Introduction
In 1931, M. Nazir Ahmad, an Indian missionary of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam in the British colony of the Gold Coast, journeyed from Saltpond in the south to Wa in the Northern Territories. Ahmad described his friendly meetings with many Muslim and traditional religious communities in a letter to the British chief commissioner at Tamale, assuring him of the Ahmadiyya’s ‘apolitical nature’ and that their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, and his followers understood their place as British subjects. Along with the detailed report of his activities, Nazir Ahmad enclosed a photograph of himself with numerous converts he had reportedly won for the Ahmadiyya sect, including the Dagomba chief, whom the Indian described as having been a ‘pagan’.Footnote 1 The photograph was not archived with the letter in the Ghana Public Records and Archives Administration Department, but many subsequent correspondences relating to Wa were. The main reason was that a riot broke out in August 1934, three years after Nazir’s visit. The chief commissioner characterized it as the first disturbance, to his knowledge, caused by ‘religious differences’ in the whole of the colony.Footnote 2 At the centre of the conflict was Salihu, the grandson of Wa’s limam (the highest Muslim authority), who joined the Ahmadiyya and left Wa to study with the Indian missionary, only to return soon afterwards, asserting his right to usurp his grandfather’s limamate. The struggle over leadership of the Islamic fold in Wa turned ‘to the use of swords’, the grandfather Alhaji Limam Mohamma wrote to the British officer in charge.Footnote 3
In the same letter, the limam made clear that he did not regard the Indian Ahmadi a fellow Muslim nor a member of a subject race like himself. He advised his grandson, on his authority as a haji (one who had performed the Islamic pilgrimage), that Arabs did not allow people to hold more than one religion at a time and that ‘no religion is more blessed’ than Islam. He noted that Salihu’s new religion ‘was not known to him or his ancestors’ and had come ‘from the white man’; another Wa Muslim leader characterized the Ahmadis as Christians. The grandfather, while requesting the traditional ruler, the Naa, to have patience with the youth, chastised Salihu for promoting a ‘path [that] leads to heathenism and deceit’. He disavowed his grandson: ‘The name of Salihu the Confusionist. He is the key which opens all disorder.’Footnote 4
The destabilizing effects of an Indian-origin religious movement, rippling from the coast deep into the savanna, were profound. While Wa Muslims had for some time disagreed among themselves, ‘factionalism finally became schism with the creation of the Ahmadiyya imamate’, historian Ivor Wilks notes (Wilks Reference Wilks2002: 204; Hanson Reference Hanson2017: 234); the Ahmadis won the upper hand in the 1940s with the British oscillating between the different factions but ultimately siding against ‘zealots’ to ensure ‘freedom of religion’ for the Indian mission. The British judgement was in no small part shaped by numerous insistent missives from the Indian missionaries written in Arabic-language correspondence that has survived only in English translations completed by Ahmadiyya Indian missionary F. R. Hakeem. In their own letters, Wa Muslim authorities laid out their many disputes with the Ahmadis on theology and politics. But the Ahmadi missionaries’ evidence – including the now missing photograph and detailed petitions to the government – constituted proof that was believable to the British and led them to distinguish between the ‘modern’ Ahmadi Muslims and the ‘fanatical’ Wa old guard.
These events in Wa – and more specifically the Ahmadiyya movement’s use of images and writing – reveal how media could transform West African–Indian relations. The Ahmadiyya’s ability to marshal ‘proof’ played a decisive part in producing and resolving conflict, which arose wherever the Ahmadiyya went, not only in Wa but elsewhere in West Africa and in other sites of the Ahmadiyya movement. A major part of this conflict stemmed from the sect’s teachings, which departed from the core beliefs of Islam, beginning with the nature of prophecy. The founder of the Ahmadiyya, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who was a religious teacher in British Punjab, claimed in 1883 to be the mujaddid (reformer) after a forty-day period of solitude and prayer (chilla). In 1889, he founded the Ahmadiyya community through a public bayat (oath), and in 1901 he declared himself a prophet, a claim that offended many Muslims as a violation of the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood (Robinson Reference Robinson1990: 43). Other Ahmadi beliefs, such as Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s claim that Jesus did not die on the cross but lived and travelled east to become a sage before his death in Kashmir, India, were also shocking. Yet, in Wa, the heterodox Ahmadiyya did not just challenge established religious beliefs; their ‘confusionism’ muddled categories of religion, race and political authority, in translations in different languages conveying information in multiple media forms to appeal to the young especially and to reconfigure power structures in the British Gold Coast. The Wa limam’s reference to the Ahmadiyya religion as belonging to the white men indexed foreignness as the source of Indians’ religious power.
This article explores the mediation of race, religion and power in writings and images, particularly photographs, associated with the Ahmadiyya in West Africa. The movement established a longstanding interaction of more than a century (since about 1920) between West Africans and South Asians, an interaction that had cultural impacts rarely discussed in the scholarship that focuses on African–South Asian economic and political interactions related to Indian diasporas in Africa, anti-colonial struggles and post-independence political alliance making, especially related to non-alignment, and global South discourse (Mensah Reference Mensah2023; King and Venkatachalam Reference King and Venkatachalam2021; Soske Reference Soske2017; Mawdsley and McCann Reference Mawdsley and McCann2011). While these themes are important, they often miss the experiences by which Africans and South Asians came to understand their interrelationship across vast physical distances and cultural differences (Shankar Reference Shankar2021). Ahmadiyya history examined here reveals how West African–Indian relationality was constructed through experiences of religious, racial and gendered differences that played out in print but could be reconciled in media circulating well beyond a singular religious community or missionary enterprise in different political moments, from the colonial to the postcolonial era. Media forms, especially photographs, ‘have a great capacity to overturn unified linear, and chronological ways of thinking and open new analytical spaces’ (Hayes and Minkley Reference Hayes and Minkley2019: 11); Ahmadiyya media also made visible and thinkable a West African–Indian spatial connection that was impossible in the same ways as in the naturalized transoceanic Indian Ocean world but could be collected from imagined and real contacts that may have been ephemeral and fleeting (Renne Reference Renne2015). As Sevea notes, describing the Ahmadiyya ‘print jihad’, the sect ‘negated the need for personal individual contact through the modern means of communication’ (Sevea Reference Sevea, Feener and Sevea2009: 135). What I wish to show here is that photographs of contact, proximity, intimacy and nearness – even if they were exceptional – could have a special impact in a context where distance, difference and conflict were common, thus making apparent and immediate a range of unspoken characteristics of West African–Indian relations.
