The Indian Ocean has been called the ‘coming strategic arena of the twenty-first century’ (Kaplan Reference Kaplan2009: 16). According to international relations commentators, the forces shaping a ‘post-American world’ intersect most visibly in the Indian Ocean region (Zakaria Reference Zakaria2008; Kaplan Reference Kaplan2009). These include Somali pirates; the rise of Asian economies; Sino-Indian competition over energy sea lanes, African markets and minerals; Al-Qaida's ongoing focus on US interests around the littoral (Tanzania, Comoros, Kenya, Yemen, etc.); and persisting US imperialism, visible in its occupation of Diego Garcia, the coral atoll in the centre of the Indian Ocean from which the population was removed in order to create a military base.
These geo-political considerations are precipitating a turn towards the Indian Ocean across a number of disciplines. What implications does this turn hold for African Studies? While the Indian Ocean arena has long been charted in some areas of African Studies – notably Swahili Studies and analyses of Southern and East African diasporic communities – it remains outside the mainstream. As oceanic and transnational forms of analysis become commonplace, the question of the Indian Ocean's place in African Studies becomes more pressing.
This special issue provides an overview of emerging trends in the field of Indian Ocean Studies and draws out their implications for scholars of Africa. The focus of the articles is on one strand in the study of the Indian Ocean, namely the role of print and visual culture in constituting public spheres in and between the societies around the Ocean.
INDIAN OCEAN HISTORIOGRAPHIES: AN OVERVIEW
Over the last decade, the boundaries of Indian Ocean Studies have expanded, moving outwards from a substantial historiography on early modern transoceanic trade to a focus on European empires (Subrahmanyam Reference Subrahmanyam1997; Pearson Reference Pearson1998), colonial worlds (Bose Reference Bose2005; Metcalf Reference Metcalf2007), post-colonial societies, and their interactions with these older networks (Ho Reference Ho2004; Reference Ho2006). At the heart of this scholarship is an Indian Ocean world system created by monsoons, port cities, sailors, religious networks, transoceanic trade and the ways in which European merchant companies initially had to accommodate themselves to this order (Chaudhuri Reference Chaudhuri1985; Pearson Reference Pearson2003; Gupta Reference Gupta2004; Prakash Reference Prakash2004). It locates itself historiographically in the wake of Braudel's work on the Mediterranean (1972, for example), world-systems theory (Vink Reference Vink2007) and Indian nationalist scholarship keen to demonstrate that India's trade was not short-distance peddling, as the British insisted, but involved long-distance networks. This body of work has established a rich legacy of ‘connected histories’ (Subrahmanyam Reference Subrahmanyam2005) of the Indian Ocean.
Until about a decade ago, the most distinguished work on the Ocean was primarily concerned with the early modern period, a temporal focus shaped by the European trading company archives on which it drew. These archives ran only to the early 1800s and were then replaced by imperial records largely organized by colony and with a focus on land revenue and property rights (Metcalf Reference Metcalf2007: 9).
This tide has turned as models of transnational, oceanic and revisionist imperial history have directed attention back from land revenue to ships and voyages. This conjuncture has promoted a renewed interest in the Indian Ocean and its scholarship. Building on the foundation of the early modern historiography, this new wave of research draws together older traditions of regional, national, diasporic and area studies in the Indian Ocean with oceanic, transnational and revisionist imperial history. Engseng Ho's account of the Hadrami diaspora of the Yemen highlights the Indian Ocean region as one made distinctive by the interaction of old trading diasporas (Hadramis, Gujaratis, Boras, Malays, etc.) with European imperial formations (Portuguese, Dutch, British, US) (Ho Reference Ho2004; Reference Ho2006). This interaction is less about colonizer and colonized than about the intimate encounter of universalisms, the grand designs of the sayyid Hadramis tangling with the global ambitions of European imperialism.
This theme of Indian Ocean universalisms has been explored by a range of writers. Sugata Bose (2005) underlines the interconnectedness or universalisms that arose from older networks interacting with, against or outside British imperial formations. Mark Ravinder Frost (Reference Frost2002; Reference Frost2004; Reference Frost, Gupta, Hofmeyr and Pearson2010) examines the print-based public spheres that took shape between the port cities of the littoral in which diasporic populations found themselves and which supported shared projects of social and religious reform. Thomas Metcalf (Reference Metcalf2007) examines British India as a sub-imperial power that advanced the interests of Britain and colonial India in the Indian Ocean area.
One theme in these ‘connected histories’ has been the circuits and movements of people and commodities. As Clare Anderson (Reference Anderson2000; Reference Anderson2004) has shown for the nineteenth-century British empire and Kerry Ward (Reference Ward2009) for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch company rule, free migrants, indentured labour, prisoners, political exiles, soldiers and slaves moved or were moved around the Indian Ocean in significant numbers. In the case of exiles and prisoners, the Indian Ocean functioned as an arena of penal settlement, its necklace of prisons stretching from Robben Island to the Andamans. These movements of people across the Ocean extend our understandings of labour history, of legal regimes and the creation of contested sovereignties (cf. Sheriff Reference Sheriff1971; Reference Sheriff1987; Hafkin Reference Hafkin1973; Alpers Reference Alpers1975; Cooper Reference Cooper1980; Campbell Reference Campbell1981; Reference Campbell1989; Ewald Reference Ewald2000).
