In the wake of the sixty-year anniversary of the revolution (2024), it is an opportune time to reassess the political significance of members of the Umma Party, a Marxist political party in Zanzibar, to the 1964 Revolution. In this article, I explore new biographies from former Umma Party members to shed light on their development of an African Marxism and analyze how this commitment to Marxism influenced their participation in the revolution (Shivji, 2003). Umma Party experiences show there was a radical non-chauvinist Marxist element within the generally ethno-nationalist thrust of the Zanzibar Revolution. But Umma’s member’s participation is also a cautionary tale of the dangers of believing one is a vanguard when in fact one is simply ‘tailing’—following a dominant reactionary tendency.
Afro-Arab defined
The term Afro-Arab has been used in the historiography to describe a variety of encounters and relations between Arabs and peoples of Africa, and it predates though is closely related to Mazrui’s coining of “Afrabia.” The term is awkward, since by counterposing the term Arab to the term African, one perhaps contributes to the very issue one wants to undermine - thinking of Arabs as necessarily non-African or overdrawing the distinction between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.
The term has a powerful connotation in decolonization-era debates over identity, belonging, and power and their engagement with the previous century’s contentious history of boundary drawing and state-building. Afro-Arab rapprochement indicated something broader than narrow nationalism: the possibilities of transcontinental solidarity in which African and Middle Eastern nations together threw off the yoke of economic and political dependency on the metropole, and created a new ‘world’ trading and relating primarily to each other rather than the west (Lee, 2010; Getachew, 2019). Transregional cultural connections were reframed as the basis for political and economic solidarity; this cosmopolitan dimension of anticolonial nationalism was an experimental way for diaspora groups in Africa and Asia to assert their belonging in-and-through the nation.[1]
In the 1970s and 1980s, Afro-Arab was used to name the “Terramedia,” a region midway between Europe and Asia, and was used to discuss OAU cooperation and the issue of Israeli-African relations (Beshir, 1976; Azevedo, 1988). In the 2000s, Afro-Arab was used to discuss conflict in Sudan in borderland regions of encounters between Arabs and other Africans (such as in Nuba Mountains, Abyei, and the Southern Blue Nile; Deng, 2009). In literature studies, Afro-Arab describes a space of uneven cultural and familial encounter, often characterized by silencing and violent erasure (Mayyas, 2023).
There is, additionally, a growing historiography on the pre-nineteenth century aspects of the Arab encounters with Africa and Africans (Schine, 2023; Kadhem, 2023). In the Indian Ocean world, the Swahili Coast has long been a borderland of sometimes contentious Afro-Arab encounter, particularly in Zanzibar, the center of a nineteenth century Islamic emirate ruled by an Afro-Arab dynasty. Scholarly approaches which keep Africanity open, while at the same time not shying away from nor apologizing for issues related to an enduring sense of ‘otherness’ and marginalization of Black North Africans or Black Yemenis, are able to address the complexities of the Afro-Arab relationship in Zanzibar without recourse to collective ressentiment and recrimination (Young & Weitzbreg, 2022).
A common dynamic during decolonization was looking to the past a source for cultural decolonization that should and would accompany decolonization of the political community. As a result of the promise of independent statehood, those sharing an anticolonial orientation were often divided by “competing national horizons,” rival orientations to a contentious history of nineteenth century state-building.[2] In African borderlands, from the Sahel to the Swahili Coast, tensions developed across this divide. These tensions were particularly acute in areas where, during the nineteenth century, groups of Arabs had preyed upon, warred with or dominated other African groups. In essence the tension was about the legacy of these older relations of dominance and subordination for the cultural direction of the state after independence. In Sudan, it led to a multi-decade civil war; in Zanzibar, it resulted in a revolution.
