Making Identity on the Swahili Coast

Steven Fabian is an Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Fredonia. Awarded two of Canada's most prestigious scholarships by the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Trust Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, his research has appeared in journals such as the International Journal of African Historical Studies, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, and the Journal of Eastern African Studies. He was President of the Tanzania Studies Association from 2015–2017 and currently serves as co-chair of Radical History Review.

• Introduction; 1. Owners of the town: Shomvi, Zaramo, Nyamwezi, and Indians; 2. Owners of the town: Baluchis, Omanis, and Spiritans; 3. Becoming Wabagamoyo: a local vocabulary for a Swahili town; 4. The particularities of place: space, identity, and the Coastal Rebellion of 1888–1890; 5. Colonial power, community identity, and consultation; 6. 'Curing the cancer of the colony': undermining local attachments.

'By taking seriously the roles of spatial identity and local attachment, Fabian has pried open a new window on Swahili culture and African urban history. Understood in these new terms, Bagamoyo's political and social history becomes a story of re-conceptualizing tradition, belonging, and urban citizenship in territorial terms as a means to confront external encroachments and displacements.' James R. Brennan, University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign