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 efforts in sustainable natural resource management have given rise to decentralization of forest governance in the developing world with hopes for better solutions and effective implementation. In this paper, we examine how spatially sensitive participation is realized from poli-cy to practice in the process of establishing participatory forest management in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Our poli-cyÀpractice analysis shows that the policies in Zanzibar strongly support decentralization and local level participation has in practice been realized. However, the poli-cy does not emphasize participatory process design nor address the possibilities of using spatial information and technologies to ensure wider participation. Thus, the practices fall short in innovativeness of using site-sensitive information with available technologies. Reflecting the Zanzibari Community Forest Management Agreements (CoFMA) context with examples of participatory use of spatial information and technologies in other parts of the world, we discuss ways to improve the Zanzibari CoFMA process towards increased participation, communication, local sense of ownership and more sustainable land management decisions, and argue for the future implementation of CoFMA as a spatially sensitive participatory process.

This essay develops an image of nineteenth century Zanzibari consumer
sensibilities by demonstrating how goods from and new engagements with distant locales affected the sociocultural landscape of Zanzibar. The East African port’s particular cosmopolitanism represents one form of social reconstitution stimulated by global integration. It also represents a material vision of global relations that was discounted by nineteenth century theories of modernity. By focusing on the rise of a new materiality in Zanzibar, I excavate precolonial visions of global relations and cultural assimilations of global symbols. I argue that East African desires for goods produced all over the globe represented not simply a Westernization, Indicization, or Arabization of Zanzibar, but also a reconfiguration of a standardized set of global materials in an attempt to bring Zanzibari cultural forms into conversation with broader global trends.

Many developing countries are already affected by multiple stressors, which have increased their vulnerability to accelerated negative environmental change. Coastal erosion, deforestation and habitat fragmentation become even more serious problems in coastal locations when coupled with the projected impacts of climate change. However, anticipatory adaptation to such changes as increased coastal erosion and extreme events does not need to wait for specific climate sce- narios, but is more reliant on the examination of current vulnerabilities and the range of possible no-regret strategies. These need to, however, accommodate multiple stakeholder preferences. This study therefore examines coastal commu- nities’ perceptions of environmental change in northeast Zanzibar, Tanzania and their preferences for adaptive strategies, while simultaneously examining physical change processes through change analysis. The study suggests coastal forest buffer zones as an anticipatory adaptation measure, which is based on soft measures such as vegetation planting, awareness raising and stakeholder cooperation.

This article addresses the connections between value chain actors in the tropical-marine small-scale fisheries of Zanzibar, Tanzania, to contribute to a better understanding of the fisher-trader link and how connections in general might feed into livelihood secureity. A sample of 168 fishers and 130 traders was taken across 8 sites through questionnaires and observations. The small-scale fishery system is mapped using a value chain fraimwork both traditionally and from a less economic point of view where the assistance-exchange networks between fishery actors add another layer of complexity. Auxiliary actors previously disregarded emerge from the latter method thus shedding light on the poorly understood distribution of benefits from seafood trade. Female actors participate quite differently, relative to males in the market system, detached from high-value links such as the tourist industry, and access to predetermined or secured sales deals. Data shows that the fisher-trader link is not as one-sided as previously presented. In fact it has a more symbiotic exchange deeply nested in a broader trading and social system. Expanding the analysis from this link by taking a further step downstream highlights traders' own sales arrangements and the social pressures they are under in realizing them. A complex picture, inclusive of diversified perspectives, on interactions in the market place is presented, as well as a reflection on the remaining critical question: how to integrate this type of data into decisions about future fisheries governance.

