Zanzibar — Fatma Karume, the widow of Zanzibar’s founding President Abeid Amani Karume and a participant in the islands’ independence struggle, has died.
The Zanzibar government said she died in Mbweni on September 21. She is due to be prayed for at Msikiti wa Jamii Zanzibar before burial at the Karume family cemetery in Mbweni, according to a televised announcement by Second Vice-President Hemed Suleiman Abdulla.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan said Mrs Karume’s death was a loss to both her family and the nation. She described her as an important part of Zanzibar’s history, from the independence struggle and the January 1964 Revolution to the formation of the Union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar.
Fatma Karume, born Fatma Gullam Hussein Jamal, married Abeid Karume in 1944. When the Afro-Shirazi Party leader became Zanzibar’s first president after the 1964 Revolution, she became the islands’ first First Lady, a role she held until his assassination in 1972.
She was also the mother of former Zanzibar President Amani Abeid Karume and Ambassador Ali Abeid Karume. But her public identity was not confined to her family’s political history.
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In a 2023 interview, Karume recalled working as a clerk in a Zanzibar women’s group during the late colonial period. She said the group pressed visiting British officials to extend voting rights to women and later helped women navigate restrictive voting requirements.
“We participated in the struggles not by merely taking care of our husbands but in active politics,” she said. She also said she had personally taken part in the January 12, 1964 Revolution.
Her account records women’s organising as political work in its own right, rather than as support work for male leaders. It is central to what she will be remembered for: insisting that women were political actors in their own right.
Mrs Karume also became a public witness to that era. In another 2023 interview, she lamented what she saw as young people’s weak knowledge of the country’s history and warned against nostalgia for colonial rule without an understanding of its consequences.
Her stated beliefs extended to women’s agency and economic independence. “Women are very powerful; they have the capacity to build or demolish,” she told the government-owned newspaper Daily News, while urging women to use available opportunities to improve their economic circumstances.
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President Samia said Karume would be remembered and honoured for helping to preserve the country’s memories and heritage, and for encouraging political, economic and social development.
Her public record combines the life of a First Lady with that of a women’s organiser and a custodian of Zanzibar’s political memory.
