Tuesday, 23 October 2012

"The Awakening"/ But Dey Still Sleeping

Paradise Lost (or, Is It Just Sheikh Farid Ahmed?)

Here's the scene at Darajani (Stone Town's main marketplace/ bus-stop) on 2:00 Wednesday afternoon:  Piles of burning rubber in the streets and the ground littered with rubble and rocks and broken ceramics and coconuts. Eerily empty dala-dala lots and fruit stalls. The butchering hall -- normally full of cow gristle and fish-tails, and ringing with the sound of metal on flesh on wood-block -- was completely silent, with just a lot of rancid blood stains all over the concrete and some abandoned chopping blocks.   The billboards on the main street were ripped up, the canvas curling off of the metal frames dejectedly.  Most of the men wore bandannas around their faces to help with breathing and anonymity; everyone held sticks or rocks or pangas, just in case the time for fighting arose.  Some guys threw pots and plates into the air, or smashed them directly onto the tarmac, just to contribute to the chaos.  This is a not-so-dramatic picture of the main street, taken when we first arrived on the scene... we stopped snapping pics as the drama escalated.


Kwa Nini? You Might Ask

First, some minimal political context: The United Republic of Tanzania was born about fifty years ago, when the island of Zanzibar officially joined with mainland Tanzania.  Ever since then, Zanzibaris have murmured and shouted and grumbled about seceding from the rest of the country.  Their cultural identity is pretty distinct from that of mainlanders, the island largely legislates itself already (i.e. education & healthcare) -- and, maybe most relevantly, the islanders vastly over-pay in taxes.  The local government subtly encourages the grumbling, happy to deflect everyone's grievances toward the mainland.

Some Zanzibaris are really serious about seceding, though, and they've coalesced under a movement called Uamsho (aka "The Awakening").  Uamsho is an Islamist secessionist party that bills itself as basically a Muslim NGO concerned only with social development and "awareness issues."  They claim to be apolitical, but in reality they're intensely active in the political sphere and have been associated with several bombings, burnings and assorted acts of violence in the past year alone.  If you care to drop by Uamsho's central offices in Stone Town (which look pleasant and welcoming, just like an NGO's), you'll see every newspaper article that has ever implicated Uamsho in a crime or act of violence -- taped up proudly on their walls.  Yes, I also found that creepy.

The rioting and fires in the streets around Darajani were a sad interruption in Zanzibar's normally peaceful and idyllic sea-sphere.  On Wednesday morning, Uamsho's leader (sheikh) mysteriously disappeared, and Uamsho followers instantly assumed he had been arrested, despite the Head of Police's claims to the contrary.  When protestors began gathering and lighting tires on fire, the police responded by firing their guns into the air and releasing tear-gas bombs onto the rioters.  The tear-gassing continued for two full days, sometimes multiple times a minute.  Here's a picture of the guy whose "disappearance" instigated the whole ordeal, Sheikh Farid Hadi Ahmed -- he magically reappeared on Friday evening!



Maybe-Mapinduzi

When the violence started, I was watching it unfold with my friend Kate, huddled under a jacaranda tree with some other non-fighters.  One guy couldn't drop his tourist-speak, even in the middle of a rebellion.  As bombs and fires peppered the marketplace around us, he looked at our mzungu skin and told us, "Welcome to Zanzibar, hakuna matata!"  Just then, a tear-gas bomb exploded about twenty meters away, and a sudden flood of humans stampeded past us to take cover in the labyrinthine alleys of Stone Town.  We joined them reactively, and I whispered under my breath as I ran, hakuna matata, welcome to Zanzibar... hakuna matata!

Some people actually seemed to love the chaos, even if they weren't part of the Uamsho party.  A lot of the guys hanging around the scene on Wednesday had lit-up eyes, like it was the best thing they'd seen in years. One swaggering scruffy teen walked by me with his hands flung wide, and said gleefully, "S'like Iraq, man! It's just Iraq here!"  I was like, "Um, not exactly..." but he was too caught up in the moment to argue the point. There seems to be this widespread desire for the uprisings to be bigger than they are -- for it to be epic, historical, a "real" revolution.

Uamsho, Ni Saa ya Kuamka

By the second day, sadly, the rebellion took on a sinister dimension.  On Thursday around midnight, a bunch of young guys assaulted a police officer as he drove home on his motorbike.  They cut off his hands with a machete and hurt him in other places, and he died soon afterwards from loss of blood.  It's the first (and hopefully only) casualty of the riots, but it's disturbing and inhuman and the kind of behavior that completely undermines Uamsho's efforts to become a legitimate civil entity.

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