Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
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Turki’s rise depended on his ability to move in the gulf and the western Indian Ocean and his use of the overlapping networks of wealth, clientship, and imperial power in this broader world. Specifically, Turki strategized his return and augmented his alliances with interior tribes through money raised in Zanzibar’s credit markets and through delicate negotiations for British support, both in Bombay and in the gulf.
SULTANS AT SEA
When Seyyid Said bin Sultan died at sea in 1856 he governed a dispersed realm in Africa and Arabia, with outposts in the Persian Gulf and the Makran Coast. His son Barghash’s ill-fated attempt to smuggle the body ashore in Zanzibar foretold a decade and a half of struggle among Said’s heirs. The politics of Oman were no longer disputes and alliances between port cities and oasis towns. Seyyid Said’s mobile form of governance had redrawn the map of state power. He did this at the same time that growing British influence and the industrialization of western India’s biggest port made London and Bombay new nodes in circuits of Omani power. From the 1840s, Seyyid Said’s sons visited these new junctions as they attempted to claim portions of their father’s realm for themselves. After Said’s death, British intervention made Oman and Zanzibar separate sultanates. Internal dissent and external threats challenged Thuwayni in Oman more than they did Majid in Zanzibar. In the 1860s, while Majid’s visit to Bombay helped launch a vision for his own new settlement, Dar es Salaam, on the Swahili coast, Thuwayni in Muscat was hemmed in by regional and intimate enemies. In the wake of his death, two short-lived regimes followed. By the early 1870s, however, Turki and Barghash, younger brothers initially shut out in succession disputes, had each returned from an exile in Bombay to rule in Muscat and Zanzibar, respectively. While nominal British power in the Indian Ocean mediated their exiles and their eventual accessions, subsequent Busaidi rulers were much less mobile, or perhaps, more aptly, they were much less able to chart their own course in establishing or disputing sovereignty.
4
Halwa and Identity in the Western Indian Ocean World
IN THE EARLY 1840S, at the time of the Nizwa drought, Thani bin Amir al-Harthi was a humble confectioner making halwa in Oman.1 Less than twenty years later, he was one of the wealthiest traders in Kazeh, an ivory depot on the East African plateau, over four hundred miles from the Indian Ocean.2 In Africa, Thani participated in trading caravans as early as 1845, and he was thus part of the expanding commercial world of the 1840s. Thani traveled and traded extensively—from the coast to the kingdoms on the lakes—and his knowledge underlays Richard Burton’s seminal book that explained interior Africa to the English-speaking world. Thani was both participant and witness to the incorporation of upland East Africa into the Indian Ocean world.
Marginal and displaced Indian Ocean actors like Thani inadvertently connected the East African interior to a distant shore of the Indian Ocean. When people like Thani left Oman to escape instability, they often went to the East African coast. The Omani sultanate at Zanzibar tried to dominate Swahili towns, and networks of debt created new obligations to Indians, among others. Thani’s rapid reversal of fortune—from low-status confectioner to wealthy ivory trader—might suggest an effortless movement through Indian Ocean circuits. Yet the caravan trails were full of hustlers from many backgrounds, including Arabs, Swahili, Nyamwezi, and those of servile (or recently liberated) status. The mobility of these groups created new encounters among them and demonstrated the need to work out ethnic and status hierarchies. These individuals built new settlements that looked like Indian Ocean towns and spread Swahili language and culture. To understand how the newcomers did this, we first must tackle coastal chauvinism, the myth of return, and how buying time led to the growth of settlements.
Examination of towns in the interior, such as Kazeh, where Thani lived, indicates that identity distinctions among Indian Ocean migrants shaped settlement patterns and suggests the need to disaggregate groups who arrived from the Indian Ocean’s shores. Throughout the region in the nineteenth century, new mobilities created a contest between Arab newcomers and Swahili elites, even those who had been reduced to slavery. Even among people considered Arabs, extreme mobility could not outrun the taint of being baysari (a low status identity in Arabia). The process of transforming upland East Africa into an Indian Ocean world was not a grand strategy implemented from Zanzibar, Muscat, Bombay, or London. It was the result of thousands of individuals trying to make the best from limited options.
ON THE BRINK OF THE INDIAN OCEAN WORLD: UPLAND EAST AFRICA
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