Film Review: "Origin" by Ava Duvernay

 I watched Ava Duvernay's "Origin" on a plane. My thoughts would no doubt be better having read the source material book for the movie, but here is my take.

This is a movie in search of a central theme. Its ambition is to tell three intertwined stories, two of them historical and one contemporary. However the two historical stories are very undertold; the main focus is author Isabel Wilkerson's journey to write the bestselling book Caste. It is definitely an unconventional choice to tell a story about the making of the book; I love that Duvernay chose to tell Wilkerson's story. But the short shrift to the other stories is unfortunate since it means that earlier attempts to theorize caste in a US South context are not substantially addressed; though Allison and Elizabeth Davis are portrayed, their intellectual contributions to theorizing caste are not incorporated into the theoretical framework of the film.

The movie is beautifully shot by Duvernay, the lead actor playing Wilkerson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor brings emotional depth to her role as a writer dealing with the loss of her closest loved ones and embarking on a global exploration of oppression. In spite of the meandering of the narrative, the movie tells an effective story that holds viewers' attention throughout. As a meditation on loss, it is moving in its way. As a film about race and caste, it is deeply flawed in its historical presentation, its comparative framework, and the relentless didacticism of its mistaken conclusions.

The film's main issue seems to be the source material's main issue: it asserts that US Jim Crow racism, the Nazi Holocaust, and caste in India are "all connected" because they are all "caste." However, these connections are not really properly theorized, nor are the significance of these connections to practical action raised except in some general love for each other we all ought to have. nstead, caste is a poetic metaphor for the writer to affirm a radical Enlightenment view of human equality. In place of materialist theorization we are told that caste is omnipresent but invisible, which raises the question of how Wilkerson knows what is and is not caste.

There are attempts to theorize race and caste, but they are very muddled. Caste is defined in an amorphous way, as the phenomenon of placing one group above another in a hierarchy. This doesn't do adequate justice to the distinction within 'caste' between occupational castes (which do not necessarily imply hierarchy) and the spiritual hierarchy of the 'varna' system in India, from which the whole notion of untouchability flows.

Moreover, race seems quite adequate to understanding social hierarchy and social ranking in the US, but Wilkerson's character continually disagrees with her interlocutors who assert this. At one point, a character responds to Wilkerson's presentation of her comparative research, "It's all racism." To which Wilkerson's character responds, "No, it is caste...Why is the same thing happening in India, they're all brown? How is is racist if they're all the same race?" The movie attempts to drive this point home by arguing that in Germany both oppressor and oppressed were of the same race, therefore racism can't explain it.

This is a very contradictory even silly thing to assert if one has read the scholarship on the Holocaust or social dynamics in India. The reality is that both race and caste are categories of practice that have been wrenched into serving as categories of academic analysis, and are thus equally problematic for doing global comparisons.

Wilkerson's assertion on the centrality of caste seems arbitrary. The movie then misses the opportunity to tell viewers why 'caste' is a more explanatory comparative term; we are expected to trust Wilkerson, without being given compelling reasons to adopt the new term. There is an attempt to do this--a discussion of various comparative pillars--on which more shortly.

The film asserts that "the Nazi blueprint for the extermination of millions of people was directly patterned after America's segregation and enslavement of black people", that "America taught the Nazis", and that although the outcomes were different, the function of caste in America and Germany is the same. There is some evidence that Nazis studied US racial dynamics and laws, but the assertion that they needed a pattern to borrow from the US to exterminate the Jews is an exaggeration in the service of the film's American exceptionalism (of the negative kind).

Wilkerson's character then goes to India, where she meets real life Dalit intellectual Suraj Yengde, playing himself. This part bore out the US-centrism of the movie, since Yengde's prominence as an intellectual is almost wholly related to his proximity to US higher education institutions. There is some exploration of the life of the Dalit intellectual and activisit B.R. Ambedkar which is very interesting and welcome. However, the movie misses an obvious contradiction of caste-as-universal-framework in discussing Ambedkar's education: he went to school with upper-caste children in a way that would have never occurred in the Jim Crow South.

Duvernay has Wilkerson's character explore several pillars of comparison, but these pillars reveal the dissimilarity of Jim Crow segregation, Nazi Germany, and caste in India. The first pillar, asserts Wilkerson's character, is control over marriage and mating in the form of endogamy. To me this is a bizarre way to begin. Notwithstanding prohibitions on intermarriage, none of these systems originate primarily to control marriage and mating strategies. Moreover endogamy as an informal institution is fairly widespread in all human communities; not all endogamy is casteist. Finally, while endogamy might apply to Jim Crow segregation, it certainly does not apply to US slavery, which can only be characterized as an institution for protecting endogamy if one ignores the history of the sexual dalliances of the master class with their slaves.

The second pillar is terror, but again one is hard-pressed to understand why race isn't just as applicable a term here, given the centrality of violence to racial hierarchy. The third pillar is purity and pollution. However, this is contradictory because endogamy as a strategy is often based in purity and pollution, making pillar one essentially a sub-pillar of pillar three.

Wilkerson's character asserts that the connective tissue making all three situations (US, Germany, India) caste is 'deference', which again seems to ignore the central role deference plays in racial and class schema.

Indeed, the movie has almost nothing to say about class, which was a central theme in the work of earlier African American scholars who used caste as a category of analysis, like the aforementioned Davis and Oliver C. Cox. Wilkerson is presented regularly hobnobbing with elites who praise her intellect and encourage her to continue writing.

In conclusion, though the aesthetics and emotional tone of the movie are impressive, its substance is not. The concept of caste is rendered definitionally incoherent by its use to connect the three cases. We don't really learn anything about the actual history of US, Germany, and India. Complexity is sacrificed to the simplicity of a single explanatory variable to create an emotionally satisfying framework. And Wilkerson is presented as creating a comparative theory of caste whole-cloth, with short shrift given to previous scholars who tested (and often rejected!) the comparison Wilkerson builds her book around.

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Studying racism in pre-modern Muslim contexts

Some thought provoking methodological reflections on my timeline recently, mostly critiques of Cemel Aydin's book, The Idea of the Muslim World. I was particularly taken with this argument: "Perhaps the better argument is that such ideas [the Muslim world] represent a rebirth of classical ideas, and are not simply some construct of colonial modernity, even if colonial modernity created the conditions in which they gained new salience."

