Pay attention to Zanzibaris’ cry for own identity

Vice President Mohamed Gharib Bilal visits Aboud Jumbe when the former Zanzibar President was ill. Mr Jumbe goes on record as the first leader to demand for the Zanzibar’s own national identity. 

By Charles Kayoka Guest Columnist

Posted  Wednesday, September 25  2013 at  15:10

In Summary

The contentious Zanzibar identity issue has been with us from the inception of the Union and is likely to continue being the pain in the neck for the rest of the millennia

Dar es Salaam. There is no doubt that the on-going process of developing a new Union constitution has become a facility on which identity politics have come to play.

It has become a political space in which ethnic identities, among other projected identity categories, are not only being projected, but also finding their way into the final document.

However, the search for identity clearly manifested and asserted by the Zanzibaris does not augur well with the high CCM authorities whose wrath against the identity search is felt among the lesser members of the party.

I find the CCM decision to terminate membership of one of its stalwarts a wrong political calculation. The former CCM cadre’s fault was to project his political belief that Zanzibar should be a clearly defined polity with clearly defined ethnic identity against its Tanganyika counterpart within the region and internationally.

It is one’s opinion that since this matter has come up, the party should find reason to engage it once and for all. The matter, whose circumstances were not clearly explained when it cropped up in 1984, led to the expulsion of former Zanzibar President Aboud Jumbe.

Tanzanians and politicians, in particular, failed to exploit that opportunity, for senior party leaders particularly Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and hijacked the agenda.

We never discussed it, for they misled and misinformed the public, saying the polluted political atmosphere was a result of a dirty handiwork of some stray elements in the party.

But that was not the end of the openly expressed anti-Union sentiments. Mainlanders through some young parliamentarians self-dubbed G55 pushed for a pro-Tanganyika government agenda in the early 1990s.

The demand for Tanganyika came back to life following a fracas that erupted among party echelons which was also not clearly explained to the public.

The ruling party successfully ensured the debate was silenced once again in Parliament. Another missed opportunity!

After Jumbe’s attempt, some Zanzibaris formed a clandestine political movement - Kamahuru. Its purpose was to reassert Zanzibar’s identity as a different political entity and a country inhabited by a people with a distinct cultural and ideological orientation, dissimilar to that of Tanganyika.

All these chances and others not catalogued here were wasted because the ruling party’s big cats maintained that the demand for Zanzibar identity within or outside the Union was not admissible.

Our 20 years of multi-party politics experimentation has witnessed a number of repeated attempts by Zanzibaris, silently or openly, trying to have their country back.

Although the ruling party is adamant that we cannot discuss it, for the Union was not in the terms of reference to the constitution review team, the process of reworking our Union constitution is found to be yet another space for identity politics this time as a national agenda.

When the Soviet Union finally broke apart, the chaos that ensued in the former satellite nations was, among other factors, caused by the search for identities among nationals of those countries.

The Soviet leadership and the political underlings believed pan-national identity would gloss permanently over individual nations’ identity politics once it was forged and sustained.

That was actually not the case, for those politics kept on simmering under the flamboyant but a rickety union, only to strongly project themselves as lava of a volcanic activity after so many years of dormancy.

But Zanzibar’s search for identity has not been a dominant volcano, it has always been active though it is always suppressed and we have never been  told why the situation should remain as such.

So long as it has not yet been explained to us the reason why the Tanganyika government was dissolved after the 1964 Union, while our Zanzibar partners kept theirs, we will still continue evading the topic. And whoever dares to raise it will meet the sternest reaction possible.

This discourse of  silencing texts that make dominant ideologues uncomfortable is no help at all. At worst, it is an escapist strategy which will only relegate the identity search movement to a temporary dormancy status before it erupts again as the contemporary history of the matter shows.

Is it not jolting for the ruling party to see its former stalwarts and Zanzibar leaders join the movement of demanding Zanzibar to not only have their country back, but also full membership in international bodies and a complete autonomy on their sovereignty and destiny?

I am of the opinion that if we really want to have Zanzibar and Tanganyika Union worth the name, we need not escape the challenges based on identity.

We need to engage the discussion and find how we can settle the matter once and for all, for it will please no one if the final document does not reflect the demands of all major social or political groups.

The Zanzibar identity issue has been with us from the inception of the union, and if neglect it will continue being the pain in our neck for the rest of the millennia. The only way of ending the pain is to deal with it positively.

 SOURCE THE CITIZEN
 Mr Kayoka is a seasoned journalist and mentor based in Dar es Salaam. Ckayoka28@yahoo.com - +255 766 959 349