Mazimbu and Dakawa: Tanzania's Settlements for South African Exiles

After the June 1976 Soweto uprising, thousands of young South Africans fled the country rather than face arrest, and many made their way into exile with the African National Congress. Tanzania, under President Julius Nyerere, had already spent the 1960s hosting the headquarters of the Organisation of African Unity’s Liberation Committee in Dar es Salaam and sheltering guerrilla movements fighting white minority rule across southern Africa, including the ANC, Zimbabwe’s ZANU and ZAPU, Namibia’s SWAPO, and Mozambique’s FRELIMO. As the number of young South African exiles swelled after 1976, Nyerere’s government made land available for a dedicated settlement to house and educate them: a former sisal estate at Mazimbu, near the town of Morogoro, roughly 200 kilometers west of Dar es Salaam.

Construction at Mazimbu began in the late 1970s, and the settlement grew to include not just classrooms but a hospital, a furniture factory, dormitories, and administrative offices for the ANC community living there. Its centerpiece was the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College, known as SOMAFCO, which enrolled its first students in 1978 and was named for the young MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe) cadre executed by the apartheid government in 1979 after a controversial trial. SOMAFCO provided primary and secondary education to the children of exiles and to young South Africans who had crossed the border after 1976, combining an academic curriculum with practical and vocational training, and it operated as a functioning township-in-exile as much as a school, complete with agricultural plots and its own administration under ANC leadership. ANC president Oliver Tambo visited Mazimbu repeatedly through the 1980s and delivered addresses there, including a notable May 1984 speech to the SOMAFCO community reaffirming the ANC’s commitment to the armed and political struggle against apartheid.

A second settlement, Dakawa, was established roughly 60 kilometers north of Mazimbu in the early 1980s as the exile community continued to grow beyond what Mazimbu alone could support. Dakawa developed its own infrastructure, including an arts center, schools, and housing, and together the two settlements formed the core of the ANC’s institutional presence in Tanzania through the final decade of apartheid. Both sites operated until the early 1990s, when the unbanning of the ANC and the transition toward democratic elections in South Africa allowed exiles to return home; SOMAFCO’s facilities were formally handed over to the Tanzanian government in 1992, closing a chapter in which a foreign government had, for more than a decade, provided land, resources, and protection to sustain an entire community of a neighboring country’s exiled opposition.