origin belonging to the Tabor tribe. She gave birth to six children, including two sons. Senghor had also inherited from the Serers, apart his first name, his two last names: his father's name, Senghor (derived from the Portuguese for Lord, Senhor) and the Serere's name Sedar (meaning "One that shall not be humiliated").

At the age of eight Senghor began his studies in Senegal in the Ngasobil boarding school of the Fathers of the Holy Spirit. In 1922 he entered a seminary in Dakar. When he was told the religious life was not for him, he attended a secular institution. By then, he was already passionate about French literature. He distinguished himself in French, Latin, Greek and Algebra. With his Baccalaureate completed, he was awarded a scholarship to continue his studies in France.

"Sixteen years of wandering": 1928-1944

In 1928 Senghor sailed from Senegal for France, beginning in his words, "sixteen years of wandering." Starting his post-secondary studies at the Sorbonne, he quickly quit and went on to Louis-Le-Grand to finish his prep course for entrance at the École Normale Supérieure.

He was there while Paul Guth, Henri Queffélec, Robert Verdier and Georges Pompidou were also studying at this establishment. After failing the entrance exam, he decided to prepare for his grammar Aggregation. He was granted his aggregation in 1935 after a failed first attempt.

He graduated from the University of Paris, where he received the Agrégation in French Grammar. Subsequently, he was designated professor at the Universities of Tours and Paris, during the period 1935-1945.

Senghor started his teaching years at the Lycee Rene-Descartes in Tours and taught with the Lycée Marcelin Berthelot in Saint-Maur-des-Fosses the environs of Paris. Besides his teaching career, Senghor attended Linguistics classes taught by Lilias Homburger at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, and studied also with prominent social scientists such as Marcel Cohen, Marcel Mauss and Paul Rivet (director of the Institut d'ethnologie de Paris).

It was at this time that Senghor, along with other intellectuals of the African diaspora who had come to study in the colonial capital, coined the term, and conceived the notion of "négritude," which was in effect a response to the racism still prevalent in France, turning the racial slur "nègre" into a positively connoted celebration of African culture and character. The idea of négritude would inform not only Senghor's cultural criticism and literary work, but also became a guiding principle for his political thought in his career as a statesman.

In 1939, Senghor was enrolled as a French army officer within the 59th Colonial Infantry division. A year later he was made prisoner by the Germans in la Charite-sur-Loire. He was interned in different camps but finally interned in Front Stalag 230, in Poitiers.

 This later camp was reserved for colonial troops captured during the war. German soldiers wanted to execute him and the other black POWs the same day they were captured, but they escaped this fate by yelling "Vive la France, vive l'Afrique noire!" The soldiers decided against executing them after being told by a French officer that this entirely racist act would dishonour the Aryan race and the German Army.

In total, Senghor spent two years in different prison camps, where he spent most of his time writing poems. In 1942 he was released for medical reasons. He resumed his teaching career while staying involved in the resistance with the Front national universitaire.

Political career: 1945-1982

Once the war was over, he took over the position of Dean of the Linguistics Department with the École Nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer, a position he would hold until Senegal's independence in 1960. While travelling on a research trip for his poetry, the local socialist leader, Lamine Gueye, suggested he become a member of the Assemblée nationale française.

Senghor accepted and became député for the riding of Senegal-Mauritanie, when colonies were granted the right to be represented by elected individuals. One occasion when Senghor showed his difference from Lamine Gueye, was when the train conductors on the line Dakar-Niger went on strike. The latter voted against the strike arguing the movement would paralyse the colony, while Senghor supported the workers, gaining him great support among Senegalese.

In 1946, Senghor married the AEF governor's daughter with whom he had two sons: Francis (1947-) and Guy (1948-1983).

The following year he left the African Division of the French Section of the Workers International (SFIO) that had given enormous financial support to the social movement. With Mamadou Dia, Senghor founded the Bloc démocratique sénégalais (1948). They won the legislative elections of 1951, and Lamine Gueye lost his seat.

Re-elected depute in 1951 as an independent overseas member, he was state secretary to the Council's president in Edgar Faure's government from 1 March 1955 to 1 February 1956. He became mayor of the city of Thies, Senegal in November 1956 and then advisory minister in the Michel Debre's government from 23 July 1959 to 19 May 1961.

He was also a member of the commission responsible for drafting the Fifth Republic's constitution, general councillor for Senegal, member of the Grand Conseil de l'Afrique Occidentale Francaise and member for the parliamentary assembly of the European Council.

Meanwhile, he divorced his first wife and in 1957 married Colette Hubert, a French national from Normandy with whom he had a son, Philippe Maguilien (-1981). In 1964 he published the first volume of a series of five titled Liberté. The book contains a variety of speeches, allocutions, essays and prefaces.

Senegal

Senghor was a supporter of federalism for newly independent African states, a type of "French Commonwealth". Federalism not being favoured by the African countries, he decided to form, along with Modibo Keita, the Mali Federation with former French Sudan (modern Mali). Senghor was president of the Federal Assembly until its failure in 1960.

Afterwards, Senghor became the first President of the Republic of Senegal, elected on 5 September 1960. He is the author of the Senegalese national anthem, le Lion rouge (the red lion). The prime minister, Mamadou Dia was in charge of executing Senegal's long-term development plan, while Senghor was in charge of foreign relations.

The two men quickly disagreed. In December 1962, Mamadou Dia was arrested and suspected of fomenting a coup. He remained in jail for twelve years. Following this, Senghor created a presidential regime. On 22 March 1967, Senghor escaped an attempt on his life. The suspect was sentenced to death.

He resigned his position before the end of his fifth term in December 1980. Abdou Diouf replaced him at the head of the country. Under his presidency, Senegal started a multy-party regime (limited to three: socialist, communist and liberal) as well as a performing education system. Senghor is often falsely seen as a democrat; however, he imposed a one-party regime and violently crushed several student protest movements. Despite the end of official colonialism, the value of Senegalese currency continued to be fixed by France, the language of learning remained French, and Senghor ruled the country with French political advisors.

Francophonie

He supported the creation of the la Francophonie and was elected vice-president of the High Council of the Francophonie.

In 1982, he was one of the founders of the Association France and developing countries whose objectives were to bring attention to the problems of developing countries, in the wake of the changes affecting the latter.

