Because of all
the political unrest on Zanzibar this past week, I think I’ve been feeling a
kind of unrest within me too. I’m not
immune to the tenor of the times, to the voices mumbling and grumbling lowly as
pass through the city’s alleys. The
source of most of this discontent is Zanzibar’s official unity with mainland
Tanzania, a unity established in 1964 – most locals think Zanzibar should be an
autonomous island nation in charge of its own legislation, policies and
taxation. In recent months, this
secessionist crusade has been framed as an essentially Muslim initiative, and I
think appropriately so. Because, at its
root, the push for legal/national independence is an assertion of identity – or
of difference in identity.
I think one of the most basic human impulses is to resist absorption into a larger entity or organization whose identity is at odds with your own. I remember when I first started school at Harvard, I felt completely paranoid about how antithetical the typical (or at least assumed) “Harvard persona” was to my own – I felt a huge and enduring anxiety about how to reconcile the two realities (the fact that A. I was technically a Harvard student, while B. I didn’t feel I displayed [or at least, I didn’t want to display] many of the personality qualities ascribed to the average Harvard kid: ambitious, competitive, self-absorbed, elitist, anxious, over-achieving, condescending, perfectionist, rich, money-oriented, and the list goes on). It was an anxiety, or a kind of chronic identity dissonance, that stayed with me until graduation day and beyond, and is only subsiding now that my status as “a Harvard kid” is a past, not a present, reality, and thus doesn’t constantly demand to be reconciled with “who I am now.”
Anyway, to get back to Zanzibar, one important fact to know is that the island’s population is 99% Muslim. While Dar es Salaam’s population is pretty Muslim too (I’m guessing around three-quarters), the bulk of mainland Tanzania is a patchwork quilt of religion, and if you made a pie-graph of all the religions represented, Pentecostal Christianity would probably get the biggest slice. In the most rural parts of the country, animism or spirit-worship might still hold sway, but a huge chunk of inland Tanzanian life is intensely Christianized, with whole communities revolving around choir competitions, baptisms, and month-long Christmas festivities at church. Basically, what this boils down to is a Zanzibari population that doesn’t feel an especial affinity to the mainland, though they share the same laws, privileges, and – perhaps most provokingly? – the same identity on the world stage (the United Republic of Tanzania).
I guess, for anyone who's never been to Zanzibar, this "issue" of identity-dissonance might seem a little abstract or over-thought… a product of Shani’s imagination & too many anthropology classes. That would be a false conclusion. If you’ve been to Zanzibar, it’s clear within minutes of arrival how thoroughly Islam has saturated and determined the island’s culture – aesthetically, relationally, practically – down to the tiniest details of daily life. I’ll save longer descriptions for another post, but there are very few elements of life that go untouched by religion in Zanzibar.
If you're a man, you probably won’t see a woman’s face during your time on the island (much less her shoulder, ankle, etc) unless she’s a visitor, a prostitute, or if you happen to catch her unprepared to meet you, i.e. eating dinner with her veil partially off. You'll see men enjoying public spaces -- sprawling, chatting, fully-dressed or not, and otherwise enjoying normal freedoms. You'll see women scurrying from doorway to doorway -- or more accurately, you won’t really see them at all, since they tend to stay indoors and out of sight. You will not find the tiniest smidgen of pork (or ham, bacon, sausage etc) on the island (I actually have not been on the lookout for pork, due to my recent but thorough conversion to vegetarianism, but my European-friends-cum-Zanzibar-residents often moan in longing as they discuss the fortunes they would trade for a single slice of bacon). You will hear the call to prayer five times a day, and if, like me, you live next-door to one of the island’s scores of mosques, you will wake up at 5:00 every morning to the wails and warbles of the first call, and amiably yawn in the still-dark to salats you cannot understand – sounds of a culture still outside you or beyond you, but insistently touching you on all sides, hemming you in.
Basically, for a city that's so patently and intensely Muslim, being labeled by the world community as a mere add-on to fairly-Christian mainland Tanzania probably feels insulting, a de-legitimization of identity. I think the issue must be worsened by Zanzibar’s island-status – to be bordered on all sides by ocean, and yet to be beholden to a land you cannot even see, are in no way physically connected-to. And a land (I’m sorry to say) that is siphoning off a lot of Zanzibar’s tourism revenue through an unfair redistribution scheme designed to benefit the less fortunate swathes of Tanzania that don’t attract extravagant wazungu. There are many reasons why Zanzibar wants to be (and maybe should be) separate from Tanzania, but I don’t think it’s an error to consider the movement a primarily religious one. Because religious identity in Zanzibar is encased within geo-national identity like the thin and barely-separable layers of a jawbreaker, bleeding into each other, showing through in the thinnest and most transparent parts. And if there’s anything that will provoke people into violent insurrection, it’s an identity war.
