GLOBE.
FORGOTTEN COUNTRIES
ZANZIBAR
(August 11, 2023)
“I would like to buy the Zanzibar bazaar” Oscar Carboni sang in the 1930s: at that time, the archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa was a British protectorate. On the throne was a sultan who managed internal affairs, while the United Kingdom, through its officials, supervised is work.
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HISTORY
The centuries-old history of this territory which experienced an ephemeral independence between December 1963 and April ’64, is very interesting because it recalls the existence of a civilisation, the Swahili, which had various moments of glory.
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THE PAST
THE ZANDJ CULTURE
«The east coast of Africa south of the Somali “horn” – writes Guida del mondo[1] –
it was known to navigators of the Mediterranean since ancient times, but it was only between the 4th and 5th centuries AD. That trade began to develop in the region. From the seventh century onwards, mercantile activity took on significant dimensions, as a function of the links established first with Arabia and later with Persia.
For political or religious reasons, there were numerically reduced migratory waves of Arab dissidents who abandoned their lands to settle in this area: in 695 AD. Prince Hanza of Oman arrived in Zanzibar with a little group of followers; in 740 AD. fugitives from Mecca founded Muqdisho (Mogadishu); in 834 AD. the defeated rebels of Basrah (Basra) became wealthy pirates based in Socotra; in 920 AD. a group of Omanis conquered Mogadishu forcing its founders to transform themselves into caravans and move inland; finally, around 975 AD. Ali Ibn Sultan al Hassan, prince of Shiraz expelled from his country, took refuge with his family in Africa, where he founded the ports of Kilwa, Pemba, Manisa (later called Mombasa) and Sofala (near the current Beira in Mozambique). His descendants – and by extension all the mestizo population of the coast – called themselves “shirazi”, a generic denomination still used today.
The Arabs called the whole region “country of the zandj” or country of the blacks (Zanzibar, which we will discuss later, in fact derives its name from “zandj bar” which means coast of the blacks) as the white minority totally merged with the Somali or Bantu peoples of the coast. The contribution of this population was fundamental from both an economic and cultural point of view: they introduced a script which, combined with the Kiswahili language, was destined to give cultural unity to the entire coast between Mogadishu and Sofala, providing its populations with access to Arab civilisation and commercial outlets suitable for the products of the region.
An active direct exchange was thus established: first with Arabia and Persia and later with India, Siam and even China, as demonstrated by the fact that, in 1415,an embassy from Malindi returned to Zandj escorted by a fleet under the command of the first admiral of the Ming empire. The main products exported from Africa were the excellent steel of Malindi and Mombasa, which was worked in Syria or in India (the famous swords of Damascus were made from this steel); ivory, which being qualitatively better than Indian ivory was also appreciated in China; the skins of the savannah; the gold of Zimbabwe through Sofala and of course the slaves.
These products were traded for textiles, books, jewellery, pearls and porcelain. Even today, archaeologists marvel at the amount of Chinese pottery found in the region.
This chain of independent port cities but united by a strong volume of trade and close collaboration, built of stone or coral blocks in the Arab style, with large squares where poets and minstrels recited their epics and love poems in the presence of large crowds, gave rise to a common culture which, although Arabised, kept strong local roots and acquired its own personality even in the field of more sophisticated artistic and intellectual creations.
When the Portuguese stopped in Zandj en route to India in 1498, they were deeply impressed by the size and cleanliness of the cities, the quality of the houses, their luxurious and artistic decorations, and the beauty and elegance of the women who attended to social life.
However, since their primary interest was trade with India and then the monopoly of merchant traffic, they saw fearsome competitors in the Zandj cities to be eliminated: in 1500 they attacked and destroyed Mozambique and continued their work with such cruelty that in 50 years managed to raze all the cities of the east coast. Their goal was to transfer all of this vital trade to their trading centres.
They did not fully succeed: their aggression, however, caused a long phase of economic and cultural decline which was interrupted only at the end of the seventeenth century when Oman expanded its empire as far as East Africa.
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THE OMANIAN CONQUEST
At the end of the seventeenth century, therefore, the Sultanate of Oman launched a vast expansion program on the African coast of the Indian Ocean, gradually supplanting the waning Portuguese. Zanzibar became part of the sultanate in 1698 and under Omani rule it returned to acquire an important commercial role, particularly in relation to the traffic of ivory, spices and above all slaves. The richest and most powerful Zanzibar slave traders, such as Tippu Tip, had real armies and militarily controlled a large part of the hinterland, up to the Great Lakes region. The importance of the island became such that in 1840 the capital of the Omani sultanate was moved from Muscat to today’s Stone Town. In 1861, following a succession struggle within the ruling dynasty, Zanzibar and Oman separated.