Académie française: 1983-2001

He was elected a member of l'Académie française on 2 June 1983, at the 16th seat where he succeeded the Duke of Levis-Mirepoix. He was the first African to sit at the Academie. The entrance ceremony in his honor took place on March 29th, 1984, in presence of then French President François Mitterrand. This was considered as a further step towards greater openness in the Académie, after the previous election of a woman, Marguerite Yourcenar.

In 1993, the last and fifth book of the Liberté series was published: Liberté 5: le dialogue des cultures.

"Je ne suis pas sûr de mourir. Et si c'était ça l'enfer?" ("I'm not sure that I will die. Maybe this is hell?") said Senghor, post-retirement, in 1996.

Funerals

He spent the last years of his life with his wife in Verson, near the city of Caen Normandy, where he passed away on 20 December 2001. His funeral was held on 29 December 2001 in Dakar.

Officials attending the ceremony included Raymond Forni, president of the Assemblée nationale and Charles Josselin, state secretary for the minister of foreign affairs, in charge of the Francophonie. Jacques Chirac (who said, upon hearing of Senghor's death: "Poetry has lost one of its masters, Senegal a statesman, Africa a visionary and France a friend") and Lionel Jospin, respectively president of the French Republic and the prime minister did not attend. Their failure to attend Senghor's funeral made waves as it was deemed a lack of acknowledgement for what the politician had been in his life.

The analogy was made with the Senegalese Tirailleurs who, after having contributed to the liberation of France, had to wait more than forty years to receive an equal pension (in terms of buying power) to their French counterparts. The scholar Erik Orsenna wrote in the newspaper Le Monde an editorial titled: "J'ai honte" (I am ashamed).

Legacy

Although a socialist, Senghor avoided the Marxist and anti-Western ideology that had become popular in post-colonial Africa, favouring the maintenance of close ties with France and the western world. This is seen by many as a contributing factor to Senegal's political stability: it remains one of the few African nations never to have had a coup, and to have always had a peaceful transfer of power.

Senghor's tenure as president was characterized by the development of African socialism, which was created as an indigenous alternative to Marxism, drawing heavily from the négritude philosophy. In developing this, he was assisted by Ousmane Tanor Dieng. On 31 December 1980, he retired in favour of his prime minister, Abdou Diouf.

Seat number 16 of the Académie was vacant after the Senegalese poet's death. He was ultimately replaced by another former president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.

Honors

Senghor received several honours in the course of his life. He was made Grand-Croix of the Légion d'honneur, Grand-Croix of the l'Ordre national du Mérite, commander of arts and letters. He also received academic palms and the Grand-Croix of the l'Ordre du lion du Sénégal. His war exploits earned him the medal of Reconnaissance franco-alliée 1939-1945 and the combattant cross 1939-1945. He was named honorary doctor of thirty-seven universities.

The French Language International University in Alexandria was officially open in 1990 and was named after him.

The airport of Dakar, Dakar-Yoff-Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport, is named after him, and the Passerelle Solférino in Paris was renamed after him in 2006, on the centenary of his birth.

Poetry

His poetry was widely acclaimed, and in 1978 he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. His poem A l'appel de la race de Saba published in 1936 was inspired by the entry of Italian troops in Abbis Abeba. In 1948, Senghor compiled and edited a volume of Francophone poetry called Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache for which Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an introduction, titled "Orphée Noir" (Black Orpheus).

For his epitaph was a poem he had written, namely:

Quand je serai mort, mes amis, couchez-moi sous Joal-l'Ombreuse.

Sur la colline au bord du Mamanguedy, près l'oreille du sanctuaire des Serpents.

Mais entre le Lion couchez-moi et l'aïeule Tening-Ndyae.

Quand je serai mort mes amis, couchez-moi sous Joal-la-Portugaise.

Des pierres du Fort vous ferez ma tombe, et les canons garderont le silence.

Deux lauriers roses-blanc et rose-embaumeront la Signare.

When I'm dead, my friends, place me below Shadowy Joal,

On the hill, by the bank of the Mamanguedy, near the ear of Serpents' Sanctuary.

But place me between the Lion and ancestral Tening-Ndyae.

When I'm dead, my friends, place me beneath Portuguese Joal.

Of stones from the Fort build my tomb, and canons will keep quiet.

Two laurier roses -- white and pink -- will perfume the Signare.

Négritude

With Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas, Senghor created the concept of Négritude, an important intellectual movement that sought to assert and to valorize what they believed to be distinctive African characteristics, values, and aesthetics.

This was a reaction against the too strong dominance of French culture in the colonies, and against the perception that Africa did not have culture developed enough to stand alongside that of Europe. Building upon historical research identifying ancient Egypt with black Africa, Senghor argued that sub-Saharan Africa and Europe are in fact part of the same cultural continuum, reaching from Egypt to classical Greece, through Rome to the European colonial powers of the modern age. Négritude was by no means - as it has in many quarters been perceived - an anti-white racism, but rather emphasized the importance of dialogue and exchange among different cultures (e.g., European, African, Arab, etc.)

Thousands of sympathisers attended the burial of the late former speaker of the National Assembly who passed away on Monday morning at the RVTH, Banjul.

The coffin of the late SM Dibba was escorted from Banjul to the Old Jeswang Cemetery in Kanifing Municipality, where thousands of people gathered to pay homage to the veteran politician, who was an active politician before turning into an octogenarian.

Politicians, government officials, friends and well wishes, as well as relatives and family members thronged the cemetery on Monday afternoon.

Many were visibly gripped by a sense of grief and sadness, while others mustered the agony that the lost soul had plunged them into.

SM Dibba, 71, was regarded by many as a principled politician, who lived up to his believes and values. These qualities evidently trailed his political career and long service to the state. In 1972, SM Dibba resigned as the vice-president and minister of Finance and again tendered a resignation as minister of Economic Planning in 1975 for what he then saw as the failure of the then PPP administration to "attend to rural development" and the mismanagement of public services.

The late SM Dibba was viewed by many in the country’s political arena as a mentor. He led a formidable opposition NCP in four presidential elections, though failed to make it to the State House.

His leadership qualities and principles of his brainchild NCP attracted a good number of Gambians, some of whom have become prominent political figures in various political parties in the country, notably the main opposition UDP.

Earlier in the day, the vice-president and the secretary of state for Women Affairs, Aja Dr Isatou-Njie, accompanied by a high powered delegation, paid a visit to the bereaved family at Perseverance Street, Banjul, where she extended condolence on behalf of the government.

Sheriff Mustapha Dibba, a veteran Gambian politician who served as the country's National Assembly speaker from 2002 to 2006, gave his last breathe on Monday morning at the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital (RVTH), Banjul.

