2. 1
Through an examination of secondary source material, this paper attempts to explain the
emergence of intense racial hatred and violence in 1960s Zanzibar, as the country experienced its
first democratic elections beginning in 1957, and as the government of the Sultan of Zanzibar
was overthrown in 1964. In many ways, the work of Jonathon Glassman in War of Words, War
of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar is the starting point for the analysis
here. Glassman convincingly details the emergence of a new discourse of race in Zanzibar as
local intellectuals processed ideological content from many sources, combining these ideas with
older forms of racial thinking, and synthesizing a unique discourse that resonated in Zanzibar. I
argue, however, that the systematic use of racial thinking to attain power and establish control
through the creation of new paradigms of belonging is the central innovation of this moment in
Zanzibari history. Furthermore, I believe the strategy of control through homogenization of
identity is the key to understanding how this happened, why it happened, and the legacy of these
discourses and the violence associated with them in Zanzibari politics up to the present.
Difference has a long history in Zanzibar. And certainly, by the early 19th century, when
the Omani sultan Said the Great moved his capital to Zanzibar, transforming it into the dominant
port in East Africa and the global center for the production of cloves, difference correlated with
political and economic power, and with social status. It is difficult to say with certainty whether
ideas of racial difference were used at this time to create or reinforce Omani hegemony, but
certainly by midcentury race was at least used to justify it.1 Whatever the case, a hierarchy
emerged, with Arabs as the political elite, South Asians as the commercial class, mainland
Africans who were slaves and former slaves, and indigenous peasants. It transformed with
1
Emily Ruete, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess From Zanzibar, (New York: Markus Weiner Publishing, 1989); (Probaby Burton
as well). Ms. Ruete likens Africans to children to justify Omani control. Similar justifications can be seen in Burton and other
sources from the time. Whether theseideas originated in Europe or are indigenous is frankly irrelevant. I should also note that
there may well be enough material to determine thefunction of these ideas; I am not familiar with any such analysis, however.
3. 2
increasing integration into the Eurocentric global market – as Arabs became increasingly
indebted to Indians, who themselves were subject to the British – and later by direct colonization
by the British. But these differences coexisted with an even longer history of cosmopolitanism.
The islands of the Zanzibar archipelago, Unguja and Pemba, have a long history of
cosmopolitanism. For many hundreds of years, Zanzibar town was one of dozens of important
trading cities along the East African coast, an important node in the Indian Ocean trade that
connected the peoples of East Africa, Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia economically and
culturally – an Islamic world market of goods and ideas. These many peoples cohabitated for
months at a time in Zanzibar, as merchants waited for the change of monsoons to return to
Arabia or East Africa. 2 Moreover, even as the institution of plantation slavery grew in the 19th
century, creating a social order that in many ways appeared to be defined by descent, these
differences were blurred by rising and falling fortunes, cultural assimilation of Arabs and South
Asians over time, and above all, by intermarriage.3
The immigrants from Arabia and the mainland who settled in Zanzibar forged
increasingly intimate relations with one another and with the indigenous inhabitants of the
islands over the 19th and early 20th centuries. These included commercial and patronage relations,
commercial, plantation, and domestic slavery, intermarriage, and ultimately multidirectional
cultural assimilation. The Arab political elite increasingly spoke Swahili and had mothers or
grandmothers from mainland Africa. As they incorporated themselves, over generations, into
local society, and as they gained access to land, Africans of mainland origins increasingly came
2
Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam, (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010).
3
Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivoryin Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy,
1770-1873, (Athens:Ohio University Press, 1987).
4. 3
to identify as Shirazis, or even Arabs.4 These differences, however, came to be understood in
more rigid terms, and came to have new significance with the prospect of independence and
Republican governance. Specifically, modes of thought that had existed in some form – concepts
of lineage, civilization and race – came to be used more systematically and with greater intensity
by both the Afro-Shirazi Party and the Zanzibar National Party as a means of contesting
elections, overthrowing the government, and ultimately establishing control. History became
colored by new ideologies – socialism, nationalism and pan-Africanism – and old grievances
resurfaced to inform contemporary disputes over the future of the island nation, and to justify
revolutionary excesses.
