War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar available in Paperback
War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar
- ISBN-10:
- 025322280X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253222800
- Pub. Date:
- 02/21/2011
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 025322280X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253222800
- Pub. Date:
- 02/21/2011
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253222800 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2011 |
| Pages: | 414 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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War of Words, War of Stones
Racial thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar
By Jonathon Glassman
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2011 Jonathon GlassmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35585-0
CHAPTER 1
Rethinking Race in the Colonial World
I
The Sultanate of Zanzibar, a pair of islands twenty miles off the coast of East Africa, has captured the attention of the Western world at two moments in the modern era, both times as an emblem of the battle between civilization and barbarism. The first was in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when David Livingstone and other ideologues of missionary Christianity made it famous as the seat of what they called the "Arab slave trade" that was then disrupting many parts of the continental mainland. Their crusade to end the slave trade and replace it with civilization and "legitimate commerce" culminated in colonial conquest at the century's end, undertaken in the name of advancing moral and social progress. The second moment, far briefer, seemed at the time a coda to the story of abolition. On the night of 11-12 January 1964, one month after Zanzibar had gained its independence from British rule, the Arab sultan and his elected constitutional government were overthrown by forces claiming to represent the islands' African racial majority and to be fighting to redress the centuries-old injustice of Arab rule. The coup was accompanied by pogroms that took the lives of thousands of the islands' Arab minority.
Contemporary observers regarded the latter events as a grave setback to the orderly processes of the preceding decade, in which British administrators and Zanzibari politicians had sought to nurture a civic nationalism that would take the place of colonial rule. Similar setbacks would occur elsewhere in the former colonial world, including in Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, and South Asia. In the language of social scientists, nationalists had aimed to build a "civil order" in which "the gross actualities of blood, race, language, locality, religion, or tradition" would be subordinated. But those "primordial sentiments" proved difficult to avoid, rooted as they were in the region's deepest histories. In the case of Zanzibar, observers across the political and ideological spectrum agreed that the violence was the product of over two millennia of tension created by Arab racial domination. The African-American Chicago Defender, a venerable champion of African nationalism, explained that the revolution was an "Arab-African explosion which had its beginning in more than 25 centuries [of] Arab influence and unresolved racial conflicts," including the never-forgotten experience of the "Arab slave trade." Mainstream pundits and policy makers, including those less sympathetic to African nationalism, issued similar pronouncements. The widespread and apparently spontaneous pogroms in Zanzibar seemed powerful evidence of such primordialist interpretations.
These were not simply the views of foreigners. Only three years earlier, spokesmen for the party that would take power after the 1964 revolution, the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), had apologized for a similar outbreak of racial violence in much the same way: as a "spontaneous" outburst of popular anger that had sprung from centuries of racial oppression. The ASP was a party of explicit racial nationalism, and the elite Arabs who led its main rival, the multiracial Zanzibar National Party (ZNP), did not accept its narrative of Arab oppression. Nevertheless, until quite late the ZNP leaders had shared a similar historical vision of the deep-seated nature of Zanzibar's racial divisions. Indeed, the far-fetched idea that Arabs had been living in East Africa as a distinct racial elite for over two millennia had long been propagated by the Arab nationalists themselves. In short, primordialist explanations of Zanzibar's racial divisions had been ubiquitous among the islands' political thinkers.
