At Home in the World: Portrait Photography and Swahili Mercantile Aesthetics

A Companion to Modern African Art, First Edition. Edited by Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visonà.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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At Home in the WorldPortrait Photography and Swahili

Mercantile Aesthetics

Prita Meier

This chapter explores the role of photography as part of a larger spectrum of a culture of things cultivated by East Africans for the performance of selfhood. Taking the rich and diverse photographs of nineteenth-century coastal East Africa as a springboard, I consider how portrait photography not only documents and expresses a sense of belonging and identity formation – issues which have been explored by Africanists extensively – but also how the photograph, through its indexical quality and very materiality, circulated in and out of Swahili spaces and cultural codes. I focus on the role of photography as an object of Swahili personhood in relationship to the politics of globalization unfolding in East Africa. I argue that for East Africans, and Zanzibaris in particular, “being global” is a carefully crafted tactic of translation, making Swahili practices comprehensible and desirable to others in the world.

In established studies of African artistic modernism, the deployment of Western image-making technologies such as photography is often narrated as the “localiza-tion” of a “global” form. But I suggest the very interpretative framework of moder-nity cannot fully account for the ways Africans co-created cultures and aesthetic practices in and outside the African continent during the age of colonialism and global capitalism. I contend that Swahili “modernity” was not formed in the crucible of colonialism. Rather, the material framework of the Swahili city, its form and meaning, was an appropriative aesthetic system long before European interests began to impact the area. As will become clear, the port city of Zanzibar was designed as composite space, where visual culture mirrored the visual landscape of other ports across the Indian Ocean (and later the industrial north) in order to exist as a space between what outside observers might recognize as “the local” and “the global.” This chapter therefore does not focus so much on how Western forms were “localized” to make an African version of modernity, but rather questions what happens when Swahili prac-tices of appropriation meet the appropriative systems of European colonialism and industrial capitalism. What becomes clear is that Western and Swahili systems of

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significations did not exist in separate registers of meaning. Rather Swahili and Western ideas about selfhood engulfed and enframed each other to create composite ways of seeing and being.

“Modernity” in African Art History

Recent art historical studies of the colonial period have foregrounded why images and spaces produced in Africa need not be discussed simply as either continuities of, or ruptures with, precolonial cultural practices. Instead, Africanists assert that colonial-era arts must be analyzed as expressions of modernity and global connectivity. This focus on modernity in the field of African art history was in many ways inaugurated by the seminal work of Johannes Fabian. In his book Time and the Other, Fabian focused on the power of temporal concepts, such as “traditional,” “primitive,” and “tribal,” to dislocate Africa from the rest of the world in Western intellectual history. He called this the “denial of coevalness,” or the refusal to see Africa and the West as sharing the same temporal plane.1 Africanists also began to engage the perspectives of postcolonial criticism to interrogate the ahistorical character of non-Western art his-tory in comparison to the insistently temporal framework of Western art history.2 Since the early 1990s Africanists and critics increasingly focused on the problem of modernity in African art history as a field of study.3 During the mid-1990s, individuals who were at some point associated with one of the vital modernist art schools or academies in Zaria, Nsukka, Dakar, Kumase, Khartoum, and Cairo became especially important to the emerging field of African modernism. These scholars and artists, such as Salah Hassan, Olu Oguibe, Atta Kwami, Nkiru Nzegwu, Chika Okeke-Agulu, and Sylvester Ogbechie, valorized formerly marginalized artists as significant players in the history of modern art. Modernist artists from Africa who trained in the Western metropole or in colonial fine art schools are invariably discussed as heroic figures who succeeded in creating a “truly” African, Nigerian, or Sudanese modernism.4

Two important exhibitions that introduced these ideas to a larger audience were Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (UK, 1996) and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition (USA, 1990). These early projects focused on formal and aesthetic issues, considering questions of visual style, influence, and artistic “original-ity.” But curators of later exhibitions, such as The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 (USA and Germany, 2001), distanced themselves from such formalist questions. These projects presented modernism as a “worldly” field of politics, focusing on the historical context of artistic production. Rather than being accounts of the appropriation of European forms, they framed African modernism as a tactic of subversion and rebellion.

Theorists such as Arjun Appadurai, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, and Paul Gilroy became particularly important to later studies of African modernism(s) because they emphasize the plurality of modernity.5 For example, Paul Gilroy’s theorization of the Black Atlantic as a site of hybrid modernity in many ways set the stage for much of the work on the multiple modernities of African art history because his work was most closely aligned with the field of African and African Diaspora studies. Elizabeth Harney’s groundbreaking In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (2004) was the first sustained study of the institutionalization of modernist art practices in an African nation-state. In her book she was not so much

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98 p r i ta m e i e r

interested in celebrating the “authenticity” or “originality” of African modernists, but understanding how and why different generations of Senegalese artists deploy “European modernist visual techniques and aesthetic concerns” over the span of several decades.6 Significantly, her work concentrated on moments in time, rather than cultural space: African artists and artworks are discussed in relationship to major sociopolitical events, such as the independence struggle, postcolonial nationhood, and neoliberal crisis.

