Slower than a massacre: The multiple sources of racial thought in colonial Africa

American Historical Review

Volumn 109, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 720-754

  Glassman, Jonathon ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 7944220528     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/530553     Document Type: Review

References (321)

1. A. W. Norris, "Pride of Race," Normal Magazine 4, no. 4 (April 1930): 30-33. The magazine was later renamed Mazungumzo ya Walimu, hereafter Maz.
2. Maz., n.s. 1, no. 3 (May 1957): 14.
3. Zanzibar consists of two main islands, Zanzibar (or Unguja) and Pemba. From 1890 to December 1963, it was a British protectorate, its official head of state chosen from the Omani Arab dynasty that had established the sultanate early in the nineteenth century. Shortly after independence, the sultan was overthrown by forces loyal to the Afro-Shirazi Party. In April 1964, Zanzibar and the mainland nation of Tanganyika united to form the United Republic of Tanzania.
4. To describe the revolution in this way is to take a stand on an issue that has aroused much contention. The extent of racial violence in 1964 is undeniable, yet several authors have argued that "so-called ethnic divisions" merely masked the fundamental fact that the coup was "not an ethnic, but a social revolution." This distinction between "ethnic" and "social" phenomena is, of course, false. I fully endorse these authors' contention that racial identities are mere "images people have of themselves and others." But the events of 1957-1964 are eloquent testimony to the impact such images can have on people's thoughts and actions, and it is imperative that the historian try to account for how they were constructed. Quotes are from L. Rey, "The Revolution in Zanzibar," in Lionel Cliffe and John Saul, eds., Socialism in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam, 1972), 1: 30;
5. and (for "images") Abdul Sheriff, "A Materialist Approach to Zanzibar's History," in A. Sheriff and Ed Ferguson, eds., Zanzibar under Colonial Rule (London, 1991), 7.
6. For a forceful statement, see Michael Lofchie, "Zanzibar," in James Coleman and Carl Rosberg, eds., Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1964), 506.
7. The quoted phrase is from Clifford Geertz, "The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States," in Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States (New York, 1963).
8. Prominent examples of Western perceptions of the Zanzibar violence include V. S. Naipaul's 1979 novel, A Bend in the River,
9. and Gualtiero Jacopetti's 1966 film, Africa Addio.
10. I will consider the African literature below. The classic argument for South Asia is Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi, 1990);
11. for broad critiques, see Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict (Chicago, 1996), 12-24;
12. C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi, 1998);
13. Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Historical Approaches to Communalism: Perspectives from Western India," in Peter Robb, ed., Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History (Delhi, 1993), 247-66.
14. See the suggestive comments in Michael Chege, "Africa's Murderous Professors," The National Interest 46 (Winter 1996);
15. also Gyanendra Pandey, "In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today," Representations 37 (1992): 27-55.
16. Allowing for the oversimplification necessary in summing up a complex and nuanced work, this stands as a fair representation of the argument in Michael Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965).
17. Anthony Clayton criticizes Lofchie for underestimating the divisiveness of ZNP rhetoric; his own account of the Time of Politics serves as a useful corrective: The Zanzibar Revolution and Its Aftermath (London, 1981), 37-49.
18. Lofchie's study remains the standard account of the islands' political history, although subsequent authors have emphasized more the colonial derivation of Zanzibari racial thought: for example, Alamin Mazrui and Ibrahim Noor Shariff, The Swahili: Idiom and Identity of an African People (Trenton, N.J., 1994);
19. Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar (Athens, Ohio, 2001).
20. For a fuller discussion of the ASP's racial rhetoric, see Jonathon Glassman, "Sorting Out the Tribes: The Creation of Racial Identities in Colonial Zanzibar's Newspaper Wars," Journal of African History 41 (2000): 395-428.
21. Ann Laura Stoler, "Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth," Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 183-206, quotes from 185.
22. Loïc Wacquant, "For an Analytic of Racial Domination," Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 221-34, quote from 222.
23. René Lemarchand, "Revolutionary Phenomena in Stratified Societies: Rwanda and Zanzibar," Civilisations 5, no. 1 (1968);
24. Catharine Newbury, "Colonialism, Ethnicity and Rural Political Protest: Rwanda and Zanzibar in Comparative Perspective," Comparative Politics 15 (1983): 253-80.
25. The concept is often associated with the sociologist Michael Banton, The Idea of Race (London, 1977); Jean-Pierre Chrétien makes use of it in his studies of Rwandan intellectual history, some of which are cited below.
26. Villia Jefremovas observes that most authors neglect the role of elite indigenous intellectuals: "Treacherous Waters: The Politics of History and the Politics of Genocide in Rwanda and Burundi," Africa 70, no. 2 (2000): 298-308.
27. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, N.J., 2001). This aspect of Mamdani's interpretation contradicts his avowed determination to go beyond analyses that focus on state agency. (It also contradicts his condemnation of "the search for origins" as "the original and persistent sin of Western history writing" about Africa [50].) Yet some of the literature that Mamdani claims to transcend demonstrates the important role played by Rwandan intellectuals in crafting racial myths.
28. Examples include Jan Vansina, L'évolution du royaume Rwanda des origines à 1900 (1962; rpt. edn., Brussels, 2000);
29. Claudine Vidal, Sociologie des passions: Rwanda, Côte d'Ivoire (Paris, 1991), 45-61;
30. Jean-Pierre Chrétien, "Hutu et Tutsi au Rwanda et au Burundi," in Jean-Loup Amselle and Elikia M'Bokolo, eds., Au coeur de l'ethnie: Ethnies, tribalisme et état en Afrique (Paris, 1985), esp. 146-50;
31. René Lemarchand, Ethnicity as Myth: The View from Central Africa (Copenhagen, 1999). This literature renders implausible any suggestion that such intellectuals merely parroted their European teachers. Although racialization was indeed largely a product of the colonial era, the historical record prompts a leading authority to "reject decisively the judgment of those who attribute the distinction between Tutsi and Hutu, and their mutual hostility, to the ideas and actions of colonial masters."
32. Jan Vansina, Le Rwanda ancien: Le royaume nyiginya (Paris, 2001), 177.
33. Robert Miles, Racism (London, 1989).
34. For a critique of the continued tendency to inflate race into a sociological category, see Mara Loveman, "Is 'Race' Essential?" American Sociological Review 64, no. 6 (1999): 861-98. Understanding race as a mode of thought has become all the more prevalent as scientists have demolished lingering notions that racial boundaries have any biological significance, yet it long predates those advances.
35. It informed Hannah Arendt's influential concept of "race- thinking" (The Origins of Totalitarianism [new edn., New York, 1973; orig. 1951]), and can be found in Max Weber, who did not consider race or ethnicity to be sociological categories.
