Comparative African Diasporas: Towards a Thematic Reading List

Dear readers,

Some time ago, I compiled a bibliography for my exams on comparing Atlantic and Indian Ocean diasporas from Africa. I present here the rough list, in case folks would like to build on this work or utilize it for teaching or an exam question. The problem of comparisons are many, but the rewards when done well are potentially great. One major problem is that there is far more information on Atlantic African diasporas, and the literature is much more voluminous. On top of this, movement and migration in the Indian Ocean predates that in the Atlantic by several millenia. There is also a question of the usefulness of the terms "African" and "diaspora" in an Indian Ocean context. The following is far from a comprehensive list, and is especially weak on the enormous literature on the black Atlantic. I am not sure that "littoral culture" and "African creoles" belong together, but I wanted to give some sense of the parallel processes of identity making and their contexts in each basin.

Lots to chew on here, so happy reading!
-Nati

Framing piece:

Phillip Curtin. Why People Move: Migration in African History. Waco, TX: Markham Press Fund, 1995.

Manning, Patrick. Migration in world history. New York: Routledge 2005.

Some general studies on African Diaspora:

Joseph Harris.” The dynamics of the Global African Diaspora.” In Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993.

Oliver Bakewell. “In Search of the Diasporas Within Africa.” African Diaspora 1 (2008).

Katharina Schramm. “Leaving Area Studies Behind: The Challenge of Diasporic Connections in the Field of African Studies.”African and Black Diaspora 1(1): 2008.

Patrick Manning. The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture. New York: Columbia University, 2009.

Dubois, Laurent & Julius Scott, eds.Origins of the Black Atlantic. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. New World Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Isidore Okpewho, Ali Mazrui and Carole Davies.The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Michael Conniffand Thomas Davis. Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora. New York: St. Martens Press, 1994.

Segal,Ronald. The Black Diaspora.New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995.

Segal,Ronald. Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001.

Gilroy,Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Thornton,John. Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800.New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Hamilton, Ruth Simms (ed.)Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African Diaspora. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2007.

Palmer,Colin. “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora.” The Journal of Negro History 85, No. 1/2 (Winter -Spring, 2000), pp. 27-32.

The African Studies Review.No. 1, Special Issue on the Diaspora, Apr., 2000, pp. 1-202.

Thompson, Vincent Bakpetu. Africans of the Diaspora: The Evolution of African Consciousness and Leadership in the Americas (from Slavery to the 1920s). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000.

Atlantic and Indian Ocean in Historical Context

Egerton, Douglas, Alison Games, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright. The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888. Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 2007.

Bernard Bailyn. Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Greene, Jack and Phillip Morgan. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Alison Games. “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities.” AHR2006, Vol.111(3), pp.741-757. 

KärenWigen, Peregrine Horden, Nicholas Purcell, Alison Games, and Matt K. Matsuda,  “AHR  Forum:  Oceans  of  History,”  American Historical Review 111 (June 2006): 717-780.

K.N. Chaudhuri. Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Sugata Bose. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Peter Coclanis, “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?”William and Mary Quarterly  63 (October 2006):725-742.

Gupta, Pamila, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson, eds. Eyes across the Water : Navigating the Indian Ocean. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010.

Ray, Himanshu Prabha and Edward A. Alpers, eds. Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World. New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Alpers, Edward. East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2009.

Michael Pearson.The Indian Ocean. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Janet Abu-Lughod. Before European Hegemony: The World System 1250-1350 AD. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89, Special Issue: Oceans Connect (April 1999): 215-224.

Arasaratnam, S. “Recent Trends in the Historiography of the Indian Ocean, 1500 to 1800.”Journal of World History 1(2): Fall, 1990, 225-248.

Beaujard, Philippe “The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World-Systems before the Sixteenth Century.”  Journal of World History 16(4): 2005, 411-465.

Regimes of labor/Labor Migration/Trade Migration

Marcus Rediker. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Marcus Rediker. The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Byrd, Alexander X. Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Lousisiana State University Press, 2008.

