Hadramis, Shimalis and Muwalladin: Negotiating Cosmopolitan Identities between the Swahili Coast and Southern Yemen

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism refers to the ability of people to negotiate, with varying degrees of effectiveness, between and across different cultures with which they may or may not be familiar. This paper looks at the strategies called into play by individuals of Hadrami descent who return from East Africa to their ‘homes’ in Hadramawt in southern Yemen only to find that welcomes are ambivalent and that they are neither entirely Hadrami nor entirely foreign. While appearing to belong, through kin links, for example, or religious practice, their identity as ‘Swahili’ is never entirely shrugged off; instead it constitutes an essential element of their social armoury as they interact with varying degrees of success in what is, often, an alien environment. Choices of strategies for negotiating pathways through various social contexts depend on individuals being inscribed within, or belonging to, the culture with which they find themselves confronted; by implication, wider strategies of negotiating through different cultures, as foreign-born Hadramis must do in Africa as well as in Hadramawt, both places to which they have ties, depends on a partial belonging. This partial belonging might otherwise be called cosmopolitanism.

Acknowledgements

This article is based on previous versions presented at the ASA Annual Conference 2006, Keele, UK; at seminars in the Departments of Anthropology and of Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University; and at the Maritime Heritage and Cultures of the Western Indian Ocean in Comparative Perspective Conference organised by the BIEA, the British Museum and the Zanzibar Department of Archives, Museums and Antiquities, July 2006. I would like to thank various participants for their comments as well as anonymous referees who commented on this version. Fieldwork in Yemen was carried out during three visits of four months total duration, in late 2005, early 2006 and early 2007; fieldwork in East Africa has most recently been focused on Zanzibar, where I spent approximately twelve months between early 2005 and mid-2007. Research in both sites was made possible by an ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship; research in Hadramawt received additional funding in the guise of an American Institute for Yemeni Studies fellowship.

My fieldwork in Yemen was generally conducted in English and Swahili, with the assistance of an interpreter for Arabic language work. Apart from the two sisters mentioned in note 31, Yemeni social practice unfortunately precluded me from working with women and all other informants were men; it should not be understood, however, that women do not move.

Notes

1. Vertovec and Cohen, ‘Introduction’.

2. Vertovec and Cohen, ‘Introduction’, 13; cf. Hannerz, Transnational Connections.

3. The German woman might also eat sushi, but, as van de Veer points out, ‘the cosmopolitan is obviously a man’; van de Veer, ‘Cosmopolitan Options’, 167.

4. Hannerz, ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals’.

5. Appadurai, ‘Global Ethnoscapes’.

6. cf. Clifford, Routes.

7. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; cf. Abu-Lughod, ‘Writing Against Culture’; Schein, ‘Importing Miao Brethren’; Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’; Held, ‘Culture and Political Community’.

8. cf. Appiah ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’.

9. Note that this does not imply the sort of cosmopolitanism I have been talking about above: a familiarity with the culture(s) concerned is a necessary condition for participation and understanding. There is no need for a recourse to dispositions or universalism.

10. Gupta and Ferguson, ‘Beyond “Culture”’.

11. cf. Friedman, ‘From Roots to Routes’; see Hutnyk, ‘Hybridity’, on the dubious utility of the term hybrid itself.

12. Dresch, A History of Modern Yemen.

13. The Kathiri and Qu'aiti sultanates in Hadramawt as well as the Socotra-based sultanate of al Mahra formed no part of the British-sponsored Federation of South Arabia established in 1963 and were only incorporated (somewhat forcibly) into South Yemen at independence in 1967 following some admittedly fanciful suggestions that they be annexed to Oman or Saudi Arabia. The eastern part of the country continues to differentiate itself from Yemen proper and Paul Dresch consistently distinguishes the North, the South (i.e., the former West Aden Protectorate and Aden itself) and Hadramawt as three distinct areas of Yemen (Dresch, A History of Modern Yemen, xiii and passim; al Mahra, as is often the case, is barely mentioned).

14. Bang, Sufis and Scholars; Freitag, ‘Hadhramaut’; Martin, ‘Notes on Some Members’.

15. Dresch, Tribes, Government and History.

16. Bujra, The Politics of Stratification; cf. Camelin, ‘Reflections on the System’.

17. Bujra, The Politics of Stratification, 41.

18. The literature is lacking in studies of these groups. While akhdam are generally considered to be a servile caste of lower status than the abidin ex-slaves, (Walters, ‘Cast Among Outcastes’), there is some disagreement over which of the two groups is of African origin. In Hadramawt, the term abidin certainly seems to be applied only to those of African origin who, while accepted as fully Hadrami, have retained a number of cultural characteristics (music, witchcraft and spirit possession in particular) of African provenance and who do not have (or are not recognised as having) Hadrami ancestry. On the akhdam, see also Bujra, The Politics of Stratification.

19. From shamāl, ‘north’. Shimāl means ‘left’; however, in Hadamawt the word shimali means ‘northerners’ and it is indeed pronounced shimali and not shamali. The masculine plural is shimaliyyin but I have preferred to use the anglicised plural shimalis, largely because in my conversations in English and Swahili the Arabic plural is not used, ‘shimalis’ or the Swahili plural ‘washimali’ being employed instead. I suspect this may simply be a reflection of the difficulty that Swahili speakers have with the ‘-iyyin’ ending: cf. note 28, below.