36. Weber, Economy and Society, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds. (New York, 1968), 1: 385-98;
37. Ernst Moritz Manasse, "Max Weber on Race," Social Research 14 (1947): 191-221.
38. For a consensus that race be regarded as "doctrine," see Michael Banton, "The Concept of Racism," in Sami Zubaida, ed., Race and Racialism (London, 1970), 17-34.
39. Miles, Racism, prefers the word "ideology." Arendt's idea of "race-thinking" is more flexible, but she, too, treated it as specific to Western thought.
40. Nevertheless, folk racisms are usually regarded as distinct from the real thing, some authors simply refusing to consider them manifestations of racial thought, others assuming that popular notions arose as pale reflections of ideas whose origins lay in more erudite circles. Examples of the first approach include Banton, "Concept of Racism";
41. of the second, Eric Wolf, "Perilous Ideas: Race, Culture, People," Current Anthropology 35, no. 1 (1994);
42. and K. Anthony Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections," in Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 30-105.
43. For an incisive discussion of "the continual barter between folk and analytical notions," see Wacquant, "For an Analytic of Racial Domination."
44. Etienne Balibar, "Is There a 'Neo-Racism'?" in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Chris Turner, trans. (London, 1991), 21.
45. This literature first arose in response to the arguments of Banton and other British sociologists that the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Tory politicians in the postcolonial UK could not properly be deemed "racism." Banton, Idea of Race, chap. 9;
46. Martin Barker, The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe (London, 1981).
47. Stoler, "Racial Histories."
48. Raciology was more about explaining difference than about ranking, and some raciologists considered themselves anti-racists, that is, politically opposed to ranking. For examples, E. W. Count, ed., This Is Race (New York, 1950);
49. Benoit Massin, "From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and 'Modern Race Theories' in Wilhelmine Germany," in George W. Stocking, ed., Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (Madison, Wis., 1996), 79-154.
50. Balibar, "Is There a 'Neo-Racism'?" 23. The term "cultural monads" is from Wolf, "Perilous Ideas."
51. Classic accounts include Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 (Madison, Wis., 1964);
52. George W. Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago, 1982).
53. Friedrich Nietzsche, Toward a Genealogy of Morals, section 13.
54. Stoler, "Racial Histories."
55. An example is Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, 1996). The first half of Hannaford's book is an erudite exercise in correcting for the opposite error, that is, the assumption through backward induction that an act of apparent racism from the pre-modern past was the product of raciological doctrines.
56. John Rex, "The Concept of Race in Sociological Theory," in Zubaida, Race and Racialism, 39.
57. For similar arguments, see Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Construction of Peoplehood," in Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 71-85;
58. Roger Sanjek, "The Enduring Inequalities of Race," in Steven Gregory and R. Sanjek, eds., Race (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994), 1-17;
59. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, "The Essential Social Fact of Race," American Sociological Review 64, no. 6 (1999): 899-906;
60. Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (New York, 2001).
61. Banton, Idea of Race.
62. Such is the view of Banton, Idea of Race, despite his skepticism that Western expansion caused the emergence of racial thought.
63. These distinctions are developed further by Anthony Appiah, from whom I have derived some of my language: In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford, 1992);
64. and "Racisms," in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis, 1990), 3-17. (Appiah writes of "racialism" rather than "racial thought.")
65. These comments do not refer to the French Enlightenment concept of civilisation, which, strictly speaking, included the embrace of universal (that is, Western) reason. But the eighteenth-century French neologism was coined to express more general concepts that long predated (and outlived) it, few of which were peculiar to the modern West. Lucien Febvre, "Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas," in A New Kind of History, Peter Burke, ed. (London, 1973), 219-57.
66. China is the best-known example, for which see Frank Dikötter, "Group Definition and the Idea of Race in Modern China," Ethnic and Racial Studies 13, no. 3 (1990).
67. Many of the concepts that were to become racialized in colonial Rwanda had their origins in earlier distinctions of boorishness and urbanity: Vansina, Rwanda ancien, 172-77;
68. David Newbury, "'Bunyabungo': The Western Rwandan Frontier, c. 1750-1850," in Igor Kopytoff, ed., The African Frontier (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), 164-92.
69. Such distinctions were of ancient standing in Bantu-speaking central Africa: for example, John Thornton, "Mbanza Kongo/Sao Salvador: Kongo's Holy City," in David M. Anderson and Richard Rathbone, eds., Africa's Urban Past (Portsmouth, N.H., 2000), 67;
70. Jan Vansina, The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples (Madison, Wis., 1978).
71. Examples from southern Africa include the contrast between cannibalism and order, and the harsh attitudes harbored toward Khoi and Basarwa hunters and gatherers by their neighbors: Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 212-13;
72. Robert J. Gordon, The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass (Boulder, Colo., 1992), 31-32;
73. John Comaroff, "Of Totemism and Ethnicity," in John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, Colo., 1992), 49-67.
74. Even those whom state dwellers scorned as stateless " barbarians" could harbor their own values of civilization, which might become hegemonic over their immediate neighbors; this irony is illustrated by the pastoralist Maa-speaking "sections" that came to dominate East Africa's Central Rift Valley in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Thomas Spear and Richard Waller, eds., Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa (London, 1993).
75. A striking parallel to the Zanzibar case involves the so-called originaires of French West Africa, whose disdain for certain of their fellow Africans was rooted in concepts of civilization and boorishness that played both on precolonial, Islamic standards and those adopted from French rulers: Rebecca Shereikis, "From Law to Custom: The Shifting Legal Status of Muslim originaires in Kayes and Medine," Journal of African History 42 (2001): 261-83.
76. Igor Kopytoff, "The Internal African Frontier: The Making of African Political Culture," in Kopytoff, African Frontier, esp. 49-50, 56-57. Kopytoff notes that discourses of civilization and barbarism shaped the competing claims of peoples who met at the continent's many internal frontiers.
77. A narrower understanding of "race," as a form of thought that categorizes humanity according to objectively existing somatic traits such as skin color, is historically and conceptually untenable: John Szwed, "Race and the Embodiment of Culture," Ethnicity 2 (1975): 19-33;
78. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity"; Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, Calif., 1985).
79. Again, these views were anticipated by Weber, who stressed the degree to which perceptions of group physical differences are culturally determined and therefore as subjective as other perceptions of common ethnic descent. Economy and Society, 2: 392.
80. Miles, Racism, 42-44;
81. Saul Dubow, "Ethnic Euphemisms and Racial Echoes," Journal of Southern African Studies 20 (1994): 355-70;
82. Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge, 1992), esp. 296-302.
83. As Barkan observes, the trend began between the wars. Similar trends can be found in the history of the French word ethnie, which, for example, was first applied to Rwanda only in the early 1960s. Dominique Franche, "Généalogie du génocide rwandais: Hutu et Tutsi; Gaulois et Francs?" Les temps modernes 582 (1995): 10;
84. Claudine Vidal, "Le génocide des Rwandais tutsi et l'usage public de l'histoire," Cahiers d'études africaines 38, no. 150-52 (1998): 660.
