Gao Tianyi (Ph.D., Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Gürner's confusion about identity reminds us that behind macro African history there are many lives that have been exiled by history, and that he lived in a time when identity choices were either or others – African or Arab. But he chose the third path, Zanzibar. The history of Zanzibar behind Gürna literature can be seen more or less as a microcosm of many social and political problems in Africa and the world. Under the influence and indoctrination of the West during the colonial period, Britain's so-called "respect for local traditions" management model was to introduce the Western racial paradigm into Africa, which became the ultimate cause of racial violence in Zanzibar and the dissipation of the identity of Gürna and others with history. Understanding Africa in the African paradigm is respect for culture and, more importantly, respect for history.
The turquoise Indian Ocean once had a small island with great historical influence, it was once the intermediate station of the Indian Ocean trade, the place where Zheng He passed through the Western Ocean, the capital of the Omani Empire, the gathering place of Swahili culture, the "East African Cuba" that almost became the "East African Cuba" during the most severe period of the Cold War, and it was also the eternal favorite commercial city-state in the minds of "Civilization" players. Zanzibar – This geographical term is once again returning to the public eye with the award of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Gurna
Although we call Gürna a Tanzanian writer, Helner grew up in Zanzibar and lived in England. What he creates is not our traditional image of Indigenous African culture, but rather a reflection on African identity when he is in a foreign land. The history that Gulner projects is not the history of Africa itself, but the confusion of African history that produces its own understanding. Even in Tanzanian literary circles, there are some who believe that Gurner is a writer of Zanzibar origin rather than Tanzania. Although Gurna only left Zanzibar in 1967, Tanganyika and Zanzibar had declared their union to become Tanzania. So why do Tanzanian authors still think that Gurna is just a Zanzibar writer? This is because although Tanzania had become a country in name in 1964, there was not much connection between Zanzibar and the Tanzanian mainland until the assassination of Zanzibar President Karum in 1972. Zanzibar remains relatively independent in administration. Karum famously said, "Union is a coat that I wear when it's cold; otherwise I'll take it off." This sentence truly shows the internal relations of Tanzania after the union at that time. Therefore, to understand the historical problems behind Gürna's literature, it is still necessary to examine the history of Zanzibar. The most important of these is to understand the history of Zanzibar independence and the Zanzibar Revolution of January 12, 1964.
The outbreak of the Zanzibar Revolution was very short, and the rebels occupied stone city, the administrative center of Zanzibar, in just one morning. It was the first political act in East African history to violently overthrow a government. After the Zanzibar Revolution, the revolutionary government of Zanzibar, formed jointly by the Afro-Shirazi Party and the Umma Party, began to reform in the direction of the socialist road. Between January and April 1964, the revolutionary government of Zanzibar proclaimed the revolution as a socialist revolution against the reactionaries. However, the ideology of the revolutionary government in Zanzibar changed with the expulsion of Abdullah M. Babu, the leader of the Umma Party with socialist ideologies, after Tanzania was united in April of the same year. They are now describing the revolutionary overthrown coalition government of Zanzibar as a foreign regime that "arabs steal the fruits of national independence", and the revolution represents the liberation of Zanzibar by Africans from colonialism and foreign oppression. To this day, Zanzibar under this historical construction model is described as being under the dual British and Arab colonization, with Arabs forming the top class and Africans at the bottom. The revolution represented a revolt against colonialism, which eventually evolved into a national liberation movement dominated by African nationalism under the repeated discourse of intellectual circles. In this model, however, the third identity of Zanzibar has no place – that is, the Shirazi people who once had a majority in Zanzibar.
Who belongs to the Zanzibar Shiraz?
In the history of Zanzibar, people living there have always been inter-ethnic marriages, which are inter-ethnic and expressively of mixed race, and the peoples who play a role under the Swahili culture are collectively known as the "Shiraz people" of Zanzibar. In other words, they are natives living in Zanzibar. In this sense, Gürna, who was born in Zanzibar, actually belongs to the category of the Shiraz people.
Before the 16th century, the Shiraz people of Zanzibar consisted of independent governments, not a unified central administrative system, and their identity origins can be traced back to the legend "from the Persian Shiraz region". In other words, the identity of the Zanzibar Shiraz is a product of the imagination of political identity.
