[Engaging Books is a returning series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. This installment involves a selection from Ohio University Press on the theme of East Africa. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean
By Thomas F. McDow
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media / Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Modern Muslims: A Sudan Memoir
By Steve Howard
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media / Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya
By Karen Weitzberg
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media / Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania
By Laura Fair
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media / Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean
By Thomas F. McDow
About the Book
In Buying Time, Thomas F. McDow synthesizes Indian Ocean, Middle Eastern, and East African studies as well as economic and social history to explain how, in the nineteenth century, credit, mobility, and kinship knit together a vast interconnected Indian Ocean region. That vibrant and enormously influential swath extended from the desert fringes of Arabia to Zanzibar and the Swahili coast and on to the Congo River watershed.
In the half century before European colonization, Africans and Arabs from coasts and hinterlands used newfound sources of credit to seek out opportunities, establish new outposts in distant places, and maintain families in a rapidly changing economy. They used temporizing strategies to escape drought in Oman, join ivory caravans in the African interior, and build new settlements.
The key to McDow’s analysis is a previously unstudied trove of Arabic business deeds that show complex variations on the financial transactions that underwrote the trade economy across the region. The documents list names, genealogies, statuses, and clan names of a wide variety of people—Africans, Indians, and Arabs; men and women; free and slave—who bought, sold, and mortgaged property. Through unprecedented use of these sources, McDow moves the historical analysis of the Indian Ocean beyond connected port cities to reveal the roles of previously invisible people.
About the Author
Thomas F. McDow is an assistant professor of history at Ohio State University. He teaches courses on the history of Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the world.
In the Media/ Scholarly Praise for Buying Time
“In Buying Time, McDow argues for a transnational western Indian Ocean network of credit and debt that linked both coastal and interior Oman to Zanzibar and the continental African interior in the long nineteenth century. With remarkable, previously ignored Arabic legal documents at its heart, McDow’s analysis is notably innovative in the way it links environmental factors, debt, and mobility.” —Edward A. Alpers, author of The Indian Ocean in World History
“If scholars have long known in a general way that Oman and East Africa were connected, McDow traces out many of the specific and unexpected ways in which they were, in the stories and actions of specific persons. This is new territory.” —Pier M. Larson, author of Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora
“This is a brilliant, readable study…[McDow] demonstrates effectively that seas connect traders and peoples rather than divide them.…Summing up: Highly recommended.” —CHOICE
Additional Information
May 2018
378 Pages
$34.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8214-2281-6
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8214-2282-3
Digital ISBN: 978-0-8214-4609-6
Where to Purchase
Ohio University Press
Excerpt
From Chapter 1, “Buying Time”
In the 1840s, Nizwa, one of the largest and most important towns in the Omani interior, and its environs were struck by a severe drought. This drought lasted for more than five years, disrupted the normal patterns of life, and resulted in mass emigration. The festival (’eid al-adha) marking the culmination of the Hajj in 1845 reflected the impact of this environmental crisis. Because of the drought, Nizwans were unable to celebrate in their normal manner. The eighty-foot-tall fort at the center of Nizwa commanded a view of what had been, in more prosperous times, extensive date groves. As a meeting place of four streams, Nizwa was generally well watered, and, consequently, its citizens were well off. Writing forty years after the drought, S. B. Miles noted that Nizwa surpassed “all the towns of Oman in its supply of water, natural wealth, and the industry of its inhabitants.” Before the drought in the 1840s, the area’s agriculture supported a population whose size was second only to Muscat, and its industry included “famous and extensive” textile and embroidery works. Nizwa grew cotton and indigo, and women spun and men worked looms to produce blue cot- ton goods. Nizwa was also a religious capital, known as bayḍat al-Islam, the core—literally, “egg”—of Islam, for its historical role in maintaining the Ibadi Imamate. The people of Nizwa prayed and studied in three hundred mosques.
During the December 1845 festival (’eid), however, something was amiss. A procession of drummers and horn players led cheering men to the central square for mock fighting with swords, spears, and matchlocks. Women watched the festivities from the rooftops. But the normal celebrations lacked something important. The ’eid al-Adha celebrations of the Hejira year 1261 went on for a typical three days, but the circumstances—namely, the five years of drought—meant that anxiety plagued people from every social class. With the central market closed and commerce suspended, adults worried about rain. Would this be the year? More immediately, those who anticipated the delectable sweetmeats for which Nizwa was famous felt the sting of the drought. There was no halwa. None of the sweet delicacies were procurable. And it was not simply a question of obtaining the ingredients. Many families had left Nizwa because of the drought and mysteriously, the departed included all of the confectioners. The out-migration of confectioners, who were people of humble status, offers new clues on the mobility and circulation of people within Arabia and beyond.
