The Swahili coast of Africa is often described as a paragon of
transnational culture and racial fluidity. Yet, during a brief period in the 1960s,
Zanzibar became deeply divided along racial lines as ...intellectuals and activists,
engaged in bitter debates about their nation's future, ignited a deadly conflict
that spread across the island. War of Words, War of Stones explores how violently
enforced racial boundaries arose from Zanzibar's entangled history. Jonathon
Glassman challenges explanations that assume racial thinking in the colonial world
reflected only Western ideas. He shows how Africans crafted competing ways of
categorizing race from local tradition and engagement with the Atlantic and Indian
Ocean worlds.
Zanzibar, an island off the East African coast, with its Muslim and Swahili population, offers rich material for this study of identity, religion, and multiculturalism. This book focuses on the ...phenomenon of spirit possession in Zanzibar Town and the relationships created between humans and spirits; it provides a way to apprehend how society is constituted and conceived and, thus, discusses Zanzibari understandings of what it means to be human.
After the abolition of slavery in 1897, Islamic courts in Zanzibar (East Africa) became central institutions where former slaves negotiated socioeconomic participation. By using difficult-to-read ...Islamic court records in Arabic, Elke Stockreiter reassesses the workings of these courts as well as gender and social relations in Zanzibar Town during British colonial rule (1890–1963). She shows how Muslim judges maintained their autonomy within the sphere of family law and describes how they helped advance the rights of women, ex-slaves, and other marginalised groups. As was common in other parts of the Muslim world, women usually had to buy their divorce. Thus, Muslim judges played important roles as litigants negotiated moving up the social hierarchy, with ethnicisation increasingly influencing all actors. Drawing on these previously unexplored sources, this study investigates how Muslim judges both mediated and generated discourses of inclusion and exclusion based on social status rather than gender.
The experiences of African women in the era before independence remain a woefully understudied facet of African history. This innovative and carefully argued study thus adds tremendously to our ...understanding of colonial history by focusing on women's education, professionalization, and political mobilization in the East African islands of Zanzibar.
Disputing Discipline explores how global and local children’s rights activists’ efforts within the school systems of Zanzibar to eradicate corporal punishment are changing the archipelago’s moral and ...political landscape. Through an equal consideration of child and adult perspectives, Fay explores what child protection means for Zanzibari children who have to negotiate their lives at the intersections of universalized and local child protection aspirations while growing up to be pious and responsible adults. Through a visual and participatory ethnographic approach that foregrounds young people’s voices through their poetry, photographs, and drawings, paired with in-depth Swahili language analysis, Fay shows how children’s views and experiences can transform our understanding of child protection. This book demonstrates that to improve interventions, policy makers and practitioners need to understand child protection beyond a policy sense of the term and respond to the reality of children’s lives to avoid unintentionally compromising, rather than improving, young people’s well-being.
This volume focuses on the cultural memory and mediation of the 1964 Zanzibar revolution, analyzing it’s continuing reverberations in everyday life. The revolution constructed new conceptions of ...community and identity, race and cultural belonging, as well as instituting different ideals of nationhood, citizenship, sovereignty. As the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the revolution revealed, the official versions of events have shifted significantly over time and the legacy of the uprising is still deeply contested. In these debates, the question of Zanzibari identity remains very much at stake: Who exactly belongs in the islands and what historical processes brought them there? What are the boundaries of the nation, and who can claim to be an essential part of this imagined and embodied community? Political belonging and power are closely intertwined with these issues of identity and history—raising intense debates and divisions over precisely where Zanzibar should be situated within the national order of things in a postcolonial and interconnected world. Attending to narratives that have been overlooked, ignored, or relegated to the margins, the authors of these essays do not seek to simply define the revolution or to establish its ultimate meaning. Instead, they seek to explore the continuing echoes and traces of the revolution fifty years on, reflected in memories, media, and monuments. Inspired by interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, history, cultural studies, and geography, these essays foreground critical debates about the revolution, often conducted sotto voce and located well off the official stage—attending to long silenced questions, submerged doubts, rumors and secrets, or things that cannot be said.
Across Africa and elsewhere, colonialism promised to deliver progress and
development. In urban spaces like Zanzibar, the British vowed to import scientific
techniques and practices, ranging from ...sanitation to urban planning, to create a
perfect city. Rather than remaking space, these designs often unraveled. Plans were
formulated and then fell by the wayside, over and over again. By focusing on these
flawed efforts to impose colonial order, William Cunningham Bissell offers a
different view of colonialism and cities, revealing the contradictions, confusion,
and even chaos that lay at the very core of British rule. At once an engaging
portrait of a cosmopolitan African city and an exploration of colonial
irrationality, Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar opens up new
perspectives on the making of modernity and the metropolis.
Since the 1960s, people on the islands off the coast of Tanzania have talked about being attacked by a mysterious creature called Popobawa, a shapeshifter often described as having an enormous penis. ...Popobawa's recurring attacks have become a popular subject for stories, conversation, gossip, and humor that has spread far beyond East Africa. Katrina Daly Thompson shows that talk about Popobawa becomes a tool that Swahili speakers use for various creative purposes such as subverting gender segregation, advertising homosexuality, or discussing female sexuality. By situating Popobawa discourse within the social and cultural world of the Swahili Coast as well as the wider world of global popular culture, Thompson demonstrates that uses of this legend are more diverse and complex than previously thought and provides insight into how women and men communicate in a place where taboo, prohibition, and restraint remain powerful cultural forces.
This book presents a comparative history of slavery and the transition from slavery to free labour in Zanzibar and Mauritius, within the context of a wider comparative study of the subject in the ...Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Both countries are islands, with roughly the same size of area and populations, a common colonial history, and both are multicultural societies. However, despite inhabiting and using the same oceanic space, there are differences in experiences and structures which deserve to be explored. In the nineteenth century, two types of slave systems developed on the islands – while Zanzibar represented a variant of an Indian Ocean slave system, Mauritius represented a variant of the Atlantic system – yet both flourished when the world was already under the hegemony of the global capitalist mode of production. This comparison, therefore, has to be seen in the context of their specific historical conjunctures and the types of slave systems in the overall theoretical conception of modes of production within which they manifested themselves, a concept that has become unfashionable but which is still essential. The starting point of many such efforts to compare slave systems has naturally been the much-studied slavery in the Atlantic region which has been used to provide a paradigm with which to study any type of slavery anywhere in the world. However, while Mauritian slavery was 100 per cent colonial slavery, slavery in Zanzibar has been described as ‘Islamic slavery’. Both established plantation economies, although with different products, Zanzibar with cloves and Mauritius with sugar, and in both cases, the slaves faced a potential conflictual situation between former masters and slaves in the post-emancipation period. Another interesting focus in this book is the largely un-researched subject of female slaves. In Zanzibar, the privileged role of the suria whose status was defined by Sharia law was explored; and in Mauritius, the manumission of female slaves was explored as they formed the majority among manumitted slaves. The book will certainly prove helpful to those involved in comparing the Atlantic slave system with that of the Indian Ocean for the better understanding of both.