The natives of Zanzibar have not historically been strictly ethnically divided, and their common emotional projections belong to Islamic culture. In fact, this is a cultural feature of Zanzibar, where the locals do not divide their identities by ethnicity. Historically, the resident population of Zanzibar has been of mixed race. There is no really racially differentiated situation in the Western sense. In the early 20th century, after Zanzibar became a British protectorate, the British colonists began to distinguish Zanzibar as an ethnic group in order to rule, including the division of the Shiraz people. It can be said that the Arabs, Indians and Africans in the Zanzibar ethnic category are largely the ideological constructs of British colonialism. Beginning in the 1920s, the Identity of the Shiraz was divided into three parts (hadi Mushrazi, Tumbatu Shiraz, and Pembashrazi), and their division of identity was a political metaphor, but there was no contradictory conflict. The Shiraz were originally a term for the natives of Zanzibar that distinguished Themselves from Arabs and Black Africans (the "Africans" they referred to were not born in Zanzibar, but had a certain period of residence after emigrating here), and later Shiraz was divided into three definitions given to facilitate the rule of Zanzibar during the British colonial period, which was meaningless in itself, but was reinforced into a political identity during the election process of the "political era" in Zanzibar.
The ongoing conflict in Zanzibar since the first elections in 1957 is an imaginary confrontation of political identities. With the same historical roots of all these problems – why did Zanzibar, which had been politically stable for more than a hundred years, finally go to the brink of violent hatred in just a few years from 1957 to 1964?
Zanzibar's "political era" and two kinds of nationalism
In the history of Zanzibar independence, the period of intense partisan rivalry between Zanzibar and African nationalists between 1957 and 1964 is also known as the "political era" (Swahili zama za Siasa). "African nationalism" generally refers to the nationalism of black Africans. Its common sentiment projects not an ethnic group, nor a country, but a race, because most african regions did not have the concept of national sovereignty during the colonial period, so this nationalism is quite different from the nationalism that exists in the East and the West. Zanzibar nationalism, on the other hand, projects shared sentiments onto the Zanzibar state itself, which has had a national character since the beginning of the Sultanate[1].
In the seven years of Zanzibar's "political era", there were four elections, and in 1961, because of the same results of the legislative council elections, there were even two elections in the same year. However, unlike the East African colonies at the time, it was precisely because Zanzibar itself had two kinds of nationalism – African nationalism and Zanzibarese nationalism – that every election on the island since 1957 was mired in an interplay of ethnic, cultural and narrow nationalism. The results of the four pre-independence elections did not allow Zanzibar to move peacefully toward independence, but rather made it a powder keg ready to be ignited by nationalism in an unstable political environment. This also triggered the eventual Zanzibar Revolution.
The earliest nationalism in Zanzibar was Zanzibar nationalism, which also stemmed from the baptism of African countries in world war II. The rise of Zanzibar nationalism has been linked to African nationalism and Arabs with study abroad experience. Sir Henry Potter, British Consul in Zanzibar, argued that "Arab nationalist leaders have similarities with nationalists on the African continent, and both sides emphasize freedom." But older Arabs don't like this very much, believing that arab interests are different from those of Africans. However, the trend toward Zanzibar nationalism has not diminished with the opposition of the older generation of Arabs, whose Arab associations continue to recruit young Arabs returning from overseas, including members of the Arab royal family. Inspired by Nasser's Egyptian revolution, these Arab intellectuals began to raise slogans of anti-colonialism and imperialism. The core members of the Zanzibar Nationalist Party came from arab associations, among which Ali Muhsin and Amour Zahor transformed local political parties to form the Zanzibar National Party. Its main political demands were to demand the right of adults to vote, to abolish racial representation in the Legislative Council, and to establish immediate independence for the Sultanate of Zanzibar. It can be said that the Zanzibar Nationalist Party has pointed the finger at the British colonialists from the beginning.
