Zanzibar: Love and Exile

Darryl Pinckney

Abdulrazak Gurnah is concerned with the unbridgeable distance between the homeland and the new
home, and the way one becomes a stranger in both places.
April 27, 2006 issue

Reviewed:

Desertion
by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Pantheon, 262 pp., $23.00

In 1872, the year Henry Stanley returned to

Zanzibar from the East African interior with
the letters that made both him and the
supposedly lost Dr. Livingstone famous,
Richard Burton published his two-volume
travelogue Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast.
Perhaps he wanted to remind the reading
public in Europe and elsewhere that he had
been looking for the source of the Nile back
in 1856, long before Dr. Livingstone came to
brood on the edges of Lake Tanganyika.
Burton’s work mostly reminds us that the
slave trade in East Africa had been as
widespread as it was in West Africa, if not
more so. Like the Bible, the Koran does not
prohibit slavery and in the early nineteenth
century Zanzibar derived most of its wealth
from slaves. However, the British Empire that
had been created by slave labor no longer
needed the slave trade, and in 1847 the British
government persuaded Zanzibar’s sultan,
Seyyid Said, to sign a treaty outlawing it,
though once it was signed the British navy Abdulrazak Gurnah; drawing by David Levine
had trouble enforcing it.1 Buy Print

A meeting place of Arab, Indian, European, and African commercial

interests, the slave depot at Zanzibar supplied labor for the date palm
plantations on the Arabian peninsula and the tea plantations on the
Indian subcontinent, and for sugar plantations as far away as
Southeast Asia and the Americas. Burton had heard about “the terrors
of the middle-passage,” the atrocities of capture and the brutalities of
purchase. Only one in ten of the slaves selected to be eunuchs in the
Ottoman Empire survived the unhygienic castration.
Burton estimated that two thirds of Zanzibar’s population were slaves,
but in Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast he writes as if he doesn’t know
who the black or brown people are or where they came from.
Zanzibar’s population was so variously descended, from Africans,
Arabs, Persians, and “Asiatic settlers and colonists,” that Burton felt
himself “in the presence of another and a new race.” The “African
element,” the Wasawahili, comprised of the Mahadimu, or “serviles,”
and the Shirazi, or “nobles” who claimed Omani Arab origins, were, to
Burton, a half-caste or mulatto people who differed from their
Egyptian, Nubian, Abyssinian, Galla, Dankali, and Somal “cousins” in
the crucial respect of their “negro effluvium.”

I am compelled by its high racial significance to offer a few words upon

this unpleasant topic. The odour of the Wasawahili, like that of the negro,
is a rank foetor, sui generis, which faintly reminded me of the ammoniacal
smell exhaled by low-caste Hindus, popularly called Pariahs. These,
however, owe it to external applications, aided by the want of cleanliness.
All agree that it is most offensive in the yellow-skinned, and the darkest
negroids are therefore preferred for domestic slaves and concubines. It
does not depend upon diet. In the Anglo-American states, where blacks
live like whites, no diminution of it has been remarked; nor upon want of
washing,—those who bathe are not less nauseous than those who do not.
After hard bodily exercise, or during mental emotion, the epiderm exudes
a foetid perspiration, oily as that of orange peel: a negro’s feet will stain a
mat, an oar must be scraped after he has handled it, and a woman has left
upon a polished oaken gun-case a hemispherical mark that no scrubbing
could remove. This “Catinga,” as the Brazilians call it, taints the room,
infects every part of the body with which it comes in contact, and exerts a
curious effect on the white races.2

The British had strong influence over the Zanzibar sultans during
much of the nineteenth century and in 1890 they made the island a
protectorate, seizing control of its administration and the sultan’s
revenues. When Sultan Hamid died in 1896, the British bombarded the
palace and deposed Khalid, a young slaveholding prince regarded by
the people as the rightful heir. In 1897 a new sultan put in place by the
British issued a decree abolishing slavery, but the price of being black
—that is, the cost of someone else’s being white or even brown—
remained high.