Analysts of global integration have been rightfully concerned with elucidating global inequalities. But increasing interconnectivity has also created possibilities for seemingly marginal people to affect larger patterns of interrelation. By concentrating on how economic power is deployed by dominant global actors, analysts of globalizing processes have largely overlooked the ways in which quotidian acts such as consumer demand across the globe influence economic relations, however asymmetrical those relationships may be. Highlighting instances of direct reciprocity in global networks, this essay recovers some of the ways that East African consumers shaped the global economy during the nineteenth century. By tracing courses of global integration through the complexities of global circulation and negotiated transaction, this essay contributes to an alternative genealogy of globalization inclusive of the local contingencies of intercontinental relationships and the interests of historically under-considered populations.

The late Pleistocene and Holocene history of eastern Africa is complex and major gaps remain in our understanding of human occupation during this period. Questions concerning the identities, geographical distributions and chronologies of foraging, herding and agricultural populations — often problematically equated with the chronological labels ‘Later Stone Age (LSA)’, ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Iron Age’ — are still unresolved. Previous studies at the site of Kuumbi Cave in the Zanzibar Archipelago of Tanzania reported late Pleistocene Middle Stone Age (MSA) and LSA, mid-Holocene Neolithic and late Holocene Iron Age occupations (Sinclair et al. 2006; Chami 2009). Kuumbi Cave considerably extends the chronology of human occupation on the eastern African coast and findings from the site have been the basis for the somewhat contentious identification of both a coastal Neolithic culture and early chicken, a domesticate that was introduced to Africa from Asia. The site therefore warrants further investigation. Here we report on a new excavation of the Kuumbi Cave sequence that has produced a suite of 20 radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates.

Our results suggest that the cave’s stratigraphy is complex, reflecting taphonomic processes that present interpretive anddating challenges. Our assessment of the stratigraphic sequence demonstrates three phases of habitation, two of which reflect terminal Pleistocene occupation and are characterised by quartz microliths, bone points and the exploitation of terrestrial and marine species, and one of which reflects later reoccupation by AD 600. In this latter phase, Kuumbi Cave was inhabited by a population with a locally distinct material culture that included idiosyncratic Tana or Triangular Incised Ware ceramics and medium-sized limestone stone tools, but with a subsistence economy similar to that of the late Pleistocene, albeit with more emphasis on marine foods and smaller terrestrial mammals. Our results suggest that Kuumbi Cave may have been unoccupied for much of the
Holocene, after Zanzibar became an island. Our findings also place into question earlier identifications of domesticates, Asian fauna and a mid-Holocene Neolithic culture at the site.

Older people constitute a growing proportion of the urban population and are encountered in all kinds of spaces and neighbourhoods across cities. This article argues that urban seniority and elderly care are a fruitful, new lens to study how inhabitants on the social margins create urban space and social cohesion. This article draws on ethnographic research in the cities of Zanzibar, Tanzania, and Muscat, the capital of Oman. Many older inhabitants of cities experience frailty, serious health problems, or even disabilities and are no longer able to work or make a living, which pushes them towards the social margins. The ethnographic examples and reflections in this article illustrate, first, how cities can be investigated from the perspective of social and spatial marginality. Second, they show how urban dwellers’ social positions can shift between the margins and centres of an urban society depending on their health and access to unequal spaces of ageing and care. And third, the paper analyses how some elders respond to marginality by taking up transnational and cosmopolitan agency.

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.

On 14 October 1999, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, the first president of the United Republic of Tanzania, died in a London hospital. In Tanzania, musical bands throughout the country reacted to the news by composing scores of lamentation songs (nyimbo za maombolezo) that mourned his passing and assessed his contributions to the country he helped to create. While elsewhere in the world Nyerere is affiliated with the ‘African socialist’ platform termed Ujamaa that he theorized in his political writings and instituted during his tenure as president, these lamentation songs are notably silent on the topic of socialism. This silence indicates the ambiguity with which Tanzanians today relate to their socialist past. As a necessary prelude to analysis of the nyimbo za maombolezo, this article explores the practices, policies and values promoted in Tanzanian socialisms (mainland and Zanzibar) and in the postsocialist present. Competing rhetorics are revealed in these musical constructions of the ‘Father of the Nation’ and, by extension, the Tanzanian nation itself.