Eltis, David, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas.” American Historical Review 112.5 (December 2007): 1329–1358.

Simpson, Ed. Muslim Society and the Western Indian Ocean: The Seafarers of Kachchh.

Ewald, Jan, et. "Crossers of the Sea: Slaves and Migrants in the Western Indian Ocean, c. 1800-1900." AHR 105(1): 2000, 69-91.

Ewald, Janet. “Bondsmen, Freedmen, and Maritime Industrial Transportation, c. 1840-1900.” Slavery and Abolition 31(3): Sept 2010, 451-466.

Campbell, Gwynn. “The African-Asian Diaspora: Myth or Reality? AAS 5: 3-4, 2006.

Hugh R. Clark. “Maritime Diasporas in Asia before da Gama: An Introductory Commentary.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49(4): 2006, 385-394.

Slavery/The Slave Trade

Walter Hawthorne. From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Stephanie Smallwood. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

W.G. Smith, ed.The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Tradein the Nineteenth Century. London: Frank Cass, 1989.

Sparks, Randy J. The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey. Cambridge, Mass., 2004.

Edda L. Fields-Black. Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Judith Carney. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Janet Ewald. "Slave Trade: The Indian Ocean, c1750-1880." Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World, edited by Peter N. Stearns (Spring, 2008), Oxford University Press.

Gwyn Campbell, ed. The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia.London: Frank Cass, 2004.

Alpers, Edward, Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman, eds. Resisting Bondage in the Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. London: Routledge, 2006.

Campbell, Gwyn, ed. Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa andAsia. London: Routledge, 2005.

Allen, Richard B. “The Constant Demand Of The French: The Mascarene Slave Trade And The Worlds Of The Indian Ocean And Atlantic During The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries.”Journal of African History, 49 (2008), 43–72.

Alpers, Edward A. “Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery among Bonded Africans in the Indian Ocean world, c.1750–1962.” Slavery &Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 24(2): 2003, 51-68.

Pier Larson, "Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora," Journal of World History  19(4): 2008.

Kim Butler. “From Black History to Diasporan History: Brazilian Abolition in Afro-Atlantic Context.” African Studies Review 43(1): Special Issue on the Diaspora (Apr., 2000), 125-139.

Miller, Joseph C. “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering: Restoring Identities  through Enslavement in Africa and under Slavery in Brazil.” In Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery, eds. José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004. 81–121.

Vernet, Thomas. "Slave trade and slavery on the Swahili coast (1500-1750)." In Slavery, Islam and Diaspora,edited by Paul Lovejoy, Behnaz A. Mirzai and Ismael M. Montana, 37-76. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. (Revised and expanded version of 2003 article.)

Vernet, Thomas. 2013 "East African Slave Migration." In Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, edited by I. Ness. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Littoral Culture/African Creoles

Michael N. Pearson. Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India and Portugal in the Early Modern Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

John K. Thornton.The Kongolese Saint Anthony : Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian movement, 1684-1706. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. Africans in colonial Louisiana: the development of Afro-Creole culture in the eighteenth century.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Nancy Priscilla Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca, and David H. Treece, eds. Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic. New York : Palgrave Macmillan 2007

Bennett, Herman. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003.

Franklin Knight and Peggy Liss. Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Restall, Matthew. The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Shahan de Silva Jayasuriya.“Trading on a thalassic network: African migrations across the Indian Ocean.”International Social Science Journal 58(2): 2006, 215-225.

J. LorandMatory, “Introduction,” and “The English Professors of Brazil: Of the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation,”Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005.

Enseng Ho. The Graves of Tarim: Geneaology and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Ed. John Hawley. India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Piers Larson.Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Paul C. Johnson. Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Erik Gilbert. “Coastal East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean: Long-Distance Trade, Empire, Migration,and Regional Unity, 1750-1970s.”The History Teacher 36(1): (Nov., 2002), 7-34.

