6.1. Bruce Lee stamps, Tanzania
Nationalism, Discipline, and the (De)Construction of Afro-Asian Solidarities
AFRICAN NATIONALISTS IN the mid-20th century gave considerable attention to the vexed question of how to project a unique African personality and identity in a world in which the West’s neocolonial influence appeared virtually unassailable. While seeking to obtain the fruits of modernity, African intellectuals did not want to do so entirely in conformity with Western thought and practices. As they examined Africa’s cultural heritage to find the basis for reinstituting a sense of cultural independence, they disagreed over what “ancestral practices” ought to be preserved.1 While many shared a view of their continent’s precolonial past as “the ideal moment for Africa, when traditions existed in their purity, when human beings and gods obeyed all the rules of nature and of the cosmos, when Africans were moral and happy,” they also developed new futurist discourses.2 Activists in the 1950s and 1960s sought to elaborate notions of a future Africa that did not begin with the premise that it was necessary first and foremost to revitalize indigenous traditions or valorize the precolonial past. Leela Gandhi, for example, refers to the “rhetoric of futurity” in Frantz Fanon’s essays, which emphasize “the struggle for creative autonomy from Europe.” It was this emphasis on creativity in place of authenticity that differentiates Fanon and others from those who espouse “a nostalgic and uncritical return to the ‘pre-colonial’ past.”3 Recognizing these tensions in outlooks is crucial for complicating our understanding of the early postcolonial period in Africa and its possible outcomes.
Zanzibar was unique as it produced a variant of nationalism in which another nation—China—was widely regarded as the model for the islands’ future. By the 1960s, a considerable portion of Zanzibar’s emerging nationalist elite discovered China as a powerful idea, historical narrative, and set of nation-building precepts. More than anything else, China represented a series of compelling visual images for what sort of society nationalists in Zanzibar wanted to establish. If, as Sylvana Patriarca has observed, “all national identities are relational, [and] each one is relational in its own fashion,” it is important to understand the material, discursive, and imagined relationships between China and Zanzibar.4 These relationships began in the years following Bandung, in a series of encounters between Chinese officials and Zanzibari nationalists, when the view was consistently expressed that despite centuries of mutual historic isolation they should now regard one another as representatives of fraternal states and like-minded cultures. Although palpable cultural chasms existed, the Chinese were prepared to meet and engage Zanzibaris on the abstract level of memory and history, believing, as they did, that Africans were reenacting elements of their own recent past. The Chinese eventually succeeded in establishing themselves as Zanzibar’s chief patron power, and in the 1970s gained a similar preeminent-aid relationship with the Tanzanian mainland. China hoped to use Tanzania as a “bridgehead” through which to spread the Maoist gospel throughout Africa.
This essay concentrates less on examining these Sino-Tanzanian aid relationships, with greater emphasis placed instead on exploring an element of nationalist thought in Africa frequently neglected by scholars: the search for a usable future. Futurist discourses were in no way equally present in all African nationalist movements, since they sometimes embodied a series of short-term aims simply to inherit and “Africanize” control over national resources and the infrastructures of power to be left behind by the colonialists. Nevertheless, nationalists in Africa, as elsewhere in the developing world, embraced what Donald Donham refers to as the “meta-narrative of modernity.”5 They evolved elaborate ideas about Africa’s future place in a world order in the 1960s that shunned stasis and sacralized “development.” The power of the development ethos was such that it encouraged many African nationalists to adopt a critical view toward Africa’s heritage and to regard the substance of “ancestral practices” as cultural forms to be molded and shaped in order to serve newly dominant agendas of development.
In Zanzibar, the search for a usable future resulted in the appropriation of China not only as an example of a nonwhite nation with solid anticolonial credentials, or an impoverished people that in a very short period of time appeared to have achieved miracles of nation building. China also attracted interest as a society consisting of millions of individuals fully mobilized for nationalist goals. Nationalists were deeply impressed by the appearance of labor and consumption discipline among ordinary Chinese citizens. They endlessly associated such discipline with development, as did Chinese officials who went to great efforts to provide their African guests with staged spectacles in which the correspondence between the two was unmistakable. Indeed, this essay demonstrates that for some Zanzibari nationalists the search for a usable future was an attempt to access the keys and mysteries of development, which they believed existed in habits of labor and consumption they had observed in China. They revered discipline as a necessary virtue for any society wishing to most effectively unleash its development capacities, and they examined their cultural ways in terms of the perceived presence or absence of this trait.
Whereas Frederick Cooper has noted that discipline, in its various forms, was part of the modernist package colonial regimes wanted to disseminate in Africa, along with a market economy, citizenship, industrialism, and achievement status systems, scholars have not fully engaged the notion that perhaps discipline was integral to both the colonial civilizing mission and the development project that followed, or that each possibly contained some of the same linear teleologies.6 With independence in Africa, the disciplinary project was neither repudiated nor abandoned. Nationalists in Africa counted progress, like the colonials, in the proliferation of the sort of disciplinary institutions examined by Foucault: the school, the army camp, the factory, and the hospital. They valued these institutions not only for their benefits in terms of health, education, and industry, but for the discipline they produced, and with discipline, the perception of added national power.
Many nationalists were convinced that, according to laws of development they considered to be universal, the principle of discipline was immutable. And to produce discipline, the state in Africa, similar to elsewhere, needed to assert itself as a pedagogue (see Chakrabarty in this volume). The lesson that Zanzibari nationalists took from the 20th century was that the state in other parts of the world no longer needed to rely on parents, elders, or religious authorities to impose social discipline. Nor did the state have to depend solely on schools and other disciplinary institutions observed by Foucault. The socialist world, for example, had evolved an array of techniques, rituals, and institutions that applied to the discipline of young people in particular. China had helped to pioneer a series of mass spectacles, where, in massive stadiums, thousands of citizens participated in marches, dramatizations, and synchronized flag demonstrations. One purpose of these festivals was to perform idealized visions of the future in which all poverty, greed, individualism, and backwardness had been abolished. In their search for a usable future, Zanzibari nationalists in the 1970s adopted such spectacles, known as halaiki in Swahili, and imported Chinese instructors to help impart a series of fantastic images of a society fully committed to nation building. Whereas nationalists in Zanzibar, as well as mainland Tanzania, welcomed Chinese development aid and expertise, they also wanted new techniques with which the state could assert itself as a pedagogue. As celebrations of an imagined future, halaiki performances spoke a transcendent visual language of forms and symbols.
By looking to China as their disciplinary model Zanzibari nationalists were consciously or not accomplishing a bit of theoretical derring-do: they were, at the same time, provincializing Europe and embracing universalist idioms.7 Indeed, it can be argued that they and their Chinese patrons were constructing forms of Afro-Asian solidarity and South-East cooperation in the 1960s, that, at least on certain levels, embodied the Bandung spirit. Such construction, however, only came about through the deconstruction of much of Zanzibar’s mixed African-Arab-South Asian cultural heritage. Those men responsible for the revolution in 1964—and the violence it engendered against Arabs and South Asians—rejected the claim made by those they overthrew, that Zanzibar’s diverse Afro-Asian heritage was a positive historical force, despite the islands’ traumatic history of slavery. Thus as they embraced a socialist, cosmopolitan, and future-oriented concept of development, Zanzibar’s racial nationalists also initiated a reckoning with Zanzibar’s once-privileged minority communities, a reckoning that was fundamentally parochial and past-oriented. As they appropriated Chinese knowledge and disciplinary techniques they also turned Arabs and South Asians in Zanzibar into exiles or second-class citizens—a simultaneous embrace and repudiation of Afro-Asian solidarities. (See, in this volume James Brennan’s essay for a similar thematic conclusion on the limits of Afro-Asian unity.)
Cosmopolitanisms
A colonial guidebook from 1931 noted that Zanzibar is “one of the most cosmopolitan in the world and there are few races of which representatives may not be found in the two islands.”8 The islands were culturally as well as racially cosmopolitan. Ahmed Gurnah recalls that in Zanzibar Town, where he spent his childhood and youth, “several great cultures routinely mixed and exchanged goods and ways of living.”9 Cafés offered African, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese dishes, and cinemas packed in audiences to see everything from American Westerns to Egyptian dramas and Indian musicals. Congolese music competed with calypso, Latin bands, taarab, jazz, Bing Crosby, and rock ’n’ roll. Kiswahili, Arabic, English, Hindi, and Urdu were commonly spoken in the streets, and read in over a dozen newspapers produced in the town. Secondary-school students read Mao, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Che Guevara, as well as Islamic literature and theology. The town displayed a series of architectural styles, from British-designed Anglo-Indian hybrids, Arabic townhouses, Cubist-modernist apartments, to African bungalows.10 These buildings were only the forms and facades of a larger truth, however: Zanzibar Town, as well as its rural hinterlands, was home for a remarkable composition of individuals and communities from around the Indian Ocean rim.
