Today I would like to post a small tribute to a brilliant intellectual, writer and philosopher whose life was untimely cut short by leukemia this past week. I remember fondly his course on diaspora which I was able to sit in on. I had some great conversations with him on the concept of "alternative modernities." Here he presents on the black diaspora, post-racialism, and black politics for the 21st century.
Dear Azanian Sea readers,
On the long road to my dissertation, I got a chance to present a summary of my research at a conference sponsored by the Moroccan-American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange. I talked about the dimensions of my research on the Swahili-speaking Omani diaspora and its future direction. The conference was surprisingly and unexpectedly engaging, featuring a wide range of academic pursuits and interdisciplinary perspectives. I enjoyed the presentations, and got a chance to refine how I present my project, as I embark on the second half of my research year. Above is the abstract of my talk:
At the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in New York City there is a great exhibit currently running on Africans in the Indian Ocean World. If you can't check out the exhibit, the accompanying website is a beautiful introduction, with stories, images, maps and multimedia. Over forty years after the publication of Joseph Harris's The African Presence in Asia, the study of Africans in the Indian Ocean world has grown in important ways. It has expanded beyond simple vindicationist studies, it has increasingly been driven by its own theoretical concerns, it is more and more grounded in knowledge of local languages and cultures. The African presence in the Indian Ocean can tell us a lot about cultural change and social hierarchy in societies of the Indian Ocean littoral, and has the potential to influence how we conceptualize and perpetuate the study of diaspora itself. If anyone has a bibliography they would like to contribute on the subject, I would love for you to post a link in the comments section. I am currently working on compiling a comprehensive bibliography. Thanks to Ishraq Ali for the link!
In March, I had the privilege to speak on a panel with a group of distinguished historians at Georgetown University. I spoke about my research into Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui and his project of Islamic reform through the Swahili-Arabic newspaper "al-Islah". Here is the full panel:
2011 Symposium - Arabia to Africa: Reassessing the Omani Trade Diaspora in East Africa, 1861-1920 from Georgetown CCAS on Vimeo.
2011 Symposium - Reimagining Communities: Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui, al-Islah and Transnational Arab Muslim Identity in Kenya, 1897- from Georgetown CCAS on Vimeo.
2011 Symposium - Syrian Migrants to the Colonial Philippines, 1880s to 1940s from Georgetown CCAS on Vimeo.
2011 Symposium - A World of Their Own: Algerian Diaspora and the Making of Algerian Nationalism from Georgetown CCAS on Vimeo.
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The book promised to be "what the other book (Roots) promised to be but never was. Rather than an incapacitating, sentimental Euro-centric tracing of ethnicity, the author reconnects the Americas to the culture of pre-colonial West Africa and the universal way of Islam."
My next door neighbor in Oman gave me the book in our discussions on Islamic theology and law. He has traveled widely in America, so I assume he picked it up there. Anyway, the book brought up an old, yet still relevant issue: did Africans reach America before Columbus? Before I go on, a note on methodology is in order. While I think that is highly likely that Africans did reach the Americas before Columbus (and Dr. Quick presents numerous pieces of evidence, mostly gleaned from the work of Ivan Van Sertima) there is also the problem of how admissible certain pieces of evidence are. The reasoning behind Quick and other scholars' work is that an accumulated mass of similarities must ergo equal pre-Columbian contact. Yet a word from a comparative anthropologist is most germane here:
It can never be assumed that apparent likenesses between cultures are fundamental, while obvious differences are coincidental or due to special local circumstances. The selection of similar elements from different cultures and the dismissal of differences must always be justified logically, in detail, and in both historical and functional terms. As in any scientific enterprise, we must not simply choose our facts to suit our theories but must demonstrate that the cultural similarities considered to be fundamental are similar in detail and durable, while dissimilarities must be logically explicable as easily changeable cultural features.For example, Quick cites Ferdinand Columbus, who writes about people in northern Honduras as being "black in color. They pierce a hole in their ears large enough to insert a hen's egg." "Black in color" indeed tells us very little of these people's concrete cultural origins, and should not be taken as evidence. However their piercings might tell us a little more. Even if piercing were practiced in West Africa similar to how Columbus described (quite likely), how do we know that this practice emerged in the Americas from contact with Africa? Independent invention seems just as likely. Happily for the scholar, their are some almost irrefutable pieces of evidence relating to language and other traveler's reports which put us on firmer ground. Overall the book gives some fascinating insight into what is in many ways still an underground history. Quick ends by meditating on a dynamic that has been much studied of-late, and remains relevant to African Studies in an Indian Ocean context:
"The real challenge is to be "Mecca-centric" yet in touch with the African world, to be an authentic Muslim yet still in touch with African American spirituality, to be a moral person yet still in touch with the pulse of African American youth, and to develop Islam in America without getting lost in the crises of the Muslim world."
