Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888.

It has become a common-place that ethnicity is socially constructed. The problem is to write the history which such an observation implies. To do so is to uncover precisely what notions of ethnic affiliation and solidarity obscure for people living within such constructs as well as for social scientists who deploy ethnicity as a variable. How social networks were created - and who was excluded from them - need to be examined alongside the idioms through which affiliation was expressed, in the face of complex and changing structures of power with which people were engaged.

Historians of East Africa have made considerable progress in writing history so that various forms of affinity and solidarity become the consequences - rather than the given units - of the story they tell. Charles Ambler has written about Central Kenya in a way that privileges regional economic linkages - leading to specialization and differentiation - over ethnic definitions; Justin Willis has described family, ethnicity, and clientage as pliable, negotiable constructs in nineteenth-century Mombasa and has made clear that the now standard separation of "Swahili" and "Mijikenda" is a recent phenomenon.(1) Jonathon Glassman now writes an account of coastal East Africa that both continues along these lines and puts theoretical and historiographic issues in the foreground. In so doing, he not only demonstrates the dynamics of political alliances, social networks, and group boundaries in part of the East African coast, but forces scholars to reconsider such basic items of their repertoire as "resistance."

Feasts and Riot starts with the conventional reading of an event that occurred in the northern coast of what is now Tarzania in 1888 and has been known ever since as the "Arab rebellion." He shows that categories like "Arab" are extremely misleading, and when he returns to the events of 1888 at the end of his book he is able to reinterpret them in an entirely different manner. Glassman's critique of resistance historiography, in his introduction, is very much to the point. Rather than seeing a dichotomy between elites and subalterns, he sees interaction. The people he identifies as "plebian" work within the cultural idioms of powerful groups - often using a language of reciprocity - but in claiming a respectable place within the regional culture they subtly alter the very idioms of power themselves. He persuasively criticizes such well-known authorities as James Scott for compartmentalizing different social groups and for defining virtually anything a subordinate group does as resistance.

Glassman's book contains a balance of a close and subtle reading of power relations and idioms of authority in a part of Africa and concepts derived from early-modern European history. He takes the distinction between "patrician" and "plebian" from E. P. Thompson and Hans Medick plus the focus on the potentially subversive meanings of festivals and carnivals from Natalie Zemon Davis and Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie. Patrician and plebian are not walled-off social categories, but power relations that are being pulled in opposite directions. The plebians are constantly making claims on the patricians in the patricians' own terms - to be good patrons, to reward loyalty. But they are also changing the very language of power and the structure of symbols that they deploy. By bringing in new cultural practices, plebians show that there is a possibility that society could be organized differently and that the patricians' way of life will only prevail if the patricians actually live up to their obligations as patrons and providers. Ritual occasions are privileged sites for examining this give and take, both because they are public, and hence leave more of a trace on the historical record than other aspects of relations among nonequals, and because the moments when power is being publicly displayed are also the ones where it is most vulnerable to challenge.

The boundaries between "African," "Arab," and "European" turn out to be the object of cultural contestation, political maneuvering, and continual testing. The "patrician" elite of the Swahili coast came from urban African Muslims, who spoke a Bantu language (and who may or may not have spoken much Arabic). What made a powerful man (jumbe) was in part membership in a recognized (but rather loosely defined) kinship group, part religious prestige, part having a large array of clients, slaves, and other followers. In this way, the most powerful people of necessity developed connections which extended beyond the narrow community, into the African interior. Increasing commercial relations in the nineteenth century both extended this system and shook it up. With commodities becoming more available, the elite's control of symbolic goods became more ambiguous, and hence the aspiring leader had to do yet more to display his wealth and attract followers. The slave trade and military/commercial alliances in the region brought more culturally diverse people into coastal politics, while the efforts of the Sultan of Zanzibar to exercise a somewhat distant sovereignty over the entire region multiplied the possibilities for intrigue.

By the 1880s, patrician power in the trading towns of the Swahili coast was being challenged by the increasing volatility of this commercialized world - by the Swahili patricians' need to fend off Zanzibari intrusions, by the growing numbers of people from the African interior living in the towns, by the diversity of demands being made by clients and allies. The towns at times had large numbers of porters in them, many of slave origin, and their atmosphere was changing. New forms of Islam that appealed to personal involvement with a sufi leader rather than elite connections became more salient. This meant that annual holidays, celebrations of the return of a caravan, weddings, and other rituals became more ambiguous in meaning. The patricians (or the intruding Zanzibaris) had to spend more and more money to demonstrate their power, while people of humble origin could sometimes rival them. The plebians not only posed demands on their individual patrons, but developed the potential to act as a "crowd," as a collective entity. Festivals were thus much more than events that reaffirmed the power structure even by temporarily inverting it, as anthropologists sometimes claim. There was always the danger that the inversion might be for real.

By the final section of the book, Glassman is ready to tackle the question which originally interested him: the rebellion that broke out against the Germans as they were in the process of establishing colonial authority. It was hardly the case of a self-contained, "traditional society" resisting colonization, but of a divided, dynamic polity facing a new element in political and economic structures, whose underlying power was at the time unclear. Certain Zanzibar-connected Arabs were trying to walk a tight line between using Germans as trading partners or as guarantors of stability against plebian challenges and being swallowed by the German intrusion. Actually, it was the rebellion that brought the Germans into the area in much greater force than they had wanted to be, while the rebellion was as much against an Arab power structure as against the Germans. Beginning on a feast day, it was a volatile affair, changing character from moment to moment. Not only was there tension between the Zanzibari Arabs and the Swahili patricians, but the Swahili patricians could not control the plebians. There were thus several rebellions within the rebellion, and it was only after some months when the Germans finally concentrated their firepower that the basis of German power became clear, and even then Germans had to cooperate with some of the elements they had defeated in order to get anything done.

Glassman shows that the languages of paternalism and community were more central to politics than the languages of class and nation. But the meanings of paternalism and community were never secure; they were subject to demands for inclusion and for elites to act properly; and the very language was subject to change as new people worked their way into the dynamics of the process. This dynamic, interactive analysis marks a major advance in the way African history is being done, and it is of considerable theoretical interest too. What is important about Glassman's book is both that it spells out a coherent case for moving toward such an approach and that it actually shows how to do it - through a well-researched account solidly rooted in an understanding of the particularities of region and of the variations within that region. Glassman has written an important book, among the very best work that has been done on the region and one that deserves to be read by all historians of Africa, and by an even wider range of scholars interested in how political and social networks and bonds of affiliation are formed and contested, in the ways in which the top and bottom ends of a power structure shape and condition each other, and in the ambiguities of colonial conquest in a world already deeply engaged in struggles over power and culture.

Frederick Cooper University of Michigan 

ENDNOTE 

1. Charles Ambler, Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism (New Haven, 1988); Justin Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford, 1993).