Abstract
In their generous comments about War of Words, War of Stones, Professors Anthony and Giblin focus on the political legacies of the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution. At first glance, this may seem somewhat puzzling: War of Words is a work of history, not political commentary, and except for the epilogue it stops short of the revolution, in December 1963. But the questions that animate it were informed by political concerns concerning race and nationalism in the modern world, and it is gratifying to see those concerns engaged by such thoughtful readers.
The Zanzibar Revolution was once a touchstone among radical Pan-Africanists and others who advocated the politics of revolutionary national liberation, heralded for ending a regime of racial domination and replacing it with a socialist political economy. In the years following the overthrow of the Arab sultanate, the new government redistributed the formerly Arab estates to the Africans who worked them and placed the islands’ few large-scale commercial and industrial enterprises under state control. Equally significant was the deal struck soon after the revolution by which Zanzibar and Tanganyika formed the United Republic of Tanzania: the continent’s only lasting merger of independent postcolonial nation-states, forged in the name of Pan-African unity.
Yet despite these very real transformations, Anthony stresses the revolution’s performative postures, and Giblin puts the word “revolution” in scare-quotes. Such acts of rhetorical distancing stem from their awareness that the matters discussed in War of Words undermine what Anthony calls the official master-narrative. No matter what the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) espoused once in office, the tensions that led to the 1964 coup and the pogroms that accompanied it were unambiguously racial in character. The ASP mobilized supporters not by calling for class-revolt—indeed, it had routinely red-baited its rivals in the Arab-led Zanzibar National Party—but by demanding that Zanzibar be ruled by a “pure African” government, cleansed of Arab influence. Even to describe the ASP as anti-colonial would be a distortion: only months before independence, its leaders were still proclaiming gratitude to British paternalism.
The ASP discovered its revolutionary ethos only after Okello and the Youth League had installed it in power. This sudden reversal was encouraged partly by geopolitics: while the Eastern Bloc offered aid and quick recognition to the new regime, the West offered only suspicion. In any case, the revolutionary master-narrative, which reimagined the revolution as a “classic” revolt of “the landless peasantry and the labouring classes against the landed aristocracy” (Othman, 1995: 172–173), was crafted well after the fact. Key authors included interested commentators such as Abdulrahman Babu, who had led a small Marxist faction (Umma) that broke away from the Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP) shortly before independence. Babu and his comrades in the ZNP’s left wing had once been the prime targets of the ASP’s anti-communism; now they provided the language with which the ASP proclaimed its newfound revolutionary credentials, translating its old racial vitriol into class terms. Beyond that, Marxism had little influence in the ASP: although Abeid Karume had some interest in the Marxists’ collectivist ideas, he distrusted Babu and his allies and quickly had them sidelined or (as in the case of ASP leftist Abdullah Kassim Hanga) murdered. But Babu remained a major influence among Tanzanian intellectuals, both in Dar es Salaam and from exile. According to his self-aggrandizing narrative, Umma co-opted the “lumpen” elements immediately after they had overthrown the sultanate, thus unleashing a “revolutionary tide” that alarmed the international forces of reaction and neo-colonialism. In an epilogue added when Babu found himself in the political wilderness (Babu, 1989), the latter forces engineered the union with Tanganyika, as a ploy to neutralize him and his allies. 1
Thus, there were two variant scripts to what Prof. Anthony calls “insurrectionary theater”: one the triumphalist romance favored by supporters of the ASP regime and its successors, and the other with a tacked-on epilogue recounting a melodrama of betrayal. These variant scripts have been repeated since the 1970s by both the regime and some of its fiercest critics, thus leaving unchallenged the drama’s central component: the elision of the distinction between race and class. In popular texts such as the revolutionary novels of Adam Shafi Adam, racial labels serve as metonyms for feudalism and capitalism, and the revolution is depicted as the outcome of a long struggle between Zanzibar’s African workers and its Arab landowners and Indian financiers. More measured accounts register the fact that significant numbers of Indians and Arabs were poor, but that rarely interferes with the reproduction of the stereotypes. In many ways, such essentialism mirrors the thinking and governing strategies of colonial Zanzibar’s British rulers. This is deeply ironic, given that both variants of revolutionary theater cast colonialism as the main nemesis. But a central theme of the first half of War of Words is that the British did not elaborate such concepts in an intellectual vacuum: Zanzibari thinkers played key roles in generating local iterations that resonated with locally inherited idioms of thought. Long before the 1950s—indeed, long before colonial conquest—it had been common to think of wealth, landholding, labor, and servility in ethnicized terms. The mid-century politics of colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism had the effect of racializing those concepts in the minds of many islanders. (Although not in the minds of all, a point to which I will return.)
