Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
a time of increasing British activity, but the documents were produced in a different milieu. The writers adhered to long-standing Islamic legal forms, and they inflected them with local usage. Each of these transactions provides a snapshot of an interconnected world before European colonialism.24 As a whole, these exciting new sources allow us to understand the inner workings of credit and debt, to see previously overlooked groups, and to map individuals into Indian Ocean circuits.
The dozen documents that have survived from the 1840s give a sense of the regional economy in transition, especially regarding the value of land. The material also points to a wide variety of actors. A very small number of wealthy people sold large farms—some with slaves attached—or houses. In most of the transactions, small holders sold their property to the customs master, who may or may not have been speculating on the land.
Jairam Shivji was the biggest buyer and creditor, participating in twelve of the fourteen transactions from the 1840s. While he was an important creditor to foreign merchants and to the sultan, he also transacted business with a wide variety of other people in Zanzibar. The range of people involved in transactions in the 1840s included an indigenous man from Tumbatu, freed slaves of early Omani migrants, a wife of a Swahili notable, and Omani families established in Zanzibar, including members of the sultan’s clan. Most people sold agricultural land (shamba in Swahili). Judging by the prices, indigenous Zanzibaris, Swahili elites, freed slaves, and some Omanis held small parcels of land. Those on the island of Zanzibar sold for between MT$15 and $70, while the only farm on the sister island of Pemba sold for a paltry MT$1.50!25 Because this was a time of growing commercial agriculture—especially cloves—land was increasingly valuable to those who could afford the labor to work it.
For some larger holdings, the labor was included in the sale. In 1845 Jairam Shivji bought a shamba in Mwera (outside of town) from Ali bin Muhammad al-Busaidi for MT$650. This sale included the clove and coconut trees on the property and eight slaves.26 Indians commonly owned African slaves, although this became contentious after the 1850s, because the British were attempting to limit the trade in slaves and to claim all Indians as British subjects. Ebji, Jairam’s younger brother, was frequently implicated in the sale of slaves. British intervention led to the forced manumission of Indian-owned slaves during and after the 1860s. Judging by Jairam’s business documents from the 1840s, other slave owners were manumitting slaves for different reasons. The twelve sales records that exist from the 1840s indicate four properties that Jairam Shivji bought from manumitted slaves. Three of the sellers had been slaves of Omani Arabs, and one was the slave of a Swahili man. As Chapter 6 elaborates, formerly enslaved people often gained property as part of the manumission process, and they either used it for cash or to finance trading ventures into the interior.
From the 1820s, Omani rule replaced or co-opted Swahili elites in Zanzibar on the East African coast, and two documents from this period help understand this process. Consider the two sales of shambas in the 1840s. One of the sellers was a member of the Swahili elite identified as Diwan Makambi (or Mwekambi) Juma bin Ahmad. Both Diwan and Makambi are honorifics here. In 1847, he sold a shamba that belonged to his wife Binti Bana (Bwana) Waziri al-Mufazii.27 Her nisba, al-Mufazii, marks her as a member of a patrician Swahili family, and it suggests origins in Faza, in the Lamu archipelago. Her father might have been Bwana Waziri, a ruler of Pate, also near Lamu, in the 1820s. During local disputes, Bwana Waziri made an alliance with Seyyid Said bin Sultan, the great Omani ruler, while his enemies called on the Mazruis in Mombasa. Bwana Waziri’s alliance with Seyyid Said was part of an elaborate contest with the Mazruis that gave Seyyid Said a foothold on the coast.28
Mwekambi Juma, Binti Bwana Waziri’s husband, represented her in the sale. He was born in Zanzibar, but he became the Diwan (ruler) of the coastal town of Saadani on the African mainland. He also led caravans to the interior.29 When Mwekambi Juma first reached Ugogo, several hundred miles from the coast, the local residents had never seen anyone as fat as he was, and they assumed he had extraordinary rainmaking powers. He denied this and refused to make rain for them. As the story goes, if it had not been for some opportune showers that fell, he would have faced certain death. Such conflicts were not uncommon for him. Around the time he sold his wife’s farm, Juma led an expedition against the Wadoe, a group of troublesome neighbors to the residents of Saadani.30 Whether the sale of his wife’s property to the Zanzibar customs master for $50 paid off a debt or helped to support a trading expedition, a military conquest, or his rule in Saadani, Mwekambi Juma’s activities were indicative of the changes in mobility and of the scale of trade that were taking place in East Africa.