Yet, studies of “African” modernity or modernism continue to be accompanied by a certain ideological anxiety. Scholars as well as art critics contend that the appropriation of “global” forms and ideas by Africans should not be viewed as an unbounded or “universal” cultural practice. Rather they argue that the Western modernism is “local-ized” and therefore the resultant artwork remains authentically “African.”7 In these scenarios Africa is always the local and the West the global. Clearly such narratives actu-ally reproduce modernity’s analytic need to flatten a multiplicity of encounters into a dichotomy of the local versus the global. Furthermore, a central unresolved question remains: Why is it particularly effective to employ the category of the modern to coun-ter ethnocentric visions of world culture, when from a historical perspective, modernity as a conceptual apparatus for global engagement is created by an imperial culture?

One response might be that modernity is an effective tool to counter the silencing of Africa’s global presence and impact because it is a comparative mode of perception. As Mary Louise Pratt has argued, modernity legitimates imagining a globally intercon-nected and interdependent community and therefore is also a potentially empowering paradigm to critique the marginalization of difference and otherness.8 Furthermore, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown, with its bundled concepts (or fantasies) of rationality and the universal rights of man, modernity can be deployed by the marginalized as the potential site from which to force their recognition as rights-bearing members of a planetary community. While different places and different times remake and translate European thought for the production of locality, part of that strategy is anchored in an awareness that it is essential to be seen as “modern.”9 Similarly, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar argues that when residents of early twentieth-century cities such as Calcutta or Shanghai embrace modernity they “are not naïve, they are not unaware of its Western origins, its colonial designs, its capitalist logic, and its global reach.”10 Its embrace is not marked by an anxiety about losing “one’s culture.” Rather, by naming and making things modern it gives local residents the “license to play with form and refigure function according to the exigencies of the situation.”11

It is clear that African artists embraced modernism precisely because it presents art as a “universally” relevant form that can do something about the gap between the promises of modernity and the social realities of modernization, such as colonialism and racism. As a creative practice modernism has been immensely generative for African and African Diaspora artists. Yet art historians often deploy modernity as a mode of analysis without acknowledging its full ideological apparatus and limitations. A key problem is that Africanists are intent on linking modernism to a bounded place, “Africa,” and that they often dehistoricize modernity and simply posit it as a marker of positive valuation.

Although often described and perceived as such, the Enlightenment project of modernity is not a phenomenon, like industrialization or modernization. Rather, as Walter Mignolo has argued, it is a conceptual apparatus created by an imperial culture (the North Atlantic world), perhaps as early as the sixteenth century, when an

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interconnected world system began to be imagined as a result of the global expansion of capitalism. As an epistemic framework, modernity is unequivocally Eurocentered, since “the outside [colonized/Other] is named from the inside [colonizer/Europe] in the exercise of the coloniality of power.”12 Similarly, “it requires an alterity, a refer-ent outside of itself – a pre- or non-modern in relation to which the modern takes its full meaning.”13 Those judged to be too different became “nonmodern” in this com-parative mode of seeing and experiencing the world. What makes modernity so com-pelling is that it claims to be a planetary system. It belongs to a bundle of terms that Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls “North Atlantic universals” that have their inception in the West, but are now accepted as describing a placeless and universal experience. North Atlantic universals are “always seductive, at times even irresistible, exactly because they manage, in that projection, to hide their specific – localized, North Atlantic, and thus parochial – historical location.”14

The geographic marker “Africa” in a story about modernity always creates an illogi-cal narrative because modernity is only capable of naming a site outside itself as “Other” or nonmodern, while studies of “African” modernism seek to make moder-nity do something that goes against its foundational narrative: to create a story about particularity and universality simultaneously. This would be a provocative intellectual project, but modernity as a theoretical apparatus set in place by nineteenth- and twen-tieth-century social philosophers cannot be deployed for such a reading. Or to put it in another way, studies of “African” modernism claim place-based particularity, while in fact modernity emphasizes temporality and can only account for a placeless mod-ernism. A story about local modernism will always raise the specter of the “derivative” because modernism has to be placeless from the perspective of modernity.

As a field of inquiry, African art history fundamentally challenges the notion of placelessness because it is defined by the territorial boundaries of a continent. But Africanist art historians have yet to unpack the fissures and contractions created when modernism is linked to place in their attempt to create an intellectual project called the “study of African modernism.” African art history was founded on the “area stud-ies” research paradigm established in the 1950s that was meant to “give voice” to formerly colonized regions and to redress the Eurocentrism of academic institutions in North America. It was part of the Cold War surveillance apparatus as well. While the former aspect of area studies was clearly laudatory, it also inadvertently entrenched the assumption that there is a constitutive and stable relationship between culture and place. “Area studies” research can and does focus on transregional interconnectivity, but it interprets the relationships between different things and peoples in territorial terms. A vaguely defined conceptual border or bounded space is presumed to have been “crossed” and place-based cultural authenticity is always imagined as the precur-sor to cross-cultural engagement. Thus, African art history is in fact locked into the modernist map of world culture, where non-Westerners move across space and Western culture is defined by change across time.