SM Dibba, 71, reportedly died of a heart-attack, after he was hospitalised last week Friday. His body was laid to rest at the Old Jeshwang Cemetery in the Kanifing Municipality. He is survived by a wife and 14 children.

Education

The late Sheriff Dibba attended Armitage High School from 1946-1947. He later moved to Banjul, where he attended the Boys High School. He graduated from there in 1955 at a very young age and had been a distinguish and hard working scholar.

Following his high school graduation, Sheriff Dibba worked at the United Africa Company (UAC) during the colonial era as a clerk and was promoted to the rank of stores clerk.In 1958, he resigned voluntarily to take up politics as a full-time career.

Political career

SM Dibba was the leader of the National Convention Party (NCP). Mr Dibba was The Gambia's first vice-president in the first republic and resigned from that position in 1975 and later formed the NCP. Following elections in 1977, the NCP became the main opposition party in The Gambia.

He was incarcerated in 1981 for alleged involvement in the foiled coup attempt led by Kukoi Samba Sanyang, but was freed after 11 months in detention.

A presidential election was held on 4 May 1982, months after a constitutional amendment instituting direct election of the country's head of state. Dibba was defeated by ex-President Sir Dawda Jawara. He ran again as the NCP presidential candidate in 1987 and 1992, coming second to President Jawara both times.

Following the change of government in 1994, the NCP and other political parties were banned. The ban on the NCP was lifted in mid-2001 and SM Dibba contested the election held on 18 October of that year. He was defeated by incumbent President Jammeh and placed fourth out of five candidates, winning 3.8% of the vote.

SM Dibba then gave his support to President Jammeh and his party, the APRC, and after the legislative elections of January 2002, he was elected the Speaker of the National Assembly at the first meeting of the new legislature on 3 February.

In April 2006, Dibba was arrested and removed as the speaker and nominated member of the National Assembly.

The late SM Dibba and the NCP nevertheless backed President Jammeh in the September 2006 presidential election.

One of Africa’s most respected figures, Julius Nyerere (1922 – 1999) was a politician of principle and intelligence. Known as Mwalimu or teacher, he had a vision of education and social action that was rich with possibility.

Education

Julius Kambarage Nyerere was born on April 13, 1922. He began attending Government Primary School in Musoma at the age of 12 where he completed the 4 years program in 3 years and went on to Tabora Government School in 1937. He received a scholarship to attend Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda where he obtained a teaching Diploma.

He returned to Tanganyika and worked for 3 years at St. Mary’s Secondary School in Tabora, where he taught Biology and English. In 1949 he got a scholarship to attend the University of Edinburgh (he was the first Tanzanian to study at a British university and only the second to gain a university degree outside Africa. He obtained his Masters of Arts degree in Economics and History in 1952.

In Edinburgh, partly through his encounter with Fabian thinking, Nyerere began to develop his particular vision of connecting socialism with African communal living. (Editor’s Note: Edinburgh, and Scotland, have always had a socialist ideological leaning. At Edinburgh University were published socialist-leaning magazines such as Radical Scotland, the February 1984 issue featuring an unknown Gordon Brown,now UK PM, on a quarter page, and the current Observer MD on full-page!).

Political career

On his return to then Tanganyika, Nyerere took a position teaching History, English and Kiswahili, at St. Francis' College, near Dar es Salaam. In 1953 he was elected president of Tanganyika African Association (TAA), a civic organization dominated by civil servants, that he had helped found while a student at Makerere University. In 1954 he transformed TAA into the politically oriented Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). TANU's main objective was to achieve national sovereignty for Tanganyika. A campaign to register new members was launched, and within a year TANU had become the leading political organisation in the country.

Nyerere's activities attracted the attention of the Colonial authorities and he was forced to make a choice between his political activities and his teaching. He was reported as saying that he was a schoolmaster by choice and a politician by accident. He resigned from teaching and traveled throughout the country speaking to common people and tribal chiefs, trying to garner support for movement towards independence.

He also spoke on behalf of TANU to the Trusteeship Council and Fourth Committee of the United Nations in New York. The fact that, like The Gambia, Tanzania did not have White Settlers meant that independence was achieved without bloodshed. In 1961 Tanganyika was granted self governance and Nyerere became its first Prime Minister on December 9, 1961.

A year later Nyerere was elected President of Tanganyika when it became a Republic. Nyerere was instrumental in the union between the islands of Zanzibar and the mainland Tanganyika to form Tanzania, after a coup in Zanzibar in 1964 toppled Jamshid bin Abdullah, who was the Sultan of Zanzibar.

Economic policies

When in power, Nyerere implemented a socialist economic program (announced in the Arusha Declaration of 1967), establishing close ties with China, and also introduced a policy of collectivization in the country's agricultural system, known as Ujamaa or "familyhood."

Although some of his policies can be characterized as socialist, Nyerere was first and foremost an African, and secondly a socialist. He was what is often called an African socialist. Nyerere had tremendous faith in rural African people and their traditional values and ways of life (like The Gambia’s current President Jammeh). He believed that life should be structured around the ujamaa, or extended family found in traditional Africa. He believed that in these traditional villages, the state of ujamaa had existed before the arrival of imperialists.

He believed that Africans were by tradition socialists. All that they needed to do was return to their traditional mode of life and they would recapture it. This would be a true repudiation of capitalism, since his society would not rely on capitalism to exist. Unfortunately, Nyerere’s idealistic ujamaa system failed to boost agricultural output. By 1976, Tanzania gone from the largest exporter of agricultural products in Africa to the largest importer of agricultural products in Africa. Politically and socially the declaration was hugely unpopular. It was a failure and only plunged Tanzania into further debt, a crisis in its balance of payments deficits and worsened relations with international donors.

Nyerere accepts failure.

With the realization that the Tanzanian economy did not flourish and being unwilling to lead Tanzania using an economic model he did not believe in, Nyerere willingly announced that he would retire after presidential elections in 1985, leaving the country to enter its free market era under the leadership of Ali Hassan Mwinyi. In an act of candor in his farewell speech while commenting on his economic policies he declared "I failed. Let's admit it".

Nyerere was instrumental in putting both Ali Hassan Mwinyi and Benjamin Mkapa in power. He remained the chairman of Chama Cha Mapinduzi (ruling party) for five years following his presidency until 1990, and is still recognised as the Father of the Nation.

