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VIDEOS OF OSCAR KAMBONA
Oscar Salathiel Kambona was
the first Minister of Foreign Affairs of Tanganyika.
He is the second-most influential and most popular leader in the country after
President Julius Nyerere.
Kambona was born on 13 August
1928 on the shores of Lake Nyasa in a small village called Kwambe near Mbamba
Bay in the district of Nyasa near Songea in Ruvuma region southern Tanganyika.
He died in London
in November 1997.
Kambona
became the secretary-general of the Tanganyika African National Union
(TANU) during the struggle for independence and worked closely with Nyerere who
was president of TANU, the party which led Tanganyika to independence.
Tanganyika won independence from Britain on 9 December 1961. The two were the most prominent
leaders of the independence movement in Tanganyika in the 1950s.
The two leaders had been close
political allies and personal friends since the days of the independence
struggle when they were the main leaders of the independence movement. In fact,
when Kambona married a former Miss Tanganyika at a cathedral in London, Nyerere
was his best man.
But the two leaders started
drifting apart a few years after independence. The first rift occurred in 1964
during the army mutiny, and then in 1965 when Tanzania officially became a
one-party state. As a cabinet member, Oscar
Kambona supported the transition to a one-party state but did so reluctantly,
only as a team player.
He was opposed to the change
because he said there was no mechanism guaranteeing change of government by
constitutional means in a country dominated by one party. He also contended
that there were no constitutional safeguards to make sure that the country did
not drift into dictatorship.
The next split with Nyerere
came in February 1967 when Tanzania adopted the Arusha Declaration, an economic and political
blueprint for the transformation of Tanzania into a socialist state. Kambona
was opposed to socialism.
A few months later, in July
1967, Oscar Kambona left Tanzania with his wife and children and went into
"self-imposed" exile in London.
He died in London in July
1997, almost exactly 30 years after he first went into exile in Britain in July
1967 where he lived for 25 years before returning to his home country in 1992
to spend the last few years of his life.
Despite his political
misfortunes, Oscar Kambona will always be remembered as one of the most
prominent leaders of Tanzania who also played a leading role in the struggle
for independence and who relentlessly campaigned for the adoption of multiparty
democracy in Tanzania.
Videos of Oscar Kambona
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
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