How It Happened

From KEITH KYLE ZANZIBAR

Tum were. I repeat, two revolutionary plots: Kassim Hanga's involving Afro- Shirazi.politicians, accepting outside help, known to Tanganyikan leaders, planned for January 19; and John Okello's confined to Africans of Zanzibar island, excluding known political figures, unknown to Tanganyika, and launched on January 12. Next to his insistence on its African- ness Okello's main concern about the operation was that it should not be messed up. by poli- ticians' personal feuds and Naves of conscience and respectability. He was on a direct line to the African god; he did not want a switchboard butting in.

Nevertheless, by Saturday evening, January I 1, American Intelligence was a*are that 'the balloon is going up tonight.' It was understood that 'everyone,' including presumably the gov- ernment, already knew. Various individuals were Warned by the Americans; most of them had heard this many times before and went back to sleep. The government had no army—only a small police force from which twenty of twenty- six European officers had recently been removed. In addition, many of the more experienced men had been discharged since Independence because they had been recruited on the African main- land. They made a disaffected group accustomed to handle weapons and well-versed in geography and the routine of police lines. Many of them got in touch with Okello's Committee of Fourteen.

There were two police armouries—one in the town in the spacious Ziwani barracks which resembled a public park more than a police camp, the other just outside at the headquarters of the crack mobile force introduced after the riots of 1961 to prevent a repetition of the situa-• lion in which the police had been overwhelmed and had been suspected of partiality. When the government received warning, the mobile force sent . an armed patrol round the town, saw nothing and went back to bed.

At midnight Othman Shari'', a leading Afro- Shirazi politician and now Minister of Educa- tion, Tourism and Youth, who was completely in the dark about the plot, was woken up by a man who stuck a gun into his stomach and another who aimed an arrow at his head. He was told that the revolution would begin in three hours, that he must not use the telephone or go out of the door on pain of death and that he must tell the revolutionaries where they could find men to operate the radio station. He told them, though in fact the African engineers who were then rounded up were so nervous that the radio transmitter, which is at the community centre of Raha Leo in a completely African section of the town, never really got going until the services of a British engineer were com- mandeered. Other opposition leaders were also, like Othman. placed under 'revolutionary pro- tection,' a procedure which did not altogether fortify their confidence.

At 3 a.m. revolutionaries struck in two simultaneous commando-type raids at the• two armouries. Within half an hour they were in command of both and, although no one quite realised it except perhaps Okello, the fight was already over. What followed was a strange drawn-out postscript at odds in its shapeless anomalies with the decisiveness of the initial act. Police Commissioner Sullivan occupied Malindi police station which was still in govern-

ment hands and called out 'specials.' He had with him one other European officer, six European specials and something like eighty men. But he had precisely five rifles and very little am- munition indeed. The police raided a neighbour- ing sports goods shop and collected twenty .22s and a few shot guns; later by letting a lorry- load of rebels come very close and bouncing them the police captured another fifteen rifles. But ammunition remained pitifully short. One of the specials—a Spanish Civil War veteran— who was reading a paperback novel during the 'battle,' rationed himself to firing one round per chapter.

The two essential points to bear in mind about the events of the twelfth were that the telephone lines were at no point cut and that the revo- lutionaries, having captured All reserves of ammunition in the small hours of Sunday morn- ing, did not bother to occupy Stone Town, a section of Zanzibar which includes Ministries, palaces and most of the European houses, during the rest of the day. Thus the previous government went on functioning for several hours after, so to speak, its head had been cut off. The readiest explanation of this is that the revolutionaries, after seizing the guns, devoted themselves to full-time looting, but this was much more true of various elements which joined in after the initial success than of Okello's own men. The Field-Marshal himself may well have had a strategic purpose in mind. Not altogether trusting the police, the government had dis- tributed large numbers of rifles among Manga Arabs, a poor but fierce and combative immi- grant group from Oman who form a huckster and petty shopkeeper class in rural areas. Apparently the idea was that in the event of trouble from the African majority in the town, these armed partisans would rally round the Arab landlords and launch a counter-offensive. Apart from the drawback that most Arab land- owners prefer to live in their town houses and were therefore caught by the rising, this plan suffered from the absence of any clear directive from the Ministers as to what these armed bands were to do in an emergency. Their neutralisation either by bloody onslaught or a war of nerves over the radio was understandably Okello's first military priority once he had captured the armouries. Still, it was a considerable risk to have left the airport and the road between it and the capital open to his opponents for almost twelve hours after the revolution began. .

Once the government's leading British ad- visers realised what was happening they decided to try to get the Ministers afloat on the Sultan's yacht Salama so that they could negotiate with the rebels from the safety of the harbour. Once there, they would have some bargaining power: they could threaten to,sail away, either into exile leaving no formal act of abdication to legitimise the new regime, or to Pemba Island which dominates the clove industry and thus the economy of the country, which had supplied the government's main support in the last election and where the Prime Minister had his personal. political lief. On the night of the coup, the Salama was tied up in Zanzibar dock. Despite the warning that the Ministers had received, no one had alerted the crew and there was no ship's engineer available. A public works depart- Ment engineer finally got the engines going with the help of a visiting French ship. But the Ministers for some reason or other refused to embark and insisted on negotiating with the rebels from land. The Sultan himself did not finally leave his harbour-front palace for the Salama until 8.10 a.m., sonic five hours after the coup had been launched and had given Okello full military command of the capital.

