One cannot engage with the Pemban landscape without being open to sense the mystical, the invisible but deep and powerful world that is grounded in its earth, as its peoples are. And one cannot even begin to learn of Zanzibar’s historical and political situatedness without being alert to the absent presence of Pemba within it. Mystical Power and Politics on the Swahili Coast is the first English-language scholarly book that insistently speaks (about) Pemba through the lens of uchawi: that is, ‘the invisible and the spiritual, the inchoately but powerfully sensed, and any practice or power that draws on rare, arcane knowledge of vital realms and beings that are typically not sensed by the untrained’ (p. 6). This book is a detailed and historicized account of uchawi discourses that are tightly entangled with notions of power, agency, identity, modernity, presence and absence, and therefore fundamental to making sense of Pemba’s place in the geopolitics of Zanzibar and in the scholarship about the islands. It is a humble, honest and profoundly care-full (full of care) narrative stemming from a relationship that the author and ‘her’ elders in Pemba have woven for almost thirty years, storying an island that, despite being of vital importance for Zanzibar, has been neglected, forcibly deleted from the official national narratives. As such, this book constitutes an unforgetting of Pemba.
Reading this book is an exercise in unlearning the vocabulary through which we, as scholars, are used to engaging with difference, because in Pemba ‘distinctions often made in Northern scholarship between visible and invisible realms and the forces that originate in each are here in a real sense irrelevant. The invisible exists, leaks into and implicates the ordinary; the skilled can always see it, the unskilled know it’s there’ (p. 5). Continuously questioning her positionality, Arnold Koenings accompanies us in this endeavour, teaching us that ‘uchawi depends on shared knowledge materialised through talk, and talk about uchawi … is always onto-epistemological; that is, at once makes and knows the world and the people and beings and objects in it’ (p. 32).
The book is organized in three parts, crafted around the three key (historical) moments through which Pemban elders conceptualize the(ir) present world as a loss in authority, uwezo (agency), shibe (well-being), protection and heshima (respect). In the first part, Arnold Koenings introduces Pemban uchawi as a ‘grammar of power’ (p. 21), its centrality in the social, religious, economic and geopolitical landscape of the island, and its role in and for being/becoming distinctively Pemban. With the guidance of Sheikh Abdulaziz wa Bahr al Shem, a Muslim jinn and expert in the mystical, we are welcomed into the house of uchawi’s seven rooms, which are the seven specific types of uchawi. Here, the author unravels the historically detailed entanglements between uchawi and authority, respect, agency and (collective) protection, and their dangerous, sometimes horrible and terrifying ambiguity. In the second part, ‘Crisis’, Arnold Koenings argues that, throughout the mid-century political changes in Zanzibar, marked by the 1964 Zanzibar revolution, Pemba came to be materially and discursively erased from the national equation. Here, we learn with the author how the uniqueness of Pemba’s experience of colonialism, abolition and emancipation came to be weaponized, transforming Pembans into ‘traitors’, undeserving of any overarching Zanzibariness, and, therefore, into targets of state violence of all kinds. Mostly, she argues, it was the elders, whose mystical and worldly authority had long served Pemban communities, who became the bodies through which the violent project of punishment endorsed by the postcolonial government could be accomplished. More ‘Transformations’ are addressed in the third and last part of the book, where Pemban poetics of loss speak of Pemba–uchawi’s condition of ‘there-not-there-ness’ (p. 14): despite being still there, the ‘mystical knowledge has been withdrawn’ (p. 193). The ambiguity of ‘too much, yet not enough power’ is what the elders are left with, throughout the political, economic and religious changes of the 1990s, and to the present day. We sense the gravity of the ‘political emergency’ (p. 202) that has been translated for more than twenty-five years into the brutal violence staged by the state against any alternative to its power, and particularly against Pembans. In this (im)mobility, as Arnold Koenings brilliantly shows, whether the mutually constitutive place/non-place of Pemba and uchawi will be seen, heard, and therefore felt and respected within the entity of Zanzibar (and Tanzania) ultimately depends on both human and otherworldly agency.
As uchawi is polyphonic, so is this book. Nathalie Arnold Koenings gifts us with the first ethnography of uchawi (in Pemba) that ‘matters-forth‘ all its entangled co-constitutive voices. These voices, livelily woven with the author’s, compose a historiography of modern Zanzibar that allows for different narratives of the revolution and its aftermath. I recommend this book to scholars interested in the onto-epistemology of uchawi (and its use as analytics), in the history of the Swahili (and the Swahili Coast) and in the Indian Ocean’s landscapes, as well as in their political and religious transformations.
