Writing on Water: Peripheries, Flows, Capital, and Struggles in

the Indian Ocean

Franoise Vergs
positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring
2003, pp. 241-257 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
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Writing on Water: Peripheries, Flows, Capital, and Struggles in the Indian Ocean
Franoise Vergs
Current discussions about globalization often ignore the ows of capital that
travel south to south and the routes, geographies, and imaginaries mapped
by these ows andby newmigratory movements. Studies have focusedonin-
creasedinequalities, onthe emergence of newcenters andperipheries, as well
as on local creativities and resistance. Postcolonial scholars have looked at
practices of cross-cultural translation, of vernacular cosmopolitanism, andat
diasporic formations. Their research has expanded the repertory of archives,
histories, and disciplines. Yet current East AsianAfrican exchanges have
gone largely unexplored. The Indian Ocean has long been the site of these
exchanges, building formal and informal connections between the African
continent and East Asia. Studying these routes of trade and cultural connec-
tions would yield, I want to argue, another map of the world in which the
West is provincialized, to paraphrase Dipesh Chakravorty.
, 11:1 2003 by Duke University Press
positions 11:1 Spring 2003 242
This essay constitutes a proposition toward a remapping of the Asian-
Africanworldof exchanges. It is anexploratory piece inwhichI, building on
primary research, suggest lookingat the reemergingdiscourses andpractices
of south-southconnections andasking: What practices of cultural translation
exist between Asia and Africa? How is Asia constructed in Africa and
vice versa? What kinds of informal routes of transaction and exchange have
developed alongside formal ones? Who are the practitioners of informal
exchanges? What has been preserved of the 1960s rhetoric of south-south
cooperation? What has been added? What kinds of projects are funded?
What kinds of expertise are offered? Througha series of examples of current
Asian-African exchanges, I intend to justify why we might want to study
these new emergences and why they should matter to postcolonial scholars.
My interest in these emerging formations stems fromtwo connected elds
of research. One is a project I coordinated with regional scholars and com-
pletedinDecember 2001. EntitledMappingAContact-Zone, this research
received funding from the Council for the Development of Research in So-
cial Sciences in Africa (CODESRIA)MacArthur Foundation Program on
Real Economies in Africa.
1
The report explored the diasporic economies
that have emerged in the contact zone constituted by the islands of the
southwest Indian Ocean. The other eld is the Indian Ocean as a cultural
site, construed so that its historical world of African-Asian exchanges may
expand our imagination and open up possibilities for changerather than
being locked in the territorialization imposed by imperialism and postcolo-
nial nationalism.
For this essay, I will lookmore specically at the corridor of exchanges that
goes between southern Africa and South and East Asia via the southwestern
islands. I wish here to propose an alternative spatialization of our political
imagination in a period of intensive and rapid economic restructuration and
cultural/political globalization. Every spatialization involves new closures.
We draw new borders by proposing new spaces; we make a choice, but that
choice forms aninevitable part of the process of elaboratingalternative spaces
that we can oppose to those imposed by states. More specically, when China
aspires to become the leader of the developing world and seeks to establish
greater economic relations with the African continent, it seems important
to study what social and cultural spaces will emerge from such policies,
Vergs Writing on Water 243
what forms of exploitation, cooperation, and hybridity will emerge, and
what corridors of power and resistance can be foreseen in this south-south
connection. I wish to point to the existence of an alternative spatialization
rather than to review the different studies of local spatializations in the
Indian Ocean, local and regional narratives of encounters and exchanges.
The Bandung Project
In a brief in October 2000, Associated Press informed us that China had
decided to write off a debt of 820 million owed to it by the poorest African
states. Foreign trade minister Shi Guangsheng, who announced the deci-
sion at the Sino-African Forum in Beijing, declared that it was taken to
help boost development and strengthen Beijings ties with the continent.
The decision, Shi argued, would position the Peoples Republic of China
(PRC) as a leader of the developing world.
2
Chinese premier Zhu Rongji
stressed the importance of new thinking in developing economic ties:
enhancing cooperation by orienting ourselves towards the market and im-
proving cooperation between governments and enterprises with the latter
being the main player. The role of enterprises and the market, however,
must reinforce South-Southcooperation. The 1960s revolutionaryrhetoric
of South-South cooperation here gives way to a market-oriented rhetoric.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Beijing devoted two billion U.S. dollars to afrm
Chinas traditional friendship with Africa.
3
In the twenty-rst century,
China still wishes to promote Sino-African friendship, this time in order to
establish an equitable and just newinternational and political order under
the sign of the market. How can we interpret that piece of news? Besides
the / that the PRC wishes to become the leader of the developing
world, what does it evoke? What does it say?
