Mweso (called Bao in Zanzibar, or Hawalis in Oman)

Mweso, a Buganda variant of Bao

Click links for bao and hawalis

Each player has 32 men. The object of the game is to capture all the opponent’s men or so to reduce them that he cannot move. The centre horizontal line of the board divides it so that each player has two rows each of eight squares. He may play only his own men on his own side of the board and may not interfere with those of his opponent except to count them or take them. When he takes any men from his opponent, a player adds them to his own men and thereafter plays them exactly the same as his original 32.

Each player moves in turn. A move consists in taking up as many men as are in any one square on a player’s own side of the board (provided there are two or more) and dropping them one by one in each succeeding square, travelling in a counter-clockwise direction and starting from the square next to the one which the men were taken. If the last man drops into an empy square the move is finished but if it drops into an occupied square then that square is emptied and the move continued from the next succeeding square. This process is repeated until the last man in the hand falls into an unoccupied square. It should be noted that a move cannot be started from a square containing only one man. This means that when a player is reduced to sixteen men or less, should then happen to be situated only one to a square, the game is lost. Of course, he may be reduced to only ten men, but provided that one square at least contains two or more men he can still move and possibly win the game.

The way in which an opponent’s men are taken is easy to demonstrate on a board but hard to describe. No men are ever taken from the board and the whole 64 remain in play from start to finish; they are merely transferred from one side of the board to the other. When, during a move, the last man from a player’s hand drops into a square in the row nearest the centre line containing one or more men, and it so happens that the two squares on his opponent’s side of the board immediately opposite are occupied, instead of continuing his move in the ordinary way the player takes whatever number of men are in those two opponent’s squares and continues his move with them on his own side of the board. But, and this is important, he does not start from where he left off but from the square next to the one last left empty on his own side of the board.

 
When this has been done, the player’s move may or may not be finished. If the last of these captured men falls into an occupied square the player continues his move in the ordinary way, unless it should so happen that this occupied square is in the row of squares nearest the center line and that the two squares of his opponent’s half of the board opposite are occupied: in which case he again takes what men are there and proceeds to play them on his own side of the board starting from the square next to the one last empty. It is thus possible for a player by a combination of relayed moves and moves made with men taken from his opponent to travel round his side of the board several times before falling out of play through his last man falling into an empty square. The skill of the game consists in working out the moves well ahead so that the opponent’s men are taken whilst as few openings as possible are left to him.

There is one complication to mention: “going back.” In certain circumstances it is permissible to move back, in a clockwise direction. Notice the diagram highlighting the four squares on the left hand of each player. If a player sees that the number of men (being two or more of course) contained in one of these squares will land him when travelling clockwise into one of the squares in his second row (the row closest to his opponent), which is occupied and has two occupied squares of his opponent immediately opposite, he many move in clockwise direction and take the men. The men which he takes he then proceeds to distribute one to each square in the usual way, starting from the square on the counter-clockwise side of the square last left empty (one of the four left hand squares), unless he finds that the number of men which he has taken, will, if started from the square on the clockwise side of the square left empty land him in an occupied square in his second row which faces two squares of his opponent both occupied. In this last event he takes the men and goes back to the square left empty and continues his move in an anti-clockwise direction unless the requisite conditions for moving backward again prevail. In moving in a clockwise direction a player may not move beyond the right hand end of his second row of squares even though he may be able to relay until he comes round again to a square in the second row which is conditioned to permit him to take some opponent’s men.

There is one move which counts as a win. If a player, in one move (including a relayed move), succeeds in taking his opponent’s men ins squares 1, 16, 8 and 9, he wins.

The board is divided into four rows of 8 squares, for a total of 32 squares. Each player begins the game with 32 men.

Before the game proper starts each player distributes his men four to each square in his first row. The object of this is to ensure that each player has the correct number of men Having checked this each player allots his men between his sixteen squares as best pleases him. There is no rule as to the number which may be placed in any square and any square may receive any number of men or none at all. One common arrangement is the “seventeen game” (photo). In his own interest he will not place men in squares in rows one and two which are opposite to each other, as this is the position in which his opponent can take them.

A player moves by taking all the men which are in any one square (provided there are two or more) and distributing them one at a time to each successive square starting at the square next to the one vacated and moving in a counterclockwise direction. It does not matter whether a square traversed by the hand is occupied or vacant, each square receives one man and no more. If the move falls into a square already occupied, then the move is relayed and the men in that square together with the one which has just arrived are taken up and distributed one at a time, still moving in a counterclockwise direction, and starting from the square on the counterclockwise side of the square just vacated. (Left hand side in second row, Right hand side in first row). If men are taken from the left hand end square of the second row, the first man is dropped into the left hand end square of the first row. If taken from the right hand end square of the first row, the first man is dropped into the right hand end square of the second row. Movement continues with taking until it is no longer possible, at which point he may relay his men until his last man falls into an empty square.

It is only permissible to move backwards under the following circumstances:

a. Starting from the two squares at the left hand end of the first row or the two squares at the left hand end of the second row.

b. The move must immediately result in the taking of some opponent’s men.

c. The distribution of men taken may be started from either side of the square last left empty, but in the case of a start from the square on the clockwise side of the empty square the move must immediately result in the taking of some more opponent’s men. Having taken all the men possible by moving clockwise, the player continues his move in a counterclockwise direction by starting to distribute the last lot of captured men, relaying where possible and finishing on an empty square.

