Field Marshal John Okello; the Ugandan house painter who led Zanzibar’s 1964 revolution
It's January 12th, 1964, at about 3:00 a.m., off the coast of East Africa, is the tiny
Indian Ocean archipelago of ZANZIBAR
This island nation has been ruled by minority Oman Arabs for generations.
Under their rule, they have treated the majority Africans as third-class citizens who are WORTHLESS.
Years of discontent and struggle have led to this moment.
Tonight Africans have had ENOUGH!
A group of 200 African revolutionaries, armed with bows and arrows, are staging a surprise
ATTACK at Ziwani police armoury.
They overrun the guards, obtaining arms and weapons.
With the newfound weapons.
The men mount a surprise resistance that cripples Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah's police and government.
Repeated bursts from automatic rifles echo through the narrow, winding streets of the
capital, once the centre of the Arab slave trade in East Africa.
After six hours of fighting, strategic buildings on the island's capital are seized.
The cable office, airstrip, and radio station all come under the rebel's control.
With these strategic gains, they use the radio to send a message to the Sultan and his family.
In a speech on the radio, the sultan is given an order to kill his family and himself afterwards;
or else, the man passing the message will do it himself.
The man broadcasting this order is John Gideon Okello, the leader of the revolutionaries.
He uses this moment to also, brand himself to the world as the "Field Marshal of Zanzibar
and Pemba".
As Dawn breaks, the international community wakes up in shock at the successful overthrow
of the sultan of Zanzibar.
With news spreading like wildfire, it sends shock waves throughout Africa.
Scared Sultan Jamshid, who had replaced his father less than a month after he died, didn't
wait for Field marshal Okello to deliver on his threats.
Together with the Prime Minister and members of the cabinet, they flee the island on the
royal yacht, just out of range of the rebel guns, heading to Oman
In Oman, he is denied permission to settle, so he flies to Britain with 61 relatives,
friends, and household staff.
After the successful execution of the revolution, there was widespread surprise about the person
of the tough-talking 27-year-old Field Marshall John Gideon Okello.
In one of his broadcasts, he tells freedom fighters looting that
" if anyone is caught with a stolen bar of soap, he will be imprisoned for eight years"
In Kenya, early reports by Kenyan newspapers hold him as a Kenyan citizen.
But who exactly was Field Marshall John Gideon Okello?
How did he end up being the face of the 1964 Zanzibar revolution, and why was he the most
feared man across the east Africa region?
Feared even by people like Idi Amin?
Well, let's find out
The man who will become the face of the Zanzibar revolution wasn't even born Zanzibari.
In fact, he is Ugandan, born in the northern district of Lango in what was then Uganda
Protectorate.
It's the 6th of October 1937.
Okello and his wife, Elwor Akullo, give birth to their fifth child.
This child will be lucky.
Since 10 out of their 13 children would succumb to illness.
At two, they baptize him as Gideon and give him a Lango name Etuku, meaning "we hope he
will live to help us parents"
As a child, Okello diligently works with his father, herding goats and cattle to make ends
meet.
At seven, the young Okello is fascinated by the military after interacting with world
war 2 soldiers who had come home on leave.
This interaction inspires him to join the army.
However, he is turned down for being a minor all after walking 45 kilometres to the recruitment
centre.
At ten, tragedy struck in Okello's life when his mom passed away while giving birth the
following year his father followed due to a stomach illness.
Devastated, Okello went on to live with his uncle, where he faced abuse and mistreatment,
pushing him to be industrious from an early age.
To escape his abusive uncle, he left home and seek various opportunities in present-day
East Africa aged 15.
He did all kinds of jobs, from being a clerk, manservant, gardener, and other odd jobs in
Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika.
Later, going through training to become a professional bricklayer.
In October 1954, Okello relocates to Nairobi in search of better work.
While there, he is arrested on allegations of rape and imprisoned for two years.
In prison, he endures torture alongside Mau Mau prisoners and detainees.
It is this experience that cultivates in him a strong hatred and detest against the British.
The young Okello left Kenya in 1959 in a small boat for the small island of Pemba, risking
his life.
He found work on farms and other kinds of handwork in Pemba.
It is here that he comes face to face with active politics.
He joins the Zanzibar nationalist party, the predecessor of the Afro-Shirazi Party led
by Sheikh Abeid Karume, which mainly advocated for the overthrow of the oppressive Arab rule.
As a member of the ASP, Okello delivered speeches attributed to Arabs and encouraged people
to raise up like the Mau Mau in Kenya, Maji Maji in Tanzania.