Challenging “Modernity” and “Place” on the Swahili Coast

The study of littoral visual culture demands that we rethink this still trenchant “area studies” model of African art history. Urban spaces on the “margins” – whether located on geographic or conceptual peripheries – highlight the ways art history

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depends on geography to make sense of world culture. Especially in non-Western fields, such as Islamic or African art history, territorial boundaries are seen to define culture. Examining how culture is produced in such borderlands as the Swahili coast is an especially clarifying exercise because its port cities are fundamentally deterritorial cultural landscapes, defined by histories of oceanic movement and migration. While this cultural landscape is certainly geographically specific, since its center is located on the coast of east Africa, it nonetheless challenges normative notions about the rela-tionship between place and culture. Here the relationship between social identity, belonging, and geography is particularly mercurial and their constructed nature is thrown into sharp relief.

Residents of the Swahili coast’s principal port cities have long constructed their material world as a cosmopolis, a nexus of multiple ways of being, where objects and spaces of the “elsewhere” converge. Connected to the trade routes of the Indian Ocean and the African continent, the port cities of east Africa have been nodes of global convergence for millennia. At the height of their power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, cities such as Mombasa and Kilwa cultivated connections with the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, North Africa, the inland cultures of Central and southern Africa, and South and central Asia. Their wealth depended on exporting African gold, ivory, and grains and importing luxury commodities for African con-sumption, such as textiles, copper wire, porcelain dishes, and jewelry. Between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries Swahili ports had increasingly to contend with outside military aggression and the destabilization of their established alliances with African polities. For example, the increased demand by British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese traders for enslaved Africans to work on European plantations in the New World and on Indian Ocean islands set the stage for the introduction of modern plantation slavery on Zanzibar Island in the nineteenth century.15

Western nineteenth-century capitalist expansion and imperialism radically reconfig-ured East Africa’s social, political, and cultural landscape. By the time Zanzibar became the seat of the Arab Omani Sultanate in 1837 and later a British Protectorate in 1890, East African networks were already connected to the commodity cultures of the North Atlantic world.16 Transformed by a set of new demands and desires forged in the expansive world of modern empire and nation-building, the visual culture of the Swahili coast was reconstituted until it became a layered palimpsest of multiple meanings. This very multiplicity created a tense and paradoxical landscape for the representation and construction of a changing social order.

Europeans have long been aware of and present on the Swahili coast. For example, the Portuguese empire sacked and then colonized such cities as Mombasa for several decades in the sixteenth century. Their views of Swahili culture are recorded in visual and written form. Yet when Europeans first appeared in larger numbers in the nine-teenth century, the Swahili coast was interpreted in radically new ways. Modern Victorian sensibilities found the metropolitan cultures of the port to be strange and unruly. The Swahili coast challenged modern European ideas because the social and cultural landscape of its cities did not conform to modern civilizational norms about the “natural” difference between races. Locals looked strangely “hybrid,” yet colonial-ism’s rule of difference depended on managing the colonized as clearly segregated ethnic bodies. Categorizing external visual signs, dress and the arts of adornment, became central to the colonial project on the Swahili coast precisely because a formal morphology of the material world seemed to offer a more secure system of fixing

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social difference into place. In fact, photography initially played a central role in creating a typology of difference for the coast because it stabilized visual difference.

Photography and the Colonial Moment

Photography as a novel form of image making was introduced into coastal East Africa as early as the 1860s.17 Today thousands of photographs can be found in national archives in East Africa and Europe, such as the Zanzibar National Archives and the British Library, as well as in personal family collections on the Swahili coast. Yet, these early photographs are simply stored in nameless boxes or files as part of the larger colonial archive. Even those residing in family collections have lost their specificity. It is clear that photography studios were first established by South Asians in Zanzibar to create a profusion of images, literally capturing local peoples for the viewing pleasures of Western clients and for official documentation of the colonial project.18 Thus, many of the thousands of postcards created during the Omani Sultanate of Zanzibar period (1856–1963), and during the following period of British influence leading to the 1890 British Protectorate, evoke a generalized sense of Zanzibar as site of exotic pleasure for the Western imaginary. Most present the female body for voyeuristic con-sumption. Studio images of women abound, clad in the lush local fashions of the day. These postcards depicted “Swahilis” as meeting the eye of the viewer either sugges-tively aggressive or with a bright smile of welcoming warmth. The stage set of the studio created a narrow pictorial space, allowing the physicality of the female body to dominate the picture plane. Unlike photographs kept by elite Zanzibari families, these postcards are not portraits of the individual women, but rather a mapping of the body and its potential pleasures. The nameless figures are dressed in local cloth, whose fan-tastic colors are “reconstructed” by hand-coloring the surface with bright hues of pink, purple, and yellow. Literally inscribed onto the surface of the image is the desire for “local” color.