In the 1960s, leaders of what came to be known as the Third World pro-
posed a dream of South-South connections with its promises of possibilities,
alternative forms of modernity, urbanization, industrialization, and cultural
expressions. It evoked images of solidarity between peoples formerly subju-
gated by Western imperialismthe rhetoric and goal of a new humanism.
In the political vocabulary of the Third World, the South was not the site
of the exotic fantasies, of the dreams and nightmares that had mobilized
positions 11:1 Spring 2003 244
the European imaginary fromthe seventeenth to the twentieth century. The
South was a historical space shaped by the violence of colonialism and its
scenes of subjection. By the mid-twentieth century, anticolonialist intellec-
tuals from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and of the diasporas produced by
imperialism had already afrmed that the peoples of the non-European
world shared a common condition. They had been colonized by Europe;
they had been confronted by its racial hierarchy, its forms of exploitation,
slavery, and forced labor; they had been subjected to its techniques of dis-
ciplining and punishing, to its forms of war and displacement of civilian
populations, to its destruction of environment, to massacres and genocide.
4
The dream of creating a transcontinental movement took form through the
Pan-African congresses, the Congress of Colonized Peoples, and in the writ-
ings of Gandhi, C. L. R. James, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others. The
movement of decolonization, started in the late 1940s, offered new grounds
for the creation of a transcontinental South-South organization, which cul-
minated at Bandung in 1955. There, the South claimed its nonalignment
with the two powers that had emerged after the 1945 conference at Yalta:
the Soviet Union and the United States of America. The South wished to
elaborate a specic formof development for the people, for those who had
been made disposable by colonialism. Further, the South reafrmed its duty
of solidarity with the peoples still under colonial rule. The Bandung Decla-
ration constructed an imaginary and ideological space in which the Third
World was no longer the site of raw and massive exploitation by Europe,
inhabited by passive peoples who could not transform their environment
and who could not use the most recent technologies to bring progress and
education to future generations. The making of the South would belie the
European discourse of passivity and backwardness. Industrialization, edu-
cation, and the afrmation of the contribution of the peoples of the South to
civilization were the goals. In no time, the South would catch up. The
construction of national museums, national ballets, national universities, as
well as the organization of transcontinental cultural festivals and political
meetings would affect the mapping of the world and the ways in which the
world had been imagined.
On the one hand, new literatures, artistic productions, cinemas, and the-
oretical writings deeply transformed the ways in which the world had
Vergs Writing on Water 245
been imagined. On the other hand, the law of catching up in the elds
of economy and politics quickly revealed the aws of such thinking. The
rhetoric of catching up implied one model of progress, as well as a race to
progress. Rapid modernization signied that the government had the right
policies. Modernization was, in many instances, represented in the architec-
ture of the monumental. Dams, cavernous buildings, stadiums, bridges, uni-
versities, and whole cities were erected to afrm the power of the wretched
of the earth. As Arundhati Roy has shown for India in 7/. c / !:,
the paradigm for development was based on the vision of a modern, ratio-
nal, progressive, andurbanizedexistence opposedtoanirrational, emotional,
preindustrial, andrural existence.
5
Dams are the temples of ModernIndia,
Nehru claimed after independence. The temples of catch-up modernization
meant displacing villages for the greater common good, forcing peasants
and workers to cooperate, crushing the opposition to such vision of devel-
opment, and entering in a competition for the greatest, biggest stadium,
avenue, palace of parliament, dam.
6
Countries of the South that claimed to
have expertise exported their models to poorer countries or offered coopera-
tion. Cooperation meant offering Africa the technical expertise it lacked and
training its future technicians, engineers, doctors, and military personnel.
True, there was some progress, but there was also corruption, inefciency,
and contempt for the poor. And, too often, the governments of the South
blamed the North for their difculties in catching up and could not rec-
ognize that their policies did not always alleviate the problems created by
colonialism and that even they could worsen the problems.
This is not, however, the only story. The 1960s South-South world also
evoked the opening up of new imagined communities, of new practices of
transcontinental solidarity. The names !. and / ^/ c
. conjured up images of struggles that mobilized imaginations. The cold
war, the enmity between the Soviet Union and China, between India and
China, and then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reordering of the
worlds powers put a halt to the South-South cultural and commercial con-
nections, or, in any case, they were no longer a priority. Now it looks as
though Asia and Africa are considering again ways to create, organize, and
develop new connections, and parallel to formal exchanges, informal routes
have emerged. Thoughwithregards tothe weight of Westernmultinationals
positions 11:1 Spring 2003 246
andthe policies imposedby the International Monetary Fund(IMF) andfor-
mer colonial powers on local and regional African economies and politics
the South-South corridor of ows and connections might look marginal, I
wish to argue that their very existence warrants attention.