The 1950s were years of relative prosperity, sandwiched between the rationing and shortages of World War II, and the depressed world prices for cloves (Zanzibar’s principal export) of the early 1960s. While the days as the leading port city of East Africa were definitely over (having been pushed aside by Mombasa and Dar es Salaam), Zanzibar Town residents enjoyed urban amenities unavailable to earlier generations. Town shops displayed a wide array of commodities enticing to tourists who increasingly passed through the streets, deposited on day trips by the cruise liners making their way between Cape Town, Aden, and Suez. For locals, such goods
were tokens of the big world, which was always cleaner and brighter than the dark, familiar one of every day. This big world did not have to be European. It could be a Japanese calendar, with pictures of delicately-lit paper houses and miniature bushes of blazing azaleas. Or it could be Lebanese grapes nestling in tissue-paper, in fruit boxes stamped with a silhouette of a cedar tree, or Iraqi dates in packets illustrated with a painting of an oasis. Nothing Indian, that was part of the odorous every day. European was best, though. The European world was remote and intimidating in a complicated way, and these tokens were like parts of its sprawling body, handled and consumed with some hunger.11
If there was anything distinct about Zanzibar Town in the 1950s, it was its cosmopolitanism, still a matter of considerable nostalgia for some who remember those times. While Western life provoked considerable interest, the social and linguistic connections between Zanzibar and Europe were not so “deep and all consuming” that the “glitz of dominant [colonial] ideologies and lifestyles” excluded everything else.12 Whereas British expatriates dominated the higher echelons of the civil service, they often withdrew to their own spaces and were many times known to lead lives several levels less than glamorous. Moreover the news from overseas, and from the islands themselves, was of colonial withdrawals and the end of Empire, which enhanced African self-confidence and “people’s willingness and desire to explore other cultures themselves, and not just accidentally bump into them.”13
Nationalist contests in Zanzibar in the 1950s and 1960s were a referendum on colonial power and cultural influence, but, on a much more visceral level, they were a debate over whether or not Zanzibaris would embrace, mediate, or reject their islands’ cosmopolitan heritage. Some nationalists venerated this heritage as the very essence of island culture and civilization, and what distinguished Zanzibar from the allegedly less-civilized African mainland. In this formulation, Zanzibar was the conduit through which all progress and new ideas arrived in East Africa. Seif Sharif Hamad remembered that as a young man in the early 1960s
I had a strong sense of Zanzibari nationalism, because we regarded ourselves in Zanzibar as more civilized than our brothers in the rest of East Africa. We thought we had a better culture, were more educated, and that we had better customs as a result of the intermingling of races and cultures here. We were unique, because as an island Zanzibar had a potpourri of influences and peoples from Africa, Asia, the Gulf, and Europe…. Zanzibaris were more exposed to the world. People came here from different parts of the world with their various experiences and traditions, and in their diversity formed a unique culture.14
The Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP) in fact located the islands within a multicultural, polyglot, and predominantly Islamic western Indian Ocean world. The party advocated a kind of Afro-Asian solidarity, but on its own terms. While the party consistently deplored the use of racial categories, and even blamed such divisions in local society on reputed British divide-and-rule strategies, ZNP propagandists undermined their own appeals for unity and solidarity by basing them on an exclusive notion of the essence of Zanzibari culture that denigrated peoples and influences from the African interior as less civilized.15 The ZNP regarded Islam as the basis for social unity in the islands; yet as the nationalist era progressed it became increasingly obvious that, at least in Zanzibar, Islam did not constitute a universal national culture capable of entirely trumping race or ethnicity. As Abdulrazak Gurnah writes in his novel Admiring Silence, politics “brought shocking things to the surface. We liked to think of ourselves as a moderate and mild people…. In reality we were nowhere we, but us in our separate yards, locked in our historical ghettoes, self-forgiving and seething with intolerances, with racisms, and with resentments.” Africans had not forgotten or forgiven; they “wanted to glory in grievance, in promises of vengeance, in their past oppression, in their present poverty, and in the nobility of their darker skins.”16
Nationalists of the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) cast Zanzibari political contests primarily as an African struggle for justice and freedom from Arab political, economic, and cultural hegemony. They rejected any notion of Afro-Asian solidarity; stigmatized Arabs as alien, former slave-owning oppressors; and defined the islands as extensions of the African mainland.17 They claimed Africans needed to unify on the basis of race, not religion. Jamal Ramadhan Nasibu wrote in his newspaper Agozi in May 1959, “We are tired of being led by other people every day. Now we will lead ourselves because we already know that other people want to sit on Africans’ heads forever. And rule them until doomsday.”18
Both the ZNP and ASP produced rhetoric in the 1950s and 1960s that tended to divide Zanzibaris into mutually exclusive ethnic camps, and yet younger Zanzibaris throughout this period continued to be rather catholic in their cultural appropriations. They adopted Western clothing styles “to purchase extra excitement and power and maybe also like all other teenagers, to get up their parents’ noses a little.”19 They listened to rock ‘n’ roll in part as a means of drawing distance from parents and teachers.20 Such “gestures of anti-membership” were not taken lightly in an atmosphere already charged with political tension.21 For some ZNP nationalists they were an affront to the Islamic, Afro-Asian cultural heritage of the islands, and evidence of an imperialist plot to subvert the young. In an editorial appearing in January 1963 in Mwongozi—an official organ of the ZNP—the editors claimed that the new Twist dance craze was spreading through Zanzibari society “with the force of an epidemic.” They argued British imperialists used the Twist to seduce and corrupt island society in the same way they used opium against the Chinese in the 19th century. “Imperialist success” in this matter could be seen when
a number of our young “politicians” who, for a limited number of minutes, are eloquent and vociferous in demanding the immediate departure of the Imperialists and neo-colonialists spend many hours in ‘twisting’ them back to influence and authority…. Every minute devoted to exercises like the Twist is a minute lost to the individual, to his family and to the nation. The youth of a country cannot waste their time twisting and expect the same time to equip themselves for the task of nation building.22
The irony noted by the editors of Mwongozi is familiar to students of nationalist movements in Africa, led as they often were by elites who frequently possessed ambiguous attitudes and relationships toward both the West and ancestral practices. At issue here was the fate of the ZNP vision of Zanzibar as the “Islamic metropolis” of East Africa.23 At issue was what kind of cosmopolitanism the islands would embrace. “The same people who read about Elvis later read about Mao and Lenin,” Gurnah would observe.24 For some Zanzibaris fondness for the Twist, Elvis, and Mao’s quotations coincided. What the editors of Mwongozi could not have predicted, however, was that very soon those in the islands most open to new music from the West and new ideas from Mao or Lenin would ally themselves with the racial nationalists of the ASP, and in so doing help to overthrow the ZNP and its notion of Zanzibar becoming, after independence, a vibrant Afro-Asian cultural synthesis under the guise of Islamic universalism.
Discovery
In 1955, almost no commercial ties or diplomatic relations existed between China and African territories. Few Zanzibaris were even aware of the Chinese Revolution. The Bandung Conference marked the beginning of a new era, when Chinese officialdom looked upon Africa as a key terrain in the anticapitalist crusade and a vast “storm center,” in which the triumph of their model of revolutionary struggle was historically inevitable.25 Chinese officials regarded the industrialized West as a capitalist “city” that could be surrounded by revolutions in “rural” Africa, Asia, and Latin America.26 African nationalists were therefore a historic vanguard, privileged agents of the destruction of capitalism. The Chinese believed if only one or two African territories “would effect a real nationalist revolution their influence would be great and a revolutionary wave would roll up the African continent.”27 Aside from ideology, they also regarded Africa as a relatively open ground, between US and Soviet spheres of influence, for the extension of Chinese power overseas. Chinese propagandists encouraged African nationalists to project China’s liberation from corruption, economic backwardness, and political powerlessness onto their own struggles against comparable foes. They did not hesitate to compare eruptions of Chinese history such as the Boxer Rebellion or the May Fourth movement to contemporary African events and conditions.28 They spoke of tides, waves, and storms. During his diplomatic tour of Africa in 1965, Premier Zhou Enlai exclaimed “the national liberation movement in Africa … has become a mighty torrent pounding with great momentum at the foundation of the rule of imperialism.” Quoting Mao, he added that, “the four seas are seething, clouds are lowering and waters raging, the five continents are rocked by storm and thunder.”29
In 1957, the Chinese embassy in Egypt helped establish one of Bandung’s organizational offspring, the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), which attracted representatives from twenty-seven African territories and colonial territories. Chu Tu-nan expressed there what was to become a consistent theme in China’s appeal to African nations: the “Chinese, Indians, Arabs and Negroes shared a heritage of ancient cultures that had been broken and ruined by the West’s imperialism.” The only answer, according to Chu, was tremendous effort by the world beyond the West to “build a new universal civilization, incorporating these lost traditions with the revolutionary elements of socialism.” This new civilization would leave the West far behind.30 In the years that followed, the Chinese launched an audio and visual assault on Africa. Radio Beijing broadcast to East Africa in English and Swahili, and the Chinese distributed glossy and well-illustrated monthly magazines showing scenes of “Chinese art, life, landscape, letters, and of course Chinese Communist society in gay and vivid colors.”31 In 1964, the Chinese Postal Ministry developed a new series of stamps that showed a Chinese man linking arms with an African.32 Through their embassies in Africa, the Chinese distributed millions of copies of Mao’s quotations. Through the AAPSO China funded liberation movements in Africa, offered scholarships to Africans to study at Chinese colleges and institutes, and arranged for visits of official African delegations to China, the number of which increased from 50 in 1959 to 105 in 1960.33
Abdulrahman Muhammed Babu (1927–96) was perhaps the first individual in East Africa to receive an official Chinese invitation. Babu was already by then a veteran politician and leading nationalist figure in Zanzibar. Arriving in London in 1951, he spent the next several years apprenticing with the British Labour Party, serving in various Pan-Africanist organizations and as joint editor of the radical anticolonial and socialist journal African, Asian, and Latin American Revolution.34 Babu’s organizational skills so matured in London that he was invited to return to Zanzibar in 1957 to assume the post of Secretary General of the ZNP. He sought not only to win elections in Zanzibar and achieve anticolonial objectives, but also to position the party within global confrontations between socialism and capitalism, and East and West. Thanks to his influence, the ZNP far surpassed the ASP in the breadth of its international connections and adopted anticolonial stands and organized demonstrations on a range of international issues, including the Algerian War and the Congo Crisis.
