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CREOLE NATIONALISTS AND THE SEARCH FOR NATIVIST AUTHENTICITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ZANZIBAR: THE LIMITS OF COSMOPOLITANISM*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2014

Jonathon Glassman
Jonathon Glassman*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Abstract

The founders of the Zanzibar National Party can be understood as creole nationalists, who imagined their political authority as stemming from membership in a transnational Arab elite. But in the mid-twentieth century, prompted by the rising hegemony of territorial nationalism and by subaltern challenges informed by pan-Africanism, they crafted a new historical narrative that depicted their movement as having originated with indigenous villagers. Party leaders then related this narrative to Western scholars, whose publications helped reproduce the myth throughout the rest of the century. This article traces the genesis of this masquerade and asks what it implies about the nature of the creole metaphor and its supposed link to discourses of cosmopolitan hybridity. The conventional contrast between créolité and nativist essentialism is shown to be illusory.

Keywords

Tanzaniadecolonizationidentitynationalism

Information

Type
Special Feature: Africa and the Indian Ocean
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , July 2014 , pp. 229 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Any examination of the discourses of political citizenship in modern Zanzibar must confront a paradox. Swahili culture is famously cosmopolitan, a model of ethnic fluidity and racial indeterminacy. How, then, are we to understand the rise of virulently nativist politics in the mid-twentieth century, including forms of nativism that, even in the rapidly ‘globalizing’ twenty-first century, show few signs of abating?Footnote 1 Prevailing explanations emphasize the influence of colonial ruling policies. A prominent example is Mahmood Mamdani, who frequently uses Zanzibar to illustrate his argument. Mamdani focuses especially on the role of colonial law in constructing racial/ethnic identities and giving rise to what he calls the politics of indigeneity. Colonialism's greatest crime, he writes, was ‘to politicize indigeneity, first as a settler libel against the native, and then as a native self-assertion’. Thus ‘the colonial state set in motion a process with the potential of endlessly spawning identities animated by the distinctions indigenous and nonindigenous’, a process that has continued into the postcolonial era.Footnote 2

Mamdani's emphasis on the politics of indigeneity and its imbrication with colonial discourse is useful. But his historical argument cannot be sustained. Discourses that distinguished between indigenous and exogenous races, and that assumed the ruling prerogatives of the latter, existed well before the colonial era both in Rwanda (Mamdani's central example) and Zanzibar; indeed, such mythic motifs were widespread throughout East and Central Africa. Moreover, their propagation and politicization in twentieth-century Rwanda had relatively little to do with colonial law. Rather, those processes were the product of Tutsi intellectuals – undertaken while in communication with European educators, to be sure, but as part of their own political projects and never consisting of simple reflections of colonial categories. Similar processes were afoot in Zanzibar at the same time.Footnote 3 On the colonial side, it is simply impossible to discern a uniform set of governing ideas concerning the distinction between natives and non-natives.Footnote 4 As I have argued elsewhere, although we cannot ignore the significance of colonial ideas, African intellectuals' engagement with them took the form of an entanglement, not a simple embrace. Locally inherited ideas played a major role in the genesis of nativist politics.

In the case of Zanzibar, one obstacle to recognizing the role of inherited discourses of nativism and exogenous power has been a tendency to approach the Swahili coast as an example of a ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘creolized’ culture, and to romanticize such cultures as being inherently at odds with nativist essentialisms. The romanticized vision stems in part from a misapprehension concerning the situational nature of communal identities in Swahili society, where people were never ‘Swahili and nothing else’.Footnote 5 Situational ethnic flexibility, of course, is hardly uncommon. But many authors describe it as characteristic of a particular type of society, born of a long history of intercontinental cultural exchanges that took place before the rise of Western-dominated global empire or in defiance of its constraints. The resulting ways of thinking about difference stand in contrast to European identity paradigms, which are fixated on categorizing human difference on the basis of origin. The authors who pose these distinctions explain Zanzibar's mid-twentieth century racial conflicts as the outcome of Western ideological contamination. In many ways such views build on longue durée studies of the Indian Ocean that tend to romanticize it as a ‘sea of peace’, especially in contrast to the Mediterranean.Footnote 6

Similar assumptions pervade a broad literature on colonial and postcolonial societies, and they have received notable reinforcement from theorists who write on ‘creolization’ or ‘creole hybridity’.Footnote 7 The word ‘creole’ and its derivations have at least three distinct connotations, the confusion of which has led to problems of historical understanding. In its oldest and most straightforward sense, criollo and its cognates referred simply to persons whose identity and social status derived from the combination of their Old World descent and New World birth (the New World here including the Indian Ocean): that is, they were the descendants of European settlers or African slaves, as distinct from indigenes. Creole identities in this sense were racial identities, imagined in terms of exogenous origins, that arose in the context of settler colonialism and forced labor.Footnote 8 Later, there emerged in some places forms of ‘creole’ identity whose advocates emphasized their ‘mixed’ racial descent, a history that would form the background to some of the ideological projects I discuss below. But in its oldest sense, ‘creole’ politics typically involved white elites. The best known examples, from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin America, involved elites who valued their racial identity as a community distinct from both slaves and indios, and who understood themselves as exemplars of European civilization transplanted onto American soil. But at the same time, they felt politically marginalized by the metropole. This prompted them to forge movements of creole nationalism in which they sought to enlist the support of indigenes and (in some instances) slaves, giving rise to ironies similar to those which I will address below.Footnote 9

‘Creole’ of course is also a linguistic label, used to describe languages or dialects that developed among populations that were ‘creole’ in the first sense. Such languages are usually understood as variants of the dominant colonial language, formed by interaction with ‘substrate’ languages (typically African or American).Footnote 10 Linguists argue over the precise historical processes by which the new languages emerged.Footnote 11 But all agree that the resulting creole languages were not simple transplants from overseas. Rather, they were locally constructed amalgams or bricolages that brought together elements from many parts of the globe and wove them into something new. Historians and historical anthropologists have built on these models of linguistic creolization to write of creole cultures and creole societies, formed by similar longue durée processes of cultural interaction and innovation. Like the linguists, they emphasize that the resulting creole cultures were not simply African or European transplants but were creative combinations and adaptations.Footnote 12

In the 1980s and 1990s, some cultural theorists took up these models of longue durée linguistic and cultural history and used them as metaphors to argue for the existence of a distinct kind of colonial and postcolonial political subjectivity. Pioneers in this move were a group of prominent Caribbean writers who, reacting against a metropolitan bias in francophone literature, advocated the insertion of creole usages into literary French and the literary use of Antillean Creole itself. Noting that the latter was not simply a version of French, they argued that créolité, not francité, formed the bond of Antillean culture. Créolité, they wrote, was the product of a melting-pot, of a world ‘diffracted and recomposed’, in which cultural elements from throughout the world had been joined together on the same soil by ‘the yoke of History’. The result was a new form of humanity (‘une humanité nouvelle’) that was a harbinger of modern, globalized hybridity and transnationalism: a humanity that rejected the old ‘normalcy’ of tracing origins to ‘ancient continental cultures’, be they European or African. (The implicit critique of the stress on racial purity characteristic of noirisme or négritude was very much intended.)Footnote 13

