copyrighted material 7113756366 · 1 introduction cosmopolitanism and creolization in the indian...

Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xv

1 Introduction 1

2 Revisiting the Creole Port City 41

3 The Malabar Coast (Kerala) and Cosmopolitanism 57

4 Revisiting Creoles and Other Languages in the Lusophone Indian Ocean 89

5 (Dis)connections in Macau and Melaka: Constructing a Lusophone Indian Ocean 115

6 The Muslim and Portuguese Indian Ocean: A Reappraisal of Cosmopolitanism in the Early Modern Era 135

7 Conclusion 167

Notes 179

References 197

Index 215

Copyrighted material – 9781137563668


THE PORTUGUESE IN THE CREOLE INDIAN OCEAN

Copyright © Fernando Rosa 2015

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1

Introduction

Cosmopolitanism and Creolization in the Indian Ocean

There are some very intriguing histories of the Indian Ocean. One such history is related to a former colonial harbor city, namely, Durban, in South Africa, enmeshed as it is in both Indian Ocean histories and histories that are perhaps not directly related to the Indian Ocean. Though Durban is undoubtedly an Indian Ocean port city, as a harbor it is also very much a colo-nial product, with almost no Indian Ocean precolonial history as far as I know (in this sense, it is a far cry from the port cities of the Swahili coast, for instance, discussed later). Also, nowa-days it is clearly a city where the vast majority of inhabitants speak isiZulu, and where there is a substantial Indian minor-ity and even a tiny Zanzibari one, besides, of course, a white minority and a “Colored” one as well. The Zanzibaris and Indians may link Durban to very ancient processes of Indian Ocean creolization that are not necessarily colonial. As com-mon sense would have it, the Indians and Zanzibaris (and at least some of the “Coloreds” and whites) would be enmeshed in Indian Ocean–connected histories, and oceanic processes of creolization, whereas the speakers of isiZulu in town would arguably not be enmeshed in these histories, or at least not to the same degree. For instance, the notion of isiZulu as an Indian Ocean language is somewhat peculiar, to say the least. Nonetheless, the fact remains that isiZulu is obviously the most



2 The Portuguese in the Creole Indian Ocean

widely spoken language in the city, a position that it has occu-pied for a very long time now (in fact, since precolonial times, when there was no port city. eThekwini is Durban’s isiZulu name). I begin with Durban here because it is a good illustra-tion of both the advantages and the limitations of using oceanic connections as a framework for historical interpretation, the Indian Ocean being a central theme in this book.

Let us, for instance take a cursory look at the work of Isaiah Shembe (see Gunner 2003). Shembe was the founder of a famous African church, namely, the church of the AmaNazaretha or the Nazareth Church. He was a visionary and a religious leader. He was also illiterate. Besides, for several years in the first decades of the twentieth century, he worked as a steve-dore on Durban’s wharves. Even if only indirectly, his is also somehow an Indian Ocean life. Pearson (2012) mentions the thorny problem of understanding cosmopolitanism historically in the ocean’s many port cities. Driessen’s (2005) is another critical voice, this time in what concerns cosmopolitanism in Mediterranean port cities. Pearson indicates that, though there are some critical voices, quite a few scholars simply assume that the ocean’s port cities were cosmopolitan almost as a matter of course. Nonetheless, he points out that almost everywhere, most people, even in famous Indian Ocean port cities, were very much local. That is, not only did they stay on land, but they also did not necessarily speak languages any outsiders could under-stand. Besides, they did not obviously profit from the undoubt-edly cosmopolitan world of the ocean, nor were they in any clear way directly involved with it. It must be added nonethe-less that at least some of them might have at times lived off the ocean in one way or another, not unlike Shembe in his early years in Durban when he worked as a stevedore. Whether or not oceanic connections are at stake, describing cosmopolitanism within the ocean—another important theme in this book—is not always easy.

In Senegambian history, to now take an example from another African littoral, this time in the Atlantic Ocean, various populations creolized through the centuries, and their origins were partly oceanic, even though nowadays they are arguably



Introduction 3

as African—and as local—as any other group (for instance, as in the case of a couple of Portuguese Creole populations—see Mark 2002). In fact, even the most obviously creolized popula-tions in coastal colonial enclaves—for instance, the island of Gor é e or the harbor of Saint-Louis-du-S é n é gal—have histori-cally used Wolof rather than French (for a local contemporary description from the nineteenth century, see Boilat 1994; see also my discussion in chapter 2 and in Fernando Rosa 2012). This happened in spite of the fact that Senegambia, not wholly unlike the Swahili coast, had more than a few Muslim trad-ers and savants coming to it since precolonial times (though, differently from the Swahili coast, they usually came over-land). Atlantic and Indian Ocean studies scholars are naturally enough quite fascinated by the oceanic connections—and the people and communities most obviously involved with them. Nevertheless, the comparatively little connected, or, even to this day, largely or wholly unconnected, have also been present even at the busiest ports, and often in very large numbers too, as Pearson (2012) for instance has reminded us. This issue is at the heart, especially in the study of littorals and their linked hinterlands, of any scrutiny of creolization, another theme of this book.

Take Melaka (Malacca), for instance, once a great Indian Ocean emporium, and now a Malaysian provincial city (from where incidentally I am now writing these lines). There are fascinating communities in the city, most of which have com-plex oceanic connections (see chapter 5 ). Some are still around, whereas others have become less visible—the Jawi Peranakan, for instance, who descended from Muslim Indian traders and local women, or the Arab Peranakan (wholly invisible today, it is my impression), and an Arab Creole community to which the famous Munshi Abdullah belonged (see my brief discus-sion of him in chapter 6 ). There are also the Chetties (or, for some people, Chitties), descendants of Indian (Hindu) trad-ers and local women, or the Baba Peranakan (also known as Baba Nyonya), the Straits’ Chinese community, descendants of traders from China, and, again, local women. Last but not the least, the Melaka Portuguese are also a local Creole community




(if the reader is wondering about all these outsiders marrying local women a very long time ago, see discussion later).

There were therefore people who crossed the ocean to come here, a long time ago; but there were also the people who crossed over from Sumatra, on the other side of the Straits (nowadays just a short ferry ride away), including traders as well as slaves, mercenaries, peasants, and others. Some came down from the Minangkabau highlands, crossed over, and established them-selves in the interior of Melaka, and in neighboring Negeri Sembilan, where their descendants still live (traditionally some-how matrilineal and Muslim, in an officially quasi-Islamic and therefore patrilineal country). Are the Minang an Indian Ocean diaspora or perhaps a more localized, Straits of Melaka one? But then can we think of the Straits of Melaka minus the ocean? These questions are both difficult to answer and hard to avoid. It is also apposite to note here that the Minang are not normally considered to be a Peranakan or Creole popula-tion. Interestingly, though they came from across the Straits, the Minang ensconced themselves in the mountainous interior, just as they did in Sumatra (whereas Peranakan and Creole commu-nities, with their obvious, glaring connections with the Indian Ocean, are invariably associated with the city, especially with its historic quarters). The Portuguese therefore acquired quite a few menancabo (as they called them) subjects when they conquered Melaka, though they did not live in the port city itself, but lived upstream from Melaka proper (Pinto 2012: 212). All of them were furthermore designated as “Moors,” not unlike the traders and others in the city itself, though they were not Minang but often Javanese, South Asians, and others. The Minang are, how-ever, an almost invisible diaspora of the Indian Ocean (except within parts of Nusantara itself, such as Sumatra, Peninsular Malaysia, and Java). At any rate, it is certainly a much less prom-inent Indian Ocean diaspora than the Hadhramis, for instance, historically also present in Melaka, as is evident from the family of Munshi Abdullah, Melaka’s most famous man of letters (see Abdullah Abdul Kadir 2009 and Engseng Ho 2006, as well as Sumit 2012). Somehow, the Hadhramis are, so to speak, a chic diaspora, as compared to other groups.



Introduction 5

Another related issue is that there is the city—especially the historic center (where I am right now)—and then there is the interior. The latter is overwhelmingly Malay today (though, as is evident from the Minang, this designation historically hides a great variety), whereas the city remains mostly Chinese (in fact, Chinese preponderance is a recent demographic phenomenon dating back to only the nineteenth century). Reading Pinto (2012) and Thomaz (2000), we notice nonetheless that after the Portuguese takeover of Melaka in 1511, probably at no point did the Malay or Muslim population return to the inner city in very large numbers as permanent residents, though of course, they are present today, even as residents, in spite of their com-paratively small numbers (workers and day visitors are of course another matter. In Portuguese colonial times, there was a very large number of apparently temporary traders, such as the Javanese. Incidentally, the Javanese—and other inhabitants of Indonesia—still keep coming to the city to this day, both as visi-tors and to work and live here). The unfortunate tendency in this case is to assign the Malays to the ulu , that is, the headwaters or upstream course of the Melaka River, and leave the city to bask in Indian Ocean glory. Perhaps revealingly and also unsur-prisingly, a traditionally Malay area of town is exactly around the Masjid Kampung Hulu, or “Mosque of the Ulu Village,” incidentally one of the oldest mosques in the country, dating back to the time when the Dutch ruled (at least one local oral tradition assigns its construction to a Chinese survivor from a shipwreck who later converted to Islam, apparently in gratitude for having been saved by locals). Another old mosque in town is the Masjid Kampung Kling, or “Mosque of the (South) Indian Village,” a mere stone’s throw away from Masjid Kampung Hulu. The existence of these two historic mosques, practically within sight of each other, and whose official names point one toward the interior, the other toward the Bay of Bengal, is food for thought, and is also an illustration of the complexity we are dealing with here. Munshi Abdullah’s modest family house, still standing, is right next to Masjid Kampung Kling.

Of course, the Malays were behind the overthrowing of the famous sultanate by the Portuguese. This event is memorialized




in the local Maritime Museum in Melaka, built in the shape of a real-size Portuguese nau (carrack or Indiaman), not to men-tion the reconstructed and magnificent royal palace nearby that reminds us through its exhibits that openly glorify the former sultanate-cum-Indian Ocean emporium. But that was long ago. Naturally, viewing the Malays as local, while everybody else is supposedly of outside origin, is a politically explosive issue in today’s Peninsular Malaysia, to say the least. The politi-cally correct view perhaps is that everybody is a local; or that, conversely, everybody came from outside (even if it was only from Sumatra, Java, and other neighboring islands), except for small indigenous populations called Orang Asli , a designation of apparently colonial concoction, bringing together the Malay (and Austronesian) orang (people) and the Arabic asli (original). The matter is complex. Kahn for instance has shown that there is also a good deal of cosmopolitanism in the Malay world, and therefore the image of Malays as merely local is at best problematic, at worst inaccurate (Kahn 2006; for greater his-torical depth, see also Andaya 1993, Milner 2008, and Andaya 2008, besides chapter 6 ). My intention here, rather than settling the issue once and for all, is merely to highlight how fiendishly complex matters can be, especially when Indian Ocean cosmo-politanism intersects with various localized histories, as is more often than not the case. Melaka incidentally features promi-nently in chapters 5 and 6 .

