The 1964 Zanzibar Revolution: 600 Rebels, a Toppled Sultan, and a Death Toll Nobody Agrees On

Zanzibar had been an independent sultanate for only a month short of a year, having gained independence from Britain in December 1963 with its Arab minority-led monarchy intact, when it collapsed in a single overnight uprising. On the night of January 11 into January 12, 1964, a force of somewhere between 600 and 800 armed men, drawn from the Afro-Shirazi Party’s youth wing and led by a Ugandan-born self-styled “field marshal” named John Okello, seized police armories, government buildings, and the radio station on Zanzibar’s main island. By morning, Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah, who had ruled for barely six months, had fled into exile aboard his royal yacht, and the sultanate that had governed the islands for over a century was finished.

Okello himself remains one of the era’s stranger figures. A day laborer and self-taught preacher with no formal military background, he had drilled the rebel force in secret in the weeks before the uprising and declared himself its commander without any official appointment from the Afro-Shirazi Party’s actual political leadership, who were reportedly as surprised by the revolution’s specifics as anyone. His radio broadcasts during and after the takeover, threatening violence against the deposed government and its Arab and South Asian supporters in explicitly racial terms, alarmed even his nominal allies, and party leader Abeid Amani Karume sidelined him from real power within weeks of the revolution’s success. Okello left Zanzibar later in 1964 and was never allowed to return; his eventual fate after the late 1960s is not definitively documented.

What happened to Zanzibar’s Arab and South Asian minorities in the revolution’s aftermath is the part historians still argue about most. The fighting itself killed a comparatively small number, credible estimates put deaths during the takeover at under 100. What followed in the days and weeks after was a far larger and more contested wave of violence targeting Arab residents specifically, with death toll estimates ranging from several hundred to figures as high as 20,000 depending on the source and methodology, a gap wide enough that no single number can be treated as settled. Historian Jonathan Glassman, who has studied the revolution’s racial dimensions extensively, has estimated Zanzibar lost roughly a quarter of its Arab population by the end of 1964 through killings, flight, and expulsion, whatever the precise death count. Thousands of refugees fled to Oman and other parts of the Arab world in the months that followed.

The new revolutionary government, led by Karume as head of the newly declared People’s Republic of Zanzibar, moved quickly to consolidate. In April 1964, just three months after the revolution, Zanzibar merged with the mainland state of Tanganyika, itself independent since 1961, to form the United Republic of Tanzania, a union that has held, not without periodic friction over Zanzibar’s autonomy, ever since. The revolution is remembered on Zanzibar today with an official holiday, but the scale and character of the violence that secured it, celebrated by some as a necessary uprising against colonial-era racial hierarchy and condemned by others as a pogrom, remains one of East Africa’s most unresolved historical arguments.