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FROM INDEPENDENCE TO THE PROTECTORATE
While the sultanate thrived on clove plantations and the slave trade, Britain and Germany began to increase their presence in the area: Zanzibar itself was a bone of contention. The treaty of Heligoland-Zanzibar, stipulated in 1890 between the two powers, gave the British control of the archipelago which became their protectorate.
The sultan formally remained the head of state, but was de facto subordinate to the British viziers (advisers) (later called “residents”). The British (who had conducted a massive campaign against trafficking throughout Africa) forced him to abolish slavery.
An attempt by the Omani dynasty to impose a sultan not liked by the British resulted in the brief Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896, which ended with the surrender of the pretender to the throne after 45 minutes of naval bombardment by Her Majesty’s navy.
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TOWARDS THE SECOND INDEPENDENCE
Zanzibar remained under British control until 10 December 1963, when, under the pressure of the decolonisation process of the whole continent, London granted full independence to the territory which became for a short time a constitutional monarchy.
On 12 January ’64, however, the Zanzibar revolution led to the proclamation of the People’s Republic, governed by the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP). A few months later, on April 26, with a referendum the population chose to unite the archipelago with Tanganika forming the United Republic of Tanzania, under the presidency of Julius Nyerere.
In any case, Zanzibar remained, in many ways, a distinct reality from Tanganyika, both for the more markedly Arab culture, and because the archipelago (and above all the island of Unguja) was the most developed and relatively richest area of the country.
Under cover, the independence pushes of a part of the Zanzibarese survived, while there was no lack of clashes between the inhabitants of the main island and those of Pemba.
In addition, in the seventies, with the collapse of the production and export of spices, one of the main sources of income in the area disappeared.
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THE STATUTE OF ZANZIBAR
With the mentioned plebiscite of ’64, Tanganika and Zanzibar constituted a federal state:
the archipelago would have enjoyed a special status: a government, a parliament and autonomous courts. Dar-Es-Salaam recognized internal self-government for the islanders, governed however by the existence of a single state party (Chama Cha Mapinduzi) which concentrated all power in its own hands.
In the 1990s, when single-party rule was abolished, the independence demands re-emerged in the islands, which we have already said.
In particular, on the occasion of the various elections held every five years both for national institutions, as for those on the island, periodic allegations of fraud carried out to favor the success of acceptable candidates for the ruling party, the CCM.
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GEOGRAPHY
The Zanzibar archipelago consists of two main islands, Unguja (Zanzibar) and Pemba, and about forty smaller islands, all separated from the mainland by the homonymous channel, 40 km wide.
It occupies an area of 2,461 sq km and hosts a population of 1.3 million inhabitants (2012).
The languages spoken are English, Ki-Swahili (official), Arabic and Somali; the most widespread religions are Ibadi Islam (97%) and Christian minorities.
The population is mostly made up of Bantu, while the Indian community, very numerous at the time of British colonisation, has disappeared. In fact, the Indians fled the island to escape the harsh repression implemented by the local government after the deposition of the last sultan.
The economy is mainly based on international tourism.
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THE KISWAHILI
“Watu wote wamezaliwa huru, hadhi na haki zao ni sawa. Wote wamejaliwa akili na dhamiri, hivyo yapasa watendeane kindugu.”[2]
Kiswahili is a Bantu language found in much of eastern, central and southern Africa. According to 2022 estimates, it is spoken by 71.4 million people.
It is an official language in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, as well as one of the six official languages of the African Union as well of the East African Economic Community.
Its diffusion, even outside the East African area, is due to its role as the language of commercial exchanges in a vast region of the continent: it is also included in Burundi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, above all in the eastern provinces, in Mozambique and on several islands in the Indian Ocean.
The name “Swahili” derives from the Arabic adjective sawahili, “coastal” or from the Persian sahel “coast”: this adjective indicates both the populations living on the east coast of Africa, bordered by the Indian Ocean, and the language from them used.
As in many Bantu languages, prefixes are added to the Swahili root:
• ki-Swahili indicates the name of the language;
• m-swahili, indicates Swahili people;
• u-Swahili is the Swahili culture, or region inhabited by peoples who speak this language.
(we inserted a hyphen to separate the prefix from the root).
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HISTORY OF KISWAHILI
Kiswahili developed as an interchange language on the trade routes linking Africa to Asia, and which constituted an extremely large and active network which had one of its major centers in Zanzibar. These exchanges, which are known from at least the 1st century BC, profoundly influenced the cultures of the east coast of Africa, which acquired Bantu, Arab, Indian, Persian elements and so on. In this context, it served as a lingua franca, comparable to English today. It is difficult to pinpoint how long Kiswahili has existed as a distinct language; most probably the nucleus of the language developed in Zanzibar, and then spread along the commercial routes, starting from 1500 years ago. One of the first surviving documents written in this language is an epic poem (transcribed in the Arabic alphabet) entitled Utenzi wa Tambuka (“The Story of Tambuka”), dated 1728.
