Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean: Transnational Histories of Race and Urban Space in Tanzania by Ned Bertz (review)

The Indian Ocean region has been a zone of human interaction throughout global history. The ocean does not divide land masses and continents but connects them. This geographical fact has been neglected for decades in major studies on East Africa and South Asia. Historians, sociologists and anthropologists are often still trained in area specialization, like “African studies” or “Asian studies.” French historian Fernand Braudel pioneered a movement of observing cross economic and cultural interaction in treating the Mediterranean Sea as an integrated historical and geographic region that extended beyond its immediate shores. His research encouraged other historians to develop their own studies of maritime zones of interaction. For the Indian Ocean, scholars such as K. N. Chaudhuri and Michael Pearson, Ned Alpers, Abdul Sheriff, and a few others have contributed to the field of Indian Ocean studies, which has finally grown mature. These scholars highlight the role of scarcity in driving trade. For example, products like wood were lacking in Arabia but plentiful in East and Central Africa, prized spices and perfumes grew only in the islands of South East Asia, and textile products, tea, medicines, and ivory drove profitable trade across long distances of water.

The book under review emphasizes the importance of the interchange of people and ideas in the context of changing power relations in late twentieth century. The author builds upon the work of the aforementioned great pioneers of Indian Ocean studies. Nevertheless, Bertz’s focus is not so much on trade, scarcity of products, or seafaring people. Instead, he highlights the transnational production of ideas like “race” and “nation” in relation to a sense of belonging. His concern is with the larger framework of empire, the quest for independence, nation building (rightly seen as a continuous historical and ongoing process), and diaspora (especially the role of the South Asian diaspora in Tanzania). The book primarily highlights two areas of interaction among Africans, Indians, and Europeans: schools and education (chapters 2 and 4) and cinemas (chapters 3 and 5). Governments usually use schools and education as their sphere of influence to construct the “nation” and to educate “national” civics. While the intersection of colonialism and education is still an understudied topic and its literature is dominated by singular nationalist contexts, Bertz persuasively shows that Indian and to a lesser extent African groups challenged elements of colonial education practices. However, he acknowledges that they largely had to work through educational practices established by the colonial government. The interplay of ethnic and religious rivalries in terms of well-united and protected educational systems, forms the center of this chapter. Bertz rightly concludes that the “tripartite colonial educational system created vastly unequal opportunities for students based on their racial group … and ideas about race penetrated urban schools” (p. 88).

Cinemas are generally seen as a bastion of commercial enterprise and not of government regulation. In the chapters on cinema, Bertz goes beyond the customary idea that Bollywood films are escapist fare for African cinemagoers and an expression for nostalgic longing for the Indian diaspora. By intermingling a great variety of bottom-up notions of “nation” and “diaspora” Bertz provides a diverse Indian Ocean region perspective that emphasizes cross-cultural and transregional production of “nation” and ideas of race, nationalism, and usage of space in urban Dar es Salaam (pp. 194–195). On the one hand, cinema halls were racially segregated public spaces that reinforced notions of the colonial state and race. On the other hand, African and Indian groups were able to challenge the administrative reliance on racial categories. State efforts to harness the cinema industry for nation building and control over public and private spheres largely failed because of persistent audience preferences for Hindi movies.

The book is well grounded in a range of archival, oral, and newspaper sources from Tanzania and India. Bertz reads Swahili, English, as well as Indian...