The Indian Ocean World
The Indian Ocean world brings forth images that evoke encounters not
placed under the signs of trauma and violence. We must imagine the arrival
in the early 1400s of the Chinese eet led by grand admiral Zheng He, a Chi-
nese Muslim, on the coast of East Africa and contrast it with the arrival of
Christopher Columbus. We might want to imagine the cosmopolitan port
cities of the Indian Ocean in which Armenians, Jews, Gujarati, Bengalis,
Hindus, Chinese, African, Malagasy, and Muslims mingled, forging a lin-
gua franca, a creolized language and culture. Of course, there were wars,
conicts, slave trade, but there were also practices and idioms of cultural
translation that maintained and developed a world of trade and exchange.
Western media have paid scant attention to current African-Asian ows
and connections. (There was, for instance, not one long article published
on the aforementioned Sino-African Forum.) Though research has been
done on Indian and Chinese diasporas on the African continent and on the
southwest islands, the emergence of newroutes of exchanges, power, and re-
sistance have yet to receive adequate attention. These routes reveal, however,
a new cartography of possibilities as well as the formation of new centers
and new peripheries. Looking at these new ows and routes shifts the fo-
cus away from a North-South divide and the battle lines left by European
imperialisms. It asks us (the us of postcolonial critics) to reconsider the his-
tory of transcontinental cultural and political connections past and present,
and to see how narratives about peripheries are fashioned, controlled, com-
bined, and marginalized in the non-Western world. Studying the sites of the
African-Asian encounters means studying the production of spaces across
continents, which are socially and culturally produced, as Henri Lefebvre
famously showed.
7
The sea is history, DerekWalcott wrote. Followinghis insight, I propose
to look at the Indian Ocean as an archive. The archeology and genealogy of
Vergs Writing on Water 247
its texts will tell the story of pirates, sailors, slaves, prostitutes, merchants,
traders, andinterpreters, of shrewdandcunningwomenandmen, of victims
and perpetrators, of cosmopolitan poets and artists, of political visionaries. It
is this writing on water, the layers of texts, narratives, and imagined worlds
that I propose to explore, discover, and study.
Studies have shown the relation established between control of lands and
power in the age of empires. It is a known fact that power is now less rooted
in possession of land than in control of international market ows. Power is
also now disseminated through new technologies and the new spaces they
have opened. Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Paul Rabinow have
looked at the forms of power/knowledge produced by newtechnologies and
showed the multiplicity and complexity of responses (often unforeseen) they
provoked. Exchanges, connections, and ows have been multiplied, and
research has looked at how these new ows are constituted. Who controls
them? What new geographies of power and resistance do they produce?
In recent years, interest in the Indian Ocean has increased. Articles in
journals, books, conferences, projects, and research in general attest to the
renewed interest in a long-neglected zone of contacts and contest.
8
The In-
dian Ocean is an interesting case because it escapes, as I said, the hegemonic
legacy of European cartography. Historians who have compared the social
and cultural world of oceans and seas have suggested the following rela-
tion between history, politics, and bodies of water. The Mediterranean, as
Fernand Braudel showed, has always been dominated by people from its
littoral.
9
The Atlantic is the creation of people from one part of its coasts.
The Pacic is the creation of people from very distant landsit is a Euro-
American creation. By contrast, the Indian Ocean existed as a cultural and
commercial space before the arrival of the Europeans (whose impact is still
a subject of debate).
10
It constituted the longest cultural continuum in pre-
Europeanimperial history.
11
The IndianOceana translationof the Arabic
term /// /!was a concept for eighth-century Arab navigators
and contemporary Africans, and for sixteenth-century Chinese. From early
on, it presented elements of unity: the role of monsoon winds, the creation
of cosmopolitan port cities with a large degree of autonomy for their hin-
terland, the kind of ships that sailed the ocean, transcontinental trade, and
piracy. It was a world of encounters and ows between the Islamic world
positions 11:1 Spring 2003 248
and Africa, Africa and Asia, between the Asian and African continents, and
the islands on the ocean.
12
Such encounters testied to the enduring connec-
tion between these worlds, and to the multiplicity of responses to European
imperialism. The heterogeneity of the oceans cultures and civilizations led
to the creation of :/ . /. (civilizations of the margins, of the
fringes), which speak for the enduring (though constantly renewed and
recongured) processes of creolization.
On their arrival, European colonial empires sought to protect their lines
of communication to India and Asia and to impose their monopoly on trade
routes. They wished to destroy vernacular cultures of hybridity and cre-
olization. They tried to establish their control over markets through the
vocabulary of commercial contracts, trade laws, and the establishment of
rigid networks of trade. Islands served as bases for their strategic and com-
mercial interests.
13
Though their presence affected the freedom the trade
routes and networks had enjoyed, recent historical work has challenged the
narrative of European hegemony on the Indian Ocean, arguing that Euro-
pean powers had to adapt to local and regional ways of doing commerce.
