Africa 81 (1) 2011: 122

doi:10.1017/S000197201000001X

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-rst
century (Kaplan 2009: 16). According to international relations commentators,
the forces shaping a post-American world intersect most visibly in the Indian
Ocean region (Zakaria 2008; Kaplan 2009). These include Somali pirates; the rise
of Asian economies; Sino-Indian competition over energy sea lanes, African
markets and minerals; Al-Qaidas ongoing focus on US interests around the
littoral (Tanzania, Comoros, Kenya, Yemen, etc.); and persisting US imperialism,
visible in its occupation of Diego Garcia, the coral atoll in the centre of the Indian
Ocean 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 for
African Studies? While the Indian Ocean arena has long been charted in some
areas of African Studies notably Swahili Studies and analyses of Southern and
East African diasporic communities it remains outside the mainstream. As
oceanic and transnational forms of analysis become commonplace, the question
of 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 focus
of the articles is on one strand in the study of the Indian Ocean, namely the role of
print and visual culture in constituting public spheres in and between the societies
around 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 in

Johannesburg, South Africa and until recently was Acting Director for the Centre of Indian
Studies in Africa (www.cisa-wits.org.za). Her rst monograph We Spend Our Years as a Tale
That Is Told: oral historical narrative in a South African chiefdom (1994) was shortlisted for the
Herskovits Prize. The Portable Bunyan: a transnational history of The Pilgrims Progress won the
2007 Richard L. Greaves Award. She is currently working on textual circulation in the Indian
Ocean. Email: Isabel.Hofmeyr@wits.ac.za
PREBEN KAARSHOLM is Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Roskilde
University. 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 at
Roskilde University. A recent publication is the co-authored (with W. Muoria-Sal, J. Lonsdale
and D. Peterson) Writing for Kenya: the life and works of Henry Muoria (2009).
International African Institute 2011

PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS

trade to a focus on European empires (Subrahmanyam 1997; Pearson 1998),

colonial worlds (Bose 2005; Metcalf 2007), post-colonial societies, and their interactions with these older networks (Ho 2004; 2006). At the heart of this scholarship is an Indian Ocean world system created by monsoons, port cities, sailors,
religious networks, transoceanic trade and the ways in which European merchant
companies initially had to accommodate themselves to this order (Chaudhuri
1985; Pearson 2003; Gupta 2004; Prakash 2004). It locates itself historiographically in the wake of Braudels work on the Mediterranean (1972, for example),
world-systems theory (Vink 2007) and Indian nationalist scholarship keen to
demonstrate that Indias trade was not short-distance peddling, as the British
insisted, but involved long-distance networks. This body of work has established
a 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 by
the European trading company archives on which it drew. These archives ran only
to the early 1800s and were then replaced by imperial records largely organized by
colony 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 and
voyages. This conjuncture has promoted a renewed interest in the Indian Ocean
and its scholarship. Building on the foundation of the early modern historiography, 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 the
Hadrami diaspora of the Yemen highlights the Indian Ocean region as one made
distinctive 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 and
colonized than about the intimate encounter of universalisms, the grand designs
of the sayyid Hadramis tangling with the global ambitions of European
imperialism.
This theme of Indian Ocean universalisms has been explored by a range of
writers. Sugata Bose (2005) underlines the interconnectedness or universalisms
that arose from older networks interacting with, against or outside British
imperial formations. Mark Ravinder Frost (2002; 2004; 2010) examines the printbased public spheres that took shape between the port cities of the littoral in
which diasporic populations found themselves and which supported shared
projects of social and religious reform. Thomas Metcalf (2007) examines British
India as a sub-imperial power that advanced the interests of Britain and colonial
India 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 the
nineteenth-century British empire and Kerry Ward (2009) for seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Dutch company rule, free migrants, indentured labour,
prisoners, political exiles, soldiers and slaves moved or were moved around the
Indian Ocean in signicant numbers. In the case of exiles and prisoners, the
Indian Ocean functioned as an arena of penal settlement, its necklace of prisons
stretching from Robben Island to the Andamans. These movements of people
across the Ocean extend our understandings of labour history, of legal regimes

