Chapter 5 Ibadhi Migrations, Religion, and Commerce in the Lake Region

Early Migrations from the Coast: People of the Foot and People of the Rail

Most accounts of people of Omani-Arab descent in the Lake Region focus on “big men” traders in the nineteenth century who owned and operated massive caravans between there and the coast, staffed with porters carrying goods, food, tents, and large harems.² This chapter, however, focuses more on the stories of lesser-known Ibadhi-Omanis in the interior and their descendants’ rise to success from poverty in the decades following independence from German (1885–1918) and then British (1916–1961) rule. Colonial-era Omani migrants who traveled across the East African mainland did so by train, unlike their precolonial forebears who arrived in the Lake Region from the coast on foot or caravan. The more ambitious and successful among them became caravan traders to interior spaces that would later become major commercial cities of the interior, like Tabora (roughly nine hundred miles from the coast) or Ujiji farther west and bordering Lake Tanganyika. These were key centers of ivory and slave trades, the latter dependent on the violent capture and exploitation of African peoples, many of whom originated from central Africa. In 1873 the British colonial government abolished the slave trade in Zanzibar, but the institution of slavery did not itself end until 1897.³ In the twentieth century, when cross-country trains became available, newer waves of Omani traders from the coast disembarked at Tabora and then continued their journeys to cities like Mwanza on Lake Victoria or to remote interior villages.

I documented these stories through interviews with members of Istiqaama in the towns and villages of Sukumaland, often over a cup of Arabic coffee and dates, or accompanied by a guided tour of historic Ibadhi mosques and newer Istiqaama schools and family-owned factories. While primarily from the perspective of people of Omani ancestry in Tanzania, these interviews revealed how deeply intertwined African, Arab, Asian, and even European, histories were in the region.⁴ They also showed the role of Istiqaama and local Ibadhi communities in setting standards of piety, intra-Muslim cooperation, and development in contemporary communities separated by miles of farmland and savannah. This chapter begins at the end of the nineteenth century with a brief history of Omani migrations and explaining the effects of the European colonial expansion on community, migration, religion, economy, and diaspora in the broader Lake Region of eastern Africa. The discussion then sheds light on the Omani diaspora’s role in agriculture and industry in postindependence Tanzania and how these economic endeavors provided the financial and social foundation for Istiqaama’s institutions and branches on the mainland.

Mzee Zahor and the Trope of the Traveling Arab Confectioner

For his part, Mzee Zahor, the relative of my traveling companions, got his big break after meeting a Sukuma chieftain named Majebere in the coastal town of Tanga. He had arrived in the coastal city from Zanzibar and made a modest living practicing his trade as a confectioner of Omani sweet meats (halwa). According to Zahor’s descendants in Mwanza, Chief Majebere so enjoyed the taste of the sweets that he invited him to travel with him back to his headquarters and establish a halwa shop there in what is now the remote city of Lalago (population under twenty-three thousand), part of the Maswa District in the semiarid Simiyu region about three and a half hours southeast of Mwanza by car. Simiyu borders the southern edge of the Serengeti and includes the Maswa Wildlife Game Reserve, which is made up of “rolling hills covered in thickets and rock outcrop known as kopjes . . . interspersed with seasonally dry rivers containing permanent water holes.”⁵ The residents of this area are not strangers to wildlife, and the region has historically been a site for hunting and poaching wild game, a lucrative practice in which some of my Ibadhi interlocutors admitted their families were once involved. Zahor agreed on the condition that he would receive the protection of the chief as he journeyed toward the Lake Region. He then boarded a German train to Tabora and from there to the fishing village of Kagei (also known as Kayenze) outside of Mwanza, which was a historic point of encounter between African chiefs, Arab and Indian traders, and European missionaries and explorers. In Kagei, another Omani emigrant received Zahor and offered him a place to pray, rest, and acclimate to the new environment, hosting him in an Ibadhi mosque built for worship, communal gatherings, and travelers. The still-in-use, one-story mosque reflects the typical austerity of historic Ibadhi architecture,⁶ without a minaret or outward or interior ornamentation. Like on the islands, this mosque was intended primarily for the use of local Omani families and their visitors. It continues to serve as a community center (Ar., bayt jam’iyya) for local Omani residents and travelers.

Zahor eventually left Kagei to settle in Lalago. He established a shop and acquired land through his marriage to one of Chief Majebere’s daughters. Like the Omani diaspora in Tanzania, the Sukuma are patrilineal, and in some cases “practice polygamy, exchange bride wealth, and traditionally viewed land ownership as communal, with private family right of usufruct to specific plots of land.”⁷ It was typical for Omani immigrants of the Lake Region to marry Sukuma or Nyamwezi women, in part as a way of securing land rights and protection when they first arrived. Later in the 1970s and 1980s, foreign missionaries and aid workers in the region noted that emigrants from Oman would have one Arab wife born into an Omani family and one or more African wives.

Having established a social safety net and secured land for cultivation, Zahor became a farmer and in time purchased an ox-drawn plow (Sw., machini ya n’gombe) that helped him increase his annual yield. His labors served as the foundation of later economic activities of his descendants, who would eventually leave Lalago and settle in larger towns and regions where there were better economic prospects. These descendants would come to play an important role in the leadership of the Istiqaama Muslim Society in the postindependence period.

Zahor’s story is a typical account of Ibadhi migrations to the northwest, though his successes were relatively modest in comparison to other Omanis such as Thani bin Amir al-Harthi, who was himself a confectioner who had left his hometown in Nizwa due to the drought. In recounting Thani’s career, McDow writes, “Less than twenty years later, he was one of the wealthiest traders in Kazeh, an ivory depot on the East African plateau, over four hundred miles from the Indian Ocean.”⁸ Trading caravans involved a cast of characters from diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds—different from the coast, where social stratification was well defined. The mobility and interdependence of the caravans meant that “ethnic and status hierarchies”⁹ were in a state of constant formation. The constant interactions between the coast and interior, however, did inspire those of means to build “new settlements that looked like Indian Ocean towns and spread Swahili language and culture,”¹⁰ so much so that the basic design of the Swahili house or Ibadhi mosque one would encounter in Zanzibar found their replicas in interior towns.

Anglo-German Colonial Rule in Victoria Nyanza (1890–1961)

The greater Lake Victoria region was not initially part of the Anglo-German Agreement of 1866, which separated mainland Tanzania (then Tanganyika) into two spheres of influence: one English and the other German.¹¹ In the 1880s, the European powers dispatched representatives from their chartered companies to serve as administrators in the resource rich and populous Lake Region, which was strategic because of its “location on the head-waters of the Nile.”¹² In a subsequent act of imperial hubris in 1890, the same powers signed a treaty that enabled German forces to send a military expedition led by Emin Pasha, a former Ottoman governor in the upper Nile who had been driven out of southern Sudan during the Mahdist rebellion in 1889.¹³ The two main military bases of the German colonial regime were in Bukoba, located on the southwestern shores of Lake Victoria, which from 1890 to 1894 was the main administrative center. Mwanza, at the time, “was the seat of the government for the south and east lake region under the control of non-commissioned officers.”¹⁴ In imposing their rule on local African communities, the military formed dubious treaties with Sukuma and Nyamwezi rulers or used brute force to bring the African rulers and their subjects to heel. In their attempts to establish a system of indirect rule, the colonial officers appointed governors called liwalis (often those claiming Arab or coastal Swahili origin) to govern in their place.¹⁵

