Social Memory, Silenced Voices, and Poli

Remembering the Revolution in Zanzibar

Cunningham Bissell, Marie-Aude Fouere, Cunningham Bissell, Marie-Aude Fouere

• Publisher: Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9789987083176
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9789987083466
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This volume focuses on the cultural memory and mediation of the 1964 Zanzibar revolution, analyzing its continuing reverberations in everyday life. The revolution constructed new conceptions of community and identity, race and cultural belonging, as well as instituting different ideals of nationhood, citizenship, sovereignty. As the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the revolution revealed, the official versions of events have shifted significantly over time and the legacy of the uprising is still deeply contested. In these debates, the question of Zanzibari identity remains very much at stake: Who exactly belongs in the islands and what historical processes brought them there? What are the boundaries of the nation, and who can claim to be an essential part of this imagined and embodied community? Political belonging and power are closely intertwined with these issues of identity and historyraising intense debates and divisions over precisely where Zanzibar should be situated within the national order of things in a postcolonial and interconnected world. Attending to narratives that have been overlooked, ignored, or relegated to the margins, the authors of these essays do not seek to simply define the revolution or to establish its ultimate meaning. Instead, they seek to explore the continuing echoes and traces of the revolution fifty years on, reflected in memories, media, and monuments. Inspired by interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, history, cultural studies, and geography, these essays foreground critical debates about the revolution, often conducted sotto voce and located well off the official stageattending to long silenced questions, submerged doubts, rumors and secrets, or things that cannot be said.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Illustrations
• Acronyms
• Acknowledgments
• Authors
• Chapter One - Memory, Media, and Mapinduzi: Alternative Voices and Visions of Revolution, Fifty Years Later
• Chapter Two - Memories of Revolution: Patterns of Interpretation of the 1964 Revolution in Zanzibar
• Chapter Three - The Voice of the Revolution: Remembering and Re-Envisioning Field Marshal John Okello
• Chapter Four - Memory, Liberalism, and the Reconstructed Self: Wolfango Dourado and the Revolution in Zanzibar
• Chapter Five - “For Us It’s What Came After”: Locating Pemba in Revolutionary Zanzibar
• Chapter Six - Uncommon Misery, Relegated to the Margins: Tumbatu and Fifty Years of the Zanzibar Revolution
• Chapter Seven - “Glittering Skin”: Race, Rectitude, and Wrongdoing in Zanzibar
• Chapter Eight - Silenced Voices, Recaptured Memories: Historical Imprints within a Zanzibari Life-World
• Chapter Nine - Memory, History, and the Nation among the Grieving Cosmopolitans: Omani-Zanzibaris Remember the Zanzibar Revolution, 1964–Present
• Chapter Ten - Africa Addio, the Revolution, and the Ambiguities of Remembrance in Contemporary Zanzibar
• Chapter Eleven - Healing the Past, Reinventing the Present: From the Revolution to Maridhiano
• Chapter Twelve - Capturing the Commemoration: A Documentary Photo Essay on the 50th Anniversary of the Revolution
• Glossary
• Index
• Back cover