The discourse that shaped this transformation took shape in the course of attempts to
build a national identity in Zanzibar in the 1930s and 1940s. As has often been the case,
schoolteachers played a key role in shaping the earliest nationalist discourse in Zanzibar, through
their instruction and through periodicals that they founded and dominated. This first generation
of nationalist thinkers were predominantly Arabs, sons of landowners, and their vision for
Zanzibar was one of a bastion of Arab civilization in uncivilized Africa. Their rhetoric became
more inclusive with the second generation of nationalist thinkers, but the core assumption of a
civilized coastal civilization and islands that had been influenced by the Arabs and an uncivilized
African interior remained. Thus, they envisioned an assimilation of indigenous islanders and the
descendants of slaves who had come to embrace arabocentric notions of civilization, and their
vision of citizenship, of subjecthood to the Sultan, excluded “uncivilized” mainland Africans.
4
This was especially true after a hurricane destroyed many of theclove plantations in Unguja in the 1870s and Pemba began to
dominate clove production. In particular, as slave labor became increasingly scarce with successive British-backed restrictions,
arrangements were made between Arab landowners in Pemba and Africans of indigenous and mainland origins whereby the latter
received land as freehold in exchange for helping to establish a clove plantation on theformer’s land. Thus, in Pemba especially,
the boundaries between Arabs and their neighbors became less distinct.
5. 4
These intellectuals would form the ZNP in (19??). The thinkers who rose in opposition to, and in
constant dialogue with, these Arab intellectuals, were largely Africans from the mainland. They
were pan-Africanists and emphasized that Zanzibar was part of Africa. They portrayed Arabs as
enslavers and oppressors of Africans and credited the British with bringing civilization. In (19??)
they formed the African Association, joining with elements of the Shirazi Association in (19??)
to form the ASP. Both sides in the political conflict that would emerge were, therefore,
exclusionary. Both were homogenizing discourses. And it was their efforts at homogenization
and exclusion that would bring partisan politics to a fever pitch beginning with the 1957 election
cycle.5
The emergence of party politics in the 1950s brought this discourse into reality. As
parties began to organize, party membership cleaved along existing class and perceived racial
boundaries, especially in the portion of Unguja dominated by clove plantations.6 The ASP
dominated the tenant farmers on the plantations, who were mostly recent immigrants from the
mainland or descendants of enslaved persons, while the ZNP represented the landowners, mostly
Arabs. This became especially intense after the 1957 elections, when this landowning class
began to expel the tenant farmers from their land as a means of attacking the ASP – to which
many tenant farmers belonged – economically and perhaps in response to ASP rhetoric to the
effect that the Arabs could not legally own land that had been held in common before their
arrival. Over the next year, the ASP organized boycotts against Arabs (mostly Yemenis) from the
merchant class. The ZNP responded by establishing unions tied to the party, effectively refusing
to hire ASP members. Soon, most elements of economic, religious and social life were
5
Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar, (Bloomington,
University of Indiana Press, 2011), Chapter 3.
6
Michael F. Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 208.
6. 5
segregated on party lines – which coincided for the most part with class lines, the racial order
espoused by the ASP, and the civilizational order of the intellectuals in the ZNP.7 The next round
of elections in 1961 proved inconclusive and another round took place in June of that year.
Immediately following the June elections, fighting broke out in Zanzibar town between
ASP and ZNP partisans. The violence spread to the planation zone the following day and
intensified. Plantations were looted. Hundreds of Arabs – mostly Yemeni shopkeepers – were
beaten, and dozens killed. Here, Glassman astutely points out that the economic and social order
had not changed significantly in the years leading up to the violence of 1961, but rather, electoral
politics “had actually mobilized people to act as ethnic collectivities.” This action along political,
class, and perceived racial lines was then transformed, as fears stoked by rumored and threatened
violence in the months leading up to the June elections, such that mob violence was used to turn
away voters from the rival party on election day. After the polls closed, however, and as the
attacks spread to the countryside, violence became increasingly motivated by fear and revenge –
for attacks on voters earlier in the day, and for an election the ASP believed to have been stolen.