In a brief autobiographical sketch Babu described his first ecstatic encounter with China:
In the 1950s, it was almost obligatory for young radicals to read as much as possible about the Chinese revolution and its success in 1949…. I studied China as a development model in contrast to the western model. China, in short, was a symbol of a poor, humiliated country emerging, through their own effort and against all odds, into a contender for world leadership. It evoked all the emotions of joy and hope for the oppressed who were still struggling under very difficult circumstances….
Thus, it is impossible to imagine the thrill with which I accepted the official invitation, in late-1959, to visit China…. The meetings with the Chinese leadership and the late night discussions with them on all questions of anti-imperialist struggle were most inspiring and helped to mould my world outlook…. Among the leaders I met included, of course, Chairman Mao, Chou en Lai, Marshal Chen Yi, Chu Ten, Deng Tsiao-Ping, and others. These were people of very strong character, well known for their resilience, perseverance and self-discipline who had liberated a quarter of the human race from repression and warlordism.35
Babu returned to Zanzibar in April 1960 and extolled at mass meetings what he had seen in China.36 He likely influenced Ali Sultan Issa, a close friend since childhood, to later make the journey. Like Babu, Issa spent several years working and studying in London. In many respects, Issa typified the ambivalent image of a rebel Zanzibari youth that mastered the jitterbug, developed a taste for narrow trousers and Italian suits, read Lenin and Mao, and came to reject colonialism and capitalism. Like Babu, Issa embodied Zanzibari students’ desires in the 1950s to travel beyond the traditional orbit of the islands within the western Indian Ocean and to access the cultural and intellectual capital of more secular lands beyond. In 1954, Issa became an active member of the British Communist Party, attending neighborhood lectures and cell meetings. He recalled, “All the intellectuals were there in Swiss Cottage: professionals, Jews, gentiles, lawyers, and doctors. I met so many fine people—it was like the Swahili saying, udongo na waridi, or clay and rose. I was the clay and I wanted the scent of a rose.”37
Issa attended the Moscow Youth Festival in 1957, and the following year returned to Zanzibar where he quickly rose to prominence within the ZNP. Although in the 1960s he tapped a seemingly endless reserve of socialist patronage to make multiple trips to Eastern Europe, Cuba, and North Vietnam, he personally found China the most compelling. In 1960, he went on an official tour that retraced the steps of the Long March. From the viewpoint of the 21st century, he recalled:
The tour opened my outlook and broadened my horizons, to see the huge sacrifices of the Chinese, and how wherever they went they confiscated lands and gave them to the peasants….
They took me to many cities. Poverty was not so visible there as in India; everyone had food and something to wear…. In general although I was already a member of the British Communist Party for four years and had visited Russia in 1957, I had not been as impressed by the greatness of the Russians as I was with the Chinese. Life is in a constant state of change, and I was free to develop and put all ideologies to the test, to see which was most viable and most suitable to our own conditions in Zanzibar. In China, I was deeply impressed by their vast and formidable country, by the people’s sacrifice and their achievements, so that when I returned to Zanzibar I was in complete agreement with Babu about China, that this was the ideological line to follow.38
The Chinese were no doubt pleased by the effect of these visits, and increasingly singled the islands out for special attention. The number of Zanzibari delegations sent to China increased from two in 1960 to twelve in 1963, and their impact on shaping Zanzibari thought in the revolutionary era was profound.39 Two delegations that arrived in 1960 were organized through the ZNP, and consisted of a total of thirty-seven islanders, some of them prominent journalists and trade-union officials. Their hosts introduced them to Mao and Zhou Enlai, took special care to demonstrate how Islam was “flourishing” in China, and gave tours of China’s showpiece industrial projects and communal farms.40 One trade-union leader and delegate recalled that his one-month visit to China in 1960 had far greater impact than the ten months he spent the previous year in East Germany, studying political economy. In China, he visited politically oriented museums and attended stage dramas conveying Maoist themes. He learned about the Long March, and any political discussions with his Chinese hosts lasted several hours.41
The experiences of the delegates were akin to the general portrait drawn by Philip Snow, who wrote that Africans arrived in China
in ones and twos and small delegations, to a welcome fit for heroes. They were carried shoulder-high, showered with flowers and confetti and bombarded with the din of traditional rejoicing, gongs and cymbals and fire-crackers. They were led before microphones to voice their demands for freedom to applauding crowds a half a million strong. They were borne round in limousines like ministers and seated beside the Chinese leaders at rallies and parades…. Very humble Africans, unknown young men and women, were received with honour by the greatest personalities in the land.42
These visits served a crucial pedagogical purpose. As they visited museums, theaters, exhibitions, and showpiece development projects, African guests in China replicated something of the experience of Egyptians visiting Europe in the 19th century, who discovered “a place where one was continually pressed into service as a spectator by a world ordered so as to represent” some larger meaning.43 On official, carefully stage-managed tours, Africans in China, even more so than in 19th century Europe, encountered a world in which everything was “collected and arranged to stand for something, to represent progress and history, human industry and empire; everything set up, and the whole set-up always evoking somehow some larger truth.”44 The habit of seeing the world as a permanent exhibition, to be assessed objectively, was especially seductive for traveling nationalists. It is difficult, in fact, to overestimate the importance of visiting and seeing as a distinct nationalist epistemology. Babu wrote that Africans visiting China in the late 1950s and early 1960s “saw the future being created under their very eyes; all sections of Chinese society were in one way or another involved in this creation.”45 China was “the perfect model for all African countries to emulate,” because the Chinese taught that “we must learn to be frugal; to be collectively, a nation of savers and not of waste-makers and vulgar consumerism…. This requires exceptional discipline.”46 Snow reported that “African visitors were driven at the start of a day’s excursion past a swarm of peasants building up a hillock of earth, then driven back in the evening to observe, to their astonishment, that the earth had already been shifted to the road or dam it was meant for and the hillock was gone.”47 Through such spectacles of labor discipline, Africans obtained “a picture of a society committed to its goals, willing to sacrifice short-term individual comforts for the common good of all…. China seemed to these Africans a beacon of morality … free of the greed and poverty which disfigured their new countries.”48
The enthusiasm of these visitors stands in sharp contrast to that of Zanzibari students in China, whose treatment by the Chinese authorities cannot so easily be described as “red carpet.” Haroub Othman recalled that Marxist and Maoist literature were widely available to students in his secondary school in Zanzibar, and that students like himself were literally “running away” when they got the chance to study overseas.49 By 1961, about 118 students from 11 African territories attended the Languages Institute in Beijing.50 Among these were eighteen students from Zanzibar, including four women, who had obtained scholarships through Babu and Issa. They were given modest living stipends and shared rooms with other African students. Yet their encounter with the Chinese Revolution, regardless of any initial impressions, was considerably more conflicted than African guests on VIP tours. Time was not on the side of Chinese authorities; providing for Africans’ needs during extended periods of study, and managing their everyday mundane concerns with efficiency during a time of general rationing, lacked the inherent epistemological power of coordinating visits to a series of exhibitions and staged events.
