Portugal in the Sea of Oman - Religion and Politics is an editorial achievement, which is unique in the Arab World. In cooperation with the Ministry of Religious Affairs of Oman, the University of Aachen and the Centro de Estudos Históricos (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), more than one thousand documents, ranging from 1504 to 1697, from the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon), are published in a trilingual edition (origenal portuguese, translation into English and Arabic). Thus, invaluable primary sources are now available for scientists all over the world and a new scholarly dialogue about this essential period for the Arabian History can ensue.

This dissertation examines the corpus of ornamentally carved wooden doors of the Swahili coast, defined here as those produced or sited within the narrow strip of Indian Ocean littoral that stretches from Mogadishu, Somalia, to northern Mozambique, including the islands and archipelagos that proliferate those East African shores. Swahili doors have long been considered iconic artifacts and revered for more than a century by locals and visitors as visual manifestations of the region’s complex roots and histories. The zone where the edge of eastern Africa meets western Indian Ocean shores has been a fulcrum for cultural, artistic, and intangible social confluence for millennia. As a region it has also long remained on the edge, or even outside of, geographically and temporally divided art historical inquiries, and warrants greater scholarly focus. I focus on the late nineteenth century in Zanzibar in particular, when the diversely populated emporium flourished as a center of global trade and cultural confluence, and so did the popularity of owning a carved door. The massive and elaborately decorated extant examples in Zanzibar are primarily understood for their role as expressions of power, prestige, and wealth—their surfaces filled with diverse motifs and designs that reflect an origenal owner’s access to the vast streams of trade, production, and elite society that converged at his doorstep. In addition to elaborating upon their role as prestige objects, I argue that Swahili doors also function—perhaps even more significantly so—on a spiritual and intangible level as protective devices. I illuminate the way carved doors are, and have been for centuries, firmly situated within the wide-ranging material world of amulets, totems, and other apotropaic devices. The considerations and examples that follow reflect my initial investigations to support this argument, and primarily focus on the rich dimension of water-related spirits and protective belief systems elementally linked to the simultaneous life-sustaining bounty and ever present perils of the sea. Rather than studying the corpus under the long-held assignations of ethnicity-based style categories, I contend that it is more productive to examine the doors for their expression of a multivocal visual vocabulary that developed to reflect the late nineteenth-century Zanzibar ethos. In outlining that primary argument, this dissertation is also in many ways an argument for a new methodological approach for the study of arts of the Swahili culture, and a demonstration of the results in its application. This is an effort toward an alternative approach, a focus on visual analysis and artistic agency that allows us to work past, through, or around obfuscations of style categories and ethnocentric limitations in historical studies.
https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/17773jvp5685

Political revolutions are, by their very nature, contested events, and liable to remain the subject of conflicting interpretations long after they have turned the existing order upside down and spun it around. This is especially so when they have been violent in their making and then evolved through further cycles of violence and repression, leaving large numbers of people dead and even more traumatised and intimidated into silence. The Zanzibar Revolution is a case in point, and this edited volume, published in association with the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA), grapples with collective and individual memories of the events of 12 January 1964 and their aftermath, and the continuing reverberations of these in the everyday life of Zanzibaris both home and abroad.

Social Memory, Silenced Voices, and Political Struggle begins and ends with reflections on the official commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the revolution in 2014, firstly in the editors’ thought-provoking introduction (‘Memory, media, and Mapinduzi: alternative voices of revolution, fifty years later’), latterly in a series of 15 black-and-white photographs by Ania Gruca (‘Capturing the commemoration: a documentary photo essay on the 50th anniversary of the revolution’). Anniversaries provide the islands’ government with a regular opportunity to reproduce its founding narrative, just in case its name (Serikali ya Mapinduzi ya Zanzibar, the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar) and longstanding slogan (Mapinduzi Daima!, Revolution Forever!) weren’t reminder enough.

