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Examining Islamic court records, this book sheds new light on Zanzibar's history of gender, social and racial identity.
Examining the process of abolition on the island of Pemba off the East African coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book demonstrates the links between emancipation and the redefinition of honour among all classes of people on the island. By examining the social vulnerability of ex-slaves and the former slave-owning elite caused by the abolition order of 1897, this study argues that moments of resistance on Pemba reflected an effort to mitigate vulnerability rather than resist the hegemonic power of elites or the colonial state. As the meaning of the Swahili word heshima shifted from honour to respectability, individuals' reputations came under scrutiny and the Islamic kadhi and colonial courts became an integral location for interrogating reputations in the community. This study illustrates the ways in which former slaves used piety, reputation, gossip, education, kinship and witchcraft to negotiate the gap between emancipation and local notions of belonging.
In this wide-ranging history of the African diaspora and slavery in Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Matthew S. Hopper examines the interconnected themes of enslavement, globalization, and empire and challenges previously held conventions regarding Middle Eastern slavery and British imperialism. Whereas conventional historiography regards the Indian Ocean slave trade as fundamentally different from its Atlantic counterpart, Hopper’s study argues that both systems were influenced by global economic forces. The author goes on to dispute the triumphalist antislavery narrative that attributes the end of the slave trade between East Africa and the Persian Gulf to the effo...
In the period c. 1880-1940, organized Sufism spread rapidly in the western Indian Ocean. New communities turned to Islam, and Muslim communities turned to new texts, practices and religious leaders. On the East African coast, the orders were both a vehicle for conversion to Islam and for reform of Islamic practice. The impact of Sufism on local communities is here traced geographically as a ripple reaching beyond the Swahili cultural zone southwards to Mozambique, Madagascar and Cape Town. Through an investigation of the texts, ritual practices and scholarly networks that went alongside Sufi expansion, this book places religious change in the western Indian Ocean within the wider framework of Islamic reform.
The experiences of African women in the era before independence remain a woefully understudied facet of African history. This innovative and carefully argued study thus adds tremendously to our understanding of colonial history by focusing on women's education, professionalization, and political mobilization in the East African islands of Zanzibar.
Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume. They were instead categories crafted by local African thinkers to make sense of deep inequalities, particularly those between local Africans and Indian immigrants. Taifa shows how nation and race became the key political categories to guide colonial and postcolonial life in this African city. Using deeply researched archival and oral evidence, Taifa transforms our understanding of urban history and shows how concerns about access to credit and housing became intertwined with changing conceptions of nation and nationhood. Taifa gives equal attention to both Indians and Africans; in doing so, it demonstrates the significance of political and economic connections between coastal East Africa and India during the era of British colonialism, and illustrates how the project of racial nationalism largely severed these connections by the 1970s.
The first major history of photography from coastal East Africa The ports of the Swahili coast—Zanzibar and Mombasa among them—have long been dynamic centers of trade where diverse peoples, ideas, and materials converge. With the arrival of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, these predominantly Muslim coastal communities cultivated and transformed the medium. The Surface of Things examines the complex maritime dynamics that shaped the photography of coastal Africa, exploring the pleasure and power of beautiful things and the ways people and their pictures transcended the boundaries of the colonial world. Immersing readers in the globally interconnected networks of eastern Africaâ...
Covers the history of the entire African continent, from prehistory to the present day A Companion to African History embraces the diverse regions, subject matter, and disciplines of the African continent, while also providing chronological and geographical coverage of basic historical developments. Two dozen essays by leading international scholars explore the challenges facing this relatively new field of historical enquiry and present the dynamic ways in which historians and scholars from other fields such as archaeology, anthropology, political science, and economics are forging new directions in thinking and research. Comprised of six parts, the book begins with thematic approaches to A...
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In this rich and multi-layered deconstruction of German colonial engagement with Islam, Jörg Haustein shows how imperial agents in Germany’s largest colony wielded the knowledge category of Islam in a broad set of debates, ranging from race, language, and education to slavery, law, conflict, and war. These representations of ‘Mohammedanism’, often invoked for particular political ends, amounted to a serious misreading of Muslims in East Africa, with significant long-term effects. As the first in-depth account of the politics of Islam in German East Africa, the book makes an essential contribution to the history of religion in Tanzania before British rule. It also offers a template for re-reading the colonial archive in a manner that recovers Muslim agency beyond a European paradigm of religion.