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The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian
Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of
Transnationalism for the Global
South Literary and Cultural
Perspectives
Isabel Hofmeyr
a

b
a
University of the Witwatersrand , South Africa
b
University of the Witwatersrand , E-mail:
Published online: 11 Aug 2008.
To cite this article: Isabel Hofmeyr (2007) The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging
New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South Literary and Cultural Perspectives,
Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 33:2, 3-32, DOI: 10.1080/02533950708628759
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533950708628759
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SOCIAL DYNAMICS 33 .2 ( 200 7): 3- 3 2
The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian
Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of
Transnationalism for the Global South
Literary and Cultural Perspectives'
Isabel Hofmeyr
Abstract
With the recent transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences,
questions of translocalism have come to dominate the academic agenda.
Where southern African studies has engaged with transnationalism, this has
generally been pursued through the framework of the black Atlantic. This
article argues that we need to supplement this perspective with a systematic
engagement with the Indian Ocean. The article outlines various major
historiographical traditions associated with the Indian Ocean and then
seeks to draw out how these themes challenge assumptions which have been
theorised on the basis of black Atlantic patterns. The paper concludes with
a discussion of how a consideration of the Indian Ocean would enlarge the
maps ofSouth African literary and cultural studies.
As the humanities and social sciences take an increasingly tra nsnational
turn, the acade mic marketpl ace has become crowded with models that
seek to explain the phenomena of globalisation and translocalism. Almost
without exception, this scholarship has focused on north-south modes of
transnationalism. Indeed the terminology itself, like the word globalisation,
thro ugh its apparent neutrality appears to imply transnational processes
emanating from the west and then radiating outward.
But what of transnationalism within the sout h itself? What of non-
western sources of globalisation, or processes of transnationalism that
happen wit hout reference to Europe? That these questions are of pressing
import is apparent if we turn to some stati stics . Trade between South Africa
and India shot up from R300 million in 1993 to R16.5 billion in 2006. By
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4 T HE BL A C K ATLANTIC M EETS TH E I NDIAN OCE AN
2005, Chinese tr ade with Africa as a whole had reached $30 billion. South-
south tr ade is expandi ng faster than any other trade flow in the world - at
about 11 per cent per year.
From a number of perspectives, then, it is critical to engage with debates
on transnat ionalism in the global south. This paper seeks to outline one
possible framework for addressing such a task. In brief, it suggests that
we look quite literally at our locat ion in southern Africa - between two
oceans - and see what ana lytical purchase that may provi de. Put in slightly
different terms, what can we der ive from thinking about three intersecting
frameworks: the black Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and Africa itself? In
investigati ng these issues, the paper argues that insofar as southern African
literary studies has pursued transnational the mes, these have generally been
done in a framework of the black Atlanti c. These approaches have produced
work of value. We need to bui ld on this legacy and at the same time extend it
by thinking more about the Indi an Ocean and its intersections with, but also
its differences from, the black Atlantic.
The paper proceeds in three parts. It begins with some historiograph ical
clear ing of the decks and draws out the major trajectories of anglophone
scholarship on the black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Secondly, I ask what
difference the Indian Ocean makes. What broader theoret ical issues does
it raise? Does it unsettl e and relativise some of the Atlantic categories that
we have come to acce pt as ' nor mal'? Thirdly, I atte mpt to translate these
categories into the field of southern African literature and to demonstrate
how a consideration of the Indian Ocean alongside that of the black Atlantic
would produce novel definiti ons of sout hern African literature.
Historiographies
The Black Atlantic
Let us begi n with the easies t part of the histor iographi cal equatio n, namely,
the black Atlantic. The term is of course so well known that, like a famous
guest, it requires no intro duction. In brief, the phrase has become a shorthand
term for underst anding the Atlantic seaboa rd as the site for the emerge nce
of capitalist modernity as a tr ansnational system. This articulating system
in and across the ocea n draws in the African slave tr ade, the American
plant ation economies and the European industries that these enabled. From
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I SA BEL HOFM EYR
the sixteenth century onwards, the peoples of the Atlantic are hurtled into
this vortex of modernity, some more violently than others (Gilroy, 1993;
Rediker, 1987; Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000). In C.L.R. James's famous
dictum, slaves become the first modern people (1992 [1962]: 296-97).
Historians like Marcus Rediker (1987) and Peter Linebaugh (2000) have
described the historical networks linking Atlantic ports, jails, barracoons,
ships and plantations and how ideas of freedom and equality are made by
sailors, slaves, prostitutes, dockworkers and pirates working in and across
these sites. Building in part on Rediker, Paul Gilroy (1993) has deepened the
analysis to understand the Atlantic as a site of transnational black modernity
neither African nor American, Caribbean or British, but a complex translation
of these vari ous traditions into something new.
The paradigm of the black Atlantic (whether known by this term or not)
has long been active in southern African literary studies. As Laura Chrisman
has indicated, it has informed Sol Plaatje's thinking and is apparent in his
interactions with W.E.B. du Bois (2003: 89-106). In Songs of Zion , a history
of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Africa, James Campbell
demonstrates how ideas of heaven have been shaped in the black Atlantic
(1995). In The Af rican Image, Ezekiel (Es'kia) Mphahlele describes the role
of black Atlantic cultural formations in South Africa as a 'dialogue acros s the
sea' (1974 [1967]: 96). Tim Couzens (1982) has written of the 'transatlantic
connection' and the impact of American-sponsored philanthropic projects
in the 1920s and 1930s in dampening the radical edges of black urban
cultural formations, a theme that Bheki Peterson has taken up more recently
in Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intell ectuals (2000). The world of
African-American music , style and fashion has been a powerful influence
and much work has traced out the interplay of African-American and South
African imaginaries. One thinks of Rob Nixon (1994) exarriining Harlem
in Sophiatown, or Dorothy Driver (2001) studying the images of women in
Drum magazine, or Michael Titlestad (2004) exploring transatlantic musical
forms and their improvisor y interaction with literature.