Such grandiose claims were perhaps not out of place in a self-conscious manifesto of cultural and literary politics. But problems arose when they were taken up by influential theorists who allowed them to stand in for descriptions of historical reality. These theorists transformed créolité from a metaphor into an active historical force, one that was imagined to have shaped a world far beyond the islands of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean. ‘Creolization’ or ‘creole hybridity’ (similar ideas go by other names, including ‘cosmopolitanism’) was said to give rise naturally to counter-hegemonic discourses that subvert what Homi Bhabha called the colonial logic of ‘origins and essences’; it is a form of ‘fugitive power’ that challenges ‘the solidity of ethnic and racial categories’. Thus the creolized postcolonial subject is ‘characterized by an obligatory openness toward others’.Footnote 14

This vision of creole hybridity, in which colonial and postcolonial subalterns are endowed with a subjectivity inherently at odds with nativist or racial essentialism, is highly romanticized, disconnected from real historical actors. It also obscures the nativist and racial concepts that are central to the original concept of the creole, which assigned status based on exogenous ancestral origins coupled with local birth. (Indeed, the first criollos defined themselves in terms of racial purity, not admixture.) Historically, the essentialist elements never disappeared: at some moments they coexisted uneasily with the contrasting theme of mixture; at others, self-identified creoles glorified francité or noirisme (or their equivalents) over local amalgams. More simply, the romanticized vision ignores the fact that créolité is a form of nativism, one that creole nationalists often used in exclusionary ways, even when voicing praise of mixture or hybridity. As several critics have noted, the concepts of créolité and hybridity remain just as locked within a discourse of racial origins as the nativisms they are said to contradict.Footnote 15

Although these critiques are aimed primarily at analyses of political subjectivity, one might also question some of the uses that have been made of the concept of creolization (or cosmopolitanism, its less fashionable cousin) in studies of the longue durée. The concept assumes a contrast with cultures or societies that do not reflect influences from globally dispersed sources: a contrast, that is, with cultures that are authentically or purely local. But is not such purity a fiction? Is there any society in the modern world that is not creole or cosmopolitan in this sense? When we use these terms to describe a particular kind of society, what we are saying is that they are societies that casual observers (including scholars) readily recognize as betraying globally diverse origins. And the way such diversity is recognized is invariably through conventional metaphors of race, metaphors closely tied to the geographical idea of continents.

This all suggests that the uncritical use of the concepts of cosmopolitanism or creole hybridity – their use as tools rather than topics of analysis – risks marking racial categories as natural rather than historically created. That is certainly the case when examining creole or cosmopolitan political subjectivities. Far better to follow several authors' suggestion that such concepts be understood not as categories of analysis but rather as actors' categories: that is, claims to creole or cosmopolitan identity are best understood as aspects of political projects that themselves must be investigated.Footnote 16 In any given instance, the advocates of such claims could make them carry a range of meanings, often using a rhetoric of inclusiveness to mask practices of exclusion.Footnote 17 As such, the romanticization of creole hybridity was hardly unique to the Caribbean littérateurs of the 1980s and 1990s or the postcolonial theorists who took up their vision. Decades earlier, for example, Latin American advocates of mestizaje and Lusotropicalism had romanticized the concept of racial admixture (even as their rhetoric of hybridity often became a new form of racial essentialism).Footnote 18 Similar moves, with all their complications, lay at the heart of Zanzibar's first nationalist project.

THE USES OF ARABCENTRISM

Zanzibar's first nationalists belonged to elite landowning families that prided themselves on their descent from Arabs who had settled in East Africa at the time of Seyyid Said or earlier. By the early twentieth century (and probably before), few of these families spoke Arabic.Footnote 19 Instead, their first language was Swahili, a Bantu tongue which since the eighteenth century had absorbed a large amount of lexical material from Arabic and other languages of the Western Indian Ocean. This pattern was the reverse of the classic creole experience (though in fact it has been common in linguistic history): here, the ‘substratal’ language was taken up by socially-dominant speakers of exogenous origin.Footnote 20 This difference is indicative of broader contrasts between the older forms of intercontinental connections from which the Indian Ocean world had been created and the modern global empires, dominated by the West, that succeeded but never entirely displaced them.Footnote 21 Yet although Zanzibar's Arabs did not imagine the linkage between their global connections and their local power in the same racial terms by which French or Spanish creoles thought about such matters, they nevertheless liked to justify their hegemony by reference to widespread concepts concerning the prestige of exogenous origins. The values placed on influences from the Islamic Near East even distorted Zanzibaris' understanding of the language they spoke, giving rise to a common belief that the introduction of Arabic was the decisive factor in the rise of Swahili.Footnote 22

The nineteenth-century Zanzibar Sultanate was in fact a racial state, dominated by locally-born Arab families.Footnote 23 But the ruling elite made use of Arabcentric discourses that had long been present on the coast. Those discourses were closely intertwined with religion: coastal people regarded themselves as more civilized than their non-Muslim neighbors in the continental interior and, as in many parts of the Islamic world, they imagined that their superiority sprang not only from their faith but also from their access to the entire world of the Islamic Near East. Such values were strikingly expressed in a long-standing practice of coastal Muslims to claim ancestral origins in the Middle East. This often took the form, especially in Zanzibar, of tales of ancient emigrants from the Persian town of Shiraz. Those claims were purely mythical; no family could trace a precise genealogy linking it to Shiraz. Still, as the power of actual immigrants grew during the heyday of the ruling Busaid sultanate, islanders' claims of Shirazi ancestry became more attractive as a prestige-laden counterweight. An indication of the growing force of Arabcentric discourses was the emergence by the century's end of a new Swahili word for ‘civilization’: ustaarabu, from an Arabic loan that literally means the state of becoming like an Arab.Footnote 24

Despite their reference to foreign origins, claims of Shirazi identity were unmistakably nativist, used by islanders to distinguish themselves from slave-descendants and others from the African mainland, the seat of barbarism and unbelief, as well as from Arabs.Footnote 25 In contrast, Zanzibar's Arabs thought of themselves as a creole elite, in the original sense of that term. Unlike the vague myths of Shirazi ancestry, Arabs traced precise genealogies that linked them to Oman, some able to do so in only a few generations. Descent was reckoned through the patriline and, ideally, marriage followed the principle of kafa'a or female hypergamy. Thus, so long as women married only at their rank or above, Arab families would not lose children to families of lesser rank. Engseng Ho describes kafa'a as a ‘theory of creolization’. But, as his analysis vividly suggests, this was a creolization that reproduced racial exclusiveness rather than the egalitarian forms of hybridity so often romanticized in the literature. The twinned theories of kafa'a marriage and patrilineal descent allowed Arab men in the Indian Ocean diaspora to have children with non-Arab wives without endangering the Arab status of their ‘creole’ children.Footnote 26

Arabcentrism also inflected the discourses surrounding slavery, discourses that continued to shape Zanzibar long after abolition. The prevailing justification for slavery was that enslavement was a gift by which the barbarian (typically from the African mainland) was saved from spiritual death and introduced to Islam and the entire moral environment of ustaarabu. The taint of ushenzi, barbarism and unbelief, did not disappear with the slaves' conversion or even with their children's Islamic upbringing; as in most slave societies, slaves passed on to their descendants a certain ‘slavish’ quality that was understood in racialized or quasi-racialized ways.Footnote 27 Even after abolition, then, islanders continued to disdain slave descendants as washenzi, barbarians. The taint inhered as well to a new tide of voluntary immigrants from the mainland that became pronounced between the wars. These mainlanders had come as migrant workers; most settled down as labor tenants on Arab-owned estates, where they established families and small communities. Like the ex-slaves, many sought to reduce their social marginalization by claiming an inheritance of coastal ustaarabu. (Most, in fact, were Muslims, which made such claims somewhat plausible.) Some even tried to pass as Shirazi. Such claims sometimes included attempts to marry local women (most immigrants were men) – attempts that contributed to debates over kafa'a that were simmering throughout the Indian Ocean world at the time.