Themes of transregional interactions have been important in work on Indian Ocean networks. Leila Fawaz and C. A. Bayly (Reference Fawaz and Bayly2002) revisit area studies, drawing together the Mediterranean-Middle East and Indian Ocean-South Asia zones. Their collection examines how the pre-colonial unities and fractures within and between these regions interacted with, inhibited and used European imperial networks to sustain or build new migrant communities, trade links and religious doctrines. Another variant of this transregional focus is work on islands which seeks to understand the macrohistories of the Ocean writ small in its islands (Gupta Reference Gupta, Gupta, Hofmeyr and Pearson2010). The Mascarenes with their compacted histories of slavery, colonialism and indenture become emblematic of the larger movements and flows in the Indian Ocean world. Examples include Auguste Toussaint's work on Mauritius as the heart of the Indian Ocean (1966); Pier Larson (Reference Larson2000; Reference Larson2009), Gwyn Campbell (Reference Campbell2005) and Solofo Randrianja and Stephen Ellis on Madagascar (2010); and Megan Vaughan (Reference Vaughan2004) and Richard Allen (Reference Allen2008) on Mascarene slavery. Thus, as Gwyn Campbell points out, seeing Madagascar as part of a ‘wider Indian Ocean world’ and an ‘Indian Ocean Africa’ challenges and changes the perspectives provided by ‘both the Colonialist and the Nationalist schools of thought’ of African historiography (Campbell Reference Campbell2005: 4ff.). In Richard Allen's recent work (Reference Allen2008), this ‘Indian Ocean world’ is shown to be connected to the world of the Atlantic region through global networks of trade and labour exploitation.
Yet another important vector in Indian Ocean scholarship has been a longstanding tradition of historical research on the Swahili coast, its economies, societies and transnational networks. Work by Abdul Sheriff (Reference Sheriff1987; 2010) on Zanzibar and the coast, and by John Middleton (Reference Middleton1992) and later Middleton and Mark Horton (Reference Middleton and Horton2000), Justin Willis (Reference Willis1993) and Parkin and Headley (Reference Parkin and Headley2000) on Swahili social and cultural organization in its interaction with the Indian Ocean world of the Middle East and India, has opened up African Studies towards the larger oceanic world. A. H. J. Prins (Reference Prins1961), Edward Alpers (Reference Alpers1975), Frederick Cooper (1977), Jonathon Glassman (Reference Glassman1994) and Jeremy Presholdt (2008) have situated the mercantile and slave-based economy and culture in the broader regional perspective, and studies of the micro-organization of Swahili societies by Minou Fuglesang (Reference Fuglesang1994) and Sarah Mirza and Margaret Ann Strobel (Reference Mirza and Strobel1989) have demonstrated how transnational cultural connections like Hindi film videos and Indian commerce are part of the constitution of the everyday, not least for women.
Cutting across this work on transregional networks, a strand of anthropological research on transoceanic communities in the western Indian Ocean has questioned the salience of universalism and the supposed automatic link between transoceanic movement and cosmopolitanism. Edward Simpson, a vocal exponent of this position, notes: ‘Human movement in the Indian Ocean fragments space and divides people’ (2008: 92). The Hindu sailors in Kachchh whom Simpson has studied invest in local caste institutions rather than long-distance allegiances. Kai Kresse and Edward Simpson argue that ‘[m]ovement and migration … tended to create new or modified divisions in the population both at home and away rather than creating a unified oceanic society’ (2008: 13). If there is an Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism, then it resides in an awareness of such differences and how to manage them as a part of everyday life. There are certainly enough broad over-arching universalisms operating in the Ocean: Islam, Sufism, Hindu reformism, Greater India, trade unionism, nationalism, imperial citizenship, white labourism, socialism, anarchism, Catholicism, Protestantism. Yet these are not guarantors of common histories, but rather open up social fields in which older contestations can play themselves out in visible idioms.
In negotiating these different streams of scholarship, it is useful to apply a distinction widely used in oceanic studies, between histories of, and histories within an ocean. The former constitute an ambitious project which would explain the ocean as a unified and discrete system; the latter a slice explored in the arena of the ocean. In his discussion of the Indian Ocean, Michael Pearson quotes Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell on writing about the Mediterranean: there is ‘history in the Mediterranean – contingently so, not Mediterranean-wide, perhaps better seen as part of the larger history of either Christendom or Islam – and history of the Mediterranean – for the understanding of which a firm sense of place and a search for Mediterranean-wide comparisons are both vital’ (2003: 9). In a recent discussion of Atlantic history, Jack Greene and Philip Morgan make a similar point: ‘Histories of the Atlantic world … will always be extraordinarily difficult to accomplish; histories within the Atlantic world – invariably slices of it as well – inevitably will prove far more manageable’ (Morgan and Greene Reference Morgan, Greene, Greene and Morgan2009: 10).
This collectionFootnote 1 discusses a series of histories in the Indian Ocean that open up new perspectives for African Studies. Arranged around the theme of print culture, the themes addressed in the contributions unfold between Southern and East Africa and India as well as along the African coast from KwaZulu-Natal through Zanzibar and Tanzania to the Arab world. They examine African–Indian interaction, identity strategies and political projects against a background of colonial history, segregation and apartheid, while Islam provides a focus as a particularly dynamic field for transnational interaction.
