The Nyerere Educational Resource Center is planning a documentary film about Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and his importance in modern African history. The documentary will premiere in April 2011, in time for the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of of the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar that created the new nation of Tanzania.

I am an African is the story of Julius Nyerere and the perils of nation building in Africa. From before independence in 1961 to his retirement in 1985, Nyerere led Tanzania into peaceful independence, overcoming colonialism, internal divisions, and Cold War intrigue to build a unified nation that led the drive to liberate southern Africa from white minority rule. While he never succumbed to corruption like many of his peers, Nyerere dominated Tanzanian politics for nearly twenty-five years. With uncompromising idealism and piercing analysis, Nyerere inspired a generation with his vision for Africa as “the continent of hope for the human race.” Yet most Americans have never heard his name. This is a request to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Development Grant to begin a television documentary about this charismatic and important African leader, who helps us envision inspirational leadership for Africa today.

Nationalism is a question of critical importance in the world today, as peace, legal order, and economic relations are formed around the assumptions of the nation-state system. This question has become a central one for American foreign policy in the last decade as the US seeks to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan as sovereign democracies and independent participants in the international system. The problem is that the people of these countries are torn between many different loyalties, not all to the new governments. For many, their primary loyalties are to ethnic, family, and religious identities that do not conform to the arbitrary boundaries that define their status in the international system. American foreign policy experts have likewise discovered that “collapsed states” like Somalia present a fertile ground for future threats to international stability. In this context, an analysis of Tanzania’s success in building a stable nation-state—of multiple religions and ethnicities—will help American and international audiences think more deeply about the challenges of the nation-state system and their place in it.

The first waves of independence from colonial rule began to move across Africa in the 1960s, making this the 50th anniversary, and thus the perfect time to focus on the issue of post-colonial Africa. It is a period marked by the collapse of hopes in that exhilarating moment, and rare triumphs against great odds. Nyerere pursued his course out of his genuine desire to build a peaceful and prosperous society, and thus his failures cannot be attributed to greed or other personal shortcomings, but are rooted in deeper structural issues which continue to vex African leaders. In 1994, South Africa invited Nyerere to talk to the first post-apartheid parliament. Praising their great accomplishment, the elder statesman spoke of the misconceptions awaiting African leaders in the international realm. Nyerere joked that while outsiders may treat Nelson Mandela with unusual deference, “for the likes of me, no! I am an African!” As the laughter died down, Nyerere made a more serious point: Africa’s nations are recent creations, fragile constructions that need to support each other in a hostile world.

This one-hour documentary—built on interviews with key participants in this history, archival film and photographs, and research of leading scholars—will illustrate for an American audience how independent Africa has wrestled with crucial political challenges in today’s world.