The migration of tens of thousands of Indian workers and traders to East Africa in the years either side of 1900 represents one of the most important developments in modern African history. Writing in the 1890s, Sir Harry Johnston spoke with more than imperial bluster when he called East Africa ‘an America for the Hindu’.Footnote 1 In the following years, Johnston's call was widely echoed by Indian settlers. As A. M. Jeevanjee declared from Mombasa in 1910: ‘Let [Africa] be opened to us and in a very few years it will be a second India.’Footnote 2 Muslim and Sikh as well as Hindu, Indian settlement across the Indian Ocean was in many respects a southern hemispheric counterpart to the great labour migrations from Europe to the United States in the same period. Expanding East African port cities such as Mombasa took on the cultural and ethnic profiles of the Indian regions of Punjab and Gujarat in the same years that districts of New York came to resemble suburbs of Hamburg and Palermo. In his study of Indian sub-imperialism in the Indian Ocean, Thomas Metcalf has argued that ‘East Africa became, in the early decades of colonialism, almost an extension of India itself.’Footnote 3 And as Savita Nair has traced through legal cases brought to the East African High Court in Mombasa and Nairobi prior to the restriction of Indian land ownership through the 1923 Devonshire White Paper, Indians considered themselves partners in processes of colonial settlement.Footnote 4 Responding to the ‘oceanic turn’ in other world regions, historians of Africa have also recently focused on the cosmopolitan African port cities of this period.Footnote 5 Yet, despite the burgeoning literature on Indian migration to Africa, scholars have remained almost entirely locked out from the experiential and conceptual dimensions of Indian migration due to a lack of early primary accounts in Indian languages.Footnote 6 To access the ways Indian settlers perceived and represented East Africa, this article turns to the Safarnama-e Uganda wa Mumbasa (‘Travelogue of Uganda and Mombasa’), a richly detailed Urdu travelogue – and in many respects, travel guide – that was written at the height of Indian railroad-worker migration in 1901.
Colonial Indian settlement overseas coincided with a tremendous expansion of cheap printing in Indian languages, leading to the publication of accounts of the various foreign destinations to which Indians were moving. If historians have not yet made use of this literature – it is poorly preserved and widely dispersed – such materials do open up the possibility of addressing a longstanding problem in East African history: how did Indians conceive of Africa? The availability of not only travel accounts in Indian languages, but also histories of community-building in Africa and poetry on African themes, lends historians access to the experiential and conceptual registers of Indian settlement in the region.Footnote 7
Through a close reading of the Safarnama-e Uganda wa Mumbasa, this article reconstructs the discursive strategies employed by its author to make Africa ‘knowable’ to Indian settlers. While staying close to the text, the method is an historical one in trying to delineate what the text did; that is, to clarify the rhetorical and cognitive action of the text (and the larger Indian settler discourse to which it belonged) in shaping attitudes to East Africa's human and natural environments. The argument that emerges from this close reading is that a hybrid ‘imperial-Islamicate’ discourse was a potent factor in shaping Indian interactions with Africans. As the following pages demonstrate, the Safarnama-e Uganda rendered Africa familiar to Indians through a fusion of commonplace imperial and Islamicate modes of ethnographic and geographic representation. In Marshall Hodgson's coining of the term, ‘Islamicate’ was used to ‘refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims’.Footnote 8 Building on this usage, the term is employed here to recognize how Islamic (and originally Arabic) categories were used to describe and categorize non-Muslim peoples and places. The Safarnama-e Uganda's clear articulation of an Indian settler discourse – a discourse that appears already fully formed by the year of its writing in 1901 – suggests that negative Indian attitudes to Africans were not necessarily the slow-building result of decades of frustrated interactions and the generational accretion of stereotypes.Footnote 9 Rather, what we see is how an Indian imperial-Islamicate discourse on Africa rapidly took shape between the beginning of Punjabi railroad worker immigration in 1895 and the completion of the Safarnama-e Uganda six years later.
Previous scholarship on such Indian attitudes has relied mainly on English-language African newspapers (such as the East African Standard), English-language Indian periodicals (such as The Modern Review), and the occasional (if nonetheless, important) document in Gujarati.Footnote 10 Dating largely from the 1910s and 1920s onwards, these materials voiced the anti-imperial complaints and incipient nationalisms that have long dominated the historiography, presenting East and South Africa as hothouses of Indian nationalism rather than as outlets for Indian sub-imperialism. In contrast to these tendencies, this article uses the earlier Safarnama-e Uganda to uncover the discursive contours of a pre-nationalist and imperial phase of Indian engagement with Africa. For as we will see, the text presents East Africa in terms of an Anglo-Indian condominium.
