Uncovering the History of Africans in Asia de silva_f1_i-xii.indd i 4/1/2008 5:36:27 PM de silva_f1_i-xii.indd ii 4/1/2008 5:36:29 PM Uncovering the History of Africans in Asia Edited by Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya and Jean-Pierre Angenot LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008 de silva_f1_i-xii.indd iii 5/6/2008 8:00:11 PM Cover illustration: “The Nizam’s African Bodyguard at the 1877 Imperial Durbar: Mounted Toy Soldier by W.M. Hocker”. With kind permission of Kenneth and Joyce Robbins. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Uncovering the history of Africans in Asia / edited by Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya and Jean-Pierre Angenot. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-16291-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Africans—Asia—History. 2. African diaspora. I. Jayasuriya, Shihan de S. II. Angenot, Jean-Pierre. DS28.A35U53 2008 950.0496—dc22 2008009473 ISBN 978 90 04 16291 4 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands de silva_f1_i-xii.indd iv 4/1/2008 5:36:29 PM CONTENTS Foreword by Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo ........................ vii Chapter One General Introduction ...................................... 1 Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya & Jean-Pierre Angenot Chapter Two Identifying Africans in Asia: What’s in a Name? ......................................... 7 Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya Chapter Three The Afro-Asian Diaspora: Myth or Reality? ............................................................ 37 Gwyn Campbell Chapter Four The African Slave Trade to Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands ..................................... 57 Robert O. Collins Chapter Five The Makran-Baluch-African network in Zanzibar and East-Africa during the XIX Century ........................................................... 81 Beatrice Nicolini Chapter Six Somali Migration to Yemen from the 19th to the 21st Centuries ........................................... 107 Leila Ingrams & Richard Pankhurst Chapter Seven Nineteenth Century European References to the African Diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula ......................................................... 121 Clifford Pereira Chapter Eight Migrants and the Maldives: African Connections .................................................... 131 Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya de silva_f1_i-xii.indd v 4/1/2008 5:36:29 PM vi contents Chapter Nine The African Native in Indiaspora ..................... 139 Jeanette Pinto Chapter Ten Migrants and Mercenaries: Sri Lanka’s Hidden Africans .............................................................. 155 Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya Extensive Bibliography on the Afro-Asian Diaspora ................. 171 Jean-Pierre Angenot & Geralda de Lima Angenot Notes on Contributors ................................................................ 189 Index ........................................................................................... 193 de silva_f1_i-xii.indd vi 4/1/2008 5:36:29 PM FOREWORD BY TUKUMBI LUMUMBA-KASONGO Why, how, and when had Africans or Blacks from the African continent found themselves in Asia? What parts of Africa did these Africans or Blacks originate from? Who were these Africans or Blacks who migrated to Asia? Where in Asia are there the majority of the people of African descent? Who and what have they become? How had they been group- ing, integrated or disintegrated into various social and cultural fabrics of the Asian countries? What is the level of social consciousness of their African-ness or Blackness, if any? And what contributions have they been making to the development of their communities in Asia? It is necessary that I fi rstly describe the general background behind these interesting and complex studies; secondly, I would like to present a sincere coup de chapeau to the Guest-Editor for a work well done; and thirdly, I invite our readers to read and use this book critically. I am working with the same Guest-Editor to produce another similar work on the same topic to be published in another special issue of the African and Asian Studies in the Fall of 2007. By some ad hoc common historical knowledge and some limited anthropological, ethnographic and biological studies, it is known that there are people of African descent in many parts of Asia. However, the scholarship in this area though not static, is still minimum. It is limited in relationship to its potential as it calls for questioning the conventional paradigms, and it is not intellectually legitimate yet. Many empirical and historical research projects are still needed to study collective and individual memories and stories of these people and how they had become Asians like other Asian ethnic groups for centuries. “The African Diaspora in Asia: Historical Gleanings” whose Guest-Editors are Dr. Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya of the University of London in Lon- don, United Kingdom, and Professor Jean-Pierre Angenot of Federal University of Rondônia, Brazil, is a monumental and rich work. It is an innovative collection of well-studied subjects undertaken by established scholars dealing with various forms of migration of the Africans to Asia from an interdisciplinary and a multidisciplinary perspective. I thank them, including the authors, for having analyzed various aspects of a topic that goes beyond a simple logic of linear history in the process de silva_f1_i-xii.indd vii 4/1/2008 5:36:29 PM viii tukumbi lumumba-kasongo of studying the movements of people with their traditions, their hopes and dreams, and their power of social reproduction. Because of the complexity of the issues examined in this volume, I would like to invite the readers to contextualize the whole work within a broader intellectual discourse and historical perspectives, to raise gen- eral issues related to the qualitative nature of the work itself, and to see how this work could help project the implications of the locations of large communities of people of African descent in Asia. After carefully reviewing each article included in this collection, I shared my satisfac- tion with Dr. Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya. Thus, I decided to push for the publication of the special issue of the African and Asian Studies as a book. In short, it is my hope that the readers will appreciate the value of this work within a bigger historical and sociological picture as an important step in the further studies of both Africa and Asia. In 2004, I was invited by Professor Jean-Pierre Angenot to participate in one of his conferences organized through the TADIA International Network, to be held in Goa. In the same year, he made a request to me to explore any possibility of publishing some papers in the African and Asian Studies. After reviewing the abstracts he submitted, the list of possible contributors, and their professional affi liations, I approved the project for publication in the African and Asian Studies. Thus, with high enthusiasm, I worked closely with Dr. Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya of the University of London, the Guest Editor, who carefully paid close attention to all the details for producing this work. I read each article with high interest and intellectual curiosity to make sure that this work could produce high quality intellectual debates and that it stimulates further discussion and scientifi c investigation. The questions related to, and/or about, the African Diaspora at large have been extensively studied mainly through two main interrelated historical perspectives, namely European-American transatlantic slavery and European colonialism. They are the dominant areas of interest, which are part of the imperialist paradigms. The studies on African internal, regional slavery and the African autonomous or independent international migrations have been limited until recently. Thus, within the existing world system and its international commercial routes, com- munication technology, and the axis of power, Africa has been more directly connected to Europe than to any other part of the world. For some, the phenomenon of Africans in Asia can be considered as enigmatic, random, individualistic or atomistic. But this is not the view shared with some authors in this collection. In this publication de silva_f1_i-xii.indd viii 4/1/2008 5:36:29 PM foreword ix a broad basis of motivations and trends have been studied. As W. E. Burghardt Du Bois expressed in his work entitled: The World and Africa, (1985, p. 176): The connection between Asia and Africa has always been close. There was probably actual land connection in prehistoric times, and the black