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

5 Politics and Civil Society during the Newspaper Wars

5 Politics and Civil Society during the Newspaper Wars Since the moment politics arrived . . . Our hearts have been troubled And burdened with foreboding. In February 1961, Mwongozi published a poem warning that the over­all state of political discourse was bringing the country to ruin. Like most poetry in the Zanzibar newspapers, this was submitted by a reader, S. M. Khamis of Pemba. Unusually for a comment on politics, however, it was nonpartisan. The poet focused on the spread of matusi—a powerful word combining the concepts of insult, curses, abusive language, defamation, and dishonor—writing that such behavior is self-­destructive, and, like all enmity among neighbors, contrary to God’s will. Most poignant is the poet’s lament for the change this represented from Zanzibar’s old ways, a change he or she associated with the introduction of “politics” (siasa) since 1957. Such things, what are they? . . . Our old love for one another Now has disappeared. In the past we loved one another, We elders and our children. Nor did we discriminate against one another. Matters now are “astonishing to contemplate,” the poem continues. Enmity has infiltrated [the land] And respect has vanished. 148 / War of Words The child knows not his mother, So low has he stooped. God’s creatures quarrel with one another And exchange curses and abuse.1 Such laments were ubiquitous throughout the Time of Politics. As political activities heated up, with both parties holding public meetings weekly in town and countryside, officials noted with alarm the growing practice of shouting abuse at passersby.2 The general tenor of political speech was later described by P. A. P. Robertson, who had been civil secretary at the time. Robertson emerges in the sources as an imperious man who resented anticolonial politics almost as a form of lese majesty. Nevertheless, his strongly worded description squares with what one reads elsewhere, in­clud­ing in much of the printed propaganda itself. The language at the political meetings, Robertson said, was “revolting, horrible.” The most horrible things used to be said about individuals, about Britain, about anything they could think of, . . . over loudhailers which were turned up to really loud decibels, quite unacceptable to a West­ern ear. . . . Voices filled with hatred pour[ed] forth abuse and inflammatory material by the hour . . . [and] there was always a vociferous round of applause from a large crowd.3 During the political campaigns of 1957–1963, then, the language of exclusive ethnic nationalism could be heard everywhere. Much of that language was racialized, much was deeply personal, and its net effect was to arouse bitter resentments . The depth of its impact could be read in the appearance of sporadic but widespread acts of racial violence within a year of the introduction of electoral politics, culminating in the election riots of June 1961, which came to be remembered as the Vita vya Mawe, or War of Stones. Several months after the riots, a relatively impartial government commission conducted a careful inquiry into their causes. In a phrase first coined by its chairman, Sir Stafford Foster-­Sutton, the commission concluded that the major cause of the riots were tensions aroused by “the ‘bombardment of words,’ both written and spoken, which the people of Zanzibar were subjected to, more or less continuously, af­ ter the first General Election in July, 1957.”4 That conclusion raises two puzzles. One is to discern the processes by which racialized discourse led to popular racial violence. (As we will see in later chapters, the June riots were not planned by the political parties but were Politics and Civil Society during the Newspaper Wars / 149 generated on the spot.) There was nothing inevitable about this. To be sure, propagandists on both sides of Zanzibar’s political divide often dwelled on violence, either in imaginative historical evocations or in paranoid fantasies of behavior imputed to their rivals. But those were mere words, at times playful . How did that rhetoric take on sufficient force to persuade people to turn against their neighbors? How did a war of words become transformed into a war of stones? We will turn to those questions in part 3 of this book. To answer them, however, we must first address a separate set of issues. The racialized discourse that provided the ammunition of the “bombardment of words” had arisen, as we have seen, from discussions and debates among Zanzibar’s intellectuals,­in­clud­ing...