Labor in Africa

All colonial powers in Africa were anxious about the shift from enslaved to free labor because they feared the withdrawal of ex-slaves from the labor market, as happened in the Caribbean, Egypt, and India after abolition in those locations.Footnote ² Most colonizers attempted to ameliorate the abolition process in a way that gave them continuing control over labor for the state.Footnote ³ In his examination of colonial efforts to control labor in the Zanzibar Islands after 1897, Frederick Cooper wryly noted that colonial officials were actually very effective in producing enough labor for the clove harvests each year, ostensibly their main labor concern.Footnote ⁴ The story of labor in the Zanzibar Islands generally is one focused on commodity production or trade and occasionally incorporates material on labor for infrastructure.Footnote ⁵ The focus on commodities has hidden the issue of agricultural food production and the role of the colonial state in perpetuating forms of coerced labor in the Islands.

Agricultural labor history in Africa is often divided by the abolition process and its immediate aftermath and the post-World War I period.Footnote ⁶ In the past five years, though, scholars have begun tracing the linkages between the history of slavery and the history of industrial and cash crop agriculture across Africa.Footnote ⁷ This article demonstrates, by looking at the longue durée of labor history in a location where slavery had dominated agricultural labor, that links of coercion exist between enslaved workers and the labor of their descendants. In concert with this newer historical trajectory, I show that in the Zanzibar Islands, descendants of slaves were often the coerced laborers used during the colonial period.

Agricultural labor history also often looks at the larger-scale production efforts from the pre- to postcolonial period.Footnote ⁸ A history of resistance in these large scale projects tellingly illustrates the agency of Africans to resist forced labor in colonial states. However, much of this scholarship also illuminates the many ways in which colonial states were successful in exploiting and creating systems of compulsory labor.Footnote ⁹ In the post-World War II period, colonial states found themselves footing a much larger bill for the colonies as development became the justification to remain in Africa.Footnote ¹⁰ Social services were expensive, and with the increasing oversight of coerced labor, colonial officials had to find new ways in which to fund their development and commodity production goals across Africa. Cost sharing became a new means by which the Zanzibar government “paid” for development—the government would provide materials, and Zanzibari communities would provide labor. In Zanzibar, this form of “voluntary” labor came to underpin all government “development” work.

The joint issues of food security and development during World War II became central to the postwar development policies of both British colonies and postcolonial nations in Asia and Africa.Footnote ¹¹ While resistance to these policies continued throughout the colonial era, in many parts of Africa, the new nations of the 1960s and 1970s attempted to institute food security through the implementation of similar forced campaigns and insisted on economically marginalized communities putting in what the British called “cost-sharing” and the French called a “human investment” to modernize peasant economies.Footnote ¹² This notion of state development harnessing the labor of the most marginalized people ostensibly for their own “development” continues to perpetuate their impoverishment into the present day. This article draws a link between enslaved labor in the past and development labor used in the nationalist period in the Zanzibar Islands.

Labor in Zanzibar

Contrary to the claims made by colonial officials in Zanzibar, the government effectively controlled labor when necessary. However, the government was not effective in persuading ex-slaves to labor in the ways the government wanted them to work.Footnote ¹³ A debate developed in the immediate aftermath of abolition between government officials and British missionary abolitionists living in the islands about how to control ex-slave laborers. The government set up a labor bureau specifically to direct ex-slave labor to different private plantations to pick cloves during the harvests.Footnote ¹⁴ The abolitionist missionaries objected not to controlling where ex-slaves should labor but to making them labor for private profit. Laboring for the state was wholly acceptable because the state “like the abolitionists, continued to see the poverty of the laborer in terms of his own failings” rather than being caught in a system designed to abuse them.Footnote ¹⁵ A similar thinking was found by Christine Whyte in Sierra Leone and Benedetta Rossi among French colonizers in colonial Niger: When ex-slaves resisted forced labor, “French officials declared them ‘backward’ and ‘not mature yet’ for voluntary work.”Footnote ¹⁶ Likewise, Eric Allina makes the case that the Portuguese used the idea of “educating” Africans through labor as a means to justify continuing their policies of forced labor rather than any intention of creating a working class.Footnote ¹⁷ Linguistically, colonial officials created a link between forced labor and the need to “civilize” ex-slave laborers as a means to justify treating this community as a cheap labor pool.