In Kerala, such issues are usually not nearly so ethnicized as they are in Malaysia (see chapter 3 , as well as Devika 2012 and Nandy 2002: 157–209). Its ancient, famously well-integrated, religious minorities—Muslims and Christians, and in the past, even Jews, in relation to the overall local population, no doubt some of India’s largest religious minorities—have age-old Indian Ocean connections, spanning the length and breadth of the Middle East (the Arabian Peninsula, and today’s Palestine/Israel, Syria, and Iraq, as well as Iran). Nandy (2002) in particu-lar talks about an “alternative cosmopolitanism” that would have taken root in Cochin. Devika (2012) has a view of the matter that is indirectly critical of Nandy’s, pointing out the highly caste-ridden and therefore hierarchical nature of Kerala’s



Introduction 7

historical cosmopolitanism. In fact, “Malayalee” seems a cat-egory that is somehow reminiscent to that of “Swahili” (see dis-cussion below), that is, it is a category that creates inclusions as much as exclusions, within a system that Kresse, referring to Mombasa, has called “ethnocentric” (2007). At any rate, a Malayalee is usually considered to be a speaker of Malayalam, an inhabitant of the strip of coast now called Kerala, though the category is historically recent (see for instance Arunima 2006 and the discussion in Rosa 2014).

This conflation of territory, language, and ethnicity, not to mention religion, seems to be a nineteenth-century creation that became almost paradigmatic in the twentieth century. Of course, Malayalees—or at least people from the Malabar Coast—have crossed to colonial Burma and Malaya, besides older, precolonial crossings that no doubt have also taken place, though the evidence is somewhat more difficult to trace than in the case of the many crossings carried out from the Coromandel Coast (see, however, Devika 2012; for the Bay of Bengal, see Amrith 2013). While carrying out research in Kerala in 2009, my impression of large swathes of the land was of an astonishingly beautiful, often watery country (though there are plenty of hills as well), mostly inhabited by small farmers, agricultural laborers, artisans, small traders, and vari-ous communities traditionally devoted to fishing (now a dying craft). The landscape and the lifestyle were at times eerily reminiscent of those of stretches of the Brazilian coast. There are even Catholic churches peppered among the villages and coconut groves just as back home (incidentally, I am Brazilian). The people are, therefore, what in Nusantara are called orang kecil ( wong cilik in Javanese), namely, the “small people,” that is, common folk. However, this designation is misleading. As the vast numbers of Malayalees currently working in the Gulf indicate, crossing the ocean is not the prerogative of only the educated or the wealthy.

Devika (2012) in particular indicates, at least during the colonial era, that common folk also crossed over to colonial Ceylon, Burma, and Malaya, making the picture of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism a very complex one, not just one of




historic—and locally prestigious—cosmopolitanism pointed out by Nandy (2002). Incidentally, the latter also indicates a cosmopolitanism that is “ethnocentric,” that is, it does not preclude prejudice against others who are nonetheless also ter-ritorially insiders. That it also discriminates on the basis of caste, as Devika (2012) indicates, approximates it even more to the Swahili model as described by Kresse (2007), and briefly discussed below.

In political philosophy and critical studies, nonetheless, cos-mopolitanism is often depicted as being a potentially universalist perspective, often centered on the individual and individual lib-erty, whose great theoreticians are traditionally Enlightenment philosophers such as Kant and, further back in time, Greeks and others. It is hard not to suspect from the material briefly expounded so far, that this perspective somehow does not apply to the Indian Ocean, at least not to its precolonial ava-tar. All the same, it is hard to deny that if cosmopolitanism somehow also means being at home in the world, and implies a measure of (freedom of) movement, and assumes more than a little tolerance for difference, then the Indian Ocean is hardly a placid, provincial pond. This book intends partially to explore this tension within oceanic cosmopolitanism, that is, a tension between a theoretical and philosophical outlook that is iden-tified with the West, and historical settings and related prac-tices that are very ancient and supposedly not Western as such (though, as in the case of Kerala and the historical Malabar Coast, Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been local inhabit-ants since such remote times that they cannot be dated with precision; see chapter 3 ).

Littoral Histories of Creolization and National Histories

Though the Madagascar-Nusantara link is now hardly an obscure connection, it is nonetheless also one bringing in incred-ibly complex—as well as quite remote—histories of creoliza-tion, both on the African coast and in Nusantara itself, besides other places. Also, the African littoral chapter of Malagasy



Introduction 9

history is arguably just as important, as Adelaar again inti-mates, as the inevitably more appealing long-distance, oceanic one. The fact that the Nusantara ancestors of the Malagasy may have been, at least in part, serfs or slaves on Malay fleets sailing out of ancient Sriwijaya on the Straits of Melaka (as it turns out, the first avatar of Melaka as a trading empire) is eerily reminiscent of their later fate in the Indian Ocean during the modern age of colonial slavery. Again, creolization here—both in a very ancient and a much more recent version—seems to be strongly linked to serfdom and slavery (Campbell 2004 and 2005). The Malagasy therefore have shared in the fate of Africans in the Indian Ocean (and the Atlantic, as they were often also traded in the Americas and in Cape Town) in more ways than one.

In this manner, it is quite apposite that Madagascar also appears in an Atlantic context, giving the lie, at least in his-torically recent times, to any trenchant division between both oceans. It is therefore not surprising that Hofmeyr, for instance, in a completely different domain, that is, in her study of the amazing spread of missionary and other translations of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-ries in over one hundred different languages, begins her account with Madagascar, though most of what follows is set both in Africa and in what she calls the “Protestant Atlantic.” Not unlike South Africa, therefore, Madagascar (as well as Mozambique) is a location where in fact very complex connected oceanic his-tories come together and hybridize (Hofmeyr 2004). At least for the colonial era, Indian Ocean and Atlantic histories are hardly disconnected, a phenomenon that we will encounter particu-larly in the connected histories of the old Portuguese colonial world (see below and chapters 3 and 5).

The Indian Ocean turns out to be quite complex, in compari-son to the Atlantic, because its connected histories often exhibit much greater historical depth, to the point that it is at times difficult to gauge with accuracy different histories of mobility across the ocean (the Malagasy are, in this way, only one of the most famous cases). What does this teach us, if anything? The first important point, I believe, is that the ocean’s processes




of creolization are so multilayered, ancient, and therefore complex, that today’s movements of people across it, no mat-ter how important, seem by comparison almost adventitious. For instance, the Malagasy middle-class visitors who cross the ocean today to go shopping or on vacation to Singapore are in fact retracing the steps of some of their distant ancestors. This is food for thought, to say the least. The increasing num-bers of southern African students in Peninsular Malaysia (both from Botswana and South Africa, at least some of whom speak isiZulu) are possibly not retracing the steps of any ancestors. However, considering the far-flung connections of the Tang Dynasty (sixth to ninth century CE), for instance, and, further-more, its close association with Sriwijaya and its trade, noth-ing is impossible here (see Lewis 2009). Besides, Africans were certainly not unknown in Tang China. Moreover, as Pearson (1998b) indicates, a region just slightly to the north of Botswana and South Africa—today’s Zimbabwe and the Zambezi river basin—clearly had strong connections to the Indian Ocean, via coastal traders coming into the interior, until at least just before the time of the Portuguese. These connections, in fact, went all the way to Ming China (incidentally also a major player in the history of the Straits of Melaka).

The comparative invisibility of ancient and past connections of course comes out strongly when we look at various national histories across the length and breadth of the Indian Ocean. These more often than not leave Indian Ocean histories entirely out of scope, as is famously the case in Malaysia, for instance (a country that has arguably comparatively little history that is not, directly or indirectly, Indian Ocean history). As a matter of fact, studies including local historiographies, be they national or local, on the one hand, and Indian Ocean histories on the other, seem to be comparatively rare. That is, the two strands of his-toriography do not seem to converse. Simpson (2006: 162), who is concerned with a part of coastal Gujarat, namely, Kachchh, puts the problem in a nutshell, saying that it

is peculiar that debates on indigenous perceptions of history, social hierarchy, nationalism, learning and religious movements



Introduction 11

have been sidelined in oceanic studies when such debates are flourishing in the social science of South Asia and East Africa. It is almost as if, by taking a comparative or connected approach to interactions between the two landfalls, the activities, preoc-cupations and political engagements of those on the shore have been eclipsed from view. In part, this is probably due to the methodological considerations and resources available to the historian. Archives, logs and mercantile records produce an impression of the human movement on which the historian’s thesis rests, but only in very rare instances do we get a glimpse of what travel meant to people, how they experienced life in foreign ports and what they did with such resources upon their return home. Struggling against this tide, Michael Pearson has proposed the history of the Indian Ocean is best approached through the concept of littoral society (1985) and that the Ocean is not bound together by some nebulous notion of commonality (2000, 2003). He points to regionalism as one expression of this and to the bonds of similarity shared between Muslims to the exclusion of others as another.

It is perhaps apposite to add here that Pearson himself also men-tions Vink’s proposal that the historian should concentrate on people as an organizational principle to construct histories of the Indian Ocean, rather than more pedestrian and well-beaten tracks, such as material cultures, valuable as these certainly are (Pearson 2011a: 81; Vink 2007). Later, I will try and briefly sketch a people-centered approach in what concerns parts of the Lusophone Indian Ocean (see also chapter 5 ), showing that it is in fact quite useful. This of course does not mean that approaches centered on material culture are not equally compel-ling (see for instance Barnes 2005 for some arresting essays on Indian textiles in various parts of the ocean).