Some African students, unsurprisingly, were deeply disappointed by the deprivations and relative squalor of Chinese cities in the early 1960s. Others found more irritating the constant monitoring of their movements and associations by government authorities. Contact with ordinary Chinese citizens was almost completely forbidden; what few acquaintances they had usually turned out to be government agents. The “spartan sexual regime” in China also proved deeply discouraging, in addition to language difficulties, low educational standards, and racial discrimination.51 African students learned from Maoist textbooks how to say, “the people’s communes like a newly risen sun, light up the path of progress for the Chinese people,” rather than more practical phrases, like “a glass of water.” Many feared their diplomas from Chinese institutions would prove worthless.52 Relations between the African students and Chinese authorities deteriorated in 1961, notably over an incident that revealed the students’ lack of consumer discipline, and their hosts’ rigid enforcement of revolutionary norms. A Zanzibari student walked into a Chinese hotel lounge and demanded to be allowed to purchase a carton of cigarettes. When he was only offered a pack he attempted to use force, whereupon the hotel staff beat him, forcing his hospitalization. The African students countered with sit-ins and hunger strikes, and by mid-1962 only 22 of the original 118 remained.53
In contrast, Zanzibaris overwhelmingly preferred studying in Eastern Europe, where hundreds attended institutes and colleges in the USSR and East Germany in particular.54 Their encounters with socialism in these countries were generally more positive than in China. Regardless of where they went, however, British intelligence agents in Zanzibar feared such youth would return to the islands as troublemakers and advocate Marxism as a solution.55 These impressions were not completely unfounded. Referring to the number of students he and Babu were able to send overseas on scholarships, Issa recalled, “the main idea was to expose them … even though some students did not last very long in China and other places, most of them returned to Zanzibar and that was how we managed to politicize the whole island.”56 In the years prior to the revolution, then, socialism in Zanzibar was a movement born through the perpetual coming and going from the islands of youth aspiring to possess specialized knowledge, among whom Babu assumed a preeminent and inspirational role. “I Saw the Future and It Works” is not only the title given to a recent collection of Babu’s essays and tributes by others to his memory, it is also a phrase that encapsulates the importance attached to Babu as an agent, exemplar, and interlocutor for his generation. It suggests a cosmopolitan relationship to history in which pasts and futures can be freely projected onto diverse cultures whose boundaries are porous and impermanent, especially according to the naked eye.
Seeing the future in practice meant obtaining a picture of society through a brief visit or longer period of residence elsewhere. For those Zanzibaris who were able to make such travel, these experiences underlined what they believed Zanzibar lacked and in the same stroke persuaded them of possible future alternatives. Such cosmopolitan visions at times closely resembled the world civilization spoken of by such personages as Chu Tu-nan. Supreme confidence in the human will and socialist techniques for constructing knowledge, imposing discipline, and altering the motivational structure of individuals meant that Babu and others could return from China and elsewhere with various ideas for how Zanzibaris should exert themselves in a national project of selective appropriation. They could privilege the distant over the more familiar, and graft the historical narratives of other nations onto their own, as either cautionary tales or authoritative stories of the triumph of discipline and the human will over colonialism, exploitation, and underdevelopment. They could begin their analysis of island history not from the moment Arabs first enslaved or civilized Africans, but from an imaginary time in the future when Zanzibar would fully realize its capacities for development. Zanzibar was more than an Islamic enclave or an African island chain; it was a showcase for socialism. What had taken place elsewhere, Babu and his friends argued, had direct relevance on what was happening in Zanzibar in the 1960s.
Nationalism
The Chinese were fortunate in Babu’s considerable political skills. Under the eclectic umbrella of the ZNP, Babu employed some of his journalistic talents in propagating the Chinese view of world politics. With Chinese funding, he edited his own weekly broadsheet, ZANEWS, which published anticolonial editorials and news articles often taken directly from the New China News Agency. Babu was also a skilled organizer; as secretary general of the ZNP, he received credit for the party’s remarkable comeback from defeat at the polls in 1957 to victory against the ASP in the June 1961 elections. For four years Babu worked effectively with Ali Muhsin, an enormously popular ZNP leader and spokesman of the more conservative mainstream of the party, much of it based in rural Pemba. The two shared a sense of Zanzibari nationalism and a common hostility toward the racial politics espoused by the ASP. Both advocated forms of Afro-Asian cooperation, yet the two men differed in the kind of cosmopolitan order they wished to establish. Muhsin looked to Nasser and Islamic principles rather than Mao or Lenin for guidance, and found Babu’s Chinese connections increasingly problematic. Babu and his cohort of socialists, entrenched in the ZNP youth and trade union associations, rejected appeals to national unity on the basis of either religion or race, and in so doing were at odds with the vast majority of voters in either contending party. They were convinced the islands’ primary contradictions were not between Arabs and Africans, or civilization and barbarism, but capital and labor. Their cast of cold war friends and enemies was also exceptional, and increasingly an issue in light of colonial desires to grant power to a moderate, pro-Western regime in the islands.
The colonial state imprisoned Babu for sedition in 1962; Issa accused Muhsin of conspiring with the British to remove Babu from politics, and resigned from the party. At a press conference, Issa read a statement entitled (with a nod to Fidel Castro), “Condemn Me Now but History Will Absolve Me,” in which he castigated Muhsin. The statement also reflected socialists’ universal claims, shared sense of secular time, and belief in the “science” of history:
All students of history both contemporary and medieval will not fail to recall that what is taking place now in our country has taken place elsewhere on earth.
What is taking place now in Zanzibar has not surprised me at all but confirms the belief I have always held since I have started to think and use my intelligence, to differentiate right and wrong, just and unjust.
Issa went on to describe the ZNP as a liberation movement that had temporarily united various classes, but which was led by Muhsin and other vacillating “parasites” unable to “march forward to a new system” that would erase all exploitation in the islands. Issa declared that new ideas always triumph over old ones, and that, depending on the contradictions within a society, old ideas fade peacefully or by force. When it came to Muhsin and other feudalistic, petit bourgeois “imperialist running dogs” in the ZNP, Issa was convinced they had become nothing more than local abstractions of malignant global forces. Issa declared: “We must be ruthless and wage a determined struggle against the enemies of the people, expose them for what they are.” Thus, whereas socialism preached the brotherhood of man, it also created its own set of purge categories. Issa closed with an assertion of his faith in socialist historiography: “I am confident that we shall win in the end, and by we I mean the progressives not only in Zanzibar but throughout the world. Venceremos, venceremos, venceremos [We Shall Conquer].”57
While such statements may have electrified local press audiences and either pleased or offended Issa’s real or imaginary international audience, they failed to garner mass enthusiasm. Most islanders did not connect local incidents with a global struggle between progressive and reactionary historical forces. Founded on his belief in the seriousness and relevance of faraway struggles in Cuba, Vietnam, Congo, and elsewhere, the urgency of Issa’s appeal was lost on most of the voting population, for whom these places remained entirely abstract. Issa’s analysis of the “objective realities” in Zanzibar, while conforming to the lessons socialists drew from their own historical experiences, did not cohere with the weight of local opinion that was either oblivious, indifferent, or in opposition to his characterization of the “contradictions” of Zanzibari society. His very nomenclature was problematic: relatively few in Zanzibar sought to explain human behavior by assigning certain class positions to political actors. For the less “exposed,” race, ethnicity, and religion remained far more compelling identifiers. For only a relative few did his political references possess all the authority of a science. They were most appealing to members of his generation who were prepared to consider new analytical terms as they were ready also to listen to a new Frank Sinatra recording.
Revolution
When Babu was released from prison in early 1963 he saw that the political situation had changed during his detention. The ZNP was preparing without him, and in alliance with the smaller Zanzibar and Pemba Peoples Party, to contest a final round of elections before independence. Babu resigned from the ZNP, claiming the party had become too racialist. With his radical associates he formed the Umma Party, which had no impact on the outcome of the August elections, another win for the ZNP–ZPPP alliance. Peasants showed little to no interest in Umma but among the youth of Zanzibar Town the party gained a couple thousand members and considerable notoriety. Umma members allegedly abused alcohol, were sexually promiscuous, and did not pray or fast. Their non-Islamic lifestyles were as often the subject of controversy as their antigovernment pronouncements and public insistence on the relevance of the violent conflicts of distant lands. Umma hosted debates on Vietnam as well as more academic discussions on the meaning of such words as imperialism.58 They sought a critical vocabulary suitable for what they considered a more-enlightened generation. Their repetitive invocations of the wisdom and development of secular “progressive” nations were unsubtle digs against the Islamic and Arab-centric cultural standards and mores of the older generation, which for years the ZNP had actively asserted and defended. Their hostility toward the ZNP pushed them toward a working alliance with ASP leaders like Abeid Karume, whom Babu had previously dismissed as unprogressive. If the comrades held Karume’s racial politics in contempt, that contempt did not extend to his supporters’ race or class origins, or their status as the downtrodden of the islands. The ASP enjoyed mass popularity among African workers and peasants, something that Umma lacked. The ASP also included elements that loathed Arabs, and were ready to instigate a revolution.
