Growing Friction : Zanzibar and Tanzania: A Shaky Union

Exasperated by the contrary citizens of this offshore province, Tanzania’s founder, Julius K. Nyerere, is said to have once made a remark many people here would sooner die than forget.

He said he wished that Zanzibar could be towed out into the Indian Ocean for good.

The 600,000 residents of Zanzibar and its sister island of Pemba often feel that Nyerere got his wish. Now, 24 years after he struck a stealthy midnight agreement with Zanzibar’s president to unite their two countries, “the feeling persists in Zanzibar that this was not a fair deal,” says Seif Shariff Hamadi, Zanzibar’s former chief minister, or top administrative officer, who was recently fired by Nyerere.

The islands of Zanzibar boast East Africa’s longest recorded history, a product of more than four centuries of trading with and settlement by Arabs and other peoples of the Indian Ocean. In the tight, winding streets of Zanzibar City’s Arabic Stone Town, the grandeur of this ancient oceanic commerce can still be sensed amid street rubble born of the last 20 years of economic neglect. Around one corner is a typical “Zanzibar door,” the intricacies of its teak carvings set off by brass studs and spikes; behind it, a dusty room is open to the sky thanks to a collapsed roof.

The Zanzibaris wear a mantle of ancient aristocracy and cultural superiority almost Japanese in its pride. Swahili as it is spoken here is held to be the world standard of the language, like the BBC’s English.

Yet today they consider their culture to be under assault from the predominantly Christian mainland and they themselves treated by the mainland government as poor relations. There is little question that resentment over their union with what was Tanganyika to form Tanzania has lately been at a crest.

Islamic Customs Criticized

The most serious incident came a month ago, after a leading mainland politician remarked that such Islamic customs as polygamy and restrictions on bequests to female heirs oppressed women.

In most Western and many African countries the sentiment would be unexceptionable. But coming from a Christian politician and aimed at Islamic Zanzibar, it provoked an angry demonstration. Two people died when police fired on the crowd, dozens were injured in the melee, and 28 were arrested for inciting a riot.

Since then, Tanzania President Ali Hassan Mwinyi, himself a former president of Zanzibar, has characterized the islands as waters so calm that “a seashell would float.” Yet every night people still gather at the Forodhani, the waterfront park under the shadow of Zanzibar’s crumbling old Arab fortress, to socialize and grumble.

“I would say that 80 percent of Zanzibaris dislike the union,” says Rashid Hadji Ali, a shopkeeper in the historic Stone Town section of the city.

The 1964 terms of union were ostensibly aimed at making Zanzibar an equal partner with mainland Tanganyika in a new nation called Tanzania. Zanzibar maintains its own legislature and executive, and also elects members to the Tanzanian parliament in the capital of Dar es Salaam. Certain responsibilities are reserved to the union government, including defense, foreign affairs and trade, but, on the islands, agriculture, primary and secondary education, and a handful of other functions remain Zanzibar affairs.

In practice, Zanzibaris complain, the union government favors the mainland and starves the islands.

‘Undressed by the Union’

“Zanzibar has been almost undressed by the union,” complains Shaban Mloo(, a prominent island politician. “Over 24 years of union some industry should have been established here, so it could contribute to employment and the balance of trade.”

Instead, Zanzibar’s economy remains almost wholly dependent, as it has for more than a century, on the export of cloves -- mostly to Indonesia, which makes cigarettes out of them. When Indonesia recently began planting its own cloves, demand and price plummeted for what is virtually the only exportable product here.

Zanzibar has made some halting efforts to market its silver beaches and centuries of romantic history to tourists, but it has no tourist-class hotel rooms, its roads are decrepit, and Tanzania’s bureaucratic approach to private investment is discouraging.

“We’re the beginners,” says Gharib A.M. Gharib, a Zanzibari who recently returned from Oman to build what would be Zanzibar’s only beachfront hotel.

Standing in front of his complex of 30 buildings, now reachable only by an almost impassable dirt road, he adds: “You don’t expect to get everything ready at once in a country where private investment is a new idea.”

Zanzibaris contend that the mainlanders are aiming to starve the islands further by trying to wrest away their only independent means of support: about $21 million a year in clove-export earnings that Zanzibar keeps in its own foreign exchange account in London. Although foreign exchange is constitutionally a union responsibility, Zanzibar officials say the move would leave them without a penny to finance island education or agriculture.

“We’d have to go begging to the manager of the Bank of Tanzania for money to buy schoolbooks,” says Mloo.

That is only one issue of contention between the central and Zanzibar governments.

The peculiarly African socialism of Nyerere, who as chairman of the country’s sole political party is known in Tanzania as Mwalimu (teacher) and regarded in the developed world as one of Africa’s premier statesmen, has never taken root here. The Zanzibar government is convinced that given half a chance, mainlanders would overrun the island to escape Nyerere’s economic policies.

