The Indian Ocean, like the winds and the storms, cannot be restricted within frontiers. From 1500 to 1800, the Indian Ocean rim included all areas between the Red Sea and the Straits of Malacca. In the 20th century, “Australia and Southern Africa were added” to the Indian Ocean space (Khader 2017, p. 85). Gabeba Baderoon in her book Regarding Muslims (2014), argues that “the sea is a metaphor for experiences that transcend conventional categories, the juxtaposition of multiple histories, the transformation of the self, and memories of slavery” (p. 67). On a similar note, this book has reinterpreted the Indian Ocean space through the creolized culinary, spiritual, and musical memories and rituals of the African Indians in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa. The fluidity of the Indian Ocean has generated fluid sociocultural practices amongst the communities residing in and around that space, as can be seen in the cases of the African Indians and the South African Indians. The various sociocultural creolized practices of the African Indians and the South African Indians, as discussed in this book, have pushed these communities into a state of “informed accommodation,” which Khatija Khader defines as a practice by communities to mark a distinct identity “by claiming membership into other larger regional or global groups—to mark similarity” (2020, p. 438). During personal conversations, the African Indians and the South African Indians shared their habitual culinary and spiritual and the musical practices that enable them to remember their “distinctive” ancestral practices, on the one side, and identify “similarities” between the sociocultural practices of the local Indian and African communities, respectively, on the other. The African Indians in Gujarat, while respecting their relationship to the local Indian cultures and traditions, never fail to acknowledge their connections to African ancestry. On a similar note, a lot of South African Indians identify their distinctiveness from the rest of the South Africans by simultaneously acknowledging their Indian and South African roots. These dynamics of informed accommodation can be thoroughly understood through the theoretical and ethnographic narratives of the struggles and resistances of the African Indians and the South African Indians. The multi-rooted sociocultural practices of these communities have led to the formation of several diaspora spaces across the Indian Ocean (Baron and Cara 2011).

Findings versus Addressing the Research Question

The initial aim of this research was to understand Brazil’s SSC strategy through cooperation in the field of health. Within that context, Mozambique stood out as the country that received not only the most cooperation programmes but also one of the most important ones: the transference of technology and know-how for the implementation of a pharmaceutical factory in the country. This project, combined with several other cooperation agreements, aimed to strengthen Mozambique’s national response to HIV/AIDS, and to enable general improvements in the population’s quality of life in the country, by upgrading the country’s institutional framework in health.

While there was a solid field of research on the Brazil–Mozambique health partnership, there were many gaps in the literature. For instance, previous research failed to analyse the objectives of this cooperation for both countries, or to verify its results, not only in terms of health, but also in terms of the political and economic motivations behind it. By reviewing the literature, it became clear that the scarcity of research, especially on the ground, combined with the lack of a robust theoretical framework for explaining and exploring the roots and results of this engagement was a weakness within the existing scholarship. In order to overcome these challenges, this research was designed to deliver a robust theoretical background, capable of verifying and analysing this cooperation more deeply.

At first, the hypothesis raised here was that international actors engage in global health because of the soft power component acquired through it. However, when engaging with the literature, it was concluded that the field of global health diplomacy could offer the tools needed to analyse not only Brazil and Mozambique in their roles as global health players but also every actor that engages in health at the international level. Thus, it was realised that within the field of global health diplomacy there was potential to develop a framework that could contribute to our understanding of the motivations and intentions of international actors in health partnerships and negotiations. This insight changed the focus of the research. As a result, instead of looking specifically at Brazil and Mozambique and trying to draw conclusions from these examples, the research led to a deeper exploration of how health partnerships work.

Introduction: Transoceanic Roots and Routes

Apart from various types of musical instruments, as discussed in Chapter 4, the African Indians and the South African Indians traveled to India and South Africa, respectively, with seeds and saplings of different traditional plants that are local to their respective geographical areas of origin. For instance, when the Indians arrived in South Africa, they carried saplings and seeds of basil, neem, curry leaf, mango, tamarind, and many others, while the Africans in India arrived with the seeds and saplings of baobab tree, lady finger, coffee beans, tomatoes, and many others. The seeds and the saplings were not just mere objects for these communities but functioned as cultural memories through which they could remain associated with their ancestral roots, even though they were physically displaced.

