His paternal grandfather Kasisika Mwakikagile, who came from Mwaya (Mwaja) in what is now Kyela District, also lived and worked in Tanga first, then in Muheza, years earlier in the 1930s.
Godfrey's paternal grandmother Laheli Kasuka Mwaibanje who also once lived with her husband in Kyela where their son Elijah was born came from Mpata village in the ward of Kabula in Busokelo in Selya in the eastern part of Rungwe District.
Godfrey's father Elijah Mwakikagile, who once worked at the Amani Research Institute in Muheza District in the late forties, was a medical assistant during the British colonial era.
John Mwakangale was also the first leader Nelson Mandela met in newly independent Tanganyika in January 1962 – just one month after Tanganyika emerged from colonial rule – when Mandela secretly left South Africa on 11 January to seek assistance from other African countries in the struggle against apartheid and wrote about him in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.
He travelled to other African countries using a document given to him by the government of Tanganyika which stated: “This is Nelson Mandela, a citizen of the Republic of South Africa.
Mwanjisi, his classmate from Standard One at Tukuyu Primary School to Malangali Secondary School who became a doctor, prominent member of TANU and, before leaving government service, was president of the Tanganyika Government Servants Association, a national organisation for African government employees during colonial rule; Jeremiah Kasambala, Elijah Mwakikagile's classmate at Malangali Secondary School who became head of the Rungwe African Cooperative Union responsible for mobilising support from farmers to join the struggle for independence and who went on to become a cabinet member in the early years of independence—taking over the portfolio for Commerce and Cooperatives and later serving as Minister of Industries, Minerals and Energy; Robert Kaswende - he and Elijah Mwakikagile knew each other since the early 1940s - who became police chief for Rungwe District in Tukuyu soon after independence and who later became deputy head of the police for the whole country and thereafter head of the National Service which became a part of the Ministry of Defence renamed Ministry of Defence and National Service; and Brown Ngwilulupi, who became Secretary General of the Cooperative Union of Tanganyika (CUT), the largest farmers' union in the country, appointed by President Nyerere.
One of their teachers at Malangali Secondary School was Erasto Andrew Mbwana Mang'enya who later became a cabinet member under President Nyerere, Speaker of Parliament, and Tanzania's Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
Brown Ngwilulupi, a member of TANU for decades, later left the ruling party and co-founded Tanzania's largest opposition party, Chadema, and served as its first vice-chairman under former Finance Minister and IMF's executive director Edwin Mtei during the same period when he was a relative-in-law of Tanzania's Vice President John Malecela who also served as Prime Minister at the same time under President Ali Hassan Mwinyi.
Earlier, Benjamin Mwambapa worked for E. N. Brend, head of the Special Branch, an intelligence unit, for Lake Province at the police station in the provincial capital Mwanza during colonial rule.
He also worked at the same police station in Mwanza with Peter Bwimbo who, after independence, became head of the Presidential Protection Unit and President Nyerere's Chief Bodyguard.
Godfrey Mwakikagile attended Kyimbila Primary School - founded by British feminist educator Mary Hancock and transformed into a co-educational institution - near the town of Tukuyu in the late 1950s.
The headmaster of Mpuguso Middle School, Moses Mwakibete, was his math teacher in 1961 who later became a judge at the High Court of Tanzania appointed by President Nyerere.
And one of his American Peace Corps teachers at Mpuguso Middle School in 1964 was Leonard Levitt who became a prominent journalist and renowned author.
His current affairs teacher at Songea Secondary School, Julius Mwasanyagi, was one of the early members and leaders of TANU (Tanganyika African National Union) who played a major role in the struggle for independence and worked closely with Nyerere.
He fell out of favour with Nyerere in the mid-1960s and spent the rest of his life in relative obscurity as a secondary school teacher, almost forgotten as one of the earliest and prominent nationalists who, together with Nyerere, Oscar Kambona, Abdullah Kassim Hanga and Bibi Titi Mohammed, was one of the first proponents and supporters of the unification of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, even before the Zanzibar Revolution, which led to the creation of Tanzania as a union of two independent countries.
He had a deep booming voice and thorough command of both Kiswahili and English and was one of the most articulate and remains one of the most-forgotten early nationalists in Tanganyika's colonial and post-colonial history.
He articulated positions which thrust him into prominence as one of the national leaders and not just of the Hehe people (Wahehe) in Iringa District in the Southern Highlands Province during the struggle for independence.
He was hired by the news editor, David Martin, a British journalist who later became Africa correspondent of a London newspaper, The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday paper, covered the Angolan Civil War for BBC and for CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and who was a close friend of President Nyerere.
Mwakikagile credits David Martin for opening the door for him into the world of journalism and helping him launch his career as a news reporter when he was still a high school student.
He was a student of Nyerere in secondary school at St. Francis College, Pugu, on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam, and president of Tanzania for 10 years, serving two consecutive five-year terms.
He also credits Mkapa for helping him achieve his goal as an author because of the role he played in sending him to the United States where he got the opportunity to write books.
[8] One of Mwakikagile's main books in post-colonial studies is The Modern African State: Quest for Transformation (Nova Science Publishers, Inc., Huntington, New York, 2001).
Professor Edmond J. Keller, Chairman of the Political Science Department at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), in his review of Professor Martin's African Political Thought in Africa Today, Volume 60, Number 2, Winter 2013, Indiana University Press, has described Mwakikagile as a public intellectual and an academic theorist.
Other major African political thinkers and theorists covered by Professor Guy Martin in his book include Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Sédar Senghor, Amilcar Cabral, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Steve Biko.
Mwakikagile contends that bad leadership is the biggest problem African countries have faced since independence because leaders are not held accountable for their actions and rig elections to stay in power and even perpetuate themselves in office, a problem he has addressed in his books including Ethnicity and Regionalism in National Politics in Kenya and Nigeria: A Comparative Study (2024).
She said her analysis was the same as Mwakikagile's and those of other prominent people including Nelson Mandela, Chinua Achebe, Ali Mazrui, and former Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, stating that she made the same point they did.
It was inspired by and followed the teachings and writings of Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X.
Before he went to Tanzania, Professor Marin was a member of the White House Consumer Advisory Council where he served on Wage and Price Control in the mid-1960s, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
[13] It was also reviewed by a prominent Tanzanian journalist and political analyst, Fumbuka Ng'wanakilala of the Daily News, Dar es Salaam, in October 2002, and is seen as a comprehensive work, in scope and depth, on Nyerere.
Professor Kwame Essien of Gettysburg College, later Lehigh University, a Ghanaian, reviewed Relations Between Africans and African Americans: Misconceptions, Myths and Realities, in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2011, an academic journal of Columbia University, New York, and described it as an "insightful and voluminous" work covering a wide range of subjects from a historical and contemporary perspective, addressing some of the most controversial issues in relations between the two.