85. Nowadays, a belief in such "cultural monads" is typically associated with functionalist anthropology and is often criticized as such. But it also formed a central component of classic racial thought and was among the targets of Franz Boas's famous critiques of the latter. Stocking, Race, Culture;
86. Stocking, Volksgeist;
87. Wolf, "Perilous Ideas."
88. An explicit emphasis on the blood relationship is not incompatible with an awareness that the relationship is a metaphor for something else. Sati al-Husri, a nationalist intellectual active in Baghdad and Cairo and a major influence throughout the Arab world, including among the Zanzibari intellectuals discussed below, recognized that common descent was merely a metaphor, yet he insisted that it was a useful metaphor for forging national unity. Sati al-Husri, "The Historical Factor in the Formation of Nationalism," in Kemal Karpat, ed., Political and Social Thought in the Contemporary Middle East, rev. edn. (New York, 1982), 39-43.
89. This abbreviated discussion describes views held by a variety of authors, many of which were anticipated by Weber. The phrase "aura of descent" is from Ronald Cohen, "Ethnicity: Problem and Focus in Anthropology," Annual Review of Anthropology 7 (1978): 379-403.
90. Discussions relevant to the metaphor of descent also include Charles Keyes, "Towards a New Formulation of the Concept of Ethnic Group," Ethnicity 3 (1976): 202-13;
91. Eric Voegelin, "The Growth of the Race Idea," Review of Politics 2 (1940): 283-317; and various sources already cited.
92. For an insightful discussion of the ambiguity of distinctions between race, nation, and ethnicity, see Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm Chapman, History and Ethnicity (London, 1989), 1-21.
93. Religious ethnicities would seem at first glance to be an exception to this argument. Yet in fact the notion of religious identity as an act of choice was "a delayed result of the Reformation and a direct result of the Enlightenment... Outside the West, religion remained an ascriptive affiliation" (Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 50).
94. For a discussion of the neo-conservative position, see Sanjek, "Enduring Inequalities," 8-9.
95. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, uses this phrase to describe similarities between idioms of kinship and ethnicity.
96. We may define nationalism as any political philosophy based on the assumption that each of the mutually exclusive ethnic groups into which humanity is presumably divided ought "naturally" to control its own state. This gloss is derived chiefly from Weber, "The Nation," in From Max Weber, H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. (London, 1948).
97. Tonkin et al. observe that "it is no more than a tautology to say that nations have ethnic origins" (History and Ethnicity, 18)-provided, of course, that one remember that ethnic communities are no less "imagined" than nations.
98. Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995);
99. A. M. Alonso, "The Politics of Space, Time and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism and Ethnicity," Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 379-405;
100. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. edn. (London, 1991). This is not to say that national thought was taken for granted at all levels of colonial society, as has been made clear by historians working on popular politics in Africa and South Asia.
101. As Eric Hobsbawm has written, the criteria are "fuzzy": Nations and Nationalism since 1789: Programme, Myth, Reality (1990; Cambridge, 1992), 6.
102. For an unusually strong rejection of the search for a consistent definition, see Valery Tishkov, "Forget the 'Nation': Post-Nationalist Understandings of Nationalism," Ethnic and Racial Studies 23 (2000): 625-50.
103. Authors who have recognized this include Etienne Balibar, "Racism and Nationalism," in Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 37-67;
104. Zygmunt Bauman, "Soil, Blood and Identity," Sociological Review 40 (1992): 675-701;
105. Carole Nagengast, "Violence, Terror and the Crisis of the State," Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 109-36;
106. George M. Frederickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), 77-97.
107. For a splendid historical analysis that makes use of this insight, see James R. Brennan, "Nation, Race and Urbanization in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 1916-1976" (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2002).
108. See the works on Rwanda already cited. Other examples include Patrick Harries, "Exclusion, Classification and Internal Colonialism: The Emergence of Ethnicity among the Tsonga-Speakers of South Africa," in Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 82-117;
109. Fair, Pastimes and Politics;
110. Mazrui and Shariff, The Swahili;
111. Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya (Berkeley, 1974), 198-206.
112. An influential statement dismissed ethnic thought as "false consciousness": Archie Mafeje, "The Ideology of 'Tribalism,'" Journal of Modern African Studies 9, no. 2 (1971): 253-61.
113. For an "internal critique" of this position, see Terence Ranger, "The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa," in Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan, eds., Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth Century Africa (London, 1993).
114. Leroy Vail, "Introduction: Ethnicity in Southern African History," in Vail, Creation of Tribalism, 1-19. Vail's essay has been taken as something of a manifesto by subsequent scholars who call their approach "constructivist," thus seeking to distinguish themselves both from those who interpret ethnic identities as the residue of some "primordial" essence and from more straightforward "instrumentalists" such as those mentioned in the preceding footnote. Their insistence that ethnic identities are created historically should be axiomatic, and makes sense only in contrast to a caricature of scholars they deem "primordialists," few of whom, in fact, argued that ethnicity was beyond history. When it comes to charting the historical processes that gave rise to ethnic identities, most "constructivists" remain instrumentalist in their stress on the demands of the colonial political economy and their neglect of inherited intellectual content. They also maintain a strict (and undefined) distinction between ethnicity and nation.
115. These points emerge from a recent statement of the " constructivist" consensus: Paris Yeros, ed., Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa: Constructivist Reflections and Contemporary Politics (London, 1999), and from a broad reading of the literature on African ethnicity.
116. Walker Connor, "Beyond Reason: The Nature of the Ethnonational Bond," Ethnic and Racial Studies 16, no. 3 (1993): 373-88.
117. Some of my language, and much of my argument, is derived from M. Crawford Young, "Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Class in Africa: A Retrospective," Cahiers d'études africaines 26, no. 103 (1986): 421-95. Young's comments were directed specifically toward literature on nationalist intellectuals, but they are applicable more generally.
118. Examples include Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison, Wis., 1990);
119. John Lonsdale, "The Moral Economy of Mau Mau," in Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa; Book Two: Violence and Ethnicity (London, 1992), 265-504;
120. Paul La Hausse, Restless Identities: Signatures of Nationalism, Zulu Ethnicity, and History in the Lives of Petros Lamula (c. 1881-1948) and Lymon Maling (1889-c. 1936) (Pietermaritzburg, 2000);
121. David Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (Berkeley, Calif., 1985);
122. John Peel, "The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis," in Tonkin, History and Ethnicity, 198-215.
123. See the discussion in Ranger, "Invention of Tradition Revisited."
124. The phrase was coined by Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, though her book, too, overprivileges the role of Europeans.
