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INTRODUCTION: PRINT CULTURES,NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS OF THE
INDIAN OCEAN
Isabel Hofmeyr, Preben Kaarsholm and Bodil Folke Frederiksen
The Indian Ocean has been called the coming strategic arena of
the twenty-rstcentury (Kaplan 2009: 16). According to international
relations commentators,the forces shaping a post-American world
intersect most visibly in the IndianOcean region (Zakaria 2008;
Kaplan 2009). These include Somali pirates; the riseof Asian
economies; Sino-Indian competition over energy sea lanes,
Africanmarkets and minerals; Al-Qaidas ongoing focus on US
interests around thelittoral (Tanzania, Comoros, Kenya, Yemen,
etc.); and persisting US imperialism,visible in its occupation of
Diego Garcia, the coral atoll in the centre of the IndianOcean from
which the population was removed in order to create a military
base.These geo-political considerations are precipitating a turn
towards the Indian
Ocean across a number of disciplines. What implications does
this turn hold forAfrican Studies? While the Indian Ocean arena has
long been charted in someareas of African Studies notably Swahili
Studies and analyses of Southern andEast African diasporic
communities it remains outside the mainstream. Asoceanic and
transnational forms of analysis become commonplace, the questionof
the Indian Oceans place in African Studies becomes more
pressing.This special issue provides an overview of emerging trends
in the eld of Indian
Ocean Studies and draws out their implications for scholars of
Africa. The focusof the articles is on one strand in the study of
the Indian Ocean, namely the role ofprint and visual culture in
constituting public spheres in and between the societiesaround the
Ocean.
INDIAN OCEAN HISTORIOGRAPHIES: AN OVERVIEW
Over the last decade, the boundaries of Indian Ocean Studies
have expanded,moving outwards from a substantial historiography on
early modern transoceanic
ISABEL HOFMEYR is Professor of African Literature at the
University of the Witwatersrand inJohannesburg, South Africa and
until recently was Acting Director for the Centre of IndianStudies
in Africa (www.cisa-wits.org.za). Her rst monograph We Spend Our
Years as a TaleThat Is Told: oral historical narrative in a South
African chiefdom (1994) was shortlisted for theHerskovits Prize.
The Portable Bunyan: a transnational history of The Pilgrims
Progress won the2007 Richard L. Greaves Award. She is currently
working on textual circulation in the IndianOcean. Email:
[email protected] KAARSHOLM is Associate Professor in
International Development Studies at RoskildeUniversity. He
recently co-edited a volume with Isabel Hofmeyr on The Popular and
the Public:cultural debate and struggle over public space in modern
India, Africa and Europe (2009).BODIL FOLKE FREDERIKSEN is
Associate Professor of International Development Studies atRoskilde
University. A recent publication is the co-authored (with W.
Muoria-Sal, J. Lonsdaleand D. Peterson) Writing for Kenya: the life
and works of Henry Muoria (2009).
Africa 81 (1) 2011: 122 doi:10.1017/S000197201000001X
International African Institute 2011
-
trade to a focus on European empires (Subrahmanyam 1997; Pearson
1998),colonial worlds (Bose 2005; Metcalf 2007), post-colonial
societies, and their inter-actions with these older networks (Ho
2004; 2006). At the heart of this scholar-ship is an Indian Ocean
world system created by monsoons, port cities, sailors,religious
networks, transoceanic trade and the ways in which European
merchantcompanies initially had to accommodate themselves to this
order (Chaudhuri1985; Pearson 2003; Gupta 2004; Prakash 2004). It
locates itself historiographi-cally in the wake of Braudels work on
the Mediterranean (1972, for example),world-systems theory (Vink
2007) and Indian nationalist scholarship keen todemonstrate that
Indias trade was not short-distance peddling, as the
Britishinsisted, but involved long-distance networks. This body of
work has establisheda rich legacy of connected histories
(Subrahmanyam 2005) of the Indian Ocean.Until about a decade ago,
the most distinguished work on the Ocean was
primarily concerned with the early modern period, a temporal
focus shaped bythe European trading company archives on which it
drew. These archives ran onlyto the early 1800s and were then
replaced by imperial records largely organized bycolony and with a
focus on land revenue and property rights (Metcalf 2007: 9).This
tide has turned as models of transnational, oceanic and
revisionist
imperial history have directed attention back from land revenue
to ships andvoyages. This conjuncture has promoted a renewed
interest in the Indian Oceanand its scholarship. Building on the
foundation of the early modern historio-graphy, this new wave of
research draws together older traditions of regional,national,
diasporic and area studies in the Indian Ocean with
oceanic,transnational and revisionist imperial history. Engseng Hos
account of theHadrami diaspora of the Yemen highlights the Indian
Ocean region as one madedistinctive by the interaction of old
trading diasporas (Hadramis, Gujaratis,Boras, Malays, etc.) with
European imperial formations (Portuguese, Dutch,British, US) (Ho
2004; 2006). This interaction is less about colonizer andcolonized
than about the intimate encounter of universalisms, the grand
designsof the sayyid Hadramis tangling with the global ambitions of
Europeanimperialism.This theme of Indian Ocean universalisms has
been explored by a range of
writers. Sugata Bose (2005) underlines the interconnectedness or
universalismsthat arose from older networks interacting with,
against or outside Britishimperial formations. Mark Ravinder Frost
(2002; 2004; 2010) examines the print-based public spheres that
took shape between the port cities of the littoral inwhich
diasporic populations found themselves and which supported
sharedprojects of social and religious reform. Thomas Metcalf
(2007) examines BritishIndia as a sub-imperial power that advanced
the interests of Britain and colonialIndia in the Indian Ocean
area.One theme in these connected histories has been the circuits
and movements of
people and commodities. As Clare Anderson (2000; 2004) has shown
for thenineteenth-century British empire and Kerry Ward (2009) for
