Journal of Cultural Geography

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Place and Humanistic African Cultural Geography:

A Tanzanian Case

Garth Andrew Myers

To cite this article: Garth Andrew Myers (2005) Place and Humanistic African Cultural Geography:
A Tanzanian Case, Journal of Cultural Geography, 22:2, 1-26, DOI: 10.1080/08873630509478237

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Journal of Cultural Geography Spring/Summer 2005 • 22(2):l-26

Place and Humanistic African Cultural

Geography: A Tanzanian Case
Garth Andrew Myers

ABSTRACT. Humanistic cultural geography studies of the

experience and meaning of place in sub-Saharan Africa are
fairly rare. The narration of senses of place has occupied
a crucial niche in Anglo-American cultural geography for
several decades. Yet edited volumes in humanistic cultural
geography seldom have Africa-related chapters, and relatively
few Africa-based research outcomes in cultural geography are
forthrightly concerned with place meaning from a perspective
influenced by humanistic thinking. I suggest in this essay
possible means by which to construct humanistic cultural
geographies of African places, using Jongowe, a small settle-
ment in Tanzania, as an empirical referent. My two emphases
are on building from African forms of humanism and on
developing a politically and historically grounded yet global
sense of African places out of a political ecology lens.

INTRODUCTION

In July 2003,1 attended a vibrant ceremony in Jongowe, a small

settlement on Tumbatu Island in Zanzibar. The ceremony was
a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of the
village primary school. Representatives of every graduating class
over those three decades had chosen and made for themselves
distinctive class uniforms, with each one reflecting an important
element of Tumbatu Island's culture and history. The classes lined
up in two rows, males on one side, females on the other, to form
a walkway for visiting dignitaries from the settlement's tiny beach
all the way to the school. Virtually all of the more than 3,000 people
who live in Jongowe watched as the main invited guest, Zanzibar's
Chief Minister Shamsi Vaui Nahodha, stepped awkwardly onto
the shore and walked the extraordinary gauntlet up to the school.

7
2 • journal of Cultural Geography

After Nahodha and his entourage inspected the rather modest

school grounds, the whole celebration shifted to the village football
pitch. Each class made a brief cultural performance for the visitors,
each designed to remind the visitors of Jongowe's 900 years of
importance to East African coastal history, Islam, poetry, dance,
music, and politics.
The distinguished guests then made speeches. Chief Minister
Nahodha, notably, spoke at length about the importance of
education for Zanzibari development. He thoroughly missed his
cues, though. He seemingly did not get it that he was speaking to
people who think of themselves as the descendants of the medieval
royal creators of the culture hearth of Zanzibari Swahili civilization.
Moreover, the elaborate display of Jongowe's piety, historical
importance, community solidarity, and cultural vitality was
carefully designed to earn an explicit commitment from the Chief
Minister for a substantial fund to maintain, complete, and expand
the school. The newly painted central room of the old wing of the
school proudly displayed for Nahodha as the "computer room"—
on an island with no electricity or indoor plumbing—would, in
all likelihood, remain the nearly bare store room it had been for
thirty years.
Jongowe is like no other place 1 have ever been in my life. Its
uniqueness and character, in appearance and performance, are
compelling to me in ways I have only begun to sift through after
a decade of visits and extended stays. The narration of senses of
place for wonderful and unsettling places like Jongowe has
occupied a crucial niche in Anglo-American cultural geography
for several decades. Yet sub-Saharan Africa seems to figure little
into the imagination of humanistic cultural geographies. The
numerous recent edited volumes that have signaled a renewed
significance for humanist inquiry into place meaning in geography
are consistently absent of sub-Saharan African authors or sub-
Saharan Africa-related articles (Adams et al. 2001).' In a few cases,
a chapter about place in sub-Saharan Africa sneaks into the mix
(Duncan and Ley 1993; Keith and Pile 1993). The "post-humanist"
Handbook of Cultural Geography does have a section written by
authors known for their Africa-related cultural studies (Anderson
et al. 2003, 18). But in a more explicitly humanist volume on Nature
and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective, the authors study
humanistic geography in India, China, Japan, the Arab world,
Europe, Central America, North America, Australia, the Arctic—
but not sub-Saharan Africa (Buttimer and Wallin 1999).
 African Cultural Geography • 3
In researching this article, I conducted a fairly broad survey of
Anglophone scholarly geography works on sub-Saharan Africa,
and therefore I must note that Lusophone and particularly
Francophone works might produce a different picture of the field.
It seems to me much in evidence, though, that in the great many
published pieces in English on sub-Saharan African human
geography during the past two decades humanistic cultural
geography has taken a backseat to more numerous inquiries into
development. This latter term is in essence the cover term given to
political, environmental, industrial, agricultural, or urban geogra-
phies in sub-Saharan contexts (Power and Sidaway 2004; Robinson
2003). Cultural analysis is surely there in African development
geography, especially in works inspired by political ecology and
feminism (Ardayfio-Schandorf 1993; Jarosz 1996; Moseley 2005;
Nel et al. 2001; Schroeder 1999a; Watts 2004). Likewise, there are
certainly impressive pieces of cultural analysis by geographers that
more firmly center on humanistic geography's questions of place
experience and meaning in African contexts (Hobbs 1998; Nagar
1997; Nagar and Leitner 1998; Nast 1996, 2005; Watts 1991, 1997;
Western 1996, 2001). Yet, ultimately, if there is a gap in humanistic
cultural geography where African studies ought to be, there still
seems to be likewise something of a gap in the African studies
geography literature where humanistic cultural geography ought
to be.
These two related gaps are curious to me, when I think about
a place like Jongowe and my own experiences of staying or
studying there. Place is a heavily valued concept in most sub-
Saharan African societies, with three or more noun classes of its
own in Niger-Congo languages (Hinnebusch and Mirza 1979; Sato
and Swann 1999). Sub-Saharan African storytelling and literature
are overrun with senses of place. Perhaps most significantly,
humanism, albeit not descended from European thought, pervades
African philosophies. The political philosophy of Zambia's first
president, Kenneth Kaunda, after all, was literally termed human-
ism (Meebelo 1973). African humanisms of a different variety are
rife in broader debates among African philosophers (Ramose 1999;
Hountondji 1996; Mudimbe 1994).
It seems not only plausible, but imperative, that an approach to
cultural geography in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa, then,
would attempt to come to grips with African humanist senses of
place. In this essay, I seek to stake a claim for the value of cultural
geographic interpretations of sub-Saharan African places informed
4 • journal of Cultural Geography

