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In this article, I propose to take up the concept and physical space of a photographic ‘darkroom’ located in Stone Town, Zanzibar, to explore a set of images from the Capital Art Studio (1930–present) collection produced by Ranchhod Oza (1907– 93), and inherited by his son Rohit Oza (1950–). I employ a concept of darkness to read this visual archive differently and propose multiple ‘other lives’ for a set of images. First, by bringing this African photography collection to light, I am taking it out of the ‘dark rooms’ of history in one sense and exposing it for interpretation. Second, I focus my lens on the Oza physical darkroom located in the back of the studio on Kenyatta Road in Stone Town, where photographs of a range of Zanzibari persons were both developed and printed and that open up the darkroom as a place of photographic complexity and sensorium, and not just mechanical reproduction. Third, I develop darkness as a form of beauty in certain images of sky, water and skin from this archive that showcase Zanzibar’s position as an Indian Ocean island and port city whilst under rule by the Omani Sultanate (1698–1964) and British Protectorate (1890–1963). Fourth, I conceptualise the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 as a time of visual darkness, which temporarily restricted photographic practices operating in Stone Town under the new Afro-Shirazi political party. Throughout my analysis, I use a framing of ‘darkness’ to interrogate photography as an aesthetic practice deeply immersed in materialities and metaphors of dark and light, black and white, and as integral to Zanzibar’s oceanic islandness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages Goan diasporic dynamism in littoral East Africa – Mozambique and Zanzibar, respectively. It begins by considering a series of images taken by Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel, that of a rural Goan fishing community living across the bay from Lourenço Marques (present day Maputo), in the small village of Catembe in the early 1970s on the eve of Portuguese decolonisation. It then places this photo archive in dialogue with one compiled by Ranchhod Oza, of Capital Art Studio in Stone Town, Zanzibar, with a focus on his visual representations of a minority Goan community during the 1950's that took up positions as tailors and bakers (and photographers) in this urban setting that was once a thriving centre of cosmopolitanism and global trade. That both of these communities are the product of Indian oceanic circuits of exchange mobility will suggest the role that understudied minority communities had in forming port cities scattered across littoral Africa. Using these visual bodies to think about intersections and divergences of representations of Goan-ness in two distinct locations and timeframes, the article brings new cultural forms, i.e. the visual, to the fore for elaborating on the (Goan) African everyday, expressive moments captured on film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]