125. For critiques along these lines, see Ronald Atkinson, "The (Re)construction of Ethnicity in Africa: Extending the Chronology, Conceptualization and Discourse," in Yeros, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 15-44;
126. Thomas Spear, "Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa," Journal of African History 44 (2003): 3-27.
127. Despite Young's plea of fifteen years ago, this cliché has been abandoned less quickly in studies of ethnic and nationalist politics than in studies of social history. Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, N.C., 1999);
128. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, "Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), 1-56.
129. Horowitz (Ethnic Groups, chap. 1) is among those who have discussed the contrast between these two ways of imagining ethnic divisions. He usefully refers to them as "unranked" and "ranked" ethnicities; the phrase "incipient whole societies" is also his. René Lemarchand ("Revolutionary Phenomena") makes a similar distinction, highlighting the presence of ethnic "stratification" to explain the "revolutionary" upheavals in Zanzibar and Rwanda. John Comaroff ("Of Totemism") proposes the terms "totemism" and "ethnicity" to describe the distinction.
130. See the works already cited by Banton, Rex, Wallerstein, and Sanjek. A critique of such an approach is implicit in my earlier discussion of literature that approaches race as social structure, and that fails to distinguish between racism and racial thought.
131. As observed by Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 15, although, as we have seen, he does little better.
132. See Chege, "Africa's Murderous Professors," for suggestive comments.
133. The latter factor helps explain why the term "race" has been less commonly applied to Rwanda's ethnic conflicts than to similar conflicts in Zanzibar: Tuutsi and Hutu no longer correspond to Western racial categories (but they once did, Tuutsi being imagined as "Hamites").
134. Hence the leading authority on Zanzibari history, in language similar to that used by many authors, explains ethnic divisions by invoking British "preferences" informed by policies of "divide and rule": Abdul Sheriff, "Race and Class in the Politics of Zanzibar," Afrika Spectrum 36, no. 3 (2001): 307-08.
135. For a pronounced version of the first interpretation, see Mazrui and Shariff, The Swahili;
136. for the second, B. D. Bowles, "The Struggle for Independence," in Sheriff and Ferguson, Zanzibar under Colonial Rule, esp. 86, 92;
137. B. F. Mrina and W. T. Mattoke, Mapambano ya Ukombozi Zanzibar (Dar es Salaam, 1980).
138. Non-Zanzibari examples of similar practices are described in René Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide (Cambridge, 1994);
139. and Dikötter, "Group Definition." The official and oppositional Zanzibari histories differ in which groups are identified as British stooges.
140. Official versions include Omar Mapuri, Zanzibar: The 1964 Revolution; Achievements and Prospects (Dar es Salaam, 1996);
141. R. K. Mwanjisi, Abeid Amani Karume (Nairobi, 1967).
142. Opposition versions include Ali Muhsin al-Barwani, Conflicts and Harmony in Zanzibar (Dubai, 1997);
143. Zanzibar Center of Human and Democratic Rights, Zanzibar Dola Taifa na Nchi Huru (Copenhagen, 1994).
144. A curious hybrid version can be found in the writings of Juma Aley, a onetime ZNP government minister who was imprisoned after the revolution and who since his release has published praise of his jailers. Aley repeats the ZNP charge that the British chief secretary personally published the most inflammatory ASP journals, and thereby absolves the ASP itself of any responsibility. Juma Aley, Zanzibar, in the Context (Delhi, 1988), 86-87, 94.
145. Appiah, In My Father's House, 7.
146. Appiah's comment stands in marked contrast to much of the literature on colonial education: see the critical review in Sybille Küster, Neither Cultural Imperialism nor Precious Gift of Civilization: African Education in Colonial Zimbabwe (Münster, 1994).
147. Glassman, "Sorting Out the Tribes."
148. Balibar, "Racism and Nationalism," 60.
149. It is by now a commonplace that anti-colonial nationalism was derived from European discourse: Elie Kedourie, Nationalism in Asia and Africa (New York, 1970);
150. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities;
151. Basil Davidson, Black Man's Burden (New York, 1992).
152. Of course, this does not mean that nationalist thinkers in the colonial world had "nothing left to imagine": Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J., 1993).
153. The intelligentsia linked the transmission of religious expertise with the inheritance of Arab status: see José Kagabo, "Réseaux d'ulama 'swahili' et liens de parenté," in F. Le Guennec-Coppens and P. Caplan, eds., Les Swahili entre Afrique et Arabie (Paris, 1991), 59-72.
154. For descriptions of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Zanzibari intellectual life, see Abdallah Salih Farsy, The Shaf'i Ulama of East Africa, Randall Pouwels, trans. and ed. (Madison, Wis., 1989);
155. Anne K. Bang, "Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: The Sufi Family Networks of Ahmad ibn Sumayt and the Tariqa' Alawiyya in East Africa, c. 1860-1925" (Dr.Art. thesis, University of Bergen, 2000);
156. Randall Pouwels, "Sh. Al-Amin b. Ali Mazrui and Islamic Modernism in East Africa, 1875-1947," International Journal of Middle East Studies 13 (1981): 329-45.
157. The elite character of these intellectual circles is implicit throughout the descriptions in Aley, Zanzibar, in the Context, who states that "Shirazi" and "African" circles "were less spectacular" than those dominated by Arabs and Comorians (58).
158. Also see Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony;
159. Shaaban Saleh Farsi, Zanzibar: Historical Accounts, 2d edn. (s.l., 1995);
160. Norman R. Bennett, A History of the Arab State of Zanzibar (London, 1978).
161. For example, W. H. Ingrams, Zanzibar: Its History and Its People (London, 1931), 125, 189-90. Another historian, L. W. Hollingsworth, will figure prominently below.
162. For the mudirs' reports, see I. H. D. Rolleston, Annual Report on the District of Zanzibar, 1935, BA 30/5, Zanzibar National Archives (hereafter, ZNA). These and similar reports continued to be written, and British officials often referred to them.
163. Fair, Pastimes and Politics;
164. compare with Lofchie, Zanzibar.
165. Alonso, "Politics of Space."
166. Kopytoff, "Internal African Frontier."
167. East African examples are described in Jean-Pierre Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History (New York, 2003);
168. Steven Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom (Madison, Wis., 1974).
169. For this and much of the following two paragraphs, see my book Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1995).
170. Abdul Sheriff and Chizuko Tominaga believe that there was sometimes a kernel of truth to claims of Shirazi descent: see "The Shirazi in the History and Politics of Zanzibar," paper presented at the International Conference on the History and Culture of Zanzibar (Zanzibar, December 1992).
171. For "Arabization" before the Omani period, see Randall L. Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800-1900 (Cambridge, 1987).
172. Instrumentalist interpretations of the turn to Shirazi identity stress the material benefits that the colonial regime supposedly bestowed on "non-natives": see, for instance, Fair, Pastimes and Politics, 51.