Thus, the rumors that had been circulated, repeated even in the speeches of political leaders –
that Wamanga were sharpening their swords to prepare for an attack, or that Wamakonde had
been seen with spears and arrows – not only fed the violence, but directed it, to the most
vulnerable groups from each side of the political divide.8
7
Lofchie, Zanzibar, 184-188. Again, this is most truefor the plantation zone on Zanzibar, which became the locus of violence
after the 1961 elections.
8
Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones, 238-240. Wamanga, or Manga Arabs, were Yemenis, typically relatively poor and
worked as shopkeepers or alongside mainland Africans as tenant farmers. They were rumored to be themilitary arm of the ZNP
and were more easily distinguishable from other Zanzibaris, as they were more recent immigrants. Wamakonde, or Makonde,
were a group of mainland Africans who were stereotyped as being especially violent, uncivilized, and as being outstanding
hunters.
7. 6
The stakes were much higher for the 1963 elections, which were to determine the
government at formal independence. According to Lofchie, the campaign was notably muted in
comparison to previous elections, though the rhetoric remained the same. Zanzibar had become
so politically polarized that parties opted to focus on organizing their voters for maximum
turnout, rather than attempt to convert partisans through propaganda. Glassman notes, however,
that both the ASP and the ZNP-ZPPP utilized the June riots to electoral advantage, the latter
promising to punish those responsible, and the former issuing vague threats of more violence.
Rumors circulated again, including the rumor that the Afro-Shirazi Youth League (ASYL) was
planning a revolution if the ZNP-ZPPP won the election.9 Thus, the rhetoric of violence along
the overlapping axes of party, class, and perceived race remained a prominent feature in
Zanzibari politics leading up to the 1963 election.
At the same time, new cleavages emerged between the respective party elites over the
issues of land redistribution and the preferential hiring of Africans to administrative positions,
which the ASP believed were essential to breaking a cycle wherein Arabs and Indians were
economically and politically dominant due to better access to education – which was made
possible through their economic and political domination. The ZNP, however, opposed on
principle any policy that recognized racial differences between Zanzibaris – this was a key
element in their party platform – and refused to budge on the issue. In addition, divisions within
the ZNP led to the expulsion and persecution of a minority of Socialists within the party led by
Abdelrahman Muhammad Babu, who proceeded to form the Ummah Party and allied themselves
9
Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones, 266-267. This is, of course, what happened in January of 1964. G. Thomas Burgess,
race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar: The Memoirs of Ali Sultan Issa and Seif Sharif Hamad, (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 2009), 88. In addition, Ummah Party member ‘Ali Sultan ‘Issa(the Ummah Party is discussed more
below) relates that he warned his uncle, a ZNP member as early as 1963 of imminent violence. It is plausible that the Revolution,
and the excessive violence that accompanied it, were planned in advance.
8. 7
with the ASP, helping to organize them in preparation for the upcoming election. Ultimately, the
ZNP-ZPPP alliance won 18 of the 31 seats in the election – though the ASP again won the
popular vote – by dominating Pemba, and took the reins of government in December 1963.
Within a month, however, an ASP-led coup overthrew the Sultan and the elected ZNP-ZPP
government.10
In the weeks following the elections of 1963, the leadership of the ZNP-ZPPP rejected an
offer by the ASP to form a unified national government and they rejected a defensive agreement
with the British. According to ‘Ali Sultan ‘Issa, moreover, the ZPP began to dismiss mainlanders
within the police – mainlanders had traditionally formed the bulk of the police force – and to
collect weapons in an armory in Ziwani following independence. This action also followed party
lines. Whatever the primary motivation of these moves, the two points of view are not mutually
exclusive, that the two categories were fused in the public consciousness by this point. In
addition, the ruling party shackled the press and opposition groups, and packed the bureaucracy
with partisans.11 On January 11th, the ASYL attacked the armory and distributed the weapons
amongst themselves. Here, moreover, the split between the Ummah Party and the ZNP-ZPPP is
important, as the former had been involved in educating Zanzibaris in Eastern Bloc countries
since the 1950s while working with the ZNP, and a number of these youth had received military
training in Cuba. According to ‘Issa – who may well have a tendency to self-aggrandizement,
and was involved in arranging this training – these Cuban-trained revolutionaries were
instrumental from this point in organizing and spreading the revolution.12 Within a couple days,
10
Lofchie, Zanzibar, 214-220.
