by M G Vassanji
I have arranged to meet here Abdul Sheriff, local intellectual and historian, the author of several books on Zanzibar. A quiet, unassuming man in his mid-sixties, he went to university in Berkeley and London. Later he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, where he was one among the intellectual crowd during the heyday of the 1970s. Returning to his native Zanzibar, for a few years he curated the House of Wonders, the rather impressive though underfunded museum of Swahili and coastal history, across the road from where we now stroll on Forodhani. His edited book, The History and Conservation of Zanzibar Stone Town, is studded with gems of information. His Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar is a detailed analysis of the growth of Zanzibar as a commercial hub in the nineteenth century. Until recently, when he retired, he ran the Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute. Funding was difficult, he says, dependent on foreign agencies, which preferred to donate to high-profile charities. The study of the Indian Ocean zone is not sexy enough. Poverty and disease are always more attractive.
We get our mishkakis, he with a naan, and I with a chapati, and sit on the seawall, partly facing the harbour. A few small boats are about, nothing else. Sea traffic is much less than it was in the time of Burton and Stanley, more than a hundred years ago. This island has only memories left, and Stone Town is one such memory. Abdul’s current project concerns the proposed new constitution for the Tanzanian Union, and he is involved in public discussions about it. The Union government is keen to push it through as quickly as possible. The present constitution, describing Zanzibar’s relations with the mainland, he says, was forced upon the island in the shotgun marriage of 1964, only a few months after the revolution. Now Zanzibaris want a better deal, on the model of the American federal system.
We find ourselves talking of our respective communities, the Ithnasheris and the Ismailis. They were initially a single community of Khojas, which split up in the late nineteenth century in India, and then again later in Africa, on grounds of religious practice. The split in Zanzibar, with repurcussions on the mainland, was bitter and sometimes violent; it divided many families. Such was the bitterness that Ismailis were forbidden even to accept water from an Ithnasheri house. That is saying a lot. And the colour black was frowned upon because it was identified with the “enemy.” It is all embarrassing now. As young people who had not seen the bitterness of the conflict, this attitude in our elders was curious, producing a slight niggling in the mind, a portent of the greater doubts that would in time arrive.
He walks me back to my hotel on Kenyatta Avenue.
The jamatkhana, the Khoja khano, on Jamatini Street was built in 1905, apparently on the site of an earlier, nineteenth-century structure. It is a light yellow rectangular building flush with its neighbours in the old section of town called Kiponda. The windows are arched and barred, the massive front door is typically Zanzibari, carved and studded. There is a carved trim on the outer wall, but none of the geometrical calligraphic affectations that seem to be de rigeur nowadays. There is no dome. This was the East African headquarters of the Khojas, and the area was called the Khoja Circle. The khano would have been crowded once, hundreds coming to pray every day, at dawn and dusk. Visitors would be welcomed. The tycoons Tharia Topan and Sewa Haji would have received pleadings and homage.
As plain and dignified as the outside is, the inside is magnificent in a baroque sort of way, with intricately carved woodwork on the wall panellings, trellises, railings, and columns, and massive ancient-looking chandeliers hanging low from the ceilings. And like all old buildings in Zanzibar, this one has its own ghosts.
The last time I went to the Zanzibar khano, I counted seventeen people.
19.
Zanzibar: The Revolution
IT WAS JANUARY 12, 1964. In Dar es Salaam, schools had reopened after the month-long holidays, the hot season was at its height, and the mangoes were ripe. Almost exactly a month before, Tanganyika had become a republic, refusing a British governor general and formal ties to the Crown; also a month ago Kenya had gained independence from Britain, and so had Zanzibar. It was an exciting time. They would tell us in school, You are the future. And so we believed. But that Sunday morning we woke up to a bizarre piece of news. There had been a revolution in Zanzibar. Those who listened to Radio Zanzibar heard the thundering voice of “the Field Marshall,” in a Swahili that sounded Kenyan or Ugandan, announcing the overthrow: “Wake up, you imperialists, there is no longer an imperialist government on this island. This is now the government of the freedom fighters.…” All these terms were foreign to us. A revolution in our backyard, in sleepy, peaceful old Zanzibar. It is impossible to describe the impact of this news. Disbelief, confusion, rumour. What did a revolution look like? Other countries had revolutions. But here? And what did it mean to our world? Zanzibar was a different country, an insignificant place, a stopover for our grandparents. The overriding fear when news of the violence had somehow drifted across the channel into Dar was, Can the revolution come here, to Tanganyika? Where will we run?
