The African Diaspora in Asia: Historical Gleanings

AAS 5,3-4_f2_271-273 1/24/07 1:37 PM Page 271

SHIHAN DE SILVA JAYASURIYA AND JEAN-PIERRE ANGENOT

General Introduction Migration of Africans to Asia, both free and forced, has gone on for several centuries. Yet there is less awareness of an African presence in Asian countries. The extent of their acceptance to kinship networks, mar- ginalisation, and lack of political clout may partially account for their low profile. In order to draw together the scholars working on different areas of Asia and in diverse academic disciplines, a cyber network was formed. By breaking down the compartmentalisation that generally exists within academic institutions and pooling the expertise of its members, the TADIA (The African Diaspora in Asia) cyber network brings together scholars. It aims to seek out Afro-Asian communities and to bring them to the attention of the world. The importance of the TADIA cyber network has been established by its recognition as a project associated with UNESCO. We invited scholars who had both a wide knowledge, and expertise in case studies of Asia, to write articles which could be published in a volume in order to emphasise the African presence in Asia. We are obliged to all the authors who have spent some considerable time in writing articles for this special volume containing original material, hypotheses, perspectives and analyses. We are also grateful to Professor Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo for raising issues, posing important questions, and finally, for publishing our papers as a special volume of African and Asian Studies. In “The problems of identifying an African presence in Asia: What’s in a Name?”, Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya (King’s College London, University of London) draws attention to the difficulties of recognising an African presence in Asia. Eastwards African migration was different

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to the transAtlantic migration in terms of the time scale involved, the types of demand for Africans and perhaps most importantly the nature of interactions with the host societies. The many terms that have been used for Africans throughout time and space, masks the African presence in Asia. Using her expertise in historical linguistics and history com- bined with fieldwork and regional knowledge, she draws attention to the rationale for the various ethnonyms and terms used for Africans. An awareness of the ethnic origins that are encapsulated in these terms is necessary for those attempting to undertake studies on the eastwards African migration. In “The African-Asian Diaspora: Myth or Reality?,” Gwyn Campbell (Department of History, McGill University, Canada) questions if there might be an African ‘slave’ Diaspora in the Indian Ocean world simi- lar to that of the well-documented African Diaspora of the Americas. There has been increasing scholarly interest in this topic probably height- ened by the International Year to commemorate the struggle against slavery and its Abolition in 2004. Campbell is testing the hypothesis whether the eastwards African migrants were a victim Diaspora or not. Robert Collins (Department of History, University of Santa Barbara, California, USA) has written on history for the past fifty years. He is of the view that history is not a social science, but a member of the human- ities family. He points out that history is the search for every available source, using any discipline, to narrate a story and that it is not bound by any rigid theoretical or methodological concepts. His approach to the “African Slave Trade to Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands” is based on narrating a story as best as one can, as to what happened, where, when, how and why. In “The Makran-Baluch-African Network in Zanzibar and East Africa during the XIXth Century,” Beatrice Nicolini (History and Institutions of Africa, Faculty of Political Sciences, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy) evaluates the cultural synthesis of different local real- ities combining material from her fieldwork with archival sources. She brings in the new historical perspective of viewing the relations between the coasts, islands and interior of the continents as areas that are in con- tact with flows of people, goods and ideas influencing and changing local societies. She acknowledges that studies on the history of the western Indian Ocean should take into account several historical-political-institutional factors. Her article emphasises slavery and examines the role played by the Makrani-Baluch tribes during the XIXth Century. Leila Ingrams (London, UK) and Richard Pankhurst (Department of History, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) draw attention to “Somali Migration to Aden from the 19th to the 21st centuries” combining archival sources