FLYING FROM DAR TO ZANZIBAR AGAIN

I can't resist posting a few more photos taken on a flight from Dar to Zanzibar, adding to those I put up earlier this year under the heading Flying from Dar to Zanzibar. The following shots were taken on a Coastal Aviation flight on 22nd September this year: we left Dar half an hour after midday and arrived in Zanzibar about twenty minutes later. This time my camera didn't run out of memory and I managed to get some images of the final stages of the flight.

Mlimani: the University of Dar es Salaam

Coastline north of Dar es Salaam

The sea, mid-channel

Controls in mid-flight (flight path and location on the screens)

Submerged island and reef

Chumbe island and lighthouse

Ras Shangani from the south

Zanzibar town from the south

suburbs of Zanzibar town

A PILOT WHALE IN PONGWE

Posing on the Pongwe whale

Just over a week ago (on Sunday 15th January) I went to stay at Pongwe on the east coast of Zanzibar (Unguja island) for the second time in three months. The tide wasn't in until the late afternoon, and not long after I'd had a quick swim -- or rather a float in the shallows -- I was told that there was a dolphin in the water just along from the beach bar that I'd repaired to. I grabbed my camera and walked down to the beach where a number of villagers had already gathered. The consensus of opinion was that the dead animal being drawn towards the shore was a small whale; when it had first been spotted in the bay local fishermen thought that it was a floating log. I began taking photographs of it from a distance as a group of youths posed with it for the cameras on their mobile phones. When it was close to the shore a number of children waded into to take a closer look, and they were only momentarily repelled when it was cut open and the stench of its guts filled the air (putting the pong into Pongwe, as one friend has suggested). A young man on the beach told me that its blubber would be used to caulk their boats. As the light faded so did the usefulness of my relatively simple camera, and I asked a Russian tourist if I could later have copies of his superior shots, including close-ups of the whale's dismemberment.

Spectators on the beach at Pongwe

The next day there was nothing of the whale left on the beach. Its identification as a small whale (nyangumi mdogo) was confirmed by hotel staff: it definitely wasn't a dolphin (pomboo), but was more like a nyamrani. The only examples of this name I can find define it as a kind of shark, in one case the much-feared Tiger Shark, Galeocerdo cuvier. My Unguja dialect-speaking better half recognises nyamrani as a colloquial term used to describe an unmarried man, leaving it open whether the analogy being made is with a shark or a small (and by implication immature) whale. The creature that we actually saw in the bay at Pongwe was most likely a Short-finned Pilot Whale, Globicephala macrorhynchus, a pan-tropical cetacean that is usually seen travelling in pods. It's a member of the family Delphinidae, the oceanic dolphins, and in that respect it's initial description as a dolphin wasn't that far out.

Whale vertebra from Matemwe at Santa Maria Coral Park

Pakenham's checklist of The Mammals of Zanzibar and Pemba Islands (1984) includes an old black and white photograph (facing page 60) of a mass stranding in Zanzibar harbour; and although "Pax" himself seems to have been unsure of their identification, these look quite like the Pongwe specimen. On the beach I was told that the last beaching of a small whale in Pongwe bay had occurred two or three years ago. The hotel bar is decorated with vertebrae from a much larger whale, stranded at Matemwe in 1994 or thereabouts, and purchased much later by the hotel's owner. In the natural history section of the Zanzibar Museum there's a photograph of a 61 foot whale washed up at Chake Chake in Pemba in 1932. Following a similar stranding at Mkumbuu in the early 1990s fisherman came from far and wide to take home pieces of the large whale, which in this case was described as a chongowe -- another name that is variously identified in the literature (this incident is described in Popobawa narratives, cf. Walsh 2009: 27).

Watching the whale's disembowelling

The Pongwe whale wasn't considered edible because it had died perhaps two or three days before it was found. But, as already noted, it would provide oil for caulking boats, known as sifa, a term apparently deriving from the Portuguese term for similar preparations (cifa, cf. Johnson 1939: 429, where the Swahili product is described as shark oil). Our barman, a man from Uroa, also suggested that its blubber might be used medicinally, whale fat being a favourite in local concoctions used to treat pumu, asthma. On Pemba my research assistant Jamila wrote that people thought that whale fat was a good medicine for mishipa, blood vessels and other internal organs and the pain associated with them; for example just two or three drops might be stirred into porridge and given to someone as a cure for the pain caused by a hernia. I should have taken the time to find out exactly what had happened to the blubber and other parts of the Pongwe whale, if they hadn't just been left to wash back out to sea. But my thoughts were with other research, and I didn't pursue these questions any further. I did, however, get the much better photos and video clips that my Russian friend, Yaroslav Alexandrov, had taken, and some of his images are shown at the end of this post.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Helle Goldman and through her, Kit Kovacs, at the Norwegian Polar Institute for help with the identification of the Pongwe whale; to Juma Ali Salehe and others at Santa Maria Coral Park for their good company and local knowledge; and to Yaroslav Alexandrov for his generosity in sharing his excellent photographs and video clips, which I've edited and downsized for posting on this blog.