But the rules require the mainlanders to display their passports on entering the islands and restricts their stay to only a few days.

“Every so often we round them up and send them back,” says Wolf Dourado, who was attorney general and minister of foreign affairs in 1964, during Zanzibar’s brief existence as an independent country before the union.

It was in Zanzibar that Tanzania’s vaunted “liberalization” -- a recent attempt to mediate the harshness of Nyerere’s socialism by applying a dash of free-enterprise -- was fashioned. For years, Zanzibaris had been receiving money from relatives who had relocated to work in the oil industry in the Persian Gulf states. In 1984, then-Zanzibar President Mwinyi proposed that the emigres send back not money but goods to stock retail shops that their relatives could operate on the islands.

The consumer trade in Zanzibar blossomed. Albeit at high prices, the tiny retail storefronts of the Stone Town were filled with housewares, Western T-shirts, toiletries, and other goods unavailable on the mainland. Scores of old Arab houses in the district, fallen into disrepair after 20 years of ownership by the Zanzibar state, began to be renovated by shopkeepers. A modest wave of property speculation even took hold. When Nyerere promoted Mwinyi to the Tanzanian presidency, he brought “liberalization” with him to the mainland.

It is in Zanzibar, also, that the contradictions of Nyerere’s one-party “democracy” are most resoundingly decried.

“I’ve strained to understand the other side and now I do: It’s a one-party dictatorship,” says Dourado. “This is a typical rehash of the Soviet system.”

Dourado’s outspokenness has earned him two jailings from Nyerere -- one a 105-day stretch that brought him to the attention of Amnesty International.

In recent months, Nyerere has reacted decisively to this kind of talk. In January he sacked Chief Minister Seif Shariff Hamadi, whose popular administration had reawakened slumbering discontent with the union.

More dramatic were the events of May 13. On that day the Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or the Revolution Party of Tanzania’s that is the country’s ultimate governmental authority, abruptly purged seven top Zanzibar politicians from its rolls. The Zanzibari Gang of Seven, which included Hamadi and Mloo, was charged with anti-union sentiments.

Behind Zanzibar’s restlessness today are centuries of nationalism, going back to the arrival in the 10th Century of Persians from the province of Shiraz. Still more important culturally was the emergence of the Arabs as the dominant economic and political force of East Africa.

The Arabs rode the monsoons down the African coastline, establishing communities that to this day lend a firmly Muslim character to the Kenyan coast north of the islands. In the mid-1800s, Sultan Seyyid Said of Oman transferred his capital to Zanzibar, making it the seat of Arab influence throughout the entire region.

Over the centuries, Zanzibar has borne witness to some of man’s noblest enterprises and worst instincts. Its ideal location and superb harbor, built around a point jutting west into the 20-mile wide strait dividing island from mainland, made it the center of the ivory and slave trade to the Arab world. The sultans added a trade in cloves, whichtransplanted handily to the soil of Pemba from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.

The first European explorers of Africa staged their expeditions from Zanzibar. David Livingstone established his headquarters in a yellow house overlooking the harbor. From there he sent indignant observations to British authorities about slaves ordered to run after tossed sticks so that bidders could judge their ability to fetch. The bodies of beaten slaves often washed up on the beach, he also told authorities.

Under British prodding, the sultan eventually outlawed the slave trade, which made hisislands economically dependent on the British as a protectorate. Independence came in December 1963. A month later, the history of maltreatment by the Arab minority produced a bloody revolution by the “Shirazis,” a term that encompassed nearly everybody in Zanzibar except pure Arabs and mainland blacks. The ruling sultan was overthrown and Arab shopkeepers in particular were targeted in the violence.

But less than four months after independent Zanzibar’s flag was hoisted at the United Nations, Nyerere and Sheik Abeid Karume, who had assumed power in the wake of the revolution, reached their compact. They had been encouraged by British and American diplomats who feared that a communist-backed opposition in Zanzibar could turn the islands into an African Cuba.

Now the mainland and islands are approaching a stand-off over their relationship. For all the unrest, few Zanzibaris believe secession is a reasonable prospect, not only because of the mainland’s certain resistance but because the islands’ economy is so poor that they could scarcely survive on their own. Instead, Zanzibari intellectuals hope for some genuine federal union.

Meanwhile, Western diplomats and other observers believe that the 66-year-old Nyerere intends to bring Zanzibar securely into the Tanzanian fold before he retires as head of the party, whenever that may be.

This is bound to inflame the islanders at their most tender spot.

“The people of Zanzibar are very proud of their identity,” says Hamadi from the dusty yard where he spends his days now in internal exile, fasting and studying Muslim tracts.

“Anything having to do with their identity they will oppose. No Zanzibari could accept being swallowed.”