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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, drawing
together the Mediterranean-Middle East and Indian Ocean-South Asia zones.
Their collection examines how the pre-colonial unities and fractures within and
between these regions interacted with, inhibited and used European imperial
networks to sustain or build new migrant communities, trade links and religious
doctrines. Another variant of this transregional focus is work on islands which
seeks to understand the macrohistories of the Ocean writ small in its islands
(Gupta 2010). The Mascarenes with their compacted histories of slavery, colonialism and indenture become emblematic of the larger movements and ows
in the Indian Ocean world. Examples include Auguste Toussaints work on
Mauritius 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 Mascarene
slavery. Thus, as Gwyn Campbell points out, seeing Madagascar as part of a
wider Indian Ocean world and an Indian Ocean Africa challenges and changes
the perspectives provided by both the Colonialist and the Nationalist schools of
thought of African historiography (Campbell 2005: 4ff.). In Richard Allens
recent work (2008), this Indian Ocean world is shown to be connected to the
world of the Atlantic region through global networks of trade and labour
exploitation.
Yet another important vector in Indian Ocean scholarship has been a longstanding tradition of historical research on the Swahili coast, its economies,
societies and transnational networks. Work by Abdul Sheriff (1987; 2010) on
Zanzibar and the coast, and by John Middleton (1992) and later Middleton and
Mark Horton (2000), Justin Willis (1993) and Parkin and Headley (2000) on
Swahili social and cultural organization in its interaction with the Indian Ocean
world of the Middle East and India, has opened up African Studies towards the
larger oceanic world. A. H. J. Prins (1961), Edward Alpers (1975), Frederick
Cooper (1977), Jonathon Glassman (1994) and Jeremy Presholdt (2008) have
situated the mercantile and slave-based economy and culture in the broader
regional perspective, and studies of the micro-organization of Swahili societies by
Minou Fuglesang (1994) and Sarah Mirza and Margaret Ann Strobel (1989) have
demonstrated how transnational cultural connections like Hindi lm videos and
Indian commerce are part of the constitution of the everyday, not least for
women.
Cutting across this work on transregional networks, a strand of anthropological research on transoceanic communities in the western Indian Ocean has
questioned the salience of universalism and the supposed automatic link between
transoceanic movement and cosmopolitanism. Edward Simpson, a vocal
exponent of this position, notes: Human movement in the Indian Ocean
fragments space and divides people (2008: 92). The Hindu sailors in Kachchh
whom Simpson has studied invest in local caste institutions rather than longdistance allegiances. Kai Kresse and Edward Simpson argue that [m]ovement
and migration . . . tended to create new or modied divisions in the population
both 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

PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS

such differences and how to manage them as a part of everyday life. There are
certainly enough broad over-arching universalisms operating in the Ocean: Islam,
Susm, Hindu reformism, Greater India, trade unionism, nationalism, imperial
citizenship, white labourism, socialism, anarchism, Catholicism, Protestantism.
Yet these are not guarantors of common histories, but rather open up social elds
in 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 histories
within an ocean. The former constitute an ambitious project which would explain
the ocean as a unied and discrete system; the latter a slice explored in the arena of
the ocean. In his discussion of the Indian Ocean, Michael Pearson quotes
Peregrine 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 of
place 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 a
similar point: Histories of the Atlantic world . . . will always be extraordinarily
difcult to accomplish; histories within the Atlantic world invariably slices
of it as well inevitably will prove far more manageable (Morgan and Greene
2009: 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 East
Africa and India as well as along the African coast from KwaZulu-Natal through
Zanzibar and Tanzania to the Arab world. They examine AfricanIndian
interaction, identity strategies and political projects against a background of
colonial history, segregation and apartheid, while Islam provides a focus as a
particularly 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;
1
This collection of essays was selected from papers delivered at a conference held in
Johannesburg 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 Ocean
Studies Programme at Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi, Roskilde University in
Copenhagen and the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, < www.ruc.dk/isg_en/indianocean; www.cisa-org.wits > . This project in turn
comprises 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, < http://www.
indianoceanworldcentre.com/ > ; the Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute, < http://www.
ziori.org/ > ; the Zentrum Moderner Orient, < http://www.zmo.de/ > ; the Indian Ocean and South
Asian Research network at the University of Technology, Sydney, < http://research.hss.uts.edu.
au/IndianOcean/ > ; and Indian Ocean Studies at the University of Bergen in Norway currently
centred around research programmes on Linking Global Cities: Tracing Local Practices
and From Transmission of Tradition to Global Learning, < http://www.global.uni.no/?
page_ id=344 > .

PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS

Newell 2000; 2002; Peterson 2004; Hawkins 2002). Examining popular and nonofcial modes of reading and writing as a form of social action, this work probes
how such texts illuminate local ideals of civic virtue and the formation of local
publics (Barber 2006: 7). The present collection investigates the roles of print
culture in the constitution of what Karin Barber has called new kinds of selfrepresentation and personhood along lines quite different from the classic model
of 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 to
pressing problems through the formulation of new genres that can make sense of
unprecedented modes of experience? This scholarship also examines the
institutions of production and consumption sustaining these worlds of print
culture, such as reading groups (Furniss 2006), debating societies (Newell 2006),
epistolary networks (Breckenridge 2006; Burns 2006; Khumalo 2006), newspaper
networks (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, seatof-the-pants venture making imaginative use of limited and second-hand
technology. Embedded in a network of localized relationships, such presses
composited social life, producing programmes, invitations, notices, pamphlets,
advice manuals, novelettes and newspapers. As Karin Barber has suggested, this
world of print was less concerned with vast anonymous address than with
consolidating personalized networks. As she argues, this mode of production is
best characterized as a printing culture rather than a print culture, a term which
implies a scale and saturation beyond the reach of these small presses (2001: 16).
Its methods of convening audiences depended less on simultaneity and
uniformity la Anderson than on a participatory mode of drawing readers into
particular African language readerships by asking them to contribut[e] elements
to, and tak[e] elements from, an ongoing conversation mediated through the
press (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 shoestring and embedded in local communities. Yet these presses operate on
transnational axes drawing together African, Indian, Muslim and Christian
political worlds. In some cases, these are presses run by their local Indian owners,
producing diasporic newspapers which enter the worlds of anti-colonial politics in
Africa and India. In other instances, the presses are sites for AfricanIndian
interactions: Africans buy equipment from Indians; Africans work in Indianowned presses; Indian printers assist African nationalist causes. After its transfer
from Nairobi to Kisumu in 1949, the Ramogi Press, a branch of the Luo Thrift
and Trading Corporation set up by Oginga Odinga in pursuit of Luo unity,
continued printing newspapers like the Nyanza Times, Mumenyereri and
Mwalimu, and added further business, printing receipt books, letterheads and
exercise-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 the
Indian 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 in
the fault lines between African and Indian Muslim communities. In Cairo,

PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS

Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi prints manuscripts from across the Indian Ocean
world. In Nairobi Indian printing works owners go to jail because of seditious
articles 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 common
patterns. 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 personnel
drawn from different areas (Hofmeyr forthcoming). Multilingual and multiethnic, 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 Indian
Ocean. Although Ned Bertzs article deals with cinema in Tanganyika and then
Tanzania, it demonstrates this point admirably. Focusing on the cinema as
meeting place and medium, Bertz tracks the encounters and conicts that unfold
in and around the racialized space of the cinema hall. Not only did Indian lm
consistently outsell US products at the box ofces, it provided allegories of anticolonialism which African audiences took up enthusiastically. In the 1930s and
1940s, cinema halls became venues for meetings in which Indians in Dar es
Salaam expressed their support for Gandhis campaigns in India. In the 1950s
African nationalists likewise used cinemas as rally venues not least to express the
demand that cinemas become fully integrated spaces. In post-independence
Tanzania, the popularity of Indian lm continued unabated and survived the new
socialist moral campaigns by being seen as non- or at times anti-Western and in
some cases, virtually indigenous. As Bertz indicates, trying to draw a line between
African cinema and Indian lm becomes impossible when seen from the
vantage point of the cinema hall where transnational strands become knotted
together.
An important characteristic of the printing presses was a stress on being both
entrepreneurial and philanthropic, of pursuing projects of social reform while
mobilizing networks of charitable support from merchant political and religious
donors, and in some cases from readers. As enterprises that address both local and
transoceanic audiences, these presses and their newspapers tended to pursue
grandiose projects of social reform alongside matters of mundane politics at
times passing the former off as the latter. Rochelle Pintos analysis of print and
politics in Goa (2007) brilliantly demonstrates how the nineteenth-century
colonial elite seized print technology not to pursue Andersonian communities
of modular egalitarianism but to insinuate caste into print and into the
historiography 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 themes
of orality, manuscript and print in Zanzibar where the introduction of printing
in 1876 extended the repertoire of media used for the circulation of religious
knowledge and theological debate. How do these intersecting media affect
styles of religious authority and the status of text in its constitution? Bang
examines this question in relation to the corpus of Islamic literature that
circulated on the East African coast between 1870 and 1930, in both manuscript
and print form.

PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS

This work in turn forms part of a broader investigation of the world of Islamic
manuscript production in Africa (Farias 2008; Jeppie and Diagne 2008; Last
2008) and its interactions with orality and print. The predominant image has
been of sub-Saharan Africa following a path from orality to print, the latter
generally taken to be introduced by Christian missions. Scholars like Bang (2003
and this volume) and Jeppie and Diagne (2008) demonstrate the partiality of this
existing scholarship. For much of the continent, manuscript has to be factored
into the orality/literacy equation, while accounts of printing in Africa need to
include 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 up
in Cairo in 1859 by a family who had migrated from Syria to Egypt. It aimed to
print and distribute books of Islamic learning throughout the world and produced
material in Arabic and African languages. While al-Halabi awaits more detailed
research, it seems that many books came into being through people going on Hajj
or other journeys who would stop in Cairo to have a manuscript printed. Funding
would 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 is
a theme in publications by Roman Loimeier (2003), Benjamin Soares (2005),
Soares and Otayek (2007), and in Kai Kresses work on public intellectuals in
Mombasa and on the Swahili coast (2003; 2007). It is also addressed in
scholarship on Islam in Southern Africa such as Shamil Jeppies work on the
Arabic Study Circle in Durban (2007) or in writing on Ahmed Deedat and the
Islamic Propagation Centre International in Durban, which in signicant respects
took off from the Arabic Study Circle (Westerlund 2003; Sadouni 2007; Vahed
forthcoming; Kaarsholm this volume). Discussions of print culture gure
prominently in recent research on Islamic publics in Africa, as promoted not
least by Abdulkader Tayob (Tayob 2007; on Islamic media in South Africa, see
Vahed 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 the
importance of direct access of the individual believer to the holy writ of God, thus
undermining the monopoly on interpretation of imams or other intermediaries
(cf. Loimeier 2003). Paradoxically, this may involve a turn to Arabic language
learning, script and debate as well as the promotion of translation into indigenous
languages for the sake of proselytization. As demonstrated in Kaarsholms essay
(this volume) it may thus result in a fundamentalist opposition between the
essence of the faith and traditional beliefs within particular cultural settings. Or
it may lead to arguments favouring syncretism and reconcilability of Islam with
customary practices, and thus to quite different arguments concerning the
relationship between Islam and modernity. Together these strands of scholarship
highlight the intersections of print cultures in the Indian Ocean world and present
different trajectories from those extrapolated on the basis of Euro-American
models. The latter stress themes of print capitalism, copyright regimes, national
state control and the construction of vast, apparently egalitarian publics. With its
themes of philanthropy, personalized printing in a transnational matrix, and
variable notions of authorship and hence copyright, this scholarship offers new
ways of thinking about global histories of print.

PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS

NATIONALISM, NEWSPAPERS AND INDIAN OCEAN CIRCUITS

The relationship between newspapers and nationalism constitutes a welldeveloped theme across several regions of Africa. As Jonathon Glassman
demonstrates, the complexities of Zanzibari nationalism and the categories of
Arab, African and Indian employed within it (2000; 2004) were largely shaped
in a welter of newspapers, political leaets and pamphlets, in which popular ideas
of race and ethnicity were tested and debated. Reports in newspapers from
African soldiers in the Second World War and their return to civilian life after the
war fuelled political organizations and exposed local communities to international trends, including movements for national liberation in West Africa and
India (Bromber 2002). In Southern Africa, the colonial African elite invested
heavily in newspapers as sites for expressing their views against encroaching
settler domination in the case of the early twentieth-century writer and
intellectual 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, ideas
and discourse. The newspaper as an institution, with its print shop and the social
relations around these, prove to be productive sites for capturing the transnational
strands 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 and
Goolam Vahed focus on the Durban paper Indian Views (started in 1914), aimed
at a Muslim Gujarati merchant class concentrated in Durban and Johannesburg
but also spread across much of the subcontinent. Bodil Folke Frederiksen sets out
a rich network of African and Asian papers in Kenya which increasingly converge
through their anti-colonialism and their sharing of personnel and expertise.
She shows how a culture of entrepreneurship, independence and anti-colonial
resistance persisted in the second half of the 1940s, when colonial government
agents sought to inuence both Indian and African newspapers. In her
contribution, Sana Aiyar draws out the particular importance in the early 1920s
of the Indian-owned East African Chronicle (edited by M. A. Desai) in giving
voice to the political aspirations of Harry Thuku, and in bridging early African
nationalism in East Africa and the transnational nationalism of the Indian
Congress movement.
These newspapers many of them Indian-owned shared certain features.
They addressed fairly well dened audiences, situated themselves in the
contemporary politics of reform, and often had an activist mode of address. In
Kenya the Indian papers came out more regularly and were better consolidated
than the Indian papers in Tanganyika, where they were small, tenuously funded
and nancially fragile. Some were family-owned and run. Appeals to merchant
philanthropy were common and merchant support was critical in keeping these
ventures 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 of
belonging. In the case he examines, editors could simultaneously entertain an
ungainly combination of ideas that included imperial citizenship, Hindu
reformism, communism and anti-communism. The multi-tasking that any
printer-publisher-editor-owner is required to take on compounded the challenges.

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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 and
educator (2007: 2). Editors around the Indian Ocean took on many of these
mantles but in new and more contradictory ways.
Waetjen and Vahed recreate the complex lives of Indian Ocean editors. The
rst editor of Indian Views was Mohammed Cassim Anglia, whose trajectory took
him from Surat (where he was born) to Mauritius, back to Surat and then on to
the Transvaal and Natal. Fluent in English, French, Gujarati and Dutch, Anglia
operated a retail business in Durban whilst acting as a shipping agent. Initially a
great 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 India
while keeping a wary eye on the colonial state, its legislation and its censorship
apparatus. As Brennan indicates, editors had to oppose colonial rule while
securing diasporic privilege. One template through which to achieve these
objectives was the idea of Greater India, the ancient cultural diffusion of
Hinduism and Buddhism from India into East and South-East Asia. Both
Brennan and Aiyar (this volume) demonstrate how discourses of Greater India
ltered into arguments for giving Indians a special status in East Africa, and
showing Indian civilization as more suitable for grafting onto African soil
than . . . that of the West (Brennan this volume). In Kenya Indian political leaders
and publicists supported African demands of elected representation in the
colonial government, reversal of land ownership, and equal treatment in all
spheres. At the same time they prided themselves on being ahead of African social
development. An editorial article in the Daily Chronicle, the most radical of Asian
newspapers in Kenya, praised the African politician, Tom Mbotela, for his
gradualist politics: The African races have to pass through a long and laborious
course of education undisturbed by mad haste and political passions (20 July
1951) (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 unifying
factor in efforts to build a South African Indian identity. At the same time as
shown also in Tayobs work on the Muslim Youth Movement this imposed
limitations on Islamic efforts to reach beyond the Indian community, to
proselytize among Africans, or in the 1970s and 1980s to radicalize and
become politically active in the anti-apartheid movement. Altogether, this made
Natal Islamic groups including Deedats Islamic Propagation Centre more
conservative towards the state than their Muslim counterparts in Cape Town and
more focused on educational and welfare activities than on the politics of
opposition (Tayob 1995: 98ff.). Of central importance within education and
welfare was the production of printed materials to support Islamic education and
to counter the international onslaught of Christian missionaries, including the
project to have the Quran translated into Zulu, and the production of an Islamic
print 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 and
entrepreneurs not only facilitated the spread of transnational and local goods and