Today, in the states of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh in India, the use of Khorasani Imli in vegetables, chutneys, and pickles are quite common. In the late Middle Ages, the Persian word “Khorasan” was used to denote the present-day country of Iran, and Khorasani Imli refers to the seeds of the Baobab tree that were brought to India by the Africans from eastern, northern, and southern Africa (whitehorsepress 2018). The Baobab seeds are referred to as Khorasani because they were brought by the Africans who came through Iran with the Islamic invaders as slaves and are referred to as Imli because they taste sour like tamarinds (known as Imli in the Hindi language). On an identical note, a lot of the houses of the South African Indians in South Africa (especially the Hindus), consists of mango trees, curry leaf plants, tamarind plants, and basil leave plants. It is so because, a majority of the indentured Indians came to South Africa from the southern parts of India, where tamarind and curry leaves are habitually used in cooking. Besides consuming tamarind and curry leaves, mango leaves and basil leaves are widely used in performing various religious, cultural, and spiritual rituals by South African Indian Hindus.

Before discussing further about the culinary practices of the Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in Durban, Pretoria, and Johannesburg, it is crucial to mention that the culinary practices of the Siddis in the contemporary era are no different from the local Indian communities.

Rather than merely focusing on the stated platforms, activities, and appeal of different Irish nationalist organizations or individuals from the late eighteenth century to 1921, this study has probed particular contours of Irish nationalism during that time frame through the perspectival lens of multivocal and multivalent Irish nationalist imaginations and self-representations by way of references to a distant land (‘Iran’ in this case, in its broadest historical, geographic, and cultural configurations). This approach has underscored the always worlded dimension of nativist and/or nationalist Irish self-imaginings (in the case of nationalism, particularly after the emergence of the multiethnic and cross-communal Society of United Irishmen). This method has relied on an array of new analytical trajectories for interrogating particular trends in the history of Irish nationalism, yielding both information that is at times familiar and an extensive range of material and interpretations that are entirely new and otherwise inaccessible through other existing modes of engaging with the history of Irish nationalism. It is also imperative to emphasize once again that the focus of this study has been the exploration of particular strands of thought in the multifaceted sphere of Irish nationalism over a broad time span through the heuristic lens of ‘Iran,’ and not the study of Irish–Iranian relations during the period covered in this book or of solely political (in its narrowest definition) dimensions of Irish nationalist engagement with contemporary Iran.

The Iranian frame of reference in this book is only one of many potential modes of investigating the evolution and diversity of Irish nationalism in a comparative world-his-torical setting—keeping in mind also that this study has only probed particular trends in Irish nationalist historical, literary, cultural, and political expressions, and that in doing so, like other studies of Irish nationalism dealing with the period under investiga-tion, this study too has relied throughout on the available recorded Irish and other sources and, hence, makes no pretence of either reflecting the entire range of continuities and transformations in Irish nationalist articulations and “mentalities” (to borrow from the Annales School), or shedding light on the otherwise undocumented attitudes of ordinary Irish people during the period who gravitated to different strands of nationalism. Such a world-historical approach can be carried out at micro or macro levels, both synchronically and diachronically, each with its own advantages and limitations.

FRELIMO and Foreign Policy Orientation

FRELIMO and foreign policy orientation: Pre-independence, cold war and civil war

Pre-independence period

Mozambique’s first foreign partnerships were mainly with neighbouring countries that shared the same ideologies and objectives at the time, which were independence and autonomy within Africa. Therefore, at the core of foreign policy among these countries, there was a strong commitment to fighting for common causes and ideals, and a recognition of the importance that international relations would play in achieving that goal. FRELIMO’s main connection started when Eduardo Mondlane was working at the UN. Within that network, a partnership was built early on with Tanzania, which was already committed to the National Liberation Movement and the African Unit. Other relevant partnerships for national independence and regional unity were established with Zambia, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea and Somalia.