by African ideas of humanism. I use the example of Jongowe as an

empirical referent for articulating how place might be more
centrally grounded in humanistic geography scholarship on sub-
Saharan Africa. I begin by situating the case study on the map of
cultural geographic inquiry, and then I move to its actual location.

THE RE<DIS)COVERY OF PLACE?

As a focus of critical inquiry, "place is abounding," writes the

philosopher Edward Casey (1997, 339). Casey sees a resurgence for
the interpretation of place meaning particularly in "the current
efflorescence of cultural geography" (1997, 339). At first glance, it
would seem that "place's scholarly renaissance" is quite resonant in
geography that engages the humanities (Adams et al. 2001, xviii).
But if the renewed interest in the study of place is indeed
abounding, it is not an untroubled expansion, for a variety of
reasons. Even if philosophers like Casey, and anthropologists,
historians, and even political scientists and economists have created
an "efflorescence" of humanistic interest in place meaning, many
geographers who work on and in sub-Saharan Africa would appear
to remain ambivalent.
Part of the ambivalence lies in the sense that champions of
place—as an arena of study or as a rallying point—are too
localizing, naive, or chauvinistic (Auge 1995; Ekinsmith and
Shurmer-Smith 2002; McDowell 1997). Cultural geographers in-
spired by feminism may look upon humanistic approaches with
ambivalence because western humanism suggests "deeply contra-
dictory goals and paths to knowledge which have both liberating
and dominating potential" (Ramazanoglu and Holland 2002,34). In
societies living through extremely difficult times, cultural studies—
particularly those driven by Euro-American trends in theory—can
even appear as arrogant impositions (Ehrenfeld 1978). Many central
subjects of inquiry within Anglo-American cultural geography,
such as humanistic inquiry into place meaning, might appear as
elitist "side issues" to Africans faced with present crises of violence,
disease, poverty, or injustice (McEwan 2003, 414). Many sub-
Saharan African and Africa-oriented cultural geographers un-
doubtedly worry, with Donald Moore (1997, 103), about "turning
... livelihood struggles into fodder for conceptual refinement."
One potential solution to African studies geography's apparent
ambivalence to humanistic approaches might come from beginning
with a different humanism, out of the "African practice of
 African Cultural Geography • 5
philosophy" (Wiredu, in Irele 1996, 29). Various forms of humanism
have dominated this "African practice of philosophy." Azenabor
(1998, 45-46) sees the main shared themes of these humanisms in
their focus on "human dignity," the "worth and possibilities of the
African" peoples, a transformative practicality, and a socialistic
inflection on the whole package, where philosophy has "the task of
changing the world." Ramose (1999, 154) is one of a number of
philosophers working toward what he terms "ecology through
ubuntu" (humanism or humanness). Ramose (1999, 154) bases his
version of African humanism on the notion that "to be human is to
affirm one's humanity by recognizing the humanity of others and,
on that basis, establish humane relations with them." He cites
a phrase found in one form or another in hundreds of African
languages: a person is a person only through other people.
Few African humanist philosophers have turned their atten-
tions to place or geography—Ramose, for instance, never explains
what is meant by "ecology" in the phrase quoted above, when such
an explanation might have connected his work with humanistic
geography. Yet it is apparent to me that Jongowe's profound and
ideological embrace of its version of ubuntu—the humane relations
by which an individual only exists by, through, and for others—is
fundamental to its character in ways that define it as a place.
Because it is also an entirely Islamic place, and one deeply
connected for two millennia to the East African interior and the
Indian Ocean rim, a full appreciation of its humanism, though,
requires us to link African humanist philosophy back to contem-
porary cultural geography.
Doreen Massey (1994, 155-56) has famously advocated an
"alternative interpretation of place" built on a "global sense of the
local." Beyond the neat turn of phrase—"a global sense of place"—
by which her essay is entitled, Massey lays out an approach to place
brimming with possibilities for geographic inquiry in sub-Saharan
Africa. She wants us to see a place as "constructed out of
a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving
together at a particular locus" but at the same time "extroverted",
conscious "of its links with the wider world" (Massey 1994, 154-
55). She urges us to see places not as "motionless things" but as
"processes," without fixed boundaries, but still laden with
a "specificity" that globalization, far from taking away, actually
intensifies (Massey 1994, 155-56).
African studies geography offers a number of exemplary
studies that see places as processes and balance the specifics of
6 • journal of Cultural Geography

