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Makerere College, Uganda: 1943–1947

In October 1941, Nyerere completed his secondary education and decided to study at Makerere College in the Ugandan city of Kampala. He secured a bursary to fund a teacher training course there, arriving in Uganda in January 1943. At Makerere, he studied alongside many of East Africa's most talented students, although spent little time socialising with others, instead focusing on his reading. He took courses in chemistry, biology, Latin, and Greek. Deepening his Catholicism, he studied the Papal Encyclicals and read the work of Catholic philosophers like Jacques Maritain; most influential however were the writings of the liberal British philosopher John Stuart Mill. He won a literary competition with an essay on the subjugation of women, for which he had applied Mill's ideas to Zanaki society. Nyerere was also an active member of the Makere Debating Society, and established a branch of Catholic Action at the university.

In July 1943, he wrote a letter to the Tanganyika Standard in which he discussed the ongoing Second World War and argued that capitalism was alien to Africa and that the continent should turn to "African socialism". His letter went on to state that "the educated African should take the lead" in moving the population towards a more explicitly socialist model. Molony thought that the letter "serves to mark the beginnings of Nyerere's political maturation, chiefly in absorbing and developing the views of leading black thinkers of the time." In 1943, Nyerere, Andrew Tibandebage, and Hamza Kibwana Bakari Mwapachu founded the Tanganyika African Welfare Association (TAWA) to assist the small number of Tanganyikan students at Makerere. TAWA was allowed to die off, and in its place Nyerere revived the largely moribund Makerere chapter of the Tanganyika African Association (TAA), although this too had ceased functioning by 1947. Although aware of racial prejudice from the white colonial minority, he insisted on treating people as individuals, recognising that many white individuals were not bigoted towards indigenous Africans. After three years, Nyerere graduated from Makerere with a diploma in education.