Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute (ZIORI)

Major Areas of Research

The Institute has identified three inter-related areas of social research:

I. Maritime Cultures & Globalisation in the Indian Ocean

Braudel introduced an important concept of the longue duree to understand the truly great movements (and not moments) of history, focused on the dialectical relationship between human beings and their environment. For more than fifteen centuries before the coming of the Europeans, processes of economic and socio-cultural interaction in the Indian Ocean were not hampered by monopolistic continental or seaborne empires, and even after their intervention, some of these processes continued to operate under their radar screen, with long-term consequences. The inhabitants could thus share in the biodiversity of the world to obtain new plants and animals, exchange complementary commodities, and create larger social and cultural unities centred on the ocean.

The sea has played a vibrant role in the life and psyche of coastal peoples around the rim of the Indian Ocean, and has given rise to a maritime ethos and disposition, a distinctive maritime culture which differs fundamentally from a continental one. For more than 2000 years the wooden sailing vessel, the dhow, has been the principal vehicle linking many regions around the western Indian Ocean, not only commercially, but also socially and culturally. As it has been said, of all things, the ship is the most cosmopolitan.

While commerce was generally the primary motive, its influence extended to the social and cultural arenas. Commerce necessarily demands exchange of goods among peoples of different ecologies, regardless of racial, religious or cultural differences, and calls for continuous expansion of inter-community relations between the ‘native’ and the ‘foreigner.’ They exchanged not only goods but also ideas, and they engaged in intimate social relations that were not confined to the market place, but often extended to the bed. From the earliest times there is evidence of intense interaction and intermarriage, and some settled down, gradually becoming indigenised.

Mercantile communities are therefore necessarily open societies, cosmopolitan, and thriving on diversity. While this does not lead automatically to a harmonious blend - particularly during the sad chapter of slavery and the slave trade, which became a base for social disharmony - it was nevertheless remarkably tolerant towards other religions and cultures.

The ‘dhow culture’ represents an earlier phase of global interaction, but one that was of a fundamentally different type from the modern globalisation. Indian Ocean was largely an arena of free trade. None of the major states in the continental heartlands around the Indian Ocean played an important role in maritime affairs. Maritime trade was instead cultivated by a string of small port/city states that depended predominantly on it for their livelihood and prosperity, and developed distinctive mercantile cultures that often attained high levels of development and civilisation. They were threaded together by trans-oceanic exchange of goods, culture and ideas. Often they had more in common with other ports across the ocean than with their individual hinterlands. The heroes of Indian Ocean trade were places like Kilwa and Mombasa on the East African coast, Aden and Hormuz at the mouths of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, Calicut on the Malabar coast, and Malacca at the Straits of Malacca.

It was left to the Portuguese and their European successors to set up a series of seaborne empires whose initial objective was to monopolise the spice trade, and ended up imposing colonial empires. However, despite colonial impositions and modern-day neo-liberal world hegemony, some of the elements of the old Indian Ocean world - such as what has been called the ‘bazaar nexus’ and cultural intermingling across the Indian Ocean, continue to persist. It is a very broad field of scholarly investigation that has great relevance to the current debate on globalisation, and the dialectics of differing conceptions of ‘clash’ or ‘dialogue of civilisations.’

II. Migrations & Formation of New Societies in the Indian Ocean: free movement, slave trade, & indentured labour.

Movements and migrations of people across the Indian Ocean have been part of the reality throughout history. Modern genetic research is investigating migration of early human beings from their African cradle to populate the whole world. The movement of people from the Indonesian archipelago in the opposite direction to occupy Madagascar, and intermingle there with those coming from the African continent within the past millennium, is still a historical enigma.