This emphasis on “local color” as an index of the authenticity also signals the inter-section of such images with the larger visual politics of Western knowledge-production and empire-building. As many scholars have argued, the seeming evidentiary power of photography was deployed as a “scientific” tool for recording anthropological knowledge and colonial “progress.”19 Yet pleasure and “empirical” knowledge always intersected in these images. Images of seductive women also documented “facts” about their ethnicity and place or origin. The text on such postcards cataloged them as either “Indian,” “Swahili,” “African,” or “Arab.” The ethnicity of the body was laid out as a terrain for the viewer’s gaze. The photograph therefore is posited as a scientific document, capturing the supposed visual specificities of an ethnic “type.” The social and biological body is therefore inscribed onto the physical artifact of photo – typical of the strategic deployment of the camera as an instrument of evidence and control, capturing the “real thing.”20 Photographic profiles of the human face were also common. Here too voyeuristic pleasure is conveniently coupled with ethno-graphic knowledge and the head and planes of women’s necks and shoulders were often bared to document their “ethnic” physiognomy. Visualizing “ethnicity” was central to the colonial project on the Swahili coast. From the late nineteenth century onwards, residents had to contend with and define themselves in relationship to North Atlantic social hierarchies. Since colonial governance required a social body

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that could be racially classified, coastal residents were pressed to take on an ethnic identity. The geographic, cultural, and linguistic designation, “Swahili,” was eventually transformed into an ethnic and racial marker.21

Scholars have interrogated at length such colonial and racist image and object regimes, especially for West and North Africa. But what can we say about these images beyond gathering generalized insights about Western fantasies of the imaginary “Other” and the violence of objectification? To reconsider these largely anonymous images, I want to think about them as things and performance in circulation. In fact, the very characteristics of photography that made it a document of control, also allowed it to be deployed for unforeseen means.

A Swahili Culture of Things

By the mid-nineteenth century, Zanzibar became the center of a powerful East African consumer culture that affected merchants, financial markets, and factories as far away as London, Bombay, and Boston.22 Seyyid Said, the first Omani Arab sultan of Zanzibar, was able to establish a new mercantile empire on Zanzibar in the 1830s by forging an alliance with the island’s hereditary leaders, the Hadimu and Tumbatu dynasties, and by connecting the existing east and central caravan economy to the growing global market.23 Furthermore, with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 travel time between Europe and East Africa decreased significantly and by the 1870s a daily stream of steamships connected East Africa to a global web of steamship routes.24 The Sultan’s wealth depended in a large part on controlling the customs house of all Swahili port cities, where his representatives collected tariffs on all exports and imports. Yet while in the first half of the nineteenth century Zanzibar was first and foremost a mercantile economy, by the 1870s slave labour plantations that produced cloves for export became the cornerstone of the local economy.25

Mass-produced commodities became cheaply available as old trade routes were now directly connected to the markets of the industrial north. Merchant vessels from all over the world docked in Zanzibar, including from Turkey, Europe, North America, and even Latin America. Remarkably, local consumer demand focused on objects “destined for the social realm of display and public communication,” such as cloth, beads, jewelry, and furniture.26 This emphasis on exotic imports was not a recent phe-nomenon or simply a result of capitalist globalization. Rather, new mass-produced objects fulfilled an ancient need and desire for signs and things of foreignness. Sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century the hereditary leaders of Swahili port cities and towns began to cultivate an aesthetic of mercantile worldliness by collecting imported luxury goods, such as clothes, Chinese porcelain, jewelry, and precious objets d’art, for display on their bodies and in their homes. This “culture of things” was an expression and idealization of the port city itself. It celebrated mercantile mobility and the ability to acquire exotic objects. Great distances separated the ports of East Africa from the cities of the Middle East and Asia, but having direct access to the artifacts of those faraway places endowed the port with an aura of worldly sophis-tication. In a sense, one was also able to surmount distance by dressing in and living with things from faraway places.

Until the nineteenth century, sumptuary laws ensured that only patricians could control this image world and aesthetic practice. This culture of things was not only

