Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (51 page)

Tracing the rooftops with his finger, from one end of the cassava souk to the other, my host, Emerson Skeens, an American who has lived in Stone Town for twenty-two years, registered for me his neighbors: Indian Hindus, Pembans (from the adjacent island), Indian Muslims, Yemenis, Persian Shiites, Ithna’sheris (Twelver Shiites, in this case from Pakistan), Bohras (another branch of Shiites, from Gujarat), Omanis, Goans, more Bohras, Africans, Shirazis, more Africans, and Comorians. “Zanzibar is African, yet different from Africa. It is Arabian and Persian, yet different from Arabia and Persia; and Indian, yet different from India,” said Ismail Jussa, a Zanzibari friend from the Gulf of Kutch in Gujarat. From different parts of the ocean they came, united by Islam and eventually, too, by the Swahili language, which, with its Arabic gutturals and loanwords, and its Bantu grammar, functions as pure, heated expression.
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After the indigenous Africans, the Shirazis arrived here with their dhows from the coast of Iran around a thousand years ago, when Zanzibar, primarily owing to the winds of the northeast monsoon, was already
being visited by traders from as far away as China. The Shirazis were not only Persians, but minority Arabs, too, from the city of Shiraz, who might well have been refugees from ethnic oppression. The Portuguese were the first westerners in Zanzibar, plying the East African coast since the time of da Gama at the end of the fifteenth century, and introducing cassava and maize. They built a chapel that the Omanis, who were importing silk from China, destroyed in the early eighteenth century, using the stones to build a fort. The Stone Town that the visitor sees today is mainly an Omani architectural affair, with strong Indian influences.

Yet above all, Zanzibar, and Stone Town in particular, was, well into the nineteenth century, a “sad, dark star, a grim address” of the slave trade, in the words of the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski.
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Hundreds and even thousands of slaves domesticated by years of captivity—men, women, and children—roamed through every street, along with those slaves who had just arrived from the interior, half mad and half dead through maltreatment. It was a scene that was like “looking into another age and another world,” somberly writes the journalist and historian Alan Moorehead about mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar, which was the jumping-off point for Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke’s expedition to discover the source of the Nile.
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So as captivating as Zanzibar was to me, let me say at the outset that this island is not without its ghosts. First and above all there was slavery, the original sin and the lifeblood of the Omani Indian Ocean empire.

In fact, Stone Town, rather than a cute Greek island village of a place, is a battered, roughened, gritty, exhausting, salt-stained monument to the historical process itself, somewhat intimidating and easy to get lost in, especially at night. Wandering around the first morning, when women with rapid broom strokes were spreading away the water from the nighttime rains, I first noticed the doors, more elaborate and replete with stories than the houses themselves. John Baptist Da Silva, an artist and lifelong resident of Stone Town from Portuguese Goa, in western India, read the doors for me as if they were books, with words between the lines. There was the simple, square Omani mango wood door with large cast-iron nails. Along the frames were designs of fish scales indicating fertility, and lotus flowers indicating power and wealth. The geometrical patterns were symbols of mathematics and, hence, of navigation. The rope patterns evinced the dhow trade, so this had been the home of a wealthy Omani merchant trader with many children.

There are the Gujarati doors made of teakwood with massive nails and square patterns below semicircular frames carved with plants and sunflowers, each sect painting its door a different color. Whereas these Indian doors are primarily square and floral, the Arabic doors, made of wood from mahogany, breadfruit, and jackfruit trees, among others, feature Koranic inscriptions. The Persian and Baluch door frames are carved into the shape of pillars, evincing a neoclassical bent. The Swahili doors are shorter than the other ones and painted in garish colors.

The breath of early morning carried with it the scents of sweet basil, lemongrass, and jasmine … of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cardamom. The yams and cassavas laid out on the
barazas
(stone benches) looked like petrified stones. The
barazas
were built primarily for gossiping and socializing, ignited by sips of Omani coffee, and were already getting crowded. Everyone had their favorite
baraza
, which need not be near their home. Men wore knitted caps
(kofias)
and traditional white Omani robes called
kanzus
in Zanzibar. Women wore
khangas
(patterned cotton dresses in African style). There was a pellucid intimacy to the morning here, with everything and every person manifesting an iconic aura that made it memorable.

Here and there palm and tamarind leaves whistled in the wind. I noticed a Jain temple and a Persian bath built on a Roman design, stuck in the midst of fifty-three mosques. A Swahili woman in a loud
khanga
was making an Indian
chapatti
(flatbread) and a Middle Eastern falafel while frying a cassava. Zanzibar is the global village writ small. It makes globalization seem altogether a normal function of human nature, requiring only technology to allow it.

Yet globalization brings its own tensions, bred of the very close quarters with which different cultures and civilizations now find themselves, for all was not well in Zanzibar. The glittering mixture of races and customs that I observed were actually vestiges of what once had been. Indeed, anyone who had known Zanzibar before independence from Great Britain in 1963 would have been saddened by the monochrome dullness of the urban environment. I had been impressed with its vitality only because it was my first visit here.

