The Zanzibar Revolution (Swahili: Mapinduzi ya Zanzibar; Arabic: ثورة زنجبار, romanized: Thawrat Zanjibār) began on 12 January 1964 and led to the overthrow of the Sultan of Zanzibar Jamshid bin Abdullah and his mainly Arab government by the island's majority Black African population.
Zanzibar was an ethnically diverse state consisting of a number of islands off the east coast of Tanganyika. Formally separated from German East Africa in 1890, it had become fully independent in 1963, with responsibility for its own defense and foreign affairs, as a result of Britain giving up its protectorate over it. In a series of parliamentary elections preceding this change, the Arab minority succeeded in retaining the hold on power it had inherited from Zanzibar's former history as an overseas territory of Oman.
Frustrated by the lack of parliamentary representation compared to its share of votes in the July 1963 election, the African Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), led by John Okello, mobilised around 600–800 men on the main island of Unguja on the morning of 12 January 1964. Having overrun the country's police force and appropriated their weaponry, the insurgents proceeded to Zanzibar Town, where they overthrew the Sultan and his government.
The insurgents conducted a massacre of Arabs, looting Arab and South Asian–owned properties and businesses, and raping or murdering Arab and Indian civilians on the island. The death toll is disputed, with estimates ranging from several hundred to 20,000. An estimated 10,000 people escaped from the island, with many fleeing to the UK. Around a quarter of Zanzibar's Arabs were killed in the massacres. The moderate ASP leader Abeid Karume became the country's new president and head of state.
The new government's apparent communist ties concerned Western governments. As Zanzibar lay within the British sphere of influence, the British government drew up a number of intervention plans. However, the feared communist government never materialised. Because British and American citizens were successfully evacuated, the UK did not intervene in the island's unrest. The Eastern Bloc powers of East Germany and the Soviet Union, along with the anti-Soviet People's Republic of China, immediately recognised the new government and sent advisors.
Karume succeeded in negotiating a merger of Zanzibar with Tanganyika to form the new nation of Tanzania. Contemporary media assessed this merger as an attempt to prevent communist subversion of Zanzibar. The revolution ended more than 250 years of Arab dominance in Zanzibar. It is commemorated on the island each year with anniversary celebrations and a public holiday. The toll of victims in the massacres is generally not recognized.
Background
The Zanzibar Archipelago, now part of the Southeast African republic of Tanzania, is a group of islands lying in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanganyika. It comprises the main southern island of Unguja (also known as Zanzibar), the smaller northern island of Pemba, and numerous surrounding islets. Merchants and traders regularly visited the islands from Persia, Arabia, and India, beginning around the millennium. Some settled there, and Islam became influential in island culture among all ethnicities.
The long history of Arab rule dated to 1698, and Zanzibar was an overseas territory of Oman until it achieved independence in 1858 under its own Sultanate. In 1890 during Ali ibn Sa'id's reign, Zanzibar became a British protectorate after the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty separated British and German territory in Central Africa during the Scramble for Africa. Although never under direct British rule, it was considered part of the British Empire.
By 1964, the country was a constitutional monarchy ruled by Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah. Zanzibar had a population of around 230,000 Africans—some of whom claimed Persian ancestry and were known locally as Shirazis—and also contained significant minorities of 50,000 Arabs and 20,000 South Asians, who had long been prominent in business and trade. The various ethnic groups were becoming mixed by intermariage and the distinctions among them had blurred; according to one historian, an important reason for the general support for Sultan Jamshid was his family's ethnic diversity.
But the island's Arab inhabitants were the major landowners, and were generally wealthier than the Africans. They enjoyed access to higher quality social services, such as health and education, than Africans. Apart from that, British authority considered Zanzibar as an Arab country and always held a position of supporting the Arab minority to stay in power.