The Afro-Arab phenomenon in Zanzibar
I use the term Afro-Arab to describe a political orientation among Zanzibar’s locally born Arab community. What makes the individuals discussed below “Afro-Arab,” when they themselves did not always use such a term? At one level, they are Afro-Arab because of partially African ancestry. The Zanzibaris whose biographies I present below are part of a larger cultural phenomenon of maritime Arab intermarriage with other Muslims in the Swahili towns dotting the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa.[3] Enseng Ho refers to the offspring of Hadrami migrants with local spouses in Indonesia and East Africa as muwalladūn. The phenomenon extends beyond Hadramis to Omanis as well and is an apt term for their social identity in Zanzibar. In Ali Mazrui’s thought, he distinguished these as generational Afrabians, formed by one or more generations of mixed marriage practices. Similar to the prazeros phenomenon among Portuguese settlers further to the south in Mozambique, Omani and Yemeni intermarriage with the Swahili has been a major factor in East African history.
But, Afro-Arab as I use it here connotes something more specifically political than the marriage practices of Indian Ocean Arab lineages. Even if they spoke Swahili fluently and had African mothers of grandmothers, muwalladūn of Zanzibar would not necessarily have sympathized with anticolonial nationalism nor with the specific embrace of Pan-Africanism. But, a younger politicized generation of muwalladūn in Zanzibar identified explicitly with forms of Pan-African nationalism in the broader region and tried to apply and integrate this discourse into their anticolonial stance; it is this attitude that specifically defines an ‘Afro-Arab’ attitude there. In short, while muwalladūn is a generational identity related to intermarriage with East Africans and sociocultural processes of localization, I use Afro-Arab to describe a new and experimental ideological stance, the product of practical attempts to integrate two contentious and vaguely defined supra-nationalist ethnic ideologies – pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism - with nationalism, often drawing heavily on Marxism. The latter identity is drawn from experiences of the former; the Afro-Arab radicals grew up with family and personal experience of a community of urban Muslims of Arab, Comorian, Shirazi, and other East African backgrounds (Loiemeier, 2009).
Secondary empire and colonial rule in Zanzibar: the Afro-Arabs as colonizer/colonized
It is important to note that some groups that eventually fell under British protection had actively pursued relationships to British imperial power in the nineteenth century and were conceived (at least officially) in terms of co-equals before the protection relationship was established. Such was the case for the Omani emirate in Zanzibar. The Omani ruler Seyyid Said had consciously cultivated a relationship with British power even before he moved his capital to Zanzibar, and scholars have seen Zanzibar as a form of ‘secondary empire,’ where reliance on imported European military and political technology enabled the political success of non-European states. One might say that, as a result of the localization of their lineages through the matriline, the Omani clans in East Africa became “colonizers with a difference.” After Seyyid Said’s death, the ruling dynasty in Zanzibar had been formally separated from the dynasty in Oman by the British, though ties of kinship and family continued to deeply link the two ‘houses’ (Zbik, 2024). The monarchy in Zanzibar accommodated itself to British order through a legal arrangement meant to preserve a fiction of sovereignty for the monarchy while granting the British control over external defense and the state purse.
Under British protection, the islands’ economies from 1890-1950 were partially transformed. The clove plantation sector, originally reliant on now-prohibited enslaved labor, had to synthesize new labor arrangements to guarantee the planting and picking of cloves in the wake of abolition. Some former slaveowners gave stakes in land to their former slaves to continue to ensure the necessary labor. The sector was also propped up by migrant labor from the mainland, with some migrants also given a stake in the land by owners in order to remain in Zanzibar after the harvest. However, other plantations became heavily mortgaged and some landowners lost their lands to creditors. The contradictory position of the Arabs in the early twentieth century is revealed in Jacques Depelchin’s statement: “among the Arab planters quite a good number were pauperized by the prohibition of the slave trade and, later, the abolition of the legal status of slavery. Their former status must have influenced their arrogant attitude toward the ex-slaves and local Hadimu [a Shirazi group], but in terms of relations of production they were closer to the latter than to the richer Arab landlords” (Depelchin, 1991). This contradictory class position led many of the offspring of this group to pursue higher education abroad on scholarships provided by the colonial state.