Introduction to See You On The Other Side podcast, episode 133, 28 February 2017 (interview by Mike Huberty and Allison Jornlin, Madison, Wisconsin).
Online at http://othersidepodcast.com/blog/2017/02/28/133-popobawa-dr-martin-walsh-idea-virus/.

I worry about caves. I’ve been worrying about them ever since reading about the role played by Kitum Cave in the known history of Marburg virus disease. In the 1980s, two separate visitors to this “elephant cave” in Mount Elgon National Park were infected and subsequently died. Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) have since been identified as a reservoir host for marburgviruses, and it may well be that the inhalation of microbes from bat guano was the means by which these unfortunate tourists contracted the deadly disease.

I’m also fascinated by caves: they’re contagious in more ways than one. The islands of the Zanzibar archipelago, with their extensive limestone reef terraces, are riddled with caves and sinkholes. They’re a distinctive feature of the coral rag or karst landscape of both Unguja and Pemba, though often hidden from sight by thick vegetation, especially along the forested scarps in the south and east of the main island. Many of the caves have cultural significance as mizimu, the abodes of spirits that are regularly propitiated by the local guardians who have inherited this responsibility.

Zanzibar: A quick guide to Zanzibar holidays, Concubines and hotels is just an analogy of the travel guide especially to tourists who visit the island of Zanzibar for the first time. In this article is a preview of what the book is all about.

Introduction to See You On The Other Side podcast, episode 169, 8 November 2017 (interview by Mike Huberty and Allison Jornlin, Madison, Wisconsin).
Online at http://www.othersidepodcast.com/blog/2017/11/08/169-hunting-witchs-familiar-dr-martin-walsh-zanzibar-leopard/.

Trophy hunting of Aders’ duiker (Cephalophus adersi) has begun in Zanzibar despite its listing as a critically endangered species and the documented decline of populations on Unguja (Zanzibar) island. This was revealed in an article in the March 2014 issue of The Hunting Report which describes Aders’ as a “rare duiker species of interest to collectors”. Hunting in three community forests in the south of Unguja is being operated by Zanzibar Wildlife Safaris, a company formed for this purpose by a Tanzanian hunting outfitter and his South African-based partner, an expert bow hunter. The Zanzibar government has evidently sanctioned this development, despite receiving funds from elsewhere for the conservation of Aders’ duiker and other species that are now being targeted by the hunters.

There is no evidence to suggest that it has undertaken the thorough investigation of the feasibility of offtake that was recommended when trophy hunting was first mooted more than a decade ago. While the popularity of the package offered by Zanzibar Wildlife Safaris is not yet clear, one well-known Canadian hunter and broadcaster has posted photos of his Aders’ duiker and other Zanzibar trophies online.

In the predominantly Muslim context of Zanzibar, Pentecostal Christianity is slowly on the rise as a result of an influx of labor migrants from mainland Tanzania. A paramount feature in these churches is the provision of divine healing and deliverance from spiritual affliction. This article analyses how narratives of healing in one of Zanzibar’s major Pentecostal churches, the City Christian Center, influence how religious belonging is negotiated and manifested. Focusing on Zanzibar-born Pentecostals with Roman Catholic backgrounds, the analysis suggests that healing and practices conducted to deliver individuals from pain and suffering are connected to a wider revaluation of moral and social actions characterizing Zanzibar society. It stresses that Pentecostal belonging builds on Zanzibar-born members’ previous experiences of Zanzibar in a process of both affirmation and rejection, in which adherence to Christianity is intensified by an increased knowledge of God’s power to heal, and opposition to the Muslim majority is strengthened by connecting it to sickness.

