Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean EastAfrica

Daren E. Ray is an assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University, where he teaches African, Islamic, and world history. He has published his multidisciplinary research in History in Africa and Muslim World journals, The Swahili World edited volume, and elsewhere. He also co-organizes the Rocky Mountain Workshop in African History.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Language Introduction: Disentangling Ethnicity from Its Ancestors in Littoral Kenya PART I : ANCESTORS OF ETHNICITY Chapter 1 Ancestors in the Doorway Claiming Kith and Kin in East Africa before 500 CE Chapter 2 Making a Peaceful Home Organizing Clans through Knowledge along Sabaki Frontiers, ca. 150 BCE-1250 CE Chapter 3 Dancing with Swords Domesticating Commerce through Clan Confederations in the Western Indian Ocean ca. 1000-1700 CE PART II: INNOVATING ETHNICITY Chapter 4 Polarizing Politics Imperial Ventures in Dar al-Islam, 1498-1813 Chapter 5 Practicing Muslims, Marginalized Pagans Accommodating Arab Orthodoxies in the Zanzibar Sultanate, 1813-1895 Chapter 6 Gazetting Identity Assembling Tribes and Demarcating Districts in the British East Africa Protectorate, 1895-1920 Chapter 7 Historicizing Tribalism A Kaleidoscope of Communities in the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, 1921-1953 PART III: TRANSCENDING ETHNICITY? Chapter 8 Transcending Ethnicity? Nationalist Sentiments and the Appeal of Autonomy during Kenyan Decolonization, 1953-1962 Epilogue Reconciling Ethnicity and Nationalism Notes Bibliography Index

A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending study. This book charts new territory for Indian Ocean and East African Studies, incorporating influences from both land and sea across time, while centering vernacular cultures and politics. A ground-breaking reconceptualization of not only ethnicity, but also kinship, Islamization, urbanization, and the oceanic. - Bettina Ng'weno, University of California, Davis Daren E. Ray's history of Kenyan coastal identities ranges over two millennia through changing social formations using a community-centered approach. His work is exemplary cross-disciplinary scholarship, featuring deft use of archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographic data as well as oral and written sources. A mosaic of words, objects, and experiences illuminates nested identities, all in motion in the East African and Indian Ocean worlds. An engaging narrative from start to finish, this book will be welcomed across many fields of inquiry and in a wide range of classrooms. - Adria LaViolette, University of Virginia An impressive work of detailed and meticulous scholarship that is unreservedly recommended as a core addition to personal, community, and college/university library East African history collections and supplemental linquistics and Black studies curriculum lists. (Midwest Book Review) Through incorporating insights from numerous methodological modalities, Ray pieces together an impressively longue-duree history of community identity formation, of ethnicity and its cultural ancestors, and of the ways that the peoples of the coast interacted with and depended upon each other. Ray's work speaks meaningfully to historiographies of ethnicity in Africa and to the smaller historiography of ethnicity in the Indian Ocean. It disrupts contemporary assumptions about the history of "Swahili towns" and about the shared histories of Mijikenda and Swahili ethnic identities. The cis-oceanic approach makes a very useful critique of the ways that local littoral concerns, motives, identities, and sociopolitical structures are sometimes glossed over in transoceanic histories of the Indian Ocean. Ultimately, this book is successful in its stated goals, and it adds some much-needed time depth to the history of the East African littoral. (H-Africa / H-Net Reviews) This volume makes an important contribution to history and social science in southeastern Kenya while challenging problematic dichotomies and mummified identities on the continent. Ray's text will interest anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and Africanists in general, as well as those who want to learn more about similar dynamics and related communities in Tanzania. (Tanzanian Affairs) Recommended. (Choice)