Co-Founder of the Organization of African Unity

Nyerere, along with several other Pan-Africanist leaders, founded the Organization of African Unity in 1963. Nyerere supported several militant groups active in African colonies, including the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress (PAC) of South Africa, FRELIMO when it sought to overthrow Portuguese rule in Mozambique, and Mugabe’s ZANLA in its war with the Smith government of Rhodesia. From the mid 1970s on, along with President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, he was one of the leaders of the Front Line States which campaigned in support of black majority rule in southern Africa. In 1978 he led Tanzania in a war with Uganda, defeating and exiling the government of Idi Amin. Nyerere was instrumental in the coup in Seychelles which brought Albert René to power.

Cultural Influences

Nyerere has continued to influence the people of Tanzania in the years following his presidency. Although his ideology of ujamaa failed and left the nation in a state of poverty, some of his broader ideas of socialism live on in the rap and hip hop artists of Tanzania. Nyerere believed socialism was an attitude of mind that barred discrimination and entailed equality of all human beings. Therefore, ujamaa can be said to have created the social environment for the development of hip hop culture.

Like in other countries, hip hop emerged in post-colonial Tanzania when divisions among the population were prominent, whether by class, ethnicity or gender. Rappers’ broadcasted messages of freedom, unity, and familyhood, topics that are all reminiscent of the spirit Nyerere put forth in ujamaa.

In addition, Nyerere supported the presence of foreign cultures in Tanzania saying, "a nation which refuses to learn from foreign cultures is nothing but a nation of idiots and lunatics…to learn from other cultures does not mean we should abandon our own." Under his leadership, the Ministry of National Culture and Youth was created in order to allow Tanzanian popular culture, in this case hip hop, to develop and flower. As a result of Nyerere’s presence in Tanzania, the genre of hip hop was welcomed from overseas in Tanzania and melded with the spirit of ujamaa.

Julius Nyerere on the Arusha Declaration

It is particularly important that we should now understand the connection between freedom, development, and discipline, because our national policy of creating socialist villages throughout the rural areas depends upon it. For we have known for a very long time that development had to go on in the rural areas, and that this required co-operative activities by the people . . .

When we tried to promote rural development in the past, we sometimes spent huge sums of money on establishing a Settlement, and supplying it with modern equipment, and social services, as well as often providing it with a management hierarchy . . . All too often, we persuaded people to go into new settlements by promising them that they could quickly grow rich there, or that Government would give them services and equipment which they could not hope to receive either in the towns or in their traditional farming places. In very few cases was any ideology involved; we thought and talked in terms of greatly increased output, and of things being provided for the settlers.

What we were doing, in fact, was thinking of development in terms of things, and not of people. . . As a result, there have been very many cases where heavy capital investment has resulted in no increase in output where the investment has been wasted. And in most of the officially sponsored or supported schemes, the majority of people who went to settle lost their enthusiasm, and either left the scheme altogether, or failed to carry out the orders of the outsiders who were put in charge — and who were not themselves involved in the success or failure of the project.

It is important, therefore, to realize that the policy of ujamaa Vijijini is not intended to be merely a revival of the old settlement schemes under another name. The Ujamaa village is a new conception, based on the post Arusha Declaration understanding that what we need to develop is people, not things, and that people can only develop themselves . . .

Ujamaa villages are intended to be socialist organizations created by the people, and governed by those who live and work in them.

They cannot be created from outside, nor governed from outside. No one can be forced into an Ujamaa village, and no official — at any level — can go and tell the members of an Ujamaa village what they should do together, and what they should continue to do as individual farmers . . .

It is important that these things should be thoroughly understood. It is also important that the people should not be persuaded to start an Ujamaa village by promises of the things which will be given to them if they do so. A group of people must decide to start an Ujamaa village because they have understood that only through this method can they live and develop in dignity and freedom, receiving the full benefits of their co-operative endeavour . . .

Unless the purpose and socialist ideology of an Ujamaa village is understood by the members from the beginning — at least to some extent it will not survive the early difficulties. For no-one can guarantee that there will not be a crop failure in the first or second year — there might be a drought or floods. And the greater self-discipline which is necessary when working in a community will only be forthcoming if the people understand what they are doing and why . . .

Nyerere on The Arusha Declaration - Excerpts from J.K. Nyerere, Freedom and Development (Government Printer, Dar-es-Salaam, (no date) Reprinted in Freedom and Development (Oxford University Press, 1973). Copyright retained by the President.

Within the Declaration there was a commitment to raising basic living standards (and an opposition to conspicuous consumption and large private wealth). The socialism he believed in was ‘people-centred’. Humanness in its fullest sense rather than wealth creation must come first. Societies become better places through the development of people rather than the gearing up of production. This was a matter that Nyerere took to be important both in political and private terms. Unlike many other politicians, he did not amass a large fortune through exploiting his position.

The policy met with significant political resistance (especially when people were forced into rural communes) and little economic success. Nearly 10 million peasants were moved and many were effectively forced to give up their land. The idea of collective farming was less than attractive to many peasants. A large number found themselves worse off. Productivity went down. However, the focus on human development and self-reliance did bring some success in other areas notably in health, education and in political identity.

Education for self-reliance

As Yusuf Kassam (1995: 250) has noted, Nyerere’s educational philosophy can be approached under two main headings: education for self-reliance; and adult education, lifelong learning and education for liberation. His interest in self-reliance shares a great deal with Gandhi’s approach.

There was a strong concern to counteract the colonialist assumptions and practices of the dominant, formal means of education. He saw it as enslaving and oriented to ‘western’ interests and norms. Kassim (1995: 251) sums up his critique of the Tanzanian (and other former colonies) education system as follows:

1. Formal education is basically elitist in nature, catering to the needs and interests of the very small proportion of those who manage to enter the hierarchical pyramid of formal schooling: ‘We have not until now questioned the basic system of education which we took over at the time of Independence. We have never done that because we have never thought about education except in terms of obtaining teachers, engineers, administrators, etc. Individually and collectively we have in practice thought of education as a training for the skills required to earn high salaries in the modern sector of our economy’.

2. The education system divorces its participants from the society for which they are supposed to be trained.

3. The system breeds the notion that education is synonymous with formal schooling, and people are judged and employed on the basis of their ability to pass examinations and acquire paper qualifications.

4. The system does not involve its students in productive work. Such a situation deprives society of their much-needed contribution to the increase in national economic output and also breeds among the students a contempt for manual work.

