Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (52 page)

The scholar Abdul Sheriff puts the 1964 revolution into perspective. “It was about both class and race,” he told me, “but the racial aspect was more visible. True, not all the Omanis were rich and not all the Africans were poor. Yet even the poor Arabs felt comfortable with the sultan’s regime, while the many Africans who had never been enslaved nevertheless felt comfortable with the new revolutionary authorities.” The nationalizations and other recriminations that followed in the late 1960s sent many Arabs fleeing back to Oman, he added.

In 1972, Karume was assassinated by his own hard-line faction, and Ali Sultan Issa and others, who had been the guiding ideological lights of the revolution, were imprisoned and tortured, as suspicion reigned generally. The revolutionary regime held on, buttressed by the politics of race, as its handling of the economy has generally been a shambles throughout all these recent decades. “We came to power through the machete, we will not give up through the ballot,” regime members have been known to declare.

Nassor Mohammed, a lawyer with close ties to the opposition, told me that Zanzibar had more of an authentic multi-party system under the last phase of British and Omani rule than it does now. In 1992 opposition parties were finally established because of pressure from Western donors, in the wake of the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe. But the “revolutionary government,” as it still calls itself, maintains power through intimidation and the doling out of government jobs and subsidies. Elections held every five years have only exacerbated tensions—identified as the political parties still are with racial groups—and have been an occasion for mainland troops to occupy the island temporarily. The investment that there is in Zanzibar tends to dry up before elections and picks up afterwards when everyone exhibits a sigh of relief that, once again, chaos has been averted. In fact, what has kept Zanzibar peaceful, according to Mohammed, is the very cosmopolitanism that struggles to survive despite the dismal post-1964 experience.

“Zanzibar is an embarrassment to the mainland,” one foreign diplomat told me. Indeed, as mainland Tanzania and neighboring Mozambique make modest economic and political progress, even as Kenya following its inter-tribal violence is still fragile, and Somalia barely existent, Zanzibar, all its cosmopolitanism notwithstanding, is still stuck in the post-colonial past of the 1960s and 1970s, with essentially one-party rule and a regime that has not done nearly enough to attract the foreign capital necessary to soak up the large pool of unemployed male youth, which is the real key to stability in the developing world, especially Africa. Zanzibar exemplifies why the East African seaboard remains the Indian Ocean’s final frontier. And that frontier is not about the holding of elections, but about the building of strong, impersonal institutions that do not discriminate according to race, ethnic group, tribe, or personal connections.

“If we were free of the mainland, we would grow up in a matter of
days, and the sons of Zanzibar would return from points all around the Indian Ocean, for our true history is written in the monsoon winds,” Sheikh Salah Idriss Mohammed told me. Sheikh Idriss, a historian, maintains his small apartment as a museum, cluttered to the ceilings with photos of former Omani sultans and with diagrams of the lineage of Omani royal families. Everywhere there are books and maps and manuscripts, concerning pre-1964 days, yellowing and rotting. Plying me with coffee scented with cloves and ginger, he lamented, “We have no democracy at all. In America you elected Obama, a black man, that’s democracy!”

I tried to be hopeful. Compared to the earlier post-colonial era in the 1960s and 1970s, thoughts of race and revolutionary ideology did appear to be in retreat. The dynamism that existed favored the increasingly vibrant opposition, as well as contacts with the outside world through trade and tourism. I refused to believe that the Gulf states, India, China, and Indonesia could keep mightily developing without East and Southern Africa as a whole being eventually, positively affected. Arabs were trickling back, and a new wave of globalization could yet return to Zanzibar what had been lost, without the oppression that had led to the revolution.

In any event, because East Africa was still a frontier, its situation was critical: for its eventual full-blown incorporation into the Greater Indian Ocean trading system would make that system, which would also have to include East Asia, the true, throbbing heart of the twenty-first-century world. No great power—not even the Chinese—would conquer the maritime rim of the Eastern Hemisphere, but a trading system would. Such a trading system would be a power in its own right, able to compete with the European Union and the United States. And Zanzibar, with its cosmopolitan tradition of old, was as good a place as any to watch for it to happen.