The Zanzibar nationalist willingness to transcend ethnic independence began to worry the British. The British colonial government set out to curb Zanzibar nationalism, encouraging the emergence of a party opposed to the Zanzibar Nationalist Party and loyal to Britain. The rudimentary Afro-Shirazi Party, led by the Africans of Zanzibar, has quietly formed. Zanzibar consists of two large islands and several small islands, two of which are Unguga and Pemba, and Zanzibar is generally referred to as Unguga. Although Pemba is far from the political center of Stone Town on Vingugia, the Pembas are opposed to association with black Africans or Arabs. It is precisely because of the strong opposition of the Pembashrazi leaders that the African-Shiraz Alliance exists in vain.
In 1957, Zanzibar held its first elections. The Afro-Shiraz union, which has only been in existence for just over a month, has even higher support than the Zanzibar Nationalist Party. Subsequently, the Afro-Shiraz Party was formally formed.
The complete defeat of the Zanzibar Nationalist Party in 1957 threatened the party's traditional political superiority maintained by the Arab Association. Having learned the lessons of his last time, Ali Mussin understood that if he wanted to win the election, he must rely on a modern, organized and disciplined party. One of the most important steps was to ask Barb in England to return to Zanzibar and reorganize the Zanzibar Nationalist Party. Barb was the first generation of African Marxists in Zanzibar to participate in the anti-colonial struggle. In Barb's own view, the line of change of the Zanzibar political parties is very clear, and the future politics of Zanzibar should continue and imitate two political lines: the first is the pan-African line, and the second is the Chinese revolutionary line. The aim of the Barb is to build the Zanzibar Nationalist Party into a mass party that unites the country against colonialism. He sought to unite people of all ethnic groups and classes on the basis of anti-colonial ideas, but also stressed the reality of class differences within races and the necessity of uniting the working class and the poor peasants, with the intention of combining the independence of the Zanzibar state with socialist development. Thus, the Zanzibar Nationalist Party began to gain the support of the socialist countries of the time.
In 1958, the Zanzibar Nationalist Party cooperated for the first time with the Afro-Shiraz Party, and the two parties formed the Zanzibar Freedom Committee. However, the good times did not last long, and with the announcement of a second round of elections in 1961, the ministerial system was introduced, that is, the results of the elections could influence the formation of the post-independence government. The two parties returned to the tensions that preceded the 1957 elections.
In 1959, there was a collective withdrawal of the Pembashrazi on the side of the Afro-Shiraz party. The incident led directly to the split of the Afro-Shiraz Party and the establishment of the Zanzibar Pemba People's Party. The formation of the Pemba People's Party was also the result of a split in the Shiraz section of the Afro-Shiraz Party. On the face of it, this is an affront within the Afro-Shiraz party, but the split between Africans and Shiraz essentially shows that the two groups are increasingly unable to agree on basic policy issues.
On the Zanzibar Nationalist side, in the face of the growing prestige of the Barbs in the Party, the contradictions between Musin and Purbu in the Party have been quietly buried, and the contradictions between the two are not only in the struggle for political rights, but more importantly, the socialist ideology brought by the Purim is already contrary to the Zanzibar nationalism that Musin has always advocated.
The results of the two general elections in 1961 (which led to two general elections in the same year because of the same number of seats in the first general election) were the victory of the Zanzibar Nationalist Party after gaining the support of the Pemba People's Party. The 1961 general election gave the Zanzibar Nationalist Party the political initiative before and after independence, but it also sparked serious violent clashes. The conflict broke out in Stone City, Zanzibar. A total of 10 people were killed in the Engbo region, where Africans live, and 15 others were seriously injured, while 63 Africans and 79 Arabs were slightly injured. In response to the violence, the government committee's findings were that "the people of Zanzibar have been more or less affected by 'bombardment of words' after the first general election in July 1957 ... We have cited a number of cases that could be called party media to be kept as evidence, and while in some countries the language of condoning violence may not have any practical impact, in the case of Zanzibar we believe it has played an immeasurable role in fanning the flames". "Word bombing" is a term coined by sir Stafford Foster-Sutton, chairman of the committee, who believes that the conflict in Zanzibar was due to excessive political propaganda by intellectuals on both sides before the election. The violence was a microcosm of the violence unleashed by the Zanzibar people's influence from political party propaganda, not entirely an ethnic clash, but was portrayed by the Afro-Shiraz party as an ethnic issue to deter those who supported the Zanzibar Nationalist Party.
