The emergence of the Indian Ocean region as an important geo-political arena is being studied across a range of disciplines. Yet while the Indian Ocean has figured in Swahili studies and analyses of East and Southern African diasporic communities, it has remained outside the mainstream of African Studies. This introduction provides an overview of emerging trends in the rich field of Indian Ocean studies and draws out their implications for scholars of Africa. The focus of the articles is on one strand in the study of the Indian Ocean, namely the role of print and visual culture in constituting public spheres and nationalisms in, across and between the societies around the Ocean.

The themes addressed unfold between Southern and East Africa and India as well as along the African coast from KwaZulu-Natal through Zanzibar and Tanzania to the Arab world. This introduction surveys debates on print culture, newspapers and nationalism in African Studies and demonstrates how the articles in the volume support and extend these areas of study. It draws out the broader implications of these debates for the historiographies of East African studies, Southern African studies, debates on Indian nationalism and Islam.

This article examines how the Gujarati-speaking Muslim trading class in South(ern) Africa was linked as a reading public through a newspaper, Indian Views, which had been founded in early twentieth-century Durban in opposition to Mahatma Gandhi's Indian Opinion. Under the editorship of Moosa Meer (1929–63) it was a conduit for sustaining existing social networks as well as offering common narratives that galvanized an idea of community embracing its geographically disparate readership. Between 1956 and 1963, Zuleikha Mayat, a self-described housewife born in Potchefstroom but married to a medical doctor in Durban whom she ‘met’ through the newspaper, wrote a weekly column that represented one of the first instances of a South African Muslim woman offering her ideas in print. She spoke across gender divides and articulated a moral social vision that accounted for both local and diasporic concerns. This article provides a narrative account of how Mayat came to write for Indian Views, a story that underscores the personal linkages within this diasporic community and, more broadly, how literacy and the family enterprises that constituted local print capitalism provided a material means of sustaining existing networks of village and family. It also reveals the role of newspaper as an interface between public and private spaces in helping to create a community of linguistically related readers who imagined themselves as part of a larger print culture.

This article examines the history of two Indian newspapers, Tanganyika Opinion and Tanganyika Herald, to demonstrate how business considerations provided both the opportunity for East African Indians to make public arguments and the central limitation on the arguments that could be made. Founded on the inspiration of mass nationalist action through a territorial hartal, the Tanganyika Opinion and later the Herald blazed the trails that articulated ‘Greater India’ among the Anglo-Gujarati reading public in Tanganyika. But growing conservative sentiments within this vulnerable minority, along with rising sectarian division, reduced both the patronage and audience for a singular ‘anti-colonial’ politics by the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, as a marginal print node along the Indian Ocean littoral, the Opinion and Herald came to rely on an opportunistic mixture of wire services and consular propaganda to keep abreast of regional and international news developments. Ultimately, the shrinking market for Anglo-Gujarati newspapers and rising opportunities in Swahili-language journals had sealed the doom of these and similar Indian newspapers by the time ‘African’ political independence arrived in the early 1960s.

This essay considers the role of Hindi films in urban Tanzania in writing new chronologies of Indian Ocean world history. Examining films and movie theatres through overlapping local, national and transnational lenses, the article contributes to our understandings of the encounter between the Indian diaspora and nationalism in East Africa, and extends the history of Indian Ocean world connections into the second half of the twentieth century. In order to escape the historiographical dialectic between nation and diaspora which splits scholarship on Hindi films overseas, cinema needs to be denationalized, and everyday social histories of urban cinema halls can then be framed within the Indian Ocean world. To do so successfully, however, we must challenge scholarship which asserts the collapse of this world in the early modern or colonial period (at the latest), in order to extend an Indian Ocean scale to capture the vibrant twentieth-century creation of a regional popular culture. The history of Bombay films in urban Tanzania thus enables a viewing of the transnational production of culture, and the ways in which cross-cultural flows are part of the construction of important categories like race and nationalism across the history of East Africa.