Yet this model of deeply rooted divisions between Arab and African — boundaries that were clear cut, fixed, and slow to change — sat poorly with the most common representations of this part of East Africa. Zanzibar is part of the Swahili coast, a name given to the language and culture practiced along almost 2,000 miles of the Indian Ocean littoral. Although the language belongs to the Bantu linguistic family, it contains many Arabic loanwords and the culture is often represented as a synthesis of African and Middle Eastern elements. More pertinently, Swahili society has often been portrayed — by Western scholars, colonial administrators, and Swahili intellectuals themselves — as the epitome of ethnic fluidity and racial indeterminacy. Swahili-speakers simultaneously perceive themselves as Arab, Persian, and/or Indian as well as African; the specific emphasis an individual gives to his or her racial identity can shift according to situation and generation. In the 1950s, the anthropologist A. H. J. Prins wrote that Swahili-peakers rarely thought of themselves as belonging exclusively to any one racial category (a person was "never Swahili and nothing else") and observed that individuals constantly crossed and straddled boundaries. More recently, the literary scholars Alamin Mazrui and Ibrahim Noor Shariff have described Swahili "identity paradigms" as "assimilative and flexible," based on "a concept of belonging that is truly liberal." Such identity paradigms were quintessentially African, they write, and stand in contrast to the fixed, rigid identity paradigms characteristic of Western thought. Throughout the colonial era, in fact, indigenous and British elites represented Zanzibar as islands of racial harmony. To a large extent this representation was a myth, informed by overlapping sets of paternalist ideals and belied by many instances of tension that punctuated the sultanate's public life. Yet it contained a kernel of truth, for Zanzibaris had not, as a rule, organized themselves into ethnically discrete communities, and, despite occasional tension, few thought of ethnic divisions with the kind of exclusionary rigidity that informed the pogroms of the early 1960s.
So primordialist explanations of Zanzibar's racial divisions are easily discounted — and, indeed, although simple primordialism is still commonplace among journalists, few serious scholars accept it anymore. But that leaves the puzzle of explaining how ethnic identities had become so polarized by mid-century. Within weeks of the 1964 revolution, the leaders of the ASP, in a sudden change of their primordialist views, began offering an answer that would soon become standard among scholars and political thinkers in many parts of the continent. In a speech in March, Abeid Amani Karume, the founding president of the Revolutionary Government, announced the prohibition of ethnic associations (klabu za ukabila). Imperialists had created such associations "in order to divide people," he explained, and to thus strengthen the rule of their puppets in the old Arab regime. Later that year Karume returned to the theme, telling audiences that ethnic divisions, in particular those between Arabs and Africans, had been introduced by British colonialism.\
In the second of these speeches, Karume went on to focus on the British use of history as a tool to divide their colonial subjects; this was one of his earliest salvos in a campaign that culminated in a ban on teaching history in the islands' schools. Karume shrewdly understood that forgetting history would be useful not only for holding together a society so recently torn apart by racial violence but also for obscuring his own role in fostering those tensions: throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, he and his party propagated fiery rhetoric, including inflammatory historical narratives that urged people to identify their loyalties and enmities on the basis of ancestry and skin color. Indeed, Karume owed his political prominence to his longtime leadership of one of the ethnic associations, the African Association, that supposedly had been invented by the British.
Similar contradictions can be found in the utterances of the elite ZNP nationalists from whom Karume seized power. This intelligentsia had long advocated a civil order based on what they thought of as the islands' distinctive Arab-centered history, a history they portrayed as civilized, multiracial, and inclusive. Their vision was deeply chauvinist, however: throughout the 1950s and 1960s, they repeatedly warned that Zanzibari civilization was endangered by the barbarism of the mainland immigrants and their descendants who allegedly formed the bulk of Karume's party. Yet at the same time they blamed all divisive language solely on the ASP, which they claimed had been mentored and even created by the colonial authorities. They ridiculed ASP loyalists as British lackeys and wamisheni: people of the missionaries, from whose abolitionism they had supposedly imbibed their anti-Arab sentiments. (In fact, virtually all Zanzibaris were Muslim.) In his 1997 memoirs, Ali Muhsin al-Barwani, the de facto leader of the government that was overthrown in January 1964, reproduces the comforting illusion that Zanzibar was once an oasis of multiracialism in which most people were "mixtures of mixtures." "The only snag was the deliberate infusion of alien notions calculated to cause confusion and hatred." And yet, for most of his life Muhsin had never allowed for any "mixture" in his own proud self-identity as an Arab. The very memoirs from which this passage is quoted, to say nothing of Muhsin's previous six decades of political journalism, are imbued with an overt disdain for mainland Africans.