Once the Labor Bureau was eradicated by missionary interference, colonial officials found the simplest method of coercing labor was to gather “the Masheha, Headmen and people together, and then, after discussing the matter, informing them that they must send a certain number of people … to clove picking.”Footnote ¹⁸ Regardless of whether compulsion was legal at the time, Mr. Last, the collector of the Islands, viewed the coercion of laborers during the clove harvest as the duty of colonial subjects to their government. Mr. Last was focused only on commodity agriculture in 1908; however, other officials made the link between controlling agricultural labor for both commodity and food production. Mr. Rivers-Smith, the new director of education, noted that he believed Africans should be taught Swahili in Arabic rather than Roman characters. His argument was not based on Islam but rather that it would keep the laboring population ignorant of European language skills and keep them doing agricultural labor. As an example to supplement his argument he offered that learning literacy had caused “trouble in the relations with the black population of the Southern States of America.” His specific reference to ex-slaves in the United States directly ties his expectations that it was ex-slaves in the Zanzibar Islands who needed to be kept on the plantation.Footnote ¹⁹

During World War I, officials felt that it was “necessary to provide labor for the carrying on and maintenance of works of public importance and the trade of the Protectorate” and instituted the Native Labour Control Decree and the Regulation of Adult Male Persons Decree of 1917 in order to force more agricultural labor out of the ex-slaves and the indigenous population.Footnote ²⁰ After the end of World War I, the Native Labour Control Decree was replaced in 1923 by the Employment of Native Labour Decree, “which gives powers to District Officers … to require the attendance of natives and to order the performance of work of a public nature.” In 1927, an administration official noted that no workers had been forced to pick cloves for private landowners using this law; however, the law had been enforced for road building, clove picking on government plantations, and other “needed” agricultural labor projects. By 1927, officials were lumping all Africans into the category of “native” labor; however, they still reserved a particularly dismissive attitude toward the labor of ex-slaves. As one official explained his view in a report,

Colonial officials discursively delegitimated the marginalized populations in the Islands and made the case that forced labor was the only means by which ex-slaves and their descendants could be “civilized.”

In contrast to the 1920s preoccupation with the size of the clove crop and use of regular meetings with local officials to drum up harvest pickers, a new concern occupied government officials in the 1930s—the dropping world price of cloves and the rising labor costs of picking the crop. Between 1928 and 1933 a new worry arose in the Agriculture Department's annual reports. In 1928, officials never once commented on whether enough food reserves or laborers were available for picking the clove crop, yet by 1933 these complaints were raised and continued through the next two decades. What happened in the intervening five years? Several changes occurred: The International Labour Organisation instituted a new Forced Labour Convention in 1930, the worldwide depression had precipitated a decline in the price and market for cloves, and workers brought over from the mainland demanded increasing wages to pay for imported food since they could not grow their own.

The International Labour Organization's Forced Labour Convention banned the coercion of workers for private use in the colonies, but it allowed coerced labor for “public works” that “educated” colonial subjects on how to be good workers.Footnote ²¹ The pre-1930 means of gathering workers for picking the clove crop on private land was no longer allowed. Officials before 1930 viewed their recruitment methods as “voluntary” because officials gave quotas to local Zanzibari community leaders for short-term harvesting work that was paid. As long as the workers were paid a regular wage, they were not seen as coerced. The 1930 ILO convention changed that ruling and no longer could officials give community leaders labor quotas for private purposes.Footnote ²² All laborers for picking cloves had to voluntarily put themselves forward without any instigation on the part of colonial officials.

By 1933, colonial officials were bitterly complaining about labor. The director of agriculture noted,

The narrative about labor dramatically shifted in these five years, while laborers were still lazy they were also now uncontrollable and too expensive.Footnote ²⁴ Between 1933 and 1937, government officials began the process of laying the groundwork for reasserting control over laborers that had been lost in the aftermath of the ILO convention in order to rein in production costs.

