Zanzibar: Odd Man Out

As East African Airways flight 304 approached Zanzibar one day last week, a message flashed ahead: "It is I, the field marshal, who comes. Have my army and the press waiting." Zanzi-baris could not fail to recognize the unique style of John Okello, the messianic Ugandan house-painter-turned-revolutionary whose bloody anti-Arab coup put Zanzibar's black Afro-Shirazi Party in power two months ago. But all that awaited Field Marshal Okello was rejection.

Appointment in Nairobi. His 1,200-man army was gone—dissolved by burly President Abeid Karume, who had tired of Okello's manic ravings. No sooner had the field marshal arrived than Karume sent him winging back to the mainland. There, Okello called a press conference on the veranda of Tanganyika's Dares Salaam Club, sadly explained that he had been kicked out of Zanzibar because some people, "four or five" at least, felt he carried the seeds of death. "Wherever I go there will be bloodshed," he mourned. But the old elan returned when he was asked how many had died in the coup. "Of my enemies, 11,999," he boasted. "Of my own men, nine."

And what of the future? "I will be dead in nine months," he wept. "God has told me. Someone, a Somali I think, will shoot me in Nairobi. However hard I try to get away, death will be there." It wasn't. After keeping his appointment in Nairobi (where he claimed he had less than two shillings to his name), Okello found himself persona non grata. So he bought himself a dark blue Peugeot, packed his pistol and candy-striped cane, and set off for Uganda.

No Surprises. With the oddest man in the Zanzibar revolutionary triumvirate out of the way, President Karume and his Peking-leaning Foreign Minister. Abdul Rahman Mohamed ("Babu"), were free to forge ahead with reforms. Their first target: the "degrading" rickshas that plied the narrow streets of Stone Town, Zanzibar's Arab and Indian quarter. "No longer will men work as animals on Zanzibar" Karume declared, personally putting the torch to a pile of gasoline-soaked rickshas. To avoid political backfire, he promised the owners $280 each in compensation.

Next on Karume's agenda was land reform, a basic concern of any African revolutionary leader. Last week, Karume announced that the huge, Arab-owned clove and coconut plantations on the main island would be "reallocated." Also nationalized were the shops and houses of Stone Town, from the tops of their Moorish-styled roofs to their brass-studded mahogany doors. All of this could only please the black majority on whom Karume bases his popularity. Equally pleasing was his crackdown on those bastions of squash and snobbery, the clubs. Visiting British Commonwealth Relations Secretary Duncan Sandys was sipping tea in the English Club at the very moment Karume nationalized it and all other "racial" clubs. Was Sandys affronted? Hardly. Said he: "I do not think anything would surprise me very much in Zanzibar."