By observing that the revolutionary narratives obscure the role of race, I do not mean to deny the significance of economic factors. But it is misleading to suggest that racial thinkers merely mistook class for race: that when ASP speakers or mobs targeted Arabs, they were really targeting landowners. Such assertions fly in the face of the facts. (The mobs targeted Arabs as Arabs, and most of their victims were not landlords but impoverished “Manga” immigrants.) They also reify race as an analytic category, despite the revolutionary authors’ claim to be doing the opposite. The sociologist Rogers Brubaker notes the common error, when writing about ethnicity or race, of construing “named populations” as socially constituted “groups” that engage as such in social action. He calls this “substantialism”: the error of investing ethnic categories with sociological substance. In contrast, he notes, race and ethnicity are but ways of making sense of the world. Hence, the task of the historian or social scientist is to trace how such modes of comprehension came into existence in any particular time and place, and how they shaped the behavior of specific historical actors (Brubaker, 2009: 21–42). The revolutionary authors do not question that racial “groups” existed in this “substantialist” sense; they merely assert that their members failed to understand the groups’ class nature. 2
As elsewhere in Africa, the most common historical narratives of the genesis of ethnic and racial thought in Zanzibar—whether revolutionary or not—place the blame on the colonial state. In large part, this tendency reflects the influence of the nationalist paradigm, which remains as pervasive in African studies as in African politics. By privileging the colonial encounter as the driving force of modern history, the paradigm has had two complementary effects. At the crudest level, it encourages teleological narratives in which any form of politics that undercut territorial nationalism—such as ethnic particularism—is assumed to have been the outcome of colonial strategies of divide-and-rule. In recent decades, this assumption has been undercut by a subtle literature that demonstrates how ethnic nationalism and anti-colonial politics often went hand-in-hand. But the paradigm has had a more subtle effect in its intersection with substantialist approaches. So long as ethnicities or races are assumed to constitute “groups” rooted in sociological facts, and so long as the colonial encounter is given primacy in having determined those facts, then colonialism is assigned the prime role in shaping ethnic thought. Studies that make such assumptions frequently distort the history of African ethnic and racial thought, locating it entirely within the realm of colonial discourse. They contrast with a rich literature on modern intellectual history that rejects the notion of two discrete discursive realms, one African and the other colonial. But such approaches have had an uneven impact, making the most mark in studies of the kinds of cultural nationalism (e.g. Gikuyu or Yoruba) typically glossed as “tribalism.” In the literature on Rwanda and Zanzibar, on the other hand, one still finds a lingering consensus that racial thought was imposed on Africans by colonial rule.
For many East Africans and sympathetic foreign observers, the default position is to contrast such Western-inspired racial thought with the age-old Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism described in some of the works Giblin cites. From a political perspective, this move is understandable: in the wake of Zanzibar’s 1960s pogroms, it is difficult not to sympathize with official narratives that seek to displace the cause of such catastrophes—and of today’s racial tensions—onto a safely distant colonial regime. But such a move is common also in scholarly studies of the postcolonial world that celebrate cosmopolitanism or “hybridity” as an essential component of subaltern subjectivity, a form of subversive power that poses inherent challenges to externally imposed ethnic and racial categories (see: Glassman, 2014). The problems of such a view are numerous. Most obvious, in our case, is the simple fact that the revolutionaries who seized power in Zanzibar did not champion Swahili cosmopolitanism but explicitly rejected it as a contaminating threat to the ideal of racial purity. The revolutionary regime’s celebration of Zanzibari cosmopolitanism is a latter-day development—and one that, as current politics reveals, the ruling party deploys only opportunistically.
