Project Tanganyika Fosters International Service

Before she arrived in Tanganyika in the summer of 1963, Gail M. Gerhart ’65 had never seen a mango tree or even eaten a mango. Every afternoon, in the elementary school where she taught English, a bell would ring, signaling the end of the day. Upon hearing this alert, Gerhart recalled that the children leapt out of their seats and bolted toward the door.

“I thought, ‘Maybe I’m a bad teacher,” she said.

But it was not Gerhart’s teaching that propelled the young students out of the schoolhouse. Outside the front door stood a “gigantic” mango tree from which fresh fruit fell each day.

“If you were the first one out there, you could eat the mangos that fell under the tree,” she said. “I was relieved.”

That summer, Gerhart was one of 20 undergraduates participating in the third summer of the Philips Brooks House Association’s Project Tanganyika, which gave undergraduate participants the opportunity to travel to Africa at the peak of the decolonization movements throughout the continent.

Project Tanganyika sent its first cohort of volunteers abroad in the summer of 1961. That December, Tanganyika gained independence from the United Kingdom.

The first PBHA program that took students abroad, Project Tanganyika represented the widespread idealism that emerged at Harvard during the early 1960s.

Despite the reality that an independent African Studies program would not exist at Harvard until 1969, Project Tanganyika significantly influenced its participants, encouraging many to find careers in civil rights and public service in the United States and in Africa.

‘AN OUTLET FOR YOUNG ENERGY’

Project Tanganyika embodied the idealism and sense of adventure that permeated the Harvard campus in the early 1960s.

Even before President John F. Kennedy ’40 passed the Peace Corps Act, which officially established the international public service organization in 1961, Peter C. Goldmark Jr. ’62 was conjuring his own plan to travel to Africa.

Goldmark’s intellectual interest in Africa, along with inspiration from a group of students who had traveled to Africa through the non-profit organization Operation Crossroads Africa, motivated him to develop Project Tanganyika.

According to Goldmark he envisioned the program as “an outlet for young energy in the world.”

Robert J. Bennett ’64, who traveled with Project Tanganyika, said that Kennedy’s idealism inspired students to apply for the program.

“That [Kennedy] was organizing this Peace Corps was something so radical and so idealistic that it was something that did have an impact on us,” he said.

Bennett added that the desire for adventure also compelled students to join Project Tanganyika.

“I was a freshman [in 1961] and [Harvard] was pretty exciting intellectually,” he said. “But it was only intellectual.”

In addition, some students went to Africa driven by their political sentiments.

As Africa emerged as a battleground in the Cold War, some saw Harvard’s presence on the continent as opposing the communist powers they feared might emerge.

“We thought of ourselves as an outpost in the Cold War,” Bennett said.

In January 1961, Project Tanganyika became an official PBHA program, and students began to apply for the inaugural trip that summer. Their only barrier—as a completely student organized venture—was funding.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

At the end of a luncheon hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1961, the former first lady stood up and made an announcement to her guests. According to Gerhart, Roosevelt—whose grandson Haven C. Roosevelt ’62 was planning to travel to Tanganyika that summer—said, “Okay everybody, take out your checkbooks and write a check for these people who want to go to Africa.”

Despite Roosevelt’s generosity, funding continued to be a problem throughout the program’s existence.

The cost of sending students to Tanganyika ranged from $30,000 to $45,000 per year, all of which the student participants raised themselves.

While the administration did not oppose the program, Bennett said the fact that students had to raise all the funds created a potential barrier.

“I realized that it was never really certain that we would go,” he said.

But, each year, the participants proved successful in raising the money they needed to travel to Africa.

SERVICE ABROAD

During their time in Tanganyika, the students worked in a variety of capacities. Several taught English at Tanganyikan schools while others worked for aid initiatives across the country.

In 1962, Project Tanganyika began offering a year-long option in addition to its original summer program.

Bennett, who chose to stay for a year, traveled to villages throughout Tanganyika with a British famine relief organization. Along with British civil servants, he handed out food coupons the villagers could redeem at shops stocked with American products.

“There were hundreds and hundreds of people waiting for these little green coupons,” he remembered.

Karen L. Worth ’64, who spent a summer in Tanganyika, described the lifestyle as “very simple.” Worth lived in a mud and thatch house in a camp for Tutsi refugees who had been displaced from Burundi.

She taught English to elementary school students during the day and at night held classes for adults.

“We were simply there as teachers and as members of the community,” she said.

'A TIME OF ENORMOUS HOPE'

The peak of the liberation movements in the early 1960s invigorated Tanganyika with a sense of optimism. As a result, Bennett said that the people they met embraced the young Americans.

