To the ACAS Homepage
Legacies of Race and Racism at the Coast of East Africa: Historiography and the Suppression of Subaltern Epistemology
Jesse Benjamin
As much as issues of nationalism are now openly discussed and debated, issues of race and racism remain largely absent in African studies, either suppressed, ignored or downplayed. In the case of East Africa, which I briefly review here, I argue that an impoverishment of historiographic interpretation has lead directly to policy implications in the present. I show that some of the best representative examples of critical contemporary scholarship share lingering colonial assumptions that contribute to skewed interpretations and power relations on the ground in the region today. Specifically, post-modernist and critical Western scholars such as Justin Willis down-play the nineteenth century and refuse the voices of the marginal in coastal society. Even Jonathan Glassman, whose work restores the “plebian” elements to coastal history, circumvents the critical element of racial analysis. And Mazrui and Shariff, like Ali A. Mazrui and others that form what I would call a Swahili neo-nationalist perspective, avoid both the nineteenth century and racial analysis, even in their most salient works. I will argue that their specific deployments of colonial historiography, and especially their misreading of nineteenth century elite Swahili and Arab collusion with British and European colonialisms are central to the maintenance of politics and power relations at the coast today.
In short, by over-representing the British colonial period [1895-1963], and underplaying the role of the Arab/Swahili period of slave trading and plantation production [1837-1895], the social relations these set in place and which remain in place today can be overlooked and laid solely at the feet of the British, who are now largely removed from the picture. In various ways, I show that these misinterpretations are also the product of the very social relations of the present they simultaneous prop up. These two short, 60-year colonial periods of external hegemonic domination, both Busaidi [Omani] and British, left lasting, even over-lapping legacies of racial stratification. Even before the ratcheting up of global Islamophobia after 9-11, intersecting racial and religious hierarchies strongly contributed to the terrains of power and politics at the coast of Kenya. As fights over land, fishing resources and the tourist economy rage under the pressures of the market economy, scholars and activists alike should acknowledge the role of race in these conflicts; their under-reporting in academic debates is part of the problem.
Justin Willis and the Epistemological/Racial Limits of Post-Modern Scholarship
Justin Willis, in his pivotal historiographic intervention, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda (1993), opened new conceptualizations of the socio-historic construction of both Swahili and Mijikenda identities. His monograph was received with general acclaim, becoming a benchmark of sorts, but has yet to be sufficiently criticized. In this essay, I discuss how this example of critical theory, influenced by post-modernist and invention-of-ethnicity/tradition trends within western social thought, contributes to extending colonial style biases in interpreting coastal social history and politics in both the past and the present. Whereas, as the title suggests, the Swahili are presented as already existing as a coherent social entity, the Mijikenda are presented as being constructed in the mid to late colonial era. The problem here is that, while this is partially true in terms of current Western conceptualizations of identity, it is certainly no more true of the Mijikenda than of the Swahili, and to stress this fabricated and willed aspect of identity disproportionately in respect to Mijikenda or other marginal coastal peoples and less so in relation to Swahili peoples and identities, works subtly but surely to reinforce colonial-era hierarchies that persist in the present, making an ostensibly objective academic work far from disinterested in terms of contemporary political economy and politics.
It is remarkable that in his entire work, covering the period from the decline and final abolition of slavery to the end of high colonialism1 Willis never employs a racial analysis, or even uses the terms race or racism, and neither are these categories included in his index. Certainly there are more racially significant analyses and discussions within his work than in earlier political-economic studies of the colonial period,2 yet it is remarkable that Willis is able to consistently maneuver away from such concerns, given the social and historical material covered. The equalization of social relations in the nineteenth century has something to do with this, because this then allows for equalization in the colonial era. Willis goes as far as equating the colonial state with the authority of rural Mijikenda homestead heads, and he consistently dismisses Mijikenda perspectives and oral histories. One example will have to suffice.