a local place with the extroverted worldly connectivity inseparable

from that specificity (Hobbs 1996; Jarosz 1994; Nast 2005). Work
that gets labeled as political ecology has probably led the way
toward a Massey-like approach to place in the region (Moore 1993;
Moseley 2005; Neumann 1995; Schroeder 1999b; Watts 1997). In the
interests of brevity, even while acknowledging that variation exists
between the authors I've cited here, I feel that Moore (1997,103) has
stated one key shared approach succinctly: "trying to steer clear of
fetishizing or essentializing 'place,'" while at the same time
emphasizing "that place matters; it has a politics and is produced
through myriad material and symbolic struggles." Moore, much
like the other authors above, details the struggles and histories for
individual people in places. Yet he just as consistently reminds
readers of the "social relations and historic patterns that have long
connected" these local places "with distant mines and cities, the
presence of state functionaries, and the flows, routes, and livelihood
practices" of other people (Moore 1997,103). With Moore, I contend
that African humanist approaches to place meaning must combine
detail of political, material, symbolic, or historic struggles of people
in places with consciousness of connections to distant "mines and
cities" by which those places are also constructed.

I spent four months conducting collaborative ethnographic

fieldwork with the members of several of Jongowe's community
groups, investigating village ideas on development under a Na-
tional Geographic Society grant in 1999-2000. I have spent time
there on three other occasions before and since. African humanist
philosophy and political ecology influence how I write my account
of place for Jongowe below. I build from an African humanist
foundation that sees humanness in collectivity and interdepen-
dence. I add to this the idea of connecting a place's particularity
with that place's historical process of global and local embedded-
ness, as well as the fractured and politicized nature of places. First, I
attempt to situate Jongowe itself.

JONGOWE'S SENSES OF PLACE

Jongowe, with 2,973 residents at the time of its own 1999

census, is the smaller of two settlements on Tumbatu. Tumbatu is
Zanzibar's largest and most heavily populated outlying island,
some three kilometers off of its main island, Unguja (at its
northwest tip) and fifty kilometers southwest of its secondary
island, Pemba (Fig. 1). Jongowe lies due west of the port of
 African Cultural Geography • 7

Tanga#
Chake
.Chake I N D I A N
7
o c e /» /v

P E M B A

TUM BATUMI
(i/*MI<okotoni

^Zanzibar

U N G U J A
0 10 70 %m

Fig. 1. The Zanzibar Islands.

Mkokotoni on Unguja. The settlement is situated just north of

a small cove on the southern tip of Tumbatu, protected by a stand
of coconut palms that also hosts the village cemetery (Fig. 2).
Jongowe has been inhabited in some fashion for nearly 2,000
years. It was a large and important Swahili city-state between 1100
and 1350 (Horton and Middleton 2000; Fig. 3). Tumbatu -Jongowe's
ruling queen was still significant enough in the era of Portuguese
rule (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) that the Portuguese
had a main administrative center right across the channel, just
north of Mkokotoni at Fukucheni. By the time the seat of Omani
control over the islands shifted to Zanzibar city in the 1690s,
though, Jongowe was clearly in decline. Under Omani rule, Tumbatu
remained the seat of regional governance for northern Unguja, but
when Britain took over in 1890, it lost even this modest role.
The people of Jongowe today subsist with a faltering water
supply, no electricity, over-fished near-shore waters, exhausted soils
and declining yields in arid fields, high rates of malnutrition, as
well as high maternal and child mortality. The biggest outside
development project of the last twenty years is a road that is rapidly
returning to the bush. There are no cars and only five bicycles in
8 • journal of Cultural Geography

T U M BA

TUMBATU *

*Mkokotoni

0 1 2 km .Zanzibar ■

Jongowe and Environs

I Delimited Village Boundary (1983)
- Main Road
U N G U J A
— — Coral Reef
Outer Extent of Mangroves

Fig. 2. Jongowe and environs.

the village, and its problematic relationship with the larger settle-
ment on Tumbatu, Kichangani (also called Gomani, to which the
road goes) make few people interested in using it (Fig. 4).
Jongowe is a place that feels—to an outsider like me, to other
Zanzibaris, and to its residents—distinct in myriad ways from
settlements scarcely three kilometers away across the channel. In
Zanzibar city, for instance, many residents regard it as a scary,
 African Cultural Geography • 9

Fig. 3. Ruins of the medieval Friday mosque of Tumbatu adjacent to

Jongowe. Photo by author.

distant backwater. For some in Jongowe, this differentiation exists

because the village hasn't "gone forward at all. We don't know
what we are doing, but we don't like interference. It is just us and us
only, with worthless fishing and worthless farming" (Ali Juma,
conversation with author, Jongowe, July 1, 1999). To the vast
majority of Jongowe residents, though, it is this "us and us only"
that defines them, feeds them, and saves their souls.
In most of what was written about Jongowe or Tumbatu before
Zanzibar's 1964 revolution, Jongowe's underdevelopment and
isolation are portrayed as being its own fault. Colonial writers
constructed a sense of place and an idea of the Tumbatu islanders as
backward, suspicious, and isolated—indeed, as interested in "us
and us only." Colonial scholarship repeatedly drove home the
separateness, aloofness, and hostility of Tumbatu islanders to
various inroads of progress. The archeologist James Kirkman (1964,
174) wrote that Jongowe's inhabitants were "a determinedly
suspicious people [who] prefer to have as little to do as possible
with foreigners, by whom they mean everyone not a Tumbatu."
Ingrams (1931, 146) argued that in Jongowe "the natives" were
"very exclusive people" who "dislike interference, thus, unfortu-
nately, they are largely inbred." Pearce (1920, 143) claimed that
Jongowe people were "of a characteristically suspicious and
retiring disposition ... coupled with an addiction to witchcraft
and the black arts."
10 • journal of Cultural Geography

\
\ V ^ Aid

t L
J 1
«M»
m W*
f±
ii&iz£f!%

" V

Fig. 4. The road from Jongowe to Kichangani. Photo by author.

