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Studio portrait of Saiyid Majid, Sultan of Zanzibar, seated beside a table with his arm resting on a large book, by Hurrichund Chintamon in the 1860s. This photograph is from the Archaeological Survey of India Collections and was shown at the 1867 Paris Exhibition. Sultan Sayyid Majid was born at Zanzibar in 1834, the sixth son of His Highness Sayyid Said bin Sultan, Iman of Muscat and Oman. Sayyid Majid was Governor of Zanzibar, Pemba and the East African domains during his father's reign. On the death of his father, 19 October 1856 he was proclaimed Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman. He died at Zanzibar 7 October 1870. 21.5 x 18 Centimetres. Photographer: Chintamon, Hurrichund.

In 1840 the Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar’s flagship, the Sultana, sailed for New York City. Sayyid Sa‘īd bin Sultān Āl Busa‘īdī sought to capitalize on new commercial networks beyond the Indian Ocean and so dispatched a trusted agent, Ahmad bin Na’aman al Kaabi, to the United States with iconic regional products: Zanzibari cloves, East African ivory, Muscati dates, Yemeni coffee, and Persian carpets. From the proceeds of their sale Na’aman purchased a cargo of American cotton cloth, already a commercial staple in East Africa. Na’aman was fêted in New York, and the Sultana’s African, Persian, and Indian crew captured headlines across the nation. The Sultana’s sojourn was of such great interest to New Yorkers that the city council commissioned a lush portrait of Na’aman for City Hall. This essay offers context to the Na’aman painting through a reconsideration of the Sultana’s voyage, a journey that encapsulated the ambitions of the Omani-Zanzibari state. More precisely, the Sultana was a richly symbolic vessel that represented the new material and political interests binding Zanzibar to distant world regions. Indeed, the ship, its mission, cargo, and crew were each emblematic of the emergent cultural economy of the Swahili Coast as well as the wider economic trends that were remaking the nineteenth century world. The portrait of Ahmad bin Na’aman thus offers an extraordinary window on the interface of the Indian Ocean and Atlantic basins, and it stands as a testament to the role of Zanzibaris in shaping emergent global relationships.

Dans un contexte de course aux colonies, Léopold II, nouvellement roi de Belgique envoie des agents au Congo pour ramener des informations qui lui permettront de créer un nouvel Etat en 1885 : l’E.I.C. Ces agents, recherchant pour la plupart de la gloire et de l’aventure, partent alors pour des contrées encore mal connues et fantasmées en Europe : le continent des ténèbres. Sur place, ne sachant comment s’y prendre, ils font appel aux commerçants Arabo-swahilis qui empruntent les routes de l’île de Zanzibar à l’intérieur du continent depuis quelques décennies. Ces derniers s’étaient installés à Zanzibar en 1840, suite à la volonté du sultan de Mascate d’y placer sa capitale. Mais la présence de ces derniers est due notamment au commerce d’esclaves, commerce dénoncé en Europe comme étant une marque de barbarie et de frein à la civilisation. Mais les agents n’ayant aucune autre possibilité, se garderont bien de donner leurs avis philanthropiques aux esclavagistes pour profiter très certainement de leur assistance. Arrivés dans les régions convoitées, les agents s’y installent, fondent des stations et fréquentent les Arabo-swahilis. Certains, au grand étonnement de l’opinion publique en métropole, en ramèneront des témoignages valorisant « l’esclavagiste arabe ». Mais si les discours des agents de Léopold II peuvent être considérés à l’époque comme étant « pro-arabe », à leur analyse rien n’est plus ambigu. En effet, ces discours lorsqu’ils sont positifs restent teintés de la mentalité de la société dont les agents sont issus : la société européenne du 19ème siècle. Cette société, fascinante par les grands mouvements artistiques, scientifiques et technologiques dont elle a été le berceau, n’était pas pour autant moins raciste et les écrits des agents en témoignent. C’est pourquoi le discours de ces derniers sur les Arabo-swahilis est à analyser de deux manières : en le replaçant dans le contexte historique dont il est contemporain et en le confrontant à celui présent en métropole. « L’Arabe téméraire, cruel et fanatique » et « l’Arabe comme allié » sont des exemples de représentations, présentes dans les écrits des agents, qui seront étudiés dans ce travail grâce notamment à une lecture socio-psychologique de la construction des stéréotypes.Tous ces discours se confrontent, s’alimentent et finalement le politique prend le dessus: la concurrence pour l’ivoire aura une telle ampleur qu’un conflit armé va être engagé jusqu’à ce que les agents de l’Etat Indépendant du Congo ne représentent plus que la seule et unique autorité au Congo.

This paper results from two visits to the Archives at Zanzibar in 1975 and 1976, lasting in all approximately three weeks. Access to these archives has not been an easy matter for some time, though more recently a few scholars have been able to secure permission to use them. This paper is an examination solely of the Arabic materials in the Archives, and may be of use to those who intend to use the Archives, particularly non-Arabic-speaking scholars. The collection was originally housed in the museum of Bayt al-Amānī before it was moved to its present site, a modern building centrally situated on the main road to the airport. There is a large reading room with an open shelf library containing various studies on Zanzibar, Zanzibar government publications, and a newspaper collection. Other documents are available on request from stacks housed in the lower part of the building. Regretably, however, no photocopying facilities are presently available. Copies of an inventory prepared in 1954 may be consulted in the reading room.

This article undertakes a critical retrospective of the symbolic appropriation process through which Soqotra was constituted as an imaginative geography, embodying the strategic desiderata of states as well as the ideational fantasies of men over millennia. The island’s location on the threshold of continents (Africa and Arabia), and on a cardinal node on the sea-lanes linking the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond, subjected its internal dynamics to the maelstrom of events in the larger world. Moreover, its physical isolation endowed it with an endemic biodiversity that has spurred reveries about the lost Garden of Eden, and made it a coveted haven for a mosaic of human aspirations. The article examines the strategic interests pursued, and the appropriating discourses deployed, by the European powers vying for political and economic hegemony at the different historical periods surveyed here: Antiquity, Portuguese, British, Soviet and the recent adoption of a United Nations-brokered environmental regime for Soqotra. Finally, it draws out the ramifications of this strategic entanglement and symbolic appropriation process on Soqotra’s estimated 50,000 inhabitants at the present historical conjuncture.

Clove plantations on nineteenth-century Zanzibar were sites on which many recent immigrants from Oman and Africa constructed new identities within the complex social relations of colonial rule, enslavement and concubinage. Archaeological evidence relating both to architectural and ceramic remains is used within this work to interpret such multifaceted identities. Ethnographic and historical accounts of African societies have both shown that gendered identities across the continent are, and have been in the past, characterized by diversity. This article has a wider significance beyond the field of African archaeology, in suggesting that archaeologists working across Africa are ideally placed to make an important contribution to the field of gender archaeology in exploring such heterogeneous subjectivities.