A century after Burton’s sojourn in East Africa, Evelyn Waugh’s A

Tourist in Africa (1960)—so distant from the colonial ignorance of his
Remote People (1930)—expresses unease with what he regards as the
hasty British departure from Zanzibar in the 1950s. Writing in a period
of political turbulence in the protectorate, Waugh doesn’t trust the
strength of the institutions the British were leaving behind. His
reservations were not unfounded: when independence came at the end
of 1963, because of British policy Arabs were in the ascendant on
Zanzibar. (Indians, creditors of the sultans, were the chief financiers.)
Africans were dismissed from the police force. The clash between
landless African laborers and the landowning Arab minority soon
turned into an uprising in 1964, during which Arabs and African-
Arabs were massacred in the hundreds. Thousands more were
detained by the new African regime and the sultan was forced into
exile.3 After the revolution, rickshaws were banned, and Zanzibar
merged with Tanganyika. The new country, Tanzania, lived through
decades of economic decay brought on by Julius Nyerere’s generally
benign but ineffective “African socialism.” Travelers to Zanzibar found
a forgotten place; the trade routes of the monsoon winds that blow in
one direction during one season and in the opposite direction in the
next were no longer so important to its life.4

The novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Muslim African born on Zanzibar

in 1948, is an eloquent chronicler of the tragic backwater’s modern
history. In his first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), the narrator
reflects that “in years gone by, slavers had walked these streets. Their
toes chilled by the dew, their hearts darkened with malice, they came
with columns of prime flesh, herding their prize to the sea.” Gurnah
writes of the Muslim world on the island and along the East African
coast, particularly of the upheavals and destruction visited on the
small shopkeepers and large mercantile families after Zanzibar
became independent. Arab, African, Indian, and Comorian lived side
by side, had intermarried, and the Zanzibaris thought of themselves as
a moderate, civilized people. But in his novel Admiring Silence (1996),
the unnamed narrator, an Indian-Arab exile from Zanzibar,
remembers, “In reality, we were nowhere near [a] we [a united people],
but usin our separate yards, locked in our historical ghettoes, self-
forgiving and seething with intolerances, with racisms, and with
resentments.” It was not that they didn’t know from their “colonized
history books” about the “savage in the interior” who was taken
captive, Gurnah’s exile continues; they had just assumed everyone
would forgive the slave past and embrace national unity:

But they [black people] didn’t. They wanted to glory in grievance, in

promises of vengeance, in their past oppression, in their present poverty
and in the nobility of their darker skins.

Often, in Gurnah’s novels, a desperate but lucky son of the house is

going away to study, getting away from the new African state and its
persecutions of Arabs and Indians, and promising never to come back.
The place to get away to could be Kenya or the German Democratic
Republic, as in the case of the exile in Admiring Silence, who had come
of age in Julius Nyerere’s socialist state during the 1970s, when
movements against South Africa’s apartheid government had their
headquarters in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam. After the
murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, a chorus of
discontent with the US began to be heard across Africa, the narrator
observes. China and the Soviet Union took up the aid projects the US
refused to finance: “So halfway through the first decade of
independence, we were jilted for flirting with the enemy.”
Ostensibly the exile has gone to East Germany to learn dentistry, but
the first chance he gets he escapes to England. It is very much an
English—not an American—exile that befalls Gurnah’s anxious men.
England is a nightmare of cheapness and threatened racial violence for
the Zanzibari hospital orderly in the edgy, bitter Pilgrim’s Way (1988).
The revolution back home has long since taught him to be afraid and
duplicitous, and he is morbidly sensitive as a foreigner in teeming
London; he dropped out of university because the other students
laughed when his stomach rumbled in class. He can’t bear to tell his
family back in Zanzibar the truth about his failure to make it in
England. A recurring theme in Gurnah’s work is that the discrepancy
between what the nonwhite immigrant had expected and what he’d
found in the rotting boardinghouses of London is part of his failure,
what he can’t let them know back home.

Gurnah is concerned with the unbridgeable distance between the

homeland and the new home, and the way one becomes a stranger in
both places, gone too long from home to fit in anymore, and never
completely accepted—or believing himself accepted—in England. In
Gurnah’s portraits of both well-meaning and bigoted white British
people, Zanzibar talks back to empire. Gurnah’s exiles and immigrants
are very conscious of how being Muslims further complicates their
distance from the life around them. In one novel, a man is afraid to tell
his mother about his daughter, because his daughter’s mother is white,
and not a Muslim, and he’s not married to her.

But in the beautiful, lyrical novel By the Sea (2000), an asylum seeker
from a Muslim family in Zanzibar, who is considerably older than
most of the refugees he meets in dealing with the British bureaucracy
that handles cases like his, finds a measure of peace and tranquillity in
England, wretched though the life of dependence in an alien society is.
Gurnah also shows what it is like to return home years later to hear
the oblique yet hurtful reproaches of family members who have stayed
behind. Just as there is a son who gets out of Zanzibar in Gurnah’s
novels, so, too, Gurnah usually provides the exiled son with an older
brother who has sacrificed himself and his dreams to stay behind in
Zanzibar with their parents, whose businesses and shops failed after
independence, the time of the destruction of the Arab political elite by
the new African government. They lost status, property, and
sometimes their lives.