In 1901, the construction of the British-funded Kenya-Uganda Railway facilitated the transport of passengers and goods from the coastal port of Mombasa to the port town of Kisumu on the banks of Lake Victoria. The railway, together with the steamers brought to the lake in 1904, stimulated what historian Buluda Itandala refers to as a “commercial invasion,” bringing “new traders from the coast.”¹⁶ Among them were Indians, Arabs, and Africans who served as intermediaries in the burgeoning illicit ivory trade.¹⁷ When they arrived, they set up shops where they would trade money and cloth for local resources, such as agricultural and animal products, produced by African farmers and pastoralists. Traders from the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf regions, especially, Oman, Yemen, and the Swahili-speaking communities of the coast, began to establish shops in rural areas far from Mwanza and Bukoba, notably in the regions and towns now known as Shinyanga, Simiyu, and Meatu. The gradual diversification of the economy in the interior decreased African participation in the caravan trade with the coast, and Mwanza grew as a regional center of trade connecting Tanganyika to the powerful kingdom of Buganda to the north across the lake.¹⁸

The presence of foreign traders in the lake region further enabled the German colonialists to transform Sukumaland from an economy of subsistence farmers and pastoralists to a peasant cash crop economy, based largely on the production of cotton. The drive to mass produce cotton for sale to Europe only intensified after Germany’s defeat in World War I, after which the British government seized the African territories formerly under German control and formed a mandate called the Tanganyika Territory in 1920. It was in this context of colonization, capitalist enterprise, a transportation boom, and diminishing sovereignty of African rulers (batemi) in eastern Africa that new waves of Omani-Ibadhi traders began to arrive.

Cotton Production and African Economic Organization

Cotton growing and textile production began thousands of years ago in East Africa, but the practice ceased in the mid-1800s because it became more cost efficient to import cloth from Europe. When the German colonizers reached the southern region of Lake Victoria in the 1880s, they found that cotton production had continued at a small scale and “German companies and settlers started growing cotton.”¹⁹ Later in the early 1900s, in British-controlled Uganda, the government had also begun to test grow Egyptian cotton in what would become the metropolitan centers of Entebbe and Kampala. In his autobiography Dream Half-Expressed (1966), Indian agriculturalist merchant and trader Nanji Mehta detailed how he made his fortune as an enterprising merchant from Gujarat. The book is at times paternalistic in its account of Mehta’s interactions with African people, yet from his narrative, we learn the process by which Indian shop owners established themselves around Lake Victoria, gradually diversifying their businesses by experimenting with various forms of crop production. Mehta planted his first crop of Indian cotton behind the shop he had established in the forest several miles away from his main business in what was then the village of Kamuli. With the success of the crop, he “arranged with the native African people to gin it by hand” and used the fluffy white product for “stuffing beds and pillows” for sale.²⁰

In 1909 a European, Indian, and African co-owned company called the Uganda Company Ltd. was formed to gin the cotton for export to England. As government interest and experimentation in cotton growing increased so did that of Indian merchants and African farmers. Expanding his business enabled Mehta to import more goods from Bombay and invest his profits from the sale of the goods into a network of rural shops, including one by the source of the Nile in Jinja, “two at Kamuli and two in the heart of the forest.”²¹ Privately owned Indian, German, and British companies and the colonial government of Uganda began to establish ginneries around the region, and Indian agents there “purchased unginned cotton from African farmers and dispatched it to the ginners.”²² Low paid African workers transported the cotton from the farm to the factories, workers who later had the added burden of paying the per capita tax that the government would later levy against the native population.²³

Similar developments were underway in Tanganyika. As the cotton industry grew there, the colonial government noticed a shortage in the production and harvesting of the crop. To push forward with their economic agenda, they “decided to force the local population to grow cotton on plots,”²⁴ under oppressive labor conditions. The harsh policies eventually resulted in the Maji Maji rebellion against German rule, although ultimately unsuccessful and resulting in the death of many Africans involved is the most celebrated example of resistance European colonial rule in Tanzanian history.²⁵ The practice of forced labor in Tanganyika intensified under British rule during World War II and new sites of cotton production developed across the region as part of the Sukuma Land Development Scheme.²⁶ The largest growth in cotton production in the southern Lake Region occurred between the 1940s after the British took control at the end of World War I and the 1980s, under Julius Nyerere’s postcolonial African government. In the late 1940s, African farmers in Tanganyika found that some of the ginning companies were cheating on the weight of their cotton at posts where the Lint and Seed Marketing Board had set the price. Following their protest, the growers established local scales for weighing the cotton before taking it to the regional markets. Local cooperative societies developed in rural Tanganyika for weighing and marketing.²⁷ The societies merged into the Lake Province Growers Association, which sent a delegation across the lake to Uganda to learn more about cooperative organization there. By the early 1950s, the colonial government had recognized the societies and appointed an officer to facilitate their operation.

Anthropologists Gottfried and Martha Lang attributed the success of the societies to preexisting Sukuma social and political organization into chiefdoms, village councils, strong and wide-reaching kinship networks, and mutual aid programs for crop cultivation and production.²⁸ By 1960, the societies had formed into unions that “owned and operated a total of 6 of the 19 ginneries in the areas.”²⁹ They stored and bagged the raw cotton, recorded weights and paid the growers, while the unions transported cotton to the ginneries, where it was then dispatched to train depots.³⁰ The federation of unions set the policy for the sale of cotton and provided farm education and hostels for members of the cooperative societies.³¹

These societies proliferated widely but eventually showed signs of corruption and lost the faith of farmers. By the time President Nyerere began relocating rural people into villages as part of the postcolonial Ujamaa policies, the cooperative structure had disintegrated in favor of village committees in which membership was not voluntary and in which people did not have the expertise to cultivate cotton or set up lines of credit. In the mid-1980s, after the Tanzanian Cotton Authority failed to gain the trust or motivation of farmers to produce high-quality cotton, societies reemerged. “They were not voluntary, had no independent sources of finance and so depended on the government and donors, had management appointment by the government and were, ultimately, political rather than economic organisations [sic].”³² A variety of financial and bureaucratic problems occurred to plague the new cooperatives, and farmers found themselves without pay for up to two years. The cotton remained in storage, unginned, for several seasons while its price depreciated. Towns like Lalago, the base of Chief Majebere, were once the center of the cotton boom and major sites of Arab settlement, gradually lost their prominence as the cooperative societies became defunct. Though intended to create national solidarity through shared labor and resources without regard to ethnic or linguistic differences, the resulting effect was economic isolation, a scarcity of resources, and a thriving black market of imported goods in which Omani descendants became key middlemen. Those involved in this trade were generally from less well-established families, as Indians and Arabs of means had begun to migrate to major urban centers like Mwanza, Shinyanga, or Tabora—or “back” to Oman in the 1970s—to establish large shops and businesses in proximity of the government, ports, and larger markets. The Arab arrivals distinguished themselves from their South Asian counterparts by marrying into African families and establishing what are today some of the regions oldest surviving mosques and centers of rural Muslim life. The kinship ties, spirituality, religious architecture, and diverse industries, such as factories, cotton ginneries and construction companies, bind these physically distant Afro-Arab Ibadhi communities today. Familial, religious, and economic institutions are also the foundations of the Istiqaama charitable and educational networks in northwestern Tanzania.

