Here and there palm and tamarind leaves whistled in the wind. I noticed a Jain temple and a Persian bath built on a Roman design, stuck in the midst of fifty-three mosques. A Swahili woman in a loud khanga was making an Indian chapatti (flatbread) and a Middle Eastern falafel while frying a cassava. Zanzibar is the global village writ small. It makes globalization seem altogether a normal function of human nature, requiring only technology to allow it.
Yet globalization brings its own tensions, bred of the very close quarters with which different cultures and civilizations now find themselves, for all was not well in Zanzibar. The glittering mixture of races and customs that I observed were actually vestiges of what once had been. Indeed, anyone who had known Zanzibar before independence from Great Britain in 1963 would have been saddened by the monochrome dullness of the urban environment. I had been impressed with its vitality only because it was my first visit here.
In the heart of Stone Town, I wandered into an Arab house, renovated in an expensive but somewhat tasteless, mass-produced style, where several men dressed in immaculate kanzus and kofias were sipping cardamom-scented coffee and munching on dates imported from Oman. They invited me to join them. The owner of the house was an engaging, welcoming man, rotund, with a perfectly groomed short white beard. He told me that this had been the house of his father and grandfather. A black and white portrait of the latter in turban and beard graced the sitting room, evocative of Omani imperial days. Pointing at the photo, my host said, “And this house had been the house of his grandfather.” Though he now divided his time between Oman and Zanzibar, he thought of Zanzibar as his true home, even as he considered himself a pure Omani. He had renovated this house, in part, he said, to make a statement. In polished English diction he then explained that what I was seeing here were the mere leftovers of a far more cosmopolitan world: of Omani sultans ruling under British tutelage, before steam travel mitigated the benefit of the monsoon winds, and before the building of the Suez Canal ended the need of Zanzibar as a stopover on the route between Europe and India.
But now there was post-colonial history to consider, he told me: the period since 1963, when Zanzibar was not only troubled, but also experienced some of the worst ravages of violence, and in particular ethnic-racial clashes, that sub-Saharan Africa has had to offer. “The [African] mainland has corrupted this island,” my Omani host declared bluntly. “They must apologize for the revolution.” From the “revolution” onward, it seemed that, at least in his mind, Zanzibar has been less an illustration of early globalization than of a latter-day clash of civilizations.
On one side of the cultural divide stood the British and their Omani surrogates, who were backed by the local Arab community as well as by the minorities from the Indian Subcontinent. On the other side stood the much poorer, indigenous Africans—embittered in too many cases by the history of slavery, and by the dispossession of their land at the hands of the Omanis. Standing with the Africans were the Shirazis, who, because they had come to Zanzibar in the early medieval centuries, before the other immigrants, and often as refugees, had become almost completely enmeshed through intermarriage with the Africans. Local elections in the period just before the British withdrew resulted in the two sides splitting the vote down the middle. The inconclusive consequences only increased ethnic and racial tensions.
“Race and ethnicity were never issues before the coming of politics,” explained Ismail Jussa, the Gujarati who is foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Civic United Front, mainly composed of ethnic Indians and Arabs. In other words, empires submerge communal politics because power is hoarded under a single absolute sovereignty. But once imperial law collapses, and its divide-and-rule legacy exposed, communal politics consumes everything. It was so in Cyprus, in Palestine, the Indian Subcontinent, and many other places in Afro-Asia, and so it was in Zanzibar. That is the real inheritance of many, if not all, forms of colonialism.