Anticolonial nationalism and Marxism in Zanzibar
Anticolonial nationalism was a strategic adaptation largely initiated from among groups in their colonies that British officials hoped to train as an aspirant bourgeoise. The possibilities of an oppositional anticolonial politics among this group were enhanced by developments in the wake of World War II. The postwar weakening of British and French empires led colonial officials to introduce a “rationalized” approach to development in the colonies meant to ideologically justify colonial rule. Extending the logics of development and progress to mass politics, a cadre of politically aware elites in African countries, many of them educated in colonial metropoles, began to develop a local base among the masses.
This was a time of possibility and tumult among a generation of colonized peoples about world politics. Possibility because it seemed possible to use politics to shift underlying relations of economic inequality and dependency between world regions in a short amount of time. Tumult because it was also a time of debate over the boundaries of the imagined community forming the new nations and of the class and ethnic tensions of the nationalist coalition. Both of these dynamics began to be strongly felt in Zanzibar from the late 1940s. New ideas of national independence acquired from both travel and colonial education, informed a new interest by Zanzibaris interest in Marxism as well as pan-Arabism, and pan-Africanism. Both the Soviet Union and China gave material support to radical thinkers in Zanzibar, both to study abroad and to train cadres locally. In fact, for a time, the two countries were supporting rival political parties—the Soviets the ASP and the Chinese the ZNP, as well as their respective trade union organizations, the Zanzibar and Pemba Federation of Labor (ZPFL) and the Federation of Progressive Trade Unions (FTPU; Hunter, 1966, p. iii-v).
Nationalist intellectuals in Zanzibar responded in different ways to other projects of anti-imperialism in Africa and Asia. Ali Muhsin al-Barwani saw Zanzibar as well positioned to respond to Egypt’s positioning as Pan-African and Pan-Arab leader and sought closer ties with the country (Lofchie, 1965, p. 258). Young African intelligentsia like Abdullah Kassim Hanga had an opportunity to study in eastern bloc countries. Others studied in Cairo, London, China, the USSR, and Cuba. Hashil S. Hashil related that he and his fellow Zanzibari youth of the 1950s closely followed Radio Cairo broadcasts and newspapers, admiring Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh, and Gamel Abdel Nasser, at one point forming a group called the Moscow Boys (Hashil, 2018, p. 10). In Zanzibar, groups like the Young Muslim League, the Zanzibar Action Group, and the Youths Own Union, attempted to channel the desires of a new generation into an anticolonial nationalist direction.
Why did Marxism seem to appeal to some Zanzibari youth in this period more fundamentally than Islamic nationalism? After all, Zanzibar was among a handful of majority Muslim states in the broader region, with a ready-made literate tradition that was homegrown. Ali Sultan Issa provides one clue in his description of what he knew about Islam growing up in Zanzibar, “I was ignorant of Muslim belief because in school, we were never taught the meaning of Islam. Since Arabic was not our mother tongue, we never knew the meaning of the words we learned; we recited the Quran like parrots…when a person is exposed to a new philosophy without a solid basis in Islam, it is easy to doubt” (Burgess, 2009). Ali Sultan, in this interview with Gary Burgess, is speaking as a former Marxist who became a devout Muslim much later in life, essentially chalking up his embrace of Marxism to ignorant naivete. Islam seemed to Ali Sultan’s generation as a bit of local custom, rather than the blueprint for a robust political program.