The success of Istiqaama in Tanzania can be attributed to several main factors. The Omani diaspora, like other trading communities, has settled in a vast geographic area across Tanzania since the late nineteenth century. Like Mzee Zahor, after disembarking from Zanzibar or the cities of the coast, the ancestors of my Omani-Ibadhi interlocutors first journeyed to major commercial centers or post cities of the interior, such as Tabora, Mwanza, Bukoba or Ujiji, before being redirected by their predecessors to the remote towns and villages where other Omani-Ibadhi were settled. There they would be welcomed by kinsmen at the small community mosques that were multipurpose, serving as spaces for prayer and community gatherings, travel lodges, and soup kitchens. Mosque communities would assist newcomers in meeting local authorities, establishing their trades, and navigating the new linguistic and cultural contexts of their place of settlement. Traders sought protection and aid from local African authorities, such as the Sukuma chiefs, through marriage and gifts, and these cross-cultural bonds remain integral for the relative success of the Omani diaspora in Tanzania today. The branch and national leaders of Istiqaama tend to be male members of well-established Omani families who maintain good relations with Tanzanian state authorities and the broader African business community, and in many cases, they also have Omani citizenship or international economic networks. Donors from Oman contribute to Istiqaama projects in regions where they maintain personal ties, for example, in the villages their parents were born and where there exists a family house or a community mosque and graveyard. For these transnational philanthropists, supporting Istiqaama is also a way of preserving East Africa’s Ibadhi heritage, which many see as an extension of Oman’s heritage. Lalago, the now sleepy town where Mzee Zahor settled, is one of those places that Istiqaama has earmarked for restoration.

Ibadhi Religious Education and Practice in the Rural Northwest: The Case of Lalago

At the center of the Lalago town square stands a colorful statue of President Nyerere, wearing the iconic “Kaunda suit.”³³ The monument signals the town’s full integration into postindependence Tanzania following the Arusha Declaration of 1967, which set out to define a particular brand of African socialism, or ujamaa. When we arrived in Lalago from Mwanza, most of the town’s residents were out for the day with their livestock. They had taken the animals, along with their prepared foods and wares for sale, to attend the country’s third largest auction. Most of the residents are subsistence farmers, though they sell or trade their surpluses.

Before the 1970s when Lalago’s Ibadhi community began to leave for Oman or bigger cities, there were some fifty families from the Omani Al-Busaidi and Al-Aduani tribes living in Lalago. At that time, there were only two roads in the whole town. One street served as the parking lot for large machinery and vehicles, while the main street comprised a series of shops established by the first generation of Omani settlers in the town who specialized in the sale of clothing and fabric. When we arrived, we were greeted by the caretaker of the Ibadhi mosque, Mzee Idris, an elderly man of Somali heritage who grew up with the descendants of Zahor al-Farai in Lalago. He had been notified of our arrival by the chairman of Istiqaama in Mwanza and had prepared a mini tour of the sleepy town center. My companions greeted him with warmth, remembering him from visits to Lalago as young children. The Somali community in Lalago were neighbors of the Omanis for generations and bonded over their shared faith in Islam, trading interest, and newcomer status. Mzee Idris himself grew up on the same street as Zahor’s relatives and was thus, as Mariam put it, “Ibadhi cultured,” as this was the dominant expression of Islam in his community at the time.³⁴ With some exceptions, Ibadhi identity in rural Tanzania was historically determined through one’s paternal Omani ancestry, regular attendance at Ibadhi mosques, or marriage into or close association with Omani-Ibadhi as in the case of Mzee Idris. Though not Omani, he is accepted as a member of Istiqaama through another form of kinship: his family’s close association with the Al-Farai clan of Oman in Lalago. One of the ways Ibadhis are identified in Lalago is through the annual distribution of Ramadan dates shipped from Oman or the United Arab Emirates, which are delivered by Istiqaama to families affiliated with the Ibadhi mosque. Each Ibadhi family receives five boxes of dates that bear the label of Istiqaama. Mzee Idris explained, “Our family names are specified on those five boxes. That’s how we understand who is [and who is not] Ibadhi.”³⁵ Aside from the annual shipments of dates, the arrival of aid in the form of food, textbooks, and clothing is not a regular occurrence in rural towns and villages.

The town’s first houses were thatched mudbrick ones (Sw., makuti) but were gradually rebuilt with corrugated iron roofs, cement blocks, and mortar with installation of running water and electricity. Taking us past the abandoned Omani homes on the desolate street across from the mosque, and now under its care, Mzee Idris explained former Omani residents of Lalago either sold or designated their homes and stores as religious endowments (awqāf) when they relocated to Oman or regional urban centers in the 1970s.³⁶

The small Ibadhi mosque in Lalago sits across the main street from a series of boarded up “ghost houses” (Sw., magofu), which are a favored nesting place of the local bat population. Istiqaama has plans to renovate the houses into schools and health care centers and designate the shops as part of a waqf (religious endowment), the proceeds of which would go toward the upkeep of the new buildings on their completion. Mzee Idris explained that leaders from the organization’s headquarters in Dar es Salaam had come by to measure and take pictures of the vacant Arab family homes to assess their market value. The rural town has both private and government primary and secondary schools. Before the Istiqaama boarding school opened in Shinyanga, located about 78 kilometers southwest of Lalago, Ibadhi youth in rural areas would study the Qur’an in the mosque, a practice that continues today under the guidance of a Sunni teacher. Mzee Idris pointed to a corridor in the Lalago mosque where the classes take place and recalled that the teacher did not spare the rod when students got out of hand or failed to master a lesson.

The teacher who served the mosque at the time of our visit to Lalago did not have the same reputation for harsh punishment. Mzee explained that while he can teach Qur’anic recitation and basic language and is familiar with Ibadhi teachings, he has not had much advanced religious education neither in Tanzania nor abroad. “He did not go to Muscat, he did not go to university . . . truthfully, he has not gone anywhere, but he knows how to recite Quran. He has studied the principles of Ibadhism and understands them. So, he went to secondary school and completed Form 2. And as it came to pass, he ended up in a corner, and he did not continue.”³⁷ The statement highlights the role and limitations of the mosque teacher in Lalago, emphasizing his knowledge in Qur’anic recitation and basic teachings of Ibadhism, despite not having advanced religious education. This indicates a gap in formal training but also underscores the importance of practical knowledge and understanding of the community’s beliefs.

The Ibadhi community in Lalago had been without a mosque teacher for a year before the recent hire. His initial compensation was room and board and irregular salary of donations, which eventually became unsustainable for a young man living far from home and no prospects of stable future employment. Mzee explained, “But he does well by us, what I mean is, he leads prayer and teaches the children over there [in the mosque]. So, the Istiqaama leadership in Mwanza told us to wait, when we have succeeded [in securing funds] we will tell you. However, we continued to fundraise little by little among ourselves. It was not an open practice; everyone was just giving him something secretly, not openly. Therefore, no one knew how much you gave him.”³⁸

He recently approached the mosque community to receive regular payment, and they were able to fulfill the request after the Omani Ambassador to Tanzania visited Lalago with an Ibadhi delegation from Mwanza. The ambassador agreed to pay the teacher a salary of 150,000 TZS per month or $64.32 for one year, a modest amount but certainly a boost until the year came to an end and the same problem arose. While they made requests for more support, Mzee feared that in the interim the teacher would find the financial insecurity of his position unsuitable and decide to leave with little notice. Compounding the issue of low teacher pay is a problem of student retention and uneducated parents who earn low incomes and see little point in sending their children to school when they could be earning money for their families by hawking eggs or peanuts to passengers at bus stops.

While male members of the Ibadhi and Sunni community attend prayers there regularly, the old Ibadhi mosque has not yet expanded to include a women’s section. Its male members usually gather at the Sunni Friday mosque (Sw., msikiti wa ijuma) just a few streets away for weekly congregational prayers. This situation highlights gender disparities within the Ibahdi community, reflecting broader societal norms and practices. In this community, women are actively involved in domestic roles and grassroots religious activities, but they have limited visibility in public spheres or leadership roles (see chap. 6). Additionally, there seems to be uncertainty or conflicting sentiments within the Ibadhi community regarding the obligation to accommodate and participate in Friday prayers, though space is made available by their Sunni neighbors.