Jane Landers.Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Linda Heywood and John Thornton.Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Jacqueline Nassy Brown. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Lee Haring.“African Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean Islands.”Research in African Literatures 33(3): Autumn, 2002, 182-199.

Megan Vaughn. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth Century Mauritius.Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman, eds.Trans-Atlantic dimensions of ethnicity in the African diaspora.London ; New York : Continuum 2003.

African Return/African culture in Diaspora

Melville Herskovitz. The Myth of the Negro Past.Boston: Beacon Press, 1990 (1958).

Robert Farris Thompson. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1983.

Michael Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Ehud Toledano, ed. African Communities In Asia And The Mediterranean: Identities betweenIntegration andConflict. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2012.

James Sweet. Domingos Alvares, African Healing and the Intellectual History the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

James Sweet. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Alpers, Edward.“Recollecting Africa in the Indian Ocean World.”African Studies Review 43(1): 2000, 83-99.

Alpers, Edward. “The African Diaspora in the Northwestern Indian Ocean: Reconsideration of an Old Problem, New Directions for Research.”Comparative Studies Of South Asia, Africa And Middle East Bulletinxv(2),1997.

Shihan de S. Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst, eds.The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003.

J.A. Langley. Pan Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900-1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

Brent Edwards. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

McKnight, Kathryn J. and Leo J. Garafalo,  eds. Afro-Latin Voices: Narratives from the Early modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009.

Johnson, Paul Christopher. “On Leaving and Joining Africanness Through Religion: The ‘BlackCaribs’ Across Multiple Diasporic Horizons,” Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007): 174-211.

Rucker, Walter C. The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Sidbury James. Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

 Catlin-Jairazbhoy,Amyand Edward A. Alpers. Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians. Noida, India: Rainbow Publishers, 2004.

Hanchard,Michael. “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture, No. 27, 1999, pp. 245-268.

Eshun, Ekow.Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa. New York: Hamish Hamilton, 2005.

Meriwether, James H. “Ghana: African Independence, 1957-1958,” Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Nelson, Gersham A., “Rastafarians and Ethiopianism,” in Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, Sidney Lemelle and Robin D.G. Kelley, eds., pp. 66-84.

Lake,Obiagele.  “Toward a Pan-African Identity: Diaspora African Repatriates in Ghana.” Anthropological Quarterly 68(1): (Jan., 1995), 21-36.

Alpers,Edward and Vijaya lakshmi Teelock (eds.) History Memory and Identity. Mauritius: Nelson Mandela Centre for African Culture ; University of Mauritius 2001.

Johnson, Robert Jr. Returning home : a century of African-American repatriation. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press c2005

Kwasi Konadu. The Akan Diaspora in the Americas. New York: Oxford University Press 2010.

Jayasuriya Shihan de Silva and Jean-Pierre Angenot. (eds.) Uncovering the history of Africans in Asia. Leiden ; Boston : Brill 2008.

Jayasuriya, Shihan de Silva.The African Diaspora in Asian trade routes and cultural memories. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010.

Young, Jason R. Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic religion in Kongo and the lowcountry South in the era of slavery.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

Esedebe,P. Olisanwuche. Pan-Africanism : the idea and movement, 1776-1991. Washington, D.C. : Howard University 1994.

Kelley, Robin and Patterson, Tiffany Ruby .“Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World.”African Studies Review43(1): 2000, 11-45.

Zeleza, Tiyambe. "African Diasporas: Toward a Global History.”African Studies Review 53(1): 2010, 1-19.

Zeleza, P.T. "Rewriting the African Diaspora Beyond the Black Atlantic." African Affairs 104(414): 2005, 35-68.

