DOCKERS IN MALINDI PORT, ZANZIBAR

Dockers unloading cement, Malindi, Zanzibar, July 2006 (photo: Martin Walsh)

Continuing the theme of recent posts (‘An orange seller in Zanzibar’, ‘The political cover that wasn’t’), here’s another of my favourite snaps, also taken in July 2006. I’d been on a short dhow trip with other participants in the conference ‘Sails of History: Citizens of the Sea?’, coordinated by Professor Abdul Sheriff as part of the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), and this was part of the scene that greeted us as we returned to the port at Malindi: dockers unloading dusty bags of Simba cement from a rusting boat dubbed the Arafat, which had presumably brought them across from the works at Tanga.

The Arafat in port (photo: Martin Walsh)

This photo once featured on the website of the Department of Social Anthropology in the University of Cambridge. I was teaching there at the time, and offered it when staff and students were asked to submit images to illustrate the diversity of places in which they worked. The department now has a photographic competition for graduate students: I doubt that this image or any of the others shown here would be shortlisted for any kind of prize, and not just because they were taken with a relatively inexpensive Olympus camera. I like it, however, because it shows people at work in one of Zanzibar Town’s most important occupations: loading and unloading goods at the port.

This is not the Zanzibar of picture-postcards and coffee-table books (I’ve got lots of those images too), but the hard grind of manual labour on the waterfront that many visitors will only catch a glimpse of when porters hustle for their trade as they step off the ferry from Dar es Salaam. What they may not know is that dockworkers have played a critical role in the political as well as economic history of Zanzibar. Action by employees of the African Wharfage Company (AWC) which began in August 1948 led to a General Strike that only ended in mid-September when efforts to suppress it failed and the colonial authorities and British-owned AWC began to give in to the strikers’ demands.

Dockers in close-up (photo: Martin Walsh)

As Andrew Coulson has remarked, the Zanzibar General Strike represented the most effective challenge to colonial authority in the pre-Independence period. It was a vital moment in the development of organised labour and political consciousness in Zanzibar, especially for the many mainlanders in the urban workforce. It is probably no accident that the man who emerged as the leader of the Zanzibar Revolution in January 1964 and who became the islands’ first President, Abeid Amani Karume, came from the same immigrant and urban milieu, having been a sailor and then the leader of a syndicate of small boat owners.

What the dockers in my photo thought about this history, and now it translated into their own political affiliations, I can only guess. Given current sensitivities, these are not topics that can be easily studied and written about by academic researchers and journalists.

Further reading

Clayton, Anthony 1976. The general strike in Zanzibar, 1948. Journal of African History 17 (3): 417-434.

Clayton, Anthony 1981. The Zanzibar Revolution and its Aftermath. London: Hurst.

Coulson, Andrew 2013. Tanzania: A Political Economy (2nd edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Glassman, Jonathon 2011. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Hadjivayanis, George and Ed Ferguson 1991. The development of a colonial working class. In Abdul Sheriff and Ed Ferguson (eds.) Zanzibar Under Colonial Rule. London: James Currey. 188-219.

THE POLITICAL COVER THAT WASN'T

by Martin Walsh

A street scene in Forodhani, Zanzibar, July 2006 (photo: Martin Walsh)

My last post, ‘An orange seller in Zanzibar’, was about an image I’d suggested for the cover of Ahmad Kipacha’s Journal of Humanities, when I was helping him format the first issue so that it could be published online by the University of Dodoma. At the same time, I also proposed a second image: a photograph of what I thought was a fairly typical street scene in Stone Town, Zanzibar. I’d taken this in July 2006 in Forodhani, walking the route that I’d followed countless times in the mid-1990s when I worked in the Ministry of Agriculture offices nearby.