 For historians, who ideally are trained to see things in terms of dynamics and evolution, rather than origins, this idea makes intuitive sense. However, I've seen a lot of reluctance among Islamic studies scholars to apply this  methodology to forms of social prejudice and governing distinctions with roots in the premodern Muslim past, that also clearly affect modern social life among Muslims. Indeed, in popular Muslim circles the exact opposite is usually claimed. A popular take from a few years ago attributed most all recent critical revisionist scholarship on the issue to 'Orientalism' and anti-Muslim Afrocentrism. I do not think such a position can be sustained. Put simply, my contention is that racism(s) in the Muslim tradition (like in the Christian or Jewish traditions) have an independent pre-modern history that was not erased by colonial modernity and thus continues to impact the present.

 In a comment left below the article linked above, one cogent commentator, Sarah, asked: "Is what religiously matters to Muslims whether it was “American” racism, or whether there was discrimination at all? Are we discussing personal-level xenophobia, cultural ideas, the history of religious legal institutions, or the possibilities of religious primary sources?" In short, a lot of today's simplistic constructions of Muslim history around race are reflections of genuine contemporary hope and faith in Islam as an alternative to the systemically embedded racism of a morally exhausted post-civil rights US society. From this perspective it is understandable why scholars might be reluctant to talk about how modern forms of Muslim racism have much deeper roots than colonial modernity, fearing they will lend support to the rantings of racist western bigots. But in doing so, scholars leave themselves no way of meaningfully analyzing forms of racism originating from people thoroughly steeped in the Islamic tradition, well before the west became the west. When these are analyzed, it is rare to see commentary that goes beyond modern notions of generic anti-racism, in which race is merely a sinful aberration.

But the roots of racism within this 'special world-system' of Islam are complex, not merely the manifestation of human sin, or the universal tendency to favor one's tribal in-group. Remember that forms of racial difference have always co-existed ideologically with socially leveling ideas, sometimes within the same religious or political group. Belief systems with the ambition to universally reorder all humanity into a new community, can give birth to their own unique forms of systemic exclusion. While not unilinearly linked to color or complexion, Muslim forms of racism took shape in the historical patterns of acculturation, accumulation and dominion that accompanied the worldly success of Muslim empire. Scholars might profitably analyze the whole cluster of ideas in the Islamic tradition relating blood, culture, color and lineage, as ideas about race. We might then see more clearly how race, as an assemblage of ideas about physical and cultural traits, informed the creation of multiple cross-cutting social hierarchies of value in Muslim societies.

 TL:DR , saying 'race and racial difference is a modern colonial construct' is about as conceptually useful as saying 'the Muslim world is a modern colonial construct'. That is not to deny that a particularly pernicious form of racial difference, birthed in the European colonial encounter, had a world-historical impact and continues to operate globally. Race was an indispensable tool of governance in the colonial Atlantic world. But the Americas are not the origin of the construction of racial difference, any more than they are the origins of capitalism. In each case one needs to carefully unpack the historical meanings encompassed within the modern discursive signs.

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Richard Iton, Inna Allahi wa Allah rajiuun

Today I would like to post a small tribute to a brilliant intellectual, writer and philosopher whose life was untimely cut short by leukemia this past week. I remember fondly his course on diaspora which I was able to sit in on. I had some great conversations with him on the concept of "alternative modernities." Here he presents on the black diaspora, post-racialism, and black politics for the 21st century.

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Some observations on the Michael Muhammad Knight versus Hamza Yusuf articles

Recently Michael Muhammad Knight published two provocative pieces on Vice critiquing Hamza Yusuf as a white convert and a spiritual salesman.

Here is the first one. It's called "The Problem with White Converts" and features a huge picture of Hamza Yusuf.
Here is the second one. It's called "Michael Muhammad Knight vs. Hamza Yusuf." It has a picture of Knight with a cape on, about to get in the wrestling ring with Yusuf.

Perhaps most readers outside the US have not even heard of Michael Muhammad Knight, so the context will seem unfamiliar. If that is the case, I recommend skipping the articles altogether. There are likely better uses of your time. But if you are American, what MMK is saying is important and true, although problematic.

Here are my cursory observations on the two articles:

1. MMK is not know for having good manners, or rather I should say, since I don't know him personally, he is not known for conforming to the rhetorical and performative aspects that Muslim scholars and the larger Muslim community understand as good manners. That means he says things in a bald-faced way, which makes some Muslims uncomfortable and means they are more likely to write him off.

2. To imply, as MMK does in the above articles, that Yusuf is some kind of huckster who is spouting rhetoric he does not believe is disrespectful, and wrong. Not just morally wrong (in the sense of implying that Yusuf is not sincere), but unverifiably wrong. Whether or not another person believes as he/she says is not a matter for idle speculation on the internet. Hamza Yusuf deserves more respect, not because he is Hamza Yusuf, but because it is neither good manners nor good argumentation to imply that someone is insincere. MMK ought to know as much, given how many times he has likely been dismissed, attacked, called insincere, etc.

3. White converts using Islam to authenticate and thereby de-privilege and "de-whiten" themselves is a real phenomenon. It is not altogether a bad thing. There are ways of moving through these spaces with integrity, and avoid becoming a slogan spouting, cartoonish parody. An analogy might be drawn to William Wimsatt's famous essay in Bomb The Suburbs "We Use Words Like Mackadocious", in that the attempt to shed white skin privilege by becoming Muslim often mirrors similar attempts by white kids trying to be down with hip-hop culture. There is an elaborate "hyper-performativity" of Muslim-ness (thank you Mahdi Tourage!) that mirrors the hyper-performativity of blackness in its relentless search for authenticity. I think Hamza Yusuf is a poor example of this, however. MMK could have done some more research, or perhaps even offered up himself as an example (actually he has in his books), before targeting Yusuf in this article.

4. The racial rhetoric of the "white convert", and the use of Hamza Yusuf as an example obscure an important point MMK is making, which is:
   The "classical Islamic tradition" is being packaged and sold as a product in the US, and it is product that cannot begin to fulfill the expectations people have of it. Notice that Hamza Yusuf and others who study abroad rarely speak on the debates going on over interpretation in the places they studied. Take Mauritania for example: I have yet to hear Hamza Yusuf give an opinion on how the Maliki fiqh scholars dealt with slavery in that country. It was instructive to hear an Mauritanian activist talk about other activists who burned books of Maliki fiqh, because of Mauritanian fiqh scholars complicity and intransigence with regards to the issue of slavery! These Mauritanian activists symbolically enacted their belief that the "classical Islamic tradition" did not have the resources to "do what was necessary" in Mauritania. Whether or not they were correct, it is instructive that there is a deep and divisive debate within the classical Islamic tradition that touches on issues of basic human rights. The packaging of the tradition hides the dimensions of these debates from Hamza Yusuf's audiences.

