The history of East African Asians is one that is interwoven through multiple geographies. Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean approaches an understanding of race and diaspora through the historical lens of education policy and cinema halls. The central tension of the monograph is between Asians and Africans in colonial Tanganyika and postcolonial Tanzania as recorded in archives and as garnered through research interviews. Its greatest strength is the diversity of its recorded voices, which are masterfully interwoven with archival sources and analysis.
Chapter 1 focuses on the emigration from India of Gujaratis to East Africa as well as the response by Indian nationalist leaders, such as the Indian National Congress, to the Asian-African community at the postcolonial moment. Chapters 2 and 4 examine the educational policies of the colonial and postcolonial governments in Dar es Salaam – specifically, how Asian communities negotiated with the colonial government to establish separate schools, survived the Arusha declaration, and regrouped after Mwinyi's economic liberalization. Similar dynamics were observed in Zanzibar in Roman Loimeier's monograph on Islamic education. Loimeier's and Bertz's studies are complementary in understanding the shifting identities of Muslim Asians, such as the Ismaili and Ithnā ʿAshari Khōjā, whose own institutions were modernized through the colonial experience.
Chapters 3 and 5 describe the fascinating history of cinema halls as negotiators of place. Because of the more developed cinema industries of India and Europe/North America, the majority of films shown in Dar es Salaam were not local. Racial segregation, censorship boards and anti-colonial nationalisms created a complex environment for public entertainment that almost completely collapsed in the late twentieth century with the digital revolution. Tanzanian neoliberalism has created exploding economic inequality and urbanization that continue to be racialized in the minds of the perceived dispossessed. This study contributes to revaluating our understanding of racialism, postcolonial African nationalism, and the continued relevance of Indian Ocean and diasporic analytical frames.
Bertz's work provides an opening for renewing discussion of Asian-Africans. Should we refer to them as Asian or Indian? A rigorous theoretical framing of terminology is critical in assessing historical identity dynamics. While many colonial records use the term ‘Indian’, terms such as ‘Cutchi’ also appear in the archives. Many Asian merchants who traversed the Indian Ocean left before the consolidation of a modern Indian identity, and caste and origin are often the basis of primary identities. Goan and Ithnā ʿAshari Khōjā in Dar es Salaam today would balk at being called Indian, and for both the Ismaili and the Ithnā ʿAshari Khōjā, their homeland was divided in the partition of India and Pakistan, with communities remaining on both sides of the border. However, Hindu and Jain communities self-identify as Indian. The average Tanzanian uses the term wahinidi when referring to Asians, lumping diverse religious and ethnic communities into a monolithic other and vice versa, whereas sometimes black Africans are referred to as kāl·ī′ō (‘blacks’).
In mainland Tanzania, Julius Nyerere is canonized and critical reflections of his legacy are almost non-existent. This includes his acquiescence during the Arab massacre and subsequent fleeing of tens of thousands of Arabs, Asians and Comorians as refugees during the 1964–65 Zanzibar revolution. While Nyerere was not overtly racial in his political rhetoric, his Swahili translation of ‘merchant’ as ‘mabepari’ (Gujarati) and his interpretation of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice evoked the Asian merchants in East Africa and positioned them as impediments to achieving his socialist vision. The policies that followed the Arusha Declaration and their enforcement by those including Prime Minister Edward Sokoine specifically targeted Asians and Europeans for dispossession.
Rectifying colonial injustices focused on a type of Africanization that rejected liberal multiculturalism for racial majoritarianism. While generally not as brutal as Idi Amin's expulsion, postcolonial East African nationalisms shared a vision of the non-black African as the existential other. The Uganda–Tanzania war and subsequent near economic collapse of Uganda somewhat tempered policies towards the Asian mercantile class in the East African community. The contributions of Asians are conspicuously absent in Tanzanian history textbooks. Anti-Asian sentiment, a function of nationalism, continues unabated and is just below the surface in Tanzania, just as anti-immigrant sentiment undergirds conservatism in Britain and the United States. The frustrated aspirational middle-class Tanzanian continues a nationalist reading of history that, in part, blames the growing economic inequality on the Asian, and increasingly on the Chinese and South African expatriate.
The larger questions that the monograph engages are the limited utility of diaspora and the Indian Ocean as frames for understanding late colonial and postcolonial Asian-African history. Diaspora is generally an etic frame applied to these communities. If the subcontinent is no longer a homeland that is central to their identity, how can caste and religious identity be reimagined in the digital age? Similarly, the Indian Ocean has a particular meaning when intercontinental travel was primarily on oceans. Does the ability to fly virtually anywhere in the Space Age transform transnational identities beyond oceanic connections?
Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean is an exceptional contribution to our historical understanding of Asians in East Africa and their complex place in postcolonial historiography. I highly recommend this engaging monograph for university libraries, graduate seminars, and to Asian-African communities in Western Europe and North America.