But there is another, thornier problem. Far from being a hedge against racial thought, Swahili cosmopolitanism, like similar cosmopolitanisms elsewhere, could be deployed in the politics of exclusion. Several authors (e.g.: Simpson and Kresse, 2008) have observed that cosmopolitan thought is not so much a tool for erasing difference as it is a way of explaining and negotiating it. Cosmopolitanism, in other words, begins with an emphasis on difference, not a denial of its significance. On the Swahili coast, the hegemonic forms of cosmopolitanism included distinctions between peoples who perceived themselves as oriented more toward the Indian Ocean (above all the elite residents of the Swahili towns themselves) and those they thought of as part of the continental interior. Central to this discourse were concepts of civilization and barbarism: engagement with Swahili cosmopolitanism, including commerce and the transcendent values of Islam, incorporated continental outsiders into coastal society by civilizing them. As late as the 1930s, Zanzibari public intellectuals were not shy about mentioning the role of enslavement in this civilizing process. Ironically, their historical narratives of how Arabs and other coastal Muslims spread civilization to the interior shaped the thinking of the Pan-African nationalists who later rejected Swahili cosmopolitanism as but a mask for racial oppression.
The deeper irony is that cosmopolitanism itself was regarded as a quality that divided peoples of the region. Many Zanzibaris—chiefly the town elite, but also many peasant farmers who regarded themselves as indigenous to the islands—prided themselves on their cosmopolitanism and their deep ancestral roots in Islam; they regarded peoples of the interior, including the descendants of slaves and of more recent immigrants, as still tainted by the parochial, inward-looking cultures characteristic of African barbarians. Of course, that vision of pristine African parochialism resembled colonial images of “tribal” Africa. But there is copious evidence that its core elements were inherited locally, not borrowed. 3 The vision is plainly false: a rich literature demonstrates that for centuries African communities have been shaped by sustained intellectual exchanges linking regions over immense distances. But in the modern world, the most readily recognized forms of difference are the continental forms conventionally understood as “race,” distinctions that for most of us have become a fundamental categorical order, taken as common sense. That’s why, for most readers, the label “cosmopolitan” is readily attached to places like Zanzibar, but not to (say) the kingdom of Bunyoro. When applied to Africa, at any rate, the label indicates only the conventional distinctions of race.
In its focus on the divisiveness that can arise from cosmopolitanism, my book is indeed, as Giblin suggests, an outlier in the literature on Zanzibar and (to a lesser extent) on postcolonial “hybridity” more generally. But I should stress that, like Giblin’s hypothetical reader, I too came to War of Words last, and from the same place. No American who has spent decades studying Swahili culture can avoid noticing how its racial boundaries differ from what we are used to at home. And that, in fact, provided the central question animating War of Words: How did a society such as is described by the works Giblin cites (and by my own first book, too), where ethnic boundaries were fluid and ever-shifting, give rise to racial violence? A study that approaches Swahili cosmopolitanism only as a code of acceptance and inclusion is likely to assume that the events of the late 1950s/early 1960s arose from external factors: colonial discourses of race or outright colonial machinations, Cold War skullduggery, or—in an analysis currently fashionable among many Zanzibari intellectuals—an “invasion” of barbarian mainlanders. The latter interpretation is a contemporary iteration of the civilizational nationalism of the 1950s, which excluded islanders of mainland descent as foreigners, even though many were born in the islands to labor migrants who had taken up long-term residence there.
I certainly don’t wish to exchange what Giblin characterizes as the extant literature’s tendency to elide conflict and exclusion for a vision of Swahili cosmopolitanism that emphasizes only conflict; that would be no less of a distortion. From the book’s first page, I tried to emphasize the contingent nature of racial conflict. This contingency appears most dramatically in the book’s final section, on violence. Although I try to trace how the 1961 pogroms were shaped by the intellectual history recounted in the opening chapters, close examination of the specific acts of violence indicates that there was nothing inevitable about it. As Scott Straus (2006) reminds us in his study of Rwanda, we must take care not to allow the history of race-making to overdetermine outcomes. While stories such as Zanzibar’s and Rwanda’s are profoundly tragic, they offer no scope for a Hobbesian belief that violence stems inevitably from the human propensity to categorize by race or ethnicity.
In a book that was already too long, I did not have the luxury to trace all the historical dead-ends (dead, that is, as of January 1964) that might have led to less tragic outcomes. Professor Giblin does my readers and me a great service, then, in describing some of the more inclusive political lessons that contemporary Zanzibari intellectuals draw from the history of Swahili cosmopolitanism. The parallels that he sees with my own views are not accidental, for although War of Words is based primarily on archival and published sources, it was shaped by years of residence in Zanzibar and Tanga. Some reviewers have taken issue with my decision (for pragmatic reasons) not to cite formal oral sources; one, misreading a paragraph in the Preface, even writes of my “disdain” for them. But readers need not be as shrewd and well-informed as Giblin to recognize how much my interpretations owe to the many conversations I had with Tanzanians; they need only read the Preface’s next paragraph, where I state how crucial my Zanzibari interlocutors were in shaping the book. Many of the Zanzibaris listed in the acknowledgements were in fact the subjects of formal interviews, but I learned more from informal conversations with friends, colleagues, and neighbors. It would be disingenuous not to note that many of those interlocutors expressed the kinds of exclusionary rhetoric that constitute much of my subject-matter or told me of having been targets of such abuse. But my thinking was influenced more profoundly by Tanzanians whose understandings of history and politics stemmed from the inclusive cosmopolitanism Giblin describes.