In the heart of Stone Town, I wandered into an Arab house, renovated in an expensive but somewhat tasteless, mass-produced style, where several men dressed in immaculate
kanzus
and
kofias
were sipping cardamom-scented coffee and munching on dates imported from Oman.
They invited me to join them. The owner of the house was an engaging, welcoming man, rotund, with a perfectly groomed short white beard. He told me that this had been the house of his father and grandfather. A black and white portrait of the latter in turban and beard graced the sitting room, evocative of Omani imperial days. Pointing at the photo, my host said, “And this house had been the house of
his
grandfather.” Though he now divided his time between Oman and Zanzibar, he thought of Zanzibar as his true home, even as he considered himself a pure Omani. He had renovated this house, in part, he said, to make a statement. In polished English diction he then explained that what I was seeing here were the mere leftovers of a far more cosmopolitan world: of Omani sultans ruling under British tutelage, before steam travel mitigated the benefit of the monsoon winds, and before the building of the Suez Canal ended the need of Zanzibar as a stopover on the route between Europe and India.

But now there was post-colonial history to consider, he told me: the period since 1963, when Zanzibar was not only troubled, but also experienced some of the worst ravages of violence, and in particular ethnic-racial clashes, that sub-Saharan Africa has had to offer. “The [African] mainland has corrupted this island,” my Omani host declared bluntly. “They must apologize for the revolution.” From the “revolution” onward, it seemed that, at least in his mind, Zanzibar has been less an illustration of early globalization than of a latter-day clash of civilizations.

On one side of the cultural divide stood the British and their Omani surrogates, who were backed by the local Arab community as well as by the minorities from the Indian Subcontinent. On the other side stood the much poorer, indigenous Africans—embittered in too many cases by the history of slavery, and by the dispossession of their land at the hands of the Omanis. Standing with the Africans were the Shirazis, who, because they had come to Zanzibar in the early medieval centuries, before the other immigrants, and often as refugees, had become almost completely enmeshed through intermarriage with the Africans. Local elections in the period just before the British withdrew resulted in the two sides splitting the vote down the middle. The inconclusive consequences only increased ethnic and racial tensions.

“Race and ethnicity were never issues before the coming of politics,” explained Ismail Jussa, the Gujarati who is foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Civic United Front, mainly composed of ethnic Indians and Arabs. In other words, empires submerge communal politics because
power is hoarded under a single absolute sovereignty. But once imperial law collapses, and its divide-and-rule legacy exposed, communal politics consumes everything. It was so in Cyprus, in Palestine, the Indian Subcontinent, and many other places in Afro-Asia, and so it was in Zanzibar. That is the real inheritance of many, if not all, forms of colonialism.

The British left in December 1963, with the Omani sultan literally holding down the fort on his own. It took only a month, until January 1964, for the sultan to be sent packing on his yacht, as an anti-Arab pogrom exploded through the streets of Stone Town: many Africans actually believed that with the British gone, the Omanis would reintroduce slavery or, at a minimum, mete out unfair treatment. “The politics of race espoused by Zanzibar’s African nationalists,” writes the American academic G. Thomas Burgess, “was based on the premise that cosmopolitanism had not produced wealth and harmony but an exotic, deceptive façade for cultural chauvinism and racial injustice.”
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The result was, according to a Western diplomat and African area expert I met, nothing less than a “mini-Rwanda” that took the lives of men, women, and children in equal proportions, as Afro-Shirazi mobs, speaking the language of revolution and mainland African nationalism and unity, went on a rampage with racial implications. Zanzibari historian Abdul Sheriff, who heads the Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute, describes the violence as “genocidal in proportions.”
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Burgess notes that one third of all Arabs on the island were either killed or forced into immediate exile.

The Zanzibari novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah remembers:

Anarchy, rather than a new post-revolutionary stability, was the result. The Afro-Shirazis who grabbed power were divided among themselves, with doctrinaire communists pitted against plain mad killers. Julius Nyerere, the leader of mainland Tanganyika, though himself a socialist, was nevertheless afraid that Fidel Castro’s Cubans would take advantage of the chaos and set up a puppet state right off his coastline. Ali
Sultan Issa, one of the leading revolutionaries from that period, now an old man afflicted with cancer, openly admitted to me his love of Castro and Che Guevara, both of whom he had met often and whose photos graced his bedroom. And yet, rather than an Afro-Shirazi, Issa was of Yemeni-Omani ancestry, just as other revolutionaries from that period were of Arab and Indian descent, according to the pictures he showed me. Likewise, Issa insisted that the revolution was a class struggle rather than a racial one. “It was a Marxist revolution, and ideology spans the boundaries of skin color,” he insisted, a cigarette dripping from his mouth. “For example, Pemban Africans were against the revolution, while some Arabs were for it. No Indians in Pemba were harmed. To define the revolution as racial is to miss the point. Still, a revolution is not a tea party.”

No, it certainly was not. In order to prevent another Cuba, as well as to shore up the political chaos, Nyerere negotiated a deal in April 1964 to bring Zanzibar into a union with Tanganyika, creating Tanzania. Nyerere had the new Zanzibari president, Abeid Karume, protected by police and soldiers from the mainland against the more radical members of Karume’s own coalition. Still, a hard-line socialist regime emerged that expropriated the property of Omanis and other minorities in Stone Town and resettled Africans here. Because the new inhabitants were poor, they could not afford house repairs, and that set the context for Stone Town’s dilapidation. Stone Town today, beyond the rash of trinket and handicraft shops for the tourist, is a hovel of a place when you look at it with careful eyes. Sadly, it is truly representative of Zanzibar as a whole, with an overwhelming African majority and a smattering of Arabs, Indians, and other ethnic groups constituting the inhabitants of the cassava souk, the minorities large in variety but small in absolute numbers (although Stone Town, because of its multicultural demographics compared to the rest of the island, is a stronghold of the political opposition).