5. Lastly, a major issue which prevents MMK's point from really getting a hearing is that, by and large, lay people do not see their religion as religious studies scholars see it. Religious studies scholars tend to see religions as historically shifting sets of discourses and practices without an essence that is constantly debated and constantly undergoing change. But everyday people prefer their religion as an ideal that humans need to realize through obedience. It is something to be lived and practiced as a route to perfection. Historicization is seen as a threat to faith, an undermining of metaphysical certitudes. One hears, for example, in conversations among Muslim Americans, "Islam is perfect, but I am not." The attraction of an ideal is very strong in human history and human thought, and the logic of the historian (or even the anti-historical, anti-essentialism of Nietzche or the Tao) is cold comfort to those attracted by this idealism.

Inshallah, I am developing some further thoughts on the idea of tradition, empirical certitude, faith, belief, law, practice and the text, which will elaborate in more detail some things I have been thinking of in relation to the issue MMK raised. I hope to post it soon.
-NLM

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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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"Where the Middle East Meets Africa"

My friend and colleague W.H. Marsh has been penning some interesting stuff on his blog "Where the Middle East Meets Africa" He is currently doing a Fulbright in Cairo and has a lot of interesting insights about race, culture and politics there.

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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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Excerpt from Race, Revolution and the Struggle for Human Rights on Zanzibar

This is a great book. Its basically two autobiographies of two major figures of the Zanzibar Revolution and Zanzibar postcolonial politics, pulled together with an introductory essay by G. Thomas Burgess (who also edited the book).
Below is an excerpt from the memoir of Ali Sultan Issa:

In the 1930s(and even now), however, Zanzibar Town was divided into two main areas, Stone Town and Ng’ambo.The well-to-do people lived in Stone Town, and the less well-offlived in Ng’ambo. Ng’ambo started as a poor man’s land on the other side of the creek from Stone Town.That is what Ng’ambomeans in Swahili,“the other side. ”Stone Town had stone buildings three and four stories high, but Ng’ambo mostly had ground-level buildings constructed of mud, cement, and thatch.The more prosperous had roofs made of corrugated iron. Mostly Arabs and Indians lived in Stone Town; very few Africans lived on that side of the creek; they would come for work in the day and return to Ng’ambo in the evenings. Ng’ambo was more ethnically mixed than Stone Town. There were Arabs and Comorians living near the creek, but the further you went into the interior,the more Africans you encountered.

I had to keep moving with my mum when she could not pay the rent. I lived in probably seven or eight different places in Stone Town and about five in Ng’ambo. My mother also remarried several times, so I had a number of stepfathers. These were short marriages: as soon as the husband tried to dominate her, she asked for a divorce. My mother married several men from the mainland, in Dar es Salaam, Tanga, and Mombasa, giving birth to four more children. My mother caned me for little things, and I feared her because she was huge and strong. Once she sent me to the shop three times to get different things for our dinner. After the third time,I said to her, “Why don’t you decide what you need first,so I can get everything in one trip?” She got mad and took a piece of firewood from the fire and hit me on the head, and I bled. She tore offmy shirt as a bandage, and she cried over the wound.I laughed and said,“You hit me,and now you cry.”

As a young boy, I was rather naughty. I would not be bullied,and despite my small size, I was often chosen as a leader. As children,we played ping-pong,cards,and dominoes. We also went swimming, but sometimes my mother would beat me because she thought I was going to drown.

At high tide,we would jump off the waterfront at Forodhani or in front of the old English Club. Cinema was also very popular in those days. We’d go to the Majestic Cinema, the Empire Cinema, and the Sultana Cinema. I saw Bogart, Sinatra, Dorothy Lamour, Ava Gardner, and Elizabeth Taylor. I liked Western films more than Indian films because I could not understand what was happening in the Indian pictures.

I spent most of my years attending primary school in the home of my grandmother in Ng’ambo. She was verystrict, tidy, and clean; she would sweep outside the house, and anyone who came, she would chase away. She had the cleanest toilet around, which everyone in the neighborhood knew about. Since she once lived in the sultan’s palace, I used to walk and play in the palace, but I also played with the local African boys. I had no established roots and no allegiance to one part of Zanzibar Town or any particular racial community. I was proud of myself and of my family, but not of my race. I did not belong to the school of thought that Arabs had achieved great things in Africa. What had they achieved? Nothing, except the accumulation of wealth for some and poverty for others. Whatever progress was achieved in Zanzibar was the product of historical accident.

Once when I was veryyoung,I dreamt my grandmother took me to Pemba and introduced me to old ladies standing in a vast clearing, all with their earlobes pulled down to their shoulders.This was at Giningi, a place famous in Pemba for where wachawi [witches] like to congregate. There, in front of that gathering of wachawi, she asked them to protect me from evil for the rest of my life. In the morning, I told her about my dream, and she said “Shhhhhh, don’t tell anyone.”I was very young, an innocent boy less than seven years old, but since then I have been a survivor.

My friendship with [Abdulrahman Muhammed] Babu began at a very early age. Babu, who became the brains of our political struggle here in Zanzibar, was several years older than I and lived just across the alley from our house in Malindi. He would tease me whenever my family served rice because he could see I liked to eat ukokoand matandu, which was the rice crust that would collect on the earthen pots after boiling. I liked to dip the rice crust in curry,but Babu would joke with me about that because normally people would not eat the matandu; they would just leaveit for the servants.

I was seven when World War II started, and food was very scarce since most of it was imported, except cassava and bananas. Ships did not run during the war, so bread and other imported foods were rationed. The British made it compulsory for each family with land to plant some sweet potatoes and cassava, and if the family did not, they were arrested. Around five in the evening, we had our meal, which was our last food until the next day. In the mornings, we had just a cup of tea. I never
Knew how my mother managed to support us; maybe she received money from her boyfriends. I never asked. I think that is why later I became more sympathetic with the working people, because of that experience of hardship. It was during the war that racial discrimination became very apparent in Zanzibar. According to the colonial rationing system, the Africans did not receive any imported rice or bread, but the Asians and Arabs got rations of rice and wheat flour of equal quantities. I remember because my mum sent me to the shop with the ration card. Because of this system, I think the British were responsible to a great extent for racial prejudice in Zanzibar. If, when the British came, Arabs were already predominant, they continued Arab dominance for their own ends.