Rather than arguing for a merely mimetic imperialism, the following pages suggest that the Safarnama-e Uganda articulated a sophisticated conjunction of imperial and Islamic claims to East Africa in which some Indians felt able to participate as Muslim imperial citizens.Footnote 11 While the aim of the analysis here is historical, the method is one of contextual literary analysis, unlocking the text's rhetorical aims to show how an Indian imperial discourse on Africa was already emerging – indeed, was already fully shaped – by 1901. The argument is not that the text had a large impact in itself: in view of the difficulties of assessing print-runs and purchase numbers for Indian vernacular publications, such ‘impact’ is impossible to quantify. Rather, the argument is that the Safarnama-e Uganda was part of a wider discourse among Indian workers and settlers – much of it presumably in oral circulation – that was sufficiently widespread and developed by 1900 for the author to present it so matter-of-factly and lucidly. For the text was not a polemic, but presented itself as a statement of the obvious and unquestionable, as chasm-did halat (‘eye-witness conditions’) in the author's own words.Footnote 12
Before turning to the analysis, it is necessary to briefly contextualize both text and author. While the name of the author does not appear in the Safarnama-e Uganda, the preface dates its completion to 31 May 1901, adding several pages later that the author embarked on his journey from Punjab to Mashriqi Afriqa (East Africa) in June 1900.Footnote 13 Throughout the travelogue, the prominence of the Uganda Railway as both material fact and point of pride strongly suggest the author's involvement in the railroad's construction. Indeed, the greater part of the travelogue consists of a tour of its line and stations, positioning the text as a cultural product of the imperial industrialization of the Indian Ocean. As such, it was an Indian counterpart to English guides such as The Uganda Railway, British East Africa: From Mombasa to Lake Victoria Nyanza, and by Steamer Round the Great Lake (1911).Footnote 14 The text's internal evidence allows us to surmise that the author was one of the many Punjabi Muslims recruited to work on the Uganda Railway, arriving in Mombasa in late 1900 at the peak of railroad-worker immigration. While we cannot be certain, it seems a fair possibility that the author was, like the friend he discusses in the text, from the Punjabi city and long-term emigration node of Jalandhar. That the author suffered a grave illness (as described in the preface) and possibly died in East Africa finally positions him among either the 6,454 Indians invalided or the 2,493 killed during work on the Uganda Railway between 1896 and 1902.Footnote 15 (It is notable here that health conditions were otherwise nowhere discussed in the text: such brute facts being inimical to its likely aim of promoting migration.) In sum, we can conclude that in being written in 1901 by a Punjabi migrant and possible railroad worker, the Safarnama-e Uganda emerged at the height of colonial Indian migration to East Africa. As such, it represents a unique early source on Indian perceptions of a new African environment.
From Indian Settlers to Urdu Sources
As it did in the Atlantic at the same time, the coming of the steam age represented a moment of great transformation for the coastal cities of the Indian Ocean. It was a transformation signalled firstly by the regular relay of steamships between African and Indian ports and secondly by the transformation of those ports into railheads with the appearance of railroads on either side of the ocean: from Bombay in 1853, Durban in 1860, and Mombasa in 1896. Cheap steam travel enabled migration on a far larger scale than the previous centuries of Afro-Indian contact, lowering access to travel down the social ladder to indentured labourers and middle-class entrepreneurial ‘passenger Indians’ in a process that further south in Natal had already been underway for some three decades. Amid this industrializing oceanic arena, the railroad was a paramount cause and enabler of Indian migration. As Thomas Metcalf has argued, despite the financing of the Uganda Railway by the British taxpayer, the railroad was ‘an Indian enterprise’, with Indian subordinate and technical staff as well as labourers.Footnote 16 To again quote the contemporary words of Sir Harry Johnston, the railroad was ‘a “wedge of India” driven into the heart of Africa’.Footnote 17 Between 1896 and 1902, almost 32,000 Indian labourers were dispatched for Mombasa from Bombay and Karachi on specially chartered steamships.Footnote 18
The history of the indentured Indians who sailed before them to Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, and Natal has been the subject of much scholarship.Footnote 19 But while the imperial economic and political structures of Indian-Africa interactions have long been the focus of discussion, we know far less of the cultural and discursive categories through which Indians experienced and apprehended Africa.Footnote 20 This is all the more true in regard to the foundational period of migration and settlement around 1900. Some progress has already been made: Savita Nair's pioneering work on Gujarati migration to East Africa has uncovered Gujarati epistolary sources, including Narasimbhai Ishwarbhai Patel's printed Africa na Pathro (‘Letters from Africa’, published 1932), though the earliest letters date from after 1915.Footnote 21 The only other early Gujarati source so far brought to light is the 1902 travelogue of Ebrahimji Noorbhai Adamji, who in following the Uganda Railway in search of trading opportunities, linked the era of the merchant pioneers to that of the mass migrant railroad workers.Footnote 22 In relation to these Gujarati sources, analysis of the 1901 Urdu Safarnama-e Uganda allows us to push back the discussion of Indian settler discourse to the high point of Indian migration to East Africa. Although Indian merchants had been trading along the coastline under Zanzibar-Omani suzerainty for over half a century, and Vasco da Gama had encountered Indian merchants in Mombasa as early as the fifteenth century, colonial Gujarati and Punjabi workers and settlers created a far larger community that in turn demanded new explanations of their relation to Africa. Written by a Punjabi railroad worker (if probably not a labourer) rather than by a member of the wealthier Gujarati merchant class, the Urdu text broadens the social scope of our insight into settler discourse. For if, as Sana Aiyar has recently argued, the African and Indian littorals created a shared political space, then this article argues that it was a space mapped, in part at least, through an imperial-Islamicate political vision.Footnote 23
Since in the 1910s and 1920s anti-imperial and nationalist attitudes spread quickly among Indians in Africa, the Safarnama-e Uganda is significant as a rare Indian-language source from the prior period. What Eve Troutt Powell has written of the predicament of Egyptians in Sudan was similarly true of Indians in East Africa: they held the ambiguous position of ‘colonized-colonizers’.Footnote 24 Perhaps inherently, then, there was always tension in the Indian engagement with the British Empire in Africa as seen in the life of the Indian Bohra Muslim, A. M. Jeevanjee (1856–1936). Although Jeevanjee first identified with an imperial agenda during the years when he grew wealthy as a principal provisioner of the Uganda Railway, by 1914 his disenchantment with that agenda prompted him to become president of the East African Indian National Congress.Footnote 25 In dating from 1901, the Urdu travelogue captures a sense of Indian partnership and opportunity in the imperial project that was increasingly hard to sustain after the rejection of full Indian rights in East Africa with the Devonshire White Paper of 1923. In this way, the text plots an early position on a spectrum of attitudes towards empire that shifted from enthusiasm to increasing reservation.