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Duality and Tradition (by way of Wael Hallaq's The Impossible State)

"Many religious, mystical and other formulations are, up to a point, shrines for the relics of a completely or partially successful attempt to present and make available to various individuals and communities means for acquiring this knowledge. Like almost everything on earth, they are subject to deterioration or fossilization. They become both museums and exhibits, at one and the same time.
Because the tendency of stress discipine and group-attention without contemporaneous adjustment of other factors, many such formulations crystallized in the short or long term, and not infrequently claimed a monopoly of truth or effective ritual. This process, mirroring limited thinking patterns, frequently goes so far as to lead to a virtual destruction of the dynamic of the formulation of the school. In practice, exclusivism and dogmatism, beyond a certain point, militate against certain necessities of flexibility. There is a continuing need for regeneration.
What appears to some people as the sum total of the human heritage of philosophy or metaphysics or religion can also be viewed as heavily burdened with the wreckage or misinterpretation (through selective choice) of formulations previously operated by coherent schools. The factor causing this state of affairs is endemic in the human community."  -Idries Shah

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading the brilliant, but deeply flawed book The Impossible State, by Wael Hallaq. If you are looking for a more thorough critique of the book, you can google Dr. Lamu Abu-Odeh, who adroitly identifies some the book's major shortcomings (including its cynical reading of the modern nation-state as contrasted with the lofty idealism of something Hallaq calls "Islamic governance."). Despite its flaws, the book is a major work of scholarship and deserves serious attention. However, I will have to deflect my extended thoughts on the book to a later time. For now I would like to focus on a major ethical problem of Hallaq's book: the idealist characterization of a past ethical paradigm (what Hallaq calls 'Islamic governance.').

 In what follows, I would like to reflect briefly on the broad claim that it is both possible and desirable to "recover" precolonial ethical paradigms that were lost or fragmented by colonialism. I regard this claim as wrong. I do not mean to say that one cannot gain from studying the past, nor do I mean to deny the profound ways Western thinkers have ignored or subjugated "non-Western" traditions. What I have to say is that it is urgent that those interested in ethics and spirituality learn to see the duality in all religions and cultural traditions.

I must start with the most obvious claim. The primacy of enlightenment reason is a false absolute. In parts of the academy where I spend a great deal of time (notably Religious Studies) this is now a truism. The slow death of enlightenment reason has left intellectuals looking around for other enabling traditions, many of which were suppressed or denigrated by modernity. Understandably they find in these a source of moral guidance and clarity. But if enlightenment reason is a false absolute, there is no past tradition that contains this absolute ground of truth.

Thus I am suspicious of claims that we can find ourselves out of the duality of modernity (its violence that co exists with and is constitutive of its reason) through access to various modes of precolonial reality. I would not be so bold as to say that various premodern traditions cannot be enabling guides or fonts of moral inspiration. But there are two objections when it comes to "recovering" precolonial spiritual traditions. One is that these traditions no longer exist in their original form. There is a real sense in which modernity has rendered significant parts of these traditions obsolete or at least incomprehensible and trying to go back to 'sankofa' what has been lost leads to various forms of cult like veneration of outmoded ideas. For example, since one cannot recover the type of self these technologies worked on, the technologies themselves are obsolete. This is the significant agreement I have with Wael Hallaq's argument about sharia and the Islamic State. He argues that the Islamic State is an impossible one in the current Westphalian climate, and is thus a doomed proposition. This is a significant objection that is not readily or easily overcome. But Hallaq still seems to think it is possible to argue that "Islamic governance" was manifestly superior to the current nation-state system. I do not regard the comparison as feasible, due to an absence of any comparable data. I think it is quite likely that if we were able to go back in time to observe, we would find most of the same problems that plague our current justice system: bias, favor towards the affluent, corruption, blatant disregard for the law, etc. Hallaq, however, succumbs to the temptation to read a universal Islamic subject out of old jurist manuals. Yet he does not seem to realize the anachronism. Imagine if I were to read the universal Western subject out of John Rawl's A Theory of Justice!!  No doubt this anachronism will be less troubling for some than others, and some will regard the statement as cynical. I do not wish to advocate cynicism, but neither do I believe it healthy to persist in the illusion of being able to "go home again" (to quote Thomas Wolfe), or even the desirability to do so, were it possible.

