Roland Travas wrote: :The British handed the political reins to the Arab-minority
:Zanzibar Nationalist Party, and left. The Africans were :disenfranchised and the status quo remained. Within a month, :a violent African-led revolution occurred, toppling the new :government and changing the entire dynamic of the small, two :island nation state.: For those interested in historical events, the elections that took place in Zanzibar prior to the colonialist leaving, are in the Guinness Book of Records as the narrowest election win ever. A government was decided by just one vote. A Goan was in charge of a polling station in Pemba and when the polling ended, he called in the representatives of the two political parties. He read them the rules and then showed them all the (approximately) 300 spoilt ballot papers. After everyone agreed that all the 300 ballot papers were spoilt and void, he announced the results of the voting. The candidate who won that district did so by just one vote. Zanzibar had a 41 member Parliament. The party that won that Pemba district, won a total of 21 seats in Parliament. The other party won 20 seats! The real problem, of course, was the British parting gift of gerrymandering. All you have to do is google ÉZanzibar gerrymanderingÉ and there is enough material there to start another revolution. :Some Goans did remain in East Africa, opting for citizenship :of the new nations. Some simply had no one in Goa or some :feared having to start all over again. The Indian :administration offered little help or no help in :resettlement. There was chaos in the new independent :countries, as the basic infrastructure was broken and :qualified persons left and the new leadership was inept in :nation building. In this scenario, Zanzibar joined with :Tanganyika to form the United Republic of Tanzania. To give one an idea of how fast the Zanzibar revolution and other events took place, let me tell you what my Zanzibar born grand-mother experienced. In December, 1963, she left her home on independent Zanzibar and traveled to independent Tanganyika to spend Christmas with her daughter and grand-children. After Easter 1964, she returned from Dar-es-salaam, TANZANIA to her home in Zanzibar, TANZANIA. Mervyn