Given recent research on Gujarati writings on East Africa, it is worth briefly addressing the question of why some Indian accounts of the region appeared in Urdu.Footnote 26 In fact, Urdu was as important a language as Gujarati among migrants to Africa. In large part, this was because the majority of early labourers brought to work on the Uganda Railway came from Punjab and other regions adjacent to Karachi.Footnote 27 Having been made the official language of Punjab after the colonial annexation of the region in 1849, Urdu had become the principal language of education and literary production in Punjab.Footnote 28 By the mid-1890s, when Indian labourers and administrators began to migrate to East Africa to work on the railroad, knowledge of either written or spoken Urdu was therefore extremely widespread among Punjabis and North Indians more generally. The fact that a large proportion of the railroad workers were Punjabi Muslims (or ‘Punjabi Mussulmans’ in colonial parlance) added a religious aspect to the migrants' familiarity with Urdu, a religious dimension that the Safarnama-e Uganda's author certainly played up. The building of the Uganda Railway and the management of its vast workforce required large numbers of Indian technicians and accountants who were necessarily literate. The fact that the travelogue's author mentioned a close friend called Munshi (‘secretary’ or ‘clerk’) Karim Bakhsh, and referred to English and Arabic books that he had read, suggests that the author himself may have been one of these many munshis who worked as middlemen between the railroad's British engineers and the Indian labourers and provisioners.
Knowing Africa: an Imperial-Islamicate Discourse
While narrating a journey, the focus of the Safarnama-e Uganda was on practical forms of information: it was as much a travel guide as a travelogue. The author stressed that his was an account of what he had seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears.Footnote 29 It seems likely that its intended readership was one of would-be emigrants from Punjab, especially those seeking administrative clerk positions but perhaps also those interested in trade and provisioning opportunities. Punjab-based businessmen, such as the famous Muhammad Sultan (d.1875) of Lahore where the text was published, had already established themselves as labour and goods contractors during the building of India's railways.Footnote 30 A primarily Punjabi readership with interests in the lucrative railway project not only seems clear from the book's publication in Lahore and its author's apparent employment links with the railroad. It is also suggested by internal evidence, not least the travel route delineated in the text, which began at the Mombasa quayside where Indian workers disembarked and from there proceeded through the Uganda Railway's every stage and station, including points of the rail line that the text suggests were still unfinished (and being worked on) when the author visited them. However, by the time the text was actually printed in 1904, the great wave of migrants for the Uganda Railway had ended. It would appear, then, that the publisher Muhammad ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had misjudged his market, though he of course had no way of knowing that the labour flows would not resume and bring with them a high demand for the book in which he had invested.
Promising on its cover an account of ‘eye-witness conditions’, for our purposes, the text is important for revealing a vision of East Africa through Punjabi Muslim eyes. Printed on the Al-Ta‘lim (Education) steam press in Lahore in 1904, the Safarnama-e Uganda can be seen as part of a wider body of Urdu travel books.Footnote 31 In a period that, in the East Indian Ocean, saw large numbers of Indians migrate to the new imperial territories of Burma, a parallel to the Safarnama-e Uganda can be found in Mawlwi ‘Abd al-Khaliq Khan's 1893 Sayr-e Barhma (Burmese Journey). For like its African counterpart, Sayr-e Barhma outlined practical and ethnographic information for merchants and potential settlers heading towards Rangoon, a port that, like Mombasa, was connected to India by William Mackinnon's British India Steam Navigation Company.Footnote 32 As a cultural product of the Uganda Railway's workforce, the Safarnama-e Uganda was also the sibling of such Urdu memoirs as Afzal al-Karamat (1921), which dealt with a parallel military labour diaspora composed of Punjabi Muslims.Footnote 33 Such sibling texts are important because they point to the fact that Indian contact with and conceptualization of East Africa emerged through the involvement of various classes of Indian workers in a larger oceanic, imperial, and industrial process.Footnote 34 For both the act and the explanation of travel were made possible by new industrial technologies of movement and printing, while the places visited were the nodal ports of empire.
It is also worth locating the Safarnama-e Uganda in relation to subsequent Urdu texts, since one of the central features of later Urdu writing on Indian settlement in East Africa was the emphasis placed on Indians as the primary agents of Africa's development. One of the most important examples is Hindustani Mashriqi Afriqa Men (‘Indians in East Africa’), written in the 1970s by the Punjab-born author, Kalidas Gupta Riza (1925–2001).Footnote 35 Present throughout its accounts of the founding fathers of the Indian community in the region is the claim that it was Indians who effectively civilized East Africa through their fearlessness and hard work. In this postcolonial claiming of the narrative of imperial exploration, it was Indians who first settled Africa's ‘terrifying and wild mountainous interior’ and its ‘deserted quarters’.Footnote 36 What is striking about such later works is the at least partial continuity they show with the Safarnama-e Uganda's representation of the Indian relationship with East Africa around 1900. For the author of the Safarnama-e Uganda, Indians and Britons had jointly rendered East Africa a known and tamed geography within a few short years of their arrival in Mombasa. It is therefore worth asking how the text could present so coherent and enduring a vision of Africa within six years of the arrival of the first Punjabi railroad workers.
In part, this instant familiarization of Africa was a rhetorical effect, accomplished through the flexible discursive tool of the Muslim travelogue genre. In Arabic, Persian, and then Urdu, the rihla/safarnama (‘travelogue’) had for centuries been used to categorize unknown peoples and places according to schemata of Muslim and non-Muslim peoples, and regions of governance and wilderness.Footnote 37 As Aziz al-Azmeh has demonstrated with regard to earlier Islamicate geographical and travel texts, ‘ethnological discourse and ethnographic writing in Arabic in general represent the literary canonization of ethnological conventions’.Footnote 38 Long filtered into Persian and Urdu genres in India, these older conventions were clearly familiar to the author of the Safarnama-e Uganda who drew on them effectively. Yet his successful familiarization of Africa was not only a result of deploying older Islamicate frameworks, but also of deploying a newer imperial model of order and governance that was familiar to his readers from British India. Alongside the older ethnographic vocabulary of originally Arabic loanwords, such as qawm (‘tribe, people’) and munkir (‘unbeliever’), the text also adopted such English loanwords as warkshap (‘workshop’) and trali (‘trolley, streetcar’) to present the towns of East Africa as part of an imperial urban continuum with British India.Footnote 39 Like many other Urdu works of its period, the Safarnama-e Uganda was a hybrid text, drawing imperial and Islamic epistemic orders into a coherent (if not necessarily seamless) whole that rang true to the existential conditions of Muslim life in British India.