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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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Coverage of East Africa in the Omani Media (Oman Observer)

I was given the article from the Oman Observer, a well-known Omani newspaper, by a friend who is interested in my research topic. Its interesting for several reasons: 1) the anonymous author clearly knew a lot about Tippu Tip and his descendants, and somehow has access to some rare pictures of them, and 2) Oman is proudly referred to as an empire. I have been seeing this empire talk with greater frequency in Omani media sources, and I wonder if the stigma once associated with that word has now faded enough so it can be used with pride. The controversy over Oman and empire has to do with the association of the word empire with imperial and imperialism. It returns to the vexed question: was the Omani presence colonial on the East Coast of Africa. The answer is 'no'....and 'yes'. Or, 'it depends when and where you are talking about.' And the question is not just historical: it has to do with how one thinks about contemporary national identity and citizenship in post-colonial African states like Zanzibar. I think the concept of layered imperialism is helpful to understanding Omani expansion, but this is a deep and sensitive topic that deserves a special post.

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Martin Walsh: East African Notes and Records

Martin Walsh's blog on East African history, culture, and ethnography is an unusual combination of travelogue, self-reflection, and quirky topics from frogs to circumcision cycles. What I really like about Martin's blog is how he is using the web to talk about and publicize his academic work. You can read his papers on Scribd, you can see his publications, and he has apparently even scanned and posted his research notebooks. I like this commitment to "open source academia", if you will. Check him out at East African Notes and Records

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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 2: Glassman shows in detail how newspaper debates between the two rival parties over Zanzibar's history, slavery, marriage, and land rights became increasingly polarized and racialized. The outcome these polemical exchanges was that any conflict, especially those with a hint of violence, could become politicized. As each side ramped up their violent rhetoric, it drew readers and listeners into an everyday drama where everyone was encouraged and even coerced to choose among racialized political identities. The personal nature of the island's social relationships made these dramas all the more bitter—gradually almost every aspect of everyday life became infused with the tension of potential racial drama. Everything from bus rides and public dances to traffic accidents and crime became an opportunity for transforming the "overlapping discursive circuits" of newspaper discourse and racial rumor into "what many came to imagine as actual lived experience."
The book draws on a wealth of original sources—the enormous number of published newspapers circulating in Zanzibar during the 1950s and 1960s (and even earlier) as well as archival material. Glassman's choice not to draw on oral interviews is a conscious attempt to steer away from the minefield of counter-interpretation generated (and being generated) around the meaning of the 1964 Revolution. Instead Glassman revises and offers fresh interpretations on theories of violence and ethnic conflict.
The arch-instrumentalists who view violence, especially "ethnic" violence, as an expression of class conflict or other material factors often stress that violence has to be "activated" by elites; violence is the outcome of planning and the hard work of social polarization. On the other hand, elites rarely control and direct the violence of crowds and mobs; the crowd's logic is not the product of external direction. Through a detailed examination of the character of mob violence in Zanzibar, Glassman argues that mob violence acts as an incentive for individuals to recast their experience along communal lines. In the context of a polarized political climate where people are encouraged to racialize their daily lives, transgressive violence can appear necessary. Violence in Zanzibar had to overcome the powerful affective bonds and neighborly relations; once it did (through the racialization of everyday experience in the "newspaper wars") criminality and rumor could work powerfully on people's everyday experience of themselves.
Rumor, argues Glassman, enables people to "replace the subjectivity of personal experience with false memories of victimhood." It "turns everyday patterns" and even sounds into "signs of impending violence." For those who actually experience acts of oppression, rumor further encourages them to think of these acts in the overall terms of a racialized narrative. For Zanzibar, Glassman documents how rival discourses of crime and criminality centered on both mainland immigrants from Mozambique and Tanzania and poor "Manga" Arabs from Oman; these discourses aided rival parties in giving concrete representation to their enemy.
Glassman rejects the distinction between acts that are expressions of the "real" consciousness of the crowd, and those they are "manipulated" into performing by elites. Working through the logic of writers like Robert Weinberg and Paul Brass, Glassman concludes that, based on their distinctions, one has to argue that violence in Zanzibar is a product of elite manipulation in the context of contests for political power.
Yet the nature of the violence itself, argues Glassman, contradicts this argument. The "stylized" and "expressive" nature of the killings in Zanzibar belies any notion that elite discourse sat as a form of false consciousness swaying the actions of an irrational mob. Propagandists in Zanzibar, notes Glassman, although they used inflammatory language, never called for violence. The violence instead was activated in the moment where racial discourse became "embodied" reality, often experienced as a fear of violence and domination from the "other." It was mostly a product of everyday experience and not directly shaped by elite direction.
Building on the work of Sudhir Kakar and Natalie Zemon Davis, Glassman argues that a mob focuses and sharpens a group's identity; participation is a kind of group ritual. Mobs are thus both spontaneous and premeditated. Participants' subjectivities and moral conscience are spontaneously re-shaped in the midst of the violent act itself, but their decision to "act spontaneously" is the product of a racialized discursive envirornment, which is then embodied and amplified through rumors and stories.
Glassman's evidence is vast and skillfully deployed, and his argument is subtle and well-stated. Yet while Glassman helpfully deconstructs the divide between spontaneous and induced violence, I wonder if he doesn't leave himself exposed to the criticism that his "false memories of victimhood" engendering "violent subjectivities" too closely resembles a form of false consciousness. In closing the gap between spontaneous and induced violence, I'm inclined to think that Glassman open up an unintended gap between "true" "personal" subjectivity (rational and moral), and "false" "collective" subjectivity. This may encourage readers to think of the "individual" as acting truly (as in heroic stories of individual rescue) as a counterpoint to the madness of the crowd. This thinking, if taken to its logical extreme, leads us back to our original problem, thus demonstrating that many crucial questions remain to be uncovered towards a better understanding of mob violence.

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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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Research in Oman: the Swahili Speaking Omani

I've been in Muscat for two weeks now, conducting interviews and meeting different people who came back from Tanzania, Zanzibar, Kenya, Uganda and the Congo. Their stories and worldviews are AMAZING. Everything I expected and more. There is a rich dissertation/book project here waiting to be written. The multiple connections linking Oman and Zanzibar in the present day are truly interesting, and the role of East African heritage in contemporary Oman is also a fascinating question. I am sorry I cannot say more. I am compiling interviews at the moment and writing a Fulbright proposal...To be continued.

