Cinema, bell bottoms, and miniskirts: Struggles over youth and citizenship in revolutionary Zanzibar

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 2-3, 2002, Pages 287-313

  Burgess, Thomas ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 9144252988     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3097615     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Frederick Cooper was the first to discuss discipline in Zanzibari society, in the context of capitalist work discipline the British hoped to impose on their African subjects in post-abolition Zanzibar. See Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya (New Haven, 1987), 69
2. Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modem Zimbabwe (Durham, 1996), 10
3. For the clove boom, see Ibrahim Fokas Shao, The Political Economy of Land Reform in Zanzibar (Dar es Salaam, 1992)
4. See government newspapers Kweupe, Kweli Ikidhihiri Uwongo Hujitenga, and Truth Prevails Where Lies Must Vanish
5. Thomas Burgess, "Youth and the Revolution: Discipline and Mobility in Zanzibar, 1950-80" (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 2001), 289-96, 340-46
6. Donald Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley, 1999) 25
7. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York, 1957), xv-xvi
8. Ali Mazrui, Cultural Engineering and Nation-Building in East Africa (Evanston, 1972), 229
9. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1963), 99-100
10. V.I. Lenin, On Youth (Moscow, 1970), 247
11. I make similar points, and provide quotations from official speeches and archival sources, in "Remembering Youth: Generation in Revolutionary Zanzibar," Africa Today 46, 2 (1999)
12. Africans in 1948 accounted for 48.8 percent of the city's population. The numbers for Asians and Arabs were, respectively, 27.3 and 16.1 percent. A.H. J. Prins, The Swahili Speaking Peoples of Zanzibar and the East African Coast (London, 1967), 19
13. For the results of Zanzibari elections prior to the Revolution, by constituency, see Michael Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution (Princeton, 1965), 176, 200, 202, 218
14. Garth Andrew Myers, "Reconstructing Ng'ambo: Town Planning on the Other Side of Zanzibar" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1993), 345
15. Interview, anonymous, Zanzibar Town, 7/15/96
16. Atlas, 8/66, 46-48
17. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence (New York, 1996), 187
18. Interview, Ali Sultani Issa, Zanzibar Town, 7/13/96
19. Interview, Abu Mansoor, Zanzibar Town, 7/6/96
20. Laura Fair, "Pastimes and Politics: A Social History of Zanzibar's Ng'ambo Community, 1890-1950" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota, 1994), 258, 316-17, 319
21. recently published as Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890-1945 (Athens, Ohio, 2001)
22. See also Burgess, "Youth and the Revolution," 90-94
23. For the significance of film among female youth in Lamu, Kenya, see Minou Fuglesang, Veils and Videos: Female Youth Culture on the Kenyan Coast (Stockholm, 1994). Pemba also boasted its own movie theaters by the time of the Revolution
24. Letter to P.A.P. Robertson, 3/25/64, MSS. Afr. s. 2116, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University, United Kingdom
25. Don Petterson, Revolution in Zanzibar: An American's Cold War Tale (Boulder, Colo., 2002), 217
26. Zanzibar News Service, 6/22/64
27. Esmond Martin, Zanzibar: Tradition and Revolution (London, 1978), 15, 17
28. Gurnah, Admiring Silence, 184
29. Meeting minutes of Censorship Board, 3/27/65, AD5/83, ZNA
30. "Mataarifa ya Semina," Seminar Declarations of ASPYL, Urban District, 6/17/72, ASYL/1/3, ASPYL HQ
31. Jumbe speech at opening of 4th General Conference of the ASPYL, 9/2/75, ASPYL HQ
32. "History of the Cinema Industry in Zanzibar," ZNA AB 5/111
33. ASPYL Conference Resolutions, 1973, ASPYL HQ
34. Martin, Tradition and Revolution, 62
35. Interview, Rashid Khamis Rashid, Zanzibar Town, 7/12/96
36. Laura Fair, "Dressing Up: Clothing, Class and Gender in Post-Abolition Zanzibar," Journal of African History 39 (1998), 77
37. These observations compare with the manner in which jeunes of coastal urban Madagascar equated notions of self-worth with their consumption of clothing commodities. See Jennifer Cole, "Sex and Money: Consumerism, Gender Relations and the Changing Nature of Social Reproduction in Global Tamatave, Madagascar," paper presented at Conference on Youth Policy and Policies of Youth in Africa, Northwestern University, May 2002
38. Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, 216
39. Fair, "Dressing Up," 65
40. Hotuba za Mwenyekiti wa Yusi Ligi, 2/17/75, ASPYL HQ
41. No file, no date, and no author, ASPYL HQ
42. Declarations of the 4th General Conference of the ASPYL, 1975, ASPYL HQ
43. Kelly Askew, "Performing the Nation: Swahili Musical Performance and the Production of Tanzanian National Culture" (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1997), 139-47
44. Fuglesang, Veils and Videos, 44, 207
45. Africans who criticized women who affected wigs and cosmetics in modern Zimbabwe consistently referred to such practices as "betrayal." In the 1980s Zimbabwe imposed a legal ban on skin-lightening creams to put an end to the phenomenon of "Fanta faces with Coca-Cola legs." Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, 188-91
46. Interview, Ali Mwinyigogo, Zanzibar Town, 7/16/96. Another "Cultural Revolution" was briefly enacted on the Tanganyikan mainland in January 1969, against the wearing of miniskirts, tight trousers, wigs, and skin-bleaching creams. It was significantly most active in two coastal, heavily Muslim cities, Tanga and Dar es Salaam. See issues of The Nationalist from January 1969, and Askew, "Performing the Nation," 236, 273, 280-82
47. Burgess, "Generation in Revolutionary Zanzibar."
48. Interview, Haji Hassan Haji, Zanzibar Town, 8/24/99
49. Interview, Alex Karigo Msangi, Zanzibar Town, 8/6/97
50. ASPYL meeting minutes, Southern District, 12/23/70, ASPYL HQ
51. Interview, Wolfango Dourado, Zanzibar Town, 8/21/98. Youth militia organizations like the Volunteers attained a transnational currency in the 1960s, particularly among African nations experimenting with socialist techniques of mobilization and nation building. Reports of zeal and misconduct were not limited to Zanzibar; see Claude Riviere, Guinea: The Mobilization of a People (London, 1977), 226-27
52. Four-month Volunteer Report, 1975, Zanzibar Region, ASYL/2/1, ASPYL HQ
53. Karume speech, 1/27/72, BA 68/11, ZNA
54. Anthony Clayton, The Zanzibar Revolution and Its Aftermath (London, 1981), 142
55. Africa Report (16) 28, 30
56. Truth Prevails Where Lies Must Vanish, 4/26/73
57. Kweli Ikidhihiri Uwongo Hujitenga, 4/26/73
58. See Fair, "Dressing Up."
59. Interview, Abdallah Suleiman Waziri, Makunduchi, 7/11/01
60. Interview, Abu Mansoor, Zanzibar Town, 7/6796
61. Interview, anonymous, Zanzibar Town, 7/24/01
62. The Nationalist, 1/18/69
63. "Manners and Preserving Our Culture," 6th meeting of ASPYL, 1973, ASPYL HQ
64. Dick Hebdige, Subculture. The Meaning of Style (London, 1979), 18
65. Burke, Lifebuoy Men, 216
66. John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (San Francisco, 1992), 41