But, beyond the sense of alienation from the philosophical bases of justification for Islamic belief, there were more explicitly political reasons for Marxism’s popularity on the islands. Marxism seemed to promise a more robust level of social equality than traditional Islamic practices, which were steeped in local forms of hierarchy and deference and hived off according to sect and ethnicity. Marxism was future oriented, containing an explicitly teleological view of politics that dovetailed with the political idealism of anticolonial nationalism. It was also more experimental than the Islam of Zanzibari elders; less concerned about the themes of public morality (especially of women) that had characterized the discourse of Islamic reformers on the coast over the first half of the twentieth century. As such, Marxism was invested in ideologically by the younger generation with the conviction that it could more effectively overcome national chauvinism (narrow nationalism) and aid development. To Marxist leaning Afro-Arabs, the ideology had already demonstrated its transformative power to develop the energies of the nation; they thought they had seen as much during their study in eastern bloc countries. Marxism provided a progressive vision of national socioeconomic transformation that could submerge the war of nationalisms in Zanzibar into an anticolonial class struggle (Sheriff, 2001).
Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu was the most influential Marxist intellectual on the islands during the Time of Politics. He was born 22 September, 1924 on the island of Pemba. He attended through Standard 13 at the Government Central School, then clerked at the Clove Growers Association from 1944-1951, and briefly spent time at Makerere before going to London in 1951 to study. Babu’s six years in London were extremely influential on hiss political commitments, as he encountered different strains of left thought from socialism to anarchism (Markle, 2017, p. 21).
Ali Sultan Issa remarked, “my friendship with Babu began at a very early age. Babu…was several years older than I and lived just across the alley from our house in Malindi” (Burgess, 2009, p. 36). Ali Sultan came from a more affluent section of the island’s Arab community but rebelled against the strictures of conservative Zanzibari society: “I did not belong to the school of thought that Arabs had achieved great things in Africa. What had they achieved? Nothing, except the accumulation of wealth for some and poverty for others” (Burgess, 2009, p. 36). Ali Sultan studied in the UK and traveled in India, Japan, South Africa, and Canada. He also attended trade union conferences in China and joined his uncle Ahmed Rashad in Cairo where he became a ZNP representative (Brennan, 2010). As Ali Sultan notes, his uncle was “a radical in those days, wanting to get rid of the sultan” (Burgess, 2009, p. 63).
A contemporary of Babu, who was also with him in London, was Khamis Ameir, born May 1,1930 in Pemba to an Omani father with a Nyasa grandmother, and an Omani mother from the Mazrui tribe. Khamis’s father took care of families in both Oman and Zanzibar. The family in Zanzibar was not wealthy, and this perspective seems to have influenced Khamis Ameir’s concern for working people throughout his life. He also traveled widely as a seaman before returning to Zanzibar. In 1952 in London, Khamis met a young man from Unguja who introduced him to East Africa House, where other Zanzibari students were staying. He eventually came to room at “Swiss Cottage” with three other Zanzibari students, including Ali Sultan Issa. Back home in Zanzibar after 1960, Khamis Ameir became active in the trade union movement (Loiemeier, 2009, p. 563). Notably, he never became a member of Zanzibar’s two dominant political parties of the late 1950s/early 1960s: neither ZNP nor the ASP, before joining Umma Party in 1963.
Ahmed Badawi Qullatein was another prominent member of this cohort. He was also born in 1930 and was already active in the trade union movement when Khamis Ameir joined. Badawi left the ZPFL in 1960, as a result of its support for the ASP (which at the time was still opposing immediate independence for Zanzibar) and formed the FPTU, an explicitly Marxist trade union. It has been alleged that Badawi was informed of the possibility of the Revolution by a Committee of 14 who organized the revolution, and that Badawi informed Babu (Haider, 2011).
Hashil S. Hashil was born at sea, in a car on a barge going to Mtambwe Pemba, on January 12, 1938. He grew up in a village in North Unguja, child of Seif bin Hashil al-Busaidi, an Omani- born migrant from Ibra, and a Pemban born woman of Zarai ethnicity named Mwanadawa binti Jadi Khamis. Hashil was the last born of twenty-four children. According to his memoir, his political consciousness developed in childhood, when he would defend others in the neighborhood from being bullied (Hashil, 2018, p. 9). After graduating from secondary school at Beit el-Ras, he went to India in order to get employment on a ship, but couldn’t find one and returned to Zanzibar, before being sent to Cuba for military training by arrangement of Ali Sultan Issa.
