On the fiftieth anniversary of the killing and raping of the Arabs of Zanzibar in the wake of the 1964 Revolution, this chapter seeks to establish that the revolution constituted genocide. In light of the almost complete failure of historians and commentators to foreground this tragedy, we argue that tragedy in Zanzibar has been a “denied” genocide. No reference whatsoever is made to it in the fast growing literature on genocide published in the last two decades, except for a passing reference in a 2002 reader edited by Alexander Hinton. The chapter argues that this genocide is commonly ignored even in studies devoted to bring to life the memory of hidden genocides. Of books lifting the lid on denied genocide, only Heribert Adams devoted a chapter to Zanzibar.

Unfortunately, the passage of a half century since the tragedy has not sensitized us to the ghoulishness of a rare genocide that was filmed on location by Italian TV and popularized in the documentary Africa Addio (1967). The newsreel from Zanzibar and other atrocities in Africa were sufficiently graphic to cause African ambassadors to protest to the Italian government for showing a film that was a disservice to a recently independent continent struggling with colonial legacies.

This chapter unpacks the politics of the “social forces dedicated to preserving unproblematic historical narratives that claim a given genocide never occurred.” It discusses the emergence of various regimes of thought that prevented the Zanzibar killing fields from being labelled as genocide; African nativism, African memory as it pertains to Arab slavery, class-biased Marxism, revolution and liberal democracy, and pan-Africanism in Cold War politics.

The Numbers Game In writings about the revolution, the numbers reported of how many Arabs the revolutionaries slayed in 1964 diverge widely. They “vary from a few dozens to about 14,000.” The lack of interest in getting these numbers right fifty years after the tragedy comes through in the indifference shown to specifity by Seif Sharif Hamad, a member of the revolutionary government of Zanzibar. He said he had been told in the aftermath of the massacre that over 13,000, mostly Arabs, lost their lives. One would have expected a more firm number from a man in the loop like Hamad.