If Issa’s account is one of complexity and contradiction, reflective of the kaleidoscope of values embraced by residents of cosmopolitan Zanzibar Town, the life story of Seif Sharif Hamad suggests a more undeviating course, adopted by one who never found any ideology or belief system more compelling than the rural Islam of his youth. Hamad has not sought to transform the conservative countryside of his youth through values at least partially adopted from overseas; he has asserted himself as a defender of that society from what he considers a harmful revolution instituted by outsiders. If Hamad has spent much of his adult life as a counterrevolutionary, he has been motivated to do so largely as a result of his satisfaction, so apparent in his memoir, with the Zanzibar of his youth.

From a family in the island of Pemba that in colonial times produced a series of landowners, schoolteachers, and civil servants, Hamad was a rural notable years before he entered politics.  A product of a political culture in the islands that accommodated itself to British colonialism, Hamad sometimes comes across in his account as extraordinarily pragmatic, even devoid of ideology. And yet, as Abdellah Hammoudi reminds us, such an impression is only accurate if the concept of ideology “is restricted to systems of social and political ideas engendered by the European humanist revolution…Let it not be forgotten that Islam provides the faithful with a theory of the ideal society and its economic and political structure” that is acted out in “Muslim daily life. ”Ideology “is thus not a coherent system of ideas and concepts, but rather a concrete set of comportments [prayer, almsgiving, fasting, etc.] which the faithful display as rallying signs.”

Yet Hamad’s pragmatism does have an analogue in European humanism.  Hamad asserts an Islamic social vision that overlaps and associates with village notions of honorable behavior and global discourses of human rights, all of which he feels were promoted or protected by the colonial state more than by the governments that followed. Hamad’s family prospered under British rule, and as a youth, he achieved distinction within the meritocratic culture of colonial boarding schools.  In such favorable circumstances, Hamad looked forward to following his father into the civil service.  His initial willingness in 1964 to allow the new regime to prove itself soon ended, however. Denied government permission to attend university overseas, he was posted as a teacher to a country boarding school in Pemba, where like most Pembans he became thoroughly disenchanted with the revolution. Hamad’s account of conditions in Pemba in the 1960s may explain better than any other printed source the genesis of postcolonial discontent in Pemba, including the rationing, constant surveillance, and punitive punishments that broke his father’s health and forced many of his close friends into exile.

Hamad’s account also illuminates the thaw experienced in Zanzibari society after Karume’s death in 1972.  A less suspicious president, Aboud Jumbe, adopted a more inclusive attitude toward Pembans and educated people in general and gradually dismantled much of the islands’ coercive security apparatus.  Jumbe allowed Hamad to attend the University of Dar es Salaam, where the young man was unimpressed by the socialist views espoused by his lecturers, both Tanzanian and expatriate, including the famous Walter Rodney.  Hamad read widely, excelled academically, and continued to embrace pragmatism and reform.  In 1977, Jumbe appointed him minister of education, despite his Pemban origins and heterodox views.   Hamad was a leading light of a new educated elite—cultivated by Jumbe—responsible for “introducing a modicum of rationality in the government.”  In a complicated and controversial series of events, Hamad soon emerged as the ringleader of a circle of reformers who outmaneuvered the revolutionary old guard in the CCM and forced Jumbe’s resignation in 1984.  The new president, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, appointed Hamad chief minister, and the two pushed a reformist agenda: liberalizing trade, initiating a new, more liberal constitution, and abolishing Karume’s system of People’s Courts.

Despite the popularity of these measures, the pendulum then swung against the reformers: in 1988, CCM’s old guard managed to oust Hamad as chief minister, and the next year he was arrested for sedition.  Hamad’s political exile provided the latent popular opposition in the islands with its most potent leader.  By 1992, he was out of prison and, in a new era of multipartyism, serving as the spiritual leader and organizational genius of the Civic United Front. Since then, Hamad has campaigned for the Zanzibari presidency three times—in 1995, 2000, and 2005—and served as CUF’s secretary general for over a decade. The issues and personal conflicts that now separate CUF and CCM in Zanzibar stem from the disputes of the 1980s between reformist and old-guard politicians.  The rhetoric has become more heated, however, as the stakes have risen and as the opposition has aired a generation’s worth of grievances.

