TayoBlog

You cannot walk past the most prestigious hotel in Stone Stone, Zanzibar,  and miss an oil-painted portrait of Barak Obama. I resisted the touristy thing to take a photograph for a long time, but succumbed on my last day in July.
The portrait expressed the savvy promotional talent of  Massoud, a 25-year-old Zanzibari who claims to have enlisted 200 individuals in an organization supporting the American democratic hopeful. He even told me that he was planning a special meeting in the 16th–century Old Fort to coincide with the official democratic nomination in Denver!
Beyond the clever advertisement trick, the portrait reveals as much about Obama as the beautiful island of Zanzibar. Massoud is a tour operator who has decided to connect his own life and that of the islands of Zanzibar with the election of the most powerful man on earth.
His grandfather hails from Oman, and settled in Pemba. This is the sister island of Unjuga that together form the largest island of an autonomous archipelago of  Zanzibar within the United Republic of Tanzania. Pemba is known as the green peninsula, well known for its plants packed with indigenous remedies. His grandmother came from this island.
Massoud’s father combined this indigenous knowledge with modern medicine, acquired from the Chinese who supported Tanzania’s post-independent efforts to establish a modern, socialist state. He ventured deeper into the interior of the country, peddling medicines from the “east and west”. No prizes for guessing whom met in the African interior: Massoud’s Congolese mother.
Massoud sees himself as the confluence of many cultures, just like Obama. And this is an aspect of the Zanzibar that one cannot miss. The people of the island are over 90% Muslim, but they are consist of African, Asian and Arab communities. Not surprisingly, the Asian are the most exclusive but are themselves divided into Ithna Ashari, Ismaili, Bohra, and Sunni. To add to the mix, there are also Hindu and Christian group among the South Asians.
A Sunni Oriental mosque, with a classic Indian dome, is tucked away into one of the many alleys of Stone Town. It is administered by seven groups of Kutchee Muslims, each group equally represented on the mosque board. The Arabs are more integrated with the indigenous peoples, but even more elitist than the Asians.
The vast majority of Zanzibaris regard themselves as African, but Shirazi. They  regard themselves descendents of the first settlers from Persia. Their Shafi communities and culture have developed over a thousand years. The earliest known mosque, going back to the  11th century AD, is located on the southern part of Unjuga island, about 40 km from Stone Town.
The Zanzibaris are proud of their distinctive culture, and see themselves quite different from other Tanzanians (including its minority Muslim inhabitants). In reality, they are what Massoud  says to tourists and passersby: A meeting of cultures and peoples across the Indian Ocean into the distant past. The ethnicities are clearly there, but they share a cultural fabric that is not difficult to miss.
But Massoud did not stop at the Obama’s multiculturalism that matched that of the Zanzibaris. He was also familiar with the general message of hope that Obama projected, and which many Americans seem to recognize.
Massoud had read the first book of Obama and was busy reading his second when I met him. Upon a little deeper probing, he told me that he also admired the courage of Obama to bring about change. Most Zanzibaris, he told me, had despaired of seeing any economic and political change for the better. They had resigned themselves to their fate, often turning to religion to accept their condition.
I certainly heard this sentiment across the island. Teachers and government officials lived on $100 per month, and ordinary workers on less than that. As we know too well, globalization ensured that most food and essentials had to be paid for in global prices. Apart from some reliance on subsistence farming and international proceeds from  Zanzibaris working in Dubai and Western cities, it was difficult to understand how people made ends meet.
The political situation is none the better. As in many African countries, state planning and intervention had given way to free-market forces in the last 15 to 20 years. The same Revolutionary Party (Chama cha Mapinduzi) that brought independence, was overseeing the wholesale sale of state assets, and withdrawal from social services. In Zanzibar, the CCM prided itself in bringing about a revolution against Arab hegemony, and still rested on those laurels.
Against these realities, Massoud was determined to turn the tide against despair and hopelessness. He was not the only one who expressed these sentiments to me. But the threats and realities of global economic exploitation were quite palpable.
Obama was a symbol of that hope for about 200 Zanzibaris. This is the not the reaction he has got from Muslims elsewhere. Before I left for Zanzibar, I took a fellow researcher from Kenya to a Friday sermon at the Awwal (first) Mosque in Cape Town. I was astounded to hear a direct attack on Obama from a very respectable and leading member of the Muslim Judicial Council.
The preacher did not elaborate on the reason for his attack, and I could not understand the vehemence of this sermon. I later found out that the sermon may have been a response to Obamah’s almost total capitulation at a 4th June pro-Israeli lobby meeting, promising American support for the whole of Jerusalem as the eternal capital  of the Jewish state, and also his support to take a hard line against Iran.
Was Massoud’s support for Obama misplaced? Or was it more important to recognize the intermeshing of our cultural streams, and the need to have the confidence of making a difference? The choice of the Americans, we know too well, has far-reaching impact on the globe. I picked up a strong desire in Massoud to steer the symbol of Obama towards the values and needs of Zanzibar that I did not see in the Friday sermon in Cape  Town.