The long drought and the loss of viable agricultural lands around Nizwa caused people to flee. While some moved to places in the interior or to the coastal towns of Oman, others went farther afield. One Nizwan became an important property broker in Zanzibar. Juma bin Salim al-Bakri, whose story was introduced earlier, amassed huge ivory holdings at his headquarters in the eastern Congo. And, fifteen years after the halwa-free Hajj festivities, a confectioner who had traveled through Muscat to East Africa became a trade agent and “big man” in the most important trading depot in central Africa. Thus, in that drought-stricken festival in 1845, while the men of Nizwa sipped coffee in the evening and listened to a poet sing his verses, they were likely worrying about the ruin of the whole province. They probably could not have imagined how far the drought would compel their neighbors and countrymen to travel.
This chapter examines eastern Arabia in the early nineteenth century to explain the environmental, social, and political conditions that prompted Arab migration to East Africa. The Omani ruler Seyyid Said bin Sultan al-Busaidi’s reasons for shifting his capital to Zanzibar in 1832 were financial and geostrategic, but what motivated others? Despite the important connections, many histories focused on East Africa have taken Arab migration for granted and overlooked push factors. Surprisingly, many of the Arab migrants who traveled to Africa in the nineteenth century were people of modest means from interior towns, not wealthy traders from port cities. Rather than neglect the Omani interior, this chapter focuses on the patterns of circulation that connected Arabian oasis towns like Nizwa to far-off Zanzibar and new settlements in eastern and central Africa.
This story necessarily begins with the underlying geographical and environmental factors that shaped human settlements in interior Oman and ends with threats that periodically upset these settlements. The management of water shaped Omani settlement patterns, and this chapter takes up the technological adaptations and religious traditions that addressed environmental limitations. Scholarly approaches that have presupposed a false dichotomy between static interior societies and enterprising coastal peoples have misread Omani history and misunderstood the processes that linked the interior regions of Arabia and Africa. Seyyid Said bin Sultan’s activity in the Indian Ocean, and his outposts in Africa in particular, renewed circuits of travel and created new opportunities. Thus, when Arabs in Oman were faced with progressively more difficult choices about how to handle constricting droughts or devastating floods, a new temporizing strategy—decamping to Africa—was open to them.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Modern Muslims: A Sudan Memoir
By Steve Howard
About the Book
Steve Howard departed for the Sudan in the early 1980s as an American graduate student beginning a three-year journey in which he would join and live with the Republican Brotherhood, the Sufi Muslim group led by the visionary Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. Taha was a religious intellectual who participated in the early days of Sudan’s anticolonial struggle, but quickly turned his movement into a religious reform effort based on his radical reading of the Qur’an. He was executed in 1985 for apostasy.
Decades after returning to the life of an academic in the United States, Howard brings us this memoir of his time with the Republican Brotherhood, who advocated, among other things, equality for women. Modern Muslims describes Howard’s path to learning not only about Islam and Sufism but also about Sudan’s history and culture. When the Brotherhood was thrust into confrontation with Sudan’s then-president Jaafar Nimeiry, Howard had a front-line perspective on the difficult choices communities make as they try to reform and practice their faith freely.
As well as a story of personal transformation, the book offers an insider’s perspective on a modernist nonviolent Islamic movement that thrived and was brutally suppressed. An important book for our times, Modern Muslims yields significant insights for our understanding of modern Islam, African history, and contemporary geopolitics.
About the Author
Steve Howard is a professor of media studies and African studies and the director of the Ohio University Center for International Studies. A sociologist by training, he has studied and worked all over the African continent. He directed Ohio University’s African Studies Program for twenty-five years and has published several scholarly articles about the Republican Brotherhood Movement.