For many readers, such disingenuousness will be remarkable only as a particularly bold example of Ernest Renan's famous statement about the need for nation-builders to get their history wrong. But it takes on added significance for students of the colonial and postcolonial world, insofar as the opportunistic perspectives of such politicians have substantially shaped the analysis of many professional scholars. This book will argue that the rise of racial thought in colonial Zanzibar was largely the work of indigenous intellectuals, including those at the forefront of mainstream nationalism, who in their debates and disputations created a locally hegemonic discourse of racial difference. Rather than obstacles standing in the way of nationalists' efforts to build a civil order, in other words, the attachments of blood and tradition had been created in part by the nationalists' own efforts. Yet much of the literature on the colonial world assumes, in contrast, that ethnic conflict arose more or less automatically from social structures that had been bolstered or even created outright by colonial rule: its emphasis is not on indigenous thinkers but on European policy makers who defined and divided their subjects by race and ethnicity. Historians who are cognizant of indigenous racial thinkers usually portray them as marginal figures, the tools of colonial mentors. The result is that such thinkers — especially those who incited dehumanizing racial violence — are treated as aberrations, as "subnationalist" demagogues isolated from the mainstream of anticolonial nationalist thought.
Such interpretations obviously have been shaped by the nationalist paradigm that has achieved hegemony in the postcolonial world in the past generation, an aspect of the literature to which I will return. But there are, I believe, deeper reasons for such an emphasis, reasons that transcend the postcolonial moment and pertain to the broader study of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Leaving aside questions of historical method — including an ingrained propensity in African studies to privilege oral sources for their "authenticity," thus allowing nationalists to shape the historical record with their own post facto self-representations — the central analytic flaw of many of these studies consists of what Ann Stoler has called the "scholarly quest for origins," the quest for the moment of "original sin" when "the die of race was cast." Such quests assume what Stoler's colleague Loïc Wacquant describes as "the logic of the trial," in which investigators seek to name "victims and culprits" rather than understand complex historical processes. In the Zanzibar case the figures made to stand trial are typically the racial nationalists of the ASP. This is understandable, given that their virulent race-baiting informed most of the pogroms, which victimized Arabs and were perpetrated by ASP loyalists. But the racial thinking from which ASP demagoguery emerged and that made so many islanders susceptible to its seductions was fairly pervasive and as such is unlikely to be traced to a single source.
A pointed illustration of the perils of searching for a single origin of racial thought can be found in the literature on Rwanda, a case that parallels Zanzi-bar's in many ways. In a recent synthesis, Mahmood Mamdani has observed that notions of Hutu and Tutsi became racialized during the colonial era. This concept of racialization is indispensable to an historical understanding of race, for it prompts us to ask how diverse forms of ethnic and national thought can become invested with racial meanings. Yet like many authors, Mamdani traces the racialization process back to a single source, the actions of the colonial state. The result is a view of Rwandan intellectual history in which Europeans are the only actors, inventing and imposing identities as prompted by administrative needs.
The literature on the colonial world, and especially on Africa, is rife with such interpretations. To understand why, we must confront a cluster of misapprehensions about the nature of race and associated forms of ethnic and national thought, some specific to the study of Africa, others more general. Only then can we craft a strategy that does not underestimate the role African thinkers played in the construction of race.
II
The first of these misapprehensions is a lingering tendency toward what Robert Miles calls the "conceptual inflation" of race into an element of social structure; as we shall see, this is especially pronounced in studies of the colonial world. Many sociologists now reject that tendency, preferring instead to understand race as a mode of thought — in constant interplay with social structures and political processes, to be sure, but best approached as a topic of intellectual history. This understanding stresses that the history of race has involved the "production and reproduction of meanings" — specifically, meanings concerning particular ways of categorizing humanity. The history of race, then, like the history of ethnicity and nationhood (below I will consider the lack of clear distinctions among them), is a story of how particular ways of categorizing humanity became important modes of organizing social and political action at particular times and places — and, as Rogers Brubaker emphasizes, how they declined in importance at others.
