John Okello and the revolution that made East Africa

On the morning of 12 January 1964, a crowd of men gathered outside Zanzibar’s central police headquarters. Armed with machetes and farming equipment, they broke into the compound and seized the firearms inside. The rebels then launched attacks on barracks, prisons, and ports across the country. Ministers fled into hiding, and their supporters were targeted by rebel patrols. By noon, a man calling himself Field Marshal John Okello had appeared on the radio to announce the dawn of a new era. Zanzibar’s racist regime, he declared, had been overthrown by a new government representing the country’s Black African majority.

Nationalists and radicals took to the streets, hungry for revolution. From his headquarters at the national radio station, Okello urged his followers to defend the new government and encouraged extreme violence against those who opposed it. Foreign observers speculated that he was a trained revolutionary or a seasoned nationalist activist. The truth, however, was more surprising. A recent immigrant from Uganda, Okello had worked as a carpenter and painter before joining a secretive rebel organisation. His rise from obscurity sparked a prolonged power struggle within Zanzibar and began a chain of events that would push the entire region to the brink of collapse.

John Okello was born in 1937. A member of the Lango community, he grew up in Okut, a small village in the north of Uganda. Orphaned at the age of eleven, he spent his teenage years moving between towns and working in the textile and construction industries. Okello’s son Moses Onyok, who still lives in the district where his father grew up, suggests that the colonial economy played an important part in Okello’s political awakening. He learned how to strike and bargain for higher wages, and was left with a lifelong distrust of the British administrators and South Asian traders who dominated local markets. Moving to Kenya in 1954 was also formative. Okello arrived just after the height of the Mau Mau Rebellion, a violent struggle for authority in the colony’s segregated highlands. The ‘spirit’ of the Mau Mau left a deep impression on Okello, inspiring him to emulate the movement throughout his revolutionary career.

As Kenya’s colonial government campaigned to suppress the Mau Mau Rebellion, their neighbours in Zanzibar were having problems of their own. The territory, made up of over fifty islands, had long been a hub of Indian Ocean trade. Conquered by Portugal in the sixteenth century and Oman in the seventeenth, it later became a protectorate of the British Empire and a bridgehead for the colonisation of East Africa. British administrators like Harold Ingrams praised Zanzibar’s cosmopolitan culture, but this ignored a stark reality of racial discrimination. Land ownership was dominated by a few Arab families. This fuelled tensions with the islands’ Black communities, the so-called Africans and Shirazis, many of whom were descended from the enslaved people once sold at local ports. By the 1950s, the arrival of working-class Arabs from Oman and Yemen, as well as labourers from the mainland, had inflamed the situation. Black African leaders whispered about a plot to turn Zanzibar back into an Arab colony, while Arabs worried that immigration might undermine their own authority.

Okello arrived in Zanzibar in 1959, hoping to take part in the islands’ lucrative spice harvest. By this time, however, ethnic tensions had reached breaking point. The territory’s anticolonial movement was split between two major groups, divided on ethnic rather than political lines. The Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP) was multiracial, but dominated by Arab radicals. The Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), meanwhile, was committed to Black nationalism. After a ZNP coalition won the territory’s 1961 elections, Zanzibar was mired in a violent ‘war of stones’ in which Arab immigrants were disproportionately targeted. Colonial officials also noted that nationalist groups had begun meeting in secret to train with improvised weapons. Okello was one of them. Working as a house painter, he had been won over by the ASP’s promise to return Zanzibar to its Black African population. In his memoirs, he recalls joining the secretive meetings of a group of labourers who planned to overthrow the Sultan’s government and install a new republic.

Okello’s broadcasts asked his supporters ‘not to do evil’ and protect minority communities as ‘guests’ of the nation, but he also ordered his troops to shoot any Arab who broke curfew or wandered outdoors during fighting

On 10 December 1963, Zanzibar achieved independence. The ZNP-ZPPP coalition formed a government, but was in power for just thirty-three days before ASP-aligned rebels toppled the government. Okello’s role in the Zanzibar Revolution has been the subject of much mythmaking. In his memoirs, he claims to have led the raid on the police headquarters and wrestled a rifle from a British officer, but this seems unlikely. As the historian Ann Lee Grimstad points out, the rebels appear to have been led into the armoury by sympathetic officers and escaped without significant fighting. What is clear, however, is that Okello and his supporters used the chaos of the revolution to occupy key points across the country. Grimstad notes that ASP leadership seem to have had provisional plans for a coup, but that Okello’s group initiated the events of 12 January without substantial oversight. Together, his supporters amassed a force of at least three hundred troops and armed themselves with weapons from the police headquarters and barracks. With the police in disarray and no national army, Okello became one of the new regime’s most important powerbrokers overnight.

Okello and his supporters set up an improvised base at Raha Leo, a civic centre in Zanzibar City. The centre soon became a revolutionary hub, with patrols passing through to receive orders and deliver political prisoners. The real prize, however, was Zanzibar’s national broadcasting service. Okello turned radio into the pulpit of the revolution. His broadcasts functioned as a form of psychological warfare, demanding that members of the former government kill their own families and threatening to burn dissenters alive. As in 1961, Zanzibar’s minorities endured the worst of the bloodshed. Okello’s broadcasts asked his supporters ‘not to do evil’ and protect minority communities as ‘guests’ of the nation, but he also ordered his troops to shoot any Arab who broke curfew or wandered outdoors during fighting. ‘I have arms which can completely destroy Zanzibar’, he announced on 14 January, ‘[and] I can use these arms without regret.’ While the exact numbers are unclear, revolutionary forces murdered thousands in the weeks that followed the revolution. By the end of 1964, more than a quarter of the islands’ Arab population had been killed or forced to flee the country.