10

PRINT 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 African
journalists, and increasingly the papers, which were highly political, became
sites of reporting on global and local anti-colonial activities and debate between
Africans and Indians on unity and difference. Sitaram Achariar assisted in the
setting up of both Muigwithania, edited by the young Jomo Kenyattta, and later
the Mombasa newspaper, the Democrat, and a Bombay paper, The Sun (Brennan
this volume). He was one of several political radicals who was transported across
the Ocean. In Tanganyika the ambition of the Swahili newspaper Kwetu, which
started in 1937, was to spread knowledge . . . do social and humanitarian work
and 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, Frank
and 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 audiences
and encapsulate new forms of diasporic experience. One example of such a genre
is the Indian Ocean travelogue which was rened in the columns of port city
periodicals. These travelogues reported on the travels of notable people between
Bombay and Durban, whose progress from port to port was reported in elaborate
detail. In such travelogues, each stop in a port city confers visibility; the person
appears 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 from
other journals with an attribution was common practice. Such attributions
created new circuits of meaning and value. An average edition of Indian Opinion
might feature cuttings from the Rangoon Times, The Zanzibar Chronicle, the
Bombay Reporter and the Madras-based Indian Review. These cuttings created an
imaginative circuit that allowed readers to visualize ideas moving between these
information ports.
Waetjen and Vaheds discussion of Zuleika Mayats column in Indian Views
demonstrates this process of emergent genres. Mayat was the rst woman to write
for the paper. Writing in the persona and under the penname of Fahmida (a
Persian name culled from an Urdu novel), Mayat formulated a public voice to
address a middle-class, modernist and gendered Islamic public. She produced a
broad-ranging column whose rubric Mainly for Women belied its wide social
and political reach.
Mayat had grown up in a trading community in Potchefstroom, South Africa.
In her fathers shop she experienced close-up multiculturalism and heard
Gujarati, Urdu, Arabic, Afrikaans, English and Sotho on a daily basis. Excluded
from secondary and higher education by racism and gender restrictions, she
reached a wider world via correspondence. She maintained epistolary friendships,
studied by correspondence, published her rst piece (on the need for education for
women) as a letter in Indian Views and met her husband through letter writing: he
spotted her rst letter in the paper and wrote a reply endorsing her views. This
exchange prompted a secret courtship by letter between them and a subsequent
marriage.

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11

Her columns drew together large issues higher education for women, the
sterilities of apartheid as opposed to the multiculturalism of her youth, trends in
Islam which were locally mediated as letters, conversations and reports. This
formula admirably captured her own diasporic experience, which wedded the
local 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 aim
to extend our understanding of lateral networks in the Indian Ocean and the kinds
of nationalist interactions that they enabled. Such insights in turn open up new
vistas in both East and Southern African Studies as well as within South Asian
Studies and studies of Islam.
East African Studies
As demonstrated in the studies by Brennan, Aiyar, Frederiksen and Bertz in this
collection, an Indian Ocean perspective can add new dimensions to East African
Studies, and to our understanding of public sphere dynamics and debates around
colonialism and nationalism from the early twentieth century onwards. Seeing
East Africa as part of a larger Indian Ocean world helps to bring out the
transnational dimensions of nationalism, and the complexity of the processes
through which African and Indian groupings interacted, identifying themselves as
slaves or free, as subjects or citizens in the context of the transition from
colonialism to independence.
Seeing East African nationalism in an Indian Ocean perspective provides an
alternative to understanding nationalism as primary resistance emerging out of
the efforts of particular and well-dened pre-colonial polities, like the Kikuyu in
Kenya. The Indian Ocean perspective in turn emphasizes the multiplicity of
nationalist voices (Atieno Odhiambo 1995), gives greater emphasis to Indian and
Swahili coast contributions to the development of nationalism, and thus
contributes to seeing it as less Africanist than has been the tradition (Sheriff
2008; cf. Sheriff 1991).
An Indian Ocean optic also highlights the signicance of Islam for the
constitution and functioning of the publics within which nationalist programmes
and strategies were debated in East Africa. It may thus help to undermine or at
least problematize the hegemony of Christian and biblical discursive models in
the formation of nationalist narratives (cf. Lonsdale 2009: 80ff.; for broader
Middle East and African perspective, Kastfelt 2003).
Southern African Studies
Until recently, Southern African Studies has seldom intersected with Indian
Ocean Studies, a eld focused on the western Indian Ocean and its monsoon
rhythms. South Africa falls below the monsoon belt and so has remained outside
the purview of Indian Oceanists. Within the mainstream of Southern African
Studies itself, there has been little interest in the Indian Ocean. There has of course
been 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

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large, Southern African Studies has manifested strongly land-based and