CREOLE COSMOPOLITANISM AS NATIVIST VIRTUE

Until the mid-1950s, the prevailing form of nationalism among Zanzibar Arabs was that of a creole elite who assumed that, because they belonged to a superior exogenous race, theirs was the only relevant political voice. The dominant nationalist organization in those years was the Arab Association, founded in 1911 in tandem with protests against the Italian invasion of Libya.Footnote 28 Those protests illustrate Sugata Bose's observation that nationalism could be fully compatible with the extraterritorial ‘universalisms’ that had grown from the long history of global interaction in the Indian Ocean arena. In this case, such universalisms included not only the sense of belonging to a diasporic community of Omani Arabs but also pan-Islamism.Footnote 29 The main thrust of Arab Association rhetoric was that, as exemplars of ustaarabu and Islam, Arabs were better and more appropriate agents than the British for carrying out colonialism's civilizing mission among the protectorate's less refined inhabitants. The association rarely sought to enlist popular support before World War Two, and its few efforts in that regard were nakedly paternalist. They peaked in the 1930s, in a series of virulently racial boycotts against the Indian community. (These campaigns against a mostly Muslim community illustrate the limits of the pan-Islamist version of creole hybridity.)Footnote 30 The campaigns were launched to defend Arabs' dominant position within British structures of ‘native rule’ against a perceived Indian threat. Their mobilizing rhetoric and tactics were based on the assumption that elite Arabs were the islands' natural political leaders. Fittingly, they made prominent use of the Arab sultan as the focus of national loyalty.

The Arab nationalists' decisive turn to mass mobilization – and an attendant shift in how they imagined the national project – came only after the war. This was part of a continent-wide pattern in which the discourses of territorial nationalism and indigeneity (or ‘native rights’) became hegemonic in colonial and anticolonial politics. In Zanzibar, the Arab Association made the shift in response to the pressures of two movements of subaltern nativism. The first was a growing trend of Shirazi nationalism that became especially visible during the war. Although the village activists who founded the Shirazi Association in 1940 used the rhetoric of ustaarabu and sought to distance themselves from mainlanders, their primary targets at first were elite Arabs. In 1943–4, the Shirazi activists were instrumental in supporting a boycott of harvest labor on Arab-owned estates, a move that generated a wave of new followers and raised alarms within the Arab Association.Footnote 31

The second and more dramatic development was the emergence of African racial nativism, inspired by pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanist ideas circulated widely in Tanganyika and Kenya between the wars, in part via Garveyite publications. In Zanzibar their most prominent advocates were the labor migrants, but pan-Africanism also had an impact among slave-descendants and even among some who had deep genealogical roots in the islands. The spread of such thinking marked a significant challenge to the Arabcentric rhetoric that had long shaped discourses of belonging: rather than claim rights in local society according to the registers of ustaarabu and Islam, the racial nativists claimed rights in terms of continental racial categories that explicitly excluded Arabs as aliens. (They also excoriated islanders who cherished the myth of Shirazi origins: like some famous latter-day commentators, they argued that such thinking constituted a racial betrayal.Footnote 32) The political threat of these ideas became impossible to ignore in 1948, when Zanzibar Town was all but shut down for three weeks by a general strike mobilized in the name of African racial solidarity against Arab as well as British oppression. The strike was led by mainlanders, and it revived the African Association, which had been moribund for most of the years since its founding the decade before.Footnote 33

The weight of these developments – especially a mass movement that had defied the colonial government with no input from the Arab intelligentsia – made it impossible to maintain the position that Arabs were uniquely endowed with political leadership, and it gave traction to a group of young intellectuals who had been urging their elders in the Arab Association to embrace more inclusive tactics of political mobilization and with them a more inclusive, multiracial vision of the Zanzibar nation. But the Arab intelligentsia were in an awkward position to accomplish this task, given their long history of identifying as a racial elite and, indeed, of jealously guarding their racial exclusiveness. A common tactic by which they tried to finesse the situation was to emphasize Islam's role in encouraging racial hybridity, pointing to interracial marriage as a sign of the ultimate irrelevance of racial boundaries in Zanzibar. But the well-known practice of kafa'a undermined their position. As early as the 1930s, pan-Africanists were arguing that kafa'a made talk of ‘intermarriage’ simply a mask for racial oppression, including, in the past, Arab masters' rape of their African slaves. These debates raged into the 1960s. From the start, a leading advocate of the position that intermarriage had created egalitarian hybridity was Ali Muhsin al-Barwani, a highborn Arab who, with others from the Arab Association, would later found the islands' first multiracial political party, the Zanzibar National Party (ZNP). Given the care with which Muhsin and his family arranged their own marriages along the lines of kafa'a, his arguments were not always convincing.Footnote 34

The Arab intelligentsia's discomfort over the issue of kafa'a pointed to a larger political dilemma. The threats of pan-Africanist and Shirazi nativism had brought home to the intelligentsia the need to adapt their rhetoric and tactics to the growing hegemony of territorial nationalism. But they had long imagined their place in the world (and their privileged place in Zanzibar) not in terms of territorial indigeneity but as part of a diasporic community with roots in the Middle East. The unifying values of the nation they hoped to lead – Islam, ustaarabu, and the Busaid monarchy – derived their force, in their telling, precisely from their link to extraterritorial universalisms. The intelligentsia now had to find a basis for claiming that those values were in fact rooted in the local soil. This dilemma bore striking resemblance to that of Latin America's creole nationalists, who in an earlier century had felt compelled to imagine ties to village subalterns whom they otherwise disdained precisely for their indigeneity. They did so by idealizing the simple indio villager as a national icon and then masquerading behind the icon (in some cases literally) in an attempt to demonstrate their own native authenticity.Footnote 35 Zanzibar's elite nationalists did likewise. They portrayed the Arab Association and the ZNP as representative of ‘the peasant farmers, the country folk, the genuine Zanzibaris’. The wealthy landowners who dominated both organizations, and even the sultan himself, were characterized as ‘children of the soil’.Footnote 36 Islam, ustaarabu, and loyalty to the sultan were said to be natural to the humblest islander, attributes that mainlanders and other outsiders could only mimic in inauthentic forms. Thus, cultural practices that propagandists praised for erasing the divisions of race – and that latter-day scholars praise as indicators of cosmopolitan hybridity – were invoked as nativist taunts.