In January 1964 the ASP Youth League managed, only one month after independence and the departure of British security forces from the islands, to overthrow the elected ZNP–ZPPP government. What might have been a relatively bloodless regime change—accomplished in a matter of a couple days—quickly turned into an ethnic bloodbath, as Arabs and to a lesser extent South Asians were plundered, raped, massacred, detained, and forced into exile.59 As the situation calmed, Babu and other leading Umma comrades quickly gained influence in the new regime as ministers, junior ministers, and army officers. ASP and Umma officially merged in March 1964, by which time Babu had emerged as by far the most able leader and spokesperson of a socialist faction within the Revolutionary Council that included ASP politicians like Kassim Hanga who had studied or traveled within the Eastern Bloc. Babu and his like-minded colleagues persuaded Karume to welcome dozens of experts and advisers from China, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Whereas socialists assumed most cabinet-level positions in the new government, they were still required to maintain the trust and support of their less schooled and more moderate president, Abeid Karume. They were also compelled to maintain the approval of the Revolutionary Council, composed mostly of men who lacked overseas “exposure” or socialist convictions, were often illiterate, but who had taken leading roles in the actual seizure of power and the punishment of Arabs.60
Babu clearly recognized the ethnic nature of the violence. In his writings he repeatedly described the revolution as an anti-Arab, spontaneous “lumpen uprising,” that Umma comrades needed to transform into an authentic revolution.61 In an interview with the New China News Agency in 1964, Babu nevertheless faithfully inserted Zanzibar into the official Chinese master narrative: “The victory of the Zanzibar revolution was only a step in the revolution in Africa, Asia and Latin America,” he asserted. “The Zanzibar people send greetings to Chairman Mao because they learned a lot from his works.”62 In June 1964 the Paris-based periodical Revolution published an interview of Babu in which he says:
From the moment where the people take up arms, it is most difficult for a leader to moderate the ardor, the allure and the rhythm of the revolution. I believe that armed revolution itself compels a country to transform itself sooner or later into a socialist country…. An African revolution can transform itself into a socialist revolution. This is exactly the process that is going on in Zanzibar.63
The Zanzibari Revolution was a signal event in what Piero Gleijeses has characterized as “the season of the great illusion,” when to many international observers in 1964–65 a continent-wide revolution seemed imminent in Africa.64 In his introduction to Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, Argentine journalist Adolfo Gilly heralds the Zanzibari Revolution as further evidence that “Revolution is mankind’s way of life today…. Capitalism is under siege, surrounded by a global tide of revolution.”65 Gilly could not have provided a clearer example of universalistic claims of socialism when he argued the French defeat in Vietnam inspired the Algerian liberation struggle, which in turn “unleashed the great tide of African revolution.” Revolutionaries in Zanzibar “took advantage of this uninterrupted chain of revolutionary struggles to realize one of the greatest deeds of the epoch…. They took the road of socialist revolution, arms in hand, with no other support than the determination of the masses of Zanzibar—barefoot, poor, illiterate, armed as well as they could manage—and their own revolutionary courage.”66 Clearly, the power of socialism’s master narrative was such that international observers might read local events anywhere in the world as part of an “uninterrupted chain.” The “barefoot” revolutionaries did not, actually, have any other revolution in their minds so much as an opportunity to topple a government that intended in their eyes to exploit and oppress Africans. They created the conditions for the emergence of an African nationalist regime that was soon ready to experiment with socialist ideas and techniques from overseas.
Nation Building
Babu’s growing power in early 1964 upset President Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika, who worried that Zanzibar, under Babu’s influence, might serve as a regional base for the export of revolution. He didn’t want Tanganyika and other states in East Africa to undergo ethnic violence comparable to that of the islands. Nor did he want cold war rivalries to influence regional politics. Speaking in 1963 at a conference of the AAPSO, Nyerere warned of a “second scramble for Africa,” not between Western powers, but between the Chinese and Soviets eager to gain African allies.67 In March 1964, he warned the American ambassador: “it is more important to me than to you that Zanzibar be nonaligned. The Chinese on Zanzibar threaten me more directly.” The threat was not only Chinese “subversion,” it was aid. Nyerere was convinced that the Chinese “could make a success for Zanzibar. Then what happens to what I stand for in Tanganyika and what happens to this country?”68 In part out of his fear of cold war politics intruding into East Africa, Nyerere managed in late-April 1964 to personally persuade Karume to form a federation with Tanganyika, later entitled the United Republic of Tanzania.69 Karume excluded Babu, his Foreign Minister, from these secret negotiations; he understood that one immediate benefit of the federation would be the safe transfer of Babu and his comrades to the mainland, where they would pose less of a threat to his power.70
Despite the union and the political exile of many former Umma members, wise socialist men from the East continued to arrive in Zanzibar, bearing gifts. The Umma comrades who remained in positions of power on the islands meanwhile set about revising the meaning and nature of the revolution. Their influence was immediately felt in the media and in education; as Minister of Education, Youth and Culture from 1965 to 1968, Issa introduced socialist teachings into the secondary-school curriculum. To pass their exams, students needed to be “politically minded” and demonstrate familiarity with the works of Mao, Marx, and Lenin. He also did his best, by sending thousands of youth to toil in work camps in the countryside, to instill labor discipline in the islands, and, inspired by Maoist models, to reduce the differences between urban and rural youth.71 Also inspired by socialist precedent, Issa helped to orchestrate the confiscation of Arab and South Asian residences around Zanzibar Town. Issa and other comrades either downplayed or distanced themselves from the violence of the revolution, yet employed class categories in their speeches and writings that became ubiquitous in nationalist discourse of the 1960s and 1970s as general references to Africans, Arabs, and Asians. Whereas Karume’s regime espoused revolutionary socialism, its understanding of nation building was very much based on the notion of racial uplift, which justified a decade-long assault on the wealth, exclusivity, and social status of formerly privileged non-African minority communities. What was left of the rapidly dwindling Arab and South Asian communities in the islands had their rights continually violated, either through socialist labels like landlords and capitalists, or actual ethnic markers. So much for Afro-Asian solidarity. Yet not according to revolutionary elites. When Karume, for example, encouraged members of the Revolutionary Council to take Arab and South Asian wives (regardless of whether the girls or women were willing or not), he certainly had in mind a society that was an Afro-Asian synthesis, just not the sort of one the ZNP had in mind.72 If in 1948 there were over 15,000 South Asians in Zanzibar, that number had by 1972 been reduced to around 3,500.73 Arabs, whose numbers were roughly triple that of the South Asians prior to the revolution, suffered a similar rate of attrition.
Life in the islands became increasingly isolated as the 1960s progressed, regardless of ethnic or racial status. The regime imposed rigid controls on citizens’ travel outside the islands, discontinued most overseas scholarship programs, severely discouraged tourism, closed down all privately owned newspapers, banned Western dance, music, and selected clothing styles, burned Western books, and shut down all community associations not affiliated with the ruling party or that did not have a specific religious function. Its takeover of the wholesale and retail trades produced recurrent shortages, the closure of shops, and considerable deprivation. Old Stone Town’s diverse neighborhoods were relentlessly drained of their people and vitality; only its three movie theaters retained something of their former popularity despite bouts of official censorship. Much of the old Stone Town was allowed to fall into ruin in favor of brand new East German-designed construction projects on the “African” side of town. Yet cosmopolitan ties endured and even flourished with the African mainland and the socialist fraternity of nations. In its first year of existence, the revolution attracted such notables as Malcolm X, Zhou Enlai, and Che Guevara. Guests from various African and socialist lands performed pilgrimages to Zanzibar’s latest development projects: a modern state-owned apartment block, a new road, another school. Like the Chinese, Karume’s regime arranged stage-managed tours to advertise the virtues of revolution, and to generate news for the official press. The story in Kweupe was always that these dignitaries were seeing the revolution, and were impressed.