The “littoral” may be a concept that allows for some flexibil-ity here, as it potentially opens up a space where both oceanic vistas and more land-based, localized ones can be integrated (including, perhaps, various nationalist perspectives). We could venture it as a kind of grey zone, both geographically and his-toriographically. Accordingly, Pearson elaborates on the issue of littoral society. In particular, he stresses that, even though




littoral societies cannot be thought of separately from the ocean, nor are they necessarily oceanic as such:

This article will be consciously tentative and problem oriented. It makes the case that there is such a thing as littoral society, that is, that we can go around the shores of an ocean, or a sea, or indeed the whole world, and identify societies that have more in common with other littoral societies than they do with their inland neighbors. (Pearson 2006: 354)

Furthermore, he says that:

One way to separate out littoral from port city is to insist that littoral people live on the coast and seldom travel. Some people in the port cities—sailors, merchants—indeed go to sea and have important maritime experiences, but my concern is with fisherfolk, or people who tend the lighters that go out to meet the big ships. These folk live on shore, but work on the sea: they are very precisely littoral. (Pearson 2006: 356)

In this sense, we could say that Shembe, mentioned above, for instance, was part of the littoral, at least during a certain period of his life, that is, when he worked as a stevedore in Durban. The cosmopolitanism of such people and, furthermore, their inser-tion in the ocean and its cosmopolitan circuits, is no easy mat-ter, as Pearson points out again (Pearson 2012). Accordingly, Simpson, for instance, proposes in his work that

Although abstract notions of space and time inevitably figure here, it is the nature of the self, elaborated with social relations with other people, which forms the base metaphor through which all else, including the Indian Ocean, is understood. (Simpson 2006: 164)

Simpson’s approach seems more than slightly reminiscent not only of Pearson’s (and Vink’s) proposal of an Indian Ocean his-tory centered on people, but also of notions of the subject opened up by oceanic processes of creolization as posited by Verg è s (2010). It is also perhaps pertinent to bring up the importance



Introduction 13

of geographically transitional areas such as littorals and islands in oceanic processes, a point that is made in a particularly poi-gnant way by Verg è s. She, in fact, indicates that Indian Ocean processes of creolization (say, in both islands and coasts) allow for conceptions of the subject that are not those of imperial sov-ereignty, as they are not essentialist or fixed. Creolization, how-ever, is not usually brought up in Indian Ocean histories, though it is a fairly common concept in Atlantic histories. It is therefore worth pausing to take a better look at the phenomenon.

There have been so many theories on creolization that, at times, it may be somewhat difficult or tricky to find one’s way through a good deal of the literature. A concept historically born in the Americas (possibly from Portuguese crioulo , mean-ing a person, plant, or animal born in the Americas, but having outside ancestry), and used particularly in the Caribbean to this day, it has often been torn between highly localized usages (in my own country, for instance, crioulo is now mostly a derogatory term to designate blacks; in Martinique, in the French Antilles, it is still used to imply locals mostly of European ancestry; in Suriname, it was once used to designate some groups of coastal blacks as opposed to maroons living in the interior, but is now often used for both populations), and increasingly very delo-calized ones, as in the well-known work of Ulf Hannerz, for instance, where it can be applied to various aspects of modern globalized life. In between such poles of extremely provincial and completely uprooted, supposedly cosmopolitan usage, one also finds works such as that of Edouard Glissant’s (see below), issuing from the heart of the Caribbean, but nonetheless posit-ing creolization as having a very broad human scope.

Unsurprisingly, considering the enormous heterogeneity of views issuing forth from fields as varied as linguistics (inciden-tally the first discipline to have applied the term in its domain well over one hundred years ago—see Baker and M ü lh ä user 2007) and literary studies, not to mention history and ethnology, the term has come under very heavy criticism (see, for instance, Palmi é ’s (2006) well-reasoned critique—he is an anthropologist specialized in the Caribbean). In fact, even a somewhat cursory look over the field may leave an impression of almost hopeless




diversity in what concerns both theorization and application (see C é lius 2000; and Stewart 2010). My objective here is not doing a literature review (for this, see Palmi é 2006, C é lius 1999, and Stewart 2010, and also Chaudenson 2001); nor exactly picking my own preferred angle from the almost dizzying array of perspectives available. Furthermore, mine is not a salvage operation either; that is, I am not concerned with extricating the term from its apparent, inherent polysemous usage across time, place, and different domains and authors, and thereby fixing its meaning for my own purposes.

Instead, my position is that creolization is perhaps best employed when it is not so completely provincial as to be almost useless outside very specific historical contexts; nor is it so broad and referenceless as to become nearly vacuous. I am therefore quite prepared to acknowledge that its scope is not limitless, nor at times perhaps broad enough. In spite of these admit-tedly important limitations, I, nevertheless, find the concept fairly useful, especially for an understanding of what happened historically in the Indian Ocean port cities and coastal regions with which this book is mostly concerned, as well as in parts of the Atlantic (see Ribeiro 2012). It is also more than a little intriguing that processes of creolization have often been linked to the Portuguese, and not only in the Indian Ocean, as for instance, a good deal of linguistics specializing in Creole lan-guages shows (see chapter 4 ), as well as certain streams of cul-tural studies (Ribeiro 2007 and Fernando Rosa 2012). Palmi é (2006) also points out that linguistics and history in particular, but also ethnology, generally feed off each other’s research in what is, for him, a somewhat circular, ultimately unproduc-tive movement in creolization studies. In my opinion, however, creolization can nevertheless lend itself to inherently transdis-ciplinary perspectives, something that is particularly useful for my purposes here. However it may be, a perspective sensitive to the historicity of the concept, not to mention associated histori-cal processes, is quite important here. In this sense, we could do worse than to use Verg è s’s work as an entry point into the theme, especially as she is clearly quite aware of the issues aris-ing from the concept as well as its application.



Introduction 15

Fran ç oise Verg è s’s is a sensitive piece on her home island, namely, R é union, in the western Indian Ocean (Verg è s 2010). Incidentally, its historical î le-soeur or sister island, namely, Mauritius, is a former VOC or Dutch East India Company settlement with ancient links to Cape Town. Vaughan’s work on Mauritius (2005), for instance, is an excellent historical introduction—with accompanying dense descriptions—to the issue of creolization (see also Eriksen 2010). I find Verg è s’s piece enticing and useful for a variety of reasons. First, she is describ-ing a very specific society, not a generic setting or condition. It is my belief that approaching creolization ultimately only makes sense if it is rooted in specific historical contexts and particular societies and individuals, as I try to do below, instead of cling-ing to it as a generic concept only (Verg è s 2010; see also Verg è s and Marimoutou 2012, as well as Verg è s 1999).

Verg è s moreover shows that even though R é union cannot possibly be understood except as a French colonial product (it is still part of France, though no longer a colony, as it is con-stitutionally an administrative region of the European Union), all the same, the colonial factor is not necessarily the only or even the main explanation for its processes of creolization: she points out that R é union is vastly different even from other for-mer French plantation island colonies in the Caribbean (one that comes to mind is Martinique, an island where I once spent a couple of months carrying out research—Ribeiro 2004b). Accordingly, she stresses that the Indian Ocean is very different from both the Caribbean and Brazil. In particular, Verg è s notes that in the context of the ocean, even a colonial society such as R é union’s actually exhibits multilayered, ancient Indian Ocean creolizations (besides of course colonial ones). Moreover, differ-ently to almost all of the Caribbean and Brazil, R é union—and the Mascarenes in general—never had any precolonial, indig-enous population. Therefore, everybody, in this way, ultimately came from outside.

In this manner, the creolization of R é union has extremely complex layers to it. This happens because the outsiders who came to the island, with the possible exception of Europeans and a few West Africans—for instance, slaves from Madagascar, the




Comoro Islands, and East Africa, as well as indentured labor-ers from South India—were often already the product of com-plex, centuries-old creolization processes in the Indian Ocean. In R é union, all these arrivals then further creolized with each other, besides creolizing with (already creolized) locals. This historically almost kaleidoscopic creolization finds no clear counterpart in Brazil and the Caribbean, or even the Atlantic islands and Atlantic coast of Africa. Therefore, even though R é union as a society—in this specific case, a slaveholding, colo-nial society—only arose in the seventeenth century, it has been enmeshed in processes of Indian Ocean creolization that are so ancient as to be difficult to date or trace with any accuracy. In this, it is clearly reminiscent of other places in the Indian Ocean, such as Melaka or Kerala. For instance, just consider one of these processes: the population of Madagascar, a major source of slaves for R é union through the centuries, is derived, as we saw above, from ancient transoceanic migrations from Nusantara as well as East Africa and the Middle East. The clos-est language to Malagasy, the main language in Madagascar, is in fact a language spoken now in southern Kalimantan (or Borneo), Indonesia, practically at the opposite end of the Indian Ocean from Madagascar (see Adelaar 2009). Malagasy, how-ever, is not simply an Austronesian language stranded, so to speak, near the African coast: it has itself suffered influences from African and other languages, and, besides, as Verg è s indicates, some of its terms are now part of R é union’s Creole (Adelaar 2012). The connection to Madagascar therefore shows that R é union is part and parcel of many intersecting histories that are far older than its colonial society.

Verg è s stresses the obvious, but in the case of such small islands in remote locations, it bears repeating: R é union is not a French island, in spite of its constitutional statute. Nor is it an African or an Asian one. We could say that it is Indian Oceanic, and yet even this fairly accurate definition would in fact leave out a couple of complexities. As I have been to Martinique, I know some of them (they are also mentioned briefly by Verg è s): that is, now the closest historical and cultural ally, so to speak, for those inhabitants of R é union who are interested in



Introduction 17

the local Creole—the main language of the island even though, unlike French, it is not official—as well as creolization is alas the French Caribbean, in particular, but not only, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Just like these two islands, R é union is also an administrative region of Europe as well as a French overseas department. Besides, all three (together with French Guiana) were concomitantly granted DOM ( d é partement d’outre-mer ) status in 1946, in accordance with local political movements that desired the end of colonization through full inclusion into the metropolis rather than independence (see Bl é rald 1986, 1988; Constant and Daniel 1997). Moreover, all three have Creole as their main language, even though it is not official; all three (particularly Martinique and R é union) also have con-servative white and nonwhite elites who want to be French in language, culture, and manners. People supporting Creole—the language, customs, song and dance, etc.—therefore look to each other as potential allies, even though the differences—and the distance—between them may be vast, as is indeed the case with Martinique and R é union (in fact, funny as this may sound, it should be added that, historically, the Mascarenes—Mauritius must be included as it was also a Francophone colony, and it still has French as one of its languages, as well as a French pass-port holding minority—have often creolized intellectually and culturally with the Antilles mostly in Paris).

Verg è s warns however that she is talking about processes and practices, not people, languages, or cuisines. Interestingly and revealingly, she first defines creolization rather metaphorically and even poetically:

Creolization is understood, to borrow an image familiar to islanders, as the endless movements of the waves on the island’s coasts, bringing new elements while taking away old elements. The line of the coast is slowly changed, erosion takes its toll, but the ocean with its movement adds new deposits. The tropical winds play a role, bringing seeds of new plants. On R é union, the physical constraints—hurricanes, fragility of the soil, pres-ence of high mountains that divide the island into discrete territories—and an active volcano also affect the processes of creolization as they are very lively actors of the imaginary.