Nyerere set out his vision in ‘Education for Self Reliance’ (reprinted in Nyerere 1968). Education had to work for the common good, foster co-operation and promote equality. Further, it had to address the realities of life in Tanzania. The following changes were proposed:

1.  It should be oriented to rural life.

2. Teachers and students should engage together in productive activities and students should participate in the planning and decision-making process of organizing these activities.

3. Productive work should become an integral part of the school curriculum and provide meaningful learning experience through the integration of theory and practice.

4. The importance of examinations should be downgraded.

5. Children should begin school at age 7 so that they would be old enough and sufficiently mature to engage in self-reliant and productive work when they leave school.

6. Primary education should be complete in itself rather than merely serving as a means to higher education.

7. Students should become self-confident and co-operative, and develop critical and inquiring minds. (summarized in Kassam 1995: 253

Judged today, the educational reforms met with some success and some failure. The policies were never fully implemented and had to operate against a background of severe resource shortage and a world orientation to more individualistic and capitalist understandings of the relation of education to production. However, primary education became virtually universal; curriculum materials gained distinctively Tanzanian flavours; and schooling used local language forms (Samoff 1990).

Adult education, lifelong learning and learning for liberation

In the Declaration of Dar es Salaam Julius Nyerere made a ringing call for adult education to be directed at helping people to help themselves and for it to approached as part of life: 'integrated with life and inseparable from it'. For him adult education had two functions. To:

1. Inspire both a desire for change, and an understanding that change is possible.

2. Help people to make their own decisions, and to implement those decisions for themselves. (Nyerere 1978: 29, 30)

Julius Nyerere - The Declaration of Dar - es - Salaam

[Man can only liberate himself or develop himself. He cannot be liberated or developed by another. For Man makes himself. It is his ability to act deliberately, for a self-determined purpose, which distinguishes him from the other animals. The expansion of his own consciousness, and therefore of his power over himself, his environment, and his society, must therefore ultimately be what we mean by development.

So development is for Man, by Man, and of Man. The same is true of education. Its purpose is the liberation of Man from the restraints and limitations of ignorance and dependency. Education has to increase men’s physical and mental freedom to increase their control over themselves, their own lives, [page 28] the environment in which they live.

The ideas imparted by education, or released in the mind through education, should therefore be liberating ideas; the skills acquired by education should be liberating skills. Nothing else can properly be called education. Teaching which induces a slave mentality or a sense of impotence is not education at all — it is attack on the minds of men.

This means that adult education has to be directed at helping men to develop themselves. It has to contribute to an enlargement of Man’s ability in every way. In particular it has to help men to decide for themselves —in co-operation—what development is. It must help men to think clearly; it must enable them to examine the possible alternative courses of action; to make a choice between those alternatives in keeping with their own purposes; and it must equip them with the ability to translate their decisions into reality.

The personal and physical aspects of development cannot be separated. It is in the process of deciding for himself what is development, and deciding in what direction it should take his society, and in implementing those decisions, that Man develops himself. For man does not develop himself in a vacuum, in isolation from his society and his environment; and he certainly cannot be developed by others. Man’s consciousness is developed in the process of thinking, and deciding and of acting. His capacity is developed in the process of doing things.

But doing things means co-operating with others, for in isolation Man is virtually helpless physically, and stultified mentally. Education for liberation is therefore also education for co-operation among men, because it is in co-operation with others that Man liberates himself from the constraints of nature, and also those imposed upon him by his fellow-men. Education is thus intensely personal.

In the sense that it has to be a personal experience— no one cam have his consciousness developed by proxy. But it is also am activity of great social significance, because the man whom education liberates is a man in society, and his society will be affected by the change which education creates in him.

There is another aspect to this. A Man learns because he wants to do something. And once he has started along this road of developing his capacity he also learns because he wants to be; to be a more conscious and understanding person. Learning has not liberated a man if all he learns to want is a certificate [page 29] on his wall, and the reputation of being a ‘learned person’— a possessor of knowledge.

For such a desire is merely another aspect of the disease of the acquisitive society - the accumulation of goods for the sake of accumulating then. The accumulation of knowledge or, worse still, the accumulation of pieces of paper which represent a kind of legal tender for such knowledge, has nothing to do with development.

So if adult education is to contribute to development, it must be a part of life — integrated with life and inseparable from it. It is not something which can be put into a box and taken out for certain periods of the day or week—or certain periods of a life. And it cannot be imposed: every learner is ultimately a volunteer, because, however much teaching he is given, only he can learn.

Further, adult education is not something which can deal with just "agriculture", or "health", or "literacy", or "mechanical skill", etc. All these separate branches of education are related to the total life a man is living, and to the man he is and will become. Learning how best to grow soy-beans is of little use to a man if it is not combined with learning about nutrition and/or the existence of a market for the beans.

This means that adult education will promote changes in men, and in society. And it means that adult education should promote change, at the same time as it assists men to control both the change which they induce, and that which is forced upon them by the decisions of other men or the cataclysms of nature. Further, it means that adult education encompasses the whole of life, and must build upon what already exists.

Extract from Julius K. Nyerere '"Development is for Man, by Man, and of Man": The Declaration of Dar es Salaam' in Budd L. Hall and J. Roby Kidd (eds.) (1978) Adult Education: A design for action, Oxford: Pergamon.

Nyerere's view of adult education stretched far beyond the classroom. It is 'anything which enlarges men's understanding, activates them, helps them to make their own decisions, and to implement those decisions for themselves' (Nyerere 1978: 30). It includes 'agitation' and 'organization and mobilization'. There are two types of educator involved:

• generalists like community development workers, political activists and religious teachers. Such people are not politically neutral, they will affect how people look at the society in which they live, and how they seek to use it or change it. (ibid.: 31)

•  specialists like those concerned with health, agriculture, child care, management and literacy.

Adult education, for Nyerere, doesn't have a beginning or an end. It should not be pressed into self-contained compartments. Rather we need to think of lifelong learning. Living is learning and learning is about trying to live better. 'We must accept that education and working are both parts of living and should continue from birth until we die (1973: 300-301).

In terms of method, two aspects stand out:

• Educators do not give to another something they possess. Rather, they help learners to develop their own potential and capacity.

•  Those that educators work with have experience and knowledge about the subjects they are interested in - although they may not realize it.

[B]y drawing out the things the learner already knows, and showing their relevance to the new thing which has to be learnt, the teacher has done three things. He has built up the self-confidence of the man who wants to learn, by showing him that he is capable of contributing. He has demonstrated the relevance of experience and observation as a method of learning when combined with thought and analysis.