China competed with East Germany and the Soviet Union for the status of chief patron power of the islands. Together, they provided enough aid, experts, and military hardware for the islands to earn the appellation of the “Cuba of East Africa.” By 1970, the Chinese had expanded their aid program to include the construction of a new sports stadium and several small-scale factories. About 400 Chinese worked on the islands on these projects, in hospitals, state farms, and as trainers of Zanzibar’s 3,000-person army. Successes in providing health services and clean water were matched by failed attempts to establish a viable state rice farm, shoe factory, and tractor repair service.74 As the years passed, however, the Chinese gained favor with Karume, who appreciated their humble living standards, often no better than those of rural Zanzibaris.75 By contrast, he became disillusioned with the high cost and/or poor success of Soviet and East German aid projects, so that by the 1970s China was clearly Zanzibar’s leading foreign patron and development model. Issa recalled:
There was no comparison. Here the Chinese were backward, they wanted to develop their country first, but still they helped. Here the Russians were advanced with Sputnik and everything, and yet they were meager. They were very mean and arrogant, I can say. That is my experience with the socialist superpowers…. Each helped in their own way but the Chinese in their own society were more akin to us: they lived in the fields, they planted with us, and they won the hearts of the people. So it was through our experience and contact with the Chinese that we looked for our solutions through the Chinese way.76
Issa’s remarks would have pleased Zhou Enlai, since they reflected “The Eight Principles” of Chinese development assistance he articulated in the mid-1960s.77 Chinese working overseas were instructed to embody the virtues of socialist discipline, and to be living advertisements for why China had accomplished so much in so little time. This was part of their pedagogical purpose. They became known for their work habits and modest lifestyles, in contrast to Soviet and East German experts, who were housed in hotels or well-appointed flats. An East German biology teacher in Zanzibar in the 1960s recalled that his students, after asking about the size of his salary, informed him that for that amount Zanzibar could support five to ten Chinese teachers, all of whom could live in the house he alone occupied.78
And yet China’s actual social influence was limited by language barriers and the stringent demands imposed on Chinese overseas by their home government. Although meant to be living advertisements of the socialist New Man, they were forced to endure severe regimentation, and segregation from local society. Oral histories are full of recollections of Chinese workers moving in tight knots through the streets, in fear of denunciation by their peers and superiors. Any social influence they might have had was undermined by their justifiable fixation on questions of personal survival. Hamad remembered the Chinese “always moved around in groups. You never found a Chinese person alone … mostly we didn’t bother ourselves about them because they kept to themselves. I heard about the wonderful Chairman Mao Tse Tung with his Red Book, which I never read. My image of China in those days was a country … that sent us commodities that were of poor quality.”79
Chinese health professionals, farm laborers, and technicians also had less opportunity to exercise influence than Russian and East German secondary-school teachers for example. Zanzibaris relied on European instructors to fill the gaps left by departing British expatriates after the revolution; they also turned to the Soviet bloc for aid and advice in establishing an array of institutions intended to discipline the younger generation, including youth labor camps, and the Young Pioneers. Zanzibaris turned toward Asia, however, for inspiration and instruction in the art of mass spectacle; it was in the realm of the future that the Chinese probably exercised, through public ritual, their greatest pedagogical influence in revolutionary Zanzibar. Throughout the 1970s, Chinese and North Korean experts trained and organized halaiki—massive dramatizations and flag and calisthenics demonstrations involving thousands of participants.80 Students and teachers prepared hours each school day for three months in advance for the annual January revolutionary festivals. So did the state. In 1965, for example, the president’s office announced: “every citizen in this country is expected to participate in these celebrations,” and ordered each government worker to donate a day’s salary for the celebrations.81 The annual commemorations took place in the massive Chinese-designed Amaani Stadium, on what was once the inland edge of Zanzibar Town, an enclosed and neutral space that permitted vast representations of the vigor and animation of the new state. It was a space without memory, easily appropriated for collective reckonings of the future.
The future needed festivals in its own image, ones of perfect order and symmetry, and so they were conducted according to a rigidly preconceived plan. Citizens acted out various scenes meant to dramatize the importance of development. Lines of people pretended to cultivate with hoes, with a mural in the background showing cloves and coconuts. To represent the workings of a factory, they formed a human pyramid.82 Children held painted wooden boards; when they opened them and held them together a house would appear, symbolizing nation building.83 To represent the past as an age of backwardness and humiliation, people pulled rickshaws through the football stadium, or they pretended to fish in old and outmoded dugout canoes.84 The message was clear for all to see: the revolution had righted a century of wrongs and rescued Africans from misery and exploitation. Dramatizations of work in fishing, agriculture, and industry served as visual reminders of citizens’ obligation to build the nation, and the essential dignity of labor. Halaiki was meant to advertise and celebrate discipline: the precision and tight economy of bodily gestures of a parade or a calisthenics display was meant as a persuasive sign of the emergence of an increasingly productive generation, for whom hard and efficient physical labor was a deeply felt need. Mass formations of uniformed young men and women moving in complete symmetry were meant to impress upon citizens the irresistible power of islanders fully mobilized for nation building.
Halaiki also served as a series of reassuring, highly synchronized dress rehearsals for a future that had abolished all poverty, vice, disorder, and privilege. In halaiki, the future intruded into the ordinary routines of the present, making the future for thousands a lived reality. For those who trained for three months, enacting the future was the routine of the present. Halaiki was also meant to be deeply satisfying as an exercise in inclusion. The festival displays temporarily abolished all social distinctions. Halaiki encouraged a sense of unity and egalitarianism by marching together students wearing the same style of uniform and executing thousands of equal and identical tasks. Each citizen’s movements had meaning and significance only in relation to the whole. As a display of state power, halaiki was meant to remind citizens of the revolution, and to persuade them they were members of a collective much larger than themselves.
The festivals were also meant to be fun. Oral histories suggest the student performers, regardless of their politics, looked forward to the enthusiastic applause that awaited their performances. Despite enduring years of rationing, shortages, reduced salaries, and unemployment, citizens could find moments, through festival participation, of temporary fulfillment. David Apter observed that states in Africa and Asia in the 1960s employing comparable “mobilization systems” offered their citizens “purification in belongingness, comfort in comradeship, democracy in loyalty, brotherhood in membership.”85 Whether or not they always deciphered the visual codes, onlookers usually came away entertained, and frequently impressed. Zanzibari nationalists believed they had discovered a way in which to act upon the senses, to provide pleasure in order to encourage virtue. It was once a year at halaiki spectacles where, as in the festivals of the French Revolution, “desire and knowledge met, where the education of the masses gave way to joy.”86
Conclusion
Babu was deeply disappointed by the formation of the United Republic of Tanzania in 1964, and his political exile from Zanzibar, which in later years he equated with the preemption of an imminent economic takeoff in the islands. In 1987 he wrote that Zanzibar “was the first country in Africa to try to emulate the Chinese experience.” Unfortunately the union made it impossible for Zanzibaris “to take advantage of the Chinese development experience.”87 It “virtually killed the UJIMA spirit,” in the islands, which Babu translated as “social power.” This “communal spirit was about to shift” from violent revolution toward “enthusiasm for production.” Instead of encouraging new attitudes toward labor and leisure, the union relationship led only to “disillusionment and ultimately cynicism.”88 Zanzibar’s incipient economic takeoff was aborted when the regime failed to mobilize the people’s energies for nation building. Karume’s regime did impose heavy forced-labor requirements, however, and for over a decade continually harangued ordinary citizens to give up their leisure hours in order to build the nation.89 Such intrusive assertions of state power are, in fact, one of the most repetitive features of oral histories of the 1960s and 1970s. Immediately after the revolution, islanders sometimes gathered in the thousands for “voluntary” labor assignments. Initially, there was “enthusiasm for production” in Zanzibari society; yet this spirit waned over time, not because of the union, but due to the coercion and incompetence of the revolutionary state.
Nor did the union prevent Babu, as a minister until 1972 in Tanzania’s union government, from exercising important influence. One of the more significant ironies of Tanzanian history was his spectacular success in spreading the Sinophile gospel and engineering a cardinal shift in Nyerere’s attitude toward China. Babu persuaded Nyerere in 1964 to see for himself what the Chinese had accomplished, and he traveled to Beijing to prepare for the president’s official visit in February 1965.90 The encounter had its intended, magical effect. Afterward, Nyerere effused to his new Chinese friends: “If it were possible for me to lift all the ten million Tanzanians and bring them to China to see what you have done since the liberation, I would do so.” He added, “There is [a] lesson which we can learn from the Chinese revolution. It is that courage, enthusiasm, and endurance are not enough. There must also be discipline…. The single-mindedness with which the Chinese people are concentrating on development was the thing which most impressed me.”91 Instead of transporting millions of his countrymen to China, he supervised the establishment of a system of National Service that sent Tanzanian youth to rural-labor camps, where they were subjected to repetitive sermons on “the demand for dedicated exertion, the suspicion of certain forms of consumption, the eulogization of the virtues of frugality and self-denial.”92
Nyerere cultivated a warm relationship with Beijing that lasted for two decades, and that involved considerable material aid. The TAZ-ARA railway project, linking Tanzania’s capital city, Dar es Salaam, with Lusaka, Zambia, became in the 1970s the largest Chinese-aid project anywhere in Africa. The thousands of Chinese workers it brought to Tanzania constituted the largest Chinese communist overseas presence anywhere in the world.93 As Jamie Monson relates, in this volume, Chinese laborers worked alongside Tanzanians recruited to build the railway, serving while doing so as embodiments of labor discipline. Both the Chinese and the Tanzanians appreciated this pedagogical role, yet Tanzanian employees of the railway were both attracted and repulsed by the heavy labor demands of their Chinese “friends.” Official media in Tanzania did not capture this ambivalence; in October 1970, Dar es Salaam’s Sunday News welcomed the beginning of railway construction:
Tanzania can take some pride in having … reintroduced the Chinese to Africa.
