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The Customs Master and Customs of Credit in Zanzibar

WHEN PASSENGERS DISEMBARKED in Zanzibar from the booms and buggalas that sailed the western Indian Ocean in the early nineteenth century, they found a city in transition. Those who had recently left the interior of Arabia and had never sailed with the monsoon may have been overwhelmed by the hubbub of the port, or just happy to be on dry land, and they may have been too disorientated even to notice what was going on around them. On the other hand, the seasoned sailors who made this journey every year or two would certainly have noticed differences in the city. Zanzibar had begun to transform from the relatively simple fishing settlement of a few decades earlier to the biggest and most prosperous town on the east coast of Africa. Zanzibar was becoming a commercial center from which networks of indebtedness reached across the Indian Ocean and far into the East African interior. This chapter examines the formalization of Zanzibar’s commercial culture by unpacking the Arabic business documents that underwrote the city’s far-flung credit networks. It focuses on the 1840s, the earliest decade for which Arabic business contracts are available, to help reveal the enmeshed social and economic networks of Zanzibar.

Among the thousands of Arabic language contracts that have been preserved in Zanzibar, only a small number deal with the period before the late 1860s. This is a result of the process of registering documents (as detailed in chapter 7), though the difference between official, bureaucratic senses of time and the sense of time embedded in these contracts meant that some creditors submitted documents that were decades old. The documents considered in this chapter are thus a subset of a vast collection that informs the whole book. As such, these examples from the 1840s stand in for what were inevitably a great number of transactions that were completed (and thus not disputed), lost, or never registered. Contracts and agreements that were not resolved were more likely to be registered. In any case, the sample that remains makes clear that a dynamic Indian Ocean economy included a wide variety of mobile economic actors who used Arabic language transactions to forward their own goals in Zanzibar, the place that welcomed the most travelers from the Omani interior.

The journey to Zanzibar from Oman took a couple of weeks with favorable monsoon winds. As the dhows made their way from Muscat or Sur, they sailed close to the coast. The passengers may have stopped at Mogadishu, a place Ibn Batuta had visited in 1331, and even if they had not stopped, they certainly would have seen the minarets of four of the largest mosques that were visible ten miles from the shore.¹ The views of Mogadishu and Barawa on the northern Swahili coast would have been somewhat familiar, as these cities resembled the coastal cities of Arabia and Persia, with low, square, flat-roofed houses built of stone and mud.² When the travelers crossed the equator south of Barawa, they would have approached the Lamu archipelago, and the landscape would have changed.

We do not know how Arabian migrants saw this, but the verdant shores may have struck them as the view struck a British captain sailing this route in 1811: “The numerous richly-clothed islands which line the shore separated by beautiful and frequently spacious inlets and bounded behind by a delightful continent, rich in all the charms of luxuriant vegetation, present to the eye a prospect extremely enchanting, and would seem to indicate a degree of natural wealth equal of the most favored regions of the known globe.”³ Sailing past Mombasa, travelers could not have helped but see the massive Fort Jesus, built by the Portuguese in the late sixteenth century to anchor their burgeoning Indian Ocean empire. The Portuguese had constructed similar forts in Muscat. In the seventeenth century, when the Omanis expelled the Portuguese from Muscat and then from Mombasa, the Omanis took over the Portuguese thick-walled forts. In the 1830s, Fort Jesus was once again the site of dispossession, but this time rival Omani factions, emissaries of Said bin Sultan, seized the fort from the Mazrui ruler, killing some and exiling others to the gulf. Thus, Said bin Sultan, the Busaidi ruler in Zanzibar, could claim control of this entire coast, from southern Somalia to Lamu and Mombasa; including the island of Pemba (Mombasa’s bread basket) and, south of that, Zanzibar.

Ras Nungwi at the northern tip of Zanzibar provided the first sight of the island, but sailing vessels had to continue down the island’s western edge, skirting the small island of Tumbatu, before spotting the large white buildings of Zanzibar town. These multistory buildings were the visible markers of Zanzibar’s boom. While they shared an architecture with Omani buildings, they shared space with the waddle and daub houses—thatched with palm fronds—that were interspersed in the narrow lanes and neighborhoods of the town’s tidal peninsula. During the nineteenth century, the mix of buildings shifted. The big houses built of coral rag predominated, and the humbler dwellings disappeared. The process of becoming “Stone Town”—as the city became known in the twentieth century—had its roots in the economic prosperity of the nineteenth century and in the market for land (and mortgages) that developed during this period.

