Below is the sixth extract of 'Race, Revolution and Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar':
 

Revolution

After election riots in June 1961 claimed more than sixty lives, nearly all Arabs, the British imposed a state of emergency.  Michael Lofchie, who conducted doctoral research in Zanzibar from 1962 to 1963, described the manner in which politics came to pervade nearly every aspect of island life.  All social relations, he noted,

became a battleground in which every individual act was invested with highly symbolic significance as a demonstration of party membership and solidarity.  Performance of the most routine daily tasks—marketing, working and commuting, for example—was viewed as an integral facet of the national political struggle...By early 1958 no dimension of social behavior remained politically neutral.  Even private quarrels and disputes which had long preceded the formation of modern political parties were absorbed into the pattern of partisan conflict.

In the last elections before independence in 1963, the ASP captured more than 54 percent of the total popular vote, yet lost eighteen of the thirty-one seats contested in the Legislative Council, often by narrow margins. ASP supporters could not help but feel cheated.  The only significant setback for the ZNP-ZPPP was the defection of A. M. Babu, for years the ZNP’s secretary general and most talented grassroots organizer.  Babu and a number of his supporters, such as Ali Sultan Issa, seceded from the ZNP in 1963 to form their own Umma Party, which espoused socialism as its official creed.  Instead of looking to Gamel Abdul Nasser for aid and inspiration as had the ZNP or as the ASP to African nationalists like Julius Nyerere, Umma claimed that Mao and Stalin possessed the answers to Zanzibar’s underdevelopment and inequality.   As the party cut its ties with the “petit-bourgeois” leaders of the ZNP, Umma allied itself with the ASP, whose leaders it had formerly ridiculed as members of the unprogressive “lumpen-proletariat.”  Umma represented a small but influential and well-trained cosmopolitan cohort, composed overwhelmingly of young men from Zanzibar Town, many of whom had visited or undertaken studies in Britain, eastern Europe, China, Egypt, and Cuba.

Only one month after Zanzibar celebrated its independence from the British in December 1963 and colonial army units withdrew, an insurrectionary force organized by the ASP Youth League launched an attack on the night of January 11–12, 1964, on two police arsenals located on the outskirts of Zanzibar Town.  The rebels took the police by surprise, even though Karume, on the day prior, had lost his nerve, warned the ZNP government of imminent violence that night, and then fled to the mainland.  The rebels quickly gained control of nearly all the government’s weapons supply; from the morning of January 12, Umma members were active in the revolution.  Within a couple of days, the sultan fled on his yacht, and the prime minister and his cabinet surrendered.  Within a couple of weeks, the rebels exported the revolution to Pemba. What might have initially been a fairly bloodless seizure of power soon became a fairly systematic campaign to round up, detain, and punish supporters of the ZNP-ZPPP regime, in which Arabs and South Asians, regardless of class, were singled out for the harshest forms of vengeance: plunder, rape, execution, ritual humiliation, and exile.  Zanzibari historian Abdul Sheriff describes the net effect of weeks of violence in 1964 as “genocidal in proportions.”