ACAS Bulletin, No. 72, Winter 2005/Spring 2006 20 Century” in African Journal in Conflict Resolution, Volume 3, No.1, (2003); Horace Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation, (Africa World Press, Trenton, 2003); Terence Ranger (ed.). Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights In Zimbabwe: Volume Two: Nationalism, Democracy and Human Rights, (University of Zimbabwe Publications, Harare, 2003) and many others. 5. Terence Ranger, “Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle Over the Past in Zimbabwe” (Paper presented at the Britain- Zimbabwe Society, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 2004). 6. E-mail communication with the author of this essay 2005. Ranger wrote this comment following reading my long paper on the nationalist paradigm and the colonial encounter in Zimbabwe from which this essay is based. 7. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth (Peguin, Harmondsworth, 1967); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, (James Currey, London, 1996); Shula Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependency in South Africa: Class, Nationalism and the State in the Twentieth Century Natal, (The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1986); John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier: Volume Two, (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1997) and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (Routledge, London, 1994). Legacies of Race and Racism at the Coast of East Africa: Historiography and the Suppression of Subaltern Epistemology Jesse Benjamin As much as issues of nationalism are now openly discussed and debated, issues of race and racism remain largely absent in African studies, either suppressed, ignored or downplayed. In the case of East Africa, which I briefly review here, I argue that an impoverishment of historiographic interpretation has lead directly to policy implications in the present. I show that some of the best representative examples of critical contemporary scholarship share lingering colonial assumptions that contribute to skewed interpretations and power relations on the ground in the region today. Specifically, post-modernist and critical Western scholars such as Justin Willis down-play the nineteenth century and refuse the voices of the marginal in coastal society. Even Jonathan Glassman, whose work restores the “plebian” elements to coastal history, circumvents the critical element of racial analysis. And Mazrui and Shariff, like Ali A. Mazrui and others that form what I would call a Swahili neo-nationalist perspective, avoid both the nineteenth century and racial analysis, even in their most salient works. I will argue that their specific deployments of colonial historiography, and especially their misreading of nineteenth century elite Swahili and Arab collusion with British and European colonialisms are central to the maintenance of politics and power relations at the coast today. In short, by over-representing the British colonial period [1895-1963], and underplaying the role of the Arab/Swahili period of slave trading and plantation production [1837-1895], the social relations these set in place and which remain in place today can be overlooked and laid solely at the feet of the British, who are now largely removed from the picture. In various ways, I show that these misinterpretations are also the product of the very social relations of the present they simultaneous prop up. These two short, 60- year colonial periods of external hegemonic domination, both Busaidi [Omani] and British, left lasting, even over-lapping legacies of racial stratification. Even before the ratcheting up of global Islamophobia after 9-11, intersecting racial and religious hierarchies strongly contributed to the terrains of power and politics at the coast of Kenya. As fights over land, fishing resources and the tourist economy rage under the pressures of the