Our Man in Zanzibar

Donald Petterson’s diplomatic tale takes us back to an earlier era when the British colonial empire had expired and the local Arab rulers of newly independent Zanzibar had a precarious hold over the island’s African majority. Located a little more than 20 miles off the coast of eastern Africa, the fabled island of Zanzibar had long served as a bridgehead for Arab penetration of Africa and a center of trade and slaving operations.

Petterson, a foreign service officer on his first tour overseas and a speaker of Swahili, was an eyewitness to what followed. Fueled by resentment and rage accumulated over the years, the Africans rose up against the Arabs in January 1964. In the space of a few days, 5,000 people--or about one-tenth of Zanzibar’s Arab population--were estimated to have been killed. The sultan and his retinue fled the island.

In the large sweep of history, this incident would have been of little consequence, but the revolution in Zanzibar rang alarms at the highest levels in Washington and London. Like our concerns about Castro’s Cuba in this hemisphere, it was feared that the Communist bloc would gain a foothold on the island that could then be used to destabilize East Africa’s newly independent states. These concerns were well-founded. The Soviets, East Germans, Chinese and other countries were soon providing advisors, military equipment and funds to the new leaders of Zanzibar, many of whom had communist sympathies.

The British and the Americans had few tools in their arsenal to counter this threat. Although the American ambassador in London, David Bruce, suggested Zanzibar offered an opportunity to test the mettle of America’s covert operations, this option was never seriously entertained. Nor was the use of military force unless British and American lives were in danger, which was not the case. The two Western powers did make a number of diplomatic approaches to the leaders of Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda in an effort to obtain their intervention to stem the radical tide in Zanzibar, but their efforts fell on fallow ground.

In the end, the Africans found their own solution to this danger without any outside help or even consultation. Sensing that radical elements in Zanzibar were becoming stronger by the day, and taking advantage of the travel out of the country of Zanzibar’s leading hardliner, President Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika took matters into his own hands and secretly negotiated with the more moderate president of Zanzibar a political union between the two countries.

While warmly welcomed, this development took London and Washington by surprise. The new political entity joining the mainland and the island was called Tanzania and has lasted until today, though the island of Zanzibar continues to retain its unique heritage and identity.

Petterson’s account is peppered with crises and personal dramas ranging from problems with his first boss, who drank too much, to dangerous encounters with local authorities. In fact, one of his bosses, Frank Carlucci, who much later became secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, was declared persona non grata and ordered to leave the country for an injudicious choice of words on a tapped telephone line. Petterson speculates that one of the communist intelligence agencies had edited the telephone conversation to make it appear that the Americans were engaged in a plot with dissident Zanzibaris to overthrow the government. Petterson was also ordered to leave at another time on charges that he was a spy. Some of the more fiery revolutionaries thought he should be shot, but fortunately more moderate voices prevailed.

“Revolution in Zanzibar” is a compelling narrative that provides a glimpse of a moment in the Cold War that soon disappeared from view. With a sharp eye, Petterson describes in unvarnished detail the array of African politicians with whom he had to deal and the beauty of the island’s “azure sea, verdant landscape, and beaches of white sand.” Interspersed throughout are accounts of raising a family in what can only be described as a highly volatile and often dangerous environment. He recounts colorful vignettes including when his wife, who was born in Mexico, met Che Guevara at a state ball. When asked what she was doing in Zanzibar, she replied in Spanish that she was the wife of the American consul. Che walked away.

Petterson ends his book on a somber note. He recounts revisiting Zanzibar more than 20 years later, when he was the ambassador to Tanzania. He found the infrastructure and roads in greater disrepair and poverty worse than before the revolution. The price of cloves, one of Zanzibar’s main crops, had plummeted and foreign aid had left little in its wake. While Petterson sees rays of hope here and there, he writes, reluctantly but honestly, I believe, that “for most of Africa, the outlook for decades ahead, at least, is bleak.”