Africa-Press – Tanzania. Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua has arrived at the Abeid Amani Karume International Airport to represent President William Ruto at the 60th-anniversary celebrations of the Zanzibar Revolution, a public holiday in Tanzania observed on January 12th.
Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua has arrived in Zanzibar City for the celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of the Zanzibar Revolution.
Gachagua will be representing President William Ruto at the event on Friday, January 12.
The Deputy President was accompanied by his wife Dorcas and MPs Owen Baya (Kilifi North) Michael Muchira (Ol Jororok), Letipila Eli (Samburu North), Rachel Nyamai (Kitui South), Joseph Cherorot (Kipkelion East), Jane Njeri (Kirinyaga County MP) and Cynthia Muge (Nandi County MP).
Other prominent leaders from Africa who will grace the occasion include President Paul Kagame of Rwanda.
The Zanzibar Revolution, Mapinduzi ya Zanzibar in Swahili, occurred in January 1964 and led to the overthrow of the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government by the island’s majority Black African population.
The Zanzibar Revolution’s 60th anniversary celebrations kicked off three weeks ago with nationwide cleaning of the environment and the launch of projects.
Zanzibar was an ethnically diverse state consisting of several islands off the east coast of Tanganyika. It had become fully independent in 1963, with responsibility for its own defense and foreign affairs, as a result of Britain giving up its protectorate over it.
In a series of parliamentary elections preceding this change, the Arab minority succeeded in retaining the hold on power it had inherited from Zanzibar’s former existence as an overseas territory of Oman.
Frustrated by under-representation in Parliament, despite winning 54 of the vote in the July 1963 election, the African Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) early in the morning of January 12, 1964, led by John Okello, youth leader of the ASP’s Pemba branch, mobilised around 600–800 men on the main island of Unguja (Zanzibar Island).
Having overrun the country’s police force and appropriated their weaponry, the insurgents proceeded to Zanzibar Town, where they overthrew the Sultan and his government.
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