In African Identity in Asia, Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya unites her own pioneering research on sub-Saharan Africans in Asia with a synthesis of scholarly literature to produce a good introduction to an “under-recognized migration” (p. 99). She opens with the coming of Africans to various parts of Asia, as businessmen (from Ethiopians in ancient Sri Lanka to Nigerians in modern Hong Kong), employees of Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial powers, or families seeking to build new lives in a new country (Falashas in Israel). A greater number arrived as victims of the Indian Ocean slave trade, which was initiated by Arabs in the sixth century ce and expanded after Europeans joined in at the end of the fifteenth. Many Africans, enslaved and free, were soldiers in the slave armies of Muslim monarchs and in European colonial regiments, and Jayasuriya devotes a chapter to African military service in Asia. She notes its function as a vehicle of social mobility, particularly in South Asia (where the African general Malik Ambar was the fiercest opponent of the Mughal emperors at the beginning of the seventeenth century), but also, for example, among Africans in the Dutch army in Indonesia.

In a chapter on the survival of African musical traditions in the Arab world and South Asia, Jayasuriya convincingly argues that “music and dance are among the best indicators of an African legacy” in Asia (p. 81). Not only that, Africans have contributed elements of their ancestral musical traditions to their Asian host societies, and one of the book's goals is to highlight African Asians' role as “cultural brokers between continents” (p. xi).

Jayasuriya is a linguist by training, and unsurprisingly, African Identity in Asia includes a chapter on language. Whether they arrived as slaves or freemen, Africans in Asia usually lost their own languages, although the lyrics of songs sung by their descendants sometimes include words that originated in Africa. Jayasuriya analyzes a list of “African” words that Sir Richard Burton collected from men of African origin in Sindh (now the southeastern part of Pakistan). She identifies them as Swahili, and is unquestionably correct in the vast majority of cases (although babaya, for “father,” and banduk. for “musket,” could just as easily come from Persian or Urdu as from Swahili; and Burton's p'hani, “sea,” may represent pani, the common North Indian word for water, rather than Jayasuriya's Swahili pwani, or “beach”). This is significant because Swahili would not have been the first language of Africans in Sindh, but Jayasuriya reminds us that as a lingua franca, it would have been initially used in Sindh when East Africans of different origins needed to communicate with each other. Then, they and their descendants continued to use some Swahili vocabulary even after they adopted Sindhi.

A comparison of the experiences of Africans in Asia and in the Americas reveals both similarities and differences. Sometimes, Jayasuriya exaggerates the contrast. Thus, while the great majority of African slaves in the Western Hemisphere did indeed labor on plantations or in mines, many performed service-related functions that she suggests were confined to Asia (pp. 3, 11, 16). It is undeniable, however, that slaves in the Indian Ocean world often enjoyed more rights than their counterparts in the New World, as well as more opportunities to attain positions of leadership. Moreover, it could be easier for Africans to assimilate into host societies in Asia than in America. Indeed, largely because of the extent of assimilation, there is a debate as to whether the term “diaspora” is even applicable to African Asian communities.

Slips are inevitable in a book that covers so much ground. There is repetitiveness, as on pages 74 and 75, where two almost identical passages describe the fate of African soldiers in Sri Lanka after the Dutch conquest. Jayasuriya frequently elides the terms “African” and “slave” (e.g., pp. 33, 42, 138–39), even though elsewhere she makes it clear that not all Africans arrived in Asia as slaves, and of course most slaves in Asia were not Africans. Non-Asian scholars who have learned Asian languages will not agree that “Asians have an advantage in writing the story of African migrants because they have the necessary communication skills to interact with contemporary Afro-Asian communities” (p. 9). Some readers may be uncomfortable with Jayasuriya's support for the Indian government's attempts to capitalize on African Indians' supposed innate athletic ability by recruiting them for sports teams (pp. 112, 135–36), or her assertion that “Afro-Asians have not changed their sense of rhythm” (p. 134).

But these do not detract from the value of African Identity in Asia. Academics and laypersons alike will thank Jayasuriya for this fine contribution to what is still a new area of investigation, and they will also second her call for further study of Africans in Asia.