Zanzibar: Independence, Revolution, and Union
At the end of World War II socioeconomic and ethnic divisions in Zanzibar and Pemba coincided, but the divisions were not clear cut and some interests and attitudes crossed boundaries: many Arabs were in fact of mixed origin, and some who might have called themselves Shirazi at one time had come to think of themselves as Arab. The Shirazi of Pemba shared certain economic interests with Pemba Arabs, and there were cases of inter-marriage. All Arabs and Shirazi were Muslims: most mainlanders were not. On Zanzibar, Shirazi and mainlanders might have had some grievances in common, but in certain situations they were competitors. Arabs and Shirazi alike looked down on mainlanders, especially those of slave origin. This complex social situation set the stage for the sometimes ambiguous politics leading to independence.
Politically the situation remained fairly quiet until the mid-1950s. The Legislative Council, like that on the mainland, included an appointed unofficial minority. Arab in composition. Except for one instance of violence in the early 1950s. there was little overt political activity. The violence occurred when farmers. already angry because some of their land had been taken to extend the airport, rebelled against the government's intention to impose innoculation against anthrax. Out of this incident emerged the National Party of the Subjects of the Sultan of Zanzibar.
A few years later, in 1954, the Arab Association, increasingly political and influenced in part by developments in the Middle East, published a series of strongly anticolonial articles in its newspaper. Alison Smith suggests that some Arabs had begun to think that if they were to remain in control of an eventually independent Zanzibar in which they were clearly a minority, they would have to speed up the process lest they be preempted by the majority. The articles led to the trial for sedition of the executive groups of the association. The British authorities had counted on the continued cooperation of the generally conservative Arabs to whom they had become accustomed, but they were confronted with an eighteen month boycott of government by all save one Arab member of the Legislative Council (who was murdered in 1955).
In 1955 a number of Arabs led by Ali Muhsin Barwani, a young member of a family of wealthy landowners (like the editor of the Arab Association paper that had published the anticolonial articles) affiliated themselves with the National Party founded by rebellious peasants sonic years earlier, In 1956 Ali Muhsin became the unofficial leader of that group. now called the Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP). Like other activist Arabs he was moved by Islamic ideas. but he had also been influenced by his understanding of nationalist movements in nineteenth century Europe.
The ZNP, now led by Arabs, included Shirazi but excluded mainlanders who were not subjects of the sultan. Like the Arab Association, it called for elections to the Legislative Council on a common roll, apparently assuming that an Arab-led, if not entirely Arab, delegation would he chosen under such conditions.
The British authorities, assuming that the Arab Association radicals and the ZN P represented an extremist fringe, offered their own views of constitutional change in October 1955. Elections were not included, and the Arab boycott of government continued. In 1956 a senior official from Kenya who had been called in as an adviser recommended common roll elections in 1957. The franchise was to be highly restricted, however, and the proposal was modified to limit the vote to subjects of the sultan, thereby excluding all but a few mainland Africans.
Most Shirazi and mainland Africans were not sure that they wanted the changes because they seemed to he steps toward an independent Zanzibar likely to he controlled by Arabs. The colonial authorities, long committed to Zanzibar as an Arab state. were nevertheless not ready to accept an election dominated by an increasingly radical Arab minority and encouraged the Shirazi and the few eligible mainlanders to vote. In fact not many could be-cause of the British failure to stress secondary education for the non-Arab population.
Despite their doubts, the hitherto independent African and Shirazi associations, confronted by the prospect of elections, did join in an alliance and their activity, as well as the large number of votes (-10 percent of the total) cast for unaffiliated candidates meant that the ZNP lost all of the six seats in the first round of elections in July 1957, One representative of the alliance, Abeid Kai-time, of working-class background, emerged as a major figure at this time, defeating Ali Muhsin for one of the six seats.
As a consequencc. of the election racial conflict intensified. On the one hand Afro-Shirazi consumer cooperatives forced many Arab shopkeepers out of business. On the other, Afro-Shirazi dockworkers who had long held a monopoly on waterfront jobs were eliminated in favor of members of the ZNP. Arab plantation owners also evicted long-tolerated mainlander squatters.