seventeenth- andeighteenth-century Dutch company rule, free
migrants, indentured labour,prisoners, political exiles, soldiers
and slaves moved or were moved around theIndian Ocean in signicant
numbers. In the case of exiles and prisoners, theIndian Ocean
functioned as an arena of penal settlement, its necklace of
prisonsstretching from Robben Island to the Andamans. These
movements of peopleacross the Ocean extend our understandings of
labour history, of legal regimes
2 PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
-
and the creation of contested sovereignties (cf. Sheriff 1971;
1987; Hafkin 1973;Alpers 1975; Cooper 1980; Campbell 1981; 1989;
Ewald 2000).Themes of transregional interactions have been
important in work on Indian
Ocean networks. Leila Fawaz and C. A. Bayly (2002) revisit area
studies, drawingtogether the Mediterranean-Middle East and Indian
Ocean-South Asia zones.Their collection examines how the
pre-colonial unities and fractures within andbetween these regions
interacted with, inhibited and used European imperialnetworks to
sustain or build new migrant communities, trade links and
religiousdoctrines. Another variant of this transregional focus is
work on islands whichseeks to understand the macrohistories of the
Ocean writ small in its islands(Gupta 2010). The Mascarenes with
their compacted histories of slavery, colo-nialism and indenture
become emblematic of the larger movements and owsin the Indian
Ocean world. Examples include Auguste Toussaints work onMauritius
as the heart of the Indian Ocean (1966); Pier Larson (2000;
2009),Gwyn Campbell (2005) and Solofo Randrianja and Stephen Ellis
on Madagascar(2010); and Megan Vaughan (2004) and Richard Allen
(2008) on Mascareneslavery. Thus, as Gwyn Campbell points out,
seeing Madagascar as part of awider Indian Ocean world and an
Indian Ocean Africa challenges and changesthe perspectives provided
by both the Colonialist and the Nationalist schools ofthought of
African historiography (Campbell 2005: 4ff.). In Richard
Allensrecent work (2008), this Indian Ocean world is shown to be
connected to theworld of the Atlantic region through global
networks of trade and labourexploitation.Yet another important
vector in Indian Ocean scholarship has been a long-
standing tradition of historical research on the Swahili coast,
its economies,societies and transnational networks. Work by Abdul
Sheriff (1987; 2010) onZanzibar and the coast, and by John
Middleton (1992) and later Middleton andMark Horton (2000), Justin
Willis (1993) and Parkin and Headley (2000) onSwahili social and
cultural organization in its interaction with the Indian Oceanworld
of the Middle East and India, has opened up African Studies towards
thelarger oceanic world. A. H. J. Prins (1961), Edward Alpers
(1975), FrederickCooper (1977), Jonathon Glassman (1994) and Jeremy
Presholdt (2008) havesituated the mercantile and slave-based
economy and culture in the broaderregional perspective, and studies
of the micro-organization of Swahili societies byMinou Fuglesang
(1994) and SarahMirza andMargaret Ann Strobel (1989)
havedemonstrated how transnational cultural connections like Hindi
lm videos andIndian commerce are part of the constitution of the
everyday, not least forwomen.Cutting across this work on
transregional networks, a strand of anthropo-
logical research on transoceanic communities in the western
Indian Ocean hasquestioned the salience of universalism and the
supposed automatic link betweentransoceanic movement and
cosmopolitanism. Edward Simpson, a vocalexponent of this position,
notes: Human movement in the Indian Oceanfragments space and
divides people (2008: 92). The Hindu sailors in Kachchhwhom Simpson
has studied invest in local caste institutions rather than
long-distance allegiances. Kai Kresse and Edward Simpson argue that
[m]ovementand migration . . . tended to create new or modied
divisions in the populationboth at home and away rather than
creating a unied oceanic society (2008: 13).If there is an Indian
Ocean cosmopolitanism, then it resides in an awareness of
3PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
-
such differences and how to manage them as a part of everyday
life. There arecertainly enough broad over-arching universalisms
operating in the Ocean: Islam,Susm, Hindu reformism, Greater India,
trade unionism, nationalism, imperialcitizenship, white labourism,
socialism, anarchism, Catholicism, Protestantism.Yet these are not
guarantors of common histories, but rather open up social eldsin
which older contestations can play themselves out in visible
idioms.In negotiating these different streams of scholarship, it is
useful to apply a
distinction widely used in oceanic studies, between histories
of, and historieswithin an ocean. The former constitute an
ambitious project which would explainthe ocean as a unied and
discrete system; the latter a slice explored in the arena ofthe
ocean. In his discussion of the Indian Ocean, Michael Pearson
quotesPeregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell on writing about the
Mediterranean:there is history in the Mediterranean contingently
so, not Mediterranean-wide,perhaps better seen as part of the
larger history of either Christendom or Islam and history of the
Mediterranean for the understanding of which a rm sense ofplace and
a search for Mediterranean-wide comparisons are both vital (2003:
9).In a recent discussion of Atlantic history, Jack Greene and
Philip Morgan make asimilar point: Histories of the Atlantic world
. . .will always be extraordinarilydifcult to accomplish; histories
within the Atlantic world invariably slicesof it as well inevitably
will prove far more manageable (Morgan and Greene2009: 10).This
collection1 discusses a series of histories in the Indian Ocean
that open up
new perspectives for African Studies. Arranged around the theme
of print culture,the themes addressed in the contributions unfold
between Southern and EastAfrica and India as well as along the
African coast from KwaZulu-Natal throughZanzibar and Tanzania to
the Arab world. They examine AfricanIndianinteraction, identity
strategies and political projects against a background ofcolonial
history, segregation and apartheid, while Islam provides a focus as
aparticularly dynamic eld for transnational interaction.