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about aesthetic pleasure and wealth, but it also played a role in policing social hierarchies by materially demarcating the difference between the free elite and the commoners and enslaved persons. The arts of dress and adornment were particularly vital in this regard. Only patricians and free members of society had the right to wear certain things. And most importantly, only free peoples controlled their own bodily display. To dress oneself and perform the codes of mercantile plentitude meant one had entered the matrix of autonomous personhood. Freeborn women were also the only ones who fully or partially covered their ornamented bodies in public. Only they had the privilege to demurely draw a veil over their head and chests. During the Sultanate years, Omani and Egyptian forms of dress became increasingly popular. Women sheathed themselves in imported silks and cottons. They also wore massive silver anklets, bracelets, and necklaces that were imported from the Arab peninsula and South Asia. The most important sign of patrician identity for men was an Omani turban and curved dagger. Wearing a fine Arab kanzu, an ankle-length white or cream-colored robe, with an embroidered head-cape, called a kofia, also became an increasingly popular form of free men’s dress. The rich layering of ornamental mass on the body was often intentionally symbolic and even insistently nonfunctional because it negated the utilitarian or mundane function of certain things. For example, women wore extremely high platform sandals as a sign of their free status. The form of such locally manufactured sandals was based on Ottoman prototypes. In Turkey such sandals were originally been worn only for short trips to the restroom, but on the Swahili coast they became highly charged symbols of a woman’s patrician pedigree. Photographs of such women from the turn of the twentieth show them wearing such sandals as they sat enthroned on massive carved chair, a kiti cha enzi, or “throne of power.” The ability to stage one’s self at rest, wearing fine clothes, meant one was in command of others, of their bodies and actions. Elders and colonial archives describe the poise and composure of patricians, as they sat stiffly erect for hours upon a kiti cha enzi, ever vigilant and in command of the movements of others.

Although a wide array of objects were coveted, cloth was the most important sign of mercantile plentitude and also the most valued commodity. In many precolonial African political economies imported textiles played a multivalent role, often acting as a form of currency, whose value was intimately linked to the value of people. As Joseph Miller argues in his seminal book Way of Death, throughout the transatlantic slave trade the African value of the enslaved was calculated as “pieces” of imported textiles.27 On the Swahili coast cloth was also so valued because East African elites could create networks of dependence – amassing people as clients or bonded persons – through a body politic in which the ability to amass and distribute imported cloth effected one’s ability to command others. Beautifully designed textiles were necessary to participate in complex rituals of gifting that cemented allegiances and one could only amass a large household and retinue if one could dress them.28 Cloth was also used to trade for ivory and enslaved Africans along the caravan routes of East and Central Africa.

By the mid-nineteenth century this system reached new heights because both imported cloth and enslaved people became increasingly affordable. The luxuriously dressed body of a household enslaved person became an ever more significant sign of leisured luxury in Zanzibar City during this period.29 They functioned as things of conspicuous consumption; their use-value was not set in motion as labor on a planta-tion, but rather their bodies were recast as an aesthetic armature for their owner’s

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performance of wealth. Enslaved and concubine women, especially, were the most important component of a patrician or landowner’s collection of worldliness and wealth. Once such a woman entered an urban household and her body was remade, it functioned as an aesthetic tableau of luxury. Photographs from this period docu-ment entire retinues of luxuriously dressed women that one might mistake for patri-cian ladies due to the wealth of their ornamentation – yet their heads and feet are bare. Sumptuously dressed in the most imported expensive silks and cottons, they would accompany patricians at various public festivals and processions. As they danced or marched through the narrow streets of the city the mass of their bedecked and bejew-eled bodies literally transformed the material character of the city.

Throughout the nineteenth century, sumptuary laws meant to distinguish between the old elite families and new immigrants and enslaved persons weakened. The Swahili patrician elite had lost their prestige as the founders of Swahili culture already by the 1860s and, by the 1890s, with the establishment of the British Protectorate, the Arab sultan of Zanzibar had little real power. The global market and colonization also acted as a catalyst for the urban underclass to remake themselves by consuming forms of dress that were previously not available to them.30 By the turn of the twentieth cen-tury recently manumitted peoples began to purchase things – commodities and arts of adornment – that were once the exclusive purview of freeborn merchants and landowners. As the work of Laura Fair has powerfully suggested, emancipation accel-erated this process.

Within three years after the abolition of slavery [in 1897] the typical fashions seen in the isles had been radically transformed. As both men and women began to disas-sociate themselves from their heritage as slaves and claim new identities as free Swahili they appropriated new forms of clothing to give visible expression to their changing definitions of self.31

After the abolition of slavery the public display of one’s body signaled a new social order. The formerly enslaved had the authority to dress and aestheticize their bodies. Europeans observed the importance of dress to the urban poor during the first decades of the twentieth century and they commented on how locals used their regular wages, however meager, to buy kangas and kanzus.32 Regular wage labor gave the urban underclass the means to simply buy the fashions they desired, instead of being dressed by their patrons or owners.