However, while occasionally there have been short spurts of more concerted migration of larger numbers, quite often this has been an unorganised gradual seepage by individuals as traders, sailors, scholars and settlers, which has been going on for thousands of years. Indians in Africa and Malaysia moved as traders in the pre-colonial period, and were transported as ‘coolies’ during the colonial period. Hadhramis, escaping from the perennial droughts in their desert homeland, played a critical role in trade and religion, with a wide network all over the Indian Ocean from the Comoros to Indonesia for centuries. While they often nostalgically looked back to their homelands as pure if poor, they made their new homes in places like Java which they considered paradise in comparison. These migrations have led to different consequences for host societies as well as for the migrants. It is these social processes of migration and assimilation in their specificity that are the most interesting historical and social questions needing investigation without imposing on them inappropriate paradigms.

One of the concepts that has been widely used to refer to migrated populations who crossed borders and exist under different circumstances has been the diaspora, a term that is overloaded with connotations of traumatic dispersal, collective memory of an idealised homeland, a strong ethnic consciousness, troubled relations with the host community, a return movement, etc. It is a carry-over from the Jewish experience, and more recently from the Atlantic slave experience. However, in the Indian Ocean, people of African origin may have moved to India and the Persian Gulf as free people as well as slaves, and Asians were moved to Africa and South East Asia as slaves or moved as traders or indentured labourers.

The concept of the diaspora is preoccupied with ‘roots’ rather than ‘routes’, and carries the danger of essentialising ‘origins’, associating these communities with a place, a culture, a race and an identity as frozen categories, and ignoring the social processes of migration, adaptation and assimilation that are the historical experiences in the Indian Ocean. In recent years it has become popular to ‘discover’ people of African origin all over the Indian Ocean by focusing on their phenotype and their ‘African’ music and dance, often based on an assumption that most of them must have been taken as slaves, which may do injustice to the rich variety of their histories and experiences.

Even when considering the sad chapter of slavery and slave trade in the Indian Ocean, it is important not to impose the Atlantic paradigm. Unlike the Atlantic system that evolved at the ‘rosy dawn’ of capitalism, and carried certain specific features of that mode of production, slavery and the slave trade extended over a much longer period in the Indian Ocean, but it was intermittent. It therefore developed under different circumstances, social systems, and modes of production. While the slave trade from Africa to other countries around the Indian Ocean is familiar, though not always concretely understood, the huge internal slave trade within India or the Indonesian archipelago has rarely received any attention, and the export of ‘Malay’ slaves to Cape Town by the Dutch, or of Baluchi slaves to the Persian Gulf, are still mere footnotes at best. The phenomenon was much more complex in the Indian Ocean, and the social composition of the slaves, and the processes of social interaction and assimilation provide an enlightening contrast to the Atlantic paradigm.

The two experiences in the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean come closer together in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery during the colonial period when slaves were replaced by indentured ‘coolie’ labour from the more populous countries in Asia, especially India and China. In many cases it has transformed the social and cultural landscape of such regions as Natal, Kenya, Mauritius and Fiji, as much as Trinidad and Guiana in the Caribbean. With the growing awareness and assertion of identity, greater emphasis has been placed on the social and cultural history of these communities, not focusing merely on their ‘origins’, but on local interactions and assimilation, and creation of new communities that are quintessentially maritime Indian Ocean.

III. Swahili Civilisation & Politics of City-States & Marginalisation

A serious debate has been going on over the past three decades on the nature of the East African coastal society: was it primarily an oriental transplant or purely African? For a littoral society at the confluence between Africa and the Indian Ocean, both protagonists have been misguided by focusing on one and ignoring the other. As Professor Abdalla Bujra has argued, both have erred by focusing on the racial origins of a major culture and society rather than on the basic nature and historical role of that society. It is indeed a pristine example of a composite society born of a social and cultural dialogue between a continental and an oceanic environment.

Bujra has proposed a rethinking in a more holistic way, taking into consideration the strategic position the Swahili occupy between the African continent and the Indian Ocean. The land provided the habitat in which the Swahili economy and society developed, including local agricultural and industrial production as well as exchange with the hinterland. It also provided the basic stock of population and the prevalent Bantu language. But the sea also played an active role in the life of the coastal people, producing not only sea-foods for subsistence, but also articles for local and oceanic exchange. It has given rise to a distinctive maritime culture. As Middleton says, the Swahili use the sea as though it was a network of roads, and it is divided into territories owned by families and protected by spirits just like stretches of land. The sea enters their everyday life at every step, and even into their proverbs, prose and poetry.