Mzee Idris mentioned Mufti Al-Khalili’s return to Tanzania in the 1990s as the moment when the Ibadhi community began to participate in the congregational prayers. “When he came, he counseled all the men here to pray the Friday prayer. That they should be doing Friday prayer, not the travel prayer. They had prayed the traveling prayer (s.alāt al-safar) the whole time. Up until some of them laid to rest, they continued to pray the travel prayer.”³⁹ In the ritual primer Talqīn as-Ṣibyān by the celebrated Ibadhi scholar Nūr Al-Dīn al-Sālimī (1869–1914), the author details the prescriptions of the travel prayer: “If you happen to be traveling, you are obligated to shorten [the prayer] (idha kunta musāfiran wajaba ‘alayka ʾan taqsura). [You should perform] two prayer cycles (rakaʿs) for each of the afternoon prayers (az-zuhr), and the evening prayers (al-’asr) and the final night prayer (al-isha al-akhīra). So, you would pray two cycles for the zuhr prayer, and two cycles for the ʾasr prayer and two cycles for the ‘isha prayer.”⁴⁰

Al-Salimi explains that the person performing the travel prayer could perform each of the three required prayers for travel at their prescribed time during the day. Alternatively, if it is more convenient, the traveler can combine the second and third prayers of the day and the two afternoon prayers and the final night prayer with the one that would usually precede it at sunset (al-Maghrib).⁴¹ Given the long mercantile and commercial history of Oman in the Indian Ocean region, it is unsurprising that most Ibadhi fiqh manuals contain a section that details the obligations for prayer when traveling to accommodate voyagers.

Ibadhi elders in Lalago prayed Safar well into the 1990s, and this practice continued among the youth in rural communities who sought to emulate their local leadership. The practice distinguished Ibadhis from non-Ibadhi Muslims and was used to replace the Friday prayers, which could not be performed in the absence of a just imam. The roots of the Safar prayer date back to the period of Umayyad Islamic rule (661–750), when Ibadhis lived as a persecuted minority under the first caliphate. As discussed in chapter 2, modernist Ibadhi scholars such as Nur al-Din al-Salimi argued for the reestablishment of the Friday prayers, a stance later adopted by postrevolution Ibadhi thinkers in Oman and Zanzibar, such as Mufti al-Khalili and his acolytes Muhammad and Khalfan al-Tiwani in Pemba. Even for those Ibadhis who had married and built families with African women, who spoke KiSukuma and other regional languages fluently, and who had not returned to Oman in decades—or even visited the country—the absence from their ancestral homeland remained palpable and necessitated a continuation of the Safar prayer.

While we sat for coffee and dates served by his Somali wife on the verandah of the family’s one-story home, Mzee Idris explained the sense of impermanence and preoccupation with the homeland felt by past generations of Omanis in Lalago. “They were thinking they would return [to Oman] . . . For example, one man was named Ali Hassan, he used to stay over there [in one of the abandoned homes on the street]. He prayed Safar until he left and went [to Oman]. He died after one year. He stayed for one year; right mama [turns to his wife who nods]? He died, but he returned home.”⁴² Despite the deep ties to their ancestral homeland in Oman, many Ibadhis in Lalago felt a sense of longing and impermanence. The stories of these individuals reflect a complex relationship with both their Tanzanian and Omani identities, highlighting the enduring connection to their ancestral lands despite geographical distance.

Mzee Idris added about Ali Hassan, “He prayed [in congregation] at home, over there.” When asked why the elders did not adhere to modern Ibadhi teachings, such as the reforms of Mufti Al-Khalili, Mzee, he replied that they lacked local guidance in these matters. “There was no one there to tell you, you had no one to explain the matter to you.”⁴³ The experience of Ibadhis in Lalago sheds light on the dynamics of religious leadership, community traditions, and shifting practices of the Omani diaspora in the rural northwest. It also hints at the authoritative influence of external figures like the Omani mufti in guiding and shaping the religious practices of the community in the postcolonial period.

Ibadhis in the Lake Region are generally in agreement with the scholarly opinion that Omanis historically spent little time proselytizing, focusing instead on ensuring their social and economic survival outside of Oman. My interlocutors frequently insisted that conversion of Africans to Islam came later (Sw., walisilimisha watu baadaye) and that even then, those who became Muslim tended to be family members, slaves, or other closely related persons. The dominant narrative is that conversion was not forced (Sw., hakuna lazima) and that the Arabs did not teach Islam, because theirs was a madhab exclusive to Arabs (Sw., madhheb ya waarabu tu). According to Mzee, “In Ramadan people would fast and others [non-Muslim Africans] admired the practice so they emulated [them].”⁴⁴ Converts to Islam often received Muslim names from their Arab connections, and Islamic education mainly focused around Qur’an recitation with limited emphasis on content or meaning.

In addition to underscoring that Islamic learning primarily took place within families and that Omanis prioritized teaching their own rather than spreading the faith beyond their community, Mzee highlights the current Ibadhi community’s role under Istiqaama in reviving religious practices, particularly during Ramadan.⁴⁵ He elaborated, “Indeed, it is our job to encourage people to follow religion, to come pray. During Ramadan we encourage them, and Ramadan is like that throughout Tanzania, you could say. . . . Here there are drunkards, but when Ramadan arrives, they are not drunk, and they pray the five prayers. During that time, we don’t have any trouble encouraging people. Everyone understands completely that during this month, everyone must try praying to get into heaven [after the resurrection]. Everyone prays that maybe in the future things will get better, but it is like that.”⁴⁶

Mzee acknowledged that, unlike in the past where such practices did not necessitate elaboration for their ancestors, the Ibadhi community now actively promotes ritual obligation during Ramadan. The emphasis on religious observance highlights the community’s commitment to supporting one another’s spiritual growth and well-being, as well as its efforts to preserve traditions that are in danger of being neglected or forgotten.

Lalago was formerly a ward in the Shinyanga District, but now it is part of the Simiyu. Most of the aid that trickles down comes from the district headquarters of Istiqaama in the district capital of Meatu. At the time of our conversation, the Ibadhi mosque in Meatu was only five years old and had been built with a women’s section to accommodate the city’s growing population. According to the Meatu leadership, the construction of the mosque began in 2002 and 85 percent of the funding came from donations secured by the chairman of Istiqaama in Mwanza. As elsewhere, the leadership is primarily composed of successful businesspeople who volunteer their time to handle mosque affairs and supervise the distribution of any aid and building projects sponsored by Istiqaama. “These leaders, each one has his own business. One has a garage, and he is the chairman. . . . The secretary, his work is to repair phones and he has a shop to repair phones. Meaning they all run private businesses.”⁴⁷

While Istiqaama chairpersons and secretaries in major cities may assist rural communities in finding teachers for their mosques, they do not generally pay the salaries of these hires, so local actors struggle to raise these funds. They meet once a month and have smaller meetings throughout the week where they connect with subcommittees of education, parents, and youth. The youth are responsible for volunteering at Ibadhi weddings, funerals, and other celebrations and somber occasions held for the community at the mosque.⁴⁸

The leaders of Istiqaama are Ibadhi men, elected for their piety and standing in the community and their achievements in business and strong connections to Oman. They claim that the reason they were able to integrate so well into local economies and family structures is because they did not discriminate between Africans and Arabs and focused their attention on trade instead of focusing on Islamic outreach (da’wa). Those mainland Africans who became Muslim, they explain, did so because they observed the strict Ibadhi adherence to Islamic traditions of prayer and fasting and in time began to model what they characterized as righteous behavior. Rather than impose their religion on outsiders, they converted through example.

