Book Description

This dissertation investigates the evolution of charitable practices in coastal East Africa, focusing especially on the growth of the institution of wakf (Islamic charitable endowment) on the island of Zanzibar. Wakf are prevalent throughout the Muslim world, but had distinctive cultural and historical characteristics in Zanzibar. Drawing on materials from the 20th century British Wakf Commissions, my research challenges a dominant narrative that has generally perceived Africa as the destination of, but rarely the source of, philanthropy. Rather than assuming that outsider elites introduced wakf, I argue that the language precolonial East Africans used and the spatial orientation of their cities placed charity at the center of Swahili society. Wakf practice grew rapidly during the 1800s as new elites from around the Indian Ocean, encouraged by the Busaidi sultanate, used endowments to build the urban infrastructure-mosques, wells, houses, burial grounds-of the Stone Town. I argue that endowments were a new departure, but not a rupture. Omani and African elites found themselves in the process of composing "sympathetic communities" with roots in multiple Indian Ocean histories. Similarly, the intervention of British reformers and officials in the early 1900s took endowment practice in new directions, but also implicated the colonial state in older notions of altruism and benevolent giving. In some ways, colonial perceptions of the failure of the Wakf Commission in 1913 obscured the real transformations underway in Zanzibari charitable practices. Exploring both the continuities and changes in these practices, the dissertation argues, invites a reinvestigation of the relationship between reciprocity and altruism by integrating its emotional and rational motivations. Along with enriching our picture of East African cosmopolitanism, and illuminating the way Swahili cities functioned, I argue that training our focus on wakf opens up new avenues for research that conceptualize African practices as charity.