One distinguishing characteristic of the Swahili is their religion, Islam. The Swahili coast has been part of the Islamic world from at least the eighth century. The process of exchange, social interaction and cultural inter-penetration that began there had a ripple effect across the vast Indian Ocean, bringing Islam from Arabia and the Persian Gulf to the Swahili coast, and from there it spread deep into continental Africa, carrying the Swahili language and culture as far eastern Congo. However, as in the case of other aspects of culture, it was not an adoption of a whole system of beliefs, but rather as a syncretic assimilation of local belief systems in Islam. The result is a fusion in life. Religious life rests on a double foundation, a Bantu under-layer and an Islamic superstructure. African religious beliefs and institutions continued alongside features of the new religion. Islam permeates every aspect of the Swahili society despite the variation in the Islamic/traditional beliefs mix between different sections of the society.

The interaction between land and sea gave rise to a polyglot and poly-ethnic society, and the culture that developed over several millennia based on intercourse between Africa and the lands across the Indian Ocean has been distinctly cosmopolitan, immersed in dense webs of production and exchange, ethnicity, kinship, and residence, with influences on material culture, social institutions, belief systems, language and literature. Middleton views Swahili society as a middleman society composed of commercial and cultural brokers who mediated between the commercial world of the sea and the productive one of the hinterland. A history of cross-cultural interaction, trade and intermarriage with other littoral peoples all around the rim of the Indian Ocean leads the Swahili peoples to situate their identity in the context of wider global exchanges. Spear concludes: ‘we now see Swahili towns not as exclusive foreign transplants nor as solely local development, but as dynamic cultural and commercial entrepots in an Indian Ocean world stretching from East Africa to Malaysia.’

The Swahili civilisation reached a high level of cultural development and economic prosperity as shown by the ruins at Kilwa and elsewhere on the Swahili coast. However, the politically acephalous Swahili city-states were ill-prepared to face the Portuguese onslaught from the sixteenth century when the Europeans began to impose trade monopolies and political hegemony. Unable to overthrow the Portuguese yoke, the Swahili had to turn to their maritime Omani neighbours for assistance, but they in turn eventually set up a commercial empire that for the first time politically united the Swahili coast from southern Somalia to the southern end of the Tanzanian coast, though now under Omani rule.

With expanding commercial opportunities in the 19th century and a common religion, the Swahili were able to participate in that prosperity. However, with the Partition of Africa and of the Zanzibari Commercial Empire, and the simultaneous penetration of Christian missions into Eastern Africa, the tables were turned against the coastal Muslims by pockets of economic prosperity and modern religious and secular education in the interior. The coast was bypassed by new colonial production and education. It is a crisis of marginalisation that simmers under the surface, and occasionally erupts as Muslim protests.

The confluence between cultures along the Swahili coast had left a potential cleavage between the continental and oceanic faces of the Swahili culture. Coupled with a history of slavery and colonialism, the society sometimes came apart at the seams. Economic hardships and socio-political tensions came to a head in the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution which sought to tear asunder centuries of miscegenation and cultural assimilation, asserting African identity while trying to erase the other side of the Swahili coin. Links with the hinterland have been strengthened, in the case of Zanzibar with the formation of the Tanzanian Union, and in East Africa as a whole by the political and economic domination by the interior over the coastal belt, now under the overall hegemony of the neo-liberal globalisation agenda. However, it still has to be seen whether millennia of cultural interaction between the littoral people of the Swahili corridor from Mogadishu to Sofala, and their counterparts in the hinterland on the one hand and around the rim of the Indian Ocean on the other, and the distinctive civilization and language that have been engendered, will still stand the test of time, as it has done for centuries past. The Swahili language continues to make giant strides as a lingua franca, and now as national languages, over a large part of eastern Africa.