And he ha shown what I might call the "mutuality" of learning—that is, that by sharing our knowledge we extend the totality of our understanding and our control over our lives. (1978: 33)

The teacher of adults is , for Nyerere, a leader - 'a guide along a path which all will travel together' (ibid.: 34).

In practical terms this approach proved successful. Mass literacy campaigns were initiated and carried through (for example, between 1975 and 1977 illiteracy fell from 39 to 27 per cent - by 1986 it was at 9.6 per cent); and various health and agricultural programmes were mounted e.g the 'Man is Health' campaign in 1973, and 'Food is Life' (1975) (Mushi and Bwatwa 1998). Adult education initiatives have made a significant contribution to mobilising people for development (Kassam 1979).

Hero of Southern Africa’s Liberation

A committed pan-Africanist, Nyerere provided a home for a number of African liberation movements including the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress (PAC) of South Africa, Frelimo when seeking to overthrow Portuguese rule in Mozambique, Zanla (and Robert Mugabe) in their struggle to unseat the white regime in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

He also opposed the brutal regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. Following a border invasion by Amin in 1978, a 20,000-strong Tanzanian army along with rebel groups, invaded Uganda. It took the capital, Kampala, in 1979, restoring Uganda’s first President, Milton Obote, to power. The battle against Amin was expensive and placed a strain on government finances.

There was considerable criticism within Tanzania that he had both overlooked domestic issues and had not paid proper attention to internal human rights abuses. Tanzania was a one party state – and while there was a strong democratic element in organization and a concern for consensus, this did not stop Nyerere using the Preventive Detention Act to imprison opponents. In part this may have been justified by the need to contain divisiveness, but there does appear to have been a disjuncture between his commitment to human rights on the world stage, and his actions at home.

Retirement

In 1985 Nyerere gave up the Presidency but remained as chair of the Party - Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). He gradually withdrew from active politics, retiring to his farm in Butiama. In 1990 he relinquished his chairmanship of CCM but remained active on the world stage as Chair of the Intergovernmental South Centre. One of his last high profile actions was as the chief mediator in the Burundi conflict (in 1996). He died in a London hospital of leukaemia on October 14, 1999.

Tom Porteous, writing in The Independent (October 15, 1999) summed him up as follows:

Slight in build, somewhat austere in manner, Nyerere was neither vain nor arrogant. He set great store by honesty and sincerity. A family man devoted to his wife and children, he was extremely loyal to his friends - sometimes to a fault.

He inspired among his people both devotion and respect and returned the compliment by complete dedication to his work on their behalf as head of state. He was ready to admit his mistakes, and to show flexibility and pragmatism, but never if this meant compromising his cherished Catholic, humanist and socialist ideals.

Nyerere’s life and career are an inspiration to the many Africans who dismiss the notion current in elite African circles today that justice, dignity and freedom should be subordinated to the single-minded pursuit of prosperity through economic liberalisation and structural adjustment. Africa needs more leaders of Nyerere’s quality, integrity and wisdom.

There are two ways to lose oneself: by a walled segregation in the particular or by a dilution in the 'universal'
— Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

Martinican poet, playwright, and politician, one of the most influential authors from the French-speaking Caribbean Aimé Césaire formulated, with Léopold Senghor and Léon Gontran Damas, the concept and movement of Négritude, defined as "affirmation that one is black and proud of it".

 Césaire's thoughts about restoring the cultural identity of black Africans were first fully expressed in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land), a mixture of poetry and poetic prose. The work celebrated the ancestral homelands of Africa and the Caribbean. It was completed in 1939 but not published in full form until 1947.

my negritude is not a stone

nor a deafness flung against the clamor of the day

my negritude is not a white speck of dead water

on the dead eye of the earth

my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral

it plunges into the red flesh of the soil

it plunges into the blaxing flesh of the sky my negritude riddles with holes

the dense affliction of its worthy patience.

Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, in the French Caribbean. His father, Fernand Elphège, was educated as teacher, but later worked as a manager of a sugar estate. Eléonore, Césaire's mother, was a seamstress. In Cahier Césaire described his childhood in a harsh light:

"And the bed of planks from which my race has risen, all my race from this bed of planks on its feet of kerosene cases, as if the old bed had elephantiasis, covered with a goat skin, and its dried banana leaves and its rags, the ghost of a mattress that is my grandmother's bed (above the bed in a pot full of oil a candle-end whose flame looks like a fat turnip, and on the side of the pot, in letters of gold:

MERCI)." Césaire's family was poor, but his parents invested in the education of their children. To faciliate the studies of their talented son, they moved Basse Pointe to Fort-de-France, the capital. Amog Césaire's classmate at the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France was Léon Damas, who later contributed to négritude.

Césaire had excellent grades in school. At the age of 18 he went to Paris on a scholarship to continue his education. He attended the Lycée Louis-le Grand, the École Normale Supérieure, and ultimately the Sorbonne, where he studied Latin, Greek, and French literature. In 1935 he went to Yugoslavia with Peter Guberina,

During his years in Paris Césaire met other Caribbean, West African, and African American students, but the most important acquaintance was Léopold Senghor, a poet and later the first president of independent Senegal. Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948) became an important landmark of modern black writing in French.

In 1937 Césaire married Suzanne Roussi; they had four sons and two daughters. Two years later Césaire moved with his family back to Martinique, where he started to work as a teacher at the Lycee Schoelcher. Among his students were Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant. In Haiti, where the Provisional French government sent him as a cultural ambassador, Césaire lectured on French poetry. His first play, La tragédie du roi Christophe (1963, The Tragedy of King Christophe), drew on one of Haiti's earliest leaders, Henri Christophe.
 
During World War II Césaire was close with André Breton, who spent the war years in the United States and West Indies. Breton encouraged Césaire to use surrealism as a political weapon. These poems were collected in Les Armes miraculeuses (1946), Soliel cou coupe (1948, Beheaded Sun), and Corps perdu (1950, Disembodied / Lost Body). Cahier d'un retour au pays natal was described by Breton "the greatest lyrical monument of our time".

Since the end of the war Césaire divided his time between Paris and Martinique. A member of the Communist Party, Césaire participated in political action and supported the decolonization of the French colonies of Africa.

 He co-founded with his wife Suzanne and other Martinican intellectuals the cultural journal Tropiques, in which he published his early poetry. In 1945 Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and he was one of the island's deputies in the French National Assembly. Césaire resigned from the Communist Party in 1956 and depicted this decision in Lettre à Maurice Thorez (1956, Letter to Maurize Thorez). In 1958 he founded the Martinican Progressive Party.

