Cuba Sì, Yankees No

Zanzibar and Political Liberation between “the Global 60s”and Local Politics

This study sheds light on the “Global 60s” in Zanzibar by focusing on Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP)’s Foreign Mission in Havana. The globalization of Zanzibar’s politics in the 1960s was only one phase of previously established South-South relations that had been determining the politics of identity in Zanzibar since the late 19th century. While the Zanzibar Nationalist Party’s visit to Cuba in 1962 and the establishment of a Foreign Mission in Havana came within the framework of a global anti-imperial solidarity, they were also tied to recent developments in Zanzibar, such as the recognition of women’s voting rights, activism of labor movements, and youth political mobilization. However, at a time of global political solidarity, local politics were fractional and divisive. The ZNP’s national and anti-imperialist vision was contested by other political parties that envisioned a different future and a different identity for Zanzibar as a nation. This tension between local and global politics in Zanzibar highlights the limitations to global solidarity in the 1960s and the contradictions within the concept of a nation as a framework of liberation in the case of Zanzibar.

Bio

Professor of History and Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. She received her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD in History from the University of Alberta. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, and a faculty member at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where she also directed the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies. She specializes in modern Arab intellectual history. She was the recipient of several grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, of the Gerda Henkel Foundation Research Scholarship, and the Institut d’Etudes Avancées de Nantes Fellowship.  Her publications have covered many topics and have encompassed a wide geography, from the Arabian Peninsula to East Africa, from the Levant to North Africa.  Her latest publications include The  Oxford Handbook of the Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History (2020) and “Self-Minoritization: Performing Difference in Colonial Algeria” in the Journal of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2021).