In 1961, the party made Okello the youth secretary for Pemba.
In the position, he will travel around Zanzibar and Pemba, delivering more speeches at union
branches and organizing a revolution to overthrow the sultan.
Slowly, but sure careful in his steps, he turned his followers into a small resilient
army of determined African nationalists who had to adhere to strict rules like sexual
abstinence, baning raw meat, and alcohol?
One should not be that, even with all this, Okello is not among the most popular leaders
in Zanzibar, fighting against the Arabs at the moment.
The few mainstream politicians who were known to the public included the leader of the Afro-Shirazi
Party, Abeid Karume, and Abdul Rahman Mohammed (Babu), the founder and leader of the radical
party, Umma.
Each of the three had a plot to overthrow the government, but it was Okello's plan,
which was far more advanced, decisive and which struck the blow that brought down the
Sultan's regime.
The strength of Okello’s strategy was supported by the fact that a majority of Africans on
the Zanzibar islands were poor, uneducated, and lived in an informal setting.
It is these everyday disgruntled Zanzibaris that Okello targeted and appealed to using
informal settings.
When the appeal came.
They were all ready to join him
When he claimed that he had been given orders in his dreams by God to break the powerful
position of the Arabs in Zanzibar & Pemba.
More masses followed
Its Dday the night of the attack but Before the attack, Okello gives his men orders telling
them to kill all Arabs between 18 and 25 years of age, to spare pregnant and elderly women,
and not to rape virgins because it would bring bad luck.
So the rebels strike at exactly 3 A.M.
breaking into the police and the Government armoury, stealing hundreds of automatic rifles
and submachine guns.
They seize the cable office, cutting all outside communication.
Within six hours, the town's telegraph office and main government buildings are all under
revolutionary control.
By 2 pm, the island's only airstrip is captured with no plane allowed to lift off or land
In the countryside, fierce fighting erupts between the rural Arabs known as the manga
and the Africans.
Arabs poorly armed, mainly with hunting rifles, put up a fight.
But with new arms ceased from the police stations and reinforcement.
The Arabs are doomed.it was a slaughter.
On the run, The Sultan's palace and other properties are seized by the revolutionary
government.
After 12 hours of fighting, at least 80 people were killed and 200 injured, the majority
of whom were Arabs.
The scenes were gruesome, with battered bodies of Arab men lying out on the streets with
their genitals severed and shoved into their mouths.
After capturing Stone Town, revolutionaries fought for control over the countryside for
two days, killing whole families of Arabs after storming their homes.
In the aftermath, A Revolutionary Council is established by the ASP and Umma parties,
with Karume as President and Babu serving as the Minister of External Affairs.
The country is renamed the People's Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba.
The sultan is permanently banished, never to return.
As for Okello, Karume quietly sidelines him from the political scene, although he is allowed
to retain his self-bestowed title of field marshal.
Okello formed the Freedom Military Force (FMF), a paramilitary unit made up of his own supporters,
which patrolled the streets and looted Arab property, carrying out beatings, rapes, murders,
and attacks on property.
Okello would put up a show after his victory.
Showing praise for himself for how he pulled off the siege.
In most of his speeches, he made gross exaggerations to exaggerate the magnitude of his strength
and his army’s conquests.
For days, the main news out of Zanzibar came from a remarkable series of radio broadcasts
to the people by John Okello.
He onced announced he had been the strongman behind the revolution and the government was
now quote “run by us, the army.”
He went ahead to add,
“We, the army, have the strength of 99 million, 99 thousand… should anyone be stubborn and
disobey orders, I will take very strong measures, 88 times stronger than at present.
I was a very high-ranking person in Kenya in the MAU MAU army, which knows how to make
weapons.
I can easily make not less than 500 guns per day.
Undoubtedly, I can make a bomb that can destroy an area of 3 square miles.
I can make about 100 grenades in an hour…”
With the days passing after the revolution, Okello continued his broadcasts and his fantasies
about himself, and his might grew equally.
On one occasion, he declared, quote
“I am above the government and cannot die.”
These broadcasts created an image of the new revolutionary government as being extremist
and unstable.
As you could predict, he was becoming a threat to the new administration of Abeid Karume
The behaviour of Okello's supporters, his violent rhetoric, Ugandan accent, and Christian
beliefs were alienated many in the largely moderate Zanzibari and Muslim ASP, and by
March many members of his FMF had been disarmed by Karume's supporters and the Umma Party
militia
It is from Okello’s irrational character and his love for the limelight that the leader
of the Afro-Shirazi party and other allies who had joined Okello to form the new government
plotted his expulsion.
