John Okello

John Gideon Okello (1937, Lango District, Uganda, – 1971?) was one of the most eccentric revolutionaries (and also one of the least known) from Africa. In 1964 he led the Zanzibar Revolution that overthrew Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah, and led to the proclamation of Zanzibar as a republic.

Biography

Youth

John Okello was baptised at two years old (his baptised name being Gideon). From his eleventh year, he was an orphan and he grew up with other relatives. When he was fifteen, he left his house in order to search for work and he worked in several places in East Africa. He worked from 1944 as clerk, manservant, gardener and worker. He later learned the trade of bricklaying and was active as a bricklayer. He was arrested in Nairobi (Kenya) for unclear reasons (he himself stated that he was arrested for a crime of sexual nature) and stayed in prison for two years. During his incarceration he became a revolutionary.

Speculations are abound about Okello having held residence and being trained in the communist Cuba of Fidel Castro, although this has not been confirmed by Okello himself.

Police officer on Pemba

In 1959 Okello left for the island of Pemba, where he tried to find work on one of the farms, but became a police officer instead. Okello joined the "Afro-Shirazi Party" of sheik Abeid Karume. This party opposed the domineering position of the minority Arabs on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba.

Revolutionary

Okello left for Zanzibar in 1963, where he contacted the leaders of the Afro-Shirazi Youth League, the youth organisation of the Afro-Shirazi Party. The Youth League strived for a revolution in order to break the power of the Arabs. On Zanzibar, Okello was also a member of the Painters Union, being a house painter. In his free time he built up a small army of determined African nationalists. This army was required to hold themselves to the strict rules of Okello: sexual abstinence, no raw meat and no alcohol.

The highly religious Okello was convinced he had been given orders in his dreams by God to break the powerful position of the Arabs and to found the revolutionary state on Zanzibar and Pemba. On the night before the “revolution”, Okello gave his men the order to kill all Arabs between 18 and 25 years of age, to spare pregnant and elderly women, and not to rape virgins.

Uprising

On January 12 1964, with popular support from the island's oppressed native African majority, Okello and his men fought their way to the capital of Zanzibar, Stone Town, where the sultan lived. Even though they were poorly armed, Okello and his men surprised the police force of Zanzibar and they took power.

During a speech on radio, Okello dubbed himself the "field marshal of Zanzibar and Pemba". He gave the sultan an order to kill his family and to kill himself afterwards; otherwise, Okello would do so himself. However, the sultan had already brought himself to safety later to be harboured in Britain. The prime minister and other ministers also managed to escape.

The coup led to the poorly-known massacre of between 5,000 and 20,000 Arabs, whose families had been living in Zanzibar for centuries, between January 18 and 20. [cite book|last=Plekhanov |first=Sergeĭ |authorlink= |coauthors= |editor= |others= |title=A Reformer on the Throne: Sultan Qaboos Bin Said Al Said |origdate= |origyear= |origmonth= |url= |format= |accessdate= |accessyear= |accessmonth= |edition= |series= |date= |year= |month= |publisher=Trident Press Ltd |location= |language= |isbn=1-9007-2470-7 |oclc= |doi= |id= |pages=91 |chapter= |chapterurl= |quote= ]

hoved to the side

Okello created a Revolutionary Council and named the leader of the Afro-Shirazi Party, Abeid Karume, as president and leader of the (Arabic) Umma-(Massa) Party, sheik Abdulrahman Muhammad Babu as prime minister (later: vice-president). Both Karume and Babu had not been informed of the coup. Both residing in Tanganyika, but returned to Zanzibar, where they were welcomed by Okello. However, neither Karume or Babu wanted anything to do with him. When Okello left for the African mainland they forbade him to return and he was deported both from Tanganyika and Kenya.

peculations concerning his death

Okello then stayed in Kenya, in Congo-Kinshasa and in Uganda. He was incarcerated multiple times and was last seen with the Ugandan president Idi Amin in 1971 and vanished afterwards. In the book “Revolution on Zanzibar”, written by Don Petterson, it is more or less assumed that Idi Amin saw him as a threat (after Amin promoted himself Okello reportedly joked that "now Uganda has two field marshals"Fact|date=June 2007) and had arranged his assassination. This remains speculative, however.

Cultural references to Okello

The black slave played by Edward Roland in Werner Herzog's 1972 film "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" is named "Okello". In his commentary to the DVD version of the film, Herzog also says that the character of Aguirre himself was partly modelled on John Okello, with whom the director had been in contact (Okello had wanted Herzog to translate a book he had written). Herzog explains: "I chose the name Okello because I owe his craze, his hysteria, his atrocious fantasies quite a bit for this film". [DVD commentary to "Aguirre, Wrath of God" (Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2004), track 13]

References