David Slocum from the Berlin School of Creative Leadership attended ZIFF Literary Forum at Mtoni Palace, Zanzibar (Tanzania) July 2010. He has written a review of 'Mtoni: Palace, Sultan & Princess of Zanzibar' published by ArchiAfrika. Please see Full Text for an extract of the review on 'Mtoni: Palace, Sultan & Princess of Zanzibar'.
The 2010 Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) Literary Forum provided the occasion to launch two books that speak to various aspects of the island’s annual celebration of Zanzibari, African and Indian Ocean history and culture.
Antoni Folkers, with Anne-Katrien Denissen, Abdul Sheriff, Gerrot Smienk, and Frank Koopman, Mtoni: Palace, Sultan & Princess of Zanzibar (Utrecht: ArchiAfrika, 2010)
Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (London: Hurst/ZIORI and New York: Columbia UP/Hurst, 2010)
A carefully researched social and maritime history of the Western Indian Ocean before the sixteenth century and an historical and architectural guide to one of the neglected monuments of nineteenth-century Zanzibar. On their face, both of the books under consideration here offers a richly layered and intelligent probing of their respective – seemingly quite distinct – subjects. The works and authors deserve appreciation for their individual achievements and the following remarks will address some of the priorities shaping each publication before identifying some issues and questions they share.
If Abdul Sheriff has written a history of commercial, intellectual, and cultural exchange that sprawls across millennia, Antoni Folkers provides in Mtoni: Palace, Sultan & Princess what appears a much more tightly focused guide to the major seaside building complex to the north of Stone Town in Zanzibar. The very nicely designed volume is brief, at less than a hundred pages, and lavishly illustrated. Yet with four principal co-authors, including Sheriff, Folkers, a trained architect, accomplishes much more than a technical reconstruction of an historical complex now in ruins. His is a layered social, architectural, cultural and political history of the physical site and the imaginative space it has occupied in Zanzibar since the early 1800s.
The close descriptions and projected usage of the complex convey how, following its construction in the 1830s, Mtoni was a consummate meeting place – literally, a space for the gathering of peoples and ideas (1). In ways, Mtoni in the years of Sultan Seyyid, it builder and first occupant, seems to epitomize the dynamism and diverse exchanges of the Indian Ocean. While not as fully integrated and self-contained as in the earlier centuries described by Sheriff, nineteenth-century Zanzibar participated in an updated cosmopolitanism embracing Europe and even North American trade and diplomacy s well as more traditional commercial and political interests from the Indian Ocean basin.
For Folkers, a central illustration of this cosmopolitanism is architectural. With Gerrit Smienk and Frank Koopman, he writes refreshingly clear explanations of a range of structural and decorative forms, and structural and functional elements. The non-specialist thus learns, without being oppressed by technical detail, about materials, design forms and technologies at Mtoni. Reasons for the use of coral stone and lime are explained, for example, as are the local variations of arches, domes and makuti roofs, and the fascinating linkages to Omani architecture in such forms as the distinctive sitting areas, the majlis, and the striking if strange entry structure, the benjile. Here, as with the complex interactions occurring across the massive Indian Ocean, the authors strike an admirable balance between the monumental scale of the meaning given to the buildings and spaces in the overall palace complex and the everyday, human scale of lived experience that took place there.
The human scale and interactions share the heart of the history of Mtoni with the palace design and structure. The interactions take two forms in Folker’s book: they emerge from the skillfully reconstructed and often imagined uses of different architectural forms and spaces but also in the accounts of individuals. Sultan Seyyid and his daughter, Princess Salme, are the most familiar, but there is also a lively supporting cast who animate descriptions of the palace and gardens: Sale bin Haramil, who introduced the clove plantation to Zanzibar, for example, and Natalja, the Russian princess whose life featured striking, contemporaneous parallels to Princess Salme. Less individually documented, though respectfully acknowledged, are the slaves whose labor presumably built and operated the palace. Customarily omitted from standard architectural histories, Folkers and his co-authors, to their credit, help make them visible again.
