(Im)mobility in a Sea of Migration: Race, mobilities, and transnational families in Zanzibar and Oman, ca 1850-2019

 

PhD Dissertation, 2021

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When I first began research on this project, I expected to be writing about mobility. All of the reading I had previously done on transnational communities, such as the one in the Tanzanian islands of Zanzibar that was at the center of my own project, privileged a certain fluid mobility. I wrote confidently in a grant application at that time, "Scholars have imagined these connections to have been severed by the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964, which precipitated the end of the Omani Sultanate of Zanzibar, and the subsequent merger with mainland Tanzania. However, numerous families continue to move, travel, and communicate between Zanzibar and Oman unto the present." This may be true, but what struck me the most when doing this research was the immobility of the vast majority of my informants. 

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Here's a common scene from my research in Tanzania: I sit on the floor of Suleiman Hemed’s sitting room where he lives in the Tanzanian islands of Zanzibar. We are eating Omani dates and sipping Omani style coffee; a poster of the Omani Sultan hangs on the wall behind my head. “Have you ever been to Oman?” I ask, but Suleiman says no, not yet. Suleiman is a member of a transnational community that has formed through generations of circular migration between the Zanzibar archipelago and Oman. Despite his own immobility, connections to Oman are important in Suleiman’s daily life. This apparent paradox was not unique in my research, but rather the norm among my interviews.

 

Scholarship on international migration has frequently seen transnationalism as relatively uniform and inevitable in that people within a transnational community necessarily think and behave transnationally, yet I have observed a more uneven reality—members of the same community and even the same family have different access to and interest in mobility, transnational exchanges, and cosmopolitan identities.