During colonialism, newroutes of exchanges, newprocesses of creolization,
new ows emerged. There were contacts among regional anticolonial or-
ganizations as well as unforeseen consequences of the imperial policies. For
instance, the imperial French colonial administration sent men from Mar-
tinique, Guadeloupe, and Runion to its colonies, hoping that they would
dutifully serve the empire. They often did, but among these men, there were
also anticolonial critics: in so-called Cochin China, the Runionnais Georges
Garros published a scathing indictment of French colonial racismin 1920; in
Madagascar, the Runionnais Paul Dussac formed, with Malagasy friends,
an anticolonial movement; and the Martinican Ren Maran did likewise in
West Africa.
14
After 1945, the competition between the United States and the former
Soviet Union for access to strategically important air and naval bases and
for the loyalties of the areas governments led to regional rivalry. However,
it also intensied networks of solidarity among local groups wishing to as-
sert regional autonomy.
15
In the 1970s, Sri Lanka launched the initiative
Indian Ocean Zone of Peace, whose goal was to forbid the presence of nu-
clear submarines in the ocean. The project embodied the regional desire for
Vergs Writing on Water 249
cooperation as well as the limits and difculties it ran against. The collapse
of communismin the Soviet Union led to the end of Moscows military pres-
ence in the Indian Ocean. The United States maintained its presence with
the military base of Diego Garcia.
16
Among former colonial powers, France
has tried to remain an important player. Emerging regional powers such as
India, South Africa, and Australia have sought ways to increase their activi-
ties and expand their inuence in the western Indian Ocean. The emergence
of Islam as a political force, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the
desire of India, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Africa to as-
sert their presence in the Indian Ocean have transformed regional politics
and economies. More recently, China has made clear that it would not be
excluded from the Indian Ocean. The creation of the Indian Ocean Rim
Association for Regional Cooperation in 1995 afrmed the aspiration of
African and Asian states to construct their own space and to respond to the
challenges of American-controlled globalization (Mauritius, South Africa,
Singapore, Kenya, Oman, and Australia attended the inaugural meeting).
The southwesternislandsMadagascar, Mauritius, Runion, Comoros, and
Seychelles) created their own structure, the Indian Ocean Commission, in
1984. The heterogeneity of the ocean seems to have encouraged the estab-
lishment of a multiplicity of institutions in the last decades. There also exist
a number of diasporic formations, some old, some new, whose lives have
been affected by local and regional politics. They add to the heterogeneous
character of the ocean. Thus the Karana, a Muslim community from India
that established itself in Madagascar, was forced by Malagasy governmental
policies to leave Madagascar. A majority came to Runion island but kept
contact with Madagascar, creating a new network of exchanges among the
islands. Recently, migrants from the Comoros islands have revivied Islam
in Runion island, while the presence of thousands of female guest work-
ers from the mainland needs to be studied if anyone wants to understand
the economy of Mauritius island. Yet what is notable is that East-South
connections and South-South connections can no longer be studied only
through the grid of governmental policies. Last summer, while doing eld-
work on Chinese diasporas in port cities of East Africa and islands of the
Indian Ocean, I noticed, for instance, the increasing number of health clinics
offering Chinese medicine in Dar es Salaam. Chinese medicine has become
positions 11:1 Spring 2003 250
very popular among the urban middle class because it offers an alternative
approach to Western medicine and seems to be closer to concerns expressed
by African views on health.
Thing, place, creature
Named, therefore known
Dom Moraes, ..,, 1990
If we look at the ocean as a cultural space, we observe layers on layers of
maps of power and resistance, which have created and still create identities,
narratives, and territories. It has been said that to identify and name a
place is to trigger a series of narratives, subjects and understandings.
17
It
also triggers mapsimagined, real, xed, inherited. Maps of friendship, of
love, of family history, of political solidarity, of connections with people we
will neither know nor wish to know, reied maps, dreamed maps, maps
of memories. Among these maps, the maps of slave trade and slavery drew
the rst routes of exchanges on the Indian Ocean. Slave trade and slavery
constituted a specic form of diasporic economy. They transformed ideas
about human resources, manual work, wealth, and status.
18
In the second
half of the nineteenth century, the regime of indentured work fostered
new networks, new maps of memories and identities.
19
Groups of Indians,
Chinese, and Muslims (from India) followed their indentured sisters and
brothers to the African coast and the southwest islands. Their groups built
networks of support, often specializing in a trade, either allowing for some
form of integration with other groups or maintaining more rigid barriers.
The identities of diasporic groups (Bohra andKarana inMadagascar, Zarabs
and Sinwa in Runion and Mauritius) were in tune with local and regional
transformations. Identities were never xed.