 African Cultural Geography • 11

Official colonial documents show that these derogatory ideas

had practical consequences for Jongowe. After a rare visit to
Tumbatu in 1952, the British Resident informed his Chief Secretary
that the islanders had "acquired some reputation for non-
cooperation with the Government . . . . We must bring it home to
the islanders that if they fail to co-operate in Government measures
for their own benefit the result will be that much greater attention is
paid to them" (Zanzibar National Archives 1952). For the British
colonial regime, Tumbatu came to mean a place of resistance,
perversity, fear, and magic. Tumbafu's people—who traveled
widely and lived all along the East African coast in seasonal
fishing camps—could not help but become conscious of the stigma
attached to them and to their place. Their identities and the identity
of the place became intertwined with this imaginary rendition of
them, in ways that have resurfaced time and again. The us of the
"us and us only" in Jongowe today is at least in part a jaundiced,
postcolonial solidarity.
With the end of colonialism and then the Omani Sultanate in
1964, the channel between Tumbatu and Unguja seemed to have
deepened. Part of this deepening has to do with party politics as
played out from the waning days of colonialism until now.
Tumbatu and northernmost Unguja have comprised the political
middle ground in Zanzibar for fifty years. In the era Zanzibaris call
the Time of Politics (1957-1964), Tumbatu voters in the three pre-
independence elections were evenly split between the three political
parties of the time, the Afro-Shirazi Party (A.S.P.), Zanzibar
National Party (Z.N.P.), and Zanzibar and Pemba People's Party
(Z.P.P.P). Crucially, the smallest of the three parties, the Z.P.P.P.,
won the island constituency in the last pre-independence poll. The
British granted independence to Zanzibar in December 1963,
handing over power to a Z.N.P.-Z.P.P.P. coalition that had earned
a combined 37% of the popular vote but held 18 of 31 con-
stituencies, because of the way the British had drawn con-
stituency boundaries (Mosare 1969, Lofchie 1965). A month after
independence, on January 12, 1964, A.S.P. revolutionaries over-
threw the minority coalition government. Months of turmoil, vio-
lence, and retributive killings followed. Tumbatu islanders who
supported Z.P.P.P. or Z.N.P. paid a heavy price, in properties
destroyed, physical harm, and loss of life.
The scars of this revolution run deep in Jongowe. Tumbatu
islanders remember vividly the A.S.P.'s first revolutionary Presi-
dent, Abeid Amani Karume, paying his respects to Jongowe's
22 • Journal of Cultural Geography

grand medieval ruins on a visit soon after the revolution. But they
also remember his plan to forcibly remove the entire island's
population to apartments on Unguja, and his general neglect of
them otherwise. He had numerous Jongowe residents imprisoned
and tortured for their roles in a purported assassination plan
in 1969.
Jongowe residents remember Aboud Jumbe, Karume's succes-
sor (1972-1984), for his 1978 water development program that
finally brought piped water from Unguja via an undersea line. This
decreased the islanders' reliance on transported bucketfuls of water
from wells three kilometers away across the hazardous Tumbatu
channel, and on the island's own brackish wells or meager
rainwater cisterns. Jumbe's investment in Tumbatu's water prob-
lem, coupled with his perceived and respected piety, swayed some
residents to become moderately supportive of the revolutionary
ruling party, now known as Chama cha Mapinduzi (C.C.M.).2
Zanzibar's two recent multiparty elections of 1995 and 2000
have brought about a second Time of Politics. In both elections,
C.C.M. gained slim majorities on Tumbatu over the opposition
party, the Civic United Front (C.U.F.), when many expected it to
lose. C.U.F. supporters see the official tallies in both elections as
highly flawed, and many international observers support their
allegations. Many Tumbatu residents see C.U.F. as "the only party
that is willing to defend our nation" [meaning Zanzibar]
(Anonymous 2000). But a great many are also ambivalent about
C.U.F.'s leadership and its rank-and-file, both of which are
overwhelmingly Pemban in background and orientation. Others
see support for C.C.M. as the island's ticket to progress,
remembering the retributions against them when they voted
against the old A.S.P. in the first Time of Politics. There is a sense
among many Tumbatu people of being forgotten in the middle
again, though, and the Chief Minister's neglect of the school
funding needs in 2003, for instance, only reinforced this. Regardless
of which party earned one's vote in Jongowe, ultimately, the party
politics are of "us and us only," abandoned by both sides.
Multi-party politics has done considerable damage to commu-
nity cohesion in Zanzibar. Jongowe has not been as painfully
incapacitated internally by party differences, though. Jongowe
people are reticent to speak publicly. Many arguments about
politics indeed take place, but privately, quietly, at night, in the uani
[courtyard]. Neighborhoods, relatives, families, and marriages are
divided by political party loyalties, but parties feel ephemeral in
 African Cultural Geography • 13