While the power of Mijikenda homestead heads was cultivated and deployed by the colonial authorities, it is odd that there is no mention of the racial “authority” and privilege of the Swahili community, its patrons, colonial power brokers and civil servants, as additional causes for Mijikenda assumption of a similarly, bounded ethnic identity. Mijikenda migrants were not simply avoiding lower-status, more exploited identities in the interior, but claiming historical rights to a consistently (for 100 years at that point) and increasingly more powerful racial identity at the coast. I describe this as a Swahili bias in Willis’ interpretation because it reflects current Swahili [and British/Western] interests to this day to avoid discussion of slavery and racial privilege in history, and especially their connections to the present. This ubiquitous racial erasure has a concomitant negative impact on Mijikenda people who still suffer from lower status being attached to them as a result to residual categories of analysis that derive from the slave era, such as the label Waungwana, which signifies elite Swahili culture, but means literally “freeborn.” It is probably more than coincidence that one of the only analyses of the suppression of racial memory stemming from the slave era in East Africa comes in the work of Joseph Harris (1987), an mgeni or outsider to coastal life, but also a prominent African American historian, who in US culture undoubtedly faced similar sorts of historical denials. The denial of racial-colonial history and privilege is a phenomenon with as global a reach as colonial history [in the broadest sense] itself, and it is certainly still rife in East Africa and its historiography.
The Swahili bias that I am trying to discern here is admittedly subtle, yet becomes clearer in contrast to his treatment of Mijikenda history and sources. Whereas effort is made to cast the Swahili as victims of colonialism (pp. 188), which in part of course they were, their privilege and power is rarely seen vis-à-vis the Mijikenda. When it is seen in passing, the agency of Swahili discrimination is rarely acknowledged, except to say that they clamored for ‘non-native’ status to avoid repressive labor and tax legislation. While Swahili used reputed Arab lineages to make such claims, this too is never analyzed in explicitly racial terms. Absent are the still common forms of derision and discrimination against “Africans” by some Swahili claiming higher [whiter] racial status. But perhaps most egregious in this regard, and further along the lines of his equalizing agenda, Willis discounts Cooper’s (1980) meticulous study of land privileges sustained by the Swahili community against [often indistinguishable] ex-slave and Mijikenda peoples.3
Willis acknowledges that “Arabs and Swahili had a clear advantage in selling land, having better access to the registration of transactions, which was carried out in Mombasa by a Muslim scribe…” (pp. 121). Yet, without any significant evidence his next sentence discounts this: “But Nyika too took part in this process. The suggestion that the Nyika were the helpless victims of fraud was a distortion or reality; but it played an important part in shaping and justifying policy.” In no way am I suggesting that Mijikenda were “helpless victims,” but neither does this mean that they were not widely dispossessed of land that they had occupied during and immediately after the slave period. Cooper (1980) has meticulously demonstrated that the land registration process was racially and ethnically biased, and that colonial policy specifically aimed to “prop-up” the former slave owners by making them into a landed elite, such that former slaves and Mijikenda migrants to the “coastal strip” subsequently became in legal status “squatters” on the land they worked, subject to rental payments (usually in kind) and vulnerable to eventual eviction and displacement, should the land become more valuable as a commodity to its new “owners,” and be sold outright.
This is no small matter. Cooper’s classic study showed how the colonial state laid the groundwork for much of the institutionalized social inequality that still exists at the coast. If Willis maintains that Mijikenda were also “taking part in this process” of land registration, how is it that the “coast strip” was divided into land parcels among former slave owners in the 1920s and 1930s, while the so-called Nyika Reserves [the interior] have only begun to be surveyed and allocated in the recent neo-colonial period? This disjuncture in land ownership is at the root of the social inequality that divides the coast, and yet Willis here attempts to deny this through equalization. In a previous, unpublished thesis (Benjamin 1992: 369-420), I demonstrated how land distribution to former slaveholders, propping up this aristocracy and subordinating the Mijikenda and ex-slaves to squatter status ala Cooper, played out in the last decades of the twentieth century. The uneasy squatter arrangement that Cooper describes was based on the fact that the landowners could only make their land productive by squatter labor. However, as Cooper had predicted, when the land further commodified and came to have value in and of itself, the owners could use their title to evict the squatters and sell the land to the highest bidder.4
My case study of one town showed how, disregarding the claims of ex-slaves and Mijikenda farmers living and working on the land, 14 former slave owners were in 1923 [sixteen years after the abolition of slavery] granted huge tracts of land in Shariani, a coastal town 25 miles north of Mombasa. Decades later they gradually divided and sold their properties, evicting “squatter” families who had lived there three and four generations or more. Numerous colonial settlers were, in the 1940s and 1950s, granted massive parcels of what was now designated [de facto “vacant”] Crown Land. But it was in the 1980s and 1990s, when the coastal tarmac road had become well established and Mombasa’s suburban and commercial expansion significantly escalated, that Shariani took on a new role as potential bedroom suburb and small development site for Mombasa residents and entrepreneurs. Land division and evictions escalated with dire consequences for the population, hundreds of families became homeless, most forced to urbanize and abandon their ancestral grave sites, trees and other crops, and others forced into a new one acre neighborhood called Dzihoshe, a Mijikenda term meaning “squeeze together.” Dzihoshe was a disturbing new phenomenon. It was essentially a dense urban slum of more than 800 people living in wretched poverty with no social services or infrastructure, located on the edge of a 1000-acre plot where this community had formerly lived as “squatter” farmers. The land was owned by “Basheik” Stambuli,5 a Zanzibar-based descendant of former slave owners who returned to Shariani in 1987 to claim his inherited privileges and immediately capitalize them through mass eviction, division and resale to speculators and investors.