Loss, exile, traces, inequality, memory, adaptation, borrow-ing, and masculinity characterized the emergence of creoliza-tion processes on R é union Island, which was apprehended as a local site, yet one deeply connected to regional processes and transformations. I speak of Indian-oceanic creolizations to cap-ture this multi-layered world. (Verg è s 2010: 146)

I find this quote important, especially if we look at it from the perspective of Brazil and the Caribbean: Verg è s in fact men-tions that she is not going to talk about cr é olit é , a term coined or at least put into wide circulation by the French Caribbean intellectuals Jean Bernab é (whom I happen to have met once in Martinique), Patrick Chamoiseau, and Rapha ë l Confiant (see Bernab é et al. 1993). I will not go into the details of their theo-rization here. I find Verg è s’s choice of not tackling cr é olit é —an abstract as well as an ideological concept—but instead con-centrating on historical processes of creolization in the Indian Ocean, quite interesting. That is because creolization is often, in my part of the world, as illustrated for instance by the work of Bernab é , Chamoiseau, and Confiant, invoked in the realm of the abstract and generic, particularly, but not only, in the Lusophone world (see Ribeiro 2007). Verg è s’s concentration on Indian Ocean creolizations as concrete historical processes is therefore quite liberating in itself. It roots her analysis firmly in the Indian Ocean, which is historiographically quite attractive, especially from a perspective embedded in Indian Ocean studies as this one—and concomitantly distances it from theorizations which may be too abstract for comfort.

Another appealing feature of Verg è s’s concept of creoliza-tion, besides its historical processual nature, is its ultimate rootedness in the landscape—both physical and social—of a specific Indian Ocean island, namely, R é union. She indicates quite clearly, as well as convincingly, that the island is a particu-lar location, at times fairly isolated, while at other times part of very extended and complex networks. This is an important counterpoint, to my mind, which is often lost sight of in theo-rizations of creolization: that is, the latter takes place as a his-torical process always unfolding on a specific location (which in this case includes coastlines, a volcano, and high mountains



Introduction 19

dividing a small oceanic island into separate spaces), and, more-over, via complex networks. In this way, the first women on the island were Malagasy and Indo-Portuguese (sic) slaves, and their children were therefore classified or dubbed as m é tis ( mestizo ), incidentally a very common term historically in Latin America and the Caribbean (Verg è s 2010: 149).

To sum up Verg è s’s other arguments, creolization in R é union involved forced integration between different people who recon-structed their identities after arrival. It was an island of slavery and indentureship, of male dominance (only in the twentieth century would a more balanced ratio between men and women be established), and of colonial compulsion for both whites and nonwhites. Very few men (usually white) controlled the lives of many more men (including quite a few whites) as well as the few women on the island. Verg è s equates R é union to a vast prison where young men were controlled through violence or the threat of its use. Besides, people died early on the island, usually after a harsh life, and outsiders had to be continuously brought in. Creolization in R é union therefore comes out of this forced cohabitation and the conflicts that it constantly brings up. This may sound very bleak, especially for those who want to theorize creolization in the twenty-first century from contexts slightly more cheerful than R é union. Nonetheless, the histori-cal evidence in the case of R é union is quite overwhelming—the background to creolization is not an edifying story—and, in this, it largely overlaps with creolization in both Brazil and the Caribbean, not to mention other places, especially if we take into consideration that these two regions together were the des-tination of about half of all the slaves that crossed the Atlantic to the Americas through the centuries. Brazil was moreover the largest slaveholding society in the modern world. Verg è s, however, also stresses one important point: though the origins of creolization on R é union and its historical development are often dreary to say the least, it did nonetheless open up spaces for the refashioning of identities and lives:

The practices of creolization incorporated the history of inequal-ity and brutality, and the melancholy of lonely men. Yet, and this deserves our attention, these men, slaves, indentured workers,




and poor whites gave us the world that today offers us the capacity to adapt and adopt, to be flexible, decentred and able to develop a theory of the subject which is not contained within the limits of imperial sovereignty. (Verg è s 2010: 147–148)

I think Verg è s touches here on a very important point which intriguingly also overlaps with a couple of abstract theories of creolization in the Caribbean: that is, creolization is a historical process, and related practices which ultimately contain within themselves liberating perspectives and even a liberationist proj-ect. As Verg è s points out, buttressing her argument with the thought of Aim é C é saire, and then through Edouard Glissant’s well-known work (both are famous thinkers, poets, and writers from Martinique, and therefore here Verg è s yokes her text fully to powerful Caribbean theorizations, after having taken her dis-tance from the work of the cr é olit é theorists mentioned above, who incidentally come from the very same island as C é saire and Glissant), creolization poses constant challenges to the assumed truths of identity as a well-bounded entity, that is, to theories of the subject according to what she calls imperial sovereignty (Glissant 1994; Glissant and Wing 1997; C é saire and Pinkham 2000, and C é saire et al. 2001).

Last but not least, she also stresses the fragility of creoliza-tion both in the past and today. Historically, it has developed in the shadow of many forms of compulsion and violence, whereas today it is often threatened in R é union by the ethnicization of memory, the privatization of narratives, and, finally, the all-out aspiration to Frenchness (2010: 158). Even for someone who, like myself, is currently based in Malaysia, and therefore in an environment that is supposed to be very different from R é union, her caveats sound both sadly familiar and quite ominous (see, for instance, the work of Helen Ting, forthcoming). The fact of ethnicization of social memory, and the consequent threat of weakening of the mutual relations and ties binding different communities together (what Glissant has called la po é tique de la relation or the “poetics of relation,” a mainstay of creoliza-tion for him and also for Verg è s) is far from unknown here (Glissant and Wing 1997).



Introduction 21

Creolization and the Self

Simpson is not concerned with creolization as such, especially since in the specialized literature on the area of Gujarat, namely, Kachchh, where he carried out his research, there has apparently never been any talk of creolization. It is intriguing however to think that littoral societies all over the ocean have spawned a range of complexities that are difficult to take account of theo-retically, some of which may have to do with creolization. In this regard, there is also Kresse’s intriguing work on Mombasa (2007), and Rita Astuti’s on the Vezo, fisherfolk from the coast of Madagascar, who are incidentally not Muslim, contrary to both the inhabitants of Kachchh studied by Simpson, and those of Mombasa researched by Kresse.

Astuti, like Simpson, also works on notions of the self—and it is quite apposite that she shows that the Vezo are in fact not an ethnic (or subethnic) group in Madagascar, but instead a localized, littoral group, one more or less (self) defined by its ocean-related lifestyle and practices; a self-identified littoral group, literally (Astuti 1995). Again, there is no talk of creoliza-tion here, much less of cosmopolitanism as such, though it is hard not to think of these notions in relation to littoral societies. Not unlike groups across the Mozambique Channel, the Vezo on Madagascar are one of the countless groups in the innumer-able stretches of the Indian Ocean littorals who live off the sea and yet are not, say, cosmopolitan in the way traders, immi-grants, travelers, and pilgrims are (in this sense, the fisherfolk of Kerala briefly mentioned above also come to mind, as well as the Portuguese of Melaka). Alas, just as the examination of processes of creolization has remained the domain of studies of very specific societies (in the Indian Ocean, usually island and, less often, port societies), there is hardly anything on littoral cosmopolitanism (for an attempt with somewhat mixed results, see Sharmani and Ribeiro 2012, as well as some of the excellent papers by various authors in the same special issue).

The Swahili are particularly intriguing in this regard, as they arguably bring together, within the context of a littoral soci-ety (their very name in fact comes from the word for littoral




in Arabic), both cosmopolitanism and creolization. I cannot go into detail here, but the Swahili have been linked to Omanis, Hadhramis, various kinds of Indians (Hindu, Shi’a, etc.), Shirazis (i.e., Persians), and other peoples through the centuries via the Indian Ocean; and, on land, they have been assimilat-ing/been assimilated by various people, for instance, those who constructed themselves under colonialism as the Mijikenda in today’s Kenya. As Kresse (2007) points out, the Swahili had an “ethnocentric” and hierarchical, but open system, where various outsiders (coming from both the ocean and the interior) could be assimilated. This system broke down at some point during colonial rule, when today’s more compartmentalized—and certainly racialized—postcolonial identities first emerged.

His analysis is in fact strongly reminiscent of Moorthy’s on cosmopolitanism in neighboring Zanzibar (see Moorthy 2010). As a fluid system, however, Swahili does not designate a people as much as an open, shifting process of creolization (though, again, Kresse never employs the term), involving various groups through time. Forms of bondage and serfdom were also impor-tant in this process. They were certainly very different from, but not wholly unlike those found in colonial contexts such as the one Verg è s describes for her island. Furthermore, Middleton (1992, 2004) intriguingly indicates that Swahili myths of origin involve outsiders coming to a point of the coast, being allowed to settle, and getting land from locals—and then marrying a woman from the local chiefly elites to cement the alliance. Not a temporary marriage as such, but nonetheless not entirely dis-similar to one either, as it also involves an alliance between local groups—who offer land and women—and male outsiders who offer goods, new gods, and transoceanic trading connections.

Pearson (1998b) also indicates how incredibly complex the history of the Swahili coast can be, involving as it does shifting alliances and enmities between various related coastal polities on the one hand, and outsiders from, for instance, Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, and Oman, on the other (in the modern era). He also points out the connections to India in the early mod-ern era (Pearson 1998a). The history of the place is therefore very lively in terms of the Indian Ocean. Yet, on some level,



Introduction 23

there are also the Mijikenda, who are from the interior, and yet not quite only of the interior, as Kresse points out. They have arguably been part of Swahili society for a long time now. In fact, Kresse suggests that they invented themselves as a separate group because they were explicitly rejected by the self-styled patrician families in Mombasa, who thought the ancestors of the Mijikenda were too African to qualify as “real” Swahili. The patricians in turn wanted to be officially acknowledged as Arab (in vain, as it turns out—see Willis 1993). Peculiar as these colonial convolutions of identity may seem in retrospect (they had some very deleterious, and even tragic, postcolonial consequences felt to this day), they do show the importance of putting the stress on people in the connected histories of creolization in the Indian Ocean. National narratives—which at least locally are often dominant—tend to erase such histo-ries. Not only the port cities, but also the littorals have had, in this way, an enormously complex and fluid set of changing creolized identities over the centuries. Besides, splitting cosmo-politanism and assigning, say, Mombasa’s self-Arabizing elites to it, while condemning the Mijikenda to its opposite, that is, provincialism, seems hardly apposite here. In fact, perhaps unsurprisingly, it plays into the hands of colonial processes of identity in Mombasa that are still unfolding today, as well into the assumptions of local national histories that establish Africans as the only truly indigenous people, the others being, say, originally slaveholding outsiders (sic). Sadly, it is hardly surprising that somewhat similar assumptions are also at work in, for instance, Malaysia.