Ahmadiyya media, like the sect itself, has been resilient and has even expanded in West Africa since the early twentieth century. Conducting research on Islam in West Africa in the 1950s, Humphrey J. Fisher drew attention to the mushrooming of Ahmadiyya schools for boys and girls in the Gambia, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, the production of religious instructional texts, and the opening of Ahmadi bookshops (Fisher Reference Fisher, Brown and Hiskett2021). Treating this emphasis on text and literacy as part of Islamic education, he concluded that Ahmadiyya education attracted West African attention because it represented a form of modernization, but while ‘Ahmadiyya may be welcomed initially by those most fervently desiring modern education … an orthodox reaction builds up at some time, encouraging non-Ahmadiyya modern schooling’ (ibid.: 198). He recorded the desire of non-Ahmadi (orthodox) Muslim West Africans to create alternatives to the controversial sect and the influx of Egyptian, Saudi Arabian and other nationalities of Islamic influence in the region, as fierce opponents of and competitors to the Ahmadiyya. The sect was able to sustain its outputs in publications, translating the Qur’an into African languages such as Yoruba and Kiswahili (Khan Reference Khan1987; Chande Reference Chande2021), often as polemical translations that generated yet more new versions seeking to correct Ahmadiyya interpretation. African opposition rarely rose to the level of the violent anti-Ahmadi discrimination that intensified in Pakistan in the 1950s, culminating in the passage of constitutional amendments excommunicating them from the Islamic fold in 1970. The Saudi-based World Muslim League banned the Ahmadiyya’s English translation of the Qur’an, and in 1974 the Pakistani National Assembly passed a constitutional amendment stripping the Ahmadiyya of Muslim identity, thus criminalizing their public expressions of Islamic identity such as greetings or prayers. Yet even amidst opposition in African countries, Ahmadiyya media expansion beyond their initial production of print to new media like radio, satellite television and digital products has been prolific, even reaching beyond the older Anglophone spheres of former British colonies into Francophone countries such as Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire (Langewiesche Reference Langewiesche2021).
This article examines some of the ways in which Ahmadiyya media became legitimate and useful because print and visual media allowed for disagreements, schisms and differences. My interest differs from Katrin Langewiesche’s focus, which has been on the functions of Ahmadiyya photographs ‘as catalysts for creating cohesion among members and on culturally distinct understandings of the mediation powers of the visual’ (Langewiesche Reference Langewiesche2021: 215). She makes a convincing case for Ahmadiyya media as having a special purpose in creating belonging for a transnational minority that is excluded from the global Muslim community or umma. Yet the present article examines how Ahmadiyya media has at times exposed religious and racial differences against the backdrop of volatile politics between West Africans and South Asian Ahmadis, who had originally come as missionaries using British imperial networks. As the opening episode reveals, early Ahmadiyya missionaries stood in an uneasy relation with West African colonized subjects and used media to sharpen this difference. But, as this article shows, the media repertoire shifted with the political tides, as West Africans achieved independence and Ahmadiyya, who were Pakistanis divorced from their homeland, which had been partitioned along religious lines, wanted to reconfigure West Africa as a familiar place where they had close relations with their hosts. Marzia Balzani captures the mutability and many possibilities for reading Ahmadiyya media that this article taps: ‘the complex and expansive Ahmadi technological machinery which records in film, in photographs and in writing all public events and Ahmadi gatherings produces an archive so large and continually added to such that no individual could possibly hope ever to gain a comprehensive overview of it’ (Balzani Reference Balzani2020: 70).
Indeed, the vast Ahmadiyya media apparatus represents an intriguing analogy with Bollywood cinema and Indian television shows, largely not exclusively in the Hindi language, which were enormously popular in many parts of Africa, but especially in West Africa. The films’ themes of being postcolonial peoples, negotiating youth, family, love and changing cultural traditions outside the West, brought to life a repertoire Larkin called parallel modernities (Larkin Reference Larkin1997). The music, aesthetics and emotional registers of these media outputs, while having enjoyed sustained appeal among some diehard fans, have waned in popularity among Africans; some Africans deride them as passé (Barlet Reference Barlet2010; Bertz Reference Bertz2019). A major reason for this decline, argues Barlet, is that Bollywood has lost its sense of ‘its own society’s relation in the world’, which struck ‘a chord in African hearts’ (Barlet Reference Barlet2010: 142). It is precisely this sense of relation – specifically between Africans and South Asians – that this article seeks to trace as it was imagined in Ahmadiyya media, shifting from an emphasis on strangeness, conflict, confusion and difference to an orientation of intimacy between Africans and South Asians at a moment of Ahmadiyya exclusion from the global Muslim umma. Ahmadiyya repertoires of images were critical to the making of the modern Muslim world across enormous diversity (Aydin Reference Aydin2017; Green Reference Green2015; Bayoumi Reference Bayoumi2006), but few have explored the actual mechanisms – textual, technological and otherwise – through which distance and diversity – material, cultural or ideological – were both viewed and erased in modern Islamic networks (Langewiesche Reference Langewiesche2021: 215). To some extent it is taken for granted that Muslims were largely non-white peoples and that their solidarity was subsumed in political discourses of a generalized racial solidarity in the twentieth-century Euro-American-dominated world order. Yet, as the limam’s impressions show, differences – whether of skin colour, dress, gender norms or expressions of piety – were impossible to ignore.
