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- Convenor:
-
Preben Kaarsholm
(Roskilde University)
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Short Abstract:
The panel will explore how old-standing connections between Africa and the Indian Ocean world have changed with globalization. What new possibilities and restrictions for development in African countries have the intensification of globalization in the Indian Ocean introduced since the early 1990s?
Long Abstract:
Historically, the Indian Ocean has both separated and united geopolitical entities - empires, religions and cultures - and has represented fundamental divisions as well as dynamic connections. It has provided a space for expansion, mobility and investment for traders and colonizers, and has been the site of dramatic contestations between religious and cultural agendas. It has enabled transportation, migration and settlement of slaves and labourers between China, Indonesia, India, the Arab world and the African coast and its islands, and given rise to new self-understandings of belonging and notions of citizenship. Since the end of the Cold War, it has provided an arena for greatly intensified and globalized connections and disruptions at both economic, political and cultural levels.
The panel will explore how interactions in the Indian Ocean have changed with globalization, and how African societies been affected by these changes? In what ways was the earlier global history of the African Indian Ocean different from current dynamics of globalisation? What are the most important ways in which Oceanic connections between Africa, India and China have changed, and what new possibilities and restrictions have the hegemonies of globalization introduced for economic, political and cultural development in African countries?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Francesco Genovesi (University of Dar es Salaam )
Paper short abstract:
Arriving to the African Indian Ocean, the Portuguese reached a culturally awaited world, but were forced to abandon the myth in favour of the complexity of history. Travel literature helped them establish a first real cultural connection with the East African coast.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to investigate how the Portuguese navigation along the coasts of the African Indian Ocean constituted not only a nautical success but also the arrival to a culturally awaited land.
The African littoral revealed the two most relevant characteristics that Europe was looking for: the presence of God and the presence of gold. The presence of God, in the shape of the legendary kingdom of Prester John, seemed tangible in the meeting with the Ethiopian Christian communities, starting from the coast where the Portuguese renamed the city of Massawa and the Dhalak Islands as "the ports of Prester John". Equally, the abundance of gold exhibited by the inhabitants of the Swahili cities fascinated the first Western travelers as a premise of richness.
However, those two elements revealed substantial differences from the Western expectations. The gold was coming from mines located around the mysterious inland kingdom of Monomotapa and it was already involved in an international trade; the visit to the kingdom of Prester John revealed several prosaic experiences, such as small thefts or locust invasions.
Hence, this paper will demonstrate how the travel literature was marked by the impulse of describing the appearance of a world that was completely new, but at the same time also intensely awaited by the readers of the old continent. Therefore, those witnesses helped Europe establish its first real cultural connection with the African Indian Ocean, abandoning the reassurance of the myth in favor of the complexity of history.
Iain Walker (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the mythical attributes of the Portuguese, their influence on perspectives on the past and their relevance to contemporary practices and expressions of identity in the Comoro Islands.
Paper long abstract:
Social memories of the Portuguese raise certain difficulties for those who wish to undertake an assessment of their historical role in the Comoros. Following the voyage of Vasco da Gama, for a hundred years the Portuguese were the only Europeans in the Indian Ocean, and their presence has deeply marked the Comorian worldview. Not only can people point to Portuguese tombs, forts and trading posts across the archipelago, the Portuguese appear both in myth and in genealogies: some myths have them as the first settlers of the islands while those claiming a deep belonging trace their ancestry back to Portuguese immigrants. Residing in the distant past - unlike the French or the English - the Portuguese have a special status in the Comorian historical memory that is manifested in different ways on different islands, but with similar results. This paper explores why they should have left a legacy disproportionate to the reality and what the implications are for claims to belonging based on descent from people who are, ultimately, kafiri - non-believers
James Kirby (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
Global connections encouraged the spread of human rights institutions in 1990s Africa. Yet, Mauritius was disruptive in designing an Ombudsman for the developing world. This paper shows how African human rights mechanisms have been informed by global trends emerging in and out of the Indian Ocean.
Paper long abstract:
The 1990s, a decade of profound globalisation, witnessed the spread of human rights mechanisms across Africa and the Global South. The human rights ombudsman was a signature institution of the period. Mauritius, an island that self-identifies as an African and Indian Ocean state, played a foundational role in designing an Ombudsman fit for the developing world. The country's constitutional development leading up to independence in 1968 was influenced by its global connections, featuring the United Nations and the International Commission of Jurists. However, Mauritius was disruptive in pursuing its own Ombudsman when only a few developed countries, outside of Scandinavia, began experimenting with the idea. Mauritius' party politics was deeply divided on ethnic lines. The Ombudsman, proposed as early as 1960, emerged as an attractive solution for solving the problem of maintaining social harmony in a multi-racial society. Mauritius' politicians not only reimagined this foreign institution for the island's internal conditions, they paved the way for similar bodies in post-colonial Africa. This paper underscores a pivotal, but previously unexplored, connection between the Indian Ocean and mainland Africa in the diffusion of National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) during the 1990s. Based on research collected at The National Archives in London and official government reports from Mauritius, the paper challenges scholarly narratives that interpret human rights developments in Africa as overly dependent on external powers and networks. It contributes to a new wave of literature that spotlights the role of African actors in the development of international human rights norms and law.