One contest is over memory.  Hamad has disputed the ruling party’s version of the past, asserting that Africans participated in the slave trade and that the British did not oppress Africans.  Most important, according to Hamad, the revolution was the beginning of Zanzibar’s current problems.  He claims it did not sweep away a regime of privilege and servitude so much as it did late-colonial institutions that imposed checks on the accumulation of despotic power.  He asserts that mainlander politicians have over the decades sought to make the island chain a dependent appendage of the mainland.  If, in the 1970s, many Zanzibaris welcomed mainland influence in Zanzibar as a force for moderation, by the 1990s the union had become in their eyes the chief obstacle to Zanzibari desires for democratization and better governance.  The use in recent election cycles of Tanzanian security forces to maintain minority CCM governments in power has further encouraged such sentiments.

The solution, according to Hamad, is not secession but rather reform of the Tanzanian union.  Yet Hamad also insists, contrary to considerable archival evidence, that the revolution was actually a cleverly disguised invasion from Tanganyika, encouraging islanders to blame their post-colonial problems on Nyerere and the mainland.  CCM officials fear that a CUF electoral victory will mean the union’s dissolution, since many in CUF support Zanzibari independence.  “Losing” Zanzibar to CUF will, in CCM eyes, allow the islands to receive large infusions of aid from the Middle East, which will set Zanzibar adrift from its ties to the African continent.  Such fears have provoked national CCM leaders to rig elections repeatedly and intervene militarily in island affairs.  In 2001, a violent crackdown resulted in dozens of civilian deaths, an unknown number of rapes and attacks on personal property, and thousands of refugees.

Hamad’s account also reveals how Tanzanians continue to be divided over issues of identity.  His calls for unity in the islands under the banner of Islam have, in an age of global terrorism, opened his party up to CCM allegations of dangerous sectarianism.  Hamad also provokes controversy when he expresses unambiguous pride in Zanzibar’s cosmopolitan heritage and in his own Shirazi ethnic identity.  He locates Zanzibar as much in the western Indian Ocean world as in Africa.  While CCM officials like Mapuri equate nation with race, Hamad’s nationalism is based in part on a celebration of cosmopolitanism in the islands.  Zanzibari nationalism is also generally grounded, for better or worse, on local pride in the regional influence that the islands exercised in the nineteenth century, on cultural chauvinism, and on a shared sense of victimization within the Tanzanian union, a victimization often conceived in sectarian terms.

Hamad’s memoir, thus, illustrates some of the most profound tensions in contemporary Tanzania and gives the only account anywhere of how a political party in Tanzania gets off the ground and survives government opposition and internal factionalism to emerge as the nation’s largest challenger to CCM rule. It reveals how CCM functions on its highest levels as neither a true despotism nor an open democracy, how it values consensus and moderation yet is capable of authoritarianism when it feels its interests are threatened.  Hamad’s memoir is a rare window, therefore, into one of the many versions of “African democracy” that have emerged since the 1990s.

Hamad’s account, finally, is a fitting counterpart to those of both Issa and Mapuri.  For Hamad, Zanzibari history is not so much the story of the struggle of any particular class or race as the story of human virtues and vices in perpetual opposition.  It is not so much the story of how social groups employ  various strategies by which to protect their interests and assert or maintain their dominance as about how and why individuals, as autonomous moral agents, exercise power to either promote or violate human rights.  Hamad’s version of human rights is anything but contingent; though informed by the village norms of his youth, it is not parochial.  It resists subordination to either the power of a revolutionary agenda or claims for justice by a community that has historically been excluded and enslaved.  His version of human rights is guided instead by the view that Islam teaches a set of ethical standards that apply to politics: in his account, Hamad repeatedly refers to the alleged deceit, folly, and foul play of his rivals—and their theft of elections—as violations of a community’s trust and as offensive to God.

One of Hamad’s arguments against the revolution is that it provided a language and view of history through which men could and did set aside Islamic ethical standards, not to mention codes of human rights; when African nationalists view politics as a “racial war of nerves,” they obscure any ethical component of elite decision making.  For Hamad, the only way for islanders to move forward from their traumatic memories of the past and to end the divisive politics of race is to remember and commonly embrace Islamic sensibilities that speak to the worthiness of an individual—and a community—more than do labels of race, ethnicity, or class. In this way, Hamad employs a language of virtues and vices, confident of its explanatory power.  He remembers his life story as a mission to convince leaders to apply Islamic notions of decency and civility to political institutions derived largely from Western experience.  Hamad’s memoir, thus, illustrates how democracy and human rights can be strengthened rather than weakened by appeals to Islam and how Islam can be employed to realize the European humanist revolution better than some of its ideological descendants.