The second objection is that modernity and what we currently know about the world has also rendered the objective descriptions of the world by past traditions obsolete. It is not merely a matter of mis-translation, or the need for new interpretation. These avoid the real ontological issue. Rather the problem is about new understandings of the objective world which render past pictures in holy books as a kind of blurred picture taken using outmoded and outdated equipment. The 'sacred' nature of a particular book ought not to blind us to this fact, although it often does. I suspect, the construction of the "sacred" is in itself an attempt to place dogma and tradition beyond the reach of reasonable doubt. The declaration of a book or a tradition as the objective and final word on reality is a tremendously tempting path for many smart, caring and dedicated activists and intellectuals. But one must ask oneself if they are dealing with things as they are or as things as they wish them to be. Finally, there is a dark side to "choosing or converting" to a single tradition. It manifests in an unwillingness to interrogate their own chosen tradition with the same acuity with which they critique modernity or atheism. Perhaps said tradition is under attack, and they feel the need to close ranks against outsiders, or perhaps it "works for them" and they do not wish to give the matter further thought. These reasons ought not to be taken lightly, but they cannot be regarded as serious arguments by the contemporary seeker.

My call again is for seeing the duality in all ethical social cultural and religious projects, and their contingent nature, including Enlightenment as well as all past religious traditions. I believe this attitude in and of itself is the appropriate ethics for our time, rather than any one tradition which needs to be (or can be) recovered and revived. I believe we have yet to investigate the possibilities of this attitude as an ethical and spiritual one. Indeed religious believers will see it as a form of unbelief, or radical skepticism which undermines their foundationalism. Our point should be that all past foundationalism is arbitrary. Once you realize the need for setting a foundation line for what you know, it becomes impossible to authentically do so, for foundationalism can only arise out of an objective conviction of the truth of something, not out of a psychological need for some foundation.

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CUF Rally, Kibanda Maiti

Last week I attended a CUF rally in Kibanda Maiti, an open area in Ngambo where CUF has a strong presence. My attendance at the rally caused a bit of a stir in my neighborhood in Stone Town. A couple folks have taken to greeting me with the CUF rallying cry, "Haki sawa kwa wote!" (Equal rights for all). Some people wanted to know why I had gone (I told them I just wanted to listen), and whether I had understood what was happening.

Suprisingly I had. Although some of the back and forth between the speakers and the crowd was lost on me, I did clearly understand the purpose of the rally. In the first place, the rally was held as a result of Kikwete's speech rejecting "serikali tatu" and essentially firmly stating that the union was not going to change. There is some discrepancy between the current Tanzanian constitution, which says that Tanzania is one nation, and the current Zanzibar constitution, which says Tanzania is two nations, Tanganyika and Zanzibar. This discrepancy was the point of debate and a part of the reason for the 'serikali tatu' proposal. The previous chair of the Constitutional Convention, former Tanzanian Prime Minister Joseph Warioba, had proposed the three-tier government as a way to preserve the union. Warioba spent months collecting public opinions on the governmental structure, and claimed that 61% of those surveyed wanted a tri-governmental structure. Kikwete's speech essentially plunged this process into chaos, and the Convention that is now proceeding to vote on sections of the Constitution is essentially dominated by CCM, since the opposition parties have dropped out in protest.

The union is undoubtedly the MOST important and controversial constitutional issue, so when Kikwete gave his speech saying "serikali tatu haiwezekani", it essentially short-circuited Warioba's painstaking process of collecting public opinions and submitting drafts for approval by the constitutional convention. Warioba, who is far from being a CUF partisan or even pro-Zanzibar, nevertheless made this profound statement: "The citizens of Zanzibar have lost a right to lead themselves; equally, the Zanzibar House of Representatives (by appearing in the union parliament) are legislating on matters that do not concern them."

