Nathanial Mathew, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at SUNY- Binghamton
Against a backdrop of massive structural shifts in the economic balance of power within the Indian Ocean basin, Zanzibar Was a Country explores the crossed history of struggles for citizenship in Oman and Zanzibar after the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution, including the failure of electoral democracy in Zanzibar, long distance Zanzibar nationalism, the negotiation of the politics of citizenship in diaspora and in the ethnic homeland of Oman, and the return of the exiles to Zanzibar two and a half decades after the revolution.