To trace how this combined imperial-Islamicate discursive order took shape, the following sections focus on the Safarnama-e Uganda's representation of the history and peoples of East Africa. However, our first concern is with how this discourse constructed East Africa as a geographical space. As with the author's treatment of other aspects of the region, space was conceived through combining imperial and Islamicate categories, while also drawing on certain tropes of the travelogue genre. The author's basic geographical conception of the region was an imperial-industrial one defined primarily by the Uganda Railway and secondarily by the steamship docks in Mombasa and the urban trolley service. The itinerary followed in the text began in the Mombasa dockyard, where the potential immigrants addressed by the text would arrive.Footnote 40 From there, the reader was guided along the city's trolley route, with descriptions given of each of the urban quarters en route, including accounts of Indian, British, and Swahili quarters as well as the city's markets and prominent buildings. In a spatialization that would have been reassuringly familiar to Indian readers, Mombasa was in this way presented as being like Indian cities in having different residential quarters for its varied ethnic and religious communities, along with market and administrative regions where people mixed for trade and work purposes. Fixing the text to its industrial inspiration, from Mombasa the author's itinerary followed the railroad inland past Voi to the Kilimanjaro region and on to Machakos near Nairobi, describing each of the stations and railroad settlements along the way.
At each place of interest, the written journey was interrupted with excurses on local ethnography, living conditions, and natural geography. The treatment of the latter was entirely from the generic mould of the Persian and Urdu safarnama. There was an emphasis on lawns and well-kept gardens (presumably of the bungalows of colonial administrators in Mombasa and along the railroad) as well as on wild trees and flowers, exporting to Africa the tropes that earlier Muslim travelogues had used to describe such cities as Delhi or even Shiraz. Yet even these generic inflections were filtered through the imperial present and their framing category was now naychar, that is, the new concept of ‘nature’ that had become an important point of discussion among Indian Muslim authors as part of the larger colonial interest in exploiting the natural world.Footnote 41 While, like earlier travelogue writers, the author complained that his pen failed to convey such beauty, he was now able to add that a camera could perform the task better than his words (though this was merely rhetoric: the book contained no illustrations).Footnote 42 With its author riding along the railroad and not only viewing but also spatializing Africa from its tracks, both the conceptualization and experience of the Safarnama-e Uganda were a product of the new nexus of industrialization and imperialism. While the author provided no bibliography of his sources, the incorporation of colonial knowledge of Africa remains apparent throughout the text, nowhere more vividly than in its recounting of the ‘Lions of Tsavo’ incident in which up to 135 Indian railroad workers were killed by lions before British officers and hunters culled the predators.Footnote 43 Here the author drew from the same imperial discourse of shared British-Indian efforts to tame Africa's wilderness that just a few years later appeared in John Henry Paterson's famous Maneaters of Tsavo. Footnote 44
Yet as we have already noted, this imperial conception of the region was combined with an Islamic conception of Africa as territory previously ruled by Muslims, engendering the notion that Muslims (and by extension, Indian Muslims) had a longstanding historical claim to the region. A long section of the text discussed the ruined mosques of the coastal regions in poetic and nostalgic terms, while condemning the ‘wild’ (wahshi) locals who now urinated in the mosque's former ablution pool.Footnote 45 As in the model of time to be discussed below in relation to the historical section of the text, the Islamic and imperial were drawn into a wistful but harmonious picture of East African geography that to an Indian audience was immediately recognizable from India itself. Indeed, Africa was represented as almost an extension of Indian geography. In such ways, the Safarnama-e Uganda – and the larger Indian settler discourse to which it belonged – served not only to make Africa a familiar environment, but one to which Indian Muslims had a time-honoured right.
Claiming Africa: Between Islamic and Imperial History
Seeking to assure Indian migrants of their longstanding right to Africa, one of the major sections of the text concerned the history of the region. This was history in a particular discursive mode – tarikh – many characteristics of which were shared by writers of Urdu and their Persian and Arabic counterparts. While in these terms the author explained that the early history of East Africa was unknown, because the region had never produced its own ‘historians/writers of tarikh’ (muwarikh), or even ‘news-writers’ (akhbar-nawis) who ‘made events pen-bound’ (waqa‘at qalamband karta), elsewhere in the text he did claim to have read some Arabic accounts of the region.Footnote 46 Even if there are no direct links discernable to specific Arabic works in the Safarnama-e Uganda, the text did insert itself into a wider Islamicate discursive tradition with much older links to East Africa. In self-conscious acknowledgement of this, the author explained how words such as ‘Swahili’ came from the Arabic word for coasts and that the Swahili peoples still held many customs in common with the Arabs and hence with other Muslims. This is a theme to which we will return in the next section.Footnote 47
The incorporation of East Africa into an Islamicate model of historical development – and more specifically of an Indian Ocean model of Islamicate historiography – was made more explicit in the text's account of the region's precolonial history. Here it projected onto East Africa the model of historical development found in earlier texts on the West Indian Ocean and East Africa such as the eighteenth-century Persian Shigarfnama-e Wilayat. For the latter's Bengali author, Munshi I‘tisam al-Din, had presented the key transformational moment (or lack thereof) of different regions as the arrival of an Arab merchant or sayyid who introduced the moral and legal restraints by which the civilizational levels of the Indian Ocean's island and coastal inhabitants could be measured.Footnote 48 If in such texts this model was used to account for the historical development of East African societies, then in the many Arabic, Persian, and Urdu histories and hagiographies concerning small towns and their saintly founder-figures in coastal India, it was also applied to the other side of the ocean.Footnote 49 More directly comparable to Mombasa was its Indian counterpart (perhaps, ‘counter-port’) of Bombay, about which new Urdu histories were also published in the early 1900s by such local intellectuals as ‘Abd al-Karim Munshi. For Bombay as for Mombasa, such texts similarly presented a sequence of historical continuity between primordial Muslim settlement and British imperial rule.Footnote 50 Whether in Bombay or Mombasa, the rights of new Muslim migrants in the industrializing ports of the Indian Ocean were articulated through the adaption of older forms of historical narrative and printed in Urdu through the new lithographic technology.
