1964 Zanzibar Revolution: Island of Transgression, Memory, and Contested History

The construction of a national past is a construct of an explicit kind that claims both moral and emotional attachments to particular motherlands or homelands and territories, positing long-established links between people, territory, and polity (Arendt 1973; Appadurai 1990, 1991; Anderson 1991; Renan 1990; Wright 1985).  My interests lies in how collective histories challenge one another or engage in struggles over both history and truth; how the social and imaginative processes of constructing national identity for those in exile are influenced by local and everyday circumstances of life in exile, and how social and spatial isolation of those who have been deterritorialized figure in these processes.  This narrative research engaged the memories of men and women who experienced the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.  Interviews conducted with informants on Zanzibar, as well as with Zanzibari's who fled following the revolution to settle in places such as Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Yemen  provide  insights that reflect a contested and contentious past.  For almost 45 years of silence and forgetting, the informants who shared their memories of this time struggle with how to make sense of transgressions that ended in the murders of many on the island.  Fear for their lives and those of their families, led many of Arab and South Asian origin to flee the island with hopes of return which most often did not materialize.