For first-time visitors, figuring out the underlying order of Zanzibar would have been difficult. While travelers who were familiar with other Indian Ocean ports would have found some similarities, the first British agent (representative) assigned to Zanzibar in the 1840s did not believe that the city’s port or its commercial aspects were ordered or rational. He reported in 1844 that the port had no quarantine regulations, no charges for wharfage or buoys, and no regular supply of local pilots. It was assumed that the captains either knew the reefs on the approaches to the port or could send someone up the mast to point them out. The merchants employed several currencies at no fixed rate of exchange, but the Spanish dollar and the German crown were considered equal in the 1840s. It seemed as though the only rule was that all goods, whether they were coming or going, had to pass through the customs house, a small thatched shed near the shore.⁴

The unpresuming thatched shed belied the vital role of the customs master, who was the linchpin of the economic, social, and political orders. His constant access to cash and elaborate networks of patronage made him the island’s apex creditor. Indebtedness—both fiscal and social—became the common language of this multiethnic society, connected through webs of patron-client relations that stretched far from Zanzibar, to the African interior, the islands of the Indian Ocean, and the shores of Arabia. Within this network in 1840, the customs master Jairam Shivji was a vital node. He lent money to the sultan and bought houses from freed slaves. He underwrote American merchants and oversaw a network of Indian financiers. Not surprisingly, his name was among the most common written on the contracts, sales, and mortgages that are left from this period. These documents—an archive within an archive—reveal intriguing details about the social and financial interconnections of Zanzibar and its hinterlands. Let us first look at Jairam Shivji’s role in financing both the Zanzibar state and foreign trade before turning to his dealings with the more common African and Arab people living in or passing through Zanzibar.

FIGURE 2.1. Zanzibar waterfront, 1847. Image courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Winterton Collection, Northwestern University.

JAIRAM SHIVJI FROM KUTCH TO ZANZIBAR

Jairam Shivji, a Banyan Hindu, was born in 1792 in Kutch, on the west coast of India. The Indian Ocean entrepôt trade shaped his family’s life. His father, Shivji Topan, was part of the Banyan merchant community in Muscat, and from there, Shivji Topan traveled to East Africa in 1785 in the company of the Muscati ruler Said bin Ahmad al-Busaidi. In the following years, Shivji Topan moved his business to East Africa. His decision was influenced by Muscat’s new ruler, Seyyid Said bin Sultan, who had his sights on Zanzibar. Early Omani governors in Zanzibar had either been slaves of the royal family or appointed from loyal Omani clans. These governors were also responsible for collecting customs duties. One of Seyyid Said’s innovations in East Africa was to remove the customs duty from the portfolio of the governor and to transfer it to a merchant house. In 1835, Shivji Topan won the contract to “farm the customs” at Zanzibar for 84,000 Maria Theresa dollars.⁵ This meant that his firm paid an advance to the ruler and then kept all customs revenue for themselves. His son Jairam took over this duty from Shivji, and although they paid increasingly higher prices for the privilege, Jairam and his family firm held this vital (and remunerative) position for fifty years. The family firm also maintained branches in Muscat, Bombay, and Kutch.⁶

From the 1830s until his retirement in 1853, Jairam remained focused on his firm’s revenue and the customs house in Zanzibar. As a Kutchi merchant, this was not unusual. An observer noted in 1836 that the port of Mandvi, in Kutch, was connected to the entire western Indian Ocean: “From Manda-vee a maritime communication is kept up from Zanguebar and the whole east coast of Africa, with the Red Sea and Arabia, with the Persian Gulf, Mekrom, and Sinde, and with India as far as Ceylon.”⁷ Jairam’s commitment was legendary. In 1837, a visitor who called on him when he was ill noted that Jairam had ivory stored under his sickbed. This was evidence of his “ruling passion,” which remained “strong in sickness.”⁸

Jairam did indeed indulge his ruling passion for finance. An American merchant in Zanzibar estimated that Jairam Shivji earned $100,000 profit in 1839.⁹ One historian guessed that Jairam had thirty million dollars in a Bombay bank.¹⁰ While this may be exaggerated, he was the wealthiest man in East Africa, in part because of his extensive commercial network. From his post in Zanzibar, Jairam controlled customs collectors in many of the major ports on the Swahili coast. Thus, he was well informed about prices and news from every part of the sultan’s realm. His financial heft and his intelligence networks made him a formidable ally and daunting foe. Foreign merchants were keenly aware of the importance of staying on Jairam’s good side. One foreign merchant noted Jairam’s ominous power over traders in 1842: “Refuse to comply with his terms and they would be driven from the market with doing little or nothing.”¹¹ The ruler and the foreign merchants in Zanzibar were indebted to him, and they needed his capital to run their ventures.

