The argument that the revolt in Zanzibar of 1964—the Zanzibar Revolution—was determined by a sole determinant, in a binary choice between race and ideology, is a specious one. Whilst it is easy to interpret the events that ignited the Zanzibar Revolution as one of racial animus, between that of the dominant Arab and South Asian minority against the Afro-Shirazi majority, or through Cold War ideological interpretation, that of Marxist uprising, these notions are reductive and do not represent the revolution’s genesis in its entirety.
To understand the determination of the Zanzibar Revolution wholly, the politicisation of ethnicity, cognisant of the prevailing socioeconomic conditions, and the paradox of blurring race within ideology—racial nationalism—must also be considered. This paper asserts that it was the inherent socioeconomic disparity, that transcends both race and ideology, that provided the incitation for the 1964 revolution.
Racial odium was an incontrovertible determinant in the inducement of Zanzibari revolutionary sentiment. Zanzibar, during Omani rule in the nineteenth-century, developed into a formidable mercantile state underpinned by a slave-plantation economy[1] - “a vile center for slavery”[2]. Arabs and South Asians emerged as the ruling classes, as landowners and merchants respectively, and the indigenous Shirazi and African mainlanders as the peasantry and enslaved.[3] The alienation of indigenous populations and the exacted transportation of slaves from the African mainland enforced the “Arabization” of Zanzibar, entrenching racial divisions in an ethnic hierarchy—a “racial state”.[4]
Glassman asserts that British colonial rule demarcated sociopolitical identities in “fixed, mutually exclusive terms that fetishized notions of racial and ethnic ‘purity’”.[5] To illustrate, despite the abolition of slavery in 1897[6], vituperative Arab attitudes towards Africans were anchored in a transitioned, squatter-economy reinforced by a colonial “racial paradigm...that tended to label population by race, and race [by] function”.[7] In this view, the Arabs were the landowning elites, the South Asians the merchant class, and the Africans “the downtrodden”.[8] The racial inequality in cosmopolitan Zanzibar naturally manifested itself, through democratisation, as politicisation of ethnicity—“regenerating complex” racial and ethnic nationalisms[9]—where the distinction between race and ideology is blurred.
The formation of the political parties in the Zama za Siasa[10][i]—the predominantly-Arab Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP) and the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP)—to espouse their respective racial interests, is fundamental in determining the incitation of the Zanzibar Revolution. For instance, the ASP united the ethnic groups of the African mainlanders and indigenous Shirazi, under the ideology of African nationalism, to crusade against the sociopolitical dominance of Arab hegemony which had used cosmopolitanism as a “deceptive façade for cultural chauvinism and racial injustice”.[11] Racial nationalism also served to unite the sectional ethnicities within them: Arab sects including the Bohora and the Ismaili populations[12] united under the ZNP, the various African ethnicities—the “Swahili, Hadiumu, and Shirazi”[13]—allied with the ASP. It must be noted, however, the ZNP’s racial nationalism was furtive, disguised by a ‘multiracialist’ interpretation of nationalism as to win the allegiance of other racial communities, whilst “practicing racialism” to preserve Arab interests.[14] Fouéré asserts that it is this racial nationalism, “re-appropriated” by the ZNP and ASP in the Zama za Siasa, which culminated in the revolution.[15]
Prerevolutionary racial nationalism ascribes to Glassman’s notion of an ‘exclusionary national categorical order’, in which society was apportioned into “mutually exclusive identities” along ethnic parameters, creating the premonition of racial dehumanization—’us against them’.[16] By politicizing ethnicity, racial nationalism and dehumanization—fueled by ubiquitous, virulent anxieties—culminated in the overtly ‘genocidal’[17] violence against the Arab-minority by those African revolutionaries engendering retribution. It can, thus, be evidenced that indelible racial animus, predating colonial rule in origin, intensified by its presence, underpinned the revolutionary sentiment that determined the Zanzibar Revolution.
Before examining the significance of ideology in the Zanzibar Revolution, the paradox of amalgamating race within ideology, given the binary argument that it was either race or ideology that determined its impetus, must be contemplated. Racial nationalism is an ideology in the sense that it espouses the view that national identity is defined by race, but is inherently inseparable from it. This paradox is important to note given that other ideologies—namely Marxism—within in the Cold War context of the revolution, affected its instigation. In this view, racial nationalism is a racial determinant of the Zanzibar Revolution, not an ideological one.
