| This dissertation recovers the history of Zanzibar during three decades of nationalism, revolution, and nation building. Although scholars have explained conflicts in Zanzibar largely through race and class identities, this study focuses instead on generation. Revisiting the period preceding the 1964 Revolution, I describe how unique cultural and intellectual influences, as well as political strategy, encouraged the construction of youth identity during the struggle for independence. By late-1963 generational divisions were responsible for the formation of a self-described socialist vanguard party of youth. This study furthermore establishes that leaders of the Afro-Shirazi Party Youth League (ASPYL) organized and executed the 1964 Revolution. After identifying the historical actors involved, and describing much of what happened during the uprising, I then reevaluate conventional historical interpretations of the Revolution. Since African and Arab youth cooperated in the execution of the Revolution, I suggest that it cannot be understood only as a racial conflict.;This study furthermore explores the historiographically neglected years following 1964. Generational identities remained prominent in public discourse; revolutionary leaders sought to rearrange political relationships in Zanzibari society according to social memories of how generational relations were conceived in precolonial Africa, when youth deferred to and obeyed their elders. In this context, the ASPYL became the enforcing agency of the revolutionary state, responsible for ensuring youth discipline and service to the state. ASPYL institutions emerged such as the Young Pioneers, Green Guards, and youth camps designed to instill socialist, revolutionary values among youth.;Such institutions were legitimized not only by African rural discourses on generation, but were inspired by the Eastern European "science" of youth leadership. Young people participated in or resisted conformity to a new revolutionary culture informed by socialist, African nationalist, and Islamic discourses.;This dissertation, then, through an extensive examination of oral and archival records, recovers the construction and reinvention of youth identities in Zanzibar, providing a theoretical reevaluation of Zanzibari social and political relations previously understood through race and class identities. |
