Julius Nyerere – Tanzania's first president and ‘Father of the Nation’ – is not an easy biographical subject. He has left a substantial paper trail of published articles, books and speeches, but that is all public material, crafted for purpose and with an eye on the audience; there is no significant body of private correspondence or diaries, no personal or informal window on his thoughts and doubts. That challenge has been compounded by the steady flow of semi-hagiographical retrospective writing by people who knew Nyerere: the temptation to gild the detail has evidently been hard for some of those writers to resist. Tom Molony is clearly well aware of this problem, and this book has two explicit aims: to turn the focus on Nyerere's early life, before he entered formal politics in the 1950s, and to offer a more balanced account. A third aim, less explicit but very evident, is to argue that Nyerere's years of study in Edinburgh had a profound influence on his political thought and writings.

At the core of that latter point is Molony's careful detective work on Nyerere's personal library and his university reading list. This approach is not entirely new: previous studies have disputed the relative influence of Kant or Laski, Rousseau or Mill. But Molony's distinctive contribution is the argument that Nyerere's developing understanding of traditional Africa owed as much to the writings of the sociologist Ralph Piddington as it did to personal experience. The argument for Edinburgh's influence seems at times a little stretched: would Nyerere have had to read T. H. Green to think about the lessons of Indian history? Are we really to accept the passing implication that a statue in Edinburgh influenced the ‘torch’ design, which became an icon of independent Tanzania? Overall, while the conclusion here sensibly steps back from arguing that Edinburgh was a decisive influence, the book does make a clear and original case for the importance of Nyerere's university study to his political thought.

Molony evidently has multiple readerships in mind, from Africanist academics to a historically aware Tanzanian public. This factor leads to a certain unevenness, combining rather abrupt references to a wider comparative literature with the evocation of names that may not mean anything to most readers: knowing that Nyerere was at school with ‘the likes of … Humi Ziota’ is unlikely to strike a chord with many. The careful style chosen here keeps the aim of balance very much in view, though at times the reader might wish for a more decisive authorial judgement: the text occasionally hovers uneasily between sceptical questioning of the Nyerere mythology and reverent acceptance that Nyerere was indeed a very unusual human. The elusiveness of Nyerere as a subject is a real challenge here: it becomes clear that there is a lot that we simply do not know. Was he outraged by the coverage of African politics in The Scotsman newspaper? Did he go to meetings of the West African Students’ Union in Edinburgh? Did he go to hear Orton Chirwa speak? Was he a member of the Catholic Students’ Society? Did he follow through on his plan of writing to other students from Tanganyika who were studying in the UK? In each case, we simply do not know.

The consequence of these gaps is that – aside from some slightly journalistic assertions that may or may not be true, such as that Nyerere arrived at secondary school ‘filled with pride’ at his recent conversion to Catholicism – the subject of the biography remains remarkably opaque. It seems curious for a biographer to tell us that a Catholic missionary is ‘thought to have had considerable influence’ on Nyerere – well, did he or not? We learn that Nyerere conducted an extended, and unsuccessful, campaign for an increase in the allowance paid to his family while he was away in the UK, and that he became involved in the campaign against the Central African Federation and met Hastings Banda. But other tantalizing evidence of Nyerere's changing ambitions and ideas, some of which might disrupt the standard narrative of the emerging nationalist, is not really pursued. Did he really aspire to become a paramount chief in his home region? How seriously was he considering the priesthood in the early 1950s? Would he have extended his studies in the UK if given the opportunity? Molony's concluding epigraph, from Mark Twain, is well-chosen: ‘Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man.’ It really is very hard to get at the stuff of Nyerere.