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Matthew Patay's
Note of the Month
October 2004
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Map and flag images provided by Graphic Maps
This month's featured note
is from the country of Tanzania.
The denomination is 1000 Shillings and the Standard Catalog of World Paper Money
(SCWPM) Number is P-4a.
The note is not dated but was issued in (1966).
_f.jpg)
(front)
The banknote is red on multi-colored under print.
President Julius K. Nyerere (1922-1999), first President of Tanzania, is at
right.
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The following information
was obtained from:
African National
Congress Web Site
President Julius K. Nyerere
(1922-1999)
Julius Kambarage Nyerere (1922-1999), was the first president of Tanzania (1964-1985). Nyerere entered politics in 1954 and founded the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). He became the chief minister of British-ruled Tanganyika in 1960 and continued as prime minister when Tanganyika became independent in 1961. In 1964 Nyerere formed Tanzania—a union of Tanganyika and the island of Zanzibar—with himself as president. He stepped down as president in 1985 but continued as head of the ruling party until 1990.
On 26 June 1959 Julius Nyerere was the principal speaker - along with Father Trevor Huddleston - at a meeting in London which launched the Boycott South Africa Movement. (It was re-named Anti-Apartheid Movement in 1960.)
Committed to African liberation, he offered sanctuary in Tanzania to members of African liberation movements from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and Uganda, and in 1978 he sent Tanzanian troops to depose Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Tanzania hosted the African Liberation Committee from its inception in 1963.
Tanzania gave land and other assistance to the African National Congress of South Africa for its headquarters in Morogoro, and for the Solomon Mahlangu school and other projects.
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_b.jpg)
(back)
A Masai herdsman with cattle is at center.
The following information
was obtained from:
Welcome to
Africa Web Site
Ever since white men came to eastern Africa, they have been having unhappy kind of love affair with the Masai people. Unhappy, because admiration and exasperation have been almost equally blended in the feelings towards these handsome, arrogant and stubborn tribesmen. Almost, if not quite, alone among the tribes of eastern Africa, the Masai have turned their backs upon the prizes and temptations off by the West.
The great majority of other African peoples have, after initial period of suspicious hesitation, grasped at those offerings with both hands: at western medicine and education and, after a certain lentgh of time, at western technology, the open sesame to that glittering go higher standard of living. They have set their feet on the path to the consumer society. Not the Masai. For a long time, it is true, there have been school and hospitals in Masai land; there are university graduates, professors, Ministers of State - even a lady who in 1970 became the first Masai woman to graduate from Nairobi University.
But, by and large, near years of colonial rule and attempted persuasion, followed by more than 25 years of African rule and attempted persuasion, have failed to do more than dent the fabric of custom and tradition. Almost within sight of Nairobi's tower blocks and traffic jams, the Masai have continued to practise their ancient rituals and ceremonies; they have continued to maintain their age-set structure with its warrior caste of haughty, swift and predatory moran - storm troopers or commandos of the tribal world
For several centuries, Masai warriors had dominated much of eastern Africa by force of arms. They disdained permanent settlements, pen and trousers, tillers of the soil, a peaceful way of life. They loved the sword and spurned the ploughshare. Their cattle were their life. The moran's pride and duty was to protect their fathers' herds and to capture other people's - which, according to their folklore, rightly belonged to them in any case, since their God had given all the cattle the world to the Masai.
This belief does not accord with peaceful progress in a properly administered country, whether the administrators are black or white. The same note of exasperation with the Masai's refusal to conform that was sounded in the reports of early colonial officials is echoed by today's United Nations agencies bent on introducing schemes of range management, water conservation and the like.
Exasperation with Masai obduracy has been balanced by the admiration these nomads have so often won from people of other races. In colonial days, there was a disease known as 'Masai-itis' to which district of officer’s, especially young ones, sometimes succumbed. In its advanced stages the victim was said to shake, quiver and even froth at the mouth, as moran were wont to do when working themselves up to battle pitch
Before that stage was reached, it was considered advisable to post that officer to a non-Masai district. The leader of the white settlers, Lord Delamere, was so enamoured of the Masai that when they stole his cattle, as they often did, he refused to prosecute, and even applauded the cunning tricks they got up to when transferring cattle from his ownership to theirs. No other Kenyan people, so far as I know, have won this kind of respect. On what was it based? The answer most generally given was courage. Masai moran were brave. When they surrounded a marauding lion, then closed in upon it and finally speared it to death, they displayed great individual fearlessness. As well as being brave, these warriors were often beautiful, because their bodies were lithe, muscular, and perfectly controlled.
Many Europeans also envied the Masai their apparent freedom, their nomadic way of life uncluttered by possessions, their sexual freedom: an existence regulated by the rhythms of the seasons. And especially they envied, perhaps unconsciously, the comradeship of the age-set- that band of brothers circumcised at the same time - which was unbreakable and knew no bounds. When a man had passed through the eunoto ceremony that entitled him to marry and become a junior elder, he was permitted to sleep with the wife of any of his comrades if he so desired.
A Masai woman did not marry just one man, she married a whole age-set. Sexual jealousy between members of an age-set was disallowed, if not perhaps entirely unknown. And yet, despite all this cultural tenacity, change, like a stain of acid, has seeped in to corrode the foundations of the tribal mores. First the suppression of inter-tribal warfare and then the enforcement of law and order destroyed the purpose of the moran, and the introduction of a western legal system removed power from the elders. Today, even greater pressures are at work, and a good deal more quickly
The African governments who took over from colonial rule have as their avowed aim the abolition of tribal distinctions and the blending of them all, Bantu or Nilotic, into one united people. Masai tribal pride, Masai customs, Masai separateness must go. Adaptation, as we all know, is the price of survival. The dinosaurs did not adapt and they did not survive.
The Masai and their flocks and herds have for long shared the East African Savannah with the great herds of game without attempting to destroy them. Now that situation is changing fast, or has already changed. Schemes of range management launched by international agencies, large-scale wheat-growing projects, and the invasion of their country by land-hungry small-scale cultivators are pressing in upon the Masai, depriving them of resources essential to the nomadic pattern of their lives and forcing them into alien moulds. How much longer can their way of life survive?
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For more information about Tanzania visit:
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