There are of course voices questioning the limit s of the paradigm of the
black Atlantic. Chrisman has pointed to the generalisations produced by it,
one of which celebrates all transnationalism as good and all nationalism as
bad. As her work oil Plaatje and Peter Abrahams indicates, nationalism is
not the opposite of transnationalism and the one can foster the other while
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6 TH E BLAC K ATLA NTIC M EETS THE I NDI AN OCE A N
transnationalism can produce its own forms of exclusion (Chrisman, 2005:
252-71). Another questioning voice has been Ntongela Masilela (1996), who
has pointed to the virtual absence of Africa in Gilroy's discussion of the black
Atlantic.
The Indian Ocean
Let us move now to the Indian Ocean, a cultural and economic system of
considerable antiquity, in some accounts stretching back 5,000 years. Sugata
Bose in his recent book A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in an Age of
Global Imperialism has characterised the Indian Ocean as an 'interregional
arena' (2005: 6), a set of articulating trade systems that have interlinked
Malays, Chinese, Indians, Arabs and Africans. It is an arena in which Britain,
Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the USA
came into contact with Africa, the Middle East and the Orient.
Before the rise of steam power in the Indian Ocean, the core of its trade
networks resided in the alternating monsoon winds blowing from the
northeast between November and April and from the northwest between
June and October. The historiography of the Indian Ocean is not quite as
ancient as these winds, but has been blowing for millennia, particularly
in the dominant written langu ages of the Ocean, namely, Arabic, Persian,
Gujarati and Swahili.
The modern anglophone historiography of the Indi an Ocean World,
while of relatively recent provenance, constitutes an extensive and complex
archive. Firstly, there have been numerous popular traditions of representing
the Indian Ocean, parts of which belong to a type of orientalism at sea. These
include popular accounts like Richard Hall's Empires of the Monsoon (1996)
and T.Y. Bulpin's excellent Islands in a Forgotten Sea (n.d.). Other examples
are Tintin's adventures, some of which unfold in the Indian Ocean (Herge,
1960), as well as numerous stories of pirates and boy's own adventure and
tales of derring-do.
With regard to more academic analyses, the Indian Ocean has been
considered from a range of vantage points. There are of course voluminous
scholarships devoted to the different geographical regions around the
Indian Ocean littoral (Mozambique; the Swahili Coast; the Horn; etc.), these
generally falling under the various categories of Area Studies that divide
the Indian Ocean World (lOW): Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, South
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I SABEL HOFMEYR 7
East Asia and Australia. Our concern is somewhat different and engages the
traditions of scholarship that have sought to understand the Indian Ocean as
a network (Kearney, 2004; McPherson, 1993; Pearson, 2003; Toussaint 1966;
Verges, 2003).
A central focus in thi s work has been an emphasis on the mechanics,
scope and scale of the long distance trade that shuttled between the major
port cities of the lOW and well-beyond. One emphasis in this work has been
on the non-violent nature of the trade. Amitav Ghosh, in his remarkable
travelogue /history/memoir In an Antique Land (1992), has explored this
peaceful long-distance trade of the Indian Ocean as a way of drawing a
contrast with .the contemporary world divided into militarised nations.
Engseng Ho makes a similar point in his work on the Hadrami diaspora in
the Indian Ocean; this ancient diaspora that reached out from south Yemen
deep into the Indian Ocean was not backed by an armed state:
The Portuguese, Dut ch, and English in the Indian Ocean were strange
new traders who brought their state with them. The y created militarized
trading-post empires in the Indian Ocean, following Venetian and Genoese
precedent s in the Medit erranean, and were wont to do business at the
point of a gun. Hadr amis and other non-Europeans - such as Gujarati s,
Bohras, Chettiars, Buginese, and Malays - did not. (Ho, 2006: xxi)
In Ho's phrasing, ' non- Europeans entered into relations with locals that were
more intimate, sticky, and prolonged than the Europeans could countenance'
(ibid).
As Bose points out, while there is a rich tradition of work on the distant
past of the Indian Ocean world, there is comparatively less on the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. One notable exception has been the work of Mark
Ravinder Frost (2002), which has started to outline a distinctive Indian
Ocean public sphere that flourished from the 1880s to the 1920s. Based
in the port cities of the Indian Ocean and sustained by the intelligentsias
of intersecting diasporas, thi s public sphere was rooted in pan-religious
movements, be these Buddhist, Muslim or Hindu. As Frost notes, the
diasporic intelligentsias of the port cities shared 'similar concerns for
reform and oversaw parallel campaigns for religious revival, educational
improvement and constitutional change' (2002: 937). These intellectual
circuits produced a world of crosscutting and contesting universalisms,
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8 THE BLACK ATLANTIC MEE TS THE IND I AN OC EAN
producing a view of colonialism less as an encounter of the local and the
global than as a contestation of different universalisms.
The Indian Ocean provides an arena in which such universalisms of
the south become apparent. What have some of these universalisms been?
Another way to phrase thi s issue is to ask: what are the unifying themes of
the lOW? Given the breadth and depth of the Indian Ocean scholarship,
there are numerous answers to thi s question apparent from the different
ways in which scholars 'carve up' the ocean analyticall y. Recurrent rubrics
are trade, capital and labour; religion (often linked to trade); pilgrimage;
travel ; war, colonial rul e and anti-colonial movements; and port towns.
Other themes focus on particular groupings like Muslims, the Portuguese,
British rule and so on.
The outline of the story that these themes explore is well-known. Once
mastered by mariners, the monsoon enabled deep-sea travel and trade in the
Indian Ocean. These trade networks were further consolidated and promoted
by the spread of Islam in the Indian Ocean from the eighth century onward,
which helped to weave together a series of cosmopolitan port cities : Kilwa,
Mombasa, Malindi, Mogadishu, leddah, Aden, Muscat, Cambay, Calicut
and so on. Islam provided the dominant idiom of public life in most coastal
cities and promoted new categories of travellers, most notably pilgrims,
administrators and schol ars using Arabic as an international language.
Islam provides a 'grammar' of the Indian Ocean, and one of its modes of
universalism that facilitated cosmopolitan exchange and mobility over vast
areas (Kearney, 2004; Risso, 1995; Fattah, 2002; Fawaz and Bayly, 2002).
The Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean in the late fifteenth century,
to be followed by the Dutch, Danish, French, British, Germans and,
subsequently, Italians. By some accounts, the arrival of European firepower
marked a great divide in Indian Ocean history, with an apparently peaceful
period of unarmed trade followed by the increasing militarisation and
conflict precipitated by the intrusion of Europeans. Hall's Empires of the
Monsoon exemplifies this narrative; subtitled 'A History of the Indian Ocean
and its Invaders; the book's first two parts are 'A World Apart' and ' The
Cannons of Christendom' (1996).