In the Media / Scholarly Praise for Modern Muslims
“There is much to learn in this memoir, especially given the normalization of extreme Islamophobia in the Western world. The answer to Islamic extremism does not lie in Western belligerence and fear, but within Islam itself. Howard reminds us all of the importance of re-centering these conversations within the communities of people who live this diverse and complex faith.” —Focus on the Horn
“It was amazing timing then for this insightful American-trained social scientist to observe a modernist nonviolent Islamic movement at the peak of its dynamic campaign. It is even more amazing timing now for this rigorous and incisive study of Islamic modernity to be available to scholars, students, and the public at large. This profound assessment of a fascinating expression of Islam as experienced by African Muslims can contribute to defusing the current global crisis of Islam and modernity. The book is also a pleasure to read.” —Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na‘im, author of What Is an American Muslim: Embracing Faith and Citizenship and translator of Mahmoud Mohammed Taha’s Second Message of Islam
“Steve Howard has produced an ethnography of a modern Muslim movement in the contemporary Sudan that is original, informative, and beautifully conceived. It is a unique (and uniquely informative), accessible, and moving journey of discovery that makes a major contribution to our understanding of Islam in the Sudan and in the contemporary world.” —Lidwien Kapteijns, professor of African and Middle Eastern history, Wellesley College
Steve Howard interviewed about Modern Muslims on WOUB's Studio B
Steve Howard interviewed on Talk of Iowa
Additional Information
October 2016
230 Pages
$26.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8214-2230-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8214-2231-1
Digital ISBN: 978-0-8214-4577-8
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
From Chapter 1, “Unity”
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha (1909–1985) was the founder, leader, and guide of the Republican Brotherhood movement. He is at the center of any description of the Republican Brotherhood, and he plays an important role in this one as well. But for me, as I tell my story from the rear guard of the movement, Taha is high on a pedestal, and I understood him best through the voices of the brothers and sisters in Sudan and in exile who invested their lives in trying to follow his guidance. They taught me about his training as an engineer in the 1930s and his membership in the Graduates Congress, the intellectual movement that led Sudan’s independence struggle. He started his own political party to participate in that effort, called the Republican Party, which he then transformed into an Islamic social reform movement in the early 1950s. He wrote and spoke in public about his vision for a modern and peaceful Muslim world, and attracted followers from all over Sudan who became his representatives in disseminating the message of the movement.
As I came to know the Republican movement I was quickly disabused of the idea that I, as a foreigner from the West, might have any privileges of position or representation. I internalized this message a few weeks into my joining the group while returning to Khartoum as a member of my first wafd, or “delegation,” to the northern city of Atbara. The Republicans took these missions all over Sudan to spread their message of the possibilities of a new direction in Islam and distribute their books on the subject. Our group of about eight brothers had spent ten days in Atbara, a city on the Nile about six hours north of Khartoum by slow-moving train. The Sudanese knew Atbara as the “city of fire and steel” in that it had been a railway terminus and an industrial center of sorts, dedicated to small-scale manufacturing. It remained a working-class city at the junction of the Nile and Atbara Rivers. Our return journey had been tough, riding while perched on our suitcases in a crowded third-class car, eating the dust that blew in from the open windows as the train crossed the August desert. When we reached the station in Khartoum North I anticipated the usual rush of Sudanese hospitality, a shower and a well-deserved hot meal to follow our arduous progress from Atbara. But to my surprise we were taken from the train station immediately to the home of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha in our sorry sweaty, dusty state. I tried unobtrusively to shake the dust that was caked in my hair as we sat in Ustadh Mahmoud’s saloon, the main room of the house, waiting to report on our trip. I wondered as I listened to the speakers if a grimy appearance was a required part of the Sufi ritual of this reporting session.
My next surprise was my position in the Atbara trip report lineup. Again, I thought that, as a guest, I would have been given an opportunity to speak early in the program. Of course, the leaders of the delegation spoke first, describing how many lectures were given in Atbara, how the crowd received us, how many Republican tracts were sold there, and importantly, how the brothers treated each other during the trip. But then Ustadh Mahmoud continued to call on members of the Atbara delegation to speak to the brothers and sisters assembled in his house to listen to us and our impressions. Again a surprise as some of those called upon were actually younger than I was, a graduate student from the United States! Finally, I figured it out. Brothers were called to speak in the order of their seniority in the movement, an order that was created by Ustadh Mahmoud’s sense of the individual’s capacity to understand, live, and model the Republican ideology, the path of the Prophet Mohamed. As for me, I was a weeks-old newcomer, mustajid, and was not ready to take an early place in the reporting line. But also I realized then that I was no longer considered as a guest.