This brief review of my own case study shows that the implications of Willis’ equalization are great. Mijikenda, especially at the coast but also in the interior, did not significantly participate in the survey and adjudication of land according to colonial law, while the Swahili elite did do so, precisely as delineated by Cooper. This reinstantiated the slave-owning Arab and Swahili planter aristocracy during the colonial era, in a new and somewhat feebler form as a landed aristocracy devoid of a labor force and thus dependent on squatter labor. Certainly not all Swahili were able to benefit from this process, but very real class and race privileges were carried over from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries, many surviving all the way into the twenty-first. Even without landed wealth, Swahili identity still provides sentiments of superiority over “pagan,” “African,” Mijikenda and other coastal peoples. To see this in the present, one need only observe the relationship between the stone-town Swahili core of a village like Takaungu6 and its mud-and-thatch periphery populated by (generally) subordinate and/or dependent Kauma and other Mijikenda from whom brides, artisans and various sorts of laborers are drawn but with whom equality is still very much elusive.
Jonathon Glassman, writing a few years later (1995), gave us a similarly important work on plebian cultures at coastal East Africa, similarly groundbreaking, and similar in its avoidance of race as an analytic category. After reading his rich text, one is still left to wonder how, for example, can we explain that even interior non-slave immigrants to the coast -- of longer standing than recent Hadrami and other Arab immigrants of the last seven decades – nevertheless remain in a much lower social status, unless we include racial formulae into the class-based equation? Race, in fact, seems in large part to be determinative of class in this instance -- more so than the other way around, and far more than religion or any other single form of difference. How and why did race become such a central axis of status and power, when did this happen, and what are the contours of struggle in this regard today? How do such contemporary debates build upon received histories, and how is the contestation of history central to both the advocates and opponents of racial hierarchies in coastal society today? My contention is that Glassman has opened the way, and a racial-labor history remains to be written for the various regions of the East African coast.
In his review, Bruce McKim argued that Glassman’s sources limited him in his interpretation of East African history:
Although the book provides a detailed picture of patrician institutions and attempts by non-elites to participate in them, it does not sufficiently delve into other rebel hopes and goals. Despite his efforts to read against the grain of European and Arab prejudice, the author perhaps unwittingly reflects the biases of his sources by focusing primarily on plebeian and outsider aspirations to be accepted by Shirazi elites. He is critical of the urban-elite orientation of previous Swahili cultural studies. Yet at times, a distinction is implicitly drawn between a dynamic cosmopolitan Shirazi culture and a geographically unspecified, evidently static “village culture.” The reader does not gain a full understanding of where hinterland peasants come from and what aspirations they might have (other than becoming Shirazi patricians). (1998: 140)
McKim raises some challenging issues for students wishing to go beyond Glassman’s benchmark, by focusing, as I have been saying all along, on the non-elite, non-Muslim and/or non-coastal peoples who constitute the majority. Willis, on the other hand, and as might have been expected, focused in his own review (1996: 141-142) on his discomfort with Glassman’s focus on the Omani, particularly as the intended targets of rebellion. Willis felt this unfairly took away from the more traditional anti-European focus, and it muddies his own work in Mombasa, where nineteenth century socio-racial configurations had already begun to take hold but remain ignored in his narrative.