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East Africa Around the Blogosphere

Greetings Azanian Sea readers,

It has been a minute since I've been in the blogging game as I had responsibilities to take care of on the home front (like finishing graduate coursework at Northwestern). But I'm back, and I hope to get back to blogging and commenting on religion, politics, culture and history in East Africa this summer, while I wade deeply into another round of Intensive Arabic in Amman, Jordan. Things are relatively quiet here, but the Syrian border is closed, Egypt and Sudan are poised for major transitions in governance, there is still unrest in Libya and Yemen and it's bizarre to think about how close we are here to the tides of revolution sweeping the region.

In East Africa, a terrible drought is sweeping the Horn of Africa. In an already destabilized region, the prospect of no rain until September could have catastrophic results for the ability of many residents to eke out a living above the margin of survival. The big question is: how much does climate change play a role in this emerging crisis? Droughts are not new in East Africa, and the region was hit hard in 2006. But the cycle of drought seems to be quickening, as Daniel Howden writes, "At the beginning of this decade the rains failed every other season and what we now see is 'perennial drought'." Climatologists and others have been warning of this situation for quite some time, but it now seems to be approaching a crisis.
The drought is likely to intensify water conflicts in the region, as well as political conflict over other resources like grazing grounds, fuel, and arable land.

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Book Review: "East African Hip Hop"

I feel embarassed saying how much I enjoyed this new book from anthropologist Mwenda Ntarangwi. It is not only a delight to read, it is that rare academic book that encourages the hungry reader to search for more information on the topic. Its chronicle of emerging forms of creativity and resistance among youth in East Africa is both inspiring and accessible. Ntarangwi sees local forms of "hip hop" emerging among youth in East Africa as both reflective of global processses of American cultural influence, and at the same time critical of the forces of economic globalization eroding the social and economic outlook of the masses of East African youth. He writes in the Preface, "Rather than seeing hip hop as a completely new cultural phenomenon in East Africa, one is better off seeing it as a window into the culture of change in East Africa's political, economic and social realities created by local and global processes."

Ntarangwi divides his book into five chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of hip hop's social impact in East Africa. Chapters' one and two discuss globalization and hip hop music. Chapter three is a discussion of gender and hip hop. Chapter four explores economic privatization and its impact on the livelihoods of East Africans. Chapter 5 is about hip hop and HIV/AIDS, and in Chapter 6 Ntarangwi offers some concluding remarks. This is not a straightforward history, but an ethnography of hip hop's social influence in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

Two things I especially loved about the book: 1) The way in which Ntarangwi centers each chapter around a song, song lyric, or artist that exemplifies his theme. 2) The stories which give a human face to his ethnography and show him wrestling with various dilemmas as an anthropologist in the field.

I've posted videos from East Africa's burgeoning hip hop scene before on this blog, and it seems to be enjoying a growing global spotlight. As I write this, the famous Tanzanian artist Profesa Jay is embarking on a US tour. Other big name Tanzanian and Kenyan hip hop artists have embarked on international tours. But instead of focusing on the "bongo flava" side of East African hip hop--the sugary sweet commercial R&B side to the scene--Ntarangwi focuses on lyricists like Profesa Jay and Ukoo Flani, whose social critique have earned them devoted fans but perhaps less in the way of commercial accolade. As a Prof. Jay fan, I particularly enjoyed Ntarangwi's analysis of Prof. Jay's "Ndio Mzee" (Yes, Elder), a brilliant send up of politicians and their empty promises, and its followup "Kikao cha Dharura" (Emergency Meeting), where the politician who had earlier made such extravagant vows is forced to retract them, stating that the people have unrealistic expectations of luxury. Ntarangwi takes the song apart to show how Profesa Jay critiques local corruption in the state machinery, while remaining aware how these local structures are caught up and in many cases dependent on a global structure of economic dependence.

I anticipate this book will become required reading in many an African Cultural Anthropology class, but it is also a valuable addition to the Hip Hop Studies canon. Furthermore, its clear and readable prose could be a great entryway for high school and college students to talk about issues of cultural and economic globalization through a discussion of hip hop lyrics. Hip hop provides a cultural vantage point that will enhance the local relevance of the discussion for many students, while at the same time making them aware that hip hop is no longer just an American phenomenon but part of a group of interlocking and overlapping global processes that affect their lives in important ways.

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Culture Music Club: Sabah el-Kheir

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India's African Past

FROM boloji.com

The Sidi community lives mostly in Gujarat (in western India), with smaller populations settled in the neighboring state of Maharashtra and the southern states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. There is no accurate census on the number of Sidis in India. According to various publications, there are no more than 20,000 in any one state. Although most Sidis live in villages, many are urban dwellers residing in towns and cities. Some also live in tribal surroundings and villages.

Descendants of African slaves and seamen, the ancestors of the Sidis came to India through sea trade with East Africa and the Gulf around the 12th century. They came from different areas such as Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and later Zanzibar. The Sidis of Gujarat are Muslims with a strong Sufi tradition. They have to some extent assimilated into the local culture through their dress, food and language, though their dark skin and African features are distinctive. Some have even married outside of their community. But, by and large, they remain marginalized, leading a life of relative obscurity and poverty. In some districts, the government has accorded them the Scheduled Tribe status.

Their history lost in time, the Sidis' only link to their past is their devotional music and dance dedicated to Gori Pir, a Sufi saint from Africa. Known as Hazrat Mubarak Nobi, he is said to have come from Nubia to India from Africa via Mecca, and stopped in Basra (in Iraq) to study with Rifai Sufis. He has shrines throughout Gujarat, in the places stopped at before settling in Bharuch district. Here he set up an agate workshop and became part of the Indian Ocean trade, especially in tasbihs (Islamic prayer beads) for hajis (pilgrims).

