Sunday afternoons have their own silence. After everyone has eaten and drifted into naps, those who stay awake often end up in front of a screen; phone, TV, or laptop. That was me. Scrolling without purpose, I found a recorded talk by historian Mohamed Said explaining Tanzania’s journey to independence. I clicked.

He spoke slowly, like someone who has carried stories longer than most of us have lived. The history moved through familiar turns of colonial policies, resistance, and the rise of TANU, until he reached Tabora, 1958, the Parish Hall. There, he said, a meeting was held that changed the rhythm of our independence story. Kura tatu.

In brief, kura tatu, the three-vote system, was introduced by the colonial government. Each voter was to cast three votes: one for an African, one for an Asian, and one for a European. It was framed as a gesture of fairness, but at its heart, it was a tool to sustain separation and to test if Tanganyika could be fractured politely.

Most TANU members rejected it outright. They felt it betrayed what they were fighting for, a united and self-defined nation. But Nyerere saw something different. To him, independence without unity was an incomplete victory. This, uncomfortable as it was, became a moment to prove that freedom was not about exclusion but about maturity.

He defended the idea not as the colonists intended, but as an opportunity to show that Tanganyika could think beyond race, that unity was not a slogan but a discipline. It was one of those crossroads where leadership means seeing further than the moment.

Between Said’s calm explanations and the hum of my fan, I found myself no longer listening. My mind had travelled, as if I were there, inside that Parish Hall in Tabora, among people arguing about race, fairness, and fear. And then, somewhere in that imagination, I began to wonder what Nyerere really saw.

He must have seen what the rest were missing, that carrying the prejudice of colour and ethnicity into independence would not make us free, only divided.

Slowly, the thought turned inward. How many people have I labelled without ever knowing them? How many times have I mistaken comfort for correctness, or difference for danger?

We like to think division is a national problem, something that politicians debate and newspapers report. But it also lives in us quietly and daily, in who we trust, who we avoid, and who we assume things about.

We inherit these small separations from those we love. They don’t come as orders; they come as advice, passed gently across generations, spoken at dinner tables, at family gatherings, in passing comments. They sound like care, not division.
Don’t marry from there, their ways are different.
Be careful with those people, they only help their own.
Don’t do business with them, they can’t be trusted.
You know how people from that region behave.
Those with that faith never mix well with us.
Those from that school think they are better.
That family always chases status, not sincerity.

At first, you don’t question it. You nod, you listen, you carry it quietly. You tell yourself it’s not hate, it’s just caution, it’s tradition. But over time, those small sentences build invisible walls around who we befriend, who we listen to, and who we believe deserves our trust.

We pass those walls on to children who never met the people we fear, to friends who repeat our cautions without ever testing them. And that is how division survives, not through public speeches, but through private sentences whispered with love.

We make them miss friendships that could have changed how they see the world, the kind that teach patience, broaden laughter, and soften certainty. We make them miss opportunities hidden behind surnames, skin tones, or accents they were warned about, doors they never knocked on because someone once said, “people like that are not for us.” We make them miss the quiet art of empathy, the ability to sit with difference and not feel threatened, to listen without suspicion.

We make them miss the beauty of possibility, because prejudice doesn’t only divide people; it also shrinks imagination. It tells the mind who is not worth knowing, what is not worth exploring.

And perhaps the saddest part is that they will carry it forward, believing it to be truth. That is how nations fracture, not through coups or wars, but through the gentle inheritance of small fears.

Maybe that is what Nyerere was trying to save us from, the quiet inheritance of division. He knew that independence is not only won in parliaments but also in hearts, and that true freedom begins when we stop seeing people through old stories we never verified.

When I think of kura tatu now, I see it less as a political event and more as a moral mirror, a test of whether we can choose fairness over fear. That day in Tabora, Tanganyika chose maturity. But every generation must choose again, in its own way.

Maybe kura tatu is not only history, maybe it is a question that keeps returning to every generation.
Maybe we too must cast our three votes, for empathy, for fairness, for unity.

Maybe freedom was never only about borders and flags, but about learning to see people as they are, not as we are told.
And maybe, just maybe, Mwalimu was not teaching politics that day, he was teaching us how to live.