![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
For years, the official narrative of the Zanzibari nation imposed a specific conception of identity and citizenship built on a racial understanding of the Isles' history and the silencing of collective memories of violence perpetrated by the 1964–1972 regime. The democratization process of the mid-1990s allowed for the emergence of a critical public sphere which contributed to the public circulation of alternative national imaginaries and the resurfacing of clandestine collective memories. This paper explores the role of the press in the production and circulation of alternative narratives of the 1964 Revolution and its aftermath by focusing on a newspaper called Dira. It shows how issues raised by the newspaper's memory entrepreneurs engage with collective representations of belonging and the nation in Zanzibar.
Notes
1. The violent overthrow of the constitutional monarchy of Zanzibar on 11–12 January 1964, one month only after independence from the British protectorate powers, is referred to as a “Revolution” in state terminology and in academic historiography. This article will show and explain why this qualification is contested today.
2. Fieldwork was partly funded by the Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique (IFRA), Nairobi, Kenya. It was conducted from November 2008 to January 2009, and in summer 2009. I wish to thank Professor Abdul Sheriff for his comments on the first version of this paper, as well as Ally Saleh and Ismail Jussa, both former members of Dira, for their critical reading of the text and additional inputs. My sincere thanks also go to William C. Bissell for his insightful comments and to the two anonymous reviewers of the journal.
3. Although this article focuses on historical narratives and political discourses, we argue that discourse analysis only makes sense if it is related to contemporary forms of economic processes and the exercise of power, or in other words, if it is part of a political economy of contemporary Zanzibar, similarly to Frederick Cooper's book of reference, From Slaves to Squatters on nineteenth/early twentieth century Zanzibari society.
4. The years from 1965 to 1972 correspond to the period of authoritarianism under President Abeid Karume, assassinated on 7 April 1972. A gradual relaxation of power occurred in spite of the maintaining of arbitrary rule and enduring control over the freedom of expression until today.
5. Burgess, “Memories, Myth and Meanings”; Fouéré, “Sortie de clandestinité”; Loimeier, “Memories of Revolution”; Myers, “Narrative Representations”.
6. I borrow the term patria from Lonsdale, “Writing Competitive Patriotisms”, that relates to the concept of “moral ethnicity” as a shared ethos of the legitimate and the illegitimate, the just and the unjust, shaping communal representations and orientating practices (Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy”).
7. Myers, “Narrative Representations”.
8. See, for example, Babakerim, The Aftermath; Fairooz, Ukweli ni huu; Ghassany, Kwaheri Ukoloni; Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony.
9. If we except, from 1992, Jukwaa (Plateform) and Maarifa (Knowledge, that took its name after a well-known weekly published from 1952 to 1964), but none of them were critical to the government.
10. The Zanzibar Newspaper Act of 1988 empowers the President to suspend or ban ‘foreign’ publications considered as a threat to the Isles’ peace and unity, hence high control over publications from the mainland.
11. The first issue of the weekly Mwongozi (The Leader) came off the presses in 1941. It ceased publication after the revolution when the Editor, Ahmed S. Kharusi, fled the country. The paper was an open supporter of the Arab Association and gained a regular circulation of 1000 copies. See Sturmer, The Media History and Hamdani, “Zanzibar Newspapers”.
12. Lofchie, Zanzibar, 210.
13. Glassman, War of Words.
14. Myers, “Narrative representations”, 430.
15. Ismail Jussa was elected member of the House of Representatives for the Stone Town constituency in the 2010 general election.
16. Mohamed Ghassany openly joined CUF in late 2009. He actively contributed to the party's activities after the rapprochement (maridhiano) between President Karume and opposition leader Seif Shariff Hamad in November 2009, most notably during the referendum campaign for the formation of a government of national unity in July 2010. He suspended his activities when he started working for Deutsche Welle in Germany in September 2010.
17. For the significance of historical experience more than race or ethnic identity in shaping generational identity and political positions in Zanzibar, see Burgess, “An Imagined Generation”.
18. See Burgess, “An Imagined Generation”.
19. During an interview, one journalist recalled writing the name of the ZPPP/ZNP party – at that time perceived by a majority of Zanzibaris as the anti-African party of the Arab elite – in the sand in his schoolyard when he was a child; because of this, he was beaten by his schoolmates. ZPPP means the Zanzibar and Pemba People's Party and ZNP the Zanzibar Nationalist Party.
