Between 1899 and 1913, the British Residency of Zanzibar and the East African Protectorate enacted a series of measures to bring extensive urban and plantation holdings under the control of the colonial administration. These properties were considered charitable endowments (wakf) both in Islamic law and by the Omani sultans of Zanzibar, who occasionally intervened in wakf affairs. The British justified their desire to control wakf in Zanzibar and on the coast in terms of making its administration more rational and benevolent, but the move has also been seen as part of a British attempt to establish hegemony over Islamic populations in the Middle East, Africa, and India (Carmichael, 1999). Based on the presenter’s research in Wakf Commission archives located in Zanzibar and Mombasa, Kenya, this paper suggests that British control over wakf was in fact largely fictional, with most of the decisions about individual endowments being made at the local (mtaa, or neighborhood) level. This colonial fantasy paralleled in some ways the larger British project in Zanzibar, which encouraged urban growth while simultaneously misunderstanding the functioning of the city itself. As such, this paper argues that following the network of locally-controlled wakf endowments through the winding streets of Zanzibar helps to elucidate the internal logic of the city by suggesting how Africans, Indians, Omani Arabs, and Europeans each domesticated the Islamic institution for their own purposes. Using the concept of domestication also allows us to see institution building as a process of trans-oceanic negotiation between peoples and ideas from the Persian Gulf and the residents of Zanzibar. Building on growing literatures about urbanization in Africa and about the realm of emotion in African life, this paper will explore the affective terrain of the city as experienced in terms of institutions and notions of charity, obligation, and cosmopolitanism in East Africa.