The 60th Anniversary of Arab Genocide in Zanzibar

By: Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

Today, January 12, marks the 60th anniversary of the slaughter of Arabs in Zanzibar following the 1964 revolution in the Peninsula. It was a revolution that was not limited to removing the Arabs’ authority over Zanzibar, but rather intended to eliminate them ethnically as foreign settler presence, perhaps more dangerous than the British colonialism that departed in 1961.
Sultan Sayed Saeed (Sultan of Oman at the time) praised the Arab state on the Peninsula, as his sultanate had sovereignty over Zanzibar and the cities of the eastern African coast since 1689, the year in which Oman succeeded in ridding the coastal population of the Portuguese at the request of its notables. Sultan Saeed transferred his government to Zanzibar in 1840 in the context of overwhelming European conflicts over African resources. The Peninsula became a port for exporting African slaves. This trade was the cause of the decline of the Kingdom of Zanzibar when European countries reversed, each in its own time, to outlaw slavery. The offence of this trade remained on the Arabs in charge of a town whose entire population was supported by this trade.
American diplomat Donald Peterson said, “If we were speaking in 1964 in today’s language, we would have described the plight of the Arabs on the Peninsula that year as ‘genocide,’ without any hesitation.” The victims of the plight were not subjected to a known census via a comprehensive investigation, but there is agreement among independent scholars that between five thousand to 11 thousand Arabs were killed. Out of the fifty thousand Arabs on the Peninsula (one-sixth of the population), only 12,000 remained due to excessive forced displacement and intimidation. Perhaps the ethnic cleansing of Arabs in Zanzibar is unique in that some of its scenes were filmed live on Italian television in the documentary “Adieu Africa” (1966). The documentary film presented the killing of Zanzibar as part of African atrocities that occurred after the independence of the countries of the continent. The audience sees in person how Arabs are being killed in the mass graves that contained their remains. Ambassadors from Africa in Italy protested against the film, which shocked them with its violence, as the continent’s independence was still in its infancy.
The plight of Arabs in Zanzibar being kept silent of is not something new. An entire science has recently emerged in the Western academia, the subject of which is the detection of such “genocides.” The science took the name “Critical Studies of the Hidden Genocide.” Most of these studies, however, ignore the tragedy of the Arabs in Zanzibar. I only came across a single chapter about the genocide of Zanzibar, which was included in the book “Untitled Atrocities in the Twentieth Century,” edited by Adam Herbert. (2011)
Incidents in the local history of Zanzibar, the African continent, and the world combined to cast a veil of oblivion over the murderers of Arabs on the Peninsula, and I can summarize them as follows:
1- Ignoring this genocide was the best trick of the Pan-African nationalist movement, and in its extremist Negro version in particular, which believes that “Africa is for the Africans.”
The concept of Africans is that they are black in origin, and all others who came from different parts of the world are pure invaders. In the view of such nationalism, Arabs are invaders, and getting rid of their heavy presence is a national gain, not a blame.
Of course, it is not possible for this “fundamentalist” movement to remember this genocide, and it was the one that rejoiced at the return of Zanzibar to the continent in union with Tanganyika in the state of Tanzania, a few months after the revolution and genocide. Accordingly, African writers have continued to deny the numbers of victims of the disaster and attribute them to the immoderate Arab imagination.
2- Zanzibari Marxist thought represented by Abdul-Rahman Babou, leader of the Umma Party and member of the 1964 Revolution Command Council, and Tanzanian academic thought in the sixties and seventies, in which his analysis dominated class, and race was not considered by him the consideration it has recently become in political studies.
In Babou’s opinion, those who carried out the revolution (and what resulted from it) were the miserable proletariat, which was quickly excluded from the course of events and led by responsible social revolutionary forces. Babou and those agreeing with him continued to avoid looking at the ethnic hatreds that were evident in the massacre of the Arabs. Accordingly, Babu’s interpretation of class was a mere explanation of the issue, not an analysis of it.
3- The Arab nationalist idea in its Nasserist version, whose alliances with African national liberation prevailed over saving an Arab people. The fall of the state of an Arab sultan, from the point of view of that nationalist idea, is an indication of the validity of its demand to get rid of other reactionary Arab sultans in the center of the Arabs. This was a tragic irony for an Arab people to perish in this way and the call for the nationalism of this people was at its peak.
4- The genocide occurred within the framework of the Cold War, whose greatest concern was winning the elite of African governance and politics to the policies of the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the West. The socialist axis rejoiced in the Zanzibar revolution, which was described as “the Cuba of Africa,” and the West was busy getting rid of it by annexing it to the relatively moderate Tanganyika.
There is, of course, something to be said about policies by African Arabs that undermine national brotherhood. But, the arrow of criticism, as long as we are in the presence of the anniversary of the Zanzibar genocide, targets the comprehensive African nationalist narrative, building a national state in Africa will fail as long as this narrative denies the citizenship of Arabs in Africa and considers them heavy settlers.
The Zanzibar genocide, which installed a wedge into its country that is still fresh, was imposed on the Zanzibaris by the African nationalist narrative. There was no plan in the program of the two opposition nationalist parties in Zanzibar, led by Obaid Karume (Afro-Shirazi) or Abdul-Rahman Babou (Al-Umma), to erase the Arab presence. Their conflict with the ruling Zanzibar National Party, which is loyal to the Sultan (led by Ali Mohsen), was over the result of free elections, the results of which varied between the National Party winning the most seats in Parliament, while the opposition won the majority of voters’ in total. This is necessarily known in elections. Thus, Zanzibar at that time was not prepared for anything more than a brutal and prolonged electoral dispute and possible ethnic clashes. There is no evidence that the 1964 revolution and the massacre that followed it is a product of unified African nationalism, and not the Zanzibari African national state, that Karume and Abdul Rahman were in a deep sleep when the revolution exploded. The rebels woke Karume at dawn and took him to Dar Es Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika, under the pretext of protecting him. As for Babou, he was already sheltering in Dar Es Salaam, and the Cuban ambassador there woke him up to convey to him the news of the outbreak of a revolution in his homeland.