PRINT CULTURES IN THE INDIAN OCEAN
Within African Studies, there is a strong tradition of scholarship on print cultures, literacies and modes of reading and writing in colonial Africa (Barber Reference Barber2001; Reference Barber2006; Newell Reference Newell2000; Reference Newell2002; Peterson Reference Peterson2004; Hawkins Reference Hawkins2002). Examining popular and non-official modes of reading and writing as a form of social action, this work probes how such texts illuminate ‘local ideals of civic virtue and the formation of local publics’ (Barber Reference Barber2006: 7). The present collection investigates the roles of print culture in the constitution of what Karin Barber has called ‘new kinds of self-representation and personhood – along lines quite different from the classic model of the formation of subjectivity in Enlightenment Europe’ (2006: 7).
The African Studies work probes the ways in which printed texts and their producers convene local audiences and sensibilities. How do texts give voice to pressing problems through the formulation of new genres that can make sense of unprecedented modes of experience? This scholarship also examines the institutions of production and consumption sustaining these worlds of print culture, such as reading groups (Furniss Reference Furniss and Barber2006), debating societies (Newell Reference Newell and Barber2006), epistolary networks (Breckenridge Reference Breckenridge and Barber2006; Burns Reference Burns and Barber2006; Khumalo Reference Khumalo and Barber2006), newspaper networks (Ogude Reference Ogude2001; Frederiksen Reference Frederiksen and Barber2006; Muoria-Sal et al. Reference Muoria-Sal, Frederiksen, Lonsdale and Peterson2009; Newell Reference Newell2009).
A fulcrum of this world is the small artisanal press, generally a one-man, seat-of-the-pants venture making imaginative use of limited and second-hand technology. Embedded in a network of localized relationships, such presses ‘composited’ social life, producing programmes, invitations, notices, pamphlets, advice manuals, novelettes and newspapers. As Karin Barber has suggested, this world of print was less concerned with vast anonymous address than with consolidating personalized networks. As she argues, this mode of production is best characterized as a ‘printing culture’ rather than a ‘print culture’, a term which implies a scale and saturation beyond the reach of these small presses (2001: 16). Its methods of convening audiences depended less on ‘simultaneity and uniformity’ à la Anderson than on a participatory mode of drawing readers into particular African language readerships by asking them to ‘contribut[e] elements to, and tak[e] elements from, an ongoing conversation mediated through the press’ (Barber Reference Barber2006: 16).
The worlds of print culture examined in this volume resemble and differ from the picture set out above. They involve small-scale jobbing presses run on a shoe-string and embedded in local communities. Yet these presses operate on transnational axes drawing together African, Indian, Muslim and Christian political worlds. In some cases, these are presses run by their local Indian owners, producing diasporic newspapers which enter the worlds of anti-colonial politics in Africa and India. In other instances, the presses are sites for African–Indian interactions: Africans buy equipment from Indians; Africans work in Indian-owned presses; Indian printers assist African nationalist causes. After its transfer from Nairobi to Kisumu in 1949, the Ramogi Press, a branch of the Luo Thrift and Trading Corporation set up by Oginga Odinga in pursuit of Luo unity, continued printing newspapers like the Nyanza Times, Mumenyereri and Mwalimu, and added further business, ‘printing receipt books, letterheads and exercise-book covers for schools’ (Atieno Odhiambo Reference Atieno Odhiambo and Ogot1976: 237–8; Ogude Reference Ogude2001). Finally, in 1952, the company made a profit. The printing press was second-hand, bought from Indian printers, and the purpose of the enterprise was to break the Indian business dominance in Nyanza (Atieno Odhiambo Reference Atieno Odhiambo and Ogot1976: 227).
Presses are crossroads where different Indian Ocean universalisms intersect. In Durban, Muslim printing networks react to Christian evangelical print culture in the fault lines between African and Indian Muslim communities. In Cairo, Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi prints manuscripts from across the Indian Ocean world. In Nairobi Indian printing works owners go to jail because of ‘seditious’ articles written or approved by African nationalist journalists.
These conjunctures bring debates on print culture in Africa into dialogue with scholarship on other parts of the Indian Ocean rim, drawing out common patterns. Whether in Dar es Salaam (Brennan, this volume), Nairobi (Frederiksen, this volume), Goa (Pinto Reference Pinto2007), Bombay (Green Reference Green, Simpson and Kresse2008), Calcutta (Ghosh Reference Ghosh2006), Cairo (Cole Reference Cole, Fawaz and Bayly2002), Madras (Subramanian Reference Subramanian, Gupta, Hofmeyr and Pearson2010), or Durban (Dhupelia-Mesthrie Reference Dhupelia-Mesthrie2004) these presses were characterized by diverse personnel drawn from different areas (Hofmeyr forthcoming). Multilingual and multi-ethnic, they were sites in which different communities and diasporas intersected.
The press becomes important methodologically in tracking interactions between different diasporas and populations in Africa and around the Indian Ocean. Although Ned Bertz's article deals with cinema in Tanganyika and then Tanzania, it demonstrates this point admirably. Focusing on the cinema as ‘meeting place and medium’, Bertz tracks the encounters and conflicts that unfold in and around the racialized space of the cinema hall. Not only did Indian film consistently outsell US products at the box offices, it provided allegories of anti-colonialism which African audiences took up enthusiastically. In the 1930s and 1940s, cinema halls became venues for meetings in which Indians in Dar es Salaam expressed their support for Gandhi's campaigns in India. In the 1950s African nationalists likewise used cinemas as rally venues not least to express the demand that cinemas become fully integrated spaces. In post-independence Tanzania, the popularity of Indian film continued unabated and survived the new socialist moral campaigns by being seen as non- or at times anti-Western and in some cases, virtually indigenous. As Bertz indicates, trying to draw a line between ‘African cinema’ and ‘Indian film’ becomes impossible when seen from the vantage point of the cinema hall where transnational strands become knotted together.
