Abstract
The historical imagination of Zanzibar as a maritime hub of the dhow trade is today generally directed to the past. Nonetheless, from the early 1990s, Zanzibari traders began to revive old routes and develop new ones. While first relying on translocal family relations to the Arabian Peninsula, they have, since the late 1990s, ventured further east to cities including Bangkok, Guangzhou, and Jakarta. This chapter examines these recent developments and traders use of them to provide Zanzibar with cloth that meets the island’s sense of fashion. Taking the shopping practices during Ramadhan as a focal point illustrates how historical relations still play a crucial role in current negotiations of fashion and taste and, thus, for present-day consumption practices.
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Notes
- 1.
Françoise Constantin and Françoise Le Guennec-Coppens, “Dubaï Street, Zanzibar…” Politique Africaine 30 (1988), pp. 7–21.
- 2.
Mohammed Ali Bakari, The Democratisation Process in Zanzibar: A retarded transition, (Hamburg: GIGA Hamburg, 2001), p. 133.
- 3.
Sylvie Bredeloup “African Trading Post in Guangzhou: Emergent or Recurrent Commercial Form?,” African Diaspora 5 (2012), p. 30.
- 4.
On 12 January 1964, only thirty-three days after Zanzibar was given full independence from the British, the new government was overthrown by a troop of mercenaries and followers of the opposition party, a political upheaval towards a socialist pro-African regime in which approximately 6000–10,000 residents were killed, and about 30,000 out of approximately 50,000 people of Arab origin were forcibly expelled or fled at their own initiative, many of them heading towards Arabia. For more on this, see Jonathan Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); and Erik Gilbert, “Oman and Zanzibar: The historical roots of a global community,” in Cross Currents and Community Networks: The history of the Indian Ocean world, ed. Himanshu Prabha Ray and Edward Alpers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 163–178.
- 5.
Gordon Mathews, “Chungking Mansions: A Center of “Low-End Globalization,” Ethnology 46, no. 2 (2007), p. 170.
- 6.
Paul Stoller, Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 178.
- 7.
The empirical material presented in this chapter is based on extensive ethnographic research in Zanzibar between 2003 and 2014, several field trips to the Arabian Peninsula in 2008, 2011 and 2013, and mobile ethnographic research that involved accompanying traders on their journeys through the Tanzanian hinterland, Arabia and South East Asia. While close relations were developed and maintained over this period with a number of Zanzibari families engaging in trade, through spending a considerable amount of time with traders in their shops, at customs, and on business trips, it was possible to gain a wider understanding of the main characteristics of this trade in Zanzibar, its major actors as well as its everyday and more mundane features. Yunus, and the other traders presented here, serve as exemplary characters by whom to illustrate the development and recent dynamics in Zanzibari trading practices.
- 8.
For about a decade, African traders have systematically started to expand their trading networks into Asia, with Bangkok and Guanghzou being two of the major posts. With regard to West African traders, it has to be noted, however, that already in the mid-1980s more discreet dynamics had emerged linking Asian export goods with African markets. See Bredeloup, ‘African trading post’.
- 9.
On the role of family relations for Zanzibari trading business in Dubai, see Julia Verne, Living Translocality. Space, Culture and Economy in Contemporary Swahili Trade (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012), p. 106.
- 10.
As Bredeloup, in her work on African trading posts in Asia, notes, a ‘feminization of the profession’ can be observed with ‘African business women—single, married, divorced, or retired from civil service—… forsaking in ever greater numbers the trading post of Dubai to come and find their supplies on the Asian markets’. See Bredeloup, ‘African trading post in Guangzhou’, p. 38. Usually, they start to travel within a group together with relatives, friends or neighbours ‘who are an authority in the profession and who represent, thanks to their high morals, protection against rumours’. See Bredeloup, ‘African trading post’, p. 177.
- 11.
Jeremy Prestholdt, As Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain: The social fabric of material consumption in the Swahili world, circa 1450 to 1600, PAS Working Papers 3 (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1998), p. 8.
- 12.