everyday life. Instead, what is more apparent and significant in the

settlement itself are deeper politics of humanness that many
Jongowe people recognize with each other and give explicit
preeminence to, ahead of party politics.
Jongowe is remarkable for the degree to which medieval
political, social, and geographical structures still pertain. Atop the
village political structure, there are two heads of town (wakuu wa
mji, sing, mkuu wa mji), one male and one female, each with a
twenty-member council {baraza la mji). Five members come from
each of the four quarters of the settlement for the male and female
baraza. Jongowe retains a widely noted characteristic from its
medieval golden age—significant political roles for women. The
male mkuu wa mji is the primary authority, but his own inner
council (separate from his baraza) includes the three leading
members of the female baraza among its nine members. The female
baraza works with the male baraza on all village matters. The
female baraza controls land and farming decisions, as women
predominate in farmwork. Gender relations are not always smooth
in practice. But Jongowe's medieval history of having been ruled by
a succession of queens figures into a more balanced contemporary
configuration of power between the genders at the micropolitical
level than that which is commonly associated with contemporary
Swahili society (Machano 1999; Nicholls 1971).
The "republican" Swahili leadership structure along the coast
varied considerably with time and place, especially in terms of
allowance for female involvement, with Tumbatu highest on the
coast in its regard for it (Horton 1996). In many settlements,
regardless of the variations, the leadership system began to break
down with the imposition of colonial administrative frameworks
on top of it (Pakenham 1947). No similar processes of dissolution
occurred in Jongowe. Jongowe has recently renovated its banda la
mji (town hall) that serves as its main gathering place, at the
geographic center of the settlement's four quarters (Lisani, Vuga,
Kigunda, and Kusini), just north of the Friday mosque.
Many sense of place studies in cultural geography highlight
intrinsic ties between settlement structure and social identity.
Although settlement structure was not a central element of my
research and thus not a major section of this article, it is clear that
the order evident in village society and that of its spatial structure
are mutually reinforcing. The four quarters have no distinct cultural
or ethnic markers to divide them, and they are represented equally
in each baraza (male and female). While houses are hardly laid out
14 • journal of Cultural Geography

Fig. 5. The settlement of Jongowe, with the Friday mosque at right

overlooking the settlement. Photo by author.

in grid form, the fluid layout retains at least some modest spacing
between homes (and occasionally wide seedbed patches or tree-
crop groves), thoroughly swept and carefully maintained (Fig. 5).
The protection from wind and storm provided to the homes by the
palm grove and cemetery in the south is mirrored in the north by
tree crops and by a long-standing effort to exclude higher quality
agricultural lands from urbanization. In both cases, indigenous
spiritualism is inseparable from environmental logic. The settle-
ment design is not atypical for medieval towns along the Swahili
coast, but it is quite different from much of what one sees today
along that coast—and not simply because of the changes wrought
by tourism. The contrast between the spatial structure of Jongowe
and that of neighboring Kichangani in northern Tumbatu—
a settlement that also lacks a tourist economy—could not be more
dramatic. Kichangani is very densely and haphazardly built,
frequently flooded by the sea on which it very directly encroaches,
and choking in its own waste and garbage.
What is different about Jongowe is that its indigenous
governmental structures garner the community's allegiance and
its resources for implementation of a wide range of social
reproduction functions, including those related to settlement
management. Community consensus and social reproduction are
 African Cultural Geography • 15
reinforced in ritual cultural and religious practices once common in
Swahili settlements but now limited to Tumbatu and scattered
corners of the coast. The whole village bathes in Jongowe's harbor
on the New Year of the Persian calendar (Mzvaka Kogzva). The baraza
declare other days for cleansing the village ritually, for practical
cleanup of the settlement, for collection of fees (ubani), for ap-
peasement of spirits.
Moreover, the age-set (hirimu) leadership hierarchies of both
men and women are active and powerful throughout daily affairs.
If ubuntu philosophy suggests that a person is not a person without
other people, in Jongowe, an adult person is not a person without
an hirimu. Women and men enter hirimu upon marriage. Jongowe
in 2003 had nine male and thirteen female hirimu (more for women
because there are more women than men in Jongowe, women live
longer lives, and women marry at an earlier age). Hirimu are
subdivided after seven to ten years, based on size of membership.
Each hirimu gives itself a riddle for a name, telling in terms of age
and power. For instance, the youngest female hirimu is named
Mwambao (The Reef), and the next hirimu up is called Mamie
Mwambao (Mother of the Reef). Like a distant reef, these are the
farthest from the center of power in village life.
Islam in Jongowe is the oldest contiguous thread of community
and identity. The oldest of its three mosques has the oldest kibla
stone in the Zanzibar islands, dated to the first decade of the twelfth
century AD. The Maulid celebration is the most visible performance
of the place of Islam in Jongowe's life, and yet it also highlights the
role of distinctly non-Islamic hirimu institutions in constructing it.
Maulid is an all-night vigil of ecstatic prayer to celebrate the
Prophet Mohammed's birthday. Each male hirimu cooks special
foods offered all night to the villagers and hundreds of Zanzibari
visitors at stations around the settlement. The exultation of the
Name of God (dhikri) takes place in a variety of musical forms,
including a style of choral throat singing unique to Tumbatu, in the
banda la mji at the center of the settlement. The rhythmic throat-
singing is interrupted by punctuated exhortations to belief from
Jongowe's religious elders, many of whom are inheritors of the
medieval Ahdali (Yemeni) sharifu (direct descendents of Moham-
med's line) traditions.
This sharifian association within Sunni Shafi'i Islam has made
Jongowe an important center of religious development for nine
centuries (Horton and Middleton 2000; Horton 1998). Distinguish-
ing tenets of Swahili culture's Shafi'i influences deeply rooted in
16 • journal of Cultural Geography

