Conventional history assumes that the rise of the steamship trade killed off the Indian Ocean dhow trade in the twentieth century. Erik Gilbert argues that the dhow economy played a major role in shaping the economic and social life of colonial Zanzibar. Dhows, and the regional trade they fostered, allowed a class of indigenous entrepreneurs to thrive in Zanzibar. These entrepreneurs, whose economic interests stretched across continents and colonial boundaries, were able to thwart or shape many of the colonial state’s pet projects. Not only did steamships fail to drive out indigenous sailing craft, but in some cases dhows were able to drive the steamer out of specific market niches. In highlighting the role of East Africa’s commercial connections to the Middle East and India during the colonial period, Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860-1970 makes a major contribution to African history as part of world history.

Disputing Discipline explores how global and local children’s rights activists’ efforts within the school systems of Zanzibar to eradicate corporal punishment are changing the archipelago’s moral and political landscape. Through an equal consideration of child and adult perspectives, Fay explores what child protection means for Zanzibari children who have to negotiate their lives at the intersections of universalized and local "child protection" aspirations while growing up to be pious and responsible adults. Through a visual and participatory ethnographic approach that foregrounds young people’s voices through their poetry, photographs, and drawings, paired with in-depth Swahili language analysis, Fay shows how children’s views and experiences can transform our understanding of child protection. This book demonstrates that to improve interventions, policy makers and practitioners need to understand child protection beyond a policy sense of the term and respond to the reality of children’s lives to avoid unintentionally compromising, rather than improving, young people’s well-being.
 

Muslim communities throughout the Indian Ocean have long questioned what it means to be a “good Muslim.” Much recent scholarship on Islam in the Indian Ocean considers debates among Muslims about authenticity, authority, and propriety. Despite the centrality of this topic within studies of Indian Ocean, African, and other Muslim communities, little of the existing scholarship has addressed such debates in relation to women, gender, or sexuality. Yet women are deeply involved with ideas about what it means to be a “good Muslim.”

In Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean, anthropologists, historians, linguists, and gender studies scholars examine Islam, sexuality, gender, and marriage on the Swahili coast and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. The book examines diverse sites of empowerment, contradiction, and resistance affecting cultural norms, Islam and ideas of Islamic authenticity, gender expectations, ideologies of modernity, and British education. The book’s attention to both masculinity and femininity, broad examination of the transnational space of the Swahili coast, and inclusion of research on non-Swahili groups on the East African coast makes it a unique and indispensable resource.

Contributors: Nadine Beckmann, Pat Caplan, Corrie Decker, Rebecca Gearhart, Linda Giles, Meghan Halley, Susan Hirsch, Susi Keefe, Kjersti Larsen, Elisabeth McMahon, Erin Stiles, and Katrina Daly Thompson

When Lost’s Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 crashed, the survivors found themselves on a seemingly deserted island. In Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe spends twenty-eight years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, while in the movie Castaway Tom Hanks survives over four years on a South Pacific island. And Jurassic Park kept its dinosaur population confined to an island off the coast of Central America. Islands often find themselves at the center of imagined worlds, secluded and sometimes mystical locales filled with strange creatures and savage populations. The cannibals, raptors, and smoke monsters that exist on the islands of popular culture aside, the more than one million islands and islets on the planet are indeed small , geological, biological, and cultural laboratories.

 

From Britain to Japan, from the Galapagos to Manhattan, this book roams the planet to provide the first global introduction to these waterlocked landforms. Longtime island dweller Steven Roger Fischer shows that, since time began, islands have been one of the primary birthplaces for plants, animals, and proto-humans. These eyots of stone and sand—whether in ocean, lake, or river—fostered the human race, and Fischer recounts how humanity then exploited these remarkable habitats as stepping stones to global dominion. He explores island economics, warfare, and politics, and he examines the role they have played in literature, art and psychology. At the same time, he sparks our imagination with visions of islands—from Atlantis to Tahiti, Treasure Island to Hawaii. Ultimately, he reveals, these isolated mini-worlds are a measure of humankind itself.

 

An engaging account of the islets that have enriched, lured, terrified, and inspired us, Islands shines new light on these cradles of earth—and human—history.

The first decades of the twentieth century were years of dramatic change in Zanzibar, a time when the social, economic, and political lives of island residents were in incredible flux, framed by the abolition of slavery, the introduction of colonialism, and a tide of urban migration. Pastimes and Politics explores the era from the perspective of the urban poor, highlighting the numerous and varied ways that recently freed slaves and other immigrants to town struggled to improve their individual and collective lives and to create a sense of community within this new environment. In this study Laura Fair explores a range of cultural and social practices that gave expression to slaves’ ideas of emancipation, as well as how such ideas and practices were gendered.