Having asserted that East Africa had produced no historians of its own, it was to the imperial-Islamicate model of development that the author of the Safarnama-e Uganda turned to present a history for East Africa that would make sense to his readers. Nine hundred years earlier (that is, around 1000 CE), he explained, the region had been populated solely by ‘wild’ peoples who lived like other ‘beasts’ (haywanat) in the jungles and mountains rather than in towns.Footnote 51 Drawing on his Islamicate criteria of development, he explained that there had been no ‘emperor’ (badshah), no ‘notables of the sultanate’ (a‘yin-e saltanat’), no ‘jurisconsults’ (qazi), no ‘judges’ (mufti), no ‘civil law’ (qanun), and no ‘holy law’ (shari‘a).Footnote 52 The inhabitants had even sometimes lived in caves; they had no possessions and were altogether ‘wild and bloodthirsty’ (wahshi aur khunkhwar).Footnote 53 Locating these early inhabitants in a more general Islamic history, he compared them to the tribal Arabs of the pre-Islamic age of ‘ignorance’ (jahiliya).Footnote 54 The turning point for East Africa, he explained, came with the arrival of the first Muslim settler, Salih bin Muhammad, who anchored his ship off Mombasa in 300 hijri (913 CE).Footnote 55
Locating the East African past in a broader comparative vision of Muslim history, the author explained that Salih bin Muhammad arrived in the age ‘when the blessed sun of Muslim fortune was spreading the light of “There is no god except God” (la-illah ila allah) over many non-Muslim kingdoms and when Arab generals even reached Galicia in Spain and conquered the borders of France.’Footnote 56 Despite the wildness of the region's inhabitants, Salih bin Muhammad saw the beauty and fertility of Africa and wished to settle there. However, on seeing his ‘white colour’ (safid rang), some of the ‘wild tribes’ believed him to be a ‘god or divine incarnation’ (devta ya avatar), while others regarded such whiteness as the reward of sinless kings.Footnote 57 Here the Islamicate comparisons brought into play were with India, as African peoples were compared to the non-Muslim peoples of India through the author's resort to a Hindu and Sanskritic vocabulary. These Indian comparisons were made all the more apparent to his readers in the next episode: a battle in 361/972 between Arab Muslim settlers and hostile African tribes. For here was a spiritual conquest narrative of the kind that also typified early twentieth-century Urdu accounts of the Islamization of the western Indian coastline.Footnote 58
After the battle, Saleh bin Muhammad's heirs ruled over the African coast for more than five centuries, during which time – in an anachronous transfer of the Muslim propagation societies of the late nineteenth century – the Arabs were said to have dispatched an ‘Islamic mission’ (islamik mishan) to the ‘black [African] herding tribes’ of the interior.Footnote 59 The author then claimed that as a result of this ‘mission’, most of the leaders of the Kikuyu had become Muslim. Since by the early 1900s, the Kikuyu were converting to Christianity under the influence of British missionaries, the story of a prior Muslim mission may have been an attempt to insert an earlier role for Islam as a ‘civilizing’ presence that was prior to the British arrival.Footnote 60 Such a double-history for the Kikuyu – first exposed to Islam and then to Christianity – would certainly have been in line with the text's imperial-Islamicate cognitive coalition. Whatever his motivation, the author claimed that in the present day the Kikuyu still practiced circumcision and were aware of the Pillars of Islam.Footnote 61 Here, then, was historical narrative as a charter for contemporary social relations. Islam provided a measure of social proximity to an African people whom the author recognized as fellow (or at least former) Muslims like many Indian migrants.
After a summary of the Portuguese arrival (dated to 1630) and their fort-building and erstwhile rule over the region, the Safarnama-e Uganda gave an account of the takeover by the Omani empire in 1698 and its eventual encounter with the British, leading to the signing over of Mombasa and the beginnings of British control over the region.Footnote 62 In line with its overall hybrid character, here the text shifted from an Islamicate to an imperial vision of history. The shift was sufficiently abrupt as to be seen in the dating system employed for the British period, which switched to the Christian calendar from the Islamic hijri calendar used for the earlier period. Henceforth, both in the historical section and throughout the main body of the travelogue, the account of British rule in East Africa presented a highly positive appraisal. Aside from the favourable assessment of the imperial logistics of post-houses and telegraph-stations, schools and army outposts, the Mombasa trolley line and of course the railroad itself, the Safarnama-e Uganda laid considerable emphasis on imperial achievements by way of ‘development’ (abadi) and the spread of ‘law’ (qanun).Footnote 63 Indeed, the author explained, while the Swahili were originally suspicious of the British, they too had become loyal and friendly to their new rulers.Footnote 64
In contrast to the subsequent writings of East African Indians discussed in much previous scholarship, the Safarnama-e Uganda was far from being an anti-imperial or nationalist text; it very much championed the British presence in Africa. More importantly, it positioned Indian Muslims as partners and potential heirs to the empire, perhaps as part of the pattern of Indian Muslim cooperation with colonial rule in the region identified by Robert Gregory thirty years ago.Footnote 65 For as with its narrative of historical continuity in which the early civilizing era of Arab Islamic rule flowed into the imperial era of British rule, the text presented the British as heirs of the Arab Muslims in ‘civilizing’ East Africa by bringing ‘law’ and, especially, ‘development’. The evidence of the Safarnama-e Uganda therefore suggests that this model of African history was not only an imperial British vision. It was a vision of Africa's past that was also shared by Indian settlers as part of what was by 1901 already an elaborate settler ideology. In inserting Indians (particularly Indian Muslims) between Arab and British settlers, the travelogue drew on a larger discourse that allowed at least some Indian Muslims to identify themselves as fellow players in this developmental history. It was a discourse that still held strong almost eighty years later. For in the Urdu history of East Africa written in the 1970s by Kalidas Gupta Riza (who, like many earlier migrants, was born in the Punjabi city of Jalandhar), it was Indian merchants, lawyers, and public servants who remained the key figures in the region's development.Footnote 66
Based on an instrumentalist reading of rhetoric, the argument here has been that the Safarnama-e Uganda and the larger discourse to which it belonged played important roles in helping Indian settlers make sense of and relate to their new homeland. Moreover, it also encouraged them to identify themselves as partners in empire, aspirations which though ultimately quashed by the 1923 White Paper were nonetheless based on convictions of a shared developmental role in Africa. As the Safarnama-e Uganda suggests, not only were Indian Muslims partners to the British, they were also heirs to the earlier ‘civilizing mission’ of the Arab Muslims. In this way, the travelogue and the wider discourse to which it belonged presented Indian settlers with a longstanding historical mission in Africa.
