Massacre of Arabs during the Zanzibar Revolution

In January 1964, during and following the Zanzibar Revolution, Arab residents of Zanzibar were victims of targeted violence committed by the island’s majority Black African population. Arabs were mass murdered, raped, tortured and deported from the island by Black African militiamen under the Afro-Shirazi Party and Umma Party. The exact death toll is unknown, although scholarly sources estimate the number of Arabs killed to be between 13,000 and more than 20,000. It has been described by some as an act of genocide.

Arabs had dominated the society of the island for more than two hundred years, both politically and economically. The uprising against the ethnic Arabs (and Indians) has been overlooked by the majority and the massacres remain largely undiscussed and outside the public eye in terms of official histories. The Zanzibar Revolution is publicly celebrated on its anniversary as an uprising against slavery and oppression, although slavery in Zanzibar had already been abolished decades before. But, the massacres are either downplayed or not discussed at all.

Background
Arab settlement in Zanzibar began more than 1,000 years ago, when traders came to the island. Due to the increase of European imperialism in the region, Zanzibar became a colonial possession of the Portuguese Empire for more than two centuries, beginning in the 16th century. Zanzibari elites invited Arabs and the Omani Empire to help them drive out their colonial overlords. The Arabs successfully ousted Portuguese rule in Zanzibar and established dominance there. The Sultanate of Zanzibar was ruled by an Arab sultan and a largely Arab ruling class.

The Zanzibar Revolution was inspired by John Okello, an African preacher from Uganda who belonged to the small Christian minority of Zanzibar. His Christianity held no appeal to the largely Muslim African population of Zanzibar, so he found racial hatred a more effective way to motivate people to his side. The revolution was led by the Afro-Shirazi Party and the Umma Party. The Afro-Shirazi Party was Pan-Africanist and attempted to unite the Shirazi people with mainland Africans, whereas the Umma Party was small, radical and Marxist.

Slavery had been abolished in Zanzibar in 1897, but much of the Arab elite who dominated the island's politics made little effort to hide their racist views of the Black majority as their inferiors, a people fit only for slavery. In Parliament, the Minister of Finance Juma Aley responded to questions from Abeid Karume by insultingly saying he need not answer questions from a mere "boatman". Aley further explained in another speech in Parliament that if Arabs were over-represented in the Cabinet, it was not because of race, but rather it was only because the mental abilities of Blacks were so abysmally low and the mental abilities of Arabs like himself were so high, a remark that enraged the Black majority. Memories of Arab slave-trading in the past (some of the older Black people had been slaves in their youth) together with a distinctly patronizing view of the Arab elite towards the Black majority in the present, meant that much of the Black population of Zanzibar had a ferocious hatred of the Arabs, viewing the new Arab-dominated government as illegitimate. The government did not help broaden its appeal to the Black majority by drastically cutting spending in schools in areas with high concentrations of Black people. The government's budget with its draconian spending cuts in schools in Black areas was widely seen as a sign that the Arab-dominated government was planning to lock the Black people in a permanent second-class status.

By the time of the Zanzibar Revolution, the island had a population of about 300,000 people, including 230,000 Black Africans, around 50,000 Arabs and about 20,000 Indians. In addition, several hundred Comorians(including Mahorans) were killed during the pogrom as they were associated with the Arab elites and Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP). In 1948, the Comorian community in Zanzibar numbered 3,267 (roughly 1.2% of the total population) but, after the revolution, the number dwindled to barely a few hundred as a result of ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation. An unknown number of Comorian-Zanzibaris survived by hiding their heritage and eventually assimilated into the post-revolution Swahili-African population. The once thriving communities of Parsis (Zoroastrians) and Malagasy in Zanzibar also came to an abrupt end as the vast majority were driven out or otherwise fled the archipelago during this time.

Massacre
American diplomat Don Petterson described the killings of Arabs by the African majority as an act of genocide, and wrote "Genocide was not a term that was as much in vogue then, as it came to be later, but it is fair to say that in parts of Zanzibar, the killing of Arabs was genocide, pure and simple".

The leaders of the Zanzibar Revolution encouraged Black African militiamen to attack non-Blacks, leading to a massacre. Thousands of unarmed Arab civilians were murdered. Motivated by racial hatred and promises of wealth and women, enraged African militiamen went from house to house, murdering, torturing, and raping every Arab they could lay their hands on. Bloody corpses filled the streets of Zanzibar, with cases of mutilated bodies. Arab and Asian women were gangraped, and Arab and Asian property was looted. Many Arab properties were expropriated. Following the targeted slaughter, thousands more were put in camps and later forcibly deported. Homes were invaded and people of lighter skin were targeted for extermination, often in a brutal manner, to the point that no body could remain for burial. Allegedly, Okello bragged that he personally killed over 8,000 people. The killing of Arab prisoners, their burial in mass graves, forced marches and executions were documented by an Italian crew, filming from a helicopter, for Africa Addio, and this sequence of the film contained the only known visual document of the killings. However, many revolutionaries at the time dispute the authenticity of the documentary. When the film was shown to a group of revolutionaries in their seventies – some of whom had seen it when it was released in the mid-1960s, while others claimed they were unaware of it – they claimed they had not seen such mass graves or bodies scattered on the beach in Zanzibar during and after the revolution. They described the documentary as fictitious. Thousands fled Zanzibar, although many were unable to leave and forced to "live in the shadow, seeking more to make themselves forgotten than to recapture lost advantages". The rebel gangs specifically targeted Zanzibar's Islamic heritage. Most of the Arabic manuscripts in the Zanzibar National Archives have been vandalized. Qur'ans and other Islamic books were burned in the streets, despite 98 percent of Zanzibar's population being Muslim.

Death toll
Historian Jonathon Glassman estimated that Zanzibar lost a quarter or more of its Arab population by the end of 1964 due to expulsion, flight or mass murder. Okello claimed that 11,995 Arabs were killed and 21,462 detained. Ali Muhsin, the ousted Prime Minister, estimated that 26,000 Arabs were detained and 100,000 were forcibly deported. Seif Sharif Hamad, a member of the new revolutionary government of Zanzibar, said that he had been told that over 13,000, mostly Arabs, were killed. Multiple sources agree that over 20,000 Arabs were killed.