Paper short abstract:

Exploring the tensions between Zanzibar’s cosmopolitanism and its island identity, and examining the ways in which the interplay of politics, religion and culture can lead to both the acceptance and rejection of the Other.

Paper long abstract:

Zanzibar has a long history of cosmopolitanism, which is often said to have ended with the 1964 revolution. In Zanzibar Town today, however, a number of the Indian families who fled to the mainland during the revolution have returned, and there is a growing number of foreigners coming to the islands to live and work in the booming tourism industry. Teenagers chat to their cousins in Norway through Facebook, and look forward to the latest Hollywood and Bollywood films. On the other hand, everyday life is hard, and there is widespread support among Zanzibaris for independence for the islands, linked to a rejection of both globalisation and links with the African mainland. This paper will explore the tensions between two contradictory aspects of Zanzibari identity: the acceptance and assimilation of other cultures, and outright rejection of them.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will present the rationale for the project and provide an overview of the visual archive under analysis, that of the photographs of R.T Oza and his son R.R. Oza at the Capital Art Studio, in Stone Town, Zanzibar.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will present the rationale for the project and provide an overview of the archive under analysis. Capital Art Studio, in Stone Town, Zanzibar, was opened in 1930 by Ranchhod Oza, who arrived in Zanzibar from Gujarat in 1925 and undertook his apprenticeship at the established (Goan) studio of Gomes & Sons. He was joined in his practice by his son, Rohit, who took over the studio following his father's death in 1983, and is its current proprietor. Our exploratory engagement with the visual archive that the Ozas have compiled over 82 years seeks to catalogue and begin theorizing its contents, drawing on a growing body of work on African studio photography as articulation of modernity and/or cosmopolitanism (Behrend, Vokes, Sprague). A cursory reading suggests that it comprises, on the one hand, a public record that frames the shifting urban landscape, technologies of connection with the wider Indian Ocean world and visiting personages and, on the other, a series of private archives of everyday life in Unguja wherein individuals engaged in acts of self-fashioning within the studio.

Paper short abstract:

Following Dr Gupta's overviewing of the archive under analysis, this paper will tease out some of the key questions with which we approached the visual archive compiled by the Ozas from 1930 to the present, with emphasis on how it frames and circulates Zanzibar before and after the bipolar world order.

Paper long abstract:

Following on from the presentation by Dr Pamila Gupta, which presents the rationale for this project and provides an overview of the archive under analysis, this paper will tease out some of the key questions with which we approached this visual archive of the Ozas: How is Zanzibar framed therein? What kinds of affiliations and aspirations can be read from private studio portraits and the framing of public life? How much does the act of having one's photo taken restore an embodied emotion of elegance (Buckley)? What images circulate, stagnate or 'flash up' in particular historical moments and within particular circuits (Benjamin)? We are particularly interested in reading the ways in which this archive enables us to chart shifts and continuities and elicits nostalgic retrievals of and/or melancholic ambivalence toward the past. In the process, we hope to arrive at new insights in relation to Zanzibar's much vaunted cosmopolitanism, its fractured and fractious histories, including its fraught relation with its Indian Ocean forelands and African hinterlands and particularly the historical memory of its illustrious past as terminus of the dhow trade.

Paper short abstract:

Is creolisation simply a process of social change that incorporates the diversity of influences in a globalising world or is it something more specific? This paper suggests that the utility of creolisation as an analytical category must be historically specific if it is to be useful.

Paper long abstract:

What is "creolisation", and at what point (either theoretically or temporally) do processes that might be called "creolisation" no longer warrant the name? Can creole societies cease to be "creole" and if so, how? Creolisation, in the Hannerzian sense of the word, conjures up images of hybridity, globalisation, cosmopolitanism; while not a uniquely contemporary phenomenon it is nevertheless widely associated with the political and economic expansion of the European world, and the cultural implications thereof, in the modern and, particularly, post-modern eras. On the Comorian island of Ngazidja in the western Indian Ocean processes of social change have been the product of interactions with the outside world since first settlement of the islands some two millennia ago and might well be considered creole. There is evidence that the language may have been a creole and the island is well known for its apparently syncretic culture and "contradictory" social structures. Descent and inheritance are matrilineal but the Wangazidja are Muslim: not unknown but an uncommon juxtaposition nevertheless; there are age systems, rarely found in conjunction with either matrilineality or Islam; like Muslims elsewhere, Wangazidja are polygynous, but residence after marriage is—again unusually—uxorilocal; and contemporary legal systems in Ngazidja draw on three, sometimes incompatible sources: shari'a, custom and French law. This paper considers the socio-cultural history of Ngazidja and asks whether creolisation is a useful analytical concept for dealing with such long term processes of change.

Paper short abstract:

The Zambezi Valley, in Mozambique is a sociological construct; a produce of 16 century colonial exchanges of the Indian Ocean. Attempts to attract Portuguese settlers helped create a class of powerful landladies. I attempt to explore how women of the area currently reproduce the memory of this past.