Mock-up of a cover for the first issue

The photo is dominated by the beautiful façade of a building that had clearly seen better days, as had most of those in the surrounding area. The crumbling plaster on its lower walls boasts a few fading political posters that look equally ancient, though they must have been pasted up during a recent election campaign. One of the posters depicts Professor Ibrahim Lipumba, national chairman of the opposition Civic United Front (CUF) and regular candidate for the Tanzanian presidency. Others are graced by the face of Seif Sharif Hamad, his then counterpart and perennial presidential hopeful in Zanzibar. Seif was the darling of CUF-supporting denizens of Stone Town, who had evidently strung up the bunting in party colours that criss-crosses the square in the foreground.
 
I was quite fond of this photograph, and not just because of its allusion to events discussed in my paper on ‘The politicisation of Popobawa’, which was appearing in the journal. But I was naïve to think that it would be a perfect cover for the first issue. Quite the opposite: it was obviously impolitic to associate the new journal, and so the university, with an image of opposition to the ruling party, Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), which dominated the national assembly down the road. But no harm was done. My photo was deleted, leaving the journal with a cover that was naked but for a swirl of colour. Ironically, it then transpired that for technical reasons the university was unable to post the issue online. Instead I offered to upload it to my Scribd account, where it’s now been viewed more than 4,500 times.

Acknowledgement
Hats off to the multi-talented Ahmad Kipacha, who had the bright idea and put all the hard work into developing the Journal of Humanities, which was unfortunately short-lived. He had nothing at all to do with my daft choice of image, or indeed anything that I’ve written here.

References

Kipacha, Ahmad (ed.) 2009. Journal of Humanities (Dodoma) 1 (1).

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

AN ORANGE SELLER IN ZANZIBAR

by Martin Walsh

An orange seller at Darajani, Zanzibar, July 2006 (photo: Martin Walsh)

I’m no Javed Jafferji, but every now and then I manage to take a photograph that I like, whether for its subject, composition, colours, or some combination of all three. This snap of an orange seller was taken at Darajani in Zanzibar in July 2006. I offered a cropped version of it to Ahmad Kipacha for the cover of the first issue of the short-lived Journal of Humanities when he was launching it in the University of Dodoma in 2009. Alas, the photo didn’t make it – indeed none did – but I’ve still got the mock-ups that I made, one of which is shown below.

Mock-up of a cover for the first issue

I like this photo both for its colours and as an image of everyday marketing on one of Zanzibar Town’s busiest thoroughfares. Anyone who’s been shopping or sightseeing at Darajani will know that it’s usually a hive of activity, and you can see some of that in the background of the full shot, minus the movement, noise and pungent odours. The taste of those oranges is another memory that the photo can only remind me of.

A decade before taking this picture I led a study of The Development of Oranges as a Cash Crop in Ndijani, Unguja – Ndijani being the centre of orange production for the island’s urban market. The main harvesting season was June-September, and it’s quite likely that the oranges in the photo were sweet Ndijani oranges plucked from trees fertilised with the manure of cattle intentionally grazed between them. This was a feature of orange growing in Ndijani, together with a rotating marketing system designed to prevent oversupply in the town and wild fluctuations in income for the rural producers.

As the Holy Month of Ramadan begins in Zanzibar, this will be a busy time for the fruit sellers of Darajani, though it may be too early for the main Ndijani crop. Ramadhani karimu!

References

Kipacha, Ahmad (ed.) 2009. Journal of Humanities (Dodoma) 1 (1).

Kombo, Abdallah, Soud Hemed, Peter Oldham and Martin Walsh (ed.) 1995. The Development of Oranges as a Cash Crop in Ndijani, Unguja. ZCCFSP Working Paper WP 95/22, Zanzibar Cash Crops Farming Systems Project, Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Natural Resources, Zanzibar.