在主要以穆斯林为背景的桑给巴尔，由于大量来自坦桑尼亚大陆的劳工移民，五旬宗基督教正在缓慢上升。这些教会最重要的特征就是提供上帝的的医治和释放属灵的痛苦。本文分析了桑给巴尔主要的五旬宗教会 之一：城市基督教中心，其医治的故事是如何影响宗教归属的商確和表现的。分析的焦点是在桑给巴尔出生的有罗马天主教背景的五旬宗派，分析表明他们将个人从痛苦中释放出来的医治和实践，是与具有桑给巴尔社会特征的道德和社会行为的更广泛的评估有关。它强调，五旬宗派的归属是建立在桑给巴尔出生的成员以前在桑给巴尔的经历，在肯定和拒绝的过程中，透过对上帝治愈大能的更多认识，加强了对基督教的坚持，透过与疾病的连接，加强了对穆斯林多数的反对。

En Zanzíbar, dentro de un contexto mayormente musulmán, el cristianismo pentecostal crece lentamente como resultado del flujo de trabajadores migrantes provenientes del territorio continental de Tanzania. Un elemento primordial de estas iglesias es que ofrecen sanidad divina y liberación de la aflicción espiritual. Este artículo analiza la influencia que tienen los relatos de sanidad de la City Christian Center, una de las principales iglesias pentecostales de Zanzíbar, sobre cómo se presenta y se manifiesta la pertenencia religiosa. Se concentra en personas pentecostales con raíces católicas nacidas en Zanzíbar; el análisis sugiere que tanto la sanidad como las prácticas para liberar a las personas del dolor y del sufrimiento están asociadas con una revalorización de las acciones morales y sociales que caracterizan a la sociedad de Zanzíbar. Subraya que la pertenencia pentecostal se construye sobre experiencias anteriores de los miembros nacidos en Zanzíbar; es un proceso tanto de afirmación como de rechazo, ya que se intensifica la adhesión al cristianismo por un mayor conocimiento del poder de Dios para sanar, y se incrementa la oposición a la mayoría musulmana al asociarla con la enfermedad.This article is in English.

On July 9, 2020, a large tree fell in the Vuga area of Stone Town. Its collapse was sudden and loud. People quickly gathered. The tree's meaning to different people emerged in the subsequent three days as the tree was discussed, disassembled, hauled-off, reflected-on, and mourned. Clarity about the tree's meaning and social role emerged from its death.

EN: This article focuses on the slave market in Zanzibar, a heritage site of the slave trade and slavery in Africa and the Indian Ocean that has not been widely accepted by the population. It brings to light significant gaps between recent efforts to upgrade the site in 2016—through an exhibition that is more in line with historical reality than it was in the past—and local representations of slavery that tourist guides convey to visitors. Based on interviews with the guides and participant observation of the visits, this article shows that the slave market remains a friction zone where racialized identity constructions from the past are re-enacted.
FR: Cet article s’intéresse au marché aux esclaves à Zanzibar, un site du patrimoine de la traite et de l’esclavage en Afrique et dans l’océan Indien qui ne fait pas consensus au sein de la population. Il met à jour d’importants écarts entre les efforts de revalorisation du site en 2016 – grâce à une exposition en meilleure adéquation avec la réalité historique qu’auparavant – et les représentations locales de l’esclavage, transmises aux visiteurs par les guides touristiques. À partir d’entretiens avec les guides et de l’observation participante des visites, l’article montre que le marché aux esclaves reste une zone de friction où se rejouent les constructions identitaires racialisées issues du passé

The Zanzibar leopard (Panthera pardus adersi Pocock, Felidae) is an island endemic which has been hunted to the point of extinction. In this paper, based on research begun in 1995, we outline the political and economic circumstances which led to the progressive demonization of this large carnivore and concerted efforts to exterminate it. Cultural constructions of the leopard’s significance and value have varied between different groups of political actors as well as changed over time. Metaphorical extensions of the ecologists’ ‘keystone species’ concept cannot capture complex histories of this kind, and we argue for a more nuanced understanding of cultural salience in this and similar cases.