THE SEARCH FOR NATIVE AUTHENTICITY

The nativist masquerade reached its apogee in the early 1960s, when Muhsin and other leading figures in the ZNP struck poses in which they denied ever having thought of themselves as Arabs.Footnote 37 That pretense was easily punctured. But another aspect of their masquerade, donned at about the same time, has taken longer to be revealed. Not wanting the ZNP to be viewed as yet another Arab-dominated institution, they crafted official narratives of the party's founding that stressed the role of humble indigenous villagers (‘Zanzibar Africans’) rather than members of the Arab Association. In 1962–3, they told the American political scientist Michael Lofchie that the ZNP had originated in a movement organized by peasants in the village of Kiembe Samaki that culminated in 1951 in disturbances that were remembered as the Cattle Riots or Cattle War.Footnote 38 That narrative has colored virtually every subsequent account.Footnote 39 But it was a myth, which Lofchie's informants concocted by cherry-picking certain facts and inventing others. It is instructive to examine its genesis.

Kiembe Samaki is located about four miles south of Zanzibar Town, at the near end of the Fumba Peninsula. Throughout the 1940s, the villagers had undergone a series of confrontations with the colonial state that had contributed to a heightened distrust of government and an unusual sense of community, the latter expressed chiefly through the creation of communal religious institutions. The tensions had multiple causes, including the threat of land losses for the expansion of Zanzibar's airport. But the immediate cause of the 1951 crisis was a succession of cattle diseases and anxieties over the government's requirements that herds be presented for dipping, inoculation, and possible quarantine. Resistance to these measures quickly spread among smallholders (large dairy farmers mostly complied) and eventually nineteen were charged with criminal violations. The arrests brought a coordinated response, which, like the resistance to the veterinary measures themselves, was led by figures who had been active in Kiembe Samaki's mosque and Koran schools. The trial in late July drew large crowds to town, and the convictions sparked an angry confrontation with the police in which five protesters were shot dead.Footnote 40

The Cattle Riot no doubt made an impact on the progressive nationalists of the Arab Association (Muhsin was seen mingling with the crowds outside the courthouse). But the nature of that impact is far from clear. The Kiembe Samaki protesters had openly defied the colonial regime, forcibly freeing eleven of the prisoners at the gates of the town jail. Yet none were recorded uttering anything that might be interpreted as conventional nationalist sentiment – certainly, nothing that resembled the ZNP's subsequent rhetoric of monarchist, territorial nationalism. The most audible expressions of a mobilizing sense of community were the calls of ‘jihad’ and ‘Allahu Akbar’ heard outside the courthouse, echoed afterward when some of the protesters told police that they had been motivated by religion. But that at least was in accord with the Arab nationalists' emphasis on pan-Islamic unity, and unlike the general strikers of 1948, the protesters did not seem to be targeting the Arab elite.

Still, a protest against veterinary science was not the stuff of modern nationalism as the intelligentsia understood it at the time.Footnote 41 Not surprisingly, then, they took pains to distance themselves from the Cattle Riot. None of Zanzibar's many weekly papers attempted to make it or the police shootings a political issue. Al-Falaq, the Arab Association organ then controlled by the association's progressive wing, defended the police, as did other nationalists.Footnote 42 Muhsin's influential weekly, Mwongozi, questioned the police's use of live ammunition, but it devoted more attention to chastising the protesters for their ‘pitiable … ignorance’. Their main delusion, Mwongozi lamented, did not simply concern the dangers of anthrax and the futility of ‘mass defiance’. Rather, it was their assumption that they could accomplish anything without the advice and leadership of people more sophisticated than they – meaning, presumably, Arab intellectuals.Footnote 43

A decade later, however, the elite nationalists had remade the Cattle Riot as their party's founding event. They told Lofchie that in the years following the 1951 disturbances, the villagers of Kiembe Samaki who had led the cattle protests formed a new organization, the monarchist Hizbu l'Watan l'Riaia Sultan or National Party of the Sultan's Subjects (NPSS). When Muhsin and the other Arab Association progressives heard about it in December 1955, they quickly joined and persuaded its founders to change its name to ZNP. The story in this form took several years to gel. Its earliest versions made no mention of either the Cattle Riot or Kiembe Samaki. In 1959, Mwongozi (by then virtually a party organ) published a three-part history of the ZNP written by Abdulrahman Babu, the party's general secretary and its main advocate of mass organizing. Babu mentioned the names of the NPSS founders and praised them as fearless ‘champions of uhuru’ who faced down unspecified plots by unnamed imperialist agents. Aside from such bombast, Babu offered not a single place-name, date, or specific narrative. (The narrative's denouement comes when, in the midst of the village leaders' troubles, Ali Muhsin arrived on the scene and gave them the strength they needed.)Footnote 44 Muhsin himself, in a widely-circulated 1960 pamphlet, was similarly vague.

In the later part of 1955 a few peasants in a remote district of Zanzibar met and asked themselves a question. They asked, quite simply, ‘Whither Zanzibar?’ It was this question which stirred them to action. They answered it, and the Zanzibar National Party was born.Footnote 45

The description of the setting as ‘remote’ was plainly meant to highlight the peasants' distance from the urban elite and their authenticity as genuine products of the Zanzibar soil. But it cannot refer to Kiembe Samaki, which is only a short bicycle ride from town.

The incorporation of the Cattle Riot into the history of the NPSS and the ZNP came later. This required misrepresenting the Arab Association's position at the time of the riot. In the 1970s, Babu described the ‘Anthrax Revolt’ as the ‘epoch making’ event that ushered in the era of nationalist politics. The young progressives of the Arab Association sprang to the cattle-keepers' defense, he asserted, and Al-Falaq ‘came out strongly on the side of the peasants’ uprising and accused the British colonialists of barbarism and brutality’.Footnote 46 In fact, Al-Falaq had argued that the police had had no choice but to shoot the rioters down – and as late as 1956, Babu himself was still describing the Cattle Riot not as a nationalist rising but as a ‘stupid and … bloody caboodle’ caused when villagers lost control of their emotions.Footnote 47

The seams in the story are exposed in Muhsin's memoirs, published in 1997. He shifts the date of the Cattle Riot from 1951 to 1955, the same year that the ZNP was founded. This is not a passing error, but one he repeats several times, in an account of the riot that highlights his personal role in attempting to defend the accused. The significance he lays on the supposed chronological convergence is suggested by his failure to notice the absurd contradictions the error introduces into his narrative. (Babu also postdated the Cattle Riot, for similar reasons.)Footnote 48 The leading figure in Muhsin's accounts of both the Cattle Riot and the NPSS is Maalim Zaid Mbarak, a Koran teacher from Kiembe Samaki and one of the men tried and convicted in July 1951. Muhsin's descriptions of Maalim Zaid consist mostly of stock rhetoric. ‘As a peasant farmer he was conservative; they all are even in England, America and Russia.’ But all the same, he was ‘a perfect example of a Zanzibari patriot’.Footnote 49

