Anti-Colonial Struggles – The Early Days

The mid-1950s and early 1960s, when this story begins, had a number of striking similarities with today. In Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom were seeking desperately to institute 'regime change' and bring in governments that they could manipulate and use in their own interests. They were using covert methods and ideologies of fear, whipping up paranoia and unleashing witch hunts – but at that time against communists, not 'Islamic terrorists'. In their plan for continuing to exploit the countries of Africa (many of which were either newly independent or fighting colonialism), Zanzibar was regarded as a crucial place. The United States saw it as part of a Central African belt which, if controlled, would protect Southern Africa (with its western investments) from the radical and socialist influences of countries like Algeria and Ghana. If Zanzibar went out of this orbit, they feared, the whole of Africa might follow.

Zanzibar was and still is a remarkable place. A hub of commerce for two thousand years connecting Asia, Africa and the Arabian peninsula, it was, as it were, a cosmopolitan centre of the world. Historian Abdul Sheriff describes evocatively what Zanzibar town was like in his childhood in the early 1950s when he played on the narrow streets with kids who were Swahili, Omani, Persian, Hadhrami or Indian in origin, and how every monsoon saw the arrival of 'dhows and sailors from Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India and Somalia ... the harbour was also full of coasting Jahazis from Lamu and Kilwa. There was a great intermingling of peoples' (Sheriff, 2008).

This multicultural scene also reflected a vibrant anti-imperialism which came out of the experiences of the Second World War and shaped the consciousness of many of the nationalists and revolutionaries of the 1950s and 1960s. During the war, as Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu wrote:

Many young Zanzibaris were drafted to fight in British armies, mostly in Africa and Asia ... in the post-war period they returned from the war zones bringing back the reality and scale of imperialist violence. Their stories of meeting recruits from other colonies (especially those from the 'Gold Coast', now Ghana, in the Burma campaign) helped make us in Zanzibar aware of the possibilities of solidarity and revolution.

(Babu, 1996)

Zanzibar: Ethnicity, Class and the Shadows of the Past

How did the social structure of these islands develop? From 1830s on they had been ruled by a dynasty of Sultans who, while they originated in Oman, had settled in Zanzibar intermarrying with local people, speaking Swahili and by the mid-20th century hardly speaking Arabic at all. In addition, because of its unique position, Zanzibar had faced a series of colonial incursions by the Portuguese, Omanis, Germans and French, and finally, in 1890, by the British.

It was a partly as a by-product of these colonial experiences that Zanzibar became a society riven with contradictions, with a strong cultural unity on the one hand and deep ethnic divisions on the other, divisions whose shadow still haunts the Isles today. Zanzibar's history as a centre of commerce, and the fact that it was an entrepôt for goods going to and coming from the interior of Africa had led it to be drawn into the acquisition and transport of slaves, although the numbers involved here were far smaller than those involved in the Transatlantic slave trade. At the same time, the growing interest of the imperialist powers in the Isles in the 19th century coincided with the introduction of cloves to Zanzibar. 'The subsequent development of a plantation system, deeply affected the relations of production on the island. The slaves that were taken from the continent were no longer solely a trade item [but] a source of productive labour on the plantations' (Depelchin, 1991: 14). At that point Zanzibar became a slave society, and it continued to be so till slavery was abolished in Unguja and Pemba in 1897.

These overlapping phases of Zanzibar's history had a crucial and lasting impact on the islands. The history of slavery meant that everyone was seen, and many categorized themselves, as either 'Arabs', or associates of 'Arabs', and ex- slave owners and therefore Mabwana (privileged masters); or as African ex-slaves and victims of the Mabwana. Despite these tensions, however, in the years before British colonialism full-blown racial conflict did not occur.

These divisions do not coincide with inequalities or hierarchies in Zanzibari society either today or half a century ago. Then as now a large majority of the population was of mixed Arab and African heritage, and the categories of Arab and African were so fluid that between 1924 and 1948 the percentage of those identifying as Arabs had risen from 8.7 per cent to 16.9 per cent mainly because many non-Arabs had 'decided to 'join' the Arab community' (Lofchie, 1965: 74), with no questions asked or impediments created.

But unfortunately the fears and anxieties of that history of colonialism and slavery have continued to haunt the Isles and have been whipped up time and again by unscrupulous politicians.