Classifying Africans: Relations of Proximity and Distance
If in its presentation of African history, the Safarnama-e Uganda combined Islamicate and imperial modes of representation, then this rhetoric was also deployed in its portrayal of Africa's living peoples. It was primarily through the Islamicate framework of the qawms or ‘peoples’ created by Allah and their relative exposure to Islam that the author conceptualized the African inhabitants of the region. Here the author clearly drew on older Islamicate tropes of representation and earlier Arabic sources that also recognized varying degrees of African ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’.Footnote 67 But the Safarnama-e Uganda's more direct discursive context was that of colonial settler ideologies, which would soon also shape debates about tribal identities in colonial East African newspapers.Footnote 68 It is not clear to what extent the author of the travelogue drew on other colonial writings in forming his own classifications of African peoples, though he did expressly mention his use of English works.Footnote 69 As English-language accounts of Africa had been translated into Urdu from since the mid-nineteenth century – as in the 1853 Urdu edition of Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, it is also feasible that the author drew on such mediated forms of colonial knowledge.Footnote 70 The crucial point here is that the travelogue presented a template of potential social relations by delineating which Africans were most like – socially closer – to Indian Muslims. Since many of these Muslims claimed Arab lineages, the connection made between earlier Arab settlers and certain African peoples was particularly important. Here again the author drew on older Arabic and Persian models of ethnographic description, while elsewhere incorporating the more recent imperial visions of British administrators and missionaries. Drawing on the generic conventions of the safarnama travelogue, the author gave lengthy descriptions of the various African peoples of the region that, in line with the old tropes of the ‘weird and wonderful’ (‘ajib u gharib), included tales of exotic customs and eerie encounters.
However, it was mainly through his assessments of different Africans' relative exposure to Islam that the author mapped out for his readers their social proximity and distance to East Africa's inhabitants. The Swahili, for example, were described as holding various customs in common with the Arabs and Muslims of other countries, but as differing in their marriage practices. As he did later in the text for several of the non-Muslim peoples of the interior, the author went on to describe the Swahilis' lifecycle rituals and other customs. Unmarried male and female Swahili youths were said to gather on certain evenings in a special place, where they were then given the command, ‘Goma!’, which the author explained meant ‘Dance!’ in Swahili.Footnote 71 Finding parallels with the experiential realm of his Punjabi readers, he noted how the ensuing dancing to the sound of the dhol drum closely resembled the phumniyan dance of rural Punjab except that, among the Swahili, boys and girls were allowed to dance together holding hands.Footnote 72 Resorting again to the traditional safarnama vocabulary of the ‘weird and wonderful’, the author described in detail how the dance led young Swahili lovers to express their feelings for one another and how in turn this led to the arrangement of the wedding itself. Here, the Indian author stepped back from the precipice of alterity presented by Swahili dance customs into recognition of their Islamic character by using the vocabulary of Muslim marriage (nikah, khalwat) to draw parallels with Indo-Muslim marriage customs. These ethnographic pairings included the legality of taking up to four wives and the showing of bloodied bedclothes as proof of a bride's virginity on her wedding night.Footnote 73 Again, the point at stake here is that the text outlined such parallel customs to provide Indian settlers with a discursive map of relative social proximity and distance to the different African peoples they might encounter.
Even so, the Islamic character of the Swahili rendered them of less interest to the author and his imagined readership than the ‘wild’ inhabitants of the interior, a weighting we might alternatively attribute to a readership of potential migrants' fascination or fear of unknown Africans who were not Muslim, Hindu, or Christian. A good deal of attention was given to the various non-Swahili peoples of the region, particularly those encountered along the inland route of the Uganda Railway who were both socially and geographically more distant from Indian Muslims, particularly from settlers destined to live in larger towns like Mombasa. Various such peoples appeared in the text as the author guided his readers along the train route; most are difficult to identify from the names and descriptions provided. On occasion, the African group in question was merely labelled as ‘wild’ or ‘uncultivated people/jungle dwellers’ (jangli log), with the ethnographic description going no further than mention that they live on a diet of coconut and sweet mangos.Footnote 74 In other cases, the author provided specific ethnonyms. In both scenarios, a consistent typology was at work. For example, like other African peoples discussed in the text, the ‘Tawita’ were conceived as a qawm who, with their men and women roaming naked except for small waistcloths, were as ‘similarly wild as the other qawms of Africa’.Footnote 75 In spite of such disparagement, the author nonetheless regarded the ‘Tawita’ with interest and described their customs in detail. Their burial practices were of special curiosity, involving the leaving of the corpse in the open air of the central area of the village and facing upwards to the sky; an implied direct inversion, then, of the Muslim practice of burying the dead and facing the corpse towards Mecca. When the flesh had rotted away, the bones were returned for burial in the deceased ‘Tawita's’ house. But so long as there was still flesh on the bones, it was the duty of the dead man's wife to sit alone with his cadaver and beat off any predators, vermin, and insects that disturbed it.Footnote 76 If such descriptions struck a macabre tone among the travelogue's readers, then other customs of the ‘Tawita’ were less gruesome. Yet, like refusing to bury their dead, such practices as drinking alcohol or even playing the ‘lyre’ (tanbura), still situated the ‘Tawita’ beyond the bounds of Muslim propriety.Footnote 77 Ethnography was again a measure of social distance and proximity.
