Zanjibar: Wa Akfān min Rahim al’alam (Book Review)

Laura Goffman is a Ph.D. student in Middle East and North African History at Georgetown University. She also holds an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from New York University. Her research focuses on the cultural and social dynamics of militarization in twentieth-century Oman. Check her out on Academia.edu.

Al-Ghonaimi, Sheikha. Zanjibar: Wa Akfān min Rahim al’alam. Maktaba ḍāmirī lilnashar wa at-tawzī‘. Sultana Oman, 2012.

The cover of Sheikha Al Ghonaimi’s 2012 novel Zanjibar: Wa Akfān min Rahim al’alam (Zanzibar: Shrouds from the Womb of Pain) is an outline of the map of Zanzibar, splattered haphazardly with blood-red blotches of paint, spilling from the island into the surrounding Indian Ocean. We learn in Ghonaimi’s introduction that this blood represents the Omanis of Zanzibar who were slaughtered during the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution. This uprising led to the death and expulsion of thousands of Arabs and South Asians, including the Omani Sultan who had been placed at the head of a constitutional monarchy when the British Empire granted Zanzibar’s independence in 1963. He fled the island on his yacht—many others were not so fortunate.

While Ghonaimi’s narrative focus is on the social life and political events of Zanzibar, the orientation of her characters firmly remains in the Omani homeland. Ghonaimi structures her novel in the form of a letter written by her narrator, Mohammed bin Abdullah Al Harthy, to his older brother, whom he has not seen since he departed from Oman some 30 years earlier. Like many Omanis of the impoverished interior, the fictional Mohammed left Oman with his father in the early 1950s in search of greater prosperity in East Africa. Mohammed is only 8 years old when he and his father arrive in Zanzibar, and the first part of the novel is built around a child's nostalgia for an idealized home in Oman. The dramatic focus of this section is Mohammed's recollection of his mother's reluctance to agree to her youngest son's departure, and his father's persistence in convincing her that their son would benefit from learning the ways of trade. Guiltily, Mohammed describes his childish ignorance of the gravity and permanence of his departure, and his mother's rare display of tears as he left. His mother, we learn, has long since passed away, and he longs to have been able to tell her goodbye.

This melancholic nostalgia for his family colors Mohammed's depiction of life in Oman, which Ghonaimi describes, through the lens of his memories, as a pure and simple existence among an intimate circle. The predictable rhythm of trips to the mosque, agricultural work, and religious education structures Mohammed's early life. This Omani community emerges in his memory as majestic in its commitment to these daily rituals. For example, he describes his first trip to the mosque with his father, "I entered the mosque for the first time at dawn...there the men were as though they were illuminated...they were dressed in the Omani way, which reflected the purity of their hearts...it was beautiful to see human beings participating as angels in that atmosphere of spiritual purity" (17, quotations are my translations).

Some troubles do seep into Mohammed’s memories of this well-ordered world of Oman's interior: the father and the teacher both feel justified in beating mischievous children, who in turn harass Antoor, a homeless wanderer who lost his entire family in a fire that started while his wife was cooking. Also, clear hierarchies prevail, as girls cook and boys carry tools to work on the date farms, and Mohammed recalls his mother sadly reminding his aunt after she learns of Mohammed's approaching departure, "I had no say in the matter" (29). His aunt is horrified that her sister is forced to relinquish her youngest son, but the necessity of covering her face and retreating from view as the men arrive to take him away prevents her from expressing these feelings to Mohammed's father, so away they go, over the mountains with their caravan to catch a ship to Zanzibar.

The Omani community in Zanzibar is apparently close-knit and guards its communal privileges by maintaining a tight control over its network of families. Ghonaimi illustrates this protection of their own when Muhammad and his father arrive in Zanzibar as bedraggled immigrants, but are immediately taken up by Al Barwani, a prominent Omani merchant with an elegant home and a host of black servants. Mohammed and his father have no connection to Barwani except for their shared Arabic language and Omani heritage, but he becomes their willing patron and invites them to be his guests after Mohammed’s father asks him for help translating the Swahili spokenon the dock. Barwani supplies Mohammed with a black servant boy, Youssef, to teach him Swahili until he is proficient enough to enroll in the local school, and he helps Mohammed’s father to start a business.

Youssef becomes like family to Mohammad, yet he holds a separate status as a non-Arab “native”. For example, when Barwani first suggests that Mohammed learn Swahili from Youssef, his father worries about his son mixing with blacks.Barwani assures him, “Don’t worry, Youssef has been brought up in my house, and his manners and morals are excellent” (61). The implication here is that Youssef, despite his race, is an acceptable companion due to his cultivation in an Omani domestic setting. When violence erupts on the island in 1964, Youssef's family saves Mohammed, now 18, and his little brother, Ahmed. In an ultimate act of loyalty, Youssef decides to accompany Mohammed and Ahmed as they smuggle themselves off of the island in the storage cabin of a ship, and when Mohammed questions his willingness to leave his own family, Youssef asks him angrily, "How can you say that there is a price for friendship?" (127).