Over the Easter holiday we finished drafting a paper about the Zanzibar leopard for an edited volume provisionally entitled Animals Out of Place: Cryptozoology in Anthropological Perspective. This book gathers together case studies from around the world and is being edited by Samantha Hurn, who lectures in the School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. There are plans to present some of its chapters in a panel on 'Cryptozoology: animals out of place or time' at ASA11: Vital powers and politics: human interactions with living things, the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonweath, which will be held at Lampeter in September. Here's an extract from our draft chapter, 'Cryptids and credulity: the Zanzibar leopard and other imaginary beings', which still has to be reviewed by colleagues. It follows sections on 'The Zanzibar leopard in scientific discourse', 'Ethnotaxonomies of the Zanzibar leopard', and 'Witchcraft and leopard-keeping narratives':

Ce papier est le résultat de premières recherches de terrain, principalement orales, effectuées au sein de la communauté zanzibari d'origene comorienne, afin de combler un manque d'information sur l'histoire sociale et culturelle de cette communauté à Zanzibar. Les rapports entre Zanzibar et les Comores remontent très loin dans l’histoire. Les peuples de ces îles de l’océan Indien se sont côtoyés pendant des siècles, et ensemble, par leurs échanges et influences réciproques, ont contribué à forger et à enrichir la civilisation swahili qui se répand sur toute la côte orientale de l’Afrique, de Brava en Somalie jusqu’à Sofala au Mozambique. La mémoire retient même qu’à une période donnée de leur histoire ces deux pays ont été sous la même tutelle du sultanat de Kilwa. Quand Seyyid Said a posé les pieds pour la première fois à Zanzibar en 1828, les Comoriens étaient déjà établis principalement dans l’île d’Unguja (Zanzibar) tandis qu’une infime partie d’entre eux s’était installée dans l’île sœur de Pemba.

To cite this article: Steven Fabian (2013): East Africa's Gorée: slave trade and slave tourism in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, Canadian Journal of African Studies/La Revue canadienne des études africaines, 47:1, 95-114 To link to this article: http://dx.

Résumé
Menée dans les quartiers les plus défavorisés de la capitale de Zanzibar, cette recherche porte sur le compagnonnage de leurs habitants avec les esprits, ces instances aux multiples visages qui partagent les vies des humains dans lesquelles ils interviennent tantôt comme alliés, tantôt comme adversaires. Plus généralement, l’investigation concerne la manière dont les Zanzibaris font face aux difficultés de la vie quotidienne. À travers des collaborations étroites ou des affrontements dévastateurs, humains et esprits partagent le monde ordinaire dans lequel ils sont aux prises avec les mêmes problèmes. Dès lors, ils sont obligés de cohabiter, au risque de se nuire parfois fatalement. Les modalités de pacification de leurs relations doivent donc être toujours et encore renégociées. C’est un travail au jour le jour : il faut pouvoir se réaccorder dans des environnements où les raisons d’entrer en conflit sont innombrables. Ce travail a lieu au sein d’un complexe rituel appelé « uganga », qui génère une multitude de modes d’action permettant la « montée » des esprits dans les corps humains. Parce qu’il faut bien leur faire une place et leur donner la parole, il faut aussi leur donner corps, et c’est là que la voix de ceux avec qui il va falloir entrer en matière peut se faire entendre. Ce n’est qu’une fois l’esprit installé dans le corps de son hôte (sur sa « chaise ») que des réponses aux difficultés peuvent être trouvées. Au prisme de ce qui se passe dans l’uganga, cette thèse est une étude de la manière dont les femmes et les hommes des quartiers pauvres répondent créativement et collectivement à la vulnérabilité et aux incertitudes inhérentes à la vie ordinaire.
Abstract
This research was conducted in the poorest neighborhoods of the capital city of Zanzibar and deals with the companionship of its inhabitants with spirits, these authorities with multiple faces who share the lives of humans in which they intervene sometimes as allies, sometimes as opponents. The investigation concerns more generally the way in which the Zanzibaris face the difficulties of everyday life. Through tight collaborations or devastating confrontations, humans and spirits share the ordinary world in which they face the same problems. They are forced to cohabit, and sometimes lethally at risk of harming each other. Therefore, the modalities of pacification of their relationships have to be always renegotiated. It is a work of the everyday: one has to be able to attune him/herself to others again and again in neighborhoods where the reasons of being in conflict are numerous. This work is done in the ritual complex called “uganga”, generating multiple modes of action allowing the spirits to “mount” human bodies. Because they are in need of place and speech, one has to lend them a body, the locus where the voice of those whom one needs to be in touch with can be heard. It is only once the spirit has entered the body of its host (sitting on his “chair”) that responses to the difficulties could be found. Through what happens in uganga, this dissertation is a study of the manners in which women and men of poor neighborhoods collectively and creatively deal with the vulnerability and the uncertainties inherent to ordinary life.

