"Ethnic" Status and the Destruction of the Two-Section System

This last problem in status membership involves a category of people who are understood as rejecting the group member status in favor of being categorized in the Zanzibar Arab group, with the prestige and material advantages under British rule such membership entailed. The Zanzibar Arab status has implications for the social structure of the community as a whole in that it brought together the individuals who claimed it in a unity that crossed the lines bounding the two Swahili sections. Resistance to their being categorized in it united against them, again across the boundaries, members of both the sections. These status realignments affected the internal unity of the sections in such clearly manifested ways as the abandonment of the weekly prayers as part of the resistance to the Zanzibar Arab status for community members. This diminished unity lessened the ability of the sections to establish and affirm the community's vitality in the manner that had long been characteristic, namely, through competitive activity.

The division between the sections had been, in classical Gluckmanian dynamics (Gluckman, Mitchells, and Barnes 1963:1–2),^[8] a key base of social unity for the Swahili. It was in many respects destroyed by the formation of

new unities across what once had been section lines. These new "ethnic" unities produced no wide-scope solidarity because they benefited the Swahili Arabs as individuals (through better rations, jobs, and taxes), not as a group, and united their opponents from the two sections only in opposition to them. Attempts to unite the two new groupings into political action groups went on for a number of years (Kindy 1972:26–45) but disappeared after independence. They survive only as vague memories in the minds of middle-aged and elderly community members.

Another force in diminishing community vitality is the other status ambiguity mentioned above. The descendants of slaves have been closely associated with the group for generations, and not a few are widely viewed by group members as worthy embodiments of the values held by group members. However, a key identifying understanding for those with group member status is having only waungwana ("noble") forebears. To accept those whose genealogies are known to include ancestors who were not noble would be to alter the group member status radically.

An indication of how seriously this was (and is) taken is that a main reason for rejecting the proposal of marriage from a man's family, one that rated as potently as the fear that the man was a drinker of alcohol or a passive homosexual, was suspicion of his family having wazalia (nonnoble) forebears. Even if the woman's family accepted a proposal, there was the possibility that, as recently as the 1950s, the wedding ritual would be interrupted by the wamiji, the elderly women guardians of ritual and propriety who were then still active, if they believed there were genealogical irregularities.

Given the common understanding that calling attention to the fact that there were slaves in the community was at best tactless and quite possibly dangerous, holding public rituals emphasizing these differences took on a new significance. This is just the emphasis of the tware and diriji dances through their excluding all but nobles and making a central point of demonstrating the essence of "nobility" (uungwana ).

According to several community members, this is why the dances stopped. Their analysis appears to be correct. The dances were an important symbol of the community's vitality based not only in the central values concerning nobility (see chap. 7) but also in the opposition of united sections competing for commonly understood and equally prized honor. These dances, in their movements and costumes as well as through the requirements for their participants, expressed and symbolized what is surely the most commonly cited (by community members) and, probably, the most crucial values in the group, those centering around nobility. Moreover, this expression occurred with the members of each section united with his fellows in competition with the other united section in expressing their shared ideal understandings and gaining prestige in terms of them. Informants say the dances were the most "beautiful" events in public life; they seem nearly pure enactments of the com-

munity's broadest social structure, including understandings about who the occupants of its component statuses were and how they should act.

The immediate basis for the end of the performances was the exclusion of the occupants of the slave descendant status and the government resentment this was understood to incur. That I have seen few indications that this resentment is actually likely and would be an active force if it were is relatively unimportant. That it was taken so is what matters.

Nor is the end of the men's dances the only change affecting community structure. If the Swahili Arab status is more salient than the status of Nine Tribes or of Three Tribes members, the oppositional basis of the community's coherence is changed and lessened. The community continues as an interconnected structure of statuses that actually guides their members' behavior. But the scope of the expectations in the relevant statuses has been decreased, their salience has been lessened in many situations, and the identifiers have been weakened. In fact, understandings about membership in the community are much as they long were, but the symbolizing of that membership is muted and privatized and this, like the change in sectional opposition, has surely affected the nature of community life, which continues but is different.