The Campaign of the Magic Eye

Elections in a one-party state are usually about as exciting as guessing how many beans in a bottle. As one-party Tanzania went to the polls last week, however, the roar in the fore ground sounded strangely like politicians fighting for votes. For six weeks, candidates had been crisscrossing the nation, walking as far as 30 miles to appear under banyan trees at isolated village rallies. Even President Julius Nyerere felt constrained to stump through the countryside with his new Polaroid camera, awing prospective voters by handing out pictures he had just taken of them.

Such tactics quickly earned Nyerere the title of "the god with the magic eye," also brought in observers from such distant monolithic states as Russia and Hungary to watch Nyerere's Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) party pull off a far more impressive feat: free, contested elections.

Nyerere himself ran unopposed for his second term as President, but 107 seats of Parliament were also at stake last week. Rather than go through the farce of running a single slate, TANU had put up two candidates for every seat except those held by six top party officials. TANU gave each opponent equal support, paired them off in daily joint appearances and assigned three referees to supervise each match. Then the party stood aside and let the candidates fight it out.

The results were surprising. Forced to return to their districts for the first time in five years, many Congressmen found themselves accused of ignoring the home folks, breaking previous campaign promises for new roads and wells, and living it up in Dar es Salaam. Voters who showed up at one rally greeted their Congressman with such prolonged boos that he went home and shot himself, "accidentally," in the hand. Another was haunted by the local witch-doctor, who went so far as to put a bloodstained coffin containing a strangled chicken outside the polling booth on election day.

All told, it was a bad week for officeholders. Only 16 members of the current Parliament managed to get themselves reelected, and among the losers were nine ranking party officials, including Finance Minister Paul Bomani, who had invoked the wrath of the electorate by raising income taxes. One of the biggest winners: hard-working Health Minister Derek Bryceson, the only white in Nyerere's Cabinet, who carried his Dar es Salaam district by a resounding 30,000 votes.

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