CREDIT AND STATECRAFT IN EARLY BUSAIDI RULE IN EAST AFRICA

The availability of credit was essential to the commercial expansion of Zanzibar. This credit, largely supplied by Indian Ocean commercial firms originating in India, financed the expansion of American and European firms in East Africa and of the Arab state in Zanzibar.¹² The wealthiest Indian merchants at Zanzibar provided staggering amounts of credit.¹³ In 1849, Jairam Shivji, the customs master and head of his eponymous firm, was “the best and only certain way of obtaining a supply of cash for immediate service.”¹⁴ Shivji stood out among merchants of that time. The other merchants and traders required fifteen to twenty days to collect MT$300,¹⁵ whereas Jairam could secure MT$5,000 in a matter of hours.¹⁶ His firm used its substantial wealth to dominate Zanzibar for the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. Jairam Shivji’s firm advanced huge sums to foreign trading interests to finance their operations in Zanzibar. Jairam had three main groups of debtors: the Arab rulers of Zanzibar, American and European trading firms, and a large group of everyday people, including Indians, Arabs, and Swahilis in Zanzibar and on the mainland.

Jairam Shivji’s firm advanced large sums of money to the al-Busaidi rulers in Zanzibar. The al-Busaidi state in Oman and Zanzibar had a long history of relying on credit from Hindu Banyan commercial houses. In the eighteenth century, firms from Kutch, in western India, lent the Omani ruler Sultan bin Ahmad al-Busaidi warships in exchange for protection and favorable commercial treatment.¹⁷ As Zanzibar grew in commercial importance, however, the customs duties collected on imports and exports had high income potential. Because the al-Busaidi rulers had relatively little wealth, they sought cash up front by farming the customs to powerful, cash-rich firms like Jairam Shivji’s. This practice—functionally the same as tax farming—was a very common way to raise cash for Muslim rulers or state treasuries.¹⁸ Tax farming entailed selling the right to collect taxes over a specific time period to an individual or private firm. The person or firm who collected the taxes kept them as profit. Jairam Shivji farmed the customs both in Zanzibar (after 1819) and on the mainland (after 1837).¹⁹ The sultan had the guaranteed income, and Jairam and his firm enforced the customs collection and kept the profits.

During al-Busaidi rule, the finances of the ruler and the state were intimately connected, and the customs master was central to providing credit to the sultan and his government. When Said bin Sultan needed to raise additional funds to pacify resistance to his rule in Oman, he turned to the customs master. In 1851, Jairam Shivji gave Said a year’s advance against the customs receipts, and Said went to Muscat with MT$500,000. He later wrote to Jairam for an additional MT$50,000.²⁰ Said used these funds to raise forces to quell the rebellion and to buy the loyalty of various leaders. These debts passed on to Seyyid Said’s heirs, and they would be one source of ongoing tension between Zanzibar and Muscat after his death.

American and European merchants also depended on credit in Zanzibar to finance their trading ventures. American whalers’ early efforts at trading in Zanzibar floundered because of the poor circulation of credit. They could not secure cargoes because they had no way to advance capital to themselves. By the 1840s, however, Indian firms like that of Jairam Shivji provided capital to American and European merchants on a regular basis. These loans were unsecured, but they had generous interest rates to provide Jairam Shivji and other lenders with good returns on their investments.²¹ In 1851, an experienced American agent explained to his superior back in Massachusetts why he had decided to keep MT$25,000 of Jairam Shivji’s money on a permanent loan. First, he considered the capital an “absolute necessity” to have funds on hand, and second, he noted that borrowing it from the powerful customs master would bring certain commercial advantages in Zanzibar, including collecting on debts and finding suitable business partners.²² They believed that the customs master would have a strong interest in the firm’s success. By the 1860s and early 1870s, Jairam Shivji’s firm had advanced loans of MT$665,000 to American, British, and French companies.²³ These infusions of credit went along with commercial treaties and informal alliances between commercial houses to help build international trade in Zanzibar. The cloth and beads coming from North America, Europe, and South Asia were necessary to meet the demands of the East African market. The peddlers, traders, and commodity producers in these markets were not foreign merchants or state officials, but a diverse group of Africans, Arabs, and Indians who were part of an expanding Indian Ocean world in the 1840s.

The 1840s was a dynamic period in the economic history of Zanzibar. Seyyid Said bin Sultan signed commercial treaties with the United States (1833), Great Britain (1839), and France (1844) that resulted in each sending consuls to represent their national and trading interests at Seyyid Said’s court in Zanzibar. In this period after the Napoleonic Wars, the British and the French were engaged in strategic maneuvering in the western Indian Ocean, and they also heralded more forceful global approaches to so-called free trade, as best exemplified in the first Opium Wars (1839–1842). The letters and records that these consuls created are invaluable historical sources for Zanzibar and the western Indian Ocean, but they emphasize diplomatic and commercial relations of the powerful, and obscure the actions of the Africans, Arabs, and Indians that made up most of the population of Zanzibar.

