Africa: Who Is Safe?

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Shaken Awake. Led by John Okello, a muscular, messianic Ugandan house painter turned cop, a handful of rebels armed with a few automatic rifles, pangas, and bows and arrows stormed the police armory, grabbed the cable office, radio station, police and government headquarters, and toppled the Arab-dominated Zanzibar Nationalist Party government. Behind studded doors and on clove plantations, the heavily armed Arabs fought on for days. Before the bloodbath ended, at least 500 Arabs were dead, while some reports counted the casualties as high as 5,000. Into the presidency came Afro-Shirazi Party Leader Abeid Karume, who claimed that he had really sparked the revolt. Okello denied it. However, last week Okello was twirling a cane in Dar es Salaam, and reports had it that he was no longer welcome in Zanzibar.

Whatever the motives and machina tions of Zanzibar's coup leaders, it is clear that the violence and ease of accomplishment with which their revolution was carried out flashed a mutinous impulse across the Zanzibar Channel. At 3 a.m. on Jan. 20, Julius Nyerere was asleep in the second-floor bedroom of his Moorish-style State House in Dar es Salaam. Suddenly security men shook him awake, told him that mutiny had erupted among the battalion of Tanganyika Rifles stationed at Colito Barracks outside Dar. Fearing that, like his friend, Sylvanus Olympic, he might be killed to no purpose, Nyerere went into hiding. Had he remained in public view, if only to negotiate with the mutineers, the general rioting and the 17 deaths that followed might not have occurred. Today Nyerere admits as much. But he did accomplish the most important thing—he kept himself and his government alive.

After his hard-driving Minister of External Affairs and Defense, Oscar Kambona, had negotiated a settlement with the rebels, Nyerere emerged, toured the city to the relief of all, but made no mention of disciplining the mutineers. Next day, to test his control over them, he ordered the First Battalion to put on its dress uniforms. They refused. Negotiations over the pay increase were breaking down and the soldiers were growing restive. Their ringleaders had been meeting with the leaders of the Tanganyika Federation of Labor, and there were reports that a general strike was being planned for the weekend.

Nyerere still refused to act. Finally, Kambona convinced him that he must call for help. Both Kenya's and Uganda's Prime Ministers, Jomo Kenyatta and Milton Obote, had swallowed their anticolonial pride and called in British troops when the spirit of mutiny flared among their Riflemen. Reluctantly, Nyerere followed suit. It took only 60 Royal Marine Commandos to rout the mutineers.

On Beyond Anarchy. Once the British presence was an accomplished fact, Nyerere got tough. He dismissed the entire First Battalion, fired 500 of his 5,000-man police force suspected of aiding the mutineers, and disbanded the labor federation, arresting 200 of its ranking members. Then, safe but sorry, he cast about for ways to fend off potential African criticism for his calling in of the British.