20. Burgess, “Cinema, Bell Bottoms, and Miniskirts”; Burgess, “The Young Pioneers”.
21. Ferguson, Expectation of modernity – the phrase refers to hopes for a society built upon political morality, economic justice and social equity that pre-independence nationalist mobilisations had raised among citizens.
22. Cameron, “Narratives of Democracy”; Rawlence, “Briefing”; Bakari, The Democratization Process.
23. Stürmer, The Media History.
24. See among others Clayton, The Zanzibar Revolution; Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to a Revolution; Martin, Zanzibar: Tradition and Revolution.
25. About the production of Nyerere as a political icon since his death in 1999, see Askew, “Sung and Unsung”; Fouéré, “Tanzanie”.
26. See Caplan and Topan, Swahili Modernities.
27. About the fear of the growing influence of Communism in Zanzibar in the context of the Cold War, see Wilson, US Foreign Policy; Speller, “An African Cuba?”; Petterson, An American's Cold War Tale; and the recently-opened CIA archives by Hunter, Zanzibar: The Hundred Days Revolution.
28. For a detailed presentation of the driving forces that led to the formation of the Union, which are only sketched out here, see, for example, Shivji, Pan-Africanism, 69–99.
29. Dira, “Nyerere si Malaika (part III)”, 20–26 December 2002, p. 4. The oft-quoted sentence “If I could tow that island out into the middle of the Indian Ocean, I'll do it”, which first appeared in Smith, Nyerere of Tanzania, p. 90, appears in publications arguing that Zanzibar was a burden to Nyerere.
30. See Shivji, Pan-Africanism, 123, who asserts that “official historiography repeats ad nauseam that Karume was a Union enthusiast. Nothing could be further from the truth. If there was one thing that Zanzibaris venerate Karume for, in spite of his despotic rule, it is Karume's Zanzibariness and his dogged resistance to get integrated into the Union and lose Zanzibar autonomy.”
31. Bailey, The Union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar; Shivji, The Legal Foundations of the Union; Othman and Peter, Zanzibar and the Union Question. Since the formation of the Government of National Unity in Zanzibar in October 2010, the Union issue has come to the front again and various political actors are advocating for a complete revision of the Union treaty.
32. Glassman, War of Words.
33. In this paragraph presenting racial nationalism which emerged during the period called the “time of politics” (zama za siasa) from 1957–1963 and was reproduced after 1964, I use the recent historiography on revolutionary Zanzibar and competing nationalisms, most notably Glassman, War of Words; Shivji, Pan-Africanism; Myers, “Revolutionary Zanzibar”), some of which Nabwa explicitly uses – he quotes his references – and conflates with his own personal memory. I do not present here the extensively studied 1957–1963 period.
34. The last census before the Revolution, in 1948, gives the racial distribution of the population, counting 264,059 inhabitants: 16.9% Arabs, 5.8% Indians, 1.1% Comorians, and 75.7% Africans (24% from the mainland; 74% native, that is, Shirazis). See Lofchie, Zanzibar, 71.
35. Sheriff, “Race and Class.”
36. Myers, “Narrative representations”, 438. Mapuri's book, The 1964 Revolution, published in 1996, is said to exemplify this new trend that articulates autochthony, blackness, African-ness and political legitimacy.
37. See Amory, “The politics of identity”, 116, who reminds us that Karume had some 18,000 Zanzibaris sign declarations saying: “I am not Shirazi, and I don't even know the meaning of Shirazi identity.”
38. Glassman, War of Words.
39. Bissell, “Engaging Colonial Nostalgia”; Presthold, Domesticating.
40. The term appears in most of the patriotic literature on Zanzibar. The latest title in date is Harith Ghassany's Kwaheri Ukoloni that, compiling personal accounts of the planning of the Revolution, asserts that the Revolution was neither a popular uprising nor a state overthrow led by Zanzibaris but a coup organized by the mainland top leaders. It argues that the end of colonialism (the first part of the book title, Kwaheri Ukoloni, meaning “goodbye colonialism”) ironically did not equate with independence, but with the end of independence (the second part of the title, Kwaheri Uhuru, meaning “goodbye freedom”).
41. Anderson, Imagined Community.
42. Such a reified conception of culture obviously goes against today's academic conceptions of culture and identity as changing, multivalent and malleable, as Laura Fair's Pastimes & Politics skilfully demonstrates in the case of Zanzibar.