A trove of Arabic-language documents in the Zanzibar National Archive provides important sources for the history of East Africa. These materials demonstrate how credit markets in Zanzibar connected much of the western Indian Ocean, from the interior of Oman to the interior of East Africa. These documents—preserved for more than one hundred years—reveal important new details about the Indian Ocean past. They record thousands of sales, loans, and transactions between Africans, Arabs, and Indians. These documents present multiple variations on the complex financial transactions that allowed people to buy time: they underwrote the ivory trade; and they mortgaged property in Arabia, on the east African coast, and in the interior of Africa. These sources are unparalleled in their listing of individual names, genealogies, statuses, and clan names of a wide variety of people (Africans, Indians, and Arabs; men and women; free and slave) who bought, sold, and mortgaged property in the nineteenth century. They also provide insight into the world of the judges, scribes, and clerks who created them. Finally, the individuals who created these documents did so outside of any colonial or European-influenced sphere. As noted earlier and explained in Chapter 7, their registration occurred during a time of increasing British activity, but the documents were produced in a different milieu. The writers adhered to long-standing Islamic legal forms, and they inflected them with local usage. Each of these transactions provides a snapshot of an interconnected world before European colonialism.²⁴ As a whole, these exciting new sources allow us to understand the inner workings of credit and debt, to see previously overlooked groups, and to map individuals into Indian Ocean circuits.

The dozen documents that have survived from the 1840s give a sense of the regional economy in transition, especially regarding the value of land. The material also points to a wide variety of actors. A very small number of wealthy people sold large farms—some with slaves attached—or houses. In most of the transactions, small holders sold their property to the customs master, who may or may not have been speculating on the land.

Jairam Shivji was the biggest buyer and creditor, participating in twelve of the fourteen transactions from the 1840s. While he was an important creditor to foreign merchants and to the sultan, he also transacted business with a wide variety of other people in Zanzibar. The range of people involved in transactions in the 1840s included an indigenous man from Tumbatu, freed slaves of early Omani migrants, a wife of a Swahili notable, and Omani families established in Zanzibar, including members of the sultan’s clan. Most people sold agricultural land (shamba in Swahili). Judging by the prices, indigenous Zanzibaris, Swahili elites, freed slaves, and some Omanis held small parcels of land. Those on the island of Zanzibar sold for between MT$15 and $70, while the only farm on the sister island of Pemba sold for a paltry MT$1.50!²⁵ Because this was a time of growing commercial agriculture—especially cloves—land was increasingly valuable to those who could afford the labor to work it.

For some larger holdings, the labor was included in the sale. In 1845 Jairam Shivji bought a shamba in Mwera (outside of town) from Ali bin Muhammad al-Busaidi for MT$650. This sale included the clove and coconut trees on the property and eight slaves.²⁶ Indians commonly owned African slaves, although this became contentious after the 1850s, because the British were attempting to limit the trade in slaves and to claim all Indians as British subjects. Ebji, Jairam’s younger brother, was frequently implicated in the sale of slaves. British intervention led to the forced manumission of Indian-owned slaves during and after the 1860s. Judging by Jairam’s business documents from the 1840s, other slave owners were manumitting slaves for different reasons. The twelve sales records that exist from the 1840s indicate four properties that Jairam Shivji bought from manumitted slaves. Three of the sellers had been slaves of Omani Arabs, and one was the slave of a Swahili man. As Chapter 6 elaborates, formerly enslaved people often gained property as part of the manumission process, and they either used it for cash or to finance trading ventures into the interior.

From the 1820s, Omani rule replaced or co-opted Swahili elites in Zanzibar on the East African coast, and two documents from this period help understand this process. Consider the two sales of shambas in the 1840s. One of the sellers was a member of the Swahili elite identified as Diwan Makambi (or Mwekambi) Juma bin Ahmad. Both Diwan and Makambi are honorifics here. In 1847, he sold a shamba that belonged to his wife Binti Bana (Bwana) Waziri al-Mufazii.²⁷ Her nisba, al-Mufazii, marks her as a member of a patrician Swahili family, and it suggests origins in Faza, in the Lamu archipelago. Her father might have been Bwana Waziri, a ruler of Pate, also near Lamu, in the 1820s. During local disputes, Bwana Waziri made an alliance with Seyyid Said bin Sultan, the great Omani ruler, while his enemies called on the Mazruis in Mombasa. Bwana Waziri’s alliance with Seyyid Said was part of an elaborate contest with the Mazruis that gave Seyyid Said a foothold on the coast.²⁸

Mwekambi Juma, Binti Bwana Waziri’s husband, represented her in the sale. He was born in Zanzibar, but he became the Diwan (ruler) of the coastal town of Saadani on the African mainland. He also led caravans to the interior.²⁹ When Mwekambi Juma first reached Ugogo, several hundred miles from the coast, the local residents had never seen anyone as fat as he was, and they assumed he had extraordinary rainmaking powers. He denied this and refused to make rain for them. As the story goes, if it had not been for some opportune showers that fell, he would have faced certain death. Such conflicts were not uncommon for him. Around the time he sold his wife’s farm, Juma led an expedition against the Wadoe, a group of troublesome neighbors to the residents of Saadani.³⁰ Whether the sale of his wife’s property to the Zanzibar customs master for $50 paid off a debt or helped to support a trading expedition, a military conquest, or his rule in Saadani, Mwekambi Juma’s activities were indicative of the changes in mobility and of the scale of trade that were taking place in East Africa.

