by Martin Walsh

ETHNICITY, IDENTITY, AND CONCEPTUALIZING COMMUNITY IN INDIAN OCEAN EAST AFRICA. Daren E. Ray. Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 2023. 329 pp. ISBN: 9780821426135 (paperback). USD $36.95.

For more than half a century, “ethnicity” and “community” as concepts have been at the centre of scholarship in eastern and southern Africa. More recently, academics have sought to understand the underlying cultural, historical, and political circumstances that (re)made social groups. In this volume from the Indian Ocean Studies Series at Ohio University Press, Darren Ray draws cases from southeastern Kenya to address how societies imagined themselves in contexts at the intersection of Africa and the Indian Ocean during the last two thousand years. The author emphasises the last two to five hundred years to avoid the typical foreshortening of history that often enables mummified social categories, such as “tribe”, in the region’s scholarship. Ray recounts developments internal to Kenya, but also social outcomes impacted by transoceanic commerce and the effects of disproportionate power in the postcolonial setting of an independent state.

In scholarship about Africa, it is now common to recognise that cultural communities were not absolutes; they varied somewhat from location to location, shifted through time, and existed with permeable boundaries. Practices influence group relations. Difference is meaningfully constituted but did not neatly predetermine monolithic ethnic identities. Although these generalisations are well understood, authors rarely detail such cases in ways that crosscut deep precolonial and postcolonial contexts. Ray’s work is a positive treatment in that it sheds the typical straitjackets of discipline, geography, and chronology to address social mosaics and change. His nuanced analysis – which also ranges beyond the “coast” and “hinterland” as exclusive geographies and beyond Africa and the Indian Ocean as separate domains of influence – highlights intersections: frontiers and cross-cultural interfaces that complicate the “local” and “global” via the region. In this volume, interdisciplinary evidence, from linguistics, material culture, oral traditions and histories, documents, and other sources, provides the substance that exposes relational dynamics within and among communities in Kenya. As the author demonstrates well, practices and expressions linked to language, kinship, and religion have ideological and ontological implications for concepts such as ethnicity and for interpretations of society.

Divided into three sections and eight substantive chapters, Ray’s text shows that societies tend to categorise members using cultural characteristics and charters as they integrate historically distinct groups into a single political economy. The Comaroffs, Igor Kopytoff, and, in southeastern Kenya, Chapurukha Kusimba, among others, have engaged the topic of social and commercial networks with sophistication. In these cases, ethnicity is a “set of relations” and a “mode of consciousness”, a fact that pushes back against earlier, often colonial, representations that immutable African societies occupied specific areas. Precolonial African people, of course, had long engaged other people on the continent and beyond it through collaboration and competition. Ray emphasises the “littoral” as a domain of both the Swahili and Mijikenda peoples. The volume outlines changes to lineages and religious sects, among other social identities. Thus, kinship, Islam, and urban invention are treated as integral to shifts in identity and in place-making practice. This approach and the overall narrative address the ways speakers of Sabaki languages reconceived identities under changed regional circumstances and politics through time.

By examining multiple groups in the same speech community – the Swahili and Mijikenda are both members of the Sabaki language family in the littoral – Ray subverts the past practice of anthropologists and historians who reiterated single ethnicities through their research and writing. The author examines the ancestry of ethnicity from deep time up to the contemporary moment to challenge the assumption that ethnicity is a colonial derivation. Ray notes, “…even at their greatest strain, relationships among Mijikenda and Swahili communities tended to be more amicable than those with Kamba or Oromo communities, whom they excluded as perpetual immigrants to the coast” (p. 242). The speakers of Sabaki languages, he stresses, “identify more as members of clan confederations that were founded as long ago as the sixteenth century (e.g., Rabai or Jomvu) than as members of the Mijikenda or Swahili ethnic group. …they [also] employ religious practice as a key criterion for determining ethnic belonging” (p. 242). Ray employs a “cis-oceanic approach” (à la David Armitage in the Atlantic world), to study the movement and consequences of the intersection of people, products, and ideas in a specific coastal region. In such approaches, the ocean is treated as the link among parts but not the subject of analysis.