If the ‘Tawita’ did not know how to bury their dead, then such neighbouring groups as the unidentifiable ‘Jawmiyunjati’ and ‘Dagiri’ had at least this much knowledge.Footnote 78 However, other African peoples were seen in Islamicate terms as outright ‘deniers’ (munkir), castigated for their beliefs that humans have no souls and that a human life is no different from that of a tree.Footnote 79 While rich through their vast herds of cattle, another people were described as having no ‘civilization’ (tamaddun) and, in another resort to Muslim religious terminology, no fear of the ‘saints’ (pir) and ‘prophets’ (paighambar) or of the commands of shari‘a.Footnote 80 Perhaps in these various civilizational denigrations were echoes of the attitudes towards Africans as ownable property that had until a few decades earlier informed Indian merchants' extensive participation in the East African slave trade.Footnote 81 As Benjamin has noted, as recently as the mid-1870s, ‘the possession of slaves was a matter of prestige’ among East Africa's Indian merchants, some of whom owned over four hundred slaves.Footnote 82 Once again, it seems likely that the attitudes revealed in the Safarnama-e Uganda belonged to a larger Indian discourse on Africa that until now historians have only been able to infer from actions rather than reconstitute from written texts.
Yet, if characterizations of wildness and negative implicit comparisons with Islamic civilizational norms were a common theme in the travelogue's presentation of non-Muslim Africans, in places there were more sympathetic accounts of burial, fighting, and wedding customs. The customs of the ‘Kamba’ – a familiar modern ethnonym – were at least ‘fascinating’ (dilchasp) as well as ‘strange’, while the ‘Kamba’ were also categorized as hardworking.Footnote 83 It was at such moments that the text moved from Islamicate to imperial tropes. As in many European colonial accounts of the period, emphasis was frequently placed in the text on African bodies: ‘Kamba’ bodies, for example, were neither tall nor short but well-kept and recognizable for being rubbed over in red ochre and black mud.Footnote 84 In a condescension shared with European travel writings of the period, other customs were derided as ‘laughable’ (mazhaka), such as one people's belief that Europeans were cannibals who lived on the ocean.Footnote 85 In an Indian echo of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), situated in the mountains of southern Africa's Natal region, the author reported having heard stories of a lost African city along the mountainous rail route near Kilimanjaro. The city was founded by a great magician who cast spells with a lantern brought from China. But true to the ‘eyewitness’ epistemology he had promised his readers, the author stated plainly that he had personally seen no evidence of any such ruined city and that enlightened minds see such Arabian Nights tales as irrational.Footnote 86
Given the author's apparent employment on the Uganda Railway, it is quite possible that, as he repeatedly claimed, he personally observed all of the peoples he described and collected this information himself. But given his admission in the opening pages that he had also in places drawn on official and governmental reports (though none were actually named in the text), there remains the possibility that some of his characterizations of African ‘primitiveness’ drew on colonial ethnographies in English.Footnote 87 As the author himself suggested, Indian settler discourse was part of a larger body of colonial knowledge.
If the Safarnama-e Uganda's many depictions of strange peoples and practices lent the possibility of East Africa appearing as a bewildering environment, then this was avoided by making repeated comparisons to peoples whose ways were known to his Punjabi readership, particularly to the practices of Indian country folk and Hindus. For example, in an echo of the rural Indian headman and panchayat village council system, every village was said to have a ‘headman’ (sardar) who called upon a ‘committee’ (komiti) comprising the older and experienced men.Footnote 88 In a discussion of another people's religious practices, veneration of a sacred tree in their village was implicitly compared with rural Indian dendrolatry, with pujari, the common term for Hindu worship, used to describe the African worshippers. Their offerings were in turn conceived in the similarly recognizable terms of nazar, the Urdu term used for offerings made at Muslim shrines in India.Footnote 89 Even the vocabulary used to describe some Africans as ‘split-eared’ (kanpata) drew on the word used to describe the famous Kanphata Yogis of India, themselves the subject of considerable interest from British colonial ethnographers.Footnote 90 In this way, while the Swahili were rendered intelligible and socially close through the Islamic practices they shared with Indian Muslims, through such comparisons with Indian Yogis the non-Muslim peoples of the African interior were likened to known – albeit more socially distant – Indian Hindu types. Through its ethnography of East Africa's various peoples, the Safarnama-e Uganda and its wider discourse mapped a set of prospective social relations for the Indian Muslim settler.
Compared to the various African qawms described in the text, there was little need for the author to write at length about such familiar peoples as the British and Indians. While their presence was certainly noted – both in specific quarters of Mombasa and in the emerging railroad settlements of the interior – the tone used to describe them suggested their appearance in the travelogue came more by way of comfort than ethnographic comprehensiveness. However, practical settler advice was given as to which towns and railroad settlements already had shops run by Indians, how much rent they paid, and where they came from (usually Bombay or Kachchh in Gujarat).Footnote 91 Here perhaps was advice aimed at the potential readership of Indian merchants and provisioners mentioned earlier. Aside from a few large shops in Mombasa (such as the famous Messrs. Smith Mackenzie & Co.), the presence of Britons was referred to only insofar as it lent reassurance about the state of law and order. The British were thus associated with the presence of police stations, civil magistrates, and post masters.Footnote 92 In view of what had become by 1900 the deep embedding of Christian missionaries in Punjab – deeper than in any other region of India – Church Missionary Society (CMS) outposts were also flagged as reassuringly familiar sights, particularly among the ‘wild’ peoples of the interior. As in so many villages across Punjab, inland along the railroad at Bura the CMS padre was said to sit every evening beneath the banana trees outside his bungalow, teaching locals about the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In Frere Town, another CMS missionary was said to have taken on 700 Africans as his disciples.Footnote 93 Through such descriptions, the African interior was rendered the conceptual kin of rural Punjab.