Wairoba sees clearly that the current union structure is not sustainable and has essentially resulted in CCM establishing itself in Zanzibar by dint of force and fraud. There is nothing to be gained from the purely pragmatic perspective of political stability, by continuing to deny Zanzibar a place within the union as a nation with its own autonomous government and an extensive degree of self-rule.

The leader of CUF, and current Vice President of Zanzibar, Maalim Seif Sharif Hamad was well aware of this context as he stepped up to the podium to speak at the rally. At first he seemed overly formal and a bit stiff, but he quickly warmed to the crowd. In an hour long speech, he touched on the history of the union, the efforts of Warioba to preserve 'serikali tatu', and the need for Zanzibaris to assert their rights within the constitutional process. At the end of his speech, he asked the crowd for permission to read a letter he was sending to "ndugu yangu, rafiki yangu" Rais Kikwete. To the cheers of the jubilant crowd, he announced that in response to Kikwete's hijacking of the democratic process, he was calling for a popular referendum on the union. This way, the union can be voted up or down by popular plebiscite.

This is CCM's worst nighmare. A referendum on the union would almost certainly favor CUF; CCM is perceived as a mainland party. But such a referendum, if it ever did emerge (an unlikely possibility) also has a worrying potential to erupt into violence, as have previous elections which were narrowly won by CCM. These narrow electoral victories, however, were only achieved through fraud and violence, and CCM's current dominance in Zanzibar is completely unsustainable.

But CUF has its own challenges. How far is it willing to go to stand up for Zanzibar autonomy? And what will it do in the event of the union actually breaking? The mainland currently provides Zanzibar's security. How will it deal with the significant popuation of mainlanders who would continue to remain on the island. What would its relationship be with mainland Tanganyika? (for a relationship of some kind is unavoidable).

The rally ended with the reading of Maalim Seif's letter to Kikwete. Time will tell what the outcome of these negotiations will be. To be continued....

By the way, I have posted pictures of the rally on my Instagram account. You can follow me: @nmathews81. On twitter, I am @AzanianSea. Karibu.

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Back in Zanzibar

Dear readers,

I'm back in Zanzibar for the first time since 2010. I am here to complete my dissertation research by looking at Omani migration and the current Omani diplomatic engagement with Zanzibar. It sure is an interesting time to be here! The new constitutional process is all over the news, with the question of the union between Zanzibar and Tanganyika at the forefront. The Union, or Muungano, is at the center of the creation of modern Tanzania. The Union was originally the result of secret talks between former Tanganyikan president Julius Nyerere and former Zanzibar president Abeid Karume after the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964. Initially the Union was supposed to be for a period of ten years, but it has continued until now. The mainland government's control (especially in terms of security and policing, and the power grid) has been and is a sore spot for many Zanzibaris, who feel it is a new form of colonialism. Yesterday Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete gave a major speech in which he addressed the union, and rejected the idea of a tri-governmental structure (an idea proposed by CUF representatives, Zanzibar's largest opposition party.) The speech caused an uproar among the opposition, who see in Kikwete's pronouncements a violation of the democratic process and an attempt by CCM to dominate the constitutional proceedings.

The island is booming, at least in terms of tourist development; the number of luxury hotels and restaurants has skyrocketed. One particular restaurant called 6 South has just sprung up next to New Africa Hotel, complete with fountains and a giant wall of falling water in the entrance. It is all very plush, but it is hard to know (or is it?) who is really benefiting from this influx.  And aside from that, how many empty rooms do these luxury hotels have, while many Zanzibaris live on a thousand shillings a day? One Zanzibari lady of Goan origin complained to me that she was being hassled by the government because she lived in an area of high tourist traffic and no longer could afford to keep her restaurant open. It seems gentrification has come to Zanzibar to stay. Bring on the pumpernickel bagels!

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Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (Book Review)

Amitav Ghosh. Sea of Poppies. New York: Picador, 2008.

