Zanzibar has had the most turbulent postcolonial history of any part of the United Republic of Tanzania, yet few sources explain the reasons why. The current political impasse in the islands is a contest over the question of whether to revere and sustain the Zanzibari Revolution of 1964, in which thousands of islanders, mostly Arab, lost their lives. It is also about whether Zanzibar's union with the Tanzanian mainland--cemented only a few months after the revolution--should be strengthened, reformed, or dissolved. Defenders of the revolution claim it was necessary to right a century of wrongs. They speak the language of African nationalism and aspire to unify the majority of Zanzibaris through the politics of race. Their opponents instead deplore the violence of the revolution, espouse the language of human rights, and claim the revolution reversed a century of social and economic development. They reject the politics of race, regarding Islam as a more worthy basis for cultural and political unity. From a series of personal interviews conducted over several years, Thomas Burgess has produced two highly readable first-person narratives in which two nationalists in Africa describe their conflicts, achievements, failures, and tragedies. Their life stories represent two opposing arguments, for and against the revolution. Ali Sultan Issa traveled widely in the 1950s and helped introduce socialism into the islands. As a minister in the first revolutionary government he became one of Zanzibar's most controversial figures, responsible for some of the government's most radical policies. After years of imprisonment, he reemerged in the 1990s as one of Zanzibar's most successful hotel entrepreneurs. Seif Sharif Hamad came of age during the revolution and became disenchanted with its broken promises and excesses. In the 1980s he emerged as a reformist minister, seeking to roll back socialism and authoritarian rule. After his imprisonment he has ever since served as a leading figure in what has become Tanzania's largest opposition party As Burgess demonstrates in his introduction, both memoirs trace Zanzibar's postindependence trajectory and reveal how Zanzibaris continue to dispute their revolutionary heritage and remain divided over issues of memory, identity, and whether to remain a part of Tanzania. The memoirs explain how conflicts in the islands have become issues of national importance in Tanzania, testing that state's commitment to democratic pluralism. They engage our most basic assumptions about social justice and human rights and shed light on a host of themes key to understanding Zanzibari history that are also of universal relevance, including the legacies of slavery and colonialism and the origins of racial violence, poverty, and underdevelopment. They also show how a cosmopolitan island society negotiates cultural influences from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe.

Yes, In My Lifetime is a collection of selected articles and essays by Haroub Othman, written over the span of his career of nearly four decades. Originally appearing in a wide range of fora, the writings reflect Othman’s growth as an intellectual and an activist. They also encapsulate his life’s passions ñ the plight of the people and their struggles for their rights, the state of the Union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, and international solidarity with the oppressed the world over. A child of Zanzibar, Othman fought long and hard for the unity of those islands, and for their continued presence in the Union, and the set of articles in that section pay homage to that work. Haroub Othman was a professor of development studies at the University of Dar es Salaam, having specialised in international law and political science. He was still working with the University when he passed away in 2009. His many Kiswahili writings are unfortunately not included in this book.

Contemporary Africa is demographically characterized above all else by its youthfulness. In East Africa the median age of the population is now a striking 17.5 years, and more than 65 percent of the population is age 24 or under. This situation has attracted growing scholarly attention, resulting in an important and rapidly expanding literature on the position of youth in African societies. While the scholarship examining the contemporary role of youth in African societies is rich and growing, the historical dimension has been largely neglected in the literature thus far. Generations Past seeks to address this gap through a wide-ranging selection of essays that covers an array of youth-related themes in historical perspective. Thirteen chapters explore the historical dimensions of youth in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first–century Ugandan, Tanzanian, and Kenyan societies. Key themes running through the book include the analytical utility of youth as a social category; intergenerational relations and the passage of time; youth as a social and political problem; sex and gender roles among East African youth; and youth as historical agents of change. The strong list of contributors includes prominent scholars of the region, and the collection encompasses a good geographical spread of all three East African countries.