An important characteristic of the printing presses was a stress on being both entrepreneurial and philanthropic, of pursuing projects of social reform while mobilizing networks of charitable support from merchant political and religious donors, and in some cases from readers. As enterprises that address both local and transoceanic audiences, these presses and their newspapers tended to pursue grandiose projects of social reform alongside matters of mundane politics – at times passing the former off as the latter. Rochelle Pinto's analysis of print and politics in Goa (2007) brilliantly demonstrates how the nineteenth-century colonial elite seized print technology not to pursue Andersonian communities of modular egalitarianism but to insinuate caste into print and into the historiography of Catholicism.
Several essays in the collection draw out features of the significance of textual production in the world of Muslim print culture. Anne Bang explores themes of orality, manuscript and print in Zanzibar where the introduction of printing in 1876 extended the repertoire of media used for the circulation of religious knowledge and theological debate. How do these intersecting media affect styles of religious authority and the status of text in its constitution? Bang examines this question in relation to the corpus of Islamic literature that circulated on the East African coast between 1870 and 1930, in both manuscript and print form.
This work in turn forms part of a broader investigation of the world of Islamic manuscript production in Africa (Farias Reference Farias, Jeppie and Diagne2008; Jeppie and Diagne Reference Farias, Jeppie and Diagne2008; Last Reference Last, Jeppie and Diagne2008) and its interactions with orality and print. The predominant image has been of sub-Saharan Africa following a path from orality to print, the latter generally taken to be introduced by Christian missions. Scholars like Bang (Reference Bang2003 and this volume) and Jeppie and Diagne (Reference Farias, Jeppie and Diagne2008) demonstrate the partiality of this existing scholarship. For much of the continent, manuscript has to be factored into the orality/literacy equation, while accounts of printing in Africa need to include Muslim and secular circuits of print from the Arab world and South Asia.
Anne Bang's article begins this task by discussing Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi, probably one of the most significant Indian Ocean publishers. The press was set up in Cairo in 1859 by a family who had migrated from Syria to Egypt. It aimed to ‘print and distribute books of Islamic learning throughout the world’ and produced material in Arabic and African languages. While al-Halabi awaits more detailed research, it seems that many books came into being through people going on Hajj or other journeys who would stop in Cairo to have a manuscript printed. Funding would come from merchants and the book would bear the name of the donor.
A number of important recent publications address the significance of translation, text production and printing for Islamic reform movements. This is a theme in publications by Roman Loimeier (Reference Loimeier2003), Benjamin Soares (Reference Soares2005), Soares and Otayek (Reference Soares and Otayek2007), and in Kai Kresse's work on public intellectuals in Mombasa and on the Swahili coast (Reference Kresse2003; Reference Kresse2007). It is also addressed in scholarship on Islam in Southern Africa – such as Shamil Jeppie's work on the Arabic Study Circle in Durban (Reference Jeppie2007) – or in writing on Ahmed Deedat and the Islamic Propagation Centre International in Durban, which in significant respects took off from the Arabic Study Circle (Westerlund Reference Westerlund2003; Sadouni Reference Sadouni2007; Vahed forthcoming; Kaarsholm this volume). Discussions of print culture figure prominently in recent research on Islamic publics in Africa, as promoted not least by Abdulkader Tayob (Tayob Reference Tayob2007; on Islamic media in South Africa, see Vahed Reference Vahed2007; cf. Kaarsholm Reference Kaarsholm2008).
One striking feature here – which has also been pointed out for South Asia by Francis Robinson (Reference Robinson1993; Reference Robinson2008) – is a ‘reformationist’ one of emphasizing the importance of direct access of the individual believer to the holy writ of God, thus undermining the monopoly on interpretation of imams or other intermediaries (cf. Loimeier Reference Loimeier2003). Paradoxically, this may involve a turn to Arabic language learning, script and debate as well as the promotion of translation into indigenous languages for the sake of proselytization. As demonstrated in Kaarsholm's essay (this volume) it may thus result in a fundamentalist opposition between the essence of the faith and ‘traditional’ beliefs within particular cultural settings. Or it may lead to arguments favouring syncretism and reconcilability of Islam with ‘customary’ practices, and thus to quite different arguments concerning the relationship between Islam and modernity. Together these strands of scholarship highlight the intersections of print cultures in the Indian Ocean world and present different trajectories from those extrapolated on the basis of Euro-American models. The latter stress themes of print capitalism, copyright regimes, national state control and the construction of vast, apparently egalitarian publics. With its themes of philanthropy, personalized printing in a transnational matrix, and variable notions of authorship and hence copyright, this scholarship offers new ways of thinking about global histories of print.