Ray’s volume and its contributions are a welcome addition to the scholarship of eastern Africa. His writing is clear and engaging. However, there are concerning absences in citation. A lapse, Ray does not cite Chapurukha Kusimba’s decades-long interdisciplinary scholarship on social mosaics and coast-hinterland entanglement in southeastern Kenya. In addition, after making robust arguments that scholars should work across spatial and social boundaries, the author closely follows nation-state borders to procure cases and sources. Research in Tanzania previously examined in detail topics closely aligned to Ray’s text, including in areas of northeastern parts of the country which also are home to Swahili and Mijikenda communities. The works of Rhonda Gonzales and Geoffrey Owens are demonstrative of research in Tanzania that partially parallels Ray’s narrative. They detail changes to societies’ expressions and practices across time in a holistic regional manner (among communities) that consciously entangles the coast and hinterland. It might then be asked why nation-state boundaries are maintained as a frame of research practice by Ray when other boundaries are treated as permeable or unjustly limiting to debates about ethnicity and community in eastern Africa at large, especially for widespread groups self-identified as “littoral” along a lengthy coastline.

This volume makes an important contribution to history and social science in southeastern Kenya while challenging problematic dichotomies and mummified identities on the continent. Ray’s text will interest anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and Africanists in general, as well as those who want to learn more about similar dynamics and related communities in Tanzania.
Jonathan R. Walz

Jonathan R. Walz, PhD, is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Chair at the SIT-Graduate Institute in Vermont, USA. His scholarly interests include the history and anthropology of eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean. He is currently stationed in Zanzibar, where he leads graduate and undergraduate programmes on human livelihoods, coastal ecology, and climate change.

HISTORIC MOSQUES IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: FROM TIMBUKTU TO ZANZIBAR (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East, Vol. 163). Stéphane Pradines. Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2022. xviii + 350, with 213 colour illustrations. ISBN: 978-90-04-44554-3 (hardback) EUR 149.00; ISBN: 978-90-04-47261-7 EUR 149.00.

This compendious and well-illustrated volume, written by Stéphane Pradines, Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the Aga Khan University in London, is advertised as “the first comprehensive synthesis on mosques in sub-Saharan Africa, bringing together sites from more than twenty states from sub-Saharan Africa; and more than 285 monuments, from the IXth to the XIXth centuries.” In his relatively brief introduction, Pradines tells us that in addition to its broad scope, the “originality of this book resides in the presentation of African monuments in their historical, political and economic context”. This is facilitated by its division into three main geographical areas, each characterised by different religious and architectural traditions. Chapter 1, “The Mosques of the Niger Valleys”, is more than 100 pages long and focuses on the mud brick mosques of West Africa, the “Sudanese” mosques as they were once called. The second chapter has the longest title (“The Mosques from the Horn of Africa to the Valleys of the Nile”) but at 30 pages is by far the shortest of the three, reflecting the lack of research in this strife-torn region.

Chapter 3, “The Mosques of the Indian Ocean Coast”, is longer than the other two chapters combined, and will no doubt be of most interest to the readers of Tanzanian Affairs.
This last chapter is in turn divided into twelve sections, the headings of which will give some idea of its contents:
3.1 The Swahilis [sic], a Cultural Model of Multiple Origins
3.2 Historiography of Research on the Swahili Mosques
3.3 The History of the East Coast of Africa
3.4 Trade and Islam in the Indian Ocean
3.5 Technology and Construction of the Swahili Mosques
3.6 Morphology of the Swahili Mosques
3.7 The Decorative Programme of the Swahili Mosques
3.8 Regional Groups and the Chronology of the Swahili Mosques
3.9 The Swahili Mosques of the Thirteenth Century
3.10 The Swahili Mosques of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
3.11 Portuguese Domination and the Style of Lamu, Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
3.12 The Swahili Mosques of the Nineteenth Century

The full list including subheadings can be downloaded from the publication webpage (https://brill.com/display/title/59360). This provides much more detail than can be included in a short review and is well worth perusing. Along with a good index, it is very helpful to have such a breakdown in a book that is likely to be most used as a work of reference. This is certainly one of the ways in which I will use it; I’ve also enjoyed reading about architectural and other aspects of the Swahili mosques and their history from the regional and wider perspectives that Pradines provides. There are still many lacunae in that history, and surveys of this kind are useful for drawing attention to them, whether intentionally or not. In addition to the obvious gaps in the archaeological record, it is frustrating to see so little attention being paid to linguistic evidence, though I was no more surprised by this than by the author’s intemperate criticism of “Africanist researchers” and their alleged efforts to “obliterate exogenous influences” (p. 157) in their reconstructions of coastal history.