Africanist tendencies of scholarship in which the major vectors of struggle are
between 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 intellectual
inheritances rather than focusing their attention on a single narrative of antiapartheid 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 of
literary scholars have asked what South Africas literary traditions look like when
seen from the Indian Ocean rather than just the Atlantic (Hofmeyr 2007b;
Govinden 2008), in part drawing inspiration from a growing body of work on
cultural studies in the Indian Ocean (Ghosh and Muecke 2007; Moorthy and
Jamal 2009; Gupta, Hofmeyr and Pearson 2010) an approach whose strength is
demonstrated in Bertzs article. Likewise new work on the interactions between
Africans and Indians in South Africa demonstrates how the tensions, disagreements and sharing of ideas shaped political developments hitherto read only from
the perspective of struggle between white and black (Soske 2009; Suttner 2009).
Also important is a growing body of work on Gandhi which argues that the
Mahatmas ideas need to be understood less as an automatic expression of some
prior Indianness and more as the product of his South African experience (Bhana
and 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. An
early 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 a
Cape Malay identity and to have this group recognized as a diaspora by
governments in Malaysia and Indonesia as explored currently in research by
Sarah 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 Indian
community, whose transoceanic links to South Asia have been maintained partly
through the importation of imams and reformist and other religious inspiration.
As Goolam Vahed has shown in a number of writings, links to India and Pakistan
have been important for the unfolding of both Su and Deobandi strands of
thought in Durban and what is now KwaZulu-Natal (Vahed 2003a; 2003b;
Vahed and Jeppie 2005). Much less explored Kaarsholms article in this
collection begins the task have been links with other traditions of Islamic
practice within Africa and along the African Indian Ocean seaboard. In ongoing
research, Anne Bang and Shamil Jeppie are exploring how networks of Islamic
education extend from Yemen and Hadramawt through Zanzibar, the Comoros
Islands and Mozambique all the way to Cape Town.2 Kaarsholms study throws
light on Durban as the missing link in this chain of Indian Ocean connectivity,

2
For more information on this project, From transmission of tradition to global learning:
African Islamic education ca. 18002000, see < http://www.global.uni.no/?page_id=518 >,
accessed 4 September 2010.

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13

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. Kaarsholm
2010).

Rethinking Indian nationalism via Africa

A study of Africa in the Indian Ocean has important implications for how we
think about nationalism in India. While the post-1960s idea of a Non-Resident
Indian (NRI) diaspora has been factored into accounts of contemporary Indian
nationalism, Indias earlier indentured diasporas seldom feature in academic
analyses of this topic. This situation is starting to shift as scholars like Tejaswini
Niranjana on Trinidad and John Kelly on Fiji demonstrate the key role that antiindenture mobilization played within early twentieth-century Indian nationalism.
Whether represented through the gure of the endangered Hindu women in the
indentured periphery, whose honour had to be saved (Kelly 1991), or through
that of the lower-caste woman who had to be symbolically or actually expelled to
create a pure body politic (Niranjana 1999), the indentured community provided
a 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 Bengali
scholars, was taken up by a range of anti-colonial constituencies keen to
demonstrate the ancient glories of India and its record as a benign colonizer.
Greater India could provide an idea of nationhood that stretched diasporically
across time and space and, importantly, could be both anti-colonial and
colonizing 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 in
shaping a discourse of dispersed nationhood that expressed itself in terms like
Greater India, Indians overseas, or colonial-born Indians. They insert Africa
more clearly into the equation and probe how it features in discussions on Indian
nationalism. As the articles in this volume and other work (Raman 2004;
Muponde 2008; Soske 2009; Suttner 2009) illustrate, the inuence of Gandhi and
Indian nationalist thought on African nationalism is relatively well-known. The
reverse 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 of
Indian nationalism. On the one hand it acted as a unifying factor since the
treatment of Indians overseas was the one issue over which there was no difference
of opinion. On the other, it became a bargaining chip in the negotiations between
white settlers, African elites, Indians in Kenya, Congress in India, the Colonial
Ofce and the India Ofce. Indian nationalists saw the matter of Indian equality
with settlers as a test case of British commitments to creating equal rights for all
imperial citizens. The Colonial Ofce nessed the matter by declaring a policy of
African paramountcy in 1923, which checked the ambitions of white settlers and
Indian settlers alike. While the declaration meant little for Africans in practice,
the idea of Africa as a boundary of Indian national and diasporic aspiration
became 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,

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Indians in the diaspora (and the mainland) were both sub-imperialists and anticolonialists. Africa became an important site for Indias sub-imperial aspirations,
and thus central to ideas and debates on Indian nationalism. Newspapers in East
and Southern Africa become arenas in which ideas and debates about Indian
nationalism were rened. Very often, Africa featured in these discussions as
providing an imaginary boundary of race and civilization against which these
ideas could take shape. Africa, then, represented one imaginative limit of Indian
nationalism (Hofmeyr 2007a).