43. The Committee of 14, gathering instigators and leaders of the 1964 Revolution, was the decisional power within the Revolutionary Council formed in 31 January 1964.
44. Myers, “Revolutionary Zanzibar”.
45. An early exception is Kharusi, Africa's First Cuba, 41–44, that provides accounts of massacres of Arabs perpetrated by mainlanders, but this account is partial as this partisan piece of work is characterized by its pro-Arab and anti-mainlander stances.
46. Crozon, “Zanzibar en Tanzanie”, 226.
47. Only Bakari, The Democratisation Process, 109, mentions in endnote 29 that Karume's successor, Aboud Jumbe, hinted at the fact that the “disappeared” were no longer alive: “The first time the authorities confessed that those who had mysteriously disappeared had been killed was in 1975 when Sheikh Aboud Jumbe told the ITV's ‘World in Action’, who had visited Zanzibar and interviewed him, that: ‘They [Hanga, Othman Shariff, Twala, Muhammed Humud, Juma Maringo, Mdungi Ussi, Saleh Sadalah, Abdul Madhifu (sic)] have not vanished.’ ‘… they have paid the price of revolution’ … ‘They are dead, yes’.”
48. Thousands of people of foreign origin (Arabs most of them, but also Comorians and Indians) fled the island – or were expelled – to escape the uncontrolled killings and the arbitrary decisions, endless humiliations and repressive measures against the supposedly “non-African” populations.
49. Nabwa, “Nyerere si Malaika-III”, 4: “Hadi leo khatima ya Saleh Sadalah na Hanga haijulikani, kama isivyojulikana khatima ya Othman Shariff, Mdungi Ussi, Jaha Ubwa, Jimy Ringo … na orodha inaendelea.”
50. For a detailed presentation of the life story of the Nadhifs, see Fouéré, “Sortie de clandestinité”.
51. See Fouéré, “Sortie de clandestinité”, 109–110; Shivji, Pan-Africanism, 118; Crozon, “Zanzibar en Tanzanie”, 232–235.
52. However, a greater attention to the authoritarian rule under Karume is noticeable in recent works. See, for example, Shivji, Pan-Africanism, 106–117.
53. For example, Mwanjisi, Ndugu Abeid Amani Karume.
54. Cameron, “Narratives of Democracy”; Rawlence, “Briefing.”
55. Figures vary according to interlocutors.
56. The newspaper was edited and laid-out in the tiny Dira office in Stone Town but sent to Dar es Salaam for printing – one member of the team, usually the Sales Manager Salim Said Salim, being in charge of bringing a burned CD of the coming issue by plane. Printed issues reached the Isles every Friday.
57. Personal communication, Prof. Abdul Sheriff, 27 July 2010.
58. “Dira ni sauti ya watu badala ya kuwa sauti ya bwana (Master's voice)”, Dira, 31 October–6 November 2003 (by Hasnul N.A. Riyamy, p. 2). He goes on: “Kuja kwa Dira kumeleta muamko mpya (…). Muamko huo umeletwa na ukweli kwamba Dira husema kile ambacho jamii inataka kisemwe; kile ambacho jamii ilikifutika moyoni mwao; kile ambacho watawala hawakutaka kiwekwe bayana” (“The coming of Dira brought a new awakening (…). This awakening has come from the truth that Dira says this that the people want to be said; this that the people buried in their hearts; this that the leaders do not want to be said openly”).
59. Not only has much ink been spilled over the issue of Ali Nabwa's citizenship in the pages of Dira, but the attack against Nabwa was reminiscent of the endless persecution of the Comorian community since 1964. See, for example, Mohamed, “Les Comoriens de Zanzibar”.
60. In its last issue, Dira published the letter from the Department of Information which stated that the newspaper would be banned on the ground that its articles published “taarifa potofu, masengenya na kejeli” (distorted news, slander and calumnies), Dira, 21–27 November 2003, p. 9, issue 51.
61. MCT (by its Executive Secretary Anthony Ngaiza), “A brief on the position of the Media Council of Tanzania”, 3 December 2003, p. 2.
62. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism.
63. See special issue on “Print Culture, Nationalisms and Publics of the Indian Ocean”, Africa 81, no. 1 (2011).
64. Glassman, War of Words, 296.