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CREOLE NATIONALISTS AND THE SEARCH FOR NATIVIST AUTHENTICITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ZANZIBAR: THE LIMITS OF COSMOPOLITANISM*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2014

Jonathon Glassman
Jonathon Glassman*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Abstract

The founders of the Zanzibar National Party can be understood as creole nationalists, who imagined their political authority as stemming from membership in a transnational Arab elite. But in the mid-twentieth century, prompted by the rising hegemony of territorial nationalism and by subaltern challenges informed by pan-Africanism, they crafted a new historical narrative that depicted their movement as having originated with indigenous villagers. Party leaders then related this narrative to Western scholars, whose publications helped reproduce the myth throughout the rest of the century. This article traces the genesis of this masquerade and asks what it implies about the nature of the creole metaphor and its supposed link to discourses of cosmopolitan hybridity. The conventional contrast between créolité and nativist essentialism is shown to be illusory.

Keywords

Tanzaniadecolonizationidentitynationalism
Type
Special Feature: Africa and the Indian Ocean
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , July 2014 , pp. 229 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Thanks to Edward Alpers and Nathaniel Mathews for comments on an earlier draft. Author's email: j-glassman@northwestern.edu

References

1 For a brief history of nativism since independence, see Glassman, J., War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington, IN, 2011), 287–98Google Scholar.

2 Mamdani, M., ‘Beyond settler and native as political identities: overcoming the political legacy of colonialism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43:4 (2001), 664Google Scholar; Mamdani, M., When Victims Become Killers (Princeton, NJ, 2001)Google Scholar, 33. Although in the latter work Mamdani is concerned chiefly with Rwanda, Zanzibar figures prominently as a secondary case.

3 Glassman, J., ‘Slower than a massacre: the multiple sources of racial thought in colonial Africa’, American Historical Review, 109:3 (2004), 720–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For the indeterminacy of British colonial ideas about native/non-native, see Lee, C. J.-H., ‘The “native” undefined: colonial categories, Anglo-African status and the politics of kinship in British Central Africa’, The Journal of African History, 46:3 (2005), 455–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lee, C. J.-H., ‘Jus soli and jus sanguinis in the colonies: the interwar politics of race, culture, and multiracial legal status in British Africa’, Law and History Review, 29:2 (2011), 497–522CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Representative of this literature is Mazrui, A. and Shariff, I. N., The Swahili: Idiom and Identity of an African People (Trenton, NJ, 1994)Google Scholar, whence I derive the phrase ‘identity paradigms’; and Bryceson, D. F., ‘Swahili creolization: the case of Dar es Salaam’, in Cohen, R. and Toninato, P. (eds.), The Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures (London, 2010), 364–75Google Scholar. The phrase ‘sea of peace’ is from Hourani, G. F., Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (expanded edn, Princeton, NJ, 1995)Google Scholar, 61.

7 Similar ideas have been advanced under other labels, including ‘diaspora’, ‘cosmopolitanism’, and ‘métissage’. The scholarly discourse of creolization is especially suggestive regarding the present case, as will be seen.

8 For a taste of the full complexity of the word's usage, see Palmié, S., ‘Creolization and its discontents’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 35:1 (2006), 433–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 These instances of creole nationalism are best known to non-specialists via Anderson, Benedict, who in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. edn, London, 1991)Google Scholar argued that they provided the prototype of the ‘modular’ idea of the modern nation. Political movements among people who identified their créolité in terms of their ‘mixed’ racial background were particularly prominent in the francophone Caribbean. For an illuminating account of their early history, see Garrigus, J. D., Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 In the Western Indian Ocean, substrates included African, Austronesian, and South Asian languages.