During 1935 and 1936, the smaller clove crops brought a lull in production prices because little labor was needed and most Zanzibaris turned to food production (including some townspeople).Footnote ²⁵ Food production was up, temporarily satisfying officials, but by the end of 1936 when the second clove harvest promised to bring a large crop, local laborers refused to pick the crop. They had spent the year growing food and satisfied their household needs by selling their extra food crops to outside pickers rather than pick themselves.Footnote ²⁶ A labor shortage ensued and wages yet again increased, much to the chagrin of the director of agriculture. Officials found that local laborers were either willing to harvest cloves and purchase imported food or grow their own food, some of which they sold in the market, but they would not do both. In 1937, officials stated there was a labor shortage but then qualified their statement by saying, “there is no real lack of labour but there is an urgent need for its proper organization and control.”Footnote ²⁷ Zanzibaris chose whichever agricultural work suited them at the time, which colonial officials found arbitrary and unacceptable. The opportunity to control laborers, in the ways officials wanted to control them, presented itself during World War II.

World War II and Wartime Policy Changes

When Burma fell in 1942 to the Japanese army, rice imports to Zanzibar stopped, allowing colonial officials the opportunity they wanted to “organize and control” labor. The “Grow More Food” (sometimes called “Plant More Food”) campaign was begun, which forced farmers in the Zanzibar Islands to grow food for the local population. Finally officials could push for self-sufficiency from the most marginalized populations. In 1942 officials introduced legislation called the Defence (Land Requisition and Personal Services) Regulations. The legislation allowed for the requisition “of any land required for food crop planting.”Footnote ²⁸ Initially all males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five who could not prove they had a full-time job were required to plant crops; however, by 1943 even those with jobs had to submit to the Defence Orders.Footnote ²⁹ During each season the government would put out an order specifying how much of each crop had to be grown. If men did not have land, they were assigned lots by the government. Any man who tried to evade the Defence Orders was arrested, put into a prison camp, and made to produce food for the urban areas. Moreover, individual orders were allowed under the legislation allowing officials to tailor their production orders to specific regions and people.Footnote ³⁰ Registration of laborers started in Zanzibar Town, and by November 1942 this had expanded to the country districts of the islands. Each man was given a registration card that was later used to distribute rations and organize clove harvest labor.Footnote ³¹ Finally, the government had the ability to organize laborers and force them to grow food crops, pick the clove harvest, and control their purchase of imported foods, thereby lowering the production costs of the clove harvests.

Laborers viewed this work as forced labor by the government because they were expected to sell part of their produce.Footnote ³² F.B. Wilson bragged, in the East African Agricultural Journal in 1944, that “they [Zanzibaris] are providing for their own and their families’ full requirements of staple food. They are doing more: they are making a substantial contribution towards the feeding of the 60,000 people in Zanzibar Town.”Footnote ³³ Every man was responsible for outfitting himself with equipment and seeds. “A scheme was inaugurated by which anyone not possessing a hoe or other necessary implement, could work for three days or so and thus earn the price of a Government jembe, sold at Sh. 2 each.”Footnote ³⁴ Some crop starts, such as cassava, were given to growers, but people had to buy their seed rice.Footnote ³⁵ By 1944, officials were pleased with their experiment; the town population had been fed, “there has been no famine in any part of the Protectorate,” and the bumper clove crop meant “large sums of money were thus brought into local circulation.”Footnote ³⁶

In the publicly published documents, such as the Agriculture Department's annual reports, colonial officials spoke of rural populations needing help or advice in learning how to grow foods. Occasionally officials might use a euphemism such as populations in the “tree-crop areas” to indicate their meaning of who in particular they wanted to coerce as laborers. However, in private government exchanges Zanzibari officials were open about their lack of respect for ex-slaves and their descendants, avoiding coy euphemisms.Footnote ³⁷ Just as the official in 1927, quoted earlier, spoke derogatorily of ex-slaves, officials in 1945 continued to describe this population as “lazy,” “slothful,” and “apathetic.”Footnote ³⁸ Fergus Wilson, a district agriculture officer and the person who oversaw the Grow More Food campaign, argued that coerced labor needed to be continued after World War II ended because

Wilson argued that ex-slaves were simply too stupid to be left to their own devices and had to be coerced to work. His rhetoric perpetuated the marginalization of this community in the Islands.Footnote ³⁹

