by Martin Walsh

A ZANZIBAR ARCHITECT’S UNSUNG LEGACY: THE STORY OF AJIT SINGH HOOGAN. ARCHITECT, ARTIST, PHILANTHROPIST. Issak Esmail Issak. DL2A – Buluu Publishing, Paris, 2023. 66 pp. (paperback). ISBN: 978144750255. £8.51 (from https:// www.lulu.com/)

This thin book is actually two books: the first 37 pages on Ajit Singh Hoogan are followed by “Part Two: Sportsman and MP: The Story of Parmukh Singh Hoogan”, the “unsung” architect’s only living grandson. Despite their brevity, both segments pack a punch. In fact, both are in essence recordings for posterity of unsung legacies – that of the architect, and that of his politician-grandson. The book is richly illustrated with more than 40 photographs – most from the family archives.

The named author, Issak Esmail Issak, is a Zanzibari who holds Norwegian citizenship. As a fiction writer, dramatist and filmmaker, Issak came to this project with creative storytelling skills. He built the book from two interviews with Parmukh Singh Hoogan, the first focused on his grandfather’s life and works, and the second on his own life and career. While Issak edited the first interview a fair amount, he left the second one more or less as is. While confusing at first, Issak’s decision to write up the interviews and present them in the first-person ultimately makes sense: Parmukh Singh is the actual author of both, and Issak the interviewer and editor.

Ajit Singh Hoogan has arguably the most significant legacy of any architect in Zanzibar, at least in terms of government buildings, as the first trained local architect and the government’s de facto architect from 1941-65 during major bursts of construction. The city’s first airport, its largest hospital, largest high school, national archives, and many smaller colonial-era buildings were built following his designs. Although he stayed on in Zanzibar for two years after the January 1964 revolution, only a few revolutionary-era projects bear his design signature.

What makes Part One especially interesting is Parmukh Singh’s story of his grandfather’s migration to Zanzibar and the almost-coincidental path that brought him to architecture. Parmukh clearly came to this first interview having researched the scholarly work on his grandfather, particularly from Sarah Longair and myself. However, he not only adds his own personal perspective; he deepens the analysis by adding other aspects of Ajit’s importance for Zanzibar and for Malawi (where he served as Senior Architect from 1966 to 1978), including his role as an artist and curator of art. The account attends to what is arguably his most significant achievement as an architect, design-wise: Pritam Nivas, the family home.

While there are criticisms one might level at Ajit Singh – for having loyally served the colonial regime and then the arch-conservative nationalist regime of Hastings Kamuzu Banda in Malawi – Part One closes with two thoughtful insights that provide a measured sort of reply. The first comes as Parmukh/Issak sums up the context for Ajit Singh’s career (p. 29): “Ajit Singh had seemed to belong everywhere…. Accepting of all, and easily carving out a non-partisan space between parties, factions and identities, he was admired by many. But few of those in positions of power and maneuvering capacity were forthcoming to facilitate an alternative when those prudent spaces of balancing acts were threatened.” The second (p. 31) illustrates how the living room of Pritam Nivas “sums up the man and his world… perhaps a simpler and more elegant and humane world than we inhabit today.” Ajit Singh was a complicated man and he left a complicated legacy; hopefully, after this book and Parmukh’s tireless work to bring attention to it, that legacy will no longer be unsung.

Part Two continues the story of this legacy in a quite different way, by telling the life story of his last surviving grandchild. Parmukh Singh’s autobiography is, like the man, humble and yet sharply direct. It begins when his otherwise “happy childhood” (p. 42) was interrupted by the Revolution. Parmukh has one of the most balanced and reflective perspectives that I have yet come across on the Revolution and its legacies. While not shying away from the brutality and violence of the early revolutionary era or the problematic policies of the revolutionary government in more recent times, Parmukh Singh was, after all, also a Member of Parliament from 2000-2010 within the ruling party, Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), literally the Party of the Revolution. He tells the story of his growth into a CCM political career after his 1982 return to Zanzibar subtly, and through sports, especially through his leadership in Kikwajuni Sports Club (KSC). Although Parmukh Singh was more of a classic “backbencher” in Parliament, his insights on his experiences in Dodoma and elsewhere (such as while part of Tanzania’s delegation to the 2001 UN Conference Against Racism in Durban/eThekwini) provide for lively reading. One feels like one has been allowed in to the everyday world of MPs in Part Two.