The violence of the revolution sent shockwaves through East Africa. International observers tried to determine who Okello was and how he had risen to prominence so quickly. Deeply concerned about the Cold War in Africa, the British Foreign Office suspected communist involvement. Officials suggested that Okello may have been a pseudonym for Ali Mafoudh, a Zanzibari socialist who had opened a political office in Havana, Cuba. The US State department disagreed, noting that Okello delivered his broadcasts in a pronounced mainland accent. They suggested that he was actually William Odhiambo Okello, a Kenyan radical who had worked for anticolonial groups in Cairo. The postcolonial governments of Uganda and Kenya offered little help, pointing out that the name Okello was common in both their countries.

Okello’s sudden rise to prominence also disturbed the new Zanzibari government. He cooperated with the ASP, using his radio service to announce the formation of a new cabinet led by party leader Abeid Karume. At the same time, however, he insisted on his own role as ‘Minister of Defence, Broadcasting and Leader of the Revolutionary Government’. It was also significant that Okello was a Ugandan Christian in a government dominated by Zanzibari Muslims. His claims to have acted as a ‘messenger of God’ alienated government allies, and led to suspicions about his declining mental health. Okello’s commanding presence and well-armed supporters, however, made him difficult to depose. Karume was forced to appease his self-appointed Field Marshal, while Foreign Minister Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu told the foreign press that Okello ‘shared equal power with the Ministers.’ British diplomats speculated that the ASP would have to try to ‘ride the tiger’ until it could remove Okello from government.

In response, the ASP turned to their East African allies. The Republic of Tanganyika, which had been independent since 1961, had long offered covert support to the ASP. A week after the revolution, President Julius Nyerere dispatched one hundred members of the Police Field Force to Zanzibar to keep the peace and provide a counterweight to Okello’s supporters. This decision, however, would have dire consequences in Tanganyika. Since independence, many of the soldiers of the Tanganyika Rifles had grown dissatisfied with poor pay and the prominent British officers in their command structure. With the local police deployed to Zanzibar, they took the opportunity to strike.

On the morning of 20 January, a group of officers staged a mutiny in Dar es Salaam. Like the rebels in Zanzibar, they seized control of radio and police stations and forced Nyerere to flee into hiding. The Tanganyikan government made quick concessions to appease the mutineers, but the uprising had already spread to neighbouring countries. Troops revolted in Uganda’s Jinja Barracks and Kenya’s Lanet Barracks, seizing weapons that had been intended to suppress the mutiny in Tanganyika. For a brief moment, the entire region seemed to be on the brink of revolution.

The East African Mutinies would permanently reshape regional politics. In Kenya, the government of Jomo Kenyatta decided to appeal to its former colonial power. British troops reinforced the remaining Kenyan forces and established a pattern of close military cooperation that would grow even deeper over the subsequent decades. Kenya remains one of Britain’s closest military allies outside of NATO, but the presence of British troops in the country has led to persistent controversy.

Tanganyika followed Kenya’s lead, using British troops to seize control of the occupied barracks across Dar es Salaam. In Uganda, meanwhile, Prime Minister Milton Obote was able to suppress the mutiny by force. To sustain his power, he began to concentrate control of the military in his own Lango community. These unresolved tensions between government and the army, as the historian Timothy Parsons suggests, would ultimately contribute to his overthrow by Idi Amin.

After containing the violence of the mutinies, the East African governments then worked together to contain John Okello. In the weeks that followed the mutinies, Okello continued to participate in ASP events and celebrations, but the party worked to expel his supporters and distance him from government. On 9 March, as Okello returned from two weeks on the mainland, they felt secure enough to act. Karume escorted him back to Dar es Salaam, supposedly for a meeting with Nyerere. Upon arrival, however, Okello learned that he had been barred from returning to Zanzibar. He tried to settle in Kenya, but the Kenyatta government reintroduced colonial legislation that allowed them to deport East African citizens to their home countries. British intelligence suggests the law was pushed through to allow Kenyatta to remove Okello from the political scene. With few options left, therefore, Okello returned to Uganda. Abeid Karume and Julius Nyerere, meanwhile, worked to formalise their unofficial alliance. On 26 April, they announced the formation of the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar – a name which was later shortened to Tanzania.

In Uganda, Okello received a mixed reception. News reports mention ‘cheering crowds’ on his arrival in Kampala, but a lack of funds soon forced him to return to his home village of Okut. ‘He lived in total abject poverty’, recounts his son Moses Onyok. ‘He had nothing, so he became a rice farmer.’ This did little to dampen Okello’s revolutionary ambitions. As a fellow Lango, Okello petitioned Obote for a position in the military. He also proposed ambitious plans to travel to southern Africa and ‘fight for the underdeveloped countries.’ Obote was unconvinced, however, and Okello would spend the next five years under the close surveillance of the secret police. He returned to the public eye in 1971, in the brief moment of optimism that followed Obote’s fall from power. He travelled to Kampala to meet with the new president, Idi Amin, who used the opportunity to show that he had ‘no quarrel with Lango people, except those who were misled [by] Obote’. This cooperation, however, was short-lived. In September 1973, when Onyok was one year old, Okello was abducted by agents of the Amin regime – murdered by a dictator whom his actions had helped bring to power.

Okello’s time in power was brief, but it would leave an indelible mark on the region. His destabilising influence in Zanzibar encouraged extraordinary violence that resulted in an exodus of the islands’ Arab population. It also unsettled the ruling ASP. Karume would tighten his grasp on power over the subsequent decades, turning on many of his revolutionary allies before his own assassination in 1972. The events of January 1964 would also have effects beyond Zanzibar’s own borders. Across East Africa, the revolution and the mutinies that followed created deep insecurities about the stability of postcolonial rule, creating patterns of authority and control that persist to the present day.