Abstract
To say that Zanzibar (which Kiswahili speakers prefer to call Unguja) is complex is to state the obvious. In the post-9/11 universe, mentioning Zanzibar, revolution, and Islam in the same sentence may be tantamount to placing a call to the Africa High Command.
From its maze of serpentine streets in Stone Town to unresolved traumas centering upon unfreedom and what the late Walter Rodney called in a formerly canonical study of the Upper Guinea Coast “other forms of social oppression,” the Isle of Cloves has cast a spell of sorts upon both inhabitants and sojourners from other places. Enchanting for its Western Indian Ocean vistas, it is equally captivating in other ways. Like the potentially perilous paths, making inroads into unraveling the intricately woven skeins of custom and caveat in this polity can prove puzzling for even keenly perceptive outside observers. No Orientalist obscurantism, it is rather a matter of optics.
In War of Words, War of Stones, Jonathon Glassman (2011) analyzes the role of “race” and racialized thinking in the vengeful violence punctuating both the run up to and the agonizing aftermath of Unguja’s bloody January 1964 revolution. Distancing himself from primordialist portrayals of difference whose etiology lay in a fictive ancient past, for Glassman racialization is dynamic rather than static. Notions of race are made by human beings in particular places and times.
A product of several years of research and reflection, War of Words built upon Glassman’s (1995a) much lauded Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995) and had as its harbingers a string of studies engaging notions of “race” and agency in the very specific setting of Zanzibar. As Glassman’s (1991) “The Bondsmen’s New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast” signaled the monograph Feasts and Riot, so “Sorting Out the Tribes: The Creation of Racial Identities in Colonial Zanzibar’s Newspaper Wars” (Glassman, 2000) and “Slower Than a Massacre: The Multiple Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial Africa” (Glassman, 2004) augured War of Words.
Even more immediately, Glassman’s (1995b) “No Words of Their Own,” a review article critiquing Claude Meillassoux’s The Anthropology of Slavery: the Womb of Iron and Gold (Slavery & Abolition 16:1 (1995)) took Meillassoux to task for essentialism and imprecision while providing a platform to work through some of his own ideas about slave-holding, slave status, modes of production, and reproduction. This intervention afforded Glassman time and space to consider both the strengths and weakness of Meillassoux’s theory, ostensibly grounded in the specific circumstances pertaining in the Sahelo-Sudanic field while seeking to find continent-wide African applications.
Feasts and Riot, revolving around resistance on the mainland, and War of Words, on Unguja or Zanzibar island, each took aim at earlier staid historiographical interpretations of agency emanating from primordial static thought and action, in the first instance often framed as retrograde instead of as potentially novel responses to fluid situations such as opportunities afforded by luxury commodity commerce.
Among Kiswahili speakers in general and Zanzibaris especially, connections linking mainland and island(s) could be hotly contested. Contestation is expressed in vernacular concepts alternately pregnant with possibility, periodic resort to prising over proscription. Prerogatives have been held by the classes in power, enforced via restrictions and definitional limitations as fundamental as the key distinction of civilization variously defined ustaarabu and uungwana and savage barbarism ushenzi. Ustaarabu, the quality of living or behaving “like an Arab,” became the Omani standard for measuring and manifesting refinement and sophistication of an “Arab” cultural and “racial” elite, in contradistinction to the mainlanders from less developed interior or bush (bara) whom elite strata tended to see primarily as workers, servants, and slaves. This is often referred to as an “Arabizing” elite. At the same time, Unguja contained self-identified indigenes claiming Tumbatu or Hadimu descent (p. 37). Pemba island, a part of the Zanzibar and Pemba polity, was both related to and in some ways distinct from the far larger Unguja. Refinement, reckoned in the sense of nobility as in mwungwana, typically rendered as “free person” but nuanced with the inference of “gentleman,” was also being racialized.
However, like other slave societies, the “ruling race” had few qualms about making use of their power in formal and informal patterns of intimate encounter, running the gamut from marriage to concubinage, a “privilege” that was not granted to the lower orders. In effect, there were multiple migration narratives operating simultaneously, reinforced by patterns of exclusivity in thought and action that pivoted around descent, literacy, faith, language, color, and “race.” These and other cultural and social practices left marks upon Unguja, Pemba, and their people(s). As if all this were not challenging enough, the 19th-century advent of British maritime hegemony in the Western Indian Ocean rhetorically furthered by a Christian-based humanitarian inspired ideological opposition to slave trading gradually brought Zanzibar into an imperial relationship with Britain that left its own imprint on Zanzibar and Zanzibaris. The 20th-century Zanzibar polity bore traces of many layers of “encounter” and “interaction” in an Al-Busaidi sultanate, a monarchy reflecting the contradictions of colonial culture. The polity emerging in the articulation between Omani dynasts who seized Unguja in a series of stages in the 18th century, first the Ya’rubi from 1729 to 1749, then more demonstratively after 1830 with Seyyid Said bin Sultan (Busaidi) relied upon force and violence (pp. 29–30). Consequently, 20th-century Unguja and its people, particularly the African majority, harbored resentments having few outlets. Many were documented, notably in newspapers and occasional periodicals. Glassman makes skillful use of such materials, many, while known to earlier researchers he invests with new significance.