In the mid-20th century, the islands were not formally a colony but a British protectorate. But protectorates were hardly different from colonies in terms of exploitation – the Sultan was a constitutional monarch on a salary from the British, and it was they who controlled the government, the markets and the trade routes, and pocketed the profits from Zanzibar's famous products – cloves and coconuts.

The class and ethnic divisions in the rural population of the two islands of Zanzibar were at the time somewhat different, and also of course different from what they are today. In Unguja, there were absentee small landowners who lived mainly in the town, subsistence farmers on less fertile ground, and squatters on the plantations. In the 1950s, these landlords in Unguja were almost all Arabs. The subsistence farmers in Unguja were mainly Shirazis, a group who had intermingled like everyone else in Zanzibar but traced their ancestry to Shiraz in Iran, from where migration to Zanzibar had occurred as far back as the 10th century. The squatters were people who had come originally as contract labourers from mainland Tanganyika in the clove-picking seasons but had stayed on and established roots locally through marriage, and had, over the generations, become completely integrated into Zanzibari society.

Zanzibar town, on the western tip of Unguja, was a highly sophisticated city which although ancient was also modern – it had electric street lighting well before London did. It was populated by merchants, traders, street vendors, shopkeepers, casual labourers, dockworkers, transport workers and so on.

However, ethnicity and class did not coincide, and nor was the class structure entirely rigid. For example, although Shirazis formed the majority of subsistence peasants and Africans (who were often migrants from the mainland) formed the majority of urban workers, these ethnic groups, like others, were spread across class divisions (Kuper, 1970: 366).

Pemba, in contrast to Unjuga, was almost entirely rural in the 1950s and less technologically developed. Here the land was rich and fertile, and there were fewer large landowners and a larger proportion of Shirazi and Arab middle and rich peasants.

The way colonial capitalism developed meant that various ethnic groups found themselves drawn into, and sometimes confined to, specific occupations and economic positions which were often in conflict with each other. For example, South Asians who had arrived in Zanzibar as early as the 1st century ad as traders and merchants (Bader, 1991: 170) found their economic activities circumscribed in the last quarter of the 19th century. Partly as a result, a significant proportion of better-off South Asians turned to money-lending. In the process they impoverished the Arab landowners who were vulnerable to the fluctuations in the price of cloves, and this inevitably led to tensions between the two groups.

As in other colonies, in Zanzibar, British colonial policy also intensified and shaped existing racial tensions. Against a background of racist colonial ideology, which saw Arabs through an orientalist lens as dissolute, conspicuous consumers with large numbers of children (Lofchie, 1965: 108) and at the same time regarded Africans as fit only to be an underclass, the colonial administration set up racially identified associations to which every citizen was required to belong. There were as many as 23 such associations – the African Association, the Arab Association (subdivided further into Omani, Hadhramout and Yemeni Associations), the Shirazi Association and so on. These associations, which were led by the dominant classes within each group, institutionalized racial divisions and engendered racial antagonism.

At the same time the education system set up by the British perpetuated class and racial inequalities, since with a few exceptions it provided state-assisted education effectively only to the sons of privileged classes (Sheriff, 1991: 87).

As the reports and letters of the period show, British colonial racism meant that as in other parts of the empire, people were labelled, and thought of by the British, only in terms of their ethnic and religious identity. There was an unwillingness to acknowledge that different groups and individuals had any political identity. The only exception to this rule was where people were suspected of being 'communists', and therefore dominated by foreign masters, Chinese or Russian, confirming the underlying assumption that these colonized people were not capable of thinking for themselves. The Americans who were to play such a profound role in the shaping of Zanzibar and Tanganyika's future adopted an identical perspective.

Anti-Colonial Struggle and the First Nationalist Party

The early 1950s saw an upsurge of nationalist consciousness in Zanzibar. The colonial Legislative Council had consisted, before 1946, of Europeans, Arabs and Indians, and even after 1946 African representation was kept small. The British had made it clear that this was unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. 'Institutionalization of full parliamentary democracy was viewed as an extremely long-range enterprise in political tutelage ... The notion that democratic self-government could occur only after many generations of careful instruction characterized British attitudes in many colonies' (Lofchie, 1965: 19).

Given the racially stratified nature of Zanzibari society, one of the few ways people could make their voices heard was through the newspapers of their associations. The more radical members of the Arab Association, for example, now began to use the association's paper Al Falaq to oppose the policy of communal representation in the Legislative Council.

