Two members of Project Tanganyika--the teaching program sponsored by the Phillips Brooks House--oranized the school in the summer of 1962 at the urging of Dr. Eduardo Mondlane the President of the Mozambique Liberation Front. At first classes were held in a refugee camp south of the city; then they were moved to one of the houses nearby. In January, 1963, the African American Institute took over direction of the school, and the Institute is now building a permanent site for the school.

Four Classes

The number of students in the school fluctuates with the inflow of new refugees and the ouflow of scholarship students. At present there are about one hundred students, grouped into four classes that correspond roughly to the seventh through tenth grades. The majority of these students are from Mozambique and speak Portuguese; many of them were "recruited" by rebel agents inside Mozambique because of their ability.

Other Mozambicans have lived for some time in Tanganyika or the Rhodesias where their parents had moved looking for work. Two of the students had been among the handful of Africans who managed to complete secondary school in Mozambique last year. Though honored by the Portuguese as showpieces of the educational system, both boys left the country within a month after receiving their diplomas and quickly worked their way north to Tanganyika. They are presently on scholarships at Rochester University in New York.

The second largest group of students comes from Southwest Africa and is largely Afrikaans-speaking. To get to Tanganyika, these students journeyed over three thousand miles, crossing the Kalahari desert into Bechuanaland and the Zambezi River into Northern Rhodesia. This is the same "freedom route" that is followed by most of the refugees leaving South Africa. It is a dangerous route to travel; many of the fleeing students are intercepted by the South African police before getting out of South or Southwest Africa. If caught, the refugees face prison terms regardless of whether or not they are "guilty" of other offenses. Being arrested is not the only danger; the refugee reception center on the Bechuanaland-Northern Rhodesia border has been dynamited twice since June by white South African saboteurs.

The refugee school in Dar es Salaam is the only one of its kind on the African continent, but it is unique in other ways also. It is one of the handful of American efforts that lend support to the African liberation movements and as such it counteracts the frequent charge that Americans are all neo-colonialists. The Harvard and Radcliffe students teaching at the school do far more than any other U.S. sponsored project to encourage the refugee students, most of whom will be leaders in their own countries in the not-too-distant future.

The refugee school is only one of the institutions located in Dar es Salaam because of the various liberation movements' presence there. More important politically is the headquarters of the African Liberation Committee, located appropriately enough on Independence Avenue. The Liberation Committee, better known as the Committee of Nine because of its nine member nations, was set up by the Organization of African Unity at the Addis Ababa Conference in 1963 to coordinate and give financial aid to the "freedom fighters" of the non-independent states. The committee meets regularly to hear petitions from the independence movements and to appropriate funds donated by the African states.

The membership of the Committee reflects the realities of African politics. Tanganyika and the Congo were chosen undoubtedly because of their geographical proximity to southern Africa, while the three countries having the largest armies, Algeria, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Republic, also happen to be members.

With the approaching independence of Northern Rhodesia in October, the "freedom line" will move almost a thousand miles further south and the refugees will undoubtedly begin to move with it. But with the Committee of Nine, the refugee school, and the scholarship programs centered in Dar es Sallaam, the Tenganyikan city will remain a "haven" for a long time to come