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

7 Violence as Racial Discourse

7 Violence as Racial Discourse Statements which were originally interpreted to be jokes are now treated as threats even if the statements were exchanged between people who have been friends for years and have practiced such jokes for ages. —Khamis Hassan Ameir, March 1962 Those innocent women and children—particularly the children—who were killed and maimed, suffered in atonement of the sins of their fathers , grand-­fathers and great-­grand-­fathers. —Letter to the editor, Tanganyika Standard, June 1961 How had the ideologically driven historical debates discussed in earlier chapters come to constitute inherited guilt that, in the minds of some, justified spilling even the blood of otherwise “innocent women and children” in expiation? How had attitudes toward neighbors that had once been as lightly regarded as folktales taken on such deadly seriousness? By examining the tensions of the sultanate’s final thirty months, the next two chapters will continue the inquiry begun in chapter 6 about the connection between racial thought and popular violence. This chapter will focus in particular on the violence of June 1961 and how such violence served to reproduce racial discourse and make racialized group subjectivities salient. At first glance this approach may seem counterintuitive: the natural assumption , after all, is that riots and pogroms are the end product of ethnic dis­ course, the “surface expression” of deeply rooted exterminationist beliefs.1 Such assertions, however, have been the subject of heated debate, particularly in a rich literature on “communal violence” in South Asia and elsewhere. Contributors to this literature raise two central objections. First, they observe that far Violence as Racial Discourse / 231 from being “spontaneous,” most incidents of large-­scale ethnic or religious violence show evidence of coordination and planning, often by state officials or other po­liti­cal actors whose interests are served by the riot. Second, what may seem like a single spasm of mass communal violence often reveals itself, on closer inspection, to have been in fact a disparate series of incidents prompted by a variety of motives having little if anything to do with communal sentiment , such as theft, class tension, or personal revenge. Thus, to try to explain communal riots as the expression of underlying mass sentiments, or indeed to explain them in terms of any single set of underlying “causes,” is at best chimerical and at worst serves as a “smokescreen” that obscures the culpability of specific po­liti­cal actors.2 Gyanendra Pandey and others , in fact, caution that the “communal riot narrative” originated as a form of “colonialist knowledge,” a way by which colonial rulers sought to understand and control the wild array of local disputes that threatened state stability by reducing them to recurrent expressions of a fundamental, pre-­po­litical division; given the power of the colonial state (and its postcolonial heirs) to allocate resources and shape po­liti­cal discourse, those forms of knowledge were ultimately self-­fulfilling.3 Such critiques sometimes tend toward an arch-­instrumentalism that seems prompted by a determination to exonerate the subaltern crowd of any charge of having been “really” motivated by ethnic hatred; those authors prefer instead to see communal violence as the masked expression of more “rational ” struggles for economic or po­liti­cal advantage.4 This last position flies in the face of the facts, as does the more common argument that ethnic thought is a colonial invention. But more measured scholarship like Pandey’s is indispensable , for it forces us to recognize that the link between ethnic discourse and popular ethnic violence is not simple or straightforward. Still, the arch-­instrumentalist assumption that at a deeper level communal violence is really about something else points to an unresolved contradiction pervading much of this literature. Instructive examples can be found in debates over anti-­Jewish pogroms in late imperial Russia. A conventional approach emphasizes the degree to which the pogroms were organized and directed by agents of the tsarist state; indeed, some scholars include official planning as part of their generic definition of the term “pogrom.” Other scholars, in contrast, inspired by the revisionist work of Hans Rogger, discount the significance of official planning and instead stress the “spontaneity” of the pogroms and the deep-­seated nature of the anti-­Semitism that prompted them.5 In an exemplary study of the 1905 Odessa pogroms, Robert Weinberg takes a persuasive middle course: the pogroms were neither an official plot, despite the 232 / War...