While dealing with the political threat from the Afro-Shiraz party, Musin set his sights on the left in the party. At Mussin's urging, the British colonial government in Zanzibar sentenced Bab to 18 months in prison on charges of arson. On 29 April 1963, When Babb was released, intra-party tensions finally broke out in the Zanzibar Nationalist Party before Zanzibar's independence. The split of the Zanzibar Nationalist Party had a huge impact on the political development of Zanzibar after that. If the Afro-Shiraz split was due to ethnic disputes between Africans and Shiraz, the internal struggle within the Zanzibar Nationalist Party was the result of ideological disputes between Báb and Mussin. 【2】
The immediate reason for The Báb's announcement of a break with the Zanzibar Nationalist Party in June 1963 was that the Báb had intended to consolidate his power and voice in an attempt to give the Zanzibar trade unions six secure seats in the Legislative Assembly, but Musin rejected the proposal. So, in June 1963, the Purbu announced his withdrawal from the Zanzibar Nationalist Party and formed the Umma Party on his own. In July 1963, the Báb chose to form a political alliance with the Afro-Shiraz Party.
In 1963, with the last elections in Zanzibar. The political alliance between the Zanzibar Nationalist Party and the Pemba People's Party of Zanzibar was victorious. On December 10, 1963, the Zanzibar government declared independence and the Zanzibar Coalition Government was formed. One of the most important features of the development of the "political era" in Zanzibar is the division of Zanzibar society under double nationalism. The general antipathy to colonial rule, the shared desire for self-government and participation in long-term efforts to achieve those goals have not produced a marked degree of solidarity among Zanzibars. In fact, Zanzibar's double nationalism was accompanied by a complete collapse of the Zanzibar social order. The end result was the Zanzibar Revolution, which emerged a month after independence.
The people of Zanzibar celebrate the establishment of the republic after the revolution
Shortly after the Zanzibar Revolution, Tanganyika united with Zanzibar – the revolution provided an opportunity for Tanzania to unite. The President of Zanzibar (who retained his actual position as President even after the unification of Tanzania) has been trying to exclude Shiraz from Zanzi politics through administrative means. In his debut novel, Memory of Departure, Gurna said of Zanzibar in 1967 that "refusing to answer questions about race is contempt for the British, a belief in unity and national status." It is now illegal to refuse to answer this question." The Zanzibar problem stemmed from the confrontation over racial construction caused by European colonization, and after the Tanzan union, the socialist factor of Zanzibar that transcended race dissipated, and the ghost of racial problem returned to Zanzibar. In fact, it is not just the Zanzibar region. There is also strong ethnic xenophobia in mainland Tanzania, Uganda and other places, especially for the exclusion of Indians.
Karum was well aware that Zanzibar's period of independence had led to a serious political rift, and that a unified identity was the best way to remove the racial rift. In January 1970, Karum delivered a speech at a mass rally entitled "Ushirazi Sio Asili ya Watu wa Zanzibar" (Identity of the Shiraz is not the Legacy of the People of Zanzibar). In the speech, Karum said that The Identity of Shiraz was deliberately fabricated by the British colonial government to create a split in Zanzibar. However, behind the unity of identity, the Shiraz people of Zanzibar have quietly disappeared into history.
Africans and Arabs aside, is it possible to be Zanzibarese?
The administrative unity of the Zanzibar government led to the final inclusion of the Shiraz identity as an African, and the politics of Zanzibar was reduced to a binary structure of confrontation between Africans and Arabs. Under the reconstruction of historical discourse, at the beginning of the Zanzibar Revolution, 42% of the people identified themselves as Shiraz people, but by the early 1980s, this number had dropped to 20%. The vast majority of Shiraz people have transformed their identity into Africans. As Tanzania shifted from a one-party system to a multi-party system in the 1990s, political loosening led to growing questions about the historical self-identity of the Shiraz people in the Zanzi region. In the 1999 survey, 27.5% of people identified themselves as Shiraz people, a number that has increased over time. The Shiraz people's sense of self-identity has not disappeared, but this identity is almost absent from the current historical memory.
