Eight percent of global Indian Diaspora is located in Africa. It is spread across all regions of Africa-anglophone, Francophone,Lusophone, Arab Africa and Oceania. People of Indian Origin (PIO) went from different parts of India-Gujarat, Southern India, Bihar, UP and Punjab. They migrated in different capacities-as free passengers, traders, indentured workers, construction workers, professionals and businessmen. But bulk of them were indentured and construction workers who went during colonial period.They palyed an important role and made significant contributions in all walks of life in their new home.They were important consideration during Indian freedom struggle, especially in Indian National Congress. M.K. Gandhi was turned into Mahatma and became apostle of non-violence and peace by his involvement with PIO in South Africa. In post-decolonization phase post-decolonization phase PIOs in Africa had mixed experinece of assimilation and integration. While in Mauritius they remainded all through in power, in countries like Uganda they suffered humiliating expulsion.They still have challenges of integration in most part of Africa. The book is an attempt to capture their history, struggle, contribution, challenges and their place in Indian Diaspora policy.
Working as merchants, skilled tradesmen, clerks, lawyers, and journalists, Indians formed the economic and administrative middle class in colonial Kenya. In general, they were wealthier than Africans, but were denied the political and economic privileges that Europeans enjoyed. Moreover, despite their relative prosperity, Indians were precariously positioned in Kenya. Africans usually viewed them as outsiders, and Europeans largely considered them subservient. Indians demanded recognition on their own terms. Indians in Kenya chronicles the competing, often contradictory, strategies by which the South Asian diaspora sought a political voice in Kenya from the beginning of colonial rule in the late 1890s to independence in the 1960s. Indians’ intellectual, economic, and political connections with South Asia shaped their understanding of their lives in Kenya. Sana Aiyar investigates how the many strands of Indians’ diasporic identity influenced Kenya’s political leadership, from claiming partnership with Europeans in their mission to colonize and “civilize” East Africa to successful collaborations with Africans to battle for racial equality, including during the Mau Mau Rebellion. She also explores how the hierarchical structures of colonial governance, the material inequalities between Indians and Africans, and the racialized political discourses that flourished in both colonial and postcolonial Kenya limited the success of alliances across racial and class lines. Aiyar demonstrates that only by examining the ties that bound Indians to worlds on both sides of the Indian Ocean can we understand how Kenya came to terms with its South Asian minority.
This book critically examines new perspectives on the transformations in the Indian diaspora. It studies the changing perspectives on the historical background of the diaspora and analyses fresh and emerging views in response to new configurations in diaspora relations. The volume highlights the transformation of the old Indian diaspora into a new ensemble in which economic, ideological and cultural forces predominate and interact closely. It looks at various themes including Indian indentured emigration to sugar colonies, comparisons between labour migration from India and China, the Girmitiya diaspora, the Indian diaspora in Africa and the rise of racial nationalism, India’s soft power in the Gulf region, and the repurposing of the ‘Hindutva’ idea of India for Western societies as undertaken by diaspora communities. Lucid and topical, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of diaspora studies, migration studies, political studies, international relations, globalisation, political sociology, sociology and South Asia studies.
Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have minorities from the Indian sub-continent amongst their population. The East African Indians mostly reside in the main cities, particularly Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Kampala; they can also be found in smaller urban centres and in the remotest of rural townships. They play a leading social and economic role as they work in business, manufacturing and the service industry, and make up a large proportion of the liberal professions. They are divided into multiple socio-religious communities, but united in a mutual feeling of meta-cultural identity. This book aims at painting a broad picture of the communities of Indian origin in East Africa, striving to include changes that have occurred since the end of the 1980s. The different contributions explore questions of race and citizenship, national loyalties and cosmopolitan identities, local attachment and transnational networks. Drawing upon anthropology, history, sociology and demography, Indian Africa depicts a multifaceted population and analyses how the past and the present shape their sense of belonging, their relations with others, their professional and political engagement.
Although much has been written about the African Diaspora in the Atlantic Ocean, the Diaspora in the Indian Ocean is virtually unrecognised. Concerned with Africans who lived south of the Sahara and were dispersed by free will or forcefully to the non-African lands in the Indian Ocean region, this book deals with a topic that has been overlooked for too long. Eight scholars researching in distinct geographical areas and with interdisciplinary expertise offer a comprehensive and informative account of the Diaspora in the Indian Ocean.