My approach is not only to excavate evidence in media sources relating to the Ahmadiyya Muslim movement that brought South Asians to West Africa but rather to examine Ahmadiyya media as key in constructing West African–South Asian interconnectedness in the midst of difference and discord. To do so, I approach the Ahmadiyya’s varied cultural productions through Meyer’s view of ‘religion as a practice of mediation’ (Meyer Reference Meyer2015: 356) to examine this Islamic missionary movement as a distinct mode of communication. With their specific emphases on proof, polemic and proselytism, the Ahmadiyya depended on the deployment and development of new media techniques as their mission changed. Yet the Ahmadiyya missionaries operated in a wider field of media, and I approach visual images, specifically black and white photographs, as embedded within West African visual economies. Deborah Poole’s pioneering work on visual economy as the organized production of images that circulate and accrue value provides an important framework for this research, particularly because she highlights how, in the excess of visual images, using the example of ethnological images taken of ‘native’ subjects, the scholarly impetus to make meaning from these sources erases the instability, contingency and unintelligibility of encounters captured in a flash of time (Poole Reference Poole2005: 164).
It was precisely to such unstable effects of Ahmadi presence that the limam of Wa referred, in spite of British and Indian insistence to the contrary and the marshalling of proof. I trace how the visual economy grew to encompass these effects and produce new encounters between West African and South Asian media makers who interwove dreams, religious and journalistic communications, and digital archives of photographs into a wider visual repertoire evoking complex emotional registers, including fear and mistrust as well as familiarity and fondness. Absorbing new visuality was possible, as Roberts shows in his discussion of the Senegalese visual economy of devotional art that the French colonialists and later Chinese manufacturers disrupted; Senegalese ‘visual epistemology’ has been resilient in containing historical traces, colonization and contemporary creative responses in a rapidly growing field of images (Roberts Reference Roberts2010: 8). This article historicizes a similarly layered West African visual economy and epistemology created through circulating Ahmadiyya images that ‘condense[d] a world of lived experience’ (Meyer Reference Meyer2015: 356) during decolonization and increasingly insistent calls for Afro-Asian solidarity.
Problems in print
From the time of its origin, the Ahmadiyya sect was controversial and its approach polemical. The disagreements between Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and Christian missionaries, Hindus (especially the Arya Samaj) and Muslim teachers in Punjab from the late nineteenth century carried over in the approach of the Ahmadiyya missionaries. With the founder’s passing in 1908 and with Nuruddin becoming the first Khalifa (spiritual head) of the community, the sect navigated internal rifts and officially split in 1914 into two different branches, one based in Lahore (Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat-i-Islam Lahore) and the other in Qadian (Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat). Although their split was prompted by many subtle arguments and disagreement over the manner of organizing their mission, their difference became sharper, especially on the question of their founder’s status. The Qadian branch, which became the larger of the two, claimed that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad belonged to the line of prophets recognized in Islam, while the Lahore camp saw Gulam Ahmed as a renewer of the faith. The Lahore Ahmadiyya, a minority among a minority, had their greatest impact in Europe, particularly in Germany. They used publications, alliances and the building of mosques to position themselves as modern, moderate, mainstream and pacifist Muslims (Jonker Reference Jonker2016). The Qadian branch used many of the same tools, though their approach was far more confrontational about their theological positions and exclusionary posture towards other Muslims (who they called kafir); they were also more zealous in missionization, which increased significantly after 1914. Both branches directed mandatory alms (zakat) and voluntary donations to expand their foreign missions (Langewiesche Reference Langewiesche and Weiss2020b), and their emphasis on social services and later humanitarian work allowed the Ahmadiyya to enter new mission fields. Both branches rejected resistance towards the West, particularly the interpretation of jihad as a struggle against established authority, and the importance of media for both branches reflects Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s elaboration of ‘jihad of the pen’ – as a struggle for one’s personal faith and to spread Islam peacefully – deemed as the proper course of action for Muslims in the modern world. Ghulam Ahmad wrote, ‘There is no sword except the sword of arguments and proofs’ (Lathan Reference Lathan2008: 379).
The insistence on proof had a resonance in Ahmadiyya encounters not only because of the specific claims of Ghulam Ahmad and his followers and their competition with other religious communities in establishing a mission of conversion. Expectation for the prophesied Mahdi in the thirteenth Islamic century ran high, with signs such as Christian European conquest seeming to confirm the coming end. The Sudanese Mahdiyya’s power in fighting the British until the end of the nineteenth century confirmed such messianic beliefs and created ripples across Africa. Another reason for reading signs of the moment was modern ‘industrial communications’ as Muslim peoples from around the world interacted, creating a consciousness of self and other that was at times confusing (Green Reference Green2013). Nile Green highlights how Muslim peoples’ diversity did not always produce immediate recognition of a global umma but rather produced new questions and a search for answers. He highlights, using examples of Asians and Europeans, how ‘ports presented confusing medleys of peoples from far and wide, whose ambiguous identities used the conceptual borders between self and other’, blurring racial and religious categories and ‘transforming Muslim conceptions of history and geography, of time and space’ (Green Reference Green2013: 406, 403).