The doctoral dissertation that finally made its way out of the Sociology Department at Michigan State University, “Social Strategies in Petty Production: Three Small-Scale Industries in Urban Sudan,” was what I had come to Sudan to research. While serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in neighboring Chad I came up with the idea that I would pursue academic African Studies when I returned home. Chad gave me an appreciation of the cultures of the Sahelian/Sudanic belt that crossed Africa from Senegal to Eritrea, and my Michigan State adviser recommended that I add an African language to my skills in planning a career as an African Studies professor. Arabic seemed like a good choice to go with the French-language skill I had developed in teaching high school in Chad, and Arabic combined with my interest in the Sahelian belt identified Sudan as a site for my dissertation research. I had also developed an interest in Sufism, an aspect of Islam often thought of as its mystical orientation, which further intensified the logic of going to Sudan. I considered Islam’s presence in Africa to be rooted in Sufi teachings and organizations, no matter how far African Islam may have strayed from those roots, and Sudan had a rich Sufi history. As I learned more Arabic and prepared to go to Sudan, I decided that once there I would become a Sufi, although at the time I was not actually sure what that might entail. My time teaching at a lycée in rural Chad had left me feeling that I wanted a deeper experience in Africa, and that Sufism could be its vehicle.
This young man had so many agendas as he set out for Sudan! But the luxuries of youth, of having that generous Fulbright-Hays dissertation grant, of wanting to savor an African experience and not being in any particular hurry, meant that I was not anxious about the ordering of those agendas. I did have some anxiety, however, about my lack of proficiency in spoken Arabic, despite two years of study as part of my graduate course work. In fact, the greatest stomach cramp I have ever had grabbed me as my plane circled Khartoum Airport at the end of 1981, ready to de- liver me into a land where I felt that I could not speak the language. And me with all those agendas.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya
By Karen Weitzberg
About the Book
Though often associated with foreigners and refugees, many Somalis have lived in Kenya for generations, in many cases since long before the founding of the country. Despite their long residency, foreign and state officials and Kenyan citizens often perceive the Somali population to be a dangerous and alien presence in the country, and charges of civil and human rights abuses have mounted against them in recent years.
In We Do Not Have Borders, Keren Weitzberg examines the historical factors that led to this state of affairs. In the process, she challenges many of the most fundamental analytical categories, such as “tribe,” “race,” and “nation,” that have traditionally shaped African historiography. Her interest in the ways in which Somali representations of the past and the present inform one another places her research at the intersection of the disciplines of history, political science, and anthropology.
Given tragic events in Kenya and the controversy surrounding al-Shabaab, We Do Not Have Borders has enormous historical and contemporary significance, and provides unique inroads into debates over globalization, African sovereignty, the resurgence of religion, and the multiple meanings of being African.
About the Author
Keren Weitzberg is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also affiliated with the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies.
In the Media / Scholarly Praise for We Do Not Have Borders
“From Weitzberg’s finely detailed discussion of several stages of the Somalis’ history in northern Kenya emerges the picture of a local mode of interaction across boundaries through kinship ties that have legitimacy and functionality of their own, notwithstanding the expectations and impositions of the different national governments…[i]t is a marvelous example of how historical research that combines archival material with fieldwork can shed light on contemporary events.” —H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online
“Particularly refreshing [is] how Weitzberg challenges scholarly conventions by using oral poetry to offer insights into how ‘rank-and-file nomadic people’ see and shape their identity as Somalis.…Her examination of Kenyan Somali identity urges us to reflect on what we think we know about citizenship and belonging more broadly. Her work is a much-needed contribution in this contemporary moment, when people in corridors of power are deciding who is a foreigner and who has rights to move freely in this world.” —Kim Yi Dionne, The Washington Post online
“[Weitzberg’s] insights into competing definitions of belonging in the region are significant, and push us to critically reflect on the complex relationships between people and territorial boundaries.…A thought-provoking call for scholars to complicate their understandings of the nation state, belonging, ethnicity, and mobility, and productively reimagines epistemological approaches to oral sources.” —Canadian Journal of African Studies
“[The] eye for a wider picture is a major strength of this book. However, perhaps its greatest strength is in the quality and sensitivity of its historiography…We Do Not Have Borders is a crucial book that demonstrates the central role of Somalis within Kenyan history, one that is highly relevant for contemporary debates on nations, borders, and belonging. I very much recommend it.” —African Studies Review
A 2017 Quartz Africa Book of the Year · Finalist, Melville J. Herskovits Prize
Additional Information
July 2017
288 pages
$32.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8214-2258-8
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8214-2259-5
Digital ISBN: 978-0-8214-4595-2
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
From the Introduction
There is a popular story in Wajir, a county in northern Kenya that was once part of the British colonial administrative region known as the Northern Frontier District (NFD) (see map 2.1). It describes the arrival of the first European to the area. According to this story, the people living in Wajir were very welcoming toward their new guest. When the European visitor asked for accommodations for the night, they provided him with an animal hide on which to sleep. Much to their dismay, his hosts awoke the next morning to find that he had sliced the animal skin into a long rope, which he had used to encircle an area that he claimed as his territory.
