Becoming Pemban: Identity, social welfare and community during the Protectorate period

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Becoming Pemban: Identity, social welfare and community during the Protectorate period "
Elisabeth Mary McMahon J. H. Hanson

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	52821
Doc. No	:	TL22775
Call number	:	‭3183467‬
Main Entry	:	Elisabeth Mary McMahon
Title & Author	:	Becoming Pemban: Identity, social welfare and community during the Protectorate period\ Elisabeth Mary McMahon
College	:	Indiana University
Date	:	2005
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	2005
Page No	:	329
Abstract	:	This dissertation explores the construction of identity and community during the rapidly changing post-abolition period on Pemba Island in the Zanzibar Protectorate. The dissertation looks at the shifts from a slave society under Omani rule in the nineteenth century to the post-abolition period under British rule. This critical time saw major changes in how people constructed their identity and understanding of others within the local community. Heshima (honor), wealth and kinship networks were brewed together in the cauldron of Pemban society, allowing new configurations of ethnicity and identity. Interactions with British explorers and colonial officials helped to shape the images of the island and people, further complicating notions of ethnicity and what it meant to be Pemban. I examine the way local responses to “modernizing colonial projects” facilitated an identity of “Pembanness.” Pembans contested government efforts to introduce new understandings of education, social welfare and agriculture, replacing “traditional” techniques with “more civilized” Western methods. While colonial efforts were a catalyst for communal change, locals reinterpreted and adapted British methods, making them culturally acceptable to Muslims living on the island. The dissertation closes with an examination of narratives concerning education, land and ethnicity in the postcolonial era. For people on the island, the issues of identity begun in the 1890s with the emancipation decree were solidified by the treatment of the island by the Revolutionary government in 1964. Pembans remembered the colonial period as a time of local control, when they decided who were wenyeji (“owners of the land”). With the Revolution, the new government took on the role of decision-maker; it decided who could own land and what ethnic identities “existed.” The hostility of the Revolutionary government toward the island coalesced earlier movements to create a coherent identity of “being Pemban.”
Subject	:	Social sciences; Community; Identity; Pemban; Protectorate; Social welfare; Tanzania; African history; 0331:African history
Added Entry	:	J. H. Hanson
Added Entry	:	Indiana University