PRINT CULTURES IN THE INDIAN OCEAN
Within African Studies, there is a strong tradition of
scholarship on print cultures,literacies and modes of reading and
writing in colonial Africa (Barber 2001; 2006;
1This collection of essays was selected from papers delivered at
a conference held inJohannesburg in January 2009 on Print Cultures,
Nationalisms and Publics of the Indian Ocean.The conference formed
part of a larger Indian Ocean project jointly run by the Indian
OceanStudies Programme at Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi,
Roskilde University inCopenhagen and the Centre for Indian Studies
in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand,Johannesburg, .
This project in turncomprises one of a growing number of centres
and programmes devoted to Indian Ocean Studies:these include the
Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University, Canada, ; the
Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute, ; the ZentrumModerner
Orient, ; the Indian Ocean and SouthAsian Research network at the
University of Technology, Sydney, ; and Indian Ocean Studies at the
University of Bergen in Norway currentlycentred around research
programmes on Linking Global Cities: Tracing Local Practicesand
From Transmission of Tradition to Global Learning, .
4 PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
-
Newell 2000; 2002; Peterson 2004; Hawkins 2002). Examining
popular and non-ofcial modes of reading and writing as a form of
social action, this work probeshow such texts illuminate local
ideals of civic virtue and the formation of localpublics (Barber
2006: 7). The present collection investigates the roles of
printculture in the constitution of what Karin Barber has called
new kinds of self-representation and personhood along lines quite
different from the classic modelof the formation of subjectivity in
Enlightenment Europe (2006: 7).The African Studies work probes the
ways in which printed texts and their
producers convene local audiences and sensibilities. How do
texts give voice topressing problems through the formulation of new
genres that can make sense ofunprecedented modes of experience?
This scholarship also examines theinstitutions of production and
consumption sustaining these worlds of printculture, such as
reading groups (Furniss 2006), debating societies (Newell
2006),epistolary networks (Breckenridge 2006; Burns 2006; Khumalo
2006), newspapernetworks (Ogude 2001; Frederiksen 2006; Muoria-Sal
et al. 2009; Newell 2009).A fulcrum of this world is the small
artisanal press, generally a one-man, seat-
of-the-pants venture making imaginative use of limited and
second-handtechnology. Embedded in a network of localized
relationships, such pressescomposited social life, producing
programmes, invitations, notices, pamphlets,advice manuals,
novelettes and newspapers. As Karin Barber has suggested, thisworld
of print was less concerned with vast anonymous address than
withconsolidating personalized networks. As she argues, this mode
of production isbest characterized as a printing culture rather
than a print culture, a term whichimplies a scale and saturation
beyond the reach of these small presses (2001: 16).Its methods of
convening audiences depended less on simultaneity anduniformity la
Anderson than on a participatory mode of drawing readers
intoparticular African language readerships by asking them to
contribut[e] elementsto, and tak[e] elements from, an ongoing
conversation mediated through thepress (Barber 2006: 16).The worlds
of print culture examined in this volume resemble and differ
from
the picture set out above. They involve small-scale jobbing
presses run on a shoe-string and embedded in local communities. Yet
these presses operate ontransnational axes drawing together
African, Indian, Muslim and Christianpolitical worlds. In some
cases, these are presses run by their local Indian owners,producing
diasporic newspapers which enter the worlds of anti-colonial
politics inAfrica and India. In other instances, the presses are
sites for AfricanIndianinteractions: Africans buy equipment from
Indians; Africans work in Indian-owned presses; Indian printers
assist African nationalist causes. After its transferfrom Nairobi
to Kisumu in 1949, the Ramogi Press, a branch of the Luo Thriftand
Trading Corporation set up by Oginga Odinga in pursuit of Luo
unity,continued printing newspapers like the Nyanza Times,
Mumenyereri andMwalimu, and added further business, printing
receipt books, letterheads andexercise-book covers for schools
(Atieno Odhiambo 1976: 2378; Ogude 2001).Finally, in 1952, the
company made a prot. The printing press was second-hand,bought from
Indian printers, and the purpose of the enterprise was to break
theIndian business dominance in Nyanza (Atieno Odhiambo 1976:
227).Presses are crossroads where different Indian Ocean
universalisms intersect. In
Durban, Muslim printing networks react to Christian evangelical
print culture inthe fault lines between African and Indian Muslim
communities. In Cairo,
5PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
-
Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi prints manuscripts from across the
Indian Oceanworld. In Nairobi Indian printing works owners go to
jail because of seditiousarticles written or approved by African
nationalist journalists.These conjunctures bring debates on print
culture in Africa into dialogue with
scholarship on other parts of the Indian Ocean rim, drawing out
commonpatterns. Whether in Dar es Salaam (Brennan, this volume),
Nairobi(Frederiksen, this volume), Goa (Pinto 2007), Bombay (Green
2008), Calcutta(Ghosh 2006), Cairo (Cole 2002), Madras (Subramanian
2010), or Durban(Dhupelia-Mesthrie 2004) these presses were
characterized by diverse personneldrawn from different areas
(Hofmeyr forthcoming). Multilingual and multi-ethnic, they were
sites in which different communities and diasporas intersected.The
press becomes important methodologically in tracking
interactions
between different diasporas and populations in Africa and around
the IndianOcean. Although Ned Bertzs article deals with cinema in
Tanganyika and thenTanzania, it demonstrates this point admirably.
Focusing on the cinema asmeeting place and medium, Bertz tracks the
encounters and conicts that unfoldin and around the racialized
space of the cinema hall. Not only did Indian lmconsistently
outsell US products at the box ofces, it provided allegories of
anti-colonialism which African audiences took up enthusiastically.