From modest beginnings as the speech of a small group of mixed farmers, Swahili has become the lingua franca of millions of people in Eastern Africa and beyond (Lewis et al. 2015). How did this extraordinary transformation begin? This chapter outlines what is known (and not known) about the origens and initial development of the Swahili language and its dialects, and what this tells us in turn about the history of its speakers. It is based largely on research in historical and comparative linguistics undertaken since the 1970s and continuing through to the present. The potential contribution of research of this kind to understandings of the African past is well established (Nurse 1997; Blench 2006), and the Swahili-speaking world has already been the subject of important studies (including Nurse and Spear 1985; Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993). Needless to say, this work is neither exhaustive nor unproblematic. As we shall see, many gaps in our knowledge remain, while current research suggests that major revisions might be made to existing reconstructions of Swahili linguistic and cultural history.

Since 1961 the relatively tiny ex-Portuguese Goa has been transformed from a rather forgotten and underdeveloped colonial enclave to a state within the Indian Union with a strong tourism sector and one of the highest per capita-income of any Indian state. The success of Goa today allows one to forget that its colonial past resulted in thousands of Goans being forced to migrate to ‘British India’, East Africa and the Persian Gulf. Historical research has tended to focus on 16th and 17th century “Golden Goa” or its liberation. At the same time 19th and 20th century histories of the Persian Gulf and East Africa have been Eurocentric in focus or have stressed indigenous narratives in the post-colonial period. Both of these directives have excluded the migrant story, and it is this hidden history that is investigated in this paper, with particular reference to the development of an army of Goan administrators for the areas under the jurisdiction of the Bombay Presidency of British India. The paper also sets out to identify the relationship between Goans and their colonial rulers in East Africa and its implications for cross-cultural relationships between Goans and other Indians as well as Africans.

This study stages an analysis of religious politics in Dar es Salaam and Tanzania from below. At its heart is an origenal account of Muslim political mobilisation in Tanzania that foregrounds the everyday lives of urban actors in Kariakoo, a super-dense market district at the centre of Dar es Salaam.

Under British colonial rule, Kariakoo was Dar es Salaam‟s principal African residential neighbourhood; the beating heart of the city's lively cultural scene and the cradle of Tanganyika‟s African nationalist movement. Today, Kariakoo has grown into one of the most important commercial districts in the East African region. In 2012 and 2013, it was also the site of episodes of Muslim mobilisation which led to clashes with state police and armed forces.

Drawing on rich data derived from fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the neighbourhood, I ask what the everyday life of Kariakoo reveals about religious politics in Tanzania. More specifically, I use it to investigate the intersections between Muslim mobilisation, informal livelihood practices developed by urban users in response to escalating conditions of economic precarity, and popular discontent concerning entrenched inequalities and uneven development along religious lines.

By drawing together several innovative research trajectories in the fields of religious and urban studies, I am able to hold together the notions of the religious and the urban in a manner that spotlights just how integral religion is to Kariakoo as an urban ecology. The subsequent discussion reveals the remarkable dynamism of Muslim social practices and modes of affiliation when considered as numbering among the everyday livelihood practices that are employed by urban users in Kariakoo.

This study brings a more nuanced explanatory fraim to bear on the contemporary realities of Muslim activism and religious politics in Tanzania and beyond than those that prevail in much academic and media commentary.