In the Gold Coast, the writings of the limam of Wa against his grandson’s conversion to the Ahmadiyya reveals a conception of space (Arabia) and time (ancestral past) that carries a racial sensibility (white men) implying a geographical distinction between the paths and historicity of travel – the difference between the south, the coast, from where the whites had come, and the east (Arabia). The stories of the Ahmadiyya’s arrival in the Gold Coast and Nigeria are told in many versions, with different views as to who initiated contact with the Indian missionaries. There is agreement, however, that the Indian missionaries came via the coast and were thus wholly removed from the older history of Islam as practised in the trans-Saharan sphere.Footnote 5
The most widely accepted version in Nigeria centres around Lawal Basil Agusto, an aguda (Brazilian) Muslim barrister who was a leader of the Muslim Literary Society in Lagos. He obtained copies of the Islamic Review and Muslim India journals, gained through a Nigerian visitor to the Lahore sect leader Khwaja Kamal ud-Din at the Woking mosque in Surrey, outside London (Deng Reference Deng2024: 128). After making contact with the Ahmadiyya movement in Qadian, Agusto received more printed literature, including the Review of Religions, which first appeared in print in 1902, from the Qadian branch. These publications grew from ‘niche’ outputs to global magazines in part because of their description of meetings and other articles showing the ‘normalcy’ of Islam (Lanzillo Reference Lanzillo2019: 4). The timing of Agusto’s request for Ahmadiyya literature and to join the movement in 1916 was motivated at least in part by the fact that a conflict over leadership of the Lagos central mosque had broken out and divided the Muslims into two parties: the Lemomu and the Jamaat, the latter led by Adamu Animashaun, a prominent Muslim journalist with his own printing press since at least 1914 who later acquired The Times of Nigeria in 1918 from J. B. Davies (Danmole Reference Danmole2005: 30). The Ahmadiyya came into Lagos just as an intra-Muslim conflict had erupted. Within a few years, the Ahmadiyya became a target of Animashaun in The Times, where he demanded that they ‘show the public evidence from all the books of Islam to justify their founder was a prophet’ (ibid.: 32). Violence subsequently broke out at an Ahmadiyya prayer meeting held at Balogun Square, for which Animashaun, who claimed his innocence in court, paid a fine and served time in prison.
The first Indian missionary in West Africa, Maulvi Abdul Rahim Nayyar, arrived in Lagos in 1921 after he had met Chief Amodu Tijani Oluwa in London. Oluwa travelled to England as one of two representatives of the National British Congress of West Africa (NBCWA), which was conceived by Nigerian resident of the Gold Coast Akinwande Savage and barrister Casely Hayford to serve as an ‘effective body cutting across the four British territories of Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and Gambia which would be able to put forward demands and adequately express the aspirations of the educated West Africans’ (Olusanya Reference Olusanya1968). G. O. Olusanya notes that the West Africans got some inspiration from the Indian National Congress, formed in 1885, which presents an intriguing possibility that British West African–Indian political and religious currents crossed in the meeting of Chief Oluwa and Nayyar (see Figure 1). The photograph, taken in 1920, of the two men with several others who are unidentified is doubtless one of the oldest ones of West Africans and Indians meeting.Footnote 6 The meeting certainly gave Nayyar more legitimacy and perhaps facilitated his regular movements between Lagos and Saltpond. The NBCWA’s politics – seen as ‘conservative and cooperationist’ with the British (Gershoni Reference Gershoni2001) – meshed with Ahmadiyya support for imperial rule, but interestingly also found some common cause with Marcus Garvey’s UNIA, which became a conduit for the Ahmadiyya in the USA (Shankar Reference Shankar2021). How such connections developed with blurred lines between religious and racial politics to help the Ahmadiyya gain more access and adherents in West Africa remains a question, but there is no doubt that Indian Ahmadiyya missionaries were understood to be religious teachers with the political backing of British and Western educated elites.
Chief Oluwa of Lagos, Nigeria with Maulvi Abdul Rahim Nayyar at Melrose Road, London, c.1920.
Nayyar’s reception in the Gold Coast, as historian John Hanson states, seemed to fulfil a prophecy foretold. Yusuf Nyarko, a relative of a prominent Fante Muslim leader in southern Gold Coast, had a dream that he was praying with white men and gathered Muslims from his community to come together and invite a Muslim teacher from across the sea to instruct them (Hanson Reference Hanson2017: 163–4). A similar experience was reported in Lagos, with the Qur’anic people who were breakaways from the Lagos central mosque community. One of the Qur’anic people:
recalled that a late leader, Tafsir Alfa Yaka, of the subordinate Ayanmo Mosque, had a vision in the 1880s that a white man would come to confirm their interpretations and the teachings that the Quran was all-sufficient for Muslims. This dream or vision came when the Quranic community was experiencing a crisis as some Muslims in Lagos who performed hajj for the first time did not encounter Muslims whose practices were similar to that [sic] of the Quranic people. Nayyar’s white skin and his knowledge of the Quran and Arabic were seen by the Quranic people as an opportunity to prove the truthfulness of the vision and to rejuvenate their community. Nayyar told the Quranic people that ‘they were of the same way of thinking’ and were ‘children of the same parent’, which helped to establish his friendship with the Quranic community. Thus, Nayyar was allowed to pray regularly inside the Aroloya mosque along with other Ahmadi Muslims. (Deng Reference Deng2024: 140)
People reported visions of Ahmadis not only in West Africa but also in the USA in the 1920s and in more recently opened mission fields such as Burkina Faso (Green Reference Green2015: 228; Balzani Reference Balzani2010; Langewiesche Reference Langewiesche2021; Hanson Reference Hanson2017). Ahmadiyya appearance in dreams offered a competitive esoteric power to that of West African Muslims, including Animashaun, who was an amulet maker, astrologer and prophesier. He filled his publications with his predictions of the deaths of important people, droughts, and other matters of everyday interest to Lagosians (Danmole Reference Danmole2005). Dreams as a form of knowledge in Islam, particularly Sufism, have had a deep importance in West Africa to connect shaykh and disciple (Ogunnaike Reference Ogunnaike2024) and to ‘rupture everyday reality’ to reveal the miraculous (Green Reference Green2003). Dreams of Ahmadiyya believers revealed ‘more intimate encounters’ and ‘private experiences’ (ibid.: 287), rivalling the claims of illegitimacy against the Ahmadiyya with powerful visionary evidence that was difficult to refute.
Thus, print and visual culture of different kinds grew around the Ahmadiyya in correspondence with the many controversies – mundane and more serious – that swirled around the sect. In print, image and personal dreams and testimonies, an Ahmadi media repertoire emerged, not necessarily ‘negating’ personal individual contact, as Sevea (Reference Sevea, Feener and Sevea2009: 135) suggests, but rather defining the personal and intimate in ways that West Africans understood to be meaningful.
