On Blue Economies: Afro-Asianism, Imperial Entanglements, Geopolitics
By Anneeth Kaur Hundle (UC Irvine)
This essay is part of a Vital Topics Forum on “Geopolitical Lives”
Televised live and broadcast by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC) and Doordarshan in Uganda and India, respectively, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Uganda in 2018 was the apogee of numerous high-level ministerial and diplomatic visits across Uganda and India that I had been tracking since 2005.[1] This visit was different, however. Modi delivered a cross–Indian Oceanic address on the “emerging blue economy” (referring to the Indian Ocean) at the Ugandan Parliament in Kampala. No Indian prime minister had ever done this before—not even Indira Gandhi, who had well-developed diplomatic relations with Uganda’s first head of state, Milton Obote, prior to the military coup led by Idi Amin and the 1972 expulsion of all South Asian communities.
How are South-South cooperation projects made meaningful, legible, and successful—especially in the context of fraught histories of national relationships like that of India and its diasporas and East African nations like Uganda? How exactly are nonliberal ideologies, practices, and histories of Afro-Asianism mobilized within the transregional circuits and networks of Indian Ocean connectivity? To what extent do we understand—or assume to understand—how Afro-Asianism is being mobilized within and across the transregional geographies of the Global South? Historian Christopher Lee (2010, 4) suggests that “Afro-Asianism” is “an ill-defined term that has signaled both a Cold War ideology of diplomatic solidarity as well as a more general phenomenon of intercontinental exchange and interracial connection.” In the United States and United Kingdom, other intellectual traditions related to Afro-Asianism excavate the histories and social and political movements of “Afro-Asian solidarity” across leftist and antiracist struggle.[2] In the Global South, scholars have recognized that revived histories, discourses, ideologies, and practices of Afro-Asianism demand more study (Burton 2012; Lee 2010). An anthropology of geopolitics offers an opening to studying the affective, cultural, racial, and gendered logics of Afro-Asianism—in this case, inside and outside the imagined boundaries of East African nations like Uganda and across the Western Indian Ocean arena.[3]
The media coverage of the televised address begins with Modi arriving from Kigali, Rwanda, to Entebbe Airport in an Air India airplane. A journalist celebrates the “Indian strongman,” and “big man in a big plane,” as he recites facts and figures about Uganda’s Indian diaspora community. There was also excitement about the revival of Uganda Airlines and the possibility of a forthcoming direct flight route between Entebbe and New Delhi, more deeply cementing South-South ties between the two nations. An entourage of Ugandan officials and the Ugandan Indian community—primarily Gujarati, and all men—greet Modi as he lumbers off the plane and ambles through the airport on a perfectly positioned red carpet. The camera cuts to Modi as he drives off on the Entebbe-Kampala highway in a luxury sedan. Then the camera pans across patriotic Indian and Ugandan flags, interlaced and intertwined, outside of the Parliament House in Kampala. Inside, a major cultural production and performance of Ugandan-Indian relations, and by extension, South-Southism and Afro-Asianism, is in progress.
This cultural politics of transregional Afro-Asianism depends upon pedagogical exercises and performances of cross-continental, cross-national, cross-cultural, and cross-racial cooperation. They require symbolic rituals that perform partnership, friendship, and brotherhood. They nostalgically recall histories of anti-imperialist and anticolonial solidarity, including Bandung and the NAM, Third World Socialisms, and Pan-Africanist movements. But as they reinvent histories in the service of newly exceptionalized ones—like the notion of an “emerging” Indian Ocean economy—state practices rely upon a historical politics of memory. This is a genre of political claims that insists on silencing and forgetting, even remaking the tensions, conflicts, and violences that belie nostalgia for anticolonial movements. These performances, directed at urban Ugandans and youth in the context of increasing popular protest against the Yoweri Museveni National Resistance Movement (NRM) government (in power since 1986), advance global governance norms of neoliberalism and Global South capitalisms, recasting Idi Amin’s military dictatorship as a spectacular and exceptional era of political crisis and economic decline.