A second aspect of this story also points to changes under Omani rule when newly arrived Omanis threatened the place of Swahili patricians. Bwana Heri bin Juma al-Mafazii, Mwekambi Juma’s son, was a trader and the Diwan of Saadani for at least twenty years. He maintained strong connections in the interior, and he was the only non-Omani governor on the Swahili coast during a late 1880s uprising that challenged the ruling Arabs and their German allies. This later event marked the onset of formal European colonialism in East Africa. Historian Jonathon Glassman has argued that Bwana Heri’s longevity and political savvy were the result of his “ability to straddle two worlds, the world of the hinterland, still dominated by values associated with village agriculture, and the world of the coastal towns, where new values were rapidly being forged in the context of expanding international commerce.”³¹ The interactions between these two worlds accelerated in the second half of the nineteenth century, but these processes had started more than a generation before. Bwana Heri’s parents had used connections to the Indian Ocean world through Zanzibar to convert property into cash.

The new presence of Omani rulers displaced indigenous people in Zanzibar. The second notable sale from the 1840s includes someone from among the WaTumbatu, one of Zanzibar’s indigenous groups. The identification on the sale of his shamba to Jairam Shivji in 1845 demonstrates both his rootedness and his mobility. His name was written Maqame bin Māsibu bin A‘ami of Tumbatu and his title was Serang.³² Tumbatu, a prominent island on Zanzibar’s northwest side, was one of the two most important trading towns and ports on Zanzibar before 1500.³³ When Seyyid Said and his followers moved to Zanzibar, their demand for land put pressure on the indigenous inhabitants.

The WaTumbatu and the WaHadimu were the two groups who lived in Zanzibar and its outlying islets before the arrival of the Arabs. Through the middle of the nineteenth century, they had their own ruler, known as the Mwinyi Mkuu. When Burton visited Tumbatu in 1858, he said the people of Tumbatu were of a new race, and he was “now beyond Semítico-Abyssinian centres.” He noted that the Omani Arabs called the people of Tumbatu “Makhádim—helots or serviles,” and the name Hadimu shares a root with the Arabic word for servant.³⁴ In 1841, Zanzibar’s British agent explained to his superiors in Bombay about the Omani Arab view of the indigenous inhabitants: “The whole of the Native inhabitants of the Islands of Zanzibar and Pemba are considered by the subjects of His Highness as slaves.” When new arrivals were given land by the sultan or bought land from other Arabs, the land’s inhabitants became slaves who were expected to work for the landowner and to provide their own subsistence. These slaves were expected to expand the clove production of the island.³⁵ Although Hamerton’s account is likely exaggerated, the inhabitants of Zanzibar definitely faced difficulties as the island’s property regime changed. As historian C. S. Nicholls notes, the effects of the Arab arrival on the Hadimu and Tumbatu are difficult to measure. Some people may have altered their ways of life; some may have changed where they lived. One outcome was clear: by the second half of the nineteenth century, many Hadimu no longer lived in the parts of Zanzibar that had the best soil. Some had moved east and south.³⁶

The example of Serang Maqame, however, suggests a different kind of mobility. Serangs have been alternately described as crew leaders, indigenous boatswains, petty officers, and “native bosses” in the Indian Ocean. The root of the word is from Malay. Serangs oversaw the maritime workers known as lascars, and serangs were vital to the functioning of the ship and the organization of the multiethnic crews of the Indian Ocean.³⁷ The men of Tumbatu had reputations as skillful pilots and good seamen.³⁸ With the advent of steamships, the work crews from the age of sail were incorporated into a highly regulated labor regime, controlled by a set of British laws called the Asiatic Articles. By 1855, as historian Janet Ewald notes, British merchant ships employed as many as twelve thousand lascars under the Asiatic Articles, 60 percent of whom were from India.³⁹ Serangs oversaw all these men and kept a certain kind of rough order onboard. As a serang, Maqame would have been a skilled negotiator, an experienced traveler, and a comfortable visitor in many ports. Because of this, Maqame represents an unusual category—the indigenous cosmopolitan—and his land sale in 1845 implies a strategy of mobility in the face of increasing land pressure on the WaTumbatu and WaHadimu. His strategy may have been possible because of his relatively high status in the maritime world of the western Indian Ocean.