11 For a sample of the debates, see Kouwenberg, S. and Singler, J. V. (eds.), The Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies (Oxford, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 The model for many of these studies, Mintz, S. and Price, R., An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, 1976)Google Scholar, was in turn inspired by the Herkovitses' search for ‘Africanisms’ in New World cultures. Nuanced studies of the longue durée processes of creolization in the Western Indian Ocean include Larson, P. M., Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar; and Vaughan, M., Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Durham, NC, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Bernabé, J., Chamoiseau, P., and Confiant, R., Éloge de la créolité (Paris, 1993 [orig. pub. 1989]), 20–7Google Scholar.

14 The latter quote is from Jolivet, M.-J., ‘La créolisation en Guyane: un paradigme pour une anthropologie de la modernité créole’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 148:4 (1997), 813–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the passage on ‘fugitive power’ is from Cohen, R., ‘Creolization and cultural globalization: the soft sounds of fugitive power’, Globalizations, 4:3 (2007), 369–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bhabha is quoted in Khan, A., ‘Good to think? creolization, optimism, and agency’, Current Anthropology, 48:5 (2007), 653–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Peng Cheah's critique of Bhabha and Clifford, James, in ‘Given culture: rethinking cosmopolitical freedom in transnationalism’, in Cheah, P. and Robbins, B. (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis, MN, 1998), 290–328Google Scholar. My critique draws on Khan, ‘Good to think’; Palmié, ‘Creolization and its discontents’; and Munasinghe, V., ‘Theorizing world culture through the New World: East Indians and creolization’, American Ethnologist, 33:4 (2006), 549–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Simpson, Edward's and Kresse, Kai's critique of ‘lazy’ conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism, ‘Introduction: cosmopolitanism contested: anthropology and history in the Western Indian Ocean’, in Simpson, E. and Kresse, K. (eds.), Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean (New York, 2008), 1–41.Google Scholar

15 In addition to the critical essays cited in the preceding note, see Caplan, L., ‘Creole world, purist rhetoric: Anglo-Indian cultural debates in colonial and contemporary Madras’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1:4 (1995), 743–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Giraud, M., ‘La créolité: une rupture en trompe-l'oeil’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 37:148 (1997), 795–811CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lund, J., The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing (Minneapolis, MN, 2006)Google Scholar.

16 See Palmié, ‘Creolization and its discontents’. A similar argument about using race as an object rather than category of analysis shapes the analysis in Glassman, War of Words, see esp. 8–18 and 298–302.

17 Will Hanley, for example, notes that this was commonly the pattern in Middle Eastern port cities that are often celebrated for their cosmopolitan tolerance. See Hanley, W., ‘Grieving cosmopolitanism in Middle East studies’, History Compass, 6:5 (2008), 1355CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 For a valuable discussion, see Lund, Impure Imagination.

19 For evidence from 1918, see A. K. Bang, ‘Cosmopolitanism colonised? three cases from Zanzibar, 1890–1920’, in Simpson and Kresse (eds.), Struggling with History, 174.

20 For other examples of this pattern, see K. Versteegh, ‘Non Indo-European pidgins and creoles’, in Kouwenberg and Singler (eds.), Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies, 158–86.

21 This contrast informs the final chapters of Sheriff, A., Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (London, 2010)Google Scholar, and is explored at length by Bose, S., A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ho, E., The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pearson, M., The Indian Ocean (London, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 This absurd view of linguistic history, effectively demolished by Nurse, Derek and Spear, Thomas in The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800–1500 (Philadelphia, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is often assumed to have originated in the racial fantasies of European travelers and scholars, who certainly played a major role in propagating it. But there is ample evidence that it was shared by Swahili intellectuals, who may well have introduced the idea to European interlocutors.

23 For a brief history of the creation of this racial state, see Glassman, War of Words, 23–39.

24 Several authors argue that late in the nineteenth century, ustaarabu supplanted an earlier term, uungwana. See, for example, Pouwels, R. L., Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900 (Cambridge, 1987), 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Prestholdt, J., Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley, CA, 2008), 141–2Google Scholar. For Zanzibar intellectuals' debates in the 1930s over the word's etymology and usage, see Glassman, War of Words, 86–8.