The fascinating culture and history of the Sidis was unknown to the world beyond their small communities spread across India. Over the past seven-eight years, though, Dr Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy's intervention has changed that. A visiting Associate Professor and Research Scholar in the Department of Ethnomusicology at University of California, Los Angeles, Catlin-Jairazbhoy has explored the cultural and historical significance of the Sidis, not only in Indian society but also as part of the larger African Diaspora. Her work has been much inspired by the groundbreaking anthropological work of Dr Helen Basu - whose book 'Sidi Sklaven, Habshi Fakiren' (Sidi Slaves, Habshi Faqirs) is considered a classic on the Sidi community; husband Nazir Jairazbhoy's collaboration; Professor of Women's Studies at University of California at Irvine and the advice of Beheroze Shroff, who guided her initial contacts with Sidis in Mumbai and Gujarat.

Catlin-Jairazbhoy became interested in the Sidi community in the 1970s, when she came from the US to Chennai, Tamil Nadu to do her dissertation in Carnatic music. She had always been interested in spirituality and music. And since she grew up during the era of the American Civil Rights movement, Catlin-Jairazbhoy had become well acquainted with the African-American culture and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and India. Twenty years later, she and her husband ethnomusicologist Nazir Jairazbhoy made a short film on the music of Kutch. This was when they came into contact with the Sidis of Gujarat.

The film generated much interest in the US, but Catlin-Jairazbhoy wanted to do more for the Sidis. She approached the erstwhile royal family of Rajpipla to put up a conference on the Sidis in Gujarat. The three-day conference brought much-needed attention to the community, with several scholars in attendance and active media participation. The Sidis welcomed her efforts and, as she points out, "in fact sought help to find an opportunity to tour outside India".

In 1991, Catlin-Jairazbhoy and her husband founded the Apsara Media for Intercultural Education based in Van Nuys, California USA, to create a platform for in-depth documentary research from South Asia and Southeast Asia, including research on the Sidis. A small but important step had been taken towards changing the perception of the Sidis from that of an outsider community to a people who had much to offer through their rich musical tradition. In September 2002, Catlin-Jairazbhoy put together a group of Sidi performers from Gujarat for their first concert and lecture tour outside India. It seemed destined; Catlin-Jairazbhoy found "everything worked like magic". The success of the show was followed by more international performances by the Sidis, including a historic tour to East Africa, the land of their ancestors. They performed to excited audiences in Mombasa and in Nairobi followed by 'jamming sessions' with local musicians in a sort of cultural exchange during a two-day stay at Zanzibar.

In 2002, Catlin-Jairazbhoy published the CD 'Sidi Sufis: African Indian Mystics of Gujarat' and a year later 'From Africa to India: Sidi Music in the Indian Ocean Diaspora, the feature-length documentary, which pieces together the history, religion and sacred music of the Sidis over the centuries, making it an important part of understanding the African Diaspora in the context of the Indian subcontinent. The following year, she co-edited 'Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians' containing essays by European, American and Indian scholars who have worked with the Sidis in Gujarat, Karnataka, and Mumbai.

There is also the CD compilation, which comprises field recordings from Sidi shrines (dedicated to Gori Pir) throughout Gujarat, recorded between 1999 and 2002. The Sidis have traditionally been wandering faqirs (mendicants) making their livelihood from alms given for their musical performances. These performances include a mesmerizing array of instruments - such as coconut rattles and armpit-held drums - which hark back to their African roots. However, the most distinctive of these instruments is the footed drum, with its pegged head and three or four 'feet'. As Catlin-Jairazbhoy points out, "Similar types of pegged drumheads and footed drums are widespread on the East Coast of Africa, while they are otherwise unknown in India."

The CD was made in collaboration with the Sidi community and Abdul Hamid Sidi, one of the lead dancers in Sidi Goma the touring group, whom the Jairazbhoys have trained in research and documentation. The proceeds from the recordings were put to the benefit of Sidi education projects in Gujarat.
In February 2003, she held a workshop to preserve Sidi culture. The 'Sidi Malunga Project' brought together some Sidi elders to teach the basic techniques of constructing and performing the traditional Malunga - an African musical bow used by the Sidis in their songs.

There is no doubt we live in a culture that is exceedingly becoming absorbed by the events of the present. But Catlin-Jairazbhoy's work emphasizes the importance of cultural and historical legacy in discovering our own place in contemporary society. Thus, as the Sidis sing and dance, and tour the world, they celebrate their present and honor their past with the hope that their new local and transnational relationships will create a more promising future.

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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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Pambazuka - Africa: Google moves into Swahili

Pambazuka - Africa: Google moves into Swahili

Google has sponsored a contest to encourage students in Tanzania and Kenya to create articles for the Swahili version of Wikipedia, mainly by translating them from the English Wikipedia, according to an article appearing in the New York Times. Swahili, because it is a second language for as many as 100 million people in East Africa, is thought to be one of the only ways to reach a mass audience of readers and contributors in the region.

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Lamu Journal: Future Kenya Port Threatens Lamu's Livelihood

LAMU, Kenya — The evening call to prayer here is like a summons, for everyone on the island. As the sun dives toward the ocean, the Muslim residents stream into the mosques, little boys wearing impossibly bright white skullcaps, their mothers in diaphanous, black head-to-toe gowns. The last of the bikini-clad tourists pick themselves up from the beach, dust off the powdery sand and head back to the hotel for a drink.

Lamu is one of the last outposts of pure Swahili culture.

Lamu has been like this for decades, a historic seafaring place where modernity has been gracefully folded into traditional culture without completely spoiling it. The snaky alleyways of the island’s old town (which the United Nations recognizes as a World Heritage site), the omnipresent smells of donkey dung and sweetly rotting fruit and the crescent-sailed dhows plying the sea make the island feel like a glass museum case — one with a living culture inside.

But all that may be about to change.