In the 1930s and1940s, cinema halls became venues for meetings in
which Indians in Dar esSalaam expressed their support for Gandhis
campaigns in India. In the 1950sAfrican nationalists likewise used
cinemas as rally venues not least to express thedemand that cinemas
become fully integrated spaces. In post-independenceTanzania, the
popularity of Indian lm continued unabated and survived the
newsocialist moral campaigns by being seen as non- or at times
anti-Western and insome cases, virtually indigenous. As Bertz
indicates, trying to draw a line betweenAfrican cinema and Indian
lm becomes impossible when seen from thevantage point of the cinema
hall where transnational strands become knottedtogether.An
important characteristic of the printing presses was a stress on
being both
entrepreneurial and philanthropic, of pursuing projects of
social reform whilemobilizing networks of charitable support from
merchant political and religiousdonors, and in some cases from
readers. As enterprises that address both local andtransoceanic
audiences, these presses and their newspapers tended to
pursuegrandiose projects of social reform alongside matters of
mundane politics attimes passing the former off as the latter.
Rochelle Pintos analysis of print andpolitics in Goa (2007)
brilliantly demonstrates how the nineteenth-centurycolonial elite
seized print technology not to pursue Andersonian communitiesof
modular egalitarianism but to insinuate caste into print and into
thehistoriography of Catholicism.Several essays in the collection
draw out features of the signicance of textual
production in the world of Muslim print culture. Anne Bang
explores themesof orality, manuscript and print in Zanzibar where
the introduction of printingin 1876 extended the repertoire of
media used for the circulation of religiousknowledge and
theological debate. How do these intersecting media affectstyles of
religious authority and the status of text in its constitution?
Bangexamines this question in relation to the corpus of Islamic
literature thatcirculated on the East African coast between 1870
and 1930, in both manuscriptand print form.
6 PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
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This work in turn forms part of a broader investigation of the
world of Islamicmanuscript production in Africa (Farias 2008;
Jeppie and Diagne 2008; Last2008) and its interactions with orality
and print. The predominant image hasbeen of sub-Saharan Africa
following a path from orality to print, the lattergenerally taken
to be introduced by Christian missions. Scholars like Bang (2003and
this volume) and Jeppie and Diagne (2008) demonstrate the
partiality of thisexisting scholarship. For much of the continent,
manuscript has to be factoredinto the orality/literacy equation,
while accounts of printing in Africa need toinclude Muslim and
secular circuits of print from the Arab world and South Asia.Anne
Bangs article begins this task by discussing Mustafa al-Babi
al-Halabi,
probably one of the most signicant Indian Ocean publishers. The
press was set upin Cairo in 1859 by a family who had migrated from
Syria to Egypt. It aimed toprint and distribute books of Islamic
learning throughout theworld and producedmaterial in Arabic and
African languages. While al-Halabi awaits more detailedresearch, it
seems that many books came into being through people going on
Hajjor other journeys who would stop in Cairo to have a manuscript
printed. Fundingwould come from merchants and the book would bear
the name of the donor.A number of important recent publications
address the signicance of
translation, text production and printing for Islamic reform
movements. This isa theme in publications by Roman Loimeier (2003),
Benjamin Soares (2005),Soares and Otayek (2007), and in Kai Kresses
work on public intellectuals inMombasa and on the Swahili coast
(2003; 2007). It is also addressed inscholarship on Islam in
Southern Africa such as Shamil Jeppies work on theArabic Study
Circle in Durban (2007) or in writing on Ahmed Deedat and
theIslamic Propagation Centre International in Durban, which in
signicant respectstook off from the Arabic Study Circle (Westerlund
2003; Sadouni 2007; Vahedforthcoming; Kaarsholm this volume).
Discussions of print culture gureprominently in recent research on
Islamic publics in Africa, as promoted notleast by Abdulkader Tayob
(Tayob 2007; on Islamic media in South Africa, seeVahed 2007; cf.
Kaarsholm 2008).One striking feature here which has also been
pointed out for South Asia by
Francis Robinson (1993; 2008) is a reformationist one of
emphasizing theimportance of direct access of the individual
believer to the holy writ of God, thusundermining the monopoly on
interpretation of imams or other intermediaries(cf. Loimeier 2003).
Paradoxically, this may involve a turn to Arabic languagelearning,
script and debate as well as the promotion of translation into
indigenouslanguages for the sake of proselytization. As
demonstrated in Kaarsholms essay(this volume) it may thus result in
a fundamentalist opposition between theessence of the faith and
traditional beliefs within particular cultural settings. Orit may
lead to arguments favouring syncretism and reconcilability of Islam
withcustomary practices, and thus to quite different arguments
concerning therelationship between Islam and modernity. Together
these strands of scholarshiphighlight the intersections of print
cultures in the Indian Ocean world and presentdifferent
trajectories from those extrapolated on the basis of
Euro-Americanmodels. The latter stress themes of print capitalism,
copyright regimes, nationalstate control and the construction of
vast, apparently egalitarian publics. With itsthemes of
philanthropy, personalized printing in a transnational matrix,
andvariable notions of authorship and hence copyright, this
scholarship offers newways of thinking about global histories of
print.
7PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
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NATIONALISM, NEWSPAPERS AND INDIAN OCEAN CIRCUITS
The relationship between newspapers and nationalism constitutes
a well-developed theme across several regions of Africa. As
Jonathon Glassmandemonstrates, the complexities of Zanzibari
nationalism and the categories ofArab, African and Indian employed
within it (2000; 2004) were largely shapedin a welter of
newspapers, political leaets and pamphlets, in which popular
ideasof race and ethnicity were tested and debated. Reports in
newspapers fromAfrican soldiers in the Second World War and their
return to civilian life after thewar fuelled political
organizations and exposed local communities to inter-national
trends, including movements for national liberation in West Africa
andIndia (Bromber 2002). In Southern Africa, the colonial African
elite investedheavily in newspapers as sites for expressing their
views against encroachingsettler domination in the case of the
early twentieth-century writer andintellectual Sol Plaatje,
virtually to the point of bankruptcy (Willan 1985).While the
newspapers discussed in the following articles develop this line
of
argument, they focus attention on newspapers as more than just
content, ideasand discourse. The newspaper as an institution, with
its print shop and the socialrelations around these, prove to be
productive sites for capturing the transnationalstrands that make
up the skein of East and Southern African nationalisms.James
Brennan provides a biography of two Dar es Salaam papers,
Tanganyika
Opinion (192355) and Tanganyika Herald (192960). Thembisa
Waetjen andGoolam Vahed focus on the Durban paper Indian Views
(started in 1914), aimedat a Muslim Gujarati merchant class
concentrated in Durban and Johannesburgbut also spread across much
of the subcontinent. Bodil Folke Frederiksen sets outa rich network
of African and Asian papers in Kenya which increasingly
convergethrough their anti-colonialism and their sharing of
personnel and expertise.She shows how a culture of
entrepreneurship, independence and anti-colonialresistance
persisted in the second half of the 1940s, when colonial
governmentagents sought to inuence both Indian and African
newspapers. In hercontribution, Sana Aiyar draws out the particular
importance in the early 1920sof the Indian-owned East African
Chronicle (edited by M. A. Desai) in givingvoice to the political
aspirations of Harry Thuku, and in bridging early
Africannationalism in East Africa and the transnational nationalism
of the IndianCongress movement.These newspapers many of them
Indian-owned shared certain features.
They addressed fairly well dened audiences, situated themselves
in thecontemporary politics of reform, and often had an activist
mode of address. InKenya the Indian papers came out more regularly
and were better consolidatedthan the Indian papers in Tanganyika,
where they were small, tenuously fundedand nancially fragile. Some
were family-owned and run. Appeals to merchantphilanthropy were
common and merchant support was critical in keeping theseventures
aoat, especially so in the case of Gandhis Indian Opinion.The
editors of these ventures necessarily led complex professional
lives. As
Brennan points out, they encompassed impossibly contradictory
layers ofbelonging. In the case he examines, editors could
simultaneously entertain anungainly combination of ideas that
included imperial citizenship, Hindureformism, communism and
anti-communism. The multi-tasking that
anyprinter-publisher-editor-owner is required to take on compounded
the challenges.
8 PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
-
This tradition of the multi-skilled printer-publisher was
well-established in India.As Ulrike Stark indicates in her analysis
of the Naval Kishore Press in Lucknow,Indian printer-publishers
assumed a complex set of roles entrepreneur,publicist, literary
patron, philanthropist, disseminator of knowledge andeducator
(2007: 2). Editors around the Indian Ocean took on many of
thesemantles but in new and more contradictory ways.Waetjen and
Vahed recreate the complex lives of Indian Ocean editors. The
rst editor of Indian ViewswasMohammed Cassim Anglia, whose
trajectory tookhim from Surat (where he was born) to Mauritius,
back to Surat and then on tothe Transvaal and Natal. Fluent in
English, French, Gujarati and Dutch, Angliaoperated a retail
business in Durban whilst acting as a shipping agent. Initially
agreat supporter of Gandhi, he subsequently became one of his
ercest critics.Compounding this complexity was the colonial and
transnational context in
which these newspapers operated. Editors had to report on
developments in Indiawhile keeping a wary eye on the colonial
state, its legislation and its censorshipapparatus. As Brennan
indicates, editors had to oppose colonial rule whilesecuring
diasporic privilege. One template through which to achieve
theseobjectives was the idea of Greater India, the ancient cultural
diffusion ofHinduism and Buddhism from India into East and
South-East Asia. BothBrennan and Aiyar (this volume) demonstrate
how discourses of Greater Indialtered into arguments for giving
Indians a special status in East Africa, andshowing Indian
civilization as more suitable for grafting onto African soilthan .
. . that of the West (Brennan this volume). In Kenya Indian
political leadersand publicists supported African demands of
elected representation in thecolonial government, reversal of land
ownership, and equal treatment in allspheres. At the same time they
prided themselves on being ahead of African socialdevelopment. An
editorial article in theDaily Chronicle, the most radical of
Asiannewspapers in Kenya, praised the African politician, Tom
Mbotela, for hisgradualist politics: The African races have to pass
through a long and laboriouscourse of education undisturbed by mad
haste and political passions (20 July1951) (Frederiksen this
volume).Drawing on work by Vahed (2009), Kaarsholms contribution
discusses how
Islam in Durban, in spite of its internal diversity, came to
function as a unifyingfactor in efforts to build a South African
Indian identity. At the same time asshown also in Tayobs work on
the Muslim Youth Movement this imposedlimitations on Islamic
efforts to reach beyond the Indian community, toproselytize among
Africans, or in the 1970s and 1980s to radicalize andbecome
politically active in the anti-apartheid movement. Altogether, this
madeNatal Islamic groups including Deedats Islamic Propagation
Centre moreconservative towards the state than their Muslim
counterparts in Cape Town andmore focused on educational and
welfare activities than on the politics ofopposition (Tayob 1995:
98ff.). Of central importance within education andwelfare was the
production of printed materials to support Islamic education andto
counter the international onslaught of Christian missionaries,
including theproject to have the Quran translated into Zulu, and
the production of an Islamicprint literature of pamphlets in Zulu
and English.Print shops and newspapers were also important sites in
which different streams
of nationalist thought encountered and inuenced each other.