Of this speech, divided into dialects relating to several geographical areas (Congo, Mozambique, Comoros, Mayotte, Somalia…), there is a prestigious standard variety, namely the “kiunguja”, based on the speech of the city of Zanzibar. Books that teach standard Kiswahili (or that start from this variety and then open a window to the others) are based on this variety.
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LEXICON, ALPHABET, PRONUNCIATION
This nature of a commercial and multicultural language is reflected in the extraordinary abundance of loanwords that characterize it: it has absorbed terms from Arabic (for example waziri, “minister”), from Persian (serikali, “government”) and from Hindi ( chandarua, “mosquito net”).
With the arrival of Europeans it made its own some terms of Portuguese (pesa, “money” or meza, “table”), German (shule, “school”) or English (bases for “bus” or gari for “car”). .
However, the majority of its words derive from Bantu languages, so that its diffusion in large areas of Africa has not been hindered in any way: in fact, people have made it their own by inserting known terms with those that were gradually absorbed.
The first written documents date back to a period between the end of the 1600s and the beginning of the 1700s and used the Arabic alphabet; the current written form, in current use, uses the Latin alphabet.
As for phonetics, Swahili words are almost all plain, ie the accent always falls on the penultimate syllable. Generally, this implies that the penultimate vowel of the word is stressed; however, there are cases where a consonant may be “stressed”. This applies for example to mbwa (“dog”), where m is emphasized, or nne (“four”) where the first n is emphasized. Vowels and consonants are usually pronounced quite similarly to English.
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AT RISK OF ISLAMIST CONTAGION?
«Milk and mint, the colors of low tide, an alternation of emerald transparencies and tongues of white sand, studded with shells. Luxuriant forests, exotic animals, the scent of ripe fruit that inebriates the senses, while the pungent scent of spices gently awakens them: “pole, pole” as the locals say, “slow, slow”, is the refrain of a holiday perfect»[3], this is the oleographic picture painted by a tourist brochure written to encourage us to get immediately a ticket to Zanzibar.
In reality, under the surface, the fire of Islamic extremism is smoldering which is affecting all of East Africa, from Somalia to Mozambique, passing right through the island of white sands and milk and mint.
‘He was brainwashed’: young men are disappearing from Zanzibar. Are extremists to blame?[4]
With this drammatic title, the Guardian of December 15, 2022 reported the disappearance of 20 young men from Zanzibar territory.
Kidnapped? No, fled to join Islamist fighters operating on the continent.
“At 10am on 16 August – told the british paper – police in Zanzibar received a missing person’s report concerning a man who had left his home on the island for an “unknown destination”. It was the first of seven reports the police would receive that month of men between the ages of 19 and 36 who had mysteriously vanished from the Tanzanian archipelago.”
Subsequent investigations will clarify that before leaving, everyone had become more solitary, intransigent, worried about the
growing “moral indecency” on the island and devoted followers of Aboud Rogo Mohammed, a radical Islamist preacher, killed in 2012.
Rogo, of Kenyan origin, had acquired a large following of faithful throughout East Africa: for the United Nations, his preaching is connected with what the al Shabaab who operate between Somalia and northeastern Kenya region.
The families of origin of the disappeared
they believe their relatives have joined jihadist groups to “fight for the faith”.
So can Zanzibar become the new cultural hotbed of Islamic extremism?
The rulers and civil society seem to be keeping a low profile for the moment: little information in the media, limited reports to the police on the activity of extremists in poor neighborhoods, where fundamentalist militancy can lurk.
But in the background there are the concerns caused both by the internal war in Somalia and by the attacks carried out by the Mozambican al Shabaab operating in Cabo Delgado against the Tanzanian defense forces.
We’ll see if in the future the island of cloves, ginger and birthplace of Kiswahili will become a source of new concern for East Africa and the rest of the world.
PIER LUIGI GIACOMONI
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NOTES:
[1] Autori vari, Guida del mondo, EMI, Bologna, 1999, P. 551;
[2] Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 1 in Kiswahili
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili language
[3] VIAGGI Zanzibar, relax al ritmo delle maree, ilfattoquotidiano.it, 4 August 2023;
[4] C. Kimeu and N. Omar ‘He was brainwashed’: young men are disappearing from Zanzibar. Are extremists to blame?, theguardian.com, 15 December 2022.