8 - Africans and the Gulf: Between Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism

Summary

Visitors to the popular Al-Satwa quarter of Dubai are frequently treated to Laiwa performances by local musical and dance troupes. Most of these Laiwa performers, who have an identifiable African appearance, do not identify themselves as African. Ethnomusicologists agree that Laiwa is an African import, but French ethnomusicologist Maho Sebiane's interviews with members of the quarter's performers’ association indicate that most identify themselves as Baluchi (from the Province of Baluchistan) rather than African, and most share the same last name, Al-Baluchi. Sebiane calls the performers an ‘enigma’ – their appearance is African, but their surname implies an Asiatic origin. Language provides little assistance, as the performers are as likely to speak some Baluchi, Hindi and Urdu in addition to their first language of Arabic, and they tend to know only the few Swahili words included in the songs they perform. Sebiane hypothesises that freed slaves may have taken the surnames of their masters, who may have been Baluchi or ‘ajam immigrants from across the Gulf. Alternatively, he speculates that the ancestors of these performers may have settled first on the Irano-Pakistani coast before making a second migration to the Arab coast and valuing their Baluchi migration experience more highly than their African origins. Still another possibility is that the performers have chosen to call themselves Baluchi in an effort to deliberately obscure their African ancestry. A similar phenomenon occurs elsewhere in the Gulf. Anie Montigny finds that in Qatar, descendants of enslaved Africans identify as Arab rather than as African and claim lineages of prominent Qatari tribes.

Sebiane's and Montigny's research highlights a challenge facing historians of the African diaspora in the Gulf: unlike with many other branches of the global African diaspora, identification with Africa is not a common feature among the descendants of enslaved Africans in Arabia. In fact, today, many of the characteristics associated with diasporic identity, including ‘a collective memory and myth about the homeland … an idealization of the supposed ancestral home’ and ‘the presence of a return movement or intermittent visits to home’ are absent among many established members of the African diaspora in Arabia. This chapter explores the question of African identity in the Gulf.