Sales of property and credit derived from mortgage-like arrangements were crucial to accessing mobility across the western Indian Ocean. Two more of Jairam Shivji’s financial deals in the 1840s illustrate this point. Both arrangements involve Ali Muhammad al-Busaidi, the man who sold the shamba with the slaves attached. In July 1845, a month after selling his shamba, Ali bin Muhammad al-Busaidi sold his house in Zanzibar and the adjoining property to Jairam Shivji for $400. On the day he sold his house, he agreed to rent it from Jairam Shivji for $40 per year. Ali bin Muhammad’s actions, written in two documents, demonstrate a business logic that challenged Islam ideals. They also provide an important window into Zanzibar society at that time.

The deed of transaction makes clear that this mud and mortar house and the adjacent land were surrounded by property owned by prominent individuals. Jairam Shivji already owned the house to the west. To the north was the house of Humud bin Sayf bin Msellem, a young clove grower who would later become a close advisor to two sultans. The Banyan Hari, presumably a merchant, owned the property to the east. In the south was empty land that belonged to Sulayman bin Hamed al-Busaidi, the long-standing governor of Zanzibar, a large landowner, and one of the most powerful men in East Africa.⁴⁰ Other bordering properties belonged to the Indian Hima, whose son would become a prominent landlord.

Why would someone sell a house and rent it back? Such a maneuver allowed the property owner to receive cash (in this case, $400) and then pay a portion of this over time. In Ali bin Muhammad’s arrangement, he would have paid the value of the house in rent after ten years. Arrangements like this allowed those with fixed property to capitalize their assets. By completing two separate transactions with two different contracts, one also avoided the Islamic prohibitions on interest. From Jairam Shivji’s perspective, the rent served as interest on the $400 he had granted. This kind of double contract would become an increasingly common method of generating credit in East Africa, especially when paired with a redeemable sale, in which the original owner could buy back the property after a fixed period of time. These deals financed the ivory and clove trades for people of varying social classes. An understanding of these debt arrangements and the mobility they engendered can be achieved through close study of Arabic business documents in Zanzibar.

AN ARCHIVE OF TRANSACTIONS

Business deeds fill several volumes within the Zanzibar archives, and they detail more than two thousand transactions that span the nineteenth century. The languages of these documents reflect underlying commercial forms and Indian processes: the vast majority of them were written in Arabic; a substantial number are in Gujarati; and a much smaller number are in English. Although some deeds describe partnerships or the settling of estates, most directly relate to the flow of cash and credit. These documents clarify the terms of sales and the conditions under which creditors supplied money. They describe the security or collateral involved (if any) and specify the terms and time frame of repayment. The length of these documents varies from a few lines of text to several pages of subclauses. The collection, as a whole, offers a portrait of the interconnected world of the Indian Ocean. While most of the documents were written in Zanzibar, they implicate property and people who traveled far across the ocean and into the interiors of Africa and Arabia.

“Said bin ‘Umar bin Muhammad bin Salim al-Kharūsi acknowledged that he owes Wala bin Banji al-Hindi one hundred frasila and twenty frasila pure ivory in the measurement [weight] of Zanzibar frasila.” ⁴¹ So begins a typical contract written in Arabic, following the precepts of Islamic legal practice. Said bin ‘Umar, the borrower, stated his obligation to deliver ivory to Wala Banji, the creditor (and one of the agents of the customs master), within a period of one year, from the date of the contract, 10 Dhu al-Qa’da 1293 (November 26, 1876). This type of document is among the most common written Islamic agreements, an acknowledgment or iqrār, and this type is well-represented in the Zanzibar collection. These documents acknowledge a debt or obligation, and they take their name from the Arabic verb root q-r-r in its fourth form ().⁴² The verb denotes acknowledgment, admission, or concession, and the documents take the form of declarations. These declarations are generally quite flexible and applicable in many areas of Islamic law. S. D. Goitein, a scholar whose masterful work includes translations of Arabic documents discovered in the Cairo Geniza that date from the tenth century, called iqrār “a legal instrument of a rather technical and abstract character.” ⁴³ Indeed, because of the documents’ wide usage, scholars have suggested that the translation of iqrār as “an acknowledgment” is too narrow, and these declarations should be considered as the recognition of rights, such as the right of patrimony or the right to collect a debt. Historically, many iqrār dealt with family rights, acknowledging relationships and dealing with inheritance,⁴⁴ but most samples in the Zanzibar archive are related to financial relationships.⁴⁵ In his large sample from Cairo, Goitein noted that iqrār were also the most frequently represented mechanisms for credit and debt.⁴⁶