Pradines concludes the text with an epilogue that is even shorter than his introduction. It is followed by a couple of annexes and other supporting matter, including glossaries. Given the high cost of this volume, it’s a pity that more effort was not put into proof-reading and smoothing out the translation from the author’s original French. That said, it is a very welcome addition to the literature on the heritage of Islam and Islamic architecture in Africa that will hopefully contribute positively to both understanding and conservation. And with any luck, it will also encourage other researchers to fill in some of those gaps and move beyond those contested historiographies.
Martin Walsh
Martin Walsh is the Book Reviews Editor of Tanzanian Affairs.

Also noticed:
MORE THAN A RESOURCE – THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF LOCAL SEED SYSTEMS AND SEED EXCHANGE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: THE EXAMPLE OF TANZANIA. Jonas Metzger. Springer VS, Wiesbaden, 2023. xv + 185 pp. ISBN: 978-3-658-40010-1 (paperback) EUR 74.99; ISBN: 978-3-658-40011-8 (eBook) EUR 64.19.
Here is the publisher’s blurb: “Seeds are at the heart of a transformation process that affects more than two billion people worldwide. This study on smallholder farmers in Tanzania examines how local seed systems are anchored in the socio­cultural structures of smallholder life worlds. Using the example of seeds, the close interweaving of agricultural and social practice is traced and it is worked out how individual processes of modernisation brought in from outside have far-reaching consequences for smallholder coexistence. The study provides a concrete, detailed and differentiated account of everyday farming life and of how smallholder households deal with seeds. A particular focus is on seed exchange relationships and how these provide both social security and social cohesion in the study region. The study is based on extensive field research and intensive interviews with farmers, who also have their own say in the work.”

And, for the sake of transparency, here is the publisher’s declaration (confession?) on the copyright page: “This book is a translation of the original German edition “Mehr als eine Ressource – die soziale Bedeutung lokaler Saatgutsysteme und des Saatgutaustausches im Globalen Süden” by Metzger, Jonas, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH in 2022. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.” (!) They must have judged that this will not put off potential readers of such a seminal study.

A DESCRIPTION OF PIMBWE (BANTU, TANZANIA): PHONOLOGY, GRAMMAR, AND DISCOURSE. Jonathan Weiss. SIL e-Books 084, SIL International, 2023. vii + 97 pp. ISSN: 1934-2470 (eBook). Free to download from https://www.sil.org/resources/publications/entry/97737.

The Pimbwe are a relatively little known ethnic and linguistic group who live to the northwest of Lake Rukwa in what is now Katavi Region. Their Bantu language is one of many in southwestern Tanzania that is being documented by researchers working with SIL International, the evangelical organisation formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Jonathan Weiss’s recently published description of Pimbwe is based on a MA dissertation completed in 2020 at Trinity Western University (British Colombia, Canada) that is also free to read online. As his abstract makes clear, this is a technical work: “The present study is the first formal description of Pimbwe […]. After situating the Pimbwe language within the wider linguistic context, I describe Pimbwe phonology, tone, and grammar, with particular emphasis on the structure of the verb. Over 150 interlinear language examples are given. Finally, natural language use in extended discourse is described based on two running commentaries of the Pear Story film. The full text of the two Pear Stories is given in two appendices” (p. iii). (This refers to a “six-minute film made at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975 and shown to speakers of a number of languages, who were asked to tell what happened in it” (p. 5)). It’s good to see descriptive studies like this in print. As well as tracking down some of the references that Weiss gives, readers wanting to know more about the past and present of the Pimbwe might like to look up the work of the evolutionary anthropologist Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and her colleagues, including the interesting volume on The History and Traditions of the Pimbwe that was published by Mkuki na Nyota in 2014.
Martin Walsh