There is little reason to believe that the ZNP propagandists simply invented their connections to rural activists. More likely they reshaped them, in efforts similar to those taken by nationalists elsewhere to make their politics appear to have sprung from the authentic impulses of peasant protest.Footnote 50 It may be true that the NPSS had been organized independently of the intelligentsia and that the latter sought an alliance with it as they set out to establish their own party. But whatever the case, the record is plain that the village activists merely served as figureheads in the early days of the ZNP and were quickly pushed aside by Muhsin and his colleagues.Footnote 51 The connection between the NPSS and the Cattle Riot, on the other hand, was almost certainly a fabrication. Of the village leaders who served ex-officio on the ZNP executive committee, only Maalim Zaid had participated in the Kiembe Samaki protests, which no doubt accounts for Muhsin's emphasis on him. But Zaid later denied having played a central role in founding the NPSS. The key figures, in fact, were not from Kiembe Samaki, and the party's earliest meetings were not in any village but in town.Footnote 52 Moreover, the 1951 protests against dipping and inoculation bore little resemblance to the NPSS, except perhaps in their stress on Islamic unity. The protesters expressed no monarchist sentiments. Many identified themselves by mainland ethnic affiliations – yet the nativist NPSS took care to exclude mainlanders.Footnote 53

A more accurate picture of the early history of the ZNP and its connection to the NPSS can be derived, paradoxically, from Muhsin's sprawling memoirs. But one must read Muhsin with care, winnowing his intentional evidence, which is discursive and unreliable, from his unintentional evidence, which consists of seemingly unconnected remarks. The disconnects that result are often revealing. I have already alluded to one example: the contrast between Muhsin's general, ideologically-driven avowals of Zanzibaris' creole hybridity in matters of marriage, and passing anecdotes that describe particular marriages, his own and others', in which the rules of kafa'a were carefully observed.Footnote 54 The memoirs thus contain two different narratives of the origins of the ZNP. One is the official party line, emphasizing the NPSS and the peasants of Kiembe Samaki. The other is more complex and must be assembled piecemeal from scattered anecdotes about specific personalities and acquaintances, complemented by evidence from the archives.

In this alternative narrative, the NPSS appears as but the latest in a succession of short-lived nativist and monarchist organizations that had appeared in the countryside since between the wars, in which members of the Arab landed gentry sought to forge alliances with villagers in order to advance their particular political interests. The specifics of these organizations are often obscure. One of the earliest and best documented was Itihad al-Watan (the National Union), which was founded in 1935 at the northern end of Zanzibar Island. Its leading figure was Muhsin's cousin and in-law Badr Muhammad al-Barwani, an influential landowner who would later collaborate with Muhsin in establishing the ZNP. Muhsin described Badr and his closest confidants as imperious men who prized their honor and were quick to defend it with violence. Like other movements of those years inspired or sponsored by the Arab Association, Itihad was established specifically to drive Indians out of business.Footnote 55 It began as a bus-owning syndicate: Indian owners were excluded, and nativist rhetoric urged villagers to boycott buses that did not display its insignia.Footnote 56 The elite Arabs who organized Itihad had set out to forge a populist alliance around a common hatred of Indians – ‘usurious moneylenders’, as Muhsin called them, whose goal was to ‘squeeze the last drop of blood’ from planter and peasant alike.Footnote 57

In his 1997 memoirs, Muhsin fudges the class nature of Itihad; in the 1980s, Babu called Itihad a ‘peasant movement’. (At the time, however, Al-Falaq, not yet imbued with a populist creed, asserted that Itihad's success came from having been organized by Arabs, not ‘natives’.)Footnote 58 When Muhsin gets to the rural political clubs of the early 1950s that he describes as the ZNP's immediate forerunners, he does even more to emphasize their humble origin. But that emphasis conflicts with the pride he takes in the islands' traditions of enlightened paternalism, for which his own family was famed. Thus, in his descriptions of the obscure villagers who founded the political clubs, the influence of an elite Arab patron – a landlord or one of the venerated religious scholars who belonged to the islands' aristocratic families (including Muhsin's father) – is rarely absent. By this time, in the aftermath of the 1948 general strike, the main internal alien was no longer the Indian businessman but the political threat represented by mobilized pan-Africanism. So, as Muhsin tells it, the villagers who came to consult with him and his kin and colleagues in the 1950s expressed fears that Zanzibar's moral fiber was endangered by mainlanders who were neither Muslims nor loyal to the sultan.Footnote 59

In sum, if one were pressed to look for a single origin of the ZNP, it would be not among humble villagers and certainly not in Kiembe Samaki. Rather, it would be among the Arab intelligentsia who dominated the party from the start. In the 1940s, Muhsin tells us, members of his circle regularly fanned out through the countryside on weekends and holidays to read aloud from Mwongozi at gathering spots and forge networks in the villages. Arab schoolteachers played leading roles in these reading groups, and one of them, Zam Ali Abbas, founded the islands' first explicitly nationalist party, the short-lived Zanzibar National Association. In 1953, his collaborator Ahmed Lemki, editor of Al-Falaq, established the Zanzibar National Union, which in structure and ideology, Lofchie writes, closely resembled the ZNP.Footnote 60 The ZNP's pan-Africanist rivals would later charge that the stories of popular participation in its founding were fraudulent. It would probably be more accurate to say that the Arab intelligentsia sought out peasant allies like the political clubs and village religious leaders in order to enhance their nativist credentials. Such connections helped make the ZNP a genuinely popular party (a quality subsequently enhanced by its effective grassroots organizing). But the new historical narrative enabled party propagandists to go further. They could now claim that the ZNP, despite its domination by the Arab elite, had sprung from the soil of islands.

I do not mean to imply that the Arab intelligentsia simply imposed nativist anxieties on their rural clients. A well-established literature challenges such bifurcated understandings of popular thought, and I have written elsewhere suggesting how communal thought in Zanzibar grew out of the circulation of ideas within a single discursive arena.Footnote 61 While many of the elements central to the discourse of ustaarabu did indeed arise from the teachings of the intelligentsia, at the same time ZNP propagandists shaped their rhetoric to resonate with the village activists' own language of nativism, monarchism, and Islam. But the intelligentsia knew that such rhetoric could be double-edged. Villagers' anxieties about Islamic practice, for example, had been prompted more by perceived threats from the Arab intelligentsia's reformist campaigns than from non-believers.Footnote 62 (For the first dozen years of its existence, in fact, Mwongozi had devoted more space to Islamic reform than to nationalist politics.Footnote 63) And the intelligentsia themselves had long championed ustaarabu not as a mark of native authenticity but as a set of values that had originated with enlightened foreigners – their own forebears – and that were best exemplified by themselves. The ZNP's stress on ustaarabu, then, was likely to remind ordinary Zanzibaris of the supremacist pretensions that the pan-Africanists accused Arabs of harboring.