We welcome the representatives of the People’s Republic of China today, not just because of their timely assistance to our development efforts, but also because of the relevance which their experience has for us….
Some Western countries accuse Tanzania of being a bridgehead [of Chinese influence in Africa]. We reply that we would be proud, if by this is meant that the ideas of discipline, frugality, and self-reliance, of hostility to racism and imperialism, that have characterized the Chinese government since the revolution, were to spread through Tanzania into the rest of the great continent of Africa.94
Just as the railway construction was at its most intense, Nyerere arrested and detained Babu in 1972 for his leading role in the assassination of Karume in Zanzibar. After his release in 1978, Babu never made his home in Tanzania again. He eventually settled in London as a journalist and lecturer, and observed the decline of the Maoist gospel in Africa. By the 1980s, “the best-known Chinese in Africa was not Mao, but Bruce Lee. All over the continent cinemas celebrated the exploits of this deceased Hong Kong film star and exponent of martial arts.”95 Tanzania even came out with its own commemorative set of Bruce Lee stamps, in which the fighter was drawn in various costumes and poses.96 In the more substantive realm of development, all the Chinese-built factories and state farms established in the islands with Chinese expertise were either by the 1980s defunct or operating at a net loss. In response to serious economic decline, Zanzibar opened itself to tourism, liberalized its trade policies, and enthusiastically embraced many principles of free market capitalism. By the 1990s, Western-donor agencies surpassed the Chinese in their development assistance to both the islands and mainland of Tanzania. In an island economy, where tourism was the only major growth sector, revolutionary “enthusiasm for production” was replaced by “enthusiasm for service.” Always an exemplar of his times, Issa put politics aside to open, with Italian financing and a loan from a subsidiary of the World Bank, the first beach-resort hotel in Zanzibar. He can sometimes now be seen singing revolutionary songs in Chinese, Russian, and Spanish to his slightly disoriented hotel staff. The same man who once founded youth-labor camps in the countryside now takes equal pride in turning pristine beaches into playgrounds for well-heeled tourists. Tourist agencies organize tours to the palaces of the Arab sultans, or around the reviving neighborhoods of old Stone Town, and specifically ignore Karume’s monumental apartment blocks built through “voluntary” labor.
Babu wrote a number of essays from London from the wistful viewpoint of “the Africa that might have been,” in which his point of critical reference was often China. His sense of alienation resulted from African departure from what he perceived to be Chinese norms. Although in these passages Babu’s ideological consistency appears somewhat strained, his geographical loyalties down through the decades are immaculate. His reverence for China as a place and as an idea suggests, once again, the role of visiting and seeing as a distinct nationalist epistemology. Thus Babu wrote in 1987 that even though Tanzania was for a time the world’s leading recipient of Chinese aid, its leaders failed to learn from the wisdom of Mao’s “Ten Major Relationships.” These relationships included “Learn from Other Countries,” in this case from China that “everything depended on people’s own initiative and ingenuity,” and “their enthusiasm for production.”97 What was missing from postcolonial Africa was “the ingenuity of the peasants, skilled manpower and mass enthusiasm for production.”98 African leaders failed to imitate Chinese experts working in Africa, who “adopted the same mode of life as their junior colleagues.” They ignored the key ingredients of China’s development: “a correct world outlook, scientific planning, frugality and a determined people.” A cultural emphasis on frugality was “the essential ingredient for development, capitalist, socialist or any other type.”99
Babu’s exaltation of discipline as a value of universal relevance was not exceptional, but was in accord with the “single disciplinary model” presented by both the West and the East.100 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have been wrong about many things, but they have cogently argued that despite the reality of cold war superpower confrontations:
The leaders of the socialist states agreed in substance on this disciplinary project. Lenin’s renowned enthusiasm for Taylorism was later outdone by Mao’s modernization projects. The official socialist recipe for decolonization also followed the essential logic dictated by the capitalist transnationals and the international agencies: each postcolonial government had to create a labor force adequate to the disciplinary regime.101
This essay demonstrates that in the 1960s the Chinese sought to break out of their historic isolation by offering not only material aid to nationalist movements in Africa, but also the enticing prospect of their collaboration in the creation of a new kind of civilization, the nature of which needed to be seen to be understood. The foundation of this civilization, of this usable future, would not only be African, or Afro-Asian, it would be founded on universal values like discipline that transcended all racial and cultural boundaries and ignored the autonomy of national-historical narratives. Some nationalists like Babu and Issa responded well to these ideas, perhaps as a function of their “exposure” to the world, or perhaps because of their generation’s polyglot, cosmopolitan milieu, elements of which were prepared in the mid-20th century to follow a nation-building strategy that embraced the universal. In the 1960s, the idea of discipline was in fact so universal—and contested—that it would be more remarkable to imagine nationalists in Africa not actually engaging the concept.
Unlike Foucault, they did not regard disciplinary techniques as insidious, petty, or malicious. Nor did they distance themselves from discipline for its associations with the colonial civilizing mission. Rather, they looked to discipline as part of a strategy to access the means by which their societies might accumulate knowledge, power, and abundance. The phenomenon of nationalists searching for a new kind of national culture, no longer under colonial domination, and yet neither an uncritical return to the ways of the ancestors, is familiar now to scholars. Partha Chatterjee writes that nationalism “produced a discourse in which, even as it challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based.”102 In the case of Zanzibar, some nationalists adopted China rather than the capitalist West as their most immediate model and usable future. They believed the inculcation of socialist ideas of personal merit and prestige as applied to habits of work, leisure, and consumption would be an antidote to dependency and underdevelopment.
Zanzibari nationalists like Babu and Issa freely transposed the historical experiences of other societies onto their own, and adopted an imported future that clashed with Islamic universalism: the claim that a national culture that transcended race could be constructed in Zanzibar through a common embrace of Islam. The Afro-Asian solidarities asserted through such a vision did not appeal to revolutionaries, unless a radical rupture from the past could be realized: the end of Arab and South Asian economic hegemony in the islands. This was the project that superficially united the nationalists who seized power in 1964, whether they spoke the language of socialism, or of race. Racial nationalists looked more toward the past than the future glimpsed by their more socialist-minded colleagues, however—they sought to right a century of wrongs, and to erase all the humiliations of slavery and inequality. They were comfortable with the idea of a universal civilization that encompassed socialism and even the concept of discipline as a fundamental ordering principle of development schemes, in part because neither discipline nor development necessarily hinged on the defense of the human rights of ordinary islanders. The revolution, from the viewpoint of the 21st century, failed to deliver either development or discipline in Zanzibar, however. Such failings have allowed critics of the revolution to once again assert the concept of Islamic universalism as their rallying cry, to disparage the revolution on its own terms—the discourse of development—as well as in reference to the emergent cosmopolitan language of human rights. Unlike socialism, the spouse of African nationalism in Zanzibar for the entire revolutionary era, the language of human rights appears to be a more reluctant bride.
Notes
1. Toyin Falola, Nationalism and African Intellectuals (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 47.
2. Ibid., 54.
3. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 19–20.
4. Sylvana Patriarca, “Indolence and Regeneration: Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism,” The American Historical Review, 110, no. 2 (2005), 386.
5. Donald Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 25.
6. Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept,” in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, eds. Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 81–82.
7. See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
8. Zanzibar National Archives (hereafter ZNA), Zanzibar Town, Tanzania, BA 109/6, Guide to Zanzibar, 1931.
9. Ahmed Gurnah, “Elvis in Zanzibar,” in The Limits of Globalization: Cases and Arguments, ed. Alan Scott (London: Routledge, 1997), 117.
10. Ibid., 117–19.
11. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Desertion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), 127. Abdulrazak is the brother of Ahmed Gurnah.
12. Gurnah, “Elvis in Zanzibar,” 123.
13. Ibid.
14. G. Thomas Burgess, Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar: The Memoirs of Ali Sultan Issa and Seif Sharif Hamad (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 183.
15. Jonathon Glassman, “Sorting out the Tribes: The Creation of Racial Identities in Colonial Zanzibar’s Newspaper Wars,” Journal of African History, 41 (2000): 395–428; see also Michael Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).
16. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence (New York: Free Press, 1996), 66–67.
17. Jonathon Glassman, “Slower than a Massacre: The Multiple Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial Africa,” The American Historical Review, 109, no. 3 (2004): 720–54.
18. Agozi, 4 May 1959, as quoted in Lofchie, Background to Revolution, 193.
19. Gurnah, “Elvis in Zanzibar,” 122.
20. Ibid., 131.
21. James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 212; italics original.
22. “Kuteka kwa Kufisidi,” Mwongozi, January 25, 1963.
23. “Views and Comments: For Serious Consideration,” Mwongozi, August 9, 1963.