11
Lofchie, Zanzibar, 265.
12
Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 85-86. This is, again, plausible. Burgess cites a
number of documents supportingtheconnection between Cuba and Zanzibar, theAmericans’ concern over this connection, and
‘Ali Sultan ‘Issa’s role in this conection.
9. 8
the revolutionaries had captured all the ministers of the ZNP-ZPPP government and the Sultan
had fled to ‘Oman. This stage of the revolution, at least, was relatively bloodless and over
quickly.
But the revolution did not end with the expulsion of the Sultan. Rather, it was extended
throughout Unguja and Pemba, accompanied by a campaign of transgressive violence. The
revolutionaries went house-to-house in Unguja, searching, looting, burning, raping, and killing.
Entire families were murdered. Thousands are thought to have died, and many more were
rounded up into camps. Much like the violence in 1961, Yemeni shopkeepers were especially
singled out for violence.13 Lofchie and Clayton attribute these initial stages of the revolution to
John Okello, who called himself the Field Marshall of the Revolution.14 In interviews with G.
Thomas Burgess, however, ʿAli Sultan ʿIssa claims that John Okello was a comparatively minor
figure in a revolution planned by Karume, that Okello was used as an outsider with a strange
name to spread fear, and quickly discarded shortly afterward.15 In either case, the brief, brutal
outburst of violence in Unguja against a “racial” other that had been constructed in the decades
before formal independence was only the opening act.
The violence was exported to Pemba as well, targeted at Arabs and Shirazis alike who
had supported, or were thought to have supported, the ZNP or ZPPP. ʿAli Sultan ʿIssa was
briefly the commissioner for Chake Chake after the revolution. He downplays his role, and
official sanction more generally, for retributive violence in these early days of the revolution, but
nevertheless confirms that Youth League members “got out of control sometimes,” looting,
13
Clayton, The Zanzibar Revolution, 78-82.
14
Clayton, The Zanzibar Revolution, 69; Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution, 276.
15
Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 87.
10. 9
raping, and lynching Pembans.16 For his part, Seif Sharif Hamad remembers witnessing John
Okello and his followers patrolling in land rovers, caning, whipping, and dry shaving Arabs he
saw on the roads – humiliation. In the months that followed, the violence became more
organized and explicitly political, with public floggings for failing to stand for passing officials
or attending public rallies.17
Within a few months of the revolution, in April of 1964, possibly under pressure from
Julius Nyerere, Abeid Karume negotiated a union with mainland Tanganyika, forming the United
Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, renamed the United Republic of Tanzania later in the
same year. This move surprised many, especially the former Ummah party led by Muhammad
Abdulrahman Babu, who was in Indonesia at the time as part of his duties as Minister of External
Affairs.18 Union with the mainland had never been part of the ASP’s public rhetoric – in fact,
they had denied any accusations that they desired union with Tanganyika. This move did not
materialize from nothing, however, as Nyerere and his part had been involved with the ASP
since its founding in 1957. Nevertheless, the decision was made without the consultation of the
Revolutionary Council, and the Union Agreement was never ratified by the RC.19 It was the first
of many unpopular decisions by Karume, and one he used to isolate political rivals in the ASP,
particularly from the socialist leadership.
A number of projects were implemented at this time as part of an effort to industrialize
Zanzibar, to encourage a more productive mindset in Zanzibaris, to erase social distinctions
between urban and rural areas, and to alter the distribution of resources within the country. In
16
Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 91-92.
17
Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 186-188.
18 Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 98. The Ummah party had been dissolved, its
members absorbed into the ASP at the behest of Abeid Karume. References to the socialist leadership within the ASP refers to
these same individuals from the Ummah Party, who formed a distinct wing of theASP.
19 Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 190-192.
