21/04/2025
New book available 📙🎉
By Issak Esmail Issak, preface by the late Ahmed Rajab, postface by Mohamed A. Saleh
Crying, Laughing, Dancing Pots highlights a smooth historical undertaking of Zanzibarisation, par excellence. It offers a comprehensive exploration of the Kumbhar community, a group that migrated from Kutch, India, to Zanzibar, approximately 300 years ago; and brought along their ancestral traditional art of pottery and other related skills. It holds value for both academic researchers and general readers, providing insights into one of the most successful processes of socio-cultural, economic and political integration of a translocal population within the Indian Ocean societies. Through narratives and memories passed down from one generation to another, the text describes how the Kumbhars quickly adapted to their new environment, mastering local dialects, and becoming deeply connected to their adopted homeland.
The book is very generous in supplying unbiased raw sociological material and historical facts, including anecdotes, beliefs, cultural and traditional values, that facilitate the intellectual exercise of reconstructing the country's past history and understanding of its present political, socio-cultural and economic quagmire. Without any complex the author re-examines concepts of history and memory against the backdrop of Zanzibar’s political turmoil, particularly the violent 1964 revolution. Despite leading simple rural lives initially, the Kumbhars displayed remarkable social sophistication. The community demonstrated exceptional resilience following the revolution’s devastation, managing not only to survive but to prosper despite the significant human suffering experienced at both individual and collective levels.
The marvel of Zanzibar old town, reminiscent of architecture in Kutch, Goa, Oman as well as the Mediterranean, with labyrinthine narrow streets, is given particular attention, in the same manner as the other side of the creek, Ng’ambo. Readers will find a very enlightening description of Zanzibar Town and its two main bridges, Malindi Bridge and Darajani Bridge, connecting the two sides, before the reclamation of the creek, putting to an end the separation of its two sides by sea water: Mjini and Ng’ambo. The immediate area of Ng’ambo, i.e., Kisiwandui, Vikokotoni, Mwembetanga, etc, was also home to a substantial number of Kumbhars. It was one of the major melting-pot localities of Zanzibar, with peaceful coexistence of various Zanzibari communities, mingling, intermarrying and in the process enriching and consolidating the Zanzibari cosmopolitan society.
Above all, through this book, the author, Issak Esmail Issak, provides a pioneering ethnographic account of his own Kumbhar community, writing with the perspective of an outsider, while maintaining historical accuracy. His work is particularly valuable as it documents a community largely overlooked by professional historians and social anthropologists, and in refusing to sanitize difficult episodes in their history. The book serves as both an introspective meditation on migration, identity and translocal connections around the Indian Ocean and a tribute to a community that has risen from marginalization to prominence in Zanzibar’s business, intellectual and political spheres.
Issak Esmail Issak's scholarly work examines the remarkable journey of the Kumbhar community and their exemplary process of "Zanzibarisation" following their migration from Kutch, India, to Zanzibar three centuries ago. These skilled pottery artisans achieved extraordinary integration within Indian....