Zanzibar—easygoing isle on one hand, and on the other, the place of perhaps the bloodiest revolution on the continent. It is a conundrum. To this day many Zanzibaris remain stunned by the fact, the violence, the suddenness of the revolution. It appears relaxed even now: the streets are mostly safe and life is slow, the sun shines and the blue sea is accessible to enjoy, the dressing is casual, the kahawa seller comes by with his kettle, at Sugra Bai’s people of all races will sit in a plain room in a humble abode in an alley for a snack of tasty bhajia mix, there remains a sense of humour. Yet sporadic—though much smaller—violence does take place. Perhaps Zanzibaris, the poor ones, hide their resentments well most of the time. Or perhaps—this can hardly be satisfactory—one simply accepts the puzzle that is Zanzibar.
What brought about this upheaval? There’s no denying that beneath the placid surface of island life there has lurked the memory of a historical racial grievance: many of the Africans were the descendants of slaves. To feed that resentment, the seeds of a revolt had already been planted in the flawed general election that was a gift of the British to the friendly Sultan of Zanzibar before they lowered their flag and departed. At independence, Zanzibar found itself with a coalition government—formed by the Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP) and the Pemba People’s Party (PPP), both dominated by the Arabs—with Sultan Jamshed as the constitutional monarch. (Pemba is the smaller island to the north, considered politically a part of Zanzibar.) The ZNP and PPP were “moderate” parties; moreover, a constitutional monarchy suited the British, for they had been the patrons of the sultans and their senior partners since the nineteenth century. The colonial powers had sponsored such mixed-race “moderate” parties in other countries as well, and failed, for the simple reason that history was against them. The Africans did not want a partnership with the minorities who had dominated them in the ruling and social hierarchy, and would continue to dominate given the chance. The predominantly African parties were the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) and the Umma party, the latter formed by disaffected socialist members of the ZNP and now banned.
At independence there were approximately 230,000 Africans, 50,000 Arabs, and 20,000 Asians on the island. As expected, the majority of the popular vote was captured by the Afro-Shirazi Party, the ASP; and yet the ZNP–PPP coalition managed to obtain the greater number of seats and formed the government. There was something manifestly unfair about this outcome. The wealthier ZNP could buy votes; the distribution of constituencies was questionable; and there were charges of vote-rigging.
The revolution began at around three in the morning and was over within the day. A few hundred “freedom-fighters” armed with rudimentary weapons—spears, machetes, bows and arrows, tire irons—managed to overcome two police stations and capture their weapons, and to take over the radio station. Their numbers swelled, and quickly a violent rampage spread across the island. Soon after the attacks began, the Zanzibari prime minister requested British troops, based in Kenya, to intervene. The Brit
ish government refused, despite American recommendation. Early in the morning the sultan, the prime minister, and members of the cabinet quietly fled in the royal yacht, stopping in Dar before flying off to England. What remained was the lingering aftermath. The world had changed.
The revolution was shockingly bloody, most of the violence directed against the Arabs, some against the Asians. It is surprising how many people today will casually mention having witnessed a murder, a rape, a beating. Don Petterson, an official at the U.S. Consulate at the time, describes a scene witnessed by some frightened Americans crowded inside the living room of a house:
[They] could see African men furtively making their way through the trees … heading for nearby houses, the homes of Arab families. The Africans were dressed for the most part in shorts and short-sleeve shirts and carried an assortment of weapons: sharp-bladed pangas (machetes), spears, and knives.
