Ruvuma Development Association

In the 1960s, a great anti-imperialist movement for independence swept the world.  President Julius Nyerere urged Tanzanians to reject capitalist exploitation, and build a society based on African communalism.  Ntimbanjayo Millinga with a few others and hardly any funding put these views into practice and built an extraordinary rural society based on equity between women and men, young and old.  By 1969, 17 ujamaa villages had formed the Ruvuma Development Association (RDA).  But the governing party was so hostile that, against Nyerere&rsquo

In the run up in 1960 to what was then Tanganyika’s Independence, Julius K. Nyerere, President of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and later first President of the country, called for its people to work hard and work together on farming in the interest of the country’s development. Responding to this call, Ntimbanjayo Millinga, who has died of cancer aged 69, led a small group of TANU party Youth League members to the Litowa valley in the Songea District of what was to become the Ruvuma Region in the south of Tanzania.