This model of Indian Ocean prelapsarian innocence torn asunder by
European violence has been questioned. Ashin Das Gupta (2004) has
famously demonstrated that the decline of the Indian Ocean trade has less to
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I SAB EL HOFMEYR 9
do with European power than with circumstances internal to India . Looking
at the pepper trade, he narrates how struggle over control of the trade in
Malabar and Mysore in the early 1700s led to its collapse. Like all other
traders, Europeans until at least the eighteenth century had to accommodate
themselves to local conditions, conventions and credit networks. They
were part of the Asian trading order. It was only with the rise of the British
steamships, maritime control, standing armies, the Suez Canal, electric
telegraphy and a range of other technological apparatus that the Indian
Ocean began to resemble a ' British Lake' (Bose, 2005: 274). However, as
Rajat Kanta Ray has demonstrated, the rise of colonial power did not mean
the end of the extensive Indian and Chinese trade and credit networks.
Under the radar of European imperial authority, Gujarati, Sind and Chinese
trade and credit networks continued to operate in those areas - like East
Africa, Muscat and South East Asia - that were never equivocally under one
colonial power, or where colonial control was a long time coming, or where
'large Western bankers could or would not go' (Ray, 1995: 552). Within this
broader framework let us focus in on the two themes that have a literary
pertinence: ' Islands' and ' People and Passages:
Islands
One broad theme in Indian Ocean Studies has been the idea of the island
as an epitome of Indian Ocean experiences of slavery and indenture. Much
scholarship has sought to understand the islands as Creole spaces, as the
histories of people without reference to nation: a kind of ultra-Caribbean
model of European, African and Asian traditions being violently brought
together. Various scholars have used the island experiences as a way of
generating concepts to think about the Indian Ocean world more generally.
Some of these ideas , like 'creolite; or the term 'antillanite' from Edouard
Glissant, are of Caribbean provenance, whilst being made to include Indian
Ocean Island experiences (Carter and Torabully, 2002).
Other ideas have sought to be more Indian Ocean specific, like the
Mauritian concept of Indienoceanisme, or that of 'coolitude' put forward by
Mauritian poet Khal Torabully and historian Marina Carter (2002). 'Coolitude'
shapes itself in relation to 'negritude; but recognises that 'negritude' does not
account for the complexity of post-abolition societies, particularly as these
developed in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean. It seeks to revalorise the term
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10 THE BLA CK ATLA NTIC M EETS THE INDIAN OC EAN
'coolie; turning a term of abuse against itself in a form of empowerment. The
central motif of coolitude is the voyage, which becomes the site of trauma
and loss but also a ' metonymy of cultural encounters; in the words of the
Belgian critic Veronique Bragard (qtd. in Carter and Torabully, 2002: 15).
She continues:
The crossing of the Kala Pani ['black water' ] constitutes the first movement
of a series of abusive and culturally stifling situations. By making the
cross ing central, Coolitude avoids any essentialism and connection with
an idealized Mother India, which is clearly left behind. It discloses the
Coolie's story which has been shipwrecked ('erased') in the ocean of a
Western-made historical discourse as well as a world of publication and
criticism. (ib id)
In Torabully's words, 'coolitude posits an encounter, an exchange of histories,
of poetics or visions of the world, between those of African descent and of
Indian descent, without excluding other sources' (2002: 150). Central to
Torabully's poetry is what he calls the 'Book of the Voyage' (2002: 15), a way
of making legible the erased experiences of indenture.
People and Passages
A second approach to exploring the unity of the Indian Ocean is through the
people that have cri sscrossed its waters. This theme seeks to investigate the
movement of slaves, indentured labourers, settlers and migrants over the last
three centuries. Let us examine three groups: slaves, indentured labourers
and free migrants.
Indian Ocean Slavery
Work on the Indian Ocean slave trade generally seeks to establi sh its
distinctiveness in relation to the Atlantic trade (Campbell, 2004a; Segal,
2001). The Indian Ocean has seen many different slave trades stretching
back some 4,000 years. The rise of Islam and the commercial expansion it
occasioned spurred an increase in the scale of the trade, as did the growth of
port cities and their need for cheap labour. The rise of plantation economies
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Mauritius and Zanzibar further
stimulated the trade, along with European involvement from the sixteenth
century onwards. The trade was multidi rectional with people moving within
Africa, from Africa to the Middle East, and from the eighteenth century
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I SABEL HOFM EYR 11
onwards to the islands, to India and the Americas. Indian slaves were
shipped to Indonesia, the islands, Cape Town and the Middle East while
Indonesians were moved to South East Asia and Cape Town; and Africans
were transported from the Mozambican coastline to Cape Town and the
Indian Ocean Islands (Campbell, 2004a).
The differences from the Atlantic model have been summarised by
Gwyn Campbell: the Indian Ocean trade was largely female, not male; it
involved predominantly household slaves rather than plantation workers;
the boundaries between slave and free were much more blurred than in the
Atlantic; and , furthermore, the association of race and slavery did not exist
in any marked form (Campbell, 2004b) .
Indentured Labour
The Indian Ocean became one of the major sites for the deployment of
indentured labour. As slavery was outlawed in the British Empire in 1834,
plantation owners faced a looming labour crisis which was addressed by
the widespread use of Indian indentured workers. This massi ve movement
of indentured labour has generated its own historiography, which for some
time sought to distinguish indenture from slavery, on the one hand, and from
'free' European migration, on the other (Tinker, 1974). These categories have
also come to be raciali sed (Carter, 1996; Northrup, 1995). In the popular
imagination, slaves are African, indentured labourers are Indian, while
colonial settlers are white.
This popular image is of course incorrect. There were Indian slaves
just as there were small numbers of African and European indentured
workers (Northrup, 1995). Equally, as one labour historian has noted, ' most
of Europe's fifty million emigrants were labour recruits [...] indentured
labourers became small farmers and leaseholders in the sugar colonies' (qtd.
in Carter, 1996: 3). The distinction between indentured labourer and settler
is hence blurred, just as that between slave and free in the Indian Ocean is
not always clear.