Paper long abstract:

The Zambezi Valley, in Mozambique is a sociological construct. Portuguese colonial rule over this area, enacted initially from Goa instituted the prazo system; by leasing to settlers for a period of time. To attract more settlers, some prazos were given as dowry to girls who married Portuguese vassals; to be inherited through the female line, for at least three generations.

Indigenous women in the region were also reportedly powerful landowners. Among the Marave, the wife of the karonga had jurisdiction over part of the territory. Female chiefs were also reported to have existed. Among the Shona, the wives of the mutapa had their own territory and could serve as ambassadors.

Despite their notoriety, historical texts mention these women marginally or as surrogates to male dominance. This is not an accidental narrative. It stems from a male perception of female roles. By constructing a text which undermines processes through which women can access power, historians have neglected important factors which may have contributed to the rise of such women to power.

Using Foulcautian and feminist anthropology approaches to power I propose to understand how women of this sociological space have been constructing the perception of their female ancestry's power. This approach assumes that women act through agency and are producers of their own position. Yet they are also constrained by social structures, within which they enact their agency. Finally, the significance of their actions is linked to a system of understanding shared by her and other subjects of the same structure.

Paper short abstract:

This book describes and explains how and why the South Asians in East Africa have emerged as a successful transnational, diasporic community, 1800-2000.

Paper long abstract:

The book is a comprehensive history of South Asian migrants in East Africa. It focuses on the balance between settling and unsettling in a globalizing world. The book aims to achieve a broader understanding of communities that do not belong to nations, yet are part of national states, by using insights from the social sciences, including concepts like cultural capital, family firm, transnationality, middleman minorities and cultural change. Over the last 150 years, the Asian African diasporic community endured important economic and political transitions, like the move of the Sultan of Oman to Zanzibar, the colonization of East Africa by the Germans and the British, and the emergence of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania as national states. The case of the South Asians in East Africa shows that this community was economically and culturally highly diverse. Moreover, its economic and cultural interests shifted from South Asia to Africa and, eventually, to Western Europe and North America. Eventually, they develop a 'triple heritage' that consists of a unique combination of experiences, habits and tools that became useful in the globalized world. For instance, knowledge of English and Swahili, as well as Gujarati, made it possible to bridge the gap between the Western world and Africa and India. Nowadays, Asian Africans have become a globalized community in a globalized world.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the demise of practices of oath swearing in northern Mozambique as a window into understanding transformations in contemporary Islam

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, Islamic authority in Nampula City in northern Mozambique has witnessed a rapid reconstitution. Following trends elsewhere in East Africa, a group of young reformist Muslim leaders, educated in Islamic universities in the Middle East, is taking over from an older generation associated with Shadhiliyya and Qadiriyya Sufi Orders. Their popular appeal is often explained in terms of their capacities for rational interpretation, the demand for which would be fostered by the spread of modern mass education. This paper focuses on oath swearing on the Qur'an, an integral part of dispute management in northern Mozambique and one that local Sufi leaders have historically been renowned for. By analyzing the demise of this practice against the backdrop of novel disciplinary regimes introduced by the postcolonial Socialist state and reformist Islam, it will be argued that in order to understand current transformations in Islam in Mozambique it is necessary to look beyond changes in knowledge formation and reasoning, and include conceptions of personhood, truth and the body.

Paper short abstract:

Contemporary Indian Ocean writers are challenging the physical and psychological violence that continues to monitor women regardless of their class or ethnic background. The three writers chosen inexorably condemn any form of patriarchal power used in detriment to the freedom of women.

Paper long abstract:

M. G. Vassanji's hybridized notion of khandaanity underlines many of the gender constraints that regulate the lives of Asian women in Indian Ocean societies. The ideology governing gender relations was based on the necessity to safeguard women's sexual purity, men's honour and social status being heavily dependant on it. This translated into an excessive enclosure of the various Asian groups within their own communities for fear that their daughters would be led astray, women being the guardians of culture and the transmitters of traditional values. Religion and culture combine to establish the boundaries that respectable females should honour.

In this paper we aim to contrast how contemporary Indian Ocean writers denounce the violence - both physical and psychological - that continues to monitor women regardless of their class or ethnic background. Jameela Siddiqi's The Feast of the Nine Virgins (2001) denounces the double standards of the Asian community. In Vassanji's The Book of Secrets (1994) a glaring example of the pressure of society on women is revealed through the suicide of the Muslim girl Parviz, whose affair with a Hindu brings public disgrace. Lindsey Collen's prize-winning novel The Rape of Sita (1993) leads inexorably to a condemnation of any form of patriarchal power used in detriment to the freedom of women.

We conclude that until women can free themselves from ideal patriarchal notions of femininity, heterosexual chastity and faithfulness to "the community", they will remain prey to acts of gender violence.