The vibrant Swahili coast port city of Dar es Salaam—literally, the “Haven of Peace”—hosts a population reflecting a legacy of long relations with the Arabian Peninsula and a diaspora emanating in waves from the Indian subcontinent. By the 1960s, after decades of European imperial intrusions, Tanzanian nationalist forces had peacefully dismantled the last British colonial structures of racial segregation and put in place an official philosophy of nonracial nationalism. Yet today, more than five decades after independence, race is still a prominent and publicly contested subject in Dar es Salaam. What makes this issue so dizzyingly elusive—for government bureaucrats and ordinary people alike—is East Africa’s location on the Indian Ocean, a historic crossroads of diverse peoples possessing varied ideas about how to reconcile human difference, social belonging, and place of origin. Based on a range of archival, oral, and newspaper sources from Tanzania and India, this book explores the history of cross-cultural encounters that shaped regional ideas of diaspora and nationhood from the earliest days of colonial Tanganyika—when Indian settlement began to expand dramatically—to present-day Tanzania, a nation always under construction. The book focuses primarily on two prominent city spaces, schools and cinemas: the one a site of education, the other a site of leisure; one typically a programmatic entity of government, the other usually a bastion of commercial enterprise. Nonetheless, the forces shaping schools and cinemas as they developed into busy centers of urban social interaction were surprisingly similar: the state, community organizations, nationalist movements, economic change, and the transnational winds of Indian Ocean culture and capital. Whether in the form of institutional apparatuses like networks of Indian teacher importation and curricula adoption, or through the market predominance of the Indian film industry, schools and cinemas in East Africa historically were influenced by actions and ideas from around the Indian Ocean. Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean argues that an Indian Ocean–wide perspective enables an examination of the transnational production of ideas about race against a backdrop of changing relationships and claims of belonging as new notions of nationhood and diaspora emerged. It bridges an academic divide, because historians often either focus on the Indian diaspora in isolation or write it out of the story of African nation building. Further, in contrast to the swell of publications on global Indian or South Asian diasporas that highlight longings for and contacts with the “homeland,” the book also demonstrates that much of the creative production of diasporic Indian identities formed in East Africa was a result of local (albeit cosmopolitan) encounters across cities like Dar es Salaam.
Global Indian Diasporas discusses the relationship between South Asian emigrants and their homeland, the reproduction of Indian culture abroad, and the role of the Indian state in reconnecting emigrants to India. Focusing on the limits of the diaspora concept, rather than its possibilities, this volume presents new historical and anthropological research on South Asian emigrants worldwide. From a comparative perspective, examples of South Asian emigrants in Suriname, Mauritius, East Africa, Canada, and the United Kingdom are deployed in order to show that in each of these regions there are South Asian emigrants who do not fit into the Indian diaspora concept—raising questions about the effectiveness of the diaspora as an academic and sociological index, and presenting new and controversial insights in diaspora issues.
Winner of the 1990 Commonwealth First Novel Prize (Africa). The Gunny Sack follows the bizarre tale of an old and unremarkable bag and the life changing secrets within it. In exile from Tanzania, Salim Juma is given a gunny sack by his beloved, but strange, great-aunt. The bag takes him back to his childhood, when he was first mesmerised by the peculiar mementos inside. He soon begins to piece together the stories hidden within, only to discover the truth behind a fateful series of events that changed his family forever. The stories that follow stretch across four generations of Salim's family, tracing their footsteps and unravelling their loves, betrayals, and incredible misadventures. The Gunny Sack is an extraordinary chronicle into the experiences of Indian migrants in Africa as they struggled under changing power structures, from German invasions to British colonialism.
This book explores the understudied and often overlooked subject of African presence in India. It focuses on the so-called Sidis, Siddis or Habshis who occupy a unique place in Indian history. The Sidis comprise scattered communities of people of African descent who travelled and settled along the western coast of India, mainly in Gujarat, but also in Goa, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Sri Lanka and in Sindh (Pakistan) as a result of the Indian Ocean trade from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries. The work draws from extant scholarly research and documentary sources to provide a comprehensive study of people of African descent in India and sheds new light on their experiences. By employing an interdisciplinary approach across fields of history, art, anthropology, religion, literature and oral history, it provides an analysis of their negotiations with cultural resistance, survivals and collective memory. The author examines how the Sidi communities strived to construct a distinct identity in a new homeland in a polyglot Indian society, their present status, as well as their future prospects. The book will interest those working in the fields of history, sociology and social anthropology, cultural studies, international relations, and migration and diaspora studies.
In this ambitious new history of the antiapartheid struggle, Jon Soske places India and the Indian diaspora at the center of the African National Congress's development of an inclusive philosophy of nationalism. In so doing, Soske combines intellectual, political, religious, urban, and gender history to tell a story that is global in reach while remaining grounded in the everyday materiality of life under apartheid. Even as Indian independence provided black South African intellectuals with new models of conceptualizing sovereignty, debates over the place of the Indian diaspora in Africa (the "also-colonized other") forced a reconsideration of the nation's internal and external boundaries. In response to the traumas of Partition and the 1949 Durban Riots, a group of thinkers in the ANC, centered in the Indian Ocean city of Durban and led by ANC president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Luthuli, developed a new philosophy of nationhood that affirmed South Africa's simultaneously heterogeneous and fundamentally African character. Internal Frontiers is a major contribution to postcolonial and Indian Ocean studies and charts new ways of writing about African nationalism.
