The Azanian Sea: Oman

Showing posts with label Oman. Show all posts

January 21, 2024

Zanzibar Was a Country (UC Press, 2024)

My book comes out with University of California Press April 9, 2024.

"Zanzibar Was a Country explores the transregional impact of the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 through the historical memory of its exiles. Thousands of former citizens of Zanzibar and their offspring live in Oman and are a significant contemporary example of an Arab community that maintains a living connection to Africa in diaspora. These “Zanzibaris” (as they are often known in Oman) speak Swahili, sustain community originally formed in Africa, and continue to remember Zanzibar’s history as an independent country. Drawing on their life histories, their historiography of Zanzibar, and the archival traces of their migrations, Nathaniel Mathews demonstrates how these exiles were important to nation‑building and economic development in Oman."

August 30, 2018

Book Summary Excerpt: by Nathaniel Mathews: An Afrabian Diaspora: Swahili-speaking Omanis recall their pasts in East Africa

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Across Africa and Asia, governments are increasingly concerned with recruiting capital investment from overseas diasporas as a solution to domestic revenue troubles. From India’s overtures to ‘non-resident Indians’ (NRIs), to the Kenyan state recently declaring its Indian community a recognized ‘tribe’, states utilize their diasporas as a source of remittance and investment.1 Their appeals to the diaspora are often couched in the language of heritage, ancestry and ethnicity. But what happens when appeals to that heritage collide with memories of the violent ethnic trauma these diasporas experienced in leaving their country of origin? And how do those tensions influence how a diaspora produces its history and identity? My book manuscript, “Children of the Lost Colony: Memory, Empire and the Making of an Afro-Arab Diaspora”, excavates the forgotten journeys of a group of Afro-Arab refugees from a 1964 revolution in Zanzibar, historicizes their transformation into a Swahili-speaking ‘Zanzibari’ community in modern Oman, and analyzes the contemporary work they do remembering their displacement and migration.

Oman may seem rather distant geographically from East Africa, but the cultural highways of the Indian Ocean have long knit the two regions. Omanis have been traveling to East Africa and intermarrying with its inhabitants since the fourteenth century, and the island of Zanzibar was the capital of a nineteenth century Omani empire. In fact, nationality on the East coast of Africa dates to the establishment of this independent trans-oceanic empire by an Omani sultan. His successors were what the late Ali Mazrui called “genealogical Afrabians”, descended on one side from Omani Arabs who arrived in the eighteenth century, and on the other from various lineages of locally born Africans. Zanzibar and parts of modern Kenya and mainland Tanzania were once part of the domains of these sultans. They were eroded and then ‘protected’ in the age of the scramble for Africa by European powers, foremost among them the British. What is unique about the case of Zanzibar and Oman is that the Omanis, like the Tutsis in Rwanda, had been king and rulers, while many contemporary Zanzibaris are descendants of Africans brought as their slaves.

The revolution of 1964, despite having only a small socialist participation, led western powers to label Zanzibar ‘the Cuba of Africa.’ The revolution helped influence a pan-African union of Zanzibar in April 1964 with mainland Tanganyika, creating modern Tanzania. Since 1985, declining state revenues have shifted Tanzanian state policy towards a more pro-business and pro-corporate strategy of seeking overseas investment Zanzibar’s political leadership now have a vision of the island as Hong Kong, Dubai, or Singapore-- a wealthy city-state sitting at the center of the global economy. To accomplish this, Zanzibar’s government made and continues to make frequent and repeated overtures to the Afro-Arab exile community in Oman, a group it once feared as counter-revolutionary. Zanzibar’s leaders couched these appeals in terms of the permanent and unbroken ties of religious, cultural and ancestral heritage between Oman and Zanzibar.

In this twenty-one-year period from 1964-1985, thousands of Zanzibaris made refugees by the revolution negotiated a path to citizenship in modern Oman. At the eastern end of the Gulf, Oman in the 1960s was poor and isolated, ruled by a sultan who shunned the outside world. With the development of an economy based on oil and gas, and the ascendance to the throne of a new sultan in 1970, Oman entered a period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. The one-time refugees from Zanzibar were one of the few population groups in Oman to have received a modern colonial education, thus they were appointed to lead key ministries and played a formative role in the making of modern Omani national institutions.

January 14, 2015

Connecting the Gems of the Indian Ocean

Had the privilege to travel to Washington, DC in November to participate in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art's roundtable entitled "Connecting the Gems of the Indian Ocean." Lots of great nuggets to chew on here. Thanks so much to Nicole and the Smithsonian staff for inviting me!

