"We, the people of Tanganyika, would like to light a candle and put it on top of Mount Kilimanjaro which would shine beyond our borders giving hope where there was despair, love where there was hate and dignity where before there was only humiliation".

So said Julius Nyerere addressing his country's Legislative Assembly over 40 years ago on 22 October 1959. It was a lofty vision, as Tanganyika was not yet independent at that time.

A little over two years later, at independence on 9 December 1961, Nyerere became the first President of his country and the unchallenged godfather figure of the liberation of the remainder of southern Africa.

I arrived in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam as a journalist on 9 January 1964. Three days later there was revolution in Zanzibar by the African majority against the Arab minority put in power by the retreating British colonialists just one month earlier.

An African-driven union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar followed three months later and the country's name was changed to Tanzania. Despair, hate and humiliation had begun the painfully slow process of retreating.

Dar es Salaam in those days was the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Liberation Committee. Living in the city were the leaders of the liberation movements of southern Africa such as the ebullient Eduardo Mondlane from Mozambique, more taciturn Angolan poet, Dr Agostinho Neto, and a host of others.

Nyerere was their beacon of hope. He was uninhibited by the paranoid attitudes that gripped the east and west at the height of the Cold War. And although he was not adverse to using westerners to achieve his vision, he sought for the continent to have African solutions created by African people.

He did not tolerate fools and was a masterly media manager. He could go for months without seeing the press. But, when he had something to say, as he did in 1976 during the two visits by the US Secretary of State, Dr Henry Kissinger, he astutely ensured that his version of events got across.

I remember one day sitting in his office questioning that a number of African countries had not paid their subscriptions to the OAU Liberation Committee Special Fund for the Liberation of Africa. He looked at me for some moments, thoughtfully chewing the inside corner of his mouth in his distinctive way.

Then, his decision made, he passed across a file swearing me secrecy as to its contents. It contained the amount that Tanzanians, then according to the United Nations the poorest people on earth, would directly and indirectly contribute that year to the liberation movements. I was astounded; the amount ran into millions of US dollars.

It was the practice among national leaders in those days to say that their country did not have guerrilla bases. Now we know that Tanzania had many such bases providing training for most of the southern African guerrillas, who were then called "terrorists" and who today are members of governments throughout the region.

Some did not make it beyond Dar es Salaam. Eduardo Mondlane was assassinated by the Portuguese secret police with a parcel bomb contained in a book of Russian essays. Tanzania was also directly attacked from Mozambique by the Portuguese.

But, in turn, each of the white minorities in southern Africa fell to black majority political rule and Nyerere saw his vision for the continent finally realized on 27 April 1994 when apartheid formally ended in South Africa with the swearing in of a new black leadership.

It had been a long and arduous march but it had only taken 35 years since Nyerere's speech that is now known as "A Candle on Kilimanjaro".

But it as well to recall the words of Mozambique's first President, Samora Machel in the early 1970s when addressing young conscripts at a camp located at Nachingwea in southern Tanzania, lest we forget their roles.

The conscripts had called for the death penalty for Veronica Anyaiva, a black Mozambican woman who had led the Portuguese secret police to an orphanage deep in her country's bush where they had massacred the children.

"We must keep her alive as a professor of the negative so that future generations will understand what we mean when we talk of colonialism and oppression," Machel told the conscripts. Then, his audience finally silent, he offered her a chair and glass of water. (SARDC)

David Martin is the former Deputy Editor of the Tanzanian newspaper, The Standard, and Africa Correspondent of the London Sunday newspaper, The Observer. He is a publisher in Zimbabwe and a Board member of the Southern African Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC) of which Julius Nyerere was the founding patron.

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