However, most studies of the history of racial thought limit themselves by regarding their subject only as a specific corpus of ideas: a "doctrine" that categorizes and ranks humanity in terms of biology. Racial thought is thus usually approached as a school of Western science ("raciology," as it once was called) that realized its classic distillations in nineteenth-century Europe. To be sure, some authors have recognized the limits of such a view, since even at the height of raciology's academic respectability, few pogromschiki or lynch mob members would have been conversant with the writings of Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain. More pointedly, over the past twenty years a substantial literature has emphasized the postscientific forms that have flourished in the wake of raciology's postwar academic demise. These "new racisms" demonstrate that racial thought need not be manifested in a scientific idiom or even entail a ranking of racial categories. There is now a "racism without races," writes Etienne Balibar, "a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences."
Yet even this literature on the "new racism" portrays it as a holdover from classic raciology or, more precisely, as a deteriorated version of that ideology, which once existed in a pristine, originary state. Such literature is mistaken in its depiction of the supposed newness of culturalist racial thought. It is also mistaken in its depiction of the older forms, which in fact were neither invariably hierarchical nor invariably built around a core of biological theory. Past social practices that are universally accepted as classic examples of "racism," including colonial racisms, were informed by a wide variety of ideologies, many of which had little to do with racial science. Far more influential than raciology, for example, was the anthropological concept of clearly bounded "cultural monads," a concept directly connected with contemporary culturalist thought. As Balibar recognizes, the idea of "racism without races" is far from revolutionary; there is little new about the "new racism."
In succumbing to the search for origins, scholars overlook a central theme of the historical literature on racial science, which charts the latter's own varied and multiple sources, including many that were neither "racial" (in the conventional sense) nor scientific. Perhaps most significant of these sources was the concept of "barbarism" and its foil, "civilization," from which modern race thinkers inherited the project of comparing all humanity according to a single, universal standard. It should be axiomatic that the history of a phenomenon cannot be found solely by looking for its earliest manifestations as it is defined a priori; to paraphrase Nietzsche, in defining a phenomenon we deny it a history. Many scholars nevertheless insist on an absolute divide between racial thought and the concepts that contributed to it and search doggedly for the precise moment that race emerged from (for example) the discourse of barbarism. As Stoler archly observes, they come up with widely divergent dates. One of the implications for the study of the colonial world should be clear. If "race" is assumed to arise solely from scientific doctrines, then its presence in the non-Western world must be traced solely to the West. And that, in fact, has become a standard narrative. Building on a set of functionalist assumptions often associated with Immanuel Wallerstein, authors describe how Western expansion called racial thought into being as a way of structuring the worldwide division of labor between the subservient "periphery" and the ruling "core."
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Note on Usage xiii
Part 1 Introduction
1 Rethinking Race in the Colonial World 3
2 The Creation of a Racial State 23
Part 2 War of Words
3 A Secular Intelligentsia and the Origins of Exclusionary Ethnic Nationalism 75
4 Subaltern Intellectuals and the Rise of Racial Nationalism 105
5 Politics and Civil Society during the Newspaper Wars 147
Part 3 War of Stones
6 Rumor, Race, and Crime 179
7 Violence as Racial Discourse 230
8 "June" as Chosen Trauma 264
Conclusion and Epilogue: Remaking Race 282
Glossary 303
Notes 305
List of References 381
Index 391
What People are Saying About This
"Do non-Western ideas about race derive mostly from European practices and modes of thought? The answer is a convincing 'no' in this dense, thoughtful, sometimes combative work. Historian Glassman (Northwestern Univ.) shows how rising racial tensions plagued Zanzibar's integrative Islamic society in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in deadly riots (the 'war of stones') in June 1961 and a bloody 1964 coup. Neither primordial nor colonial in origin, Zanzibar's social stratification reflected its economic development from the mid-19th century and postemancipation efforts to maintain the plantation system. Under British rule, struggles over labor, property, identity, and 'civilized' status drew upon subjective memories of violent enslavement, ethnic stereotyping, and fears of criminal disorder. Such 'multiculturalism' lacked tolerance, polarizing Arab islanders and African mainlanders (slave descendants and more recent migrants). Increasingly virulent political debates and rumors, documented in archival sources and a vigorous local press, gave a menacing air to the Time of Politics after 1957. Given Glassman's facility as fieldworker and Swahili linguist (Feasts and Riot, CH, Nov'95, 33-1674), his decision here to forego oral history will provoke controversy. Nevertheless, along with rethinking racialism, the book advances Africanists' ongoing reassessment of the role of oral evidence. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Academic and large public libraries; undergraduates and above. —Choice"
A boldly conceived and meticulously conducted study that throws down a challenge to the writing of African politics in the twentieth century. . . . sure to unsettle, provoke, and guide for years to come.