The tendency now is to see these racialised distinctions as emerging
out of colonial discourses and modes of government. The process of
moving, cat egorising, controlling and administering labour became a site
for constructing ideas of race and for formulating ideas of biopolitical
populations. Jonathan Klaaren's work (2004) has demonstrated that ideas
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12 THE BLAC K ATLA NTIC M EETS THE I NDI AN OC EA N
of South African citizenship first emerge in relation to laws of immigration
and practices of administration formulated in relation to 'Asians' (namely
indentured Indian and Chinese workers). A South African citizen is initially
defined in the 1920s as a person who is not a prohibited immigrant. As
Klaaren demonstrates, this xenophobic understanding of citizenship has
interesting resonances with our contemporary situation.
The new labour historiography in the Indian Ocean, while being alert
to different categories of labour, points to the value of grouping together
analytically different types of labour in and across the Indian Ocean
(Carter, 1996). The Indian Ocean can hence be seen as an arena of colonial
experimentation in the control of unfree labour, whether it be slave, convict,
indentured or apparently voluntary 'free' migration. Significant numbers
of convicts, for example, were moved around the Indian Ocean, some to
the Andaman Islands, India's Robben Island (Anderson, 2005). Equally,
the administration of indentured labour became an important site for
experiments in colonial governmentality. Mauritius, for example, was the
first place in the world to use photography for purposes of government
(Breville, 1999: 399).
Also linked to this form of labour control is the world of lascars or
African and Asian seamen, who emerged as a specific category of maritime
labour under the British (Balachandran, 2003; Ewald, 2000). The Empire had
extensive communication and transport networks and hence an insatiable
demand for cheap labour to build ports and man steamships. The group who
fulfilled these roles was comprised of African and Asian seamen who came
to be subject to particular labour contracts that pegged their wages at one-
third to one-fifth of European sailors' pay. They also signed contracts which
prevented them from settling in Britain such that most lascars can be seen as
long-distance migrant contract labour.
Free Migrants
The Indian Ocean was a zone for many itinerants: pilgrims, administrators,
soldiers, sailors, traders and merchants. The most well-known examples of
this voluntary migration were South Asian migrants who moved to East
Africa and southern Africa (Bhana and Brain, 1990; Gregory, 1971). The
presence of Gujarati merchants in East Africa goes back many centuries,
and it was these traders who also had networks stretching inland into the
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I SABEL HOFME YR 13
interior (Alpe rs, 1976). Wit h th e adve nt of indentured labour to bu ild East
African railways, th e po pulation of traders increased. In th e lat e ni neteent h
century, as Empi re made its belat ed way into East Africa, Bri tai n exploited
the pathways and links established by these t rader s (Gregory, 1971) . There
were also free mi gr ati ons fro m Africa outward. Africans, for exa mple,
migrated to ot her parts of the Indian Ocean fro m th e th irt eenth century
onwards, not only as slaves bu t also as ' po licemen, t rader s, bureaucrats,
clerics, bodyguards, conc ubi nes, servants, soldiers and sailor s' (Jayas uriya
and Pankhurst , 2003: 7; d. Ali, 1995) .
To summarise, th en : if t he Ind ian Ocean operates or has operated as a
network, it s uni ty resides in a myriad of factors: trade, capital, rel igion , war,
pilgrims, port s, shi ps, slaves , indentured workers, clerics, sailors, creditors
and commodi t ies (Bose notes that bet ween th e sixteenth and ni neteent h
centuries, most Indian Ocean inhabita nts wore Indian cotton from Gujarat,
Coromandel or Ben gal [2005: 12]).
The Indian Ocean: So what?
Let us turn now to ask t he qu est ion of what differen ce th e Indian Ocean
might make. First, however, a cavea t: one da nger of t rying to gene ralise
about th e Ind ian Ocean is th at one ends up making too sta rk a dichotomy
with the Atlant ic. In such a contrast, th e Indian Ocean appears pre-mo dern,
a zone of t imeless Islam as aga inst th e modern ism of th e capita list At lantic;
in such analyses, t he Indian Ocean emerges as t he zone of lost innocence ,
in some ways like th e mythical lost cont ine nt Lernur ia, which by some
accounts lay origina lly to th e sout h of Ind ia before it sank wi thout t race. In
her work on Lemuria, Sumathi Ramaswamy looks at th e history of th e lost
conti nent as an idea in European science, th en in colonia l th inking about
India, then in Tamil nat ionalism (in which Lemuria becomes t he lost Tamil
homeland ) (Ramaswamy, 1999; 2002) . In brief, Lemuria becomes freighted
with nost algia for a pristi ne pre-modernity, one of the templates produced
by roma ntic co ncept ions of th e Indian Ocean. Inst ead, we need to t hi nk of
the Indian Ocean as t he site par exce llence of 'alt ern ative mo dernities; t hose
formatio ns of mo dernity th at have t aken shape in an archive of deep and
layered existi ng social and intellectual tr ad it ions.
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14 TH E BL A CK ATLANTIC MEETS THE INDIAN OC EAN
Who is a Slave?
As the discussion of Campbell (2004a & 2004b) has already indicated, the
Indian Ocean makes a difference to the question of 'who is a slave' or, put in
different terms, understandings of the relationship of slavery and freedom.
In this regard, the Atlantic model has become invisibly normative. The
state of slave and free are clearly demarcated and, furthermore, racialised.
This starkness plays itself out in a number of domains. In much political
theorisation, notions of subjectivity, sovereignty, autonomy and freedom
tend to pivot on the idea that slavery and freedom are neatly separable
states. This absolute distinction is also apparent in traditions of anti-colonial
thinking and the hydraulic paradigms of domination and resistance to which
. these give rise. In such analyses, the domain of ruler and ruled, oppressor
and oppressed, are apparently distinct and legible.
Slavery in the Indian Ocean is more complex: the line between slave and
free is constantly shifting and changing. As Campbell argues (2004b), the
bulk of slaves in the Indian Ocean were generally not located in plantation
settings and were instead integrated into households. The possibilities
for mobility or manumission were consequently greater. Debt slavery or
pawning of a lineage member were also strategies followed in times of
catastrophe, such as drought or famine. The hope, however, was that these
conditions were not permanent.
The meanings of freedom and slavery, then, are complex and shifting.