The Umma Party as an Afro-Arab phenomenon
The formation of the ideological core of the Umma Party can be said to have originally come from London, where Abdulrahman Babu, Ali Sultan Issa, and Khamis Ameir first lived and organized together. Ali Sultan Issa encountered Marxism, and according to Ahmed Rajab, helped move Babu’s view from anarchism to Marxism. A fourth, Badawi Qullatein, was also a mainstay among Zanzibari students in London. According to Issa, “Only Badawi [Qullatein], Khamis, and I were able to debate with Babu ideologically because we had been more exposed than had the others…we were the four leaders of the Umma movement, a quartet, and Babu never did anything without our support” (Burgess, 2009, p. 81).
Many of the members of the Umma Party began as members of a much larger party called the Zanzibar Nationalist Party. In essence, this latter party was an alliance between the muwalladun-led Zanzibar National Union (ZNU), and a Shirazi protest group called the National Party for the Subjects of the Sultan. The latter protest group had their issue made (post hoc) into an explicitly nationalist one, in which the muwalladun elite of the ZNU forged an alliance with the local farmer members of the NPSS that allowed them to claim they represented the masses of ordinary islanders (Glassman, 2014). Politically, the new party, called “Hizb al-Watan al-Raia” or Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP), was dominated by an alliance of Arab and Shirazi constitutional monarchists, who envisioned a transition to parliamentary democracy in Zanzibar, with a role for the monarchy like that of the United Kingdom. However, the party was thrown into disarray by its overwhelming loss in Zanzibar’s first elections of July 1957. While the elections did not determine the transfer power to a new government, they heralded a shift in the locus of popular sovereignty towards the island’s African majority.
After his return to the islands from London, Abdulrahman Babu became Secretary General of the ZNP, leading it through a period of its most notable electoral success in a series of hotly contested elections in 1960 and 1961. Lofchie observed, “Babu…enjoyed considerable popularity in the African community…His personal opposition to Muhsin and to the influence of the Arab oligarchy within the ZNP were widely known to Africans, as was his deep commitment to revolutionary social change” (Lofchie, 1965, p. 278). He helped form the progressive youth wing of the ZNP which sought outreach to African youth around the idea of anticolonial nationalism (Wilson, 2013, p. 22). Babu and his cadres aided similar efforts through the trade unions, attempting to build a class unity that could counter the racialized political deadlock.
The ZNP revamped its strategy to make inroads among the islands’ African voters. The initiative for their electoral success in 1960 and 1961, compared to 1957, came from the organizing efforts among the African community. In close elections, the ZNP demonstrated its ability to consolidate a popular base among the African masses. Appeals to Pan-Africanism increasingly became part of the party’s outreach. In 1958, Babu participated in the founding of PAFMECA, the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa, an umbrella organization that sought to unify the anti-colonial nationalists of Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Nyasaland. Babu saw Pan-African unity as the instrument for bringing consort and unity between Zanzibar’s conflicting nationalist visions.
In 1962, Babu was arrested twice by the colonial government and charged with sedition, and some of his associates were charged with ‘bringing in seditious materials.’ The materials in question were an edition of Babu’s newspaper, ZANEWS (founded 1960). Babu was not protected from the colonial government by ZNP leadership; Hashil S. Hashil claims that the party was threatened that the independence handover would not happen unless Babu’s influence was curtailed; he claims the British played on Ali Muhsin’s already existing fears about the influence of Babu’s Marxist ideas (Hashil, 2018, p. 29-30). When Ali Sultan Issa protested to Shamte and other ZNP leaders, they suspended Ali Sultan from the Executive Committee of the ZNP (Hashil, 2018, p. 32). The Marxist- wing of the ZNP was becoming alienated from the more conservative Islamic nationalists of the party.