It is perhaps equally unsurprising that the issue of creolization often comes up (as among Melaka’s various Creole communi-ties mentioned above) in one of its most graphic forms—that of the established practice at many points of the Indian Ocean of so-called temporary marriages (see Andaya 1998, and Ghosh, who brings up a well-known case of a Mediterranean Jewish trader who contracted a local marriage in the Malabar coast that lasted for two decades, back in the twelfth century—Ghosh 1992 and 1993). The phenomenon is also quite well-known in Senegambia, for instance (see chapter 2 ), where, just as in




Malabar, patrilineal outsiders married matrilineal insiders. Creolization and cosmopolitanism in this way come together, though their intersection is neither necessarily simple nor straightforward. For a succinct description of the system of local marriages for outsiders, see, for instance, the sixteenth-century description by a French traveler in Cambay, today’s western India, in Pearson (2003: 98); see also the wonderful vignettes of Portuguese women (i.e., locals married to Portuguese and other outsiders) in late sixteenth-century Goa in Van Linschoten’s Itinerario (Linschoten et al. 1998).

As I briefly intimated above, in Melaka too, the histories of origin of the various local communities invariably involve male outsiders marrying local women, and in this way starting, not unlike in Swahili histories of origin, a whole new community, with strong ties both to the land and the sea. In Senegambia, in fact, we know these histories from the female side, so to speak, as women were the only ones who stayed (male outsiders usu-ally left, and therefore marriage was only temporary), to the point that they formed a separate class of their own, named signares (from Portuguese senhoras or ladies). Taylor (1983) has also pointed out in a now classic work the importance of local women’s lineages in Dutch Java, in a description that often reminds the reader of Van Linschoten’s account (see also dis-cussion in chapter 2 ), not to mention classic historiography on Brazil (see Bosma and Ribeiro 2007). These histories are now considered almost folkloric, or else related only to minority com-munities in former colonial coastal enclaves, such as Melaka in Malaysia or Saint-Louis-du-Senegal. Taylor (1983) and Bosma and Raben (2008) in fact suggest that their import has a far wider scope. Intriguingly, it is hard to avoid the thought that these histories remain a major, largely neglected interface between oceanic and national historiographies, especially insofar as they involve both processes of creolization and cosmopolitanization on the one hand, and gender-related histories, on the other. It is also intriguing to think that one major way of inspecting this interface is through family histories, oral histories, and liter-ary works, that is, often through the histories of individuals as portrayed in a variety of sources. We are here thrown back once



Introduction 25

more to the importance of a people-centered approach. Before looking into this, however, I will do a brief excursus into a local history unfolding, this time in Kuala Lumpur.

Chins, Malays, and Waswahili: Land and Ocean Histories Meet

The issue of littoral versus transoceanic connections, or littoral versus interior, is therefore one that keeps appearing, under var-ious forms, more or less all over the Indian Ocean. In Malaysia, for instance, for decades now there has been a growing Chin exodus from Burma/Myanmar and northeast India to the West, using the country as a stepping stone. Some of the refugees/immigrants end up in Australia, and therefore their trajectory is that of a Zomian people who have moved across no fewer than three (or four in case India is included) Indian Ocean locations. Yet, Zomians of any kind, not unlike isiZulu speakers, are not usually considered to be inhabitants of the Indian Ocean world. The challenge here is how to think of current migrations without losing sight of ancient ones. The processes of creoliza-tion that are now in course are new and yet, arguably present an important degree of continuity with the past, even the very distant, vague one. Not even oceanic historiographies (Pearson 2014) are necessarily of help here, as the complex intersection between chronologically separate periods of time in which dif-ferent histories of mobility unfold is not appropriately consid-ered in most historiographical approaches.

During my recent research among Chins (and other migrants from Myanmar) in Kuala Lumpur, I have become keenly aware of this fact. Pearson, in the wake of Shashi Tharoor’s mus-ings on New Delhi, proposes that current metropolises such as Johannesburg, for instance, are not unlike traditional Indian Ocean emporia in the age of globalization (Pearson 2012). This insight is particularly apposite for Kuala Lumpur, a colonial nineteenth-century creation that is located inland barely two hours by road from Melaka, probably a 600-year old Indian Ocean emporium. Yet it is difficult to think of the Chins as part of a process of creolization, let alone one rooted in Indian




Ocean connected histories, but rather easy to see them as tem-porary, and, therefore, extraneous, inhabitants of Peninsular Malaysia. Intriguingly, however, as they move in ever-growing numbers to the West, crossing various international borders in the process, they can be said to be a very cosmopolitan popula-tion, in fact, currently much more so than many local groups in Malaysia who have oceanic origins.

I have been carrying out research among Chins in Bukit Bintang (literally “Star Hill”), an old, traditional neighborhood and entertainment district (it also contains the historic red light district around Jalan Alor), where many thousands of visitors and tourists from literally all over the world pass through every day. The area has a very large concentration of workers from Myanmar, particularly Chins, and historically it is a neighbor-hood that has been receptive to outsiders, usually Indian Ocean migrants and their descendants (in particular, the Chinese). Unsurprisingly, Chins nowadays, just like other Asian immi-grants (from Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, etc.), usually stay in the same old tenements that used to be occupied by Chinese migrants to the city (they are still primarily Chinese-owned though most of their traditional residents have moved out of the neighborhood). Revealingly, another hill in the area is called Bukit Ceylon, and yet another, just outside the area but within walking distance, is called Bukit Nenas or “Pineapple Hill.” The Malay word for pineapple— nenas —comes from Portuguese anan á s , which in turn comes from an indigenous Brazilian language. The fruit of course came to Asia via Portuguese colonial circuits. It is apposite, therefore, that there should be quite a few reminders of Indian Ocean connections in a neighborhood that is today reput-edly one of Kuala Lumpur’s most cosmopolitan quarters.

The main tension within my ongoing research is in seeing the Chins—and Bukit Bintang where they live—as a new cosmo-politan diaspora issuing out of globalization and postcolonial nationalist processes, on the one hand, and as the continuation of age-old Indian Ocean—and Zomian—migration patterns on the other. I cannot go into details of the matter here. 1 Suffice to say that Bukit Bintang’s old port city cosmopolitanism, no doubt considerably transformed in several ways in the age of the



Introduction 27

Internet and rampant globalization, meets old and new Zomian migration circuits, and undoubtedly another strain of cosmopol-itanism as well—for instance, the various groups of Chins, who are overwhelmingly Protestant Christians of diverse denomina-tions with very strong links to the United States and the West in general. These links have been vital in their migration trajectories to the West, by now grown into a veritable exodus, to the point that apparently whole neighborhoods and villages in and near the Chin Highlands on the Indo-Burmese borders are reportedly at this point comparatively devoid of their young people.

That some Chins eventually depart, after years in Malaysia (their stay here ranges anywhere between three to longer than ten years) to inhabit port cities in, for instance, Australia, such as Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Sydney, where they are very tiny but growing minorities, only makes matters more complex, as Australia is historically also an Indian Ocean location. As I mentioned above, you could say that, in this way, they depart from the Indian Ocean (that is, India and Burma) via the Indian Ocean (that is, the western part of Peninsular Malaysia) to yet another Indian Ocean location, that is, Australia. Nonetheless, the Chins are not thought to be an Indian Ocean people, but are instead considered a highland Southeast Asian people. They are, therefore, merely passing through the Indian Ocean on their way from somewhere in their homeland to yet another place that just happens to be part of the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, at least to some extent, theirs looks very much like a partially “hidden” Indian Ocean history. It is certainly, at any rate, a very marginal history that can neither fit more mainstream Indian Ocean histories, nor the national histories and historiographies of Burma, India, or Malaysia, let alone Australia. In this way, we could posit that the Chins have practically fallen off the his-toriographical record, both according to various national histo-ries and Indian Ocean histories. Yet, ethnographically speaking, they are very visible today on the streets and in the various busi-nesses of Bukit Bintang, and have been for quite a few years now (in fact, in a typical night venue in the neighborhood, they are often the majority of workers, whether or not they are together with other workers from Myanmar). The contrast between high




visibility on the ground and historiographical invisibility in lit-erature could hardly be starker.

I do not have a better perspective to offer here, except to note the paradox and the many imbrications it presents, first and foremost with the complex (and apparently under-researched) overlaps between “Zomia” and the Indian Ocean, both in the age of globalization and the Internet, and in ancient times (when headhunting seemed to have spread more or less all over Southeast Asia, in fact, as far as Melanesia). To make matters even more peculiar, the Chins have long spilled over (or, perhaps, have always been there in the first place) into the neighboring Rakhine state in Burma/Myanmar. That happens to be the his-torical Arakan, the site of a famous precolonial Indian Ocean trading kingdom that lasted until a Burmese invasion destroyed it in the late eighteenth century, followed by British annexa-tion in the wake of the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–1825 (Gommans and Leider 2002). In Melaka, again during a period of field research, I have come across many Arakanese or “Rakhines” who work in the city. They all mention Mrauk U, the ancient—and highly cosmopolitan— Arakanese royal capi-tal (whose magnificent ruins still stand); and equally allude to the bountiful sea of Arakan with its abundant fresh fish (which they contrast with what they see as the very expensive and not so good provision of fish in Melaka itself).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as Arakan is a coastal strip with a mountainous interior, there are “Sea Chins” there, that is, groups of Chins living on islands off the coast of the Andaman Sea. They are called Aso Chin (a self-designation, as I have dis-covered while talking to some of them in Kuala Lumpur. Arakan Chins are, by the way, famous among other Chins for their exquisite handwoven textiles, possibly an Indian Ocean-related legacy. For the importance of Indian textiles in the ocean, see the various essays in Barnes 2005). Though we are accustomed to think of the Chins as a variegated highland society (and that perception turns out to be largely correct), they are also, at least to a small degree, very much a littoral people, as the Sea Chins in particular indicate, not unlike a myriad other such small groups along the many coasts of the Indian Ocean. Also, they may have



Introduction 29

been a littoral people for a very long time now, though, as there are apparently no records or research on the subject, it is very hard to say anything with any degree of certainty.

