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The General Strike in Zanzibar, 1948

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Anthony Clayton
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Extract

This article examines a three-week long strike in Zanzibar City in August and September 1948. The strike began among labourers from the mainland at work in Zanzibar port, but spread to all African work-people in the City after an unsuccessful attempt to break the strike by the government. This attempt had led to a major demonstration and confrontation at the entrance to the port, violence being only narrowly averted.

While at one level the strike was a Zanzibar sequel to the strikes of the previous year in Mombasa and Dar es Salaam, in Zanzibar there was additional significance in the fact that the City and Island's work-force were in very large proportion men from the East African mainland. Zanzibar's dependence on mainland labour had begun in the early decades of the twentieth century. In those years mainland labour had been particularly well-paid, by the standards of the time. By the late 1940s however, mainland labour in Zanzibar was as poor as, perhaps poorer than, its mainland counterparts. Besides, the political structure of the Protectorate aggravated sentiments of alienation since mainlanders were not regarded as permanent residents for whom the government should have any particular concern: nor were mainlanders represented in the legislature.

Even after the strike was over the colonial authorities saw only a need for labour reforms rather than political re-structuring to accommodate mainlanders. The strike however had briefly united all Africans, indigenous and mainlander. When, a decade later, this unity of Africans, mainlander and indigenous, town and plantation labourer and peasant, was re-formed, revolution followed. As a portent, therefore, Zanzibar's strike is of particular significance.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 1976 , pp. 417 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

1 The strike has not hitherto attracted any academic attention. There are three sentences about the strike in Harlow, V. and others (eds.), History of East Africa, ii (Oxford. 1965), 670Google Scholar. Neither Lofchie, M., Zanzibar, Background to Revolution (Oxford, 1965)Google Scholar nor Ayany, S. G., A History of Zanzibar (Nairobi, 1970)Google Scholar, record the event at all.

This article is a shortened version of my more detailed study entitled The 1948 Zanzibar General Strike (Uppsala, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Research Report No. 32, 1976). An earlier version was presented to a seminar at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, and I am grateful for comments made on that occasion.

2 The analysis which follows is based on a Social Survey of Zanzibar and Notes on the Census of Zanzibar Protectorate, 1948. The Social Survey was conducted in 1948–9 by Professor E. Batson of Cape Town University. Its twenty-one volume manuscript report appeared in London and Cape Town in 1962, but material may have been available for official use much earlier. There is a copy in the library of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London.

3 This figure for Arabs included a number of people of mixed ancestry who at this time perceived themselves as Arabs.

4 Agriculture Department, Annual Report, 1924. See also Church, A. G., East Africa. A New Dominion (London, 1928), 168Google Scholar. Church, an M.P. and member of the Ormsby-Gore Commission of 1924, observed that the wages paid to mainland labour in Zanzibar, the rupee equivalent of Shs. 30 per month, were the highest rate in Eastern Africa. The cash element of Kenya resident labourers' wages was Shs. 12 to Shs. 14 at this time.

5 The 1948 Census, also quoted in Middleton, J. and Campbell, J., Zanzibar: its Society and Politics (London, 1965), 21.Google Scholar

6 The Social Survey, I, notes one-third of the Protectorate's male mainland Africans and one-fifth of the female as born outside the Protectorate, but in Zanzibar City 47 per cent of the mainland population were immigrants.

7 This table is based upon Report of the Native Census, 1924; Notes on the Census of the Zanzibar Protectorate, 1948; and Goldthorpe, J. E. and Wilson, F. B., Tribal Maps of East Africa and Zanzibar (Kampala, 1960)Google Scholar, which provide 1931 census figures. Both sets of figures represent totals collected outside the clove-picking season. In the case of the 1924 census, I have added totals collected under the headings of ‘Shihiri’, ‘Swahili’, ‘Hadimu’, ‘Tumbatu’, ‘Shirazi’ and ‘Pemba’, for the heading Indigenous; and ‘Nyasa’, ‘Yao’, ‘Nyamwezi’, ‘Manyema’, ‘Zaramu’, ‘Kikuyu’ and ‘Other Africans’ for the heading Main-landers. In the case of the 1931 census, quoted by Goldthorpe and Wilson, the headings were the same, except there were no ‘Shihiri’. There are certain discrepancies between the figures published at different times; these reflect their rudimentary methods of collection and analysis.

8 These wage rates are taken from the Zanzibar and Tanganyika Annual Colony Reports. Zanzibar's attraction lay in its local freedom from direct taxation, linked to the fact that many mainland Tanganyikan district officials (but not all) would not tax a man who had been away at work.