The importance of ideology as a determinant in the Zanzibar Revolution varies significantly, as does the heterogeneity of the ideologies at play: Marxism, Zanzibari nationalism, authoritarianism, and Pan-Africanism. The ASP espoused racialised African nationalism[18], with Pan-Africanist sentiment, evident in their support for Tanganyikan President Julius Nyerere[19]; the ZNP advocated a Zanzibari nationalism that “subsumed all divisions of race”[20], centering loyalty on an Islamic interpretation of the Swahili tradition of “ustaarabu”—’civilization’— advocating “siasa si ngoma”,the notion that politics does not equate to ethnicity[21]; and the Umma Party which staunchly endorsed Marxist socialism and, as Burgess identifies, held ‘Mao and Stalin to possess the answers’ to correct Zanzibar’s history of “underdevelopment and inequality”.[22]
Radical socialists and Marxists had been crucial in establishing the ZNP in 1957, such as A.M. Babu, who sought to position the party within Cold War ‘binary confrontations of socialism and capitalism’.[23] This radical sect seceded in 1963 to establish the Umma Party which “espoused socialism as its official creed”.[24] Fouéré notes how intellectual Zanzibari socialists were shaped by the nation’s historic economic disparity, the emergent Pan-Africanist and nationalist sentiments, to assume a Marxist identity in the collapse of anti-colonial ideologies, reactionary to increasing ZNP “authoritarianism”.[25] Whilst the Umma Party did not ‘engineer’ the revolution, with Babu himself identifying the revolution as originating as merely “a lumpen uprising by angry...frustrated urban youths who had simply aimed to burn down the city of Zanzibar”[26], Hwang argues, it did aid its transformation into a “socialist revolution”.[27] This view is corroborated by Speller who identified the replacement of a “conservative Arab-dominated regime with one that espoused the principles of African nationalism and radical socialism”.[28]
The entrenched sociopolitical and economic disparity between the Arab and Afro-Shirazi populations conveniently fitted Marxist rhetoric, coupling “African nationalist discourse of racial grievance” with socialist thinking, which Burgess posits, justified the “assault on the wealth and exclusivity”’ of the Arab and South Asian communities in the Zanzibar Revolution.[29] This demonstrates that it was not an exclusive ideology, but a combination of two—radical socialism and Pan-Africanism—that shaped revolutionary thinking in determining the Zanzibar Revolution against the “petit-bourgeoise”[30] of the ZNP intelligentsia.
As has been considered, historians generally attribute the cause of the revolution to either race or ideology, which oversimplifies the socioeconomic, political, and ‘racial-class’[31] complexities inherent in 1960s Zanzibar. Assessing both the rhetoric and discourse of racial nationalists and radical socialists illuminates the fact that they sought a mutual objective: the overthrow of Arab domination or, more precisely, an overhaul of the class system that permeated ethnic racial divisions and disparities. There is academic agreement on the view that the disparity and polarization between classes, along ethnic lines, transcended both race and ideology in determining the Zanzibar Revolution.
Speller highlights the concentration of “land, wealth, and political power”[32] in the Arab community and the monopoly on business enjoyed by the South Asians as causing prominent ethnic socioeconomic inequalities—a ‘mixed racial-class division’.[33] Burgess draws on the thinking of Babu and his radical socialist following which identified that Zanzibar was not divided between Arabs and Africans, but “capital and labor”.[34]
In this view, the subjugation of the Afro-Shirazi majority by the dominant Arab-South Asian elite was the fundamental justification for the Zanzibar Revolution, with race and ideology merely differing vehicles in which to understand the existent socioeconomic disparity. Racial or ideological determinants of the Zanzibar Revolution—be it a socialist revolution or a Pan-African uprising—are subsumed by the overarching, universal revolutionary motivation to correct the immanent domination of Arabs over the Afro-Shirazi.
Racial and ideological accounts as to the determination of the Zanzibar Revolution are convincing but superficially plausible. It is an undeniable fact that race played a climacteric role in inciting a violent rebuttal of Arab hegemonic dominance over Zanzibari society. This is true, also, of the indubitable influence ideology—both Marxist and Pan-Africanist—had on mobilizing and justifying the instigation of the revolution. This does not, however, explain the impetus to racial odium or ideological antagonism present in January 1964.
