Laura Fair Zanzibar essays

Laura Fair Zanzibar essays In her book, Fair describes many significant ways in which people use dress, music, and sport to challenge the inherited social order, and to redefine race, ethnicity, gender, and class. The book covers the time from the end of WWII back to the 1990s. During that time, Zanzibar experienced rapid social changes in the appearance of a large number of immigrants, and the end of slavery. The majority of the book focuses on urban Zanzibar and The political evolution of Zanzibar, in Fair's analysis, is largely a story of a change in identity issues among the people of the country. As the 1800's ended, people in Zanzibar were largely seen interims of old identities of free, well-bred Muslims (mwungwana), or non-Muslim, slave or rural (mshenzi). As the century progressed, there was a desire to be seen as Swahili in the 1910's, and there was a switch to ethnic identification in the 1920s. Get another identity appeared as the title Shiraze became increasingly popular in the 1930s and 1940s. These changes in identity were often marked by many differences in sport, music, and dress were used to challenge (and sometimes even identify) changes to social order, and make new definitions of gender, ethnicity, class, and race. Slavery was abolished by the British in 1896 in the Zanzibar Protectorate. Slaves themselves were a diverse lot, consisting of many different ethnicities from the African mainland, most were poor, some were well-off enough to own slaves themselves. As slavery ended, many former slaves suddenly found themselves without a formalized 'place' in the new Zanzibar, as their often relatively benign patron-client relationship Over time, the former slaves developed a new identity that was largely based on the traditional Swahili culture of the East African coast. Many remained on plantations owned by Arabs, but the majority moved to N'gambo, part of Zanz...