The ‘Autobiography’ of Tippu Tip

Abstract

This essay takes as its starting point an autobiography written in Kiswahili by the nineteenth-century Zanzibari slave trader Tippu Tip, and the genealogy of how it was initially read according to existing understandings of African geography and western genres. That manner of reading and interpretation has as its core the idea that Africa and Africans operate according to a historical logic fundamentally separate from that of the rest of the world. This mode of engagement often (unconsciously) persists in contemporary scholarship about the continent, and thereby reinscribes the colonial exception of Africa. Through rereading Tippu Tip's autobiography in accordance with its style and form – rather than its content alone – I offer a reading of not only the text, but also the dialectical relationship between coastal and interior African geography, which enables us to see how knowledge and ignorance were strategically deployed about the continent; and thereby offer a paradigm for postcolonial reading and scholarship that accounts for and includes both the legacy of colonialism and the cultural possibilities of cultural and social difference on the continent.