Property confiscation in the Zanzibar Revolution

Abstract

The literature on the Zanzibar Revolution highlights contested views of events leading up to a short period of violence in 1964. Other studies have followed the paths of those who fled the islands of Zanzibar in the aftermath of the revolution, many of whom lost property to government confiscations. How the confiscations impacted and still inform the relation of their previous owners to Zanzibar, however, has received rather little scholarly attention. This article introduces a dataset of georeferenced property confiscation orders, originally published in the Zanzibar Gazettes between 1964 and 1987. The data contribute to our understanding of the Zanzibar Revolution by showing that the temporal arc of the Revolution was decades long and that property confiscations went beyond urban houses in Stone Town and large plantations. Property confiscations, effected by revolutionary decree, persisted into the 1980s on both Pemba and Unguja islands. By bringing the data into conversation with family histories and previous literature on the aftermath of the revolution, this article illustrates the relevance of Revolutionary era property losses for questions of identity, belonging, desire for restitution, and ongoing development efforts.