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Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering (Book Review)

In the discourse on Islam prevalent in the popular media and academia, one frequent Manichaen dichotomy one finds is that between so-called 'liberal' Islam and 'radical' or 'Islamist' Islam. This dichotomy is predicated on a superficial understanding of Islamic philosophy and Islamic discourse, in which the theological and philosophical bases for categorization are rarely revealed. If they are, the categories are those of Western liberal discourse, which whatever their virtues as 'universal' values cannot help but operate under particular blind spots and presumptions when it comes to Islamic philosophy.

I view Dr. Sherman Jackson's intervention in Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering as an intervention aimed to correct that ignorance. As such it is one of the best books I have read that attempts the work of cultural translation: that is interpreting Islamic philosophers from the Classical period (8th-12th centuries) in a manner which respects their philosophical positions and imbues their positions with meaning and relevance for the current era.

Dr. Jackson's book is structured as a response to another theological work, Is God a White Racist? by William Jones, which argues that traditional black theodicy overprivileges the idea of redemptive suffering, and that by implication they create the idea that God favors whites. In point of fact, Jones intellectual inspiration is more rooted in Camus and Sartre than any specific theologian from the Christian tradition.

To counter this bold and controversial statement, Jackson lays out the theological positions of the major Islamic theodicies: Mutazilite, Ash'arite, Mutiridite and Traditionalist. After an introduction and first chapter dealing with black theodicy and the problem of evil, he starts by outlining the basis of Quranic interpretation and the development of classical Islamic theology. He then systematically explains the arguments of the major schools over the basis of reason for interpreting truth, the real nature of God, the problem of free will, and God's omnibenevolence vs. God's omnipotence. At the end of discussing each school of thought, Jackson addresses the points of agreement and disagreement between their approach and Jones's.

This book actually works on two levels. Even if one does not have an interest in the various currents of black theology and theodicy as such, the book is one of the best explanations of classical Islamic philosophy I have read in English. It is simultaneously extremely erudite and accessible, a difficult balance pulled off by the author through his clear prose and consistent re-explanation of previous points in order to contrast them. He is passionate about taking the reader on a journey through these beliefs yet ultimately agnostic on his own preference, leaving that to the discerning reader. He does however, urge that blackAmerican Muslims equip themselves with the philosophical and conceptual tools to in order to shape the character of the Muslim community in America. His book is meant as a tool towards that end.

If I have one critique of this book, it is that Dr. Jackson does not historically situate many of these theological debates. Nor does he problematize to any great degree significant anti-black tendencies which inhere in the writings of some Arab scholars and poets. He writes of the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owning thousands of slaves, but he does not see fit to question or criticize a great number of Islamic scholars who operated under similar conditions. This brings us to the question of the links between race and slavery in the Islamic world, an uncomfortable topic for many. And it points to the gaps between idealist conceptions of a belief or religion (for example Islam's teachings on slavery) and the actual practice of Muslims in societies with great numbers of slaves (for example 19th century Zanzibar). For more on this debate, Hishaam Aidi has an interesting article. I won't say more because the debate is complex and a bit of a rabbit hole, but suffice to say that Jackson finessed his approach in discussing these provocative issues.

For example, in one footnote Jackson argues that although there is a presumed opposition between "Islam" and "the West", there is no presumed opposition between Islam and blackness. While this is in part true, it ignores significant historical events where in fact the two did conflict (i.e. the Zanzibar Revolution). Jackson does not engage at all with Bernard Lewis's discussion of race and Islam in Race and Slavery in the Middle East. Even if one disagrees vehemently with Lewis's political stances and often reductive writing about Islam, the sources he presents bear engagement and critique with, especially if Jackson's point is to be strengthened. In the end, Jackson's analysis points to a difficulty Jackson himself raises: how in particular cases of overemphasis "blackness" or "Islamic" become neologisms, with more meaning to the person who uses them than a common agreement about their provenance and direction.

I don't necessarily see these omissions as faults per se. They nevertheless point to the need for a historical engagement with these issues. Jackson's book is a work of theology, and in this dimension is is a skillfully argued plea for Islam as a religion capable of meeting the challenge of black suffering as well as a clear explication of Islamic theodicy. It remarkably succeeds in both the academic register and as a sustained personal plea.

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Conflicts and Harmony in Zanzibar

Finished Ali Muhsin Al Barwani's memoirs today--Conflicts and Harmony in Zanzibar Sheikh Ali translated the Holy Quran into Swahili, a copy of which I have somewhere in my collection. But he's also famous as one of the founders of the Zanzibar Nationalist Party. He comes from a long line of very distinguished Swahili from the Barwani family, including Rumaliza, who led coastal anti-colonial resistance against the British. His father was a famous sheikh. The book is a fascinating dive into some of the issues of the Zanzibar Revolution. Basically, Sheikh Ali was put in prison likely on orders from Nyerere, after Zanzibar and Tanganyika joined into the federation of Tanzania. The book is a scathing critique of Nyerere, an exploration of the aims and goals of the Zanzibar Nationalist Party, and a chronicle of Ali's life events, including the chaotic 'time of politics' before the 1964 Revolution, and his ten-year sojourn in various Tanzanian prisons.

The way Ali tells it, the British supported and nurtured the Afro-Shirazi Party against the ZNP because the ZNP accepted aid in the form of scholarships from Nasserite Egypt. Frankly, Ali's little known story of events seems highly plausible. The 1964 revolution had a variety of causes, some of which were the ZNP's ignorance of the changing dynamics that labor migration had created in Zanzibar. If you don't exactly agree with Ali's interpretation at every turn, you can appreciate his progressive drive, his tremendous knowledge of the Omani-Zanzibar connection, and his having been a participant in attempting to liberate Zanzibar from British colonial rule.

Yet although Ali is a breath of (occasionally cranky) fresh air, its hard to see exactly why ANYONE would have been against the ZNP the way he tells the story. At times, Ali glosses over the quite brutal aspects of the Arab slave trade and plantation slavery and the subtle racial and civilizational dynamic which the ZNP employed and which alienated many mainland Africans. For a thought provoking look into the complicated links between race, colonialism, and intellectual discourse in Zanzibar, I can do no better than to recommend Jonathon Glassman's excellent article: "Slower Than a Massacre: The Multiple Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial Africa." Also Jesse Benjamin explored this and suggested that the dialectic of race on the East Coast of Africa needs more attention with regard to Omani-African relationships.