Party propagandists therefore often found it most expedient to define the nation in negative rather than positive terms: that is, rather than focus on the true nationals who best embodied ustaarabu, they chose instead to raise the threat of false nationals who lacked a firm commitment to Islam and the monarchy. Almost invariably, their preferred targets were uncivilized mainlanders. That was certainly the case during the political period from the mid-1950s through 1963, when the ZNP contested a series of Legislative Council elections with the pan-Africanist Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP). Mainlanders were said to be overrunning the islands, carrying disease, crime, disrespect for the sultan, and subversion of Islam. They were described as closet Christians (in fact most were Muslim), and during and after the Suez crisis it was insinuated that they were Zionist agents.

Reading Mwongozi, one finds a striking juxtaposition of such shrill nativism alongside high-minded rhetoric about the multiracial hybridity and ecumenical tolerance of modernist Islam. But the (apparent) contradiction was perfectly in keeping with the manner in which Muhsin and his colleagues used the cosmopolitan universalism of ustaarabu as an expression of nativist chauvinism. This came through with particular clarity in how they responded to the ASP's campaigns to inject the history of slavery into political debates. The ASP campaigns were filled with racial invective, accusing Arabs of the inherited sin of racial oppression. But the ZNP responded with a curious syllogism: since Zanzibar was Muslim and Islam enjoined colorblindness, anyone who spoke of race must therefore be an alien and an enemy of Islam. When testifying before a 1961 government commission investigating that year's race riots, ZNP spokesmen held to the line that susceptibility to racism was an innate quality that marked mainlanders as fundamentally different from islanders. They seemed unaware of the irony.Footnote 64

GLOBAL NATIVISMS

In recent years, historians have challenged the assumption that twentieth-century colonial subjects invariably made claims to citizenship in the language of territorial nation-states. Despite the rising hegemony of the nation-state and mounting pressures to make political demands within its discursive framework, anticolonial politics also reflected the pull of extra-territorial and universalist allegiances.Footnote 65 In some cases, those allegiances had been shaped by a sense of being subjects of a global empire. But in others they had originated quite apart from Western domination and long before it. Thus, as we have seen, Sugata Bose emphasizes the role played by Islam and other ‘religiously informed’ universalisms that for centuries had helped shape regular linkages across the Indian Ocean. The survival of these older cosmopolitanisms and their use in imagining anticolonial political projects constitute a powerful refutation of master-narratives that depict global interconnections as an innovation first introduced by Western expansion and ‘modernity’ during what was once called, in the Indian Ocean literature, the ‘Vasco da Gama epoch’.Footnote 66 It is little wonder, then, to see the older cosmopolitanisms celebrated by sympathetic scholars – especially when the only political alternatives in the postcolonial world can seem to be either acquiescence to the rampant hegemony of Western neoliberalism that goes by the name of ‘globalization’ or the conservative local nativisms that rise in reaction to it.Footnote 67

It is important, however, to recognize the limits of cosmopolitanism. Although anticolonial activists like Gandhi and Ali Muhsin may have integrated universalist allegiances into their agitation for an independent nation-state, that did not necessarily translate into a rejection of divisive nativisms. In a trenchant critique, Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse observe that cosmopolitanism did not reduce diversity but instead provided the peoples of the Indian Ocean with strategies for recognizing human differences and navigating through them.Footnote 68 In the minds of those who met on the ocean's littoral, not all universalisms were accepted as equally validating. Zanzibar's elite intelligentsia celebrated the islands' history of cosmopolitanism and Islamic universalism as a way to make chauvinist claims that excluded people of mainland ancestry.Footnote 69 But they were not the only ones in Zanzibar to make such use of cosmopolitan allegiances. Their ASP rivals did so too, challenging the intelligentsia's rhetoric with a competing cosmopolitanism of pan-Africanist racial solidarity, which they used to exclude and dehumanize Arabs.

Pan-Africanist cosmopolitanism has elsewhere proven capable of inspiring movements of political emancipation and humanist inclusion; so has the rhetoric of Islamic modernism and pan-Arab nationalism that informed the intelligentsia's vision. But in Zanzibar, both camps' universalisms showed their capacity also for creating new forms of exclusionary nativisms.Footnote 70 Neither nativism was narrow or local; both were rooted in the broadest of global categories. This is not unusual; similar phenomena are all around us, making the ‘globalizing’ world of the new century a world of violence. Prominent examples include the clash of Zionism and Islamism in the Middle East, and the internationally-funded movement of Hindutva.Footnote 71 In those cases, as in mid-century Zanzibar, it is the cosmopolitan nature of those nativisms – their rootedness in something universal rather than merely local – that has made their clash so bitter.

Footnotes

*

Thanks to Edward Alpers and Nathaniel Mathews for comments on an earlier draft. Author's email: j-glassman@northwestern.edu

References

1 For a brief history of nativism since independence, see Glassman, J., War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington, IN, 2011), 287–98Google Scholar.

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17 Will Hanley, for example, notes that this was commonly the pattern in Middle Eastern port cities that are often celebrated for their cosmopolitan tolerance. See Hanley, W., ‘Grieving cosmopolitanism in Middle East studies’, History Compass, 6:5 (2008), 1355CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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20 For other examples of this pattern, see K. Versteegh, ‘Non Indo-European pidgins and creoles’, in Kouwenberg and Singler (eds.), Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies, 158–86.

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23 For a brief history of the creation of this racial state, see Glassman, War of Words, 23–39.

24 Several authors argue that late in the nineteenth century, ustaarabu supplanted an earlier term, uungwana. See, for example, Pouwels, R. L., Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900 (Cambridge, 1987), 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Prestholdt, J., Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley, CA, 2008), 141–2Google Scholar. For Zanzibar intellectuals' debates in the 1930s over the word's etymology and usage, see Glassman, War of Words, 86–8.

25 This contradicts a conventional interpretation in the literature that explains claims of Shirazi identity as a response to colonial rulers' privileging of Arab status: Shirazis, according to this interpretation, were claiming to be ‘non-natives’, even Arabs. In the case of Zanzibar, the conventional interpretation is without basis. See Glassman, War of Words, 52–6.

26 Ho, Graves of Tarim, 186–7. Ho writes of ‘genealogy’, not race, accepting conventional modern Western understandings of the latter term. But his overall account suggests how such notions of genealogical purity could become racialized.

27 Penningroth, D. C., ‘The claims of slaves and ex-slaves to family and property: a transatlantic comparison’, American Historical Review, 112:4 (2007), 1039–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Penningroth draws the adjective ‘slavish’ directly from a 1995 Ghanaian court ruling.

28 Evidence of the link with the Libya protests is circumstantial but compelling. For the date of the Association's founding, see ‘Mafveraky: Who is Who?’, Al-Falaq (Zanzibar), 21 Dec. 1946. The founders of the Arab Association were prominent in the 1911 Libya protests: Zanzibar National Archives, Zanzibar (ZNA) AC 1/151, Edward Clarke to Foreign Office, 29 Nov. 1911, plus Police Inspector's report on meeting of 25 Nov. 1911. (Thanks to Philip Sadgrove for directing me to this source.) The Ibadi scholars who dominated Zanzibar's elite political and intellectual life had a keen interest in pan-Islamism and the defense of the Ottomans, and they displayed a special preoccupation with the Libyan invasion. See Ghazal, A. N., Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (1880s–1930s) (London, 2010)Google Scholar; for Libya, see 45, 54, 84, and 96.

