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On 19 May 2025, at about 2:30 a.m., I and two Kenyan comrades, Hussein Khalid and Hanifa Farsafi disembarked from a Kenya Airways flight that had landed at Julius Nyerere International Airport from Nairobi. The three of us were aware that three of our compatriots, including Hon. Martha Karua, had been detained at this airport earlier and deported back to Kenya. We were part of the various teams from Kenya and Uganda that were in Dar es Salaam to observe the ongoing treason trial against Hon. Tundu Lissu, the leader of Chadema, Tanzania’s main opposition political party.
We queued up to have our entry into Tanzania processed by the immigration officers. We all carried East African Community passports. An individual who was not a uniformed immigration officer stood by looking at us. When our turn came to be processed, the onlooker confiscated our passports and directed us to sit down on some chairs nearby. He finally told us that we would not be allowed into Tanzania and that, from that moment, we were detained. When we demanded to know why we were being detained, he replied that there were reasons that could only be communicated to us by his boss and urged us to wait for him. He then disappeared after asking a uniformed police woman to take us to a restaurant for breakfast at our expense. We went for breakfast and invited the police woman to join us, which she did, sitting at a distance that allowed us to discuss what we could do.
We were very active on social media from 3 a.m., particularly on X. We called members of teams that had already been allowed to enter Tanzania. We also called Tanzanian lawyers whose contacts we had, including the president of the Tanganyika Law Society. We knew that come sunrise we would start getting responses. And we did. It became clear that we would be deported back to Kenya when we found out that the manager of Kenya Airways in Dar had our passports in his possession; he came to see us about the times of the flights that would be landing at the airport.
We were put on a Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi at 3:05 p.m. and flown back to Kenya. The onlooker was nowhere to be seen. We had learned through social media that comrade Boniface Mwangi had locked himself inside a hotel room to resist arrest. His story, and that of Ugandan comrade Agather Atuhaire – who was arrested and detained by the Tanzanian police together with Mwangi – is now an open secret: it was a violation of the rule of law, and a horrendous psychological, mental, and physical torture. Both have since returned to their respective countries but have had to go to hospital for treatment.
Observation of political trials has become the norm in states that wish to avoid being accused of undermining democracy by oppressing political rivals or in those that believe they have strong cases, believe in justice, and want the rest of the world to know that they respect constitutionalism and the rule of law. There are trials during which rules are seemingly observed yet all the while the judiciary is second-guessing the executive and invariably rendering the wishes of the latter. I wanted to observe which approach Tanzania had adopted. Besides, Hon. Tundu Lissu and I have been friends for decades. I was one of the first Kenyans to see him at the Nairobi Hospital when he was flown there, his life in extreme danger after being shot 27 times. I wrote a foreword to his book on parliamentary democracy which he penned in blood, sweat, and great pain while recovering in Belgium. I admire his courage and determination to get East Africans to see that our current political leadership is not patriotic and cannot engineer any social transformation in the national interest. Although I was not able to get to Lissu’s trial, I have irrefutable evidence confirming that my dear friend knows that nobody retires or retreats as the struggle for liberation continues.
There is a personal footnote to my detention and deportation from Tanzania. I studied law at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) between 1968 and 1971 and from 1973 to 1974. It was at the UDSM, the Mecca of revolution as we called it, that my intellectual, ideological, and political positions matured. I encountered and was taught by revolutionary students, lecturers, and professors. It is at this university that I attended lectures by leaders of liberation movements that had been provided with a base from which to wage their revolutionary wars by the government of Tanzania. Indeed, I had the opportunity to see President Nyerere at close range as he debated us students and our lecturers and professors. I joined scholars that called themselves Nyerereists. Nyerere incited and excited our brains. I knew Nyerere’s legacy would be that of a great individual.
It was at the UDSM that I read radical literature. As a Kenyan, I knew that books published by the Beijing Foreign Press were banned in Kenya. So, I read them at the university and smuggled home those that I could not part with. For reasons that were not made public, the Kenyan government had no issues with books published by Moscow Progress Publishers. There was even a bookshop in Nairobi that sold those books. The influence of the UDSM has never left me and I have ever lived it. It is part of my life and politics. I love Tanzania. I have friends and family there. Kenya detained me. I never thought Tanzania would detain and deport me. I must quickly qualify what I mean by “Tanzania”. The people of Tanzania did not detain and deport me. It is the government of the Republic of Tanzania acting, not in the name of the people of Tanzania, but in their own interest, that did so.
That is one part of the background to this personal footnote. The other part is my answer to President Samia Suluhu. We the people of East Africa are not “messing” our countries. What do we gain by doing so? In East Africa there is a class that rules over the working people. It is in Tanzania that I understood who they are by their various categorisations in Kiswahili:
Wanyonyaji
Exploiters
Makabaila
Capitalists
Matumbo yasiyoshiba
Stomachs that are never sated
Walalahai
They who sleep alive and satisfied
Wanyapara na watumwa wa ukoloni mambo leo
Agents of neocolonialism.
Watumwa wa watawala wa nje
Slaves of imperialism
Wadosi
They who doze because they are wealthy and idle
Wavuna Jasho
They who harvest the sweat of Wavunja jasho, those that break sweat
Madame President you belong to that class and, as President of Tanzania, you personify it.
We have been oppressed a great deal. We have been humiliated a great deal. We have been exploited enough; We have been tortured enough. We have been abducted enough. We have been murdered enough. Our resources have been stolen and wasted. We have been denied our material needs, namely, water, universal education and health care, food, security, housing, and our lands have been privatised and commodified. And your class has been the loyal slaves of foreign interests whose commissions make your class hate us, we the people.
Tumechoka nanyi
We are tired of you
Tumekataa
We refuse your leadership
Tumewakataa
We reject you
Uongozi mpya Afrika ni sasa
The struggle for alternative leadership in Africa is now.
Dictatorship of whichever gender cannot stop the African revolution. The African youth will never allow this to happen. The days of dictatorships in Africa are numbered.