… suddenly, the quiet was broken by shouts, and the armed men could be seen rushing the nearest neighbouring house. The shouting was now joined by screams. The American onlookers saw a bearded Arab man dragged out of the doorway of the house. Struck by a panga, he fell to the ground, nearly decapitated. They saw no further violence, but the screaming within the house continued for several minutes. Afterwards, the attackers herded the disheveled women and three children.…
And in its January 24, 1964 issue, Time observed,
An air of weird unreality hung over the sleepy, sun-baked capital of the world’s newest “people’s republic.” Cubantrained “freedom fighters” sporting Fidelista beards and berets stalked the narrow twisting streets. Carloads of whooping blacks careered through the Arab and Indian quarters, looting and shooting. Radios blared ominous messages of doom and death. From the hood of one car dangled a grisly trophy: the testicles of a murdered Arab.
Arab bodies would be seen on the roads, testicles stuffed into their mouths. Women’s breasts were cut off. Estimates of Arab deaths range from a few hundred to 20,000. Pettersen’s estimate is 5,000 Arabs, one in ten, with many others wounded. The systematic, selective, and continuous killing seemed to western observers an attempt at genocide, long before Rwanda. There were many rapes. As Asian boys would repeat in Dar, in a grotesque attempt at humour, “they”—the Zanzibaris—had duriani in the morning, biriyani in the afternoon, and an Arabiani at night, the latter referring to an Arab woman. Recalling this repugnant line, I try in vain to understand the teenage mind that would utter it. I am relieved I did not speak it, remember distinctly a feeling of distaste, a queasiness. Our home had four girls and my mother. Our own Khoja community of Zanzibar, we heard, had gathered frightened in the khano, seeking safety in numbers and the sanctuary of a prayer house. They seem to have suffered minimally in physical terms, though according to some people today the violence against Asians was under-reported. I recall that in the khanos of Dar there were special prayers said every day at noon for our people on the island.
How to explain this violence in an island long considered calm and peaceful, with a common identity so strong even to this day? I once put this question to a few Zanzibari friends; there was no satisfactory response. One muttered, “Racism … Rwanda,” surely hopelessly inadequate and inaccurate, except perhaps revealing the residual bitterness. Another simply said the obvious, that the common faith, Islam, and its fraternity were momentarily forgotten during the violence. Few will recall, unless prodded, the blunt racism, the racial hierarchy that preceded the revolution: Africans at the bottom and treated with contempt, then the Asians and Arabs and the whites. The Arabs had come as rulers, they were for the most part the elite, owning plantations and the higher positions in the civil service. Among the Africans, on the other hand, there would still have been those who remembered the days of slavery.
But this purely race-based explanation is perhaps a little too clean. There were, after all, many African families among the elite. And often in Zanzibar there is no clean division between Arabs and Africans: the “Shirazi” of the revolutionary Afro-Shirazi Party is a conscious acknowledgement of Middle Eastern roots. Many so-called Africans have Arab blood, and vice versa. Even the sultans had black wives. But the mobs that went around hacking with their pangas seemed to know their victims. The point has been made that many of the revolutionaries were from the mainland, for whom the racial division was indeed clear-cut.
In the days and months following the revolution, a time of anarchy and, for some, pure terror, thousands of Arabs were expelled, thousands were put in camps. Plantations and properties were confiscated, corporal punishments meted out. But the revolutionaries had instructions not to harm whites; British warships lurked not far away, the British troops in Kenya were on alert.
Who were the leaders of the coup, and how was it organized? There has remained a cloud of mystery surrounding the details, aided by deliberate obfuscation, historical erasure, and propaganda. The new president of Zanzibar was the leader of the ASP, Sheikh Abeid Karume, an uneducated, unsophisticated man, often dismissed as a former fisherman; could he have led the revolution, as it was ultimately claimed? Or was it truly the “Field Marshall” who had proclaimed the revolution and for a few days was its voice on the radio? His name was John Okello and he was from Uganda. From the outset there was suspicion of Cuban and Soviet involvement, and the Americans in that heyday of the Cold War were quick to see in Zanzibar, East Africa’s own Cuba and a communist triumph. The new vice-president was Abdallah Kassim Hanga, educated in Moscow, where he had married a Russian woman. The minister of external affairs was Abdulrahman Babu, a left-wing intellectual who had also travelled to communist countries, and, according to Time, “Africa’s most brilliant and ugliest politician.” There is, however, no evidence of communist involvement in the coup, but the Warsaw Pact countries immediately recognized the new government, while an anxious West waited.