Sheikh Ali died in March of 2006 at the age of eighty-six. Much respect to this freedom fighter and Islamic scholar. May we learn from his example, but also continue to clarify and understand the subtle ways in which schisms can creep in unnoticed into any progressive nationalist movement, and subsequently be exploited. I hope we also remain aware that just because there is a name attached to something: "Socialist" "Revolutionary" "Islamic" "Nationalist" "Christian" doesn't mean it represents what it claims to represent. And that goes for the word "Change" too, all due respect to Barack Obama.

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Mandela, Obama, and the Post-racial Age

Interesting take from a giant in the field of African Studies. Post racial? I think the Swahili word, 'bado' captures my response succinctly. That is, in English, "Not yet." Because there are enough Americans out there not searching for a postracial age, and indeed quite nervous about the possibility. Interesting idea about 'low-hate retention' cultures, though.

by Prof. Ali A. Mazrui
The Daily Monitor
Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama are potential icons of a post-racial age which is unfolding before our eyes. Mandela has become the most respected Black man by all races in world history.

Obama stands a chance of becoming the most trusted Black man in US history. No African-American has ever come so close to winning the US presidency. But no African-American could have approached so close to winning the US presidency without an unprecedented level of trust from a sizable part of the white electorate.

A major cause of the Mandela-Obama respective successes lies in their embodying a short memory of racial hatred, and their impressive readiness to forgive historical adversaries. They have both illustrated a remarkable capacity to transcend historical racial divides.

Cultures differ in hate retention. Some nurse their grievances for generations. Others are intensely hostile in the midst of a conflict, but as soon thereafter, they display a readiness to forgive, even if not always to forget. The Armenians, Irish and Jews fall in this category.

Armenians were butchered in large numbers by the Ottoman Turks in 1915 – 1916. This story of the Armenian martyrdom of World War I has been transmitted with passion from generation to generation.

Armenians are still demanding justice from Turkey nearly a hundred years after the massacres. Similarly, the Irish have long memories of grievance. Clashes occur in Northern Ireland virtually every year concerning marches that commemorate ‘Orange Conflicts’ in the seventeenth century. Jews also have strong collective memories of the Holocaust and other outbursts of European anti-Semitism.

Mandela came from a culture illustrative of Africa’s short memory of hate. That culture is far from being pacifist. Wars and inter-ethnic conflicts have been part of Africa’s experience before European colonization and decades after independence.

What is different about African cultures is relatively low level of hate retention. Obama’s tolerance may be due to personal multi-culturalism. He had a white American mother, a Black Kenyan father, and an Indonesian step-father.

His cultural ancestry includes Luo culture, Islam and Black American Christianity. Mandela’s life passed through stages. His early days as a nationalist were characterized by a belief in non-violent resistance. In a sense, he carried the torch of South Africa’s Albert Luthuli and Mahatma Gandhi. Sharpeville was a major blow to his belief in passive resistance.

By the time that Mandela was having afternoon tea with the unrepentant widow of the founder of apartheid, Hendrick Verwoerd, he had tough acts to follow in African magnanimity. There were precedents of forgiveness that he followed and improved upon.

Post-colonial Africa had produced other instances of short memory of hate. Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, once condemned by a British colonialist as a “leader of darkness and death” was unjustly imprisoned in a remote part of the country.

When he finally emerged from prison on the eve of independence, he proclaimed “suffering without bitterness.” He proceeded to transform Kenya into a staunchly pro-Western country.

In November 1965, colonial Southern Rhodesia’s Ian Smith launched his Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain, unleashing a bitter Zimbabwe civil war. Yet, he lived to sit in a parliament of Black-ruled Zimbabwe and was not subjected to postwar vendetta. Again, Africa’s short memory of hate at work. In the late 1960s, Nigeria waged a highly publicized civil war that cost nearly a million lives. The Federal side won that war but was uniquely magnanimous towards the defeated Biafrans. Yet, another manifestation of Africa’s short memory of hatred.

For his part, when Mandela was finally released from prison in 1990, this most illustrious of all Africa’s liberation fighters embarked on a mission of healing and forgiving. This former hero of mobilization leadership became a paragon of the reconciliation style of leadership. He became the greatest of all African examples of prolonged reconciliation, an exemplar of African short memory of hate.

Obama illustrated his post-racial tolerance by denouncing his firebrand pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and leaving his own radicalized church. Obama is more of an ideological liberal than a moral Gandhian. Indeed, Obama is less of a Gandhian than Martin Luther King, Jr. was. But in their different ways, Mandela, Obama and King have all been part of the search for a post-racial age.

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The 'Swahili' Omani

Nation-building and communities in Oman since 1970: The Swahili-speaking Omani in search of identity

by Marc Valeri
full text article
In 1964, the revolution in Zanzibar put an end to the local al-Busa‘idi dynasty. The Omani Arabs were summoned by the newly independent state to ‘go back home’, because of their supposed foreignness. Yet no collective repatriation process was organized by the sultan of Muscat. It is alleged that around 17,000 Arabs died during the events. Oman received 3,700 refugees only and many other families were forced to settle in Dubai, Kuwait or Cairo.

A second wave of return followed the call launched in 1970 by Sultan Qaboos to the Omani elite abroad, inviting them to contribute to the ‘awakening’ of the country. Around 10,000 Omani from Zanzibar are thought to have moved back to Oman by 1975. Despite the fact that most of the expatriate Omani did not speak Arabic fluently, Qaboos had no option but to grant them Omani citizenship, as soon as they returned, without any consideration of the time their family had spent abroad. First, the Omani abroad were relatively more educated than those at home. Many of them spoke English fluently and had been trained in technical fields in Europe, East Africa or other Gulf countries, so they made a significant workforce for the ruler's planned modernization. Besides, given his political isolation when he came to the throne, the Sultan understood that since the Omani abroad had neither been involved in the internal political and tribal issues in Oman nor on the best of terms with his father's regime, they could be an asset to him.

All these factors account for the fact that the returnees soon filled many positions in key fields such as intelligence, police and security. Their Arabic language handicap was outweighed by their skills in administrative organization and political control. An example of the Sultan's dependency on these Omani during the first years of his rule is given by the Interim Planning Council, established in March 1972 to shape development achievements. Of its 10 members, six had been educated in eastern European countries, while two had been born in Zanzibar and had never been in Oman prior to the 1970 coup.

