Sorting out the tribes: The creation of racial identities in colonial Zanzibar's newspaper wars

Instrumentalist interpretations have done much to historicize our understan ding of the rise of racial politics in colonial Zanzibar, especially the ro le of the state in encouraging such politics. But often left unexamined are the precise debates and discussions by which Zanzibari intellectuals craft ed locally compelling concepts of racial nationalism. These debates occurre d in two phases. The first involved promotion of the idea of exclusionary e thnic nationalism. This nas accomplished largely by elite literati, affilia ted with the Arab Association and Zanzibar National Party, who imagined a n ational community defined by class-bound criteria of arabocentric 'civiliza tion'. The implied foil of this vision were 'barbarians' from the African m ainland. In the second phase, poorly educated propagandists affiliated with the African Association countered with their own vision of exclusionary et hnic nationalism, one that imagined the nation in explicitly racial terms. Most of the article focuses on the second of these phases, examining debate s from the popular newspapers of the 1950s in which Zanzibari intellectuals argued against flexible notions of identity and instead promoted new parad igms that defined ethnicity in fixed racial terms. The article demonstrates that these new ideas were not simply absorbed from colonial discourse, nor were they the exclusive preserve of any one political camp. Rather, they a rose from a common circuit of discourse, in which elite literati, popular j ournalists and their readers all informed one another. The article closes b y examining debates over slavery, intermarriage and 'blood purity' that may have served to justify sexual assault as a tool of racial levelling. Thus the racial pogroms of the early 1960s are shown to have had a significant p rehistory in the discourse of the nationalist press.