Sarah Longair's history of the Peace Memorial Museum in Zanzibar is rich and complex – so much so that it is difficult to summarize its contributions. It addresses the histories of architecture and anthropology in Africa, questions of museology, the place of Zanzibar in East African history more generally, the revisionist history of African colonialism, material culture studies, and the history of revolutionary nationalism. From this embarrassment of riches, Longair's own introduction argues that authors such as Said, Richards and Cohn gave the ‘imperial museum project’ (p. 8) too much coherence. Instead, she highlights accounts showing the haphazard and imperfect fashion in which colonial museums formed. This theme is in itself important. Yet the chapters that follow far exceed this theme.

Chapter 1 describes the displays of material culture in Zanzibar that predate the museum, giving an insight into the chequered biographies of objects that ended up in the museum – such as the Mwinyi Mkuu's drums. Once secret regalia of the Sultan's primary vassal, these drums were ‘bagged’ as trophies by the Sultan's First Minister, Sir Lloyd Mathews, then denigrated as side tables by one of his less pleasant successors, only to be shown to the public for the first time during the Zanzibar Exhibition of 1905. Chapter 2 addresses the flawed architecture of British Resident John Sinclair – responsible for the ‘cracks in the dome’ of the book's title – providing (for me) novel insights into Orientalism as a way of designing an African city so that it may live up to its reputation for ‘Eastern’ splendour. Chapters 3 to 5 concentrate on the British curators and their Zanzibari collaborators, the collection and displays, and the educational mission of the museum in the period between 1925 and 1942, when its last full-time curator resigned. Chapter 6 covers 1942 until the 1964 revolution, when government neglect turned the museum's mission towards preserving the Zanzibar archives. Longair concludes by emphasizing how the Zanzibar Museum pioneered education and outreach long before they became fashionable topics among curators and directors, even in the UK. In so doing, she upsets the chronology of colonial museums suggested by John MacKenzie.

Chapter 4 is my favourite, not least because of the detailed analysis of the photographs of the museum interior in Appendix 2. After studies by Jeremy Prestholdt (on Zanzibari consumer society), Stephanie Wynne-Jones (labelling the Swahili as a ‘material culture’) and Laura Fair (on Zanzibar fashion), Sarah Longair succeeds once more in demonstrating that the material turn in history and in African studies teaches that culture cannot be simply ‘read off’ material signs as if they are texts. Laura Fair, for example, argues that one cannot ‘read’ the full body cover of the buibui as an Islamic repression of women, because in the practice of early twentieth-century Zanzibar it represented female emancipation instead.

Longair shows a similar reversal by arguing that the colonial museum was in some ways more advanced than its metropolitan counterparts, and not a mere extension of a governmental perspective. Alfred Spurrier and Alisa Nicol Smith acted as pioneer educational curators mostly despite neglect by the Zanzibar government (thus nuancing the perspective unfolded by Tony Bennett and his collaborators in their recent Collecting, Ordering, Governing). Intriguingly, their acquisition and display practices not only pioneered forms of education and outreach, but also materialized one of the first instances of repatriation (of the Mwinyi Mkuu's rice bowl from Lady Cave's collection) and of diasporic display design (i.e. of Princess Salme's room in the museum annex). Other examples of Longair inviting us to rethink common historical assumptions include Sinclair's designing of a more ‘Saracenic’ city centre, or the finding that the 1964 revolution's ban on history in schools was preceded by the destruction of historical items in the museum collection: a set of slave stocks, which might remind both Arabs and Africans of past trauma.

Longair unfortunately relies on metropolitan rather than colonial histories of anthropology when interpreting Zanzibar ethnography: whereas the ‘orientalization’ of Zanzibar by Sinclair and others confirms earlier studies, she fails to note that W. H. I. Ingrams’ ethnographic focus on individual lifecycles and rites of passage (p. 158) is highly unusual among administrative ethnographers of East Africa (I found it only among the Spiritan Fathers, who lived a short boat trip away, in Bagamoyo). Nor were the likes of Ingrams being ‘replaced’ by academic anthropologists in the 1920s (p. 126) – if anything, such a process happened in Tanganyika only between 1945 and 1960. Rather, the uniqueness of Longair's ethnographic history of the Zanzibar Museum lies in how its curators ‘show[ed] and explain[ed] their culture, past and present, to the natives’ (p. 151). This reversed metropolitan salvage ethnography as the Zanzibar Museum curators replaced its focus on the past with a future-oriented, educational ethnography that, Longair notes, was promoted in the UK by Alfred Haddon, but not practised by his peers at the Museum Association. To include Longair's book under constructivist studies of state policy and nation building (as Fouéré and Hughes did in a recent overview in Azania) fails to do justice to such qualities in revising East African, and even global, histories.