A Swahili ‘Neo-Nationalist’ Perspective and the Racial Politics of Middle Elites
Turning to the group of scholars whose work I generally designate as Swahili neo-nationalist, the exemplary work of Mazrui and Shariff (1994) is sociologically and historiographically more satisfying than that of their contemporaries, because they do directly engage the issue of nineteenth century coastal culture and the place of Arabs and Arabness therein. Nevertheless, throughout their text there is a discernible discomfort with and avoidance of the racial dimensions of coastal history before sole British hegemony and formal colonialism.
Certainly, I do not wish to imply that nineteenth century Arab-based constructions of race were identical to twentieth century British conceptions, or to other Western or Western-inflected social patterns elsewhere in the nineteenth century. My point is that nineteenth and twentieth century cultural constructions of race in East Africa, under both Busaidi and British hegemony, were far more integrated than most scholars wish to acknowledge. Mazrui and Shariff’s subsequent discussion of racism in Swahili culture during [formal] British colonialism is among the best in the literature,7 yet problematic in that it distinctly formulates nineteenth century Arab and twentieth century British racial formations as discrete and even opposite from one another (p. 28). We see this residual assumption of temporal separation in a subsequent passage discussing the implementation of the divisive colonial legal apparatus: “the law planted dangerous seeds of disunity among the Swahili. If they had in the past always considered themselves as one people, with a sense of common destiny despite their variation in origins and color, this was now shattered at the altar of British colonial expediency” (p. 39).8 We are returned to the image of formal British colonial rule creating the racial divisions in coastal society out of whole cloth, in the first decades of the twentieth century. Ignored is the fact that, after the passage of the 1873 and 1876 restrictions of the sea and overland trade in slaves, direct slave raiding in the interior “shattered” the prevailing ‘unity’ of coastal society (Salim 1973, Cooper 1980, Sheriff 1987). To recognize this, the locus of responsibility for the history of racism has to shift to include Arab and Swahili society, together with the British, with all the attendant implications that this entails.
A few pages later, Mazrui and Shariff briefly acknowledge the late nineteenth century spike in slave production, but see this only as a result of the changing international division of labor (p. 42), thereby avoiding the significance this had for local racial politics.9 This is the only time in their book that this is even briefly mentioned.10 Yet, in any discussion that includes the testimonies of Mijikenda and/or ex-slave people, this is one of the primary issues referenced. This is why Justin Willis could not reconcile the work of Thomas Spear (1978, 1981, 1982). Not because it was factually incorrect, but because Spear’s work centers Mijikenda oral traditions, which in turn center their historical and epistemological perspectives. And common to most Mijikenda historical narratives is a naming of the late-nineteenth century shift in socio-racial relations as absolutely pivotal, as when everything tilted and the present state of social relations took shape. This is also why most Swahili scholars can not dwell on this period and its meaning for the present: how it shaped the meaning of freedom in the decades to come.
Invoking the work of Nicholls (1971) to diminish the impact of the nineteenth century, Mazrui and Shariff simply identify the fact that “use of slave labor in local production and trade was not a phenomenon of the entire Swahili society; it was, rather, restricted to sections of the Arab and Swahili ‘bourgeoisie’” (p. 42). While this is true, and is also empirically true of most modern chattel-slavery-based societies, the distribution of power and privilege in nineteenth and twentieth century Swahili societies has been little studied. How was white privilege distributed throughout society? What factors were central to the calculus of the ‘wages of whiteness’11 in East Africa? How did Arab identity get located and locate itself between the poles of British Aryan culture, on the one hand, and African blackness/Negroness/ Nyikaness, on the other? Was orientalism here equivalent to blackness/Africanness, or did the other split here into further hierarchy? What fissures in the hierarchy emerged over time, and how did the hegemonic structure of social relations engulf and survive such challenges?
