SWAHILI MUSLIM PUBLICS and POSTCOLONIAL EXPERIENCE AFRICAN EXPRESSIVE CULTURES Patrick McNaughton, editor Associate editors Catherine M. Cole Barbara G. Hoffman Eileen Julien Kassim Koné D. A. Masolo Elisha Renne Z. S. Strother SWAHILI MUSLIM PUBLICS and POSTCOLONIAL EXPERIENCE Kai Kresse Indiana University Press This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2018 by Kai Kresse All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. 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ISBN 978-0-253-03753-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-253-03754-1 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-03755-8 (ebook) 1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii Part I: Conceptualizations 1 Introduction: Past Present Continuous: Postcolonial Experience, Intellectual Practice, and the Struggle for Meaning 3 2 Muslim Publics, Postcolonial Imaginations, and the Dynamics of Self-Positioning 34 Part II: Readings 3 Colonial Experience and Future Anticipations: Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui and Swahili Islamic Pamphlets, 1930–32 61 4 The Voice of Justice: An Islamic Newspaper in Postcolonial Kenya, 1972–82 105 5 “Get Educated with Stambuli!”: An Open Discussion Platform on Local Islamic Radio, 2005–07 147 6 Conclusion: Toward the Understanding of Understanding: Elements of a Swahili Intellectual Tradition 190 References 213 Index 233 Preface The time of existence and experience, the time of entanglement . this time of African existence is neither a linear time nor a simple sequence in which each moment effaces, annuls, and replaces those that preceded it, to the point where a single age exists within society. This time is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones. It may be supposed that the present as experience of a time is precisely that moment when different forms of absence become mixed together: absence of those presences that are no longer so and that one remembers (the past), and absence of those others that are yet to come and are anticipated (the future). A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony (2001, p. 16) The thoughts of a people distant in time or space cannot be at all deeply shared without our becoming acquainted with things and ideas important to them but of which we have no exact equivalent. As far as possible, one wants to read the works themselves in which the thoughts have been expressed; in these, even in translation, the special concepts and categories of the writers, as well as the personalities and places referred to, must be reproduced (if the translation is serious) in forms alien to the usual flow of English, no matter how much the resources of English may have been adapted or even twisted to do duty for what remain alien conceptions. The same is, in some degree, true of any work treating of the alien civilization. The serious reader must be prepared to think in novel ways. To this end, he must be prepared to absorb as readily as possible a whole range of new concepts and terms. Otherwise he cannot expect to profit seriously by a study of the culture; at most he will receive an impression of exotic quaintness, romance, or incongruity which does no justice to the human reality. “On Making Sense of Islamicate Words, Names and Dates,” M. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. I (1977 [orig. 1958], p. 3) Two Entry Points At the turn of this century, the Cameroonian philosopher and anthropologist Achille Mbembe (1992; 2001) presented us with critical inventories and stimu- lating conceptualizations of postcolonial experience in Africa. He combined a critique of autocratic rule, narrated as a description of its common patterns (and those of popular resistance in response), with a critique of a history of Eurocentric vii viii | Preface scholarship that continued dismissing and obscuring Africa’s lived subjectivities and actual realities. Mbembe’s vivid accounts are full of perceptive observations on political dynamics and everyday life that feed into a critique that is frank, piercing, and stimulating, often picking up on the real-life satires that the post- colony creates and ordinary people have to endure. On the research front, he criticized an increasing lack of fieldwork, a lack of knowledge of local languages, and a low sense of (and sensitivity for) human and intellectual agency in Africa (2001, 7). My study here speaks to these points (which have also been flagged by other critical Africanist researchers), as I provide ethnographically contextual- ized readings and discussions of postcolonial experience and intellectual practice on the Kenyan Swahili coast.1 In the second epigraph, from almost half a century earlier, Marshal Hodgson called upon researchers to acquire familiarity with and convey a deep under- standing of Muslim societies and life-worlds,2 in their own terms and through the words used by social actors (and thus sensitive to language in a way that is no longer self-understood). Reminding ourselves of Hodgson’s commitment is not a bad entry point for a study such as this one. This book explores how coastal Muslims in postcolonial Kenya address and negotiate the conceptual and political challenges they confront in their everyday lives, by drawing from the rich resource of genres and discursive strategies that Swahili language and cul- ture provide. Such creative conceptual (and largely discursive) activity occurs in response to practical demands, is framed in political or religious terms, and is embedded in historical continuities of language use, forms of interaction, and mutual normative expectations among community members. In short, it hap- pens in a social field of intellectual practice. Around the time of Hodgson’s writing, Seyid Qutb was one of the most criti- cal and most influential modern Islamic thinkers, an author whom some of my Swahili interlocutors pointed to as inspirational. Qutb lamented that colonized Muslims around the world had neglected their own forms and histories of intel- lectual practice, which they could have used to reassert themselves and to counter the pressing global political imbalance. Instead, he wrote, they were simply copy- ing the principles and practices pursued by the representatives of the European empires: “Here in Egypt and in the Muslim world as a whole, we pay little heed to our native spiritual resources and our own intellectual heritage; instead, we think first of importing foreign principles and methods, or borrowing customs and laws from across the deserts and from beyond the seas” (Qutb 2000 [orig. 1953], 19). Qutb’s regret about such neglect of one’s own intellectual heritage that should have been brought to bear in struggles against external domination and for the building of future political visions for one’s society was shared, among others, by East African Muslims. In the early 1930s, already Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui’s pamphlets voice similar sentiments. This book discusses the discursive Preface | ix activity of individual figures advocating religiously guided forms of social reform on the Swahili coast at different points in time both before and after Qutb made this statement. Overall, this book works through the dynamics of continuity and change within the wider field of intellectual practice on the Swahili coast, in terms of language use and the verbal arts, as well as the ongoing social signifi- cance of poetic genres, but also in terms of its use for religious and/or political expression, discussion, and contestation. In the opening chapter, I develop and introduce my take on intellectual prac- tice as an ethnographic and conceptual entry point to the study of society that also lends itself to understanding the facets of postcolonial experience of coastal Muslims in Kenya, and the ways they struggle to find their place in the world, in dynamic processes of self-positioning. When seeking to understand (and convey to others) the back-and-forth of arguments going on among social actors, we need to acquire a good sense of both the key concepts and the ways of speaking and arguing that people employ in specific situations, in similar (and yet indi- vidually significantly different) ways. This is what this book works through, and what it works toward, looking at three differently situated case studies of Swahili Muslim publics. Sources and the Research Process A useful and important tradition in anthropological research is to account for one’s research process, the collection of materials, and one’s relations (interac- tions and dependencies) with one’s interlocutors and advisers. In this case, the main materials on which the following chapters are based have been collected over a period of over ten years, in collaboration with friends, interlocutors, and colleagues in Mombasa, Kenya, Europe, the United States, and Canada. Further primary sources are worked into the chapters that follow. Here I account for the main materials used in each of the three main ethnographic chapters. Chapter 3—Uwongozi/Guidance I received a copy of Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui’s Uwongozi collection from Abdi- latif Abdalla, with whom I have been in close touch over the last years. This col- lection of his Sahifa essays from 1930–32 was a local reprint from 1955 that was originally published in 1944.