“Peter Rand’s stylish memoir plunges us into the boozy bonhomie among the journalists, hoteliers, and other Caucasian hangers-out and hangers-on in an African nation. MY ZANZIBAR REVOLUTION brings to mind Graham Greene in its empathic understanding of innocence –its crazy grandeur as well as its destructiveness. This beautifully written, exciting, and insightful memoir is a must-read for anyone interested in Africa-in-transition, or the follies of youth.”
---Scott Spencer, author of Endless Love and A Ship Made of Paper
At the age of twenty, Peter Rand flunked out of college, left his comfortable home in California, crossed the ocean, and roamed the world to pursue his destiny as a writer. In Africa, this young drifter, an inexperienced stringer for the New York Herald Tribune, stumbled into revolution. He was living on Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Kenya in the Indian Ocean. Fabled as an Arab trading center, Zanzibar was also a legendary slave port where racial anger still simmered under the surface. Revolution broke out immediately following independence from British rule. It was a violent uprising. When it was over, revolution had altered the landscape of Zanzibar. It had also transformed the life of the college dropout.
In his memoir, My Zanzibar Revolution, Peter Rand recounts in vivid, powerful detail the land and people of the island of Zanzibar and tells how he rose to the occasion and seized the opportunity to join forces with other American journalists, rubbing shoulders with death. It was a defining moment of profound bravery, kindness, and friendship in a dire, life-threatening situation. Drawing on the raw emotional material of this extraordinary episode, Rand fashioned his first published novel, Firestorm. Critics called him “a young Hemingway.”
This rare, firsthand, eye-witness account of the revolution on Zanzibar also reveals British and American geopolitical intrigue in the twilight hours of colonialism, when imperial power began to fade at the onset of African independence. Thus, this book is not only a personal memoir. It’s an important contribution to a part of world history we cannot afford to ignore.