Most of Gurnah’s characters face eastward. Sometimes they are

invested with a sense of belonging to the centuries-old Muslim trade
diaspora around the Indian Ocean and to the untraceable migration of
Muslims, Indians, Arabs, and Persians in the region. Paradise (1994) is
set on the East African mainland in the early twentieth century, and is
the story of a Muslim boy who is given by his father to a merchant in
payment for a debt. The boy grows up working in a small shop in a
coastal town until he is old enough to make the perilous journey with
the merchant’s caravan into the interior seeking to trade for ivory. The
caravan will be decimated by unprincipled African chieftains along the
route. The boy hears stories around the campfire. One man claims that
when Arabs first came to that part of Africa, they didn’t always
capture their victims for the slave trade themselves, because there
were plenty of people eager to sell their neighbors and cousins for
trinkets. An Arab nationalist idea of the late 1930s held that “Arab
slavery”—in Islamic regions—had been more benign and civilizing
than Christian slavery in the New World, but this does not figure in the
novel. Instead, Gurnah wants to show how destructive customs
persisted among different peoples of African and Arab extraction
around the turn of the century in East Africa, even as the brute force
of German weapons was announcing their approaching occupation.
(Tanganyika remained a German colony until after World War I.)
Paradise ends ignobly, with the boy grown up and seeking the
protection of employment with the new German masters in order to
escape the wrath of the ruined merchant, whom he has also betrayed.

Gurnah’s most recent novel, Desertion, begins in East Africa under

the British, in 1899, two years after the abolition of slavery, and
thirteen years after the sphere-of-influence accord between the British
and the Germans, which gave the British Kenya and the Germans
Tanganyika. In this new era of imperial expansion owing to the rubber
trade and the building of the railroads, Martin Pearce, an English
gentleman and Orientalist, is brought into the lonely life of Rehana
Zakariya, an Indian-African woman isolated in a crumbling town
down the Kenyan coast from Mombasa. A century later, the story of
their secret affair captivates their descendants, who are strangers to
one another, but in whom, in their avid, forgiving curiosity about the
lovers, East and West will meet again.

When the novel opens, Rehana’s brother, an Indian shopkeeper, finds

Pearce collapsed from exhaustion in a square, in front of a mosque,
and takes him to his shop. For a moment, Rehana thinks the
semiconscious figure may be the husband who abandoned her years
before, a merchant from India who simply went back when it suited
him. The unexplained appearance of a European, or mzungu, is an
event and as soon as Frederick Turner, the colonial administrator,
hears of Pearce, he ventures into streets he finds disgusting in order to
rescue the white man from his brown Samaritans. Swahili is the
common language and there are people who speak Arabic and Gujarati
fluently, but before Pearce stumbled into town, Turner has had only a
drunken rubber plantation manager for English conversation and
white male companionship of his own class. The plantation manager
tends to hold forth about how the inevitable Darwinian disappearance
of Africans will make room for white settlers throughout East Africa.
“This continent has the potential to be another America.” The
harvests had been profitable, until one English manager took it upon
himself to free the sultan’s slaves and reemploy them as wage labor, at
which point they ran off. People won’t work anyway.
“In slavery they learned idleness and evasion, and now cannot
conceive of the idea of working with any kind of endeavour or
responsibility, even for payment,” Turner observes, a creature of his
prejudices, too. Indians had been there before the Portuguese. “If you
see an Indian trader setting up in business, you can be pretty certain
there is a penny or two to be made in the place,” he says. A cultivated
man, as Gurnah portrays him, Turner is nevertheless a mere wheel of
the colonial administration who had been more comfortable in India
than in small, bypassed Zanzibar. “No African language had writing
until the missionaries arrived,” he reminds Pearce.

While convalescing at Turner’s house, Pearce tells his story, which

Turner misunderstands, because he assumes that Pearce’s attitudes
toward Africa and Africans are like his own. Pearce tells Turner he was
a historian and a linguist, and had been traveling in Abyssinia,
working on a book, when he met an Englishman who invited him to
join his hunting expedition to Somalia. Since he had hardly traveled
there, he couldn’t resist going along. “The white hunter organized
everything, the camels, the guides, the provisions, like an angry
quartermaster most of the time.” They killed every day. “It was
unbearable destruction.” Slaughtered meat, drying hides, flies. He
protested, until he was allowed to head for the coast with Somali
guides, who eventually abandoned him rather than kill him.