25 This contradicts a conventional interpretation in the literature that explains claims of Shirazi identity as a response to colonial rulers' privileging of Arab status: Shirazis, according to this interpretation, were claiming to be ‘non-natives’, even Arabs. In the case of Zanzibar, the conventional interpretation is without basis. See Glassman, War of Words, 52–6.

26 Ho, Graves of Tarim, 186–7. Ho writes of ‘genealogy’, not race, accepting conventional modern Western understandings of the latter term. But his overall account suggests how such notions of genealogical purity could become racialized.

27 Penningroth, D. C., ‘The claims of slaves and ex-slaves to family and property: a transatlantic comparison’, American Historical Review, 112:4 (2007), 1039–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Penningroth draws the adjective ‘slavish’ directly from a 1995 Ghanaian court ruling.

28 Evidence of the link with the Libya protests is circumstantial but compelling. For the date of the Association's founding, see ‘Mafveraky: Who is Who?’, Al-Falaq (Zanzibar), 21 Dec. 1946. The founders of the Arab Association were prominent in the 1911 Libya protests: Zanzibar National Archives, Zanzibar (ZNA) AC 1/151, Edward Clarke to Foreign Office, 29 Nov. 1911, plus Police Inspector's report on meeting of 25 Nov. 1911. (Thanks to Philip Sadgrove for directing me to this source.) The Ibadi scholars who dominated Zanzibar's elite political and intellectual life had a keen interest in pan-Islamism and the defense of the Ottomans, and they displayed a special preoccupation with the Libyan invasion. See Ghazal, A. N., Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (1880s–1930s) (London, 2010)Google Scholar; for Libya, see 45, 54, 84, and 96.

29 Bose, Hundred Horizons, 31 and passim. Bose also observes that multiple universalisms, which from a latter-day perspective may seem incompatible, often managed to coexist. So, in our case, pan-Arab nationalists in Zanzibar (as elsewhere) sprang to the defense of the Ottoman Turks in 1911, and they were joined in their protests by members of Zanzibar's Shia Indian community. Pan-Islamic themes remained prominent in Arab Association rhetoric throughout its history.

30 These are limits that Bose often ignores; certainly he does so in his account of the experience of Zanzibar Indians in the 1930s, which, surprisingly, makes no reference to the anti-Indian campaigns: Hundred Horizons, 97–108. Compare with Munasinghe's discussion, in ‘Theorizing world culture’, of how Caribbean creole nationalism routinely excludes Indians, even in Trinidad, where they are so numerous. The account of Zanzibar Arabs' pan-Islamic politics in Ghazal, Islamic Reform, is similarly shortsighted about such matters, a quality that Hanley says is common in Middle East studies in ‘Grieving cosmopolitanism’.

31 Glassman, War of Words, 94–103. My account differs from much of the literature, which depicts Shirazi nationalism as demanding a share of Arab ‘non-native’ privileges rather than expressing a resentment of them. Such literature also misapprehends British policy at the time, which (at least officially) proclaimed the hegemony of ‘native rights’, not the opposite.

32 The critique will be familiar to anyone who has seen Henry Louis Gates, Jr's treatment of the Swahili coast in his television series, Wonders of the African World, dir. N. Godwin and H. Appio, PBS, 1999.

33 Glassman, War of Words, 108–23.

34 For the debates, see Glassman, War of Words, 139–44. Sixty years after his first intervention, Ali Muhsin al-Barwani was still pushing this argument in his memoirs, Conflicts and Harmony in Zanzibar: Memoirs (Dubai, 1997), a volume where the contradictions of his position are in full display. Although the passages that deal intentionally with intermarriage give full voice to his ideological defense of egalitarian hybridity, those that touch on the issue unintentionally – that is, anecdotes about the specifics of his and others' marriages – indicate a quite different kind of thinking at work (for example, 82 and 113–15).

