Abstract
Among the pleasures of Jonathon Glassman’s War of Words, War of Stones is its “Conclusion and Epilogue: Remaking Race.” It eloquently recapitulates the book’s arguments and carries them forward from the end of Zanzibar’s colonial period in 1963 to the present. With the thoughtfulness, erudition, and moral gravity that distinguish the entire book, Professor Glassman takes up postcolonial developments beginning with the “revolution” of 1964. The revolution overthrew the sultanate of the Omani Busaidi dynasty. It was followed swiftly by the incorporation of Zanzibar into the United Republic of Tanzania. Another landmark development was the commencement of multiparty politics in 1992. Since that time, Zanzibar has witnessed a succession of bitterly contested and violence-marred elections, lengthy detention of opposition activists, and repeated but ultimately futile efforts to create power-sharing arrangements. The more recent of these arrangements disintegrated with the onset of prolonged partisan controversy before and after the national election of October 2015. In Zanzibar as well as on Tanzania’s mainland, voting proceeded in relative calm that surprised many citizens who had anticipated disorder. On the mainland, a new president of the United Republic, members of national parliament, and local officials were duly elected. But in the islands, the Zanzibar Electoral Commission annulled the polls for Zanzibar’s president, House of Representatives, and local councilors, citing the inability of the electoral commissioners to agree to sanction the results. Amid charges of widespread irregularities at polling places, the primary opposition party, the Civic United Front (CUF), charged that the Electoral Commission, which was dominated by the ruling party, annulled the vote because CUF had in fact won the presidency. The Electoral Commission declared that the election would by re-run on 20 March 2016, but CUF boycotted the re-run and the resulting meager turnout produced an overwhelming victory of the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), or Party of the Revolution.
These recent events re-emphasize the salience of Professor Glassman’s arguments. Campaigning and post-election controversy obviously sharpened animosity between the ruling party and the opposition, leading not only to sporadic violence but also to resurgence of the racialized nativism described by War of Words. As Professor Glassman demonstrates, such racialized identities constantly change in response to events and influences. In their most recent iterations, again as Professor Glassman points out, they are inflected by widespread dislike not only for the Tanzanian union but with a variety of interventions and influences from the mainland. They are also affected by the conviction, inspired by global as well as local events, that on Zanzibar as elsewhere Muslims have been forced into a defensive struggle to preserve their faith and moral perception of the world.
The intensity of Zanzibar’s political animosities undoubtedly comes as a surprise to visitors expecting a tranquil tropical island paradise. It is likely also to surprise a reader who surveys recent scholarly studies of Zanzibar while deciding to save War of Words, War of Stones for last. For by contrast with much of the recent scholarship, Professor Glassman’s heavy emphasis on conflict, and indeed outright hatred, is exceptional. The broader trend in Zanzibari studies—whose rigor, nuance, and innovative openness to new perspectives have been as refreshing as Zanzibar’s sea breeze—casts Zanzibar as a tolerant and highly cosmopolitan social milieu. For an historical example of permeability of social boundaries, one may consider the work of Elisabeth McMahon on the abolition of slavery. She shows that, as both social practice and source of moral obligation, kinship opened up to former slaves opportunities to form solidarities both with fellow survivors of slavery and former masters. While these new relationships were no guarantee of equality, for former slaves they did widen access to material and social resources. In a very different context, the patient linguistic ethnography of Katrina Thompson reveals surprising tolerance for sexual diversity. She describes idioms and conversational forms in Kiswahili that provide safe space, free of opprobrium and condemnation, where Zanzibaris can speak of sexual desires that social convention condemns as transgressive.