These alliances were seen as key strategies because the countries involved were also committed to liberation movements. Therefore, there was not only an ideological connection between these actors, but also, they could provide assistance in the areas of military training, as well as transference of weapons and means for the liberation movement (Schneidman, 1978, p. 58). However, objectives could not be reached just by aligning with African countries that were facing similar challenges; it was essential to build partnerships in a broader context, mostly due to the Cold War.

Therefore, Schneidman (1978) considers that the apex of FRELIMO’s foreign policy was reached in gaining support from China and the Soviet Union – the Soviet bloc – at the time. China and the USSR provided cash aid, military support, guerrilla training and transportation. However, the USSR also provided political and diplomatic endorsement for the liberation movement in Mozambique. Moreover, the USSR was the only member of the UNSC that supported the African-Asian bloc in condemning Portuguese colonial rule. Other Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany also provided some aid to FRELIMO in terms of military training, and also in the fields of education and health. In 1966, Sweden offered support to FRELIMO by providing medical facilities and supplies to the population.

The historical recapitulation presented above highlights Mozambique’s profile as an international receptor of international aid, which will be contested within the field of health in Chapter 6. Mozambique has relied on international aid in its different forms and from within various sectors since before its independence.

Methodological Approach

This chapter describes the background and challenges of the implementation of Brazil’s most audacious project in health: Sociedade Moçambicana de Medicamentos. It is important to mention that the fieldwork and case study were developed around the main hypothesis of this research, namely that Brazil’s health diplomacy has followed the traditional lines of the Itamaraty agenda, but was emphasised under two presidential diplomacies, consequently leading Brazil to become a major protagonist in the field. The findings and evaluation objective of this research rely on identifying what was on the table for Brazil and if indeed its GHD has made a contribution to the country in terms of its soft power.

The chapter contains the following sections. First, SMM: Chronology aims to contest the idea that the factory was part of Lula’s presidential foreign policy, and an exclusive project to emerge from his time in government. By exposing this timeline, one can gain an idea of the construction of Brazil’s soft power and agency in global health, which ended up making this project possible. It also exposes the high political complexity of cooperation in health, and the issues involved in adapting one’s projects to other countries’ realities. Second, The practical/technical aspects of managing this project seeks to show how the official diplomatic decision had an impact on the evolution of the project, and also how the project had been adapted throughout the years to address the demands of Mozambique’s government and society. It also describes how Brazil, via FIOCRUZ mainly, could offer to overcome possible challenges. Finally, the last section, The Challenges and Aftermath of SMM, offers conclusions and answers to practical day-to-day questions. It seeks to map institutional agency, as well as the ideological and economic issues that play, as argued here, the most significant roles in influencing the final result and the SMM stage nowadays.

SMM: Chronology

Many scholars claim that the diplomatic encounters between Brazil and Mozambique that led to the creation of Sociedade Moçambicana de Medicamentos took place in 2003, during President Lula’s official state visit to Joaquim Chissano, in Maputo, Mozambique (Cabral et al., 2014, p. 180). Yet, this section also highlights that the consolidation of the countries’ intentions to exchange technology and know-how had been established prior to that visit.

Despite the extensive literature from secular, Western feminism, the material body has been strangely marginalised. Yet, the reproductive capacity of women has been cruelly exploited in rape camps throughout history during warfare, designed to destroy biological continuity. There are multiple examples of this, as diverse as Japan’s state-endorsed use of comfort women held in stations during its occupation of China in World War II; the use of sexualised violence by the Indonesian security forces as a form of land-grabbing in West Papua to dilute indigenous land rights; the mass rape of women in Bosnia to destroy religious identity and Muslim continuity; and modern-day Uyghurs in China where reports have shown that inside the country’s re-education camps, women have been systematically raped and sexually abused (Ochab, 2021). Rape has, moreover, become a weapon of war against asylum seekers in new border conflicts, across the world and including on the borders of western Europe (Fernandez, 2023).

