Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar ...

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. 51 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.” 52
While the revolutionaries had overthrown an elected government,
they were in no way united as to how to proceed next. Few members of
the hastily erected Revolutionary Council possessed, like Babu, both
political skill and radical nation-building ideas; most commanded deference,
however, as a result of their leading roles in the uprising and
supported Karume as chief, since he still commanded mass popularity.
Babu urgently advised Karume to adopt socialist policies and lean on
advisors from East Germany, China, and the USSR; he gave the impression
to some he wanted to supplant the older man. If so, Babu was outmaneuvered;
in a few short months, Karume removed from the islands
a series of individuals whom he regarded as untrustworthy, including
Babu and a number of his Umma colleagues. 53 The union agreement
between Tanganyika and Zanzibar in April 1964 meant, for Karume,
little actual interference from the mainland and a strengthened position
from which to assert his primacy and purge his political rivals.
Yet Umma’s influence continued, at least indirectly; an influx of socialist
foreign advisors made Zanzibar into something of a regional showcase
for revolution. The CIA reported in September 1964 that “Babu and
his colleagues have brought Zanzibar further under Communist influence,
or at least for the time being, than has been the case in any other African
country.” 54 British administrators, who had for decades introduced ideas
and ruling practices from other imperial territories as far away as
Guyana and Malaya, were replaced by hundreds of East German, Chinese,
and Soviet teachers, doctors, and technicians. Karume saw in their
various proposals the means by which to fulfill African nationalist desires
for racial development. Such development would be achieved through
22 introduction