Fergus Wilson's comments also indicate the ways in which colonial officials in the 1940s and 1950s began tying together the concepts of development and forced labor. Marginalized populations could only be taught how to be “developed” or “modern” through coerced labor practices. Likewise, the British resident in 1945, in his argument to the Colonial Office, made the case that “the improvement of social welfare, health, and education, depends very largely on the decision that is made in regard to the continuance of subsistence agriculture.” And when he said “continuance of subsistence agriculture,” he was speaking of his request to extend the coercion of the Defence Orders indefinitely to make sure rural—that is, slave descended—communities “developed themselves” and their colony through their labor.Footnote ⁴⁰ Fergus Wilson reminded his readers that rural slave descendants had a “slave mentality” and that they were “the most backward and unresponsive people,” “the worst nourished section of the population,” with “the least capacity for sustained work, and the greatest lack of independence and initiative” and thus had to be forced to labor.Footnote ⁴¹ Both Wilson and the British resident (the highest colonial position in Zanzibar) agreed that the only way ex-slaves and their descendants could be modernized is through coercing their labor for their own benefit.

The issue of coercion after the end of World War II and whether coercion of labor “for their own benefit” was actually forced labor became the central question the Colonial Office dealt with when they received the British resident's request to allow the continuation of the Defence Orders. Initially officials in the Colonial Office debated whether the requested extension could be allowed under Articles 7 and 19 of the International Labour Organisation's 1930 Forced Labour Convention. One of the sticking points, as officials saw it, was that the British resident “would require natives to grow food not only for their own and their dependents support but for the general market, to meet the needs of town-dwellers and the community generally.”Footnote ⁴² Officials began drafting a response to the British resident that told him to get the Sultan to pass an antifamine legislative order and to use that as cover for the coerced labor practices. However, Sir Sidney Abrahams, a former chief justice in several colonies, intervened when the file was passed to him, pointing out that the Zanzibar officials’ reading of Article 19 of the ILO Convention was egregiously incorrect and that they could not extend the compulsory labor policy.Footnote ⁴³ Abrahams made the case that “cultivation of crops for economic purposes or to improve the standard of life of the community does not, in my opinion, come within the purview of authorization by the Convention, laudable though it may well be in the interests of the community.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The Colonial Office passed Abrahams’ decision on to the British resident toward the end of 1945, almost a year after he asked, that he could not extend the 1943 Defence Regulations, unless he could prove famine conditions would ensue.Footnote ⁴⁵

The famine needed by the British resident to keep the Defence Regulations in force materialized during 1945 and 1946, thus enabling the government to continue the planting orders that required that laborers in the countryside provide food for themselves and the towns. Poor weather created a food crisis, and near famine conditions prevailed in much of the Protectorate in early 1946, especially in the towns. In 1946 the rice crop failed, and laborers were resisting picking cloves such that the cost of hiring laborers almost doubled.Footnote ⁴⁶ Being reliant only on local food crops ended up increasing production costs because the weather was not consistent.Footnote ⁴⁷ During 1946 the government gave out rice and other seeds in a desperate effort to improve the food situation. Officials noted that Pembans began eating the sweet potatoes they were forced to grow out of hunger.Footnote ⁴⁸ While the Agriculture Department reports usually put a positive spin on Zanzibaris reactions to the Defence Orders, their comments on Pembans’ reluctance to eat sweet potatoes or pulses and other “little resistances” demonstrate that islanders saw this work as coerced, even if it was “beneficial” to them.Footnote ⁴⁹

From Forced Labor to “Responsible Labor”

By 1947 and thereafter, famine conditions on the islands had subsided, yet Defence Orders requiring the planting of certain crops and the imprisoning of “idlers” continued.Footnote ⁵⁰ Officials noted in 1947 that the “improved food situation provided a reserve from other areas” such that the countryside was still supporting the towns.Footnote ⁵¹ However, 1947 also brought a significant increase in the picking wages for cloves. Even in Pemba, the doubling of wages in late 1946 had now become the standard wage.Footnote ⁵² Even as officials in the Colonial Office made clear to the British resident that forced labor must be stopped in the islands, Zanzibari officials moved at a snail's pace to pass new legislation. In fact, compulsory planting continued on the islands until 1956, when pressure from the Colonial Office finally stopped the practice. The committee in London in charge of monitoring British colonial adherence to the International Labour Organisation's Conventions became deeply frustrated with Zanzibar's intransigence over several labor issues, including forced labor.