This article is a preliminary discussion of the circulation of textual material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Zanzibar. Three main contentions are made in the article. First, that this corpus of texts constituted a public sphere that was intimately connected with the western Indian Ocean, primarily Arabia, but with branches to Egypt where much of the material was printed. Second, that the transition from manuscript mode of transmission to printed texts upheld the same principles for circulation. Finally, the article also points to how the use of this scriptural material as a basis for Islamic learning was expanded into new types of reading, reference, interpretation and copying. The article examines cases from Zanzibar, both manuscripts and printed books, from the point of view of the lifespan of the texts.

Islam in KwaZulu-Natal has typically been seen as an Indian preserve and as closely linked with contestations around South African Indian identities. Against this background, dedication to Islam among Africans has appeared as exceptional, represented by groupings with particular histories of immigration from Mozambique, Malawi or Zambia. Since the 1970s, strong efforts have been made to extend the call of Islam to Africans in the province, as demonstrated in the mobilization efforts of the Islamic Propagation Centre International and the Muslim Youth Movement, and in the dawah projects of transnational Islamic NGOs like the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. Following the transition to democracy in 1994, Islam played an important role in establishing contacts between South Africans and the thousands of immigrants from other African countries – many of them with an Islamic background – who have been coming into KwaZulu-Natal. The essay discusses two different examples of Islamic practice in an African informal settlement on the outskirts of Durban, and demonstrates their different understandings of the relationship between Islam and African cultural ‘custom’. It places these differences of local theology and politics in the context of propagations of Islam as manifested in the writings of Ahmed Deedat and recent examples of pamphlet literature by African Muslims. It argues that understandings of Islam in KwaZulu-Natal as an African religion relate the area to the Indian Ocean world not only though links across the sea to South Asia, but also along the coast – bridging the gap between the Swahili continuum to the north and transnational Islam in the Cape.

This article explores the connection between three political movements that broke out amongst Africans and Indians within the public political realm across the Indian Ocean – the Khilafat/non-cooperation movement initiated by Gandhi in India between 1919 and 1922, the ‘quest for equality’ with European settlers amongst Indians in Kenya from 1910 to 1923, and the anti-settler movement launched by Harry Thuku in protest against unfair labour ordinances between 1921 and 1922. Moving away from the racial and territorial boundaries of South Asian and Kenyan historiographies, it uses the Indian Ocean realm – a space of economic, social and political interaction – as its paradigm of analysis. A variety of primary sources from archives in Kenya, India and Britain have been studied to uncover a connected, interregional history of politics, race and empire. In an attempt to highlight the importance of the Indian Ocean realm in understanding the interracial and interregional concerns that shaped the political imaginary of Indians and Africans in Kenya, the article reveals the emergence of a shared public political space across the Indian Ocean that was deeply contested.

The article addresses African and Indian newspaper networks in Kenya in the late 1940s in an Indian Ocean perspective. Newspapers were important parts of a printing culture that was sustained by Indian and African nationalist politics and economic enterprise. In this period new intermediary groups of African and Indian entrepreneurs, activists and publicists, collaborating around newspaper production, captured fairly large and significant non-European audiences (some papers had print runs of around ten thousand) and engaged them in new ways, incorporating their aspirations, writings and points of view in newspapers. They depended on voluntary and political associations and anti-colonial struggles in Kenya and on links to nationalists in India and the passive resistance movement in South Africa. They sidestepped the European-dominated print culture and created an anti-colonial counter-voice. Editors insisted on the right to write freely and be heard, and traditions of freedom of speech put a brake on censorship. Furthermore, the shifting networks of financial, editorial and journalistic collaboration, and the newspapers’ language choice – African vernaculars, Gujarati, Swahili and English – made intervention difficult for the authorities. With time, the politics and ideologies sustaining the newspapers pulled in different directions, with African nationalism gaining the upper hand among the forces that shaped the future independent Kenyan nation.