Julia Verne

Contemporary Geographies of Zanzibari Fashion: Indian Ocean Trade Journeys in the Run-Up to Ramadhan Festivities

The historical imagination of Zanzibar as a maritime hub of the dhow trade is today generally directed to the past. Nonetheless, from the early 1990s, Zanzibari traders began to revive old routes and develop new ones. While first relying on translocal family relations to the Arabian Peninsula, they have, since the late 1990s, ventured further east to cities including Bangkok, Guangzhou, and Jakarta. This chapter examines these recent developments and traders use of them to provide Zanzibar with cloth that meets the island’s sense of fashion. Taking the shopping practices during Ramadhan as a focal point illustrates how historical relations still play a crucial role in current negotiations of fashion and taste and, thus, for present-day consumption practices.

“We Are Part of Zanzibar” – Translocal Practices and Imaginative Geographies in Contemporary Oman-Zanzibar Relations

Particularly since the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964, relations between Oman and Zanzibar have been marked by contested political views and conflicting versions. While from the perspective of Oman the relation to Zanzibar meanwhile often seems to be of only minor significance, in Zanzibar it has been of high ideological and imaginative value and is a dominant argument in political controversies until today. However, instead of engaging in the wider and more macro-level political and economic debates about the relationship between Oman and Zanzibar, the aim of this paper is to ground these in the everyday practices and imaginative geographies of those actually constituting the translocal connections. Focusing on emotional, material and individual business ties between the two places, we illustrate how contemporary connections are lived and experienced by Zanzibari Omani. Only this, we argue, can provide a deeper understanding of the ambiguity and complexity of these personal relations, thus adding an important but often ignored dimension to the current discussions of Oman’s translocal relations.