By the 1880s factory-produced cotton cloths called kangas and lesos became the most important commodity to urban women, both patrician and recently freed. They were sold in local markets by South Asian shopkeepers, but supplied by German, American, and British traders and exclusively produced in European factories for the East African market – but only after Zanzibari or Mombasan taste-makers were consulted.33 In fact, many merchants, including Americans and Germans, bitterly complained that they were at the mercy of Swahili mercurial tastes, often arriving with an entire cargo of kangas only to discover that their styles had long been eclipsed by other designs. To counter this, one German merchant hired a famed fashionista living in Mombasa as his kanga consultant in the hopes of keeping up with women’s changing tastes.34

Yet what is rarely analyzed in the history of Swahili consumption is the fact that the kanga is a complex composite of both ancient and very recent ideas about the value

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of body adornment and the constitutive relationship between manufactured goods and personhood. Clearly, the fact that fine imported cloth was once the exclusive purview of the freeborn patrician class made it desirable to newly emancipated urban residents. The kanga signaled Muslim propriety and becoming a Muslim was the first step in transforming oneself from an enslaved newcomer to an urbane sophisticate. The formal features of the kanga are inspired by Omani, Portuguese, or South Asian prototypes, but they were recast as a mass-produced form precisely because East African cultural and economic practices placed a premium on imported cloth. In fact, Sheryl McCurdy has recently suggested that inland Africans, such as Manyema women from present-day western Tanzania, shaped Zanzibari fashions and tastes as much as Arab or Indian Ocean cultures during the nineteenth century. These women, who had often experienced slavery and social dislocation, arrived in Zanzibar as concubines of wealthy merchants. They set about cultivating a reputation for being alluring, beautiful, and even dangerous. Strikingly, “good” Swahili and Arab women began to wear Manyema-style jewelry and a kanga designed to emulate the patterns of Manyema textiles became extremely popular all across the city.35 Umbrellas and parasols imported from the USA were also coveted during the British Protectorate years. They were surely valued in part because Europeans promenaded about town with them, but they also offered an exciting new way to add another import to one’s performance of self. In a sense, new commodities, artifacts, fashions, visual vignettes – and even people – were always needed for the construction of Swahili personhood.

Portrait Photographs as Objects

Portrait photography was firmly established as a fundamental form of African creative practice by the second half of the nineteenth century.36 As stated previously, portrait photographs entered Swahili visual culture by the 1860s, when South Asians from Goa first established permanent studios in Zanzibar and later also in Mombasa. Their studios were family businesses that initially produced images for postcards and por-traits for European visitors, the colonial administration, and the court of the sultan. Initially only Europeans and the Sultanate elite commissioned portraits, but after the abolition of slavery a more diverse clientele began to ask and pay for studio portraits of themselves or members of their family.

Members of the elite, including Sultanate ruling classes, actively collected mounted carte de visite photographs of famous peoples and monuments throughout the Sultanate years.37 Photography circulated through Swahili society along with other mass-produced image technologies, such as lithography. These mimetic and perspec-tival representational modes had few local precursors, although mirrors had been popular on the Swahili coast since the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, they became instantly popular in all port cities along the coast. The very profusion of photographic images gave East Africans a new medium through which to capture various perfor-mances of self. When local women began to commission photos of themselves and through the photographic encounter expressed their own logics of selfhood, they also began to participate in the globally circulating iconography of portraiture and codes of modern self-representation. The photo’s perspectival depths, its ability to act as a memento and artifact of vision, allowed locals to see other ways of self-representation. For example, portraits of female members of the sultan’s household (who were often

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from East or Central Africa), now housed in the Zanzibar National Archives, clearly indicate that local women were comfortable posing for the camera. They easily per-formed European codes of feminine virtue and comportment, gesturing and posing like European women did in their portraits. Images show women wearing European high-necked lace dresses, whose silk bows, tied around their midriff, emphasized the contours of their body underneath. Their bodies are recast as a Victorian hourglass silhouette, a form completely different from Swahili fashions of the time, which emphasized the expansive volume and surface of the textiles themselves. The images also show the women perfectly inhabiting Victorian-era portraiture conventions. One such image shows a young woman demurely turning her body sideways, away from the camera’s lens, as she contemplatively gazes to the left. The fingers of her left hand are elegantly propped against her cheek, while her right hand, adorned by a wrist-watch, rests casually in her lap. However staged or temporary such ways of presenting the self were, seeing and reproducing the poses and surfaces of European women allowed local women to engage faraway cultures in new ways. These images speak of the interpenetration of different codes of performing the cultured body during this period of heightened trade and travel.

Yet photography was also appropriated to reassert and give new life to very local practices. What made photography so compelling to coastal East Africans during the second half of the nineteenth century is the ability of the photograph’s surface to document another surface: the dressed and aestheticized body. My emphasis on the surface of portrait photography is indebted to Christopher Pinney’s analysis of post-colonial photographs as “images that project a materiality of the surface.” In his work, which draws on Olu Oguibe’s work on Nigerian photography’s “substance,” he argues that the “surfacism” of Indian and West African popular photographic prac-tices “becomes a site of refusal of the depth that characterized colonial representa-tional regimes.”38 I seek to extend and reformulate his insights about surfacism by locating its historic precursor. While his analysis is first and foremost concerned with understanding how postcolonial practices of self-fashioning negate colonial photo-graphic codes, I want to suggest that on the Swahili coast “surfacism” must be under-stood as the reification of precolonial cultural practices and values. It made temporary acts of self-adornment and comportment into permanent things. As discussed in the previous section, the body played a central role in presenting Swahili ideas about the civilizational order of their world. The richly dressed and ornamented body func-tioned as a symbol and object of mercantile wealth and sophistication. It was a tableau for the presentation of exotic imports and whoever controlled and amassed such bod-ies commanded wealth and political authority. Furthermore, free members of society controlled their own bodies, using slightly different codes of self-display than those available to their bonded or enslaved dependents, to project their autonomy. Photography’s mimetic doubling therefore became a tool with which to hold onto to the materiality of the body in the form of another object, the photograph. As such an object, which also reached the coast through international networks of circulation, it too could be deployed as a sign of global connectivity. It was a multilayered object, since its indexical depth also carried within it the surface of the body that was also sheathed in exotic commodities.