Yet Amin’s Uganda is also a profoundly contested era in East African and South Asian diasporic imaginaries. The 1972 Asian expulsion is a global critical event that is bound up in populist critique of Indian subimperial complicities with British empire, quasi-settler-colonial presence, Indian economic and racial exploitation of indigenous Africans, and Indians’ lack of social integration with Africans—especially the community policing of interracial marriages and sexual liaisons between African men and Indian women. The afterlives of expulsion—both material and affective entanglements of intimacy, desire, estrangement, disavowal, and nonrecognition—persist across the transregional networks that connect East Africa, South Asia, and African Asian diasporic networks in Europe and North America.
Idi Amin’s vision of national decolonization advanced a critique of postcolonial racial capitalism and, ultimately and unfortunately, a nativist/rightist vision of a decolonized nation that resulted in the expulsion of its internal Others, an unrealized project of African socialism, and the turn to military dictatorship in the context of neo-imperialist processes (Mamdani 1984). More recently, I have assessed how the Yoweri Museveni–led National Resistance Movement (NRM) government has, since the mid-1990s, successfully incorporated elite Ugandan Asian family firms, other exiles, and new South Asian entrepreneurs as foreign investors and “partners in development” while maintaining a normative African (indigenous) majoritarian citizenship via liberal constitutionalism and performative acts of autochthonous African sovereignty and political authority (Hundle, forthcoming). The NRM has also been successful in cultivating political support among the Ugandan Asian and Indian capitalist classes on the basis of promises of racialized security. Thus, successive postcolonial governments in Uganda have drifted from policies of outright South Asian expulsion to both exclusion and incorporation amid the militarization and securitization of urban life (Hundle, forthcoming; Oloka-Onyango 2017).
An anthropology of geopolitics that broadens its scope to think through Afro-Asian entanglements, or what I define as the complex material, affective, temporal, and spatial scales of cross-racial interdependency, collaboration, intimacies, and estrangements that bind Africans and South Asians together—offers us clarity in understanding these rapidly shifting dynamics of governance, sovereignty, and citizenship. Global governance norms and nonliberal circulations, practices, and performances of African sovereignty and Afro-Asianism (South-South cooperation) assemble in novel ways to authorize the assertion of Indian capital, migration, and settlement, inaugurating new labor-capital relations between Africans and Indians. Bilateral trade conferences and high-level ministerial and diplomatic visits are ethnographic sites that reveal these ritualized performances of Afro-Asianism; they allow us to take on Afro-Asianism as a subject of ethnographic study, exploring the ways in which Afro-Asianism might be approached more capaciously by studying its circulation within specific networks in the Global South, including how they are being repackaged in novel, if nebulous and palatable, formulations. And, as Ghosh (this forum) observes, these ritualistic performances and practices not only are reflections of already-existing relationalities between states, nations, and citizen-subjects but also are constitutive of them as emergent practices. As such, they are also available for debate, critique, and contestation.
The proceedings begin with Ugandan parliamentarians, the Ugandan president and Indian prime minister (Museveni and Modi, respectively), the speaker of the house (Rebecca Kadaga), and guests standing for both the Ugandan and Indian national anthems, played by a Ugandan national marching band. Kadaga’s opening address notes the long “cordial and close ties” between Uganda and India, including the ways in which Uganda’s 1962 independence had been inspired by India’s freedom struggle. Kadaga notes that Indian settlers first moved into modern Ugandan territory in the nineteenth century and remarks that “Indians of African origin” have lived in peace and harmony with “their African brothers” throughout Ugandan history. Notably, she states that two Ugandans of “Indian extraction” and former PMs are guests here today, to which Ugandan MPs of multiple political parties clap their hands effusively. She observes that, of course, there was a “dark period of history during Amin” in which Indians were expelled and their properties confiscated by the government. There is no context as to why or how the expulsion occurred. Indian settler expulsion is rendered anomalous and exceptional. It is evidence of backwardness and an obstacle to progress in the long march of economic development. Kadaga then gestures to the president: “We thank our president who corrected this injustice, and who invited the Ugandan Asians to return and repossess their properties.”