Katama Mkangi and Subaltern Mijikenda Epistemologies
The recent and untimely passing of Katama Mkangi in a road accident in Kenya has left the scholarly and activist communities of this part of the world devoid of a lone voice of reason and dissent, counter-perspective and subaltern Mijikenda viewpoint that we are otherwise now largely without. A novelist and political activist, political leader and graduate of the Dar es Salaam School of radical African historiography, Mkangi’s work spanned numerous genres, decades and issues. I am most concerned here with the fact that as a sociologist, Mkangi was one of the only non-Swahili coastal social scientists working in the social and historiographic area of the Kenya coast region, where he himself was from.
Mkangi’s indigenous perspective has the potential to shake up East African scholarship, yet it has so far gone largely unrecognized in the academy. The question of power is not far off when we note that the preponderance of indigenous [Mijikenda or other non-Swahili] perspectives question the prevailing discourses and epistemology. It is interesting that generally speaking it has been indigenous peoples, from a variety of class backgrounds, that have advocated a subaltern perspective. Mkangi’s contributions show the potential of marginalized, subaltern voices in academic and popular discourses, as a clearly counter-hegemonic cosmology and culture are thrust into the fore. Almost every issue Mkangi touched is seen from a counter-hegemonic epistemological perspective, making him a voice in the wilderness of coastal scholarship. Let me briefly review some of his contributions.
Perhaps Mkangi’s most important intervention for this study, his discussion of the relationship of Mijikenda people to Islam, begins by locating the Mijikenda as a people contiguously enmeshed within coastal society’s other peoples, the “Waswahili, Wasegeju, Wasanye, Wapokomo, Wasagala and Wataita in that order” (1995: 110). Gone are the discrete ethnic notions of anthropologists, and instead we have a nuanced, overlapping set of identities that determine one another in their similarities and differences. Mkangi also directly identifies the “two historical factors which have contributed to Mijikenda’s perspective on Islam… the Eastern Africa Slave Trade and European Christian colonial domination” (ibid.). This seemingly common-sense orientation to Mijikenda history is actually refreshingly new in its inclusion of nineteenth century Arab domination in the loci of power relations to be understood and examined today. We have seen how commonly this important factor is ignored or downplayed, and what the implications of doing so are for historical interpretation and the understanding of identity and power in the present.
Contrary to Willis, Mkangi takes Mijikenda oral histories and memories seriously, for example, when he relates that:
“Raids by the Arab – assisted by the Waswahili – into the Mijikenda hinterland in search of slaves, [are] well remembered among the Waribe through an incident when the slave-raiders fired a canon into their kaya which destroyed a tamarind tree. Stories also abound narrating the tricks which were used by the slave-raiders into luring the unsuspecting Mijikenda victims into slavery.” (1995: 110-111)
I have seen similar stories stemming from my own research in Shariani. While Willis dismissed these narratives, Mkangi and I would maintain that they are indeed central to the history of the coast and serve as critical diagnostic tools for interpreting current social relations there. As Mkangi follows the issue up, “Families have stories of how some of their relatives disappeared only later to be discovered having been “swahilized” in one of the Waswahili towns and settlements along the Coast.” (p. 111) Thus, the nineteenth century practices of forced enslavement and subsequent social ascription into Swahili society may be seen as continuing along similar lines in the twentieth century as these social groups retain their relative standings in terms of relational power.
Mkangi’s discussion of the Swahili-Mijikenda interface is far more balanced and nuanced than those discussed above. While Mijikenda often become Swahili after making coastward migrations, they are also seen to maintain their Mijikenda identities even for several generations at a time, as evidenced in continued matrilineal and Mijikenda-descent land claims in the interior by coastal “Waswahili” peoples (ibid.). Mkangi’s discussion of “mudzomba,” [uncle/nephew] the Mijikenda term for mjomba in Kiswahili, shows that the “cut-point between these two communities sometimes has been difficult to identify” (ibid.).12 Most importantly, again, we see that Mkangi identifies the nineteenth century, under the ‘Zanzibar Arab Sultanate’ and its Mwambao Protectorate as the origins of the modern coast’s “racial social hierarchy.” He acknowledges that this was further complicated by British racism during formal colonial rule, but identifies these two streams of inequality and their interaction as primary factors in understanding the present. This allows him to state what should be obvious, and yet is overlooked in almost all other studies of coastal societies: “…it is still the “Mgiriama”13 who works as a domestic servant in Swahili houses” (p. 112).
