Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0363/03639.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 32KB | 520 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03639}
$Pretitle{262}
$Title{Tanzania
Chapter 1F.   Zanzibar: To Independence, Revolution, and Union}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Irving Kaplan}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{znp
independence
british
government
nyerere
shirazi
tanu
arab
zanzibar
arabs}
$Date{1978}
$Log{}
Country:     Tanzania
Book:        Tanzania, A Country Study
Author:      Irving Kaplan
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1978

Chapter 1F.   Zanzibar: To Independence, Revolution, and Union

     As the end of World War II socioeconomic and ethnic divisions in Zanzibar
and Pemba coincided, but the divisions were not clear cut and some interests
and attitudes crossed boundaries: many Arabs were in fact of mixed origin, and
some who might have called themselves Shirazi at one time had come to think of
themselves as Arabs. The Shirazi of Pemba shared certain economic interests
with Pemba Arabs, and there were cases of intermarriage. All Arabs and
Shirazi were Muslims; most mainlanders were not. On Zanzibar, Shirazi and
mainlanders might have had some grievances in common, but in certain
situations they were competitors. Arabs and Shirazi alike looked down on
mainlanders, especially those of slave origin. This complex social situation
set the stage for the sometimes ambiguous politics leading to independence.

     Politically the situation remained fairly quiet until the mid-1950s. The
Legislative Council, like that on the mainland, included an appointed
unofficial minority, Arab in composition. Except for one instance of violence
in the early 1950s, there was little overt political activity. The violence
occurred when farmers, already angry because some of their land had been taken
to extend the airport, rebelled against the government's intention to impose
innoculation against anthrax. Out of this incident emerged the National Party
of the Subjects of the Sultan of Zanzibar.

     A few years later, in 1954, the Arab Association, increasingly political
and influenced in part by developments in the Middle East, published a
series of strongly anticolonial articles in its newspaper. Alison Smith
suggests that some Arabs had begun to think that if they were to remain in
control of an eventually independent Zanzibar in which they were clearly a
minority, they would have to speed up the process lest they be preempted by
the majority. The articles led to the trial for sedition of the executive
groups of the association. The British authorities had counted on the
continued cooperation of the generally conservative Arabs to whom they had
become accustomed, but they were confronted with an eighteen month boycott of
government by all save one Arab member of the Legislative Council (who was
murdered in 1955).

     In 1955 a number of Arabs led by Ali Muhsin Barwani, a young member of
a family of wealthy landowners (like the editor of the Arab Association paper
that had published the anticolonial articles) affiliated themselves with the
National Party founded by rebellious peasants some years earlier. In 1956 Ali
Muhsin became the unofficial leader of that group, now called the Zanzibar
Nationalist Party (ZNP). Like other activist Arabs he was moved by Islamic
ideas, but ha had also been influenced by his understanding of nationalist
movements in nineteenth century Europe.

     The ZNP, now led by Arabs, included Shirazi but excluded mainlanders who
were not subjects of the sultan. Like the Arab Association, it called for
elections to the Legislative Council on a common roll, apparently assuming
that an Arab-led, if not entirely Arab, delegation would be chosen under such
conditions.

     The British authorities, assuming that the Arab Association radicals and
the ZNP represented an extremist fringe, offered their own views of
constitutional change in October 1955. Elections were not included, and the
Arab boycott of government continued. In 1956 a senior official from Kenya who
had been called in as an adviser recommended common roll elections i n 1957.
The franchise was to be highly restricted, however, and the proposal was
modified to limit the vote to subjects of the sultan, thereby excluding all
but a few mainland Africans.

     Most Shirazi and mainland Africans were not sure that they wanted the
changes because they seemed to be steps toward an independent Zanzibar likely
to be controlled by Arabs. The colonial authorities, long committed to
Zanzibar as an Arab state, were nevertheless not ready to accept an election
dominated by an increasingly radical Arab minority and encouraged the Shirazi
and the few eligible mainlanders to vote. In fact not many could because of
the British failure to stress secondary education for the non-Arab population.

     Despite their doubts, the hitherto independent African and Shirazi
associations, confronted by the prospect of elections, did join in an alliance
and their activity, as well as the large number of votes (40 percent of the
total) cast for unaffiliated candidates meant that the ZNP lost all of the six
seats in the first round of elections in July 1957. One representative of the
alliance, Abeid Karume, of working-class background, emerged as a major figure
at this time, defeating Ali Muhsin for one of the six seats.

     As a consequence of the election racial conflict intensified. On the one
hand Afro-Shirazi consumer cooperatives forced many Arab shopkeepers out of
business. On the other, Afro-Shirazi dockworkers who had long held a monopoly
on waterfront jobs were eliminated in favor of members of the ZNP. Arab
plantation owners also evicted long-tolerated mainlander squatters.

     The ZNP, despite its losses, took the initiative, seeking support from
several foreign sources for its drive to independence. Ali Muhsin gained the
approval of Ghana's president, Kwame Nkrumah, and the party's general
secretary, Abdul Rahman Mohammed (known as Babu-grandfather), used his links
with communist states and with Labour Party members in Great Britain to gain
the advice and support of the left. On such advice, particularly from Labour
Party professionals, he developed a varied group of voluntary organizations
that provided him and the party with a power base in addition to his personal
base as a union leader.

     Beginning in the mid-1950s unions had become increasingly important:
several of the larger ones under Afro-Shirazi influence formed the Zanzibar
and Pemba Federation of Labour and affiliated with the Western-oriented
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Babu organized
agricultural and some Shirazi waterfront workers into the Federation of
Progressive Trade Unions and affiliated it with the communist-oriented World
Federation of Trade Unions.

     This network of organizations, including numbers of Shirazi and a few
mainlanders, enabled the newspapers subsidized by the ZNP to insist on its
multiethnic nature, a position that the ZNP took from the 1957 elections to
the early 1960s. Nevertheless the leadership was largely Arab.

     Meanwhile the alliance of the African and Shirazi associations had
converted itself into a party-the Afro-Shirazi Union (ASU). It was not able to
take real advantage of its relative success in the elections, however, because
it had little organizational experience, and it lacked the resources of the
ZNP, which, despite the radical stance and connections of some of its leaders,
was able to draw on Arab wealth.

     The ASU's greatest problem lay in the ideological differences between the
mainlanders and many of the Shirazi. The mainlanders, strongly anti-Arab,
continued to fear early independence lest it mean Arab rule. The Shirazi,
linked to the Arabs by religion and in some cases by intermarriage, were not
prepared to take the anti-Arab position of the mainlanders. The Pemba Shirazi
in particular were on good terms with the Pemba Arabs, disliked the
mainlanders, and despised the working-class background of Karume.

     In 1959 two leaders of the Pemba Shirazi and their followers withdre