Such reminders are useful in a post-apartheid context where the glamour
of narratives of domination and resistance has worn thin. Indeed such
narratives are now being rehabilitated as part of an official state history. As
political theorists have shown elsewhere in the continent, our understandings
of power need to be more complex than this binary idea implies. Achille
Mbernbe's work has demonstrated the intimate co-habitation of ruler and
ruled (2001). Similarly, other political theorists like Iean-Francois Bayart
(1993) and Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz (1999) have critiqued
excessive dichotomisations of African society into popular and elite, high
and low. Whatever the asymmetries of power between these groups, they are
still linked by populist networks of clientilism and dependency.
Understanding political discourse and action, then, becomes a task of
understanding a complex layered precolonial, colonial and postcolonial
archive in which versions of modernity are negotiated in an ever-shifting set
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ISABEL HOFME YR 15
of idioms around 'tradition: One area of Africa that provides a particularly
rich source for understanding such interactions is the Swahili Coast. Here, as
Jonathan Glassman (1994) brilliantly demonstrates, a range of constituencies
- inland societies, Islamic Swahili patrician families, an urban crowd made
up of slave and plebeians, all under the rule of the Omani sultans - shaped
a series of cosmopolitan public cultures that revolved around the politics
of reputation and the contested terrain of public reciprocity and display. In
these ritual displa ys, power itself - for example, patriarchy - was not directly
challenged; rather, its meanings, rights and obligations were contested.
Colonial intervention was a belated entrant in this complex world and had to
accommodate itself to the contours carved out in many centuries of Indian
Ocean interaction.
One novel which explores this terrain superbly is Abdulrazak Gurnah's
Paradise (1994). Set on the eve of World War I on the Swahili coast, the
novel examines the trajectory of Yusuf, pawned by his father to a wealthy
merchant relative to offset his debt. The novel examines the complex
interaction between African, Indian, Arabic, German and British forms of
oppression. What does slavery mean in this context? What does freedom
mean? What is agency? Such novels, while not strictly speaking southern
African, are important since they begin to open up the complexities of the
Indian Ocean and help us understand the forms of modernity it produces.
This is a task that others are beginning to take on. Leila Tarazi Fawaz and
CA. Bayly in Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian
Ocean (2002) have started to examine the forms of cosmopolitan modernity
that have emerged through the interaction of Middle Eastern and South
Asian societies and how they have adapted and rewritten forms of European
modernity, picking up themes like printing, urban Islam and the universal
idioms of Islam more generally.
Who is a Settler?
Ifwe are asked to rethink the meaning of slave, we are also asked to reconsider
the idea of who is a settler. As indicated above, the older historiography
defined this term racially. Settlers were those who came from the north,
were generally considered free and were headed tautologically for settler
colonies . Indentured workers were from the south, were unfree and headed
for sugar colonies. However, indentured workers often become settlers and
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16 THE BLAC K ATLA NTIC M EETS T HE IN DI AN OC EAN
attempted to insert themselves into the discourses of settlerdom. 1960, for
example, marked the centenary of the arrival of the first Indian indentured
workers in Natal. The celebrations for this event went under the rubric of
'The 1860 settlers' (Pather, 1960), in turn a riposte to the idea of the '1820
settlers; the myth of origin built up by white English-speaking intellectuals in
response to growing Afrikaner nationalism. The idea of Indian settlers was
also well-developed in relation to East Africa, where Indians were portrayed
as 'opening up' the interior and being the true 'pioneers: M.K. Gandhi
frequently wrote about these settlers, whom he characterised as better than
the English since they did not drink and did not have the Bible (Gandhi, 1919;
Anon., 1921; Tadvalkar, 1919) .
These narratives raise far-reaching questions about settlers and Empire.
Who was a settler? What was Imperialism? Whose Empire was it? One novel
that dramatises these issues is the Gujarati children's classic Dariyalal ('Lord
of the Seas') by Gunvantrai Acharya, abridged and translated by Kamal
Sanyal (2000 [1974)). The story unfolds in a Gujarati settlement in Zanzibar
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and focuses on Ram,
a ruthless slave trader. Virtually as the narrative begins, he has a change of
heart about slavery and, by the end, has persuaded the Zanzibari Gujaratis
to give up slavery and shift to waged clove production. Interspersed in this
narrative is a colonial adventure genre in which Ram saves John Dunkirk
from cannibal tribes (Dunkirk is a fictional member of Mungo Park 's party
who has somehow made his way from West to East Africa). Thrown into
this mixture is the inevitable Ram and Sita myth (Ram and Sita being the
romantic protagonists of the Ramayana), and a Hindu reformist agenda with
the good guys in the novel opposing caste. Seen from a southern African
perspective, Acharya's novel asks us to recontextualise a range of genres:
the settler story, the anti-slavery narrative, the colonial adventure tale and
the genre of romance. A similar set of realignments emerges if one looks
at another set of Indian Ocean migrations, namely those associated with
Goans. At a recent colloquium held at the University of the Witwatersrand
on 'South Africa-India: Re-imagining the Disciplines; Rochelle Pinto and
Pamila Gupta presented papers on this theme. Normally subsumed uneasily
under histories of India, or histories of the 'Indo-Portuguese; a history
of itinerant Goans provides new purchase on old themes of empire and
nation. Pinto (2006) demonstrates how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
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I SABE L HOFM EYR 17
Goans, a marginal group in a marginal empire, exploit the fluidity and
ambiguity of imperial racial hierarchies, at times playing up their claims to
Portugueseness and, at others, erasing their close associations with Africans.
Goans attempted to insert themselves into colonial narratives and arenas
shaped by interacting racial discourses created by French , British and to a
lesser extent Portuguese colonial practices. Gupta (2006) examines the Goan
community who immigrated to Maputo after 1961 (when India took back
Goa from the Portuguese), and stayed on after Mozambican independence
in 1975. She seeks to use the itinerant nature of this group to investigate the
existing historiography of decolonisation, which generally sees the process as
something not yet complete, as something still unfolding in an evolutionary
framework. Instead Gupta explores 'decolonisation' as an event in its own
right and as a global historical process with multiple effects including the
precipitation of new migration.
