Long Way from Utopia

"Uhuru" was also being shouted to the southeast, 80 miles from Kenya's coast on the tiny, palm-wreathed island of Zanzibar. To the accompaniment of a 41-gun salute, a red, gold and green flag was hoisted in Zanzibar Town, replacing the Union Jack and ending 73 years of British rule in the clove-scented protectorate of Zanzibar and neighboring Pemba Island. With a population of only 300,000 on the two islands, Zanzibar becomes Africa's smallest independent nation.

For more than three centuries, Zanzibar was the jumping-off place for adventurers and explorers and a sanctuary for slavers, who carried their black cargo from the mainland beyond the range of avenging tribes. Swept by the monsoons, dhows from the Arabian peninsula brought Moslem raiders who installed Arab sultans and kept the island's black majority in bondage cultivating the clove groves (the island still supplies 75% of the world's cloves). After the British took over in 1890, troops kept the racial peace, but today race riots sporadically erupt. Though the Arabs make up less than 20% of the population, they control the economy, dominate the new government through the Arab-led Nationalist Party.

The new nation faces pressing problems. The per capita income is only $56 a year, and the population is still so primitive that in last summer's general election both the Nationalist Party and the opposition Afro-Shirazi Party hired witch doctors to influence the results.

Like Kenya's Kenyatta--and unlike some other African leaders--Prime Minister Sheik Mohammed Shamte Hamadi does not equate uhuru with Utopia. "We appreciate that freedom does not mean a distribution of loot," he said at last week's independence ceremonies. "There is no loot to distribute."

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