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Contents Notes on Contributors vII Introduction: Strategies of Belonging in Indian Ocean Island Societies 1 Iain Walker and Marie-Aude Fouéré Part 1 Zanzibar 1 Zanzibariness in the Shadow of an Ambiguous Documentary State 21 Marie-Aude Fouéré 2 Marriage, Mobility, and Belonging of Asian Women in Zanzibar 49 Akbar Keshodkar 3 Rearing Like the State: Belonging, Child Rearing, and Greeting in Zanzibar 75 Franziska Fay 4 To Manifest African Destiny: The (Spiritual) Revolution, Pentecostal Belonging, and the Past in Zanzibar 96 Hans Olsson Part 2 Madagascar, Mauritius and Mayotte 5 On Belongings and Betrayals. Migratory Projects and Moral Obligations among Youth in Mahajanga/Madagascar 127 Patrick Desplat 6 Identity, Citizenship and Belonging in Postcolonial Mauritius 157 Ramola Ramtohul vi Contents 7 I Came, Therefore I Belong: Unsettling Origin-Stories on Mainland Mauritius 180 Gitanjali Pyndiah 8 Mayotte, France and the Comoros: Mimesis and Violence in the Mozambique Channel 200 Iain Walker Index 225 Notes on Contributors Patrick Desplat holds a temporary professorship at the University of Münster at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Germany. He is a social anthropologist primarily interested in religion, youth, migration and sociality in urban Africa. He carried out fieldwork in East Africa and the Indian Ocean, particularly in Kenya, Ethiopia and Madagascar. Most recently, he investigates envy discourses and social tensions among young people in the city of Mahajanga, Madagascar. Franziska Fay is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. She holds a PhD from SOAS, London. Her research focuses on child protection, belonging, female political authority, diaspora, and decoloni- sation. Her book Disputing Discipline: Child protection, punishment and piety in Zanzibar schools was published by Rutgers University Press (2021). Marie-Aude Fouéré is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. She works on belonging, memory and the uses of the past in Tanzania and Zanzibar, with a focus on the time of Ujamaa and the 1964 revolution. She notably co-edited Social Memory, Silenced Voices, and Political Struggle: Remembering the Revolution in Zanzibar (2018). Akbar Keshodkar is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Moravian University, in Penn- sylvania, United States. His primary research interests lie in examining how historical and contemporary transnational networks across the Indian Ocean facilitate access to different pathways of socio-economic mobility and formu- lations of identities in Muslim communities in Zanzibar and the East African coast. Another area of his research investigates how people in communities increasingly dominated by tourism in different parts of the world strive to ne- gotiate their notions of belonging, cope with and maintain their resilience un- der growing conditions of involuntary immobility imposed by the influence of tourism in their societies and everyday lives. Hans Olsson (PhD) is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen. He has worked on the relationship between religious belonging, politics and nation in the religious plural settings of both Tanzania and Zanzi- viii Notes on Contributors bar and is the author of Jesus for Zanzibar: Narratives of Pentecostal (Non-)Be- longing, Islam and Nation (Brill 2019) and The Politics of Interfaith Institutions in Contemporary Tanzania (Swedish Science Press 2011). His current research focuses on Evangelical-Charismatic Christian farming in South Africa and the interplay between religious practice, ecology and food production. Gitanjali Pyndiah is a London based Mauritian researcher and creative writer. She is currently an associate researcher at the Centre for Research on Slavery and Indenture (CRSI) at the University of Mauritius, and an affiliate Art History Fellow under the Indian Ocean Exchanges program supported by Harpur College, Bingham- ton University and the Getty Foundation. Her academic publications focus on the visual-sonic history of the Creole archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean. She also publishes creative works under her pen name Gitan Djeli and works at the Commonwealth Foundation. Ramola Ramtohul is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Mauritius where she teaches Gender Studies and Sociology. She has a PhD in Gender Studies from the African Gender Institute at the Uni- versity of Cape Town. She has published widely on women, gender and politics in Mauritius. Her research interests include gender, politics and citizenship in multicultural contexts as well as high net worth migration and citizenship. She has received research fellowships from the University of Cape Town, American Association of University Women, University of Cambridge and University of Pretoria. She is co-editor of Journal of Contemporary African Studies and Island Studies Journal and a member of the editorial board of the journal Small States & Territories. Iain Walker is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropol- ogy. He works on diasporas and identities in the western Indian Ocean, with a focus on the Comoro Islands and the Hadrami diaspora. He has conducted fieldwork on all the Comorian islands and developed the theory of mimesis in an analysis of Ngazidja society in his book Becoming the Other, Being Oneself: Constructing Identities in a Connected World (2010); more recently he has been considering questions of identity on Mayotte. He is also the author of Islands In A Cosmopolitan Sea: A History of the Comoros (2019). Introduction Strategies of Belonging in Indian Ocean Island Societies Iain Walker and Marie-Aude Fouéré Belonging is oft invoked in the literature on migrations, diasporas and identities; but despite some attention in recent years, and various levels of theorisation, the term is still frequently employed without much considera- tion for its meaning, presumably because belonging, in its vernacular sense, is perceived as largely unproblematic, somehow instinctive: we all know what it means to belong because we feel and experience it – or do we? In the sense in which it is often used, belonging is an attribute, a characteristic, or per- haps a perception or sentiment, of a person (or people) admitting or claim- ing membership of a collectivity – be it social, cultural, political. It requires consciousness of a whole of which a person claims to be, feels to be, or feels entitled to be a part: “to be appropriate, suitable, or fitting”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary “to be a follower or adherent of a person, a subject of a ruler, a member of a family, a native or inhabitant of a place.” Whether or not it is possible to belong nowhere is moot: most people do appear to belong somewhere, whether they like it or not. Even those who do not belong in a civic sense, such as non-citizens or stateless individuals, may well belong in a social or affective sense, and they may aspire to and strive towards a more secure civic belonging. Interest in the concept of belonging started growing in the first decade of the century. The cognate concept of identity was increasingly being criticised for being too essentialist and too inflexible; belonging, in contrast, promised fluidity, contingency and variability (Bell 1999). Yet, as so often with terms that seize the scholarly imagination, much subsequent use of the concept has tended to invoke it somewhat formulaically. Thus in a small handful of recent articles1 we have references to “migrant belonging”, “transnational belonging”, “diasporic belonging” (Wilcock 2019: 183, 184), “territorial belonging”, “transbor- der belonging”, “ethnic belonging”, “indigenous belonging” (Barenboim 2018: 124, 127), “national belonging” (Damaledo 2018: 27), “multi-sited belonging” 1 Selected, if not at random, then at least without prejudice. © Iain Walker and Marie-Aude Fouéré, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004510104_002