Via Mozambique, of course, the question of Goan narratives makes its
way into southern African literature. Let me dwell on just one example: Mia
Couto's richly comic short story 'How Ascolino Do Perpetuo Socorro Lost his
Spouse' in the collection Voices Made Night (1986). The story is an allegory
of colonial rule and decolonisation in Mozambique, narrated through a
Goan protagonist who veers between various identities. When sober, he sees
himself as respectably Indo-Portuguese, when drunk he wants to form an
alliance with ordinary African Mozambicans, all the while claiming to be in
love with his wife, whom we never see and who is an equivalent of Portugal,
the mother country. The story breaks new ground by narrating colonial rule
as comedy. By exploiting the possibilities of Indian Ocean marginality, it
points the way to a novel set of literary imaginings.
A consideration of the Indian Ocean thus opens up new avenues for
thinking about 'race: One obvious example here would be the way in which
identities of whiteness are made in Empire, two important nodes being South
Africa and Australia. As Jon Hyslop (1999) has demonstrated, ideas of white
labourism were formulated across a range of different white settler colonies.
These ideas of whiteness were also sharpened in the merchant navy, a site
in which sailors were increasingly racialised. As on the South African mines,
the skilled jobs were done by 'whites' while the more physically demanding
jobs were done by African and Asian sailors called lascars.
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18 TH E BL A C K ATLA NTI C M EET S THE I N DI A N OC EA N
The growing popularity of theosophy - through figures like Annie
Besant, Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott (Van der Veer, 2001: 55-82;
Viswanathan, 1998: 177-207) - also opened up new avenues for rethinking
whiteness in the lOW. There were spiritualist enthusiasts in South Africa ,
one of whom was a Mr. G. Williams, a great fan of Parmanand. Williams
wrote to Parmanand in India saying, 'This European form I have assumed
in this birth has been to me a source of pain and of many difficulties' (qtd.
Khursand, 1982: xxi).
Diaspora
Another term that the Indian Ocean requires us to rethink is 'diaspora' The
word has become central to the postcolonial lexicon and at its broadest is
used to describe almost any sort of movement. The widespread academic
use of the word has tended to be most consistently applied to post-1960s
movement from the south to the north occasioned by changes to US and
European emigration law aimed at attracting more middle class migrants. In
comparison to the nineteenth-century movement of indentured labour, this
twentieth-century movement involved those of a higher social provenance and
hence attracted more attention. Much contemporary discussion on diaspora
and its associated postcolonial vocabulary of hybridity and hyphenation is
implicitly theorised on the basis of this latter group. The term, however, sits
uneasily in the Indian Ocean. Firstly, the Indian Ocean has been home to
failed diasporas, notably people who move but do not embark on projects
of cultural memory and constructing homelands. One notable example is
the movement of African slaves and free migrants to the Middle East and
South Asia (Jayasuriya and Pankhurst, 2003). These communities generally
retained littl e memory of Africa or evinced littl e desire to return.
Another common use of the term is in relation to the movement of Indians
to Africa . Here it makes a bit more sense, but as Patrick Eisenlohr's work on
Mauritius indicates, the term 'diaspora, as it unfolds in parts of the Indian
Ocean, requires revision. Analyses of Indian diaspora, Eisenlohr notes, have
moved through three stages (2006: 227-65) . Initially, from the 1960s, analyses
of Indians who had migrated focused on questions of survivals and traces:
how had ' Indian culture' generally understood as caste and the joint family
survived or changed as it moved to new locales? A second wave of analyses
tended more towards stressing the invention of diasporic communities
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I SABEL HOFMEYR 19
rather than seeing them as 'transplants' who automatically looked back to
an 'original' homeland. This set of approaches focused more on how certain
themes like purity and pollution were invented and reinvented. A third
orientation has been to examine diasporic communities as colonial and
postcolonial constructions: ' highlighting the colonial aspects of migration
has accounted for both the shaping of Indian communities overseas out of
highly heterogeneous groups of immigrants, and the deep transformations
they have undergone in the contexts of empire and indenture' (Eisenlohr,
2006: 233). Eisenlohr summarises: 'existing studies have shown that Indian
diasporic communities can by no means be considered extensions of India'
(ibid).
There is currently excellent work being done on Indian fiction in South
Africa and East Africa by, amongst others, Devarakshanam Govinden
(forthcoming), Ronit Fainman-Frenkel (2004), Rajendra Chetty (2002) and
Dan Ojwang (2004). This narrative archive has already illuminated the
invention of diaspora, and will continue to do so. Thi s work in turn forms
part of a growing reassessment of how to write and think about the history
of indentured communities. Put in crude terms, this history has until
recently been a story of one-way movement that examines the migration of
indentured workers from India to various parts of the world. The question of
what such migration means for India or what the intellectual formations in
the diaspora mean for developments back home have seldom been explored.
The 'new' post-1960s diaspora from India to the north has of course
attracted much more attention. The 'old' indentured diaspora of the south,
however, is little studied in India itself and is instead consigned to scholars
in the diasporic peripheries, as Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie noted in a keynote
address at 'South Africa-India: Reimagining the Disciplines' (University of
Witwatersrand,2006) .
As she went on to show, this situation is starting to change, most notably
with the work of John Kelly (1991) on Fiji and Tejaswini Niranjana (1999)
on Trinidad. Both of these texts take up themes of gender and diaspora.
Niranjana's work on the Trinidadian diaspora and its mutual imbrication
with Indian nationalism charts out how India and its indentured diasporas
mark each other. She demonstrates how the definition of the upper castel
middle class Indian women in nationalist discourse depended on a disavowal
of lower caste women, who were actually or imaginatively dispatched to
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20 TH E BLACK ATLA NT IC ME ET S THE I N DI A N OCEA N
indentured locations far away. Lower caste women in the diaspora were
portrayed as being corrupted by the indenture system or as embodying the
trope of Hindu female virtue under threat, a theme that Kelly develops at
length. This trope was energetically propagated back in India and came to
unite a range of anti-colonial constituencies in a concerted campaign to
demand the end of indenture. Niranjana's work importantly highlights the
theme of disavowed modernity. Those in the diaspora embark on their own
modernist projects changing ideas about caste, gender and religion. Very
often, these forms of modernity are reflected back in India but generally
in ways that portray the lower caste and class modernity of indentured
communities as undesirable.