173. These interpretations are not always convincing: see Glassman, "Sorting Out the Tribes," 403-04.
174. Furthermore, they make too much of the specific ethnonym "Shirazi," neglecting to recognize that admiration of Middle Eastern status could exist in the absence of that particular ethnonym. Evidence collected before the accelerated turn to Shirazi identity in the 1920s, for example, indicates that although indigenous islanders at that time called themselves "Tumbatu" and "Hadimu," they nevertheless already considered themselves descendants of Persians and as such more civilized than the barbarians of the mainland. F. B. Pearce, Zanzibar: The Island Metropolis of Eastern Africa (London, 1920), 248-52.
175. This ambivalence is described by Ariel Crozon, "Les Arabes à Zanzibar: Haine et fascination," in Le Guennec-Coppens and Caplan, Les Swahili, 179-93.
176. For a suggestive account of the role of Kenyan schoolteachers in crafting a local cultural nationalism, see David Sandgren, Christianity and the Kikuyu: Religious Divisions and Social Conflict (New York, 1989).
177. For an explicit statement, see the comments by W. Hendry, the director of education, on agricultural education, July 21, 1924, and June 8, 1925, AB 1/365, ZNA. A more general statement regarding the place of "Arab" leadership in educational policy can be found in W. Hendry, "Some Aspects of Education in Zanzibar," Journal of the African Association 27, 108 (1928): 351.
178. For a firsthand explanation, see Zam Ali Abbas, "Yaliopita huzungumzwa (maendeleo ya skuli)," Maz., n.s. 1, no. 2 (January 1957): 15-18.
179. Indians were also disproportionately represented in the islands' classrooms. For this and the next two paragraphs, see Bennett, Arab State, 194-96, 222-34, 245;
180. Farsi, Zanzibar: Historical Accounts, 20;
181. O. W. Furley and T. Watson, A History of Education in East Africa (New York, 1978), chaps. 6 and 10. Furley and Watson assume, erroneously, that because Zanzibari schools catered to all races, educational policies were non-racial;
182. Muhsin also defends the colonial schools against charges of racial bias, although his memoirs are inconsistent on the issue (Conflicts and Harmony, 30-31). Compare Hendry's comments, cited above, which suggest a race-based policy of vocational "tracking." At any rate, the enrollment figures cited by Bennett and Furley and Watson confirm that, regardless of official intent, educational opportunities were skewed by race. Additional evidence of the discrepancy is overwhelming: see, for example, figures in CO 618/44/15, Public Records Office (hereafter, PRO), Kew, United Kingdom.
183. Zanzibar Protectorate, Annual Report of the Education Department for the Year 1927 (Zanzibar, 1928), esp. 6-7; W. Hendry, February 27, 1934, and "Memorandum of the Arab Association," February 5, 1934, both in CO 618/60/15, PRO. Figures from 1937 indicate that teaching school was the most likely salaried post available in the administration for "African" and "Arab" school-leavers: AB 1/184, ZNA.
184. In 1935, as part of empire-wide educational reforms, TTS was closed and its teacher-training functions divided between two new elite schools, Dole Rural Middle School and Government Secondary School.
185. Hollingsworth later became director of the elite Government Secondary School, where his influence was, if anything, greater. The already-cited memoirs of Zam Ali Abbas, Ali Muhsin, Juma Aley, and Shaaban Saleh Farsi explicitly acknowledge how the experience of classroom teaching helped foster a sense of belonging to a leading intelligentsia; the latter three discuss Hollingsworth. Also see "Dr. Hollingsworth and Uhuru," Mwongozi, September 20, 1963; and Acting Dir. Educ., June 12, 1933, AB 1/76, ZNA.
186. They include Abdullah Saleh Farsy, one of East Africa's most prominent Islamic scholars and public intellectuals; Yahya Alawi, who would become one of the highest-ranking Zanzibaris in the colonial administration (among his posts was information officer in charge of broadcasting); Zam Ali Abbas, founder of the Zanzibar Association, the islands' first explicitly nationalist organization; Ahmed Seif Kharusi, founder of the influential weekly Mwongozi; Juma Aley and Mohammed Salim Hilal Barwani, leading figures in the ZNP; Mohammed Shamte, chief minister of the ZNP/Zanzibar and Pemba People's Party government that would be overthrown in 1964; and Aboud Jumbe, second president of the revolutionary government.
187. Given Hollingsworth's encouragement of discussion of topical issues as a way to hone expressive skills (and his sympathy for the goals of Arab-led cultural nationalism), there is little doubt that the schoolteachers inculcated some of their ideas in the classroom. Muhsin describes the classroom influence of A. M. al-Hadhrami, the leading figure on Mazungumzo's editorial board in the 1930s (Conflicts and Harmony, 64).
188. This term, with all its pejorative implications, was used in the English-language journalism of the Mazungumzo circle. There was eventually a small debate over its appropriateness, sparked, ironically, by the objections of a British educator; Arab Association journalists defended the usage ("Native or African?" Al-Falaq, November 8, 1941).
189. Compare the latter-day memories of Juma Aley, a leading member of the Mazungumzo circle who as a member of the ZNP government would become notorious for his disdain of Africans (Clayton, Zanzibar Revolution, 63);
190. Aley claims that the British imposed use of the word "native" as part of their policy of stirring up racial hatred. Zanzibar, in the Context, 40.
191. This assessment and much of what follows is based in part on a broad reading of Mazungumzo from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as Arab Association journalism and files in the Zanzibar National Archives. Fuller documentation can be found in Chapter 3 of my book manuscript under preparation on the rise of racial thought in colonial Zanzibar.
192. The version of Tuskegeeism introduced to East Africa in the 1920s stressed schoolteachers' roles as community leaders in "community development." See esp. Kenneth James King, Pan-Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa (Oxford, 1971);
193. also Lene Buchert, Education in the Development of Tanzania, 1919-90 (London, 1994).
194. Zanzibar's longtime acting director of education, G. B. Johnson, was an internationally prominent advocate of Tuskegeeism, and his Swahili-language adaptation of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901) was a standard reader in Zanzibar schools: Maisha ya Booker T. Washington, Mtu Mweusi Maarufu (London, 1937).
195. For the founding of the Arab Association, see "Mafveraky: Who Is Who?" Al-Falaq, December 21, 1946; the context is described in AC 1/151, ZNA (thanks to Philip Sadgrove for directing my attention to the latter source).
196. Previous works have mistaken both date and context: see, for instance, Alison Smith, "The End of the Arab Sultanate: Zanzibar 1945-1964," in D. A. Low and A. Smith, eds., History of East Africa, Vol. 3 (Oxford, 1976), 199.
197. Such themes can be found in the writings of pan-Arabists and Islamic modernists at least as early as Jamal al-Din Afghani and the Egyptian nationalist Rifa'a Badawi al-Tahtawi: see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Cambridge, 1983).