Post-democratic times have seen the rise of the global right – personified in populist leaders in North America, Latin America and Europe – which has created a revitalisation of neo-liberalism. Such developments have made life more precarious, and a democratic deficit has arisen out of greater precarity and securitisation, which has targeted vulnerable citizens and forms of embodiment considered unacceptable and subjected to excessive regulation (Sabsay, 2020). In contemporary secular Europe, it is the Muslim body that has become a site for vilification in a time of heightened national security and securitisation, which has turned the bearded man and the veiled woman into suspect bodies. Controversies about veiling have traversed secular Europe, drawing attention to the vulnerability of Muslim women. Curiously, the politics of the veil has led to an unimagined alliance between security politics, human rights and Western liberal feminists whose opposition to the veil has led to complicity with reactionary populism – including the far right such as Marine Le Pen. The re-orientalisation of the Muslim woman’s body has led human rights and feminism to ally themselves with securitisation and populism, and ultimately, objection to covering is rooted in the perception of sexual availability and therefore reproduction. These unlikely connections mean that human rights, instead of protecting Muslim women’s bodily integrity, have succeeded in increasing their vulnerability.

As noted in previous chapters—in addition to the general lack of awareness among Iranians (to this day) of the place of ‘Iran’ in certain corpus of Irish-nationalist antiquarian and other range of historical, folklore, literary, and/or more narrowly political writing during the time period covered in this book—, in the early twentieth century Iranian nationalists continued to to be apathetic toward Irish nationalist politics (until the Easter Rising of 1916), notwithstanding fervent Irish nationalist expressions of solidarity with the Iranian constitutionalist-nationalist struggle of 1906–11 and subsequently. By the turn of the twentieth century, at least educated Iranians following world events were not entirely ignorant of Irish political developments in general. Since the latter decades of the nineteenth century, summary coverage of Irish nationalist activities had appeared in a spectrum of Iranian publications. The topics covered in these reports ranged from Home Rule campaigns to agitation for land reform or armed republican activities. The delayed Iranian nationalist expressions of support for their Irish counterparts appears all the more confounding given the rapidly multiplying Iranian condemnations after 1907 of British imperial domination of India and Egypt. As discussed below, the Iranian neglect of the Irish Question prior to 1916 appears to have been considerably due to Ireland's somewhat ambiguous position as an English colonial entity. Notably, other than being England's oldest substantial colonial territory outside mainland Britain, as well as being a European colony, Ireland had its own separate parliament from 1264 to 1800 and was later incorporated into the new territorial-administrative amalgam of the United Kingdom in 1801. It was around this time that the British Empire emerged as a major outside player in Iranian affairs and attracted increasing Iranian diplomatic, military, commercial, historical, and cultural attention, with also a small (albeit gradually increasing) number of Iranian travelers visiting England during the nineteenth century, but rarely venturing into Ireland.

The evolution of this book is widely motivated by my close association with coastal cultures and oceanic values since my childhood days. I was born in the city of Kolkata, and it is located in the coastal state of West Bengal. As a result, my social, cultural, political, historical, esthetic, and intellectual evolution is deeply entangled and interwoven with diverse coastal cultures, traditions, and lifestyles that are habitually brought into the mainstream, exclusionary, and capitalistic urban cultural spaces of Kolkata by the vegetable vendors, fishmongers, and domestic helpers. A large number of vendors and helpers in Kolkata belong to the coastal regions of West Bengal, and they come to the city in search of jobs. In the process of seeking and engaging in variety of jobs, they not only inf luence the economic structures of the city, but also transform the culturescapes through their unique spiritual, culinary, musical, societal, fashion, and other practices. For instance, as a child I remember that there were a lot of women in our locality who were from the coastal region of Digha and worked as cooks in different houses. As I had many friends, I would often be invited for lunch or dinner in their houses, and I would be served with traditional coastal dishes of sea fishes, fish eggs, and various other seafood that were prepared by the cooks. Apart from seafood, the cooks would also prepare various other vegetarian and nonvegetarian dishes that are culturally and traditionally rooted in other parts of West Bengal. In this way, I developed a multicultural palate, which allowed me to indulge in an interconnected mode of belonging beyond the narrow enclaves of sociocultural binaries.