References

Johnson, Frederick (ed.) 1939. A Standard Swahili-English Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press.

Pakenham, R. H. W. 1984. The Mammals of Zanzibar and Pemba Islands. Harpenden: privately printed.

Richmond, Matthew D. (ed.) 2002. A Field Guide to the Seashores of Eastern Africa and the Western Indian Ocean Islands (2nd edition). Sida/SAREC -- UDSM.

Walsh, Martin 2009. The politicisation of Popobawa: changing explanations of a collective panic in Zanzibar. Journal of Humanities (Dodoma) 1 (1): 23-33.

The pilot whale in Pongwe bay (photo by Yarolsav Alexandrov)

Men and women inspecting the dead pilot whale (photo by Yaroslav Alexandrov)

Cutting the whale open (photo by Yarolsav Alexandrov)

The whale's intestines spilling into the sea (photo by Yaroslav Alexandrov)

DISASTER IN ZANZIBAR

I was going to resume writing this blog with one of my trademark posts about a quirky and largely inconsequential subject. But I couldn't ignore the news. Our phones began ringing before dawn with reports of the disaster that had befallen Zanzibar. The ferry to Pemba, MV Spice Islander, sank off Nungwi last night with hundreds of people aboard. The details are still sketchy: many people have been rescued (as this BBC report shows), but a large number are still missing. Some of the boat's passengers were travelling back to Pemba after Ramadhan and the Eid festival, and it's feared that whole families have been lost. We're praying for them, and for everyone affected by this disaster.

MV Spice Islander in happier times (photographed on 20 July 2011 from the Tembo Hotel in Zanzibar town)

THE MALDIVES CONNECTION

Bajau child at sea (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bajau)

One of the enduring mysteries of Indian Ocean history is how and why speakers of a Bornean language came to settle on the island of Madagascar. The Dutch explorer Frederik de Houtman (1603) drew attention to the similarities between Malay and Malagasy more than two centuries before Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836-39) proposed the name Malayo-Polynesian for the language family to which they both belong, now classified as a branch of the Austronesian language phylum. Subsequent scholars speculated on the nature of ancient contacts between Indonesia and East Africa, and a various theories were advanced about the settlement of Madagascar. The puzzle deepened when Otto Christian Dahl (1951) concluded that Malagasy is most closely related to Ma'anyan and the East Barito languages of southeastern Borneo, a hypothesis that is now widely accepted. How did the Bornean ancestors of the Malagasy, members of a group that has no apparent maritime tradition, reach Madagascar? Were they brought on the vessels of Malay (Srivijayan) or Bajau ('sea nomad') traders and/or raiders visiting the coast of East Africa, as some have suggested? How did they pick up the smattering of Bantu vocabulary and linguistic habits that are evident in Malagasy? Was Madagascar already settled by Africans before their arrival, as Dahl argued?

Festschrift for Professor Claude Allibert

These and other questions about the nature of Austronesian voyages and settlement in the western Indian Ocean remain unanswered, though our knowledge is advancing all the time. Last weekend I received my copy of Civilisations des mondes insulaires (2010), a collection of papers written in honour of Professor Claude Allibert, best known for his archaeological and historical research in the Comoros and Madagascar. I was pleased to find that a number of the thirty-plus contributions to this weighty volume have a direct bearing on the Austronesian problem. These include a review of the cultivated plants introduced by the first Austronesian migrants to Madagascar by Philippe Beaujard, and a discussion of the genetic evidence for the settlement of the Comoros and Madagascar by Axel Ducourneau. The first paper I read, though, was 'The Maldives connection: pre-modern Malay world shipping across the Indian Ocean' by Pierre-Yves Manguin, not just because it was in English, but because of its relevance to my own contribution about a particular set of historical traditions on the East African coast.

Aerial view of the Maldives (from http://www.visitmaldives.com)

These traditions, about a foreign people called Diba (Wadiba), Debuli (Wadebuli), and variants thereof, have been recorded in scattered locations between the Lamu archipelago in the north and Kilwa (and thereabouts) in the south. The Diba et al. are sometimes described as unwelcome slave-raiders and invaders, and in other sources as the bearers of new cultural practices, technologies (maritime, architectural), and agricultural crops. There is no consensus on who the Diba and Debuli were: commentators have identified them as visitors of Arabian, Persian, Indian, Laccadive or Maldive origin. Harold Ingrams (1931: 47-48) considered but rejected the possibility, raised by Archdeacon Dale (1920: 13), that they might have been Malay. Some traditions as well as one version of the ethnonym (Dubuki) imply a connection with Madagascar, while the name Diba (ultimately from Sanskrit dvipa, 'island') could refer to inhabitants of any of the islands in the Indian Ocean, not just the Laccadives and Maldives. These and other features of the traditions suggest that the Diba et al. might have been Austronesians, though the evidence for this is equivocal. It is clear that the recorded traditions conflate different historical events, and in my paper I concluded as follows:

Unless we read the Diba/Debuli traditions very selectively, we cannot interpret them as evidence for interaction with a single group of visitors to the East African coast. And if they contain a deep memory of Austronesian contacts and trade, then this has evidently been overlain by other memories of interaction with outsiders, Persians, Arabs, Indian, and Portuguese included. (2010: 469).

