Tanganyika Unites with Zanzibar: Tanzania Is Born

Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged on April 26, 1964, to form the United Republic of Tanzania under President Julius Nyerere, creating the largest nation in East Africa and one of the most unusual political unions in postcolonial history. The merger came just four months after a violent revolution on Zanzibar had overthrown the island's Arab-dominated sultanate in January 1964, replacing it with a revolutionary government led by Abeid Karume and the Afro-Shirazi Party. The Zanzibar Revolution was brief and bloody. On January 12, 1964, approximately 600 armed insurgents led by the Ugandan-born John Okello seized the police armories, government buildings, and the sultan's palace in a predawn coup. Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah fled to exile. The revolution targeted the Arab and South Asian merchant class that had dominated Zanzibar's political and economic life under both the sultanate and British colonial rule. Estimates of those killed range from several hundred to several thousand, with widespread looting and sexual violence directed at Arab and Indian communities. Nyerere's motivations for the merger were partly ideological and partly strategic. He feared that Zanzibar's revolutionary government, which had received immediate recognition from the Soviet Union and China, could become a Cold War flashpoint off the East African coast. A union with Tanganyika would absorb the volatile island into a larger, more stable, and more Western-aligned state. Karume saw the merger as protection against counterrevolution and a way to access Tanganyika's larger economy. The negotiations were conducted in secret and announced as a fait accompli. Tanzania under Nyerere pursued ujamaa, a vision of African socialism based on collective farming and self-reliance that attracted international admiration but produced economic stagnation. The union itself has endured for six decades, though not without tension. Zanzibar retains its own president, legislature, and judiciary for internal affairs, and separatist sentiment persists on the islands. Elections in Zanzibar have been consistently more violent and contested than those on the mainland, reflecting unresolved questions about the terms of a union that was negotiated between two leaders rather than ratified by their populations.