Because Pearce can speak Arabic, as well as some Swahili, he can

avoid discussions with the other white men about “the hubris of
Empire” and make his own contacts among the townspeople. “He
loved the way his halting knowledge of the language had always won
him friends in his travels, and now here too. He was not at a loss to
understand why.” When invited by Rehana’s brother to lunch, he
readily accepts. While Turner behaves in an insulting and threatening
manner toward the shopkeeper and his family, Pearce is conscious of
his debt to Rehana’s brother, not doubting that “natives” are entitled to
a gentleman’s consideration. He is introduced to Rehana. “That was
what he saw first, those eyes.”

Gurnah shows what the colonizers think of the colonized, but also
what the local population thinks of Europeans in their power. While
Turner’s first thought is to get Pearce away from the local people, they
see only the arrogance and ignorance of his precipitous actions. The
differences in perception and the cultural misunderstandings between
brown and white people make for Gurnah’s deeper subject in the
novel. Unfortunately at the point in the story where Rehana and
Pearce begin their affair, the narrative ends, and Rashid, a man of this
century, an Indian in exile from Zanzibar living in England, takes over
in the first person. He says he does not know how Rehana and Pearce
became lovers and can’t imagine how they circumvented the woman’s
guardians. Moreover, “the people [Pearce] was among [i.e., the local
British] would have been curious of how he went about his affairs.
They would have kept their eye on him.” Rashid toys with different
versions of how the affair may have started. He knows from his
brother that Rehana followed Pearce to Mombasa and that they lived
together until Pearce, it was said, “came to his senses” and returned to
England.

What Rashid knows about their story comes from his brother, Amin,
because the love affair had consequences for him. Desertion now
becomes a novel about the involvement of the twentieth-century
characters in the lovers’ past: “about how one story [the love affair
between Rehana and Pearce] contains many and how they belong not
to us but are part of the random currents of our time”—that is, the
twentieth-century characters will become part of this unknown past.

The novel abandons the story of Rehana and Pearce’s love affair to
tell the story of Rashid, his brother, Amin, and his sister, who all grow
up after World War II in crumbling Zanzibar. Rashid and Amin
progress from Koran schools to state schools. Amin enrolls in a
teachers’ college. They do not know that they are trying to work out
their futures between the end of one age and the beginning of another.

This section of the novel concerns another illicit affair, between Amin
and Jamila, a friend of his sister’s, a divorced woman six years his
senior who lives in an apartment in her family’s house with her own
street door. That she is of a higher class than Amin only seems to
further darken her image in the eyes of his family. It turns out, Rashid
tells us, that she is the granddaughter of Pearce and Rehana, a woman
still notorious in their families. Though Jamila hasn’t been approved
by his family, Amin dreams of their life together. “He walked home like
someone remade, beautiful and loved.” The lovers are discovered and
his parents force Amin to give her up.

Rashid’s reflections then go back to the year before independence, and

he suffers guilt that he was too caught up in his own excitement that
he was leaving to study in London to realize the depths of his brother’s
heartbreak over the loss of Jamila. He recalls his own alienation as a
student in Britain in the late 1960s, and remembers that it was years
before he could write home about his doctoral degree in English, a
long time after the brutal politics of the new Tanzanian regime back
home had turned him into an exile. He remembers the telegram from
his brother telling him that his mother has died. It has been twenty-
two years since he last saw her. He gets a parcel containing his sister’s
book of poems, published in Rome, and presumably written in Swahili,
because Gurnah never specifies in which language a character is
attempting to communicate (just as he never says what these people
call themselves: black, brown, African, Indian). A poem about Jamila
and Amin makes Rashid weep. After he learns that his brother has
become nearly blind, he receives the notebooks that Amin kept in his
youth, his melancholy, beautifully written record of his doomed affair
and his account of Jamila’s later life as a mistress of a minister in the
new government, and what Amin knows of her grandmother’s love
affair with an Englishman back at the turn of the century.

Later, at “a conference on the treatment of mixed-race sexuality in

English writing” in Cardiff, Frederick Turner’s granddaughter Barbara
happens to be in the audience for Rashid’s paper on “race and
sexuality in settler writing in Kenya.” In this speech he talks about
what he then knew of Rehana’s story of desertion. “I did not at that
point know Pearce’s name,” Rashid says. After he meets the
granddaughter, he learns that Turner had written his memoirs, in
which he had given a brief version of an affair between a native girl
and an unnamed Englishman. Frederick Turner’s granddaughter is
also Martin Pearce’s granddaughter. The two men had met again, it
turns out, back in England and Pearce’s daughter by his white English
wife later married Turner’s son. So Rashid has discovered Rehana’s
name from his brother’s notebooks and Pearce’s name from Turner’s
granddaughter, who is as interested in their story as he is. Rashid
implies that he is having an affair with Barbara and that she is resolved
to find Jamila and her other East African relatives. He thinks it is time
for him to go home, too, “to put my fears to rest and to beg pardon for
my neglect.”

