Word: okello
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...East African Airways flight 304 approached Zanzibar one day last week, a message flashed ahead: "It is I, the field marshal, who comes. Have my army and the press waiting." Zanzi-baris could not fail to recognize the unique style of John Okello, the messianic Ugandan house-painter-turned-revolutionary whose bloody anti-Arab coup put Zanzibar's black Afro-Shirazi Party in power two months ago. But all that awaited Field Marshal Okello was rejection...
Appointment in Nairobi. His 1,200-man army was gone-dissolved by burly President Abeid Karume, who had tired of Okello's manic ravings. No sooner had the field marshal arrived than Karume sent him winging back to the mainland. There, Okello called a press conference on the veranda of Tanganyika's Dares Salaam Club, sadly explained that he had been kicked out of Zanzibar because some people, "four or five" at least, felt he carried the seeds of death. "Wherever I go there will be bloodshed," he mourned. But the old elan returned when he was asked...
...wept. "God has told me. Someone, a Somali I think, will shoot me in Nairobi. However hard I try to get away, death will be there." It wasn't. After keeping his appointment in Nairobi (where he claimed he had less than two shillings to his name), Okello found himself persona non grata. So he bought himself a dark blue Peugeot, packed his pistol and candy-striped cane, and set off for Uganda...
Though Washington and London withheld recognition, many officials clung to the hope that Zanzibar would not in fact turn out to be another Cuba. They insisted that President Abeid Karume was a determined African nationalist, not a Communist. And though U.S. intelligence sources were certain "Field Marshal" John Okello had been trained in Cuba, it was becoming increasingly clear that he wielded little power in the new government. Last week Okello was back at his broadcasting chores, warning civilians to lay down their guns. "Otherwise," he bellowed in his own arresting argot, "you will see how we hang people...
...Okello blustered, Karume was busy flying to nearby capitals, protesting to his African neighbors that his government was not Communist. But for all his soothing words, the fact remained that the only newsmen still permitted in his brand-new "people's republic" were correspondents from Moscow and Peking. And no one believed that the Communists, whether they instigated the revolution or not, would hesitate about trying to take it over...