Museveni also elaborates a long history of Ugandan-Indian relations. His discourse is much more intellectual and high-brow than Kadaga, as he cites the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea and maritime mercantile trade to establish Indian Oceanic/African-Indian connections more centrally in his speech. He delves into a lengthy analysis of the relative advantages and disadvantages of both Africa as a continental formation and India as a subcontinental formation in their respective anti-imperialist freedom struggles against the British and/or other European colonizers. Noting the successes of the National Resistance Movement (simply referred to as “the Movement”), he observes that “the long night of African marginalization and subjugation is over.” Pan-Africanist themes intersect with Afro-Asian ones, as he notes that Africans are “being conscious that they must act as one,” especially in regards to “the market.”
Most of the parliamentary proceedings are devoted to Modi. He remarks that the presence of young people in Uganda and in the parliament, including a female speaker of the house, is “good news for democracy.” Modi explicitly emphasizes “the ancient bonds of solidarity and friendship between our people.” He discusses the most sacred site of Jinja, the location of the source of the Nile in nearby Busoga, where some of Mohandas Gandhi’s ashes were immersed (because of cross–Indian Oceanic Gujarati kinship networks). In a voice that progressively picks up in tempo and volume, he pronounces that the Indian government will build a Gandhi Heritage Center/Convention Center at this site, to excited applause.
While Kadaga stresses that Africans were inspired by India’s freedom struggle, Modi reverses this formulation. He explains that the moral principles of “freedom, dignity, and opportunity” were not only confined to India but also applied to Africa, and that “India’s freedom was incomplete so long as Africa was in bondage.” The recalling of this Indian Oceanic Gandhian history, applied to Africa more broadly, sets the stage for Modi’s explicit conjuring of “Afro-Asian solidarity in Bandung” and “India’s firm opposition to apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia.” He notes that the enduring strength of Gandhian peaceful resistance can be found in Africa’s liberation struggles. It is here that Modi expertly transitions from solidarity in decolonization struggles to desires and aspirations for Global South capitalism. He explains that shared moral principles and emotional bonds are relevant to solidarity with a common cause of development among free nations: “We fought against colonial rule together, let us fight for material prosperity together.” He exclaims that “Uganda is an example of Africa on the move” and that “India is proud to be Africa’s partner—Uganda is central to our commitment.[4]
Modi’s visit exemplifies a new turn in our twenty-first-century understandings of Afro-Asianism and Afro-Asian entanglements. Africans (Ugandans) and Indians are not adversaries in racial and economic status but partners in Global South aspirations for development and prosperity. Uganda (and by extension, Africa) is recast as a frontier space and futures market for an infusion of Indian capital, replete with the potential for trickle-down opportunity for Ugandan citizens, and even the reterritorializing of Uganda with Indian monuments, such as the Gandhi Convention Center. Both Museveni and Modi articulate an anti-Western and anti-imperialist politics that builds on mid-century Bandung and Non-Alignment Movement resonances. These are historical visions of a “third way” or “third space,” autonomous from Western capitalism and Eastern-style socialism, yet repackaged and retooled as Global South neoliberal capitalism.
Modi-era state practices of Afro-Asianism celebrate India and Indianness through the project of diasporic Hindutva. Indian/Hindu supremacy is fashioned into a modernizing, developmental, and civilizational force in East Africa. In Uganda, South Asian settlement is once again becoming possible in a nation that continues to strongly police the boundaries of insiderness and outsiderness through racial logics and the postcolonial politics of Africanization and de-Indianization. However, as much as Afro-Asian partnership, friendship, and fraternal sodality are being celebrated, African anxieties surrounding Indian subimperialism, economic exploitation, and Indian sources of civilizational and racial superiority to Africans persist. In one instance of the speech, Museveni takes pains to assert the particular challenges of European imperialist expansion facing the African continent as compared to the Indian subcontinent, as if to mitigate nationalist feelings of shame and embarrassment surrounding Uganda’s less successful development trajectory in comparison to India, and to assert the superiority of his own revolutionary and militarized self in relation to Modi’s masculinist and strongman persona.
