Revolution in Zanzibar: An American's Cold War Tale

Don Petterson. Revolution in Zanzibar: An American's Cold War Tale. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002. xv + 277 pp. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Index. $28.00. Cloth.

The memoirs of Don Petterson, a career diplomat, provide the backdrop for this eyewitness account of the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, in which a loose coalition of African laborers and farmers, trade union organizers, and avid Marxists wrested power from the East African islands' postcolonial Arab-dominated government. Petterson served as the islands' vice-consul during the years leading up to the revolution, and he holds the distinction of having been the only American remaining in Zanzibar throughout the uprising and in the postrevolution period.

Petterson's opening passage, a rather sensationalist scene of mass murder and mayhem witnessed by twenty-two frightened Americans, gives readers their first glimpse of the 1964 revolution. The remainder of the book's introductory chapter provides a concise history of Zanzibar, beginning with the interaction of Arab traders with the islands' native inhabitants, followed by the establishment of the clove industry, the slave trade, and Omani Arab colonial rule. This chapter also includes information about early European and American contact with the islands as well as Zanzibar's evolution into a British protectorate and an American area of interest. Petterson maintains this American perspective throughout the text.

Although the book contains some excellent background information about Zanzibar, Petterson fails to discuss and analyze the reasons behind, and the state of affairs leading up to, the 1964 revolution. He incorrectly portrays the revolution as a spontaneous lumpen rebellion and concentrates on the cold war angle, rather than detailing the motivations and methods of the various groups involved in the uprising. Making frequent references to Soviet-controlled subversive elements as the revolution's driving force while ignoring the era's powerful tide of African nationalism, he lets his own agenda overshadow any factual information or thoughtful analysis he might otherwise have provided. In his quest to link events in Zanzibar with the larger scheme of U.S. cold war-era foreign policy in Africa, Petterson misses the opportunity to describe the Zanzibar revolution as it really happened. He reduces the revolution to a random disturbance by an unfocused mob while failing to give any attention to the deeper ideology that fueled the political currents behind the uprising. This simplistic view discredits Petterson's work, offering nothing more than a narrow perspective, aptly summed up by the book's subtitle: "An American's Cold War Tale".

Apart from its one-sidedness, Petterson's account of the events of the revolution relies far too heavily on Anthony Clayton's The Zanzibar Revolution and Its Aftermath (Archon, 1981). Clayton's contentious version of events is drawn primarily from the unreliable diaries of John Okello (Revolution in Zanzibar [Nairobi: EAPH, 1967]), an egotistical and mentally unstable roughneck who, though playing a part in the actual events of the revolution, had very little to do with the concrete situation in Zanzibar at the time of the uprising. Okello, a Ugandan by birth, was working in Zanzibar when the 1964 revolution broke out, at which point he opportunistically appointed himself leader of a ragtag band of angry young men who engaged in the ensuing acts of racial violence, looting, vandalism, terror, and bloodshedthe majority of which had nothing to do with the primary goals and objectives identified by the technically skilled and ideologically fortified revolutionaries of the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) and the Marxist-oriented Umma Party.

Petterson's "eyewitness account" ends up sounding like an awkward amalgamation of his own uneventful diary entries with the more exciting (and no doubt exaggerated) happenings related in the Okello and Clayton texts. His clumsy prose combines sensational scenes of racially charged murder with banal statements detailing his own concurrent comings and goings. The lasting impression is that Petterson's so-called eyewitness account is really just his own personalized version of Okello's hyperbolic rantings, with a bit of Clayton's analysis thrown in for good measure.

Althugh this text is a welcome addition to the small body of literature about Zanzibar, let the buyer beware. Given its biased perspective and its memoir format, Don Petterson's Revolution in Zanzibar: An American's Cold War Tale should be taken with a grain of salt and not as a credible scholarly work on the subject of the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.

Jennifer Betowt

Huntsville, Alabama

Copyright African Studies Association Sep 2003
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