Abeid Karume

Karume was born on 4 August 1905. His birthplace is disputed: the English article reports Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), while other reports and his own claim, as the Arabic article gives it, place his birth at the village of Mwera in Zanzibar. ^{1 2} He had little formal education and worked as a seaman — he once served as an oarsman for the Sultan's ceremonial barge — before entering politics. He left Zanzibar early in his life and travelled, including to London, where exposure to African thinkers such as Hastings Banda of Malawi broadened his understanding of geopolitics. He built his position through the expansion of the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) and its relations with Tanganyika's TANU party. ^{1 2}

Zanzibar became independent on 10 December 1963 under a constitutional sultan, with the Zanzibar National Party in government. Karume was on the African mainland on 12 January 1964, the night the revolution led by the Ugandan John Okello deposed Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah. Between 2,000 and 4,000 Zanzibaris, mostly Arabs and Indians, were killed in the revolution, which ended about 500 years of Arab domination of the island. ^{1 2}

Okello invited Karume back to take the title of president of the People's Republic of Zanzibar, reserving "Field Marshal" for himself. In the three-month power struggle that followed, Karume aligned neighbouring African leaders against Okello, brought Tanganyikan police onto the island, and, when Okello travelled abroad, declared him an enemy of the state and barred his return. In April 1964 Karume agreed with Tanganyika's president Julius Nyerere that Zanzibar would unite with Tanganyika to form Tanzania; Karume became first vice-president, and the Marxist leader Abdulrahman Mohammad Babu, who had favoured alignment with the communist bloc, was marginalised. ^{1 2}

In office Karume nationalised land owned by Arabs and Indians and redistributed it among the poor majority, and established free education and health services for all Zanzibaris regardless of race, alongside housing built at affordable rents. ¹

The sources also report a darker episode. In 1970, when four young Persian girls refused to marry the 64-year-old Karume, he ordered the arrest of ten of their male relatives for "hindering the implementation of mixed marriages" and threatened to deport them and dozens of other members of the Twelver Shia sect to which the families belonged. Under pressure from President Nyerere the charges were dropped; a few months later the girls were forced to marry members of his Revolutionary Council and eleven relatives were ordered imprisoned and flogged. A United Nations commission studied the affair, as the New York Times reported in 1972. ¹

On 7 April 1972 four gunmen shot Karume dead as he played bao at the headquarters of the Afro-Shirazi Party in Zanzibar Town; reprisals followed against people suspected of opposing his regime. ^{1 2} His death date, 7 April, has since been a public holiday in Zanzibar. His son Amani Abeid Karume was elected president of Zanzibar in 2000 and 2005 and served until late 2010. ¹

No source names a religious school for Karume, and no article text states his religion: the English, Arabic and Urdu articles carry only category filings (Tanzanian Muslims), the Arabic infobox's religion field is empty, and the Urdu article follows the Arabic account. Wikidata gives his religion as Islam with no branch — a single structured value. The English article's only sect content concerns the Persian Twelver Shia families of the 1970 affair, which is about other people, not his affiliation. ^{3 1 2 4} His faith is therefore recorded as unknown.

Because his birthplace is disputed between Nyasaland and Mwera, no birthplace relation is written; the relation written is his death in Zanzibar Town. His successor Aboud Jumbe has no record in the museum. ¹

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