This evocative anecdote (which borrows tropes from oral narratives circulating in other parts of the Horn of Africa) depicts an item of hospitality trans- muted overnight into a symbol of state sovereignty and land tenure. As the story suggests, the legacy of colonial boundaries is the locus of much contention among the people of northern Kenya. In the late nineteenth century, the Ethiopian, British, and Italian governments divided Northeast Africa into five different territories: British Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, French Somaliland (Djibouti), Ethiopia, and Kenya. Over the subsequent decades, the Kenyan colonial officials attempted to further confine the populations of the NFD in an effort to impose their vision of order on the region. Fatima Jellow—a prominent resident of Wajir and wife of the NFD’s first senator— explained that when her father, a member of the Somali Degodia lineage, refused to move to the “homeland” designated for his clan, he was jailed by British colonial authorities. At various points over the last century, nomadic populations and their leaders have attempted to circumvent, redraw, or rethink the colonial borders that hindered their mobility and divided them from their kin and pasture. After World War II, Pan-Somali nationalist leaders advocated for unifying Somalis across Northeast Africa into a single nation-state. By the early 1960s, most of the nomadic inhabitants of Kenya’s borderlands (including many people who were not normally considered “Somali”) rallied around the idea of a Greater Somalia, which they hoped would dismantle the territorial borders that crisscrossed the arid north.
Alongside the largely nomadic population of the NFD, Kenya was also home to Somali-identifying people who had immigrated to the colony from coastal cities such as Berbera (in modern-day Somalia) and Aden (in modern-day Yemen) (see map 1.1). Like their nomadic kin, they shared a history of skirting colonial boundaries. Mustafa (Mohamed) Osman Hirsi, a third-generation Kenyan, described his community as a people who were “not about boundaries,” whose “umbilical cord was never cut.” His grand- father, an askari (soldier) in the Somaliland Camel Corps, had come to Kenya after serving in the colonial military. Like many Somali veterans, he identified as a member of the Isaaq clan. European settlers and British officials had recruited Isaaq men from cities and towns along the Gulf of Aden to serve as soldiers, porters, guides, and translators in East Africa. Under colonial rule, they had enjoyed many of the same privileges as South Asians living in Kenya, who had greater political rights and freedom of mobility than the vast majority of African subjects. Although born in Kenya, Hirsi had not lost touch with the land of his grandfather’s birth. Despite being dispersed throughout East Africa and other parts of the former British Empire, members of the Isaaq diaspora continued to maintain connections to Somaliland. Upon arriving in a new country, Hirsi explained, “we don’t unpack.”
Whether describing themselves as a people “without borders” or lament- ing the colonial frontiers that divided them from their kin and grazing land, many of the people I spoke to invoked the negative effects of boundaries on their lives. This pervasive theme ran across dozens of interviews I conducted with Kenyan Somalis of diverse class, geographic, and clan backgrounds in 2010 and 2011. Their shared frustration with borders provides a perfect lens through which to observe how the modern world is not, in fact, becoming increasingly “borderless” for many people. Their experiences also show that there are ways of imagining borderlessness that are distinct from neoliberal rationality, which envisions people as market actors operating in a world in which capital and goods flow freely across national boundaries. As their histories indicate, narratives of transnationalism must account for both integration and disconnection, as well as reckon with ways of life and forms of belonging that predate the nation-state. Territorial borders are neither disappearing nor remaining intact; rather, they continue to be fought over, reimagined, and reconfigured.
Understanding this fraught relationship with borders is also key to addressing one of the central questions posed in this book: How did Somalis come to be thought of as only questionably indigenous to Kenya? Unlike studies that have looked at the Somali refugee community and their struggles as stateless people in Kenya, this work concentrates on a minority group whom many consider to be not fully “native” to a country where they have lived for generations. Somali-identifying people dwelled in the area known today as Kenya long before it became a protectorate in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they face widespread perceptions that they do not belong within the country. For many decades, scholars blamed their predicaments on the arbitrary or artificial nature of colonial boundaries. Now frequently invoked by journalists and social scientists to explain virtually any ethnic conflict on the continent, this argument has become almost cliché. While it is certainly true that imperial powers imposed borders in the late nineteenth century with little regard for the nomadic people of the Horn of Africa, the concept of arbitrary borders does little to help us understand how ethnic territorialism came to be thought of as “natural” in the first place.