OKELLO, BABU, MO, AND PHOTOGRAPHIC PROPAGANDA

Last week I returned to the University of Edinburgh for the second time in two years to give a seminar in the Centre of African Studies. In February 2010 I was 'Explaining Popobawa'; this time I was talking about 'Images and Counter-Images of the Zanzibar Revolution', at the end of a day-long workshop on 'Representations of a Continent: Public and private visual images in data collection in Africa', organised by Tom Molony in CAS. It was a fascinating day, with a richly illustrated presentation by Sandy Robertson on 'Picturing Africa', and another by Tom and his colleague Steve Kerr (who had flown in from Saint Augustine University in Mwanza) on the practical, technical and ethical issues raised by their collaborative project on 'Images of Nyerere'. As my old friend Marcus Banks has remarked, "visual research can sometimes lead in unexpected directions" (2001: 74). More than this, it can provide new ways of (quite literally [sic]) seeing a subject, and I certainly found this when preparing my own presentation.

One of the subjects I explored in my seminar was the use that different participants in the Zanzibar Revolution had made of photographs to project particular images of themselves and their role in events. The self-styled "Field Marshal" John Okello (1937-c.1971), who portrayed himself as the military leader of the Revolution, was the master of this kind of manipulation, which mirrored his theatrical comportment and threatening behaviour, and his notorious use of radio broadcasts and verbal violence to spread the "Terror" that accompanied the Revolution. His last-but-one visit to Dar es Salaam in March 1964 was rumoured to include a mission "to pick up the scores of copies of a photographic portrait of himself that he had ordered" (Petterson 2002: 175). And the photos of himself and others reproduced in his Revolution in Zanzibar (1967) have remained a prime source of images for commentators, including scholars and website authors.

Mo Amin in later life

Okello's manipulation of imagery was matched, and in some respects supported by, the machinations of Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu (1924-96), the left-wing intellectual of the Revolution. When the Revolution began in the early hours of Sunday 12th January 1964, Babu was in Dar es Salaam, having fled there earlier to escape arrest in the wake of the banning of his Umma Party by the newly independent government. Although many later accounts imply that he knew nothing about the imminent outbreak of violence, it's clear that he had some forewarning: "On Friday [10th January] I heard over here in Dar es Salaam from someone - a member of the Afro-Shirazis - that something would happen very soon. Well, you know, you always heard those stories. But I thought this might be true" (Babu, quoted in Smith 1973: 96). The next day, Saturday 11th, he telephoned the young photographer Mohamed "Mo" Amin (1943-96). Mo had opened his Camerapix studio in Dar in March 1963, and had made Babu's acquaintaince during subsequent assignments in Zanzibar:

'If you want a big story you should be in Zanzibar tomorrow.'

'Why?'

'There's a big story. Take your cameras. You'll get an exclusive.'

'What kind of story?'

Babu would say no more. When Amin learned from his own sources that the Sultan had given the opposition Afro-Shirazi Party permission to hold a fete, he dismissed the story as non-newsworthy and thought no more about it. Until 0430 on Sunday 12 January, when he was woken by the telephone and a voice saying: 'There's shooting all over Zanzibar.' (Tetley 1988: 46-47)

Okello photographed by Mo Amin (from Tetley 1988: 45)

Mo caught the 0700 hrs flight to Zanzibar, but the pilot was refused permission to land. Later the same day he sailed to Zanzibar with two fellow journalists in a dhow hired from Bagamoyo. The same boat was used to carry Mo's film back to the mainland every day, and for four days his footage of the revolutionary violence and its consequences "led world television bulletins [and] hit the front pages of the world's Press" (Tetley 1988: 48). But he was also used by the revolutionaries:

Soon after landing on the island he was pressed into service to take the first official pictures of the revolution's leaders. One of them - Babu, his confidante - had become the new regime's Minister for External Affairs. Meeting Babu in a crowd of excited revolutionaries in Zanzibar's seething streets he told him he needed permission to charter a plane to ship his film. Time was critical, and the airport was still  closed.

'Give me a piece of paper,' said Babu.

'I don't have any.'