Friendship between a black former servant and an Omani immigrant may be priceless, but it does have its limitations: after they have reached Dar es Salaam, for example, Mohammed spots an older Omani woman on the docks, and switches from Swahili to Arabic. When Youssef protests that he does not understand, Mohammed replies that he is using Arabic because "I want her to feel that I am close to her" (156). Just as Barwani took in Mohammed and his father in Zanzibar, in Dar es Salaam Mohammed immediately forges a connection with an Omani he identifies by language and appearance. As Mohammed and his brother settle into another enclave of the Omani diaspora, only Youssef’s exceptional loyalty to Mohammed and his upbringing in Barwani’s household grant him entry to this community.

As Nate Mathews noted in another post on Coverage of East Africa in the Omani Media, nostalgia for Oman's East African "empire" has become widespread in Omani media today. Ghonaimi adopts the standard points of this narrative. Through the voice of a minor character (a man who helps Mohammed and his companions to escape Zanzibar during the uprising), Ghonaimi offers an elaborate account of the history of Omanis in Zanzibar. The crucial points here are the propagation of Islam in East Africa through Omani efforts, the primitive nature of Africans before the Arab arrival (even alluding to acts of cannibalism), and the gracious, cultivating influence of the Omanis (138-139). The legacy of slavery is hardly mentioned, and after this historical rendition, Mohammed asks indignantly, "Why do the Omanis deserve all this pain in a country they improved so much?" (141). The answer to this query is at the didactic heart of the novel, and Ghonaimi assures us that the horrors of 1964 came about due to officious British colonizers and demagogic mainlanders (in the final section of the book, Mohammed even lists the names and crimes of specific political leaders), whose combined influence, she suggests, tragically disturbed the harmonious and cosmopolitan balance of pre-1964 Zanzibar.

The most engaging parts of Zanzibar: Shrouds from the Womb of Pain are Ghonaimi’s vivid descriptions of family and community life in Oman and Zanzibar. Here, her enthusiasm for Omani history and her sensitivity to the textures of daily life make for fascinating and compelling reading. Ghonaimi’sinsistence on Omani benevolence and victimhood in East Africa is, however, somewhat one-sided due to her reliance on racial and cultural stereotypes of "Africans" and to her neglect of the historical reverberations of slavery and ethnic chauvinism. Ultimately, these shortcomings are detrimental to her innovative attempt to use the epistolary novel and the complex power of memory to make some sense of the horrific violence of the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.

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Consciousness, Motivation and Violence: Review of War of Words, War of Stones