11. 10
short, these were projects of homogenization and social control as much as economic
development. ʿAli Sultan ʿIssa speaks of instilling factory-like discipline in Zanzibaris – which
he contrasts with the easy life of cassava farming – as a means of modernizing them
psychologically. A massive land-redistribution program was initiated early on, which confiscated
private property from people with more than one residence, with no compensation. Nearly all of
Stone Town – the well-to-do section of Zanzibar City – was nationalized in this way and large
rural estates were broken up, with the owner retaining a portion of the estate and the rest waiting
awaiting redistribution.20 Public works projects were begun, as well, which relied on “voluntary
labor.” In practice, the state established work camps to which, initially, the elite of the ASYL
went for work and indoctrination. These were later expanded and attempted to recruit both urban
and rural youths by requiring secondary school students to work for two years. In addition,
government workers were expected to contribute their labor and were subjected to fines, non-
promotion and threats of dismissal if they refused. Though the first resort was simple persuasion,
ʿIssa notes that there was a great deal of fear after the Revolution, and people were easily
intimidated.21
School reform was also on the Revolutionary agenda. Private schools were nationalized;
curricula changed; a campaign of school-building coincided with book-burning; and seats in the
secondary schools were allotted based on a racial quota system in which a certain number of
seats were allotted to Arabs, Asians, Comorians and Africans – something in the neighborhood
of nine to fourteen percent of the total seats went to non-Africans.22 ʿIssa claims these
proportions were based on a census and intended to make up for the disadvantages Africans
20 Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 101-102.
21 Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 95, 114-118.
22 Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 199.
12. 11
faced as students. Still, in addition to expanding the access to education, the reform of Zanzibari
schools was explicitly intended to transform Zanzibaris politically. The quota system further
encouraged identification with racial groups, specifically the racial groups deemed appropriate
by the state, and left non-Africans resentful, as the Arabs, Indians, and Comorians in the islands
had previously sent a much higher proportion of their children to secondary school, and at least
initially tended to have higher test scores. Teachers were subjected to political retraining, and
forced to self-censor.23 Sharif Hamad reports that history books were burned and replaced with
ideologically-driven texts, which invented Arab abuses to justify the abuses of the
Revolutionaries.24 Political classes were implemented in which students read Karume’s speeches
alongside Mao Tse-tung, Lenin, and Stalin. Testing was ideological as well, and students had to
“accept African Nationalism and Marxism” in order to pass.25 In this way, the rhetoric of the
Revolution, the culmination of the racial rhetoric from the ‘time of politics,’ has come to
influence the way Zanzibaris see themselves and their history.
At the same time as the implementation of this program for social change in Zanzibar, the
new government came increasingly to revolve around the personality of Abeid Karume. As
mentioned above, he managed to isolate his political rivals through appointments to the
government in Dar es Salaam, at the same time strengthening his hand against threats from
within Zanzibar. Karume’s personal agenda seems to have been a racial agenda. According to
ʿAli Sultan ʿIssa, Karume wanted to ‘get rid of’ the Comorians, Indians, Arabs, and even
Shirazis, who made up a majority of the population of Zanzibar. The violence of the initial
revolution, forced expulsions, and the nationalization of larger rural estates in 1964 succeeded in
23 Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 108.
24 Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 199-200.
25 Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 108-111.
13. 12
‘getting rid of’ about one third of the Arabs. The nationalization of the wholesale trade in 1964,
followed by the Indian-owned factories and the retail trade in 1967 succeeded in getting rid of
most of the Indians of Zanzibar. And he demolished the area of Zanzibar where most Comorians
lived – they had been ZNP supported and used to make fun of him – to build a hotel. In 1968, he
forced them to publicly renounce their Comorian identity, parading around Zanzibar Town with
“placards, and saying ‘We renounce Comorian identity. We are all Zanzibaris, Tanzanians.’”