Disappointed by the government's promises of socioeconomic improvements in Martinique, Césaire ceased to speak after 1950s in parliament and did not publish poetry for several years. However, he was active in international forums for the liberation of the Third World.

Between the years 1939 and 1955, Césaire mainly focused on poetry. His poems usually concerned with slavery, freedom, and paradise. He deployed language against French colonialism. "I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement." (from Discours sur le colonialisme, 1955) Césaire's comrades in the French Communist Party attacked his linguistically difficult works for obscurity. In the 1950s he began to write more accessibly, but his international reputation was not established until towards the end of the fifties.
 
Césaire criticism of European civilization and colonial racism in Discours sur le colonialisme (1955) influenced deeply Frantz Fanon's revolutionary manifesto Black Skin, White Masks (1967, available at Timbooktoo), an examination of psychic, cultural and social damages inflicted by colonialism. Césaire paralles the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized with the relationship between Nazis and their victims.

 "People are astounded, they are angry. They say: "How strange that is. But then it is only Nazism, it won’t last." And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves: It is savagery, the supreme savagery, it crowns, it epitomizes the day-to-day savageries; yes, it is Nazism, but before they became its victims, they were its accomplices; that Nazism they tolerated before they succumbed to it, they exonerated it, they closed their eyes to it, they legitimated it because until then it had been employed only against non-European peoples; that Nazism they encouraged, they were responsible for it, and it drips, it seeps, it wells from every crack in Western Christian civilization until it engulfs that civilization in a bloody sea." Césaire saw colonialism in exactly the same light as Nazism.

Et les chiens se taisaient (1956, And the Dogs Kept Quiet), a story about the blacks and their humiliation, marked Césaire's transition from poetry to drama. La tragédie du roi Christophe, the first part of his trilogy, was about an early-19th-century Haitian ruler, Henri Christophe, who faced the task of building a state after independence.

In Une saison au Congo (1966, A Season in the Congo), the second part of the trilogy, Césaire dealt with the tragedy of Patrice Lumumba and his assassination. In the play Lumumba is a poet-leader who inflames the African conscience, but fails to unify his own country.

The trilogy was finished by Une Tempète (1968), a radical rewriting of Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Césaire portrayed Prospero, the white man, as a decadent colonizer; Caliban, the man of instinct, has a black cultural heritage, he rebels for his freedom, but fails and accuses Prospero: "Prospero, you are the master of illusion. Lying is your trademark."

Ariel, a mulatto slave, is pressed between these opposite forces of Caliban and Prospero. Une Tempète was first published in the journal Présence africaine in 1968. Caliban's first word is "Uhuru", which is Swahili for "freedom". "Call me X", says Caliban in the 1969 text, echoing the radical voice of Malcolm X.

In 1993 Césaire retired from politics, but he remained a fervent anticolonialist, and in 2005 he refused to meet with Nicolas Sarkozy, the minister of the interior at that time. Césaire died on April 17, 2008, in Fort-de-France.

For further reading: Aimé Césaire by Gregson Davies, Abiola Irele (1997); Critical Perspectives on Aimé Césaire, ed. by Thomas Hale (1992); Aimé Césaire by Janis L. Pallister (1991); Modernism and Negritude: the Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire by A. James Arnold (1981); Aimé Césaire by Susan Frutkin (1973); Aimé Césaire by L. Kesteloot (1962).

The passionate, lyrical voice of the poet from Martinique was part of a lifework that embrace négritude, Marxism and surrealism all in one, says Nira Wickramasinghe.

"Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge" (Aimé Césaire)

Aimé Césaire died on 17 April 2008 in Fort-de-France on the French Caribbean island of Martinique at the ripe age of 94. His life and political choices are truly captured in his friend and surrealist writer André Breton's words: Césaire was the "prototype of dignity".

But, like most brilliantly creative men, he had more than one incarnation. Throughout his long life, Césaire contained the multiple identities of surrealist poet, political playwright, intellectual engagé, politician and anti-colonial crusader.

Aimé Césaire was born in 1913 in the small town of Basse Pointe in Martinique to a lower-middle-class family. He displayed early brilliance and was admitted at the age of 11 to the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France. After moving to Paris, and studying in the prestigious Lycee Louis Le Grand, he prepared for the competitive entrance exam of the elite École normale supérieure.

During this period, many African and Caribbean intellectuals had been recruited under the French colonial policy of assimilation to study at metropolitan universities. The years Aimé Césaire spent in Paris were formative in many ways. There he absorbed French culture, European humanities and learned Latin and Greek; but he also befriended the Senegalese intellectual Léopold Sédar Senghor (with whom he began to study African history and culture), and was exposed in Paris to influences from African-American movements such as the Harlem renaissance.

In this intellectually ebullient climate Césaire and Senghor (together with Césaire's childhood friend Léon-Gontran Damas) launched a journal called L'Etudiant Noir (The Black Student) featuring the works of writers from Africa and the Caribbean. The concept of "négritude" - defined as the "affirmation that one is black and proud of it" - was coined by them in the first issue of the journal, although credit is generally ascribed to Senghor alone. Négritude blossomed into a political, philosophical and literary theory that would have repercussions all over the world.
 
A return to source

Much of Césaire's later work revolved around the theme of restoring the cultural identity of black Africans. Critiques of négritude have pointed to the essentialism and nativism inherent in the idea that all people of negro descent shared certain inalienable essential characteristics.

But négritude went beyond the race-based assertions of African dignity of WEB du Bois or Marcus Garvey, in that it attempted to extend perceptions of the negro as possessing a distinctive personality in all spheres of life, intellectual, emotional and physical. Within the négritude stream, Césaire's life and oeuvre was special and different in its attempt to embrace négritude, Marxism and surrealism all in one.

In the early 1940s Aimé Césaire and his wife Suzanne Roussy (Roussi) returned to Martinique and took up teaching posts in Fort-de- France. With other colleagues and friends they launched a new journal called Tropiques.

This became a major voice for surrealism which they perceived as the strategy for revolution and emancipation of the mind. Césaire's most renowned works, Les Armes Miraculeuses (Miraculous Weapons) and Soleil cou coupé (Beheaded sun), embraced both surrealism and négritude. But it was his Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal (1939) that brought him fame and led André Breton to describe it as the "the greatest lyrical monument of our time".

This epic poem depicts in symbolic imagery the degradation of black people and describes the rediscovery of an African sense of self. It provided the all important starting-point for the claiming of a black Caribbean identity.