Jonathon Glassman. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

PART 1: Scholars of mass violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide frequently debate the precise nature of the links between popular violence and an elite propaganda. Mass violence, they increasingly argue, is not the product of primordial hatred activated in a Hobbesian environment of weak social inhibitions. Yet this thesis has come to have something of the air of a cliché; provoking an enormous literature that is essentially a reaction against the "uncontrollable passions" thesis. Such literature argues that such violence was really about "something else", such as control over resources or political power.
In his new ambitious new book on racial violence in colonial Zanzibar, Jonathon Glassman argues that neither approach adequately captures the complexity of violence in the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution and the events leading up to it. In 1964, a group of armed Africans overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and purged his supporters in the rival political party. They then embarked on the massacre and intimidation of Arabs; some figures cite as many as 5,000 Arabs were killed in the months following. As in other cases, reports of violence were immediately contested—revolutionaries naturally denied the massacres, while exiles painted a gruesome picture of anti-Arab (and anti-Indian) pogroms.
In Zanzibar, Glassman argues, violence was the product of dueling discourses of civilization and barbarism from groups of "Africans" and "Arabs." Each group shaped competing approaches to the island's history and identity. In his introduction, Glassman traces the development of these identities through the history of Zanzibar, beginning with the founding of the Zanzibar Sultanate in the mid-nineteenth century, when it fell under the rule of the Busaidi family from Muscat, Oman. The Busaidi sultans expanded Zanzibar's wealth through usage of Indian merchant credit and an intense plantation slavery system built around clove production. British-imposed abolition soon destroyed the productivity of this system, and slaves and masters had to re-negotiate relationships of labor through tenancy and squatting. British colonial administrators sought to control and rationalize these relations, and they steadily increased their influence in Zanzibar until the establishment of a formal protectorate in 1890. British administrators had seen Zanzibar as an "Arab state" before the protectorate, and afterwards they continued to rule with (and often for) the Arab sultan as if Arabs were the natural ruling elite of the island.
In the half-century leading up to Zanzibar's first common roll election in 1957, British administrators nurtured a secular intelligentsia of (mostly) elite Arabs, who they inculcated thoroughly with British notions of civilizational nationalism. These Arabs served important roles as middlemen in the colonial bureaucracy. Yet they were no parrots of their would-be teachers; these elites also drew on Islamic modernism and pan-Arabism to advocate (initially) for the Arabs as the natural rulers of Zanzibar, and to mobilize Arabs (and eventually all Zanzibari citizens) against colonialism. Their vision of Zanzibari nationalism was broad and inclusive, but rested on specific values (like allegiance to the sultan) and particular exclusions. All "true" citizens were welcome under the inclusive umbrella of ustaarabu, (a Kiswahili word meaning "civilization") but such logic often criminalized mainlanders and encouraged Arab cultural chauvinism. Politically, the National Party of the Sultan's Subjects (Hizbu or ZNP) represented this ideological position.
In N'gambo, the African neighborhood east of the elite streets of Zanzibar's Stone Town, a vibrant post-bellum African culture nurtured its own intellectual vision of Zanzibar's future. This nationalist vision relied heavily on metaphors of blood and race. Africans, it argued, had been victims of Arab imperialism, and it was only by uniting with each other on the basis of skin color and shared oppression that Africans could overcome Arab hegemony. This vision came to be represented by the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), an outgrowth of a fusion of member of the town's African and Shirazi associations. The ASP was a complex mixture of former slaves, mainland migrants, and the indigenous Shirazi who resented Arab political dominance. Despite their links, those self-identified as Shirazi often faced criticism from the "Africans" that they were futilely trying to be "Asiatic." Instead of adopting an Arabocentric identity, the ASP argued, Africans ought to rediscover and reclaim their "tribal" ancestry. The Arabs were just as colonial as the British, the ASP claimed, but at least the British had abolished slavery. The ASP in effect, "racialized" the memory of slavery. Where the ZNP saw a shifting relationship between patron and client, the ASP saw evidence of pernicious racial oppression. This issue between the two proved to be one of the most contentious points dividing the two parties in the period known as the "Time of Politics", 1957-1963.

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Medieval Arab Writers on Africa: Abû Ûthmân al-Jâhiz: From The Essays, c. 860 CE

On the Zanj:

Everybody agrees that there is no people on earth in whom generosity is as universally well developed as the Zanj. These people have a natural talent for dancing to the rhythm of the tambourine, without needing to learn it. There are no better singers anywhere in the world, no people more polished and eloquent, and no people less given to insulting language. No other nation can surpass them in bodily strength and physical toughness. One of them will lift huge blocks and carry heavy loads that would be beyond the strength of most Bedouins or members of other races. They are courageous, energetic, and generous, which are the virtues of nobility, and also good-tempered and with little propensity to evil. They are always cheerful, smiling, and devoid of malice, which is a sign of noble character.

The Zanj say to the Arabs: You are so ignorant that during the jahiliyya you regarded us as your equals when it came to marrying Arab women, but with the advent of the justice of Islam you decided this practice was bad. Yet the desert is full of Zanj married to Arab wives, and they have been princes and kings and have safeguarded your rights and sheltered you against your enemies.

The Zanj say that God did not make them black in order to disfigure them; rather it is their environment that made them so. The best evidence of this is that there are black tribes among the Arabs, such as the Banu Sulaim bin Mansur, and that all the peoples settled in the Harra, besides the Banu Sulaim are black. These tribes take slaves from among the Ashban to mind their flocks and for irrigation work, manual labor, and domestic service, and their wives from among the Byzantines; and yet it takes less than three generations for the Harra to give them all the complexion of the Banu Sulaim. This Harra is such that the gazelles, ostriches, insects, wolves, foxes, sheep, asses, horses and birds that live there are all black. White and black are the results of environment, the natural properties of water and soil, distance from the sun, and intensity of heat. There is no question of metamorphosis, or of punishment, disfigurement or favor meted out by Allah. Besides, the land of the Banu Sulaim has much in common with the land of the Turks, where the camels, beasts of burden, and everything belonging to these people is similar in appearance: everything of theirs has a Turkish look.

Source.

Scanned by: J. S. Arkenberg, Dept. of History, Cal. State Fullerton. Prof. Arkenberg has modernized the text.

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Afrabia: Is it a mere intellectual fascination or can it be realised?

by Ali A. Mazrui
There are different levels of Pan-Africanism, varying in degrees of sustainability. Sub-Saharan Pan-Africanism is a quest for the unification of Black people in Africa below the Sahara. Then there are two possible versions of Continental Pan-Africanism.

The Sub-Continental version would seek the union of Black States while excluding Arab Africa. This idea has been floated from time to time, but it does not seem to have much political support. More triumphant has been Trans-Saharan Pan-Africanism which formed the Afro-Arab basis of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU,) and its successor, the African Union (AU).