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full article here
The Black Sidis of Gujarat are a tribal Sufi community of East African origin which came to India eight centuries ago and made Gujarat their home. They carried with them their exceptionally rich musical tradition and kept it alive and flourishing through the generations, unknown to the rest of the world. Their history is rooted in the slave trade of the 13th century and beyond, when Arab and later European slave traders systematically captured thousands of African men, women and children and took them across the seas for sale to the highest bidders. Many Sidi arrived in India as slaves to the Maharajas and Nawabs of the day, whilst others came as merchants, navigators, sailors and slave kings, settling in Gujarat. Their Nubian features attracted the Arab slave traders because of their huge demand in many Indian households as trusted servants and status symbols. That remains true in the Parsi community and several Sidi royal family lineages also continue to thrive to this day in India.
A traditional occupation of African-Indian Sufis in Gujarat has been to perform sacred music and dance as wandering faqirs, singing songs to their black Sufi saint, Bava Gor. Sidi men and women perform sacred music and dance during rituals in the shrines to Bava Gor, and have lived on accepting alms for touring these devotional genres from villages to shrines for centuries. The Sidis are the most musically inclined, who recognise music as a tool for becoming closer to God. Many Sidis also perform as muezzins as they feel closely related to Hazrat Bilal, a black African man who was the first person chosen by Prophet Mohammed to recite adhan (call to prayer). Over time, the Sidis' native African music styles, melodic and rhythmic structures, lyrics and musical instruments mingled with local influences in Gujarat to form this unique and symbolic representation of African-Indian ness.
Sidi Goma perform in a group of twelve: four lead musicians (drummers/singers) and eight dancers. The program presents an overview of Sidi ritual performance, from the traditional muezzin call to prayer to a staged ritual performance. It centres around a danced zikr (remembrance), consisting of joyful, satirical praise dances to their Saint, who is attributed with giving them the joy they express in their dances. Intoxicating drum patterns that "speak" the zikr prayers in rhythm support the dancers who perform virtuosic feats of agility and strength, gradually reaching an ecstatic climax. While the music gradually gets more rapid and excited, the dances unfold with constantly evolving individual and small-group acts of animal imitations, climaxing in a coconut-breaking feat. The programme features solos on the malunga, an instrument resembling the Brazilian berimbau, as well as prayer calls and seated ritual songs (baithi, dhamal andqawwali). Included in the show is a certain type of circle dance, with people coming into the centre to perform more exhibitionistic dancing, indicative of the slave dances of Zanzibar.
The Sidi speak word perfect Hindi and Gujarati, but have remained an oppressed class in India. Because they are black, from Africa, and Muslim, this has kept them at a lower socio-economic and educational level, but recently their situation is finally beginning to change for the better. Yunus Babu Sidi, one of the group's leaders speaking in a recent interview with ethnomusicology professor Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy in UK's fROOTS magazine, says:
"The general population in India think of us as Africans, although we are Indians, pure and proper and Swahili is the language of our forefathers and we should not forget it. I am the only one learning Swahili in the group, so I can teach my fellow brothers and sisters in the future. We use the Swahili language in some of the songs during our performances, but we don't know the true meanings behind these words. If someone asks me what have you sung, I don't have an answer for them and that becomes a problem for me, because this issue is not just about the performance but it lies in the roots of our culture… All I know is I come from Africa, and I would like nothing better than to sit around with my Sidi brothers and sisters one day and have a conversation with them in Kiswahili....
More information can be found at http://www.everyculture.com/South-Asia/Sidi.html
source
by Roger Owen
Few people in the world can deny that, since the 1990s at least, we have been living through a period of rapid globalization in which people's lives are more intensely interconnected than at any time up to now. But how to write the history of this period? And how to relate it with earlier periods, not just to the first great wave of modern globalization at the end of the nineteenth century, but also to previous centuries when smaller, but still extensive, networks of interconnectedness were created across the world's oceans by trading empires like the Portuguese, the British and the Dutch, as well as by influential diasporas communities emanating from outward-looking societies without powerful navies to protect their interests located in strategic places along a sea-coast like south China, south India, or, in the Arab world, Syria/Lebanon or parts of Yemen
This enormous challenge has been taken up with a considerable degree of success by Professor Enseng Ho, a Harvard social-anthropologist, whose new book, The Graves of Tarim (University of California Press, 2006), based on many years of research on Hadramawt and its Indian, South-East Asian and African Diaspora, contains a wonderfully sophisticated analysis, not just of the creation, and then the maintenance, of a system of networks which outlasted the great sea empires in which it was partially embedded, but also of the methodological problems connected with such a vast intellectual enterprise. Though not always an easy read, there is no doubt in my mind that, over the years, it will be seen as one of those few foreign books about the Arab world which richly deserve the name of classic.
