People's Republic of Zanzibar
| People's Republic of Zanzibar | ||||||||||
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| Capital | Zanzibar City | |||||||||
| Religion | Islam | |||||||||
| Government | Military-led republic | |||||||||
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| • | 23 Jan – 26 Apr 1964 | Abeid Karume | ||||||||
| Historical era | Cold War | |||||||||
| • | Zanzibar Revolution | January 12, 1964 | ||||||||
| • | Merger with Tanganyika | April 26, 1964 | ||||||||
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The People's Republic of Zanzibar was an African state founded in 1964, consisting of the islands of the Zanzibar Archipelago. It existed for less than a year before it merged with Tanganyika to create the United Republic of Tanzania.
In the wake of the Zanzibar Revolution, a Revolutionary Council was established by the ASP and Umma parties to act as an interim government, with Abeid Karume heading the council as President and Abdulrahman Mohammad Babu serving as the Minister of External Affairs. The country was renamed the People's Republic of Zanzibar; the new government's first acts were to permanently banish the Sultan and to ban the Zanzibar Nationalist Party and Zanzibar and Pemba People's Party. Seeking to distance himself from the volatile John Okello, Karume quietly sidelined him from the political scene, although he was allowed to retain his self-bestowed title of field marshal. However, Okello's revolutionaries soon began reprisals against the Arab and Asian population of Unguja, carrying out beatings, rapes, murders, and attacks on property. He claimed in radio speeches to have killed or imprisoned tens of thousands of his "enemies and stooges", but actual estimates of the number of deaths vary greatly, from "hundreds" to 20,000. Some Western newspapers give figures of 2,000–4,000; the higher numbers may be inflated by Okello's own broadcasts and exaggerated reports in some Western and Arab news media. The killing of Arab prisoners and their burial in mass graves was documented by an Italian film crew, filming from a helicopter, for Africa Addio and this sequence of film comprises the only known visual document of the killings. Many Arabs fled to safety in Oman, although by Okello's order no Europeans were harmed. The post-revolution violence did not spread to Pemba.
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