The text's conceptualization of East Africa's human geography rendered the region part of a continuum with India, reflecting both colonial claims to Africa and the Islamic claims made in the text's history section. Like its view of East Africa's past, the Safarnama-e Uganda's picture of human geography blended the imperial and the Islamicate. Familiar Islamic and Indian discursive categories and ethnographic types were deployed to render knowable even the most unfamiliar African peoples, lessening their unfamiliarity by reducing them to almost stock types of exotic but harmless unbelievers. They were the equivalents of the tribal or Hindu peoples of India, familiar strangers who might be regularly encountered but with whom social relations would be less than with the more familiar and socially proximate Muslim peoples of Africa or India.
This sense of Africa as an exotic but tamed and familiar environment was reinforced by the text's perpetual reminders of imperial order in the region, of laws that were already known from India. Indians were subject to Indian law, not the laws of a foreign nation. Moreover, these laws were in any case enforced by a police force that was half made up of Indians, many of them Punjabis.Footnote 94 Other observations in the text enhanced this perspective of shared rule. While Messrs. Smith Mackenzie had the contract with the British India Steam Navigation Company, Messrs. Jayunji & Co. of Karachi had the contract to supply the railroad; while the Post Master General was Mr. Youngtown, the Deputy Post Master General was the Indian, Sayyid Qasim.Footnote 95 Indeed, with the Indian-built railroad serving as the backbone of his travelogue, the author was not far from presenting East Africa as an Anglo-Indian condominium.
Conclusion
The previous pages have presented a close reading of what is so far the earliest known detailed Urdu description of East Africa that was in printed circulation. Since the period of Indian colonial settlement in Africa coincided with the expansion of vernacular publishing in India, it seems likely that other source materials may come to light, in Urdu as well as other languages. As the study of African history becomes an increasingly interconnected venture, such sources have the potential to provide new frontiers of historical research. By way of a test case for such possibilities, this article has sought to extrapolate the discursive frameworks through which Indians made sense of Africa during the years of large-scale migration either side of 1900. The argument has been that in being at once Islamicate and imperial, the Safarnama-e Uganda's vision of the physical, historical, and social geography of British East Africa was entirely a product of its period, applying to Africa ways of knowing that Indian travellers were using to make sense of other settlement regions around the Indian Ocean. In discursive and textual terms at least, East Africa was very much part of this imperial and industrializing ocean. By following the train line to the interior, the author incorporated not only the coastal Swahili, but also the peoples and places of the African interior into this oceanic culture area.Footnote 96 Ultimately, it is the steamship, train, and printing press that set this period apart from an earlier age of maritime interactions between India and Africa.Footnote 97
Written in 1901, the Safarnama-e Uganda coincided with the peak of Indian railroad worker migration to East Africa. More than a testamentary milestone, it has allowed us to reconstruct how Indian migrants conceptualized both the geography and inhabitants of a region of Africa that became one of the major Indian settlement zones of modern times. Whether through its principal focus on the Uganda Railway, its descriptions of Indian traders and Christian educators, or its repeated celebration of successful development, the Safarnama-e Uganda endorsed imperial settlement as a process in which its Indian readership could share. As we have seen, Britons and other Europeans cropped up only rarely as the text devoted the greatest attention to non-Muslim Africans, less attention to the Swahili, and the least, to Indians and Europeans. There is little intellectual purpose in decrying the sometimes derogatory terms in which its author described Africa, a region portrayed overall as picturesque and orderly. Instead, it seems more fruitful to position the text as part of an imperial discourse shared by Indian and European settlers as each group staked their own claims to the region. For as James Brennan has written with regard to colonial Tanganyika, Indians ‘employed a language of civilization to compete with the similar paternalist claims of Europeans’.Footnote 98 What the Safarnama-e Uganda has shown is that, for Indian Muslims at least, this settler discourse gained additional legitimacy through the incorporation of precolonial Islamicate elements.
In being written before the East African English newspapers and Gujarati memoirs that have given historians a window into Indian opinions in East Africa, this Urdu text elucidates a more robust sense of Indian involvement in empire around 1900. When those Indian imperial ambitions were thwarted by the legal machinations of white settlers, this Indian settler discourse was gradually muted by the nationalist and anti-imperial voices of the later 1910s and 1920s. However fruitless such Indian imperial ambitions may have proved, during the early 1900s, they were sufficiently widespread to create the cogent imperial-Islamicate discourse presented in the Safarnama-e Uganda. The travelogue's articulation of a complete and coherent vision of East Africa suggests that this discourse was not the product of a single intellect, but part of a wider body of settler knowledge on the region distilled by its author into matter-of-fact prose. Insofar as the use of a civilizational discourse to promote Indian claims to Africa implied the denigration of Africans' own civilizational claims, such attempts at imperial citizenry emerge as a zero-sum game. Even in becoming more inclusive, empire required excluded parties.
The Safarnama-e Uganda should therefore be understood not merely as a window into past attitudes but as a rhetorical act that aimed to shape how Indian settlers would relate to an African environment. It was both a charter of rights and a template for interactions. While explicitly derogatory depictions of African peoples were not a feature of such later Urdu travelogues as that written by Manzūr Husayn Mahir al-Qadiri about South Africa and Kenya in 1969 or of Kalidas Gupta Riza's history of East African Indians, there remained in those later writings a strong sense of Indians as the key players in the region's development.Footnote 99 Written generations before these works and as the product of an imperial age, key elements of the discourse underlying the Safarnama-e Uganda survived in postcolonial Indian accounts of Africa.