Overall, the dedication and collaboration of business savvy rural Istiqaama community leaders play a crucial role in sustaining and advancing the Ibadhi community’s religious and social activities. The need for continued support and funding for vital services such as mosque teaching positions highlights the ongoing challenges faced by those communities in securing resources for valued religious education and community engagement activities. Despite these challenges, their commitment to support one another reflects a strong sense of unity and shared responsibility within rural Ibadhi communities.

Religious Competition in the Rural Northwest

Despite the long history of Arab Muslim settlement in the greater Lake Region, Islam never became dominant,⁴⁹ as local populations continued to practice their ancestral traditions and converted to Christianity in large numbers influenced by well-resourced mission schools and churches. Ibadhis are believed to have shown little interest in proselytizing their faith, preferring instead to establish themselves economically. Mzee explained, “When those Christian foreigners entered, they proselytized, they informed people of their faith . . . [they would say] come pray! And the people would go to them. But the [Omani] elders just looked on.”⁵⁰

The first church to gain a significant following in the southern Lake Region was the Roman Catholic Church, but today other denominations are gaining large followings. Commenting on the matter with some amusement, Mzee noted “the Seventh-day Adventists have come, so and so has come, there are others who pray all night long, all day long.”⁵¹ The increase in public expressions of piety in rural Tanzanian communities at times leads to tensions between Muslim and Christian neighbors over noise (competing calls to prayer and preaching through loud speakers) and unequal access to resources and development within the respective religious communities.

Ibadhis today see the dominance of Sunni Muslims and Christians in the southern Lake Region as a byproduct of their Omani elders’ reluctance to propagate their religious traditions within the communities where they settled, choosing instead to focus their energies on managing their shops and trades. Other Muslim traders such as the Yemenis who settled in the interior did promote Islamic education and practice in their new communities. However, they offered no equivalent to the modern schools and health care centers that played a large role in the expansion of Christian ideas and institutions in rural areas in Tanzania. Itandala suggests that the Sukuma people living in the lake zone “managed to resist” the spread of Christianity through the first decade of the twentieth century because their social and political institutions remained relatively intact despite German rule. “Up to 1909, missionary activity in Usukuma was still confined to the White Fathers stations at Bukumbi, Nyegexi, and Mwanza town and the CMS station at Bulima, in Nasa, where converts to Christianity were still very few, possibly because the new religion was too contrary to Kisukuma social and religious practices such as polygamy, ancestor worship and bufumu.”⁵²

Until the establishment of the Istiqaama schools in the 1990s, there had been little effort to train an indigenous African Ibadhi leadership that could expand the faith beyond the closed network of Omani families. This contrasts with the various Christian missions in the lake zone, which long ago replaced European and American with culturally Sukuma churches, priests, and deacons. Through the rise of indigenous African churches, some of the more recent Pentecostal movements have proven attractive to elders and youth alike in rural Tanzanian communities.

The majority Christian population of Lalago has grown exponentially since the establishment of the St. Francis Xavier Catholic Parish in the neighboring town of Gula in 1949. The early community consisted of “a church, rectory, and primary school” built in the image of local Sukuma houses, which were primarily mudbrick with flat grass roofs.⁵³ Under the leadership of ordained and lay American missioners from the Maryknoll society, the Catholic presence in the region grew gradually over the subsequent decades, with parishes built approximately twenty-five miles apart. Typically, their parishes were built on the outskirts of the town rather than at the center, as this was where the Arab communities would build their mosques. The most detailed written accounts of the religious and social life of people living in the rural towns during the transition to independence in Tanzania between 1950 and 1970 are from missioners associated with the American Catholic missionary society, Maryknoll. They include observations of local Arab communities and their various economic engagements in Lalago, which they called “an Arab village.” In his account, Father Frank Breen observes, “The parish was situated on a hill three miles from the town of Lalago, which in the 1950s could accurately be described as an Arab village. Arabs who were involved in the slave trade had been relocated to Lalago and all commercial enterprise in the town was in Arab hands, except for one bar owned by an African. Over the years, Arab traders and lorry-owners proved to be cordial neighbors to the priests and cooperative in responding to business requests.”⁵⁴

Like the Arab Muslim traders who had already established a commercial center in Lalago, by the time of the missionaries’ arrival, the Catholic newcomers built their institutions with permission and land grants from Chief Majebere. The chief had been “appointed” by the British colonial administration “to be paramount king in all of Sukumaland.”⁵⁵ In return, he pressured the priests to build “a dispensary and eventually a hospital” in his kingdom, which they eventually did, having great success in attracting patients and providing medical services and medications competitive with those available at the more distant government hospitals.⁵⁶ One missionary described the chief as “65 years old, tall and regal-looking, had six wives and about 40 children.”⁵⁷ The account suggests that, contrary to acting as a mere pawn to the foreign authorities in the region, Chief Majebere knew how to get what he wanted from the various foreigners in his domains and he was not adverse to pomp and circumstance. As historian Thomas Spear has observed, historical scholarship on African rulers during this colonial period focuses too much on the ways in which “they were exploited, manipulated and transformed by colonial and local authorities and not enough on internal African politics and the agency that chiefs exerted in using the resources at their disposal to respond to their subjects’ desires for the future. To mobilize African ambitions, colonial rules had to appeal to both the past and the future, to what Africans had been as well as what many wished to be, and to provide a means of deploying tradition to attain modernity and vice versa.”⁵⁸ These appeals, which were made to both government officials and missionaries, were often expressed in demands for modern institutions of education, health care, and even worship.

While Lalago’s Arab community did engage in farming, most began as traveling salesmen or shopkeepers, selling imported fabrics, bicycles, household wares, grain, and cooking oil made from local products like pressed cotton seed. Successful Omani traders would buy farming equipment, such as tractors, and hire out their tilling services to the African farmers. They also hunted and sold wild game and ivory and invested in diamonds from local mines. They invested the wealth extracted from these endeavors into cars, buses, and trucks for the long-distance transport of passengers and wholesale items to towns and markets from as far away as Arusha near Mt. Kilimanjaro.

While cotton production continues in Lalago and the surrounding farming communities in the Lake Region of Tanzania today, high government taxes and frequent draught and flooding results in low yields and delays in sales. Mzee Idris explained that while buyers are eager to purchase the cotton, they feel constrained by the taxes and demands of regional authorities. To adjust to these strictures, farmers began to diversify their crop production to include sunflower seed (Sw., alizeti), peas (choroko), and sorghum (mtama). As part of the fallout of the unstable cotton industry, residents of Lalago struggle to meet their basic needs and cite hunger and alcoholism (ulevi) as endemic concerns. The cotton season had opened on May 21, but a month later, during our interview, the crop remained in storage. Mzee informed me that they were eagerly awaiting a “money car” (Sw., gari ya pesa) from the major agribusiness company, Olam, which is one of two major buyers.⁵⁹

Mzee attributed the economic decline to the departure of prominent businesspersons and farmers from Lalago due to the frustration caused by the ebbs and flows of an unreliable cash economy. “The [Omani] elders left when the cotton business had started to go backwards. It did not used to be that way; the policy became such that a person from whom cotton was purchased was not paid until his death. What I mean is, you would go ahead and sell your cotton only to be reassured of payment [by the buyer] the day after tomorrow, [then again] the day after tomorrow. By the time you cultivate the next crop, you have not been paid for the previous one.”⁶⁰

Those who did not leave for Oman moved in waves to Mwanza to look for better business opportunities, leaving the town’s two “Arab streets” empty. Among those who left is the owner of a major construction company in Mwanza who employs several former residents of Lalago, the Arab-owned juice factory is also a key regional employer.

