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REVOLUTION IN ZANZIBAR by Don Petterson

REVOLUTION IN ZANZIBAR

An American’s Cold War Tale

by Don Petterson

Pub Date: May 1st, 2001
ISBN: 0-8133-3949-9

A comprehensive account of events surrounding the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar as experienced by American vice consul Petterson.

At the time a young man with a new wife and child, Petterson was looking forward to working on his Swahili and getting to know the island when he was posted to Zanzibar, directly off the coast of East Africa. What no one knew was that a revolutionary named John Okello was about to tap deep-seated “ethnic and class hatreds” in order to overthrow the country's entrenched Arabic leadership, install an all-African government, and lead a massacre of about ten percent of the island's Arab population. Petterson gives an almost hour-by-hour account of the insurgency’s first confusing days, recounting how mobs of locals roamed the streets, raping and killing Arab citizens but, almost miraculously, obeying their leader's instructions not to harm the Americans or Europeans, all of whom were evacuated in short order. The instability of his boss, the senior consular official, meant that Petterson was the only US representative on the island in those early days; he spent his time delivering censored reports of events, trying to protect American property, and slowly burning sensitive documents in a small hand-cranked stove. The US and Britain recognized the new government, and Petterson moves on to document the Cold War machinations that informed all of his official actions in the months that followed, the many players involved in local government, and the almost comical relations among the various diplomatic factions—American, English, Cuban, Chinese, Czech, Bulgarian—that showed up to make their presence felt in the new and malleable republic. Petterson's beautifully lucid prose teases out the numerous characters, loyalties, and motivations, and his eye for the amusing makes for an engaging tale.

Required reading for those interested in Zanzibar history and the African theater of the Cold War.