With the 1964 revolution, Pan-African nationalism prevailed over Zanzibari African patriotism. I do not know anyone who has noted the exorbitant irony of fate in that situation like Professor Ali Al Mazrouei. He put his finger on the contradiction that the Zanzibar Revolution entailed between the national state and the unifying African state. The leader of the revolution, John Okello, is African, but not Zanzibari. He came to the Peninsula in 1959 among the Africans of the interior who continued to be attracted by the labor market in Zanzibar. Thus, this “foreigner” in the concept of the national state overthrew a fourth-generation sultan on the Peninsula who had full jurisdiction over a Muslim people. The Islamic identity dramatically deepened the alienation of the leader of this revolution from the Zanzibari homeland. For, he is a Christian who converted from a purely African religion and was baptized by the Quakers in Uganda. He excessed that he accompanied his Christian faith in his revolution against the Muslim Arabs. The Quakers called him “Queydon” who is the sincere one in their religion. Okello played the role of the savior of the Africans of the Peninsula from the oppression of the Arabs. He told about his travel by ship from the Kenyan coast to Zanzibar and his exposure to a storm that almost drowned them. A wise writer said that this was represented by St. Paul, whose ship nearly sank on the Island of Malta.
Zanzibari nationalism did not surrender to Okello’s revolutionary “conquest”. Karume’s first concern after his appointment as Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council by Okello was to get rid of him as an alien. He succeeded in his endeavor within fifty days. The foreign leader of the revolution (in the national sense) confused the African horizons from which he first came. In addition, this Zanzibari nationalism continues to resent the Tanzanian union imposed on it in the name of inclusive African nationalism and without its consultation. This patriotism has a party that has been calling for the dismantling of the union.
What the Arabs must do on the forgotten 60th anniversary of the Zanzibar Genocides is to design a strategy that places this catastrophe on the map of evil in the world. This mission will include restoring the dignity of the Arabs as African citizens by confronting the anniversary of Arab slavery, which the “fundamentalists” of Pan-African nationalism use to disavow the genocide of Zanzibar. The truth is that Okello, the leader of the 1964 revolution, came to kill Arabs without any scruple as a means of perpetuating Arab slavery and inciting African hatred against the Arabs through it. He visited Christ Castle in Mombasa, Kenya. He said that its walls, in which the history of slavery was engraved, would shame every Arab. Henry Gates, a professor at Harvard University, presented all of these attractions years ago in his documentary about Africa. His colleague Jonathan Glassman, a professor at Northwestern University in the United States, criticized him for ignoring this monument to him, so he narrated legends about tourist guides as if they were facts.
Professors Ibrahim Sharif and Mohammed Al-Mahrouqi recently revealed in a scientific paper the forgery that went into making these monuments. They said, for example, that the tourism industry in Arab slavery takes the visitor to the Church of St. Monica to see a basement containing rusty shackles that are the alleged remains of Arab slavery. If we know that the church was built in 1905, many years after the abolition of slavery in Zanzibar, we will discover the false imagination behind that industry. What is currently disturbing is that UNESCO declared the stone city in Zanzibar, which contains most of these monuments, a global monument in 2000. Accordingly, tourism of making people hate Arabs has flourished. Those who read Tanzanian tourist literature on slavery noticed that it lacked any mention of the 1964 revolution, in order to avoid the history of genocide it raises that might cover up the history of slavery, or perhaps reveal the double standards of the extremists of African nationalism: the desire to make the Arabs bad and cover up their own bad.
Perhaps we considered in our approach a reminder of the plight of Zanzibar, and we added that we overlooked it for a long time, with systematic insistence, on the determination of the Jews who made the Holocaust an inescapable fact. They wrote extensively about it until they counted six thousand books about it annually. Among them emerged someone like Efrem Zuroff (65 years old), described as the “Dean of Nazi Hunters,” who prepared a list of those “wanted” Nazis for their crimes against the Jews. He was famous for saying that the crimes of the Holocaust do not have a statute of limitations. When he saw the Nazis reaching the eldest age and die natural death of God, he said that he wished for Him to prolong their lives until they received their deserved punishment.
The Holocaust has been touched on so many times that it has become a profitable industry, as Jewish professor Norman Finkelstein said in his book “The Holocaust Industry.” Last January 2014, the New York Times published news about a book called “The Holocaust Book,” which critics described as “playful” in its remembrance of the Holocaust. It has 1,250 pages. It is six and a half feet long, and 46 feet in circumference. The owner of the idea (not the author) is Phil Jermoski, a mathematics teacher, who immigrated from America to Israel. The book only contains the word “Jews” in small font, repeated six million times, equal to the number of victims of the Holocaust. There is no ceiling on its price, of course, as long as the book is published for a cause. One of them bought 100 copies to distribute to members of the US Congress and Jewish leaders in South Africa and Australia. Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Semitic Insult Organization, focused on getting a copy to the White House.
May God have mercy on the dead Arabs and Muslims in Zanzibar on the 60th anniversary of their ordeal.
The part about the killing of Arabs in Zanzibar in the movie “Adieu Africa”, documented the incident as it happened.
Africa Audio Zanzibar (youtube.com)