Social media commentaries also betray Ugandan viewers’ ambivalences surrounding this new turn in Afro-Asian entanglements. One YouTube commentary is particularly instructive. “I hope the Indians will totally change their attitude, calling [Ugandan] nationals boys, and [sic, their] discriminating status, building separate schools, like in the past. Plus hiring their own Indians in preference to native Ugandans. The result of it ended up kicking them out of Uganda by fearless Amin. In general, humans need to live together as one. If they are dreaming to become Ugandan [sic, n]ationals, they must allow Africans/Ugandans to marry their women without hindrance. My opinion.” The commentator visibilizes that which is invisibilized in public performances of Afro-Asian solidarity and partnership: Indian sources of anti-Black/African racism, casteism, and colorism, including the maintenance of Indian racial and caste-based community endogamy through marriage practices and Ugandan men’s patriarchal assertions about the sexual inaccessibility of Indian women to African men. Here, Indian claims to Ugandan citizenship and belonging, including economic entitlements, must entail both social integration and other registers of exchange and reciprocity with Ugandans. This includes sexual reciprocity, or the exchange of women from each other’s communities (unstated and unexpressed here is the presumption that Indian men have sexual access to African women). These subaltern “intimate geopolitics” (Smith 2020) are often unspoken and undergird the official and diplomatic state-led performances of Afro-Asianism.
The ceremonial proceedings at the Parliament House marshal nonliberal histories of Afro-Asianism into urban publics and digital/virtual spheres. They are masculinist in nature. They promote interracial and continental connection through shared histories and geographies of solidarity and partnership among Global South strongmen, even while they occasionally celebrate the inclusion of women within their initiatives. Afro-Asianism is now about partnership in a transregional Global South project of late capitalism, militarism, securitization. These emergent projects authorize heteropatriarchal authoritarianism in the name of freedom, democracy, and development across the Global South. They refashion the figure of the Indian in East Africa as a global, cosmopolitan, and futurist figure, primarily as a Hindu businessman and, as a representative of Hindutva (see Kaur 2020; Van der Veer 2005). They reveal the morphing and strengthening nature of the transnational Indian capitalist class and Indian/Hindutva subimperialist formations, even as they are contested by African popular sovereignties.
While some commentators have noted that Afro-Asian solidarities remain at best an elusive, idealized, and nostalgic project, and at worse an overly romanticized one, it is now clear that postcolonial elites are remaking Afro-Asianism—and by extension, Global South futures—on their own terms and to their own ends. The need to continually perform state productions of Afro-Asian partnership, friendship, and fraternal sodality might also indicate the off-stage yet actually existing, unresolved nature of these entanglements across time and space and in the popular memory and consciousness, embodied encounters, and everyday registers of Afro-Asian worlds that persist in these locations (despite the era of high nationalism, decolonization, and Indian exodus from East Africa). An anthropology of geopolitics that contends with the frictions and tensions within emergent Afro-Asian projects offers us possibilities for ethnographically dwelling with and in the complexities of co-optation (Roy 2017) and what Biodun Jeyifo (1990) has described as “arrested decolonization.” And by centering the continually unfolding and contextualized nature of constructs and practices of Afro-Asianism in our ethnographic work and through the conceptual language of entanglement, we can be more attentive to the transforming nature of power. We might then be able to directly confront the ways in which postcolonial intellectuals and the liberal-left within the US academy still tend to romanticize both Afro-Asianism and Afro-Asian solidarities in both Global North and South contexts.
References Cited
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Hundle, Anneeth Kaur. Forthcoming. Insecurities of Expulsion: Race, Violence, Citizenship and Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transregional Uganda.
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Van der Veer, Peter. 2005. “Virtual India: Indian IT Labor and the Nation-State.” In Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World, edited by Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, 276–90. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Notes
[1]This analysis is based on my second viewing of the mediatized address on YouTube in Spring 2021, in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqaBgs76UGM&t=3s.
[2] See, for example, Brah (1996), Ho and Mullen (2008), and Prashad (2001), among many others.
[3] BRICS is a geopolitical bloc that emphasizes economic and political cooperation between India, China, Brazil, and South Africa. For more context on “South-South cooperation” or “southern globalization,” see Cheru and Obi (2010), Gudavarthy (2009), and Bond and Garcia (2015).
[4] Modi offered two lines of credit to Uganda ($141 million for electricity infrastructural development and $64 million for agricultural and dairy production), as well as a commitment to assistance in military defense training, helping to consolidate the NRM’s state practices of neoliberal developmental authoritarianism.
Cite As
Hundle, Anneeth Kaur. 2022. “On Blue Economies: Afro-Asianism, Imperial Entanglements, Geopolitics.” American Anthropologist website, August 4.