Facing and effacing difference
Within a few short years, the West African impact on the Ahmadiyya as a global Muslim movement defining itself by an egalitarianism was clear. In 1924, the Ahmadiyya Khalifa Bashiruddin Ahmad began his addresses at the Conference of Living Religions within the Empire in London by remarking that ‘people of all ranks and classes’ belonged to the Ahmadiyya movement, bringing together high- and low-caste Indians, and embracing Africans, predominantly in the west of the continent; in America, from Chicago, the mission had spread to Trinidad, Brazil and Costa Rica (Ahmad Reference Ahmad2007: 7–8). What brought together peoples from every race, religion and nationality in the movement was prophecy – that is, the promise of a messenger, ‘the opening through which all nations may obtain a vision of their Lord’ (ibid.: 15).
The race consciousness of the mission was reflected in the staging of white and Black converts, brought together by Indians in between. The Moslem Outlook newspaper, published in Lahore, drew attention to interracial intimacy, as romantic and as religious:
There is no gainsaying the fact that the majority of Muslims of India are those recruited from the original inhabitants of the country – the Pariahs and untouchables. But yet as soon as these people embraced Islam, they were admitted into the society, with the same fairness and magnanimity, as if they were Syed for ages. Malik Kafur, who as history tells us fell in love with a blue-eyed fair-complexioned princess of the imperial harem, hailed from the rank of low class Hindu. The General, who commanded the Pathan Army during the days of Sultana Razia, was no other than a black Abyssinian … The first General who led the Muslim army into the land of the Nile was no other than a black Othello. The first Muezzin of Islam was a slave, a Negro. In India we find a dynasty is known by the proud title of slave dynasty came as they were from the status of slaves [sic]. In short, as we proceed, through the pages of the Islamic history, the same example of Equality and Brotherhood will meet us in every page. It is indeed a unique feature of Islam. (Ahmady Reference Ahmady1927: 1)
Fairness – as both a physical trait and a quality – is paired with Blackness, and the two are intimately connected in the story of Rezia Sultan’s love affair with the African slave general, which has since been the inspiration for Bollywood films. To tell this tale in a Muslim newspaper with a global audience in the 1920s suggests a radical interracial intimacy that was not seen in other secular or religious media. Descriptions like these – which were left to the imagination – were contextualized into stories about the philosophical differences between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois and conflicts over caste between Indian Muslims and Hindus (Shankar Reference Shankar2021).
As for photographs of Muslims, early Ahmadiyya publications had usually included only the grainy pictures of Ghulam alone, sometimes surrounded by family or disciples, his gaze direct, with his long beard and large turban, and his head often slightly tilted to one side. These rarely show up after the 1920s, when converts from around the world were instead pictured in groups or in families. These photographs contained key motifs – books, specific headwear, robes, males and females, Western-style clothes and ‘native’ clothes – that constructed Muslim piety as respectable, inclusive, worldly and non-white (see Figure 2). Sylvia Chan-Malik draws attention to Ahmadiyya portrayals of Muslim women of colour in the USA in arresting photographs such as one titled ‘Four American Moslem ladies’, from a 1923 issue of the same Lahore-based Moslem Sunrise newspaper (see Figure 3). According to Chan-Malik, the Indian missionary Sadiq, who arrived in the US in 1921 to proselytize, placed only one advertisement in the nation’s largest Black newspaper, The Chicago Defender, on the ‘Women’s page’, to invite African Americans to preaching sessions (Chan-Malik Reference Chan-Malik2016). It is unclear how photographs travelled from the West to the East, but their subjects became recognizable through the staging of posture and sartorial choices.
Sadiq provided stories and images of faraway places – India and Arabia – which likely included photos of their newfound ‘sisters’ in Islamic dress. While the Four American Moslem Ladies may not have had fine silks and saris of their Ahmadi Muslim sisters in the Punjab, Sisters Khairat, Zeineb, Ahmadia, and Ayesha made do by pulling out and pressing their best linens, putting on their church clothes and hats, and wrapping themselves as regally and beautifully as they knew how. They innovated and improvised, and of their own will, chose Islam. (Chan-Malik Reference Chan-Malik2016)
Ahmadiyya in Lokoja, Nigeria.
Source: Review of Religions, November 1930 <https://www.reviewofreligions.org/category/archive-edition/>.
‘Four American Moslem ladies’: Black American women in the Ahmadiyya movement of Islam, 1921–3.
Source: Moslem Sunrise, 1923, reprinted in Chan-Malik (Reference Chan-Malik2016).
West African Ahmadis used English-language texts like the Moslem Sunrise, which itself was pieced together or culled from other sources in ways that were intelligible locally (James Reference James, Peterson, Newell and Hunter2016), as well as oral and print translations of sections of the Qur’an in African languages to preach publicly in Fante, Twi and Yoruba, a practice more commonly seen in Christian missions. Ahmadiyya in the Gold Coast and Nigeria became ardent missionaries who spread their faith beyond coastal cities into the Twi-speaking regions of Wa and Kumasi and Hausa-speaking regions of Northern Nigeria (Dovlo and Asante Reference Dovlo and Asante2003). Schools were a centrepiece of these evangelical activities, and children of all creeds were welcome, to learn through Arabic, English and indigenous language instruction in Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Nigeria, and later East Africa, where the sect had a smaller presence. Independent African newspapers and books that were used by Muslims and Christians alike were produced through the 1950s and 1960s by Ahmadi printing presses in West African locations and around the world. These texts circulated through bookshops and schools.
Ahmadiyya involvement in the development of media thus grew into an extensive enterprise. Maulana Naseem Saifi, an Indian who came to Nigeria in 1945 as a missionary and was later the national amir and missionary-in-charge until 1965, was especially active in developing Nigerian journalism. He worked at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation from 1947 and published columns on Islam in Nigerian newspapers, such as The Daily Service, The Daily Telegraph, The Morning Post, The Daily Mail and The Middle Belt Herald. In 1951, he started the official weekly Ahmadiyya newspaper The Truth (Deng Reference Deng2024). One image from the weekly is the photograph of the American sports and civil rights hero Muhammad Ali visiting Nigeria in 1964 and accepting a Qur’an from Saifi, as a crowd of young men look on (Khan Reference Khan2016) (see Figure 4); Ali also prayed in an Ahmadiyya mosque in Frankfurt, suggesting he had a deeper relationship with the sect. Photographs like this one are now posted online, without attribution, as part of the Ahmadiyya adaptation to new (digital) media to catalogue and update its older efforts and control its image. Saifi, like a few other Ahmadiyya missionaries, was also well connected to the world of journalism; he was the first vice president of the Nigerian national journalists’ union (Omotayo Reference Omotayo2022). Ahmadiyya professionals like him were intimately involved in the establishment of a modern visual economy disseminated through images, mostly photographs, embedded in texts that circulated beyond Muslim communities.
Naseem Saifi with Muhammad Ali in the Truth Weekly, originally published August 2016: ‘My Hearty Thanks’.
Source: <https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2021/08/22/who-is-naseem-saifi/>.
The photograph with Ali shows a vernacular performance common in journalistic images as compared with portraits that were part of the older aesthetic of the Ahmadiyya and other religious and secular images. For example, a vibrant, colourful Islamic imagery evolved in Senegal and grew globally, centred on the Sufi saint Amadou Bamba (1854–1927), of whom there is just a single photograph from the era of his exile to Gabon in Central Africa by the French authorities (Paoletti Reference Paoletti2018; Roberts and Roberts Reference Roberts and Roberts2002). The image of Bamba, as the most revered saint of the Muridiyya Sufi tariqa (order), has been reproduced in different media, displayed everywhere from massive murals on city walls to the walls of homes in highly personal and close figurations. It is possible to understand this reproduction through recognizing Muslim Sufis’ reverence for their teachers as ‘channels of divine grace’, Giulia Paoletti argues. ‘As part of Sufi reverence for their current and past teachers, the custom of owning and employing devotional portraits in one’s personal spiritual practice [was common] … as early as the 1910s’ (Paoletti Reference Paoletti2022: 778). The Ahmadiyya, on the other hand, moved away from the central figure of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and even Indian missionaries to mix visual icons, blend religious and secular interests, and allow for active social performance of class identity, expressed through clothing, hairstyles and corporeal poses (Buckley Reference Buckley2014).
New Ahmadiyya visual practices indexed two different but related factors: the changing power of foreign Ahmadiyya missionaries and West African consumption and interest in print culture. The Ahmadiyya Khalifa, Bashiruddin (from 1914 to 1965), reorganized and enhanced foreign missionary efforts, but with the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the Ahmadiyya relocation to the new country brought more opposition to their interpretations. The hardening of mainstream Pakistani Muslims’ views of the Ahmadiyya erupted into violence in 1953 amid constitutional negotiations – Ahmadis were lynched in the streets and their property stolen (Evans Reference Evans2020; Qasmi Reference Qasmi2014). In 1970, the World Muslim League declared the Ahmadiyya’s English translation of the Qur’an illegitimate. Four years later, the Saudi Arabian and Pakistani governments declared Ahmadis non-Muslims, ‘decisions [that] stirred another round of crises, including newspaper debates among the Ahmadiyya in Nigeria’ (Hassan Reference Hassan, Denzer and Shereikis2015: 43). Pakistani Ahmadis increasingly looked to West Africa and other locations as familiar and safe havens (Shankar Reference Shankar2021). Saifi’s own career and outputs as a journalist in Nigeria illustrate his political dislocations from British India to Pakistani citizen and then exile. This photograph welcoming Ali (mirrored in another in which he and an entourage are welcoming Haile Selassie of Ethiopia to Nigeria) portrays Saifi ‘at work at home’ in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, journalism, as opposed to missionary photography, had a new, important political purpose for West African countries gaining independence. In 1954, three years before Ghana became the first British West African colony to gain independence, the Ahmadiyya reportedly sent a letter to the future president Kwame Nkrumah to confirm:
The Ahmadiyya movement is not a political party and as such it does not dabble in politics. To make the position clear, the Holy Founder of our Movement laid it down as a fundamental principle to his followers that they should be loyal to the Government in power in their respective countries. In obedience to this injunction the members of this community have ever kept aloof from all kinds of agitation and commotion and have also exercised a restraining influence upon a large number of people.Footnote 7
The Indian government also found:
The letter is further reported to have indicated that the movement does not limit its individual members from having such political views as they like, but that as a movement it would not take part in politics or become a political party. This letter to the Prime Minister appears to have been necessitated by the recent decision of the Gold Coast Government to enact a law banning all political parties with religious or regional motives and programmes.Footnote 8
This Ahmadiyya missive, similar to ones from the era of British rule, was a sign of South Asian acquiescence to West African rule, in a distinct move away from earlier conflicts with West African authorities. Nkrumah, as a secular authority, also understood Ahmadiyya power as useful for Ghana. After independence, Nkrumah told the Indian Council of World Affairs in New Delhi in 1958 that the Western press was biased against Ghana, questioning its democratic character, and that it was the ‘moral obligation of the press to report about new states factually’.Footnote 9 The Ahmadiyya’s decades-old media infrastructure gave the discriminated Pakistani minority a new place in West African political spheres – namely, to prove, in some measure, the democratic and tolerant character of African leaders and citizens.
The centre of the Ahmadiyya gaze shifted increasingly to attacking the West (in contrast to its earlier proclamations of support for the British and of apolitical interests). The head of the sect’s foreign missions, Mirza Mubarak Ahmad, in a pamphlet called ‘Islam in Africa’, published in 1962, offered the Muslim mission as a counterpoint to the African crusade of Billy Graham in 1960 (Ahmad Reference Ahmad1962: 37). ‘When Western missionaries convert Africans what emerges is, all too often, a couple of separate communities, each Christian, but one white and the other black,’ cited Ahmad from the historian Arnold Toynbee; in contrast, Ahmadi leaders called upon their brethren to send a member of each family to ‘pull the whole of Africa towards Islam’ (ibid.: 36–7). ‘Islam eliminates racial prejudice and barriers at one single stroke,’ he wrote. Demonstrating Ahmadi goodness in such moments of encounter was an illustration of Ahmadiyya ‘peaceability’, in an implicit contrast to conflict they inspired ‘outside’ West Africa (Evans Reference Evans2017: 491).