24. Ahmed Gurnah, “Elvis in Zanzibar,” 131.
25. John Cooley, East Wind Over Africa: Red China’s African Offensive (New York: Walker, 1965), 211.
26. See, for example, George Yu, China’s Africa Policy: A Study of Tanzania (New York: Praeger, 1975).
27. Cooley, East Wind Over Africa, 214.
28. Philip Snow, The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 71.
29. Cooley, East Wind Over Africa, 57.
30. Ibid., 16.
31. Ibid., 195, 197.
32. Ibid., 199.
33. Alaba Ogunsanyo, China’s Policy in Africa, 1958–71 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 84.
34. See, for example, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, “Remembering A. M. Babu,” in Babu, I Saw the Future and It Works: Essays Celebrating the Life of Comrade Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu 1924–1996, ed. Haroub Othman (Dar es Salaam: M and M Printers, 2001), 136–37.
35. A. M. Babu, “Memoirs: An Outline,” in Babu, I Saw the Future and It Works, 15–16.
36. Haroub Othman, “Comrade Abdulrahman Babu: A Revolutionary Internationalist,” in Babu, I Saw the Future and It Works, 115.
37. Burgess, Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar, 51.
38. Ibid., 60–61.
39. Cooley, East Wind Over Africa, 40.
40. Adal Insaf, “No One Starving or Jobless in China,” September 13, 1960; American Consulate, DSM, to Secretary of State, 194, June 17, 1960, Central Decimal File 1960-3, Box 1709, National Archives, College Park, MD (hereafter NACP); Dispatch, King to Department of State, 51, September 19, 1960, Central Decimal File 1960-3, Box 1709, NACP; Ogunsanwo, China’s Policy, 34–35.
41. Interview, Anonymous, Dar es Salaam, May 18, 1998.
42. Snow, Star Raft, 72–73.
43. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 12.
44. Ibid., 6.
45. A.M. Babu, “From China with Lessons for Africa,” in The Future that Works: Selected Writings of A. M. Babu, eds. Salma Babu and Amrit Wilson (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2002), 33–34.
46. A. M. Babu, “The New World Disorder—Which Way Africa?” in The Future that Works, 319, 324.
47. Snow, Star Raft, 90.
48. Ibid., 91, 94.
49. Interview, Haroub Othman, Zanzibar Town, July 16, 2004.
50. Cooley, East Wind Over Africa, 202.
51. Alan Hutchison, China’s African Revolution (Boulder: Westview, 1976), 186–88; Emmanuel Hevi, An African Student in China (New York: Praeger, 1963), 116, 119–43, 162–63.
52. Snow, Star Raft, 197; Cooley, East Wind Over Africa, 202–3.
53. Nearly the entire Zanzibari contingent left early. Snow, The Star Raft, 198–99; Ogunsanwo, China’s Policy, 85; Bruce Larkin, China and Africa, 1949–1970: The Foreign Policy of the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 142. Over the next few years the number of Zanzibari students in China rebounded, but was again seriously reduced by the onset of China’s Cultural Revolution. Hutchison, China’s African Revolution, 186–88.
54. In Eastern Europe, for example, they faced fewer social restrictions and issues of consumer deprivation. For a more general discussion of the Zanzibari student diaspora in the 1950s and 1960s, see Thomas Burgess, “An Imagined Generation: Umma Youth in Nationalist Zanzibar,” in In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence from Tanzania: Essays in Honor of I. M. Kimambo, eds. Greg Maddox, James Giblin, Y.Q. Lawi (London: James Currey, 2005); Thomas Burgess, “A Socialist Diaspora: Ali Sultan Issa, the Soviet Union, and the Zanzibari Revolution,” in Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: 300 Years of Encounters, ed. by Maxim Matusevich (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006).
55. British National Archives, London CO 822, 2166, 26, British intelligence report, November 1960.
56. Burgess, Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar, 66.
57. Ali Sultan Issa, “Condemn Me Now but History Will Absolve Me,” photocopied statement in author’s possession.
58. Interview, Anonymous, Zanzibar Town, August 2, 2001.
59. The actual extent of the violence in January 1964 is a matter of hot dispute. Arabs of Unguja island suffered the most, yet more Arabs and South Asians went into immediate or eventual exile than were killed in the early days of the revolution. This excludes those who were raped, plundered, and detained.
60. For a lengthier recovery of the complicated political maneuverings within the new revolutionary regime, see Burgess, “A Socialist Diaspora.”
61. A. M. Babu, “I was the First Third World Minister to Recognise the GDR,” in Babu, I Saw the Future and It Works, 52–53. A. M. Babu, “The 1964 Revolution: Lumpen or Vanguard?” in Zanzibar Under Colonial Rule, eds. Abdul Sheriffand E. Ferguson (London: James Currey, 1991), 220–47.
62. As cited in Cooley, East Wind Over Africa, 41.
63. Ibid., 48.
64. Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 7.
65. See Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 1.
66. Ibid., 3.
67. Hutchison, China’s African Revolution, 43.
68. Donald Petterson, Revolution in Zanzibar: An American’s Cold War Tale (Boulder: Westview, 2002), 154. Snow suggests Nyerere was also initially skeptical of the Chinese because of their official atheism, the doctrine of permanent revolutionary upheaval, and the Chinese reputation for regimentation. Snow, Star Raft, 88.
69. The federation agreement was not only the result of short-term political expediency, but also long-standing working ties between Nyerere and TANU and Karume and the ASP, and their shared African nationalism. The agreement took place in a period of intense discussions regarding the feasibility of establishing an East African federation also to include Kenya and Uganda.
70. For the union agreement see, for example, Issa Shivji, Pan-Africanism or Pragmatism? Lessons of Tanganyika–Zanzibar Union (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2008); Amrit Wilson, US Foreign Policy and Revolution: The Creation of Tanzania (London: Pluto, 1989).
71. Thomas Burgess, “To Differentiate Rice from Grass: Youth Labor Camps in Revolutionary Zanzibar,” The History of Youth in East Africa, eds. Andrew Burton and Helene Charton (Athens: Ohio University Press, forthcoming).
72. For forced marriages in Zanzibar, see Esmond Martin, Zanzibar: Tradition and Revolution (Zanzibar: Gallery Publications, 2007), 69–71.
73. Lofchie, Background to Revolution, 71; Martin, Tradition and Revolution, 69.
74. Colin Legum, “Zanzibar: Another Papa Doc?” Venture 23, no. 6 (June 1971), 22–23; Alan Hutchison, “Clove Boom Helps Zanzibar in Diversification Drive,” African Development February 1974, 49–57; Ogunsanwo, China’s Policy in Africa, 136–37, 203; CIA Memorandum, December 2, 1968, United Republic of Tanzania vol. 2 Cables February 1965–December 1968, National Security File, Africa–Tanganyika, Box 100, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, University of Texas, Austin TX.
75. Petterson, Revolution in Zanzibar, 167.
76. Burgess, Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar, 107.
77. Hutchison, China’s African Revolution, 50–51.
78. Interview, Eckhart Schultz, July 22, 2004, Zanzibar Town.
79. Burgess, Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar, 227.
80. The popular Chinese term for halaiki translates roughly as “meeting of 10,000 people.”
81. ZNA, AD 1/140 Kusherehekea Siku ya Mapinduzi, 10, Afisi ya Makamo wa Kwanza wa Rais, January 4, 1965.
82. Interview, Muhammed Idris Muhammed Saleh, Zanzibar Town, August 3, 2001.
83. Interview, Seif Juma Seif, Zanzibar Town, July 12, 2001.
84. Interview, Abdullah Suleiman Waziri, Makunduchi Kajengwa, July 11, 01.
85. David Apter, “Political Religion in the New Nations,” in Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Free Press, 1963), 85.
86. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 9.
87. A. M. Babu, “China and Africa: Can We Learn from Each Other?” in The Future that Works, 168–69.
88. A. M. Babu, “Zanzibar and the Future,” in Babu, I Saw the Future and It Works, 28.
89. Any perusal of Kweupe, the mouthpiece of the revolution from 1964 to 1972, illustrates the numbing repetitiveness of the nation-building rhetoric of the era.
90. Cooley, East Wind Over Africa, 41.
91. William Edgett Smith, Nyerere of Tanzania (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), 160.
92. Ali Mazrui, Cultural Engineering and Nation-building in East Africa (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 220.
93. Hutchison, China’s African Revolution, 251, 259.
94. “Karibu,” Sunday News, October 1970, as cited in Charles Swift, Dar Days: The Early Years in Tanzania (New York: University Press of America, 2002), 113.
95. Snow, Star Raft, 211.
96. The complete set is in the author’s possession, though the date of their origin is unclear.
97. Babu, “China and Africa: Can We Learn from Each Other?” 170.
98. Ibid., 171.
99. Ibid., 173–74.
100. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 250.
101. Ibid., 248.
102. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, 2nd ed. (London: Zed, 1993), 30.