With the enormous growth in trade, the clove plantations, made possible by slave labor, were the twin sources of Zanzibar’s nineteenth-century wealth and prominence. The island’s commercial growth enabled Mtoni to be built and an important insight in the text is he recognition that Sultan Seyyid was a quintessential first-generation capitalist. Like his American contemporaries studied later by sociologist Max Weber, Seyyid worked hard, accumulated capital, and was committed to endowing the wider society rather than living for himself alone and spending frivolously. Weber’s thesis about the “Protestant Ethic” in the US consequently appears too limited (2). More generally, here again is a telling connection between the expansion of commerce and the resulting efflorescence of culture.
In a further parallel with Abdul Sheriff, Antoni Folkers regularly takes pains to acknowledge the process of formulating historical accounts of the development and uses of the Mtoni palace from the ruins and archives. Rather than being disruptive of his architectural descriptions or renderings of palace life, they serve as an important reminder about how historians use inevitably fragmentary and partial sources to produce their coherent accounts. As a result, they are a useful reminder to those of us interested in the study of history of how our understandings of past experience and even collective memory are constructed. Such reminders also foreground how, in Mtoni, Folkers and his co-authors have provided the truest kind of historical guide: one that not only informs us about the palace and the experiences lived there but also the processes by which we remain actively connected to that past.
Discussing these books by Abdul Sheriff and Antoni Folkers, my aim has been to highlight some of the key ideas shaping each. In the process, several shared issues have emerged. These include: the importance of artifacts (dhows, buildings) to understanding the integration of the past and present; the centrality to cultural understanding of mobility and space(3) ; the historical relationships between commerce and ideas, art or expressive culture; and, an appreciation of the longue durée, or at least the complexity and layeredness of cultural historical formations and re-formations.
To close, I would offer a further observation that builds on the efforts and insights of both authors. Each of the books strives to make sense of the past not just by gathering and organizing material in order to mount an argument but by enabling readers to see and make sense of the past (a special priority for African subjects and settings that have been historically invisible). Recovering culture requires close attention to the researcher’s process of working with materials and constructing accounts of integrated worlds. This is true in the more obvious case of the inevitably fragmentary evidence of historical research as well as in analyzing the apparent surplus of more contemporary conditions and materials. The humility of the researcher as guide to the worlds being explored is a valuable reminder to the reader that the accounts presented remain part of an active process of analysis and attempts at historical understanding.
By involving the reader in that active process of attempting to see, understand and make sense of the past, the new volume by Abdul Sheriff is thus a guidebook every bit as much as Antoni Folkers’. Yet they are both guides not only to historical moments or spaces. Instead, and more significantly, they serve as guides to ourselves and how we as individuals and members of the public can actively contribute to the reconciliation of the present with the past in order to build for the future.
By involving the reader in that active process of attempting to see, understand and make sense of the past, the new volume by Abdul Sheriff is thus a guidebook every bit as much as Antoni Folkers’. Yet they are both guides not only to historical moments or spaces. Instead, and more significantly, they serve as guides to ourselves and how we as individuals and members of the public can actively contribute to the reconciliation of the present with the past in order to build for the future.
These remarks were originally presented at the ZIFF Literary Forum, at Mtoni Palace, Zanzibar, on July 18, 2010. My thanks to Fatma Alloo and Dr. Martin Mhando of the Zanzibar International Film Festival for their invitation to serve as discussant; to Professor Abdul Sheriff, of the Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute (ZIORI) for his help in organizing the book launch; and to the Prince Claus Fund for their support of the event.
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(1)This value could not have been reinforced more directly by the ZIFF Literary Forum organizers, who scheduled the July 18 book launch inside the surviving palace walls.
(2) Max Weber (1905/2002) The Protestant Ethic and ‘the Spirit of Capitalism,’ trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells, New York: Penguin.
(3) This is perhaps symptomatic of a broader “mobility turn” or critical mobility studies emergent during the past decade that draw on network analyses and new geographies to re-think social scientific approaches to space, migration and social interactions. An illustrative gathering of essays on the topic is Weert Canzler, Vincent Kaufmann, and Sven Kasselring, eds. (2008) Tracing Mobilities: Towards a Cosmopolitan Perspective, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. For a more focused assessment of mobility in historical studies, see Javier Caletrío Garcerá and Ramón Ribera Fumaz (2007) “Mediterranean Studies, Braudel and the ‘Mobility Turn’ in the Social Sciences,” Ulisses Cibernètic 5: 1-10.