20
The change of occupationand
status through generations accounted for the transformation of identities, as
well as for whether or not members married outside the group. Colonial and
then postcolonial laws also affected their identities. In recent years, events
like the Middle East conict, the return of Hong Kong to the PRC, and the
emergence of Islamic politics have also impacted diasporic groups.
Inthe polycentric worldof late capitalism, informal transnational transac-
tions in the Indian Ocean have been reinforced. The emergence of regional
Vergs Writing on Water 251
powersIndia and South Africaand the discourse of globalization have
given new arguments to communities engaged in forms of diasporic econo-
my.
21
They felt justiedtoescape the control of states, whichhadshowntheir
incapacity to protect the interests of diverse groups andwhichembodiedcor-
ruption, graft, and a spirit of predation rather than entrepreneurship. The
innovation in communications has favored an increase in trade and com-
merce, facilitating the journeys of family members and individuals in the
name of maintaining time-bound ties, itineraries of connection, and paths
of informal transactions. Ma Mung has shown why diasporic communities
wish to maintain an autonomy vis--vis the state: this autonomy guarantees
the local and transnational reproduction of the group.
22
It must be noted that the Afro-Malagasy community has not beneted
greatly from the reconguration of identities. It is at this juncture that we
can foresee future erasures and inventions of tradition in the Indian Ocean
world. The slave trade andslavery participatedinthe junctures creation. In-
sisting on the world of pre- and postslavery diasporic formations constructs
a present in which the African-Asian world has put slavery into brackets,
as if it does not bear responsibility for slave trade, slavery, and other forms
of enslavement. Such forgetting marginalizes the processes of hybridity and
creolization produced thereby, concentrating on ties between civilizations
whose connections are set up in opposition to the Western world. Does this
opposition necessarily carry new possibilities, or does it lead to the civi-
lizationism that Kuan-Hsing Chen has criticized?
23
Chen has shown why
civilizationismthe connection, ctive or real, to a great civilization
recreates an ethnic hierarchy among the oppressed. On the islands of the
Indian Ocean, the connection with the civilizations from which the Creoles
originally cameIndia, China, Africa, Madagascarmust be studied in
connection with the processes of creolization through which they all went.
In other words, there is no glorious past to retrieve. Rather, one must explore
the endless working and reworking of the practices of borrowing, imitat-
ing, and appropriation from civilizations, keeping in mind the historical
displacements of centers and peripheries in which they operate.
To economists and military strategists, the Indian Ocean now represents
the new heart of the world. Western powers want to protect their ac-
cess to oil elds and wish to control the routes of oil through the Canal of
positions 11:1 Spring 2003 252
Mozambique. Regional powers seek to assert a strategy of marginalizing the
West through the constitution of a South-South corridor. New peripheries
are constructed.
Let us now look at some examples of formal and informal routes of
exchanges. Using the South-South rhetoric of cooperation between non-
European countries, Beijing has convinced regional countries to accept cul-
tural and economic investments. For instance, Beijing, which has paid en-
tirely for the Comoros TV headquarters, plans to reinforce cultural links
with the islands. It has set up a program of medical cooperation between
China and the Comoros. Chinese students have been sent to provide help to
African countries. Thirty of them interviewed by the c/ `/ D/, de-
claredinMarch2000that it was verymeaningful tohelpthe poor there.
24
A
fewyears ago, Beijing signed an agreement with the Mauritian government,
which needed workers for its free trade zone: female Chinese workers were
sent to work in the factories, living and working under very strict rules.
25
Unions could not make contact with them. In the local newspapers, there
were negative reports on the Chinese women, who prostituted themselves
and brought AIDS.
26
Capital from Singapore, Hong Kong, and South
Africa has nanced projects in the Seychelles, Mauritius, and Madagascar.
Insisting on the common bonds between Madagascar and Japan (islands
with an enlightened monarchy in the past, carriers of a distinctive culture
and civilization), Japan has established a number of programs on the island
(teaching Japanese, student exchanges, cooperation).
The restructuring of the Indian Ocean space has facilitated the emer-
gence of informal routes as well, which either reconstruct ancient routes
of exchange or create new ones. Direct ights between Antananarivo and
Singapore twice a week have reinforced informal economic connections be-
tweenthe twocountries. The Malagasy middle class nowshops inSingapore,
andnewnetworks of informal trade have emergedbetweenMadagascar and
Southeast Asia. Diasporic groups in South Africa, Runion, Comoros, Mau-
ritius, and Madagascar have seized these new opportunities, but states are
trying to control the diasporic economies and the emerging transcontinental
identities. Hence the Republic of India has launched an information cam-
paign targeting descendants of Indian indentured workers, telling them
Vergs Writing on Water 253
that they can visit their motherland without a visa and can establish busi-
nesses without having to fulll requirements for noncitizens. I have argued
elsewhere that these new links between diasporas, produced by indentured
work, colonialism, imperialism, andso-calledmotherlands threatenthe Cre-
ole African-Asian world of the Indian Ocean.