Jongowe are its interpretation of ijma (legal community consensus)

as the consensus of the mosque community (rather than of elite
scholars) and the prioritization of this communal ijma above
scholarly exegesis (Pouwels 2000; Pouwels 1987). A person is a
person, if you will, by praying with other people. And a com-
munity only creates its rules through communal prayer.
Jongowe is on a tiny island, but it is anything but a bounded
place, not just for its provision of spiritual leaders for Zanzibari
and Swahili Islam. To be sure, Maulid dhikri performances are re-
corded annually on guests' and residents' boom boxes, later to be
played all over the islands and sent overseas. But there are other
permeated barriers. Jongowe men and women own land across the
channel on Unguja, and this land increasingly provides basic foods
to the village. During the dry season or during breakdowns in the
undersea pipeline from Unguja, the settlement's water supply
again comes from Mkokotoni. At any given time, up to one-third of
the adult male population is encamped, usually along with a few
women, fishing in temporary extensions of the village (dago)
somewhere between northern Kenya and southern Tanzania. And
Jongowe's long-established indigenous structures are also negoti-
ating with the nationalization of Tanzanian culture, economy, and
politics over the last half-century.
Education is the central arena of this negotiation, as one
indigenous leader articulated quite eloquently on my first day of
research in 1999: "We got left behind in education and de-
velopment. They made us into slaves, servants, porters, you see?
So we tried to liberate ourselves . . . . The key to our liberation is
education . . . . We are too small and powerless to liberate ourselves
with weapons. Instead, we liberate ourselves with education, little
by little." 3 There was, then, an incredible amount of deeply
emotional feeling about the thirty-year anniversary celebration
that I attended for the village primary school in 2003. Part of this
had to do with the Chief Minister's visit, which was at least a small
recognition of connectivity with the state and the nation.
But it also had to do with the record of results for this self-
liberation. Jongowe students have had consistent success in
secondary school entrance examinations, although Tumbatu has
no secondary school. The village not only supplies its primary
school with all of its teachers, but supplies 75% of the staff of
Kichangani's primary school in the larger settlement in northern
Tumbatu. As of 2003, thirty-three Jongowe graduates were teaching
on Unguja island schools, too. Another sixty Jongowe people
 African Cultural Geography • 17
worked in mid-level ministerial posts, private industry in the
city, or overseas, typically in educational fields. The maternal and
child health clinic, which the village built itself in 1990, had a staff
that was born and raised in Jongowe and trained all over
Tanzania. Jongowe has produced marine biologists, urban plan-
ners, archivists, and professors, with experience studying in Aus-
tralia, East Asia, Europe, North America, and other parts of Africa,
all within a bit more than a generation of formal schooling.
Since 1991, Jongowe has applied for and received grants from
the United Nations Development Program, the European Union,
the United States Embassy in Tanzania, and the Al-Yussuf
Charitable Society of Saudi Arabia. Jongowe's development
initiatives have all been built internally, through community-based
organizations, environmental NGOs, and a development commit-
tee. The Jongowe Village Development Committee (JVDC) encap-
sulates in its membership the philosophical underpinnings of
connection between old and new indigenous structures, and the
efforts of these to create broader linkages that affect an extroverted
"worlding" of Jongowe (Simone 2001). The JVDC has ten members,
eight males and two females; its members include both the
government sheha (chief) and the male and female wakuu wa mji.
There are fourteen other registered NGOs or CBOs in the village as
well, along with dozens of unregistered fishing and farming
cooperatives.
The male United We Stand community-based organization has
as its cooperating parallel the female CBO, Mshikamano Ndio Umoja
Wetu. This latter phrase is technically a Swahili translation of
United We Stand, but literally it translates as "A Stand Indeed is
Our Unity." The "stand" that is the constructed "unity" of Jongowe
is one that, at least as publicly articulated, includes cooperative
labor, collective interdependence, open discussion, Islam, and
multiple solutions to livelihood struggles.

FRACTURED PLACE

For the positive energy that has come from the combination of
sustaining medieval indigenous institutions and generating adap-
tive new ones to be perpetuated, there need to be linkages to
broader processes of liberation, and to greater cash flow. Un-
fortunately, these linkages and flows are not nearly as present in
Jongowe as the sense of community solidarity. All of these
institutions of Jongowe are still reliant on outside funds and
18 • journal of Cultural Geography

agendas. Conservationist, government, party, or Islamist agendas

that arrive or pass through Jongowe with aid change it constantly,
but more significantly they can change the foci that villagers
themselves identify by hotly debated ijma consensus.
While aid from the Al-Yussuf Charitable Society led by Sheikh
Abdullah bin Yussuf focused on improving water and transport
and has been warmly received in Jongowe, other Islamic aid has
not been so uniformly embraced. In particular, the greatest divide
in the village stems from the construction of its third mosque,
colloquially known as Pakistan mosque. The tiny southern mosque
by the village harbor only just barely serves the workday needs of
both men and women at the foreshore, while the central Friday
mosque is now too small for the needs of the whole village. So the
construction of a third mosque somewhere in the northern area
made sense to many villagers. But Pakistan was constructed with
funding from the Kuwait-based African Muslims Agency and
political Islamists in Zanzibar city. Although Pakistan has not
imported a non-Jongowe imam, the village leaders consider its
teachings to be antithetical to the deeply entrenched spiritual core
of Islam as practiced in Jongowe for nine centuries.
Jongowe is so resource poor as to welcome, at least in some
quarters, any aid at all. Sources of capital are few and far between.
The few Tumbatu people abroad regularly send money or clothes
home, often at great personal sacrifice themselves. Several Jongowe
people overseas work up to sixteen hours per day at two low-
paying jobs; the first job is to feed, clothe and shelter themselves,
and the second is to send money and clothes home. Even the
approximately 70 migrants to the city of Zanzibar from Jongowe
who are not there in temporary fishing camps cope with
tremendous struggles, most living in the rough and crowded
Kandemba neighborhood in the city. In the final analysis, the facts
of Jongowe's growing connections around the world do not create
of it much more of a wealthy place.
Jongowe is not a place rent asunder by a great mass of open
social wounds. Instead, it is a place of festering sores. Poverty, and
particularly feminized poverty, probably festers the most. Even all
of what Jongowe has as a place has as yet done little to alter the
severity of poverty that is immediately apparent. As one resident
put it, "poverty is our biggest problem. We have social unity, water
supply—sometimes—and electricity will come one day, but none of
that matters to a child who hasn't eaten all day" (Hassan Sharif,
conversation with author, Jongowe, July 2, 1999). Food shortage
 African Cultural Geography • 19