Gradually, as I started critically engaging with various oceanic and transoceanic communities and their cultures across India and the world, the collectivity, reciprocity, and malleability of the oceans and their impact on the communities near and far from the coasts, motivated me to embrace a critical, intellectual, esthetic, porous, and fluid identity of “Oceania” that “seeks to open up different ways of being with others, relating, and dwelling in and across this ocean-interconnected world” (Wilson 2022, p. 5). This identity has served as the inceptual point of this book.

Introduction

This chapter contextualises the HIV/AIDS crisis in the Brazilian context, exploring domestic and international efforts to establish an ARV factory. It highlights Brazil’s role as a central player in fighting against HIV/AIDS, and the global health diplomacy involved during the epidemic, traversing the presidencies of Cardoso, Lula and Rousseff. It analyses the important policies that developed from the period of Cardoso’s reign, which dealt with the immediate impact of the epidemic; introduces the idea of South-South cooperation, which emerged under President Lula’s government, describing how this is related to soft power and the domain of health; and discusses the role of the Brazil–Africa policy under Rousseff. This paves the way for the discussion of Mozambique’s health diplomacy during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Chapter 4.

HIV/AIDS in Brazil and the social movement for health: The domestic scenario

In the 1990s, World Bank experts conducted a speculative study about the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Brazil. Their conclusions were overly pessimistic that by the end of the decade 1.2 million people were supposed to be infected. The negative expectations were entirely justified, as Brazil had all the necessary ingredients to become a sizeable endemic area. The country is comprised of a large and very unequal population, with a less than three thousand dollars per capita per year income, combined with a health system where infectious diseases accounted for 5 per cent of the mortality rate per year. On that note, the concentration of poorer layers of society was in crowded urban areas, which would contribute to the intensification of the transmission (Serra, 2004, p. 1).

Although the Brazilian national health system had its limitations, it was not as ill-equipped as pointed out by the World Bank experts. This system had managed to eradicate several infectious diseases before, such as poliomyelitis and measles. Moreover, the system had developed some strengths in promoting prevention campaigns, through the support of public institutions and medical practises in hospitals. In terms of coverage, the national healthcare system provides services throughout the whole 8.5 million square kilometres, reaching almost 170 million people. It is estimated that at least 80 per cent of the population depends on this service (Serra, 2004, p. 1).

The system described by Serra is Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS). It was created through the Federal Constitution of 1988, which commands that the government should take responsibility for providing universal healthcare.

Commenting on the early phase of the Royal Irish Academy, the prominent twentieth-century Irish nationalist author and playwright William Butler Yeats wrote in 1937:

Yeats did not mention that by 1842 Petrie's position on the Round Towers (first articulated in 1833) was steadily gaining ground in the Royal Irish Academy, even if Petrie's most comprehensive study on the topic The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland did not appear in print until 1845. From 1833 to 1846, Petrie was in charge of the Ordnance Survey, mentioned by Yeats, with which O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry too were affiliated. Nor did Yeats elaborate that many scholars and other commentators continued to latch on to varying oriental theories of ancient Ireland, regardless of their perspectives on the origin of the Round Towers. As already noted, in some circles the former competing oriental theories of the likes of Vallancey, Sylvester O’Halloran, Louisa Catherine Beaufort, Betham, Lanigan, D’Alton (Dalton), Henry O’Brien, Windele, Thomas Moore, and others continued to hold sway, even if often in revised forms. These views were frequently echoed in the “national” and provincial press in Ireland. Examples of the latter include the Cork Examiner, founded in 1841 as an O’Connellite pro-Catholic rights and pro-Repeal movement newspaper. Certainly outside the Academy, no abrupt para-digm shift was detectable regarding the old antiquarian views of the Round Towers. Nor did the appearance of the Young Ireland nationalist movement and its newspaper The Nation in 1842, which was committed to cross-ethnic and cross-confessional Irish nationalism, mark any seismic departure from older oriental theories of Irish origins in general. The Young Ireland coterie, with their own dynamic brand of romantic nationalism, remained divided on the supposed oriental heritage of ancient Ireland, as well as on the subject of the Round Towers.