One of the most striking aspects of Islamic contract law, however, is that written agreements are not required for any transaction. Theoretically, a written contract is only valid after the oral testimonies of qualified witnesses verify its content.⁴⁷ Thus, written agreements in Islamic commercial life have had an uneasy history. The Quran explicitly instructs people to write down their agreements and to make contracts: “Believers, when you contract a debt for a fixed period, put it in writing. Let a scribe write it down for you with fairness; no scribe should refuse to write as God has taught him. . . . ​ So do not fail to put your debts in writing, be they small or big, together with the date of payment. This is more than just in the sight of God; it ensures accuracy in testifying and is the best way to remove all doubt.” ⁴⁸ This injunction reflects the transactional relations and the commercial world of seventh-century Arabia, and it lays the groundwork for prohibiting two Islamic commercial practices: usury (riba in Arabic, which means an increase with an implication of illegal means, such as bribery, profiteering, and fraud) and speculation (gharar in Arabic, which means risk, hazard, or jeopardy).⁴⁹

The Quranic injunction to write contracts notwithstanding, early Islamic legal theory emphasized the primacy of witnesses’ oral testimony and downplayed the role of documentary evidence.⁵⁰ Oral testimony and the qualification of witnesses have been central to Islamic legal epistemology. Despite the tension between oral testimony and written documents, however, paper contracts have been fundamental to Islamic commercial practice from the earliest days.⁵¹ These contracts rested—much like oral agreements—on the testimony of witnesses. Thus, while written documents shadowed testimonial evidence, scholars and practitioners linked these by writing formularies and templates that only had to be witnessed to be valid.⁵²

Signing formulae arose so that witnesses could state their acknowledgment of the agreement. And written documents increasingly followed boilerplate texts to avoid standard objections and pitfalls, while still remaining legally sound. Getting the details correct in such documents would guarantee that transactions were legal and rights were respected. In the case of property sales, for instance, deeds were required to list the owners of all adjoining properties, because these people had a right to preempt the sale under Islamic law. These forms and contracts were easily replicated with the formularies that allowed people to create contracts that met Islamic legal standards.⁵³ Parties to these agreements wanted them to be legally impeccable, and formularies were especially important to non-Muslims who wanted to ensure the documents’ validity in Muslim courts.

Iqrār documents acknowledge rights (as in the right to collect a debt). Legal scholars consider the people making these declarations to be doing so unilaterally. Hence, these acknowledgments, if properly witnessed, are irrevocable. Any person making an iqrār must have reached the age of puberty and be of sound mind. Slaves could theoretically make iqrār, although there were some exceptions to this. If the declaration had been properly witnessed, the person who made it could not repudiate it, and only in a few cases did grounds exist to invalidate them. An iqrār written under duress was considered invalid, for instance, and each school of Islamic law has its own strict rules to determine the acceptability of iqrār created when the declarer is near death. Recognition of rights granted in an iqrār can be extinguished if the beneficiary of the acknowledgment refuses to accept the recognition.

The generic formula for iqrār includes the name of the person acknowledging the obligation, the beneficiary, the object of acknowledgment, the terms of payment, the date, and the signature of witnesses.⁵⁴ The formula demands a degree of specificity to ensure the validity of the document and to avoid ambiguity. After the initial verb expressing intention, a clause identifies the declarant (al-muqirr, the acknowledger) and the person to whom the rights are given (al-muqarr lahu; the “acknowledged,” or the one to whom something is acknowledged).

In the example above, Said bin ‘Umar bin Muhammad bin Salim al-Kharūsi acknowledged his debt to Wala bin Banji al-Hindi. Manuals of instruction make clear that the names of both the declarant and the person “acknowledged” should include their personal names (Said and Wala, respectively); the names of their fathers (‘Umar and Banji); the names of their grandfathers (Muhammad, for the former); and the nisba (clan name or descriptive adjective: al-Kharūsi—of the Kharūsi clan—and al-Banyani—the Banyan) or laqab (nickname), which are further means of identifying individuals. This degree of specificity makes the documents in Zanzibar especially useful, because connections among members of the same families and clans can be made.

To return to the exchange in the Introduction, Juma Merikani was identified by his whole name, Juma bin Salim bin Mubarak bin Abdullah, which traces not only his patrilineal genealogy to the name of his great-grandfather, but also includes his clan name, al-Bakri, and a nisba of origin, al-Nizwi. This information linked him to the interior Omani town of Nizwa, the site of the drought in the 1840s that had compelled many families to emigrate. Ladha Damji, the person to whom he owed the ivory, was identified in the document as Ladha bin Damha al-Baniani.⁵⁵ After the naming clauses, the object of the acknowledgment (al-muqarr bihi) must be detailed in full. Because of the flexible nature of the iqrār, the object might be the price of something for sale, the sum of a debt, or the weight of ivory. For example, the document of Said bin ‘Umar al-Kharusi states the good (ivory); its quality (pure); its unit of measure (frasila, a unit of thirty-five pounds); the number of that unit (one hundred twenty); and the basis for the unit of measure (the Zanzibar frasila).