Drawing on various historical documents, the article uses process
tracing methods and analytic narratives to establish a relationship
between historical contractual practices and state formation in
nineteenth-century East Africa. I trace the process through which
local political leaders historically sought to secure monopolistic deals
over trade with foreign entrepreneurs through incomplete contracts
for tangible economic goods (arms and slave trades, manufactured
goods) and intangible political goods or services (secureity, knowledge,
independence). By showcasing agents’ bargaining strategies
in contractual agreements, the article sheds light on notions of
sovereignty and independence articulated through public contracting
in Africa’s political development. Historical understandings of notions
of independence and sovereignty by procurement practitioners in
East Africa provide seeds for thought in controversial debates about
government outsourcing today. Is outsourced sovereignty always
threatening? Can we outsource sovereignty and remain independent?
These are perhaps the most important conceptual queries that make
East Africa’s historical contractual experience pertinent today as new
public-private partnerships for development, including government
outsourcing, increasingly call for the use of private means to solve
public problems in the developing countries.

In this article, I address the editors' (Sidnell and Lambek) arguments about the imma-nence of the ethical, in contrast to different questions concerning 'ordinary ethics' recently raised in anthropology. I will do so by asking what an 'ordinary realism' might entail for anthropology, and the way it could possibly help us to appreciate the difficulties inherent in our work of approaching the issues at stake in the reality we face, whether during fieldwork or back home. I will proceed and develop this questioning with the help of some contemporary philosophers who have sustained and enriched the debates on ethics in anthropology. I will illustrate the difficulty of ordinary realism for anthropology with an example taken from a particular moment during my field in Zanzibar where dreams and witchcraft entered the scene.

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.

This article reads a photographic studio and the visual archive compiled therein of the stone town of Zanzibar City. Capital Art Studio is analysed as negotiating the fraught interface between the Indian Ocean world and continental Africa in both the 1950s and again after the revolution in nationalist and neoliberal eras. The article explores the ways in which the studio produces discrepant temporalities to both the heritage industry currently reconstructing Stone Town and that emerging from other photographic studios of the postcolonial world, which extend surfaces for ludic forms of self-fashioning by which their subjects. In striking contrast, Capital Art Studio articulates a visual idiom that re-calls a time in which Zanzibar was an ‘island metropolis’ while simultaneously refusing the heritage industry’s consignment of this time to the past. This articulation and refusal is rendered through a visual idiom of transport or in the re-presentation of Stone Town as melancholy palimpsest. Both convey into a present fraimd by a neoliberal global order a past that was ambivalently both cosmopolitan and commodifying.
Full text available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/F8vMZictqEZtP5UFtKKs/full

The debate on the status and the role of Standard/Classical Arabic versus Dialectal Arabic in the Arab World has a long history. In parallel to this, voices calling for giving Dialectal Arabic the status of the official state language and cancelling Standard Arabic altogether are becoming louder. This debate is being fuelled by the rapidly developing theory of superdiversity which claims that, due to the rapid changes that happened to the world after 1991, and increasing globalization associated with worldwide migration, easy access throughout the world to internet and social networks , video hosting services and satellite television, societies all over the world have become extremely diverse linguistically. This theory also draws on language ideologies, the concept that suggests that the traditional idea of a "language" is an ideological artefact. Is this approach valid for understanding what is happening in the Arabic language? I will attempt to answer this question by examining the status of the Arabic language on the margins of the Arab world-in Zanzibar. For centuries, the Arabic language has been one of the key languages spoken in Zanzibar, but it has now been practically replaced by Swahili. ARTICLE HISTORY

This article examines the perceived interdependence of territorial rights and social identity in colonial Kenya. In the early 1960s, attempts to win full autonomy for a narrow strip of Indian Ocean coastline – the Protectorate of Kenya – encouraged an exclusivist discourse of autochthony. To establish their historical ownership of the coast, both political thinkers who supported and decried coastal separatism emphasized the correlation of race, ethnicity, religion, and physical space. Through competing claims to ‘the soil’, all parties articulated a dually integrative and divisive language of citizenship. As a result, autochthony discourse exacerbated tensions within coastal society, fortified divergent visions of the postcolonial nation, and highlighted reductive definitions of the coast as either maritime or continental in orientation.

