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INDEPENDENCE OF TANGANYIKA: THE 'MECCA' OF AFRICA'S LIBERATION EMERGES
Tanganyika was the first country in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa to gain its independence, on 9th December 1961 (African nationalists and most of progressive humanity have never recognized the independence of South Africa). Like Ghana before it, Tanganyika felt that its own independence was meaningless until the whole of Africa was free. It therefore helped, with all the resources available, other peoples in the region to gain their independence: it opened its borders to patriots from other areas running away from persecution; it allowed its territory to be used for the training of freedom fighters who would launch armed struggles to end colonial rule in their countries; it made possible the establishment of offices by the nationalist organizations so that they could reach the international community for support; and it gave its diplomatic and political support to all those fighting racism and colonialism everywhere. It was no doubt this commitment to Africa's liberation together with its geographical position at the time vis-a-vis the colonial territories of the region that won Tanganyika the honour, in 1963, of becoming the headquarters of the OAU Liberation Committee, a body that was to coordinate Africa's and international support for the nationalist movements fighting colonialism, racism, apartheid and white settler supremacy in Africa.

Zanzibar presented TANU and its government with a dilemma. There was the Afro-Shirazi Party, claiming to represent the indigenous and migrant African population of Zanzibar, who were the majority, and at whose founding Mwalimu Julius Nyerere was present. [And it should be remembered that the ASP was a merger of the Shirazi Association and the African Association that was established in 1934 in Zanzibar as a branch of the Tanganyika African Association the very association that transformed in 1954 into TANU]. On the other hand, there was the ZNP, which in rhetoric, seemed to challenge the colonial regime, and was very radical in its demands and programmes. But it was preaching non-racialism: would this ensure an African majority government in Zanzibar? ZNP was also embracing the monarchy: would an Arab Sultan be able to survive African nationalism in the area? TANU, in any case, decided to give its full support to the ASP.

TANGANYIKA AS A POLITICAL ISSUE IN ZANZIBAR: THE MAINLANDERS ARE COMING
The decision of the TANU leadership to give its full support to the ASP became an issue in Zanzibar politics. This support was not only political but material as well. Some children of ASP members in Zanzibar (including the former Zanzibar President Dr. Salmin Amour) were sent to Tanganyika for education; ASP had an office in Dar es Salaam; and several ASP leaders who could not get travel documents to travel abroad used to sneak to Dar es Salaam where they were provided with travel documents. At times of Zanzibar elections, TANU leaders such as Bibi Titi Mohamed and Ali Mwinyi Tambwe went to Zanzibar to campaign openly for the ASP. This was the background against which the ZNP made the accusation that should ASP win the elections it would sell Zanzibar to Tanganyika. ASP, of course, retorted by saying that a ZNP victory would bring back the slave trade into the islands, given the fact that a number of prominent ZNP leaders were of Arab origin and the party had fully identified itself with the royal family and maintained strong ties with the Arab world.

ZANZIBAR'S INDEPENDENCE: ARAB DYNASTY LEGITIMISED?
Zanzibar's road to independence was a bumpy one. While in Tanganyika TANU enjoyed overwhelming support of the population, in Zanzibar the two major political parties had almost even support. In the 1957 elections, the first of its kind in Eastern and Central Africa, ASP stormed through, winning five out of six seats in the Legislative Council; but in the subsequent elections of January and June 1961 and July 1963, the party maintained the lead in the number of votes it captured, but was unable to translate that into a majority of seats in the Legislative Council. In Tanganyika the struggle for independence went on peacefully, in Zanzibar the June 1961 elections were disrupted by explosive riots that resulted in 68 deaths, 400 injured and 1000 arrests. A year later, a prominent Zanzibar politician, Abdulrahman Babu, who was at the time Secretary-General of the ZNP, was sent to jail after a libel case. Certainly the June riots were an indication of what was to come: the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution. Violence was being accepted as a way of solving political conflict.

When the dust had settled, physical wounds healed and tempers cooled, a constitutional conference was held in London between 19th March and 6th April 1962, attended by all the political parties in the Legislative Council, with the Colonial Secretary chairing. At the conference the ZNP/ZPPP alliance and the ASP showed very divergent views on future constitutional development. While they both reaffirmed their loyalty to the Sultan and the throne and their desire that the dynasty should continue, they had different ideas on the programme of taking Zanzibar into internal self-government and independence.