CONCLUSION
According to Kresse and Simpson, the Indian Ocean world comprises an everchanging community of strangers . . . a society based on the fact that it knows
enough about itself to know that it does not, really, exist:
The historical experience of commonality at the street level that shapes the region has led
to a consciousness of social diversity and a largely-assumed knowledge of social
differences. This view of things dissolves the idea of simple unity and along with it the
view of transoceanic community with a shared history. (2008: 267)

If the Indian Ocean coheres only as a set of shifting social optical illusions, does it
have analytical value? The articles collected here demonstrate that it possesses
considerable heuristic power, especially for students of Africa. This power lies in
the ability of an Indian Ocean perspective to complicate received paradigms and
academic traditions.
With regard to both East and Southern African Studies, an Indian Ocean
perspective enriches narratives of anti-colonial nationalism still often understood
in a resistance framework of settler versus native. A view from the Indian
Ocean requires us to factor in multiple voices, be these merchants, indentured
labourers, slaves, political exiles or prisoners from different regions in the Indian
Ocean world. Taking this cast of actors into account moves us away from binary
narratives 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 regional
historiography 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 Cape
Town and Durban, cohere through the intellectual networks and personnel
passing 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 to
insert questions of Africa into other historiographies. Indian nationalism has
generally been studied from a territorial and teleologically nationalist perspective.
As this eld opens up to more transnational and oceanic forms of thought, the
role of Africa and Africans in shaping discourses of Indian nationalism becomes
apparent. This conjuncture presents an opportunity for African Studies to raise its
prole by inserting Africa more prominently into the study of the Indian Ocean

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15

world. The growing importance of studying lateral networks and linkages within
the 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, these
enriched analyses can start to point to broader patterns. By connecting a series of
print culture histories in the Indian Ocean region, this collection raises the
possibility of new global histories of print. Rather than print capitalism and vast
anonymous publics being the unstated premise of analysis, this collection suggests
that themes of philanthropic production and personalized print offer new vectors
for thinking about global histories of print culture. A view from the Indian Ocean
then offers the possibility of revising our understandings on different levels, from
the local and regional to the global. Histories in the ocean may in the longer run
contribute to a history of the Indian Ocean and its distinctive contributions to
world history.

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ABSTRACT

The emergence of the Indian Ocean region as an important geo-political arena is

being studied across a range of disciplines. Yet while the Indian Ocean has gured
in Swahili studies and analyses of East and Southern African diasporic
communities, it has remained outside the mainstream of African Studies. This
introduction provides an overview of emerging trends in the rich eld of Indian
Ocean studies and draws out their implications for scholars of Africa. The focus
of the articles is on one strand in the study of the Indian Ocean, namely the role of
print and visual culture in constituting public spheres and nationalisms in, across
and 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 and
Tanzania to the Arab world. This introduction surveys debates on print culture,
newspapers and nationalism in African Studies and demonstrates how the articles
in the volume support and extend these areas of study. It draws out the broader
implications 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 Indien

en tant quarne gopolitique importante. Si locan Indien gure certes dans les
tudes swahili et les analyses des communauts diasporiques dAfrique orientale
et australe, il est cependant rest lcart des tudes africaines traditionnelles.
Cette introduction prsente un survol des tendances qui mergent dans le riche
champ des tudes de locan Indien et en tire les implications pour ceux qui
tudient lAfrique. Dans ces articles, il est question dun courant dtude de
locan Indien, savoir le rle de la culture de limprim et du visuel dans la
formation des sphres publiques et des nationalismes dans les socits riveraines
de 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 passant
par la Tanzanie et Zanzibar. Cette introduction contemple les dbats sur la
culture de limprim, les journaux et le nationalisme dans les tudes africaines et
montre comment les articles de ce volume soutiennent et tendent ces domaines
dtude. Elle tire de ces dbats de larges implications pour les historiographies
issues des tudes sur lAfrique orientale, des tudes sur lAfrique australe, des
dbats sur le nationalisme indien et sur lislam.

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