Julius Nyang'oro

Julius Nyang'oro (born 1954) is a writer, political scientist and legal scholar.[1] Julius Nyang’Oro was the chairman of the Department of African and African-American Studies for over ten years. He led the department from its infancy as a curriculum to its status as a Department in 1996.He retired from the University in 2012.

Nyang'oro was born in 1954. He attended the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania graduating with a BA (Upper second Class) in Political Science and International Relations. He holds a master's and PhD degrees in Political Science from Miami University.

He also holds a JD from Duke University. Professor Nyang'oro spent most of his academic career at the University of North Carolina and has been a leading member in the Africanist community in the United States. His earlier academic writings were on Africa's political and economic underdevelopment. His first book entitled The State and Capitalist Development in Africa was published in 1989.

Subsequent to that, he published books on political development in Africa, notably on the question of civil society with much of the work dealing with Eastern and Southern Africa.

Since 2010, Professor Nyang’oro’s work has concentrated on Tanzania, writing three books on the subject: JK: a Political Biography of Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete (2010), Politics and Public Policy in Tanzania (2016); and ESCROW: Politics and Energy in Tanzania (2016).  These three books easily catapulted him into an authority on Tanzanian and African politics in general, making him a regular commentator on programs such as BBC, VOA and Deutsche Welle.    

Besides his academic work, Professor Nyang’oro has worked in the past few years as an international consultant on matters related to African development and security.

In 2011 during an investigation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it was alleged that there were classes which instructors didn’t teach and falsified grade changes and faked faculty signatures on grade reports. After more than five years of investigation by the NCAA, the University was cleared of any wrong doing in 2017. Charges against Professor Nyang’oro for having falsely obtained $12,000 for a course he allegedly did not teach were also dismissed, thus making the whole episode a non-issue.