NATIONALISM, NEWSPAPERS AND INDIAN OCEAN CIRCUITS
The relationship between newspapers and nationalism constitutes a well-developed theme across several regions of Africa. As Jonathon Glassman demonstrates, the complexities of Zanzibari nationalism and the categories of ‘Arab’, ‘African’ and ‘Indian’ employed within it (2000; 2004) were largely shaped in a welter of newspapers, political leaflets and pamphlets, in which popular ideas of race and ethnicity were tested and debated. Reports in newspapers from African soldiers in the Second World War and their return to civilian life after the war fuelled political organizations and exposed local communities to international trends, including movements for national liberation in West Africa and India (Bromber Reference Bromber, Deutsch and Reinwald2002). In Southern Africa, the colonial African elite invested heavily in newspapers as sites for expressing their views against encroaching settler domination – in the case of the early twentieth-century writer and intellectual Sol Plaatje, virtually to the point of bankruptcy (Willan Reference Willan1985).
While the newspapers discussed in the following articles develop this line of argument, they focus attention on newspapers as more than just content, ideas and discourse. The newspaper as an institution, with its print shop and the social relations around these, prove to be productive sites for capturing the transnational strands that make up the skein of East and Southern African nationalisms.
James Brennan provides a biography of two Dar es Salaam papers, Tanganyika Opinion (1923–55) and Tanganyika Herald (1929–60). Thembisa Waetjen and Goolam Vahed focus on the Durban paper Indian Views (started in 1914), aimed at a Muslim Gujarati merchant class concentrated in Durban and Johannesburg but also spread across much of the subcontinent. Bodil Folke Frederiksen sets out a rich network of African and Asian papers in Kenya which increasingly converge through their anti-colonialism and their sharing of personnel and expertise. She shows how a culture of entrepreneurship, independence and anti-colonial resistance persisted in the second half of the 1940s, when colonial government agents sought to influence both Indian and African newspapers. In her contribution, Sana Aiyar draws out the particular importance in the early 1920s of the Indian-owned East African Chronicle (edited by M. A. Desai) in giving voice to the political aspirations of Harry Thuku, and in bridging early African nationalism in East Africa and the transnational nationalism of the Indian Congress movement.
These newspapers – many of them Indian-owned – shared certain features. They addressed fairly well defined audiences, situated themselves in the contemporary politics of reform, and often had an activist mode of address. In Kenya the Indian papers came out more regularly and were better consolidated than the Indian papers in Tanganyika, where they were small, tenuously funded and financially fragile. Some were family-owned and run. Appeals to merchant philanthropy were common and merchant support was critical in keeping these ventures afloat, especially so in the case of Gandhi's Indian Opinion.
The editors of these ventures necessarily led complex professional lives. As Brennan points out, they encompassed ‘impossibly contradictory layers of belonging’. In the case he examines, editors could simultaneously entertain an ‘ungainly combination’ of ideas that included imperial citizenship, Hindu reformism, communism and anti-communism. The multi-tasking that any printer-publisher-editor-owner is required to take on compounded the challenges. This tradition of the multi-skilled printer-publisher was well-established in India. As Ulrike Stark indicates in her analysis of the Naval Kishore Press in Lucknow, Indian printer-publishers assumed a complex set of roles – ‘entrepreneur, publicist, literary patron, philanthropist, disseminator of knowledge and educator’ (2007: 2). Editors around the Indian Ocean took on many of these mantles but in new and more contradictory ways.
Waetjen and Vahed recreate the complex lives of Indian Ocean editors. The first editor of Indian Views was Mohammed Cassim Anglia, whose trajectory took him from Surat (where he was born) to Mauritius, back to Surat and then on to the Transvaal and Natal. Fluent in English, French, Gujarati and Dutch, Anglia operated a retail business in Durban whilst acting as a shipping agent. Initially a great supporter of Gandhi, he subsequently became one of his fiercest critics.
Compounding this complexity was the colonial and transnational context in which these newspapers operated. Editors had to report on developments in India while keeping a wary eye on the colonial state, its legislation and its censorship apparatus. As Brennan indicates, editors had to oppose colonial rule while securing diasporic privilege. One template through which to achieve these objectives was the idea of Greater India, the ancient cultural diffusion of Hinduism and Buddhism from India into East and South-East Asia. Both Brennan and Aiyar (this volume) demonstrate how discourses of Greater India filtered into arguments for giving Indians a special status in East Africa, and showing Indian civilization as ‘more suitable for grafting onto African soil than … that of the West’ (Brennan this volume). In Kenya Indian political leaders and publicists supported African demands of elected representation in the colonial government, reversal of land ownership, and equal treatment in all spheres. At the same time they prided themselves on being ahead of African social development. An editorial article in the Daily Chronicle, the most radical of Asian newspapers in Kenya, praised the African politician, Tom Mbotela, for his gradualist politics: ‘The African races have to pass through a long and laborious course of education undisturbed by mad haste and political passions’ (20 July 1951) (Frederiksen this volume).
Drawing on work by Vahed (2009), Kaarsholm's contribution discusses how Islam in Durban, in spite of its internal diversity, came to function as a unifying factor in efforts to build a South African Indian identity. At the same time – as shown also in Tayob's work on the Muslim Youth Movement – this imposed limitations on Islamic efforts to reach beyond the Indian community, to proselytize among Africans, or – in the 1970s and 1980s – to radicalize and become politically active in the anti-apartheid movement. Altogether, this made ‘Natal Islamic groups’ – including Deedat's Islamic Propagation Centre – ‘more conservative towards the state than their Muslim counterparts in Cape Town’ and more focused on ‘educational and welfare activities’ than on ‘the politics of opposition’ (Tayob Reference Tayob1995: 98ff.). Of central importance within education and welfare was the production of printed materials to support Islamic education and to counter the international onslaught of Christian missionaries, including the project to have the Qur'an translated into Zulu, and the production of an Islamic print literature of pamphlets in Zulu and English.