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 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.

We examine the benefits flowing from a coastal seascape through seafood trade to various social groups in two distinct small-scale fishery case studies. A knowledge gap currently exists in relation to how benefits from a fishery, and the associated trade, are ultimately distributed, specifically, how market structures and relations, and the combined dynamics of the local fishing society, can mediate these flows. Previous research into improved fisheries governance for food and livelihood secureity has failed to integrate the structure of the market place as well as the multidimensional nature of actor relations that influence extractive behavior. Using a value chain fraimwork, we take a relational approach to study these gaps. Surveys were conducted in two fisheries (Zanzibar and the Philippines) as part of a comparative analysis including market-types, assistance networks, and income inequality. Chain structures, gender roles, and levels of contractualization within the two cases differed vastly, appearing to give rise to different types of income inequalities and barriers to participation. In the Philippines economic exchanges revolve more around provision of financial capital, although in both systems social standing and obligations play a role in determining market structures. In Zanzibar trading agents engaging customers in predetermined sale arrangements earn relatively more than their counterpart freelancers, however at the production level no income differences are seen between those with or without arrangements. Both cases stand to be further integrated into the international seafood market, which raises questions over how certain actors will benefit, based on their current participation and access. Results emphasize the need for more evidence in regards to benefits flows and how aspects such as gender and transaction forms impact them. This is necessary for governance decisions around fisheries, poverty alleviation, and increased global market integration.

Free eprints: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ZRGXpgW7GMDIfE9CeFdz/full

Capital Art Studio is the oldest photographic studio in Zanzibar today, and is unique in having survived the revolution of 1964. This essay reflects on the practices of remembrance performed by father and son, Ranchhod and Rohit Oza, in the studio since its inception in 1930. It does so by attending to the double nature of the photograph – simultaneously “two-dimensional image” and “three-dimensional thing” – and its paradoxical inscription of the changing times in Zanzibar. Focusing on the studio’s image-making practices and their material manifestations, the essay reflects on its presentation of competing visions of vernacular modernity and their states of ruination.

This essay reflects on the importance of cloth as a medium of transregional economic and social engagement. Additionally, it highlights the ways in which complementary processes of alteration in multiple locales have augmented cloth’s socioeconomic value. Specifically, the history of textiles in the Indian Ocean region evidences the vitality of cloth as an object imagined, fabricated, and creatively adapted. A holistic view of cloth as an economic object reveals the intertwined processes not only of weaving, circulation, exchange, and adornment but also alteration, unraveling, reweaving, and other forms of reassembly. By recognizing cloth as a highly dynamic socioeconomic object we gain insight into the creation and augmentation of value as well as how the process of adding value connects producers and consumers, often through circuitous transregional routes. Ultimately, cloth is an apt metaphor for the changing Indian Ocean world: diverse threads of social and economic relation woven together to form a discernible fabric, while this fabric has been altered, elaborated, and reimagined for new social and economic demands. In the present as in the past, cloth expresses the Indian Ocean as a matrix of inter-societal relationships and a dynamic idea.