9 Report of the Native Census, 1924, and Social Survey I. The Social Survey's figures do not quite tally with those of the 1948 Census. Batson, drawing his distinction between mainlanders born on the mainland and those born in Zanzibar or Pemba, noted a masculinity ratio of 2·2 for the former category in the Protectorate as a whole.

For a contemporary comment on a similar decline in the fortunes of coast labour in Kenya see Clayton, A. and Savage, D. C., Government and Labour in Kenya, 1895–1963 (London, 1975), 271–2.Google Scholar

10 The Social Survey's tables on ‘Social Class’ (IV), ‘Occupations’ (V), Numbers in Households (VII), ‘Personal Socio-Economic Rating’ (XII), ‘Wage Earners’ (XIII), ‘International Occupational Classification’ (XIV), ‘Nature of Employer’ (XVII) and Plantation Ownership (XV) all indicate the mainlanders’ position at the bottom of the scale.

11 Social Survey, I.

12 Annual Report, Zanzibar Protectorate, 1948.

13 Ranger, T. O., Dance and Society in Eastern Africa (London, 1975), 20–2, 102Google Scholar, provides evidence strongly suggesting ex-slave dance groups. F. Wilson, formerly Zanzibar Agriculture Department and later Professor at the University of East Africa, to the author, 12 June 1975, notes the savings clubs.

14 The Hon. A. P. T. H. Cumming-Bruce, Zanzibar Administration at the time, to the author, 20 June 1975: “Just as it did more obviously at independence, this arrogance triggered off African self-consciousness; the term ‘mwafrica’ was a new and unfamiliar one.”

A Moslem day of shop-closure and strikes had taken place on 12 December 1947.

15 Annual Report, Zanzibar Protectorate, 1946.

16 Barber, D. B., Zanzibar Administration at the time, to the author, 24 May 1975Google Scholar. Barber commented that, as a district commissioner, he received numerous complaints.

17 Clayton, and Savage, , Government and Labour, 293–5, 276–9.Google Scholar

18 Iliffe, John, ‘A History of the Dockworkers of Dar es Salaam’, Tanzania Notes and Records, no. 71 (1970), 119–48.Google Scholar

19 Cumming-Bruce, to the author, 20 June 1975Google Scholar. Cumming-Bruce and others have suggested that the huge sums of money being spent on a project believed by Africans to be doomed from the start must in itself have spurred on a demand for higher wages.

20 Two ‘general wisdom’ comments of the time were: “Zanzibar imported in a month more that it could consume in a year” and “Zanzibar's fishing boats left the island for a night's fishing off Bagamoyo as low in the water as on their return after a heavy catch”.

A British business man (hereafter A.B.) to the author, 30 June 1975. A.B. was resident in Zanzibar at this time.

21 The Zanzibar Labour Report, 1949, notes the strength of the Labour Association as 380.

22 These representatives were selected informally by their fellows but were no doubt subject to Company approval. There was no trade union.

23 These other benefits included full pay during temporary disability arising out of employment and half pay for up to 50 days during other illness.

24 McQueen, D., Branch Manager of Smith Mackenzie Ltd., in Zanzibar at the time, to the author, May 1975.Google Scholar

25 In reconstructing the events of the strike, I have used the British Resident's address to the Zanzibar Legislative Council (Proceedings of Zanzibar Legislative Council, 6 Sept. 1948), Bell, Colonel A. to the author, 19 Sept. 1975Google Scholar, and the Zanzibar Annual Report, 1948, as a basis for the sequence of events. Colonel Bell's letter enclosed extracts from a report written by him to the Inspector-General of Colonial Police Forces at the Colonial Office, 31 Jan. 1952, and extracts from his own diary.

26 McQueen to the author, confirmed by Shaikh Yahya Alawi, District Commissioner Zanzibar Urban at the time, to the author, 10 July 1975; Stiven, E., interview March 1976Google Scholar; and Robertson, Captain J. B. to the author 10 Aug. 1975Google Scholar. Robertson wondered whether Kenyatta had been only a ‘front man’. The practice of assuming a name to attract attention or increase prestige was not an uncommon one in East Africa at the time. The Immigration Regulation and Restriction Decree in force in Zanzibar at the time required no documents from African mainland immigrants (except, technically, those from Nyasaland and Mozambique) other than a smallpox vaccination certificate and, only occasionally, a yellow fever certificate. Mainland Africans were exempt from immigration control; they could present themselves from vaccination (free) or, if time was short, borrow or buy a certificate. No control or identity card system existed therefore to check on an African under any name he wished to select entering or seeking employment in Zanzibar. Wright, W., formerly of the Zanzibar Police, to the author, 12 July 1975.Google Scholar