198. For interwar currents, see Reeva Simon, "The Teaching of History in Iraq before the Rashid Ali Coup of 1941," Middle Eastern Studies 22 (1986): 37-51;
199. Simon, "The Imposition of Nationalism on a Non-Nation State: The Case of Iraq during the Interwar Period, 1921-41," Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (1997), 3-25,
200. and Israel Gershoni, "Rethinking the Formation of Arab Nationalism in the Middle East, 1920-1945," both in J. Jankowski and Gershoni, eds., Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York, 1997), 3-25, 87-104;
201. Gershoni, "The Emergence of Pan-Nationalism in Egypt: Pan-Islamism and Pan-Arabism in the 1930s," Asian and African Studies 16 (1982): 59-94;
202. C. Ernest Dawn, "The Origins of Arab Nationalism," in Rashid Khalidi, et al., eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York, 1991), 3-30.
203. Arab nationalists had often stressed explicitly racial themes in their definitions of the Arab nation: see the passages quoted from Rifa'a al-Tahtawi and Lutfi al-Sayyid in Hourani, Arabic Thought, 79, 173;
204. Eve Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley, Calif., 2003);
205. Powell, "Brothers along the Nile: Egyptian Concepts of Race and Ethnicity, 1895-1910," in Hagai Erlich and I. Gershoni, eds., The Nile: Histories, Cultures, Myths (Boulder, Colo., 2000).
206. Simon, "Teaching of History," and "Imposition of Nationalism";
207. C. Ernest Dawn, "The Formation of Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years," International Journal of Middle East Studies 20 (1988): 67-91. The pan-Arabists, who were first motivated by opposition to Ottoman rule, adopted Breasted's theories in reaction to Ottoman authors who had celebrated the civilizing influence of ancient "Aryan Turks."
208. L. W. Hollingsworth, Milango ya Historia, 3 vols. (London, 1925-31). It was promoted shamelessly in Mazungumzo and reprinted many times over four decades; the 1965 edition was approved for classroom use by the Tanzania Department of Education. Hollingsworth acknowledges the assistance of A. A. Seif, A. M. al-Hadhrami, and Mohamed Salim Hilal al-Barwani. Seif appears as translator on the title page of Vol. 1; however, in a list of titles on the back cover of the Swahili edition of another of Hollingsworth's works published by the same company (Macmillan),
209. Seif is credited as translator of all three volumes: Historia Fupi ya Pwani ya Afrika ya Mashariki (London, 1966).
210. Milango ya Historia was at first used as a reader in Standards 4 through 8, and also urged as a text with which teachers should prepare for teaching other classes; pupils in the upper standards were also assigned Hollingsworth's Short History of the East Coast of Africa (London, 1929).
211. G. B. Johnson, "Report on Text-Books in the Swahili Language," Annual Report of the Education Department for the Year 1927, 27-31, CO 618/44/15, PRO;
212. W. Hendry, "Memorandum," February 27, 1934, CO 618/60/15, PRO;
213. "Syllabus, 1944," AD 1/80, ZNA.
214. Geography primers told similar stories of civilization and barbarism, often in racial terms: B. M. Hart, Bara Afrika: Chanzo cha Jiografia ya Afrika (Nairobi, 1948);
215. E. C. Francis, Afrika (London, 1952; first pub. in English, 1933);
216. G. W. Broomfield and D. V. Perrott, Habari za Walimwengu, Book 3,
217. Masimulizi ya Juma juu ya Waingereza (London, 1954).
218. Explicit statements of these themes can be found in Milango ya Historia, 1: 15-27 (monarchy and literate learning)
219. and 1: 42-48 (the ancient Jews and monotheism). Given the exemplary importance of the Greeks in Vol. 1, Hollingsworth could hardly insist on monotheism as part of his definition of civilization (as he does the other attributes), but the entire work, particularly the last two volumes, emphasizes the civilizing power of Judeo-Christian-Muslim values.
220. Broomfield and Perrott's primer was less equivocal in proclaiming religion "the foundation of all true civilization": Habari za Walimwengu, Book 3: 101.
221. Similar views of "civilization" were common in mainstream social science at the time: see Charles Ellwood, The Psychology of Human Society: An Introduction to Sociological Theory (New York, 1925);
222. and other sources cited by Thomas Spira, Nationalism and Ethnicity Terminologies, Vol. 1 (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1999), 69.
223. For example, Milango ya Historia, 1: 93-94.
224. Milango ya Historia, 3: 87-94.
225. Also see Hollingsworth, Short History;
226. and the work of his close colleague and collaborator, W. H. Ingrams, Zanzibar. These aspects of East African history figured prominently in the Middle School exams in 1933 and the TTS exams in 1957: AB 1/184 and AD 1/213, ZNA.
227. Norris, "Pride of Race." Seif explains the circumstances of the essay's publication in an editorial note introducing it.
228. It originally appeared in the Accra Teacher's Journal 6 (October 1929), a publication that had been inaugurated one year later than Mazungumzo. Thanks to Cati Coe for sharing the latter information.
229. Examples include M. Abdulrahman, "Safari ya Kilwa," serialized in six parts, beginning in Maz. 12, no. 2 (February 1938): 24-26;
230. Muhammad Othman, "Siku Kuu ya Mwaka," Normal Magazine 4, no. 9 (September 1930): 112-15.
231. M. Abdurrahaman [Abdulrahman], "Maisha ya Watu Wengine," Maz. 12, no. 11 (November 1938): 162-63;
232. Maz. 12, no. 12 (December 1938); and following issues.
233. "Mshenzi, n. wa- a barbarian, savage, one of the aborigines, a person untouched by civilization. Often used contemptuously by the coast native of those who come from the interior, although they are frequently more cultured and refined than the coast native!" Frederick Johnson, Standard Swahili-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1939), 419.
234. Muhammad Othman, "Asili ya Neno 'Ustaarabu na Mstaarabu,'" Maz. 12, no. 4 (April 1938): 59-61;
235. A. M. el-Hadhrami, "'Ustaarabu,'" Maz. 12, no. 4 (April 1938): 61-62;
236. Ali Said el-Kharusy, "Asili ya Waarabu," Maz. 12, nos. 6-7 (June-July 1938): 81-83, 99-101. Parts of this debate were anticipated in the Dar es Salaam paper Mambo Leo of February and March 1923 (thanks to Katrin Bromber for this reference).
237. The importance of the descent metaphor should be clear from all that has been said about Shirazi identity; it is also apparent in all the standard ethnographic studies. For an explicit statement, see Mohammed Shamte's careful consideration of how best to reckon ethnic identity, in "Mpemba," Maz. 11, no. 4 (April 1937): 52-54; Shamte opts for a strict reckoning based on descent.
238. The literature still suffers from embarrassed silence about the degree to which Arab-centered notions of skin color as status marker were and remain widespread on the coast. A good indication of this is the furor raised among Lamu intellectuals by the publication of Abdul Hamid M. el Zein, The Sacred Meadows: A Structural Analysis of Religious Symbolism in an East African Town (Evanston, Ill., 1974), which describes such notions.