Nothing and no one summed up for me the
idea
of Africa and the Indian Ocean as much as the novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in 1948 in Zanzibar and now teaching literature in England. Gurnah’s Zanzibar is a “tumble-down raft floating on the edges of the Indian Ocean,” decrepit and unassuming, international yet parochial.
⁸
It is a place populated by native Africans, Somalis, Omanis, Baluchis, Gujaratis, Arabs, and Persians, all seeing the same streets and shoreline through different personal, family, and collective historical experiences, even as Islam is a commonality, like the air everyone breathes. In one way or another, commerce and
the monsoon winds have brought them all to this shore. “This is what we’re on this earth to do,” declares one of Gurnah’s characters. “To trade.” To go inland in search of goods to bring back to the coast, to travel to the bleakest deserts or most impenetrable forests, in order to do business with “a king or a savage.… It’s all the same to us.”
⁹
Trade delivers peace and prosperity. Trade is the great equalizer among people and nations; it does more than perhaps any other activity to prevent war.

Yet in the novelist’s elegiac vision Zanzibar’s cosmopolitan population has made for a world of separations and abandonment, and the severest personal loss. Trade entails opportunity and movement, and therefore the rending of family ties forever. As one character says, “such pain never ends … nothing which means so much is ever over.”
¹⁰
Another character, a young boy taken away from his parents in order to pay off his father’s debt and to find a livelihood with a trader, “wondered” years later “if his parents still thought of him, if they still lived, and he knew that he would rather not find out.” At the same time this boy is “numbed by guilt that he had been unable to keep the memory of his parents fresh in his life.”
¹¹

Such deeply felt personal loss is partially appeased by the shock of new landscapes and experiences that the protagonists encounter in their one-way journeys away from loved ones. This sad and beautiful world, of permanent partings and dhow journeys—captured in totally different ways by Camões and Gurnah—is made all the more tragic by the experience of colonialism. A typical Gurnah character is a young East African student sent to study and live a marginal existence in England, who ends up never seeing his family again, and is thus at home nowhere. Referring to the people he meets in England, one such character observes, “How chilling and belittling blue eyes can be.”
¹²
Indeed, even as the imperial power strives to maintain the highest traditions of justice and liberty, the very relationship between the colonizer and its subjects leads to cruel misunderstandings and a feeling of inferiority and servitude on the part of the indigenous inhabitants.

But Gurnah is even more unsparing of his homeland’s own post-colonial failure, which only makes the humiliation experienced by his characters that much worse. Barbarism, in the form of the 1964 revolution, quickly follows independence. “There was hardly time to get used to the [new] flag” before “murder, expulsion, detention, rape, you name it.” Gangs roamed the street. There is a local dictator for whom “no meanness was too petty,” even as he himself was cut down by “mean bastards”
with machine guns, a clear reference to Karume.
¹³
Then there are the petty “deprivations and wretchedness” of self-rule: blocked toilets, running water and electricity only a few hours a day. Historic houses kept up by the English are “turned into hovels.” It is a series of uglinesses.

As Gurnah writes: “We don’t know how to make anything for ourselves, not anything we use or desire, not even a bar of soap or a packet of razor blades.”
¹⁴

Following the British departure, rather than forge a better world, this supposed cosmopolitan and intermarried Indian Ocean civilization of Arabs, Persians, Indians, and Africans comes undone by “seething” intolerances and “racisms,” all brought to the surface by post-independence politics. Colonialism, having rent the fabric of traditional island culture, leaves it exposed to every indignity, self-inflicted and otherwise, after independence. It is like a complex organism without any defenses left. Taking a walk, “going nowhere in particular,” is, according to the novelist, the “postcolonial condition.”
¹⁵

And yet at some point a direction must emerge for the walker, because the post-colonial period itself must pass into a new era; the era, in fact, that I experienced in my travels. Looking at the myriad faces and skin complexions around me, I knew that each had borne a family’s separate and unique experience of departures and leave-takings, of struggles and abandonments. And all for what purpose? “To trade.”