Pastimes and Politics examines the ways in which various cultural practices, including taarab music, dress, football, ethnicity, and sexuality, changed during the early twentieth century in relation to islanders’ changing social and political identities. Professor Fair argues that cultural changes were not merely reflections of social and political transformations. Rather, leisure and popular culture were critical practices through which the colonized and former slaves transformed themselves and the society in which they lived.

Methodologically innovative and clearly written, Pastimes and Politics is accessible to specialists and general readers alike. It is a book that should find wide use in courses on African history, urbanization, popular culture, gender studies, or emancipation.

Zanzibar has had the most turbulent postcolonial history of any part of the United Republic of Tanzania, yet few sources explain the reasons why. The current political impasse in the islands is a contest over the question of whether to revere and sustain the Zanzibari Revolution of 1964, in which thousands of islanders, mostly Arab, lost their lives. It is also about whether Zanzibar’s union with the Tanzanian mainland—cemented only a few months after the revolution—should be strengthened, reformed, or dissolved. Defenders of the revolution claim it was necessary to right a century of wrongs. They speak the language of African nationalism and aspire to unify the majority of Zanzibaris through the politics of race. Their opponents instead deplore the violence of the revolution, espouse the language of human rights, and claim the revolution reversed a century of social and economic development. They reject the politics of race, regarding Islam as a more worthy basis for cultural and political unity.

From a series of personal interviews conducted over several years, Thomas Burgess has produced two highly readable first-person narratives in which two nationalists in Africa describe their conflicts, achievements, failures, and tragedies. Their life stories represent two opposing arguments, for and against the revolution. Ali Sultan Issa traveled widely in the 1950s and helped introduce socialism into the islands. As a minister in the first revolutionary government he became one of Zanzibar’s most controversial figures, responsible for some of the government’s most radical policies. After years of imprisonment, he reemerged in the 1990s as one of Zanzibar’s most successful hotel entrepreneurs. Seif Sharif Hamad came of age during the revolution and became disenchanted with its broken promises and excesses. In the 1980s he emerged as a reformist minister, seeking to roll back socialism and authoritarian rule. After his imprisonment he has ever since served as a leading figure in what has become Tanzania’s largest opposition party

As Burgess demonstrates in his introduction, both memoirs trace Zanzibar’s postindependence trajectory and reveal how Zanzibaris continue to dispute their revolutionary heritage and remain divided over issues of memory, identity, and whether to remain a part of Tanzania. The memoirs explain how conflicts in the islands have become issues of national importance in Tanzania, testing that state’s commitment to democratic pluralism. They engage our most basic assumptions about social justice and human rights and shed light on a host of themes key to understanding Zanzibari history that are also of universal relevance, including the legacies of slavery and colonialism and the origins of racial violence, poverty, and underdevelopment. They also show how a cosmopolitan island society negotiates cultural influences from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe.

The rise of Zanzibar was based on two major economic transformations. Firstly slaves became used for producing cloves and grains for export. Previously the slaves themselves were exported.

Secondly, there was an increased international demand for luxuries such as ivory. At the same time the price of imported manufactured gods was falling. Zanzibar took advantage of its strategic position to trade as far as the Great Lakes.

However this very economic success increasingly subordinated Zanzibar to Britain, with its anti-slavery crusade and its control over the Indian merchant class.

Professor Sheriff analyses the early stages of the underdevelopment of East Africa and provides a corrective to the dominance of political and diplomatic factors in the history of the area.

Zanzibar stands at the center of the Indian Ocean system’s involvement in the history of Eastern Africa. This book follows on from the period covered in Abdul Sheriff’s acclaimed Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar.

The first part of the book shows the transition of Zanzibar from the commercial economy of the nineteenth century to the colonial economy of the twentieth century.

The authors begin with the abolition of the slave trade in 1873 that started the process of transformation. They show the transition from slavery to colonial “free” labor, the creation of the capitalist economy, and the resulting social contradictions. They take the history up to formal independence in 1963 with a postscript on the 1964 insurrection.

In the second part the authors analyze social classes. The landlords and the merchants were dominant in the commercial empire of the nineteenth century and had difficulties in adjusting to the colonial condition. At the same time the development of capitalist farmers and a fully proletarianized working class was hindered.

The conservative administration could not resolve the contradictions of colonial capitalism, and the formation of a united nationalist movement was hampered. This period culminated in the insurrection of 1964, but the revolution could not be consummated without mature revolutionary classes.