To the dismay of many residents and tourists, the Kenyan government is planning to build the biggest port in East Africa here. It is an ambitious, multibillion-dollar project that could transform trade in this region and knit together Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, eastern Congo and southern Sudan as never before.

Pipelines, rail lines, highways, airports, an oil refinery and extra-deep berths for 21st-century supertankers are all in the blueprints, though it is hard to imagine such infrastructure rising up along this long-neglected stretch of the Kenyan coast, dotted by crumbling ruins and impenetrable mangrove swamps.

The Chinese government, one of the most aggressive investors in Africa, is backing the project and has already begun feasibility studies.

“This is real,” said Chirau Ali Mwakwere, Kenya’s transport minister. “We’ve made tremendous strides toward the realization of what you might call a dream.”

Not a historian’s dream, however.

Lamu is one the last outposts of pure Swahili culture, a throwback to the days of cannons, slaves, spices and sultans who were a mix of Arab and African blood and who ruled the East African coast for hundreds of years. Because it is a small island, reachable only by a short airstrip or a very bumpy road and a ferry, it has been spared the big hotels and development that have swept the port city of Mombasa, Zanzibar and other tourist hotspots in the region.

People here say they are not especially well suited for the mechanized world. There was only one car on the island until recently (the district commissioner’s); now there are just 10. Most things are carried by donkeys, who plod through the alleyways or along the beach with heavy loads and blank, accommodating eyes. This is why many of Lamu’s elders say they think that the port will bring more trouble than good.

“People in the street think they will get jobs,” said Mohamed Athman, who leads a small marine preservation group. “What jobs? We don’t have drivers or crane operators.”

The biggest worry is the environment. Fishing is a lifeline for many of Lamu district’s 85,000 people, and the Kenyan government does not have the greatest record of preserving its natural resources, with raw sewage dumped into Lake Victoria and countless trees chopped down in the Rift Valley. Lamu fishermen fear that the planned dredging of the port will ruin fish breeding grounds.

“They will break the rocks where the fish hide,” said one angler, Mohamed Shabwana. “They will destroy everything.”

Omar Mzee, a former member of Parliament from Lamu, worries about pollution from the port and possible oil spills.

“This is going to be a total mess,” Mr. Mzee said. “The government is thinking of the national G.D.P. This will not benefit Lamu. It never has.”

Lamu has been marginalized for decades, Mr. Mzee said, kept down because the people here are Muslim and coastal, while Kenya, since its independence in 1963, has been ruled by Christian politicians from the highlands. There are few roads out here and few schools. The way residents describe it, Lamu was left to bake in tropical obscurity until tourists started flocking here in substantial numbers in the 1990s, precisely because the area was so underdeveloped and environmentally and culturally pristine. The villages around the island are studies in poverty. There is no electricity and no running water. The houses are built from mud, sticks and string. Malaria is rampant. Many of the children sitting idle in their homes or clutching saggy soccer balls on the beach have their feet chewed up by chigoes, the tiny fleas that lay eggs under people’s toenails.

“The government doesn’t take us seriously,” Mr. Mzee said.

The government says that in this case, it does not have much of a choice. Kenya’s growing economy desperately needs a bigger port, and Mombasa, the current one, cannot be expanded because of natural limitations on the harbor.

Ever since a Swiss firm in the 1970s identified the Lamu area as the best spot in Kenya for a new port, because it is deep and sheltered by a string of islands, the Kenyan government has been trying to raise the money. Now the geopolitics of the region seem to be working in its favor.

Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi are all landlocked, with growing economies, and interested in reinvigorating the East African Community. At the same time, southern Sudan is gearing up for independence from northern Sudan in 2011, and southern Sudan’s capital, Juba, is far closer to the Kenyan coast than it is to Sudan’s main port on the Red Sea.

“The Kenya side has a lot of reasons,” said a Chinese diplomat in Kenya who asked to be identified simply as Mr. Liu. “The relevant Chinese companies are now looking into this.”

The proposed site for the port is a few miles away from Lamu island on a desolate stretch of the mainland. But residents of Lamu town fear that the blast radius of the port — the crime, the pollution and the overall seediness — will reach them. Kenyan government officials admit, when pressed, that Lamu and its traditional Muslim culture will be affected.

“Of course it will change,” said Mahmoud Hassan Ali, a port official. “Lifestyle will change and whatever. But if you have faith, you have faith, my friend.”

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Rights, the law and religion: Islamic courts in East Africa

In Tanzania too there has been a raging debate over the introduction of the Kadhi’s courts in the legal and judicial system. Like in Kenya, the most vocal and visible opposition against Kadhi’s courts assumes a religious character, with the church being at the forefront of those most hostile to its introduction. But the motion to reinstate Kadhi’s Courts in Tanzania was first introduced by an opposition leader, the Honourable Lyatonga Mrema of the Tanzania Labour Party (TLP), undoubtedly as a political strategy to win Muslim support in the 2005 General Elections. The ruling party is said to have appropriated the motion, turning it into a campaign pledge to make the same a reality in exchange for the Muslim vote. Not surprisingly, as the 2010 elections loom, the issue is gaining renewed vigour.

Religious forces have kept the matter very much alive in various spaces, including pulpits, newspapers and blogs, intensifying the pressure on the government to concede on the issue. Using a variety of advocacy channels, some Islamic bodies institutions have embarked on a media advocacy strategy aimed at consolidating Muslim opinion over the introduction of the Kadhi’s court. Dismissive remarks by the Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda during the 2009 budget session on the issue of the Kadhi elicited a harsh reaction from Muslim quarters. To appease the situation, the chief mufti, Sheikh Shaaban Simba, formed a committee to advise and negotiate with the government over the matter. In response, the prime minister also formed a committee to engage with the Muslim Council.