Gurnah has much to teach. “Imagination is a kind of truth,” he writes, for to imagine is to be able to put yourself in another’s shoes. And the more you imagine, the more aware you are of how little you know, for “to be too certain of anything is the beginning of bigotry.”
¹⁶

From Stone Town I traveled for an hour and a half to the southeastern tip of Zanzibar, to the coastal town of Makunduchi. It was late July, and the Shirazi festival of Mwaka Kogwa was at hand, a celebration of the Zoroastrian new year, long ago absorbed into the culture of the African Swahili inhabitants. Tradition held that through the catharsis of ritual combat the locals would be cleansed of all their grudges and other bad feelings built up between them in the course of the year.

On any open field of red laterite several long lines of fighters jogged in from various directions, loudly chanting fight songs. These Africans were dressed in every outlandish manner of cheap hand-me-down, including fake fur coats, old motorcycle and construction helmets, and torn
woollen ski caps. Some of the men were even dressed like women, with small coconuts strapped to their chests to indicate breasts. Each man carried a banana stem to use as a weapon. Small boys tagged behind them. The atmosphere was menacing, as if real violence would occur. Then individual fights broke out. Soon there was a vast melee, with battles raging on every front, and the crowd of onlookers rushing out of the way in this direction and that to avoid being trampled by the fighters. Dust flew. After an exhausting hour of combat, the village women in loud
khangas
marched in from all sides, singing. Soon the fighting died down, a fire was set, and the Persian festival celebrated by Africans was brought to an end.

Later, people gathered at the beach for a picnic. Dhows, like ideograms of the wind itself drawn in rapid ink strokes, went out from the shallows. Small waves broke and it was as if the whole universe reverberated. Beyond a coral reef several miles out lay the entire expanse of the Indian Ocean, stretching all the way to Indonesia. I thought of Oman and India, and the other places in between where I had been. In particular, with the Shirazi festival uppermost in my mind, I thought of an old Persian trader whom I had met many months before in Kolkata.

To his friends his name was Habib Khalili. To Indians in Kolkata, his name was Habib Khalili al-Shirazi—that is, Habib Khalili from Shiraz, in Persia. In Persia his name was Habib Khalili al-Shirazi al-Hindi—that is, Habib Khalili from Shiraz, and more recently of India. Habib Khalili was a tea merchant. He claimed to have forty relatives in Singapore, and more in Malaysia and Abu Dhabi. “My real country is the Indian Ocean,” he had told me, his fingers racing through the noisy night air, as though hankering for prayer beads.

We were in the house in Kolkata where he had been born in 1928, full of potted plants, piles of old newspapers, and the moan of traffic through neoclassical columns and the French windows left open for the sake of the monsoon breezes. By the end of our conversation it was dark enough so I could no longer see his face. He had been reduced to a mere excited voice, leaping up and down like his fingers, a vestige in the flesh of the powerful magnetism of Iranian culture and language, whose veins still reach unto Bengal, on the border with Southeast Asia, and southwest unto Sofala in northern Mozambique.

“There are more Persian graves in the Deccan than there are trees,” he
said, referring to India’s southern plateau region. “Fifty percent of Bengali used to be Persian loanwords. With the severing of Muslim East Bengal in 1947, it is now 30 percent. Iran,” he went on, “is a country that has never been conquered, and yet has never been free.” His conversation was like that, jumping without transitions from one issue to another. I could not hold him still.

I did not bother to check his figures: Persian influence in the Indian Subcontinent has always been substantial. Farsi was the official lingua franca in India until 1835, when English finally replaced it, and until the early modern era it was universally understood in Bengal. Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novel about nineteenth-century Calcutta,
Those Days
, intimates how Persian was a second language.
¹⁷
In the seventeenth century, many of Dhaka’s artists, poets, generals, and administrators were Shias who had migrated from Iran.
¹⁸
Mughal rule from the sixteenth through eighteenth century bore a heavy Persian imprint. The Subcontinent, no less than Mesopotamia, illustrated the importance of Iran. And Iran, as the trader intimated, while never colonized, had its affairs constantly interfered with by European powers. Unable to claim formal oppression, Iran developed feelings of oppression that became that much worse.