By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript
Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Zanzibari British novelist and literary critic, has won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
An emeritus professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in England, Gurnah was born on the island of Zanzibar, then a British colonial protectorate, in 1948. It was long an Arab-ruled island.
In 1698, Omani ruler Said bin Sultan moved from the Omani city of Muscat to what became known as Stone Town on Zanzibar Island. He established a ruling Arab elite and encouraged the development of clove plantations, using the island’s African slave labour.
Until 1884, the sultans of Zanzibar controlled a substantial portion of the Swahili Coast, the Indian Ocean region running from Kenya to Mozambique. For centuries, Arab Muslims in east Africa sold captured Africans to the Middle East and the Sultanate was the centre of the east African slave trade.
The slave trade really took off from the 17th century as more merchants from Oman settled in Zanzibar. The island took on an even more important role in the international trade of goods and consequently also in the slave trade. This is how the largest slave market in East Africa was created.
Senegalese author Tidiane N’Diaye estimates that 17 million east Africans were sold into slavery: “Most people still have the so-called Transatlantic trade by Europeans into the New World in mind. But in reality the Arab-Muslim slavery was much greater.”
It was not until 1873 that Sultan Seyyid Barghash, under pressure from Great Britain, signed a treaty that made the slave trade in his territories illegal. That decree was not enforced effectively and it was not until 1909 that slavery was finally abolished in east Africa.
A military coup in 1964 overthrew the Arab-controlled Sultanate a year after the country gained its sovereignty. It led to the persecution of its Arab minority, which until then had been the island’s ruling class.
As part of the process of decolonisation, political parties were established in 1961. They were primarily organised along ethnic lines: the Arab-led Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP), the African-dominated Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) and the Afro-nationalist Zanzibar and Pemba People’s Party (ZPPP).
Parliamentary democracy did not last very long. Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah was overthrown in a bloody revolution that brought the Black African majority to power, and the Sultanate was replaced by the People’s Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba.
The new president, Abeid Amani Karume, targeted the Zanzibari Arabs. The following months were dominated by deep division, tensions and vengeance.
The killing and expulsion of most of the island’s Arabs and the nationalisation and redistribution of land following the revolution did not solve the underlying problems that punctuated post-revolution Zanzibar. The existence of this short-lived socialist republic was ended with its union with mainland Tanganyika, also a former British colony, to form the new entity known as Tanzania.
Gurnah moved to Great Britain as a refugee not long afterwards and has lived in Britain ever since. He has written exclusively in English, his second language. He is a native speaker of Swahili. His novels explore themes of memory, migration, and the legacy of colonialism.
His best-known, 1994’s Paradise, recounts the story of Yusef, an African boy sold into slavery by his father to a powerful Arab merchant named Aziz. Yusuf joins the trader as they travel into central Africa and the Congo basin and are thrown into a world of war and violence. I have included Paradise in a course on African politics that I teach.
Gurnah is the first writer from Africa to win the Nobel Prize in literature in more than a decade and most articles about him call him a Tanzanian or Black African. That doesn’t really describe a person of Arab descent who grew up on an island that had been governed by an Omani royal family from the Arabian peninsula, and who has lived and worked outside Africa for 53 years. Some Tanzanians agree.
Today, Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous jurisdiction with its own president and government, in an uneasy relationship with Tanzania’s mainland.
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