personal memories revolutionary states and indian ocean migrations

Zanzibar had the revolution not taken place. Indeed, she considered staying in
Zanzibar as some other (albeit few) women and families had despite the revolution.
In what ways Ghania could or would not eventually also have been “from there”
opens questions about the status of the previous waves of Omanis in Zanzibar and
the ways they came, in the years just before the revolution, to claim to be
Zanzibaris (rather than Omani Arabs) in Zanzibar as well as they came to be
considered “Zanzibaris” in Oman. Although she lived in East Africa for about 10
years, she would not, in Oman today, be considered a “Zanzibari,” as the
descendents of the previous generations of Omanis to East African have been. She
was, instead, a manga Arab.
CONCLUSIONS
In the first half of the twentieth century and especially after the
intermittent successes of the clove industry in the 1920s and during the turbulence
of interior Oman’s politics, thousands of Omanis from towns like Bahla undertook
the arduous journey from their desert oases to coastal Oman and on to East Africa.
For the most part, the travelers were men looking for temporary work on the clove
and coconut plantations or as porters in the market and port. Many were also
hoping to set up their own shops and farms, bringing their families with them from
Oman. They often expected to move outside Zanzibar’s capital, Stone Town, to the
villages either on the island’s coast or in the more fertile central and northern
interior. While they certainly benefited from the economic and political assistance
of the policies of the British protectorate administration, they were hardly “elite”
large plantation owners or members of Stone Town’s cosmopolitan social world.
Indeed, they were hindered in their attempts at migration. Thus, to the extent that
families and women such as Ghania participated in agricultural life and shopkeeping,
this personal story reveals aspects of rural life that complement and
contrast both with the historiographic record and social expectations in
contemporary Oman.
At the same time, this account cannot be understood isolated from its
practice as memory work, both in its content and in its form. Indeed, in
contemporary Oman, Ghania’s emphasis on her daily activities in the store and on
the farm works to highlight both local Omani hierarchies and her personal
independence and strength, obfuscating to some extent the tense racialized relations
on Zanzibar before the revolution. Striking, however, in this account is also
Ghania’s apparent detachment from the affective weight that arduous travel, death
of a mother and a massacre might be expected to convey. Rather than simply draw
conclusions about the culturally appropriate articulation and structuring of grief and
sentiment, her renderings could also be understood to heighten her own message of
independence and strength, a message that is geared not so much against the
ravages of a massacre or ethnic tensions, but against the vagaries of a personal
story. In the end, this is a story, therefore, not only of a class of migrants and the
violent revolution focused against them, but of a personal attempt at balancing
between independence and loneliness, between strength and reliance.
http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/
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