The ZNP, despite its losses, took the initiative, seeking support from several foreign sources for its drive to independence. Ali Muhsin gained the approval of Ghana's president, Kwame Nkrumah. and the party's general secretary„ Abdul Hallman Mohammed (known as Babu—grandfather), used his links with communist states and with Labour Party members in Great Britain to gain the advice and support of the left. On such advice, particularly from Labour Party professionals, he developed a varied grimy) of voluntary organizations that provided him and the party with a power base in addition to his personal base as a union leader.
Beginning in the mid-1935 unions had become increasingly important: several of the larger ones under Afro-Shirazi influence formed the Zanzibar and Pemba Federation of Labour and affiliated with the NVestern-oriented International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Balm organized agricultural and some Shirazi waterfront workers into the Federation of Progressive Trade Unions and affliated it with the communist-oriented World Federation of Trade Unions.
This network of organizations, including numbers of Shirazi and a few mainlanders, enabled the newspapers subsidized by the ZNP to insist on its multiethnic nature, a position that the ZNP took from the 1957 elections to the early, 1960s. Nevertheless the leadership was largely Arab. Meanwhile the alliance of the African and Shirazi associations had converted itself into a party----the Afro-Shirazi Union (ASU). It was not able to take real advantage of its relative success in the elections, however, because it had little organizational experience, and it lacked the resources of the ZNP, which, despite the radical stance and connections of some of its leaders, was able to draw on Arab wealth.
The ASU's greatest problem lay in the ideological differences between the Mainlanders and many of the Shirazi, The mainlanders, strongly anti-Arab, continued to fear early independence lest it mean Arab rule. The Shirazi. linked to the Arabs by religion and in some cases by intermarriage, were not prepared to take the anti-Arab position of the mainlanders, The Pemba Shirazi in particular were on good terms with the Pemba Arabs, disliked the mainlanders, and despised the working-class background of Karue.
In 1959 two leaders of the Pemba Shirazi and their followers withdrew from the ASU and joined a Shirazi member of the Legislative Council in forming the Zanzibar and Pemba People's Party(ZPPP), an almost entirely Shirazi entity. The remainder (and larger part) of the AS U then became the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP).
The British resident throughont this period retired at the end of 1959 and was succeeded by Sir George Mooring. II is background and other developments in East Africa at the t I inc seemed to signal a change in the long-standing British emphasis on the Arab character of the Zanzibari state. In early 1960 Sir Hilary Blood was appointed to 1110k into the Zanzibari sit in ion and recommend the next series of constitutional changes, Ilk proposals included an enlarged Legislative Council with an unofficial majority and a council of ministers, including a chief minister.
Testimony before the Blood Commission indicated seine of the complexity of the divisions in Zanzibar On the one hand some ZNI) positions emphasized loyalty to the snitanate, and there was also a question as to the qualifications necessary to permit recent immigrants to become citizens of Zanzibar. The resolution of that question would speak directly to the weight carried by mainlanders. Moreover the ZNP proposed a bicameral legislature that seemed to favor continued Arab influence.
On the other hand the ZNP insisted on immediate independence and full adult suffrage, and it stressed its nonracial character, claiming that the other parties were racial groupings willing to permit continued British rule in order to survive. The ASP in turn claimed that the ZNP was communist oriented (it had given eighty-five scholarships to students for studs' in Moscow. Peking, and Cairo. then the center of Middle Eastern radicalism).
In the elections in January 1961 the ASP won a little more than 40 percent of the vote and ten of the twenty-two seats: the ZNP took nine seats with nearly 36 percent of the vote. The balance of power lay with the ZPPP, which won three seats with 17 percent of the vote. Two of the ZPPP leaders allied themselves with the ZNP, the third with the ASP, leading to a tie. An extra seat was added and another election scheduled for June.
The tensions in this period were high. The ZNP was accused of stressing racial and religious differences in its campaign and in its turn objected to the financial and other aid (including speakers) given the ASP by TANU. The election itself was followed by a week of rioting in which sixty-eight Arabs were killed and several hundred other persons hurt.