The idea that groups naturally belong to homelands to which they are “native” became an increasingly dominant political logic as countries the world over transitioned from colonialism to independence. Mahmood Mamdani has persuasively argued that the colonial state constructed the distinction between native and non-native, politicized indigenousness, and reinforced these divides through spatial segregation and bifurcated legal codes. This had ongoing ramifications in the postcolonial era, when the state redefined citizenship as a right of natives, rather than of non-natives and settlers. Yet Mamdani’s work (and much of the academic scholarship that followed in its wake) has been limited by the assumption that the colonial state imposed these categories from above and that African subjects readily internalized them. Instead, this book argues that older forms of cosmopolitanism, diaspora, and nomadic life came to coexist and compete with the modern territorial state.
The predicaments faced by generations of Somalis in Kenya (and their lack of a definitive status as an “indigenous” ethnic group) stand as an important challenge to the nativist, nationalist, and area studies frameworks that have long dominated the field of African studies. As Mamdani, Frederick Cooper, and Jemima Pierre have pointed out, Africanist scholars have tended to focus on the construction of national and subnational identities at the expense of regional and extraterritorial forms of social and political affiliation. The tendency to approach the continent in particularist terms has obscured the ways in which Africa has been historically integrated into the wider world. Historians have also marginalized the experiences of groups who did not fit into conventional nationalist and nativist histories, including those who actively benefited from the colonial racial order, supported rival nationalist, separatist, or irredentist movements, or identified as non-African or multiracial. This has had the effect of reifying racialized boundaries, including the distinction between the “African” and the “Arab” worlds. For many of these reasons, historians of Kenya have, until recently, neglected the history of the Kenyan Somali population.
Questioning methodological nationalism does not necessitate a wholesale rejection of the nation-state. Nor does recognizing the limitations of area studies entail a decentering of “Africa.” Such approaches do, however, call for a greater awareness of the importance of regional and global forms of solidarity in Africa, which went beyond the policed boundaries of empire and nation-state. Prior to European rule, Somali and other Cushitic speakers (as well as many people throughout the region) identified as members of Islamic, nomadic, and lineage communities that spanned Northeast Africa and Arabia. The rich cultural and material residue left by centuries of nomadic travel, spiritual interaction, and trade enabled Somalis and other related groups in Kenya to participate in collective lives that stretched across colonial borders and to survive periods of economic downturn and eco- logical degradation. In addition, collective histories and narratives about a past before the advent of immigration controls, border checks, and territorial boundaries have become fertile ground and rich symbolic terrain for envisioning new futures. Kenyan Somali political thinkers have creatively rethought citizenship by engaging both with models derived from Europe and with ideas of community that evolved out of the diverse worlds of Northeast Africa and the Western Indian Ocean. Since the early colonial period, people in the region have challenged dominant definitions of indigenousness and imagined supraterritorial alternatives to the Kenyan state. In the early 1960s, many Kenyan Somalis aligned around a rival form of pan-nationalism, which undermined the hegemony and exclusivity of the Kenyan nation-state. Today, they participate in transnational networks that do not always adhere to the demographic, territorial, and secular logics of the state.
These supraterritorial, pan-national, and transnational affiliations cast doubt on the notion that ethnicity is the overriding political logic in many parts of Africa, thus challenging the ethnic paradigm that has long dominated Kenyan scholarship. In the 1980s, Africanist scholars such as John Iliffe, Leroy Vail, and Terence Ranger argued that ethnic identities were neither timeless nor primordial, but rather inventions constructed by missionaries, colonial officials, and African elites. In the 1990s, Kenyan historians such as John Lonsdale, Thomas Spear, and Richard Waller took the study of ethnogenesis in more nuanced directions by revealing the limits of colonial invention, the importance of precolonial institutions, and the internal moral debates around which ethnic communities constituted themselves. More recently, East Africanists such as Laura Fair, Gabrielle Lynch, and Myles Osborne have expanded our understanding of the gendered, generational, and class-ridden processes that led to ethnic invention. While this body of literature has greatly advanced our understanding of ethnic formation (and provided an important corrective to the racist essentialism of colonial-era ethnography), it has also occluded other kinds of political imagination. Moreover, while ethnicity has taken on political primacy of late, it is important to avoid the teleology that sees such an outcome as inevitable.
