The Zanzibar treason trial

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Abstract
More than four years ago Sheikh Abeid Karume, Chairman of the Zanzibar Revolutionary Council and First Vice‐President of the United Republic of Tanzania, was assassinated. (Karume's two positions of authority reflected a fact which is worth emphasising: despite the union in 1964 of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, the latter essentially retained its complete internal political autonomy, with the result that two entirely separate administrations ruled different parts of the nominally united country.) In the aftermath of an ensuing investigation—which involved the detention of approximately 1,100 people and the extensive use of torture—the Zanzibari authorities announced that they had uncovered a far‐reaching plot ‘conceived and masterminded’ by Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, a former leader of the nationalist movement and an important actor in the 1964 revolutionary insurrection which established the present Zanzibari administration, a cabinet minister in the Tanzanian government from 1964–72, and an internationally influential communist. This article briefly summarises the development of the Zanzibari social formation through the colonial period, traces the developments of the post‐colonial period that resulted in Karume's assassination, reviews the process of transition occasioned by his death, and evaluates the subsequent mass treason trial which left more than 40 people under sentence of death.

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