Yet, in a society like Oman where personal relationships play such a role, the fact that marriage patterns of most Manga Arabs had been limited to their kin in Africa, and that they had been kept out of the political affairs of the sultanate in Zanzibar, dramatically narrowed the networks on which they could rely when they returned. The cumulative effect of this lack of social intermediation (wasta) with their lower level of education was a tremendous handicap. If the ‘back-from-Africa’ Omani in general were unquestionably advantaged compared with the nationals who had stayed at home, nobody was better positioned to benefit from the opportunities offered by the developing Oman than the descendents of the aristocracy of Zanzibar.

Today, the ‘back-from-Africa’ Omani population is thought to number about 100,000, out of a total of more than two million Omani citizens. Locally they are called ‘Swahili’ (referring to their vernacular language) or ‘Zanzibari’ (Zinjibâriyyin; ‘Umâniyyin min Zinjibâr). Most of the tribes and ethno-linguistic groups contain within them so-called ‘Swahili’ individuals or clans—including among the royal tribe, the Shia communities and the Omani groups native to Baluchistan—but in varying proportions. The greatest numbers are found within tribes from Inner Oman, like Habus, Hirth, Bani Kharus, Kinud, Mahariq, Masakira, Bani Riyam or Bani Ruwaha. Families, or even individuals, descended from the same clans can be considered ‘Swahili’ (or not) whether they are tied (or not) to Africa.

The Omani who came back from East Africa thus constitute a highly heterogeneous group, which cannot be defined solely on genealogical or geographical criteria. The most important dividing line is the one inherited from the hierarchization in East Africa. This combination of social, cultural and economic divides was a determining factor of the position these returnees found in Oman.

In addition, every member has remained closely linked to his native tribe. Sheikhs who had stayed in Oman played a key role in validating the genealogies of members who came back after three or four generations. The vivacity of the tribal affiliation is highlighted by the huge amounts of financial transfers made by expatriates both to their native villages in Oman before 1970 and to the poorest clans of the tribe in Africa itself.

Another major dividing line is the African place of settlement. Here, there is a division between the ‘anglophone Swahili-speaking Omani’ who had lived in Zanzibar, Kenya or former Tanganyika on the one hand, and the francophones who had travelled to Central Africa (Rwanda, Burundi and eastern Congo) on the other. The latter, who are estimated to be about 10 percent of the whole Swahili-speaking Omani population, were usually Manga Arabs. Most of them only came back to Oman at the beginning of the 1990s, when Rwanda and Burundi exploded into crisis.

Finally it is necessary to keep in mind that a strict and well-known distinction is established between the back-from-Africa Omani, who can lay claim to a patriarchal genealogy in southeast Arabia and are the proper subject of this paper, and the Omani citizens who are descended from slaves brought forcibly from Africa (khadim) and who are considered not to be of Arab blood. As Mandana Limbert has put it, ‘Through the paternalizing care of the Arab-Omanis, [they] could become brothers, however, who would never be allowed to forget that they had been slaves, that they had known nothing and that they had had to be cultured’. Hence, many families with noble (qabîli) Arab lineages, who lived in Africa and are nowadays viewed as ‘Swahili’ in Oman, have always taken care to keep their Arab lineage ‘pure’.

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The African Presence in Oman: Research Questions

My research looks at the influence of Swahili culture on Oman. This research is extremely relevant at the present time. The Arab/African dichotomy has been the subject of extensive media coverage due to the conflict in Darfur. Unsurprisingly, the media focuses only on conflict, reducing a complex historically-negotiated relationship to an ugly racial divide. The history of Oman offers another example of extensive cultural interchange between Arabs and Africans and may help shed light on questions of how intermarriage and migration complicate the simplistic Arab/African dichotomy. It also may shed light on questions of power vis-à-vis family identity.
There are various groups of people who all could be considered African, in one way or another, but who may identify as Arab, Swahili, or simply Omani. Africans in Oman have diverse origins: some come directly from East Africa for employment, while others have someone (usually a mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother) from East Africa. Still others are the descendants of Africans brought by Omani slave traders until the late nineteenth century.

My research starts from the premise that the culture that became Omani—primarily coastal Arabs of the southeast peninsula—had its origins in maritime pursuits and connections with the larger Indian Ocean world. For example, Oman in the nineteenth century encompassed diverse groups of people-- Indian traders who made up the core of Muscat’s overseas financial empire, Baluchi mercenaries, Swahili Arabs like Tippu Tip, and indigenous Zanzibaris.
Those I refer to as Swahili Arabs migrated to the Swahili coast in large numbers beginning in the early 18th century and continued until the end of the nineteenth century. There were two major waves of migration—early 18th century, after the overthrow of the Portuguese, and mid-nineteenth century, with Sultan Seyyid Said’s move to Zanzibar.

This migration gave rise to a distinct Omani influence on the coastal culture of East Africa. Tippu Tip’s family was one example of the Swahilized Arabs who traded and intermarried in Mombasa, Zanzibar, Tanga, Bagamoyo, and other city-states of the mrima.

I am most interested in contrasting the community of Swahili Arabs with their fellow Omanis. This means tracing the history of each community, their mother tongues (Arabic vs. Swahili) and the ways in which they constitute themselves as individuals and social groups. Do all now consider themselves ‘just’ Omani? What religious and cultural differences separated Zanzibari/Swahili Omanis from other Arab Omanis? Is there a social stigma in Oman in being from Zanzibar? What kind of economic differences are there between the two groups What aspects of culture in Oman can be said to have an African origin? Which nisbas are most associated with migration to East Africa?

One way I hope to answer these questions is through an individual who in many ways straddles these divides. Hamed bin Muhammed el-Murjebi, the most famous of the nineteenth century Swahili ivory-traders, was the great grandson of an African woman and an Arab migrant trader from Oman. The first part of my research is directed towards finding relatives of Hamed bin Muhammed el-Murjebi (Tippu Tip) and interviewing them, as well as tracing any documents related to Hamed bin Muhammed’s life and family.
Arab/African Intermarriage

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Sudanese: 'What Arab-African rift?'

While the World sees only Arab-African conflict in Darfur, pockets of amity thrive unnoticed.
Christian Science Monitor
by Heba Aly
Dongola, Sudan - Ask Abbas Adam Ibrahim whether he is Arab or African, and he does not quite know how to respond. "Both," the Sudanese man says, after slight hesitation.

