And Home Was Kariakoo (34 page)

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.

Okello gives detailed information about the planning and the meetings, some of which involved large numbers of people. It is hard to believe that with so many youths of his party involved, Karume would be unaware of what was going on; but then the government in power was also in the dark. It is also interesting to note that the core group of fighters, according to Okello, had more men from the mainland than indigenous Zanzibaris. The delusions of this young
man who heard voices from God are evident; we cannot help but feel that he exaggerates, and writing from a prison after three tumultuous years, some of his accounts would be inaccurate. Okello seems to have believed that the Arabs had planned a genocide of Africans: “All male African babies would be killed, and African girls would be forced to marry or submit to Arabs.…”

The revolt, as described by Okello, has a distinctly African-Christian ritualistic component to it. Before the fighting began, he had two dreams. In the first of these, God asked him to step into the river at Mtoni and pick up a black, white, and red stone and perform a ritual. In the second dream he was asked to sacrifice a black cat and a black dog and mix their blood and brains and the powdered stone in a pot. Afterwards all the recruits passed over this grisly mixture and took an oath. The oath, the water dipping, and Okello’s instructions and injunctions to his fighters regarding food and contact with women are reminiscent of other African wars, for example, Maji Maji in mainland Tanzania and Mau Mau in Kenya. His rules on the conduct of war sound eerie: “Never in any situation rape women whose husbands have been killed or detained. No soldier may rape or even touch a virgin girl.…” We can assume what was allowed or even encouraged.

Here was a demented, naive, and sensitive young man, restless, religious, and deeply wounded by the racism he saw and experienced. There can be no doubt that for a period of a few weeks this unlikely person managed to take East Africa by storm, by emerging as a leader in the Zanzibar revolution. Many of us are confused, even wounded, products of colonialism, in our culture, our politics, our responses to racism. It is possible to see in this lonely, wandering John Okello an extreme manifestation of this confusion.

Once the revolution got underway, a madness consumed him.
His arbitrariness and cruelty are legendary by now. Seif Sharif Hamad, in his biography, describes:

This account of course implicitly acknowledges Okello’s role in the revolution. Another account, by Ali Sultan Issa, a member of the ZNP and later the Umma Party, dismisses reports of Okello’s dominant role in the revolution as “rubbish.” But, an avowed Marxist, Issa was in China when the revolution began, arriving in Zanzibar two weeks later on January 25, having taken two days off for shopping in Hong Kong with his wife. Arriving in Zanzibar, he was immediately dispatched to Pemba. His hearsay account of how the revolution began is hardly reliable.

A CIA report, written in 1965 and released in 2010 as
Zanzibar: The Hundred Days’ Revolution
, suggests but does not affirm that Karume and Hanga were the leaders of the revolution. No details of what role this leadership took or how the planning occurred are given. The report moreover has no references and is out of date, having been written long before the books by Petterson, Okello, and others appeared. If Karume were involved in the planning, surely
details would be available to become part of the history and folklore of the revolution?

A full, authoritative account of the Zanzibar revolution, then, continues to remain elusive.

Under Karume, a repressive regime was in place. The Asian and Arab minorities especially lived in constant fear. Properties and businesses were confiscated. Favouritism and outright theft by the leaders was the order of the day and people were afraid to speak out, to complain or criticize. There were disappearances, mass detentions, public floggings, and abductions of women and girls that were tantamount to rape. “During Karume’s time,” writes Hamad, in a statement corroborated by many, with the naming of names, “people had no security in their homes because if they had a beautiful wife or daughter, she could be taken and forced to sleep with a big shot.” Many people, women and children first, were smuggled out in boats by means of bribery.

From a global perspective, this tiny spice island in the Indian Ocean had caught the spotlight as a place of contention between the Communists and the West. The worry for Britain, the recently departed colonial ruler, and America, democracy’s somewhat shortsighted crusader, was that the coup was the stepping-stone for the spread of communism into East Africa. They were watching Abdulrahman Babu, in particular, with an obsession, seeing Karume and Nyerere as friendly and moderate. Don Petterson gives a clear picture of American concerns about Babu: