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Abstract
The networks of human relation that define the Indian Ocean region have undergone significant reconfiguration in the last half-century. More precisely, the economic insularity of the region has diminished while the postcolonial nation has both restricted movement and reoriented the political imaginations of people along the rim. At the same time, the Indian Ocean has been revivified as a unit of social exchange and analysis, particularly since the end of the Cold War. This article explores the meaning of Indian Ocean Africa in the context of a multipolar world by focusing on how the dictates of nations have transformed the region and how the petroleum economy as well as shifting means of social engagement have engendered new linkages. The essay argues that although the postcolonial era affected the closure of certain historical routes of connectivity, relationships structured by contemporary nations and air travel, among other things, have encouraged perceptions of regional coherence. What we might term basin consciousness has begun to reverse the introverted politics of the early postcolonial era and animate the Indian Ocean as an idea.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank those who commented on versions of this essay presented to the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of California-Los Angeles, Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Roskilde University, University of Warwick, University of Basel, and the University of Warsaw. Special thanks to Edward A. Alpers, David Anderson, Andrew Apter, Gopalan Balachandran, Anne K. Bang, Daniel Branch, James R. Brennan, Gwyn Campbell, Jatin Dua, Pamila Gupta, Patrick Harries, Isabel Hofmeyr, Preben Kaarsholm, Christopher J. Lee, Ghislaine Lydon, Giorgio Riello, the editors of JEAS, and two anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
† The special thematic section that follows – including the papers by Jeremy Prestholdt, Preben Kaarsholm, Scott Reese, Jatin Dua, Stephanie Jones, and David Anderson and Jacob McKnight – has its background in two workshops that were held at Roskilde University in November 2013 and May 2014 on ‘Pirates, preachers and politics: Security, religion and networks along the African Indian Ocean coast’. The two workshops were organized jointly by the AEGIS collaborative research group on ‘Africa in the Indian Ocean’ and Roskilde University's research priority programme on ‘The Dynamics of Globalisation, Inequality and New Processes of International Interaction’. Among the participants and discussants who contributed to these two lively and inspiring workshops were Anne K. Bang, Felicitas Becker, James R. Brennan, Francesca Declich, Isabelle Denis, Nikolas Emmanuel, Tobias Hagmann, Stig Jarle Hansen, Sarah Hillewaert, Anna Leander, Bjørn Møller, Gorm Rye Olsen, Rosa Maria Perez, Samadia Sadouni, and Kadara Swaleh.
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3. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe.
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7. Gupta, “Introduction,” 3–4; Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea”; Wigen, “Introduction.”
8. Vergès, “Writing on Water.” For earlier examples see Larson, Ocean of Letters and Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes.”
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18. Harries, “Middle Passages of the Southwest Indian Ocean”; Ross, Cape of Torments; Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa; Ward, “‘Tavern of the Seas’?”; Ward, Networks of Empire; Worden, “VOC Cape Town as an Indian Ocean Port.”
19. Prashad, The Darker Nations; Lee, ed. Making a World After Empire.
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21. Pearson, The Indian Ocean. On the gradual and uneven transition from sail to oil see Bhattacharya, “The Indian Ocean in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”; Gilbert, Dhows; Madureira, “Oil in the Age of Steam.”
22. James L. Gelvin and Nile Green, “Introduction,” in Global Islam. On spatial imaginations facilitated by steam, see Pietsch, “A British Sea.”
23. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History, ch. 6; Erik Gilbert termed this flow of migrant labor to the Gulf, rather than away from it, a ‘great reversal’. “Coastal East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean,” 30. On earlier patterns of labor importation in the Gulf see Hopper, “Slaves of One Master.”
24. Pearson, “Littoral Society.”
25. Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonization,” 216.
26. McKeown, “Global Migration”; McKeown, Melancholy Order.
27. Bang, “Cosmopolitanism Colonised?,” 168, 187; Simpson and Kresse, “Introduction,” Struggling with History; Clarence-Smith, “The Rise and Fall of Hadhrami Shipping.” On circumscribed mobility in the imperial Indian Ocean see Anderson, Subaltern Lives.
28. Green, Bombay Islam; Vergès and Marimoutou, “Moorings.”
29. Frost, “In Search of Cosmopolitan Discourse”; Frost, “‘Wider Opportunities.’”
30. Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 275; Devji, “A Shadow Nation”; Dodson and Hatcher, Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia.