Thus, his acknowledgement of nineteenth century slavery as the origins of modern racism and social hierarchy at the coast allows Mkangi, unlike Willis or Mazrui and Shariff, to see racial hierarchy in the present. My own research at the coast revealed such hierarchy to be very prevalent at the coast, making its avoidance in the academy a real problem. We have already briefly mentioned the hierarchical relationship between Takaungu stone town, for example, and its Mijikenda thatch suburbs. We could also point to the racial hierarchies, stemming straight out of nineteenth century slavery, still active in the economic fields of marine resource exploitation. The range from spear fishing, which remains the lowest level socially and economically, the most dangerous, even illegal of the fishing trades, and is primarily a Mijikenda vocation, to the distribution of responsibilities and privileges within dhow/jahazi fishing vessels, which continue to reserve the most prestigious and lucrative roles for Muslim Swahili and Arabs. This leads us to what is perhaps Mkangi’s most important articulation of these issues:
“During the rule of the Zanzibar sultanate, the Waswahili/Muslims were a notch above the Mijikenda in status and privileges. It was then an “in-thing” in becoming an “Arab” once one was a Muslim. This transformation even forced the Bantu-speaking Waswahili to substitute “uungwana” (being “civil” or “gentle”) with “ustaarabu”.” (ibid.)
Mkangi also explored the democratic components of indigenous Mijikenda culture and epistemology; challenged prohibitions on illegal brewing, palm wine tapping, and distilling as integral parts of the both the informal economy and local culture; traveled and offered opinion pieces on Zimbabwe – all in addition to his steady literary contributions for which he is better known by most Kenyans (1999a, 1999b, 2001). These interventions, and others, beyond his exploration of Mijikenda/Swahili/Arab relations, remain to be fully explored by scholars. I have tried to suggest the potential epistemological fruits of doing so in this brief essay.
In conclusion, to properly understand the politics of the present at the coast of Kenya, and probably the wider Swahili world, we must acknowledge the legacies of race and their grounding in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because of British colonial displacement, indigenous people like the Mijikenda, especially after their resistance in the second decade of the twentieth century, have remained largely outside of the academy, its representation and its production of knowledge. There are far more Western scholars than African, and far more Swahili scholars than Mijikenda, Pokomo, Taita or Segeju. As such, the under-represented, even subaltern voices of epistemological insurgents like Mkangi remain rare in the academy and challenge the rest of us regarding the way we construct our own genealogies of knowledge. If we do not do so self-consciously, we run the risk of inadvertently supporting the power status quo in the region we represent.
References:
Jesse Benjamin, 1992, Processes of Change in Shariani, Kenya: Ideological, Institutional and Infrastructural Levels, Senior Thesis submitted to Friends World College/Program, Long Island University, June 1992, in partial fulfillment of the degree of Bachelor of Arts.
Elly Bulkin, 1984, “Hard Ground: Jewish Identity, Racism, and Anti-Semitism,” in: Elly Bulkin, Barbara Smith, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Yours in Struggle, Ithaca: Firebrand Books.
Frederick Cooper, 1980, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890 - 1925, Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau.
Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, 1989, “Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule,” Introduction to a special section of American Ethnologist 16(4): 609-621.
Basil Davidson, 1992, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation State, New York: Times Books, Random House.
Jonathon Glassman, 1995, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Cheryl I. Harris, 1993, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review, 106(8), [pp. 1707-1791].
Joseph Harris, 1987, Repatriation and Refugees in a Colonial Society: the Case of Kenya, Washington D.C.: Howard University Press.
Gavin Kitching, 1980, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite Bourgeoisie, 1915 - 1970, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
George Lipsitz, 1998, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How People Profit From Identity Politics, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Robert Mambo, 1984, “Historiographical Problems of the Coastal Region of Kenya: The Singwaya Legend Revisited,” Historical Association of Kenya, Annual Conference, University of Nairobi.
--------, 1987a, “Politics and Ethnic Associations in Colonial Kenya: The Experience of the Mijikenda Union of Kenya’s Coast, 1944-1954,” Nairobi: Kenyatta University.
