Chapter 4 examines the movements of people. Mobility shifted notions of identity as Indian Ocean peoples established themselves in the East African interior. The nineteenth century marked the delinking of ethnonyms from specific geographies: Arabs were not just in Arabia; Swahili people left the coast; and Nyamwezi and other interior people took to the sea. This movement produced new configurations of people and geographies, which had implications for identity, kinship, and belonging for Arabs and Africans. Chapter 5 focuses on the kinship networks of the most famous trader of this period, Hamed bin Muhammad al-Murjebi, better known as Tippu Tip. Reading his autobiography through the lens of kinship reveals that, rather than being a self-made man, Tippu Tip benefited from elaborate webs of kinship, stretching from Oman to the eastern Congo. His trade organization—like many during this period—relied on siblings, and his marriage into an elite Omani family provided him with property in Zanzibar and Oman. Kinship emerges as a vital way to understand business and family networks.
While both the slave trade and slavery itself have been associated with this period of African history, freed slaves have often been overlooked. Chapter 6 first examines manumission and the mobility of freed slaves in the western Indian Ocean up to the 1850s. Islamic manumission was an important social practice long before European colonization disrupted slavery in East Africa. The chapter then addresses the moral economy of manumission and insincere manumission after the 1850s to meet the demand for labor in the Indian Ocean islands. Chapter 7 looks at the period following the 1873 antislavery treaty to examine Indian Ocean mobility amid the rise of a British documentary regime. New consular courts, a redefinition of British Indian subjecthood, and naval antislavery enforcement all contributed to a focus on new kinds of writing and a return to insincere manumission. By this time, however, African slaves and former slaves were tightly connected to Arab and Indian households, and when households left Africa for Arabia or India they revealed a racial gradient of mobility. By examining the lives of freed slaves—including their economic activity, their relationships with their former masters, and the routes they traveled—the broader history of the western Indian Ocean comes more sharply into focus.
Each of the final two chapters focuses on an individual who represents a microcosm of the Indian Ocean world: a freed slave and an Omani tribal leader. They both built lives and transformed environments far from the sea, but they depended on Indian Ocean credit, mobility, and kinship to advance their own agendas when the deck was stacked against them.
The eighth chapter focuses on the extraordinary career of the man who built the first dhow on Lake Victoria. He was a freed slave who entered the ivory business on the mainland with his partner, another freed slave. They became entangled with Zanzibari creditors and the complex local politics of their African patron. The freed slave and ivory trader created tight kin networks with his patron on the island of Ukerewe in Lake Victoria, and he built “a second Zanzibar” on the lake’s shore. This trading post attracted missionary attention in the 1870s, and it created a collision among the local ruler, the missionaries, and the ivory dealer, which led to many deaths. It sent reverberations across the lake and down the caravan trails to Zanzibar. At the center of the dispute were attempts at the manipulation of credit, misunderstood documents, and a contest in the interior over Indian Ocean trade.
During this period in Arabia, the political history of interior Oman proved to be intricately tied to Indian Ocean networks, specifically credit markets in Zanzibar. Chapter 9 traces the history of Salih bin Ali al-Harthi (1834–1896), a major religiopolitical leader in the Omani interior, to show how his challenges to the Omani sultans were connected to Zanzibar. The second half of the century also saw ongoing migration (and circulation) from Arabia to East Africa, despite the political division of the territories in 1861. Salih bin Ali was preceded in death by his former ally Barghash, the sultan of Zanzibar (r. 1870–88), and by his bête noir Turki, the sultan of Muscat (r. 1871–88). The death of these two sultans marked a turning point in the western Indian Ocean: European hegemony resulted in the partition of East Africa and an unofficial protectorate in Oman. An epilogue connects these nineteenth-century events to the present, including twentieth-century Omani migration; the violent revolution in Zanzibar in 1964, which killed and expelled thousands of Arabs; the 1970 palace coup in Oman, which paved the way for East African Arabs to “return” to the homeland of the predecessors; and the place of these so-called Zanzibaris in modern Oman.
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When Juma bin Salim wrote his two-year ivory contract with Ladha Damji in Zanzibar in 1869, he identified himself by genealogy and origin. He included his tribal name, al-Bakri, and appended a signifier of his place of origin, Nizwa, one of the most important cities in the eastern Arabian interior. The circumstances in Oman and Nizwa that thrust Juma bin Salim out into the Indian Ocean, into debt, and into the heart of Africa begin our story.
1
Drought and New Mobilities in the Omani Interior
“He who eats her halwa must [also]
patiently endure her misfortune”
“If fortune does not obey you, follow it so
that you may become its companion.”
—Nineteenth-Century Omani Proverbs
IN THE 1840S, Nizwa, one of the largest and most important towns in the Omani interior, and its environs were struck by a severe drought. This drought lasted for more than five years, disrupted the normal patterns of life, and resulted in mass emigration. The festival (’eid al-adha) marking the culmination of the Hajj in 1845 reflected the impact of this environmental crisis. Because of the drought, Nizwans were unable to celebrate in their normal manner. The eighty-foot-tall fort at the center of Nizwa commanded a view of what had been, in more prosperous times, extensive date groves. As a meeting place of four streams, Nizwa was generally well watered, and, consequently, its citizens were well off. Writing forty years after the drought, S. B. Miles noted that Nizwa surpassed “all the towns of Oman in its supply of water, natural wealth, and the industry of its inhabitants.”1 Before the drought in the 1840s, the area’s agriculture supported a population whose size was second only to Muscat, and its industry included “famous and extensive” textile and embroidery works. Nizwa grew cotton and indigo, and women spun and men worked looms to produce blue cotton goods.2 Nizwa was also a religious capital, known as bayḍat al-Islam, the core—literally, “egg”—of Islam, for its historical role in maintaining the Ibadi Imamate.3 The people of Nizwa prayed and studied in three hundred mosques.
During the December 1845 festival (’eid), however, something was amiss. A procession of drummers and horn players led cheering men to the central square for mock fighting with swords, spears, and matchlocks. Women watched the festivities from the rooftops. But the normal celebrations lacked something important. The ’eid al-Adha celebrations of the Hejira year 1261 went on for a typical three days, but the circumstances—namely, the five years of drought—meant that anxiety plagued people from every