In April 1963, Babu was released from prison, a few months before the July 1963 election that would grant a government sovereign power in Zanzibar. Babu’s final break with the ZNP came over a practical expression of ZNP strategy in the July election; he argued the party should run candidates of different ethnicities in different constituencies than their traditional ones, in order to show the ZNP was truly a post-communal nationalist party (Burgess, 2010). After ignoring his advice and winning the July 1963 election, ZNP leadership felt sure they could govern Zanzibar without the party’s left wing. On December 10, 1963, this fragile and isolated government celebrated Zanzibar’s independence from colonial rule.
In the new political formation he formed after leaving the ZNP, Babu and his comrades gathered around themselves a cohort of Afro-Arab youth with socialist convictions. Many of these new recruits were the offspring of the landowning families who were descendants of the nineteenth century Omani ruling class. In the words of Ahmed Rajab, they “committed class suicide, actually, by siding with the masses from a very early stage of [their] lives. This came as a result of their attempting to get in touch with the political desires and sentiments of the working classes, including through active participation in the labor movement (Rajab, 2022). Umma should be understood, thus, as an experimental Marxist party formed to ally with and guide the working classes of Zanzibar in progressive socialist development of Zanzibar (Markle, 2013).
Born nearly a decade or two after him, Babu provided guidance and grounding for the youth of Umma, as a “local cosmopolitan,” someone who had traveled internationally, was patriotically devoted to Zanzibar, and had the courage of his anticolonial convictions. He was also a married man with children. According to Seth Markle, “He became known for living a modest lifestyle free of…corruption and class elitism” (Markle, 2017, p. 59). To Hashil S. Hashil, of all Zanzibari political figures, Babu was the teacher who “influenced me the most” (Hashil, 2018, p. 11).
The Afro-Arabs of Umma Party in the Zanzibar Revolution
The history of the Zanzibar Revolution is replete with controversies, at which Umma cadres were often at the center. Though Babu himself was on the mainland at the time of the Revolution, other Umma Party members participated directly. Opinions about Umma’s role in the revolution diverge widely, not only among commentators of among those who lived through the events. Umma presence in the streets chanting “Venceremos!” led to western paranoia of a Communist takeover of the island (Hunter, 2013, p. 100-101). While several of my Zanzibari interviewees in Oman called Umma the “brainbox” of the revolution, others understood them as having “betrayed” the Arabs in Zanzibar, leading to the massacres of 1964. Other interviewees scoffed at Umma Party claims to have made the revolution socialist and denied that Umma members had taken a meaningful part in the revolution. A few even claimed that Umma members only participated in the revolution to “save their own skin,” meaning to avoid falling victim to an anti-Arab pogrom.
A theme many interviewees as well as scholars have emphasized is that Umma Party members helped curtail the criminal aspects that came with the breakdown of order caused by the overthrow of the government. Benn Haider notes that, Badawi Qullatein “instructed Umma militants to guard their neighbourhoods and families from roaming criminal bands of lumpens who saw the revolution as a racial anti-Arab orgy” (Haider, 2011). Khamis Ameir noted that the role of Umma Party was to prevent “mambo machafu” (dirty things: stealing, raping, or killing innocent people) being done by some revolutionaries (Ameir, 2022, p. 73).
Amrit Wilson claimed that Umma helped secure the revolution, and agrees with Mahmood Mamdani’s argument that Umma prevented a situation like post-1959 Rwanda from developing, crystallizing revolutionaries and anti-revolutionaries on ethnic lines (qtd. in Wilson, 2013, p. 48). Though many actual participants in the paramilitary action that unseated the government denied that Umma Party members had any foreknowledge of their plans, this was not completely true, according to Khamis Ameir, who said that Badawi Qullatein knew more than other Umma members as a result of his trade union ties. Umma cadres also organized military groups to take over the Cable and Wireless station, the prison at Kiinua Miguu, and the Malindi police station; Hashil Seif Hashil led a group of Cuba-trained Umma paramilitaries in taking over the former, and also assisted in the storming of the Malindi police station and the prison (Wilson, 2013, p. 48; Ameir, 2022, p. 95-6).