The evidence from the Straits of Melaka (in case it has any value for the Arakan coast further north) indicates, as Andaya (2008) in particular has pointed out, that various “tribal” groups, based on both land and sea, as in historical Melaka, and coastal groups (in this case, Malays), not unlike their Swahili and Mijikenda cousins across the Indian Ocean, were not tightly compartmentalized populations; on the contrary, they were quite open populations with fluid borders. Historically, people would therefore cross those boundaries in both ways, that is, becoming Malay ( masuk Melayu , i.e., “enter Malay” or become Muslim), or else becoming Orang Asli (though this denomination is not necessarily an old one), that is, “indige-nous” (and non-Muslim). The boundaries only congealed some time in the early twentieth century, and, therefore, well into the colonial era with its racializing state policies.

If this model is at all serviceable for the Arakan coast (also a British colony just as colonial Malaya), then we can also posit a similar interplay between Arakanese, on the one hand, and the various peoples from the coast and interior, on the other, where identity boundaries may have been much more fluid than our current knowledge allows us to believe (I have met Arakan Chins in Melaka—they were Buddhist just like their Arakanese neighbors, but I have never come across other Chins who are Buddhist from parts of Myanmar where Chins are the major-ity population, for instance, the Chin state or Kalay City in the Sagaing Division, both places being major sources of Chin migrants to Malaysia. The Matupi Chins, however, though mostly Christian, also reportedly have a Buddhist minority). That a very distant location (in terms of both the Andaman Sea and the nearby Straits of Melaka), namely, the Swahili coast, exhibits a similar dynamic, as historically Washenzi (i.e., “barbarians” or outsiders from the interior) become Waswahili (i.e., Swahili) just like the variegated immigrants from the Arabian Peninsula, India, and the Persian Gulf, is food for thought. It is also far from impossible that Waswahili




turned into, say, Mijikenda, at what is the “lower” end of the social scale (at least from an urban, patrician Swahili point of view). It is also quite apposite to remember here, that becom-ing Swahili is still tantamount to becoming Muslim, “Africans proper” being Christian or at least non-Muslim, especially in Kenya, what is yet another similarity to the process of masuk Melayu, that is, becoming both Muslim and Malay. Of course, “Muslim” here hides an enormous variety of local practices, as in the case of the Minangkabau in Nusantara, who are still often matrilineal in some way, or the Malabar Mappilas, also a historically matrilineal Muslim group in Kerala. 2 We could also think of the stretch of the Swahili coast now inside Mozambique as a place where, historically, only the local equivalents of the Mijikenda were left, as creolization processes changed tack, to a large degree de-emphasizing oceanic connections in favor of land-based ones. Also, as Noa (2012), among others, reminds us, the coast of Mozambique and its Indian Ocean history may still be ominously associated, at least for some locals, with slav-ery. I am also grateful to Paolo Israel, of the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, for reminding me of this fact (see his outstanding study of the Makonde, Israel 2014). The Makonde are a people on the Mozambique/Tanzanian bor-derlands who inhabited the interior—and still do—partly in order to better resist slave raids from the coast, carried out, of course, by people with strong Indian Ocean connections. Is it perhaps a coincidence that Indian Ocean connections are much more celebrated in, say, Zanzibar, than they seem to be in Mozambique? (For current celebrations and reworkings of the Omani-Zanzibari connections both in Oman and Zanzibar, see Mathews 2014; for Mozambique, see Noa 2012). It is sobering to point out here that issues of historiographical invisibility are in fact very complex, as they also involve diverse local histories of creolization and cosmopolitanism that may have sidelined, for various reasons, oceanic histories. Moreover, perhaps inevi-tably, such neglect then dovetails in complex ways with vari-ous national histories. In this way, is it entirely by chance that Arakan is currently the site of deadly and vicious confrontations between assumed outsiders, namely, the Muslim Rohingya, and



Introduction 31

official insiders, namely Buddhist Rakhine? Or that Malaysia is famous the world over for its state ethnic policies based on the perception that Malays and a few others are insiders, and every-body else supposedly outsiders ( pendatang )? Here again we are made to think of the complex imbrications between oceanic and nationalist historiographies and histories, besides various local histories—that Simpson for instance calls “indigenous.” Let us now return to the issue of people-centered histories, and Lusophone circuits.

The Lusophone Indian Ocean

Within the already complex historical environment of the Indian Ocean, Portuguese-related trajectories at times seem almost wickedly complex. They often include the Atlantic as well as the Indian Ocean, in this way, almost giving the lie to any notion that these oceans are separate in historically recent times. Macau, for instance, to this day is full of Portuguese passport holders who started out as colonial Mozambicans, and who have hardly spent much time in the metropolis. There are also quite a few Angola-born or raised Macau residents as well, not to mention residents born in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, or S ã o Tom é and Pr í ncipe. There is, moreover, a tiny Lusophone Indian minority in town (often from Goa and Dam ã o), usu-ally middle-class professionals of various types, who are (and have always been) Portuguese passport holders. Furthermore, a couple of them have connections to Africa but not, as we might have expected, to Mozambique (a place with many Goan con-nections). Instead, in at least one case, they have connections to West Africa, via Portugal.

Rui Le ã o is a prominent architect in Macau, and head of the local architects’ association. He studied in Lisbon for a time. His family left Goa just as the colonial era ended (his grandfather used to own a bookshop there where even Brazilian magazines used to be stocked. His father once mentioned to me O Cruzeiro , a magazine that was still in circulation in Brazil when I was a child. The bookshop closed down after Goa’s return to India in 1962, especially, I assume, as customers became very scarce).




He was not born there, nor in Macau. Instead, he was born in S ã o Tom é (now S ã o Tom é and Pr í ncipe), an island country in the Atlantic, where his father worked for years as a doctor. Later he would eventually be transferred to Macau. As it turns out, Dr M á rio Le ã o’s first wife was Cape Verdean (whereas his second wife, Rui’s mother, is Goan). Of course, regardless of Dr Le ã o’s family history, it turns out that there are close his-torical connections between Cape Verde and S ã o Tom é across what might be called, at least partially, a Luso-Creole Atlantic (see Berthet 2014).

The family history is therefore closely enmeshed with the his-tory of Portuguese rule in both Africa and Asia. Yet, Rui and his parents always remind me that, alas, they are very much a Goan family. It turns out that Dr Le ã o is, in fact, a local historian of Goa (Le ã o 1996, 2011). Besides, Rui has already taken his family, —his Italian-born wife and two Macau-born and raised daughters, to visit Goa. They speak only Portuguese at home—his daughters also study at Macau’s sole surviving Escola Portuguesa de Macau (Portuguese School of Macau), and his wife is perfectly fluent in the language. His parents speak Konkani well, but only speak Portuguese within the family. Moreover, Rui and his family do not know any Konkani—or any other Indian language. Rui is, however, fluent in spoken Cantonese, though he cannot read or write Chinese, nor does he know Mandarin. In this, his situation is very much like that of the local Macanese, the largest group of Portuguese passport holders in town—see chapter 5 —who are also fluent in both Cantonese and Portuguese, know English, but cannot speak, let alone read, Mandarin. Rui lived and studied in Lisbon for a while, and is a frequent visitor to Brazil and Angola as well. However, he has never been to Mozambique, even though his-torical connections between Macau and Mozambique are hardly absent. In fact, in colonial times, there used to be a regular boat plying the route Macau-Louren ç o Marques, namely, today’s Maputo. Macau was also, historically, full of Mozambican sol-diers, whose memory still lives on locally, in the form of the famous galinha africana or “African chicken,” a local food that was originally a barracks emergency dish rather than an exotic,



Introduction 33

imported cuisine. Incidentally, the Mozambican soldiers were quartered on Mongh á hill, where there is a plaque mentioning the fact in a park on top of the hill. This is very close to where Rui now lives with his family. Until recent times, the city also had African bars, including ones with jazz and live music.

The unexpectedly complex Lusophone connected histories of Macau, crisscrossing both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, are not circumscribed to the past only. In postcolonial times, there exist, for instance, small numbers of Lusophone students com-ing out of West Africa to the city, often eventually settling down there, not to mention the existence of a very tiny diaspora from S ã o Tom é and another, not so tiny, and usually comparatively wealthy diaspora, from Angola, besides yet another from Cape Verde (the city only has three consulates: Portugal’s, the consul-ate of the Philippines—Filipinos are historically the third larg-est group in town after Chinese and Portuguese—and that of Angola). The imbrication between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean also pops up when least expected. There is for instance Jeff (not his real name), a professional working for one of the many casinos in town. He introduced himself to me as someone from Curitiba, a city in southern Brazil, who had spent time in Lisbon. He is obviously of Chinese origin. He is a Portuguese passport holder too. His accent is somehow midway between a curitibano and a lisboeta accent. It turns out that his family originally came from a village just a couple of hours away from Macau (which, inciden-tally, he has never visited in spite of his many years of residence in the city). From there they—and many others like them—mi-grated to colonial Mozambique, where they stayed for a couple of generations, until independence or just afterward, when more or less the entire community decided to migrate once more, this time to Curitiba. Jeff has, therefore, partially retraced the steps of his ancestors across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, add-ing Lisbon to his trajectory in the process (as colonials, Chinese in Mozambique had the right to a Portuguese passport), though, interestingly, not entirely so—that is, he clearly is not keen on visiting his ancestral homeland in neighboring Guangdong. As a citizen of the global Lusophone world, he understandably does not necessarily identify with it. 3




I also met a couple of Lusophone Muslims in Macau—an unexpected encounter for me, though they have apparently been there for a long time, as shown, for instance, by the famous Quartel dos Mouros or Barracks of the Moors in town. It was reportedly built in mock-Mughal style in the second half of the nineteenth century, to house a regiment from Goa. The Muslims in question are of Indian origin (and just like Rui, they also keep their ties to India); Portuguese passport holders; have links to S ã o Paulo (where they have both lived and traded); Johannesburg (sic); and trade connections to Lusophone West Africa, namely, Guinea-Bissau. However, one of them, involved with the only local mosque, keeps his family in Dubai. As I talk to him, I pon-der that it is the most convenient location, considering his far-flung connections, and, therefore, it makes sense that his family should live there. I ask him where he considers his home is (our conversation of course is entirely in our mother tongue, namely, Portuguese—moreover, he speaks with a Brazilian rather than a Portuguese accent). He said home is his suitcase. I do not believe he spoke flippantly, or offered the thought merely as a joke. The reference to his suitcase is evidently his way of emphasizing the central importance of mobility in his life. The other man, who had lived and traded in S ã o Paulo, and also spoke with a Brazilian accent, told me that he liked going to India for medi-cal treatment. In fact, he seemed quite well-acquainted with that country. Furthermore, they both spoke Indian languages, differently to Rui and his family.