Concrete proposals to introduce Kadhi’s courts failed to come up during the recently concluded parliamentary session in November. In the meantime, the government has directed the Law Reform Commission to collect views and make recommendations on the matter. Women’s voices are noticeably absent from the discussions. From available reports, there is no female representation on this crucial body, advising on the most intimate aspect of family and social relationships.

This absence of women’s interest in the ongoing discussion is not only a physical absence but also an absence of gender considerations in the overall content of the proposals in substance. Largely, the voices of women have been sidelined or muffled by political forces informing the debate. Yet, it is they who stand to loose the most from what is being proposed. Indeed, the overwhelming interest in Kadhi’s courts does not seem to be a preoccupation of Muslim women, but of sections of the Muslim community who seek political advantage both from political parties and in the larger community. Otherwise, it consumes most those sections of the community who stand to benefit the most from the existence of Kadhi’s courts.

Pambazuka - Rights, the law and religion: Islamic courts in East Africa

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Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Paradise is a little book about a boy named Yusuf who grows into manhood in East Africa. As a coming of age story it is remarkably simple and straightforward, but the way in which Abdulrazak Gurnah illuminates the tremendous historical changes sweeping around Yusuf, and does so while still maintaining the narrative integrity of his man-child protagonist, is simply breathtaking.

Yusuf starts out in a provincial town in the East African interior, the son of a poor hotel owner. He is mortgaged by his father to pay his deepening debt to a man Yusuf knows only as Uncle Aziz. Yusuf travels in the care of Uncle Aziz to the coast, where he befriends Khalil, another debt-slave whose has secrets Yusuf will eventually discover.

Yusuf is an exceptionally beautiful boy and a very sensitive observer who cries at visions he sees in his dreams. His journeys in Paradise mirror two processes which bound the interiors of Eastern Africa to the Western Indian Ocean--one a process of the migration (often via slavery) and subsequent Islamization of upcountry Africans, and the other a venturing into the interior as far as Eastern Congo by armed bands of Swahili-Arab traders.

Gurnah's description of life on the caravan road is illuminative and he vividly portrays the 'utani' relationship of sly joking and storytelling by which the porters structured the monotony of the march. He also gives one of the richest explorations (through dialogue) of the fantastic dimensions of East African Islamic mythology, in which the 'washenzi' lurk in the lands of Gog and Magog waiting to destroy the believers and dragons, birds, jinns, and ghosts all inhabit a universe in intimate interaction with humans. Finally in the background are the Germans, a brooding silent foreboding force who everyone around Yusuf speaks of with trepidation, and who intervene at a key point in the novel. Gurnah accurately captures the ambigous status of Yusuf as grows up on the eve of European colonial rule, and searches for a way out of his dependency. His unexpected decision ends the book abruptly, almost breathlessly, but somehow completely appropriately. In this single last sentence, Gurnah has somehow captured what Jonathan Glassman calls "the contradictory dimensions of slave resistance," the moral dilemma through which Yusuf will shape an independent destiny for himself. Paradise more than lives up to his name and will offer students of East African history and literature a beautiful and compelling read.

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The Standard | Online Edition: Fire on Faza Island in Lamu archipelago

The Standard Online Edition: Lamu fire: More than 2,500 residents out in the cold

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Top Tanzanian Bureaucrats Choose To Enroll Children At Successful Turkish Schools

Top Tanzanian Bureaucrats Choose To Enroll Children At Successful Turkish Schools

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Pensee #3: Reconceptualizing the "Regions" in "Area Studies"

I couldn't have said it better! As someone who has had the privilege to sit in Dr. Voll's class, his thoughts are on point and very welcome in light of the issues discussed in this blog.
by John Voll, Professor of Islamic History and Associate Director of the Prince al-Waleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.
Article originally appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies
“Area studies” as a way of trying to understand human experience is undergoing a major transition. Questioning the connection between Middle East and African studies highlights important dimensions of the changing nature of area studies at the beginning of the 21st century.

The question reminds us that the “regions” at the core of the concept of “area” studies were and are constructs for the convenience of analysts. During the 1950s and 1960s, policymakers and scholars divided the world conceptually into regions for study. In the United States, the definition of these regions crystallized around the list of non-Western “world regions” studied in centers supported by funding initially authorized by the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Although world regions had been (and are still) defined in many different ways, this 1960s conceptual division of the world became widely accepted. It is in this context that the regions involved in “African” studies and “Middle East” studies came to be defined. African studies became primarily the study of sub-Saharan Africa rather than the continent as a whole. The emerging cadre of professional “Africanists” tended to exclude the countries of “North Africa”
from their subject matter.

The definition of the Middle East changed significantly from the early usage by military planners in the 1890s. However, virtually every definition excluded African areas beyond the Mediterranean coast. In one exception, the British War Office during World War II included the Horn of Africa, but by the 1960s, most people accepted the conclusion of one of the standard geography texts of the time that Sudan and the countries of the Horn were “more properly considered as parts of intertropical Africa.”

One important result of this division was that the two fields—African and Middle East studies—developed relatively separately, and the conceptual regions tended to become reified. People spoke of “culture continents” with distinctive identities,2 opening the way for a vision of the world made up of separate—and clashing—“civilizations.” Topics that did not fit into these two conceptual boxes tended to be marginalized in “mainstream” coverage of sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East in conferences and professional associations.

These conditions contributed to two difficulties in the area-studies approach that are now changing. The first is a regionalist primordialism, which endows regions with some essential identity. As a result, interactions among regions are viewed as “borrowing” or “foreign” influences. However, interactions between the Middle East and “Africa” have resulted in dynamic cultural syntheses that are distinctively local but no longer simply manifestations of some primordial essence that has “borrowed” some foreign elements. Studies of these developments require “area-studies” expertise but also require transcending regionalist primordialisms. An interesting example of this postprimordialist analysis is Donald Wright’s study of Islamization and globalization in “a very small place in Africa." A dual regional studies approach, combining African and Middle East studies, is an important part of going beyond the primordialist perspective.

