Third World Historical: Revolution in Absentia
Taushif Kara
Image courtesy of Hajime Narukawa
Third World Historical articulates a research agenda for a project suggestively housed as a special section in the pages of CSSAAME (42.2). The editor’s community webpage on Borderlines features experimental writings that enact the project’s attention to questions of form. Here, the intention is to engage in a collaborative project that is its own form of archive building, a portal that speaks to the wider themes of the Third World Historical. The essays in Borderlines highlight the visceral and the relational as distinct from abstract concepts of revolution as complete breaks. The words in these pieces are never failure, or defeat but stories of complicity, compromise, and fragmentation. By emphasizing relationality, movement, and complicity we aim to think concretely about moving between a world overwhelmed by structural forces that preclude action and an imagined world filled with boundless agents detached from history, an equally self-defeating proposition.
Those who leave Zanzibar—many in order to find work in places like the Gulf or mainland Tanzania—tend to be called ughaibu by the ones they leave behind. Variously translated as a state of absence, withdrawal, or even disappearance, the Swahili term is increasingly applied to young people who left the island, many of them to escape the immense fissures created by the enactment of neoliberalism in recent decades. Hoping to save money for marriage and secure their livelihoods, but unable or unwilling to work in an exploitative tourism industry, these same youth, the anthropologist Franziska Fay notes, are also seen by some as matunda ya mapinduzi: “fruits of the revolution.” As one of the generations to come of age in a post-revolutionary Zanzibar, these “fruits” now tend to be dislocated in many ways from the very site of that revolution. They are in a sense archives of the revolution located in the present; or, perhaps, an archive of the revolution’s future.
Beyond its literal spatial meaning, the word ughaibu also carries with it a much deeper linguistic and temporal resonance, one intimately linked to its wider intellectual history. In Shia thought, for instance, the word ghayba refers to the concealment of the twelfth imam, whose worldly absence is often said to prohibit or impede true justice. In a conventional understanding, this justice could only come about on earth after the return of the imam, requiring a kind of suspension: a perpetual state of waiting called intizar. One of the most profound theoretical innovations brought about by the revolution in Iran was the eclipse of that very state of waiting; sovereignty was in effect snatched from the future and deposited into the present in what was nothing less than a radical temporal rupture. “The praxis of Khomeini,” writes Amr Sabet, “underscored that intizar should not be construed as the passive awaiting for the return of the Imam, but as ‘an active effort of preparing the way’ for such a return.” Revolution, then, has been a refusal to wait and a desire to seize the future. Perhaps, then, the conceptual problem posed by the ghayba is not simply some theological peculiarity impeding revolution or “the political” more broadly, but in fact one of its most significant conditions?
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Might we read back onto Zanzibar’s history a theoretical abstraction like ughaibu, generated out of its present? Or even one like ghayba, generated elsewhere? Could the displaced “fruits” of its revolution today tell us something about the past? And what might the condition of absence, understood in temporal terms, mean for revolution itself?
In 1964 the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), claiming to represent Zanzibar’s African “majority,” staged a revolutionary overthrow of the Sultan and his government just months after the latter’s election to power. The revolt was accompanied by violent pogroms which exiled or took the lives of thousands of the island’s Arab and Indian inhabitants, conceived of in revolutionary discourse as an elite “minority.” I place these numerical markers in inverted commas in order to gesture towards their erstwhile porosity and the construction of such categories over time, and to avoid treating these groups in exclusively demographic, and by extension colonial, terms. But seeing these categories as entirely colonial constructions also obscures a critical facet of the revolution’s intellectual history. For, as Jonathon Glassman argued in his elegant study of exactly that, it was these very containers and the gradual process of their “racialization” by indigenous and not colonial actors that set the stage, conceptually, for the revolution and its attendant violence. This process, encompassing a period of intellectual ferment and hotly contested elections between 1957 and 1963, is now remembered as Zama za Siasa – the Time of Politics.
Image courtesy of Ali Kazim & Jhaveri Contemporary
During this Time of Politics, the ASP marshalled their revolutionary program against prevailing ideas of “civilization,” which in Zanzibar were deeply fused with a kind of Arab supremacy. By the middle of the twentieth century, lofty narratives of human progress and ideas about a pure Islam were inextricably linked up to the Swahili notion of ustaarabu—literally, the act of becoming an Arab. This perpetual state of waiting and incompleteness—absence, even—was at once both a metaphysical and a material condition. Islam’s professed universalism was made contingent upon Arab cultural and spiritual superiority; the slaves from whose labor Zanzibar’s wealth was continually extracted were primarily drawn from the interior while the plantations they labored upon were owned and operated by those who claimed to be at the top of a civilzational heirarchy.
I am not attempting to present some false equivalency here between the various movements of labor around the Indian Ocean, past and present, forced and “free.” I am more interested in recovering paths to “the political” generated out of the Third World. How and indeed when does the conceptual space for revolution begin to open up?
The state of absence is not at all unique to the site of Zanzibar, past or present, but has a much wider, even global, resonance. The Third World in particular was often cast in terms of a time lag or read through its eternal belatedness; relegated, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s now well-known phrase, to the “imaginary waiting room of history.” But today the condition of waiting and its attendant suspension of sovereignty seems to have emanated onto the entire planet, largely as a result of the spectre of climate change. The trial of climate change and the broader precarity of life under neoliberalism have created conditions in which the future is quite literally unthinkable. That is, it is increasingly difficult to even conceive of a planetary future at all, let alone as a political subject. Imagining the future or rather “futures” today is quite literally the venture of global capital. Other visions of the future involve escaping into space and so rejecting the globe.
Yet, at the same time, it is precisely the future that remains an object of desire and so a site of freedom for many; those called ughaibu, for instance, are obsessed by it. Like the young people of Delhi described by Rana Dasgupta, they are often disinterested and so entirely undisturbed by the weight of history, preferring instead to bypass it entirely. But such an obsession with the future, inaugurated by a present defined by waiting, can and usually does justify intense violence in its name. While it is well understood that revolutions must stage a break with time, often sacrificing the present for the future, perhaps the Third World might tell us something about the gap between the present and the future.
Taushif Kara is a research associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research on global Islam and the history of Muslim political thought has appeared in Global Intellectual History and the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.