This—to me, rather unexpected—flitting encounter in Macau, incidentally showing an Indian-ness and Lusophone-ness that were both reminiscent of, and very much at variance with, that of Rui’s genteel Catholic Goan family, as well as equally exhibiting, eerily or not, connections to West Africa, is a good illustration of the complexities of Lusophone oce-anic creolizations. Noel Felix, mentioned later in chapter 5 , is another good example. He cannot trace any family connections to Portugal, as is usually the case with the Melaka Portuguese. 4 He is part of what Pearson dubs the littoral society, that is, he is a retired fisherman. Unlike some (but certainly not all) of his



Introduction 35

Macau counterparts, he is in no way a seemingly sophisticated, European passport-holding citizen of the global Lusophone world. His Portuguese is fluent, but it is the local Creole lan-guage, which I follow with both delight and slight apprehension as he talks (apprehension because I cannot always understand what he is saying, though I am keenly following him so as not to lose any of his sentences). He has, nonetheless, been to Lisbon once, which, all things considered, is not a normal trajectory for a resident of one of the littoral societies of the Indian Ocean. He is only a retired fisherman of very modest means, and yet his daughter lives in S ã o Paulo—and speaks to him now in Brazilian Portuguese, he tells me. This may seem rather exceptional, but at least some local youth have also ended up studying in Macau, for instance—a very unusual trajectory, to say the least, even within the local Portuguese community itself. Another youth I mention in chapter 5 wants to study to be a chef of Portuguese cuisine (instead of the local cuisine, also called Portuguese, that is in fact a Creole Indian Ocean cuisine) in Portugal, of all places, a very remote and unlikely location for an aspiring Malaysian university student, but not an unlikely one for many people inside the Portuguese Settlement. Children from some of the local families may talk of studying in Portugal, though they usually do not act on their plans, as there are no specific scholarships for Melaka Portuguese in Portugal, and costs can therefore be staggering, compared to studying locally at one of Malaysia’s many tertiary institutions (the country has inciden-tally become an international student destination, especially, but not only, for African and Asian students).

The community in Melaka therefore enjoys, even if to a somewhat modest degree only, international connections that are not the usual lot of other Melakans of the same social class. I have also noticed that the community frequently has visitors from Portugal or Macau, even though the vast majority of them do not stay for a long time. One of these visitors—for a time, also a kind of informal patron of the local community—used to be Maria Casimiro, who is Mozambican-born and bred, taught Portuguese at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur




for nearly a decade, once also worked in Timor Leste, and is now based in Macau. Maria’s trajectory is also an incredible example of the complexity of current Lusophone histories in the Indian Ocean.

Therefore, there is no knowing what the ocean will wash up on its shores. In this way, both creolization and cosmopolitanism have to be taken cum grano salis , as neither can be considered to be obvious, inherent processes in the Lusophone Indian Ocean, any more than in the Indian Ocean as whole, as the trajectories very briefly sketched above seem to indicate. Someone such as Noel F é lix is arguably cosmopolitan, though his cosmopolitan-ism strikes us as less glitzy and perhaps less obvious than that of the Dubai-based (if he is based anywhere) Muslim Lusophone man mentioned above. Their trajectories in fact are very differ-ent, even from those of either Rui or Maria. It is also important to remark here, that F é lix adamantly rejects any notion that his language—and, I assume, his identity—is a Creole one. He speaks Portuguese, he says, even if it is old Portuguese. We could say that the subject of creolization here refuses to be creolized. This may serve as a sobering reminder of the limits of the use of the concept of creolization (for years I have also carried out a lively exchange on the issue with Shaun Viljoen, an academic based in Cape Town, whose family is not only the result of a couple of oceanic creolizations, but also has a strong diasporic branch in Brazil. He is very critical of any use of creolization, including in scholarship such as my own). Just as invoking cre-olization brings up thorny issues and even flat refusals, it is also apposite to bring up again Pearson’s injunctions against assum-ing an overall, indistinct, and foundational cosmopolitanism for the Indian Ocean, together with his emphasis on the spe-cific character of many littoral societies in the ocean, including those living in the shadow of celebrated ocean emporia such as Macau and Melaka (see also Pearson 2014 for the complexities of writing oceanic histories in general).

It is also apposite to point out here that Miller and Malpas (2011) remind us that cosmopolitanism needs a sense of place to be meaningful. This may seem an obvious issue, but, in fact, it is not always so. Cosmopolitanism must be welded, paradoxical



Introduction 37

as this may sound, to a layer of parochialism (though not neces-sarily, it is important to note, nationalism, a term that is often used as its very opposite—see Cheah and Robbins 1998). Miller and Malpas accordingly remind us that paroik í a in Greek is simply the house and its adjacent territory, much like its English equivalent, that is, parish, designating as it does the parish house and its territory. In other words, invoking a place here does not in the least imply provincialism as such. Therefore, to Miller and Malpas, parochialism is simply another dimension to cosmopolitanism, without which the latter loses its moorings to any actual site of socially and historically constructed, mean-ingful human interactions—that is, incidentally, what Miller and Malpas believe “place” to mean.

In this sense, as the Portuguese historically invade, plun-der, and interact in the Indian Ocean, the maritime space they joined was already an ancient, creolized, and cosmopolitan space crisscrossed by complex connected histories. They did not exactly merely add themselves to such histories; their intru-sion was often clearly felt as that of an extraneous, invasive element, and not just in the beginning (Sheikh Zainuddin, for instance, documents well over half of a century of fighting against the Portuguese in Malabar—see chapter 6 ). However, through the centuries, they were just as often, at least par-tially, assimilated to the more ancient processes of creolization of the ocean and its cosmopolitan networks. That in Melaka, for instance, Portuguese means a local community rather than one in Europe, is, in this regard, quite meaningful. In fact, as early as the sixteenth century, people such as Garcia da Orta, exceptional as he certainly was, already had a reasonably good claim to being as much Portuguese as an inhabitant of the Indian Ocean, as Pearson cogently emphasizes in a recent path-breaking analysis of Orta’s trajectory (see Pearson 2015), just as Melaka-born Er é dia somewhat later on (see chapter 6 ), and Goa-born Sebasti ã o Dalgado in more recent times ( chapter 4 ), besides quite a few of the inhabitants of today’s Macau, Goa, or even Melaka (regardless of whatever passport they may hold).

It is both relevant and sad to note, however, that such people were—and are—often marginal, paradoxically or not, even




when they clearly belong to local elites (as was incidentally the case with Orta, Er é dia, and Dalgado, all three discussed in the chapters that follow), and therefore their trajectories and the complex cosmopolitan networks where they insert them-selves usually escape the notice of national historiographies, whether these are African, Asian, or European. Their lives are also not necessarily better described in Indian Ocean histories, though these do often allow for a better take on their context and personal predicaments than much traditional historiogra-phy. In this sense, it remains of the utmost importance to write Indian Ocean histories centered on people and their trajectories of mobility, at the same time taking notice of the important dele-tions, instances of silencing, and marginalizations continuously kept in place by various strands of national historiographies to this day. It is also fundamental that Indian Ocean historiogra-phies, especially as they (mostly unwittingly) ignore national historiographies and their power, should not join in this pro-cess. It is not just constant vigilance that is being preconized here; instead, it is essential that we also develop an awareness of where we come from as tellers of histories, and where we aim to go. I must confess that the Indian Ocean (where I have now lived for quite a few years in a row, in Cape Town, Kerala, Macau, and Melaka) has served me well in this purpose: that is, it has largely weaned me from national historiographies, with-out letting me forget their original (and sometimes continuing) grip on my imagination as a scholar, as well as their endur-ing power in general in the process; it has also allowed me to distance myself from Lusophone historiographies and related imaginings, without losing sight altogether of their most impor-tant contributions. Intriguingly, being a Brazilian in the Indian Ocean has meant being in a world that is not wholly unfamiliar to me, and not just because I first learned Malay-Indonesian, in Brazil, or because there are Lusophone connections in this part of the world, though both facts have of course been quite helpful. Instead, there is a sense in which different parts of the former colonial world, despite their many obvious differences, somehow converse with each other in seemingly mysterious, or



Introduction 39

at least somewhat hard to trace, ways (as I have often felt in Cape Town). Sketching at least some of these similarities or com-monalities is one of my ambitions in writing this book. In this sense, I hope this volume will be a contribution by a displaced Brazilian scholar toward understanding the complex world of the Indian Ocean, in at least some of its partly Lusophone, partly creolized and cosmopolitan, dimensions. In this exercise, I have realized that I both take stock of a common heritage and take leave of it, in order to better understand a world that may largely be creolized and cosmopolitan regardless of any Portuguese or Lusophone histories.



Index

Abdullah, Munshi, 3–5, 139, 141–3, 145, 150, 152, 159, 164, 168. See also Melaka

Adil Shah, 147, 158, 194. See also Bijapur

Africa and Africans, 1–3, 8–11, 15–16, 23, 30–5, 38, 47–8, 50, 55, 60, 64–5, 71, 73, 92–3, 95–6, 108, 111, 116–18, 122–3, 125, 132, 148, 150, 154, 180, 182. See also under specific place names

Ahmednagar [Sultanate], 66–7, 147, 149, 155, 167, 171–2, 194

Americas, 9, 13, 19, 64–5, 108, 133, 161

Andaman, Sea of, 28–9, 139Angola, Angolan, 31–3, 75, 125Antilles, 13, 180

Netherlands, 107, 185see also Martinique

Arab, 23, 46, 52, 180, 184, 188, 194

Arabia, 68, 137, 145, 151Arabian Peninsula, 29, 68, 74,

141Arabian Sea, 135

Arabic, 6, 22, 66, 73–5, 90, 93, 142, 144, 147, 149–52, 154, 159, 163–5, 169, 184, 187, 193

in the Indian Ocean, 150as lingua franca, 60, 163

Arabi-Malayalam, 163, 196Arakan, Arakanese, 28–30

Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao [ABC Islands], 107, 121–2, 130, 185–6

Asia, Asian, 4, 11, 16, 26, 32, 35, 38, 52, 55, 58, 65–6, 68, 78, 84–6, 89–94, 96–7, 103–4, 106–13, 116–17, 119, 122, 129, 131–2, 137, 146, 148–54, 157, 163, 167, 170–4, 180, 182–3, 185, 188, 194–5. See also East Asia, Central Asia, Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia

Assis, Machado de, 43–4, 78Atlantic, 2–3, 9, 13–14, 16, 19,

31–3, 56, 58, 64–5, 87, 90, 177, 179

Australia, 25, 27, 157, 184, 191Auto-da-fé, 148. See also

Inquisition, OrtaAvicenna, 66–7, 86, 149, 167–8,

194Ayurveda, 149, 154, 174

Baba Peranakan/Nyonya, 3, 124, 189

Bahadur [Sultan], 148, 167–8, 176–7. See also Gujarat

Bahmani [Sultanate], 66Bangkok. See ThailandBardez, 101–2, 184Barreto, Lima, 43–7, 49, 51, 55,