This volume focuses on the cultural memory and mediation of the 1964 Zanzibar revolution, analyzing it’s continuing reverberations in everyday life. The revolution constructed new conceptions of community and identity, race and cultural belonging, as well as instituting different ideals of nationhood, citizenship, sovereignty. As the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the revolution revealed, the official versions of events have shifted significantly over time and the legacy of the uprising is still deeply contested. In these debates, the question of Zanzibari identity remains very much at stake: Who exactly belongs in the islands and what historical processes brought them there? What are the boundaries of the nation, and who can claim to be an essential part of this imagined and embodied community? Political belonging and power are closely intertwined with these issues of identity and history—raising intense debates and divisions over precisely where Zanzibar should be situated within the national order of things in a postcolonial and interconnected world. Attending to narratives that have been overlooked, ignored, or relegated to the margins, the authors of these essays do not seek to simply define the revolution or to establish its ultimate meaning. Instead, they seek to explore the continuing echoes and traces of the revolution fifty years on, reflected in memories, media, and monuments. Inspired by interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, history, cultural studies, and geography, these essays foreground critical debates about the revolution, often conducted sotto voce and located well off the official stage—attending to long silenced questions, submerged doubts, rumors and secrets, or things that cannot be said.

This edited volume firmly places African history into global history by highlighting connections between African and East German actors and institutions during the Cold War. With a special focus on negotiations and African influences on East Germany (and vice versa), the volume sheds light on personal and institutional agency, cultural cross-fertilization, migration, development, and solidarity.

Examining the process of abolition on the island of Pemba off the East African coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book demonstrates the links between emancipation and the redefinition of honour among all classes of people on the island. By examining the social vulnerability of ex-slaves and the former slave-owning elite caused by the abolition order of 1897, this study argues that moments of resistance on Pemba reflected an effort to mitigate vulnerability rather than resist the hegemonic power of elites or the colonial state. As the meaning of the Swahili word heshima shifted from honour to respectability, individuals' reputations came under scrutiny and the Islamic kadhi and colonial courts became an integral location for interrogating reputations in the community. This study illustrates the ways in which former slaves used piety, reputation, gossip, education, kinship and witchcraft to negotiate the gap between emancipation and local notions of belonging.

Notions of ustaarabu, a word expressing “civilization,” and questions of identities in Zanzibar have historically been shaped by the development of Islam and association with littoral societies around the Indian Ocean. The 1964 Revolution marked a break in that history and imposed new notions of African civilization and belonging in Zanzibar. The revolutionary state subsequently introduced tourism and the market economy to maintain its hegemony over Zanzibar. In light of these developments, and with locals facing growing socio-economic marginalization and political uncertainty, Tourism and Social Change in Post-Socialist Zanzibar: Struggles for Identity, Movement, and Civilization examines how Zanzibaris are struggling to move through the local landscape in the post-socialist era and articulate their ideas of belonging in Zanzibar. This book further investigates how movements of Zanzibaris within the emerging and contending social discourses are reconstituting meanings for conceptualizing ustaarabu to define their roots in Zanzibar.

Manipulation of the past and forced erasure of memories have been global phenomena throughout history, spanning a varied repertoire from the destruction or alteration of architecture, sites, and images, to the banning or imposing of old and new practices. The present volume addresses these questions comparatively across time and geography, and combines a material approach to the study of memory with cross-disciplinary empirical explorations of historical and contemporary cases. This approach positions the volume as a reference-point within several fields of humanities and social sciences. The collection brings together scholars from different fields within humanities and social science to engage with memorialization and damnatio memoriae across disciplines, using examples from their own research. The broad chronological and comparative scope makes the volume relevant for researchers and students of several historical periods and geographic regions.

During the Cold War, alternative globalization projects were underway: socialist Eastern Europe and left-leaning countries in the Third World maintained close economic relations. The two worlds traded and exchanged know-how and technology. This book examines the specific spaces of interaction of these exchanges and discusses the consequences for those projects of globalization undertaken in both world regions.

In Jesus for Zanzibar: Narratives of Pentecostal (Non-)Belonging, Islam, and Nation Hans Olsson offers an ethnographic account of the lived experience and socio-political significance of newly arriving Pentecostal Christians in the Muslim majority setting of Zanzibar. This work analyzes how a disputed political partnership between Zanzibar and Mainland Tanzania intersects with the construction of religious identities. Undertaken at a time of political tensions, the case study of Zanzibar’s largest Pentecostal church, the City Christian Center, outlines religious belonging as relationally filtered in-between experiences of social insecurity, altered minority / majority positions, and spiritual powers. Hans Olsson shows that Pentecostal Christianity, as a signifier of (un)wanted social change, exemplifies contested processes of becoming in Zanzibar that capitalizes on, and creates meaning out of, religious difference and ambient political tensions.