Indian traders andentrepreneurs not only facilitated the spread of
transnational and local goods and
9PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
-
nance, but were also decisive in initiating and sustaining a
culture of print media,particularly newspapers, in the whole of
East Africa. Already in the late 1920s,newspapers in Kenya and
Tanzania had African editors and relied on Africanjournalists, and
increasingly the papers, which were highly political, becamesites
of reporting on global and local anti-colonial activities and
debate betweenAfricans and Indians on unity and difference. Sitaram
Achariar assisted in thesetting up of both Muigwithania, edited by
the young Jomo Kenyattta, and laterthe Mombasa newspaper, the
Democrat, and a Bombay paper, The Sun (Brennanthis volume). He was
one of several political radicals who was transported acrossthe
Ocean. In Tanganyika the ambition of the Swahili newspaper Kwetu,
whichstarted in 1937, was to spread knowledge . . . do social and
humanitarian workand to establish closer contact between the native
and non-native communities(Iliffe 1979: 3769). In Kenya the
contemporary Indian-owned Colonial Times,bilingual in English and
Gujarati, was published under the motto, Free, Frankand
Fearless.One feature that was central to the rise of an Indian
Ocean public sphere was
the formulation of new genres which could speak to new
transnational audiencesand encapsulate new forms of diasporic
experience. One example of such a genreis the Indian Ocean
travelogue which was rened in the columns of port cityperiodicals.
These travelogues reported on the travels of notable people
betweenBombay and Durban, whose progress from port to port was
reported in elaboratedetail. In such travelogues, each stop in a
port city confers visibility; the personappears to become more real
and visible with each successive newspaper report(Hofmeyr 2008:
21).Equally important was the use of the cutting. Since papers
could not afford
correspondents and wire services could be expensive, excerpting
material fromother journals with an attribution was common
practice. Such attributionscreated new circuits of meaning and
value. An average edition of Indian Opinionmight feature cuttings
from the Rangoon Times, The Zanzibar Chronicle, theBombay Reporter
and the Madras-based Indian Review. These cuttings created
animaginative circuit that allowed readers to visualize ideas
moving between theseinformation ports.Waetjen and Vaheds discussion
of Zuleika Mayats column in Indian Views
demonstrates this process of emergent genres. Mayat was the rst
woman to writefor the paper. Writing in the persona and under the
penname of Fahmida (aPersian name culled from an Urdu novel), Mayat
formulated a public voice toaddress a middle-class, modernist and
gendered Islamic public. She produced abroad-ranging column whose
rubric Mainly for Women belied its wide socialand political
reach.Mayat had grown up in a trading community in Potchefstroom,
South Africa.
In her fathers shop she experienced close-up multiculturalism
and heardGujarati, Urdu, Arabic, Afrikaans, English and Sotho on a
daily basis. Excludedfrom secondary and higher education by racism
and gender restrictions, shereached a wider world via
correspondence. She maintained epistolary friendships,studied by
correspondence, published her rst piece (on the need for education
forwomen) as a letter in Indian Views and met her husband through
letter writing: hespotted her rst letter in the paper and wrote a
reply endorsing her views. Thisexchange prompted a secret courtship
by letter between them and a subsequentmarriage.
10 PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
-
Her columns drew together large issues higher education for
women, thesterilities of apartheid as opposed to the
multiculturalism of her youth, trends inIslam which were locally
mediated as letters, conversations and reports. Thisformula
admirably captured her own diasporic experience, which wedded
thelocal intensities of her fathers shop with links to a bigger
transoceanic world.
BROADER IMPLICATIONS
Through the lens of print culture, the contributions to the
present collection aimto extend our understanding of lateral
networks in the Indian Ocean and the kindsof nationalist
interactions that they enabled. Such insights in turn open up
newvistas in both East and Southern African Studies as well as
within South AsianStudies and studies of Islam.
East African StudiesAs demonstrated in the studies by Brennan,
Aiyar, Frederiksen and Bertz in thiscollection, an Indian Ocean
perspective can add new dimensions to East AfricanStudies, and to
our understanding of public sphere dynamics and debates
aroundcolonialism and nationalism from the early twentieth century
onwards. SeeingEast Africa as part of a larger Indian Ocean world
helps to bring out thetransnational dimensions of nationalism, and
the complexity of the processesthrough which African and Indian
groupings interacted, identifying themselves asslaves or free, as
subjects or citizens in the context of the transition
fromcolonialism to independence.Seeing East African nationalism in
an Indian Ocean perspective provides an
alternative to understanding nationalism as primary resistance
emerging out ofthe efforts of particular and well-dened
pre-colonial polities, like the Kikuyu inKenya. The Indian Ocean
perspective in turn emphasizes the multiplicity ofnationalist
voices (Atieno Odhiambo 1995), gives greater emphasis to Indian
andSwahili coast contributions to the development of nationalism,
and thuscontributes to seeing it as less Africanist than has been
the tradition (Sheriff2008; cf. Sheriff 1991).An Indian Ocean optic
also highlights the signicance of Islam for the
constitution and functioning of the publics within which
nationalist programmesand strategies were debated in East Africa.
It may thus help to undermine or atleast problematize the hegemony
of Christian and biblical discursive models inthe formation of
nationalist narratives (cf. Lonsdale 2009: 80ff.; for broaderMiddle
East and African perspective, Kastfelt 2003).
Southern African StudiesUntil recently, Southern African Studies
has seldom intersected with IndianOcean Studies, a eld focused on
the western Indian Ocean and its monsoonrhythms. South Africa falls
below the monsoon belt and so has remained outsidethe purview of
Indian Oceanists. Within the mainstream of Southern AfricanStudies
itself, there has been little interest in the Indian Ocean. There
has of coursebeen a longstanding tradition of work on Indian
communities in South Africa(Dhupelia-Mesthrie 2007), but this has
often operated as a discrete area. By and
11PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
-
large, Southern African Studies has manifested strongly
land-based andAfricanist tendencies of scholarship in which the
major vectors of struggle arebetween black and white.In the wake of
South Africas political transition, this situation has started
to
shift as scholars start to engage with the countrys multiple
intellectualinheritances rather than focusing their attention on a
single narrative of anti-apartheid struggle. Scholars of slavery
like Nigel Worden (2007) and Kerry Ward(2009) have started to
resituate Cape Town as an Indian Ocean port. A number ofliterary
scholars have asked what South Africas literary traditions look
like whenseen from the Indian Ocean rather than just the Atlantic
(Hofmeyr 2007b;Govinden 2008), in part drawing inspiration from a
growing body of work oncultural studies in the Indian Ocean (Ghosh
and Muecke 2007; Moorthy andJamal 2009; Gupta, Hofmeyr and Pearson
2010) an approach whose strength isdemonstrated in Bertzs article.