In 1949, the Zanzibar government reported to the ILO Committee in the Colonial Office that they realized the rule was in contravention of the 1930 Convention, but they just had not had the time to adopt new legislation.Footnote ⁵³ Four years later, the British resident wrote to the secretary of state, asking if they could give Zanzibar a model on which to base new legislation that would still allow for a limited compulsory labor force “in order to stimulate the production of food crops and discourage too exclusive a reliance on the clove.”Footnote ⁵⁴ At the same time as the British resident asked about how to continue compulsory labor, the Zanzibar government was also fighting over the length of contracts for indentured laborers from India (the ILO required contracts be no more than two years, and Zanzibar wanted the contracts to last four years) and workmen's compensation. In 1951, an inspector was sent out to Zanzibar to look at the compliance with ILO policies on the part of the government. The issue of workmen's compensation and accidents was raised, along with concerns about inspection of conditions on plantations and factories.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus, the metropolitan government was deeply concerned with making at least the appearance of cooperation with ILO policies. Within the correspondence on the three issues, the Colonial Office did not give the British resident on Zanzibar an answer about compulsory labor for a full year.

The ILO Committee in the Colonial Office demonstrated its total exasperation with Zanzibar in several documents, noting that “Zanzibar's reports are neat and tidy but … are almost complete re-prints of previous reports even down to the same errors.” They complained that Zanzibar continued to refer to various “draft” ordinances that had passed six years previously. And they finally noted in 1957 that the Committee “trusts that twelve years after the termination of hostilities the Government will at last bring about the abolition of these wartime regulations, which are incompatible with the Convention.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The Zanzibar Government reported that it had finally complied with the ILO Convention by revoking the Defence Regulations of 1943 on May 23, 1957. No longer would a policy of government coercion of labor exist on the islands. As the Committee noted in 1960, the labor reports from Zanzibar continued to “nearly always contain something startling & something tantalizing and usually one or two extraordinary items.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Clearly, concerns over compulsory food planting were not the only violation of labor conventions that Zanzibar practiced.

In the minds of colonial officials, their continuation of the Defence Orders well past 1945 was not an arbitrary action. In the later 1930s a mysterious disease began attacking clove trees and killing them. By 1947, Sudden Death, as it came to be called, had killed half of the clove trees on Zanzibar Island. With so many trees hit in 1947, the faith of clove tree owners and colonial officials was severely shaken.Footnote ⁵⁸ Sudden Death, along with the failure of food crops because of weather, exacerbated the long-held mentality among colonial officials that islanders needed to be self-sufficient and that the only way to do this was to make the Islands more productive through compulsory agricultural labor.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the early 1950s, scientists in the islands figured out the cause of Sudden Death, but sufficient treatment options took another decade of work, prolonging officials’ concerns about the economy of the islands.

Thus the multiple concerns about the economy, from the fears of the boom-bust cycle of monocrop agriculture, Sudden Death, and limited food security weighed on the minds of colonial officials who in the mid-1950s had to abolish the Defence Orders. These concerns showed up in the five-year development plan written for 1955—1959. After saying the economy of Zanzibar was “fundamentally unstable,” officials complained:

While laborers could no longer be forced to support themselves, officials needed to find new ways to make the majority of the population in the Islands “responsible.” By using the language of “responsibility” officials discursively reinforced the perception that communities descended from slaves (i.e., the rural population) were incapable of becoming developed on their own.

The language and idiom of development became the central means by which colonial officials in the late 1950s and early 1960s engaged with labor on the islands. “Self-help” was the means by which labor was engaged for development, and yet this language was not new. The annual report of 1928 mentioned several buildings and projects where the local population “volunteered” their labor.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1944, the British government imposed a new program in their colonies called “mass education.” The purpose of mass education was to harness the “voluntary” labor of rural, marginalized populations to bring economic development to the colonies.Footnote ⁶² Zanzibar would be modernized through the labor of rural communities provided at no cost to the colonial government. Christine Whyte notes a similar discursive shift in Sierra Leone, where in the “post-war period ‘communal labor’ was gradually replaced by ‘community development,’ a scheme that also relied on the coercion of labor.”Footnote ⁶³ In 1948 Makunduchi was chosen as the model village of the mass education program for Zanzibar.

