Background
Oscar Kamboima was born on August 1928 at Songea in Southern Province, the son of a radical Anglican priest from the Mnyanja tribe in Nyasaland, who believed in salvation by good works.
Oscar Kamboima was born on August 1928 at Songea in Southern Province, the son of a radical Anglican priest from the Mnyanja tribe in Nyasaland, who believed in salvation by good works.
Educated at the Songea Mission School and the Government Secondary School, Tabora. He taught from 1951 to 1954 at Alliance School, Dodoma, when he was urged by his pupils to get into politics.
He was appointed Minister for Education and Minister for Home Affairs from 1962 to 1963. During the army mutiny of January 1964 he showed great personal courage and was the one really important government figure who remained at his post, broadcasting an appeal for calm.
In 1963 he became Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence and was fast approaching the peak of his power. He resigned the Defence Ministry, ostensibly on health grounds, in April 1964 and in 1965, President Nyerere took the running of External Affairs away from him. Kambona continued as chairman of the African Liberation Committee of the Organisation for African Unity, which was based in Dar es Salaam. He led the Tanzanian delegation to the OAU Assembly meeting at Addis Ababa early in 1966, but then spent the next three months in Holland, having medical treatment, and returned to lead the Tanzanian team to the Ministerial Council Session of the OAU in November 1966.
But during this period he was serving at home in the comparatively unimportant Ministries of Regional Administration from 1965 to 1967 and Rural Development from 1967, and it became clear that disagreements on foreign policy issues between himself and President Nyerere had resulted in his dismissal as Foreign Affairs Minister in 1964.
Since then, the two men had grown further apart. Kambona appeared to disagree with the Arusha declaration introduced in 1967, which ordered, among other things, that no men in public office should have more than one house, one job and one salary.
He resigned his ministry and the secretary generalship in the party and left for Britain in June, immediately after a cabinet reshuffle in which B. A. Hanga, a close friend, was dismissed.
The true reasons for his departure have still not been fully clarified, but Nyerere on January 12, 1965, asked him to return and testify before a judicial commission concerning £44,840 that had accumulated in his bank account over an 18 months period. Meanwhile, Kambona claimed that a plot had been unearthed in order to frame him. There were other accusations concerning the way Kambona had carried out his duties as chairman of the OAU Liberation Committee.
In the celebrated treason trial of May 1970, he was accused, in absentia, of master-minding a plot in 1967-1969, to bring himself to power after President Nyerere had been removed and his government overthrown. The charge was dropped when it was found that he could not be tried under Tanzanian law if he remained in Britain, but the case against his alleged associates continued for 14 months and three of the eight accused were found guilty.
During the celebrations to mark Tanzania’s tenth anniversary of independence on December 9, 1971, he hired two small planes to drop leaflets over Dar es Salaam, challenging the President to meet him and face him in free elections. Further leaflets followed on June 1, 1972, in other provincial capitals, signed by him as the leader of the Movement for Free and Popular Democracy.
On June 27, his two younger brothers, Otini and Mattiya Kambona, were detained. They had earlier been detained from December 1967, shortly after he had gone to Britain, to February 1971. They were picked up on June 12, 1972, following a series of bomb blasts in Dar es Salaam, for which Oscar was held responsible.
He left London for Lisbon in the early part of 1972 and announced that his organisation was harrying President Nyerere from a secret base in Northern Mozambique and had been responsible for dropping the leaflets on the Tanzanian cities.
He had followed the formation of the Tanganyika African National Union with enthusiasm and went to offer his services to Julius Nyerere. He was appointed organising and general secretary for the party in November 1954. For two years he energetically built and organised the party into the most united movement in independent Africa and with membership at over 100,000, he left in 1956 to read law in London at the Middle Temple. With elections approaching, Nyerere needed him back in Tanzania and recalled him before he had qualified. He was returned unopposed in August 1960, as member for Morogoro.
Five feet five inches tall, with a dominating personality and a warm, uninhibited and impulsive manner. When he was a colleague of President Nyerere and the heir apparent, his great achievements were the building of the Tanganyika African National Union Party, the prominence he gave his country in Pan-African Affairs and the courage he showed at the time of the army mutiny in 1964. Later he quarrelled bitterly with his friend and mentor and finally fled to Britain. Years in exile bred hatred and suspicion and he turned all his energies against the man he once admired and respected, even drawing support from the Portuguese, the traditional enemies of his nation. His rigorous opposition to Nyerere did very little to affect the course of events inside Tanzania.