31. Ghazal, Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism; Willis, “Debating the Caliphate.”
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33. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment.
34. Gupta, “Mapping Portuguese Decolonisation in the Indian Ocean”; Amrith, “Tamil Diasporas across the Bay of Bengal.”
35. Gupta, “The Song of the Non-Aligned World.”
36. Ho, “Names Beyond Nation,” 28–29; Ho, The Graves of Tarim.
37. Lee, “The ‘Native’ Undefined,” 462–463; Salim, “Native or Non-Native?”
38. Glassman, “Creole Nationalists and the Search for Nativist Authenticity”; Prestholdt, “Politics of the Soil”; Brennan, “Lowering the Sultan's Flag”; Salim, “The Movement for Mwambao.”
39. Lee, “Between a Movement and an Era,” 19; Brennan, Taifa; Glassman, War of Words; Sumich, “Tenuous Belonging”; Gupta, “The Disquieting of History”; Houbert, “The Indian Ocean Creole Islands.”
40. Abushouk and Ibrahim, eds. The Hadrami Diaspora in Southeast Asia; Warburton, “The Hadramis”; Freitag and Clarence-Smith, eds. Hadhrami Traders, Scholars, and Statesmen.
41. Prestholdt, “Politics of the Soil”; Brennan, “Lowering the Sultan's Flag”; Stren, Housing the Urban Poor, 31–32.
42. Glassman, War of Words; Lofchie, Zanzibar.
43. Burgess, “Mao in Zanzibar”; Gilbert, “The Dhow as Cultural Icon,” 69; Bissell, “Casting a Long Shadow”; Monson, Africa's Freedom Railway; van Ness, “China and the Third World.”
44. Lee, “The Indian Ocean During the Cold War”; Kumar, “The Indian Ocean.”
45. Imam, “The Indian Ocean and Decolonization”; Shubin, The Hot ‘Cold War’; Weitz, “Continuities in Soviet Foreign Policy”; Bissell, “Soviet Use of Proxies in the Third World”; Bowman and Clark, eds. The Indian Ocean in Global Politics; Kearney, The Indian Ocean in World History, chap. 8.
46. Cooper, On the African Waterfront; Brennan, Taifa. On Arab migration to East Africa see, Vianello, “One Hundred Years in Brava”; McDow, “Arabs and Africans.”
47. Caplan and Topan, eds. Swahili Modernities.
48. Stren, Housing the Urban Poor, 14–19.
49. Kai Kresss terms the position of Muslims in postcolonial Kenya a ‘double-periphery’: peripheral to both the postcolonial state and the larger Umma. Kresse, “Muslim Politics in Postcolonial Kenya.” See also Eisenberg, “Hip-Hop and Cultural Citizenship”; Seesemann, “Kenyan Muslims.”
50. Becker, Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania; McIntosh, The Edge of Islam; Nzibo, “Islam and the Swahili-speaking communities of Nairobi.”
51. “It's ‘Allahu Akbari’ as Islam spreads across maasailand.” Standard, January 11, 2011.
52. Khalid, The Liberation of Swahili from European Appropriation; Mazrui and Shariff, The Swahili.
53. Bjork and Kusow, From Mogadishu to Dixon; McGown, Muslims in the Diaspora; Sadouni, “‘God is Not Unemployed.’”
54. Sheikh and Healy, “Somalia's Missing Million.”
55. Vianello, “One Hundred Years in Brava.”
56. Gilbert, Dhows.
57. Broeze, McPherson, and Reeves, “Engineering and Empire.”
58. Pearson, “Littoral Society,” 367; Fremont, “Global Maritime Networks”; Levinson, The Box.
59. Kearney, The Indian Ocean.
60. Rajan, “New Trends of Labour Migration from India to Gulf Countries”; Kaplan, Monsoon, 12.
61. Al-Rasheed, Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf.
62. Kamrava and Babar, Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf; Gardner, City of Strangers.
63. Brown, The Economic Geography of Air Transportation; Graham, Geography and Air Transport.
64. Katodrytis, “Metropolitan Dubai and the Rise of Architectural Fantasy”; Davis, “Fear and Money in Dubai”; Ali, Dubai.
65. Green, Bombay Islam.
66. Prins, Sailing from Lamu.
67. Kaplan, “Center Stage for the 21st Century.”
68. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 37; Kaplan, Monsoon, 7.