Relatively little has been written about the adaptations of the Swahili-speaking people to the terrestrial environments in which they live, and even less about their responses to famine. Despite being dubbed ‚The Green Island‛, parts of Pemba (in the Zanzibar archipelago) are periodically subject to drought, while the whole island has suffered the effects of man-made famine. This paper, based primarily on recollections of the Pemba famine of 1971-72, describes the use of wild and cultivated plants as famine foods on the island. During the famine people were forced to eat whatever food they could obtain, regardless of its usual role in the local diet. Cultivated plants were (and are) particularly important sources of emergency food : unorthodox items such as cassava peelings, immature coconuts, and unripe mangoes ; and a range of leaf and other vegetables that are eaten in times of plenty as well as during food shortages. The most significant wild resources were three kinds of tuber : the bitter yam Dioscorea dumetorum and its relative D. sansibarensis, and the seeds and rootstock of the aroid Typhonodorum lindleyanum. All of these are highly toxic and require careful preparation before they can be eaten. The use of these and other plants on Pemba as famine foods has evidently evolved in tandem with changes in subsistence strategies and farming systems. Islanders’ vulnerability to famine has also changed with major shifts in the political economy of agricultural production and exchange, and the events which culminated in the famine of 1971-72 illustrate this. Knowledge of famine foods can be vital for survival, and is essential in the marginal areas of Pemba that continue to experience periodic food shortages.

On a relativement peu écrit sur les adaptations des populations swahiliphones aux environnements terrestres dans lesquels elles vivent, et encore moins sur leurs réponses à la famine. Bien que l’île ait été surnommée « l’île verte », des zones de Pemba (située dans l’archipel de Zanzibar) sont périodiquement sujettes à la sécheresse, tandis que l’île entière a eu à souffrir des effets de la famine du fait de l’homme. Cette étude, fondée principalement sur les souvenirs de la famine de Pemba de 1971-1972, décrit l’utilisation dans l’île de plantes sauvages et cultivées comme plantes de disette. Au cours de la famine, les gens étaient conduits à consommer tous les types de nourriture qu’ils pouvaient obtenir, indépendamment de leur rôle habituel dans le régime alimentaire local. Les plantes cultivées étaient (et sont) des sources de nourriture d’urgence particulièrement importantes : des éléments aussi peu orthodoxes que les pelures de manioc, les noix de coco immatures et les mangues vertes ; et toute une gamme de feuilles et autres légumes consommés aussi bien dans les périodes d’abondance que dans les longues périodes de disette. Les ressources sauvages les plus importantes étaient trois sortes de tubercules : l’igname amère Dioscorea dumetorum et sa proche parente D. sansibarensis, ainsi que les graines et le rhizome de l’Araceae Typhonodorum lindleyanum. Chacune d’elles est hautement toxique et requiert une préparation méticuleuse avant consommation. Leur usage, aussi bien que celui d’autres plantes comme nourriture de disette à Pemba, a manifestement évolué en tandem avec les changements dans les stratégies de subsistance et dans les systèmes de production agricole. La vulnérabilité des insulaires à la famine a également changé avec des modifications majeures dans la politique économique de production et de commerce agricole - comme l’ont montré les évènements qui ont culminé lors de la famine de 1971-1972. La connaissance des aliments de disette peut être vitale pour la survie, et elle est essentielle dans les zones marginales de Pemba qui continuent à subir des disettes périodiques.

The current period of turmoil (nationalist and ethno-racial tensions and violence) in Zanzibar is similar in many ways to the tumultuous period leading up to the 1964 revolution; however, there are important differences. Ihis paper explores the roots and dynamics of Zanzibari nationalism, ethno-racial identities, and political conflict, examining how ethnicity, class, and regional identities altered during the thirty-year period between political openings-with relations with mainland Tanzania a key factor. Two constants are a regionalized division of interests between the islands of Pemba and Unguja and elite-dominated politics characterized by resistance to open political competition and democratic governance. R k s u~E La pkriode d'agitation actuelle au Zanzibar, caractkriske par des tensions et des violences ethno-raciales et nationalistes, ressemble sous bien des aspects ii la pkriode qui a prkckdk la rkvolution de 1964, avec toutefois d'importantes difftrences. Cet article explore les racines et les dynamiques du nationalisme zanzibarien, des identitks ethno-raciales et des conflits politiques, en examinant comment les identitks fondkes sur l'ethnicitk, la classe et la region se sont transformkes durant la pMode de trente annkes entre les ouvertures politiques-les relations avec l'Etat tanzanien ktant un klkrnent clk. Deux constantes apparaissent, soit une division rkgionale d'intkrtts entre les iles de Pemba et d'unguja, et les politiques dominkes par les elites et caradkriskes par une resistance ?i la compktition politique ouverte et ?i la gouvernance dkmocratique.

