Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow

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       The Customs Master and Customs of Credit in Zanzibar

      WHEN PASSENGERS DISEMBARKED in Zanzibar from the booms and buggalas that sailed the western Indian Ocean in the early nineteenth century, they found a city in transition. Those who had recently left the interior of Arabia and had never sailed with the monsoon may have been overwhelmed by the hubbub of the port, or just happy to be on dry land, and they may have been too disorientated even to notice what was going on around them. On the other hand, the seasoned sailors who made this journey every year or two would certainly have noticed differences in the city. Zanzibar had begun to transform from the relatively simple fishing settlement of a few decades earlier to the biggest and most prosperous town on the east coast of Africa. Zanzibar was becoming a commercial center from which networks of indebtedness reached across the Indian Ocean and far into the East African interior. This chapter examines the formalization of Zanzibar’s commercial culture by unpacking the Arabic business documents that underwrote the city’s far-flung credit networks. It focuses on the 1840s, the earliest decade for which Arabic business contracts are available, to help reveal the enmeshed social and economic networks of Zanzibar.

      Among the thousands of Arabic language contracts that have been preserved in Zanzibar, only a small number deal with the period before the late 1860s. This is a result of the process of registering documents (as detailed in chapter 7), though the difference between official, bureaucratic senses of time and the sense of time embedded in these contracts meant that some creditors submitted documents that were decades old. The documents considered in this chapter are thus a subset of a vast collection that informs the whole book. As such, these examples from the 1840s stand in for what were inevitably a great number of transactions that were completed (and thus not disputed), lost, or never registered. Contracts and agreements that were not resolved were more likely to be registered. In any case, the sample that remains makes clear that a dynamic Indian Ocean economy included a wide variety of mobile economic actors who used Arabic language transactions to forward their own goals in Zanzibar, the place that welcomed the most travelers from the Omani interior.

      The journey to Zanzibar from Oman took a couple of weeks with favorable monsoon winds. As the dhows made their way from Muscat or Sur, they sailed close to the coast. The passengers may have stopped at Mogadishu, a place Ibn Batuta had visited in 1331, and even if they had not stopped, they certainly would have seen the minarets of four of the largest mosques that were visible ten miles from the shore.¹ The views of Mogadishu and Barawa on the northern Swahili coast would have been somewhat familiar, as these cities resembled the coastal cities of Arabia and Persia, with low, square, flat-roofed houses built of stone and mud.² When the travelers crossed the equator south of Barawa, they would have approached the Lamu archipelago, and the landscape would have changed.

      We do not know how Arabian migrants saw this, but the verdant shores may have struck them as the view struck a British captain sailing this route in 1811: “The numerous richly-clothed islands which line the shore separated by beautiful and frequently spacious inlets and bounded behind by a delightful continent, rich in all the charms of luxuriant vegetation, present to the eye a prospect extremely enchanting, and would seem to indicate a degree of natural wealth equal of the most favored regions of the known globe.”³ Sailing past Mombasa, travelers could not have helped but see the massive Fort Jesus, built by the Portuguese in the late sixteenth century to anchor their burgeoning Indian Ocean empire. The Portuguese had constructed similar forts in Muscat. In the seventeenth century, when the Omanis expelled the Portuguese from Muscat and then from Mombasa, the Omanis took over the Portuguese thick-walled forts. In the 1830s, Fort Jesus was once again the site of dispossession, but this time rival Omani factions, emissaries of Said bin Sultan, seized the fort from the Mazrui ruler, killing some and exiling others to the gulf. Thus, Said bin Sultan, the Busaidi ruler in Zanzibar, could claim control of this entire coast, from southern Somalia to Lamu and Mombasa; including the island of Pemba (Mombasa’s bread basket) and, south of that, Zanzibar.

      Ras Nungwi at the northern tip of Zanzibar provided the first sight of the island, but sailing vessels had to continue down the island’s western edge, skirting the small island of Tumbatu, before spotting the large white buildings of Zanzibar town. These multistory buildings were the visible markers of Zanzibar’s boom. While they shared an architecture with Omani buildings, they shared space with the waddle and daub houses—thatched with palm fronds—that were interspersed in the narrow lanes and neighborhoods of the town’s tidal peninsula. During the nineteenth century, the mix of buildings shifted. The big houses built of coral rag predominated, and the humbler dwellings disappeared. The process of becoming “Stone Town”—as the city became known in the twentieth century—had its roots in the economic prosperity of the nineteenth century and in the market for land (and mortgages) that developed during this period.

      For first-time visitors, figuring out the underlying order of Zanzibar would have been difficult. While travelers who were familiar with other Indian Ocean ports would have found some similarities, the first British agent (representative) assigned to Zanzibar in the 1840s did not believe that the city’s port or its commercial aspects were ordered or rational. He reported in 1844 that the port had no quarantine regulations, no charges for wharfage or buoys, and no regular supply of local pilots. It was assumed that the captains either knew the reefs on the approaches to the port or could send someone up the mast to point them out. The merchants employed several currencies at no fixed rate of exchange, but the Spanish dollar and the German crown were considered equal in the 1840s. It seemed as though the only rule was that all goods, whether they were coming or going, had to pass through the customs house, a small thatched shed near the shore.⁴

      The unpresuming thatched shed belied the vital role of the customs master, who was the linchpin of the economic, social, and political orders. His constant access to cash and elaborate networks of patronage made him the island’s apex creditor. Indebtedness—both fiscal and social—became the common language of this multiethnic society, connected through webs of patron-client relations that stretched far from Zanzibar, to the African interior, the islands of the Indian Ocean, and the shores of Arabia. Within this network in 1840, the customs master Jairam Shivji was a vital node. He lent money to the sultan and bought houses from freed slaves. He underwrote American merchants and oversaw a network of Indian financiers. Not surprisingly, his name was among the most common written on the contracts, sales, and mortgages that are left from this period. These documents—an archive within an archive—reveal intriguing details about the social and financial interconnections of Zanzibar and its hinterlands. Let us first look at Jairam Shivji’s role in financing both the Zanzibar state and foreign trade before turning to his dealings with the more common African and Arab people living in or passing through Zanzibar.

      FIGURE 2.1. Zanzibar waterfront, 1847. Image courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Winterton Collection, Northwestern University.

      JAIRAM SHIVJI FROM KUTCH TO ZANZIBAR

      Jairam Shivji, a Banyan Hindu, was born in 1792 in Kutch, on the west coast of India. The Indian Ocean entrepôt trade shaped his family’s life. His father, Shivji Topan, was part of the Banyan merchant community in Muscat, and from there, Shivji Topan traveled to East Africa in 1785 in the company of the Muscati ruler Said bin Ahmad al-Busaidi. In the following years, Shivji Topan moved his business to East Africa. His decision was influenced by Muscat’s new ruler, Seyyid Said bin Sultan, who had his sights on Zanzibar. Early Omani governors in Zanzibar had either been slaves of the royal family or appointed from loyal Omani clans. These governors were also responsible for collecting customs duties. One of Seyyid Said’s innovations in East Africa was to remove the customs duty from the portfolio of the governor and to transfer it to a merchant house. In 1835, Shivji Topan won the contract to “farm the customs” at Zanzibar