At 8 a.m. Sullivan in Malindi police station had got through on the telephone to East Africa Command in Nairobi to find out what chances there were of British troops being sent in. He was told that 700 men were on the alert, that • two Beverleys were being prepared and that, always provided a political decision to intervene was made both in London and (now that Kenya is independent) by .lomo Kenyatta's Cabinet in Nairobi, the first -could leave at 9.30 and the second at 10.30. Since the telephones remained open, the Commissioner was also in touch with Mohammed Shamte and Ali Muhsin, the leaders of the government.' At about nine o'clock he told them that he could not hold out niuch longer because of the shortage of ammunition and that Malindi police station was completely indefensible. They asked hirn to help them make contact with the other side to negotiate for surrender.

But who was the other side? This was the problem that was bothering not merely the government but also the leading figures in

opposition. A few hours after the revolution had started Kassim Hanga 'slipped quietly out

of Zanzibar by canoe and made for the main- land. Why'? One can only guess. (His own answer now to this question is that he was 'on a mission.') The likelihood is that he was just as much in the dark as the other politicians: this was not his revolution. Three hours later Abeid

Karume, the Afro-Shirazi president, fled also into refuge in Dar-es-Salaam. The shrewd old man may well have known more about what was going on than people assumed, but he probably ' took this for a premature rising that would be crushed.

While the Afro-Shirazi leaders were in flight-- the lower -echelons of the party had joined eagerly in the rebelling and above all in the looting—the British were acting on theassump- tion that the Afro-Shirazis were the victorious side. In an early brush with the revolutionaries, Sullivan's men had captured two of them: under interrogation they had said that the rising was an Afro-Shirazi one but that the details had been planned by Babu who was sup- posed to be in Dar-es-Salaam trying to contact

his lawyer to challenge the banning of his Umma Party. He had, so they said, crossed over to Zanzibar by a small boat in time to give the Afro-Shirazi cadres their final instructions on the Saturday night before recrossing in order to be found innocently in the Tanganyikan capital when the coup should go off. This telligence report having been phoned out of Zanzibar, it became' for a while the accepted

British version and a basis for most of the accounts crediting the Communists with a coup.

There is only one thing wrong with this informa- tion. Babu did not leave Dar-es-Salaarit. He spent the whole of Saturday evening there drink- ing with a well-known American journalist. African prisoners had been telling British police officers what they thought they wanted to hear.

Assuming the Afro-Shirazis were the victors, the Police Commissioner went through his list of telephone numbers of leading members of the party and began ringing them up to find some- one to whom to surrender himself and the Ministers. No one replied. The opposition leaders were either not at. home or, like Othman, had been warned off using the phone. The Prime Minister was also trying to call up his parlia- mentary opponents, including one to whom he is related by marriage, but with a similar lack of effect. At about eleven in the morning the Commissioner rang up flying control at Zanzibar Airport, which was still in govern- ment hands, and asked about the Beverleys. The reply was that they were not coming. London's decision, presumably after consultations with East African governments, was not to interfere. The airport was not seized by the revolution- aries until 2.30 in the afternoon.

At four o'clock the police decided to evacuate Malindi. Nobody was looking except some old men who went on smoking imperturbably.

Sullivan and his men got out through the docks after some delays due to mistaken orders ihd were embarked on the Salama. The Sultan's party was transferred to his larger yacht which had been recalled from the mainland by radio for the purpose. The revolutionaries did not capture the police station till the next morning. All night it remained empty. In the legend of the revolution Malindi is the scene of the fiercest battle, of Sultan Jamshid's last stand. There is, however, one striking fact about the building after the fight. Its windows are un- broken.

By now Radio Zanzibar was at last on the air and over it Okello was appealing to Karume to return to Zanzibar immediately to take charge of the new government. The revolutionary com- mittee was agreed that Karume must be presi- dent but by this time the details of the Hanga plot and its relationship to Tanganyika had been disclosed by the Afro-Shirazis who had jumped on Okello's bandwagon. It was therefore decided that, in order to fuse all the revolution- ary forces and obtain early recognition of the new regime on the mainland, Kassim Hanga should be the Prime Minister—a title which Karume later succeeded in getting diluted to vice-president to conform with Tanganyikan ter- minology. Babu, as leader of the third potential revolution, that of the Umma Party, was to take Ali Muhsin's portfolios of foreign affairs and

defence. •

Meanwhile where were Karume, Hanga and Babu? They were in Mr. Feinsilber's glass- bottomed boat. Babu having, as he says, been woken up by the Cuban 'Embassy in Dar-es- Salaam, who had heard on their wireless that there had been a revolution in Zanzibar and had assumed, like most of the world, that Zanzibar's most celebrated revolutionary might be expected to know something about it, had spent most of the day button-holing journalists, diplomats and anybody else he could find to ask if it really was true that the Shamte-Muhsin government had resigned. Karume and Hanga separately reached the mainland, and at some stage of Sunday all three men and another new Cabinet Minister came together and decided

that since the new masters of Zanzibar were acclaiming them as the rulers it /would be un- becoming of them to remain absent from the scene for even as much as another day. Since the Tanganyika Government had not yet recognised the new regime and the revolution- aries had closed the airport, there seemed nothing for it but to go back by private boat. Because of the tides this was not as easy a matter as slipping over in the reverse direction. A Jewish

businessman had a lifeboat which he had con- verted for use by tourists and which was in Dhow harbour at Dar-es-Salaam awaiting repairs. By plugging the holes with concrete she was made temporarily seaworthy. Thus it was that Mr. Feinsilber piloted the new Zanzibar Cabinet into power. Through the glass bottom President Karume, for whom as a veteran boatman this was no new experience, and his three colleagues could watch the corals and the fishes.