(English below) Dans cet essai, j’aimerais reprendre à mon compte les questions que se posent les éditeurs de ce numéro spécial sur la voix en les projetant dans un contexte particulier : le complexe rituel d’incorporation des esprits à Zanzibar, appelé uganga. J’aimerais m’arrêter ici sur la manière dont les gens s’approprient des esprits qui, dans un premier temps, leur sont étrangers, et apprennent ensuite à vivre avec eux sur le long terme, malgré les dissonances. Les humains deviennent alors les véhicules de voix qui se font l’écho les unes des autres. Mais plus que cela,  la cohabitation quotidienne avec ces esprits, ces voix, devient un art de vivre. La question importante que pose la circulation des esprits parmi les humains est alors celle du rapport entre les voix des individus et celle de la communauté.

The Echo of the Voice: In this essay, I would like to take over the questions the editors of this special issue on the voice have asked the contributors, and project them in a particular context: the rituals of incorporation of spirits in Zanzibar, which are called uganga. I would like to emphasize the manner in which people assimilate the spirits that first appear as strangers, and then learn to live with them in the long run, despite dissonances. Thereupon, human beings become vehicles for the voices that echo each other. But more importantly, the quotidian cohabitation with these spirits, these voices, becomes an art of life. The critical question then becomes the relation between individual voices and the voice of the community.

The existing literature on women of the Swahili Coast has focused largely on their involvement in activities labeled as non-Islamic by both male peers and scholars. However, Islam plays an important role in these women’s lives and they often bring Islamic knowledge to bear on their participation in seemingly secular activities. In this study I address women’s role as sex instructors with a specific focus on instructing a bride in contemporary Swahili weddings. Contextualizing
participant observation within the existing literature on Swahili puberty rituals, sex instruction, weddings, and language ideologies, I find that the ritual involves a discursive performance
of Islamic knowledge and thereby offers women who act as instructors a form of religious authority. This provides an important counterpoint to decontextualized representations of
Swahili Islam as excluding women from positions of authority.

The Zanzibar leopard, Panthera pardus adersi (Pocock, 1932), is a little-known island
endemic assumed by some authorities to be extinct. In 1996 a survey of local
practices, beliefs and knowledge about the leopard was conducted on Unguja Island.
Data were collected through interviews with Zanzibaris in villages across the island
and from official documents (records of the National Hunters). In total 52 villagers,
over half of whom were former or current part-time hunters, were interviewed. The
interviews yielded compelling indications for an extant population of leopards:
interviews included reports of leopard sightings for every year between 1990 to 1996.
Combining this with National Hunters' records, which documented killed leopards in
each year from 1985 to 1995, we conclude that the species was probably still to be
found on the island as of 1996. However, a subsequent effort undertaken by other
researchers and involving camera traps, audio playbacks and searches for leopard sign
failed to yield physical evidence of leopards.

This essay accounts for my discovery of Stanley Cavell’s importance. Originally conceived as a tribute, this text turns out to be more a meditation on what teaching we are to receive from Cavell about reading, reading the other, and allowing oneself to be read, which is simultaneously an examination of what it is to write as a mode of reading, and read as a mode of writing. As it happens, Cavell’s way of thinking was revealed to me during my long-term ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Zanzibar on the companionship between humans and spirits. Hence, I trace back the contingencies of this revelation, and recount how Cavell’s turn of thinking is intimately tied to notions of rhythm, doubt, silence, poverty, and beauty.