Pedro Machado, “Awash in a Sea of Cloth: Gujarat, Africa, and the Western Indian Ocean, 1300-1850,” in The Spinning World: A global history of cotton textiles 1200-1850, ed. Giorgio Riello, and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Pedro Machado, “Cloths of a New Fashion: Indian Ocean Networks of exchange and cloth zones of contact in Africa and Indian in the eighteenth and nineteemth centuries,” in How India Clothed the World, ed. Giorgio Riello, and Tirthankar Roy (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Prestholdt, As Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain, p. 9; Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).
- 13.
Laura Fair, “Dressing Up: Clothing, Class and Gender in Post-Abolition Zanzibar,” The Journal of African History 39, no. 1 (1998), pp. 63–94.
- 14.
Terence Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 31.
- 15.
While uungwana, generally translated as ‘civilization’, was used as a description of Swahili patricians while emphasizing their status as free men (as opposed to the slaves, watumwa), the term ustaarabu, also best understood as fine manners and respectable behaviour, contains a direct reference to Arab ways, meaning ‘being like an Arab’. For more on this, see Randall Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Katrin Bromber, “Ustaarabu: A conceptual change in Tanganyikan newspaper discourse in the 1920s,” in The Global Worlds of the Swahili, ed. Roman Loimeier and Rüdiger Seesemann (Münster: LIT, 2006), pp. 67–82; Kai Kresse, Philosophising in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam and Intellecual Practice on the Swahili Coast (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); John Middleton, African Merchants in the Indian Ocean; Swahili of the East African Coast (Long Grove: Waveland Press, 2004).
- 16.
Pouwels, Horn and Crescent; Randall Pouwels, “Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean to 1800: Reviewing Relations in Historical Perspective,” in International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, no. 2/3 (2002): pp. 385–425; James de Vere Allen, “Swahili Culture Reconsidered: Some Historical Implications of the Material Culture of the Northern Kenyan Coast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” in Azania 9 (1974): pp. 105-138; Bromber, “Ustaarabu: A conceptual change;” Glassman, War of Words.
- 17.
Pouwels, Horn and Crescent; Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa.
- 18.
Jonathan Glassman Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consicousness on the Swahili Coast 1856-1888 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1995), p. 63.
- 19.
Fair, ‘Dressing up’.
- 20.
Fair, ‘Dressing up’, p. 82; Allen, ‘Swahili Culture Reconsidered’.
- 21.
Jeremy Prestholdt, “On the global Repercussions of East African Consumerism,” The American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004), p. 763.
- 22.
Thomas Burgess, “Cinema, Bell Bottoms, and Miniskirts: Struggles over Youth and Citizenship in Revolutionary Zanzibar,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, no. 2/3 (2002), p. 308; Fair, “Dressing Up,” p. 83.
- 23.
Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa.
- 24.
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The structure of everyday life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 328.
- 25.
Terence Turner, “The social skin,” in Not Work Alone: A cross-cultural view of activities superfluous to survival, ed. Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin (London: Temple Smith, 1980), pp. 112–140.
- 26.
Minou Fuglesang, Veils and Videos: Female Youth Culture on the Kenyan Coast (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 1994), p. 115.
- 27.
Fuglesang, Veils and Videos, p. 126.
- 28.
In Dubai and Muscat, new designs and styles of abaya (buibui) are introduced more or less monthly by designers from brands such as Hanayen, Mauzan or Al Ameerat, which all have shops in the big malls.
- 29.
The price for a ready-made buibui of the latest style in Dubai and Muscat ranges from more or less a hundred to several hundred US dollars.
- 30.
Since opportunities to acquire such new styles depend on personal travel or the mobility of relatives, it is not always the same women setting the trend. More generally, however, as also observed by Fuglesang in the case of Lamu, ‘trendsetters’ usually have a certain social status and prestige, often closely connected to ‘Arab’ affiliation.
- 31.
Fuglesang, Veils and Videos, p. 85.
- 32.
For example, the popular luxury brand Hanayen is famous for using original Swarovski crystals for the ornamentation of buibui. In the Gulf States as well as in Zanzibar, cheap imitations of such stones are used to imitate the designs.
- 33.
