Joan Wicken -British socialist who loved Tanzania.

(From Yorkshire Post)

JOAN Wicken, who has died in Keighley, aged 79, was Dr Julius Nyerere's personal assistant when, as President of Tanzania, he was one of the most influential Commonwealth leaders of the post Second World War period. Her position gave her access to anything she wanted, yet she insisted on travelling from her tiny home outside Dar es Salaam to State House each morning on a Vespa motor scooter. One day in 1968, Nyerere called her into his office and told her that she would catch her death of cold. He suggested she should travel from her rented accommodation at a Salvation Army complex several miles outside the city in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes Benz, like all the other members of his senior staff.

Joan Wicken refused. She told the man whom Africans called "Mwalimu" (the teacher) that government officials should live like ordinary people, otherwise socialism and self-reliance would be scorned by the millions of dirt-poor peasants who made up that people-rich but commodity-poor East African country.

In her late 60s and early 70s, Joan Wicken, pictured above, could still be seen travelling to her rented bed-sitter by bicycle.

She made her own clothes on an ancient sewing machine and cooked food on a small kerosene hot plate throughout her life. Yet despite such amazing feats of personal modesty, this Fabian thought-deed woman was for three decades (from 1960 to South Africa's independence in 1990) one of the most influential women in ...