CONCLUSION


It can easily be concluded that Zanzibari people are a mixture of mixtures, no group of people can claim to be more indigenous or   having more rights than others;  the deciding factor for civilized man is not ethnicity, what race one belongs to, but nationality, one's birthplace or one's choice of a country to belong to, to die for if need be. Neither is it a question of who came first. An American is an American whether he is descended from Red Indians who footed it from Siberia into Alaska across the Bering Strait 20 to 40 thousand years BC., or he was uprooted from his African soil and deposited in chains on the inhospitable shores of the New World a mere three hundred years ago, or indeed of his own volition jetted down in comparative comfort to claim the asylum and, in due course, the citizenship of the most powerful and most advanced nation in the world. Whether he is black, white, brown or yellow, his hair woolly or silken, black or golden, his eyes almond shaped or popping, his nose flat or curving, are matters of little significance to any but fools. The skeletons of all are much the same.

All that  have been said about the make-up of Zanzibaris applies with equal force to all the peoples of the East African Coast from southern Somalia, down the Mwambao of Kenya and the Mrima of Tanganyika to the isles of Comoro, wherever Swahili in its various dialects is spoken as a mother-tongue. They are all mixtures of mixtures, predominantly Bantu and Arab, but with undeniable doses of the various races and mixtures of races which infuse the inhabitants of the lands that are washed by the western portion of the Indian Ocean. It is the characteristic of being able to imbibe culture and genes, without disturbing its basic identity that gives confidence in the continued virility of the Zanzibari nationality unperturbed by a multiplicity of ethnicities.

 




Swahili

By Mr. Farouk Abdullah Al Barwani


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