Cosmopolitan aging in urban Zanzibar: health, gender and transnational care spaces related to Oman

Population aging, urbanization and transnationalization are three major developments shaping the 21st century all over the world and especially in Africa. This book takes up the case of the East African Swahili city of Zanzibar in Tanzania to illustrate the wide range of experiences of health, gender and care in heterogeneous urban contexts. Based on seventeen months of multi-sited ethnographic research in the city of Zanzibar (Tanzania) and Muscat (Oman), the author analyzes norms and practices of aging and caregiving from the perspectives of older Zanzibari, as well as their relatives and acquaintances within local, cosmopolitan and transnational spaces. This book makes a point for understanding elderhood not as a uniform and stable stage of life but that one should pay attention to diverse and ever changing health situations and their consequences for older persons’ experiences of aging and caregiving. An analysis from this perspective sheds light on gendered aspects of aging and care, and how older men and women’s access to social spaces opens-up and closes depending on their health situation. This study counters simplistic depictions of older men and women in Sub-Saharan Africa as solely tied to local places and spaces but it also argues against a newer trend of assuming aging and caring as completely transnational phenomena. Instead, by adding a new dimension - the concept of cosmopolitan aging - it provides insights into the many facets of everyday lives of older agents who interact actively with others to provide and receive care.