Today Tanzania no longer lists Shiraz as an identity. Although some sources sometimes equate Shiraz with Swahili, in fact Swahili as a term for self-identification disappeared as early as 1948. According to Jonathon Glassman's research, the reason for the gradual disappearance of Swahili identity is related to the suspension of the slave trade, as the word "Swahili" is more associated with "descendants of slaves." So, this is also the difficulty of studying the phenomenon of Swahili culture in Africa, that is, how to understand Swahili people. Today's so-called Swahilis and the historical Shiraz are not in the same context. In terms of the African identity paradigm, Swahili speakers and Swahili are not equated, and Swahili is more of a cultural term than an ethnic term.
The critique and reflection on the political-historical developments in Zanzibar is particularly important, as Tanzania's proud Swahili culture is a representative of Africa's multiculturalism, and the Zanzibar region is the epitome of this culture. Kenyan political scientist Ali Mazrui said in the idea of "Triple Heritage", "Africa is formed by a continuous fusion of indigenous, Islamic and Western cultures, which are simultaneously competitive and complementary." "The Arabs in Zanzibar are not ethnically Arabs, in a sense they are more like the Fulani of northern Nigeria. Regarding the narrative of african history as a simple understanding of racial confrontation, the Tanzanian scholar Sharif also believes that in the process of examining the history of African national independence movements, "racial identity is the projection of people's images of themselves or others, and using these superficial ideas to analyze history is 'writing the history of appearances'". Karum's policy of identity unity is designed to build a unified identity in Tanzania, yet history has not always presented a simple binary opposition. Gurna's confusion about identity reminds us that there are many lives behind macro African history that have been exiled by history, and that he lived in a time when identity choices were either or other — African or Arab, but he chose the third way, Zanzibar.
Enhancing an understanding of the history of various regions of Africa should not be merely a receptive and cognitive summary of information. From the history of Zanzibar's independence, it can be seen that this history is the main reason for the confusion of the identity of Gurna's protagonist. But we should also see that his book shows his thoughts and regrets for the African homeland. "Maybe it has to do with the sea ... The sea is so calm, so beautiful and bright, so sparkling, seemingly hard and solid, but in fact it is hidden in danger. I long to have a beautiful solid land for me to stand on. "There is no doubt that the Shiraz belong to Africa, the Swahili culture belongs to Africa, and the Gulna belongs to Africa as well.
The Silent of Admiration book cover
In Admiring Silence, Gulner says, "We like to think of ourselves as a moderate people. Arabs, Africans, Indians, Comorians: we live with each other, talk to each other, and sometimes intermarry. Civilization, exactly as we say. We like to be described that way, and we describe ourselves that way. In fact, we are far from 'us', but we are each closed in the broken house of history, self-forgiveness under the bitter racist resentment... It is not that we do not know ourselves, that we do not understand slavery, that we do not understand injustice... But under the long river of history, we must persuade ourselves to meet the argument of unification. [3] Gurna saw farther away, he saw both sides of the resentful relationship, but in fact they were both manipulated by words and the identity model constructed by the West. In other words, under the influence and indoctrination of the West during the colonial period, Britain's so-called "respect for local traditions" management model was to introduce the Western racial paradigm into Africa, which became the ultimate cause of racial violence in Zanzibar and the dissipation of the identity of Gurna and others with history.
While history reflects reality and looks to the future, we should not continue the history of African independence to inter-ethnic strife. The history of Zanzibar behind Gürna literature can be seen more or less as a microcosm of many social and political problems in Africa and the world. Understanding Africa in the African paradigm is respect for culture and, more importantly, respect for history.
(For the literature cited in this article, see Gao Tianyi: "A Joint Study on the Politics of Tanganyika and Zanzibar from the Perspective of Nationalism", Doctoral Dissertation of East China Normal University, 2021.) ）
[1] Sultanate, supreme ruler Sultan, and African sultans are often mixed. Sultan is the correct translation. Sudan refers only to the African countries Sudan and South Sudan.
[2] The Zanzibar Nationalist Party is divided for two reasons: first, the political philosophy between Musin and Bab is completely different; second, the membership of the Pemba People's Party of Zanzibar gives Musin the capital to oppose The Bab.
The "we" here refers to Zanzibar's original model of pluralistic identity, while the unified argument refers to Zanzibar's subsequent attempt to construct a unified national identity, the african identity.
Editor-in-Charge: Wu Qin
Proofreader: Luan Meng