Introduction

Most national cultures in Eastern and Southern Africa are testimonies of multiracialism. In East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania) beside the White and Black races, exist substantial populations of the so-called ‘Brown’ race made up of migrant communities of South Asian origins and peoples of Arabic heritage. An attempt to categorize, for academic purposes, East Africans of Asiatic heritage, especially South Asian heritage, has given rise to the name ‘Asian Africans’ (See www.museums.or.ke/asian.html). Neither indigenous Asians nor indigenous Africans, the Asian African community in East Africa are the hybrid product of cultural contact between Asia and Africa over many centuries. However, to distinguish South Asian (Indo-Pakistani) communities from the Arabo-Persian ones, both captured by the general label ‘Asian Africans’, the Kiswahili terms Wahindi and Waarabu respectively, are popularly used across East Africa. In this chapter, we should understand ‘Asian Africans’ as descendants of a racially-distinct migrant community of South Asian heritage that settled in East Africa long before and during twentiethcentury European colonization of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Asian Africans, as a descriptive label, is used within this chapter to distinguish the Wahindi and Waarabu from a fresh wave of contemporary ‘investor Asians’. The latter are part of the transnational migrating labour/ capital, characteristic of the present stage of globalization, which made (and are still making) their maiden settlements in East Africa in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.