Sorting Out the Tribes

The Creation of Racial Identities in Colonial Zanzibar's Newspaper Wars

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8977231
AutoresJonathon Glassman (autor de correspondencia)
Año2000
Volumen41
Número3
Páginas395-428
Fecha de publicación2000-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Journal of African History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-8537 • E-ISSN: 1469-5138
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0021853799007677
OpenAlexW2162471776
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas42

The days are approaching when you will hear new things. Soon you will hear that an Arab is not an Arab, a Shirazi is not a Shirazi, and an African is not an African. You will hear this, and you will be told that you are all Zanzibaris. Al-Falaq , paper of the Zanzibar Arab Association, 1946 Nani awezaye kumnyoosha Binaadamu pindi alitiwa kibyongo na Mungu ? [Who can straighten out mankind, whom God has made a hunchback?] Afrika Kwetu , paper of the Zanzibar African Association, 1952 S TUDENTS of the history of African ethnicity will recognize in the second of these quotes a Swahili version of the aphorism from Kant with which Leroy Vail introduces his important volume on the creation of tribalism in modern Africa: ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight will ever be fashioned’. True to their spirit, both aphorisms can be interpreted in contradictory ways. Vail intended to point up a theme that runs throughout his volume: that ethnic categories are rarely as clear-cut as ethnic nationalists would have them seem, and that, where such clarity exists, it is only momentary, having arisen out of complex and messy historical processes. But the editors of Afrika Kwetu , the weekly newspaper of the Zanzibar African Association that published the Swahili proverb in 1952, drew less subtle implications. The immediate context was a plea against religious chauvinism, part of the newspaper's allegation that Zanzibar's Arab nationalist leaders had violated the Islamic injunction to respect other religions ‘of the book’. But the clear implication – elsewhere made explicit – was that God and nature had fashioned humankind into irreducibly separate races and nations, and that it was foolish and even blasphemous to mix or combine them, as (they charged) their Arab rivals were seeking to do

Barbarism · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Ethnic group · Genealogy · Islam · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Swahili · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Religious studies