The essence of the revolution was embedded in the generational subjugation of Africans, both indigenous and mainlander, by the dominant Arab elite, nascent in the period of Omani rule and intensified by colonial interference. This feudalism established a virulent socioeconomic class division, transmuting racial or ideological enmities. The comprehensive determination for the Zanzibar Revolution was to reverse the structural class disparity which, through the emergence of racial nationalism and Marxist theory, were translated into either racial or ideological accounts, opposed to one of an idiosyncratic Zanzibari situation.
Will Kingston-Cox is currently in his 3rd year of a BA in History and Politics at the University of Warwick.
Notes: [1] Jonathon Glassman, 'Sorting out the Tribes: The Creation of Racial Identities in Colonial Zanzibar’s Newspaper Wars', Journal of African History, 41 (2001), p.402 [2] Don Petterson, Revolution in Zanzibar: An American’s Cold War Tale (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2002), p. 4 [3] Abdul Sheriff, ‘Race and Class in the Politics of Zanzibar, Africa Spectrum, 36(3) (2001), p. 301 [4] Jonathon Glassman, 'Sorting out the Tribes: The Creation of Racial Identities in Colonial Zanzibar’s Newspaper Wars', Journal of African History, 41 (2001), p.402 [5] Ibid, pp.396-397 [6] Don Petterson, Revolution in Zanzibar: An American’s Cold War Tale (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2002), p. 12 [7] Abdul Sheriff, ‘Race and Class in the Politics of Zanzibar, Africa Spectrum, 36(3) (2001), p. 301 [8] Ibid, p.301 [9] Kyu-Deug Hwang, ‘Revisiting the Politics of Zanzibar: In Search of the Root Causes of the 1964 Revolution’, International Area Review, 12(2) (2001), p. 30 [10] Abdul Sheriff, ‘Race and Class in the Politics of Zanzibar, Africa Spectrum, 36(3) (2001), p. 310 [11] 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), pp. 19-20 [12] Ibid, p. 17 [13] Ibid, p. 17 [14] Kyu-Deug Hwang, ‘Revisiting the Politics of Zanzibar: In Search of the Root Causes of the 1964 Revolution’, International Area Review, 12(2) (2001), p. 28; see Johannes Mosare, “Background to the Revolution in Zanzibar”, A History of Tanzania (1969), 230-231 [15] Marie-Aude Fouéré, ‘Reinterpreting Revolutionary Zanzibar in the Media Today: The Case of Dira Newspaper’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 6 (2012), pp.679-680 [16] Jonathon Glassman, 'Sorting out the Tribes: The Creation of Racial Identities in Colonial Zanzibar’s Newspaper Wars', Journal of African History, 41 (2001), pp. 397-398 [17] Don Petterson, Revolution in Zanzibar: An American’s Cold War Tale (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2002), p. 94 [18] Marie-Aude Fouéré, ‘Reinterpreting Revolutionary Zanzibar in the Media Today: The Case of Dira Newspaper’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 6 (2012), pp.679-680 [19] Abdul Sheriff, ‘Race and Class in the Politics of Zanzibar, Africa Spectrum, 36(3) (2001), p. 310 [20] Jonathon Glassman, 'Sorting out the Tribes: The Creation of Racial Identities in Colonial Zanzibar’s Newspaper Wars', Journal of African History, 41 (2001), p. 406 [21] Ibid, p. 406 [22] 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), p. 21 [23] G. Thomas Burgess, ‘Mao in Zanzibar: Nationalism, Discipline and the (De)construction of Afro-Asian Solidarities’, in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), p.212 [24] 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), p. 21 [25] Marie-Aude Fouéré, ‘Reinterpreting Revolutionary Zanzibar in the Media Today: The Case of Dira Newspaper’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 6 (2012), p. 679 [26] Kyu-Deug Hwang, ‘Revisiting the Politics of Zanzibar: In Search of the Root Causes of the 1964 Revolution’, International Area Review, 12(2) (2001), p. 27 [27] Ibid, p. 27 [28] Ian Speller, ‘An African Cuba? Britain and the Zanzibar Revolution, 1964’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35(2) (2007), pp.283-284 [29] 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), p. 2 [30] Ibid, p. 21 [31] Ian Speller, ‘An African Cuba? Britain and the Zanzibar Revolution, 1964’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35(2) (2007), p. 285 [32] Ibid, p. 285 [33] Ibid, p. 285 [34] G. Thomas Burgess, ‘Mao in Zanzibar: Nationalism, Discipline and the (De)construction of Afro-Asian Solidaities’, in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), p. 213
[i] Zama za Siasa - ‘age of politics’ from 1957 to 1964; the democratisation process