Regrettably, Babu never divulged fully what had happened during the revolution. According to Horace Campbell, “In fact, Babu had developed a draft outline of his memoirs and these were to have been published as part of a project on the Biography of African Leaders” (Campbell, 1996, p. 240-246). Though these memoirs are yet to see the light of day, Babu presented his theory of the revolution in an important essay to an important edited volume on Zanzibar’s colonial history with an explicitly Marxist, materialist focus. In Babu’s view, the revolution started as a unified “peoples uprising,” was guided into a revolution by Umma comrades, and was subverted by the Union and Karume’s dictatorship. In his essay, “The 1964 Revolution: Lumpen or Vanguard,” Babu presented the revolution as “the culmination of a people’s struggle against more than two centuries of aggression and oppression by foreigners, by slave traders, by Omani colonialism, and by seventy years of British colonialism.” Relevant to how he perceived the Afro-Arab phenomenon, he notes that most of the rank-and-file members of the Arab Association “had long ago ceased to be Arabs,” referring to the practice of local marriage of Arabs to ex-slaves (Babu, 1991). Babu viewed the ethnically motivated killings during revolution as minor and inconsequential for its legacy.
There is a tendency in Wilson and some of the other literature on Zanzibar to take western paranoia of Communism as a sign that powerful and influential Umma cadres were in control of the revolution, before interference by Karume, Nyerere, and western powers. For instance, Markle writes, “The prominence and activity of Umma youth during the ‘100 days’ of the People’s Republic of Zanzibar represented the temporary realization of Babu’s theories of a vanguard generation bringing about socialist development” (Burgess qtd. in Markle, 2017). From this perspective, only US and British pressure on Nyerere contained the power of Babu and propped up Karume against the younger left-leaning members of his government. An article from Pambazuka recycles most of these tropes into a teleological narrative of Marxist struggle:
The party’s creation was a correct analysis of the potentially revolutionary conditions. On January 12, 1964, the unemployed and oppressed youth of Zanzibar rose up in spontaneous rebellion. The Ummah Party leadership used its organizing experience and training in Cuba to teach the youth revolutionary tactics and gain leadership of the insurrection. The Ummah party and disaffected youth removed the Sultan from power. This was Africa’s first successful revolution to overthrow neocolonialism (Woods, 2014).
This conclusion is mistaken for four reasons. First, that western powers expressed concern out of a basic ideological outlook of anti-Communism is not in doubt. But the above views by scholars take western fears at face value, as expressive of a real plot to undo the Revolution. US anxiety over Communism in Zanzibar does not amount to a plot, whatever Umma’s intentions may have been. The agency of Karume and Nyerere, not international pressure, was paramount to the Union formed in April 1964 between Zanzibar and Tanganyika.
Second, Umma was a coalitional partner in the revolution, and not the dominant one. The revolution was not a spontaneous uprising by the masses, but a covert paramilitary action planned for months in secret by Okello and associates. Umma comrades went into the streets after the storming of the police station and army barracks by Okello’s forces but were never in meaningful control of the direction off the revolution, though they did succeed partially in tamping down on the criminal violence that occurred during the pogrom accompanying it. An interview with Okello, Babu, and Karume together held soon after January 12, 1964, reflects the uneasy and distrustful dynamic of their alliance; Babu’s fluency in English may give the mistaken impression he is in control of the situation, when in reality he was the least powerful member of the coalition.
These views condescend to Karume in that they tend to assume that, had western powers not gotten involved, the Umma Party members would have politically outmaneuvered their partners in the revolution. Karume was a savvy political operator with a popular base among the Zanzibar masses much larger than Babu or any other Zanzibar politician. Wilson presents the Union as giving Karume free reign over “the discipline imposed by the revolution” (Wilson, 2007, p.12). It is true that the Union strengthened the hand of Karume, but although Babu and other muwalladun politicos thought Karume was a naïve and weakened force who needed guidance from the left, the discipline imposed by the revolution was as much Karume’s contribution as it was Babu’s.