A second difficulty is a monolithic view of the dimensions of human activities in the region under study. Classical area studies tended to see geographicphysical, economic, cultural, and religious boundaries as being roughly the same. However, looking at the Middle East and Africa together reminds us that important regions or networks of interaction cross borders. The networks of Muslim pilgrimage that run from the Atlantic coast of Africa to western Arabia are an integrated region rather than two regions interacting. The networks of economic interaction have little relationship to the boundaries assumed by area-studies definitions of the Middle East and Africa. The classic study of the trans-Saharan trade from antiquity by E. W. Bovill presents an important example of how economic enterprise does not conform to the regions of area
studies. Studies of religious and economic relations between South Arabia and East Africa by scholars like Anne Bang illustrate that there was no clear “regional” boundary between the Middle East and Africa in this broad swath of territory.

Within the framework of these thoughts, why and how should Middle East and African studies be connected? They need to be connected through scholarship that transcends the primordialism and monolithic definitions of old-style area studies because these two regions are not separate “areas” or discrete “civilizations.” Instead, they are interacting and diverse sets of human experiences that historically have influenced and shaped each other. Understanding this will help scholars build a perspective and a methodology that avoids the dangers of old-style cultural essentialism that can lead not only to the conception but also to the reality of a clash of civilizations.

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Political and Cultural Aspects of Qur'anic translation in East Africa Part Three: Ahmadiyya in East Africa

Part 3 in a special series on Kiswahili Qu'ranic translation for The Azanian Sea

Part 3: Ahmadiyya in East Africa and Kurani Tukufu
In a lecture in Dakar, Senegal in 1996, Tigiti Cengo expressed the questions of Islam’s cultural relevance to African culture and religion in a discussion about the Arabic origins of Swahili: “How many realize the direct descendance of the Swahili language, spoken all over East and Central Africa, from the Arabic. (Ebrahim Doda), a question which nobody can answer because it is baseless, unfounded, and even unnecessary. The same is true with the fundamental mistake of dating the birth of Islam as 7th century. How can one justify the non-existence of Allah(SW) and all His Creation which submitted to him before the 7th Century? Muslim scholars should consult deeper sources than those from the exploitative, oppressive, and sentimental generalizations that “Africa has had no culture, language, civilization, nothing; that “Islam is nothing but Arabism,” and the like from euro-western schools.”

Cengo’s assertion is extremely interesting; on the one hand, like the Ahmadiyya missionary Mubarak Ahmad Ahmadi in the introduction to the Ahmadiyya translation Kurani Tukufu, he seeks to give Africa its place in the world history of religion, inverting the argument used by Arabism to subtly argue that Africans possessed concepts of Allah well before Arabs or any other civilization. On the other hand, he posits that most of the negative ideas about Africa and the conflation of Islam with being Arab and speaking Arabic are western ideologies.

The latter statement is partly true, but not completely. British educational policy in Zanzibar was predicated on an absolute separation of races, with each “race” to be taught according to their perceived abilities. Africans figured at the bottom of his hierarchy, and the British went so far as to refuse requests by Arab parents to have the Africans join their children in the classroom. The British believed they were upholding the “natural” social order; in reality they were freezing their conception of “lower races.” Nowhere is this more starkly revealed than in the overall European view of the Waswahili as some kind of morally and racially degenerate mixture between Arab and African, chained to Islam and incapable of renewal, change, or innovation.

Yet this view of African degeneracy was shared by many members of the 'Arab' elite during the early twentieth century, but not for the same reasons. Their concept of civilization was not scientific racialism but cultural chauvinism. In Al-Falaq, one of a group of Arabic newspapers published in Zanzibar, one writer warned that stripping Arabic from the educational curriculum would result in Arabs becoming like the “zanji” in their manners and cultural. This Arab variety of racism relied on the threat of cultural degeneracy through loss of linguistic and religious identity. Without Arabic, Arabs in Africa would become like the heathen Africans, the washenzi.

A new Muslim group calling themselves Ahmadiyya would seek to transform the Arab cultural paradigm through which coastal Islam had traditionally been viewed, seeking to retain the importance of Arabic, while freely translating the Qu’ran into other African languages and employing a discourse of African contributions to Islam.

Founded in the town of Qadian, India (hence its alternate name of Qadianiyat) in 1889 by Hazraut Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), Ahmadiyyism was a prophetic movement that proclaimed Mirza Ahmad as mujadid, mahdi, and Messiah of Islam. Ahmad came from a family whose forbears fought in the British army in India. Educated in the Qur’an (he knew Arabic, Persian, and Urdu), Ahmad came of age as the subcontinent was wracked by competing ideas of religious legitimacy from all sides. Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians debated each other and themselves in their attempts to win converts. This policy was partly spurred by the British colonial policy of awarding political representation based on communal religious confession, but it was also a result of the rich texture of religious discourse, a climate that encouraged people to take theological matters seriously.

From 1872, Ahmad emerged as spokesperson for Islam against Christians and various Hindu sects like Arya Samaj. Yet he also proved quite ready to define his vision of Islamic legitimacy; in the early years of his ministry he debated Maulvi Muhammed Husain about the differences between the Hanafi madhab and the ahl al-Hadith Ahmad established a degree of fame before his claims to prophethood by his flamboyant debating tactics: in one instance offering money to the person who would refute his book on Islamic apologetics, in another instance, before a debate with a Christian missionary, issuing an invitation for a mubahala. According to the Ahmadiyya histories, Ahmad received a type of divine illumination through fasting; soon after he proclaimed himself the mahdi. His assertion led even close friends to disassociate themselves from him.

Most authors working on Ahmadiyya focus on the person of Ahmad, the theological debates his claims of prophethood raised, and the religious context of the Indian subcontinent. More work along the lines of Humphrey Fisher’s work is needed to understand the role of Ahmadiyya in the development of Islam in East Africa. It is known that the movement began its work with Mubarak Ahmad’s arrival in Mombasa in 1934. Branches of the organization soon sprang up in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, while the headquarters were initially located in Tabora.

