Decolonization transformed borderlands into homelands, nationalizing interstitial regions by splitting territories and identities. Yet for communities divided by oceans – such as Goans residing along the coasts of the Indian Oceanic world spanning East Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere – there could be no realizable aspiration for making territory, polity, and community congruent. Their existence, as with other informal diasporic confederations or global minority networks, did not align with the growing norm of the postcolonial state as anticolonial nationalist liberation's ideal ending. Therefore, these communities had the potential to pose a definitional stumbling block for new national governments and institutions of international order during the transition between imperial rule and national independence. For Goans, two such moments occurred simultaneously in December 1961 – independence for Tanganyika (which became Tanzania in 1964) and the Indian annexation (or liberation) of Goa. These events when juxtaposed, provide a double angle of analysis, exploring some of the uneven layering of African and Asian decolonizations.

For both the public performance and metropolitan reception of decolonization, India served as a possible model and emblem of “peaceful,” “successful” national liberation, Third World leadership, and the potential for Afro-Asian solidarity. However, in December 1961, for some Goans in British East Africa, themselves an embodiment of Afro-Asian links, independence on one side of the Indian Ocean occurred simultaneously with conquest on the other.