I've previously reviewed an earlier work from the prolific and brilliant Amitav Ghosh. 1993's In An Antique Land was an arresting mashup of Ghosh's fieldwork in Egypt and a historical reconstruction of the life of a 12th century Indian slave who moved with his master between Cairo and India.

Sea of Poppies finds Ghosh working the same rich themes of culture, language and hierarchy in the Indian Ocean world; but this time the context is colonial India in 1838, with Britain on the brink of the Opium Wars with China. Ghosh conjures up a world of sailors, merchants, convicts, colonial landlords and indentured laborers. The texture of language in the novel is almost unimaginably rich; one needs (and Ghosh provides) a reference index for the many untranslated words from the language of sailors. Whereas Ghosh's authorial voice intervened frequently in In An Antique Land, reflecting on both his own identity and the story he is tracking, in Sea of Poppies, the message is in the fully realized world that springs to life in its pages.

Ghosh wants to use language to pull us into the dizzying complexity and diversity of the Indian Ocean world; a subject that has fascinated historians and scholars. But Ghosh avoids the romanticism of much of this scholarship by emphasizing the strict social rules and hierarchies that structure individual lives. Racial discrimination, arranged marriages, slavery, caste, Hindu-Muslim relations are just a few of the topics Ghosh broaches with dazzling erudition.

Sea of Poppies is to be savored; its plot is easily lost in the texture of the multiple journeys of its fascinating characters--from the freeman Zachary, who is passing for white, to the Brahmin nobleman turned convict Raja Neel Rattan, to Deeti, a low caste opium farmer fleeing the vengeance of her family. But while the plot meanders, the goal is clear enough: each of these richly realized characters will end up aboard the ship Ibis, sailing from Calcutta to Mauritius.

With an obvious nod to The Many Headed Hydra, Ghosh emphasizes how a new kind of society emerges from the bowels of the ship; while this journey obliterates many barriers of caste and social distinction, it only serves to heighten other social tensions, propelling the novel forward to its tense and unresolved conclusion (the second novel in the trilogy, River of Smoke, is out now).

My only complaint about this magnificent novel is the character of Zachary, an "octoroon" freeman from Baltimore who passes for white. Ghosh struggles to find this character's inner dialogue and his language is curiously unaccented. His position on the ship allows him to talk to and engage with characters across the spectrum of society, both high and low; as such he remains a character who other characters talk to, but who lacks some of their tragedy and inner torment.

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Cargoes of the East (Martin and Martin)

Cargoes of the East: the ports, trade and culture of the Arabian seas and Western Indian Ocean. 
Esmond Bradley Martin & Chryssee Perry Martin
 London: Hamish Hamilton. 1978. 244 pp.

Zanzibar: Tradition and Revolution. 
Esmond Bradley Martin. 
London: Hamish Hamilton. 1978. 149pp.

Cargoes of the East is a long romantic pictorial essay on the traditional sailing vessel of the Western Indian Ocean, the dhow. The authors, an adventurous husband and wife team, have spent many years studying the dhow: where they go, who sails in them and what they carry. They have travelled widely in this area and talked to dhow owners, builders, captains, sailors, the buyers and sellers of the strange and exotic cargoes carried by these boats and written a diverting,almost escapist account of their research and travels. Though what has come to be known as a 'coffee table book', Cargoes has a wealth of anecdotes and richly-reproduced photographs.

Zanzibar has been more or less closed to the outside world since 1964. Edmond Bradley Martin claims to be the first writer to have been allowed full access by the authorities to 'carryout research and fieldwork' on Zanzibar and the island of Pemba which according to rumours current in the sixties was being converted into a Chinese military base. Being a geographer and because of his familiarity with East Africa, he has produced a good handbook, rich in description about the country's culture and ethnography.He also discusses Zanzibar's agricultural economy, its tourism and Islamic practices and includes a chapter on the country's future role in East Africa.

Third World Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), pp. 167-168.

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