Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean

Edited by Iain Walker | Manuel João Ramos | Preben Kaarsholm Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean CENTRO DE ESTUDOS INTERNACIONAIS INSTITUTO UNIVERSITÁRIO DE LISBOA ebookIS ebookIS Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean CENTRO DE ESTUDOS INTERNACIONAIS - INSTITUTO UNIVERSITÁRIO DE LISBOA Title Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean Editors Iain Walker Manuel João Ramos Preben Kaarsholm Contributors Aleksi Ylönen Ana Roque Denis Venter Elena Brugioni Iain Walker Manuel João Ramos Meghna Singh Preben Kaarsholm Rafael Thiebaut Cover Jaali (marble screen) of Sidi Sayyed's Mosque, Ahemadabad (Gujarat, India) ©Manuel João Ramos Pagination Rita Cordeiro ISBN 978-989-8876-16-4 Copyright © 2017 by Centro de Estudos Internacionais do Instituto Universitário de Lisboa CEI-IUL (ISCTE-IUL), Sala 2W06 Av.ª das Forças Armadas 1649-026 Lisboa PORTUGAL +351 210 464 029 htp://cei.iscte-iul.pt [email protected] Table of contents Introduction 11-17 Iain Walker, Manuel João Ramos and Preben Kaarsholm The Coast of Sofala (Mozambique) in the 16th Century: Between the 19-36 African trade routes and the Indian Ocean trade Ana Roque The Role of “Brokers” in Securing the Dutch Slave Trade on Madagascar 37-64 during the Eighteenth Century Rafael Thiebaut ‘Behind so many names, the sea’. Mozambique and the Indian Ocean 65-80 Elena Brugioni ‘Sponsorshiped’: Refections on female temporary migration from the 81-101 Horn of Africa to the Gulf and Lebanon Manuel João Ramos Confronting the ‘Arab North’: Interpretations of Slavery and Religion in 103-129 Southern Sudanese Separatist Resistance Aleksi Ylönen India and Africa: Maritime Security and India’s Strategic Interests in the 131-167 Western Indian Ocean Denis Venter A Notice to Motion: Exploring states of stillness through the event of 169-195 waiting on the arrested vessel WBI Trinity at the port of Cape Town Meghna Singh Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean © 2017 Centro de Estudos Internacionais do Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) Affiliations Aleksi Ylönen is Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Centre of International Studies, University Institute of Lisbon, and Associate Researcher of the African Studies Group, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. He specializes in armed conficts, security issues and separatism in the Sudans and the greater Horn of Africa. Ana Roque is Faculty Member of the Faculty of Arts, University of Lisbon, and Senior Researcher of its Centre of History, and vice-coordinator of the research line Science and Empire. Her research focusses mainly on modern history of Africa and the Indian Ocean, especially Mozambique and Southern Africa, on topics relating to scientifc expeditions, indigenous traditional knowledge, biodiversity and environmental problems in the colonial context. Denis Venter is Senior Research Fellow in Politics, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg; Research Associate in Political Studies and Governance, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. Formerly he was Nelson Mandela Chair Professor (2010-11), and Researcher of the Centre for African Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Elena Brugioni is Professor of African Literatures and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Literary Theory of the University of Campinas, Unicamp. She specializes in African Lusophone cultural studies in the post-colonial period. Iain Walker is Research Ofcer at Martin Luther University Halle Witenberg and Research Associate at Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. His research interests include the Hadrami and Comorian communities in the western Indian Ocean. His current project is looking at memories, histories and identities on the island of Mayote. Manuel João Ramos is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Senior Researcher at the Centre of International Studies of ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon. He studies Europe-Ethiopia relations and his current research deals with political conficts, urbanization and migration trends in the Horn of Africa. Meghna Singh is presently afliated to the Drama Department of the University of Cape Town as PhD Candidate, and is a Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration and Society at WITS University Johannesburg with a research project on the theme of oceanic migrations in South Africa. Preben Kaarsholm is Professor of Global and International Development Studies at Roskilde University. His current research is focused on transitions from slavery to indentured and migrant labour in the Western Indian Ocean, and on Islamic networks along the African Indian Ocean coast. Rafael Thiebaut is PhD candidate in African History at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne under joint supervision with the Vrije Universiteit Amster- dam. He is preparing a thesis on French and Dutch slave trade in Madagascar from the 17th to the 19th centuries. His research interests are in maritime and colonial history in the Indian Ocean world during the Early Modern Age. Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean © 2017 Centro de Estudos Internacionais do Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) Acknowledgements The editors wish to thank: the Centre of International Studies – University Institute of Lisbon for its support during all stages of the organisation of the Second Thematic Conference on Africa and the Indian Ocean, and for the ensuing book; the board of AEGIS for ofering the network’s continued support to the activities of its Collaborative Research Group on African in the Indian Ocean, under which the Conference and this group was prepared; Inês Ribeiro, CEI- IUL’s secretary, for managing the editorial aspects of the e-book; João Dias, of ISCTE-IUL’s Library, for all the pagination work in the new LODEL platform used by OpenEditions; the anonymous referees who were generous enough to double-blind peer-review all the present book’s chapters; the participants of the Conference and contributors to the e-book for the patience revealed during the painstaking process of peer-reviewing, and for so readily revising their texts. Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean © 2017 Centro de Estudos Internacionais do Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) Introduction Iain Walker Manuel João Ramos Preben Kaarsholm 12 Introduction The Indian Ocean, with its extensive trade and circulation networks, has been characterized as a major inter-regional arena within broader studies of processes of globalisation. These maritime networks are some of the oldest in the world, and through the centuries persistent and resilient forms of transnational and transcultural communication have developed in the regions touched by it, linking the Horn of Africa, the African Indian Ocean islands and Eastern and Southern Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian subcontinent and even meaningful parts of Southeast and Eastern Asia. It is also a particularly sensitive area in security terms, presently harbouring major naval and aerial surveillance capabilities of both intra- and extra-regional military and economic powers. The western Indian Ocean has thus been both a fuid space of intense ex- changes between various local communities and a much-coveted seting for suc- cessive projects of hegemonic appropriations of human and material resources. The substantial fow of goods and people across it has, from time immemorial, atracted predatory and clandestine activities, which are today the pretext for member countries of NATO to maintain an impressive security presence and for emerging powers such as India and China to display their military and naval capacities. A comprehensive understanding of the conditions and implications of this multiple presence requires a multidisciplinary efort that has to take into account the underlying, and generally silent, reality of the existence of family-based networks (African, Arab, Indian, Armenian, Iranian and South-east Asian) which, assuming an ancient heritage, have ensured the continuity of fows between the diferent countries connected by the Western Indian Ocean by resiliently adapt- ing themselves to ever-changing balances of power, to the impositions of external agents, and to the bargaining strategies of local and regional predators. The present volume sets forth to analyse illustrative aspects of the deep-rooted immersion of the populations of the eastern coasts of Africa in the vast network of commercial, cultural and religious interactions that extend to the Middle-East and the Indian subcontinent, as well as the long-time involvement of various exogenous military, administrative and economic powers (Otoman, Omani, Portuguese, Dutch, British, French and, more recently, European-Americans). On the side-lines of an inward-looking vision of Africa shared by most African Union member countries, which have only recently begun to develop a fedgling security policy and a strategy of development of the African coastline, various agents from East African countries have sought to manage and develop existing networks in a transnational logic supported by historical ties that come from the E-Book’IS • Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean • 2017 Iain Walker, Manuel João Ramos and Preben Kaarsholm 13 old triangular trade facilitated by the monsoon regime, linking these coastal regions to the Arabian Peninsula and South-east Asia. As the overall process of globalization of human afairs assumes local

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