It is too bad that Gurnah drops the story of Rehana and Pearce’s affair,
because it is the best part of Desertion. The account of their illicit love
is moving, whereas his later commentary on the cultural obstacles to
their love is more essayistic. The supposedly postmodern strategies
Gurnah uses in this second section, of fragmentary texts, historical
self-consciousness, and miraculous coincidences, are far less
satisfying than the straightforward tale of romance and taboo.

Rashid’s description of his hard times in London in the 1960s puts one
in mind of Naipaul talking about London in the 1950s in The Enigma of
Arrival, just as Gurnah’s exiles seem related to the cynical merchant
and survivor in Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. Yet Desertion doesn’t
read like an attack on contemporary African history, perhaps because
Gurnah’s twentieth-century characters of Arab and Indian origin are
too much at a loss in their improvised lives to come off as superior to
black Africans. But the nineteenth-century characters in Desertion are
as likely as the Europeans, the mzungu, to have “a mouthful of notions
about the savage,” unpredictable in his anger, uncontrollable in his
hungers. “An animal.” “Everyone told savage stories all the time.”

Zanzibar’s African and Arab history is not directly described in

Gurnah’s work, including the difference that made coastal Muslims so
anxious to distinguish themselves from their non-Muslim, tree-
worshiping neighbors. Meanwhile, the part that Islam plays in the lives
of his characters is clear, if unexamined. It is simply their identity, their
family rootedness. When one of his deracinated young men from
Zanzibar is mistaken for a West Indian, he tells himself that he wishes
he had the heart to explain that he was “strictly in Indian Ocean land,”
not Afro-Caribbean, that he had nothing to do with the Atlantic; he
was Muslim.

It is the Muslim encounter with European imperialism, not Africa’s

encounter with the Muslim empire, that Gurnah emphasizes. But
Gurnah doesn’t seem interested in the problems among Indians,
Arabs, and Africans in Africa, and he lets them sit just below the
surface. He is thinking culturally, which isn’t always the same thing as
thinking racially. And yet for his East African characters, their being
Muslim can isolate them within English society, even when they are
only nominally Muslim. It’s as though Gurnah’s characters don’t
understand: they think they are representing a culture, whereas they
are being perceived in racial terms. But maybe the insistence on
looking at things culturally hides an unease about race, as if to be
Muslim and of mixed Indian Ocean ancestry were to be brown, not
sub-Saharan black. Something in Gurnah’s characters doesn’t want to
admit that brown wants to have its own quarrel with white and
doesn’t want to make common cause with black anymore.

And yet Gurnah belongs to the African exile. He has no trouble

speaking of African writing, and identifies himself as being among the
African writers who compose and publish in European languages.5 He
belongs to Wole Soyinka’s generation, writers for whom the founding
event was not the slave-trading past but rather independence; writers
betrayed by politics, many of whom have not really gone back to
where they came from, except in their minds.

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Darryl Pinckney
Darryl Pinckney's latest book is Busted in New York and Other Essays. A new edition
of Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy has just been published.
 (March
2021)
1. As late as 1892, the Admiralty issued a manual of over a hundred
pages to officers of the British navy setting out their powers to
visit, search, and detain vessels suspected of engaging in the slave
trade in East Africa. They were instructed to ask, “Have you any
slaves on board the vessel, or passengers?” (Unao wateumwa ao
abiria chomboni?) ↩

2. University Press of the Pacific, 2003. Burton had been on

Zanzibar between 1856 and 1859, writing a series of reports for
the Foreign Office and the Royal Geographical Society that then
got lost in African colonial offices and society archives. He
published First Steps in East Africa in 1856. See also Jonathan
Glassman, “Slower Than a Massacre: The Multiple Sources of
Racial Thought in Colonial Africa,” The American Historical
Review, Vol. CIX, No. 3 (2004), and Beatrice Nicolini, Makran,
Oman and Zanzibar: Three-Terminal Cultural Corridor in the
Western Indian Ocean (1799–1856) (Brill, 2004). ↩

3. See Esmond Bradley Martin, Zanzibar: Tradition and Revolution

(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978). ↩

4. See John Ryle, “The Lost Library of Zanzibar,” TLS, September

13, 1985, and his “Journey to Zanzibar,” Departures,
November/December 1985. ↩

5. Essays on African Writing, edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah

(Heinemann, Vol. 1, 1993; Vol. 2, 1995). ↩