Rather than a study of a “people,” this book analyzes Somaliness as a category and mode of thought, which has changed across time and place. At the risk of overemphasizing the importance of group belonging among Africans, such an approach provides an alternative to the scholarly focus on ethnonationalism. Examining how Kenyan Somalis imagined borderlessness from a position of marginality within the nation-state, We Do Not Have Borders offers new inroads into debates over African sovereignty, the “failed state,” the “resurgence” of religion, and the meanings of being African. Drawing upon archival research and oral histories, it also analyzes how Somali and northern Kenyan political thinkers developed an oppositional politics that, at times, troubled the territorial, demographic, and secular politics of the state.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania
By Laura Fair
About the Book
Reel Pleasures brings the world of African moviehouses and the publics they engendered to life, revealing how local fans creatively reworked global media—from Indian melodrama to Italian westerns, kung fu, and blaxploitation films—to speak to local dreams and desires. In it, Laura Fair zeroes in on Tanzanians’ extraordinarily dynamic media cultures to demonstrate how the public and private worlds of film reception brought communities together and contributed to the construction of genders, generations, and urban citizenship over time. Through copious interviews, Laura Fair recounts the experiences of Tanzanian audiences who flocked to the cinema in greater numbers than anywhere else in East Africa and what it was they loved about the films they saw. She tracks the business of cinema for the entrepreneurs who ran them and how film screenings differed dramatically across the nation.
Radically reframing the literatures on media exhibition, distribution, and reception, Reel Pleasures demonstrates how local entrepreneurs and fans worked together to forge the most successful cinema industry in colonial sub-Saharan Africa. The result is a major contribution to the literature on transnational commodity cultures.
About the Author
Laura Fair is the author of Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 and Historia ya Jamii ya Zanzibar na Nyimbo za Siti binti Saad. She teaches at Michigan State University.
In the Media / Scholarly Praise for Reel Pleasures
“Fair’s superb social history of cinema in Tanzania is rich with keen insights into urban life in East Africa throughout the twentieth century.…[Her] impressive versatility means she is equally at ease discussing midcentury international film distribution networks as she is explaining the local appeal of obscure Indian movies.” —Foreign Affairs
“Fair masterfully integrates the diverse and complicated elements that define a comprehensive examination of film: economic and business history, political history, and the histories of social change, media, and popular culture. A landmark work in both history and film studies.” —Charles Ambler, author of Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism
“Tanzania had more cinemas and a more cosmopolitan cinematic experience than the whole of French West Africa. With a long urban culture exposed to influences from across the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, its people saw Indian, Egyptian and western films that cut across racial and gender divides from as early as the 1920s. Laura Fair’s new book is a fascinating and perceptive study of urban popular culture in Tanzania.” —Abdul Sheriff, author of Dhow Cultures and the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce, and Islam
“Through copious interviews, Laura Fair recounts the experiences of Tanzanian audiences who flocked to the cinema in greater numbers than anywhere else in East Africa and what it was they loved about the films they saw. She tracks the business of cinema for the entrepreneurs who ran them and how film screenings differed dramatically across the nation. The result is that Reel Pleasures is one of the most comprehensive accounts of the history of cinema we have in African studies.” —Brian Larkin, author of Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria
Additional Information
January 2018
472 pages
$34.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8214-2285-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8214-2286-1
Digital ISBN: 978-0-8214-4611-9
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
From the introduction
For generations, going to the movies was the most popular form of leisure in cities across Tanzania. On Sundays in particular, thousands of people filled the streets from late afternoon until well past midnight, coming and going from seeing the week’s hot new release. Films from every corner of the globe were shown during the week, but on Sundays, it was always Indian films that stole the show, serving as the focus of these large public gatherings in city centers across the land. In the final hours before a screening, the scene outside the ticket windows could became crazy, as crowds of patrons jostled in desperate attempts to secure the last remaining seats. The meek and gentle often hired agile youth to fight to the front of the line on their behalf, and many later reminisced about the strategies these young men employed to score tickets in the face of such crowds: slinking along walls, crawling between legs, or forming human pyramids capable of catapulting companions to the front. In Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, two towns with particularly avid fans, demand was so intense that a vibrant black market in cinema tickets burgeoned. At its peak, Dar es Salaam’s population sustained nine different cinemas with a Sunday capacity for nearly sixteen thousand fans, yet inevitably, some were turned away. From the early 1950s through the 1980s, black market tickets for films starring popular actors easily sold for two to three times the ticket window price in the final hours before the show. To avoid the unfortunate fates of those who waited until the last minute to secure a ticket, most people booked their seats well in advance. In towns across the country, many individuals and families even had reserved seats at a favorite theater, which they occupied each Sunday, week in and week out, for years on end. Going to the movies was a central preoccupation for millions and a significant way in which people enjoyed and gave meaning to their lives.