The British left in December 1963, with the Omani sultan literally holding down the fort on his own. It took only a month, until January 1964, for the sultan to be sent packing on his yacht, as an anti-Arab pogrom exploded through the streets of Stone Town: many Africans actually believed that with the British gone, the Omanis would reintroduce slavery or, at a minimum, mete out unfair treatment. “The politics of race espoused by Zanzibar’s African nationalists,” writes the American academic G. Thomas Burgess, “was based on the premise that cosmopolitanism had not produced wealth and harmony but an exotic, deceptive façade for cultural chauvinism and racial injustice.”5 The result was, according to a Western diplomat and African area expert I met, nothing less than a “mini-Rwanda” that took the lives of men, women, and children in equal proportions, as Afro-Shirazi mobs, speaking the language of revolution and mainland African nationalism and unity, went on a rampage with racial implications. Zanzibari historian Abdul Sheriff, who heads the Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute, describes the violence as “genocidal in proportions.”6 Burgess notes that one third of all Arabs on the island were either killed or forced into immediate exile.
The Zanzibari novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah remembers:
We like to think of ourselves as a moderate and mild people. Arab African Indian Comorian: we lived alongside each other, quarreled and sometimes intermarried.… In reality, we were nowhere near we, but us in our separate yards, locked in our historical ghettoes, self-forgiving and seething with intolerances, with racisms, and with resentments.7
Anarchy, rather than a new post-revolutionary stability, was the result. The Afro-Shirazis who grabbed power were divided among themselves, with doctrinaire communists pitted against plain mad killers. Julius Nyerere, the leader of mainland Tanganyika, though himself a socialist, was nevertheless afraid that Fidel Castro’s Cubans would take advantage of the chaos and set up a puppet state right off his coastline. Ali Sultan Issa, one of the leading revolutionaries from that period, now an old man afflicted with cancer, openly admitted to me his love of Castro and Che Guevara, both of whom he had met often and whose photos graced his bedroom. And yet, rather than an Afro-Shirazi, Issa was of Yemeni-Omani ancestry, just as other revolutionaries from that period were of Arab and Indian descent, according to the pictures he showed me. Likewise, Issa insisted that the revolution was a class struggle rather than a racial one. “It was a Marxist revolution, and ideology spans the boundaries of skin color,” he insisted, a cigarette dripping from his mouth. “For example, Pemban Africans were against the revolution, while some Arabs were for it. No Indians in Pemba were harmed. To define the revolution as racial is to miss the point. Still, a revolution is not a tea party.”
No, it certainly was not. In order to prevent another Cuba, as well as to shore up the political chaos, Nyerere negotiated a deal in April 1964 to bring Zanzibar into a union with Tanganyika, creating Tanzania. Nyerere had the new Zanzibari president, Abeid Karume, protected by police and soldiers from the mainland against the more radical members of Karume’s own coalition. Still, a hard-line socialist regime emerged that expropriated the property of Omanis and other minorities in Stone Town and resettled Africans here. Because the new inhabitants were poor, they could not afford house repairs, and that set the context for Stone Town’s dilapidation. Stone Town today, beyond the rash of trinket and handicraft shops for the tourist, is a hovel of a place when you look at it with careful eyes. Sadly, it is truly representative of Zanzibar as a whole, with an overwhelming African majority and a smattering of Arabs, Indians, and other ethnic groups constituting the inhabitants of the cassava souk, the minorities large in variety but small in absolute numbers (although Stone Town, because of its multicultural demographics compared to the rest of the island, is a stronghold of the political opposition).
The scholar Abdul Sheriff puts the 1964 revolution into perspective. “It was about both class and race,” he told me, “but the racial aspect was more visible. True, not all the Omanis were rich and not all the Africans were poor. Yet even the poor Arabs felt comfortable w
ith the sultan’s regime, while the many Africans who had never been enslaved nevertheless felt comfortable with the new revolutionary authorities.” The nationalizations and other recriminations that followed in the late 1960s sent many Arabs fleeing back to Oman, he added.
In 1972, Karume was assassinated by his own hard-line faction, and Ali Sultan Issa and others, who had been the guiding ideological lights of the revolution, were imprisoned and tortured, as suspicion reigned generally. The revolutionary regime held on, buttressed by the politics of race, as its handling of the economy has generally been a shambles throughout all these recent decades. “We came to power through the machete, we will not give up through the ballot,” regime members have been known to declare.