Their cosmopolitanism in fact took several, overlapping forms—if by cosmopolitanism we mean a mode of imagining community in ways that transcend the local. Pan-Africanism is one such form, and although in Zanzibar the ASP used it to justify a narrow form of racial nationalism, that should not blind us to the more inclusive, democratic forms it also has taken there. Such “left” Pan-Africanism—along the lines espoused by Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika and within the Charterist traditions of the African National Congress in South Africa—had been influential even within the ASP (party literature lionized such icons as Kwame Nkrumah and Paul Robeson) and was prevalent also in the left wing of the ZNP during that party’s early years. But the ASP leadership leaned more toward Garveyite racial pan-Africanism (to the extent that it had any ideological commitment at all), and the ZNP leftists were marginalized after 1961, with most joining Babu two years later, when he bolted to form Umma. Still, advocates of democratic, left Pan-Africanism, with its emphasis on forging global alliances against neocolonial capitalism, can still be found.
The socialist internationalism of Babu and his followers is another form of cosmopolitanism, one that overlaps with left Pan-Africanism. Unfortunately, it failed to inhibit many of Babu’s colleagues from being co-opted by Abeid Karume’s regime; a notorious example is Ali Sultan Issa, a former communist who is now a darling of foreign investors in Zanzibar’s resort sector (Burgess, 2009). But democratic socialist voices can still be heard. They include the eminent legal scholar Issa Shivji (2008), who has published a book that critiques the Zanzibar revolution and its legacy from a perspective combining Marxism and left Pan-Africanism. Shivji is one of the many Tanzanian intellectuals of his generation who were influenced by Babu, and his interpretation is based in part on conversations with former Umma comrades whom he knew in the 1970s, although neither they nor Babu himself escape Shivji’s critical eye. (Shivji’s critique of Babu’s revolutionary narratives resembles my own.) When I did the bulk of my research in the late 1990s, some of the comrades could still be found. One, the late Said Baes, was perhaps my most formative teacher of Zanzibar political history. Born in 1934, he was raised by his grandmother in a village near Fuoni, and as a young man worked in town as a stevedore, a compositor at some of the political newspapers, and a carpenter at the Public Works Department. When the political era began in the mid-1950s, he quizzed spokesmen for both main parties and read their literature, eventually falling under the spell of the charismatic Babu and joining ZNP. Two things appealed to him about the party. First was its emphasis on the multicultural nature of Zanzibar society, its opposition to the ASP’s racial nationalism; this, Mzee Said told me, echoed the values his grandmother had taught him as a boy. The other was Babu’s talk of social democracy. Said Baes’s political thought thus epitomized the kind described by Giblin, in which elements derived from transnational discourses of socialism and democracy became entangled with values derived from local understandings of Swahili cosmopolitanism. He maintained these hopeful convictions despite having twice been jailed by the postcolonial regime. Although he supported the main opposition party in the 1990s, he frequently voiced disapproval of its lapses into anti-mainlander chauvinism and its lack of socialist principles.
At the core of the most commonly celebrated visions of Swahili cosmopolitanism lie the transcendent values of Islam, especially those that enjoin the faithful to eschew all divisions of ethnicity and color; it was probably such values that inspired Said Baes’s grandmother. As Professor Anthony notes, part of my book recounts the irony of how even such universalizing rhetoric could be deployed to exclude, as when ZNP figures questioned the quality of mainlanders’ religion or Abeid Karume quoted Quran to prove that God had meant the races to remain separate. But many Zanzibaris would insist that such interpretations are a travesty of their faith. This can be seen in the case of one of 20th-century Zanzibar’s best-known religious scholars, Abdulla Saleh Farsy. He was born in 1912, the scion of a family of scholars and courtiers who were close to the 19th-century sultans; that is, his background was much like that of his contemporaries who crafted narratives about how Arab Muslims had brought civilization to the Dark Continent. But Farsy himself had little patience with such chauvinism. Touring Tanganyika in the early 1950s, he mocked his fellow-Zanzibaris for thinking that they were better Muslims than mainlanders, and he praised Muslims in Tanga and Morogoro for their ecumenicalism (Musa, 1986). (Tellingly, although he had had close ties to the ZNP leadership, Farsy survived the revolution with his position and local reputation intact.) My own most powerful lessons in the inclusionary values of universalist Islam came not from public figures like Farsy, however, but from friends whose faith is the basis of a firm belief in the oneness of humankind.
