And Home Was Kariakoo (35 page)

One of the people who expressed this latter opinion, in a cable to Washington, was the American ambassador to Kenya, William Attwood, who would himself soon produce a book,
The Reds and the Blacks
(1967), about the Communist threat in Africa. It would be banned in Kenya, which is surprising since Kenyatta was an avowed friend of the United States. In a rather candid account of his career as a diplomat, in
The Twilight Struggle
(1989), Attwood blithely admits that several Kenyan members of the cabinet were on the payroll of the Americans. Those of us who come from small countries can only muse later in life how such casually described machinations not only changed the course of our countries but also determined our own personal lives: why we are here and not there.

And Okello? He was a loose canon on the scene, one who genuinely believed that it was his mission to liberate not only Zanzibar but also South Africa, Mozambique, and the African countries still under colonial rule. On one hand he respected Karume, the new president, on the other he would set conditions on the presidency. He was the one who sent Karume to safety on the eve of the revolution, and the one who invited him back. He was also aware that as a
Christian in a predominantly Muslim nation, his position could not last. He mentions receiving anonymous letters of threat. But his image was large, his speech populist, and the three East African presidents, Nyerere, Kenyatta, and Obote were nervous.

On January 19, Okello paid a visit to Dar es Salaam for medical treatment, apparently in a plane sent for him by Nyerere; he met Nyerere and members of the cabinet, and he was in Dar when early the next morning the Tanganyka African Rifles went on a mutiny. This only fed rumours of Okello’s nefarious influence, but he says that he only placated the mutineers, telling them that they were going about their protests the wrong way. This was a scary moment in Dar es Salaam, especially for the Asians, after the violence of Zanzibar. People on the streets, watching defiant-looking soldiers speeding by in open army trucks, quickly started a free-for-all, a fujo, breaking down doors and looting shops. I recall my mother frantically praying, pulling her tasbih, at the same time warning us kids at the windows not to peep out. The mutiny was quickly quelled with the aid of British commandos.

The next month Okello visited Uganda and Kenya. According to the
New York Times
of February 29, Kenya went on emergency alert. “Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta and his closest associates were said to fear that a coup might be in preparation.” On his way to Nairobi airport to catch his flight back to Zanzibar, Okello says, he was whisked away to “a large office building in the city centre.” There he met a nervous trio of Nyerere, Kenyatta, and Obote, who interviewed him about the situation in Zanzibar.

Okello proved too strong a medicine, and he was very soon sidelined. Lied to and betrayed by the East African leaders, he was asked once to accompany Karume to a meeting in Dar es Salaam, where Nyerere pointedly ignored him and had him escorted to
Kenya, from where he was post-haste deported to Uganda. He had little money on him. Ironically, as he says, “The ousted Sultan fled to Britain, where he is living comfortably. He had been paid
£200,000
by the Colonial Office … as compensation.… I was expelled from Zanzibar as an unwanted person without a cent.”

Ironies abound in this postcolonial drama. Within three months of the revolution, Tanganyika and Zanzibar formed a union, the United Republic of Tanzania; apparently, Nyerere had tamed Zanzibar, as the West had desired. Calling Nyerere a statesman,
Time
, in its May 1, 1964 issue, declared jubilantly, in its florid style, “Last week, with scarcely a twitch of his toothbrush mustache, Nyerere swallowed—whole—the People’s Republic of Zanzibar.”

But Tanzania in a couple of years was one of the staunchest allies of the Communist Bloc, in particular China, which built the Tanzania–Zambia railway line when the World Bank denied assistance. Chinese goods flooded the Tanzanian market (as they do now under different conditions). And Tanzanians visited in droves the Chinese trade fair in Dar, on the Mnazi Mmoja ground; many even saw the opera
The East Is Red
. Tanzania consistently supported China’s bid for admission to the United Nations, and when it was
finally admitted in 1971, the Tanzanian ambassador, Salim, as the world press reported, “danced a victory jig.” One might well ask who swallowed whom. And Babu, whom the British and Americans had feared as a “Commie,” and might perhaps even have had assassinated, went on to live his last years in London. “Friendly” Karume turned out to be a brutal dictator, an embarrassment, who soon after he had forcibly married a sixteen-year-old girl, was assassinated. Today we know more about Okello than Karume, whose Wikipedia entry is almost barren. Many believe that he was in fact a mainlander, born in Malawi. Until the Zanzibar authorities release archival material—newspaper reports, radio transcripts, photographs, whatever remains—Okello’s account is all we have of the details of the Zanzibar revolution.

O
NE DAY A FUNNY SMELL HIT
U
HURU
S
TREET
in Dar es Salaam. It was cloyingly sweet, and extremely repulsive to the young folk. My mother however immediately recognized the foreign odour with a smile. It was duriani, a fruit found in many parts of the tropics, including Zanzibar, but unusual in Dar. A vendor had brought a basketful for sale. We ran from it. Zanzibaris love duriani, and my mother was born in Zanzibar. Apparently the islanders don’t react to the smell the way others do. But it repelled enough people on our street that we never saw it again.

Whenever I bring up the issue of race with Zanzibaris, often the first response is an uncomfortable silence; the next one might be a subtle change of subject. I wonder if it’s the smell they are afraid of. Zanzibari Asians feel, perhaps with some truth, that important nuances will be lost if their island life is not properly understood. In 2009 a BBC report on the revolution created an uproar of protest. Zanzibar was never simple.