Scholars have also shown that an important inspiration to openness in Zanzibar was Islam. Inclusiveness, their work indicates, has been enhanced by the location of Zanzibar’s Muslims within wide regional and global currents of Islamic education and practices. Anne Bang, for example, explores Zanzibar’s place within networks of Sufi scholarship that radiate outward from Yemen throughout the western Indian Ocean. Amal Ghazal has emphasized that an overlapping Ibadi network linking Zanzibar with Oman and the North African Maghreb encouraged Islamic solidarity and resisted sectarianism. For Elke Stockreiter, these influences gave colonial Zanzibar a supple tradition of Islamic jurisprudence that provided justice not merely to elites but also to individuals of inferior status, including women and former slaves. None of these authors goes anywhere near so far as the historian Abdul Sheriff, however, in making a case for cosmopolitanism as Zanzibar’s defining quality. He acknowledges a wider range of influences than do many scholars who speak of Zanzibar in cosmopolitan terms. He is mindful not only that its long integration into Indian Ocean circuits of trade exposed Zanzibar to Arab and Islamic influences but also considers currents of influence from pre-Islamic Persia and the East African mainland. They converged on Zanzibar, he believes, to create a diverse and outward-looking culture. 1
War of Words, War of Stones does not reject these images of cosmopolitanism. Professor Glassman recognizes the “obvious cosmopolitanism of Swahili culture” (p. 300). Nevertheless, War of Words stands as an outlier within the recent historical scholarship on Zanzibar, for its story is about diversity not as source of tolerance, openness, and social permeability, but rather of animosity, hatred, and exclusionary identities. His mirror-image of cosmopolitanism leads us to wonder whether scholarly construction of cosmopolitanism inevitably involves the elision of exclusion and conflict. His work possesses powerful capacity for troubling visions of cosmopolitanism because he is highly attentive to change and social process. He knows that categories of social difference are in a state of continual transition, and he is able to specify the activities which change them. “Race endures,” he argues, “not by persisting but by being constantly made anew” (p. 287). “Racial fears have not simply ‘persisted’,” he argues in another passage, [but] “were remade … in part through the habits of everyday life, but also by the willed actions … of intellectuals and politicians” (p. 298).
Professor Glassman reveals a vital aspect of this process of continually remaking exclusionary categories and animosities in saying that “racial rhetoric is unlikely to exert a grip on … ordinary people unless it resonates with some of the deeply rooted grammars of thought that pervade their cultural environment” (p. 287). Here, he discovers a form of intellectual creativity which, I believe, not only reproduces racialized nativism but also integrates into Zanzibari culture a variety of influences, including those which inspire cosmopolitanism. It is a creativity which finds cultural convergences and meeting points. It is also a creativity, I suggest in my remaining paragraphs, which is also involved in the search by Zanzibaris for alternatives to racism and nativism.
Professor Glassman’s epilogue raises the question of whether the racialized conception of difference which dominates so much of Zanzibar’s political life is hegemonic. Speaking of the situation that has prevailed throughout the period of multiparty politics, Professor Glassman asserts that the opposition’s narrow nativism … demonstrates that the discourse of African racial nationalism has become hegemonic in the precise sense … [by shaping] the resistance that it arouses … Zanzibar’s rulers have justified themselves with the language of racial nativism, claiming that their authority stemmed from having overthrown an alien region … Their opponents all too often respond with a limited negation, not by challenging the terms of nativist discourse but by merely transmuting them, redefining who the aliens are. (p. 299)
Here, Professor Glassman carefully leaves space for political responses which are not framed by racism or nativism, and it is this space that I wish to explore now. As I do so, I suggest that among the many globalized currents of thought that influence Zanzibari political life is concern for universal human rights and political freedoms, including freedom of the press.
These concerns have given some Zanzibari intellectuals a footing outside the hegemonic bounds of nativism. Taking a standpoint outside the prevailing paradigm may provide a view of Zanzibari nativism and racism which resembles that of Professor Glassman. An example of a Zanzibari political commentator who has achieved this perspective is Ahmed Rajab. We can see a resemblance with Professor Glassman in an essay which Ahmed Rajab (2012) published in the Dar es Salaam political weekly, Raia Mwema, shortly after serious rioting in Zanzibar in June 2012 that followed intense debate over proposed constitutional change.
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At issue was the question of whether the goal of constitutional change ought to be the increased autonomy for Zanzibar within the Tanzanian union or outright independence. The national government blamed the unrest on an organization named Uamsho, or “Awakening,” that sought increased autonomy for Zanzibar. Rajab focused on the racialized terms in which pundits as well as politicians made this charge. One commentator wrote about “Arabs” and “black people,” observed Rajab (2012): as if those who are associated with Arab-ness are of one color completely different from that of Zanzibaris who don’t have Arab ancestry. This same writer was frightened by the gentle countenance of Sheikh Farid Hadi Ahmed, one of the principal leaders of Uamsho. What this writer was trying to say was that because Sheikh Farid has Arab ancestry, Uamsho wishes to bring back the [Omani] Sultanate … [This] … is dangerous “analysis” that resembles accounts of the Hutu of Rwanda before the genocide of 1994.
