The African continent’s relations with China, India and other non-Western countries have gained increased material and cultural importance and visibility over the last two decades (Jayasuriya and Angenot Reference Jayasuriya and Angenot2008; Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya, Cheru and Obi2010; Bhatia Reference Bhatia2021; Greg Reference Greg2023). Research on Africa–Asia relations has also expanded significantly; yet problems remain in drawing meaningful connections between these two massive and diverse continents (Venkatachalam and King Reference Venkatachalam, King, Venkatachalam and King2022: 1–24). Too often, narrow, predetermined, overly generalized and simplistic accounts prevail. There is a recurrent focus on particular places and themes: Africa–China relations, Indian diasporas in Eastern and Southern Africa, and Afro-Asian solidarity and non-alignment in anti-colonial struggles and during the Cold War (Hofmeyr and Williams Reference Hofmeyr and Williams2011; Shangwe Reference Shangwe, Venkatachalam and King2022; Lee Reference Lee2010; Li Reference Li2022; Alden and Large Reference Alden and Large2018). Underlying these topics are certain assumptions – Asians’ power relative to African disempowerment, shared interests in resistance to European and American dominance, and geographical and political economic determinism of diasporic movements, motivations and identities. Rather than de-territorializing global studies, Africa–Asia studies that rely on such oft-repeated assumptions actually foreclose the many possibilities and alternatives that Africa’s connections to Asia may offer.
This special issue challenges prevailing assumptions and sets new agendas in the study of African–Asian interconnections in two specific ways: first, it examines resilient and dynamic interlinkages between West Africa and South Asia, revealing that the separate worlds assumed by Atlantic and Indian Ocean studies are not reflective of how Africans, specifically West Africans, understand their engagements in Asia and the world. Second, the spheres in which West Africans construct affinities with and distances from the Indian subcontinent examined here show how popular media – such as the press, film, ritual performance and photography – have been a sphere for negotiating dynamic relationships that express a range of relationalities, real and imagined, beyond the overly benign and uncomplicated notions of economic opportunity and political solidarity and a vague cultural similarity permeating the non-West or global South. More than twenty-five years ago, the publication in this journal of Brian Larkin’s much-cited article ‘Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities’ revealed an African ‘alternative world’ fixated on love – familial, romantic and aesthetic – and expressed through the consumption of Indian images, music, dance and fashion (Larkin Reference Larkin1997). More recent scholarship has developed this account to show a complex affective world, one in which ‘affectively charged … exchange’ and ‘image-sharing’ (Dattatreyan Reference Dattatreyan2023: 232–3) take place. Film was only one medium and love just one emotion – moreover, Africa–South Asia did not have only one direction of flow of emotion and exchange. Africa–India mediascapes, as we show here, are multiform and convey ‘positive’ emotions alongside more ambivalent ones – such as fear and resentment – in everyday African–Indian relations that affect many participants in distinct ways.
Building on newer works such as Sana Aiyar’s study of Kenya, Jon Soske’s work on South Africa, and Shobana Shankar’s on West Africa (Aiyar Reference Aiyar2015; Soske Reference Soske2017; Shankar Reference Shankar2021), we examine Africa–Asia relations as highly creative, dynamic and unstable, and often blurring imagination and reality. The research presented here centres West Africa’s connections to South Asia through encounters and connections as well as the perceptions, interpretations, imaginations and uses of such contacts to construct and reconstruct affinities and differences. This focus highlights cultural and intellectual processes often ignored in the scholarship, which tends to centre Afro-Asian solidarity and non-alignment in which leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Jawaharlal Nehru are often positioned as the progenitors of a set of special West African–South Asian relations that continue to be evoked in global South governments’ political and economic propaganda and public messaging (Malone et al. Reference Malone2015; Mawdsley and McCann Reference Mawdsley and McCann2011; Venkatachalam and King Reference Venkatachalam, King, Venkatachalam and King2022; Nayudu Reference Nayudu2025). Without discounting the importance of these economic and political relations during and after European imperialism, the articles here show the cultural significance and changing meanings of West Africa–South Asia histories as deeply experienced, embedded and dynamic; these interactions and imaginations are distinct from Indian Ocean frames but not entirely separate from them. The articles in this special issue highlight how world making in West African–South Asian dynamics has been mediated through expressive practices such as print culture, performance, material culture and photographs. The focus in these articles is on media practices as a means of ‘world making’ that does not always concern imperial, national or international boundaries and bilateral interrelationships; rather, they are attempts to reorder hierarchies and refigure selfhood and otherness (Getachew Reference Getachew2019).