Ibadhi Heritage and Industry in Rural Tanzania

Juma, an Ibadhi owner of the Jambo Juice Factory in Shinyanga, explained that his Arab ancestors came to East Africa from the city of Barzman in the Sharqiyya region of Oman as adults to escape political and economic strife and a desert drought that resulted in widescale food scarcity. Zanzibar appealed to the island’s Arab immigrants because of its ample rainfall from the biannual monsoon showers, which stimulated the growth of fruit and other produce unimaginable for a desert emigrant accustomed to drought and perpetual food shortages. Moreover, in Zanzibar they found a stable business environment that enabled even those emigrants who possessed little or no capital to seek employment in Stone Town or establish a shop or farm in the countryside. As Juma put it, “They came to help themselves here [in East Africa].”⁶¹ He related that only a few residents of Barzman made the trip to Zanzibar, those that did first settled on the islands and married women from there, like Juma’s grandmother who was from Pemba Island. Eventually some left Zanzibar for the East African mainland. The house of his emigrant ancestors still stands in Barzman under the care of extended family members in Oman.⁶²

Juma’s maternal grandfather was from Lalago. However, his mother and father married in the nearby village of Imalaseko, part of the greater Shinyanga region. The Ibadhi community there was close-knit and consisted of over twelve families, all of whom followed “Arab traditions” brought over from Oman and Zanzibar. The small town neighbors the world-renowned game parks of Serengeti and Ngorongoro. Juma grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, before the populations of the towns had grown and the boundaries of the parks became more formalized. The Sukuma name Imaleseko means “when you get there, there is no more laughing,” which is a reference to the village residents’ caution against making loud noises that would attract the attention of lions out on the prowl. The only Ibadhi mosque in Imalaseko was built sometime in the 1930s, “when the king [or sultan] was still in Zanzibar,”⁶³ and the Omani community’s youth studied religion in a madrasa while also attending the government school for primary and secondary education. Juma has four brothers and three sisters. After he and one of his brothers completed their secondary education in the village government school, they decided to leave school to go into the family trucking business.⁶⁴

In the 1970s and 1980s, several Arab families in northwestern Tanzania used the capital earned from their petty trade (biashara ndogo ndogo) centered on small-scale farms, shops, and from working in the mines to buy trucks for the transport of agricultural produce, primarily cotton, from the fields to the ginneries and markets. Juma’s family used their trucks to buy cottonseed oil and then sell it in the regional towns and cities. Once they saved enough money, they opened a wholesale store and began to distribute sugar and oil to local markets. In time he and his brother applied for small bank loans to build two cotton ginneries and opened an oil mill to press the cottonseed. They formed a group to manage their modest cotton trade and began to explore new areas of trade and investment.⁶⁵ Their success inspired the brothers to purchase Chinese-made, water-purification equipment and bottles, expanding their business to include the sale of potable water. Eventually, they decided to increase their water production and traveled to Germany to purchase the necessary equipment. They found a German company willing to lend them a line-one machine for purifying water and making soda. After a while they were able to acquire additional lines for making juice and soda. The company began by selling their bottled beverages to small local businesses. They saved and reinvested their profits into new industries along the way and eventually formed Jambo Food Products Ltd in 2013. The company claims to have grown in sales by 15 percent annually with their products sold in stores around the country.⁶⁶ According to a report by Africa Outlook, a print and online magazine designed for business executives, the Jambo Group is now a conglomerate of oil mills, ginneries, petroleum products, spinning mills, cargo transportation, and food products. Moreover, it is “one of the largest manufacturers of carbonated soft drinks, fresh juices, and the processing and bottling of water within East Africa, based in Shinyanga, Tanzania.”⁶⁷ The company’s slogan is “life in every drop,” and they present their business as having a humanitarian mission of providing safe and clean water and other quality beverages and foods at prices affordable for Tanzanians.⁶⁸

The business remains family owned, and on our stop in Shinyanga, they invited me and my travel companions to dine in their walled and gated compound that stretches several acres from the juice and soda factory, across the main road into town. In the dryness and heat of summer, the expansive driveways, fountains, and well-watered gardens of date palms and other tropical and subtropical plants gave the appearance of an upper-class family home in Muscat, Oman. After lunch with the family matriarch, we made our way across the highway to the well-maintained factory complex, where a fleet of now three-hundred lorry trucks⁶⁹ stood by to take shipments of juice, soda, and water to buyers of the product and the company’s various clientele.⁷⁰ Above the iconic Mercedes three-point star on some of the trucks reads the Sukuma word Jamukaya, meaning “a place for everyone,” which signifies the company’s efforts to market their product as born of local efforts but intended for universal consumption. One truck depicting high-resolution images of a new cola reads, in Swahili, “jivunie kizozi kipya” or “be proud of the new product,” again signaling that this is an unapologetically Tanzanian product and the community it serves are shareholders in its success. The factory has “the capacity for production of more than 72,000 bottles each hour.”⁷¹ Already providing products to 60 percent of Tanzania, the company plans to add another hundred trucks to its fleet to reach neighboring countries in East and Central Africa, specifically Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda.⁷² Obstacles that the company may encounter in its expansion are increased regulation on the use of plastics in production and not transferring the burden of tax increases onto their customers.⁷³ Because of the company’s origins in Shinyanga, much of its customer base is in the broader Lake Region.⁷⁴

According to Juma, the mosques in Lalago and Imaleseko were built by the same Arab ancestor in the 1930s, which indicates how deeply intertwined the social and religious lives of rural Ibadhi communities are, even though the journey between the towns was thirty kilometers or more and carried out on foot. Juma is one of the all-male twelve trustees of the Ibadhi mosques in Shinyanga. The board is responsible for electing the chairperson, the secretary, and the treasurer of the regional branch. They also appoint the leadership of all the Shinyanga Ibadhi schools and provide supplies and equipment when donor funding and school budgets fall short. The board also plays the role of mediators in disputes that occur at the mosques or schools. These include the modest old Ibadhi community mosques built by their Omani ancestors and the newly constructed Ibadhi Friday mosques in the region, some of which are renovations of replacements of preexisting mosques. Due to its geographical proximity to Mwanza and the strong family ties that exist between Omanis across the northwest, they frequently collaborate with the other branches of Istiqaama, though they are self-sufficient in their sources of funding and decision-making. Juma explained, “You know, Ibadhi Omanis or Istiqaama are one family. They come from the same place, have their customs, their relationships, they live together and that becomes something like brotherhood (kama ni ndugu). Unlike other countries where they [Ibadhi Omanis] do not interact well with one another, the Omanis over here know each other; they interact and understand each other.”⁷⁵

Alongside their government education, Juma and his siblings studied religion from both Shafi’i and Ibadhi perspectives in a madrasa built by the community a short distance from the mosque in the center of Imaleseko. Istiqaama built another madrasa open to all Muslim students regardless of madhab affiliation in the town that forms part of the network of twelve Ibadhi schools, according to Juma’s estimate, and mosques in the greater Shinyanga region. In addition to the smaller madrasas that emphasize religious education, there is an Istiqaama boarding and day school that follows the government curriculum of secular and religious studies on the outskirts of Shinyanga city and only a few kilometers from the juice factory. Prior to the rise of Istiqaama and the proliferation of Ibadhi schools in towns and villages in Shinyanga, Juma explained, the religious education they received had been minimal. The push to revive religious education among Ibadhis came as “a force from outside” because before Istiqaama “the elders used only their own strengths” to persuade the youth to adopt the traditions of their ancestors.⁷⁶

