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...