We highlight three interrelated foci: (1) West Africa–South Asia as an expansively imagined cultural landscape; (2) networks made and symbolized through media, including print culture, photographs and films, ritual performances and sacred material artefacts, and performances of everyday expression; and (3) the history and anthropology of emotions that can be discerned from a repertoire of language, visual symbols and other expressions developed through contacts – real and imagined – between West Africans and Indians. We highlight African perspectives, which are often obscured or overshadowed by South Asian ones, a legacy of what Burton has described as ‘Brown over Black’ in postcolonial studies (Burton Reference Burton2016).
West Africa between the waters – Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds
West Africa and the Indian subcontinent are often seen as distant and disparate regions, particularly when compared to the seemingly ‘natural’ proximities of the Indian Ocean region. Even while separated by vast distances, West Africans and South Asians have exchanged objects and ideas over centuries of their interaction, even before transportation and direct person-to-person contact became easier. Most notably, cotton cloth produced in India became one of the most indispensable goods exchanged in West Africa during the Atlantic slave trade. In tracing West African demand and consumption, Kazuo Kobayashi, Jody Benjamin, Joanne Eicher and others show that Indian cloth was a commodity of West Africa–Indian subcontinent exchange well before the idea of the global South existed (Kobayashi Reference Kobayashi2019; Benjamin Reference Benjamin2024; Eicher Reference Eicher2022). Although Europeans and possibly Arabs were the first intermediaries of this trade, Indians increasingly found ways to use European imperial networks as an opening to export textiles and other goods into West Africa, thus giving rise to people-to-people contacts starting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Kobayashi Reference Kobayashi2019; Venkatachalam et al. Reference Venkatachalam, Mordi and Salazar2021). As in Eastern and Southern Africa, Indians in West Africa were known as commercial agents who set up shops, and in places like Freetown and Lagos, Sindhi trading family firms, such as Chellaram & Sons, were at first known as textile importers (Merani and Van der Laan Reference Merani and Van der Laan1979; Mensah Reference Mensah2023). The great cultural importance West Africans placed on Indian cloth, known in various locations of coastal West Africa by names such as injiri and george, was not simply due to the foreignness of the goods; rather, through a process of indigenization, African artisans, particularly women, added their own designs to enhance the value of these Indian-made cloths. This co-production increased the cloth’s value as family heirlooms (Eicher Reference Eicher2022; Evenson Reference Evenson1994). Thus Indian cloth became ‘authenticated’ through value added by West Africans.
This way of using Indian goods has a parallel in the way knowledge about India and interactions with Indians became a valued cultural currency within West African circles during World War Two, when hundreds of thousands of West African soldiers came into contact with South Asian troops and fought in India and Burma (Korieh Reference Korieh2020; Coates Reference Coates2020; Mordi Reference Mordi2020a: 1048). Although soldiers’ cultural, intellectual and social interactions with Indian society remain unclear and contested (Coates Reference Coates, Kalu and Falol2018a; Reference Coates2018b; Osei-Poku Reference Osei-Poku2022: 18), the war encounters undeniably gave rise to increasing affinities (Stapleton Reference Stapleton2022; Mordi Reference Mordi2020b). Some African men started families with Indian women and never returned to their homelands, thus adding numbers to the older African diaspora that had come over centuries through Indian Ocean trade. Others wrote about their experiences to educate African readers back home. The news of India – not strictly political about Indian independence or Gandhian thought but about history and religion – filtered into broader West African society to give rise to homegrown Hinduism in Ghana and Nigeria, in which religious sensibilities were less focused on the exotic other and more on a reorientation of the African self to indigenous religions at a time of insistent Christian and Islamic pieties (Atiemo Reference Atiemo2017; Wuaku Reference Wuaku2013; Shankar Reference Shankar2021; Drewal Reference Drewal2009; Rush Reference Rush and Hawley2008). To extend the notion of cultural authentication textile scholars use to characterize African transformations of Indian cloth, we draw attention to Africans’ creative processes by which distance and difference have been refashioned and reinvigorated with new meanings and uses within local and regional networks.