Looking around him, Babu saw a discarded detergent carton, picked it up, tore off the flap and scribbled a crude but official note clearing a plane to land at Zanzibar. (Tetley 1988: 48)

Mo's imprisonment in 1966 (Tetley 1988: 70-71)

In the end Mo's relationship with Babu wasn't enough to make him feel safe, and after armed revolutionaires tried to snatch his camera while he filmed the boat carrying British subjects and deported journalists off the island, he jumped on board and joined them. This didn't stop him from returning to Zanzibar on a number of later occasions, though his determination to get a scoop was eventually rewarded with a 27-day imprisonment in one of the island's most notorious gaols (Tetley 1988: 53, 54, 57-61, 65-72). The Zanzibar Revolution was Mo's first frontline job and he went on, of course, to become one the world's most famous photojournalists. But the Revolution is only mentioned briefly in a more recent tourist guide produced by Camerapix, which includes colour shots taken on the island by Mo (Mercer 1999: 71).

Babu pretending to row (from Okello 1967: between 112-113)

Back to the first day of the Revolution: while Mo was sailing across to Zanzibar, Babu was also looking for transport to the island, together with Abeid Amani Karume (who had only just left Zanzibar, at Okello's insistence), Abdalla Kassim Hanga (who had also hurried across to the mainland, allegedly to discuss a separate plot), and other Afro-Shirazi Party leaders. They eventually obtained the use of an old lifeboat (with a glass bottom for reef viewing) that belonged to Mischa Fainzilber, an Israeli entreprenuer and master-of-many-trades who was already well known to Babu.* They left Kunduchi at midnight but didn't reach Kizimkazi until around six o'clock in the morning (of Monday 15th January): the crossing should only have taken a couple of hours but one of the boat's two engines packed in on the way. At Kizimkazi they were met by a large crowd of people, and borrowed the local headmaster's car to send for transport from Zanzibar town.

We know this and more from a detailed account by the boat's pilot, Ahmed Ali Ghulam Hussein, nicknamed "Shebe" (Chapter 13 of Ghassany 2010). We also know that "On his arrival Babu arranged for himself to be photographed, for propaganda purposes, paddling a canoe" (Clayton 1981: 82, fn.65). Whether this was a  "canoe" or outrigger, it certainly wasn't the boat that brought Babu and his companions to the island. Whether this photo was taken later, in Zanzibar town harbour, or whether Mo was involved, I don't know. Like a number of other photographic plates in Okello's book (1967), it's credited to I.P., an agency that I've yet to identify (International Press?). Whatever the case, it's difficult to escape the conclusion that Babu was hoping to manipulate future perceptions of his less than heroic return to Zanzibar. Okello - or his editor - simply reproduced the photo and (added?) its deceptive caption without further comment.

Despite their skill as propagandists, neither Babu nor Okello foresaw the course of the Revolution. They were both outmanoeuvred by the outwardly less sophisticated Karume, who became the first President. After his early ejection from Zanzibar, Okello later disappeared in Amin's Uganda. After the union with Tanganyika, Babu was sidelined as a minister on the mainland, detained for six years after Karume's assassination, and ended his days in exile in London.
-----

* I met Mischa (whose name also appears as Misha, Fainsilber, Feinsilber and Finsilber) in early 1982 when I stayed at Silversands, the hotel that he'd handed over to the University of Dar es Salaam. My research supervisor Ray Abrahams knew him somewhat better before this, and he was immortalised as "Willi", proprietor of the "Haven of Peace" beach hotel, in Shiva Naipaul's North of South (1978: for this and reference to some of Mischa's other enterprises see Chachage 1995: 66-67).

References

Banks, Marcus 2001. Visual Methods in Social Research. London: Sage Publications.

Chachage, Chachage Seithy L. 1995. The meek shall inherit the earth but not the mining rights: the mining industry and accumulation in Tanzania. In Peter Gibbon (ed.) Liberalised Development in Tanzania: Studies on Accumulation Processes and Local Institutions. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. 37-108.

Clayton, Anthony 1981. The Zanzibar Revolution and its Aftermath. London: C. Hurst & Company.