--------, 1987b, “Nascent Political Activities Among the Mijikenda of Kenya’s Coast During the Colonial Era,” Transafrican Journal of History 16, pp. 92-120.
Alamin M. Mazrui, and Ibrahim Noor Shariff, 1994, The Swahili: Idiom and Identity of an African People, Trenton: New Jersey.
Bruce McKim, 1998, Review of Jonathon Glassman, Feast and Riot, Africa Today 45(1).
Katama Mkangi, 1995, “The Perception of Islam by the Mijikenda of Kenya Coast,” in: Mohamed Bakari and Saad S. Yahya (eds.), Islam in Kenya: Proceedings of the National Seminar on Contemporary Islam in Kenya, Nairobi: Mewa Publications.
--------, 1999a, “The Democratic Roots in Mijikenda Polity,” paper read at African Studies Association Conference, Philadelphia.
--------, 1999b, “Legalise Chang’aa, Let Our Creative Juices Flow,” Business Opinion, The East African (Nation Group), September 22-28.
--------, 2001, Opinion [On Zimbabwe], in The Daily Nation (Nairobi), September 17th.
C. S. Nicholls, 1971, The Swahili Coast: Politics, Diplomacy and Trade on the African Littoral (1798-1856), London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
David Roediger, 1991, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London: Verso.
Karen Brodkin Sacks, 1995, “How Did Jews Become White Folks?” in: Race, Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (eds.), New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Ahmed Idha Salim, 1973, The Swahili-Speaking Peoples of Kenya’s Coast, 1895 - 1965, Nairobi: East African Publishing House.
Abdul M. H. Sheriff, 1976, “Trade and Underdevelopment: The Role of International Trade in the Economic History of the East African Coast before the 16th Century,” in: Hadith 5: Economic and Social History of Kenya, Bethwell A. Ogot (ed.), Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau.
-----------, 1987, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770-1873, London: James Currey, Nairobi: Heinemann, Athens: Ohio University Press.
Barbara Smith, 1984, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Relationships Between Black and Jewish Women,” in: Elly Bulkin, Barbara Smith, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Yours in Struggle, Ithaca: Firebrand Books.
Thomas Spear, 1978, The Kaya Complex, Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau.
--------, 1981, Kenya’s Past, Burnt Mill, UK: Longman
--------, 1982, Traditions of Origin and their Interpretation, Athens OH: Center for International Studies, Ohio University
Ann Laura Stoler, 1991, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power,” in: Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, Micaela di Leonardo (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press.
--------, 1995, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Roger M. A. van Zwanenberg, 1975, Colonial Capitalism and Labor in Kenya, 1919 - 1939, Kampala, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam: East African Literature Bureau.
Immanuel Wallerstein, “Book Review: The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State,” Political Geography 17(7).
Justin Willis, 1993, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
---------, 1996, Review of Jonathon Glassman, Feast and Riot, African Affairs, January, 95(378).
Richard D. Wolff, 1974, Britain and Kenya, 1870-1930, Nairobi: Transafrica Press.
Notes:
Portions of this argument appear in greater detail in Jesse Benjamin, 2002, East Africa and the World: The Relationship of Knowledge and Power in the Construction of History, Race and Identity, Ph.D. Dissertation, SUNY Binghamton.
1. van Zwanenberg (1975) definitively defined the period of high colonialism in Kenya as 1919-1939, in his classic political-economic analysis of British colonialism. See also Wolff (1974) and Kitching (1980).
2. The three studies in the previous footnote are good examples of this limitation, where van Zwanenberg only devotes the final three pages of his study to ‘ideological’ [superstructural] issues within which would be encompassed race and racism, while Kitching only did slightly better. Contrast this for example with the writings of Nyerere and Nkrumah as much as several decades earlier, which are clearly very conscious of race, drawing as they were from direct experiential knowledge and political engagement. We witness a remarkable bifurcation of knowledge, especially around the issues of race and colonialism, along racial and epistemological lines between Western and African/pan-African traditions.
3. An important subtext throughout this work is Willis’ attempt to critique Cooper (pp. 2, 56n49, 123, 185), though most of this is unconvincing. Perhaps this is a reflection in part of Willis’ seeming discomfort with class analysis (pp. 2, 4). At the same time, much of his argument stands only on information largely derived from Cooper (pp. 84, 121-122, 126, 188).