Initially government officials saw positive change occurring in Makunduchi. “The Committee” (i.e., colonial-run) in charge of the program gave “preference to projects where the local community was willing to contribute to the cost either in money or, even better, by the provision of free labour or other service.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Within a year, the community began to rebel against the implementation of government projects. The social welfare officer reported in 1950 that “it appeared that there was more cooperation by the villagers [in Makunduchi] in measures of social betterment, but later experience has shown that this co-operation was entirely superficial.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Within three years of declaring mass education as the solution to development in Zanzibar, officials were so frustrated by obstructions from the community that the “Social Welfare Co-ordinating Committee decided in February 1951, that there should be no further expansion of Government services in the area until such time as a more co-operative attitude might be forthcoming from the inhabitants.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet again, colonial officials reported that rural people were the problem, not the requirement by the government that they work “for their own betterment.” Harkening back to earlier infrastructural projects in the 1920s, such as road building, laborers in the Islands were asked to “contribute their share” of the cost of development by “volunteering” their labor. By actively treating rural communities, especially those descended from former slaves, as a problematic pool of free labor rather than seeing the economic system exploiting them, colonizers in Zanzibar created a system of labor usage that perpetuated the economic oppression of the most marginalized communities. These communities, such as the villagers in Makunduchi, were well aware of this problem and actively resisted programs that defined their “development” for them.

In looking at the roles of coerced and “voluntary” labor during the postabolition colonial period (1909–1963), two points emerge. Firstly, no matter how rural populations reacted to colonial policies, those descended from enslaved people were consistently viewed as lazy and incapable of changing by colonial officials. Secondly, rural populations clearly were doing significant work reproducing their communities through food production, producing profit for the colonial government through commodity production, and development of infrastructure through “voluntary” labor. The examples given earlier of colonial denigration of former slaves and their descendants culminated in the 1960 Economic Development Report commissioned by the government. In the report the authors, Selwyn and Watson, repeatedly noted, “The farming community consider that Government should give them more assistance. This attitude is in our view part of the general lack of initiative which we have encountered throughout the whole economy.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Selwyn and Watson's blame of the economic problems of the islands on the unwillingness of Zanzibaris to labor beyond their personal necessity, even when they owned the land they farmed, echoed complaints of earlier agricultural officials who clamored for compulsory agricultural labor. In a section titled “Lack of Initiative,” Selwyn and Watson complain, “The amount of effort which the individual farmer puts into agricultural production is determined in the last resort mainly by the nature, intensity and order of his wants.” Yet again, laborers in the rural areas were “lazy” and lacked “responsibility.”

The irony of this narrative was not lost on rural communities in the Islands. They knew they were doing a lot of work (picking cloves several months during the year, growing food crops that took months to grow, and laboring “voluntarily” on various government projects). And communities certainly saw some of this work as valuable to them. Clove picking allowed them to earn cash, which they used to buy a variety of items, imported food being just one of them.Footnote ⁶⁸ While the Makunduchi community resisted the “model village” approach of mass education, surrounding villages happily worked with the government to share the cost of boring holes for wells since fresh water was a constant problem in the rural areas of both islands.Footnote ⁶⁹ Rural communities on Pemba Island, when asked in 2002 about their experiences under British colonialism, offered a mixed reaction. Their responses were colored by their lives under the Revolutionary government after 1964. However, many of the farmers recollected their parents as being “self-sufficient” in terms of food, contrary to colonial reports of the time.Footnote ⁷⁰ One man in his eighties recalled that “life under the British administration was no good especially for the Swahili.”Footnote ⁷¹ This reference indicates the memory of discrimination by colonial officials continued to linger for that individual. The specific language used to justify controlling the labor of ex-slaves and their descendants, and other working-class groups on Zanzibar certainly shifted over time. However, the rhetoric remained consistent in attributing the problems of the Zanzibar economy—many of which were caused by outside forces beyond Zanzibar, such as world markets and world wars—to the inability of marginalized laborers to understand the value of (their) labor and their social responsibility to labor for all sectors of Zanzibari society (including the colonizers).

