Trying for Paradise and Watching for Signs: keeping doves in Zanzibar

Keywords: Zanzibar, traditional healing, birds, pigeons, doves, love, place
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

On the Indian Ocean islands of Zanzibar, as they do elsewhere, human beings continually struggle for political, domestic, and interior peace. Since the mid-twentieth century, a persistent political impasse, old and new colonialisms, human rights abuse, and poverty constrain ordinary Zanzibaris from every side. In both urban and rural Zanzibar, in walled-in enclaves and village homesteads, the keeping of doves ('njiwa' in Swahili) fosters serenity and cultivates hope in an agitated world. With their remarkable flight and return, distinctive murmur, and habituation to human settlements, doves are entangled in human discourses and practices of both peace- and place-making. Overcoming barriers which human beings can’t, doves also embody narratives of absence and desire, and, as literary figures, recur in classical and contemporary Swahili love songs as well as in intimate social exchanges. But doves also play additional concrete roles: They are eaten; they are given in sacrifice, and their flight and behaviour are signs with which human beings make sense of and remedy emotional distress.

Based inquiries preliminary to longer field research planned for summer 2023, and drawing on nearly 30 years' ethnographic engagement with rural communities in Zanzibar, this paper views doves as material, agentive beings who contribute to human environments, ‘co-becoming’ with their carers, as well as to multiple poetic and emotional practices, I aim to bring a transdisciplinary, transspecies perspective to scholarship on human Swahili communities while also contributing African material – often sorely lacking – to animal studies in general and avian studies in particular.