The Zanzibar uprising was a revolution, primarily arising out of popular discontent and the challenge of armed civilians, rather than from any professional army. The Zanzibar experience cannot therefore be described as a military coup.

In retrospect the Revolution on the 'Isle of Cloves' seems an almost inevitable result of racial pluralism on Zanzibar and Pemba and the tendency for racial divisions to coincide with economic and political inequalities. An Arab minority of about 50 000 dominated an African majority of about 250 000. The Arabs owned the vast bulk of arable land whereas the Africans were peasants and labourers. The indigenous and diverse 'Shirazi' African communities (called 'Shirazi' because they were part descended from the early Zanzibar Arabs who came from Shiraz) were largely peasants and fishermen, whereas the 'mainland Africans' were farm-squatters, urban labourers or house-servants.

A key element in the socio-economic pattern was the economic dominance of the 20 000 Asians of Indo-Pakistani origin who controlled commerce, finance and the intermediate grades of the civil service. The Arabs were politically dominant too, controlling the legislature, the administration and the police; a process the British had encouraged, interpreting the protectorate as an obligation to protect the interests of the Arab community. Africans were discriminated against in employment - in appointments to the civil service and the police and to Asian business firms, except in menial tasks. Unequal job opportunity was related to educational imbalance, whereby the distribution of education was related to ability or inability to pay fees.

In Zanzibar city, Stone Town reflects the Arab past of the island of Zanzibar. Stone Town is the oldest section of the city, built in the 18th century for the island's growing population of Omani Arab traders.

When the mainland states of East Africa began to make constitutional progress, the Sultan and his British advisers made plans to transform the sultanate into a constitutional monarchy under Arab elective leadership, not into an African state. Nevertheless, the educated Arab elite as a whole was more far sighted and saw a vision of an Arab-African partnership. From 1954 to 1956 the Arab Association campaigned for a common roll; its members did not fear swamping by Africans because they believed they could lead and control them - after all, the Africans were divided into diverse communities.

In the 1957 Problems of disunity: conflicts and uprisings election for a limited number of seats the newly formed Arab-led Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP) of civil servants and landowners campaigned for African support. The African and Shirazi Associations decided to contest as rival organizations. The Hadimu Shirazi of Zanzibar Island, who had lost their best land to the Arabs, shared the anti-Arab sentiments of the mainland Africans; the Shirazi of Pemba, however, felt closer to the Arabs than to the mainland Africans. The results reflected the communal divisions on the two islands, with several parties gaining seats but the ZNP winning more because of split votes among the African and Shirazi parties.

The Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), led by Abeid Karume reacted to the 1957 election results by organizing a boycott of Arab shops. In retaliation Arab land owners evicted African squatters and refused to employ African workers unless they joined the ZNP, In the January 1961 election the Pemba Shirazis under Muhammad Shamte, shocked by the ASP's anti-Arab stance, split from it. Out of 23 seats the ASP won (en, the ZNP nine and Shamte's People's Party three. The PP then split, to give the ASP and the ZNP eleven seats each, so another election was held in June.

This time the ASP and the ZNP won ten each and the PP won three. A ZNP-PP coalition was formed, with Shamte as Prime Minister. The coalition was a bitter disappointment for the ASP and in a week of African rioting in Zanzibar city and on the plantations about a hundred Arabs were killed- The pre-independence election of July 1963 produced another victory for the ZNP-PP coalition which won 18 seats out of 31. The ASP had gained 54 per cent of the votes cast, but these votes were densely concentrated in certain constituencies, which counted for little in a first-past-the-post election system. Therefore, between 1957 and 1963 four elections were held on a non-racial franchise, but an Arab-led party was able to win them by attracting sufficient African support. At independence in December 1963 the Arabs continued to control the political life of Zanzibar. To many Africans it seemed that if they could not overthrow Arab rule in a constitutional manner, they would have to do so by violent means.

The emergence of Umma, a new radical party led by the socialist Abdul Rahman Muhammad (Babu), which broke away from the ruling ZNP on the eve of independence, severely weakened it. Could the ASP bide its time and unite with Umma to defeat the ZNP in a future election? Many ASP leaders and supporters dismissed this possibility because the ZNP-PP government seemed determined not to let the constitutional process work. Laws were made to prevent opposition leaders going abroad. No attempt was made at social reform; rather the opposite, as British funds for agricultural development were paid out to the large (Arab) landowners for crop diversification schemes rather than to the peasantry. There was no plan for land reform. The insecurity felt by the government was shown when African policemen were discharged for suspected disloyalty.

ABEID KARUME became vice President after the revolution.
Several discharged policemen fought in John Okello's revolutionary army which seized power in a revolution on the night of 11-12 January. Okello was a Langi from Lango in northern Uganda, who had come to Zanzibar in 1952 at the age of 21. He had worked as a painter, stone-cutter and casual labourer before becoming a minor branch official of the ASP on Pemba Island. In 1963 he moved to Zanzibar Island. Okello succeeded in carrying out his revolution because of a number of factors. One was the secrecy of his planning, among a few militants (not the ASP leaders) in the villages.