Much of the controversy between Ahmadiyya and other Muslims had to do with Ahmad’s view of the death and resurrection of Jesus and the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood. In an 1899 book, Jesus in India, Ahmad claimed Jesus had not died on the cross at all, but had sent a proxy, and had instead migrated to Kashmir and died in Srinagar at the age of 120. The controversy about Muhammad’s prophethood hinged on Ahmad’s unique explanation of the Qur’an 33:41. In Kurani Tukufu, the Arabic Khatataman Nabiyyina is translated as “Muhuri wa Manabii” According to Ahmad, the seal was not a literal finality. To counter the established wisdom, Ahmad related a hadith from Ayesha, “Say by all means that is the Seal of the Prophets, but do not say that there will be no Prophet after him.”

All of these theological issues in turn related to Ahmad’s overarching goal: countering Christian missionizing in its imperial aspect through a reform of key doctrinal vulnerabilities within Islam. One of those “vulnerabilities” was the relationship of Jesus and Muslim belief in his resurrection. The crux of much of this debate was Qur’an 4:157 “The Women” (which, you will recall, was one of the verses Godfrey singled out for criticism in his Qur'anic commentary) :

“That they said (in boast), "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah";- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them [or it appeared so unto them], and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not: Nay, Allah raised him up unto Himself; and Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise.”

The verse itself, because of the ambiguity and indirectness of its phrasing, invited multiple interpretations. The “orthodox” view prevalent in Ahmad’s time was either that God had rescued Jesus from the cross and raised his physical body to heaven, or that it was not really Jesus on the cross to begin with. Christian missionaries like Godfrey seized on this fact to prove the power of Jesus and Christianity over the power of Muhammed and Islam in debates. Ahmad’s mission has arisen because “Islam was in a situation of one who is encircled by bitter enemies and is assaulted continuously from every direction.”

A Kiswahili translation of the Qur’an was thus entirely consistent with Ahmad’s vigorous defense against those who attack Islam; the battle with Christianity became the context for justifying what many scholars viewed as “bida” or unlawful innovation. Sheikh Mubarak Ahmad prepared a new translation, beginning in 1936, as a counter to the “Upinzani unaoletwa na wasiokuwa Waislamu, hasa Wakristo.” (The opposition which has been brought to Islam by non-Muslims, especially Christians). The work was also an explicit response to Dale’s work:

“Zamani Padre Godfrey Dale aliandika tafsiri ya Kurani. Lakini kwa sababu yeye hakuwa na maarifa ya Kiarabu alishindwa mahali pengi kuandika tafsiri iliyo sawa. Mara nyingi hakufahamu neno la Kiarabu, na alichukua toka tafsiri ya Kiingereza baadhi ya maneno na kuyageuza Kiswahili bili kupeleza maneno ya asili. Hivyo tafsiri ya Padre Dale ina uharibifu mwingi unaokutana na kutojua kwake, na kadhalika unaotokana na uadui wake uliopitiliza mpaka. Kadhalika katika tafsiri yake, Padre Dale, hakuandika maneno ya asili ya Kiarabu ili watu wangepata kujua amekosa wapi, na amekosa nini, au amezidisha nini na kupunguza nini."

The work was begun on the first day of Ramadan in the month of November by Sheikh Mubarak Ahmad Ahmadi, the head of the Ahmadiyya mission in East Africa. With the publication of Kurani Tukufu in 1953, the Ahmadiyya made a significant contribution to Islamic renaissance on the East African coast. Copies of the new translation were sent to Mau Mau detainees in Kenya and plans were made for further translations into East African languages like Kikuyu. Whatever their theological differences with other Muslims, the Ahmadiyya, through their translation, addressed themselves to Dale’s denigrations of Islam in Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu and also contributed to a debate evolving about the origins of Islamic legitimacy on the East African coast. The Kurani Tukufu linked many Muslims in East Africa with a different part of the Islamic world, Pakistan. Furthermore, the Ahmadiyya were very explicit about the egalitarian and non-racial nature of Islam, mainly in an attempt to contrast it with Christianity. Perhaps this message may have also been effective against chauvinism and nepotism of certain members of the Arab elite, who blocked access to the highest levels of the ‘ulama for African Muslims.
By framing the introduction to Kurani Tukufu in terms of African contributions to Islamic history, the Ahmadi drew on rising nationalist sentiments and offered an alternative to the Arab civilizational motif prevalent in much of the Arab elite resistance to colonial rule. The introduction to Kurani Tukufu can be read as a subtle parable on the arrogance with which the Ahmadiyya itself was treated by the established Islamic authorities, an arrogance equivalent to the early messengers from Mecca who underestimated the Ethiopian king. The Meccan messengers who persecuted the early Muslims are of the same type who persecuted the Ahmadis. In fact now, the Qur’an itself is oppressed, and the Ahmadi translation would help to liberate it:

“To the people of Africa and especially the Eastern part, having studied the language placed before you with this translation, I am proud and happy because in the first days of this book you all’s continent protected those who hoped in this book and completely rejected oppression, injustice. Moreover, you were strengthened to erect justice and ethics. Today the teaching of your Qur’an is in a condition of oppression like those believers who were oppressed.”

Notwithstanding their unique theology, the Ahmadiyya are quite conservative on the issue of ijtihad, and their actual practice of Islam is quite orthodox. Yet they were attacked and heavily criticized both inside and outside of Pakistan. One frequent point of contention was Ghulam Ahmad’s collaboration with the British, which extended to frequent praise for the British role in cultural advancement on the Indian subcontinent. Such statements were used as evidence by anti-Ahmadi groups that the Ahmadiyya were little more than an imperialist front group seeking to undermine Islam. Out of this critique came the impetus for a third translation.

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