This paper examines official and personal Omani accounts of the 1964 Zanzibari revolution and its aftermath. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Oman and Zanzibar, official and local histories in Oman as well as archival documents in London and Zanzibar, it explores understandings and descriptions of the revolution’s causes, its perpetrators, and its victims. Though Zanzibar gained independence from Britain in 1963, many African-identified Zanzibaris feared that the subsequent parliamentary elections would simply reinstate the island’s “Arab” elite. And, indeed, in January 1964, in the aftermath of the elections, armed revolt broke out, leading to the massacre and expulsion of thousands of people who were popularly identified as “Arab.” This event, and especially later news that officials of the new post-independence Zanzibari state were forcing some remaining Arab women to marry them and encouraging other men to do the same, have left indelible marks on personal and national accounts of Oman’s past in East Africa. Undoubtedly, such accounts of violence have helped shape national identity through a sense of shared trauma and victimhood. However, many questions remain: What are the differences between accounts of those who were either witness to or contemporaries of these events and accounts of those, much younger Omanis, who were not? How are social, political, and economic hierarchies and resentments presented? How are they occluded? And, to what affects? This paper illustrates how different Omani accounts of the Zanzibari revolution also often reveal personal and national nostalgia for life in East Africa, reflect people’s subtle attempts to grapple with the political, social, and economic conditions of the revolution’s eruption, and indicate tensions and hierarchies between various groups of Omanis who had lived in East Africa. Ultimately, this paper also argues that in addition to helping to shape a shared yet fragile national identity, accounts of the violence of the Zanzibar revolution have sometimes reinforced and sometimes raised doubts about notions of a shared Omani “Arabness.”