Such figures struggled to resolve a contradiction that lies at the heart of Swahili cosmopolitanism, as indeed at the heart of all civilizational discourses. On one hand, ideals such as Islamic universalism extend an appeal to all the world’s peoples. But because those ideals come from one place, their propagation implies a hierarchy: a set of historicist assumptions that ranges people across a gradient from absolute barbarians to those with deep ancestral roots in the civilized heartland. The contradiction is not uncommon, as can be seen by many studies of how the promise of Enlightenment ideals played out within modern Western empire. Zanzibari intellectuals are the heirs of a rich tradition that celebrated Arab settlers and their Swahili kin for introducing civilization to the African interior. Those motifs often translate into historical narratives that exaggerate Zanzibar’s power and influence. The sultanate ruled a vast area that reached all the way into the Congo basin, they assert, and such was the appeal of coastal civilization that (according to a familiar adage) when the flute played at Zanzibar, Africans danced at the lakes. Such narratives undergird a chauvinism toward mainlanders still common in the islands.
But inherited discourses are not prisons, and many Zanzibaris, public figures and ordinary citizens alike, seek to craft a more expansive interpretation of Swahili cosmopolitanism. Many do so with an urgency born of an historical awareness of the dangers created by the divisiveness that marked the run-up to independence, dangers some fear are being repeated during the current political crisis. One of these is the brilliant writer Abdulrazak Gurnah. Gurnah is the author of Admiring Silence (1996), a novel of memory and forgetting that addresses many of the issues covered in my own book, with an economy and elegance my lumbering tome could never attain. But a more telling example of Gurnah’s search for an embracing cosmopolitanism can be found in Paradise (1994), a historical novel, set at the end of the 19th century, whose characters’ dreams of a better world grow from deeply rooted coastal discourses and cosmologies. Throughout the novel, these characters use the language of civilization and barbarism to construct notions of human otherness, and hence notions of self. This culminates with a trading journey to the center of the continent. The caravan’s participants view the region as “the land of darkness” and “savages” and regard their own endeavors there as the noblest of callings, bringing commerce to people who “have not yet been brought to life by trade, and … live like paralysed insects” (Gurnah, 1994: 83, 119).
The parallels with Heart of Darkness, whose ivory traders also liked to think of themselves as emissaries of light, are intentional. But whereas Conrad’s travelers heard only grunts, Gurnah’s travelers, at one crucial moment, hear the barbarians speak. This happens just beyond the lakes, a region whose people supposedly dance to Zanzibar’s tune, but who in fact, in the words of an angry chief, regard the Zanzibaris as bearers of evil and hunters of human flesh (Gurnah, 1994: 160–62). “We did not ask you to come,” the chief says, and “have no welcome for you.”
… we will not wait until you have made slaves of us and swallowed up our world. When your like first came to this land you were hungry and naked, and we fed you. Some of them were ill and we cared for them until they were well. Then you lied to us and cheated us … [Do] you think we are beasts that we should go on accepting treatment like that? (Gurnah, 1994: 160)
This furious tirade momentarily intrudes on the Zanzibaris’ complacence, providing a glimpse of what lies on the other side of their civilized refinement.
By thus flashing a light on the chief’s perspective, Gurnah might be said to be subverting the Swahili cosmopolitanism he himself is heir to. But he might equally be said to be engaged in expanding it. I suspect that Gurnah would tell us that the impetus to imagine the chief’s perspective grew out of his upbringing in Zanzibar: a place that, on reflection, made me learn how necessary it is to make up a story for yourself, because your neighbour has another story, and the other community has another story, and that’s what I was trying to write about in many of my books. (BBC 2009)
Those other tales might be tidied up to serve the tellers’ self-images (such tidying-up is a central theme of Admiring Silence). But a thoughtful citizen of the world, Gurnah seems to say, will make the effort to understand them all.