This information linked him to the interior Omani town of Nizwa, the site of the drought in the 1840s that had compelled many families to emigrate. Ladha Damji, the person to whom he owed the ivory, was identified in the document as Ladha bin Damha al-Baniani.55 After the naming clauses, the object of the acknowledgment (al-muqarr bihi) must be detailed in full. Because of the flexible nature of the iqrār, the object might be the price of something for sale, the sum of a debt, or the weight of ivory. For example, the document of Said bin ‘Umar al-Kharusi states the good (ivory); its quality (pure); its unit of measure (frasila, a unit of thirty-five pounds); the number of that unit (one hundred twenty); and the basis for the unit of measure (the Zanzibar frasila).
The document should include description of how payment is to be made. In the case of debt, the debtor should clarify his ability to pay in the future. Liabilities for someone pledging or guaranteeing on the behalf of the acknowledger should also be stated. The formula for marking calendar dates follows, and the witnessing statements come at the end. The witnesses are the key to making the document legitimate, and the witnessing formula should be free of ambiguity. The date of the testimony is included, and the witnesses must specify whether or not they wrote it in their own hand. Witnesses attest to the declarations and their names are included in the document. In our example, the attestation was given by the author of the document (Humūd bin Said bin Salim al-Fera’i) and it was endorsed by the sultan (Barghash bin Said al-Busaidi).
The Zanzibar archives contain hundreds of writings (waraqa), and these illustrate microeconomic transactions based on relationships, kinship, and small-scale commerce. These small interactions collectively permit us to assess the macroeconomic trade system that linked Oman and the Indian Ocean to Zanzibar and the East African interior. In East Africa, these deeds provided people in the 1840s with new ways to conduct financial relations over long distances.
MORTGAGES AND PLEDGES OF PROPERTY
More sophisticated iqrār functioned as mortgages, providing credit against fixed assets. Two types of credit-generating transactions are found in the Zanzibar archives. The first was a rahnan maqbudan (
For example, Muhammad bin Rashid bin Ahmed al-Riyami sold his farm in Pemba through a time sale for one year to Gopal Takarsi for MT$700. During that same year, he agreed to rent the farm from Gopal for MT$175 per annum.58 Muhammad bin Rashid was permitted to buy back the farm for the original price of MT$700. At the end of the year, he would also have to pay the rent, meaning he would have paid a total of MT$875 to redeem his property. Through arrangements like this, many Arabs in Zanzibar and elsewhere forfeited property.
Scholars have viewed this rent as a form of interest. Consequently, these sales have been condemned by legal purists for their “very questionable orthodoxy,” given the Islamic prohibitions of interest and speculation.59 Others accepted the practices out of necessity. Islamic judges (qadis) in Zanzibar ruled that these kinds of sales were legal “to enable persons needing money to obtain credit without incurring the possible guilt of dealing in transactions by way of interest.”60 Thus, these methods of conducting business allowed observant Muslims to stay (narrowly) within Islamic prohibition on interest and speculation.
Time sales gave anyone who had property the ability to raise cash. Although the creditors resided in Zanzibar and operated their businesses from there, they extended credit to property owners in many directions. In Oman, where many Arabs relied on date farming and attenuated irrigation channels for their income, this form of mortgage was already established. Arabs in Oman sold houses and date trees to secure loans to cover the lean period between harvests.61 This practice moved to Zanzibar with the Arab migrants who followed Said bin Sultan when he shifted the capital in 1832. Arabs who retained property in Oman were able to use it to capitalize their ventures in Zanzibar.
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While Jairam Shivji was the apex creditor, the relationships of debtors and creditors crossed social and ethnic boundaries, forming the basis of Zanzibar’s cosmopolitan culture. Arabic business contracts provide new insights into the temporal and spatial aspects of debt and credit and the tension between obligation and opportunity. Webs of indebtedness linked Zanzibar, the African interior, and Oman, creating the common commercial culture of the western Indian Ocean. Historian Philip Curtin has argued that the development of common commercial culture reduced the need for brokers to serve as intermediaries between groups.62 The mechanisms of credit and debt (especially Arabic-language contracts) allowed individuals to conduct business across racial, ethnic, and confessional lines and across the long distances of the Indian Ocean and its continental interiors. By the 1840s, Zanzibar was emerging as an important financial center, a place where deals were struck, credit advanced, and repayment, eventually, was due. These contracts derive from a long history of Islamic legal practice and provide an intimate view of the business and societal connections emanating from Zanzibar. They also provide unusual insight into the position of freed slaves and the microeconomics of the ivory trade.
3
Sultans at Sea
Mobility and the Omani States
ON THE NIGHT OF OCTOBER 25, 1856, a small band of Arab men rowed toward the flickering oil lights of Zanzibar town. They had waited at anchor behind a small island in the channel since late afternoon. During the day, Zanzibar’s shore buzzed with activity. Gangs of laborers unloaded cargo from the African mainland, animal hides, gum copal, and mangrove poles. Merchants supervised ivory shipments while their workers scraped and washed the tusks.1 The Indian customs master and his assistants hovered around the port, eager to collect levies on the shipments arriving from Bombay, Manchester, and Salem. At night, however, the waterfront was quiet. Against a rising storm, the oarsmen pulled the travelers on the final leg of their journey from Arabia. Most likely, the passengers kept silent, due both to their cargo and their errand. Among them were three important men—including one who was anxious to prove his manhood and another who was six days dead.
The corpse was Seyyid Said bin Sultan al-Busaidi, the Omani merchant prince who had brought East Africa under his sway. Said bin Sultan was a contemporary of Napoleon Bonaparte and Mohammed Ali Pasha of Egypt, and, as a British official observed, he was “hardly inferior” to either man, “except in as far as the stage on which he acted was more restricted.”2 This “restricted” stage touched all sides of the western Indian Ocean, and, as hard as it would be to calculate, Seyyid Said probably covered more lifetime miles than either of these other men. After nearly three decades of shuttling between Arabia and the East African coast, to establish himself in East Africa and then to maintain his rule in both places, Seyyid Said bin Sultan died at sea on a return trip to Zanzibar. A unified Omani realm did not survive him. The other men on the ship, including his young son Barghash and the leader of the Harthi confederation in Zanzibar, hoped to bury Seyyid Said quietly and then seize power.3 This proved impossible, and Seyyid Said’s death set off contests for control in Zanzibar and Muscat that lasted fifteen years and reverberated into the twentieth century.