and malnutrition are widespread among villagers, and these

disproportionately affect women and children. The farming and
fishing systems are inadequate at present for reversing these
problems. Almost 15% of Jongowe households now have access
rights to only one field out of the village's five farm areas, meaning
they assist in and depend on plots belonging to their mothers or
grandmothers. More than half of these landless households are
female-headed households. The average plot size of each household
or family field in these five areas is 0.125 hectares, an impossibly
small amount of land on which to expect to produce an entire
household's food for the year (Tunsilima Bakari, conversation with
author, Jongowe, July 3, 1999).
Despite the common claim that Jongowe residents share their
poverty, there are divergent patterns of this experience of poverty
between women and men. One element in this is exceedingly
geographical. Jongowe's men are much more mobile and connected
to the wider world. Many Jongowe women have quite literally
never left Tumbatu Island, where all but the severely disabled men
have traveled far and wide, at the very least to fish. Young women
from Jongowe have only in a few cases been the ones to advance to
high school off of the island. Tumbatu women speak Kiswahili in a
very sharply accented and highly localized dialect heavily inflected
with vocalizations and tongue gestures not readily understood
even in Zanzibar city, often to the exclusion of knowing the
"standard" Kiswahili that many avenues of advancement off of the
island would demand. In the sixty interviews I conducted in
Jongowe in 1999 and 2000, men were more likely than women to
mention the togetherness of the village and educational opportu-
nities as positive aspects of development. They were more than
twice as likely to cite cooperatives and their off-island connections
as significant improvements in village life. Women's greatest
development concerns—pests and vermin in their fields, firewood,
water, and food shortages—seldom received mention in interviews
with men (Tatu Silima, conversation with author, Jongowe, June 30,
1999). The everyday conduct of relatively harmonious social life in
Jongowe secludes the gender tensions of the place that these and
other elements of differentiation make plain.
Ethnicity is a construct dredged up in curious ways by
Jongowe residents. Navigation of racial or ethnic identity for many
Swahili peoples proves the volubility and fluidity of the concept
(Fair 2001). The famous "triple heritage" that the Swahili in-
tellectual Ali Mazrui (1986) applied generally for all African
20 • Journal of Cultural Geography

peoples is most readily applicable to Swahili coastal peoples

themselves, who mix and match between the influences of Asia,
Africa, and Europe in highly fluid and contested ways almost daily.
For at least the last 100 years, Zanzibari Swahili peoples in
particular have "self-consciously deployed" ethnic and racial
identities "in strategic ways," identifying more consciously at
various times with distinct places of origin and diverse forms of
racial consciousness (Fair 2001, 29). Tumbatu people are no
different than other Zanzibaris, or people the world round, in that
they deploy these identity politics in strategic ways. For the last
decade, the most prevalent strategy is one that deploys a de-
Africanization, and particularly a de-Bantuization, of Jongowe.
Retelling the history of the village involves recasting it as Yemeni,
Saudi, or Persian in origins, perhaps with the ancestors having
made stops along the way in Eritrea, Somalia, or the Lamu
archipelago of northern Kenya. The Omanis are wakuja, mere
newcomers. The Bantu do not even rate mention as belonging,
ironically, since the settlement is said to derive its name from
a Mrima coast Zaramo (Bantu) commander, Jongo, in Tumbatu's
late medieval war with the Portuguese (Ali Haji Mbarouk,
conversation with author, Jongowe, January 12, 2000).

There are undoubtedly Jongowe bloodlines connected long ago

with Arabia and Persia, but much of this discourse is a conversation
about the Zanzibar revolution and the union with Tanganyika that
formed Tanzania in 1964. In this discourse, the two leaders who
forged the revolution and the union, Abeid Amani Karume and
Julius Nyerere, are distinguished ethnically from Tumbatu people.
"Karume came to Unguja as a four-year-old child. We know him as
a Malawian . . . . We have been had by Nyerere, we have been told
we are Tanzanians. I will never say I am a Tanzanian. I am not
a Bantu. I am a Zanzibari" (Anonymous 1999).
Comments like that almost uniformly belong to village
supporters of the Civic United Front. The contrast is subtle with
those who publicly profess allegiance to the C.C.M. Amongst these
villagers, one is far more likely to hear sentiments like this: "We
have so much facial hair, we cannot be Bantu, but we are definitely
not Arabs." Few Jongowe residents would accept a connection to
the Bantu expansions that most Tanzanian historians now see as
having given rise to the formation of the Swahili city-states like
theirs in the first place. Male body type and facial hair, as well as
female skin tone, are used as the distinctions that mark the
Tumbatu as non-Bantu. Neither C.U.F. nor C.C.M. residents accept
 African Cultural Geography • 21