Performing Memories and Weaving Archives offers an insightful and rare glimpse of a two-way excavation entailing an Indian Ocean world at the crossroads. Here, the lifeworlds, ancestral knowledge, and collective memories of diasporic African communities in India and conversely diasporic Indian communities in South Africa are put into conversation. The spatiotemporal encounters Dey and his participant authors trace bear upon everyday life through these historic reverberations. This work deftly interweaves three spheres of everyday life: sacredscapes (through the spiritual mnemonic), musicscapes (through cultures of dance, music, and movement), and foodscapes (through culinary practices).

These traversals weave the ancestral knowledge, “creolization,” and “decolonial resistance” that thematically braid the multistranded narratives of South African Indians, Siddis, and other Afro-Indian communities. For a narrative that is intensely personal as much as it remains socioculturally expansive and open-ended, Dey begins with his own intergenerational biography against a seemingly familiar backdrop of postindependence Bangladesh and West Bengal in flux. Yet, against the urban fabric of childhood spaces, the portrait of a more muted, intriguing history emerges. It is that of a 15th century African kingdom in West Bengal, the Habshi dynasty, and one of many Afro-Indian kingdoms that dotted precolonial India, and long before Indian indentured labor was shipped across the farthest reaches of the British Empire. It is through these transoceanic and transcontinental interstices that Dey ferrets back and forth, between the historic and the contemporary, in offering readers an “archive of creolized memories.”

How is the Indian Ocean as a material space, metaphor, and archive of both connection and dissonance, reimagined in Dey’s transoceanic, transcontinental multi-sited ethnography? If a post-Purcellian reading of the so-called Indian Ocean as a transcultural borderland proves useful at some stage, at what point in this tracing of littoral lifeworlds do notions of hybridity, flow, and entanglement get ruptured, if ever? Indeed, Dey and his collaborators prompt us to think with/through the many sensibilities of porosity that pattern diasporic meaning-making and sentiments of belonging. For example, through an intersectional reading of identity and social hierarchy implicating class, caste, gender, and regional communalism among others, they further venture on to complicating contemporary paradoxes of colorism on either side of the Indian Ocean.

Biopolitical governance and securitisation affect all religions; however, today’s generalised fear of Islam has become a fixation, leading to calls for greater political security involving excessive state bordering and a return to state sovereignty to erase the presumed threat of the Muslim. We have become preoccupied with controlling migration based on a same/other dichotomy framed through the lens of security so that restrictions can be used to stop movement across borders on grounds of dangerous strangers or citizens (Nyers, 2003). The political bordering of bodies has created new technologies of control – such as detention – and strategies of exclusion – such as deportation (Huysmans, 2005). After 9/11, the idea of the perfect suspect – Muslim – created new forms of governance which fuelled a sense of unease about migration as a threat to global security, where profiling technologies to scrutinise, detain or remove unwanted bodies, particularly asylum seekers and so-called illegal refugees – mainly Muslims – were established (Nyers, 2003) and civil liberties and rights were eroded through the mobilisation of elite discourses and institutionalised forms of security (Balzacq, 2016). Popular acceptance of discourses about Muslims as dangerous meant that governments (typically) could push their security agendas through without much protest – the key illustration being the wave of emergency measures that swept across North America and Europe after 9/11 so that clear derogations of human rights were seen as moderate rather than extreme (Bilgin, 2010).

In this context, securitisation theory took the place of human security by overturning the emphasis on policies to protect people from poverty or terrorism, with a perspective that highlighted the negative aspects of security agendas and politics, shedding light on their potentially harmful ramifications and the creation of new, existential insecurities. Ideas about discipline, biopolitics and technologies of security fitted seamlessly into its framework and showed how colonialism, its sediments and residues, continued to be carried into metropolitan centres to contribute to the subjugation of people deemed backward and dangerous. It has shown how security agendas created and sustained through language have joined up with technological and administrative practises such as border control policies involving a dedicated band of professional security personnel. Securitisation through speech has coalesced with practises such as profiling, risk assessment and the rise of security professionals, fusing to ensure successful securitisation (Bigo, 2010).