In exploring West Africa–South Asia networks as a source of goods and ideas to use and reuse, we highlight the idea of mirror reflections to show that Africans and South Asians use transoceanic connectivities to envision the present, past and future (Gill Reference Gill2019; Mampilly Reference Mampilly2022; Verma Reference Verma2023). Although Africans from across the continent have long resided in South Asia, we focus specifically on the west of the continent. West Africa–South Asia linkages provide a prism to project different visions not only back to the other but also onto local contexts. We connect Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean studies to demonstrate how distances are cross-cut into ‘small-scale linkages’ (Hill, this volume) by human mobilities, the flow of goods, and ideological forms that do not conform to the geography of empire and nation state that signified the workings of political power (Hofmeyr Reference Hofmeyr2013). What is also important is how these transoceanic relations figure and refigure the local and the indigenous.
Media reflections between West Africa and South Asia
We foreground the role of media in West Africa–South Asia creativity, appropriation and remixing (Drewal Reference Drewal2009; Mowtushi Reference Mowtushi2018). Studies of transoceanic media have provided some of the most robust evidence that the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds were knitted together by colonized and subaltern actors in ways that prefigured and outlasted European imperialism. The writing of the Indian Ocean – an ocean of letters, to use the phrase of Pier Larson (Reference Larson2009) – included many forms of print, from religious tracts and missives penned by Muslims, Christians and Hindus to the polyglot printing press of Gandhi and travellers’ accounts written by Indians in Africa and African students and soldiers in India (Ho Reference Ho2006; Hofmeyr Reference Hofmeyr2010; McCann Reference McCann2013). The African diasporic cultures of the North Atlantic, connecting West and West-Central Africa with North America, Western Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America, have long been understood as constituting an analytic unit (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993; Phillips Reference Phillips2000; Dubois and Scott Reference Dubois and Scott2010). Black Atlantic literate networks have been durable and diverse: Leslie James, for instance, has shown how West African newspapermen developed complex transatlantic networks and engaged in intellectual dialogues across the Black Atlantic with North American and Caribbean homologues (James Reference James, Hunter, Newell and Peterson2016; Reference James2022). Shankar has shown Ahmadi Muslim writings and the scholarship of Senghor reaching across the Indian Ocean and inspiring Afro-Dravidian studies that expanded transoceanic visions over a great expanse (Shankar Reference Shankar2021).
Yet these examples privilege literary or print cultures that largely focus on elite males educated in Western modes and languages; the effect is an orientation towards certain strata of colonized subjects and an overall diminishment of African perspectives (Hofmeyr Reference Hofmeyr2013; Reference Hofmeyr2022; Hofmeyr et al. Reference Hofmeyr, Kaarsholm and Frederiksen2011; Burton Reference Burton2016; Hofmeyr and Peterson Reference Hofmeyr and Peterson2019). We argue for a conceptualization of African–South Asian modes of expression that acknowledges techniques of communication that are embodied, encompassing visual art, performance and ritual practices. Print, film and photography build upon these multiple expressive forms as intertextual media traditions that refuse the limits of Western-originated innovation.
This approach sees texts as multiform and changing, with concrete material consequences and human networks. Green has shown how South Asian and Persian intellectual cultures were closely related to material mobilities in the Indian Ocean, and in the maritime culture of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea more generally (Green Reference Green2015; Reference Green2019; Ziad et al. Reference Ziad, Gevlin, Green, Gelvin and Green2019). Similarly, media has been understood as a major transcultural and trans-geographical vector in the Atlantic world, with Gilroy tracing cultural formations between the Caribbean, Britain and the southern USA, and a number of scholars revealing the importance of print media as a vehicle for the traffic of political ideas between the USA and West Africa, as well as between the Sahel and North America (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993; Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2010; Diouf Reference Diouf2013; Getachew Reference Getachew2021). These connections move beyond textuality to reveal cultural encounters in music, dance and performance (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2017). Africa/Asia studies have yet to fully appreciate the potential of media as such a transcultural vector. Larkin (Reference Larkin1997) has shown how African audiences responded to Indian texts, but he does not focus on how Africans documented or conceptualized India using media. It is true that some scholars have reflected on African evaluations of Indian media (Ibrahim Reference Ibrahim2022: 327; Olaoluwa Reference Olaoluwa2018: 279), but this falls short of showing how Africans use media to comprehend India and Indians in relation to the world and to themselves, as opposed to African consumption of mobile South Asian media artefacts. A different approach to African media studies can be found in historical research on how African soldiers used photography as a tool to understand World War Two South Asian landscapes and political sites (Coates Reference Coates, Kalu and Falol2018a).