The document should include description of how payment is to be made. In the case of debt, the debtor should clarify his ability to pay in the future. Liabilities for someone pledging or guaranteeing on the behalf of the acknowledger should also be stated. The formula for marking calendar dates follows, and the witnessing statements come at the end. The witnesses are the key to making the document legitimate, and the witnessing formula should be free of ambiguity. The date of the testimony is included, and the witnesses must specify whether or not they wrote it in their own hand. Witnesses attest to the declarations and their names are included in the document. In our example, the attestation was given by the author of the document (Humūd bin Said bin Salim al-Fera’i) and it was endorsed by the sultan (Barghash bin Said al-Busaidi).

The Zanzibar archives contain hundreds of writings (waraqa), and these illustrate microeconomic transactions based on relationships, kinship, and small-scale commerce. These small interactions collectively permit us to assess the macroeconomic trade system that linked Oman and the Indian Ocean to Zanzibar and the East African interior. In East Africa, these deeds provided people in the 1840s with new ways to conduct financial relations over long distances.

MORTGAGES AND PLEDGES OF PROPERTY

More sophisticated iqrār functioned as mortgages, providing credit against fixed assets. Two types of credit-generating transactions are found in the Zanzibar archives. The first was a rahnan maqbudan (), or a mortgage in which the person providing the credit takes full possession of the house or property.⁵⁶ More frequent, however, was a conditional or redeemable sale called bay‘ al-khiyar () or sometimes bay‘ al-iqāla (). British officials referred to these as “time sales,” because this transaction permitted the seller to buy back the property at the same price within a fixed period of time. In some cases, the seller also rented the property from the person to whom he had mortgaged it.⁵⁷ If one iqrār contained the sale, the purchaser might create a second iqrār to lease the mortgaged property to the original owner.

For example, Muhammad bin Rashid bin Ahmed al-Riyami sold his farm in Pemba through a time sale for one year to Gopal Takarsi for MT$700. During that same year, he agreed to rent the farm from Gopal for MT$175 per annum.⁵⁸ Muhammad bin Rashid was permitted to buy back the farm for the original price of MT$700. At the end of the year, he would also have to pay the rent, meaning he would have paid a total of MT$875 to redeem his property. Through arrangements like this, many Arabs in Zanzibar and elsewhere forfeited property.

Scholars have viewed this rent as a form of interest. Consequently, these sales have been condemned by legal purists for their “very questionable orthodoxy,” given the Islamic prohibitions of interest and speculation.⁵⁹ Others accepted the practices out of necessity. Islamic judges (qadis) in Zanzibar ruled that these kinds of sales were legal “to enable persons needing money to obtain credit without incurring the possible guilt of dealing in transactions by way of interest.”⁶⁰ Thus, these methods of conducting business allowed observant Muslims to stay (narrowly) within Islamic prohibition on interest and speculation.

Time sales gave anyone who had property the ability to raise cash. Although the creditors resided in Zanzibar and operated their businesses from there, they extended credit to property owners in many directions. In Oman, where many Arabs relied on date farming and attenuated irrigation channels for their income, this form of mortgage was already established. Arabs in Oman sold houses and date trees to secure loans to cover the lean period between harvests.⁶¹ This practice moved to Zanzibar with the Arab migrants who followed Said bin Sultan when he shifted the capital in 1832. Arabs who retained property in Oman were able to use it to capitalize their ventures in Zanzibar.

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While Jairam Shivji was the apex creditor, the relationships of debtors and creditors crossed social and ethnic boundaries, forming the basis of Zanzibar’s cosmopolitan culture. Arabic business contracts provide new insights into the temporal and spatial aspects of debt and credit and the tension between obligation and opportunity. Webs of indebtedness linked Zanzibar, the African interior, and Oman, creating the common commercial culture of the western Indian Ocean. Historian Philip Curtin has argued that the development of common commercial culture reduced the need for brokers to serve as intermediaries between groups.⁶² The mechanisms of credit and debt (especially Arabic-language contracts) allowed individuals to conduct business across racial, ethnic, and confessional lines and across the long distances of the Indian Ocean and its continental interiors. By the 1840s, Zanzibar was emerging as an important financial center, a place where deals were struck, credit advanced, and repayment, eventually, was due. These contracts derive from a long history of Islamic legal practice and provide an intimate view of the business and societal connections emanating from Zanzibar. They also provide unusual insight into the position of freed slaves and the microeconomics of the ivory trade.