While the whole book is a quick read, both parts linger with the reader. Issak has facilitated the emergence in print of an important voice and noted raconteur of Zanzibar, Parmukh Singh Hoogan, while also bringing to light the important legacies of his grandfather, Ajit Singh Hoogan.
Garth Myers

Garth Myers is the P.E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT USA, where he also directs the Center for Urban and Global Studies. He is the author of six books and over 80 book chapters and articles, as well as co-editor of two volumes of scholarship, the vast majority of which concerns African urban development, with a special emphasis on Tanzania.

FASHIONING INLAND COMMUNITIES: TRADE AND POPULAR CULTURE IN CENTRAL EAST AFRICA. Yaari Felber-Seligman. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2025. xxii + 308 pp. ISBN 9780299350406 (hardback) US$89.95. ISBN 9780299350437 (eBook/pdf) US$109.95. ISBN 9780299350482 (eBook/ epub) US$109.95.

This book is a welcome addition to the literature on the history of the region that it quixotically designates as “Central East Africa”: principally southern Tanzania and nearby parts of northern Mozambique and eastern Malawi, where Makonde, Yao, and other Ruvuma languages are spoken. It builds on field research undertaken in 2010–11, the resulting doctoral dissertation (Encircling Value: Inland Trade in the Precolonial East African-Indian Ocean World, ca. 1st-17th Centuries, Northwestern University, 2014), and subsequent papers, some of which appeared under the author’s former name, Andrea Felber Seligman.

The central thesis of Fashioning Inland Communities is that fashion, in the broadest sense, has played an important role in the evolution of communities and patterns of local and regional trade since the emergence of the ancestral Ruvuma speech community in the first half of the first millennium CE. Following an introduction that sets the historical and linguistic scene, Felber-Seligman develops this argument through four substantive chapters linked by three chronological interludes — “Foundation”, “Expansion”, and “Turbulence”. The long titles of the chapters will give readers a flavour of their contents: “Popular Aesthetics: Early Fashioning of Trade and Community ca. Sixth–Fourteenth Centuries”, “As Good as Copper: New Trade, Popular Fashion, and Regional Culture, Fourteenth–Seventeenth Centuries”, “Resource Entrepreneurs: Everyday Trading and Engaging New Networks, Fourteenth– Seventeenth Centuries”, and “Refashioning Affinities: Negotiating Materiality, Hierarchy, and Transregional Style, Mid–Nineteenth to Mid–Twentieth Centuries”. It’s not entirely clear, to me at least, why the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century are missing from this scheme.

Felber-Seligman’s sources are wonderfully varied, but at the core of the author’s method is an approach to historical reconstruction that draws on the linguistics-light and inference-heavy version of “Words and Things” (Wörter und Sachen) that was popularised by the late Christopher Ehret and continues to be propagated by his students. A lexical appendix lists the 32 reconstructed word roots around which the author’s speculative history has been woven. It’s an eclectic list of terms, drawn from a wide variety of semantic domains, including agriculture and other economic activities. Only some of the evidence that might justify Felber-Seligman’s lexical reconstructions and allow others to assess them is presented. It’s particularly regrettable that the table of Rufiji-Ruvuma phonological correspondences that appeared in Felber-Seligman’s PhD did not make it into this volume, all the more so because the 2014 dissertation is behind a paywall. I can imagine why an uncomprehending book editor might want to omit this kind of thing, but it’s essential for proper analysis and evaluation.

Even so, it’s immediately apparent that some of the author’s reconstructions and inferences are questionable. Take, for example, the reconstructed Ruvuma root *-kólò, which is glossed as “matriclan (also female domestic animal)”. The Bantu etymology of this as a term for kin and groups of kin is well established, though as an anthropologist I would like to see a lot more evidence for its historical identification with particular kinds of corporate grouping, matriclans included. Contemporary cognates in the wider region refer to a variety of kin-group structures, and these can morph over time much more easily than many non-anthropologists realise. Moreover, Felber-Seligman is mistaken in claiming that Proto-Ruvuma speakers extended its meaning to include “small female livestock”. As Ehret himself recognised, the livestock term has a very different source from the inherited Bantu word for a group of kin: the roots may look the same, but they’re actually non-cognates. The historical scenario imagined by Felber-Seligman to explain this supposed semantic development has no basis in fact (“By renaming female livestock as *-kólò, the same term that described a matrilineal clan, female elders affirmed their control over domestic livestock”, p. 31). The history of gender relations deserves serious attention, but speculative historical narratives of this kind are not uncommon in parts of the Ehretian tradition.