35 For the literal masquerade, see Scarano, F. A., ‘The jíbaro masquerade and the subaltern politics of creole identity formation in Puerto Rico, 1745–1823’, American Historical Review, 101:5 (1996), 1398–431CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Earle, R., ‘Creole patriotism and the myth of the “loyal Indian”’, Past & Present, 172:1 (2001), 125–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 The quotes are from Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 79–80, but they echo language that was ubiquitous in ZNP rhetoric.

37 Glassman, War of Words, 241–2.

38 The event has often been labelled a ‘war’ (vita) in the decades since, no doubt owing to the influence of nationalist ideology such as I will describe below. But at the time, the word ghasia, which more closely approaches the English ‘riot’, was heard. See Gray, J. M., Report on the Civil Disturbances in Zanzibar on July 30th, 1951 (Zanzibar, 1951)Google Scholar, 15.

39 Lofchie was conducting doctoral research at the time. His revised dissertation, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1965), soon became a classic of African political science. It remains the standard reference on the period, relied upon by guild scholars and public intellectuals alike. My thanks to Professor Lofchie for sharing his recollections, conveyed in an email of 28 Aug. 2005.

40 For these events, see Glassman, War of Words, 125–6.

41 Their vision was neatly expressed by a journalist who would later be prominent in the ZNP's left wing: ‘It was Nehru who once remarked that if Swaraj … meant the beating of tom-toms – then he would not have Swaraj …. Nationalism is necessary but it must be based on rationalism.’ R. Bulsara, ‘Indigenous Quackery’, Adal Insaf (Zanzibar), 3 Sept. 1950.

42 ‘An Unhappy Event’, Al-Falaq, 8 Aug. 1951; R. Bulsara, ‘All Quiet’, Adal Insaf, 4 Aug. 1951. The main pan-Africanist paper, affiliated with the African Association and later with the Afro-Shirazi Party, took a toadying line in praise of the government. See ‘Result Obtain from CATTLE’, Afrika Kwetu (Zanzibar), 9 Aug. 1951.

43 ‘Regrettable’ (unsigned leader), Mwongozi (Zanzibar), 3 Aug. 1951, read in The National Archives, Kew (TNA) Public Records Office (PRO), Colonial Office (CO) 822/620, ‘Annex, disturbance at Gaol in Zanzibar’.

44 Babu, ‘Tulitokea Wapi?’, Mwongozi, 29 May and 12 June 1959 (the last two of three installments).

45 Zanzibar National Party, Whither Zanzibar? Growth and Policy of Zanzibar Nationalism (Zanzibar, 1960)Google Scholar. The prose style is distinctly Muhsin's; he acknowledges his authorship in Conflicts and Harmony, 173 and 175.

46 Babu, A. M., ‘The 1964 revolution: lumpen or vanguard?’, in Sheriff, A. and Ferguson, E. (eds.), Zanzibar Under Colonial Rule (London, 1991), 221–3Google Scholar. Also see Babu, A. M., ‘Appendix I: the background to the Zanzibar Revolution’, in Wilson, A., US Foreign Policy and Revolution: The Creation of Tanzania (London, 1989), 141–2Google Scholar.

47 ‘An Unhappy Event’, Al-Falaq, 8 Aug. 1951; A. R. Mohamed [Babu], ‘Book review – “Isle of Cloves”’, Mwongozi, 20 July 1956.

48 Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 88–9. Within the space of a few pages, he has himself simultaneously in Zanzibar, assisting the Kiembe Samaki defendants, and overseas (he hears of the founding of the NPSS upon his return). Similarly, he has the village Koran teacher Maalim Zaid simultaneously being jailed for resisting inoculation and visiting Muhsin to personally invite him to join the NPSS. Babu (‘Appendix I’) dated the Cattle Riot to 1954, thus not only aligning it more closely to the founding of the NPSS/ZNP but also making it occur in the same year that Al-Falaq was banned on sedition charges, charges that Babu falsely attributes to its imagined defense of the protesters.

49 Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 88–9.