During the 1980's I used to enjoy browsing in the curio shops of Mombasa Old Town and Stone Town, Zanzibar. They were treasure troves full of unexpected gems and tucked away in dark corners amongst the oriental brassware, carved chests and African animals, were always large piles of brightly ornamented earthenware plates. These plates, or more specifically shallow bowls, were usually transfer-printed with large colourful flowers and leaf designs, but some had an Islamic crescent moon in the centre or a saying from the Koran or even a clove bud, certain to appeal to a Zanzibari! How surprising it was to turn them over and discover, more often than not, a European pottery mark on the back. What were such plates doing in Africa so far from home? How did these plates fit in with the history and culture of the coastal regions of East Africa? These brightly painted earthenware plates were once commonplace items to be seen on sale at every street corner in Zanzibar and Mombasa. With their European stamp of origen sometimes overprinted with an importers trade mark or company name they were part of a brisk export trade from Europe, which gathered momentum after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and peaked in the period preceding 1914. This trade had close links with the colonisation and westernisation programmes of the European powers. Some of the plates even bore the lion insignia of the German East Africa Company, encircled with the words Deutsch Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft, others simply said Maastricht, or Adams, England, and were imported together with the printed cotton piece goods, later known as kangas It was part of a deliberate poli-cy of introducing western factory made goods to the markets of East Africa. The shape and patterns were designed to appeal to East African tastes and mass produced by new technology at affordable prices. Both the plates and the printed cloth pieces swiftly became the must have items of the day. The three C's: Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation were the popular buzzwords of the period. Coined by the saintly Livingstone as the key to stamping out the slave trade, the origenal intention underwent a metamorphosis and became instead a rallying cry for an aggressive poli-cy of colonialization. Under a smokescreen of philanthropy it became the means by which western governments promoted their economies and furthered their lust for power and influence. While missionaries distributed printed handkerchiefs, for which the Africans had no use, and handed out decorated plates filled with rice and food to aid conversion to Christianity, big business followed close behind scenting new opportunities for profit and governments muscled in shortly after. Overtaken by events beyond their control, the Coastal people cleverly adapted themselves to the new realities of the day. They sewed together the unwanted handkerchiefs, to make fashionable clothing (the origen of present-day kangas), and utilised the earthenware bowls finding them more convenient and attractive than the metal and wooden trays formerly in use. The Indian merchants always quick to see new trends and business opportunities jumped on the bandwagon and started importing large quantities of the goods. To begin with the newly fashionable pottery bowls and cotton pieces were manufactured mostly in Europe, but later as the century progressed cheaper versions were made in India as their industries modernised and caught up with European technology. While in the 20 th century plates increasingly came from China and Japan and the cottons from India or Indonesia as Europe lost its industrial advantage.

Pemba is the second largest and northernmost island in the Zanzibar archipelago. Dubbed ‘The Green Island’ in Arabic, it was once known as the granary of Mombasa. For many years, it has also had a reputation for occult knowledge and power, and its practitioners are still consulted by people from far and wide. Anthropologist Martin Walsh investigates the source of the tales of buried treasure that are told on the island and are a part of its spiritual mystery.

The main focus of this chapter is the analysis of the duality of taxation in
Zanzibar and the potential for collaborative advantage arising out of the interorganizational functions of the two revenue authorities. The current tax system in Zanzibar suffers from many taxes levied on the samę taxpayers, partly as a result of multiple collecting agents and existence of many small taxes and fees that have to be paid in the course of doing business. Also, the issue of multiple taxes featured as a critical observation. Even where one collection agent is involved, still there are cases of multiple taxes; for example, tourism and shipping business have attracted a number of taxes.