A second aspect of this story also points to changes under Omani rule when newly arrived Omanis threatened the place of Swahili patricians. Bwana Heri bin Juma al-Mafazii, Mwekambi Juma’s son, was a trader and the Diwan of Saadani for at least twenty years. He maintained strong connections in the interior, and he was the only non-Omani governor on the Swahili coast during a late 1880s uprising that challenged the ruling Arabs and their German allies. This later event marked the onset of formal European colonialism in East Africa. Historian Jonathon Glassman has argued that Bwana Heri’s longevity and political savvy were the result of his “ability to straddle two worlds, the world of the hinterland, still dominated by values associated with village agriculture, and the world of the coastal towns, where new values were rapidly being forged in the context of expanding international commerce.”31 The interactions between these two worlds accelerated in the second half of the nineteenth century, but these processes had started more than a generation before. Bwana Heri’s parents had used connections to the Indian Ocean world through Zanzibar to convert property into cash.
The new presence of Omani rulers displaced indigenous people in Zanzibar. The second notable sale from the 1840s includes someone from among the WaTumbatu, one of Zanzibar’s indigenous groups. The identification on the sale of his shamba to Jairam Shivji in 1845 demonstrates both his rootedness and his mobility. His name was written Maqame bin Māsibu bin A‘ami of Tumbatu and his title was Serang.32 Tumbatu, a prominent island on Zanzibar’s northwest side, was one of the two most important trading towns and ports on Zanzibar before 1500.33 When Seyyid Said and his followers moved to Zanzibar, their demand for land put pressure on the indigenous inhabitants.
The WaTumbatu and the WaHadimu were the two groups who lived in Zanzibar and its outlying islets before the arrival of the Arabs. Through the middle of the nineteenth century, they had their own ruler, known as the Mwinyi Mkuu. When Burton visited Tumbatu in 1858, he said the people of Tumbatu were of a new race, and he was “now beyond Semítico-Abyssinian centres.” He noted that the Omani Arabs called the people of Tumbatu “Makhádim—helots or serviles,” and the name Hadimu shares a root with the Arabic word for servant.34 In 1841, Zanzibar’s British agent explained to his superiors in Bombay about the Omani Arab view of the indigenous inhabitants: “The whole of the Native inhabitants of the Islands of Zanzibar and Pemba are considered by the subjects of His Highness as slaves.” When new arrivals were given land by the sultan or bought land from other Arabs, the land’s inhabitants became slaves who were expected to work for the landowner and to provide their own subsistence. These slaves were expected to expand the clove production of the island.35 Although Hamerton’s account is likely exaggerated, the inhabitants of Zanzibar definitely faced difficulties as the island’s property regime changed. As historian C. S. Nicholls notes, the effects of the Arab arrival on the Hadimu and Tumbatu are difficult to measure. Some people may have altered their ways of life; some may have changed where they lived. One outcome was clear: by the second half of the nineteenth century, many Hadimu no longer lived in the parts of Zanzibar that had the best soil. Some had moved east and south.36
The example of Serang Maqame, however, suggests a different kind of mobility. Serangs have been alternately described as crew leaders, indigenous boatswains, petty officers, and “native bosses” in the Indian Ocean. The root of the word is from Malay. Serangs oversaw the maritime workers known as lascars, and serangs were vital to the functioning of the ship and the organization of the multiethnic crews of the Indian Ocean.37 The men of Tumbatu had reputations as skillful pilots and good seamen.38 With the