Abstract
This chapter tackles the materiality of households, largely focused on the plantation of Mgoli, Pemba, and drawing extensively on excavation data. It is argued that plantation owners’ homes were sometimes used to materialize an Omani identity. This chapter also explores the nature of power on plantations. Drawing on features such as the clove-drying floor and baraza at Mgoli, the paternalistic structure of power on Zanzibari plantations is explored, as is the way that a small number of elite women were able to take charge within this structure. By contrast, the position of women held as concubines is also discussed through an analysis of how such women may have figured into the architectural structures of plantation households.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to note that this historical narrative mentioned multiple stone buildings (“stone houses,” in the plural), further supporting later discussion that the plantation household at Mgoli (and others like it) was formed of multiple dwelling structures, linked together into a single household unit.
- 2.
The most accurate form of dating came from glass artifacts, as during the nineteenth-century glass artifacts were subject to relatively frequent shifts in manufacturing technology (Miller and Sullivan 1984). Glass finds in Trench C contexts, associated with the chokaa house discussed later in this chapter, had dates of manufacture associated with technologies expected from the early nineteenth-century through to the 1880s or later, making this the earliest dated deposit on the site date from ca. 1850 to 1890. Material from a trash pit deposit in Trench D yielded glass artifacts with later dates of manufacture. None of these showed evidence of having been fully machine produced, as hand-tooled finishes were visible on all the bottle finishes recovered. Material from Trench D dated from ca. 1890. Despite the increasing mechanization of glass production, bottles remained expensive objects and were regularly reused even in the U.S. into the twentieth century (Busch 1987, p. 68).
- 3.
The majority of sites recorded on the survey fell into a vague category of “old village sites.” These seemed to date from periods post-dating the abolition of slavery, and were likely communities in which freed slaves and their descendants lived alongside immigrant clove plantation laborers. Many of these had been abandoned slowly as villages had located closer to paved roads. Sometimes, these old village sites were adjacent to contemporary settlement, seeming to show some kind of drift through time in settlement location. Thirty-eight of these sites were recorded in total, forming 59 percent of the sites recorded on the survey. Of these, only nine had stone remains present, and 29 showed no sign of any former stone building elements. This suggested that roughly 75 percent of village sites were built of wattle-and-daub architecture from the late nineteenth-century on into the twentieth.
- 4.
Although stone had clearly been recycled from old buildings at some sites, it was evident when a stone structure had once been present. Even if stone houses were in a deeply ruinous state, coral rag rubble was always visible, often associated with a more sizeable mound of earth. The purposive nature of the survey also allowed us to draw on local memory in relation to plantation sites. For example, the former “plantation palace” of Rashid bin Amor in the Mahonda region had largely been robbed out for stone. However, a mound with coral rag rubble eroding from the side was still visible.
- 5.
Finding concrete evidence for wattle-and-daub buildings through surface survey is a near impossible task. Excavations of nineteenth-century sites have shown the clear potential for recovering evidence of this type of building (Marshall 2009, 2011). But survey in other areas similarly inferred wattle-and-daub buildings through the absence of other building materials when surface remains of ceramics indicated occupation at a site (Wynne-Jones 2005a, b). The alternative form of buildings would be those constructed of thatch. However, as I discussed above, these were generally associated with the lowest social strata on nineteenth-century Zanzibar. Thus, when we have oral historical evidence for plantation owners, coupled with a lack of surface evidence for a stone building, we can infer that there would have been wattle-and-daub construction present. These buildings would have included some variance along the social scale of Zanzibari architecture posited by Myers (1997).
- 6.
Omani immigrants to Zanzibar were also largely coming from Muscat and not from Sohar.
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Croucher, S. (2015). Plantation Households. In: Capitalism and Cloves. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8471-5_5
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