With the approach of the withdrawal of the British in the early 1960s, the major political parties organised largely along ethnic lines, with Arabs dominating the Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP) and Africans the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP). The ZNP looked towards Egypt as its model, which caused some tensions with the British officials on the islands. On the other hand, for centuries Zanzibar had been dominated by its Arab ruling class, and the Colonial Office could not imagine a Zanzibar ruled by black Africans.
In January 1961, as part of the process of British withdrawal from the islands, the island's authorities drew up constituencies and held democratic elections. The ASP and the ZNP each won 11 of the available 22 seats in Zanzibar's Parliament, so further elections were held in June, with the number of seats increased to 23. The ZNP entered into a coalition with the Zanzibar and Pemba People's Party (ZPPP) and this time took 13 seats, while the ASP, despite receiving the most votes, won 10. Electoral fraud was suspected by the ASP, and civil disorder broke out, resulting in 68 deaths. To maintain control, the coalition government banned the more radical opposition parties, filled the civil service with its own appointees, and politicised the police.
In 1963, with the number of parliamentary seats increased to 31, another election saw a repeat of the 1961 votes, along with bitterly divisive propagandaizing. Due to the layout of the constituencies, which were gerrymandered by the ZNP, the ASP, led by Abeid Amani Karume, won 54 percent of the popular vote but only 13 seats. The ZNP/ZPPP won the rest and set about strengthening its hold on power. The Umma Party, formed that year by disaffected radical Arab socialist supporters of the ZNP, was banned, and all policemen of African mainland origin were dismissed.
This removed a large portion of the only security force on the island, and created an angry group of paramilitary-trained men with knowledge of police buildings, equipment and procedures. The new Arab-dominated government made it clear that in foreign policy, the Sultanate of Zanzibar would be seeking close links with the Arab world, especially Egypt, and had no interest in forging relationships with the nations on the African mainland, as the black majority wished.
Slavery in Zanzibar had been abolished in 1897, but much of the Arab elite who dominated the island's politics made little effort to hide their racist views of the black majority as their inferiors, a people fit only for slavery. In Parliament, the Minister of Finance Juma Aley responded to questions from Karume by insultingly saying he need not answer questions from a mere "boatman". Aley said in another speech in Parliament that if Arabs were over-represented in the Cabinet, it was not because of race, but rather it was because the mental abilities of blacks were so abysmally low and the mental abilities of Arabs like himself were so high, a remark that enraged the black majority.
Memories of centuries of Arab slave-trading in the past (some of the older black people had been slaves in their youth), together with the distinctly patronizing view of the Arab elite towards the black majority in the present, meant that much of the black population of Zanzibar had a ferocious hatred of the Arabs, and viewed the new Arab-dominated government as illegitimate. The government drastically cut spending in schools in areas with high concentrations of black people, which heightened tensions. The government's budget, with its draconian spending cuts in schools in black areas, was widely seen as a sign that the Arab-dominated government was planning to lock the black people in a permanent second-class status.
On 10 December 1963, with the termination of the British protectorate, complete independence was achieved, with the ZNP/ZPPP coalition as the government. The government requested a defence agreement from the United Kingdom, asking for a battalion of British troops to be stationed on the island for internal security duties, but this request was rejected. The UK believed it inappropriate for British troops to be involved in maintenance of law and order so soon after complete independence. And in any event many of the cabinet, who were seeking closer ties with Egypt, ruled by the radical, anti-Western nationalist Nasser, did not want British troops in Zanzibar. British intelligence reports predicted that a civil disturbance, accompanied by increasing communist activity, was likely in the near future, and that the arrival of British troops might cause the situation to deteriorate further. Many foreign nationals remained on the island, including 130 Britons who were direct employees of the Zanzibar government.
In 1959, a charismatic Ugandan named John Okello arrived in Pemba, working as a bricklayer. In February 1963 he moved to Zanzibar. Working as an official in the Zanzibar and Pemba Paint Workers' Union and as an activist of the ASP, Okello had built a following and, almost from the moment when he arrived on Zanzibar, had been organizing a revolution that he planned to take place shortly after independence.