Nassor Mohammed, a lawyer with close ties to the opposition, told me that Zanzibar had more of an authentic multi-party system under the last phase of British and Omani rule than it does now. In 1992 opposition parties were finally established because of pressure from Western donors, in the wake of the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe. But the “revolutionary government,” as it still calls itself, maintains power through intimidation and the doling out of government jobs and subsidies. Elections held every five years have only exacerbated tensions—identified as the political parties still are with racial groups—and have been an occasion for mainland troops to occupy the island temporarily. The investment that there is in Zanzibar tends to dry up before elections and picks up afterwards when everyone exhibits a sigh of relief that, once again, chaos has been averted. In fact, what has kept Zanzibar peaceful, according to Mohammed, is the very cosmopolitanism that struggles to survive despite the dismal post-1964 experience.
“Zanzibar is an embarrassment to the mainland,” one foreign diplomat told me. Indeed, as mainland Tanzania and neighboring Mozambique make modest economic and political progress, even as Kenya following its inter-tribal violence is still fragile, and Somalia barely existent, Zanzibar, all its cosmopolitanism notwithstanding, is still stuck in the post-colonial past of the 1960s and 1970s, with essentially one-party rule and a regime that has not done nearly enough to attract the foreign capital necessary to soak up the large pool of unemployed male youth, which is the real key to stability in the developing world, especially Africa. Zanzibar exemplifies why the East African seaboard remains the Indian Ocean’s final frontier. And that frontier is not about the holding of elections, but about the building of strong, impersonal institutions that do not discriminate according to race, ethnic group, tribe, or personal connections.
“If we were free of the mainland, we would grow up in a matter of days, and the sons of Zanzibar would return from points all around the Indian Ocean, for our true history is written in the monsoon winds,” Sheikh Salah Idriss Mohammed told me. Sheikh Idriss, a historian, maintains his small apartment as a museum, cluttered to the ceilings with photos of former Omani sultans and with diagrams of the lineage of Omani royal families. Everywhere there are books and maps and manuscripts, concerning pre-1964 days, yellowing and rotting. Plying me with coffee scented with cloves and ginger, he lamented, “We have no democracy at all. In America you elected Obama, a black man, that’s democracy!”
I tried to be hopeful. Compared to the earlier post-colonial era in the 1960s and 1970s, thoughts of race and revolutionary ideology did appear to be in retreat. The dynamism that existed favored the increasingly vibrant opposition, as well as contacts with the outside world through trade and tourism. I refused to believe that the Gulf states, India, China, and Indonesia could keep mightily developing without East and Southern Africa as a whole being eventually, positively affected. Arabs were trickling back, and a new wave of globalization could yet return to Zanzibar what had been lost, without the oppression that had led to the revolution.
In any event, because East Africa was still a frontier, its situation was critical: for its eventual full-blown incorporation into the Greater Indian Ocean trading system would make that system, which would also have to include East Asia, the true, throbbing heart of the twenty-first-century world. No great power—not even the Chinese—would conquer the maritime rim of the Eastern Hemisphere, but a trading system would. Such a trading system would be a power in its own right, able to compete with the European Union and the United States. And Zanzibar, with its cosmopolitan tradition of old, was as good a place as any to watch for it to happen.
Nothing and no one summed up for me the idea of Africa and the Indian Ocean as much as the novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in 1948 in Zanzibar and now teaching literature in England. Gurnah’s Zanzibar is a “tumble-down raft floating on the edges of the Indian Ocean,” decrepit and unassuming, international yet parochial.8 It is a place populated by native Africans, Somalis, Omanis, Baluchis, Gujaratis, Arabs, and Persians, all seeing the same streets and shoreline through different personal, family, and collective historical experiences, even as Islam is a commonality, like the air everyone breathes. In one way or another, commerce and the monsoon winds have brought them all to this shore. “This is what we’re on this earth to do,” declares one of Gurnah’s characters. “To trade.” To go inland in search of goods to bring back to the coast, to travel to the bleakest deserts or most impenetrable forests, in order to do business with “a king or a savage.… It’s all the same to us.”9 Trade delivers peace and prosperity. Trade is the great equalizer among people and nations; it does more than perhaps any other activity to prevent war.