50 In this regard, their use of the Cattle Riot resembled a compressed version of the process by which Congress nationalists rewrote the history of the Chauri Chaura riot of 1922. See Amin, S., Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Berkeley, CA, 1995)Google Scholar.

51 That was how Maalim Zaid Mbarak himself remembered it: A. M. Juma, ‘Cattle Riot (Vita vya Ng'ombe): a case study of peasant rising, Zanzibar, 30 July 1951’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Dar es Salaam, 1982), 33.

52 In 1982, Zaid told a Zanzibari researcher that the key figures in the founding of the NPSS were the religious leaders Vuai Kitoweo and Miraji Shaalabu, neither of whom was from Kiembe Samaki. (Indeed, by 1955 Zaid himself had been living for some time in town.) Also prominent in early official accounts of the party was Haji Hussein, from Bububu, which is five miles north of town, nowhere near Kiembe Samaki. Zaid became the ZNP's ceremonial vice-president only after Shaalabu died and Muhsin and his colleagues were fully in control. Juma, ‘Cattle Riot’, 32–3 and 34n11; Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 27. For Zaid's town residence, see Malik, S. interview, in Barwani, S. A. et al. (eds.), Unser Leben vor der Revolution und Danach – Maisha Yetu Kabla ya Mapinduzi na Baadaye (Köln, 2003), 24–5Google Scholar.

53 TNA PRO CO 822/620, R. E. Middleton, Ag. Commissioner of Police, ‘Report on Police Action during disturbances 30th July 1951’ (plus attachments), and P. Pullicino, Ag. Administrative Secretary, 9 Aug. 1951. As to the lack of monarchist sentiments: it is, of course, always difficult to marshal evidence of absence. However, none of the rioters whose verbatim statements appear in the police report made any reference to the sultan – and a statement to the police would seem the ideal occasion on which to profess such loyalty. In advance of the riot, there were rumors that the protestors would make a representation to the sultan, who instructed his gatekeepers to allow a delegation into the palace. But a delegation never appeared.

54 See fn. 34, above.

55 Other examples – also organized by kinsmen of Ali Muhsin who would later become important ZNP functionaries – are documented in ZNA AB 12/114, ‘Boycott of Indians’, police bulletin, 4 July 1938.

56 During its brief existence, it also ran some rural cooperative shops that likewise were intended to compete with Indian-owned businesses. Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 79–83; see also ZNA BA 30/5, Noad, Annual Report for 1936; ZNA BA 30/6, Zanzibar District Monthly Reports for May, June, July, Aug. and Oct. 1936, and for July/Aug. 1937; ZNA BA 30/7, Zanzibar District Monthly Rep. for Oct. 1938.

57 Muhsin, Conflicts and Harmony, 167 (describing the clove-buying crisis). Although this passage (and others, very similar, that recur throughout the memoirs) was written decades later, such rhetoric appeared frequently in the Arab Association journalism at the time.

58 ‘Itihad-el-Watani’, Al-Falaq, 11 Feb. 1939; in contrast, see Babu, ‘Appendix I’, 142.

59 See Muhsin's discussions of Ramadhan Madafu, Othman Sudi, Haji Kombo, Abdulla Mali, and Haji Hussein, in Conflicts and Harmony, 130, 90–1, 27. The last-named, who ZNP propaganda celebrated as a key figure in the founding of the NPSS, had known Muhsin since childhood, when his father had studied Koran with Muhsin's father at the latter's country estate at Bububu.

60 Mushin, Conflicts and Harmony, 199–201. Muhsin mentions Lemki but not his National Union, for which see Lofchie, Zanzibar, 140–1.

61 Such a critique informs the whole of War of Words; for theoretical statements, see 17–22, 175–6, and 230–7. For popular thought more generally, see Glassman, J., Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, NH, 1995), 1–25Google Scholar.

62 This and the following two paragraphs draw on the middle chapters of Glassman, War of Words. For the religious tensions, see 90–1.