4. The other factor in this equation was the willingness of the state, through its own cost-benefit calculus, to use violence [police, bulldozers, arrests] to enforce this rupturing of the coastal social contract by the [neo-]colonial legal code of freehold land ownership. Landowners previously wishing to alienate squatters from land they inherited title to would have known that they would not succeed without the consent of the state, and until the late 1980s this did not appear to be forthcoming. Among other reasons, we can list the perceived political fallout of squatter evictions, having as they did such powerful historical memories in the young nation [“Mau Mau,” The People’s Land Freedom Army], and the fragility of the Moi regime in the aftermath of the failed coup in 1981.
5. This name is a reference to Turkish, thus foreign and “Arab” (sic) lineage, from Istanbul. I never determined for certain whether or not this was an invented or actual lineage, the Stambuli family tracing to a region of the north coast in which brief Turkish alliances were in fact made in the nineteenth century. The point being that, whether real or invented, or probably some combination of both, the claim itself was what mattered and allowed this family to rise above its cousins and neighbors to own other members of the community and eventually inherit the wealth of landed property and privilege in the colonial period. This injustice, as it was felt to be by most Shariani residents, and especially the violation of the “agreement” that squatters and owners had maintained for six decades, resulted in physical violence against Stambuli in 1989, when an attempt was made on his life one evening as he entered the Shariani Mosque. Armed bodyguards subsequently accompanied him whenever he was in public. Thus, historical tensions and their implications for identity not only continue in the present but often lead to suffering and/or various forms of violence.
6. An historically important small town on the Northern Kenya coast, about thirty miles north of Mombasa. When the Mombasa Mazrui (and allies) were defeated by the Zanzibar Busaidi (and allies), they found refuge in the deeply sheltered inland channels of a small and treacherous tidal inlet buffered on all sides by steep hills or cliffs, yet directly next to Kilifi Creek and thus both the oceanic and continental trades. The Kauma were historically aligned with the Mazrui, and “gave” them the land for their new nineteenth century refuge, yet later found themselves as a result of slavery and colonial era racial social formations living in the periphery of Mazrui Takaungu, as was the case throughout most of the coast. As one would imagine, most Kauma today do not acknowledge Mazrui or Swahili superiority, and stubbornly remember the history of Takaungu’s origins.
7. Where else can one find a discussion of chemical skin lightening creams and hair relaxers in the context of racial and colonial coastal history?
8. The problem is that, in the nineteenth century, not everyone was able to be considered a member of Swahili civilization, and it was precisely slaves and interior-descended peoples that were excluded from this supposed unity. In both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the social hierarchy is best studied by focusing on the borders of Swahili society, on the groups denied membership and inclusion, and on the groups claiming inclusions but not always accepted. Such tenuous locations allow for greater degrees of discrimination and exploitation on a systemic level, and should be investigated.
9. The spike was centered in Zanzibar, and on the mainland coast, especially in, around and between Mombasa and Malindi, but also felt throughout much of the Swahili world.
10. The wider social context of nineteenth century social relations in East Africa are only acknowledged by Mazrui and Shariff to deflect attention away from racial analysis, rather than situating the coast as actively participating in global racial and labor hierarchies.
11. As Du Bois has shown in the US case, the ‘wages of whiteness’ spread far beyond slave-owning and even property-owning white folks, such that claims to whiteness served as a sort of Trojan horse of entry into bourgeois society and respectability even for the lowest of whites. While Du Bois also generalized such formulations into international and global contexts of colonialism and imperialism, most contemporary scholars limit their work to either domestic Western [U.S.] issues of white history (Smith 1984, Bulkin 1984, Roediger 1991, Harris 1993, Sacks 1995, Lipsitz 1998), or non-Western, colonial and imperial discussions of whiteness and privilege at points of social intersection (Cooper and Stoler 1989, 1997, Stoler 1991, 1995).
12. It is significant that one of the only other discussions of this central point about Mjomba/Mudzomba appears in the work of Robert Mambo (1984, 1987a, 1987b), himself one of [if not] the only other coastal social science scholars to contribute to academic scholarship in recent decades.
13. The largest of the nine Mijikenda subgroups.