Do non-Western ideas about race derive mostly from European practices and modes of thought? The answer is a convincing 'no' in this dense, thoughtful, sometimes combative work. Historian Glassman (Northwestern Univ.) shows how rising racial tensions plagued Zanzibar's integrative Islamic society in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in deadly riots (the 'war of stones') in June 1961 and a bloody 1964 coup. Neither primordial nor colonial in origin, Zanzibar's social stratification reflected its economic development from the mid-19th century and postemancipation efforts to maintain the plantation system. Under British rule, struggles over labor, property, identity, and 'civilized' status drew upon subjective memories of violent enslavement, ethnic stereotyping, and fears of criminal disorder. Such 'multiculturalism' lacked tolerance, polarizing Arab islanders and African mainlanders (slave descendants and more recent migrants). Increasingly virulent political debates and rumors, documented in archival sources and a vigorous local press, gave a menacing air to the Time of Politics after 1957. Given Glassman's facility as fieldworker and Swahili linguist (Feasts and Riot, CH, Nov'95, 33-1674), his decision here to forego oral history will provoke controversy. Nevertheless, along with rethinking racialism, the book advances Africanists' ongoing reassessment of the role of oral evidence. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Academic and large public libraries; undergraduates and above. —Choice
Do non-Western ideas about race derive mostly from European practices and modes of thought? The answer is a convincing 'no' in this dense, thoughtful, sometimes combative work. Historian Glassman (Northwestern Univ.) shows how rising racial tensions plagued Zanzibar's integrative Islamic society in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in deadly riots (the 'war of stones') in June 1961 and a bloody 1964 coup. Neither primordial nor colonial in origin, Zanzibar's social stratification reflected its economic development from the mid-19th century and postemancipation efforts to maintain the plantation system. Under British rule, struggles over labor, property, identity, and 'civilized' status drew upon subjective memories of violent enslavement, ethnic stereotyping, and fears of criminal disorder. Such 'multiculturalism' lacked tolerance, polarizing Arab islanders and African mainlanders (slave descendants and more recent migrants). Increasingly virulent political debates and rumors, documented in archival sources and a vigorous local press, gave a menacing air to the Time of Politics after 1957. Given Glassman's facility as fieldworker and Swahili linguist (Feasts and Riot, CH, Nov'95, 33-1674), his decision here to forego oral history will provoke controversy. Nevertheless, along with rethinking racialism, the book advances Africanists' ongoing reassessment of the role of oral evidence. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Academic and large public libraries; undergraduates and above. —Choice
In this brave and powerful book Glassman shows that African thinking about nationhood wasn't abstract, but sometimes rooted in ideas about history, culture, and physical bodies. And while race and ethnicity were social constructions made on the ground, that ground itself was fissured by claims and disclaims of ancestry and birthplace and by weakened plantation economies and the evictions of squatters. With painstaking care and painful clarity Glassman maps that ground, on which ideas about race and ideas about nation were translated into terror and trauma.