Print shops and newspapers were also important sites in which different streams of nationalist thought encountered and influenced each other. Indian traders and entrepreneurs not only facilitated the spread of transnational and local goods and finance, but were also decisive in initiating and sustaining a culture of print media, particularly newspapers, in the whole of East Africa. Already in the late 1920s, newspapers in Kenya and Tanzania had African editors and relied on African journalists, and increasingly the papers, which were highly political, became sites of reporting on global and local anti-colonial activities and debate between Africans and Indians on unity and difference. Sitaram Achariar assisted in the setting up of both Muigwithania, edited by the young Jomo Kenyattta, and later the Mombasa newspaper, the Democrat, and a Bombay paper, The Sun (Brennan this volume). He was one of several political radicals who was transported across the Ocean. In Tanganyika the ambition of the Swahili newspaper Kwetu, which started in 1937, was to ‘spread knowledge … do social and humanitarian work and to establish closer contact between the native and non-native communities’ (Iliffe Reference Iliffe1979: 376–9). In Kenya the contemporary Indian-owned Colonial Times, bilingual in English and Gujarati, was published under the motto, ‘Free, Frank and Fearless’.
One feature that was central to the rise of an Indian Ocean public sphere was the formulation of new genres which could speak to new transnational audiences and encapsulate new forms of diasporic experience. One example of such a genre is the Indian Ocean travelogue which was refined in the columns of port city periodicals. These travelogues reported on the travels of notable people between Bombay and Durban, whose progress from port to port was reported in elaborate detail. In such travelogues, each stop in a port city confers visibility; the person appears to become more ‘real’ and visible with each successive newspaper report (Hofmeyr Reference Hofmeyr2008: 21).
Equally important was the use of the cutting. Since papers could not afford correspondents and wire services could be expensive, excerpting material from other journals with an attribution was common practice. Such attributions created new circuits of meaning and value. An average edition of Indian Opinion might feature cuttings from the Rangoon Times, The Zanzibar Chronicle, the Bombay Reporter and the Madras-based Indian Review. These cuttings created an imaginative circuit that allowed readers to visualize ideas moving between these information ports.
Waetjen and Vahed's discussion of Zuleika Mayat's column in Indian Views demonstrates this process of emergent genres. Mayat was the first woman to write for the paper. Writing in the persona and under the penname of Fahmida (a Persian name culled from an Urdu novel), Mayat formulated a public voice to address a middle-class, modernist and gendered Islamic public. She produced a broad-ranging column whose rubric ‘Mainly for Women’ belied its wide social and political reach.
Mayat had grown up in a trading community in Potchefstroom, South Africa. In her father's shop she experienced ‘close-up multiculturalism’ and heard Gujarati, Urdu, Arabic, Afrikaans, English and Sotho on a daily basis. Excluded from secondary and higher education by racism and gender restrictions, she reached a wider world via correspondence. She maintained epistolary friendships, studied by correspondence, published her first piece (on the need for education for women) as a letter in Indian Views and met her husband through letter writing: he spotted her first letter in the paper and wrote a reply endorsing her views. This exchange prompted a secret courtship by letter between them and a subsequent marriage.
Her columns drew together large issues – higher education for women, the sterilities of apartheid as opposed to the multiculturalism of her youth, trends in Islam – which were locally mediated as letters, conversations and reports. This formula admirably captured her own diasporic experience, which wedded the local intensities of her father's shop with links to a bigger transoceanic world.
BROADER IMPLICATIONS
Through the lens of print culture, the contributions to the present collection aim to extend our understanding of lateral networks in the Indian Ocean and the kinds of nationalist interactions that they enabled. Such insights in turn open up new vistas in both East and Southern African Studies as well as within South Asian Studies and studies of Islam.
East African Studies
As demonstrated in the studies by Brennan, Aiyar, Frederiksen and Bertz in this collection, an Indian Ocean perspective can add new dimensions to East African Studies, and to our understanding of public sphere dynamics and debates around colonialism and nationalism from the early twentieth century onwards. Seeing East Africa as part of a larger Indian Ocean world helps to bring out the transnational dimensions of nationalism, and the complexity of the processes through which African and Indian groupings interacted, identifying themselves as slaves or free, as subjects or citizens in the context of the transition from colonialism to independence.
Seeing East African nationalism in an Indian Ocean perspective provides an alternative to understanding nationalism as ‘primary resistance’ emerging out of the efforts of particular and well-defined pre-colonial polities, like the Kikuyu in Kenya. The Indian Ocean perspective in turn emphasizes the multiplicity of nationalist voices (Atieno Odhiambo Reference Atieno Odhiambo, Ogot and Ochieng1995), gives greater emphasis to Indian and Swahili coast contributions to the development of nationalism, and thus contributes to seeing it as less ‘Africanist’ than has been the tradition (Sheriff Reference Sheriff2008; cf. Sheriff Reference Sheriff, Sheriff and Ferguson1991).