New Textual Circuits
These movements of ideas back and forth across the Indian Ocean
help us to see novel textual circuits. One example is drawn from the
Modern Review, a Calcutta-based journal started in 1907 by Ramananda
Chatterjee. The journal was an important nationalist forum and, like many
nationalist ventures, had a strong reformist agenda particularly with regard
to Hinduism, which nationalists sought to 'modernise' and ' rationalise: The
journal carried extensive reporting on the indentured diaspora and featured
a regular column on ' Indians Abroad: Such reporting provides a window
for understanding how the debates staged in the diaspora were woven into
nationalist agendas 'back home: For example, one critical issue in reformist/
nationalist debate pertained to caste and the journal often reported on how
caste was being changed for the better by communities in the diaspora. It
must of course be noted that these were elite communities; when indentured
communities abandoned caste, this was invariably seen as loss rather than
gain (Hofmeyr, 2006).
Major figures also entered debates in the diaspora. In 1928, for example,
Rabindranath Tagore entered a debate on Fort Hare College, the sole
university open to black South Africans at the time. Small numbers of Indians
had long attended Fort Hare; as part of the 1927 Cape Town Agreement,
Indian communities were supposed to be given greater access to education.
One part of this package was to provide increased access to Fort Hare. Some
South African Indians opposed this attempt to classify them with 'natives'
and their views were reported back in India. Tagore summoned his full moral
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I SA BEL HOFME YR 2 1
magister ialism and berat ed the South Africa n Indian community: 'Our only
right to be in South Africa at all is that Nat ive Africans, to whom the soil
belongs, wish us to be there; he said (Anon., 1928a: 356; d . Anon., 1928b;
1928c).
These kinds of dialogues and textual traditions have yet to be explored in
any depth . Anoth er example: in June 1928, the Modern Review ran an article
entitled 'South Africa and India: Olive Schre iner's Message' (Andrews, 1928:
641-46). The piece was by c.F. Andrews, the lapsed Anglican missionary who
had become one of Gandhi's close confidantes, and who spent time in South
Africa where he met Olive Schre iner. The article by Andrews summarises
Schreiner 's Closer Union and then draws out some parallels with India: ' India
represent s an even greater congeries of races than Sout h Africa; and the
struggle for racial unity in India is many centuries old, while in South Africa
it has only just begun' (1928: 642). The idea of Olive Schre iner in Calcutta
is not one we often think of, but it is a conjunction which holds out exciting
possibilities.
A further example of a somewhat counterintuitive textual circulation
comes from the story of the repat riat ed South Africa n Indians. As Uma
Mesthrie (1985) has demonstrated, from the 1920s, the South African state
made strenuous attempts to send Indians home. Lucrat ive cash offers for
repatriation were made available. Those who took them up gave up their
right to return to South Africa. Most repatriates had great difficult y fitt ing
back into Indi an society: they had lost caste and some no longer spoke any
Indian languages. Mos t repatriates ende d up in slum communities in Madras
and Calcutt a. Some had extraordinary lives. Muni Gadu and his family were
repatri ated and then requested permi ssion to return. Their request was
refused but the family nevertheless caught a ship bound for Dar es Salaam
and from there walked 2,500 miles to Natal (Chaturve di and Dayal, 1931).
The South African Nati onal Archives carries many of the repatri ates'
letters pleading to be allowed back. These letters constitute a yet-to- be
studied cor pus of Indian Ocean texts, one that point s to the rich possibility
inherent in indenture d histori es seen not as a one-way story but as part of a
multi-direct ional intellectual circulation in the Indi an Ocean. As Dhupelia-
Mesthrie (2006) has argued, such an approach will take us beyond the
current status quo in South African Indian history, which tends to focus
repetitively on two themes concerni ng South Africa n-Indian relations:
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22 TH E BL A C K ATLAN TIC M EETS THE IN DI A N OC EAN
namely, Gandhi and the anti-apartheid struggle. In some instances, scholars
are starting to move beyond these themes. Jon Soske (2006) is examining
the interactions of Indian and African nationalisms as a way of solving the
current situation in which there are two separate historiographies, one
Indian, one African. Paru Raman (2004) has also done groundbreaking
work on Yusuf Dadoo and the way in which his political project is made
between South Africa and India. There are many interesting leads to pursue
in thinking about the zones of cross-over between Indian and African.
D.D.T. Iabavu, for example, was interested in Gandhi's pacificism and in
1949 attended the World Pacifist Meeting in India, where he spoke about
conditions in South Africa (Dhupelia-Mesthrie, 2004: 338). Iabavu is an
important figure in black liberalism and, as Dhupelia-Mesthrie has shown in
her brilliant biography Gandhi 's Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi's Son Manilal
(2004), a critical dimension in this story would be Gandhi's non-violence and
anti-communism, a position that attracted a range of intellectuals including
Jordan Ngubane, who wrote for Indian Opinion, the newspaper which
Gandhi had started in 1903 (ibid: 339).
Islands would be central to formulating new textual circuits. There is of
course a substantial body of work on the literatures of various Indian Ocean
islands. Little of it, however, has attempted to think of these islands in relation
to South Africa . Mauritius, for example, has critical sets of interactions with
South Africa . Darryl Accone's All Under Heaven: The Story of a Chinese
Family in South Africa (2004) not only touches on Mauritius but much of
the book unfolds on the Indian Ocean, opening up a new vista of narrative
possibilities for South African literary history.
There seem also to be interesting possibilities in relation to thinking
about Afrikaans/Dutch literary circuits in the Indian Ocean. One quick
example (taken from ongoing research) pertains to J.L.P. Erasmus, a Boer
commandant captured by the British in 1903 and sent (like 9,000 others) as
a prisoner of war to India. During his sojourn, Erasmus became interested
in Indian history and culture and on his return to South Africa linked up
with Gandhi and wrote for Indian Opinion (Hofmeyr, 2007). There is also an
older Dutch East India literature that forms an important strand in Afrikaans
literary history and needs to be more fully factored into accounts of South
African literature.