Yet in the novelist’s elegiac vision Zanzibar’s cosmopolitan population has made for a world of separations and abandonment, and the severest personal loss. Trade entails opportunity and movement, and therefore the rending of family ties forever. As one character says, “such pain never ends … nothing which means so much is ever over.”10 Another character, a young boy taken away from his parents in order to pay off his father’s debt and to find a livelihood with a trader, “wondered” years later “if his parents still thought of him, if they still lived, and he knew that he would rather not find out.” At the same time this boy is “numbed by guilt that he had been unable to keep the memory of his parents fresh in his life.”11
Such deeply felt personal loss is partially appeased by the shock of new landscapes and experiences that the protagonists encounter in their one-way journeys away from loved ones. This sad and beautiful world, of permanent partings and dhow journeys—captured in totally different ways by Camões and Gurnah—is made all the more tragic by the experience of colonialism. A typical Gurnah character is a young East African student sent to study and live a marginal existence in England, who ends up never seeing his family again, and is thus at home nowhere. Referring to the people he meets in England, one such character observes, “How chilling and belittling blue eyes can be.”12 Indeed, even as the imperial power strives to maintain the highest traditions of justice and liberty, the very relationship between the colonizer and its subjects leads to cruel misunderstandings and a feeling of inferiority and servitude on the part of the indigenous inhabitants.
But Gurnah is even more unsparing of his homeland’s own post-colonial failure, which only makes the humiliation experienced by his characters that much worse. Barbarism, in the form of the 1964 revolution, quickly follows independence. “There was hardly time to get used to the [new] flag” before “murder, expulsion, detention, rape, you name it.” Gangs roamed the street. There is a local dictator for whom “no meanness was too petty,” even as he himself was cut down by “mean bastards” with machine guns, a clear reference to Karume.13 Then there are the petty “deprivations and wretchedness” of self-rule: blocked toilets, running water and electricity only a few hours a day. Historic houses kept up by the English are “turned into hovels.” It is a series of uglinesses.
As Gurnah writes: “We don’t know how to make anything for ourselves, not anything we use or desire, not even a bar of soap or a packet of razor blades.”14
Following the British departure, rather than forge a better world, this supposed cosmopolitan and intermarri
ed Indian Ocean civilization of Arabs, Persians, Indians, and Africans comes undone by “seething” intolerances and “racisms,” all brought to the surface by post-independence politics. Colonialism, having rent the fabric of traditional island culture, leaves it exposed to every indignity, self-inflicted and otherwise, after independence. It is like a complex organism without any defenses left. Taking a walk, “going nowhere in particular,” is, according to the novelist, the “postcolonial condition.”15
And yet at some point a direction must emerge for the walker, because the post-colonial period itself must pass into a new era; the era, in fact, that I experienced in my travels. Looking at the myriad faces and skin complexions around me, I knew that each had borne a family’s separate and unique experience of departures and leave-takings, of struggles and abandonments. And all for what purpose? “To trade.”
Gurnah has much to teach. “Imagination is a kind of truth,” he writes, for to imagine is to be able to put yourself in another’s shoes. And the more you imagine, the more aware you are of how little you know, for “to be too certain of anything is the beginning of bigotry.”16
From Stone Town I traveled for an hour and a half to the southeastern tip of Zanzibar, to the coastal town of Makunduchi. It was late July, and the Shirazi festival of Mwaka Kogwa was at hand, a celebration of the Zoroastrian new year, long ago absorbed into the culture of the African Swahili inhabitants. Tradition held that through the catharsis of ritual combat the locals would be cleansed of all their grudges and other bad feelings built up between them in the course of the year.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 38