Official Tanzanian government records have attempted to erase John Okello’s role in the revolution. An “authoritative story of the Zanzibar Revolution” appeared on its first anniversary in the propagandist daily The Nationalist, published in Dar es Salaam. It is a shamelessly biased and inaccurate account, in which John Okello’s name is not even mentioned. Nor is he mentioned during the annual commemorations of the revolution. Yet there can be no doubt that he was a key leader and spokesman. Few who lived through those tumultous weeks can forget that voice on the radio; or the attention he garnered and the apprehensions he generated throughout East Africa. Not only the local but also the international media kept track of him. There exist published photos of Okello with the presidents of Kenya and Tanzania, and I recall the fears and rumours that spread in Dar when he came visiting, and went on to Nairobi, that he had come to instigate new revolutions. The New York Times clearly affirmed Okello’s leadership in the revolution, and an article on March 1, 1964, was headed “Kenya on Alert in Okello’s Visit; Nairobi Wary.” Don Petterson of the U.S. Consulate mentions Okello as a key figure; so does the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński, who apparently spent a few days immediately following December 12 in Zanzibar. (His account is in other ways quite fanciful.) John Okello wrote up his own version of events in Revolution in Zanzibar. It is a straightforward account with minute details about the planning of the coup, that regardless of the naïveté of the author, has a certain ring of truth. How much truth it actually contains is impossible to say.
John Okello was born in Uganda in 1937 in the Lango tribe and baptized, significantly for the calling he would take upon himself, with the Christian name Gideon. As a young man, having lost both parents, he travelled in Uganda and Kenya, working at different jobs—he was, variously, house servant, tailor, carpenter, mason, labourer, and street vendor. He was deeply influenced by the Bible and affected by the lowly treatment of Africans by Europeans and Asians (the latter of whom, he admits, also often came to his assistance). He says he became fluent in Swahili. (Though in the 1950s, we must remember, the level of the language in Kenya and Uganda, except for the Kenya coast, was rather
crude even by Asian standards.) In Nairobi he was sent to jail for two years for an “alleged” sexual offence. Upon his release he proceeded to Machakos and on to Mombasa, where he arrived in February 1958. There, he recalls, he resented in particular being called “boy” and “mtumwa” (slave) by the Asians and Arabs, and he had a dream, in which a voice told him, “You will not die. God has given you the power to redeem the prisoners and the slaves, and you will make those who cannot understand to understand.” In June 1959, hearing of better prospects on the island of Pemba, he left illegally by dhow for that destination. With him were some new Kenyan friends.
In Pemba, Okello became involved in politics, joining the youth wing of the ZNP, later abandoning it for the more African-supported ASP; he started a brick-making business and became involved in organizing workers. He gave political speeches. And he had another dream: “God the Almighty has anointed you with clean oil.… With power from Almighty God you will help redeem your black brothers from slavery. God will give you more wisdom, courage and power to do this.” After the General Election of 1961, in which the two parties supported by Arabs and wealthy Asians won a majority of the seats, he became disillusioned and began to think of an armed struggle. Given to quotations from the Bible, he sought inspiration in these words from St James: “Go now, you rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.…”
Okello arrived on Zanzibar island in February 1963. And after the disappointment of the July 1963 election for the government of independent Zanzibar, in which ASP again lost, he began organizing workers and members of the ASP youth towards an armed revolt. He called secret meetings, organized weapons training, planned strategies. In all this, he says, he did not involve Abeid Karume, in order to save him from arrest in case his plans were found out. What his actual relationship was with Karume before the revolution, we don’t know.