Coercive Labor Policies after the Revolution

After the revolution of January 1964, the new government of Zanzibar propagated an ideology of “nation building” (kujenga taifa), which paralleled the mainland ujamaa project.Footnote ⁷² Community members were encouraged to “build the nation” through their voluntary work for the state and join in the new president's ideas of discipline that would help Zanzibar become modernized.Footnote ⁷³

Yet again, rural communities in the islands were expected to both produce commodities for the state's profit and offer their “voluntary” labor for the benefit of food security and development. Similar to the experience under colonialism, the response of Zanzibaris to the government's calls for nation building were mixed.

In urban areas of the Zanzibar Islands, many of the nation-building projects involved building housing. However, urban youth were also sent to rural camps to farm for the nation. Initially, recruits to these camps were volunteers and were usually political party members.Footnote ⁷⁵ Thomas Burgess argues that the Zanzibar government, “expended considerable resources in an attempt to create a new generation for whom hard physical labor would be a deeply felt need, an essential condition of an honorable life.”Footnote ⁷⁶ While the rhetoric of agricultural labor for the state remained the same, the target of this rhetoric had changed a little. Ali Sultan Issa, a leader in the early revolutionary government of Zanzibar, recollected that even as these young men “voluntarily” worked on the farms, many nearly starved to death.

In the rural areas, the new citizens of the nation of Tanzania were encouraged to become self-reliant in their food production. On the mainland Julius Nyerere famously encouraged villagization as a means to create self-reliance among rural populations.Footnote ⁷⁷ In Zanzibar, and especially Pemba (which had not initially supported the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964), peasants were not moved into villages because of the existing population density.Footnote ⁷⁸ Ali Sultan Issa recalled that in 1968 President Karume “decided that the country had to become self-sufficient in food production. … The only way to get our people to produce food themselves, he thought, was to stop importing rice, sugar, and flour, to put our people on rations.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Only people in urban areas were given rations, and even these were kept small in order to “stimulate local production of the rationed commodities, while saving foreign exchange.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Once again, the rural population of the Islands was forced to both feed themselves and the urban dwellers of their nation.

The imposition in the late 1960s of coerced labor by the national government, along with rationing to encourage food self-sufficiency, echoed the colonial efforts of the early 1950s. The economy of Zanzibar was not under attack, no famine existed, the price of cloves was booming in the late 1960s, but the new government wanted to “discipline” the laborers of the nation. The difference between the colonial and nationalist governments was the target of government policies. During the colonial period it was the descendants of ex-slaves who were “backward” and “lacking in a sense of responsibility” to their communities. By the nationalist period all people in the society had to learn to work hard as citizens of the new state. Part of this logic comes from the impetus of the Revolution itself. The Revolution overthrew the colonized elites, those whose wealth had been generated through the labor of primarily rural people; thus, the elite now had to learn how to work. The Revolutionary government fashioned a system where everyone worked for the state, not just those descended from enslaved people. Rural populations were still marginalized under the Revolutionary government, but so was everyone else (not connected to the government). Marginalization was no longer associated with descent, as under the colonial government, but instead upon location. Moreover, the Revolutionary government had conflated the two categories of forced and voluntary labor—the labor in most cases was definitely coerced but was classified by the government as “voluntary.”Footnote ⁸¹

The developmental discourse during the nationalist period called for all citizens of the state to participate in building the new nation. Development was directly tied to the nation state and the patriotic duty of citizenship to work for the better of all citizens. The Revolutionary government argued that everyone, even schoolchildren, had to help build the economy of the state in order for success.Footnote ⁸² The colonial and Revolutionary governments discursively framed development as the practices of self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and increasing the production of the state economy. However, the discourses differed in the role of citizenship as central to the developmental discourse of the Revolutionary government. During the colonial period, only marginalized communities and the “workers” were responsible for helping to bring in the wealth of the state; after 1964 all citizens, regardless of their economic or social status, were part of the development project of the state.