Though we are not yet able to foresee all the consequences of formal con-
nections, calls to civilizationism, as Chen has shown, present the danger of
xed identities and reinvented traditions, which support and reinforce the
claim of nation-states, rather than the transnational politics of cultural soli-
darity. As for the informal connections, they testify to the enduring character
of the Indian Ocean as a space of heterogeneous encounters.
The powers of SouthAsiaandEast Asiaare seekingtorecreate anAfrican-
Asian world as the site of a future non-European cultural and economic
matrix. New centers and new peripheries emerge through the construc-
tion of these African-Asian connections and exchanges. Powers turn to the
narrative of anexistingprecolonial worldtojustifya restructuringof transre-
gional ows and the integration of the island economies into Asian capital.
The discourse of South-South cooperation, as well as that of non-European
civilizationism, masks the establishment of new layers of inequalities. Yet
we are already observing the unforeseen consequences of these policies. The
decentering of Europe and the reconstruction of African-Asian links open
new possibilities for the revision of former politics of solidarity, the circula-
tion of narratives of resistance, alternative forms of hybridization, and the
creation of newpolitics of solidarity among the urban poor, peasants, artists,
and scholars. The connections between the urban poor in Bombay and Cape
Town, between trade unions in Madagascar and Malaysia, between musi-
cians in Mauritius and South Africa bespeak these emergent formations.
27
New writings on water.
Notes
1 I workedwithChristiane Rakotolahy of the University of RunionIsland, economist, political
scientist, and specialist of the Madagascan political system and its philosophy and represen-
tations; Solofo Randrianja, professor of history at the University of Tamatave, Madagascar,
specialist in the history of working-class and anticolonialist movements in the region; Zakir
positions 11:1 Spring 2003 254
Hussen, of Runion island, political representative and specialist of the Bohra community;
Hai Quang Ho, professor of economy at the University of Runion Island, author of books
on the economic history of the region; and Thierry Malbert, doctoral student in history at the
University of Runion Island.
2 Associated Press brief, Beijing, October 2000. On Sino-African cooperation, see www.fmprc.
gov.com; www.centrexnews.com; www.sino-projects.com; www.oneworld.org/ips2/; www.
chinese-embassy.org.uk; www.chamber.org.hk; and www.afrchn.com. At the Sino-African
Forum in October 2000, Chinese ofcials used an old Chinese saying to portray their
countrys relation with Africa: Distance cannot keep true friends away. China accounts for
58 percent of all investment in the African continent, though the trade volume between the
two sides remains modest ($6.5 billion in 1999).
3 Chinese ofcial reports do not describe the working and living conditions of workers on
these projects. Reportedly, hundreds among the 10,000 Chinese workers assigned to work on
the 1,850-kilometer railway between the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam and the Zambian
copper mines died from heat and exhaustion (www.oneworld.org/ops2/oct00/08).
4 See Mike Davis, !. ! !/ !/ ^ !. /. `/ / /. 7/ !/
(London: Verso, 2001). Davis shows how through a series of devicesfrom manufactured
famines to the establishment of a monetary systemthe West constructed a causal trian-
gle between ecological poverty, household poverty, and state decapitation, which led to the
emergence of a third world.
5 Arundhati Roy, 7/. c / !: (New York: Modern Library, 1999).
6 The Soviet Union and the PRC reintroduced forced labor and forms of enslavement.
7 Henri Lefebvre, 7/. ::/ / c,/ (London: Allison and Busby, 1976), and Lefeb-
vre, 7/. ! / ,. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). See also David Harvey, ,. /
!,. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Klaus Doods and David Atkinson,
C.,// 7 c., / C.,// 7// (London: Routledge, 2000); Edward
W. Soja, !. C.,/. 7/. !.. / ,. c/ / 7/., (London:
Verso, 1988). The work of Yves Lacoste and his journal !.. are also useful for the
understanding of space as socially and politically produced.
8 For instance, the conference Reasserting Connections, Commonalties, and Cosmopoli-
tanism: The Western Indian Ocean since 1800 at Yale University, 35 November 2000,
organized by Dodie McDow and Bruce McKim, and the ongoing Oceans Connect Project
at Duke University, directed by Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen.
9 Braudels study of the Mediterranean was very much biased toward its northern shores and
inhabitants. Braudel had no knowledge of the Berber and Islamic worlds of the southern
shores. Despite these biases, his insights have passed the test of time. See Fernand Braudel,
! ,. ,/. [The dynamics of capitalism] (Paris: Arthaud, 1985).
10 See Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson, ! /. ! O. .cc.cc (NewDelhi:
Oxford University Press, 1989).
