Cinema, Bell Bottoms, and Miniskirts: Struggles over Youth and Citizenship in Revolutionary Zanzibar

Abstract

Young people in Zanzibar after the 1964 Revolution matured during a period of ambitious nation-building projects inspired by an official development discourse that made heavy demands on the physical resources of island citizens. All citizens, including elders, women and juniors, were supposed to be fully engaged in the construction of a new revolutionary society. This society, ruling party leaders argued, would be based upon local understandings of what constituted African, Islamic, and socialist discipline. It would be the fulfillment of the people's revolutionary conflict against colonialism and capitalism. Despite such official discourse, Zanzibar's political elite continued through the 1960s and 1970s to tolerate the daily showing of Western films in the capital that paid no deference to socialist development or Islamic standards of decency, and made no reference to the islands' historic race and class conflicts. These film narratives instead offered images of societies experiencing forms of consumption and individualism unacceptable within revolutionary Zanzibar.