While the Istiqaama leadership in Tanzania are tight-lipped about exact amounts and sources of funding, all agree that assistance from Oman is critical for the organization’s developmental goals in the short and long terms. According to Juma and my other interlocutors in Mwanza and Shinyanga, the Istiqaama leadership in Oman rewards local initiative by contributing to the furtherance of grassroots building projects. “Istiqaama of Oman is the one who helps here in Africa, we could say Tanzania itself awaits the Shinyanga model. You are building the mosque and they over there contribute.” He continued, “They [Oman] don’t start anything . . . it goes from zero to above (zero kuja juu).”⁷⁷ Two types of Omani donors contribute to Istiqaama’s projects in Tanzania. The first are those who are from there or whose parents are from there but left to live in Oman and who contribute directly to the organization’s projects in their hometowns. The second are those donors who send their contributions to the Istiqaama headquarters in Muscat and let the leadership there decide how and where to send the funds and gifts. Juma explained that Istiqaama fills in where the government and foreign aid organizations fall short. Their proximity to local Omani-Ibadhi communities, born of over a century of established transregional kinship bonds and ethnoreligious fraternity, ensures a relationship of trust that is often missing between local and foreign development actors in postcolonial African societies. This trust enables both sets of actors to avoid government bureaucracy and politics that may slow the transfer of funds and the shipment of resources from Oman to Istiqaama communities in Tanzania.

Moreover, the expectation from Oman that development begin in local communities—and with local start-up funds—ensures community control of development. The direct line between Istiqaama’s leadership in Oman and Tanzania has the potential to eliminate corruption and misuse of funds, as donors frequently travel overseas to the communities they support to check on the progress of projects. The donors from Oman do not dictate specific guidelines for the construction or maintenance of the building projects but they do insist on “good leadership.” Juma explained, “Basically, if they see that there is leadership in the community, and it works, they contribute.” When asked why some branches of Istiqaama appear to have made more advancements in education than others, Juma replied that this was an issue of each community’s history, its leadership, and the scope of its projects.⁷⁸

In regions where Ibadhi leadership was strong, like Zanzibar, Tanga, and Dar es Salaam, Istiqaama could easily adapt to existing practices of patronage that included building spaces of worship, founding schools, recruiting teachers locally and from abroad, and establishing soup kitchens for those in need. He insisted that favoritism was not the issue; rather, some Ibadhi communities have always been more organized than others. “While we are talking about primary schools, they are talking about secondary schools, they are talking about universities, and they are talking about sending fifty students to Oman to study education (elimu). So, you cannot compare them.”⁷⁹ The Shinyanga Ibadhis are a close-knit and united community, but there is only one congregational mosque in the regional capital that is several kilometers from those who reside in surrounding towns. This contrasts with Unguja Island on Zanzibar, for example, where there are large new Ibadhi mosques in towns and villages far from outside of Stone Town, such as Fuoni and Mwera.

In addition to assisting with the construction of mosques and schools in Shinyanga, donors from Oman send food and dates during Ramadan, sewing machines, clothes, and other resources according to the specific needs of the community. According to Juma, “They also help educate disadvantaged children and orphans, finding them and bringing them to the schools where they should study. They dig wells and help widows at home with daily living allowances.”⁸⁰

Conclusion

Major trading centers like Tabora and Mwanza, the former capital of German East Africa in the northwest, would become national branches of Istiqaama in the postcolonial period. What this chapter has shown, however, is that rural towns and villages in the broader lake regions of Mwanza, Shinyanga and Simiyu were home to the entrepreneurial Ibadhi families who would raise the founders of lucrative Tanzanian industries, like cotton ginneries, juice factories, and construction and transportation companies. Almost always starting from humble origins, these now affluent figures would become the current leaders of Istiqaama. One tends to find new Istiqaama schools and mosques only in towns where there is an old mosque or row of homes built by early Omani settlers. Affluent Swahili-speaking Omani nationals are now returning to the homes of their parents or grandparents in Tanzania with schemes to repair their family homes or invest in the building of new or renovation of existing mosques, schools, and dispensaries. Istiqaama serves as the middleman in such interactions as individuals and groups of donors from Oman generally reach out to the Istiqaama’s branch leaders in their region of interest. In turn, Istiqaama families host them during their stay in Tanzania and may arrange a tour for them of historic Ibadhi settlements and mosques, like my own journey.

African and Arab kinship networks and merchant capital merged to create the economic and social foundations that support the branches of Istiqaama in northwestern Tanzania. The Ibadhi-Omani story intersects with the histories of migration and commerce of other ethnic minorities and diaspora groups in the broader Lake Zone, such as Hindus and Muslims from Gujarat, India. The Ibadhi experience there has been shaped by a unique colonial and agricultural past and the complex African and non-African, Muslim and non-Muslim, social relations that existed and continue to exist.