Revolution
Around 3:00 am on 12 January 1964, 600–800 poorly armed, mainly African insurgents, aided by some of the recently dismissed ex-policemen, attacked Unguja's police stations to seize weapons, and then the radio station. The attackers had no guns, being equipped only with spears, knives, machetes, and tire irons, but they had the advantage of numbers and surprise. The Arab police replacements had received almost no training and, despite responding with a mobile force, were soon overcome. Okello himself led the attack on the Ziwani police HQ, the largest armory on the island. Several of the rebels were fatally shot, but the police were overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
Okello personally attacked a police sentry, wrestled his rifle from him, and used it to bayonet the policeman to death. Arming themselves with hundreds of captured automatic rifles, submachine guns and Bren guns, the insurgents took control of strategic buildings in the capital, Zanzibar Town. At about 7:00 am, Okello made his first radio broadcast from a local radio station his followers had captured two hours earlier, calling upon the Africans to rise up and overthrow the "imperialists". At the time, Okello referred to himself only as "the field marshal". There was much speculation on Zanzibar about the identity of this mysterious figure leading the revolution, who spoke Swahili with a thick Ugandan Acholi accent that was unfamiliar on Zanzibar.
Within six hours of the outbreak of hostilities, the town's telegraph office and main government buildings were under revolutionary control, and the island's only airstrip was captured at 2:18 pm. In the countryside, fighting had erupted between the Manga, as the rural Arabs were called, and the Africans. The Manga were armed mainly with hunting rifles, and once the arms seized from the police stations reached the rebels in the countryside, the Manga were doomed. It is claimed by an American diplomat Don Petterson, living then in Zanzibar, that the fiercest resistance was at the Malindi police station, where under the command of Police Commissioner J. M. Sullivan (a British policeman who stayed on until a local replacement could be hired), all of the rebel attacks were repulsed, not least because the insurgents tended to retreat whenever they came under fire. Sullivan did not surrender the Malindi station until late in the afternoon and only after running out of ammunition. As claimed by Sullivan, he marched his entire force (not one policeman had been killed or wounded) down to the Stone Town wharf to board some boats that took them out to a ship, the Salama, to take them away from Zanzibar.
Throughout Stone Town, rebels had looted and destroyed shops and homes owned by Arabs and South Asians, and gang-raped numerous Arab and South Asian women. The Sultan, together with Prime Minister Muhammad Shamte Hamadi and members of the cabinet, fled the island on the royal yacht Seyyid Khalifa. The revolutionary government seized the Sultan's palace and other property. At least 80 people were killed and 200 injured, the majority of whom were Arabs, during the 12 hours of street fighting that followed.
Sixty-one American citizens, including 16 men staffing a NASA satellite tracking station, sought sanctuary in the English Club in Zanzibar Town, and four US journalists were detained by the island's new government.
Not knowing that Okello had given orders to kill no whites, the Americans living in Stone Town fled to the English Club, the point for evacuation. Those travelling in the car convoy to the English Club were shocked to see the battered bodies of Arab men lying out on the streets of Stone Town with their severed penises and testicles shoved into their mouths. As part of Okello's carefully laid out plans, all over the island, gangs of Africans armed with knives, spears and pangas (machetes) went about systematically killing all the Arabs and South Asians they could find. The American diplomat Don Petterson described this horror as he watched from his house a gang of African men storm the house of an Arab man, behead him in public with a panga, followed by screams from within his house as his wife and three children were raped and killed, followed by the same scene being repeated at the next house of an Arab, followed by yet another and another. After taking control of Stone Town on the first day, the revolutionaries continued to fight the Manga for control of the countryside for at least two days afterwards; whole families of Arabs were massacred after their homes had been stormed.
According to the official Zanzibari history, the revolution was planned and headed by the ASP leader Abeid Amani Karume. But, at the time Karume was on the African mainland, as was the leader of the banned Umma Party, Abdulrahman Muhammad Babu.