Property Confiscation in the Zanzibar Revolution

DOI

10.1093/afraf/adaf022

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.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-15-2025

Publisher Statement

© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.

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