Likewise new work on the interactions betweenAfricans and Indians
in South Africa demonstrates how the tensions, disagree-ments and
sharing of ideas shaped political developments hitherto read only
fromthe perspective of struggle between white and black (Soske
2009; Suttner 2009).Also important is a growing body of work on
Gandhi which argues that theMahatmas ideas need to be understood
less as an automatic expression of someprior Indianness and more as
the product of his South African experience (Bhanaand Vahed 2005;
Mongia 2006; Natarajan 2009).There has also been an upsurge in
studies of religion, and of Islam in particular,
which emphasize the linkages between the Cape and the Indian
Ocean world. Anearly example is a study by Achmat Davids of The
Mosques of Bo-Kaap (1980),which has been elaborated upon in more
recent writings by Fareed Esack (1988),Shamil Jeppie (1987),
Abdulkader Tayob (1995; 1999) and Sindre Bangstad(2007). This work
has been stimulated by recent efforts to resurrect notions of aCape
Malay identity and to have this group recognized as a diaspora
bygovernments in Malaysia and Indonesia as explored currently in
research bySarah Jappie on imaginings of Malayness in Cape Town
(Jappie 2009).As far as KwaZulu-Natal is concerned, the Indian
Ocean perspective in the
study of Islam has been focused primarily on the South African
Indiancommunity, whose transoceanic links to South Asia have been
maintained partlythrough the importation of imams and reformist and
other religious inspiration.As Goolam Vahed has shown in a number
of writings, links to India and Pakistanhave been important for the
unfolding of both Su and Deobandi strands ofthought in Durban and
what is now KwaZulu-Natal (Vahed 2003a; 2003b;Vahed and Jeppie
2005). Much less explored Kaarsholms article in thiscollection
begins the task have been links with other traditions of
Islamicpractice within Africa and along the African Indian Ocean
seaboard. In ongoingresearch, Anne Bang and Shamil Jeppie are
exploring how networks of Islamiceducation extend from Yemen and
Hadramawt through Zanzibar, the ComorosIslands and Mozambique all
the way to Cape Town.2 Kaarsholms study throwslight on Durban as
the missing link in this chain of Indian Ocean connectivity,
2For more information on this project, From transmission of
tradition to global learning:African Islamic education ca.
18002000, see ,accessed 4 September 2010.
12 PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
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and sees Islam in KwaZulu-Natal as linking up not only with
networks in India,but also with African and Swahili Coast
traditions of practice (cf. Kaarsholm2010).
Rethinking Indian nationalism via AfricaA study of Africa in the
Indian Ocean has important implications for how wethink about
nationalism in India. While the post-1960s idea of a
Non-ResidentIndian (NRI) diaspora has been factored into accounts
of contemporary Indiannationalism, Indias earlier indentured
diasporas seldom feature in academicanalyses of this topic. This
situation is starting to shift as scholars like TejaswiniNiranjana
on Trinidad and John Kelly on Fiji demonstrate the key role that
anti-indenture mobilization played within early twentieth-century
Indian nationalism.Whether represented through the gure of the
endangered Hindu women in theindentured periphery, whose honour had
to be saved (Kelly 1991), or throughthat of the lower-caste woman
who had to be symbolically or actually expelled tocreate a pure
body politic (Niranjana 1999), the indentured community provideda
key set of parameters for imagining India.Work by Susan Bayly
(2004) on the idea of Greater India demonstrates
how this discourse, rst articulated in the 1920s by
French-inuenced Bengalischolars, was taken up by a range of
anti-colonial constituencies keen todemonstrate the ancient glories
of India and its record as a benign colonizer.Greater India could
provide an idea of nationhood that stretched diasporicallyacross
time and space and, importantly, could be both anti-colonial
andcolonizing at the same time.The articles in this special issue
extend our understanding of these themes by
pointing to the central role that diasporic newspapers and their
editors played inshaping a discourse of dispersed nationhood that
expressed itself in terms likeGreater India, Indians overseas, or
colonial-born Indians. They insert Africamore clearly into the
equation and probe how it features in discussions on
Indiannationalism. As the articles in this volume and other work
(Raman 2004;Muponde 2008; Soske 2009; Suttner 2009) illustrate, the
inuence of Gandhi andIndian nationalist thought on African
nationalism is relatively well-known. Thereverse ow is far less
frequently discussed.The articles in this collection address this
reverse ow in different ways. Sana
Aiyars article demonstrates the key role that Kenya played in
the evolution ofIndian nationalism. On the one hand it acted as a
unifying factor since thetreatment of Indians overseas was the one
issue over which there was no differenceof opinion. On the other,
it became a bargaining chip in the negotiations betweenwhite
settlers, African elites, Indians in Kenya, Congress in India, the
ColonialOfce and the India Ofce. Indian nationalists saw the matter
of Indian equalitywith settlers as a test case of British
commitments to creating equal rights for allimperial citizens. The
Colonial Ofce nessed the matter by declaring a policy ofAfrican
paramountcy in 1923, which checked the ambitions of white settlers
andIndian settlers alike. While the declaration meant little for
Africans in practice,the idea of Africa as a boundary of Indian
national and diasporic aspirationbecame important.Another theme
that these articles elucidate is that of Indian nationalism as
being colonial and anti-colonial at the same time. As Brennans
article argues,
13PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
-
Indians in the diaspora (and the mainland) were both
sub-imperialists and anti-colonialists. Africa became an important
site for Indias sub-imperial aspirations,and thus central to ideas
and debates on Indian nationalism. Newspapers in Eastand Southern
Africa become arenas in which ideas and debates about
Indiannationalism were rened. Very often, Africa featured in these
discussions asproviding an imaginary boundary of race and
civilization against which theseideas could take shape. Africa,
then, represented one imaginative limit of Indiannationalism
(Hofmeyr 2007a).