Mr. Adam comes from the Fur tribe, of Darfur – commonly understood to be an African tribe, under persecution by Sudan's Arab-dominated government.

Last month, the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor indicted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur, saying "evidence shows that al-Bashir masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa groups, on account of their ethnicity."

But for Sudanese Arabs and Africans coexisting peacefully outside Darfur, these racial distinctions are not so clear.

Adam, for example, believes he has some Arab blood.

During the drought of the early 1980s, Adam left Darfur for the mostly-Arab north of Sudan, in search of work and a better life. He settled in Dongola, a city more than 300 miles north of the capital, Khartoum, and has lived among Arabs ever since. He even married one and now has four "mixed" children.

"We live here peacefully and there are no problems," he says. "We live as if we are natives here. We feel that this is our country and this is our town."

Around the corner, at a small Darfurian social club, the atmosphere is loud and buoyant. Young men gather around tables playing cards, slamming down dominoes excitedly, and watching television. They are mostly economic migrants who left Darfur years ago. Among them are members of various tribes that are killing each other back in Darfur and in neighboring Kordofan State.

"There is no such thing as Arab or African. We are all Sudanese," says Mohammed El-Cheikh an Arab from Western Kordofan. "Him over there," he says, pointing across the yard to a young man standing shyly in the corner, "that's my friend Abubakr. He's from the [African] Tama tribe.

"There are problems in Darfur, but they are not between people. They are related to the government and to politics."

In scores of markets, clubs, and homes in the Arab north, Arabs and Africans are working side by side, sending their children to the same schools and intermarrying. The Arab-African distinction that has played out so broadly in media coverage of Darfur means little to people here.

In fact, historians say the distinction has no factual basis. There is a long tradition of intermarrying between the Arab and African tribes that settled in what is now Sudan.

"No single tribe in Sudan can claim it is purely African or Arab," says history teacher and mayor of the greater Dongola locality Bushra Mohamed Saleh. "They are all mixed."

And while some tribes may be more Arab or more African, coexistence between them is nothing new. Even in Darfur, different tribal groups lived together for centuries. So-called Arab nomadic tribes and African farming communities shared the same land – the nomads using it for their cattle to graze; the farmers using it to grow their crops. Conflicts arose routinely but were solved through traditional leaders.

Things changed early this millennium when traditional leaders lost their control, guns became more commonplace, and a group of non-Arab Darfurians took up arms against the government, arguing that their region had been neglected.

In responding to this rebellion, the government made a "big, big, big mistake," says Gen. Hassan Hamadain, who governed West Darfur State during the late 1990s.

It called upon popular defense forces from local communities to combat the Darfur rebels. But those who responded were mostly Arabs, many of whom joined the now infamous janjaweed militia that is accused of razing hundreds of African villages, looting, raping, and killing along the way.

"The government made use of the conflict in Darfur in a kind of non-thoughtful way," says General Hamadain, who has since retired from politics, acknowledging that he and others failed in Darfur. "It was not sensitive to the tribal relationships, the tribal history of the area, and the resources."

And so what began as normal, cyclical conflicts between mostly Arab herders and non-Arab farmers grew to what has been termed the world's largest humanitarian disaster. The United Nations says some 300,000 have died and 2.5 million have been displaced.

Among the dead were members of Hassan Ali Ibrahim's village, which was completely destroyed by Arabs. But he says he can't hold them all responsible.

"The disputes between the Arabs and people in Darfur originate from different reasons – grazing, pastures, natural things. They are not rooted in race," said the community elder, sitting under a tree at the Islamic school he manages in Dongola, where both Arab and African children sit side by side. "The Arabs that are here have nothing to do with this."

Still, for some Darfurians, it is not so easy to forget. Daoud (not his real name) watched with his own eyes as members of his family were killed by Arab militias in West Darfur. After the first attack on his village, he found his father dead. He says he does not blame the Arabs – "Who supported them? Who gave them the guns? Wasn't it the government?" – but he still has difficulty getting too close.

"I can interact with Arabs at work or in general ways, but when it comes to close relationships, I feel there is a wall between us."

British analyst Jago Salmon says this social polarization – a result he blames partly on simplistic descriptions by Western Darfur advocates – has been an unfortunate consequence of the conflict, but was never its root.

"We were still looking for dichotomy of some kind, something that would explain what was going on easily and simply. We latched onto the Arab-African dichotomy, which did vast damage…. Then as the conflict developed, it became a reality on the ground. It became something by which people explained the conflict themselves."

But as the conflict continues in Darfur – 180,000 have fled their homes this year alone, according to the UN – Adam will wake up next to his Arab wife every morning, Ali will teach his Arab students, and plenty of other African Darfurians will keep living alongside Arabs, wishing the politics would cease and their tribes could go back to life as usual.

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Whiteness as a Global Phenomenon: Some Observations

And, yet, a certain word, a glance, a guise, will mirror, never show, reflecting not my gaze, but my uncertain question caught inside a shadow of our shifting eyes.


A man's errors are his portals of discovery.
--James Joyce


Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something... we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?
Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

--from The Good Shepherd directed by Robert De Niro

I've had a lot of time over the past few days to think, since I am currently holed up in Mombasa with a dwindling cash supply. I've been thinking a lot about race and racial identity. Even though 'mzungu' calling here seems to have dwindled a bit lately (the kids in the building where I;m living finally know my name), reminders of the ongoing importance of 'whiteskin privilege' are ever present.

Yesterday, I was sitting in the baobab forest on the west side of town, munching on coconut biscuits and litchi juice, when this young man came and sat nearby and struck up a conversation. Turns out he is a new arrival in Mombasa from Kampala, Uganda, recently graduated from highschool and looking to get a job in I.T.
He spoke excitedly of his love for America and California, American television (Prison Break anyone?), and of his ultimate desire to marry an American woman. When I asked why this was so, he replied how much he liked their attitude and their freedom. Apparently though, as I soon clarified, this only applied to American WHITE women, because black women, he had been told, cheated on their men, and if their man found out about it, he would kill you.
Again, it got me thinking about the pervasive attitude I have observed over here of mzunguphilia...I am talking about in casual conversation, as well as the numerous women who have approached me telling me they love white men. Is it money? Yes. Is it self-hatred? This I find to be more complex answer.