Like other imported goods, such as furniture, chinaware, glass bowls, and vases, a photograph could be collected and displayed. The interior of people’s homes func-tioned as a kind of museum for the display of such collections (Figure 5.1). Layered

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assemblages of prestige objects played an important role in the town culture. Nineteenth-century photographs of merchant houses illustrate how Swahili patri-cians decorated their interiors. In these images the interiors are literally bristling with hundreds of imported objects, often the same object-type being repeated over and over in rows across shelves or hanging on walls. The photograph in Figure 5.1 fea-tures a domestic room in a stone mansion in Zanzibar. It was taken by Souza and Paul, one of many photography studios operating in Zanzibar and it documents the typical style of the Sultanate years, which I describe as “mercantile modern.” During the reign of Sultan Barghash (r. 1870–1888), when this image was taken, Swahili coast material culture was ever more influenced by the visual culture of the British Raj. Barghash was exiled to Bombay before the British allowed him to ascend to the throne and after he came to power he wanted to reproduce the splendor of Bombay on Zanzibar Island. As can be seen, Zanzibaris juxtaposed the latest technological innovations, such as European clockworks and electric lighting, with fashionable Anglo-Indian furniture designs from Goa. A version of this photograph was also published in a British newspaper, where the caption noted that “The conflict between Oriental and Western civilization is clearly discernible in the decorations of the cham-ber.” In fact, the conflict was felt by Western residents not locals. Europeans con-stantly derided what they understood as the misuse of “their” material culture. Travelogues and journals of this period are littered with anxieties about East Africans “simulating” Western ways. The photograph might have been staged and first and

Figure 5.1 Unknown photographer. Interior view of a stone mansion in Zanzibar, circa 1880s. Collection of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum – Kulturen der Welt, Cologne; 21.262.

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foremost created for Western consumption, but it clearly documents the cultural codes and visual culture of its age. This young man, whether part of the Sultan’s inner circle or not, certainly is exhibiting a sense of comfort with the cultural politics unfolding in Zanzibar. He is dressed in official Omani ceremonial garb, which included a multicolored turban and a long, black overcoat with gold embroidery. His body language is relaxed as he leans against the curve of the chair’s back, extending his legs slightly before him. He causally holds a walking stick between his legs and gazes with calm certainty across his right shoulder. His posture and presence declares his confidence and authority. He is also surrounded by his collections of expensive furnishings, porcelain chinoiserie, and most importantly, photographs. This photo-graph therefore documents how portrait photographs were inserted into local spaces. Three large mounted portraits of men in Omani dress are displayed on the ornate cabinet on the left. A framed photograph also rests on the nightstand. Most likely the sitters in these photographs were family members or local rulers. As decorative objects these photographs sit at the edge of multiple logics of display. They are part of the historic Swahili coast desire for objects from “the elsewhere,” yet they also display the body as a spectacle of the “real,” and emplace a realist form of representa-tion. After all, the ability of photography to inhabit the Swahili culture of things meant Swahili coast residents saw beyond the surface, so to speak, into the indexical depth of the photograph. It meant they understood the truth-telling conventions of photographic realism, since they were interested in having such image-objects because they represent people as things and in turn simulate things.

Modernity on the Edge

If we juxtapose those photographs meant for the colonial gaze discussed in the beginning of this chapter with images meant for local consumption, we can begin to complicate the way we think about photography as a space and object of selfhood in circulation. As a globally circulating sign, the portrait photo was an intelligible image readable by the diverse communities. “Local” and “colonial” image worlds clearly interpenetrated each other once urban residents began commissioning image-objects of themselves.

Photography was certainly a “global” or “Western” technology, but I would argue that it was not hybridized or localized on the Swahili coast, in the conventional sense of how localization is framed in studies of the cultural dimensions of globalization. As it is used by Africanists who privilege space over time, globalism overextrapolates the modernist map of world culture that is predicated on seeing a stable link between people, culture and place. But residents of port cities such as Zanzibar cultivated a cultural tactic that emphasized a sense of the deterritorial and nondiscrete and a desire for “the elsewhere.” The complex reciprocities shaping Swahili praxis cannot be flat-tened into a study of a local/global dialectic because place-based authenticity is not seen as the “natural” state of things on the Swahili coast. Ultimately I want to suggest that Swahili aesthetic practice is not a question of localization, but a carefully crafted tactic of translation, where technologies of the self, such as photography, are appropri-ated to sustain in-betweenness and distance.

