“The Ignorant Do Not Belong to Any Particular Sect”: Legal Practice and Social Identities in Colonial Zanzibar

Abstract

Omani and British reforms of Zanzibar’s judiciary date back to the 1820s, when the abolition of the slave trade justified Western control of the sultanate’s political economy. The sultan enacted the abolition of slavery as a legal status in 1897, seven years after Zanzibar had become a British protectorate. Through the lens of a 1948 inheritance case, I analyze how colonial judicial reforms shaped the negotiation of grievances and the judges’ interpretations of social equality. As members of the colonial elite, both Muslim and British judges were embedded in a racialized social hierarchy. Their reasoning not only exposes the continuous marginalization of former slaves but also attests to ex-slaves’ ability to assert material power. While a Muslim and a British judge used different hermeneutics, both validated the marriage of a Hadrami water carrier to a former slave, thereby affirming his entitlement to a share of his wife’s estate.