Aerial view of the Maldives (from http://www.visitmaldives.com)

Nevertheless, I remain attracted by a selective reading of the Diba traditions. Sacleux (1939: 538) defined Swahili Mdiba as the name for an indigenous inhabitant of the Maldives, and Lydekker (1919: 90-91) was led to believe that the Wadiba of Bajuni tradition came from the Laccadive islands. In his paper, Pierre-Yves Manguin reviews the documentary evidence for historical connections between insular Southeast Asia and these continguous archipelagos, which are often treated as one in the early literature. The evidence is impressive, and includes the suggestion that the Maldivian (Dhivehi) name for the Chagos archipelago, Folovahi (and variants), is derived from Malay Pulo Weh, an island off the northwestern tip of Sumatra which is on the old sailing route to the Maldives. Manguin argues that in addition to the direct and well-known route between the Maldives and the coast of Somalia, Austronesian voyagers may also have used Diego Garcia and the Chagos islands as a stepping stone to reach Madagascar and the East African coast. In any event these different journeys involve passing through the Maldives.

A boxfish in the Maldives (from http://www.visitmaldives.com)

Other kinds of evidence, from maritime technology (Manguin 2000) and comparative linguistics (Tom Hoogervorst, personal communication, April 2010), support the hypothesis that the Maldives were an important staging point for Austronesian exploration and expeditions into the western Indian Ocean. We know from Buzurg ibn Shahriyar's Book of the Marvels of India that Indonesians were raiding and trading on Pemba and the mainland coast (down to Sofala) in the 10th century (Mauny 1965: 7-8), and they may well have been doing so for some time. Two centuries later Al-Idrisi reported that merchants from Sumatra were still trading with the East African coast, where "they understand one another's language" (Mauny 1965: 14). These facts fit well with some of the Diba and Debuli traditions, including one Pemban historian's repeated reference to the people of "Diba and Jawa" together, as though they were a single entity (Ingrams 1931: 125). Jawa, of course, is the island of Java (Yawadvipa in the Sanskrit epic Ramayana). Can it be that his garbled history and others like it are showing us a glimpse of events that happened so long ago? I'm tempted to say yes. The Maldives connection certainly deserves a closer look.

Aerial view of the Maldives (from http://www.visitmaldives.com)

References

Beaujard, Philippe 2010. Les plantes cultivées apportées par les premiers migrants austronésiens à Madagascar. In Radimilahy and Rajaonarimanana (2010). 357-385.

Dale, Godfrey 1920. The Peoples of Zanzibar: Their Customs and Religious Beliefs. Westminster: Universities' Mission to Central Africa.

Dahl, Otto Christian 1951. Malgache et Maanjan: une comparaison linguistique. Oslo: Egede Institutett.

Ducourneau, Alex 2010. Approche phylogéographique du peuplement de l'océan Indien occidental. In Radimilahy and Rajaonarimanana (2010). 855-871.

de Houtman, Frederik 1603. Spraeck ende woord-boeck, inde Maleysche ende Madagaskarsche Talen met vele Arabische ende Turcse woorden. Amsterdam.

Aerial view of the Maldives (from http://www.visitmaldives.com)

von Humboldt, Wilhelm 1836-39. Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java (3 vols.). Berlin.

Ingrams, Harold 1931. Zanzibar, its History and its People. London: H. F. & G. Witherby.

Lydekker, C. J. W. 1919. The "mtepe" dhau of the Bajun islands. Man 19 (46): 88-92.

Manguin, Pierre-Yves 2000. Les techniques de construction navale aux Maldives originaires d'Asie du Sud-Est. Techniques & Culture 35-36: 21-47.

Manguin, Pierre-Yves 2010. The Maldives connection. In Radimilahy and Rajaonarimanana (2010). 261-284.

Mauny, Raymond 1965. The Wakwak and the Indonesian invasion in East Africa in 945 A.D. Studia 15: 7-16. 

Radimilahy, Chantal and Narivelo Rajaonarimanana (eds.) 2010. Civilisations des mondes insulaires (Madagascar, îles du canal de Mozambique, Mascareignes, Polynésie, Guyanes): Mélanges en l'honneur du Professeur Claude Allibert. Paris: Karthala.

Sacleux, Charles 1939.Dictionnaire Swahili-Français. Paris: Institut d'Ethnologie.

Walsh, Martin 2010. Deep memories or symbolic statements? The Diba, Debuli and related traditions of the East African coast. In Radimilahy and Rajaonarimanana (2010). 453-476.