Rajab (2012) then asserted that such racialized and divisive views have been encouraged by successive generations of politicians since 1964 in order to make the union of Zanzibar and Tanganyika union appear indispensable. In the most controversial part of his essay (it was the focal point of many critical online readers’ responses), Rajab argued that Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere, took the lead in claiming that, should the moderating influence of the United Republic be withdrawn, Zanzibar would descend into chaos. “If Zanzibar separates from Tanganyika,” Rajab (2012) wrote, recalling the argument of Nyerere, Zanzibaris will practice discrimination between Pembans and the people of Unguja [as War of Words explains, residents of the island of Pemba are often assumed to be Arabs, while residents of Zanzibar’s other main island, Unguja, are assumed to be Africans] and eventually they will go so far as to pry into each other’s ancestry.
Pundits on the mainland who continually reiterate Nyerere’s view, Rajab (2012) continued, wish to “frighten and divide Zanzibaris.”
Readers’ responses to Ahmed Rajab on the Raia Mwema website lend support to Professor Glassman’s view of the hegemonic tendency in racialized nativism. Many readers attacked Rajab by suggesting that his views of Nyerere and union were perverted by his own Arab-ness and Islamic faith. What I find more hopeful and interesting, however, is the similarity between the views of Rajab, a veteran of Zanzibar’s political battles, and Professor Glassman. Like Professor Glassman, Ahmed Rajab (2012) also realizes that “deeply rooted grammars of thought” involving ancestry and complexion as markers of essentialized identities inform the categorical difference between “Arabs” and “Africans.” Also like Professor Glassman, he recognizes that these essentialisms inspire the assumption that racialized identity determines political loyalties (thus, today’s Zanzibari “Arabs” are said to desire the return of the Omani sultanate). Yet Rajab also understands, just as does Professor Glassman, that these essentialized identities are continually and consciously being reshaped by politicians, pundits, scholars, and governments in response to changing contexts. Thus, in recent years, as Ahmed Rajab (2012) argues, the fraught politics of Tanzania’s union have exerted profound influence on racialized difference in Zanzibar. Defenders of union argue that only the union prevents Zanzibar’s descent into Rwanda-like catastrophe, while opponents of union blame it for exposing Zanzibar to the corrupting and destabilizing influence of the mainland.
Another prominent Zanzibari political commentator is Jabir Idrissa. He has regularly tested the limits of press freedom with articles sharply critical of the Zanzibari and union governments. As a result, he has repeatedly suffered censorship, having been briefly prohibited from practicing journalism by the government of Zanzibar in 2005, then in 2012 losing his platform when the government suspended the Dar es Salaam weekly, Mwanahalisi. Later he became an editor of another political weekly, Mawio, which was banned permanently by government in January 2016, apparently because it stated that the opposition had won the presidency of Zanzibar in the October 2015 election (I have not seen the issue of Mawio which led to its suspension).
Here, I offer a few observations on essays by Jabir Idrissa published in July and August, 2015, at a time when Tanzania was passing through unprecedented political drama. At this time, the presumptive presidential candidate of the ruling party, the CCM, was denied the nomination as the result of backroom dealing by the incumbent president. He then crossed over to the opposition, won its presidential nomination, and induced many CCM notables to follow him into opposition. During this time of turbulence, Jabir Idrissa wrote passionately from Zanzibar, focusing on developments which, in his view, demonstrated the ruling party’s desire to subvert the coming election in Zanzibar. In particular, he denounced gerrymandering and manipulation of voter registration, particularly through intimidation by police and security forces of residents of predominantly opposition neighborhoods who wished to register.
A key characteristic of Jabir Idrissa’s commentary is the way in which he situates himself as a born and bred Zanzibari. Indeed, much of his authority as a commentator comes from his intimate knowledge of Zanzibari life and politics. In his columns, he frequently alludes to the vocabulary, cadences, and pronunciations of Kiswahili in Zanzibar. Similarly, he makes no secret of his identity as a Muslim who is deeply rooted in Zanzibar’s distinctive Islamic culture. Surely this writing strategy is itself a response to the islands’ deeply divisive political culture in which the distinction between insider and outsider is critical.