“It was a time of enormous hope and very little anti-American feelings,” Goldmark said.

According to Gerhart, cities in Tanganyika became home to the headquarters for African liberation movements. She remembered that FRELIMO, an organization that advocated for independence for Mozambique, at the time a Portuguese colony, had its base in Dar es Salaam.

On Dec. 9, 1961, Tanganyika gained independence. Three years later, the country merged with the new island nation of Zanzibar to become Tanzania.

At a ceremony on the night of its independence from Britain, Bennett remembers that the Tanganyikans lowered the Union Jack and sang the anthem, “God Save the Queen” for the last time, raising the Tanganyikan flag in its place as they sang the anthem of Tanganyika.

That evening the newly independent Tanganyikans danced in celebration. As he and a friend watched the festivities, Bennett said a woman took their hands and pulled them into the circle, including them in the revelry.

“They saw us as liberators,” Bennett said. “They really accepted us, at least on the surface.”

INDEPENDENT EDUCATION

While University President Nathan M. Pusey ’28 would later celebrate Project Tanganyika for its worldly vision that extended beyond students’ own “private affairs and thoughts,” administrators were initially apprehensive about the new program.

“They really thought it was never going to happen,” Goldmark said, adding that because Project Tanganyika preceded the Peace Corps, administrators were uncomfortable with the unfamiliar idea of international service.

But the program’s participants said they remained indifferent to the administration’s opinions.

“I didn’t care whether faculty supported us because [Project Tanganyika] was PBH,” Worth said.

Before leaving for Tanganyika, Peter de Lissovoy—who would have graduated in 1964, but left Harvard to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an American Civil Rights organization—remembered that a professor said to him, “Okay, see you later. Don’t get lost over there, now.”

“I would say that everybody took it in stride and nobody paid any special attention,” de Lissovoy said.

As their interest in Africa grew, some students found themselves wanting more courses in African Studies than Harvard offered.

Goldmark said that the only course that addressed Africa was one graduate seminar.

“It was not the world’s most profound or exciting course,” he added.

Gerhart said her experience as part of Project Tanganyika compelled her to study Africa in an academic context.

“It was a little frustrating because there were only a handful of courses,” Gerhart said.

Following her undergraduate studies, Gerhart—who would later work in sub-Saharan Africa—pursued a Ph.D. in Public Law and Government at Columbia, which she said had a “much stronger African Studies program.”

Though Goldmark and others involved with Project Tanganyika pushed the Committee on Educational Policy to offer credit for the course in Swahili that the program required, their request was denied.

Pusey supported the CEP’s view that Swahili did not belong among the courses required for the A.B. A February 1962 Crimson article explained Pusey’s position that Harvard should teach “only languages which have a substantial literature or the study of which leads to a doctorate.”

Harvard did not have an independent African Studies department until 1969, when black students marched to demand a student role in establishing an African Studies program and hiring black faculty.

A LIFELONG INFLUENCE

Project Tanganyika had a lasting impact on many of its participants, significantly influencing their work later in life.

David Zarembka ’66 entered the Peace Corps after graduating. He moved to Kenya following his tenure there and eventually founded the African Great Lakes Initiative, which promotes peace “at the grassroots level in the Great Lakes region of Africa,” according to its website. In 2011, Zarembka published a book about politics in the region.

Late human rights activist and historian Alison Des Forges ’64, who traveled to Tanganyika with Worth in 1963, became a prominent figure in issues related to Africa. Des Forges served as a senior adviser in the Africa division of Human Rights Watch. For her work as an activist and her book “Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda,” Des Forges was awarded the MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 1999.

“For Alison, it became her life’s work,” Worth said. “It was a wonderful opportunity that had an impact in the work we did later.”

When his time with Project Tanganyika concluded, de Lissovoy chose to stay in Africa, hitchhiking to Rhodesia, South Africa, and Cairo. While working for a Rhodesian newspaper, he was arrested in South Africa for interviewing President of the African National Congress Albert Luthuli and returned to Harvard following his deportation.

Within a year, de Lissovoy left Harvard to join SNCC and went to Georgia to participate in the American Civil Rights Movement.

“The freedom movements in Africa made me aware of what was going on in the United States, so that led me to join up with SNCC,” he said.

De Lissovoy credited Project Tanganyika for preparing him for his work in American Civil Rights and for providing its participants with a transformative experience.

“I think the kids learned far more than they gave,” he said.

—Staff writer Eliza M. Nguyen can be reached at enguyen@college.harvard.edu.