Mama Fatma Karume

Mama Fatma Karume, born Fatma Gullam Hussein Jamal on 2 February 1929 in Bumbwini Misufini in North Unguja, was Zanzibar's inaugural First Lady and a living witness to the island's revolution and union with Tanganyika. She died at her home in Mbweni on 21 September 2026, aged 97. Zanzibar's Second Vice President, Hemed Suleiman Abdulla, announced the death and said she would be prayed for at Zinabar Mosque and buried at the family cemetery in Mbweni. President Samia Suluhu Hassan and other national leaders mourned a woman whose private life had been woven into public history.

She was the daughter of Gulamhussein Ismail and Mwanasha Mbwana Ramadhani, and she later recalled growing up between Bumbwini and town under an uncle who worked with the African Dance Club at Michenzani. At fifteen, in 1944, she married Abeid Amani Karume, then a sailor turned community organiser who would lead the Afro-Shirazi Party. The marriage crossed racial lines that colonial Zanzibar treated as nearly taboo; her father, she said, approved it without hesitation. Their first child, Asha, died two days after birth. Sons Amani Abeid Karume (born 1948) and Ali Abeid Karume (born 1950) survived into public life: Amani as the sixth President of Zanzibar (2000-2010), Ali as a career ambassador.

Long before she was called First Lady, Fatma worked as clerk of a Zanzibar women's group that pressed colonial officials for the vote. After the 1957 elections a Lancaster House delegate visited the islands; with translator Abdallah Mzee, the women argued their case and won the principle of female suffrage, then organised sewing and cookery projects to meet literacy and three-shilling property hurdles that still blocked registration. She later insisted women had not merely kept house for revolutionary husbands but had practised active politics. She said she personally took part in the January 1964 Revolution. When Karume became Zanzibar's first President, she became its first First Lady and a support figure through the founding of the Revolutionary Government and the Union that created Tanzania.

Karume was assassinated on 7 April 1972. Mama Fatma endured widowhood as a national figure, later recalling comfort from Julius Nyerere and the hard years that followed for the family. She kept a low public profile yet remained a sought-after oral historian. In extended Daily News interviews in 2023 she spoke with encyclopaedic recall about independence meetings, women's organising, and the meaning of the Union, which she compared to paradise and urged Tanzanians to protect. She admired President Samia's leadership and pressed women to use political space for economic change. Even in advanced age she made a point of being in Zanzibar for Revolution Day.

In her final months she was treated at Aga Khan Hospital in Dar es Salaam and Lumumba Hospital in Zanzibar. President Samia visited her in hospital on 11 August 2026; Ridhiwani Kikwete later visited her Maisara home with a government pledge to care for spouses of retired national leaders. She died overnight on 21 September 2026 at Mbweni. Tanzanian and Zanzibari officials remembered her as Mother of the Nation of Zanzibar: wife of the first President, mother of another, women's-rights organiser, and keeper of a personal archive of the islands' modern founding.