20. Dresch, A History of Modern Yemen, 184.

21. And, of course, taking the jobs that Hadramis are reluctant to do.

22. Perhaps vulgarly, I include emigration prompted by war and famine as economic in character. This is not the place to discuss the reasons for emigration from Hadramawt, historically a chronic feature of life in the wadi (in particular), but trade, famine and war are the principal ones, the latter two particularly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is said that during the 1943–44 famine, a third of the population died, a third left and a third stayed behind. Links were not broken, of course, and I have yet to find a village in Hadramawt where there is not at least one Swahili speaker. Many also left for religious purposes, to teach or to proselytise on the coast, or to take up a post as qadi. On Hadrami emigration, both to East Africa and Indonesia, see Bang, Sufis and Scholars; Boxberger, On the Edge of Empire; Freitag, Indian Ocean Migrants; Ho, The Graves of Tarim; Le Guennec-Coppens, ‘Qui épouse-t-on’; Le Guennec-Coppens, ‘Changing Patterns’; Manger, ‘Hadramis in Singapore’; Martin, ‘Migrations from the Hadramawt’; Martin, ‘Arab Migrations’; Mobini-Kesheh, The Hadrami Awakening. Note that the Hadrami presence on the East African coast dates back centuries, if not millennia.

23. Interestingly, one informant made the comment that it was curious how the ‘white’ people went to Indonesia and the ‘black’ people went to Africa. When I suggested that perhaps the white people were from higher social strata and were thus wealthier than the black, he said, ‘No, no, nothing to do with how wealthy they were.’ Note also that returns from Indonesia were not of the same character as from Africa and, due to the costs involved, generally only involved the wealthy, of which, it must be said, there were many.

24. Exception made for a brief period of southward movement in the early 1990s when the Yemeni failure to support the US-led coalition during the first Gulf War led to the mass expulsion of Yemenis from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Some of these people, once again facing unemployment and poverty at home, decided to try their luck in East Africa. Note also that the Communist government of South Yemen (1967–90) restricted the movement of its citizens, and some imagination was required to get to Saudi Arabia during this period. One informant obtained authorisation to visit family in Kenya in the late 1970s, which he did, then promptly flew to San‘a’ and on to Saudi where he spent the subsequent decade. Saudi hostility to the South Yemeni regime meant that such individuals were generally welcomed.

25. There were no significant controls on Hadrami immigration into British East African territories during the colonial period, for a number of reasons: historical (movements had been occurring for centuries), economic (the dhow trade was essential to the economy) and political (Hadramawt, like Zanzibar, was a British protectorate).

26. A father would simply refuse to let his daughter leave the Hadramawt in the company of her husband. Thus the 1924 census of Zanzibar has only 443 women out of 2092 Hadramis resident in Zanzibar, and a footnote observes that even they were probably almost entirely of mixed blood, i.e. born in Africa of a Hadrami father and a locally-born mother.

27. Daughters were also returned to Hadramawt, although not as regularly as boys, where they could marry a Hadrami man; this was particularly true of the sada class.

28. The word muwalladin refers to Yemenis born outside Yemen but in this paper it should be assumed that I am referring to African-born Hadramis unless otherwise made explicit. The masculine singular is muwallad; English and Swahili speakers both use the Arabic masculine plural when referring to muwalladin and I have preserved this preference: cf. note 19, above.

29. Mukalla, a city of about 175,000, is the capital and principal port of the Hadramawt governorate.

30. Oman, with its healthy economy and higher standard of living, is a preferred destination for Swahili but for those of Hadrami origin the necessary permits are almost impossible to obtain. Even for Swahili of Omani origin Oman, like Dubai, is an increasingly closed destination.

31. Straightforward for some, less so for others. In Seiyun I met two sisters who had come to Hadramawt eight years earlier after the death of their father to meet his family. During their absence their mother died; they overstayed their visas, ran out of money and spent much of the subsequent eight years trying to obtain Yemeni papers. They eventually succeeded, but, as one of them said, ‘it's easy if you're rich and from a good family, you just go to see the shaikh and he does it. But if you're poor no-one cares’. Note also that the support of the family in the home village is required, too, and if there is any conflict, such as over land or other property, the locally resident family will wield more influence with the paper-issuing shaikh than the visiting muwalladin.

32. Reception room.

33. Awadh had a Kenyan passport as well as Yemeni citizenship. For the moment Kenyans are also prohibited from holding dual citizenship.

34. Douglas, Purity and Danger.

35. Ho, ‘Hadhramis Abroad’; Ho, The Graves of Tarim, esp. 223–43; see also Freitag, Indian Ocean Migrants.

36. Ho, ‘Hadhramis Abroad’, 146; Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 239.

37. Respectively, coconut cassava, and rice and chicken.

38. I will admit that a knowledge of two different cultures and an ability to negotiate between them may more effectively equip an individual to learn to deal with further cultural differences in the future, much as someone who is bilingual finds it easier to learn another language than does a monolingual person; but this does not alter my basic argument that it is belonging that is important.

39. In fact the first on their list.

40. Vertovec and Cohen, ‘Introduction’.

41. Held, ‘Culture and Political Community’, 58.

42. Held, ‘Culture and Political Community’, 58.

43. Held, ‘Culture and Political Community’, 58.

44. That said, Swahili culture itself is often seen as being not-quite-authentic, a creole or hybrid culture, neither African nor Arab.

45. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 95.