In her book, Fair describes many significant ways in which people use
             dress, music, and sport to challenge the inherited social order, and to
             redefine race, ethnicity, gender, and class. The book covers the time from
             the end of WWII back to the 1990s. During that time, Zanzibar experienced
             rapid social changes in the appearance of a large number of immigrants, and
             the end of slavery. The majority of the book focuses on urban Zanzibar and
             The political evolution of Zanzibar, in Fair's analysis, is largely a
             story of a change in identity issues among the people of the country. As
             the 1800's ended, people in Zanzibar were largely seen interims of old
             identities of free, well-bred Muslims (mwungwana), or non-Muslim, slave or
             rural (mshenzi). As the century progressed, there was a desire to be seen
             as Swahili in the 1910's, and there was a switch to ethnic identification
             in the 1920s. Get another identity appeared as the title Shiraze became
             increasingly popular in the 1930s and 1940s. These changes in identity
             were often marked by many differences in sport, music, and dress were used
             to challenge (and sometimes even identify) changes to social order, and
             make new definitions of gender, ethnicity, class, and race.
             Slavery was abolished by the British in 1896 in the Zanzibar
             Protectorate. Slaves themselves were a diverse lot, consisting of many
             different ethnicities from the African mainland, most were poor, some were
             well-off enough to own slaves themselves. As slavery ended, many former
             slaves suddenly found themselves without a formalized 'place' in the new
             Zanzibar, as their often relatively benign patron-client relationship
             Over time, the former slaves developed a new identity that was
             largely based on the traditional Swahili culture of the East African coast.
             Many remained on plantations owned by Arabs, but the majority moved to
             N'gambo, part of Zanz...