27 Henderson, Ian, ‘Early African leadership: the Copperbelt Disturbances of 1935 and 1940,’ J. Southern African Studies, ii (1975), 83–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clayton, and Savage, , Government and Labour, 222–5.Google Scholar

28 The Zanzibar Voice, 22, 29 Aug. 1947, notes the claim, warning that the Wharfage Company's monopoly position could, and perhaps had, led to its identification with the government. The Wharfage Company's labour force did not contain a preponderance of any mainland ethnic group; Robertson, however, believed that the fact that it represented so great a mixture made it the more militant.

29 , A. B. to the author, 30 June 1975.Google Scholar

30 The Zanzibar Official Gazette, 31 Aug., 1 Sept. 1948.

31 Bell, to the author, 19 and 27 Sept. 1975Google Scholar, and Busaidi, Seyyid Saud, town mudir at the time, to the author, July 1975.Google Scholar

32 Ph. Pullincino, a senior colonial officer in the secretariat, wrote to the author (10 June 197S): “Soon office messengers were called on by the strikers to stop work, and the stoppage rapidly spread to domestic servants … Later a gang or gangs of men went from house to house to ensure that all servants were out…” The compact area of Ngambo made the rapid passing of the strike call and the summoning of a crowd very easy, a point made in the Tanganyika Standard, 18 Sept. 1948.

33 Busaidi, to the author, July 1975.Google Scholar

34 This committee became in practice a temporary Minimum Wage Board, operating by recommendations and not producing a formal report.

35 Adie, J. J., the secretariat official, to the author, 28 Mar., and Bell to the author, 19 Sept. 1975.Google Scholar

36 Busaidi, to the author, July 1975.Google Scholar

37 The Zanzibar Voice, 5 Sept. 1948.

38 Barnabas was not a militant figure; he was a quiet and deeply religious man of peace-loving temperament. He remained in Zanzibar until after the revolution, which he soon found discouraging, and retired to the Mainland where he died in 1965. Russell, Bishop Neil to the author, 1 Aug. 1975Google Scholar; MrsDavies, V. to the author, 14 Sept. 1975Google Scholar. Lofchie, op. cit. 165, notes that Barnabas was President of the African Association in the early 1950s.

39 Busaidi, to the author, July 1975.Google Scholar

40 Zanzibar Labour Report, 1948, Robertson to the author, 10 Aug. 1975, believes the strikers' major error was not to have arranged that the strike was simultaneous in port and city.

41 McQueen, to the author, May 1975Google Scholar. Robertson, to the author, 10 Aug. 1975Google Scholar, states that at the time he also heard of Kenyatta's departure and subsequent arrest. He judged that the fund could not have amounted to more than a few hundred shillings and that the labour force bore him no ill-will.

42 , A. B., the businessman concerned, to the author, 30 June 1975.Google Scholar

43 Smith, K. G. S., Zanzibar Administration at the time, to the author, 27 Apr. 1975.Google Scholar

44 The Zanzibar Voice, 5 Sept. 1948, notes the Arab domestic scene. Bell, to the author, 19 Sept. 1975Google Scholar, notes the Europeans' reaction. Robertson, to the author, 10 Aug. 1975Google Scholar, remarked that the strike was ‘more political and anti-white than a true labour movement’.

45 The Tanganyika Standard, 25 Sept. 1948. The report noted that the meeting took place and the boycott began while the strike was in progress.

46 The playing down was quite deliberate: , A. B. to the author, 14 July 1975Google Scholar. A. B. was connected with the East African Standard group. The postponement of a much publicized ceremonial visit of the Royal Navy's Indian Ocean flagship, H.M.S. Birmingham, was presented as a news item unrelated to the strike. Even the report of the Italian liner drama played down the strikers' intervention.

47 The strike attracted very little attention in Britain. It was briefly mentioned in The Times and attracted two somewhat perfunctory parliamentary questions from Rankin, J. and Platts-Mills, J. F., two left-wing Labour M.P.s. (Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 22, 24 Sept. 1948)Google Scholar neither of which resulted in any awakened British interest in Zanzibar since there did not seem to be any particular causes for concern, such as shooting or death.

48 The Zanzibar Labour Report, belatedly admitted: “A particularly unfortunate feature of the strike was the clearly evinced inspiration by agitators not normally resident in the Protectorate … it was apparent that a number of African workers came out on strike for no better reason than a mistaken sense of loyalty to their own race …”.