Baluchis, Omanis, and Spiritans
from Part One - Becoming Bagamoyo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2019
This chapter builds upon the previous one by examining how the town’s residents reacted to the arrival of newcomers who behaved more aggressively and could resort to their own means of military support: first the representatives of the Zanzibari sultanate, who arrived in the 1840s to oversee the caravan trade, and then the French Catholics, who established their first mainland mission in Bagamoyo in 1868. Both case studies reveal struggles which demarcated the social boundary between insiders and outsiders, wenyeji and watu wa kuja. While people could develop their own sense of attachment to a place regardless of how earlier settlers might view them, it did not mean that the newcomers could behave in ways antagonistic to established convention. Power in Bagamoyo rested in local hands; to succeed in the town, one had to respect the interests and institutions of the community. Thus, newcomers to Bagamoyo had to become localized, meaning they had to adapt to local customs and become accepted by the local inhabitants. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Indians and upcountry Africans respected established customs, even as they introduced ones of their own. For those who flouted local interests, the repercussions were often violent
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.