Ghassany, Harith 2010. Kwaheri Ukoloni, Kwaheri Uhuru! Zanzibar na Mapinduzi ya Afrabia. Lulu Enterprises Inc.

Mercer, Graham 1999. The Beauty of Zanzibar. Nairobi: Camerapix Publishers International.

Naipaul, Shiva 1978. North of South: An African Journey. London: Penguin Books.

Okello, John 1967. Revolution in Zanzibar. Nairobi: East African Publishing House.

Othman, Haroub (ed.) 2001. Babu: I Saw the Future and it Works. Essays Celebrating the Life of Comrade Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu 1924-1996. Dar es Salaam: E&D Limited.

Petterson, Don 2002. Revolution in Zanzibar: An American's Cold War Tale. Boulder: Westview Press.

Smith, William Edgett 1973. Nyerere of Tanzania. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. [originally published in 1972 as We Must Run While They Walk: A Portrait of Africa's Julius Nyerere. New York: Random House.]

Tetley, Brian 1988. Mo: The Story of Mohamed Amin[,] Front-line Camerman. London: Moonstone Books.

CHILD'S PLAY IN USANGU AND UHEHE

In the good old days of descriptive ethnography children's games and pastimes were treated as a serious matter. The now-defunct handbook Notes and Queries on Anthropology declared games of all kinds to be "worthy of special study", and advised fieldworkers to join in and learn to play them, as well as recording them as fully as possible (1929: 321; 1951: 334). When I began fieldwork in Usangu in 1980, Alison Redmayne encouraged me to collect children's riddles for the linguistic and cultural information they contained, much as she and other Oxford-trained anthropologists of her generation had done. But after a tentative start I switched my attention to the verbal 'games' that adults played, making no more than occasional notes on children's pastimes whenever I came across them. Sometimes they were difficult to ignore, like the boys who playfully parodied the ethnographer-as-photographer with their own clay models of my camera.

I discovered Iona and Peter Opie's The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) in the mid-1990s and haven't tired of dipping into their work ever since, not least because it brings forth memories of my own childhood in the north-west of England. In 1998 I went through my Sangu dictionary and fieldnotes from Usangu plucking out the snippets that I'd written about children's toys, games and other pastimes. Here are some lightly edited extracts from my compilation:

Counting songs
In 1981 I recorded one childhood counting song from two adult Sangu, a man and a woman, who sang it in unison:
1. mbwe
2. yangaya
3. yapusi
4. yalima
5. tumbwe-tumbwe
6. manguluma
7. kinengu
8. nengulya
9. kilosa
10. chumilya
These apparently nonsensical 'numbers' bear no obvious relation to the Sangu cardinals in everyday use, nor other known Sangu counting systems (a cominatorial verbal sequence in use in the late 19th century and a finger counting system which is still employed). The tenth term, chumilya, appears to be a playful variant of Swahili kumi, 'ten', or one of its Northeast Coast Bantu cognates (/ch/ is not an inherited Sangu phoneme, nor is it usually retained in loanwords except in some proper names). The ninth term is possibly derived from the place name Kilosa, located in Usagara on one of the old caravan routes to the coast, though why it should be so derived is obscure (/ki/ also has a very restricted distribution in Sangu, and is probably indicative of a loan in this case: this also applies to the term for seven, kinengu). The other terms in the list share the regular phonological characteristics of Sangu, and playful etymologies might be suggested for some of them, though this would be no more than guesswork.

Jacks
The Sangu version of jacks (imdodo) that I witnessed on numerous occasions in Utengule in 1980-81 was played with twelve small stones as the jacks and a small round fruit of the ilihuluhulu (Capparis tomentosa) shrub as the ball. The game is played as follows. A small hollow is made in the earth and the stones are placed inside it. The fruit is then thrown up in the air and before it is caught a single stone must be scooped up in the other hand. If more than one stone is scooped up then the extra stone(s) must be returned to the hollow on the next throw. When all twelve stone have been removed one by one in this way, they are returned to the hollow and the same procedure is repeated, this time the stones being removed in twos. Next time they are removed in threes, then fours, and so on, until all twelve stones have to be scooped up in one go. If the player errs at any point (for example by failing to catch the fruit) then it is the turn of another player (or the same player if she is playing alone) to start from the beginning again. This game is most commonly played by girls. A twelve-stone game was also observed and photographed by Kubik in 1976 in the vicinity of Mahango-Mswiswi (1978: 103). This is a version of the game called 'fivestones' by Opie and Opie (1997: 56-72).