Methodologically, War of Words relies chiefly on written documents despite now more general Africanist conventions of deploying oral data. For Glassman, written texts are records while oral sources are understandings of the past, not records of them (Preface, x–xi).
Glassman’s larger interventions concern how violence in speech and action and how race-making intersect, especially when these give rise to retributive violence as in genocide. These considerations are of profound importance for Africanist scholars particularly if it is our belief that our scholarship is at least partly motivated by the goal of social change.
Whereas primordialists and instrumentalists stress deformations caused by imperial and colonial rulers, Glassman confronts excesses Africans themselves may have undertaken. With each successive decade separating us from the imperial and colonial eras, it seems increasingly difficult to assign responsibility for choices made by postcolonial actors to the colonial legacy, even where vestiges of former structures and behaviors are evident. Glassman is painstaking in his reconstruction of events as these were documented and remembered, something of tremendous importance in Zanzibar whose revolution even now is neither fully documented nor safely discussed, particularly on the island itself. Foreign-born scholars with overseas passports are likely better placed to investigate and theorize regarding these matters, which continue be surrounded by auras of uncertainty. In fact, an illustration of the gap between documentation and conjecture is evident in the title War of Words, War of Stones, the central tropes upon which Glassman’s thesis rests.
The War of Words in Glassman’s study is the period beginning in the mid-1950s when Zanzibari political discourse hit a fever pitch, engaging in invective on an unprecedented and volatile scale (treated in Part II). But this did not arise suddenly. It was a result of decades of slowly but steadily increasing tensions around race within competing segments of Unguja society. Glassman detects this within the publications of a Western-trained secular intelligentsia such as Mazungumzo za Walimu (Conversations of Teachers) comprising elite “Arab” educators whose moderate vision of the nation was “liberal, inclusive and ecumenically tolerant” but flowed from a paternalistic, exclusivistic ideal of ustaarabu (p. 77). Tracing media voices of opinion shapers in rival sections of Unguja, Glassman teases out what he sees as the roots of conflicts slowly simmering until they exploded, rhetorically during the journalistic newspaper wars of 1957–1959 (Chapter 5) and then targeted mass action in June 1961 (“War of Stones,” Part III).
The climactic third part of the book unpacks the constituents of the racialized violence: Rumor-fueled, calculated social action with cultural, symbolic, and ritualized overtones. Both bellicose analogies, the images of words and stones remain extremely powerful.
Early on Glassman reinforces the sense that part of the pernicious power of “race” is its connection to notions of “blood” and “descent.” Often in Africa, “race” is seen as Western doctrine (p. 16). In extreme episodes like genocidal ethnic violence aimed at extermination, rhetorical rationalizations urge offense or defense against what are portrayed as mortal contests between hierarchically opposing strata (p. 16).
I have massaged and repositioned some of those key words without intending to vitiate or violate their integrity. They are worth considering and reconsidering. Embedded within Glassman’s detailed reconstruction of the revolutionary process in Unguja lie questions of ethics. Zanzibar has long been a site within Africa in which several key concomitant conditions were felt to help form a reply to the query: What is a revolutionary situation? Glassman’s monograph begs these follow-ups: Should revolutionary actors act morally? Where does one draw the line in morality? Is revolutionary violence purely retributive?
