In the context of this coursework, the lenses of resilience and transformation are employed to frame the ways in which the people of Zanzibar historically and contemporarily respond to the pressures of globalization. As new ideas, cultures, power structures, and people manifest on the islands, these perspectives contextualize the ways in which change is embraced, moderated, and rejected. The history of slavery in Zanzibar traces the arc of expanding economies and empires, is intertwined with modern conceptions of ethnicity and indigeneity, and illustrates the ways in which both societies and perceptions of abstract constructs utilize resilience and transformation in the process of change.
Despite rich soils and favorable environmental conditions, much of the land mass on both Pemba and Unjuga remained minimally developed until the early 19th century, when the Sultan of Zanzibar commandeered land to build 45 spice plantations. Thousands of slaves were imported to perform the labor-intensive tasks of the spice farms, to run the households of the Arab aristocracy, and to live as concubines for the powerful men of the island. By controlling labor and manipulating the relationships developed with merchants and traders, these plantations proved extremely profitable.
Where economics might dictate that the output, and thereby the profit, from each slave be maximized through any means of incentivization possible, in this part of East Africa it seems that slaves were not treated as harshly, nor worked as relentlessly as is evidenced in other plantation economies in the U.S. south or the West Indies. This may be a result of the stipulations of Islamic law, which require slaves to be treated with a level of humanity, or of the importance of large kinship groups in the appropriation of power in East African societies. Here it seems that the institutions of religion and culture were to some degree resilient against the otherwise highly transformative power of the shifting economy.
Spurred in part by grisly travel accounts of missionaries like David Livingstone (the complexities of whose relationship to the abolition of slavery would require another blog unto itself), the British abolished slavery within it’s bloated borders in the late 19th century. This represented a huge shift in the economic viability and control of labor on the plantations. Landowners and the aristocracy resisted this change, unwilling to discard the financial and hegemonic authority implicit in slave ownership. This is evidenced by the continuation and growth of the slave trade in Zanzibar after 1897. New methods of concealment for transport and holding of slaves were conceived. Further, the end of formal legal slavery in East Africa cannot truly be seen as an absolute transformation from slaves to equal citizens. As Fredrick Cooper discusses in From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, there was significant resistance on the part of the British (those very architects of this change) to releasing the control of labor. Systems and laws were put in place to attempt to mitigate against the suddenly-free will of ex-slaves, though this population proved resilient to most of them, to the deep frustration of the Empire.
Not only did the people of Zanzibar express qualities of resilience to and transformation from the institution of slavery, but the presence of slavery on the island has equally transformed conceptions of ethnicity and power for Zanzibari people. Slaves were acquired from the mainland, as prisoners of tribal wars, as individuals sold in dire circumstances, and as victims of kidnapping. Their backgrounds, linguistically, geographically, and ethnically were therefore quite diverse, and as these individuals were folded into households, experiencing some level of vertical integration into Zanzibari society, a dynamic element was introduced. At the same time that ethnic and racial mingling was occurring in the upper tier of society, ethnic and racial separations were being reified on the other end of the spectrum.
No comments:
Post a Comment