By appreciating media as diverse in terms of their material and technological constitution and their reception, use and sensibility, we highlight here that West Africa–South Asia media were produced by many creators – not only Indians but also West Africans and by writers as well as artists, photographers, religious agents and singers. By drawing on their cultural production and the dissemination of these forms, the research here draws attention to the expressive cultures and affective relationships that animate West Africa–South Asia connections (Barber Reference Barber2018; Kraamer and Barnes Reference Kraamer and Barnes2015; Kraamer Reference Kraamer2023). Attention to the emotional registers of these relationships highlights their complex and malleable characteristics, which media makers shape in different time periods and situations.
The articles in this special issue
This special issue charts West African ‘makings’ of South Asia across several periods of time, from the precolonial and colonial to the contemporary era. Oliver Coates’s article sets the scene by examining Nigerian mediations of Indian independence and partition in 1947. Contrary to simplistic ideas that Gandhi and Indian nationalism inspired African nationalism, Coates plumbs writings in a press war between rival newspapers allied to the Action Group and the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, analysing fears over ‘Pakistanism’. Key Indian political leaders, including Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah, were refigured into Nigerian personages and ideas about Pakistan, motivating commentators to reconsider Nigeria’s divisions and its future. Seen from Nigeria, the nascent Pakistani state thus served as an ominous prolepsis of political and societal breakdown in West Africa. Asia as a locus of African fears is an emotional response of distancing Asia that is rarely explored in scholarly texts on Africa–Asia relations. The literature on fears of Asian colonization in Africa is most attuned to India’s role in Kenya in the 1950s and China’s more recent growth, but Coates suggests that African fears were not of Asian strength but rather of its weakness.
Elyan Hill’s article brings focus to how Togolese ritual practitioners reinterpret and repurpose histories of contact with Indian merchants and the economic flows of sacred images and commodities from Indian Ocean worlds. Incorporating images and objects imported from India, ritual choreographies show how West Africans actively participate in global markets through processes of critical consumerism. This is no accidental or opportunistic process of creation but one that reveals intentional, embodied and gendered relationalities in religious dynamics between West Africa and South Asia. The Togolese logics of the sacred and worldly operate outside secular ideas of the global South or South–South exchange.
Neelima Jeychandran’s article also shows different dimensions of the unstable but usable meanings of past Africa–India connections as African migrants in India today have been dislocated, misplaced or generalized but then incorporated into a history of connectivities of religions, memories and texts, and with the power of humans and non-human agencies that is constantly being reinvented. Using ritual and material cultural sources such as the gems associated with African Muslim saints in India, said to be from Nigeria, Jeychandran illustrates the potential of West Africa–Indian encounters as emotional, passionate and affectionate and less focused on truth or accuracy in ‘cross-cultural understanding’. The emotional registers of West African–Indian encounter produce a geography that is more alive than the dichotomy of real/imagined or the precision of identifying and placing people and objects on conventional maps of Africa and Asia in world divided into global South and North.
Shobana Shankar also examines how real and imagined differences and emotional attachments between West Africa and South Asia were constructed in print and photographic media. She centres the West African consumption and shaping of images and texts produced by the Indian-origin Ahmadiyya Muslim mission. With the partition of India in 1947 and sectarian conflicts in Pakistan, the West African–Indian Ahmadiyya visual repertoire of demonstrating Islamic piety turned from a missionary impetus and truth making to one of universalism and tolerance as part of the political urgency of postcolonial alliance building. She argues that this Ahmadi universalist impulse grew to encompass African norms, including gendered relationalities and distinct embodied expressions of piety, which Ahmadis assimilated in their search for security amid political upheaval and rising African–South Asian racial tensions in the 1970s. Photography made real the possibility of intimacy and became a means of propaganda for utopian transnationalism.
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.
Oliver Coates is Director of Studies for History and tutor at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. His recent research has appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and Itinerario. His book Achille Mbembe was published in December 2024 in the Routledge ‘Critical Thinkers’ series.