Vergs Writing on Water 255
11 Frank Boeze, ed., !. / /. . !c. / / /. ./.c/ c.. (n.p.:
South Wales University Press, 1989), and Boeze, C.a, / !c. /. ./
.c/ c.. (London: Kegan Paul, 1997). Also see Nicolas Chittick, LAfrique de lEst et
lOrient: Les ports de commerce avant larrive des Portugais [East Africa and the Orient:
Port cities before the arrival of the Portuguese] (Paris: UNESCO, 1974), 19.
12 See Edward A. Alpers, The African Diaspora in the Northwestern Indian Ocean: Recon-
sideration of an Old Problem, ^.a D. / !../ c,:. . / /
/ /. `/. ! 17, no. 2 (1997): 6281; Kiri N. Chaudhuri, !./. !
,. !, c:/ / /. ! O. / /. !. / !/ .c (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990); Chaudhuri, 7. c:/ /. ! O.
! !, / /. !. / !/ .c (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985); Das Gupta and Pearson, ! /. ! O.; Richard Hall, !,. / /.
` !, / /. ! O. ! !:. (London: Harpers and Collins, 1998);
John Middleton, 7/. !/ / /. a// / `./. c:/. (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Laskhmi Subramanian, ed., 7/. !./ ! ! c
,, /. 7. / /. ! O. (Calcutta: Center for the Studies in Social Sciences,
1999); and Auguste Toussaint, !, / /. ! O., trans. June Guicharnaud (London:
Routledge,1966). The pioneering work of Hubert Gerbeau on the world of the slave trade
and slavery must also be noted; see Gerbeau, !. ./:. ! . /. /..
[Black slaves: For a history of silence] (Saint-Denis, Runion: Ocan Editions, 1998). For
readings on the mythologies in the Indian Ocean, see Sumathi Ramaswamy, Catastrophic
Cartographies: Mapping the Lost Continent of Lemuria, !.,.., no. 67 (summer
1999): 92129, and Jean-Claude Carpanin Marimoutou, La Lmurie: Un rve, une langue
[Lemuria: A bank, a language], c/. c!!!c!!O!, no. 6 (1990): 121131.
13 Edmond Maestri, !. /. . . /O. !. . / !. . .. ^ [The
islands of the southwest Indian Ocean and France from 1815 to today] (Paris: LHarmattan/
Universit de La Runion, 1994).
14 Paul Dussac was a colonial civil servant from Runion who served in Madagascar, where he
sided with the Malagasy against the French colonial power. Georges Garros, a colonial civil
servant serving in Indochina, wrote a pamphlet in which he denounced French colonialism.
Ren Maran, a Martinican colonial governor in West Africa, wrote a novel called !/,
whichwonthe Prix Goncourt in1921. See Philippe Dewitte, !. :.. `. . !.
.,.,.,, [Negro movements in France, 19191939] (Paris: LHarmattan, 1985); Michael C.
Lambert, From Citizenship to Ngritude: Making a Difference in Elite Ideologies of
Colonized Francophone West Africa, ., / c,:. , / ., !, 35,
no. 2 (April 1993): 239262; Tyler Stovall, ! ^ /. /. c, / !/
(NewYork: Houghton Mifin, 1996); Franois Manchuelle, Le rle des Antillais en Afrique
Noire francophone [The role of Antillais in francophone Africa], c/. .. /.,
positions 11:1 Spring 2003 256
no. 127 (1992): 375408; Ren Maran, !/ !.//. `. [Batoula: ANegro novel]
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1921).
15 Monoranjan Besboruah, ., /. ! O. 7/. !./ !.,. (New
York: Praeger, 1977); Moti Lal Bhargava, ! O. .. // /. . (NewDelhi:
Reliance PublishingHouse, 1990); R. Delcorde, !. .. . ,. /O.!.
[The game of superpowers in the Indian Ocean] (Paris: LHarmattan, 1993); Asok Kapur,
7/. ! O. !./ !./ !a. !/ (New York: Praeger, 1982).
16 Diego Garcia belongs to the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Its positionequidis-
tant from Africa, the Middle East, and Indiatransformed it into a very attractive site for a
military base during the cold war. In 1965, the British government proposed independence
to Mauritius under the condition that the former could keep the islands of the Chagos
archipelago. The British expelled the inhabitants of Diego Garcia to Mauritius and lent the
island to the United States, which transformed it into a military base, controlling the Indian
Ocean and its rims. It became a strategic base for the U.S. military during the cold war and
was used to supply its forces in the Red Sea and Vietnam. B-52 bombers were also stationed
on the island during the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Between 1966 and the early 1970s,
the Labour government of Harold Wilson evicted approximately 1,500 inhabitants of Diego
Garcia, Peros Banhos, and Salomon in a deal struck with the U.S. military. In return for
the islanders removal and exclusion from the British colony, London reportedly received an
eleven-million-dollar discount on the purchase of the U.S.-made Polaris nuclear weapons
system. In 1998, inhabitants of Diego Garcia launched a legal action in the London High
Court. In 2001, the court sided with the claim of the inhabitants of Diego Garcia, who are
expecting compensation and return to their island. The Unites States, however, do not wish
to abandon their base.
