Zanzibar Was a Country: Exile and Citizenship between East Africa and the Gulf

by Nathaniel Mathews

Zanzibar Was a Country traces the history of a Swahili-speaking Arab diaspora from East Africa to Oman. In Oman today, whole communities in Muscat speak Swahili, have recent East African roots, and practice forms of sociality associated with the urban culture of the Swahili coast. These "Omani Zanzibaris" offer the most significant contemporary example in the Gulf, as well as in the wider Indian Ocean region, of an Afro-Arab community that maintains a living connection to Africa in a diasporic setting. While they come from all over East Africa, a large number are postrevolution exiles and emigrés from Zanzibar. Their stories provide a framework for the broader transregional entanglements of decolonization in Africa and the Arabian Gulf. Using both vernacular historiography and life histories of men and women from the community, Nathaniel Mathews argues that the traumatic memories of the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 are important to nation-building on both sides of the Indian Ocean.

358 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 9, 2024

Reviews

[History Today]

In January 1964 the Zanzibar Revolution saw the brutal ethnic cleansing of the island’s Arab population by militant followers of a Ugandan activist. Having originally built their wealth on slaveholding, the Arabs found themselves in a desperate position when British rule ended the previous December. Drawing on Arabic and Swahili memoirs by exiled survivors, Nathaniel Mathews’ Zanzibar Was a Country: Exile and Citizenship Between East Africa and the Gulf (University of California Press) explores the legacies of dispossession and expulsion that were the companions of decolonisation. This is courageous, morally complex history – and superb scholarship.

Read History Today’s Books of the Year 2024 at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Nile Green is Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA and author of (W.W. Norton)

[Jouja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book, but poor editing - repetition verbatim in some chapters.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.8