69. Bouchard and Crumplin, “Neglected No Longer,” 47.
70. Kaplan, Monsoon; Green and Shearer, “Defining US Indian Ocean Strategy”; Rumley, Doyle, and Chaturvedi, “‘Securing’ the Indian Ocean?”; Bouchard and Crumplin, “Two Faces of France.”
71. Balachandran, “Sovereignty, Subjectivity, Narrations”; Menon, “Finding South Asia on a Map.”
72. Vines and Oruitemeka, “Engagement with the African Indian Ocean Rim states”; Kaplan, “Center Stage.”
73. Hofmeyr, “Africa as a Fault Line in the Indian Ocean.”
74. Kaplan, Monsoon, 183–184; Scott, “India's ‘Grand Strategy’ for the Indian Ocean”; Berlin, “The rise of India and the Indian Ocean.”
75. Alpers, “Piracy and Indian Ocean Africa”; Prange, “A Trade of No Dishonor.”
76. Dua, “A Sea of Trade and a Sea of Fish”; Weldemichael, “Maritime Corporate Terrorism and its Consequences in the Western Indian Ocean”; Potgieter and Schofield, “Poverty, Poaching and Pirates.”
77. Hansen, Piracy in the Greater Gulf of Aden; Little, “On the Somalia Dilemma.”
78. Lanteigne, “Fire Over Water”; Kantai and Smith, “The Dangers of Carving Up Somalia.”
79. Hansen, Al Shabaab in Somalia; Prestholdt, “Fighting Phantoms”; Lefebvre, “U.S. Military Hegemony in the Arabian/Persian Gulf.”
80. Bouchard and Crumplin, “Neglected No Longer”; Khurana, “China's ‘String of Pearls’ in the Indian Ocean and Its Security Implications”; Walgreen, “China in the Indian Ocean Region.”
81. Kaplan, “Center Stage.”
82. “Defender of a Harmonious Ocean.” People's Daily Online, April 24, 2009. Accessed February 3, 2013. http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90786/6644733.html; Campbell and Subramanian, “The IOR and the Strategic Importance of the Indian Ocean Region in the Post-Cold War Era.”
83. Campbell, “Introduction: Indian Ocean Rim (IOR) Economic Association: History and Prospects,” 2–4; Campbell, “The Indian Ocean Rim (IOR) Economic Association: A Giant in the Making?”
84. Wigen, “AHR Forum: Oceans of History: Introduction,” 720. See also Erik Gilbert, “The Dhow as Cultural Icon.”
85. Connery, “Sea Power.”
86. Go, “Modeling States and Sovereignty.”
87. Gilbert, “The Dhow as Cultural Icon.”
88. My sincere thanks to Gopalan Balachandran for suggesting this term.
89. Ward, Networks of Empire.
90. Zegeye, “A Matter of Colour,” 95.
91. Kaarsholm, “Diaspora or Transnational Citizens?”; Jeppe, “Reclassifications: Coloured, Malay, Muslim”; Haron, “Gapena and the Cape Malays.” See also Karaan, “Coming Home” and Kaarsholm, “Zanzibaris or Amakhuwa?”
92. Soon thereafter the Kenyan government signed an oil exploration agreement with China for blocks in the Lamu Archipelago. “Mystery Ship and Chinese Genes at the Kenyan Coast.” Nation, August 7, 2005; “Project Seeks to Confirm Roots of ‘Lamu Chinese.’” Standard, March 23, 2010; “Kenya Signs Exploration Contract.” Standard, April 18, 2006.
93. Peter Greste, “Could a Rusty Coin Re-Write Chinese-African history?.” BBC.com 17 October 2010. During the 1960s, similar claims of cordial historical relationships were made in the context of China-Tanzania relations. Lal, “Maoism in Tanzania,” 101–102.
94. Ott, “End of the Line for the ‘Lunatic Express’?”.
95. “Expo Honoring Ancient Chinese Navigator Opens in Shanghai.” China Daily July 8, 2005 http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-07/08/content_458551.htm; Amal Hasson, 2010. “Ancient Treasure Ships and Oman Voyage – From China to Arabia.” Global Arab Network, December 31. http://www.english.globalarabnetwork.com; Gilbert, “The Dhow as Cultural Icon.”
96. Bissell, “From Dhow Culture to the Diaspora”; Bissell, “Conservation and the Colonial Past”; Gilbert, “The Dhow as Cultural Icon.”
97. Kresse and Simpson, “Between Africa and India,” 1.