Where's the cow?
The following guessing game is one of the most common Sangu children's games, and I watched it being played in both Utengule and Luhanga in 1981. The game is played by two opponents (often accompanied and assisted by other children) who face one another and take turns to guess in which hand the other is concealing a small stone. The stone is referred to as ing'ombe, a cow, and each turn begins with the following exchange:

Player concealing the cow: hilili, hilili (the name of the game)
Player trying to guess where it is: ing'ombe, ing'ombe, 'cow, cow'
First player again: ing'ombe yili kwi?, 'where's the cow?'

If a player guesses correctly, then he or she is entitled to advance his or her counter (also a stone) towards a goal drawn on the ground. This goal takes the form of a circle or small hollow in the middle of a pitch of typically five or six concentric circles (sometimes not completed at the sides, so that the pitch comprises two bands of lines on either side of the goal). The game starts with the two counters at the outer edge of the pitch, being moved progressively towards the centre (across individual lines) at each successful guess. The winner is the player or team whose stone counter reaches the central goal first. When I first recorded this game being played, in Luhanga, children whose turn it was to conceal the 'cow' frequently attempted to cheat by dropping the stone behind their back, so that it was in neither hand. The game is called hilili, presumably after its opening formula, the etymology of which is opaque. The same term is also used in an extended sense by many Sangu speakers to refer to puzzles and riddles in general. Hilili can perhaps be thought of as the quintessential Sangu children's game, not only because of the wider use of its name, but also because it is cast in a bovine idiom.

If I was to rewrite these notes I'd say more about the actual games I watched and the contexts in which they were played. There's a nice account by Marius Fortie (1938: 302-303) of a series of contests and games which he observed being played in the west of Usangu in September 1934, having provided the prize money himself. That's one way of getting people to play games, although it wasn't Fortie's intention to record them in any great detail.  Studying children's games isn't child's play, and I'm not aware of any attempt in East Africa to undertake the kind of research that the Opies did in England, Scotland and Wales, though there are scattered sources from which a compilation might be begun, including the now largely forgotten literature on string figures. In November-December 2002 my Hehe-speaking research assistant, Justin John Kitinye, filled six school exercise books (436 pp.) with descriptions of the games that he knew and had played as a child. I've barely begun to translate these and reflect on their significance, but am very much looking forward to it.

References

Fortie, Marius 1938. Black and Beautiful: A Life in Safari Land. London: Robert Hale.

Kubik, Gerhard 1978. Recording utamaduni in Tanzania - a field report from Iringa and Mbeya regions, Oct 10 - Dec 14, 1976. Review of Ethnology 5 (11-14): 81-107.

Opie, Iona and Peter Opie 1959. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Opie, Iona and Peter Opie  1969. Children's Games in Street and Playground. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Opie, Iona and Peter Opie 1985. The Singing Game. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Opie, Iona and Peter Opie 1997. Children's Games with Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Redmayne, Alison 1970. Riddles and riddling among the Hehe of Tanzania. Anthropos 65: 719-813.

The Royal Anthropological Institute 1929. Notes and Queries on Anthropology (5th edition). London: The Royal Anthropological Institute.

The Royal Anthropological Institute 1951. Notes and Queries on Anthropology (6th edition). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.

Walsh, Martin 1985. Shisango Dictionary. Unpublished ms. (computer printout), Cambridge, June 1985.

Walsh, Martin 1998. Children's toys, games and other pastimes in Usangu. Unpublished ms. (draft).