Once again the results of the election were ambiguous. Both major parties won ten seats, but the ASP had gained a little more than half of the total vote. The ZPPP, which had campaigned with the ZNP held three seats, and the alliance was therefore able to form a government. In the circumstances, the leader of the ZNP offered the position of chief minister to the head of the ZPPP.
Between mid-1961 and mid-1963 the coalition government was in power, but stresses within the coalition parties were beginning to make themselves felt, and the ASP seemed to be gaining additional internal support as well as the support of a number of mainland parties in east and central Africa. some of them dominating already independent states. These were joined in an organization called the Pan African Freedom Movement for East. Central and Southern Africa (PAFMECSA).
The radical elements in the ZNP led by Hahn had been responsible for much of its organizational work and its propaganda, hut the bulk of the members and the leaders of the ZNP and the ZPPP actually in pwernment were Muslims and in many respects conservative. In mid-1962 ten of the more radical members of the ZNP, including Hahn (already convicted of seditious statements) were held responsible for several cases of sabotage alleged to have been committed by the Youths Own Union, a ZAP group. When Balm and others were convicted and jailed for fifteen months, the government leaders did not object.
After serving his term, Balm urged on the ZAP his own candidates for the next election, objecting specifically to the ZNP's practice of choosing candidates who were of the same race as the dominant one in their constituencies. His list rejected, Babu left for the mainland, to return before the election. With two other former ZNP leaders he then formed the Umma (Masses) Party, an explicitly radical group, leaving the ZNP dominated by its Islam oriented, largely conservative elements.
The intervention of Tanganyikan and Kenyan elements in PAFMECSA, concerned that independence might be delayed by strife between the two leading parties, brought the ZNP and the ASP together briefly, but the reconciliation did not last. Among other things the ZNP was persuaded that PAFMECSA's sympathies lay with the ASP.
By late 1962 and early 1963 the ASP as well as the ZNP were looking forward to independence. The parties differed, however, on whether elections should be held before or after the granting of self-government. The ASP, apparently confident that it could command a majority of the votes, preferred an election before self-government on the grounds that if the minority party were in power when self-government was granted it would find ways of retaining that power no matter what the results of the subsequent election.
The elections were in fact scheduled for July 1963, two weeks after internal self-government was to be established. Thirty-one seats were to be contested, and all adults were eligible to vote, this time at the ASP's insistence.
With a turnout of more than 99 percent, the ZNP won twelve seats, and its ally, the ZPPP, six—more than enough to form a government. The ASP had polled 54.3 percent of the vote, however, and resented the fact that their clear popular majority was not reflected in control of the Legislative Council.
Mohammed Shamte, the ZPPP leader, remained the head, now prime minister, of the coalition government, which quickly tried to find ways of shoring up its strength so that it might prevail after independence. Loyal members of the ZNP were sent in to take over rural administration, and the mainlanders in the police force, its most experienced component, were dismissed. The government also made plans to forbid political opposition when full independence came.
Independence was granted on December 10, 1963. In January 1964 a bloody revolution did away with the coalition government and the sultanate. Curiously the revolution was not the work of the ASP, which continued to manifest organizational weakness and was marked by internal quarrels in the months between the elections and independence. The strongest opposition to the government was offered by Balm's Umma Party and the Federation of Progressive Trade Unions, which he carried with him when he deserted the ZNP. He somehow managed to get that union and its rival, the Zanzibar and Pemba Federation of Labour, to form the National Labour Committee. Landless workers also supported him, and the All Zanzibar Journalists Organization threw their weight behind him effectively in newspaper attacks on the government.
The actual task of overthrowing the regime fell to a soldier of fortune, John °keno, a Luo from Kenya. On his own he enlisted a small force, including Umma Party members and, most important, those mainland police who had not returned to their homes. During the night beginning on January 11, 1964, Okello's forces seized two police armories and quickly took over Zanzibar town. There was no further fighting, but numbers of Arabs were killed after the coup had, for all practical purposes. succeeded. Okello's part in the revolution was soon over. The Umma Party and the more radical elements of the ASP led by Karume took over almost immediately. Three months later (on April 26, 1964) Zanzibar joined Tanganyika to form the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar—shortly thereafter changed to the United Republic of Tanzania.
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