personal memories revolutionary states and indian ocean migrations

MEMORY, LABOR AND VIOLENCE
Ghania’s account of life in and return from Zanzibar is structured around
work and the violence of the revolution. Contrasting her life in Zanzibar with what
was possible in Bahla, she emphasizes how she and her brother-in-law’s wife would
manage their stores near the farms in Zanzibar. Although many women in her birth
place of Bahla manage little stores outside of the main market today, few Arab
women do. Within the market as well, although some young women have taken
jobs in shops, they are usually not Arab women. The market is, in general,
considered (as in some other places in the Middle East) a place of disrepute and
inappropriate for women, especially for Arab women. Stores in the rest of the town
selling candy for children, feminine hygiene goods and basic cleaning products as
well as some ready-made clothes have been established outside the main market in
Bahla to cater to women who are not supposed to venture to the market. Although
I knew several Arab women who ran such stores, most of the stores were
connected to the houses of and managed by those of the “servant” class. Ghania’s
pride in her management of the store did not in this case, however, reflect a
complete rejection of class divisions between servants and Arabs in Bahla, but
rather a pride in her responsibilities for the formal affairs of their business
endeavors.
In addition to the management of the store, Ghania enjoyed describing the
details of copra production. Frederick Cooper has noted that in the late nineteen
twenties, Zanzibar’s copra was sun-dried and mostly done by a small number of
Indians. And, except for some Arab families on Pemba, Arabs, he notes, generally
did not do their own drying. 18 Ghania’s detailed account of Copra drying – with fire
– suggests that either her techniques and participation were exceptions to the
general economy of copra or that by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the industry
had changed. It is also possible, of course, that while elite Arabs in Zanzibar did not
participate in copra, manga Arabs in rural areas did. Similarly, it is possible that
colonial officials writing the archival record simply did not know about the activities
of rural manga Arabs.
Although Ghania did not associate copra drying with a particular ethnic
category, whether Arab, African or Indian, as some of the literature on early
twentieth century coconut agriculture does, Ghania was also very careful about her
use of social categories in reference to labor in other contexts. In particular, when
speaking about who worked for them on the farm, Ghania insisted that all of their
“workers,” were Omani and, further, that all received payments. She was, in other
words, insisting that they were not slaves, either from East Africa or from Oman.
Indeed, she became somewhat defensive about their “payment” of the workers,
saying “what’s wrong, of course we paid them.” At the same time, however, Ghania
refused to answer her grandson’s questions about whether the workers were
“servants” (akhdâm) in the Omani sense of the term. Her refusal and her grandson’s
continued questions not only suggested that, in fact, their workers were servants, but
that her grandson was somewhat confused about the structure of identity. Like their
own identities as “Arabs,” being a servant in Oman is transferred patrilineally and is
not necessarily a condition of labor. For Sayf, the distinction was between workers
and servants: “work” for Sayf implied monetary compensation while being a
servant did not.
In her account, Ghania distinguishes herself and her family from those
“from there,” but it is also quite clear that she and her family might have stayed in
Vol. 5, Fall 2005, © 2005 The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies
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