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