17 G. O. Tuathail and J. Agnew, Geopolitics and Foreign Policy: Practical Geopolitical Rea-
soning in American Foreign Policy, !// C.,/,, no. 11 (1992): 190204.
18 . //. /./:. (Antanarivo: n.p., 1997); Pier M. Larson, !, `.,
/. . / !/:.. !. `. !// ` .c... (Oxford: James
Currey, 2001); Sudel Fuma, !/:. . ,. !. . . .ccc !. !. .
/. . /// . ., / .. .. (Saint-Denis, Runion: Fondation
pour la recherche et le dveloppement dans lOcan Indien, 1982); Christiane Radinar-
ivo Rakotolahy, Empreintes de lesclavage dans les relations internationales, in !/:.
. c/ c//. . .,, (Le Port, Runion: CCT, 1998), 4578; Franoise
Vergs, Abolition et citoyennet and Traite des esclaves: Esclavage et abolition in D
/., no. 46 (May 1998): 1521, and 2224, resp.; Vergs, D. /./:. ,. (Paris:
Gallimard, 1998); Vergs, Une citoyennete paradoxale: Affranchis, coloniss et citoyens des
vieilles colonies, introductionto !// . /./:. / , /. . //.
(Brussels: Editions Complexe/Ligue des Droits de lHomme, 1998), 1747.
Vergs Writing on Water 257
19 Marina Carter and James Ng, ! /. !/a !/ ! !/ `
(Mauritius: Alfran, [1997]); Denis Lombard and Jean Aubin, eds., `/ . /.
//. . /O. !. . / `. . c/. (Paris: Editions de lEcole des hautas
tudes en sciences sociales, 1988); Hugh Tinker, ^.a ,. / /:., 7/. !, /
! !/ O:.. .c.,.c (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); Edith Wong-
Hee-Kam, ! , /. /. `.. (Paris: LHarmattan, 1996); Wong-Hee-
Kam, !.. / !.:/. . :./ ./:. (Saint-Denis, Runion: Ocean
Editions, 1998); Jean Rgis Ramsamy, !. . /. . /!/. . ! !.
(Saint-Denis, Runion: Azales Editions, 1999).
20 Zarabs and Sinwa are the names given in Creole language to the descendants of indentured
workers or migrants who came from the Indian subcontinent or Asia. Zarabs are Muslims
of the Indian subcontinent who emigrated during the second half of the nineteenth century.
They usually entered commerce and trade, specializing in fabrics, jewelry, and more recently
in household goods and cars. Sinwa came as indentured workers and traders, mostly from
the Canton region. They opened small grocery stores; their descendants today have become
professionals (doctors, pharmacists) or have opened the rst supermarkets on the islands.
Bohra and Karana are Muslim communities established in Madagascar, specializing in trade
and commerce. These communities are not homogeneous. There were, and are, class differ-
ences. If the majority of these communities members adopted a position of accommodation
vis--vis the colonial power and the postcolonial state, some members became active in the
unions, in anticolonial movements, and in cultural associations.
21 Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini, . !,. 7/. c// !/ / `.
c/.. 7/ (New York: Routledge, 1997).
22 Emmanuel Ma Mung, Dispositif conomique et ressources spatiales: elements dune econo-
mie de diaspora [Economic organization and spatial resources: elements of the economy of
the diaspora], !.:. !,... . ` !./. 8, no. 3 (1992): 175194.
23 Kuan-Hsing Chen, The Decolonization Question, in 7.. !. c//
., ed. Chen (London: Routledge, 1998), 156.
24 The quote can be found on www.fmprc.gov.com; www.centrexnews.com. It is interesting
to note that there seems to exist one vocabulary on aid, which leads its users to insist on
disinterestedness, on the purity of intentions of aid workers. Thus the economy of aid appears
as a pure exchange.
25 On free trade zones and female workers, see Uma Kothari and Vidula Nababsing, C..
!/. (Mauritius: Editions de lOcan Indien, 1996).
26 Conversations during visits in Indian Ocean in 2000, 2001, and 2002 with trade unionists,
economists, andcultural actors Ginette Ramassamy, CarpaninMartimoutou, Hia Quang Ho,
Loran Mdea, Dick Jeremy, Kwan Tat Louis-Oliver Bancoult, Patricia Day-Hookomsing,
and Danyel Waro.
27 These connections are being studied by Arjun Appadurai.