29 Bose, Hundred Horizons, 31 and passim. Bose also observes that multiple universalisms, which from a latter-day perspective may seem incompatible, often managed to coexist. So, in our case, pan-Arab nationalists in Zanzibar (as elsewhere) sprang to the defense of the Ottoman Turks in 1911, and they were joined in their protests by members of Zanzibar's Shia Indian community. Pan-Islamic themes remained prominent in Arab Association rhetoric throughout its history.

30 These are limits that Bose often ignores; certainly he does so in his account of the experience of Zanzibar Indians in the 1930s, which, surprisingly, makes no reference to the anti-Indian campaigns: Hundred Horizons, 97–108. Compare with Munasinghe's discussion, in ‘Theorizing world culture’, of how Caribbean creole nationalism routinely excludes Indians, even in Trinidad, where they are so numerous. The account of Zanzibar Arabs' pan-Islamic politics in Ghazal, Islamic Reform, is similarly shortsighted about such matters, a quality that Hanley says is common in Middle East studies in ‘Grieving cosmopolitanism’.

31 Glassman, War of Words, 94–103. My account differs from much of the literature, which depicts Shirazi nationalism as demanding a share of Arab ‘non-native’ privileges rather than expressing a resentment of them. Such literature also misapprehends British policy at the time, which (at least officially) proclaimed the hegemony of ‘native rights’, not the opposite.

32 The critique will be familiar to anyone who has seen Henry Louis Gates, Jr's treatment of the Swahili coast in his television series, Wonders of the African World, dir. N. Godwin and H. Appio, PBS, 1999.

33 Glassman, War of Words, 108–23.

34 For the debates, see Glassman, War of Words, 139–44. Sixty years after his first intervention, Ali Muhsin al-Barwani was still pushing this argument in his memoirs, Conflicts and Harmony in Zanzibar: Memoirs (Dubai, 1997), a volume where the contradictions of his position are in full display. Although the passages that deal intentionally with intermarriage give full voice to his ideological defense of egalitarian hybridity, those that touch on the issue unintentionally – that is, anecdotes about the specifics of his and others' marriages – indicate a quite different kind of thinking at work (for example, 82 and 113–15).

35 For the literal masquerade, see Scarano, F. A., ‘The jíbaro masquerade and the subaltern politics of creole identity formation in Puerto Rico, 1745–1823’, American Historical Review, 101:5 (1996), 1398–431CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Earle, R., ‘Creole patriotism and the myth of the “loyal Indian”’, Past & Present, 172:1 (2001), 125–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 The quotes are from Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 79–80, but they echo language that was ubiquitous in ZNP rhetoric.

37 Glassman, War of Words, 241–2.

38 The event has often been labelled a ‘war’ (vita) in the decades since, no doubt owing to the influence of nationalist ideology such as I will describe below. But at the time, the word ghasia, which more closely approaches the English ‘riot’, was heard. See Gray, J. M., Report on the Civil Disturbances in Zanzibar on July 30th, 1951 (Zanzibar, 1951)Google Scholar, 15.

39 Lofchie was conducting doctoral research at the time. His revised dissertation, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1965), soon became a classic of African political science. It remains the standard reference on the period, relied upon by guild scholars and public intellectuals alike. My thanks to Professor Lofchie for sharing his recollections, conveyed in an email of 28 Aug. 2005.

40 For these events, see Glassman, War of Words, 125–6.

41 Their vision was neatly expressed by a journalist who would later be prominent in the ZNP's left wing: ‘It was Nehru who once remarked that if Swaraj … meant the beating of tom-toms – then he would not have Swaraj …. Nationalism is necessary but it must be based on rationalism.’ R. Bulsara, ‘Indigenous Quackery’, Adal Insaf (Zanzibar), 3 Sept. 1950.

42 ‘An Unhappy Event’, Al-Falaq, 8 Aug. 1951; R. Bulsara, ‘All Quiet’, Adal Insaf, 4 Aug. 1951. The main pan-Africanist paper, affiliated with the African Association and later with the Afro-Shirazi Party, took a toadying line in praise of the government. See ‘Result Obtain from CATTLE’, Afrika Kwetu (Zanzibar), 9 Aug. 1951.

43 ‘Regrettable’ (unsigned leader), Mwongozi (Zanzibar), 3 Aug. 1951, read in The National Archives, Kew (TNA) Public Records Office (PRO), Colonial Office (CO) 822/620, ‘Annex, disturbance at Gaol in Zanzibar’.

44 Babu, ‘Tulitokea Wapi?’, Mwongozi, 29 May and 12 June 1959 (the last two of three installments).

45 Zanzibar National Party, Whither Zanzibar? Growth and Policy of Zanzibar Nationalism (Zanzibar, 1960)Google Scholar. The prose style is distinctly Muhsin's; he acknowledges his authorship in Conflicts and Harmony, 173 and 175.

46 Babu, A. M., ‘The 1964 revolution: lumpen or vanguard?’, in Sheriff, A. and Ferguson, E. (eds.), Zanzibar Under Colonial Rule (London, 1991), 221–3Google Scholar. Also see Babu, A. M., ‘Appendix I: the background to the Zanzibar Revolution’, in Wilson, A., US Foreign Policy and Revolution: The Creation of Tanzania (London, 1989), 141–2Google Scholar.

47 ‘An Unhappy Event’, Al-Falaq, 8 Aug. 1951; A. R. Mohamed [Babu], ‘Book review – “Isle of Cloves”’, Mwongozi, 20 July 1956.

48 Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 88–9. Within the space of a few pages, he has himself simultaneously in Zanzibar, assisting the Kiembe Samaki defendants, and overseas (he hears of the founding of the NPSS upon his return). Similarly, he has the village Koran teacher Maalim Zaid simultaneously being jailed for resisting inoculation and visiting Muhsin to personally invite him to join the NPSS. Babu (‘Appendix I’) dated the Cattle Riot to 1954, thus not only aligning it more closely to the founding of the NPSS/ZNP but also making it occur in the same year that Al-Falaq was banned on sedition charges, charges that Babu falsely attributes to its imagined defense of the protesters.

49 Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 88–9.

50 In this regard, their use of the Cattle Riot resembled a compressed version of the process by which Congress nationalists rewrote the history of the Chauri Chaura riot of 1922. See Amin, S., Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Berkeley, CA, 1995)Google Scholar.

51 That was how Maalim Zaid Mbarak himself remembered it: A. M. Juma, ‘Cattle Riot (Vita vya Ng'ombe): a case study of peasant rising, Zanzibar, 30 July 1951’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Dar es Salaam, 1982), 33.