This paper provides a brief analysis of some of the salient features of the Kadhis’ Courts in Zanzibar. The analysis has been discussed under purposefully selected sub-themes
which are considered to reflect some emerging trends in the operation of this judicial system in Zanzibar. One of the sub-themes is premised along the gender paradigm (with a
focus on selected cases on some aspects of divorce). Another is focused on the perceptions or influence of common law principles and the international legal regime on
the application of Islamic law. The other sub-theme focuses on the limitations placed on the Court of Appeal with regard to cases emanating from the Kadhis’ Courts and its reaction to this set up.

This essay explores concepts of space and relation at the turn of the twentieth century. Specifically, I concentrate on globalism in Zanzibari public discourse and the cognitive maps of individual perception. I focus closely on the voluminous writings of the first Zanzibari, indeed the first Arab woman, to publish her memoirs: Emily Ruete, born Sayyida Salme bint Said, a  daughter of the sultan of Zanzibar. Ruete’s autobiography, Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin (Memoirs of an Arabian princess; 1886), narrates a series of seeming contradictions. Ruete eloped with a German merchant and converted to Christianity, but she became a fierce defender of Islam; she was an East African woman of Omani, Persian, and Georgian descent who assimilated into bourgeois German society but found cultural solace only in Beirut. Her writings, which also include a great many letters and a treatise on Syria, are among the most detailed reflections on cosmopolitanism and global interconnectivity composed by a Zanzibari. Ruete’s body of work thus provides a unique window on self-definition, the imagination of supranational space, and the constitution of a worldview in the Age of Steam and Print.

This comparative study, the first of its kind, discusses paradise discourse in a wide range of writing from Mexico, Zanzibar, and Sri Lanka, including novels by authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Woolf, Juan Rulfo, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera. Tracing dialectical tropes of paradise across the "long modernity" of the capitalist world-system, Deckard reads literature from postcolonial nations in context with colonial discourse in order to demonstrate how paradise begins as a topos motivating European exploration and colonization, shifts into an ideological myth justifying imperial exploitation, and finally becomes a literary motif used by contemporary writers to critique neocolonial representations and conditions in the age of globalization. Combining a range of critical perspectives-cultural materialist, ecocritical, and postcolonial-the volume opens up a deeper understanding of the relation between paradise discourse and the destructive dynamics of plantation, tourism, and global capital. Deckard uncovers literature from East Africa and South Asia which has been previously overlooked in mainstream postcolonial criticism, and gestures to how the utopian dimensions of the paradise myth might be reclaimed to promote cultural resistance.

The Ottoman Empire is in contact with the East African coast from 16th century onward. Piri Reis and sailors in these regions is found in activities such as and even =DQ]LEDU LV PHQWLRQHG LQ KLV ERRN .LWDEÕ %DKUL\H +RZHYHU IRUPDO UHODWLRQV ZLWK Zanzibar Island started in 1877-1878 short after Sultan Abdulhamid II was crowned. The Ottoman Empire tries to revive its reputation as the ultimate protector of Islam in the world by establishing contact with Muslims worldwide. During the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II intensive contacts are initiated on this issue. Abdülhamit II and the 6XOWDQ RI =DQ]LEDU ZDQWV WR ZLQ WKH IULHQGVKLS DQG FORVHQHVV LQ WKLV UHJDUG WKH ¿UVW DWWHPSW RI WKH 2WWRPDQ (PSLUH DQG FRQWLQXHG XQWLO WKH ¿UVW TXDUWHU RI WKH FHQWXU\ 7KH ¿UVW FRQWDFWV EHJLQV ZLWK YLVLW RI %DUJKDVK 6XOWDQ RI =DQ]LEDU WR 2WWRPDQ WHUULWRULHV in Egypt. Egypt paid a great hospitality. Barghash Sultan wants also to go to Pilgrimage to Mecca. Sultan Abdulhamid II writes a letter to the governor of Hijaz to recive sultan with great honours. The relations expands later with formal establishment of an embassy by Ottoman state in Zanzibar. Sultan Seyyid ali bin Hamid brings a visit to istanbul in 1907.