These factors helped bring about the whirlwind tour that the Khalifa Hazrat Hafiz Mirza Nasir Ahmad, who became spiritual head in 1965, took of six West African nations in 1970. The trip was documented in a booklet called Africa Speaks, ‘exclusively based on published or broadcast reports taken from the Press and Radio of the countries concerned viz. Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, the Gambia and Sierra Leone’ (1970). The five-week tour was an occasion to announce the unveiling of Nusrat Jehan (literally translated as ‘world aid’ but in the Ahmadiyya organization in 1970 it was called ‘Africa Leap Forward’), a charitable wing of the mission focused on educational and medical facilities for Africans (Nasir Reference Nasir2022). The Khalifa promised to increase Ahmadiyya religious schools alongside ‘modern’ (secular, Western) education. He promised that Ahmadis would build sixteen secondary schools and four medical clinics around Nigeria. Similar messages sounded in Ghana, where many Ahmadi mosques and schools already existed. He spoke at the Kumasi University of Science and Technology and the Pakistan High Commission in Accra. In Abidjan and Monrovia, where Ahmadi presence was small but growing, he laid out plans for schools and clinics (Ahmad Reference Ahmad2006: xiv).
The photographs in Africa Speaks, however, do not easily fit into the mode of missionary propaganda that might convey a South Asian Islamic civilizing mission in independent and modern West African nations. Indeed, the images come from many West African outlets, though unfortunately we do not know about the photographers themselves. Nigeria’s The Sunday Times and Daily Times, Ghana’s Daily Graphic and The Pioneer, Côte d’Ivoire’s Fraternité Matin, Liberia’s Star, The Gambia News, and Sierra Leone’s Unity and Daily Mail were among the papers cited. Because of their input, the photographs demonstrate a journalistic impulse imposed on the Ahmadiyya visit and agenda. This point can be illustrated in the roughly similar images appearing in Africa Speaks (published in English in Rabwah, Pakistan; see Figure 6) for global audiences and an Urdu-language publication intended for Pakistani audiences, called A Spiritual Memoir of the Glorious Preaching Tour of West Africa in 1970 by the Holy Imam of the Ahmadi Community (see Figure 5); the Ahmadiyya head’s meeting with the press makes clear the effort to shape public opinion. While the Khalifa was a dignitary meeting African heads of state, he was available and accountable to the modern youth.
Khalifa with journalists, Lagos.
Source: The Urdu publication A Spiritual Memoir.
Khalifa at a press conference with students and professors, University of Lagos.
Source: Africa Speaks, p. 5.
In Africa Speaks’ images from Sierra Leonian newspapers, there is a female journalist who does not appear in the Urdu-language text at all (see Figures 7 and 8). The Sierra Leonian is the modern woman whose presence in West African media is all the more striking in relation to a passage of text in the pamphlet, in which the words of Liberian President William Tubman are quoted to highlight the differences between African and South Asian practices. He notes that the state dinner he hosted honouring the Khalifa and his entourage was the first occasion at which ‘the sheep were separated from the goats’ – ‘he was referring to women being separated from men … which is part of Pakistani culture’ (Anonymous 1970: 50).
At the tomb of Alhaji Maulana Nazir Ahmad Ali.
Source: Africa Speaks, p. 86.
Meeting Sierra Leonean resident Prince Williams.
Source: Africa Speaks, p. 85.
The woman appears in several of the West African press photographs, at meetings between the Khalifa and political leaders and at the tomb of a South Asian missionary who died in Sierra Leone. The tomb and the publicized visit are an important way of marking Ahmadiyya pilgrimage outside Arabia, for which Ahmadiyya were attacked by Saudi Arabian and other Muslims (Balzani Reference Balzani2020); hajj would be impossible for Ahmadiyya members within a short time. But figuring Sierra Leone as a pilgrimage site placed the Pakistanis as part of local history while also showing Ahmadiyya visitors’ accommodation of West African gender norms as culturally acceptable. Indeed, the Khalifa’s wife also appears in West African press photographs, including the one at the gravesite and another showing the laying of the foundation stone of a mosque at Bo, Sierra Leone (see Figures 9 and 10). Neither of these photographs appears in the Urdu-language book. Indeed, no women appear in photographs in the Urdu-language book for South Asian audiences. The difference between Ahmadiyya gender norms in West Africa and those among Pakistanis is a major reason African women report their choice to pray on their own, apart from Pakistanis (Langewiesche Reference Langewiesche2021). The visual repertoire from 1970 makes this lived experience apparent.
Prayers after laying the foundation stone at Bo, Sierra Leone.
Source: Africa Speaks, p. 84.
Laying the foundation stone at Bo, Sierra Leone.
Source: Africa Speaks, p. 84.
Africa Speaks also relates messages the Khalifa delivered at a Friday khutbah (prayer) once he returned to Rabwah, Pakistan. He drew attention to racial differences to dispel anti-African sentiments among Pakistanis by evoking the intimate details of his trip (pictured in the booklet) – a sensory catalogue of sights, sounds and smells. In recounting the many African women, men and children – of all faiths – who came to greet him, he called attention to their cleanliness:
By the Grace of God, the Glorious, in Ghana alone I and Mansoura Begum [his wife] shook hands with more than twenty-five thousand men and women … during the tour of these countries, we shook hands with a very large number of people, embraced thousands and caressed thousands of children, and yet throughout our journey we did not come across any case of body odour, with the exception of one or two persons. (Ahmad Reference Ahmad2006: 17)
He gently chided his audience, saying, ‘In these parts they are known to be very dirty and smelling … but there are among them who wash thrice a day and change five times a day.’ This candid and even embarrassing reference to the Pakistani sense of superiority offers details of close encounters that serve the purpose of conveying intimate details in a manner of admonition to Ahmadiyya audiences, which differs from the journalistic photographs that convey secular social and political messages.