Careful not to anger his followers and mercenaries, who terrorized the streets of Zanzibar, Abeid
Karume hatched a plot to deal with Okello once and for all while he travelled to the
mainland in Tanganyika, as he regularly did.
It's 11 March 1964, an East African Airways flight 304 approaches the main airport on
the island.
As it touches the runway.
A message flashes ahead:
"It is I, the field marshal, who comes.
Have my army and the press waiting."
However, today there will be no army waiting, but Abeid Karume, the leader of the ASP and
his peers, waiting with a banishment order.
Upon arrival in Zanzibar, Karume tells the field marshal he is not needed in Zanzibar
anymore.
Field Marshal John Gideon Okello's downfall begins at this moment
Returning to the mainland, Tanganyika Okello held a press conference saying he had been
dismissed as field marshal of the Zanzibar revolution and banished by the island’s
Revolutionary Government.
When asked about his next plans.
He said, "I have no money and no plans except to return to my village in Uganda and take
up my former job as a bricklayer."
Okello's fall resulted from the very thing he believed he had created—the Zanzibar
revolution.
Barely two months after the revolution, he had become a pariah.
In just one week, he had been barred from Zanzibar, escorted out of Tanganyika, expelled
from Kenya, and left with the equivalent of only 21 cents in his pockets.
When Field Marshal Okello was forced to leave Nairobi, an Ethiopian admirer bought him a
small French sedan worth $2,420.
It then developed that Okello could not drive.
So a local bartender was rounded up to drive him to the Ugandan border.
Halfway there, they ran out of fuel.
Stuck by the roadside with a new car and only 21 cents in cash, Marshall Okello stopped
a passerby and borrowed $14 for fuel to get across the border.
Uganda was the only place in East Africa left open to him.
The country did so only because no one else wanted him.
You see, even in his defeat, the four East African countries still feared Okello.
They viewed him as a security risk because of his singular hold on the illiterate, impoverished,
and discontented masses.
If Okello got to this group of people in these countries, the leaders feared he could be
the spark that could ignite a tinderbox.
His travels and movements were always monitored around the region with no breathing space
at all.
He spent the rest of his life in and out of prison, accused by the governments of Kenya,
Uganda & Tanzania of conspiring against them.
In November 1964, even Hastings Banda accused him of planning to overthrow Malawi's government.
The Uganda he returned to was also grappling with a crisis under the Obote regime.
He was last publicly seen in 1971 with another emerging Ugandan Field Marshall, Idi Amin
Dada.
Meeting Amin, Okello said,
" Ever since I left Zanzibar in 1964, I have been robbed, mistreated and imprisoned by
the Obote regime.
Wherever I went, I was followed like a dog by the general service unit and could never
move freely as I am able now.
Its September 9, 1973, John Okello is now back in Uganda settling in.
He has a wife and several children.
Today he plans to visit his brother in the nearby village of Amugo.
He says goodbye to his wife and kids.
Soon after he leaves, a group of men follow him.
At around 4 pm, while in Amugo, he is bundled up and arrested by the men.
It is not clear who these men are but such arrests are common under Idi Amin’s regime.
A group of women and students returning from school witness the arrest.
Okello waves at them and pleads to them to inform his family about his arrest.
That would be the last day and time he was ever seen alive.
This was all on the account of his wife, Ms Akao Okello.
Field Marshall John Gideon Okello might have used his passion, wit, and energy to free
the African people of Zanzibar from the grip of oppressional minority Arab rule, but his
legacy and name have not been pronounced as much.
Instead, the country celebrated Abeid Karume, its first president and leader of the Afro-Shirazi
Party that benefitted from Okello’s revolution and finally banished him.
To repatriate his position, Karume allied with Tanganyika’s Julius Nyerere to form
a political federation of Zanzibar and Tanganyika, becoming present-day Tanzania.
Karume was assassinated in April 1972 by shot dead by Four gunmen as he played a board game
at the headquarters of the Afro-Shirazi Party.
In Zanzibar, John Okello has been forgotten no buildings or airports or roads are named
after Him.
Regardless of his mistakes and charisma his contribution to the Zanzibars revolution will
leave on for if it wasn't for his decisive actions may be History on this small island
nation would be different today.
If there is something Okello would have loved most, it is his title of Field Marshall.
And I think for his contribution that's something I can't take away from him