John Okello

The black slave played by Edward Roland in Werner Herzog's 1972 film Aguirre, the Wrath of God is named "Okello". In his commentary to the DVD version of the film, Herzog also says that the character of Aguirre himself was partly modelled on John Okello, with whom the director had been in contact. (Okello had wanted Herzog to translate a book he had written.) Herzog explains: "I chose the name Okello because I owe his craze, his hysteria, his atrocious fantasies quite a bit for this film".

Okello then stayed in Kenya, in Congo-Kinshasa and in Uganda. He was incarcerated multiple times and was last seen with the Ugandan president Idi Amin in 1971; he vanished afterwards. In the book Revolution in Zanzibar by Don Petterson, it is more or less assumed that Idi Amin saw him as a threat and arranged for his murder. After Amin promoted himself, Okello reportedly joked that "now Uganda has two Field Marshals." The veracity of the joke has come under scrutiny, as it was only some years after Okello's presumed death in 1971 that Amin was promoted to Field Marshal. But Okello's status as a member of the Lango group, alongside his popularity and charisma may have played a factor in his disappearance.

On 12 January 1964, with popular support from the island's native African majority, Okello and his men fought their way to the capital of Zanzibar, Stone Town, where the sultan lived. Even though they were poorly armed, Okello and his men surprised the police force of Zanzibar and they took power.

Okello left for Zanzibar in 1963, where he contacted the leaders of the Afro-Shirazi Youth League, the youth organisation of the Afro-Shirazi Party. The Youth League strove for a revolution in order to break the power of the Arabs. On Zanzibar, Okello was also a member of the Painters Union, being a house painter, which gave a regular salary and allowed to move around the island, supposedly giving speeches at union branches, but in reality to organize a revolution to overthrow the sultan. In his free time, he built up a small army of determined African nationalists. This army was required to hold themselves to the strict rules of Okello: sexual abstinence, no raw meat, and no alcohol.

Little is known of Okello's youth: he was born in Lango District in what was the Uganda Protectorate, and was baptized at age two, receiving the baptismal name of Gideon. He was orphaned at age eleven and grew up with other relatives. When he was fifteen, he left and set out on his own and found work in several places within British East Africa. At various times, Okello was a clerk, manservant, gardener, and did odd-jobs as he drifted around British East Africa, living in various times in Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika. He later went through training to become a bricklayer. He was arrested in Nairobi, Kenya on allegations of rape and was incarcerated for two years, an experience that left him with an intense Anglophobia. In 1959 Okello left for the island of Pemba, where he tried to find work on one of the farms. Okello joined the Afro-Shirazi Party of Sheikh Abeid Karume. This party opposed the dominant position of the minority Arabs on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba. A charismatic individual, Okello's speeches denouncing British colonial rule, the South Asians from the Indian subcontinent who dominated the commercial life of Zanzibar and the Arabs who dominated the political life of the Sultanate won a following amongst the African population on the island. In 1961, the Arab-dominated Zanzibar Nationalist Party won a rigged election, which convinced Okello that only a revolution achieved by violence would give the African majority political power in Zanzibar.

John Gideon Okello (October 26, 1937 – c. 1971) was a Ugandan revolutionary and the leader of the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964. This revolution overthrew Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah and led to the proclamation of Zanzibar as a republic.