63 As Ghazal usefully notes, the nationalists epitomized by Muhsin and Lemki were not so much a ‘secular’ intelligentsia (as I have written elsewhere) as a lay intelligentsia. See Ghazal, Islamic Reform, 92.

64 Glassman, War of Words, 241–3. In another disconnect between discursive pronouncements and practical knowledge, Muhsin also testified that, like any genuine Zanzibari, he could tell a mainlander by sight. This disconnect resembles one in an oral account by Muhsin's ZNP colleague, Amani Thani, who in 2000–1 recounted, with great eloquence, how precolonial Zanzibar had been a peaceful melting pot, a paragon of creole hybridity. As a result, he insisted, bodily markers could not be used to discern a person's ethnic background. But in the telling, Thani revealed some of Swahili's rich vocabulary for categorizing those very markers. African traits, he explained, include mweusi tititi, ‘pitch-black skin’; nywele za kipilipili, ‘kinky hair’; and pua imepanuka, ‘a broad nose’. Arab traits, in contrast, include pua nzuri, a ‘beautiful nose’. Barwani et al., Unser Leben, 138–9.

65 I derive much of my language here from Bose, Hundred Horizons. But I think also of a rich literature on the francophone Atlantic that approaches similar questions from an entirely different angle. Examples include Cooper, F., ‘Possibility and constraint: African independence in historical perspective’, The Journal of African History, 49:2 (2008), 167–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mann, G. and Lecocq, B., ‘Between empire, umma, and the Muslim third world: the French Union and African pilgrims to Mecca, 1946–1958’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27:2 (2007), 367–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mann, G., Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilder, G., ‘Untimely vision: Aimé Césaire, decolonization, utopia’, Public Culture, 21:1 (2009), 101–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 The phrase is from a classic 1953 text by M. Panikkar. See Prange, S. R., ‘Scholars and the sea: a historiography of the Indian Ocean’, History Compass, 6:5 (2008), 1382–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Ghosh, A., In an Antique Land (New York, 1993)Google Scholar, offers a poetic evocation of such older cosmopolitanisms and their contrast with modern nativisms. James Clifford invokes Ghosh's vision in his own celebration, a much-cited article on diasporic cosmopolitanism. See ‘Diasporas’, in Clifford, J., Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 244–77Google Scholar. In contrast, see Hanley, ‘Grieving cosmopolitanism’, who finds such ‘grieving nostalgia’ for ‘a more tolerant past’ common in the literature on cosmopolitanism in Middle East studies.

68 Simpson and Kresse, ‘Cosmopolitanism contested’; I paraphrase from 14–15. Pier Larson makes a similar argument regarding creolization, which, he writes, was less about mixture than it was about ‘the learned capacity of persons to move in and out of the everyday challenges of cultural and linguistic discontinuity’, a process he calls ‘créolité-as-versatility’. Larson, Ocean of Letters, 226 and 352–3.

69 They continue to do so today. See the memoirs of Sharif Hamad, S. in Burgess, G. T. (ed.), Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar: The Memoirs of Ali Sultan Issa and Seif Sharif Hamad (Athens, OH, 2009), 171–311Google Scholar.

70 Both potentials in pan-Africanist thought – toward inclusionary emancipation and narrow racial nativism – can be seen in the successive bifurcations that have repeatedly split South Africa's ‘Africanist’ movement and its political descendants since the 1940s. Some might argue that similar contrasts can be seen by comparing the pan-Africanism of the ASP with that of Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), its post-1964 political partner. Bryceson, in fact, suggests that TANU's inclusiveness is an outgrowth of Swahili creolized hybridity (‘Swahili creolization’). But for a more critical account of TANU nationalism, see Brennan, J. R., Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens, OH, 2012)Google Scholar.

71 B. Robbins, ‘Introduction part 1: actually existing cosmopolitanism’, in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 1–19; Hanley, ‘Grieving cosmopolitanism’.