If anti-colonial consciousness was growing, one of the early struggles against colonialism was a peasant uprising which took place between 1951 and 1954 in the west of Unguja not far from Zanzibar town. The British crushed it brutally.

The revolt had two immediate causes. The first was the appropriation by the colonial government of large tracts of land belonging mainly to middle peasant households – in other words families who worked on their own land, and did not hire in, or hire out, agricultural labour – to build an airport; and the second was the forced inoculation of cattle against anthrax and compulsory dipping against East Coast fever. The compulsory dipping had been introduced in 1948: not only did the peasants have to pay for it but it had resulted in a number of cows dying. (As the officials later acknowledged, dipping a cow could lead to its losing its immunity against disease, causing it to catch infections and die if regular dipping was not continued.)

Cattle were an important source of income for the peasants, and when the government tried to introduce compulsory inoculation the peasants refused. Arrests and fines led to a boycott of various administration activities. Nineteen peasant leaders were convicted but when they were being driven away to prison, peasants from nearby areas who had surrounded the court ambushed the van and released eleven of them. They then tried to storm the prison to try to release the others. The police fired on them, killing nine people (Bowles, 1991: 95).

The crushing of the uprising led to the setting-up of the first political movement for independence the Party of National Unity for the Sultan's Subjects (PNUSS) by the peasants – the name reflecting the party's aim of uniting groups with differing ethnicities and at the same time including not only people of Unguja and Pemba but the Swahili-speaking people of the Kenyan coast. The identity 'Sultan's subjects' must be understood against a background where the Sultan was not regarded as a foreign power, unlike the British. In fact there were stories told by peasants in Zanzibar about how their forefathers had travelled to Oman to seek the assistance of the Sultan against Portuguese colonialism (Babu, 1991: 223).

News of the revolt and the repression it had unleashed spread through the urban and rural areas of Zanzibar like wildfire. The colonial government reacted with panic. They feared the spirit of the Mau Mau rebellion was spreading, and not just among the peasants but to other sections of society.

They also clearly feared Arab-African unity, and threatened to enforce a law which made political activity by civil servants illegal. This effectively blocked African civil servants from political involvement, and affected the politics of the African Association enormously. The president of the African Association had been a progressive government doctor, he now had to withdraw from politics, and Abeid Karume, a former seaman and later a boat owner and head of the Boat Owners Federation, became its president. The African Association under Karume began to take a conservative and anti-Arab position – opposing what it saw as Arab nationalism, at the same time as it began to campaign for communal representation to continue, no matter that it disempowered Africans (Lofchie, 1965: 166).

When articles in Al Falaq expressed their solidarity with the peasant uprising and condemned the violence of the colonial response, the British responded by charging its publisher and the entire executive committee of the Arab Association with sedition. Among these committee members was Ali Muhsin, later one of the central figures of the nationalist movement. The Arab Association withdrew all their representatives from the Legislative Council, condemning it as communal and demanding immediate progress towards self-government. This boycott was completely effective for a year and a half.

The sedition trial had an enormous impact on people's political consciousness across the country. Urban workers, craftspeople, the petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals began to join the PNUSS. The peasants who were the party's founders welcomed them in, because it meant the party now possessed the skills that the peasants themselves could not provide. Soon the PNUSS began to evolve into a fully fledged nationalist party. It changed its name and in 1955 became the Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP). Ali Muhsin became its leader.

The party began to campaign for non-racial representation in the Legislative Council, the right for all adults to vote and a new constitution committing the government to early independence.

British Fears and the Formation of the Afro-Shirazi Party

The British felt deeply threatened by this situation. As documents of the period show, in private they expressed their fears about the emergence of the ZNP as a liberation movement, and in line with cold war thinking, they assumed that the party was packed full of communists who were in the pay of the Soviet Union and China. Publicly however, they projected the ZNP-led anti-colonial movement as a development which the people of Zanzibar should fear.

To the Arab landowners they depicted the movement as a direct threat to their personal privilege and to their position in the economy. To the African and Shirazi petty bourgeoisie they presented the movement as a skilful Arab 'front' organization designed to get rid of the British and expose the masses of Africans to the mercy of the Arabs (Babu, 1991: 225).