On 24th January 1963 Zanzibar became an internally self-governing territory, and new elections were held. It was clearly understood by all that these were to be the last elections before independence, and that the government that was to be formed would lead the country to independence. The elections were held from 8th to 15th July 1963 for a legislature of 31members. The ZNP/ZPPP alliance won 18 seats, and the ASP 13. As indicated above, the ASP won the majority of votes cast but not a majority of seats. While the ZNP had a fall in the percentage of votes cast from 35.0% in 1961 to 29.8% in 1963, the ASP increased its share of the votes from 49.9% in 1961 to 54.3% in 1963. The ZPPP made an increase from 13.7% in 1961 to 15.9% in 1963.

Once more the ASP and its supporters felt cheated in the whole election exercise. After all in the January 1961 elections as well the party had won 10 seats against ZNP's 9 and ZPPP's 3. ASP could not understand why the British resident did not call upon its leader to be the Chief Minister, given the fact that with the three ex-officio British civil servants, namely the Chief Secretary, Financial Secretary and the Attorney-General, in the Legislative Council, the party would have had a working majority. But the British argued that a party must have its own majority before counting on the support of the ex-officio members. Meanwhile the ZPPP itself split, with one member joining the ASP and the other two allying themselves with the ZNP. Thus new elections had to be called in June; and meanwhile, a coalition government of all the parties with the Chief Secretary acting as the Chief Minister operated in the interim period.

Independence was attained on December 10th, 1963, with the Sultan as the Head of State, with power also to nominate his successor. Thus, as Michael Lofchie stated,the Arab rule had not only survived the introduction of representative institutions, but had acquired a degree of legitimacy under constitutional democracy.

THE REVOLUTION: CLASS STRUGGLE OR RACIAL WAR?
What surprised many people outside the islands was how there could occur a ‘sudden’ revolution barely one month after Zanzibar attained its ‘flag independence’. James Cameron, writing on Zanzibar in 1960, said: “today this sleepy place holds little to help us in our search for the African Revolution.” But hardly four years after those words were written, Zanzibar experienced a revolution that not only overthrew the ZNP/ZPPP coalition government, but immediately abolished the monarchy. With the establishment of a republic and a new coalition of classes in power, a radical change of circumstances occurred. Indeed, it has been remarked that ‘with the possible exception of [Sekou Toure’s] Guinea, no country in tropical Africa changed so radically in so short a time”.

The first action of the revolutionary government was to abrogate the Independence Constitution of 1963 and proclaim a ‘Constitutional Decree No.5’ that provided for “Constitutional Government and the Rule of Law”. Although the revolutionary government allowed itself a period of one year to call a Constituent Assembly to adopt a constitution, such a body was never called, and Zanzibar only came to have a written constitution 15 years later, in 1979. In fact the first President of Zanzibar, the late Abeid Karume, no doubt remembering how ASP had suffered in elections in the past, had warned that there would be no elections for sixty years!

The Revolution has been consistently described as a racial one and as a culmination of the struggle between the minority Arabs and the African majority. But that is only half the truth, and a distorted one as well. If we accept Lenin’s definition that every political struggle is a class struggle, we can see that behind the ‘racial revolution’ there was a class war. The point about pre-revolution Zanzibar is that racial differentiations went parallel with class divisions. The 1964 upheaval can be characterized as a revolt of the landless peasantry and the labouring masses against the landed aristocracy and political oligarchy. As Duggan has remarked, the revolt appeared to be a classic one, having been staged “in an area where political, economic, and social conditions favoured its institution and guaranteed its success”. As Michael Lofchie observed in his book Zanzibar: Background to Revolution, the Revolution set as its objective: To transform Zanzibar into a wholly egalitarian society… [and] undertook measures to bring about a fairer distribution of the arable land. [It] also sought to eliminate from Zanzibar all symbolic vestiges of racial clubs and organizations and sought to infuse the society with radical socialist methods stressing class and national solidarity rather than race.