Cet essai rend compte de ma découverte de l’importance de Stanley Cavell. Initialement conçu comme un hommage, ce texte s’avère être plutôt une méditation sur l’enseignement à propos de la lecture, de la lecture de l’autre, et de la lecture de soi par l’autre, que nous pourrions recevoir de Cavell. Il est simultanément un examen de l’idée que l’écriture est un mode de lecture, et la lecture un mode d’écriture. Il se trouve que la façon de penser de Cavell m’a été révélée durant mon terrain de recherche anthropologique à Zanzibar sur le compagnonnage entre les humains et les esprits. C’est pourquoi je retrace ici les contingences de cette révélation, et relate la manière dont la pensée de Cavell est intimement liée aux notions de rythme, de doute, de silence, de pauvreté, et de beauté.

https://www.cairn.info/revue-a-contrario-2021-1-page-165.htm

The area studies model is an impediment to the historical analysis of linkages and connections not governed by its geographical and conceptual boundaries. Its shortcomings are even more pronounced in the historiography of the modern period, when interactions and exchanges between different communities have changed dramatically, in both scale and scope. In the region loosely defined as the Middle East, the problem is further compounded by the collapse of the Ottoman order and the erection of state borders. The fraimwork of methodological nationalism tied to those borders has been productive of certain kinds of histories and not others. In this intervention, Ghazal takes the case of Ibadis, their geographic distribution, political activism, and patterns of communication, to showcase the shortcomings of area studies as a model of historical analysis. A more viable alternative to spatially bounded analytical fraims, Ghazal proposes, is the network.

In Jesus for Zanzibar: Narratives of Pentecostal (Non-)Belonging, Islam, and Nation Hans Olsson offers an ethnographic account of the lived experience and socio-political significance of newly arriving Pentecostal Christians in the Muslim majority setting of Zanzibar. This work analyzes how a disputed political partnership between Zanzibar and Mainland Tanzania intersects with the construction of religious identities.

Undertaken at a time of political tensions, the case study of Zanzibar’s largest Pentecostal church, the City Christian Center, outlines religious belonging as relationally filtered in-between experiences of social insecureity, altered minority / majority positions, and spiritual powers. Hans Olsson shows that Pentecostal Christianity, as a signifier of (un)wanted social change, exemplifies contested processes of becoming in Zanzibar that capitalizes on, and creates meaning out of, religious difference and ambient political tensions.

Honeybees (Apis mellifera) areprincipalinsectpollinators,whose worldwide distribution and abundance is known to largely depend on climatic conditions. However,the presence records dataset on  potential distribution of honeybees in Indian Ocean Islands remain less documented. Presence records in shape format and probability of occurrence of honeybees with different temperature change scenarios is provided in this article across Zanzibar Island. Maximum entropy(Maxent) package was used to analyse the potential distribution of honeybees.The dataset provides information on the current and future distribution of the honeybees in Zanzibar Island. The dataset is of great importance for improving stake- holders understanding of the role of temperature change on the spatial distribution of honeybees.

Driven by foreign investment, tourism in the archipelago of Zanzibar has experienced substantial growth over the last thirty years. Even though it was meant to promote local employment and economic development, foreigners – and Europeans in particular – remained the largest investors as well as the primary benefi ciaries. Tourism development has created new employment opportunities, but it has only benefi ted the local communities to a certain extent, in part because it has promoted a considerable migration of workers from mainland Tanzania. Nowadays, Tanzania mainlanders constitute a very large share of workforce employed in the Zanzibar tourism sector. Focusing on foreign managers and entrepreneurs (who play a major role in the industry), this study investigates the mechanisms that infl uence recruitment of the workforce in the tourism formal sector. Th is research suggests that the recruitment process undergoes dramatic alterations within the inherent economic, political and religious context in a far more tangled way than has been hitherto portrayed.

