By Laura Fair
“This book is a masterpiece. Historian Laura Fair has woven a multifaceted series of studies on music, housing, sport, and dress into a single narrative that explores the fluid and multifaceted communities of ordinary townspeople in Zanzibar from the abolition of slavery in 1890 through the end of the Second World War”
African Studies Quarterly
“This accessible work exposes the complications and the creativity of urban Africans and deserves a wide readership among Africanists. You can show this book to those unfamiliar with colonial Africa and they will be captivated rather than daunted.”
African Studies Quarterly
The first decades of the twentieth century were years of dramatic change in Zanzibar, a time when the social, economic, and political lives of island residents were in incredible flux, framed by the abolition of slavery, the introduction of colonialism, and a tide of urban migration. Pastimes and Politics explores the era from the perspective of the urban poor, highlighting the numerous and varied ways that recently freed slaves and other immigrants to town struggled to improve their individual and collective lives and to create a sense of community within this new environment. In this study Laura Fair explores a range of cultural and social practices that gave expression to slaves’ ideas of emancipation, as well as how such ideas and practices were gendered.
Pastimes and Politics examines the ways in which various cultural practices, including taarab music, dress, football, ethnicity, and sexuality, changed during the early twentieth century in relation to islanders’ changing social and political identities. Professor Fair argues that cultural changes were not merely reflections of social and political transformations. Rather, leisure and popular culture were critical practices through which the colonized and former slaves transformed themselves and the society in which they lived.
Methodologically innovative and clearly written, Pastimes and Politics is accessible to specialists and general readers alike. It is a book that should find wide use in courses on African history, urbanization, popular culture, gender studies, or emancipation.
Laura Fair author of Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 and Historia ya Jamii ya Zanzibar na Nyimbo za Siti binti Saad. She teaches at Michigan State University. More info →
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978-0-8214-1384-5
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Release date: October 2001
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384 pages
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Zanzibar under Colonial Rule
Edited by Abdul Sheriff and Ed Ferguson
Zanzibar stands at the center of the Indian Ocean system’s involvement in the history of Eastern Africa. This book follows on from the period covered in Abdul Sheriff’s acclaimed Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar.The first part of the book shows the transition of Zanzibar from the commercial economy of the nineteenth century to the colonial economy of the twentieth century.The authors begin with the abolition of the slave trade in 1873 that started the process of transformation.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · South Indian Ocean Islands · Tanzania · African Studies
Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar
The Memoirs of Ali Sultan Issa and Seif Sharif Hamad
By G. Thomas Burgess
Zanzibar has had the most turbulent postcolonial history of any part of the United Republic of Tanzania, yet few sources explain the reasons why. From a series of personal interviews conducted over several years, Thomas Burgess has produced two highly readable first-person narratives in which two nationalists in Africa describe their conflicts, achievements, failures, and tragedies.
Memoir · African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Tanzania · South Indian Ocean Islands · African Studies
Working Papers in Southern African Studies
Vol. 3
By D. C. Hindson
THE STATE AND AGRICULTURAL LABOUR Zanzibar after Slavery Fred CooperFROM REFUGE TO RESISTANCE Botshabelo, Mafolofolo and Johannes Dinkwanyane: Missionaries and Converts under the Authority of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, 1860-1876.