In turn, the photograph’s attachment to North Atlantic modes of transacting auton-omous personhood was also played with. Clearly, Zanzibaris did not want to be reduced

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to a nameless object within colonizing representational regimes. The “ distance” that marks colonial alterity was refused by cultivating the photograph’s thingness and play-ing with entirely different notions of distance, where photography’s origins in the distant imperial metropole make it interesting locally. The ability of the photograph to be deployed as an object of the self was also a site of tension and disavowal. Clearly, Swahilis recognized that the power of the photo rested somewhere at the interstices of its surface and its indexical depths. The portrait photograph allowed residents of the port to merge Swahili ideals of the cultured body, colonial codes of the body, and newly forming ideas about the individual subjectivity. None of these ideas about per-sonhood can be demarcated as either wholly African, wholly colonial or foreign. Their overlapping interaction resists allowing us to apply the normative label of “alternative” modernity to Swahili coast portrait photography, since such a label suggests that a parallel and self-contained space was produced. Rather, in coastal East Africa photog-raphy functioned as a new and old performative space of the in-between.

Notes

1 Fabian (1983, 17–18).2 The royal arts of Ife and Benin in Nigeria are studied in relationship to dynastic chro-

nologies and stylistic change since they include objects created and used in the distant historical past.

3 The literature on African modernist art is expansive. Some of the key texts include Harney (2004); Deliss (1995); Oguibe and Enwezor (1999); Ogbechie (2008).

4 Hassan (1995); Okeke (1995).5 Appadurai (1996); Gaonkar (2001); Gilroy (1993).6 Harney (2004, 12).7 For example, Okwui Enwezor argues that African modernism “is not founded on an

ideology of the universal” because it is “internal” to Africa (2001, 12).8 Pratt (1992).9 Chakrabarty (2000).

10 Gaonkar (2001, 21).11 Gaonkar (2001, 21).12 Mignolo (2002, 57).13 Trouillot (2002, 222).14 Trouillot (2002, 221).15 These large commercial plantations were established by the Omani elite. Although

various forms of bondage have existed in East Africa for centuries, the unprecedented cruelty of modern plantation slavery forever changed the social-cultural landscape of the Swahili coast. To this day the violence of this history has left deep scars, and ques-tions of who was ultimately responsible for the rise of slavery in the nineteenth century still impact contemporary relationships between various groups living in East Africa.

16 The annexation of Zanzibar by the Busaidi dynasty of Oman, a kingdom of the Persian Gulf, was supported by the British, who also choreographed the separation between Oman and Zanzibar in the 1850s. Another branch of the Busaidi family ruled Muscat and its Arab peninsula dominions and the sultan of Zanzibar paid an annual subsidy to the sultan of Oman. A clear independence of the two empires was not recognized until the establishment of the British Protectorate in 1890.

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17 For analyses of the relationship between postcard photography, colonial desire, and the making of the exotic “Other” during the age of empire see Alloula (1986); Geary and Webb (1998).

18 Brielmaier (2003, ch. 1).19 Ryan (1997); Edwards (1992); Geary and Pluskota (2003); Pinney (2011).20 On the role of photography as an apparatus of state power and surveillance see Sekula

(1986); Tagg (1988).21 “Swahili” as an ethnic construct is largely the invention of the nineteenth-century

colonial system. Swahili identities have been studied by countless scholars. For an analysis of the issue see Willis (1993); Glassman (2011).

22 Jeremy Prestholdt’s book Domesticating the World powerfully challenges the accepted idea that Africa played a passive and peripheral role in the global economy. Prestholdt (2008) considers how Swahili consumer desire shaped the making of a new global world order in the nineteenth century.

23 The Tumbatu and Hadimu, like the “autochthonous” residents of other Swahili port cities, claim to have ancient connections to Shiraz, a port town in present-day Iran. Initially they were classified as “Shirazi Swahilis” by the colonial administration because they refused to be called either Arab or “native.”

24 Bennett (1978, 106).25 Wealthy Zanzibari landowners with access to British Raj banks emulated the slave

plantation system of several French-owned islands in the Indian Ocean.26 Prestholdt (2008, 93).27 Miller (1988).28 For an analysis of Swahili practices of gifting and feasting see Glassman (1995).29 Prestholdt (2008, 118–121).30 Prestholdt (2008, 100).31 Fair (2004, 20).32 Huebner and Sieberg (1998, 95).33 Schmidt (1888, 83).34 Huebner and Sieberg (1998, 95).35 McCurdy (2006, 466–469).36 Haney (2010, 57).37 Prestholdt (2008, 95).38 Pinney (2003, 202).

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Documents

At Home in the World: Portrait Photography and Swahili Mercantile Aesthetics