Afro-Shirazi Party in the context of "African nationalism"

The Sultanate of Zanzibar (Swahili: Usultani wa Zanzibar, Arabic: سلطنة زنجبار, romanized: Sulṭanat Zanjībār), also known as the Zanzibar Sultanate, was an East African Muslim state controlled by the Sultan of Zanzibar, in place between 1856 and 1964. The Sultanate's territories varied over time, and after a period of decline, the state had sovereignty over only the Zanzibar Archipelago and a 16-kilometre-wide (10 mi) strip along the Kenyan coast, with the interior of Kenya constituting the British Kenya Colony and the coastal strip administered as a de facto part of that colony.

Under an agreement reached on 8 October 1963, the Sultan of Zanzibar relinquished sovereignty over his remaining territory on the mainland, and on 12 December 1963, Kenya officially obtained independence from the British. On 12 January 1964, revolutionaries, led by the African Afro-Shirazi Party, overthrew the mainly Arab government. Jamshid bin Abdullah, the last sultan, was deposed and lost sovereignty over Zanzibar, marking the end of the Sultanate, and resulted in the massacre of tens of thousands of Arabs. It was also involved in the shortest war in history, the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which lasted 38 minutes.

The Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, lit. 'Party of the Revolution') is the dominant ruling party in Tanzania. It was formed in 1977 from a merger between the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), which were the sole operating parties in mainland Tanzania and the semi-autonomous islands of Zanzibar, respectively. It has formed the majority government in Tanzania ever since, making it the second-longest ruling party in the history of Africa, only after the True Whig Party of Liberia.

TANU and its successor CCM have ruled Tanzania uninterruptedly since independence. The party has been described as authoritarian. Although opposition parties have been legal since 1992, the CCM rules the country as a virtual one-party state. Since the creation of a multi-party system, CCM has won the past seven general elections in 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2025. Jakaya Kikwete, its presidential candidate in 2005, won by a landslide, receiving more than 80% of the popular vote and John Magufuli as a candidate in 2020 garnered over 84% of the vote. In the 2020 election, the CCM won 256 of the 264 constituencies, continuing to hold an outright majority in the National Assembly.

The Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) was the principal political party in the struggle for sovereignty in the East African state of Tanganyika (now Tanzania). The party was formed from the Tanganyika African Association by seventeen founders on 7th July 1954, namely S. M. Kitwana, Kisung'uta Gabara, John Rupia, Japhet Nkura Kirilo, Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Germano Pacha, Abubakar Ilanga, Joseph Kimalando, Dossa Aziz, Tewa Said Tewa, Constantine Oswald Milinga, Lameck Makaranga Bugohe, Patrick George Kunambi, Joseph Kasella Bantu, Ally Sykes, Abdulwahid Sykes and Saadan Abdul Kandoro. From 1964, the party was called the Tanzania African National Union. On 5th February 1977, the TANU merged with the ruling party in Zanzibar, the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), to form the current Revolutionary State Party or Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). The policy of TANU was to build and maintain a socialist state aiming towards economic self-sufficiency and to eradicate corruption and exploitation, with the major means of production and exchange under the control of the peasants and workers (Ujamaa-Essays on Socialism; "The Arusha Declaration").

Julius Nyerere was the first President of Tanzania, serving from the 1960s to 1985. In 1962, Nyerere and TANU created the Ministry of National Culture and Youth. Nyerere felt the creation of the ministry was necessary in order to deal with some of the challenges and contradictions of building a nation-state and a national culture after 70 years of colonialism. The government of Tanzania sought to create an innovative public space where Tanzanian popular culture could develop and flourish. By incorporating the varied traditions and customs of all the people of Tanzania, Nyerere hoped to promote a sense of pride, thus creating a national culture.

In January 1964, during and following the Zanzibar Revolution, Arab residents of Zanzibar were victims of targeted violence committed by the island’s majority Black African population. Arabs were mass murdered, raped, tortured and deported from the island by Black African militiamen under the Afro-Shirazi Party and Umma Party. The exact death toll is unknown, although scholarly sources estimate the number of Arabs killed to be between 13,000 and more than 20,000, around a quarter of the Arab population. It has been described by some, including a number of scholars, as an act of genocide.

Omani and Arab elites had dominated the society of the island for more than two hundred years, both politically and economically. The uprising against the ethnic Arabs (and Indians) has been overlooked by the majority and the massacres remain largely undiscussed and outside the public eye in terms of official histories. The Zanzibar Revolution is publicly celebrated on its anniversary as an uprising against slavery and oppression, although slavery in Zanzibar had already been abolished almost a century before. Regardless, the massacres are either downplayed or not discussed at all.