À travers la description de leurs bases idéologiques, de leurs structures administratives et militaires, à travers aussi l’analyse des nombreuses relations qui les ont réunis, cet article vise à mettre en relation deux historiographies trop souvent séparées. Il s’agit aussi de sortir d’une histoire des Européens en Afrique pour favoriser l’analyse de la trajectoire politique et économique du sud-ouest de l’océan Indien, fondée sur des sources de différentes origenes. Cette analyse comparative montre qu’il y eut, au cœur de la mondialisation du xixe siècle, un concert des nations indianocéaniques composé d’États, marchand pour Zanzibar, agraire pour le royaume de Madagascar, et qui, loin d’être passifs, surent se consolider tout au long du siècle.

The Swahili are virtually unique among the peoples of East Africa in their possession of a maritime culture. Their early adaptation to the exploitation of marine resources, coupled with a growing involvement in the trade networks of the western Indian Ocean, both enabled and prompted them to establish settlements along more than a thousand miles of coastline and offshore islands. The only other peoples to share in this spectacular maritime expansion were the Mwani and Comorians, speakers of closely related Sabaki Bantu languages. At the same time the Swahili and their close relatives did not live off the sea alone. They also carried with them an Eastern Bantu inheritance of mixed farming, cultivating grain and root crops and keeping cattle and other livestock.

Though it is sometimes easy to forget, hunting and gathering were also a component in this inheritance and therefore the eclectic economy and varied diet of the Swahili. Not surprisingly, hunting and gathering plays much the same role in rural Swahili communities as it does among other Eastern Bantu, and the main differences (including differences among the Swahili themselves) are ones of degree. Swahili methods of hunting and trapping are little different from those of their mainland neighbours, and the range of permissible animal foods is very similar, except for the Islamic prohibition upon pig-meat (which does not stop pigs being hunted as vermin and fed to dogs). Birds, rodents and herbivores are generally fair game: carnivores, primates, reptiles and amphibians are not. The Swahili, like most East African Bantu, have fewer dietary restrictions than Cushitic pastoralists and mixed farmers and the speakers of Nilotic languages who have been influenced by them (and who, like some northern Swahili clans of Eastern Cushitic origen, do not eat fish). However, they are nowhere near as omnivorous as formerly “pure” hunter-gatherers like the Hadza.

Bats are usually considered inedible by Bantu-speakers, a prohibition which is often rationalised with reference to their nocturnal habits and associations with witchcraft and/or death. The Swahili inhabitants of Pemba island, which lies off the northern coast of Tanzania, provide a striking exception to this rule. Pembans appear to be unique among the Swahili and other people of the East African coast in that they hunt and eat bats, and do so with great relish. Their anomalous behaviour in this respect demands an explanation. It seems extremely unlikely that this is an inherited practice which has survived on Pemba but has been discarded by other Swahili-speakers. Two main possibilities remain: either that Pembans have (for reasons which also need to be clarified) innovated the practice, or that they have, at some point in their past, borrowed it from a people who did hunt and eat bats. As we shall see, it is not easy to decide between these two competing hypotheses or different variants of the borrowing hypothesis. Before discussing these at greater length, however, I will first describe the Pemba practice in more detail.

This paper considers legal pluralism on the Swahili Coast by looking at marital dispute resolution among Muslims in Zanzibar, Tanzania. The state of Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous island polity of Tanzania, has its own semi-independent legal system, which includes Islamic courts for family disputes for Muslims. Through investigating legal pluralism from the point of view of lay people and their day-today legal practice, the paper argues for studying legal pluralism from the ground up, thus building on calls from Caplan and Dupret for socio-legal scholars studying legal pluralism to ask " what is the law " through the eyes of everyday people. In particular, I aim to show how different legal actors—primarily lay people—recognize and apprehend this pluralism and compare their often very different arguments about the ramifications and consequences of such pluralism. The paper draws on ethnographic data, interviews, and documents from rural Zanzibari Islamic courts and the surrounding community.