Abstract
Histories of Vumba, on the southern coast of Kenya, were recorded during the early British colonial period in this region, and inevitably reflect a series of contemporary concerns. Nevertheless, due to the wealth of detail provided as to the material practices of the Vumba elite, the traditions have become important in understandings of the deeper Swahili past, as well as in historical reconstructions of the nineteenth century. An approach to Vumba’s materiality allows a clearer view of these traditions, questioning both arguments relating to the invention of tradition during colonial negotiations and suggestions of long-standing or unchanging practice. These negotiations of authority during the colonial period were a nexus of historical memory, contemporary understandings of identity, and the material and social relations of power. They also entailed a process that brought together objects, people and places, and the ways that they were mutually constituted. In this chapter, this historical negotiation is put further into context as part of a process of performance. The writing of colonial-period histories was the latest act in a long-running narrative through which coastal identities had been understood. Rather than emphasizing the materiality of the Vumba society, through the recognition of a dialectic which nonetheless continues to privilege static aspects (people and objects), it is the performance itself that is prioritized. The concept of a biography of practice is advanced, through the foregrounding of the activities that have long structured–and been structured by—the objects and humans entangled in them.
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Notes
- 1.
The title of Diwan is originally of Persian origin and is used in many historical Middle Eastern contexts to signify officials of high rank. It was used to denote the ruler of Vumba from the seventeenth century, when a break in succession meant the abandonment of the office of Sultan. The Diwans ruled in a hereditary fashion from this time onwards.
- 2.
An ell was a measurement of cloth based on the length of a man’s arm. An English ell was approximately 45 in..
- 3.
Botanical remains were analyzed by Dr. Sarah Walshaw of Simon Fraser University.
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Wynne-Jones, S. (2015). Biographies of Practice and the Negotiation of Swahili at Nineteenth-Century Vumba. In: Richard, F. (eds) Materializing Colonial Encounters. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2633-6_6
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