War of Words, War of Stones appeared nearly five decades following the revolution in Zanzibar. By then, the Soviet Union and the Cold War were history, as were narratives of armed struggle against imperialism and colonialism in racist minority settler regimes in Southern Africa, and those in Kenya, Algeria, and the former Southern Rhodesia had been reconfigured into states where White minorities remained under new dispensations or not at all. Arguably the most substantial illustration of a drastically altered postcolonial situation may have been Zimbabwe. Although some Whites may have argued that South Africa seemed a close second, this appears untenable. But in the same decade that the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa made history for its all-race elections, Rwanda made headlines for quite another reason. Moreover, media portrayals of Africa were less often celebrating the advent of newly independent states but rather lamenting the losses of a generation to civil wars, in which children of war included child soldiers, refugees, and hosts of atrocities too horrific to relate, along with HIV, failed states, and institutionalized violence against women, including rape as a weapon of war. Even fabled revolutionary regimes were now excoriated for corruption, suppression of opposition, drug trafficking, and insensitivity to the needs of their populations. In the face of these narratives, tales of revolutionary Zanzibar were pale in comparison. Still, revisiting Unguja matters a great deal.
It is difficult to convey the effect that the performance of revolution might have in a place like Zanzibar, even if much or maybe most of it now appears as insurrectionary theater. It was surely taken seriously in its time and continues to be memorialized in ways that are all but impervious to change, impenetrable from the barbs of incisive foreign critics. Then and to a considerable degree today, the revolution as master narrative belongs to those who claim to master it, those who wield state power. We are left with several key questions: Who was John Okello? How did this shadowy Ugandan migrant come to be so prominent and play such a pivotal role in the cataclysmic events of 11 January 1964?
What was the purpose of the pogroms following the Okello-led coup d’etat? How could Glassman’s crucial coda regarding the dangers of African racial nationalism be realized? “Race” functions in ways that facilitate hegemony wherever racialization takes place. Race-making is about power. This prompts me to repeat and revise an earlier question. Where do race-making discourses fit within contexts of revolutionary morality or ethics? Is there still a place for Fanon’s revolutionary violence, the cleansing force of his theory? As Glassman points out, the revolution in Zanzibar did not succeed in eradicating race. What happens when violence as cleansing force combines with race and ethnicity? Did Unguja in its zeal to uproot the Arab-centered racial hegemony of the Busaidi sultanate by enacting ethnic cleansing replace it with another having an African cast and caste?
In mainland Tanzania during the 1970s cartoons, wall posters and murals were regularly used to communicate with the masses. Such representations typically contained verbal messages, generally in Kiswahili. But the power of a visual image is such that it may “speak” to even the unlettered. One could have been a school-leaver or even wholly unschooled and still derive something of benefit from these images. One especially memorable example was a two-panel illustration. In the first panel, an African was seen with a European sitting on his shoulders. In the second pattern, an African was shown sitting on the shoulders of another African. The epigram accompanying the panels read, Don’t let this, be followed by this. The message was quite clear. Mwalimu Julius Nyerere in whose name much of this work was done, even if he was not involved in it (and it is questionable whether he countenanced everything the Youth League projected, for example) would likely have been sympathetic to this particular wall poster. However, to a large degree that is precisely what was happening and was observed to be occurring. It is impossible to read this as having been a non-racial message. It did not depict the supersession of a European colonial overlord by an “Asian” or “Arab” but by an African. It did not suggest that an Asian or an Arab did not deserve to become a Tanzanian citizen. It showed a racially identifiable Black superordinate lording it over a Black subordinate. The particular mode of conveyance was significant. The superordinate was not being carried as might a baby or a child. Nor was he on the back of the subordinate. He was literally sitting upon his shoulders, something no one able to see it could misconstrue.
Conversely, the second panel did not show an African sitting on a European or Asian or Arab. The message was that exploitation should not be replaced by another exploiter of the same color or “race” or any color or race. In other words, exploitation should end. However, in order to communicate that message, the artist utilized a “racial” reference. This is a long way around the question of how “race” may have been intended to convey a message that actually intended to transcend racism, yet still made us of that expedient. How is it possible to move beyond race, race-making, and racism in Africa or elsewhere? We may pose the question and model through our own practice a way of modeling that. But we cannot necessarily expect that to happen however much we desire for it to be so.
Until and unless it becomes generally clear that there is no profit in race and racism, it is likely that race and racial appeals shall continue to be used in Africa and outside of it. We are indebted to Glassman for this work, only a fraction of which I have discussed, leaving out for the moment the critical role played by Islam, in general, and the Ibadi rite, in particular, for the Omani and their allies in Unguja, Pemba, and the mainland. Islam lay at the core of many discourses involving ustaarabu, uungwana, the opposition between civilization and savagery or barbarism and many related antinomies that played key roles in the contestations pitting different residents of Unguja and to a lesser extent Pemba against one another as they vied for the mantle of rightful rulers of Zanzibar. In War of Words, War of Stones, Jonathon Glassman has provided a window on these processes that has both assimilated earlier insights and augmented them with new readings of his own that can provide food for thought for some time.