It is, foremost, a small island. Stone Town and the part of Ngambo (the “other” and formerly poorer area) adjoining it are tiny compared to the expanse of any modern city. In pre-revolution
days the families living here, closely packed together in the maze of narrow streets, had known each other for decades, and were known by nicknames that are in use even today. It was difficult to keep secrets when you could get the story of a family through several sources, when you could eavesdrop from your window or balcony. News and rumours about the revolution had spread from balcony to balcony, window to window in ripples.

The Internet has created a virtual Zanzibar in which the exiles speak to each other, sharing information, keeping sweet memories alive, all in Swahili and English. They write about the various community festivals they would attend, the cricket matches at Mnazi Mmoja, the promenades at Forodhani where boys and girls threw flirtatious looks at each other, how the old sultan wearing his robe and turban, driven by a liveried chauffeur in the open state car, would wave at the people on the roads. They talk about the festivities of Imam Ali’s birthday, how the scouts marched through the streets, throwing salutes at the mosques. They recall the processions of the communities at their festivals—the Goans, the Khoja Ithnashiris, the Khoja Ismailis, the Bohras, the Hindus of various castes; the Yemeni kahawa sellers with their tall urns and tiny cups which they clattered together to announce their arrival, the snack places—Masi’s bhajia, Abedi’s “mix,” Adnan’s mbatata (potato), Maruki’s halwa; the street vendors they knew by name; all the island’s fruits, including, yes, duriani. They will tell you of how on New Year’s Eve they would go and stand in front of the English Club at Shangani and watch the elegantly dressed “European” couples go inside, and listen to the music and imagine the dancing. From the ships in the harbour and the hotels too would come strains of music, the entire Shangani seashore thrumming with lively jazz.

“There was absolute harmony and peace,” writes former islander Abdulrazak Fazal wistfully in a blog.

These are the sweet stories of pre-revolution Zanzibar, sad and nostalgic. But there is a smell, and that smell has to do with race. But race in Zanzibar, as anywhere in a mixed society, is not simple; people lived peacefully and intimately for the most part, and many Zanzibaris were of mixed origin. In his book,
Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar
, Thomas Burgess writes,

Still, the question persists, Why the orgy of violence directed primarily towards one identifiable race? Despite the mixing of races, the ambiguity of origins, and the class differences that could override race and religion, the division of the population into Africans, Asians, and Arabs existed and still does. The key word in Burgess’s observation is the uncomfortable
slave
. Slaves were retained in Zanzibar due to the growth of the clove industry in the nineteenth century; slaves were also used domestically. Reliable population estimates do not exist, but Zanzibar rarely had a nonslave population of more than 50,000. Burton’s estimate for 1857 was 25,000. It’s an astonishing fact then that during that period there were 60,000 to 100,000 slaves on the island. In 1860, 3,000 slaves were emancipated from the Indians. How could that memory not have irked any African, of whatever description? The underclass remained, throughout, “African.” And who, beyond a certain age, could in all honesty have forgotten the treatment of servants everywhere in East Africa?

In 1857, Richard Burton undertook a tour of Zanzibar town. He describes the African quarter in the “East End” thus, in his book
Zanzibar
:

This area would have included Ngambo, across the creek, where the poorer Indians had yet to arrive in significant numbers in the early twentieth century.

There are two prominent museums on the seafront, the Bait al Ajaib, House of Wonders, and the People’s (formerly Sultan’s) Palace. The former, built in the later 1800s by the third Omani sultan, the ambitious Seyyid Barghash, is a large and tall white building; inside, the central courtyard is open up to the roof, with tall slim columns supporting the balconies, which run around the second and third floors. It’s a museum of coastal art and culture, displaying photographs and artifacts with useful annotations. The lighting is poor everywhere and the place has a somewhat shabby, neglected look, surviving as it does on the most meagre budget. There’s much on show; the only regret is that there could be much more.

The People’s Palace next door, built in the eighteenth century, contains exhibits relating to the sultans, including large, impressive portraits of most of them. This building too has a central courtyard. Of some interest is the royal receiving room, on the front side of the second floor. A large chandelier hangs over an oriental carpet; at one end of the room is the padded royal chair with armrests, looking upon two padded benches facing each other. A door opens to a balcony, which looks out upon the sea in front and the city from the sides. Across the courtyard on the opposite side of the second floor is the sultana’s receiving room, similarly appointed. This was evidently the royal house of a very modest, a minor sultanate. One
suspects, however, that much of whatever remained in the palace when the last sultan fled on the royal yacht on the day of the revolution was stolen.

The Omanis arrived in Zanzibar relatively recently, in the seventeenth century, displacing the Portuguese. The earlier history of the island remains somewhat murky.

During the first millennium, Zanzibar island had consisted of separate African fishing and farming communities, following which, starting from the eleventh century, came an era when settlers arrived on the East African coast from Arabia and Persia—according to tradition, the city of Shiraz—and founded the thriving city states Kilwa, Malindi, and others. Shangani (Stone Town) was a minor entity, though Unguja Ukuu to the south, as an eleventh-century map shows, was an important Shirazi city. (Excavations indicate that Unguja Ukuu was a major African community as far back as
AD 500
, trading with the mainland.) With the arrival of the Portuguese on the Indian Ocean in 1498, life all along the coast, from Mozambique to Somalia, round the Arabian Peninsula and on to India, underwent a dramatic change. In 1507 the Portuguese had already occupied Muscat, the capital of Oman. By 1509, with the defeat of a massive Muslim fleet off the western coast of India, their dominance over the Indian Ocean was complete.