The moral conventions of that culture inform his political views and frequently inspire ferocious attacks on government actions which, in his view, threaten its moral integrity. “What kind of soldier” (Idrissa, 2015a), he wondered in mid-July 2015, covers his face while carrying a weapon and disturbs youth while they are quietly waiting at a mosque for the hour of prayer? … What kind of soldier shoves a woman like he’s fighting with a bouncer? Who strips and a woman naked and rapes her in a playing field during this during this holy month of Ramadan?
At first sight, such comments might seem to reflect the nativism that concerns Professor Glassman. But in fact exclusionary nativism is not Jabir Idrissa’s position. In the same essay, he echoes South Africa’s Freedom Charter in saying that “while Zanzibar has its indigenous people, it is the country of all who live in it” (Idrissa, 2015a). Yet, he couples that assertion with the charge that government leaders of Zanzibar “are not true believers.” He is in fact doing the work, described by Professor Glassman, of grafting globalized conceptions of freedom and constitutional democracy onto a “deeply rooted grammar” of honor, respectability, and piety. Referring to notorious and incendiary remarks made by a ruling party parliamentarian in 2014, Jabir Idrissa (2015a) wonders, they who glorify themselves and worship ignorance by saying that, “the government of Zanzibar will never be taken with ballots, those who wish to do so will have to make a revolution”—do they not worship the work of the devil, pride, deception and a culture of corruption? (p. 15)
Here is a Zanzibari intellectual doing the work of combining deep indigenous cultural grammar and a global culture of democratic rights.
While Jabir Idrissa was concerned during this troubled period with principled defense of democratic rights, he was also worried about practical matters of electoral procedure, for he understands good governance to be a safeguard of voters’ rights. In late July, he expressed grave doubt that the election of October would be free and fair. Past precedent during the period of multiparty politics was one source of his worry. “Threats, disorder, discrimination and parachuting lots of voters [into local constituencies] are matters that have often overshadowed voting … even in the recent period of democracy-building such complaints have been heard” (Idrissa 2015b). Another source of concern, in his view, was widespread violation of proper electoral practices. “An election is a process,” he pointed out, that includes “registering voters, nominating candidates and other matters … For an election to be recognized as having been free, fair and transparent, everything depends on all the steps that precede the announcement of results” (Idrissa 2015b). He cited reports from numerous constituencies that called into question the propriety and fairness of the electoral process: [S]ometimes the registration of voters is conducted with animosity, so that thousands and thousands of voters are denied their opportunity [to register} … During registration voters encountered threats and even attacks on people at the registration stations and in the streets. Those who were suspected of these acts were government soldiers wearing civilian clothes … they appeared to be accompanied openly by police. (Mawio, July 23–29, 2015, p. 15) (Idrissa 2015c)
Fundamental human rights as well as fair electoral process are violated, argued Jabir Idrissa in other columns, because the ruling party clings to power through nepotism, corruption, and misuse of the powers of state. Thus, he applied to the CCM-dominated government of Zanzibar emerging global standards of good governance. “Chief Secretaries, executive officers and directors in every department are still chosen,” he declared, “by prioritizing political interests” (Idrissa 2015d: 15) (Idrissa, 2015a: 15). “People don’t realize,” he declared provocatively, that “Tanzanians have only one enemy—this party” (Idrissa, 2015b: 15). The main opposition party, CUF, he characterized as the “only hope for pushing forward real change needed to build democracy in Zanzibar” (Idrissa 2015d: 15) (Idrissa, 2015c: 15).
I am not endorsing here Jabir Idrissa’s characterization of either of these parties. Over the months since he wrote these essays many things have happened that raise doubts about these judgments of both parties. What I have tried to show here, however, is that the writing of Zanzibari intellectuals such as Ahmed Rajab and Jabir Idrissa reveals the limits of the hegemony of Zanzibar’s racialized nativisms. We can see that some Zanzibari commentators are able to position themselves outside their hegemonic reach. Having achieved ironic distance from them, they can deconstruct the ways in which such racialized nativisms are reproduced. They then create new ways of merging global discourses and practices of human rights, democracy, meritocracy, and good government with Zanzibar’s “deeply rooted grammars.” In this way, they are practicing the intellectual and social creativity that lies at the heart of Professor Glassman’s book.