Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the changing modality of discussing politics in ICT in contemporary Zanzibar and to interrogate the multiple participatory frames and identities constructed, reproduced or subverted across several media.

Paper long abstract:

Due to the uniqueness of the historical and socio-political context of the Zanzibar archipelago (compared to the coastal Swahili milieu of East Africa), political issues have always been discussed in a subtle and indirect way. Sociality has been enacted around the baraza - lit. sitting area outside traditional Swahili homes - intended, among others, as representing both "different degrees of formality/informality, institutionalization and abstractness" and as "a spectrum of places where people meet" (Loimeier, 2009:179). On the baraza Swahili individuals interact within their immediate community and, through it, with outer communities, negotiating social roles and multiple identities.

As ICT are undergoing a rapid growth, even on the Islands, Swahili communities are experiencing new modes of sociability and new constructions of identities. The virtual spaces in the spotlight are the cyber-baraza, that are, according to Farouk Topan (2006), blogs, e-mail networks and websites through which the Swahili communities are engaged in global interactions. These technologies and their application seem to reproduce the baraza at a different level, maintaining some modalities of its networks, but also altering others. They enable new communicative practices which allow a different approach to politics and a different modality of its discussion. The on-line display of these discourses is an interesting forum which focuses on the interaction among the global Swahili diaspora and the "globalized" Wazanzibari and brings our attention back to the contested issue of "identities", as experienced on the Islands.

This paper seeks to explore these changing modalities and to interrogate the multiple participatory frames and identities constructed, reproduced or subverted across several media.