CONCLUSION
According to Kresse and Simpson, the Indian Ocean world
comprises an ever-changing community of strangers . . . a society
based on the fact that it knowsenough about itself to know that it
does not, really, exist:
The historical experience of commonality at the street level
that shapes the region has ledto a consciousness of social
diversity and a largely-assumed knowledge of socialdifferences.
This view of things dissolves the idea of simple unity and along
with it theview of transoceanic community with a shared history.
(2008: 267)
If the Indian Ocean coheres only as a set of shifting social
optical illusions, does ithave analytical value? The articles
collected here demonstrate that it possessesconsiderable heuristic
power, especially for students of Africa. This power lies inthe
ability of an Indian Ocean perspective to complicate received
paradigms andacademic traditions.With regard to both East and
Southern African Studies, an Indian Ocean
perspective enriches narratives of anti-colonial nationalism
still often understoodin a resistance framework of settler versus
native. A view from the IndianOcean requires us to factor in
multiple voices, be these merchants, indenturedlabourers, slaves,
political exiles or prisoners from different regions in the
IndianOcean world. Taking this cast of actors into account moves us
away from binarynarratives of black versus white towards
post-resistance perspectives.An Indian Ocean perspective redraws
regional historiographical maps and
creates new ones. The Cape moves from a relatively sequestered
regionalhistoriography by being drawn analytically into a broader
Indian Ocean arena.Muslim circuits of education bring new
analytical networks to light. Yemen,Zanzibar, the Comoros,
Mozambique and parts of South Africa, notably CapeTown and Durban,
cohere through the intellectual networks and personnelpassing
through them.An Indian Ocean optic has long been recognized for the
rich connected
histories that it enables. For scholars of Africa, such
histories enable them toinsert questions of Africa into other
historiographies. Indian nationalism hasgenerally been studied from
a territorial and teleologically nationalist perspective.As this
eld opens up to more transnational and oceanic forms of thought,
therole of Africa and Africans in shaping discourses of Indian
nationalism becomesapparent. This conjuncture presents an
opportunity for African Studies to raise itsprole by inserting
Africa more prominently into the study of the Indian Ocean
14 PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS
-
world. The growing importance of studying lateral networks and
linkages withinthe South underlines this opportunity.By connecting
histories in the Indian Ocean arena, scholars can certainly
complicate regional and national historiographies. Yet, in the
longer run, theseenriched analyses can start to point to broader
patterns. By connecting a series ofprint culture histories in the
Indian Ocean region, this collection raises thepossibility of new
global histories of print. Rather than print capitalism and
vastanonymous publics being the unstated premise of analysis, this
collection suggeststhat themes of philanthropic production and
personalized print offer new vectorsfor thinking about global
histories of print culture. A view from the Indian Oceanthen offers
the possibility of revising our understandings on different levels,
fromthe local and regional to the global. Histories in the ocean
may in the longer runcontribute to a history of the Indian Ocean
and its distinctive contributions toworld history.
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ABSTRACT
The emergence of the Indian Ocean region as an important
geo-political arena isbeing studied across a range of disciplines.
Yet while the Indian Ocean has guredin Swahili studies and analyses
of East and Southern African diasporiccommunities, it has remained
outside the mainstream of African Studies. Thisintroduction
provides an overview of emerging trends in the rich eld of
IndianOcean studies and draws out their implications for scholars
of Africa. The focusof the articles is on one strand in the study
of the Indian Ocean, namely the role ofprint and visual culture in
constituting public spheres and nationalisms in, acrossand between
the societies around the Ocean.The themes addressed unfold between
Southern and East Africa and India as
well as along the African coast from KwaZulu-Natal through
Zanzibar andTanzania to the Arab world. This introduction surveys
debates on print culture,newspapers and nationalism in African
Studies and demonstrates how the articlesin the volume support and
extend these areas of study. It draws out the broaderimplications
of these debates for the historiographies of East African
studies,Southern African studies, debates on Indian nationalism and
Islam.
RSUM
De nombreuses disciplines ont tudi lmergence de la rgion de
locan Indienen tant quarne gopolitique importante. Si locan Indien
gure certes dans lestudes swahili et les analyses des communauts
diasporiques dAfrique orientaleet australe, il est cependant rest
lcart des tudes africaines traditionnelles.Cette introduction
prsente un survol des tendances qui mergent dans le richechamp des
tudes de locan Indien et en tire les implications pour ceux
quitudient lAfrique. Dans ces articles, il est question dun courant
dtude delocan Indien, savoir le rle de la culture de limprim et du
visuel dans laformation des sphres publiques et des nationalismes
dans les socits riverainesde locan, mais galement entre elles.Les
thmes traits nous mnent entre Afrique australe, Afrique orientale
et
Inde, et le long du littoral africain du KwaZulu-Natal au monde
arabe, en passantpar la Tanzanie et Zanzibar. Cette introduction
contemple les dbats sur laculture de limprim, les journaux et le
nationalisme dans les tudes africaines etmontre comment les
articles de ce volume soutiennent et tendent ces domainesdtude.
Elle tire de ces dbats de larges implications pour les
historiographiesissues des tudes sur lAfrique orientale, des tudes
sur lAfrique australe, desdbats sur le nationalisme indien et sur
lislam.
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