Hybrid Housing: Improvement and Control in Late Colonial Zanzibar

elements from different cultural traditions.1 This is apparent in many ex-colonies, from Singapore’s shop houses to Louisiana’s Creole style. Colonialism created opportunities for cultural exchange and synthesis as well as oppression. Colonizers displaced indigenous peoples and compelled them to compare and adapt their lifestyles. Whether adaptation produced hybrids depended on circumstances, the attitudes of the colonizing power, and—because no rule is absolute—the attitudes of the colonized.2 Colonialism created hybrid architecture and urbanism, but their forms and processes have rarely been documented. In particular, as Jay Edwards has observed, “very little attention has been devoted to how the wisdom of local ‘native’ builders was absorbed into expatriate European culture,” and so “found knowledge” has often been interpreted as an “innovative solution. ”3 This paper uses Zanzibar in the later years of British rule, roughly from 1940 to 1960, to explore how innovation drew on two very different building cultures to produce a hybrid form. Architecture is a significant form of cultural hybridity. Visible and durable, it embodies economic practices as well as cultural values. Vernacular housing has particular significance because it is unavoidably part of everyday life. Studies of housing, then, can ground our understanding of cultural exchange as almost nothing else can.4 But it is not quite true that, in Amos Rapoport’s words, vernacular architecture “is the world writ small, the ‘ideal’ environment of a people expressed in buildings and settlement. ”5 This is too heavy a burden, as housing is not a mirror of culture but a fragment.6 Certainly housing offers valuable clues to cultural patterns and change. In late colonial Mauritius, for example, a “Westernization” trend that encompassed dress, religion, language, and endogamy was reflected in a staged transition from mud huts to modern (concrete) houses.7 But this neat correspondence between house form and culture is not always apparent, especially in colonial settings where one cultural group can impose its values and building practices on another. A barracks or apartment building erected by a public works department says more about its builders than its occupants; but the exact message will depend on its location, rent levels, and occupancy regulations. Hybrid houses are even harder to read, for they articulate varied purposes and unstable cultural accommodations. To comprehend colonial hybridity, we must view dwellings in their context, which has two relevant aspects. The first important aspect of a house’s context is physical, encompassing design, decorative features, materials, methods, and techniques, what Howard Davis has called “the culture of building. ”8 Paul Oliver has observed that the meaning of “traditional” architecture is contained more in the passing on of specific knowledge and practices than in physical forms; the same applies to hybrids.9 Then again, design cannot sensibly be discussed apart from the geography of street, neighborhood, and urban environment. In a colonial context, for example, “modern” and “traditional” richard harris McMaster University