Letter from Zanzibar

...True enough, Ali Muhsin and a ministerial colleague readily accepted the invitation of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika to join the Working Party for East African Federation from the moment Zanzibar became independent...

...It is a strange outcome, but one cannot help feeling that the situation has still to be fully resolved...

...Othman then suffered a political eclipse...

...The man to watch in the coming weeks will be the new Minister of Education, Sheikh Othman Shariff...

...This, though, was hardly the point...

...Babu used to be the ZNP'S Organizing Secretary...

...Politics in Zanzibar has been largely a competition for the Shirazi vote...

...Throughout the deposed Sultan's domains the civil service has been overwhelmingly Arab, as was the dominant tone of life in Zanzibar Town...

...The most likely answer is the Minister for External Affairs and Defense in the new revolutionary government, Sheikh Abdul Rahman Mohamed, popularly known as Babu...

...They wouldn't have offered us Ministries if they had won...

...At the time, he was said to be making all preparations to go into exile on the royal yacht at a moment's notice...

...Keith Kyle, a new contributor to these pages, is a freelance journalist now travelling in Africa...

...Thirdly, the members of ZNP —which, curiously enough, was founded by African peasants who afterward invited the Arab intellectuals in because of their superior education—were fluent in English and could offer the British more articulate opposition...

...Babu is the leader of the Umma party, which has no seats in Parliament but has close connections with the trade unions...

...This difference of political behavior in the two islands is fairly easy to explain...

...The racial division in the country, which consists of two main islands (Zanzibar and Pemba) plus a few associated islets off the shores of Tanganyika, has always been between Arabs and Africans...

...Subsequently, he quarrelled openly with his party president, Abeid Karume, the President of the new Republic, a former boatman who is scarcely literate but who holds the loyalty of the "mainlander" Africans...

...Many observers urged Sheikh Shamte and his partner, Sheikh Ali Muhsin...

...The result was an extreme example of the distortion which can occur with the single-member constituency system and no provision for proportional representation...

...But this impression of a fundamentally non-African society so close to the African mainland was based on a population of Arabic extraction that at the highest estimate was no more than 19 per cent of the whole...

...Broadly speaking, it has gone with the mainland Africans on Zanzibar island, where the Afro-Shirazi party, led by the new President, Sheikh Abeid Karume, is dominant...

...Among other things, it had considerably fewer educated men than its opponents...

...Now, a month after the British departure, the Afro-Shirazis are in power with the aid and partnership of the most Left-wing personality on the islands...

...Since for temporary internal reasons Uganda was casting around for an excuse to slacken the pace of the advance toward federation, it availed itself of the Zanzibari paper for this purpose—a course of action that flattered the Zanzibar government but scarcely endeared it to Kenya and Tanganyika, both of which, being much nearer to Zanzibar than Uganda, were in closer touch with the domestic situation there and far more able to influence its evolution...

...in Pemba, the island which produces most of the famous "Zanzibar cloves," the Arabs and Shirazis tend to be allies...

...Four main factors were at work: First, there was the alliance of the mainly Arab ZNP with the Shirazis of Pemba under former Prime Minister Shamte...

...Just before the last election Babu and company were purged from the ZNP by Ali Muhsin, who was confident that when they were out on their own they would not prove more than 100 strong...

...But by writing the Opposition off and expecting it to disintegrate they showed themselves wildly over-confident of their ability to insulate Zanzibar from mainland influences...

...But that Babu has won would be a premature conclusion...

...They had made some headway with propaganda in favor of a "Zanzibari patriotism" that ignored racial origins but restricted immigration from the mainland...

...But 100 determined men in such a small country can have quite an impact, especially when they have a discontented popular majority to play upon...

...Finally, there was the eccentric result of a democratic election conducted under conditions of the most scrupulous fairness...

...How, then, under a democratic system fostered by the British did the Arabs manage to retain political leadership until forcibly overthrown...

...the ZNP leader and Minister for External Affairs, to offer Cabinet seats to the Opposition and thus form a National Administration...

...To all arguments suggesting that it might be in their own interests, not to mention that of the Sultan, to open the way to a national government, the leaders of the ruling coalition responded with a firm negative: "No, why should we...

...and it seems most unlikely that he will be prepared to play third or fourth fiddle for long to the combination of Karume, Babu and, presumably, the mysterious John Okello...

...Now, only a month after the Arab Sultan Jamshid had graduated from being His Highness under British protection to being His Majesty without that protection, Zanzibar has been proclaimed a Republic under an African President...

...Two generations back many of the Africans were owned as slaves by the Arabs...

...Because he was considered to have Communist leanings, and certainly had Communist (mainly Chinese) connections and financing, the ZNP as a whole was, quite mistakenly, suspected by the Protectorate authorities of leaning to the far Left...

...The Arab influence in the coalition government, despite the passionate sincerity of the Ministers in calling themselves Zanzibaris and not Arabs, showed itself in a certain aloofness from the mainland states and in the cultivation of particularly close relations with Cairo...