An Indian Ocean optic also highlights the significance of Islam for the constitution and functioning of the publics within which nationalist programmes and strategies were debated in East Africa. It may thus help to undermine or at least problematize the hegemony of Christian and biblical discursive models in the formation of nationalist narratives (cf. Lonsdale Reference Lonsdale and Knighton2009: 80ff.; for broader Middle East and African perspective, Kastfelt Reference Kastfelt2003).
Southern African Studies
Until recently, Southern African Studies has seldom intersected with Indian Ocean Studies, a field focused on the western Indian Ocean and its monsoon rhythms. South Africa falls below the monsoon belt and so has remained outside the purview of Indian Oceanists. Within the mainstream of Southern African Studies itself, there has been little interest in the Indian Ocean. There has of course been a longstanding tradition of work on Indian communities in South Africa (Dhupelia-Mesthrie Reference Dhupelia-Mesthrie2007), but this has often operated as a discrete area. By and large, Southern African Studies has manifested strongly land-based and Africanist tendencies of scholarship in which the major vectors of struggle are between ‘black’ and ‘white’.
In the wake of South Africa's political transition, this situation has started to shift as scholars start to engage with the country's multiple intellectual inheritances rather than focusing their attention on a single narrative of anti-apartheid struggle. Scholars of slavery like Nigel Worden (Reference Worden2007) and Kerry Ward (Reference Ward2009) have started to resituate Cape Town as an Indian Ocean port. A number of literary scholars have asked what South Africa's literary traditions look like when seen from the Indian Ocean rather than just the Atlantic (Hofmeyr Reference Hofmeyr2007b; Govinden Reference Govinden2008), in part drawing inspiration from a growing body of work on cultural studies in the Indian Ocean (Ghosh and Muecke Reference Ghosh and Muecke2007; Moorthy and Jamal Reference Moorthi and Jamal2009; Gupta, Hofmeyr and Pearson Reference Subramanian, Gupta, Hofmeyr and Pearson2010) – an approach whose strength is demonstrated in Bertz's article. Likewise new work on the interactions between Africans and Indians in South Africa demonstrates how the tensions, disagreements and sharing of ideas shaped political developments hitherto read only from the perspective of struggle between white and black (Soske Reference Soske2009; Suttner Reference Suttner2009). Also important is a growing body of work on Gandhi which argues that the Mahatma's ideas need to be understood less as an automatic expression of some prior Indianness and more as the product of his South African experience (Bhana and Vahed Reference Bhana and Vahed2005; Mongia Reference Mongia2006; Natarajan Reference Natarajan2009).
There has also been an upsurge in studies of religion, and of Islam in particular, which emphasize the linkages between the Cape and the Indian Ocean world. An early example is a study by Achmat Davids of The Mosques of Bo-Kaap (1980), which has been elaborated upon in more recent writings by Fareed Esack (Reference Esack1988), Shamil Jeppie (Reference Jeppie1987), Abdulkader Tayob (Reference Tayob1995; Reference Tayob1999) and Sindre Bangstad (Reference Bangstad2007). This work has been stimulated by recent efforts to resurrect notions of a ‘Cape Malay’ identity and to have this group recognized as a ‘diaspora’ by governments in Malaysia and Indonesia – as explored currently in research by Sarah Jappie on imaginings of Malayness in Cape Town (Jappie Reference Jappie2009).
As far as KwaZulu-Natal is concerned, the Indian Ocean perspective in the study of Islam has been focused primarily on the South African Indian community, whose transoceanic links to South Asia have been maintained partly through the importation of imams and reformist and other religious inspiration. As Goolam Vahed has shown in a number of writings, links to India and Pakistan have been important for the unfolding of both Sufi and Deobandi strands of thought in Durban and what is now KwaZulu-Natal (Vahed Reference Vahed2003a; Reference Vahed2003b; Vahed and Jeppie Reference Vahed, Jeppie, Daniel, Southall and Lutchman2005). Much less explored – Kaarsholm's article in this collection begins the task – have been links with other traditions of Islamic practice within Africa and along the African Indian Ocean seaboard. In ongoing research, Anne Bang and Shamil Jeppie are exploring how networks of Islamic education extend from Yemen and Hadramawt through Zanzibar, the Comoros Islands and Mozambique all the way to Cape Town.Footnote 2 Kaarsholm's study throws light on Durban as the ‘missing link’ in this chain of Indian Ocean connectivity, and sees Islam in KwaZulu-Natal as linking up not only with networks in India, but also with African and Swahili Coast traditions of practice (cf. Kaarsholm Reference Kaarsholm, Gupta, Hofmeyr and Pearson2010).
Rethinking Indian nationalism via Africa
A study of Africa in the Indian Ocean has important implications for how we think about nationalism in India. While the post-1960s idea of a Non-Resident Indian (NRI) diaspora has been factored into accounts of contemporary Indian nationalism, India's earlier indentured diasporas seldom feature in academic analyses of this topic. This situation is starting to shift as scholars like Tejaswini Niranjana on Trinidad and John Kelly on Fiji demonstrate the key role that anti-indenture mobilization played within early twentieth-century Indian nationalism. Whether represented through the figure of the endangered Hindu women in the indentured periphery, whose honour had to be saved (Kelly Reference Kelly1991), or through that of the lower-caste woman who had to be symbolically or actually expelled to create a pure body politic (Niranjana Reference Niranjana1999), the indentured community provided a key set of parameters for imagining ‘India’.
