Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu (22 September 1924 – 5 August 1996)[1] was a Zanzibar-born Marxist and pan-Africanist nationalist who played an important role in the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution and served as a minister under Julius Nyerere after the island was merged with mainland Tanganyika to form Tanzania.

He was jailed by Nyerere from 1972 and, after his release following an international campaign, remained a vocal critic of imperialism, authoritarian states and excessively statist (as well as private capitalist) development models.

At independence in 1962, government was transferred to a coalition, drawn from the right-wing of the ZNP and a splinter off the moderate Afro-Shirazi Party of Abeid Karume, which retained the Sultan as constitutional monarch.

In early 1964, massive riots broke out, and the Umma Party played a key role, notable for having "prevented the revolution from taking a racial character i.e. African against Arab".

Following the state capture of Zanzibar, racially motivated violence and persecution continued, forcing up to 75% of Arabs, Asians and Comoros Islanders to leave their centuries-old ancestral home.

Due to his personal experience with the Chinese and his ideological affinity for their Marxist-Leninist model of development, Babu seized the initiative and mentioned the difficulties his government faced in trying to secure financing for the TAZARA Railway.

[10] In 1972, Karume was assassinated, and Babu along with 40 other Umma Party members were jailed for alleged involvement, despite a lack of evidence, leading to death sentences three years later, but were finally released after an international campaign.

In his 1980 Open Letter to Robert Mugabe in 1980, he argued that experience showed that 'the taking over of ongoing viable farms' by states 'has invariably led to almost total collapse of agricultural production and has forced the countries concerned to incur heavy foreign debt to import food'.

[8] For most of the years after his release by Nyerere, Babu lived in the United States of America or Britain, but remained involved in African politics, including efforts to forge an alternative to neo-liberalism.