The Curious Cosmopolitanism of Ali Sultan Issa

How research into historic Afro-Asian solidarities drew a filmmaker into the path of a Zanzibari political revolutionary

- Gary Zhexi Zhang

As our common understanding of inter-national borders fundamentally shifted following the COVID-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, I found myself becoming curious about previous instances of significant geopolitical realignment. I began by investigating the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union – which prompted American political theorist Francis Fukuyama to famously question, per the title of his 1989 essay, whether this might even signal ‘The End of History?’ But despite the popularity of this phrase, Fukuyama’s conclusion was ambiguous.

As part of this research, I stumbled upon G. Thomas Burgess’s 2010 essay ‘Mao in Zanzibar: Nationalism, Discipline and the (De)Construction of Afro-Asian Solidarities’, which examined a deep yet idiosyncratic connection between post-revolutionary Zanzibar and the People’s Republic of China. As Burgess writes, China became ‘widely regarded as the model for the islands’ future’. One of the essay’s protagonists was Ali Sultan Issa, a Zanzibari revolutionary whose life story offered a thread through resurgent Afro-Asian political imaginaries of the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1960s.