Work by Susan Bayly (Reference Bayly2004) on the idea of Greater India demonstrates how this discourse, first articulated in the 1920s by French-influenced Bengali scholars, was taken up by a range of anti-colonial constituencies keen to demonstrate the ancient glories of India and its record as a benign colonizer. Greater India could provide an idea of nationhood that stretched diasporically across time and space and, importantly, could be both anti-colonial and colonizing at the same time.
The articles in this special issue extend our understanding of these themes by pointing to the central role that diasporic newspapers and their editors played in shaping a discourse of dispersed nationhood that expressed itself in terms like ‘Greater India’, ‘Indians overseas’, or ‘colonial-born Indians’. They insert Africa more clearly into the equation and probe how it features in discussions on Indian nationalism. As the articles in this volume and other work (Raman Reference Raman2004; Muponde Reference Muponde2008; Soske Reference Soske2009; Suttner Reference Suttner2009) illustrate, the influence of Gandhi and Indian nationalist thought on African nationalism is relatively well-known. The reverse flow is far less frequently discussed.
The articles in this collection address this reverse flow in different ways. Sana Aiyar's article demonstrates the key role that Kenya played in the evolution of Indian nationalism. On the one hand it acted as a unifying factor since ‘the treatment of Indians overseas was the one issue over which there was no difference of opinion’. On the other, it became a bargaining chip in the negotiations between white settlers, African elites, Indians in Kenya, Congress in India, the Colonial Office and the India Office. Indian nationalists saw the matter of Indian equality with settlers as a test case of British commitments to creating equal rights for all imperial citizens. The Colonial Office finessed the matter by declaring a policy of ‘African paramountcy’ in 1923, which checked the ambitions of white settlers and Indian settlers alike. While the declaration meant little for Africans in practice, the idea of ‘Africa’ as a boundary of Indian national and diasporic aspiration became important.
Another theme that these articles elucidate is that of Indian nationalism as being colonial and anti-colonial at the same time. As Brennan's article argues, Indians in the diaspora (and the mainland) were both ‘sub-imperialists and anti-colonialists’. Africa became an important site for India's sub-imperial aspirations, and thus central to ideas and debates on Indian nationalism. Newspapers in East and Southern Africa become arenas in which ideas and debates about Indian nationalism were refined. Very often, ‘Africa’ featured in these discussions as providing an imaginary boundary of ‘race’ and ‘civilization’ against which these ideas could take shape. ‘Africa’, then, represented one imaginative limit of Indian nationalism (Hofmeyr Reference Hofmeyr2007a).
CONCLUSION
According to Kresse and Simpson, the Indian Ocean world comprises ‘an ever-changing community of strangers … a society based on the fact that it knows enough about itself to know that it does not, really, exist’:
The historical experience of commonality at the street level that shapes the region has led to a consciousness of social diversity and a largely-assumed knowledge of social differences. This view of things dissolves the idea of simple unity and along with it the view of transoceanic ‘community’ with a ‘shared’ history. (2008: 26–7)
If the Indian Ocean coheres only as a set of shifting social optical illusions, does it have analytical value? The articles collected here demonstrate that it possesses considerable heuristic power, especially for students of Africa. This power lies in the ability of an Indian Ocean perspective to complicate received paradigms and academic traditions.
With regard to both East and Southern African Studies, an Indian Ocean perspective enriches narratives of anti-colonial nationalism still often understood in a resistance framework of ‘settler’ versus ‘native’. A view from the Indian Ocean requires us to factor in multiple voices, be these merchants, indentured labourers, slaves, political exiles or prisoners from different regions in the Indian Ocean world. Taking this cast of actors into account moves us away from binary narratives of ‘black’ versus ‘white’ towards post-resistance perspectives.
An Indian Ocean perspective redraws regional historiographical maps and creates new ones. The Cape moves from a relatively sequestered regional historiography by being drawn analytically into a broader Indian Ocean arena. Muslim circuits of education bring new analytical networks to light. Yemen, Zanzibar, the Comoros, Mozambique and parts of South Africa, notably Cape Town and Durban, cohere through the intellectual networks and personnel passing through them.
An Indian Ocean optic has long been recognized for the rich ‘connected histories’ that it enables. For scholars of Africa, such histories enable them to insert questions of Africa into other historiographies. Indian nationalism has generally been studied from a territorial and teleologically nationalist perspective. As this field opens up to more transnational and oceanic forms of thought, the role of Africa and Africans in shaping discourses of Indian nationalism becomes apparent. This conjuncture presents an opportunity for African Studies to raise its profile by inserting Africa more prominently into the study of the Indian Ocean world. The growing importance of studying lateral networks and linkages within ‘the South’ underlines this opportunity.
By connecting histories in the Indian Ocean arena, scholars can certainly complicate regional and national historiographies. Yet, in the longer run, these enriched analyses can start to point to broader patterns. By connecting a series of print culture histories in the Indian Ocean region, this collection raises the possibility of new global histories of print. Rather than print capitalism and vast anonymous publics being the unstated premise of analysis, this collection suggests that themes of philanthropic production and personalized print offer new vectors for thinking about global histories of print culture. A view from the Indian Ocean then offers the possibility of revising our understandings on different levels, from the local and regional to the global. Histories in the ocean may in the longer run contribute to a history of the Indian Ocean and its distinctive contributions to world history.