Third, the perspectives of Babu and those writers most influenced by his perspective do not deal forthrightly with the racial nationalist motivations of a number of revolutionaries, though Hashil and Ameir’s memoirs do address it.[4] Few take seriously that it was directly connected to the racialist ideology of its initiator, John Okello. In actuality, the revolution has as much claim to being a racial-nationalist event as it does a socialist uprising (Ibrahim, n.d.). Elements who made the revolution acted out of grievances against the ZNP and ZPPP, which they saw as symbolic of illegitimate Arab dynastic rule over an African majority. The racial and criminal aspects of the violence demonstrate just this. Most of the violence was conducted not against Arab landlords, but against Arab immigrants, mostly small landowners and petty traders who the attackers did not know personally.
Finally, although the Afro-Arab Umma members understood well and criticized that the revolution was “eating its own,” there is little evidence that Babu, for instance, ever connected that tendency to the basically extra-legal way in which the revolutionaries had gained power (Burgess, 2009, p. 129). Though his essay in African Socialism or a Socialist Africa? entitled, “Fighting Internal Oppression,” Babu launched a trenchant criticism of the “long, sad spectacle of the naked misuse of power by people in authority,” he never renounced the takeover of power through extralegal means in the revolution, nor seemed to recognize that it was this act itself which opened the door for the authoritarian turn of Zanzibar under the dictatorship of Karume(Babu, 1981, p. 165). This nuanced critique of Umma in the revolution came from the late Seif Sharif Hamad (1943-2021), a longtime Zanzibar government minister and member of parliament. Hamad dismissed claims that the revolutionaries, “liberated us from the sultan’s rule,” for “the sultan was just a symbol without any power at all. And even if there was widespread feeling among the ASP mainstream that the sultan was an Arab, an alien to the country, with no right to rule or serve as head of state in Zanzibar, the question could have been resolved peacefully through a national referendum...” (Burgess, 2009, p.190).
Regardless of the truth of this counterfactual, it points to a contrast between the experimental and often utopian expressions of Afro-Arab and Afro-Asian interstate fraternity justifying the revolution, and the racialized violence that killed several thousand innocents, many of them immigrants, and made thousands more into refugees, while destroying a unique culture and way of life on the islands. The realization that the dark side of the Revolution had in the long run overpowered its idealism, drove considerable anguish among a number of former Comrades and some eventually rejected Marxism as a result.
The Umma Party: lessons for Afro-Arab solidarity
What can the Afro-Arabs of Umma teach us in the present day? Umma Party members were products of their time, a heady period of global experimentation with new ideological forms by politically conscious youth in Africa and Asia. The excesses of revolutionary rhetoric were also characteristic of the period in which they lived, when revolution seemed no longer utopian but inevitable. In many ways, the Afro-Arab Marxists of Umma are a cautionary tale: confusing a genuine vanguard movement with one that is tailing off the initiative of others, they were swept into a governing coalition they did not control, banned as a party, and eventually purged from the Revolutionary Council and the Zanzibar government.
However, there is a distinct and valuable ethos salvageable from the ruins of Marxist experimentation on the islands. While the Afro-Arabs are a product of mobility and travel, they in fact represent a path of de-diasporization, representing an alternative to the postmodern embrace of mobility as ethos, as found in discourses of hybridity and creolization, as well as to the alternative universalism of Islamic purism that has recently gained ground in Zanzibar. The paths pursued by the Afro-Arab cadres of Umma symbolize a recoverable ethos enduring in the ruins of the experimental synthesis of anticolonial nationalism and Marxism: a cosmopolitan refusal of national chauvinism alongside a patriotic commitment to helping local people and solving local problems.
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