The Happy Island

Once upon a time, in the palm-fringed squares of Zanzibar, off Africa's east coast, where Arabs gather each evening to chat over tiny cups of syrupy black coffee, the talk was all of pleasant things, of rich crops of clove and cinnamon, of the fleets of slant-sailed dhows which each January drifted over to the island on the northeast winds and in April, when the winds changed, drifted back, heavy-laden, toward India and the Arabian coast. Zanzibar, in the words of one of its political leaders, was "a happy island"--its climate fine, its people content, its crime rate low, and even its clocks willing to jog along a full six hours behind those in the rest of East Africa. But that was before democracy raised its enlightened head. Last week as Zanzibaris, dressed in their Sunday best, trooped to the polls to cast the first votes of their lives, the world caught up with Zanzibar.

Mixed Lot. The people of Zanzibar and the nearby island of Pemba are a mixed lot. At the bottom are the 200,000 black Africans, "God's Poor." Then come the 45,000 better educated and land-rich Arabs, descendants of Arab conquerors who hailed originally from Muscat and Oman. The tiny European colony at last count numbered 296, mostly British officials. Most everybody on the island speaks Kiswahili and practices Mohammedanism (including the blacks). Overseeing everything is an aged (77) and beloved Sultan, His Highness Seyyid Sir Khalifa bin Harub, G.C.B., G.C.M.G., G.B.E. (whom God Preserve).* The old Sultan owns three palaces, three pet peacocks and three bright red automobiles.

But despite Zanzibar's isolation and contentment, the cry for independence began to be heard. It was the Arabs who did the stirring. Last year Britain agreed that six of the twelve "unofficial" members of the Sultanate's 25-man legislative council should be elected by popular vote from an election roll open to all, regardless of race. The newly formed, Arab-led Nationalist Party was delighted, and its leader, Sheikh Ali Muhsin Barwani, 38, a well-educated Zanzibar Arab, boldly filed for office not in a "safe" constituency of Arabs but for Ngambo (literally, the Other Side), the heavily African poor section of Zanzibar city. He counted on the fact that two-thirds of his party's membership is African.

Zanzibar Ernie. But in the sudden awareness of the fact that they had been given equal rights with the Arabs, and harking to the racial winds blowing over from Kenya, Zanzibar's black majority awoke to a new sense of its own importance. Once they had been divided--the Africans from the mainland, and the other blacks, who call themselves Shirazis and claim descent from Persian conquerors. The two factions came together under the leadership of 52-year-old Abeid Annane Karume, described by one local Briton as "the Ernie Bevin of the Zanzibar workingmen's movement." The son of a slave woman from Ruanda-Urandi, a longtime merchant seaman whose 22 years at sea carried him to most of the world's ports, including the U.S., Karume eventually rose to quartermaster and then settled down to run a syndicate of motorboats in Zanzibar harbor.

Campaigning took an odd turn. The Arab nationalists wanted to stay in the Commonwealth but decried British "imperialism," criticized Zanzibar's "alien civil service" (Muhsin keeps Nasser's picture on his living-room wall). In contrast, African Candidate Karume was for eventual independence, but "we want the British to stay--for a time--because we will learn something from the British; the Arabs are backward just like us, and they try to make slaves out of us." Soon the Arab Nationalists were complaining that the British were too eagerly encouraging African registration. Local Britons were delighted by the African support of them. "I say," said one, "they are getting keen on us."

Last week 89% of the nation's 40,000 newly enfranchised voters went to the polls, shading themselves with parasols made of banana leaves. Result: a landslide for the black majority. In Ngambo, Quartermaster Karume swamped Sheikh Muhsin 3,328 to 918. "I'm a son of Zanzibar," crowed the triumphant Karume. "Those others, they're all descended from somewhere else, not Africa."

* Enthroned in 1911, the same year as Queen Elizabeth's grandfather, George V.

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