239. Also see Fair, Pastimes and Politics, 94-96;
240. and, for nineteenth-century material, Fred Morton, Children of Ham: Freed Slaves and Fugitive Slaves on the Kenya Coast, 1873 to 1907 (Boulder, Colo., 1990).
241. For the Arab and Islamic world more generally, see John Hunwick, "Islamic Law and Polemics over Race and Slavery in North and West Africa," Princeton Papers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 7 (1999): 43-68;
242. Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York, 1990);
243. Powell, Different Shade.
244. Othman, "Asili ya Neno." He reminds readers of the standard etymology, which traces mshenzi to the Persian word zinj, meaning black, and the Swahili word he uses to describe coast peoples' supposedly lighter skin color is far from neutral; the color is cleaner, purified, brightened (takata). Othman cites a book entitled History of Zanzibar, probably Ingrams and Hollingsworth's 1925 school text. But his essay reflects a variety of influences, including local understandings of Islam.
245. For cultural nation-building in the Tuskegeeist principles favored by British educators, including the preservation of "tribal customs," see King, Pan-Africanism, 167-70, 263.
246. Examples include Zam Ali Abbas, "Kwenda kwingi kuona mambo," Normal Magazine 3, no. 6 (July 1929);
247. Abdul Rahman Muhammad, "Sikukuu ya Mwaka," Normal Magazine 3, nos. 10-11 (November-December 1929): 148-49, 162-63;
248. Saleh Muhammad, "Ubaya wa somo juu ya mwari wake," Normal Magazine 4, no. 12 (December 1930): 147-48. The essays represent a debate between those who wanted to reform and preserve such dances as symbols of national pride and others who wanted simply to suppress them. By the 1930s, the reformist position had won the day, at least in the pages of the teachers' journal.
249. For festive dance and community identity in the previous century, see Glassman, Feasts and Riot.
250. In theological terms, their concerns were with the dangers of bidaa or "innovation," forms of worship sanctioned neither by God nor His prophets, and shirk, mixing worship of God with pagan idolatry. For such concerns among East African ulamaa, see Pouwels, Horn and Crescent;
251. Farsy, Shaf'i Ulama;
252. and Bang, "Sufis and Scholars of the Sea";
253. and, for Islamic modernists more generally, Hourani, Arabic Thought, 225, 231-32. (The latter source refers to Rashid Rida, whose paper al-Manar was read in Zanzibar.) These concerns meshed with British officials' desire to discourage festive rites they considered economically wasteful. But the ulamaa's independent theological motives were well established; Islamic modernists had been criticizing such rituals for over a generation. See documents from 1935-1936 in AB 30/22, ZNA.
254. The ulamaa continued to condemn such customs well after the campaigns: Muhammad Saleh Abdulla Farsy, Ada za Harusi katika Unguja (Nairobi, 1956).
255. For the ulamaa's leadership in similar campaigns on the mainland coast, see Sarah Mirza and Margaret Strobel, eds. and trans., Three Swahili Women: Life Histories from Mombasa, Kenya (Bloomington, Ind., 1989);
256. Ali bin Hemedi el-Buhuriy, "Habari za Mrima," Mambo Leo, nos. 141-47 (1934-35).
257. Sheikh Tahir [Abubakr el-Amawi] (senior qadi), March 21, 1936, AB 30/22, ZNA. (The qadi of the minority Ibadhi sect appended a postscript expressing his agreement.) For other ulamaa who took similarly puritanical views, see Saidi Musa, Maisha ya al-Imam Sheikh Abdulla Saleh Farsy katika Ulimwengu wa Kiislamu (Dar es Salaam, 1986), esp. 65 and following. But Musa's account must be treated with caution, especially when he attributes such views to Abdullah Saleh Farsy, the subject of his hagiography.
258. Bennett, Arab State, 228-29;
259. Furley and Watson, History of Education, 122-23;
260. Teaching of Koran and Arabic in Government Schools, 1924-1957, AB 1/390, ZNA. The comparison to parrots was made by one of the qadis on the commission (Ingrams, Zanzibar, 230).
261. M. A. el-Haj (Mudir, Koani), "The Koran Schools," 1936, AK 33/294, ZNA. For the report's circulation within the Education Department, see AB 1/82, AB 1/390, ZNA.
262. Louis Brenner, "Muslim Representations of Unity and Difference in African Discourse," in Brenner, ed., Muslim Identity and Social Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 1-20.
263. Also see J. Glassman, "Stolen Knowledge: Struggles for Popular Islam on the Swahili Coast, 1870-1963," in Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti, ed., Islam in East Africa: New Sources (Rome, 2001), 209-25.
264. Hourani, Arabic Thought, 299-301 (for Rashid Rida);
265. Gershoni, "Emergence of Pan-Nationalism," 76-77 (for Hasan al-Bana).
266. "Our New Educational Chief," Al-Falaq, May 20, 1939;
267. "Native Trusteeship (1)," Al-Falaq, July 29, 1939;
268. "Memorandum by the Arab Association," February 5, 1934, CO 618/60/15, PRO;
269. "Report on Zanzibar Education (II)," Al-Falaq, October 1, 1938.
270. Lofchie, Zanzibar, 119-26;
271. Zanzibar District Monthly and Annual Reports, BA 30/5-7, ZNA;
272. Al-Falaq, 1938, passim. A leading member of Mazungumzo's editorial board, Mohammed Salim Hilal el-Barwani, was among those most active in this campaign: Secret Police Bulletin, July 4, 1938, AB 12/114, ZNA. I borrow the phrase "purge category" from Brennan, "Nation, Race and Urbanization."
273. Al-Falaq, June 15, 1940;
274. M. A. el-Haj, "Hadimu Land Tenure," May 1940, AK 33/294, ZNA.
275. Ali Muhsin, "Slavery as It Used to Be Practiced in Zanzibar," Makerere College Magazine 1, no. 4 (August 1937): 111.
276. Muhsin's essay was celebrated in Al-Falaq; for a full discussion, see Glassman, "Sorting Out the Tribes."
277. Six decades later, Muhsin continued to issue similar apologies: Conflicts and Harmony, 177-86.
278. "The So-Called Native Lethargy," Al-Falaq, September 3, 1938. The article was published as part of an ongoing campaign to persuade the authorities to create the legal apparatus by which estate owners might more effectively control agricultural labor.
279. Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925 (New Haven, Conn., 1980), for British efforts to convince Zanzibari planters of the merits of industrial work-discipline.
280. Eve Troutt-Powell and John Hunwick, papers presented to the Workshop on Slavery and the African Diaspora in the Lands of Islam, Northwestern University, April/May 1999.
281. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, Conn., 1977);
282. Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 79-114;
283. and, for a comparative example, see Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974).