connection to Oman, a tellingly political tactic of the revolutionary

era, when Omani identity meant disaster for thousands of
Zanzibaris. However, where the C.U.F. villagers name every place
that surrounds Oman as a possible place of origin, supporters of the
C.C.M. regime make it clear that the Tumbatu are "not Arab" at
all, nor even "Shirazi" (Persian). A comfortable placement of the
origin story for them lies in Northeast Africa, where many people
also play identity politics that distinguish them from other sub-
Saharan Africans.
Identity politics and gender inequalities are amongst the cross-
currents and fractures in the process of place creation in Jongowe.
Taken together, these are part of what can make Jongowe seem like
it is becoming more extroverted and yet stepping closer to
implosion at the same time. Studying these, in conjunction with
development of an understanding of Jongowe's micropolitics, and
its new forms of linkage, we emerge with a deliberately compli-
cated overall sense of the place. It is particular, and yet unbounded.
It has many attributes unique to it, yet it has long been extroverted,
part of processes well beyond its shores. Why this sort of
deliberately complicated picture might matter is another ques-
tion entirely.
My own political-ecological agenda might be found in a search
for the answer to Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba's (1994, 257) question:
"What are the conditions in Africa, for emancipatory politics to
exist?" My contention is that those conditions include a privileged
position for African humanism, with recognition of human dignity
and worth married to a practical collective spirit for transformation.
They also include a critical interrogation of place meaning, one that
sees both the introverted and extroverted character of places and
articulates the position of places like Jongowe on the peripheries of
a global system and the sharp edges of contested nation-states.

CONCLUSION

There has been relatively little study of African places within

humanistic cultural geography. Humanistic cultural geographers
have paid relatively little attention to sub-Saharan Africa, while
geographers conducting research in sub-Saharan Africa generally
tend to eschew explicitly humanistic approaches for a variety of
reasons. In this piece, I have tried to recover means by which these
gaps might be overcome. The study of place meaning entails
a sometimes uncomfortable or even muddled mixing of emotional
22 • journal of Cultural Geography

a n d scientific u n d e r s t a n d i n g s . Writers of this sort of cultural

g e o g r a p h y are inevitably situated in between—they cannot step
outside of the picture, nor can they fully immerse themselves
within. Even from within such a partial perspective, however, it
is conceivable to d r a w o u t valuable reasons for saying that
places matter.
Using inspirations from African practices of humanist philos-
o p h y a n d from political ecology, I have developed an approach to
place meaning in Jongowe, a small settlement in Zanzibar. I have
suggested s o m e w a y s in which Jongowe can be seen to have an
intricate, intimate politics of place as well as an extroverted sense of
itself, and h o w the politics of place are intertwined with livelihood
struggles. I h a v e also attempted to see differences both within the
settlement and within its connections, along lines of gender and
ethnicity. N o n e of these can be anything more than a snapshot of
the real complexities of the place. Still, the case study helps
enunciate that African places matter, from close u p and from
far away.
O n e m a y still ask w h y it matters that Jongowe is different, or
w h y it matters to explain the place from within the rubric of African
humanistic cultural geography. There are very specific, visceral,
political reasons w h y it does. If w e take seriously A z e n a b o r ' s (1998)
vision of African h u m a n i s m as h a v i n g the "task of transforming the
w o r l d , " then J o n g o w e a n d T u m b a t u are pivots of history around
which that transformation m a y take place. In all likelihood the
future trajectories of Zanzibari politics and Islam will evolve out of
this particularly in-between setting. With those trajectories, so goes
the United Republic of Tanzania, a n d m a y b e even the seemingly
endless " w a r on terror" in its East African front. Understanding the
pivot points m e a n s k n o w i n g a w h o l e lot more than party politics or
election outcomes. Research that takes on Ramose's (1999, 154)
tasks, "to affirm one's h u m a n i t y by recognizing the humanity of
others a n d , o n that basis, establish h u m a n e relations with them",
could not be m o r e vital in such a context.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this article was made possible by grants from the
National Geographic Society Committee on Research and Exploration and
the General Research Fund of the University of Kansas. I thank Ang Gray
for creating the maps from my pathetic sketches, and Erin Dean for
keeping my sense of Tumbatu up to date through her 2005 fieldwork.
I would like to thank the officers of what was known until 2001 as the
 African Cultural Geography • 23

Zanzibar Commission for Lands and Environment, as well as the Unguja

North Region administration for permission to conduct the main part
of the fieldwork during a time of significant political tension. I owe an
enormous debt to the people of Jongowe who agreed to interviews,
helped with surveys, or participated in the research, especially Mngwali,
Sheha Mjaja, Bi Miza Mshenga, Juma Sharif, Mohamed Mohamed,
Mohamed Majuba, Salum Haji, and Bwana Ali Haji. My long-time
collaborator Makame Ali Muhajir made the whole project possible, hosted
me, advised me, and yet let me do the research in my own way, and to
reach my own conclusions. Thank you as always, Chief Muhajir.

NOTES

1. I am listing only one volume here, but literally a dozen other

prominent books would evidence the same absence.
2. The C.C.M. was formed through A.S.P.'s merger with the
Tanganyika African National Union (T.A.N.U.). The C.C.M. has been
Tanzania's ruling party since the 1977 unification of A.S.P. and T.A.N.U.
3. This is one of two quotations that come from confidential
interviews that I conducted in 1999 with two different Jongowe residents.
The interviewees did not wish to have their names utilized.

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Garth Andrew Myers is Associate Professor of Geography in the

D e p a r t m e n t of G e o g r a p h y a n d D e p a r t m e n t of African/African-
American Studies at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045.