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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, .


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,


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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


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.


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,


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


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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