Films became the cornerstone of urban conversations as friends, neighbors, and complete strangers debated the meaning and artistic style of what they had seen on screen. On a continent where literacy was always the preserve of an elite few, films provided a narrative spark that lit debates that quickly engulfed a town. Audiences were never passive. Their active engagement with onscreen texts began inside the theater itself, where youth in the front rows frequently talked back to characters, sang and danced along with lovers in the film, and delivered punches and karate kicks to villains on the screen. Older members of the audience were typically far more reserved, saving their energy for the animated analysis that erupted during intermission and continued to escalate after the show let out. The skills of various actors and actresses were rated, the social worth and deeper meaning of their characters debated. For days, weeks, and sometimes months after a premier, people talked about the message of a film and its implications for their own lives. Generational tensions, the meanings of modernity, class exploitation, political corruption, dance and fashion styles, and the nature of romantic love were just a few of the topics films raised that people avidly analyzed and discussed. As Birgit Meyer has poignantly argued, films become hits because they give form to socially pervasive thoughts, dreams, and nightmares. Movies, she asserts, “make things public”—visible, visceral, material, and thus available for tangible public debate. On street corners and shop stoops in Tanzania and in living rooms and workplaces, people engaged both global media and each other as they sifted and sorted, weighed and deciphered, and determined what they did and did not like about the places, the people, and the styles they encountered on the screen. Whether you went to the movies or not, said many, there was no escaping these discussions. For much of the twentieth century, films were the talk of the town in Tanzania.
From the early 1900s, when the display of moving pictures first became a regular feature of urban nightlife in Zanzibar, local businessmen struggled hard to meet audience demand. Not only were they often pressed to accommodate more fans than their venues could hold, they also had to work hard to build dynamic regional and transnational networks of film supply to secure and maintain the enthusiasm of local audiences. A steady crowd could never be taken for granted; it had to be consciously and continuously fashioned. The men who pioneered and built the cinema industry were typically avid film fans themselves as well as knowledgeable entrepreneurs. They kept abreast of the latest global developments in the art, craft, and industry of film and exhibition, and they committed themselves to providing products and services that resonated with local aesthetic demands. the east Africans who ran exhibition and distribution had to keep their fingers on both the local and the global cinematic pulses simultaneously. Building on precolonial trade links spanning the Indian and Atlantic worlds, Zanzibari entrepreneurs in the twentieth century developed networks of global film supply reaching to India, Egypt, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, and the United States. As a result of their efforts, Tanzanians enjoyed access to a far more diverse range of global media products than most audiences anywhere else in the world. Although Indian films were perennial favorites, each generation had different genres and national film styles that caught its fancy. During the colonial era—particularly along the coast—Egyptian musicals were nearly as popular as their Indian counter parts. Elvis, kung fu, and blaxploitation films were favorites of the young, postcolonial generation. Cowboys, from the American Alan Ladd in the 1940s and 1950s to the Italian Giuliano Gemma in the 1960s and 1970s, consistently drew a sizable young, male crowd. Globalization may have emerged in the late twentieth century as a new buzzword in academia, but the transnational movement of goods, ideas, and technologies has long been part of east Africans’ mental and material worlds. And in the case of celluloid, it was Tanzanians who were driving and directing these flows.
This book interweaves the local, national, and transnational. Some chapters offer closeups illustrating the richly textured experiences of specific audiences and how they reworked particular films to give them meaning in individual and communal lives. Other chapters take a broader view, exploring how audience experiences varied across sociological categories, space, and time. and then there are the panoramic views that situate Tanzania within the context of twentieth-century transnational media flows and global cosmopolitan connections. Often, these local, regional, and global entanglements are brought together in a single chapter to highlight their interconnections. In other instances, such relationships are best revealed through paired chapters, one of which is more ethnographic or temporally and spatially focused, whereas the other tracks change over time. Audiences and entrepreneurs are the central characters in the story. Throughout, cinematic leisure and the political economy are viewed as two sides of the same coin; business and pleasure are intertwined. The changing social, cultural, and political context of exhibition and moviegoing is examined from the early colonial period through the socialist and neoliberal eras, demonstrating the importance of historical and political-economic context for understanding cultural consumption, leisure practices, and the relationship between media and audiences.
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