Notes

1. 1. Thomas E. McDow, Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018).
2. 2. See for example Stuart Laing, Ivory, Slavery and Discovery in the Scramble for Africa (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2017), 63–70.
3. 3. See Elisabeth McMahon’s book, for example, which describes how emancipation enabled the formerly enslaved to integrate into island social and cultural life in Pemba: Elisabeth McMahon, Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
4. 4. The interconnectedness and interdependency I speak of here does not imply absolute harmony.
5. 5. See Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority (TAWA), “Maswa Game Reserve,” n.d., accessed March 27, 2024, https://www.tawa.go.tz/attraction-details/maswa-game-reserve.
6. 6. Stéphane Pradines, Historic Mosques in Sub-Saharan Africa: From Timbuktu to Zanzibar (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2022), 281; Abdul Sheriff, “Mosques, Merchants, & Landowners in Zanzibar Stone Town,” in The History and Conservation of Zanzibar Stone Town (ZanzibAr. Dept. of Archives, Museums & Antiquities, 1995), 46–66.
7. 7. “Maryknoll History in Tanzania, Part Five A: Shinyanga Diocese, 1954–1963,” n.d.
8. 8. McDow, Buying Time, 86.
9. 9. Ibid., 87.
10. 10. Ibid.
11. 11. Buluda Itandala, “African Response to German Colonialism in East Africa: The Case of Usukuma, 1890–1918,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 20, no. 1 (1992): 3.
12. 12. Ibid., 4.
13. 13. Ibid.
14. 14. Ibid., 7.
15. 15. Ibid., 5. See also Jonathon Glassman, FEASTS AND RIOT: REVELRY, REBELLION, AND POPULAR CONSCIOUSNESS ON THE SWAHILI COAST, 1856–1888 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995).
16. 16. Itandala, “African Response,” 23.
17. 17. Ivory smuggling continues today, though the Tanzanian government has recently made a public show of cracking down on those they deem the “ring leaders” of this exploitative practice. The scandal involved the so-called Ivory Queen, a Chinese businessperson named Yang Fenglan and was widely covered in the national newspapers and television during the years of my fieldwork in Tanzania, which suggests that Arab and African traders, or men for that matter, no longer have a monopoly on the ivory trade. “Yang was accused of operating one of Africa’s biggest ivory-smuggling rings, responsible for smuggling $2.5m (£1.9m) worth of tusks from some 400 elephants.” The Tanzanian government has cracked down on poaching in recent years, leading to a steady increase in the number elephants. The government continues working toward a “zero poaching” policy across the country. See: No Author. “Chinese ‘Ivory Queen’ Yang Fenglan Jailed in Tanzania,” BBC News, February 19, 2019, accessed March 30, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47294715.
18. 18. Itandala, “African Response,” 23–24.
19. 19. Andrew Coulson, “Cotton and Textiles Industries in Tanzania: The Failures of Liberalisation,” Review of African Political Economy 43, no. S1 (2016): 44.
20. 20. Nanji Kalidas Mehta, Dream Half-Expressed; an Autobiography (Bombay: Vakils, Feffer and Simons Private LTD., 1966), 98.
21. 21. Ibid., 100.
22. 22. Ibid., 110.
23. 23. Ibid.
24. 24. Coulson, “Cotton and Textiles,” 44.
25. 25. Ibid., 44.
26. 26. Coulson writes of this spike in production “more than 50,000 bales (10,000 tonnes) were produced in 1941” alone. Ibid., 45.
27. 27. Gottfried O. Lang and Martha B. Lang, “Problems of Social and Economic Change in Sukumaland, Tanganyika,” Anthropological Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1962): 90.
28. 28. Ibid., 93.
29. 29. Ibid., 91.
30. 30. Ibid.
31. 31. Ibid., 92.
32. 32. Coulson, “Cotton and Textiles,” 47.
33. 33. A safari-style suit, often in a gray, khaki, or olive hues, made popular by Zambia’s first president Kanneth Kaunda and worn by other African nationalists and presidents of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Julius Nyerere.
34. 34. Very little has been written about Somali communities in precolonial Tanzania or the conditions under which they migrated to and settled in the broader Lake Region. Literature on Somali history in Tanzania tends to be documented by human rights organizations and focuses on Somali refugees and their struggle to attain Tanzanian citizenship in towns like Chogo in northeastern Tanzania, following the civil war in Somalia in the 1990s and the fall of the socialist leader Siad Barre’s regime. See Brendan Bannon and Eveline Wolfcarius, “Somali Bantus Gain Tanzanian Citizenship in Their Ancestral Land” (The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), June 3, 2009), March 27, 2024, https://www.unhcr.org/news/somali-bantus-gain-tanzanian-citizenship-their-ancestral-land.
35. 35. Mzee Idris (Ibadhi Mosque caretaker), interview with author, Lalago, June 17, 2019.
36. 36. Mzee Idris, interview with author, June 17, 2019.
37. 37. Ibid.
38. 38. Mzee Idris, interview with author, June 17, 2019.
39. 39. Ibid.
40. 40. ʻAbd Allāh ibn Ḥumayyid Al-Sālimī, Talqīn Al-Ṣibyān Mā Yalzamu Al-Insān (Masqat: Maktabat al-Jīl al-Wā‘d, 2015), 36.
41. 41. Ibid., 36–37.
42. 42. Ibid.
43. 43. Ibid.
44. 44. Mzee Idris, interview with author, June 17, 2019.
45. 45. Istiqaama Mwanza (male community leaders), interview with author, Mwanza, April 25, 2016.
46. 46. Mzee Idris, interview with author, June 17, 2019.
47. 47. Ibid.
48. 48. Fieldnotes, Meatu, June 20, 2019.
49. 49. Notably absent from the oral histories I collected on this trip, and in my other conversations with Ibadhis in Tanzania, was any mention of Sufism or the role of Sufi teachings in local communities. Given that the impact of Sufism has been widely documented in the historical studies on the spread of Islam beyond elite circles of mostly Arab groups and their kin in Tanzania, I found it curious that Sufi communities never came up as having any bearing on Islam or the work of Istiqaama. This is unlike Salafism and Wahhabism, which were often presented as a threat to the identities of Ibadhi youth and a counternarrative to Omani ideals of religious tolerance and Istiqaama’s ideals of intra-Muslim cooperation.
50. 50. Mzee Idris, interview with author, June 17, 2019.
51. 51. Ibid.
52. 52. Itandala, “African Response,” 25.
53. 53. Father Frank Breen, “Maryknoll History in Tanzania, Part Five A: Shinyanga Diocese, 1954–1963,” in Maryknoll History in Africa: Tanganyika 1946 to early 1960s, v. 2. (Maryknoll, NY: Maryknoll, n.d.), https://maryknollafrica.org/category/our-downloads/.
54. 54. Ibid.
55. 55. Ibid.
56. 56. Ibid.
57. 57. Ibid.
58. 58. Thomas Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa,” The Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (2003): 27.
59. 59. Most of Tanzania’s cotton comes from small-scale farming in the semiarid region of northwestern Tanzania. Growing cotton does not require large amounts of water nor high-quality soil, “but it is labor-intensive, and requires effective marketing and transport” (Coulson, “Cotton Textiles,” 42). Soil exhaustion and drought cause runoff that affects the growth of otherwise resilient crops. Where the soil is not productive, farmers use fertilizers and pesticides, but these are expensive and are taken out of the farmers’ final sale price. Moreover, the long-term use of chemical sprays may present health risks for the farmers and their communities. Today, cotton is first processed in local ginneries using a roller gin “which separates the cotton lint (the fiber) from the seeds on which they grow.” In Tanzania, the ginnery keeps seeds of the desired varieties for distribution to farmers for planting the next crop. The excess seed is processed to extract cooking oil and the remaining cake is fed to livestock as a protein source.
60. 60. Mzee Idris, interview with author, June 17, 2019.
61. 61. Juma (Jambo factory CEO), interview with author, Shinyanga, June 18, 2019.
62. 62. Ibid.
63. 63. Ibid.
64. 64. Ibid.
65. 65. Phoebe Calver, “Jambo Food Products: Life in Every Drop,” Africa Outlook, 2020, accessed March 15, 2024, https://issuu.com/outlookpublishing/docs/jambo-food-products-ltd.
66. 66. Ibid.
67. 67. Ibid.
68. 68. Ibid.
69. 69. Tom Wadlow, “Jambo Food Products Ltd 2020: Quenching Africa’s Thirst,” Africa Outlook, December 25, 2019, accessed March 15, 2024, https://www.africaoutlookmag.com/company-profiles/1217-jambo-food-products-ltd-2020.
70. 70. Africa Outlook reports that other trucks such as those made by “Scania, Iveco, Mitsubishi and Man” are being replaced with a reliable fleet of Volvo trucks, which could easily be a multimillion-dollar investment. During my visit to the site in 2019, there were several Mercedes trucks as well.
71. 71. Calver, “Life in Every Drop.”
72. 72. Wadlow, “Quenching Africa’s Thirst.”
73. 73. Ibid.
74. 74. “The group’s success puts it in competition with the Bakhresa Group, an in-ternational food and beverage company under the name of Azam based in Dar es Salaam, which was founded and ran by a Yemeni Tanzanian named Said Sa-lim Awadh Bahkresa. Azam also owns a national football league, a television channel, and the high-speed ferries that carry passengers from Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar daily. Born to a Hadrami Yemeni family in Zanzibar in 1949, Mr. Bakhresa purportedly “dropped out of school at the age of 14 to become a potato mix salesperson, before he got involved as a restaurant operator in the 1970s” (Media Council of Tanzania. “The Bakhresa Family,” Media Ownership Monitor Tanzania 2018, accessed March 15, 2024, https://tanzania.mom-gmr.org/en/owners/individual-owners/detail/owner//the-bakhresa-family/). In thirty years, he expanded his holdings well beyond Tanzania and became the wealthiest man in Tanzania and one of the wealthiest in Africa.
75. 75. Juma, interview with author, Shinyanga, June 18, 2019.
76. 76. Ibid.
77. 77. Ibid.
78. 78. Ibid.
79. 79. Ibid.
80. 80. Ibid.