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I SA BEL HOFME YR 23
Religious Universalisms
How might the religious uni versalisms of the Indian Ocean und erwrite
new und erst andings of South Africa n literary and cultura l history? One
example emerges from the role of reform Hinduism in the Indian Ocean,
apparent in the work of the Ar ya Samaj, whi ch comes to play a central role
in Hindu nati onalism and in overseas Indi an communities. Founded in
India in 1874, the Arya Samaj, like many Hindu reformi st organisat ions,
responded to the onslaught of Christian mission evangelisation by seeking
to 'modernise' Hinduism and consti tute it as a church- like organisation wit h
congregations, fixed meet ing times, set texts. As a revivalist organisation,
the Samaj had evangelical tendencies and, both at home and abroad, sought
to 'save' Hindus from lapsing or to reco nvert tho se who had. The Samaj
sent missionarie s out int o different parts of the indentured diaspora. There
is a voluminous scholarship on the Samaj but it run s in two distinct tracks.
There is scholarship on the Samaj in India (Jordens, 1997; Rai, 1992 [1915))
and then ther e are minor studies of the Samaj elsewhere: in South Africa,
Trinidad, East Africa (Vedal ankar and Somera, n.d.; Naidoo, 1992). With
the exception of Kelly's work on Fiji (1991), ther e has been no atte mpt to
combine these two tra ditions of scholarship and to tr eat these areas as one
integrated space which could illuminate how Samaj debates in the periphery
feed into debates 'back home' in India. Very often, these debates in India
concerned thems elves with the limits of Hinduness and with who could be
a Hindu. In the indentured periphery, these debates were often dramat ised
in extreme form and at times took the shape of questions about whether an
African could be a Hindu. We need intellectual and literary histori es that
can trace out these debates in South Africa and through what channels and
in what form they are fed back to India.
Such a domain will also render visible a series of life stories that unfold
between South Africa and India and have important implications for South
African liter ature. Two examples would be the South Africa n born Bhawani
Dayal and the Indi an born Bhai Parmanand. Both were Arya Samajist s and
spent time between South Africa and Indi a (and, in Parmanand's case, other
countri es too).
Dayal was born in 1892 in Johannesburg, the son of an indentured father.
In 1904 he returns to Indi a to complete his schooling, and takes part in the
swadeshi movement, an anti-colonial campaign in response to the partition
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24 T HE BL A CK ATL A NT IC MEET S TH E I N D I A N OC EA N
of Bengal. He also becomes dr awn int o the Arya Samaj. Dayal returns to
Natal in 1912 and participates in Gandhi's satyagraha/ passive resist ance. He
is imp risoned and produces his autobiography in Hindi , Hamari Karavas
Kahani ('Story of my Prison Life')." In 1914 he produced Dakshin Afriake
fa Satyagrah ka Itihas ('History of Passive Resist ance in South Africa') the
first account of passive resista nce in Hindi .' He continues to shut tle between
South Africa and India and is for many years involved in the Natal Indi an
Congress, which he represents at annual Indian Congress meet ings in India
(Agrawal, 1939). There is much more that can be said of Dayal. Some of the
implications that his work holds for definitions of South African literature
are its indications that we need to start thinking of Hindi texts as forming
part of the South African liter ary archive. Dayal's autobiogra phy would form
an int eresting contribution to debates on both South African life stories and
pr ison liter ature. Thi s see ms an excellent project for collaboration between
South Africa n and Indi an scholars .
Let me turn briefly to Parmanand, who was born in the Punjab. He is
perh aps best known for being sentenced to death by the British in 1915 for
participat ing in a supposed conspir acy. His sentence was commuted to life
imprisonment on the Andaman Islands and then in 1920 he was released as
part of a gener al amnesty. Less well-known is the fact that he spent time in
Piet ermaritzburg in 1905 as an Arya Samaj representative, where he st arted
the Hindu Young Men's Association. His autobiography The Story of my Life
(1982 [1934]) touches bri efly on his South African experiences and again
could usefully be included in the archive of southern African literatu re.
Christia nity in the Indi an Ocean can equally produce unexpect ed
narrat ives. One of these woul d be an account of John Rungiah, a Telegu
Baptist missionar y who comes from south India to proselytise in Natal in
1903 (Rungiah, 1905). Such south-sout h movements will have int eresting
impli cati ons for underst and ings of Chr istian mission, which are almos t
uniformly understood as a north-south phenomenon.
Islam has underwr itt en the most extensive universalisms in the Indi an
Ocean. At pr esent the idea of Islam and Islamic writing has virtually never
been consistently factored into South African literary and cultural histo ries.
Once such a project is attempted, the boundaries and vectors of Sout h
African literature will be substantially extended. A project such as this would
minimally consider the 'secul ar ' writers who engage with Islami c or Koranic
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I SABEL HOFM EYR 2 5
themes (one thinks for example of Shabbir Banoobhai) and what this would
mean once factored into historiographies of South African literature. Also
important would be representations of Islam, an int eresting example being
Peter Lanham and A.S. Mopeli-Paulus's Blanket Boy's Moon (1984 [1953]),
which deals in part with a positive portrayal of Durban's Islamic community
in the 1940s. The writing of practitioners of the faith in South Africa would
constitut e a vast body of work spread across numerous languages. Shamil
Ieppie's (2007) recent exemplary study of the Ar abic Study Circle in Durban
leads the way here, demonstrating the themes that a detailed study of a
particular textual community can open up.
+++
In conclusion, let me bring matters up to the present. What difference
does the Indian Oc ean make today? As indicated earlier, there has been a
significant intensification of trade between South Africa and Indi a. It is clear
that South Africa's future will be sign ificantly shaped by India. This paper
suggests that we need urgently to start writing the histories of this emerging
present.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand,
South Africa. In 2004 she published The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of
The Pilgrim's Progress (Princeton University Press), which examined themes of north-
south textual circ ulation. She has now turned her attention to quest ions of south-
south circulation and is working on a book entitled Indi an Ocean Lives and Lett ers.
She coordinates the South Africa-India Connections and Comparisons project at the
University of the Wit watersrand. Email: IsabeI.Hofmeyr@wit s.ac.za
Notes
This paper was initially given as a keynot e address at ' Forging the Local and the
Global; AUETSA/SAACLALS/SAVAL Conference, University of Stellenbosch, 9-12
July 2006.
2 Title and translat ion as given in catalogue of the Johann esburg Public Librar y.
3 Title and translation as listed in Prem Naira n Agrawa l's Bhawani Dayal Sasnnyasi
(1939: Appendix I) .
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26 THE BLA CK ATLANTI C MEETS THE INDIAN OC EAN
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