The government was aware of the ASP leadership's vague plans for revolt at a later date; it was taken by surprise by Okello's revolt of the rank-and-file. The ASP leaders were as surprised as the government when the revolution took place. Another factor was that on the evening of 11 January a special Ramadan festival was being held in Zanzibar city; the revolutionaries used it as a cover to enter the town individually and then assemble at a prearranged place in the African quarter. A third factor was the seizure of Ziwani armoury, after which the revolutionaries were able to capture the police station at Mtoni.

After Okello's 'army' seized Zanzibar city ASP supporters went on the rampage, looting and destroying Arab and Asian shops and businesses, killing thousands of Arabs and forcing thousands more to flee from the islands. Okello set up a Revolutionary Council made up of himself and ASP and Umma leaders. Sultan Jamshid and his ministers escaped in the royal yacht and flew from Dar-es-Salaam to exile in Britain.

Control over weapons was the most critical factor in Okello's revolution. By Okello's account, his army did not come into possession of a single modern weapon until the attack on the government was initiated, and the group skillfully approached the principal armoury at Ziwani. Okello claims that until he personally seized a rifle from the sentry guarding the armoury, his followers were being equipped with only bows and arrows, spears, and pangas. The arms thus obtained made all the difference to the success of the confrontation with the age-old sultanate.

The strategy for the tilting of the balance depended on surprise. When the little group had overcome the guards at the armoury, in a swift surprise move they proceeded to distribute arms and ammunition among the revolutionaries. Thus, when dawn broke on Sunday morning, 12 January 1964, and reporters on the scene caught their first glimpse of the revolutionaries, they saw a fairly well-equipped soldiery.

John Okello was a trans- national figure in the sense that he was a Ugandan who had led a revolution in Zanzibar, He was someone drawn from another society but cast in the role of initiator of fundamental change in a country of later adoption. Why was a Ugandan successful in launching a revolution outside his own country? In terms of roots on the island, Okello was more of a foreigner in Zanzibar than the Sultan he overthrew. The Sultan was born a Zanzibar!; so was his father, his grandfather and his grandfather's father. But in terms of ethnic identity it was the Sultan who was the marginal man, part- Arab, part-African, more fully Zanzibari than the man who overthrew him but less purely African than his enemies.

For a delirious few weeks John Okello might indeed have derived his mystique from his distance. The local Africans in Zanzibar had inter-penetrated with the 'Arabs, culturally, religiously and biologically. Islam was the religion of the great majority of Africans, as well as of the Arabs. Kiswahili was the language of both groups, and Swahili as a culture, born of both Arab and African traditions, was dominant in the population as a whole.

There is no doubt that the local Africans shared a large number of attributes with the Arabs that they were now challenging. But precisely because the challenge was against the Arabs, it made sense that its chief articulator in the initial Stages should be distant enough to symbolize the purity of the African challenge. The bonds in this case were not the bonds of culture, or of religion, or even of intermarriage. In many ways the majority of Zanzibar! Africans had more in common with the majority of Zanzibar! Arabs than they had with this Langi revolutionary from Uganda.

But what was at stake in that revolution was racial sovereignty rather than national sovereignty. By the tenets of national sovereignty, Sheikh Ali Muhsin, the leader of the Zanzibar Nationalist Party which was overthrown, as well as the Sultan himself, were more Zanzibar! than John Okello. But by the criterion of racial sovereignty it was the fact that John Okello was an African in a purer sense than either Muhsin or the Sultan which really mattered. A Langi on the Isle of Cloves was a symbol of pure Africanity.

On 12th January 1964, the discontented Zanzibar civilians organised an uprising headed by John Okello, a Ugandan of Langi origin who had settled in Zanzibar in 1952 as a painter and stone worker and active member of the Afro Shiraz Party (ASP).

The immediate and most significant action in this revolution took place on the night of 11th-12th January 1964. Okello organized people to pick all sorts of tools and got rid of the Arab dominated government. The ex-service policemen joined the local people. They seized Ziwani and Mutoni police stations from where they got firearms to control the island completely.

On January 12, 1964 the people of Zanzibar woke up to hear a certain Field Marshall John Okello raving over the radio: "I have an army equal to a swarm of locusts. The power behind me is 999,999,000. Those who oppose me will be cut into pieces, thrown into the ocean, be burnt, or tied on trees for novice marksman to practice on. I want Mr. Harusi to kill himself and his sons, or we will do it for him." Okello announced that Zanzibar had been declared a republic and that Sheikh Abeid Karume would be the president.

After taking control over the city, the supporters of ASP looted and destroyed Arab and Asian shops and businesses. Arabs were forced out of government. Sheikh Abeid Karume, leader of ASP became the president. He was later assassinated in 1972. Field Marshall John Okello as he was known among the supporters was later arrested and deported. He just came back to Kampala to sell his story of the revolution to those who wanted to listen.