Another version of sub-Saharan Pan-Africanism is sub-regional rather than sub-continental. The sub-regional variety has produced organisations like the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) which in recent years has been more activist as a peacekeeping force than as a vanguard for economic change.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has also received a new lease on life since South Africa became a full member in the post-apartheid era. In December 1999 Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania finally succeeded in reviving the East African Community since its collapse 22 years earlier.

But by far the most ambitious idea floating around in the new era of intellectual speculation is whether the whole of Africa and the whole of the Arab world are two regions in the process of merging into one. Out of this speculative discourse has emerged the concept of Afrabia.

Two tendencies have stimulated the new thinking about African-Arab relations. One tendency is basically negative but potentially unifying: The war on terrorism. The new international terrorism may have its roots in injustices perpetrated against such Arab people as Palestinians and Iraqis, but the primary theatre of contestation is blurring the distinction between the Middle East and the African continent.
In order to kill twelve Americans in Nairobi in August 1998, over 200 Kenyans died in a terrorist act at the United States Embassy in Nairobi. Four years later, a suicide bomber in Mombasa, attacked the Israeli-owned and Israeli-patronised Paradise Hotel. There too, three times as many Kenyans as Israelis died.
Independently of the war on terror, Islam as a cultural and political force has also been deepening relationships between Africa and the Middle East. Intellectual revival is not only in the Western idiom. It is also in the idiom of African cultures and African Islam. Hot political debates about the Shariah (Islamic Law) in Nigeria constitute part of the trend of cultural integration between Africa and the Middle East.

The new legitimation of Muammar Gaddafi as a viable African leader has contributed to the birth of no less a new institution than the AU. It is sometimes startling how much more Pan-Africanist than Pan-Arabist Gaddafi has become in recent years. At least for the time being, Gaddafi is out-Africanising the legacy of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The fourth force that may be merging Africa with the Middle East is political economy.

Africa’s oil producers need a joint partnership with the bigger oil producers of the Middle East.

In the area of aid and trade between Africa and the Middle East, the volumes may have gone down since the 1980s. But most indications seem to promise a future expansion of economic relations between Africa and the Middle East. In the Gulf countries of the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman the concept of Afrabia has begun to be examined on higher and higher echelons.
It was initially Trans-Saharan Pan-Africanism which gave birth to the idea of Afrabia. The first post-colonial waves of Pan-Africanists like Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Sekou Toure believed that the Sahara was a bridge rather than a divide.

The concept of Afrabia now connotes more than interaction between Africanity and Arab identity; it is seen as a process of fusion between the two. While the principle of Afrabia recognises that Africa and the Arab world are overlapping categories, it goes on to prophesy that these two are in the historic process of becoming one.

But who are the Afrabians? There are in reality at least four categories. Cultural Afrabians are those whose culture and way of life have been deeply Arabised but have fallen short of their being linguistically Arabs. Most Somali, Hausa, and some Waswahili are cultural Afrabians in that sense. Their mother-tongue is not Arabic, but much of the rest of their culture bears the stamp of Arab and Islamic impact.
Ideological Afrabians are those who intellectually believe in solidarity between Arabs and Africans, or at least between Arab Africa and black Africa. Historically, such ideological Afrabian leaders have included Kwame Nkrumah, the founder president of Ghana; Gamal Abdel Nasser, arguably the greatest Egyptian of the 20th Century; and Sekou Toure, the founding father of post-colonial Guinea (Conakry.) Such leaders refused to recognise the Sahara Desert as a divide, and insisted on visualising it as a historic bridge.

Geographical Afrabians are those Arabs and Berbers whose countries are concurrently members of both the African Union and the Arab League. Some of the countries are overwhelmingly Arab, such as Egypt and Tunisia, while others are only marginally Arab, such as Mauritania, Somalia and the Comoro Islands.
As for genealogical Afrabians, these are those who are biologically descended from both Arabs and Black Africans. In North Africa these include Anwar Sadat, the former President of Egypt who concluded a peace treaty with Israel and was assassinated for it in 1982. Anwar Sadat’s mother was Black. He was politically criticised for many things, but almost never for being racially mixed.

Genealogical Afrabians in sub-Saharan Africa include Salim Ahmed Salim, the longest serving Secretary-General of the OAU, and the Mazrui clan scattered across Coastal Kenya and Tanzania. It should be noted that Northern Sudanese qualify as Afrabians by both geographical and genealogical criteria. These four sub-categories of Afrabians provide some of the evidence that Africa and the Arab world are two geographical regions that are in the slow historic process of merging.


About The Author:


Professor Ali A. Mazrui is the Chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology: http://www.jkuat.ac.ke/



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