Zanzibar Was a Country traces the history of a Swahili-speaking Arab diaspora from East Africa to Oman. In Oman today, whole communities in Muscat speak Swahili, have recent East African roots, and practice forms of sociality associated with the urban culture of the Swahili coast. These "Omani Zanzibaris" offer the most significant contemporary example in the Gulf, as well as in the wider Indian Ocean region, of an Afro-Arab community that maintains a living connection to Africa in a diasporic setting. While they come from all over East Africa, a large number are postrevolution exiles and emigrés from Zanzibar. Their stories provide a framework for the broader transregional entanglements of decolonization in Africa and the Arabian Gulf. Using both vernacular historiography and life histories of men and women from the community, Nathaniel Mathews argues that the traumatic memories of the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 are important to nation-building on both sides of the Indian Ocean.
Nathaniel Mathews is a historian of East Africa and the Indian Ocean. He received his PhD from Northwestern University and is currently Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at SUNY Binghamton.
"Nathaniel Mathews is able to tell a different kind of history—one that centers the narratives by these communities, and by their own political thinking. Rather than reading the history of this diaspora from the outside in (which would be tempting to do, given the kind of material we normally use), he is able to tell it from the inside out: as an emic history of diasporic political consciousness in the postcolonial moment."—Fahad Ahmad Bishara, author of A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950
"Zanzibar Was a Country draws on extensive archival and oral historical research to trace the ethnic sorting and diasporic politics of Arab exiles from Zanzibar. It is a major contribution to scholarship on the messy processes of decolonization, citizenship, and nation-building in Africa and the Middle East."—Mandana Limbert, author of In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town
358 pp.6 x 9Illus: 1 b/w figures
9780520394520$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Apr 2024