...While most of the ZNP leaders, and particularly Ali Muhsin, were close to Cairo, none except Babu and his immediate entourage was close to Moscow or Peking...

...When Sultan Jamshid was still heir to the throne at one remove—he was grandson to the then ruler, but acceded unexpectedly soon since grandfather and father died within 18 months of each other —he used to behave virtually as a ZNP politician...

...Becoming Sultan just two weeks before the 1963 elections, it was openly rumored in Zanzibar that he did not expect to last 24 hours after polling day if the AfroShirazis won...

...Since Babu was out of the country at the time—his party having been suppressed by the government—one should probably attribute the actual execution of Babu's plans to the younger trade union leaders trained by John Okello, an outside agent of Kenyan extraction and Russian and Cuban training...

...In Pemba the landholdings are smaller and are about equally divided between Arabs and Shirazis, who socially are on the same footing...

...The Afro-Shirazis piled up useless majorities in the constituencies they easily won on Zanzibar island, while the coalition of zppp and ZNP carried most of the Pemba seats and a minority of Zanzibar seats by margins that were narrow in all but a few instances...

...Given the delicate situation on the islands, Ali Muhsin was particularly indiscreet in visiting Cairo with maximum publicity twice within a short period of his delusory election victory—once just before and once just after independence...

...That Arab leadership of Zanzibar is finished seems clear...

...With a 99 per cent poll and no fraud or accusations of fraud whatsoever, the election saw the defeat of the AfroShirazi party, which won 54 per cent of the votes in the two islands and 63 per cent of the vote on Zanzibar island alone...

...and the mainlanders, who came over to the islands as migrant labor— either slave or free—and stayed...

...The coalition government of Sheikh Mohammed Shamte, leader of the Zanzibar and Pemba People's party (ZPPP), and Sheikh Ali Muhsin, leader of the Zanzibar Nationalist party (ZNP), always seemed to be sitting with disconcerting complacency on the edge of a volcano...

...Because past accusations of electoral fraud had ended in race rioting and bloodshed, specially imported British administrators and troops went to endless trouble and expense to insure that the government which led Zanzibar into independence was one genuinely chosen by the people...

...The ability of the leading men in office was not in question...

...Rather shortsightedly, the ZNP made extreme loyalty to the throne a particularly strong slogan...

...Secondly, the Afro-Shirazi party, which was based on the principle that all Africans should stand together whether originally "islander" (Shirazi) or "mainlander," was for a long time divided and badly led...

...But the British guided the Zanzibaris in developing their constitution, and most British people have a fixed prejudice against any form of proportional representation, a system which has always been rejected in Britain itself...

...Since the total population of the country was only 300,000, it should have been apparent that the dangers of such an anomaly with 31 separate constituencies were unwarrantably high...

...Shamte himself, Ali Muhsin and the eloquent and harddriving Finance Minister, Sheikh Juma Aley, were as capable a combination as the islands could offer...

...Yet the paper they submitted challenged most of the principles previously agreed upon by the other three nations...

...But the Africans themselves are also divided into two groups: the Shirazis, who claim they are the original inhabitants of the islands and maintain that through trading connections in the distant past they have an admixture of Persian blood...

...A man of great ability and even greater ambition, Othman would have been Prime Minister if the Afro-Shirazis had won the 1963 election...

...Having A 13,000 minority of popular votes and ominously little support in all except one predominantly Arab section of Zanzibar Town, the ZNP-ZPPP alliance enjoyed a majority of five seats in the 31-man Parliament...

...Who actually engineered the coup...

...Of course, this was a misconception...

...Kenya and Tanganyika both backed the Afro-Shirazi party, which shared their views about a strong East African Federation...

...The problem of bringing new life to the islands' stagnant economy seemed in any case so great, and the necessity of rousing the easygoing population to uncharacteristic efforts of self-help and progressive farming was so apparent, that it was impossible to see how a government with such little popular appeal on the main island could hope to bring off its task...

...Three multi-member constituencies (e.g., Pemba, Zanzibar Rural and Zanzibar Urban) that coincided with the country's administrative structure would almost certainly have produced a more representative result...

...This delivered most of Pemba to the former government, and support for the alliance by a minority of the Shirazis on Zanzibar island was enough to add the few extra seats there necessary to give it a majority in Parliament...

...The suspicion was reinforced in British minds when, at the time of the Suez crisis and for some while thereafter, it became fashionable to equate Egyptian and Communist influence...

...Since he has a Ministry, though, he was apparently privy to the plot...

...The British had always quietly encouraged the Afro-Shirazi party because they felt (until the purge of Babu) that the Zanzibar Nationalist party was too Left-wing...

...In Zanzibar there is a clear class division between Arabs, who own most of the land and the coconut and clove trees on it, and the Shirazis, who live on the land and cultivate the soil around and among the trees on a more or less permanent squatter basis...