Another zoonym that has led Felber-Seligman astray is the generic term for honeyguides, Indicator spp. The root of this is reconstructed as *-ségú, and, recognising that there are many cognates of this in Southern Bantu, the author assumes that it has been borrowed from that direction:

“When early speakers of Yao and Makonde adopted the word *-ségú, probably by the mid-second millennium, they indicated that they appreciated the advantages of these useful birds. This term appeared to be a loan assimilation by Makonde and Yao from Chewa and Nyanja. It probably reached Ruvuma communities through their trade networks with early Nyanja speakers who described these birds as nsadzu. Their knowledge of honeyguides circulated among networks they, in turn, had with communities located farther south, including speakers of Shona, Sotho, and Ndebele, whose terms they adapted. Along interior networks that brought copper wire and other goods to the Lake Nyasa region also came exchanges of resource technology, including how to partner with honeyguide birds. Over time, certain Ruvuma adapted this loan word to their own pronunciation patterns. They likewise innovated wax and honey prospects to link this resource to coastal trade centers.” (p. 110)

This is an attractive hypothesis, which Felber-Seligman combines with reference to the always-fascinating science of honeyguide-human mutualism, before going on to discuss the regional and international beeswax trade.

Unfortunately, this scenario is equally implausible, and there’s no evidence at all that honeyguides “were unknown to ancestral communities” of Ruvuma speakers before they migrated into the lowlands of (what is now) southern Tanzania as Felber-Seligman asserts. Quite the contrary: cognate terms have been recorded across a wide swathe of East Africa between the northern end of Lake Nyasa and the Tana River in the northeast. Perhaps originally borrowed from a non-Bantu language, Felber-Seligman’s *-ségú was clearly an inherited term in Ruvuma, and in all likelihood speakers knew about the guiding behaviour of honeyguides all along. All of the East African cognates have the same inherited shape, with /g/ or demonstrable /g/-loss. The geographical distribution of the cognates makes a southern origin improbable, since closely related forms occur across Tanzania. It’s difficult to derive any of them from “Nyanja” (= Chewa) nsadzu and other /g/-less forms to the south, and the author should have taken this into account.

It’s a shame that lexical reconstruction should be the weakest part of Fashioning Inland Communities. Again and again, Felber-Seligman fails to spot evidence from Eastern Bantu languages to the north of the Ruvuma group — in the case of the honeyguide name, he even misses cognate terms from neighbouring Rufiji and nearby Kilombero languages. It’s easy, of course, to miss data in languages that you’re not familiar with, especially if you don’t trawl the dictionaries and other sources, but rely on better-known compilations, as the author seems to have done. Ironically, in this instance, Nurse and Hinnebusch also got their “doubtful” reconstruction of the honeyguide’s name wrong in their classic study of Swahili and Sabaki (1993), one of the Eastern Bantu sources that Felber-Seligman does consult.

Making mistakes is, of course, part and parcel of any etymological endeavour, and Fashioning Inland Communities shouldn’t be judged solely on these grounds. Yaari Felber-Seligman has done important research with Ruvuma language speakers, and drawn together an impressive amount of evidence from different disciplines and sources, including archaeology, history, and comparative ethnography. They have skilfully woven all this material together into a series of compelling narratives in support of their main thesis. I look forward to revisiting these narratives, and will surely return to them many times, and not just to pick them apart or merely raid them for information. I agree wholeheartedly with the author’s observation that “Over the centuries of Ruvuma history, popular fashion provides a rich window into historic Ruvuma engagement with trade, community, and aesthetics” (p. 165). And, as Felber-Seligman aptly concludes, “More collaborative research is surely needed before we can gain a comprehensive picture of historic Ruvuma and many other Africans’ popular cultures” (p. 170).

Martin Walsh
Martin Walsh is the Book Reviews Editor of Tanzanian Affairs.