It brought me back to a reflection about race and white identity that was published in the Liberator Magazine about "Positive White Identity". That article was my attempt to piece together all the disparate parts of my experience into some coherent philosophy for moving forward and living wholistically in world where the standard for what is right, as much as whites don't want to admit it, is still based on what powerful white men think.

My article was interpreted by some as an unequivocal stance against identifying as white, as if the identity itself was the virus and not the privilege, power, and arrogance that rides shotgun. Yet I was not trying to call whiteness the enemy so that every white would feel guilty when that identifying word was used. I wrote provocatively because I wanted to use the emotions of that word to spark a deeper probing of identity in general for people like me, family members, friends, and others who may have struggled with these questions and issues.

My own probing began in highschool with history, primarily American history, and looking at how the edifice of white supremacy in America was built and sustained from the first European settlement all the way through the Black Power movement. When I moved South for the first time, the ongoing reality of this system and its effects hit home in a powerful way.

Many years later, after a visit to South Africa, I began to understand how the system that whites built in America had been duplicated in other parts of the world where European migrants settled. Reading Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism made me aware of how the intellectual lineage of European thought was grounded in an attempt to universalize the mix of dynamism and fratricidal warfare that characterized intra-European relations (the specific heritage of European development through history) as a pattern for global development. To some extent this became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the effects and after effects of European expansion and colonialization still reverberate through our modern political order.

At the same time that the historical link of whiteness and power was entering my understanding, my consciousness was penetrated by a second, more profound realization at the deepest levels. This was stimulated by going to school in majority black envirornments at Howard and Lincoln. Already radicalized going into these experiences, I was unprepared for how much I actually enjoyed the respect and affirmation I received for being (more often than not) the only white in most every situation. I didn't keep quiet or censor my views, but I did find that I was forced to grapple with viewpoints that were far from the rainbow view of diversity-for-personal-enhancement that I had been spoon fed by my public education.

More than being respected, I found I desired to be totally accepted by blacks. Since I increasingly did not find myself comfortable in the lily-white envirornments of armchair leftists, I gravitated towards black culture, and I saw my move as a cultural, as well as a political stance. If I wasn't going to be white (at least in spirit) then I would try to be black (at least in spirit). I felt I was solving two problems with this move. First, I was confronting my own segregated heritage and the cultural and social divide along racial lines that is absolutely real in America, Obama notwithstanding. Second, I believed I was dealing in an active way with the 'white guilt' that seems to overtake 'liberal' whites who attempt to confront race. (I used to observe despairingly the extent to which these whites let their guilt virtually paralyze their ability to analyze independently in discussions of race; it was as if their logical circuits shut down, and they put themselves down as the de facto oppressor.)

However, my growing adaptation culturally--deepening friendships, serious working relationships, dating, and even the ability to master linguistic cues in Black English--was not without its problems. Some blacks found my 'passing' into black culture less than authentic and actually quite pathetic. Those who disliked me likely did so for one of three reasons (that I either overheard or was told directly) 1) Genuine suspicion--ie, this guy has got to be a spook or 2)Belief that I was basically an interloper snooping where I didn't and couldn't belong. (commonly held by the 'conscious' crowd) or 3) Envy--ie, how could this white guy be so successful at a school for 'us'?

At the same time, I think my immersion raised concern among my family that I had really lost my foundation and didn't know who I was. I am quite sure other whites had even more unkind thoughts: Who the hell is this 'wigger' and what does he think he's doing? But there were many whites, who even if a bit quizzical, admired what I was doing. For my own part , I (uncharitably)found their admiration evidence of their unwillingness (or, more likely, inability) to do what I was doing.

I got so accomplished at being racially ambigous that black women customers at the Silver Spring Kinkos where I worked would frequently ask what race I was or comment how I must just be lightskinned. My personal favorite was, "Are you related to my cousin in Newark? Because you look just like him." This phenomenon even occured internationally. Two years ago, in Tanzania, an elderly man asked me, "Are you mixed with Negro?"

It made me very happy to not be considered white, I must say. At first, I felt like some kind of pioneer, or maybe a new hero, someone like the few whites I idolized--John Brown, Bob Zellner, Heather Booth. I was motivated by the idealistic feeling of a higher calling to do something no one else was willing to or capable of doing. I was that 'special white boy.' I was 'different than the rest.' And maybe I was, indeed am. No one can take the experience I have had from me.
But the inescapable fact, despite my abilities, my openmindedness, my ability to break down cultural barriers, despite the acceptance I have gained, is that I am no closer to being 'non-white'. At the end of the day, I have privilege and power I didn't ask for, benefits I have not earned, simply because of my skin color and my passport.

Indeed, the immersion into majority-black-envirornments actually helped me avoid dealing with the fundamental issue of who I am. In a way, as long as I was the only white, and I was down enough to hang around, I could enjoy myself and not have to think about a more fundamental problem: who the hell is Nate Mathews? That question only popped up when other whites came around, and I was forced to interact with them on some interpersonal level. Maybe that's why I found myself often a little suspicious at other whites and their motives for being where I was.

At the root of a lot of my suspicion, as well as white guilt, as well as the pervasive fear in the American body politic, is a lack of knowledge about who WE truly are? What collective identity do white people (now many generations removed from European descent) have other than living in the most powerful nation on earth? As a colleague put it, if America were to fall, what would 'whites' really have? What cultural foundation do we have to stand on? Where are our roots? Who the hell are we?

Now this is a question I found that African Americans (that is the descendants of those Africans brought to America to be enslaved) had to grapple with historically, and did so on a collective level by drawing on their remembrances of West African culture and tradition and attempting to extend that in an unfamiliar context. However, white Americans, by virtue of their political position, have not had to do this to any great extent. This is because of the relative economic position and illusory security offered by whiteness (in the form of land benefits, better jobs, family wealth, etc). Yet it is something that we must do, if we imagine a future beyond the United States as a people. I am reminded of that immortal quote from James Joyce, "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." I hope I am too modest to claim to be forging the uncreated conscience of my race, but G-d willing, my experience can offer some food for thought on how whites can both look at themselves critically and take action as REAL participants in the struggle for justice, not mere sideline contributors driven by latent guilt or a need for identification with the other. May the 'battles behind my forehead' be something worthwhile to someone, somewhere.

P.S. You know, as close as 6 months ago, I could not have written this post. I was still working so hard to be accepted. But thanks to some great conversations with people like DH, NP, and TN, I have been able to see the importance of admitting to myself certain things I did not want to see for a long time.

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