52 In 1982, Zaid told a Zanzibari researcher that the key figures in the founding of the NPSS were the religious leaders Vuai Kitoweo and Miraji Shaalabu, neither of whom was from Kiembe Samaki. (Indeed, by 1955 Zaid himself had been living for some time in town.) Also prominent in early official accounts of the party was Haji Hussein, from Bububu, which is five miles north of town, nowhere near Kiembe Samaki. Zaid became the ZNP's ceremonial vice-president only after Shaalabu died and Muhsin and his colleagues were fully in control. Juma, ‘Cattle Riot’, 32–3 and 34n11; Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 27. For Zaid's town residence, see Malik, S. interview, in Barwani, S. A. et al. (eds.), Unser Leben vor der Revolution und Danach – Maisha Yetu Kabla ya Mapinduzi na Baadaye (Köln, 2003), 24–5Google Scholar.

53 TNA PRO CO 822/620, R. E. Middleton, Ag. Commissioner of Police, ‘Report on Police Action during disturbances 30th July 1951’ (plus attachments), and P. Pullicino, Ag. Administrative Secretary, 9 Aug. 1951. As to the lack of monarchist sentiments: it is, of course, always difficult to marshal evidence of absence. However, none of the rioters whose verbatim statements appear in the police report made any reference to the sultan – and a statement to the police would seem the ideal occasion on which to profess such loyalty. In advance of the riot, there were rumors that the protestors would make a representation to the sultan, who instructed his gatekeepers to allow a delegation into the palace. But a delegation never appeared.

54 See fn. 34, above.

55 Other examples – also organized by kinsmen of Ali Muhsin who would later become important ZNP functionaries – are documented in ZNA AB 12/114, ‘Boycott of Indians’, police bulletin, 4 July 1938.

56 During its brief existence, it also ran some rural cooperative shops that likewise were intended to compete with Indian-owned businesses. Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 79–83; see also ZNA BA 30/5, Noad, Annual Report for 1936; ZNA BA 30/6, Zanzibar District Monthly Reports for May, June, July, Aug. and Oct. 1936, and for July/Aug. 1937; ZNA BA 30/7, Zanzibar District Monthly Rep. for Oct. 1938.

57 Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 167 (describing the clove-buying crisis). Although this passage (and others, very similar, that recur throughout the memoirs) was written decades later, such rhetoric appeared frequently in the Arab Association journalism at the time.

58 ‘Itihad-el-Watani’, Al-Falaq, 11 Feb. 1939; in contrast, see Babu, ‘Appendix I’, 142.

59 See Muhsin's discussions of Ramadhan Madafu, Othman Sudi, Haji Kombo, Abdulla Mali, and Haji Hussein, in Conflicts and Harmony, 130, 90–1, 27. The last-named, who ZNP propaganda celebrated as a key figure in the founding of the NPSS, had known Muhsin since childhood, when his father had studied Koran with Muhsin's father at the latter's country estate at Bububu.

60 Mushin, Conflicts and Harmony, 199–201. Muhsin mentions Lemki but not his National Union, for which see Lofchie, Zanzibar, 140–1.

61 Such a critique informs the whole of War of Words; for theoretical statements, see 17–22, 175–6, and 230–7. For popular thought more generally, see Glassman, J., Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, NH, 1995), 1–25Google Scholar.

62 This and the following two paragraphs draw on the middle chapters of Glassman, War of Words. For the religious tensions, see 90–1.

63 As Ghazal usefully notes, the nationalists epitomized by Muhsin and Lemki were not so much a ‘secular’ intelligentsia (as I have written elsewhere) as a lay intelligentsia. See Ghazal, Islamic Reform, 92.

64 Glassman, War of Words, 241–3. In another disconnect between discursive pronouncements and practical knowledge, Muhsin also testified that, like any genuine Zanzibari, he could tell a mainlander by sight. This disconnect resembles one in an oral account by Muhsin's ZNP colleague, Amani Thani, who in 2000–1 recounted, with great eloquence, how precolonial Zanzibar had been a peaceful melting pot, a paragon of creole hybridity. As a result, he insisted, bodily markers could not be used to discern a person's ethnic background. But in the telling, Thani revealed some of Swahili's rich vocabulary for categorizing those very markers. African traits, he explained, include mweusi tititi, ‘pitch-black skin’; nywele za kipilipili, ‘kinky hair’; and pua imepanuka, ‘a broad nose’. Arab traits, in contrast, include pua nzuri, a ‘beautiful nose’. Barwani et al., Unser Leben, 138–9.

65 I derive much of my language here from Bose, Hundred Horizons. But I think also of a rich literature on the francophone Atlantic that approaches similar questions from an entirely different angle. Examples include Cooper, F., ‘Possibility and constraint: African independence in historical perspective’, The Journal of African History, 49:2 (2008), 167–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mann, G. and Lecocq, B., ‘Between empire, umma, and the Muslim third world: the French Union and African pilgrims to Mecca, 1946–1958’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27:2 (2007), 367–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mann, G., Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilder, G., ‘Untimely vision: Aimé Césaire, decolonization, utopia’, Public Culture, 21:1 (2009), 101–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 The phrase is from a classic 1953 text by M. Panikkar. See Prange, S. R., ‘Scholars and the sea: a historiography of the Indian Ocean’, History Compass, 6:5 (2008), 1382–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Ghosh, A., In an Antique Land (New York, 1993)Google Scholar, offers a poetic evocation of such older cosmopolitanisms and their contrast with modern nativisms. James Clifford invokes Ghosh's vision in his own celebration, a much-cited article on diasporic cosmopolitanism. See ‘Diasporas’, in Clifford, J., Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 244–77Google Scholar. In contrast, see Hanley, ‘Grieving cosmopolitanism’, who finds such ‘grieving nostalgia’ for ‘a more tolerant past’ common in the literature on cosmopolitanism in Middle East studies.

68 Simpson and Kresse, ‘Cosmopolitanism contested’; I paraphrase from 14–15. Pier Larson makes a similar argument regarding creolization, which, he writes, was less about mixture than it was about ‘the learned capacity of persons to move in and out of the everyday challenges of cultural and linguistic discontinuity’, a process he calls ‘créolité-as-versatility’. Larson, Ocean of Letters, 226 and 352–3.

69 They continue to do so today. See the memoirs of Sharif Hamad, S. in Burgess, G. T. (ed.), Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar: The Memoirs of Ali Sultan Issa and Seif Sharif Hamad (Athens, OH, 2009), 171–311Google Scholar.

70 Both potentials in pan-Africanist thought – toward inclusionary emancipation and narrow racial nativism – can be seen in the successive bifurcations that have repeatedly split South Africa's ‘Africanist’ movement and its political descendants since the 1940s. Some might argue that similar contrasts can be seen by comparing the pan-Africanism of the ASP with that of Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), its post-1964 political partner. Bryceson, in fact, suggests that TANU's inclusiveness is an outgrowth of Swahili creolized hybridity (‘Swahili creolization’). But for a more critical account of TANU nationalism, see Brennan, J. R., Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens, OH, 2012)Google Scholar.

71 B. Robbins, ‘Introduction part 1: actually existing cosmopolitanism’, in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 1–19; Hanley, ‘Grieving cosmopolitanism’.