By the end of the second world war, Césaire - like many young intellectuals of the time - joined the French Communist Party (PCF). He took an active interest in politics, running successfully for mayor of Fort-de-France and was for decades deputy to the French national assembly.

He was instrumental in the change of status of the former colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guinea, and Reunion from colony to départements within the French republic. In 1956 he broke away from the Communist Party partly because of its unwillingness to condemn the Soviet Union's intervention in Hungary and partly because of the privileging of proletarian revolution over anti-colonial struggles.

Thus while many communist intellectuals in France remained mute, Césaire took a principled stand. He later created his own political formation, the Martinique Progressive Party, and openly supported the candidature of Ségolène Royal in the 2007 presidential election.

Césaire's writings and politics had a deep impact on the francophone colonised world. His Discourse on Colonialism (1950), less known than the writings of his former student Frantz Fanon, argued subtly that colonialism affected the colonised as as much as the coloniser who was dehumanised through the practice of torture and violence. It dealt with issues that would be taken up by postcolonial thinkers in the later 20th century: the importance of an ideology of race and culture that sustained colonial rule anticipated the idea that colonialism is also domination through knowledge. He believed that a revolt of the tiers monde was the only path possible for the creation of a just world.

His later works on colonialism were grounded in history. He wrote about Toussaint L'Ouverture's heroic attempt at revolution, about Patrice Lumumba's struggle in the Congo and finally adapted Shakespeare's Tempest to explore the relation between coloniser and colonised.

Reading him is a caution against today's tendency to read colonialism as an encounter between cultures or the creation of contact-zones. Reading him serves as a reminder that colonialism was essentially humiliation and pain.

Aimé Césaire never lost his dignity and as a intellectual engagé always took a principled stand, critiquing in the same vein all the avatars of modernity from Marxism to nationalism and colonialism with the trenchant weapon of poetry. He leaves us beautiful words reminiscent of some of Mallarmé's poems, complex and demanding yet conveying a piercing sensation of beauty and depth.

Nira Wickramasinghe is a professor in the department of history and international relations, the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She grew up in Paris and studied at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne and at Oxford University, where she earned her doctorate Among her books are Civil Society in Sri Lanka: New Circles of Power (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks/ Sage, 2001); Dressing the Colonised Body: Politics, Clothing and Identity in Colonial Sri Lanka (New Delhi, Orient Longman, 2003); and Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities (C Hurst and University of Hawaii Press, 2006).

The "official dialogue process" began on 29 January between Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), even as violence that has ravaged the country since late December continued to spread, with the latest casualty a Member of Parliament who was shot dead outside his home in Nairobi, the capital.

Pledging his commitment to the process of national healing and reconciliation, Kibaki announced that 32 fully-equipped police stations would be built in parts of the country affected by the violence. He said Ksh700 million (US$10 million) had already been committed to this project.

ODM leader Raila Odinga also committed himself to the dialogue process but maintained that the most urgent issue facing the country was the resolution of the "deeply flawed" presidential elections that have resulted in violence in many parts of the country.

Both leaders condemned the killing of the MP for Embakasi constituency in Nairobi, Mellitus Mugabe Were.

Police spokesman Eric Kiraithe told IRIN the police was treating the case as murder, "but this man was a politician and you can never rule out anything".

The MP's killing fuelled the already high political tension across the country. Hundreds of people have been killed and at least 255,000 displaced since the violence started soon after an announcement by the Electoral Commission of Kenya declaring Kibaki winner of the 27 December 2007 presidential elections.

Were, who won the seat on an ODM ticket, was shot dead as he returned home in the early hours of 29 January.

"We have put together a very competent [investigations] team," Kiraithe said, adding that the police were not ruling out a political motive for the murder.

He said ODM was free to send an investigator of its choice to join the police inquiry team to avoid any suspicions of a cover-up.

However, ODM leader Raila Odinga said the killing was nothing less than an assassination.

"This was an assassination; planned and executed by ODM's enemies," he said on local television. "How can the police spokesman dismiss it as a common murder yet no investigation has been carried out?"

When the news of the MP's killing spread, trouble started in various areas of the city, with reports that four people were killed in chaos that erupted in the Kibera slum, in the constituency represented by Odinga.

A local journalist, who requested anonymity, said rowdy youths had created boundaries in sections of the slums, depending on their ethnicity.

"The gangs, armed with machetes and all sorts of crude weapons, have created borders that members of the different ethnic groups dare not cross," the journalist said.

Earlier, Kiraithe said the police had prevented youths from Kibera slum and Umoja residential area from taking to the streets to protest at Were's murder.

"Right now the situation is under control," he said. "People out to destroy lives and property will not be treated with kid gloves."

However, tension remained high across the country as an African Union-mandated team, led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, held its first national reconciliation meeting with Kibaki and Odinga, who have nominated three members each to lead their parties in the negotiations.

Annan arrived in the country last week and has already held meetings with the two groups as well as other stakeholders. He has also visited camps for thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs).

Education crisis in Samburu

Meanwhile, in the far-flung northern district of Samburu, school has yet to start as teachers and parents continue to avoid the area due to fear caused by the post-election violence.

Education officials said on 28 January that a number of teachers from outside the district had already secured transfers to their home district or to other areas they considered safe.

The Samburu executive secretary of the Kenya National Union of Teachers, Raphael Lesaloit, said the district was experiencing a shortage of teachers and appealed to the government to consider recruiting local graduates to replace teachers who had moved out of the district.

"We already had a shortage of teachers in the district; the situation is worse now because more teachers have left out of fear and some have secured transfers to other areas," Lesaloit said.

Some parents who fled the area following attacks soon after the election results had yet to return.

Moreover, local schools have yet to receive teaching materials and funds for free primary education. A teacher at a school in Maralal, the district's headquarters, said they would have to send home children who had reported to school or demand money from their parents because the government had not sent any money.

Government services in the district have also been affected as several public servants have left, with the worst affected offices the ministry of health, veterinary and livestock services.

At the same time, workers at hotels in Samburu and Isiolo districts have been sent home after tourist cancellations.

Fabian Lolosoli, a member of the Samburu Tourism Cultural Group, said the cancellations and difficulties getting livestock to market had deprived many families of income.

"The government and donors are focusing their attention on the internally displaced in areas affected by conflict whilst we are suffering in silence,” Lolosoli said.

"Intervention measures to help Kenyans affected by the chaos should also take our plight into consideration," he said.