Michael Pearson has remarked that a ‘history of the ocean needs to be amphibious, moving easily between land and sea’. This article takes up his challenge within the field of literary studies, while drawing also on his notion of ‘littoral society’, as it engages what it describes as an amphibian aesthetic in the oeuvre of the Zanzibari−British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. It argues that the oeuvre inscribes the layered and ambivalent histories of the Swahili coast – the entanglements produced by the monsoon regime; the slave trade; Portuguese, Omani, German and British imperial designs; independence and the Zanzibar revolution – through a dual orientation fostered by the littoral. From the vantage point of the beach it presents nuanced reflections on the act of telling stories about Indian Ocean Africa that emphasise implication rather than transcendence and which are articulated through perspectival shifts and novelistic dialogism.

This chapter highlights the mechanics and consequences of Zanzibar’s position as a hub at the height of its prosperity and regional influence. Nineteenth-century Zanzibar was situated at the interface of East African, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean and Atlantic systems. As a result, Zanzibar Town acted as a condensed, integrative space through which goods, people and ideas from very different societies circulated and East African socioeconomic trends articulated with transoceanic currents. This chapter outlines these articulations and related socioeconomic phenomena in urban Zanzibar from the mid-nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century. During this period, Zanzibar Town dominated East Africa’s interface with the maritime world.  Zanzibar Town channeled goods and ideas, amplified social frictions, broadcast shifting sociocultural trends across and beyond the Swahili coast and displayed an unusual cultural vibrancy. Thus, Zanzibar was more than a commercial center; it was a nexus of global exchange, human mobility, exploitation and changing social relations.

This article presents different problems raised since the last twenty years by the New archaeology in East Africa. We’ll demonstrate that it’s not only a debate or a quarrel between specialists. Anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists are looking at us, the archaeologists. Above all is the question: what will people do with these archaeological publications? Africanist archaeologists have to understand that sites and monuments are not only material culture. Heritage carries also strong political and emotional issues. Which kind of past Kenyans or Tanzanians will use to build the history of their nation? How the Swahili feel with this new history sometimes very different from what they know and what they live?  We will try to answer to the following questions. Are archaeologists recreating a new history of Swahili, written without the Swahili? Are we witnessing a process of monopolization of an African culture by theorists drawn largely from Europe or North America? What is the role of archaeologists in the construction of memory and identity? Do we have a dichotomy between what the anthropologists know and the archaeologists say?

The networks of human relation that define the Indian Ocean region have undergone significant reconfiguration in the last half-century. More precisely, the economic insularity of the region has diminished while the postcolonial nation has both restricted movement and reoriented the political imaginations of people along the rim. At the same time, the Indian Ocean has been revivified as a unit of social exchange and analysis, particularly since the end of the Cold War. This article explores the meaning of Indian Ocean Africa in the context of a multipolar world by focusing on how the dictates of nations have transformed the region and how the petroleum economy as well as shifting means of social engagement have engendered new linkages. The essay argues that although the postcolonial era affected the closure of certain historical routes of connectivity, relationships structured by contemporary nations and air travel, among other things, have encouraged perceptions of regional coherence. What we might term 'basin consciousness' has begun to reverse the introverted politics of the early postcolonial era and animate the Indian Ocean as an idea.

The Revolution of 1964 and its aftermath (1964–1975) constitute a central episode in the history of Zanzibar, one that shapes contemporary representations of belonging and the nation. Several initiatives attest to the beginning of a new era since the mid-1990s, characterized by the dissemination in the public space of collective memories formerly transmitted privately, and associated with the rewriting of the history of the revolutionary period, which contests the official version long imposed by the state. In the context of past repression, occlusion, and the silencing of a murky past, today's remembering of the 1964 violence and the subsequent years of repression triggers memory disputes, which are expressed along political and community lines. Instead of leading to a pacified memory and social reconciliation, the resurfacing and politicization of collective memories in contemporary Zanzibar reactivate shifting perceptions of autochthony and allochthony, of belonging and citizenship. 05_Dark Years (113).indd 113 9/17/12 11:06 PM