This was not a diplomatic effort undertaken for the government of Pakistan, which had been under a military regime since 1958 and was engaged in repression of the Ahmadiyya sect. The visit had a more symbolic and affective purpose, signalling the security of the sect in West Africa, while in Eastern and Southern Africa the place of South Asians was more uncertain and precarious. A South Asian exodus out of East Africa was well under way even before the expulsion of Asians from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972 (Shankar Reference Shankar2024). The Ahmadiyya being in West Africa evokes a certain familiarity and intimacy, contrasting with the tense and increasingly violent history of settler colonialism, physical insecurity, precarious citizenship and African–South Asian racial divides in other parts of Africa. In this light, the West African–Indian visual economy in these photographs does significant emotional and political work of picturing amity amid undeniable and growing African–Asian animosities elsewhere on the continent.
Some Africans reacted negatively against the Ahmadiyya tour and suggested their fear of being duped, precisely by what they argued was a false appearance of intimacy. Haji Salahuddin Tayo, a Ghanaian missionary who was a one-time Ahmadi and later worked with two Saudi organizations, Darul Iftah and Muslim World League, claimed he had helped the entourage at first because of the request of the Pakistani military ruler Ayub Khan in 1969. Yet he came to feel, through closer study of Ahmadiyya writings and the Khalifa’s visit, that he had been misled about the nature of the Ahmadiyya visit. According to an Ahmadi missionary with whom he worked in Trinidad, Tayo was at one time a key Muslim voice who wanted to ‘dispel the stigma of Islam as an “Indian” religion’ (Hydal Reference Hydal1981: i). Yet, within a few years, perhaps because of the Nusrat Jehan scheme, he evoked their heterodoxy to rail against what he called ‘religious slavery’ into which ‘Indo-Pakistani Ahmadiyya missionaries’ had lured Africans (Tayo Reference Tayo1978: 4).
The 1970 tour did not silence differences but rather conveyed multiple imaginations of West African–South Asian connections beyond British imperial rule as the main point of commonality. West Africa as a wider region in this tour represented less a place of failed states or fertile mission fields and more a refuge for a religious minority that tried to portray universalism in one visual economy and cultural conservatism in another (see Figure 11). In pictures and words, the Ahmadiyya head’s trip in 1970 was a balancing act that shows the malleability of media and of religious and secular missions. The trip secured the Ahmadiyya’s place in West African nations through investments made in the Nusrat Jehan scheme, which allowed Pakistani movement to West Africa not as permanent settlers but as temporary workers. The Khalifa had secured acreage in West African countries for the construction of clinics, schools and other sites. For funds, he enjoined the well-to-do Ahmadis in London to invest a minimum of £100,000 in the six African countries he had just visited. He laid out a scheme whereby 200 devotees donated £200 each, another 200 an additional amount of £100 each, and the rest £36 each. He set up a bank account in the name of the relief unit Nusrat Jehan and returned to Pakistan, vowing to never be like ‘those who had gone before us with a message of love [and] bled the land dry’ (Ahmad Reference Ahmad2006: 8). In the following decades, West African Ahmadiyya sites offered a network for Ahmadi doctors and other professionals to perform service, an effort that eventually helped the establishment of Humanity First, a medical charity that has since distanced itself from the religious mission (Weiss Reference Weiss2022; Langewiesche Reference Langewiesche, Heuser and Koehrsen2020a).Footnote 10 These subtle transformations in West African–South Asian imaginaries were occurring against a backdrop of an exodus of Asians from East Africa and Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians in Uganda in 1972, with fifty or so Ahmadi exiles alone arriving in London per week as supplicants, with no housing, employment or homeland (Balzani Reference Balzani2020: 4). Ahmadiyya photographs produced a hopeful picture that obscured past and present conflicts – rather than making them manifest as the print jihad did – in a perilous postcolonial world.
Khalifa and Begum Sahiba being received in Liberia.
Source: Africa Speaks, p. 50.
Conclusion
This article has brought attention to the emotional registers of an African–South Asian print culture as it changed from a missionary impulse to one of political refuge and social intimacy and racial equality. The case of West Africa–India imagery and Ahmadiyya media, the focus here, is distinct from East Africa, where Asian-origin photographers had a crucial role in the development of studio photography and later professional journalism (Sheikh-Miller Reference Sheikh-Miller2015). Photographers such as Mo Amin and Mo Dhillon even photographed Idi Amin, who received them cordially owing to his obsession with the medium, as discussed by Nelson Abiti, Richard Vokes, Derek Peterson and Edgar Taylor (Peterson et al. Reference Peterson, Vokes, Abiti and Taylor2021). But the aims of visualization discussed here differ from the uses of photography in Africa that other scholars discuss – of class affirmation, political power and professionalization of the industry. Rather, in West Africa, the interaction with South Asia had long been intertextual between different media forms and relevant to religious and racial identity, sometimes confusing and conflictual but at other times universalist and unified.
The racialization I trace here offers a story that is different from the usual explorations of the intersection of race and religion as seen in the history of slavery and European discourses of Islam and Orientalism (Güner Reference Güner2023). Ahmadiyya superiority lay less in their sense of whiteness and rather more in their relationship to the infallibility of their religious beliefs, which were always highly contested and therefore a cause for isolation and the continuing need for proof as truth (Evans Reference Evans2020). West Africa presented a dynamic but difficult space for Ahmadiyya ambitions, where, in the end, Africans shaped the Muslim mission’s expressive repertoire in the media through ideas of a non-particular, even universalist, expression of modernity forged by West African pluralism within which South Asian Muslims sought security and sanctity.
Shobana Shankar is Professor of History/Africana Studies Affiliate at Stony Brook, State University of New York. Her research explores cultural encounters and politics in West Africa and Africa–Asia networks. She is founder and co-editor of the book series African Religions, Social Realities (Ohio University Press). Her book An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the spectre of race (Hurst, 2021) was named a finalist for the P. Sterling Stuckey and International Studies Association Global Development Studies book prizes.