September 24, 2014

Dates in Oman (excerpt from Unknown Oman, by Wendell Phillips)

“Depending on one’s state of mind, the state of the weather and the time of day, a graceful date garden can be a scene of exceeding beauty. Oasis life is more refined than life on the open desert, with certain oasis tribes proudly referring to themselves as “ahl an-nakhl” (people of the palm). As a general rule, the Omanis eat their dates raw. They claims to possess over one hundred varieties of dates, which are both the ‘staff of life’ and ‘bread of the land’, and they assert that a good wife can place before her husband a dish of dates differently prepared every day of the month. As first noted by Carsten Neibuhr in the late eighteenth century, Arabs classify dates into hot or cold depending on the taste. Oman produces a dozen first-class types of soft dates, with those from al-Batinah noted for their flavor and maturing earlier than those from Basrah. The main variety on al-Batinah (not found in the interior) is the umm silah which, packed in the palm-frond basket, is well know in the markets of South Arabia. The mabsali is not restricted to al-Batinah (found in the interior and on the coast); it is boiled when it reaches the red stage and it is the type which brings the highest price. The most celebrated Omani varieties are the Fardh, Khalas and Khanaizi. Pliny stated in his Natural History that if he could remember their barbarous names he could list forty-nine varieties of dates. In all, over 500 different names and epiphets are used in Arabia, for the date reigns supreme as the queen of trees. Truly the one-humped camel and the date palm are the symbol of Arabia.

June 16, 2014

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.

May 10, 2013

How to Eat, Khaleeji style (traditional)

Among the many gems of description in T.E. Lawrence's classic book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is the following excerpt on a feast prepared for Lawrence and his companions by a prominent sheikh and participant in the Arab revolt, Auda Abu Tayi. I post it here because it reminded me so vividly of eating at weddings and for iftar in Oman.

"This load was set down on the soil of the cleared space between us, where it steamed hotly, while the procession of minor helpers carried in the small cauldrons and copper vats in which the cooking had been done. From them, with much-bruised bowls of enameled iron, they ladled out over the main dish all the inside and outside of the sheep, little bits of yellow intestine, the white tail cushion of fat, brown muscles and meat and skin, all swimming in the liquid butter and grease of the seething. The bystanders watched the work anxiously, with muttered satisfactions when a very juicy bit plopped out.

Pouring these bowls-full of scrap over the heap was warm labor, for the fat was scalding. Every now and then a man would drop his baler with an exclamation, and plunge his burnt fingers, not reluctantly, in his mouth to cool them: but they persevered till at last their scooping rang loudly on the bottoms of the pots, and with a gesture of triumph they fished out the intact livers from their hiding places in the gravy and topped the yawning jaws with them. Then two raised each cauldron and tilted it over the mass, letting the liquid splash down the meat till the crater of the rice was full, and the loose grains at the edge swam in the abundance, and yet they poured till amid exclamations of astonishment from us it was running over and a little pool congealing in the dust. That was the final touch of splendor, and the host called us to come and eat.

We feigned deafness, as manners demanded; at last we heard him and looked suprised at one another, each urging his fellows to move first: till Nasir rose coyly, and then we all came forward, and sank on one knee round the tray wedging in and huddling up till the twenty-two for whom there was space groped around the food. We turned back our right sleeves to the elbow, and taking lead from Nasir with a low, "in the name of God the merciful, the loving-kind," we dipped together.

The first dip for me at least was always cautious, since the liquid fat was so hot that my unaccustomed fingers could seldom bear it: and so I would toy with an exposed and cooling lump of meat till others' excavations had drained my rice segment. We would knead between the fingers, not using the palm, neat balls of rice and fat and liver and meat, all cemented by gentle pressure, and project them by leverage of the thumb from the crooked forefinger into the mouth.

With the right trick and the right construction the little lump held together and came clean off the hand: but when surplus butter and old fragments clung cooling to the fingers they had to be licked carefully to make the next effort slip easier away.

The host stood by the circle encouraging the appetite with pious ejaculations, and we worked at top speed twisting, tearing, cutting and stuffing, never speaking since conversation at a meal would be an insult to its quality, though it was proper to smile thanks when one of the more intimate guests passed across a select fragment or when Mohammed el Dheilan or Farraj gravely handed over a huge barren bone with a blessing. On such occasions, I would return the compliment with some hideous and impossible lump of guts, a flippancy with rejoiced the Howeitat, but which the gracious and aristocratic Nasir saw with disapproval.

As the meat pile wore down (nobody really cared about the rice; the flesh was the luxury) one of the chief Howeitat eating with us would draw his dagger, silver-hilted, set with turquoise, a signed masterpiece of Mohammed ibn Zari of jauf and would cut crisscross from the larger bones long diamonds of meat easily torn up between the fingers; for it was necessary boiled very tender, since it had all to be disposed of with one hand.

At length some of us were nearly filled, and these began to play and pick, glancing sideways at the rest, till they grew slow, and at least ceased eating, elbow on knee and the hand hanging down from the wrist over the tray edge to drip, while the fat and butter and scattered grains of rice cooled and stiffened into a white grease which gummed the fingers together. When all had stopped Nasir cleared his throat meanly, and we rose up together in haste with an explosive, "Our host, God requite it to you," and grouped ourselves outside among the tent ropes while the next twenty guests came forward and inherited our leaving.