War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar

4 Subaltern Intellectuals and the Rise of Racial Nationalism

4 Subaltern Intellectuals and the Rise of Racial Nationalism Instructing a nation is the same as civilizing it. . . . Ignorance is the lot of the slave and the savage. —Denis Diderot When the fool becomes enlightened, the wise man is in trouble. —Swahili proverb The uses the subalterns made of the intelligentsia’s high-­minded teachings were not what the latter expected. So long as nation-­building was understood as an act of uplift, the intelligentsia, as exemplars of all that was most enlightened and civilized, could expect to remain in control of the process. Like nationalists everywhere, they also understood nation-­building as an exercise in uncovering histories and other truths previously hidden, a task that seemed tailor-­made for them, the islands’ leading educators.1 But creating a nation is not an act of discovery. It is, rather, an exercise of the imagination, and by inviting ordinary Zanzibaris to participate, the intelligentsia invited them to exercise their own. As in the proverb about the wise man and the fool, the outcome augured trouble. By the end of the war the thinking of subaltern nationalists had begun to diverge significantly from that of the nationalist intelligentsia. Spokesmen for the latter, building on themes many had first explored in essays written for Mazungumzo ya Walimu, voiced a belief in a multiracial nation in which all ethnic and racial divisions would be subsumed by an overarching loyalty to the sultan and the ancient values of civilization he supposedly represented. Subaltern intellectuals, in contrast, argued that issues of national belonging should be 106 / War of Words reckoned through a strict calculus of racial descent. God and nature had fashioned humankind into irreducibly separate races and nations, they reasoned. Therefore to try to mix or combine them, as the elite nationalists wanted, was an act of folly and even blasphemy. A contributor to Afrika Kwetu, the weekly paper of the African Association, posed the question pithily in 1952. Inspired perhaps by the Bible, he asked: “Who can straighten out mankind, whom God has made a hunchback?”2 Yet despite these dramatic differences, the two visions had much in common . Although the subalterns’ political imagination had been shaped by a variety of intellectual currents—among them pan-­Africanism, European abolitionism , the colonial rhetoric of “development,” and home-­grown ideas arising from their daily experiences as labor migrants, squatters, and the urban poor— their racial propaganda nevertheless drew on the same narratives of history and civilization that the intelligentsia had taught them. More fundamentally, the intelligentsia had been largely responsible for introducing the subalterns to the very idea of nationalism. (Indeed, some of the ASP’s leading activists had served political apprenticeships under Arab Association nationalists.)3 And in that respect, both sides were equally engaged in trying to straighten out hunch­ backed humanity. Central to all national projects are efforts to sort out the muddle of multiple and overlapping identities and supplant them with categories whose boundaries are hard and clear. In Zanzibar the rival nationalists differed mainly over what criteria should be privileged when redrawing those boundaries—civilization or race. Both nationalist visions, that is, were exclusionary. But the intelligentsia’s vision looked more supple and embracing—at least at first. More attuned than their subaltern rivals to international trends critical of overt racial politics and conscious too that they were generally perceived (and indeed perceived themselves ) as members of a small racial minority, they castigated the African and Shirazi associations for trying to divide the nation along the lines of racial distinctions . Although the idea of race was not alien to them and their rhetoric often invoked vague metaphors of descent, by the postwar years the most liberal of them were urging that such distinctions be set aside because they had served the interests only of foreign intruders, Indian and British. You must now recognize, they exhorted, that “an Arab is not an Arab, a Shirazi is not a Shirazi , and an African is not an African.” Rather, “you are all Zanzibaris.”4 But calls to multiracial unity sat awkwardly with the intelligentsia’s over­ all paternalism. The exhortation just quoted, from 1946, appeared in a series of brief items in Al-­Falaq that were among the first in the paper to address Subaltern Intellectuals and the Rise of Racial Nationalism / 107 such themes. (They apparently were prompted by continuing tensions between planters and their workers.)5 Significantly, they were also...