284. In a regular column, "Father Zanzibar" addressed his "children" in a patronizing tone unlike anything in the English section ("Risala ya Unguja," Al-Falaq, 1946). Otherwise, most Swahili-language items consisted of advice on cooking, child-rearing, decorating, and other non-political matters directed specially at women; again, such items did not appear in the English language section. By 1951, the paper was publishing Swahili translations of leaders from its English and Arabic sections, but Swahili continued to be its tertiary language.
285. "Itihad-el-Watani," Al-Falaq, February 11, 1939.
286. More precisely, it reflected the villages' subjection to the island's most powerful indigenous potentate, the Mwinyi Mkuu, who in turn became the sultans' direct vassal. John Gray, History of Zanzibar from the Middle Ages to 1856 (London, 1962);
287. Pearce, Zanzibar: The Island Metropolis;
288. Mohammed Abeid el-Haj, "Hadimu Land Tenure," May 1, 1940, AK 33/294, ZNA;
289. Hemed Jabir el-Farsy, "The Mwinyi Mkuu," Appendix C, Zanzibar District Annual Report, 1935, BA 30/5, ZNA.
290. Charles Sacleux, Dictionnaire Swahili-Français, 2 vols. (Paris, 1939-41), 2: 622;
291. R. H. W. Pakenham, Land Tenure among the Wahadimu at Chwaka, Zanzibar Island (Zanzibar, 1947);
292. John Middleton, Land Tenure in Zanzibar (London, 1961);
293. Abdul Sheriff, "The Peasantry under Imperialism," in Sheriff and Ferguson, Zanzibar under Colonial Rule.
294. Among the most telling examples is M. A. el-Haj, "Hadimu Land Tenure"; we have already encountered the influential el-Haj's disdain for village madarasa teachers.
295. Lofchie, Zanzibar, 169. For Tajo's lack of English, see CO 822/1376, PRO; for the Shirazi Association generally, AB 12/2, ZNA.
296. This included the SA's advocacy for indigenous islanders in the ethnically structured rationing schemes being discussed in the opening years of the war, as well as their demand that a non-Arab be appointed mudir in the southern district of Makunduchi. See J. O'Brien, October 4, 1944, plus other documents in AB 4/39, ZNA;
297. R. Pakenham, Zanzibar District Monthly Report, December 1943, and other documents in BA 30/7, ZNA; "Shirazi Association," AB 12/2, ZNA.
298. I spell out this interpretation in a section of a forthcoming book; its sources include various documents in AB 4/39, ZNA; District Reports in BA 30/5-8, ZNA; Timothy Welliver, "The Clove Factor in Colonial Zanzibar" (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1990), 380-84;
299. Pakenham, Land Tenure;
300. Pascal Bacuez, "Une ethnographie dans son contexte: Administration coloniale et formation identitaire," Cahiers d'études africaines 38, no. 149 (1998): 103-33. British officials overestimated the SA's role in instigating the boycott; in fact, the evidence suggests that the SA largely took advantage of a situation that had been initiated in the villages.
301. My interpretation contrasts with others that read Shirazi ethnic revivalism only in terms of a nationalist master narrative: either a divisive identity imposed by colonial rule or a unifying one crafted to defy the British. The first of these interpretations, which accords with the official ASP view, is echoed in Fair, Pastimes and Politics;
302. for the second, see Sheriff and Tominaga, "The Shirazi."
303. See Glassman, "Sorting Out the Tribes," 404-05 n.
304. Even the fiercest anti-Arab nationalists believed, incorrectly, that Africans had never developed their own systems of writing, and that they had always depended on Arabs and Europeans for enlightenment and "true religion." This is apparent from a perusal of the African Association weekly Afrika Kwetu; an explicit example is "Kale hata leo," January 13, 1955.
305. The discussion of African Association rhetoric in this and the next two paragraphs is based mostly on Glassman, "Sorting Out the Tribes." For the British defense of "Islamic slavery" generally, see Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983), 261-68;
306. and Morton, Children of Ham;
307. the views of several Zanzibari officials can be found in Sir Arthur Henry Hardinge, A Diplomatist in the East (London, 1928).
308. Jonathon Glassman, "Between Two Worlds: Diasporic Visions and Racial Politics in Colonial Zanzibar," a paper presented at the Workshop on the Western Indian Ocean since 1800, Yale University, November 3-5, 2000.
309. See the description of the Makunduchi rally at which the ASP was launched: Afrika Kwetu, February 14, 1957.
310. Anti-mainlander sentiments can be found in the ZPPP newssheet Sauti ya Wananchi, among other sources; see AK 20/1, ZNA; also Saud A. Busaidy (DC Urban), March 6, 1963, AK 31/15, ZNA. In a particularly telling moment, Tajo shared the stage with Zam Ali Abbas, long a figure on Mazungumzo's editorial board; their speeches are summarized in "Umma Hay!" Mwongozi, April 21, 1961.
311. The tensions at Makunduchi are well reflected in "Makunduchi," and "Mtumwa mwenye ari si mungwana asiekuwa na ari," Afrika Kwetu, October 29 and November 5, 1959; also Security Report, July-August 1961, CO 822/2046, PRO. The political events of the Time of Politics are best recounted by Lofchie, Zanzibar, although his assertion that ZPPP never posed a threat in Makunduchi is belied by his own data, which show that in 1963 the party lost to ASP there by a mere sixteen votes.
312. I spell out the history of this discourse in Chapter 6 of my forthcoming book; for a summary, see "Gangsters, Thieves, and the Construction of Race in Colonial Zanzibar," a paper presented to the African Studies Seminar, University of Wisconsin, Madison, April 10, 2002.
313. Quotes from "Barua," by "Mzanzibari," Mwongozi, May 3, 1957;
314. "Yepi Yaliyowaleta Pamoja Wananchi na Wazalendo," Mwongozi, March 3, 1961;
315. "Declaration from Lamu," Mwongozi, September 13, 1963. Similar rhetoric can be found in an official ZNP statement from October 1957, CO 822/1377, PRO.
316. I paraphrase Comaroff, "Of Totemism."
317. Glassman, "Sorting Out the Tribes."
318. The latter theme is explored in two chapters of my forthcoming book that draw on comparative studies of contemporary ethnic violence in South Asia and Central Africa.
319. Frank Dikötter draws similar conclusions in his critique of a different literature: "Racial Discourse in China, Continuities and Permutations," in Dikötter, ed., The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan (London, 1997), 12-33.
320. For a prominent example of such an argument, see Bill Berkeley, The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa (New York, 2001). I hasten to add that, despite his emphasis on colonialism's historical role, Berkeley refuses to absolve African politicians of responsibility for pogroms and massacres; compare with the "academic sycophants" denounced by Lemarchand, Burundi. And Berkeley fully recognizes the parallels between tribalism and race.
321. This tendency seems most pronounced in the sociological literature, perhaps because that literature has been dominated by American scholars for most of the past century. Howard Winant, "Race and Race Theory," Annual Review of Sociology, 2000.