*title borrowed from one of my favorite-eva Pete Tosh tunez!
I think one of the most basic human impulses is to resist absorption into a larger entity or organization whose identity is at odds with your own. I remember when I first started school at Harvard, I felt completely paranoid about how antithetical the typical (or at least assumed) “Harvard persona” was to my own – I felt a huge and enduring anxiety about how to reconcile the two realities (the fact that A. I was technically a Harvard student, while B. I didn’t feel I displayed [or at least, I didn’t want to display] many of the personality qualities ascribed to the average Harvard kid: ambitious, competitive, self-absorbed, elitist, anxious, over-achieving, condescending, perfectionist, rich, money-oriented, and the list goes on). It was an anxiety, or a kind of chronic identity dissonance, that stayed with me until graduation day and beyond, and is only subsiding now that my status as “a Harvard kid” is a past, not a present, reality, and thus doesn’t constantly demand to be reconciled with “who I am now.”
Anyway, to get back to Zanzibar, one important fact to know is that the island’s population is 99% Muslim. While Dar es Salaam’s population is pretty Muslim too (I’m guessing around three-quarters), the bulk of mainland Tanzania is a patchwork quilt of religion, and if you made a pie-graph of all the religions represented, Pentecostal Christianity would probably get the biggest slice. In the most rural parts of the country, animism or spirit-worship might still hold sway, but a huge chunk of inland Tanzanian life is intensely Christianized, with whole communities revolving around choir competitions, baptisms, and month-long Christmas festivities at church. Basically, what this boils down to is a Zanzibari population that doesn’t feel an especial affinity to the mainland, though they share the same laws, privileges, and – perhaps most provokingly? – the same identity on the world stage (the United Republic of Tanzania).
I guess, for anyone who's never been to Zanzibar, this "issue" of identity-dissonance might seem a little abstract or over-thought… a product of Shani’s imagination & too many anthropology classes. That would be a false conclusion. If you’ve been to Zanzibar, it’s clear within minutes of arrival how thoroughly Islam has saturated and determined the island’s culture – aesthetically, relationally, practically – down to the tiniest details of daily life. I’ll save longer descriptions for another post, but there are very few elements of life that go untouched by religion in Zanzibar.
If you're a man, you probably won’t see a woman’s face during your time on the island (much less her shoulder, ankle, etc) unless she’s a visitor, a prostitute, or if you happen to catch her unprepared to meet you, i.e. eating dinner with her veil partially off. You'll see men enjoying public spaces -- sprawling, chatting, fully-dressed or not, and otherwise enjoying normal freedoms. You'll see women scurrying from doorway to doorway -- or more accurately, you won’t really see them at all, since they tend to stay indoors and out of sight. You will not find the tiniest smidgen of pork (or ham, bacon, sausage etc) on the island (I actually have not been on the lookout for pork, due to my recent but thorough conversion to vegetarianism, but my European-friends-cum-Zanzibar-residents often moan in longing as they discuss the fortunes they would trade for a single slice of bacon). You will hear the call to prayer five times a day, and if, like me, you live next-door to one of the island’s scores of mosques, you will wake up at 5:00 every morning to the wails and warbles of the first call, and amiably yawn in the still-dark to salats you cannot understand – sounds of a culture still outside you or beyond you, but insistently touching you on all sides, hemming you in.
Basically, for a city that's so patently and intensely Muslim, being labeled by the world community as a mere add-on to fairly-Christian mainland Tanzania probably feels insulting, a de-legitimization of identity. I think the issue must be worsened by Zanzibar’s island-status – to be bordered on all sides by ocean, and yet to be beholden to a land you cannot even see, are in no way physically connected-to. And a land (I’m sorry to say) that is siphoning off a lot of Zanzibar’s tourism revenue through an unfair redistribution scheme designed to benefit the less fortunate swathes of Tanzania that don’t attract extravagant wazungu. There are many reasons why Zanzibar wants to be (and maybe should be) separate from Tanzania, but I don’t think it’s an error to consider the movement a primarily religious one. Because religious identity in Zanzibar is encased within geo-national identity like the thin and barely-separable layers of a jawbreaker, bleeding into each other, showing through in the thinnest and most transparent parts. And if there’s anything that will provoke people into violent insurrection, it’s an identity war.
*title borrowed from one of my favorite-eva Pete Tosh tunez!
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