In respect to men’s and boys’ clothing, the link to the Arabian Peninsula is less complicated. The long white robe (dishdasha) men in Dubai and Muscat wear in official settings, called kanzu in Swahili, is usually directly imported from the Arabian Peninsula and therefore matches those worn over there. However, since most shops in Zanzibar usually only sell ready-made kanzu within the lower price range, all those wishing to follow the latest fashion details of the more expensive variants either have to order one through a friend of relative in Oman or the United Arab Emirates, or find a Zanzibari tailor who is able to produce a garment accordingly. In respect of everyday male clothing, a link to ‘Arab’ style is less relevant. But even without any clear geographical or cultural reference, discourses about the most fashionable styles remain vital in informing the selection and work similarly to those of women.
- 34.
For a detailed impression of African traders operating in Guangzhou, see Angelo Müller, and Rainer Wehrhahn, “Transnational Business Networks of African Intermediaries in China: Practices of networking and the role of experietial knowledge,” in Die Erde 144 (2013): pp. 82–97; Brigitte Bertoncello and Sylvie Bredeloup, “The emergence of new African trading posts in Hong Kong and Ghuangzhou,” in China Perspective 218 (2007): pp. 94–105; Adams Bodomo and Enyu Ma, “We are what we eat: Food in the process of community formation and identity shaping among African traders in Guangzhou and Yiwu,” African Diaspora 5 (2012): pp. 3–26; Lyons et al., “In the Dragon’s Den: African Traders in Guangzhou,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38, no. 5 (2012): pp. 869–888.
- 35.
From a more general African perspective, Jakarta had already been a relevant trading post before the xenophobic acts against Chinese merchants and other foreigners in 1988 and the financial crisis that heavily affected Indonesia, and was then replaced by new trading posts in China. For the political reasons already mentioned, this was not the case for Zanzibari traders, who—when going beyond Dubai—started to travel to Bangkok and Guangzhou in the 2000s and only for a few years explore new destinations such as Indonesia and Singapore.
- 36.
Müller and Wehrhahn, “Transnational Business Networks,” p. 87.
- 37.
AbdouMaliq Simone, “The Surfacing of Urban Life,” City 15 (2011): p. 361.
- 38.
Theodor Adorno, “On popular music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science IX (1941): p. 43.
- 39.
The Swahili verb ‘kung’ara’ (to shine) is commonly used to describe a person wearing new commodities and the ‘trendy’.
- 40.
Paola Ivanov, Translokalität, Konsum und Ästhetik im islamischen Zanzibar – eine praxistheoretische Untersuchung (Unpublished Habilitation, submitted at the University of Bayreuth, 2013).
- 41.
Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993): Adriaan Hendrik Johan Prins, Sailing from Lamu: A study of maritime culture in Islamic East-Africa (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1965); Abdul Sheriff, “The dhow culture of the Western Indian Ocean,” in Journeys and Dwellings, ed. Helene Basu (London: Orient Longman, 2008), pp. 61–89; and Alan Villiers, Sons of Sindbad (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1940).
- 42.
Michael Pearson The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge 2003), p. 58.
- 43.
Nicole Boivin et al., “East Africa and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean World,” Journal of World Prehistory 26, no. 3 (2013): pp. 213–281.
- 44.
Enseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).
- 45.
These observations deeply resonate with Prestholdt’s idea of a ‘basin consciousness’ and an increasing notion of regional coherence in the Indian Ocean—see Jeremy Prestholdt “Locating the Indian Ocean: notes on the postcolonial reconstitution of space”, Journal of Eastern African Studies 9, no. 5 (2015): pp. 440–467.
- 46.
See also Bredeloup, ‘African trading post in Guangzhou’; Bodomo and Ma, ‘We are what we eat’.
- 47.
For a theoretical engagement with collective, cultural and translocal memory’ see Brigittine French, “The semiotics of collective memories,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): pp. 337–353; Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): pp. 4–18; Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney, Transnational Memory (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014).
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Verne, J. (2018). Contemporary Geographies of Zanzibari Fashion: Indian Ocean Trade Journeys in the Run-Up to Ramadhan Festivities. In: Machado, P., Fee, S., Campbell, G. (eds) Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58265-8_13
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