Hadramawt itself consists of a thin, well-watered wadi (valley), stretching some eighty miles from east to west between the arid wastes of Saudi Arabia's 'empty quarter' and the Arabian Sea, long settled by a people with an intimate connection with the rise of Islam in the land to its north. And yet, rich though it is in agricultural and commercial potential, for over eight centuries it has been exporting a significant part of its male population, first as (Sayyids) along paths of Islamic missionary enterprise, then as civic and religious figures at the various Indian courts, finally, as adventurers, sultans, merchants, diplomats and landlords further east into Malaysia and Indonesia.
Everywhere they went these individual Hadramis, without power or protection, had to elbow themselves into their host region's local social and political arrangements. Everywhere they did this in part by marrying local women to create families linked to their homeland by genealogical lines of descent, as well as by a culture and a learning based on notions of outward movement and return, of religious and moral education, to create a trans-oceanic society of people who understand themselves as linked by bonds of kinship maintained by singing, writing, reading and narration, or, in Professor Ho's arresting phrase, by the stories they shared about themselves.
All this is well known in its bare outlines. But how to tell its story, to
understand its particular dynamic, to indicate the emotional density of its largely familial inter-connections and to explain the changed relationships between Diaspora and homeland over long stretches of time? The key to Professor Ho's approach is the way he has combined a huge array of historical evidence - textual, historical, sociological and material based on his own personal experience - from sites across the world to create a larger picture based on notions of cycles of outward movement and return centred on the small wadi town of Tarim with its mosques, its graves, and, more recently its eastern-looking palaces, bungalows and villas, where, in his argument, the various flows which first pushed the Hadramis abroad came together in the early centuries of Islam in a burst of religiously-inspired, outward-looking activism.
To this he adds a wonderful analysis of the global context in which these cycles took place, produced first by the shift in maritime trading patterns west from the Gulf to the Red Sea after the land-routes to China were interrupted by the Mongol conquest, then by the various European sea empires which, in their last, British phase, created an Indian Ocean world dominated at sea by the various London ministries and departments which ran its maritime activities, and on land by the increasingly competitive and bureaucratically controlling territorial possessions of Britain and Holland. These latter, in his argument, while both encouraging and then restricting Hadrami movement abroad, also began to have more and more impact in Hadramawt itself as developments and divisions affecting the diasporas abroad increasingly found their way back to the homeland resulting, finally, in Britain's extraordinarily belated decision to incorporate it into its empire as part of its last imperial possession, the so-called East Aden Protectorate, just before World War Two.
But this is only the half of it. The methodology employed to write the story, while appearing deceptively simple, is, in fact, novel in the extreme in its largely successful attempt to find answers to the complex challenges which the writing of global history poses for conventional historical narrative, for the imposition of coherence, and for giving meaning to a pattern of interconnectedness based on a dense network of personal, social and ideological ties sustained over long distances by travel, written messages and shared histories, all subject to the opportunities provided and the demands imposed by such technical developments as the change from sail to steam, the imposition of the passport, the arrival of the postage stamp and the international telegraph cable.
To understand Professor Ho's response to such methodological challenges we have to note the following two points. First, he became a global person himself, with the good fortune, the languages, the academic confidence, not just to travel freely around the Indian Ocean but also, partly through his Hadrami connections, to feel at home wherever he went. This, in turn, allowed him to practice a type of imaginative historical sociology in which an intimate knowledge of the Hadrami homeland and its present diasporas informs and interacts with his analysis of related aspects of the Hadrami past. Hence an ability to present a self-contained world both from inside and outside, as well as to understand its own world view as a community of people who, in his own succinct phrase, were and are, at once deeply engaged in other worlds and yet deeply distrustful of them.
Finally, he is able to give meaning to the intensity of the rather arid notion of networks through his observation of the central significance of the ubiquitous family connections which give these global relationships their particular feel, their particular flexibility, and also their particular poignancy, as the individual stories, not just of personal success but also of difficulty and dislocation, begin to mount up, particularly in the modern world of nation states and tighter and tighter national jurisdictions.
The Graves of Tarim promises to be one of those great books best read, thought about, and then read again. Let us hope that it can soon reach an Arabic-speaking audience as well. It is a remarkable achievement. (Al Hayat Newspaper).
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