And he attempted to declare the majority Shirazis aliens, or convince them to renounce this
identity, due to their tradition of descent from Persians. Worse, of course, was the policy of
forced marriages between African men and Arab women, an effort to invert what Karume and
others in the ASP leadership saw as an element of racial hierarchy in Arabs’ refusal to marry
their daughters to non-Arabs.26 Perhaps worse still was Karume’s personal conduct in this
matter. According to Seif Sharif Hamad, and corroborated by oral histories of Zanzibari women,
Karume had one of his security officers pick women – mostly Arabs or Asians – off the street
“perhaps twice a week” to sleep with Karume, “whether she liked it or not.”27
Karume also became increasingly paranoid and built an increasingly stifling surveillance
apparatus. Seif Bakari, one of the closest supporters of Karume, established a group called the
Volunteers who were involved in low-level snitching, forcing people to do ‘voluntary’ labor, and
generally bringing the state into daily life through intimidation.28 Karume also controlled a state
security apparatus trained by the East Germans. Not only ZNP and ASP leaders who ran afoul of
Karume, but common people were accused of wanting to overthrow the government and were
disappeared. Ministers had the ability to imprison anyone without trial (or even have them
26
Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 124-125.
27
Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 205-206. See also footnote3 on page 322.
28
I use the word ‘snitching’ here, because it is more evocative of the sort of petty reportingand backbiting than more formal
words like ‘spying’ or ‘informing.’
14. 13
executed) and this was abused regularly.29 There was a special group within the prisons set aside
for torture that was also trained by the East Germans. Karume also abolished the British court
system, replacing it with the People’s Court. But the judges were not legally trained, and the
prosecutors doubled as defense attorneys.30 In short, Karume created an atmosphere of fear
through surveillance, arbitrary arrests and killings, and sexual violence, and these apparatuses
were largely directed against the racial ‘other’ constructed by the ASP, and against groups that
had supported the ZNP-ZPPP, or otherwise run afoul of Karume. As ʿIssa said in reference to
ASP- and ZNP-dominated areas “Here you can feel the tension, and there, nothing at all.”31
Things improved somewhat under Aboud Jumbe following Karume’s assassination in
1972. The security apparatuses loosened, and some of the disastrous economic policies embarked
on by Karume were abandoned. Elections were reinstated in Zanzibar in 1979, and in 1992
political parties were allowed to form for the first time since the Revolution. Interestingly, the
ruling party – the CCM, Chama Cha Mapundizi – continue to contest elections in Zanzibar
through the same sorts of appeals to real and revisionist history of long-past abuses by Arabs and
Asians in Zanzibar and allusion to the threat of Zanzibari secession and domination by Arab
states. Their appeal to Africans as downtrodden in the islands, however, is anachronistic after
decades of abuse of Arab and South Asian minority groups, and abuse and neglect of regions of
Zanzibar where Shirazis identified so long ago with the ZNP.
The evolution of nationalist ideologies in Zanzibar thus can be seen as initiating
discourses of imagined belonging and exclusion that built on “racial” stereotypes and very real
structures of inequality that date to at least the 19th century. Competing paradigms of inclusion
29
Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 121, 124-128.
30
Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 207-208.
31 Burgess, race, revolution, and the struggle for human rights in Zanzibar, 133-134.
15. 14
and exclusion were discussed through periodicals, in public meetings, and in private over the
decades leading up to the first elections in Zanzibar. Ultimately, a cosmopolitan nationalism that
nevertheless relied on the concepts of Arab and coastal Civilization and African and mainland
barbarity put forward by the ZNP competed with the African Nationalism of the ASP. The
encouragement of identification with race, explicitly by the ASP and the overlapping of their
ideas with the cultural chauvinism of the ZNP – which notably left those who identified as
Shirazi in the middle – and resulting overlap of party, race, and class, set the die for political
competition in Zanzibar. As the stakes of the competition were raised with successive elections,
many of which were perilously close together, and impending independence from British control,
the constant campaigning and the bleeding of party politics into daily life led to violence along
the lines of party-class-race. And the resentments that built during this period of party
competition were exercised, re-enacted, and reinforced during and after the Revolution of 1964
through the actions of the revolutionaries and, later, the policies of the government of Abeid
Karume. These resentments, moreover, and the competing historical narratives they birthed, are
still salient in the party politics of present-day Zanzibar.
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