169, 180–1. See also Brazil, Rio de Janeiro



216 Index

Bengal, Bay of, 5, 7, 136, 192Bengali language and script, 93,

144region, 85, 106

betel, 174, 196Bijapur [Sultanate], 147, 158, 194Bombay, 96, 105, 150, 182Borneo. See KalimantanBraginsky, Vladimir, 138–9, 144,

193. See also Sejarah MelayuBrazil, Brazilian, 7, 15–16, 18–19,

24, 26, 31, 32, 33–6, 38–9, 41–3, 49, 51, 54–6, 64–5, 75–9, 81–3, 93, 113, 116, 126–7, 131–3, 168, 176–8, 184–6, 188–9, 191, 193, 195

Britain, British, 28–9, 58, 72–3, 75–81, 84–5, 89, 95–6, 98, 102, 104–6, 110, 118–19, 141–2, 183–4

Buddhism, 29, 31, 86, 170, 188Bugis, 138, 157, 159Bukhara, 66Bukit Bintang, 26–7, 196. See also

Chins, Kuala LumpurBuru Island and Quartet, 46,

49–50, 55, 180Byzantine [Empire], 145, 159

Cairo, 148–9, 167–8, 177Calcutta, 112, 141Calicut, 69, 73, 146–9, 159, 171,

192Cambay, 24, 178Canton, 161Cantonese [language, people], 32,

109, 118, 125–8, 130, 133, 188Cape Town, 9, 15, 36, 38–9, 56,

163, 176Cape Verde Islands, 31–3, 91–2,

110–11, 117, 122, 127, 129–30, 186

Caribbean, 13, 15–20, 64–5, 116, 118, 121–3, 136

Catholic [church, people], 7, 34, 70, 75, 95–7, 99, 103, 110, 119, 121, 173, 183, 186–8. See also Inquisition

Central Asia, 66, 84, 167, 171Ceylon [Sri Lanka], 7, 26, 89, 92–3,

95, 97, 106–12, 122, 132, 160, 183–5, 187

Chandu Menon, 77–83, 85, 169. See also Malabar, Malayalam

Chera [king, kingdom], 151, 153. See also Malabar

Chetties [Chitties], 3, 120. See also Melaka

China, 3, 10, 91, 109, 128, 130–1, 137, 145, 156, 190–2, 195

Chinese, community, people, 3, 5, 26, 33, 46, 52–4, 68–9, 123–5, 127, 129–31, 145, 179, 186, 189–93

language, 32, 114, 125, 188Chins, 25–9. See also Bukit

Bintang, Kuala LumpurChristians, 6, 8, 27, 66, 68, 73, 75,

84, 148–9, 152–3, 172Brahmin [Goa], 94–5, 184New [converts], 148, 172, 195

Cochin, 6, 70, 111, 114, 122, 138, 146, 152–3, 155, 171, 185–6, 194. See also Malabar

Coelho, Adolfo, 97, 91, 109–11Colombo [Sri Lanka], 93, 106, 111,

184Comoro Islands, 16Concubinage, 46, 48, 50, 53–4Constantinople, 149conversion [religious], 5, 66–7,

71, 121, 148, 150–1, 154–5, 157–8, 160, 173–4, 187, 195

Coromandel [Coast], 7, 148Correia, Gaspar, 176cosmopolitanism, concept, 37,

57–65, 68–73, 75, 77–9, 81–7, 168–9, 177–9, 181, 194



Index 217

cosmopolitanism—Continuedin the Atlantic, 64–5creolization and, 62–3, 65, 78,

81–2, 84, 87, 168–9, 174, 177

in the Indian Ocean, 2, 6–8, 12, 21–4, 26–7, 30, 36, 72–3, 81, 84, 163, 178–9

in Kuala Lumpur, 179in Malabar, 69–71, 77, 82–3, 85,

194Couto, Diogo do, 139, 144, 164,

168. See also Sejarah MelayuCreole, African [language], 111

Arab in Melaka, 3Arab in Surabaya, 52Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao

[language], 107, 120, 129, 185–6

Asian [languages], 132Brazil [language], 116, 184Calcutta [language and people],

112Cape Verde [language], 92,

110–11, 117, 127, 129Caribbean, 136Chinese in Melaka [people], 125Chinese in Surabaya [people], 52communities in Melaka, 4, 23Damão and Diu [language], 92,

107, 112French in Trinidad [language],

107glossaries, 93–4Goa [language], 107, 185, 195Guinea-Bissau and Casamance

[language], 3, 117, 127Hadhrami, 72, 74, 141, 145,

149–50, 152, 157–8, 164Indian in Melaka, 120, 124Indian Ocean [communities and

languages], 87, 107, 118Indonesia and Timor [languages],

92, 111

Indo-Portuguese [language], 70, 89, 91–2, 94, 97, 106–13, 117, 182–3, 186

Java [elite], 181Jews and Muslims, 149, 152, 173languages [general], 14, 89–90,

107–8, 163, 185–6life in Senegambia, 47linguistics, 92Luso-[communities, legacy,

ocean], 32, 114, 133, 170, 175–6, 182, 185–6

Luso-[languages], 91–2Macau [language and

community], 91, 109–11, 113, 115, 126, 129, 185, 187

Martinique and Guadeloupe [language], 17

Mauritius [language], 90Melaka [cuisine], 35Melaka [languages and texts], 92,

96, 115–24, 137Melaka Portuguese [language and

community], 35, 36, 120–9, 134, 157–8, 185–7

nationalism, 54Neo-Latin or Romanic dialects, 110Netherlands Antilles [language],

107, 185Portuguese [as lingua franca], 108Portuguese and Portuguese-

lexified [languages], 108, 115Réunion [language], 16, 17, 90São Tomé and Príncipe

[language], 117studies, 91, 182system, 71texts, 83, 94, 109, 135, 137–8,

144–5, 165Thailand [community], 114, 185Trinidad Portuguese [language

and people], 107, 116Creoleness, créolité, 18, 120,

123–4, 144, 154, 157



218 Index

Creolistics, 90–1creolization, 1, 3, 8–10, 30, 34,

36–7, 55–6, 62–5, 69–72, 78, 81–2, 84, 87, 108, 135–6, 160, 168–9, 174, 177

concept of, 12–25cuisine and, 17, 33, 35, 126, 131,

189Gilberto Freyre and, 41–3

Cunha, José Gerson da, 182Curitiba, 33

Dalgado, Sebastião, 37–8, 89–114, 170, 174, 182–5. See also Creole, Goa, Konkani, Portuguese

Damão, 31, 92, 107, 112, 183datura, 160Deccan, 66–7, 84, 147–8, 159,

167–8, 171–3, 175–6, 194. See also Ahmednagar, Bijapur, Goa, Orta

Delhi, 25, 66, 68Devanagari, 93, 98–100, 184Diu, 107, 111, 171, 176–7, 183Dubai, 34, 36Durban, eThekwini, 1–2, 12Durian, 155, 195Dutch, people, 5, 46, 48, 50, 54,

72, 90, 124, 149, 162colonialism and possessions, 24,

58, 108, 110, 119, 122, 132, 145, 159, 161, 170, 180, 187

East India Company, 15, 110language, 44, 50, 56, 110, 185–6

East Asia, 86Erédia, Manuel Godinho de,

156–62, 169, 174–5. See also Melaka, Nusantara

Eurasia, Eurasian, 86, 111, 119, 123, 167, 186–7

Europe, European, 13, 15, 17, 35, 37–8, 47–50, 52–4, 56, 64–5, 67, 75–6, 78, 83–4, 91,

95, 103, 108, 110–11, 116, 118, 135, 145–6, 148, 150–1, 154–5, 157–9, 163, 173, 180–1, 189, 191, 194–5

Indo-European, 46, 54

Filipinos, 33, 125, 188, 191. See also Philippines

France, 15, 41, 47–8, 50–1, 67, 85French [people, language],

Francophone, 3, 13, 15–18, 20, 24, 41, 47–9, 51, 53, 55, 72, 76, 90, 92, 104, 107, 119, 127, 169, 180, 188, 192

Freyre, Gilberto, 41–3, 45, 56, 133–4. See also Brazil and creolization

Gama, Vasco da, 73, 171Ghats [mountains], 148, 155, 160,

171Goa, Goans, 24, 31–2, 34, 37, 43,

64, 66, 89, 91–2, 94–102, 104–7, 112, 114, 125, 134, 139, 146–50, 155, 157–8, 164, 167–8, 170–2, 175–6, 179, 182–5, 194–5

Gomes, Francisco Luiz, 94, 182Gorée Island, 3, 52Greek [people, language], 8, 37, 44,

58, 59, 67, 153Greece, 180

Guangdong, 33, 179Guiana, 17, 161Guinea-Bissau, 31, 34, 117, 127Gujarat, 10, 21, 92, 108–9, 138,

147–9, 159, 168, 171, 176, 183, 194

Gupta [Empire], 86

Hadhramaut, Hadhrami, 4, 22, 72, 74, 141, 145, 149–50, 152, 154, 159, 164

Hesseling, Dirk, 90–1



Index 219

Hikayat, Abdullah, 141–2Hang Tuah, 192Muhammad Hanafiah, 196Raja-raja Pasai, 144, 153, 192see also Sejarah Melayu

Hindus, Hinduism, 3, 22, 69–70, 73–4, 84, 149–53, 155–6, 159, 161, 169–73, 179, 183, 187, 194

Hindustani [language], 93, 101–2, 105, 159, 184

Hokkien, 118Hollanda, Sérgio Buarque de, 45Hong Kong, 125, 183, 188–9

Ibn Battuta, 59–60India, 6, 11, 16, 22, 24–5, 27–9, 31–2,

34, 64, 66, 68–70, 76, 84–5, 89, 91–3, 95–6, 98–9, 102–3, 105–7, 109–11, 116–17, 119–20, 122–5, 132, 135–6, 138, 141, 144–5, 148, 151, 154, 156–60, 163, 168, 171–2, 176–7, 183–4, 187, 193–5. See also specific place and personal names

Indian Ocean, Africans in, 2, 9–10, 15, 23, 30, 32–3, 35, 71, 125, 150

Atlantic and, 3, 9, 13–14, 16, 31, 33, 56, 65, 87, 90, 177, 179

circuits, connections, and links, 4, 6, 10, 25–6, 30, 72, 89, 145, 154–5, 157, 164

cosmopolitanism, 6–8, 36, 57, 59–60, 65, 71–3, 81, 84, 87, 163, 170, 177–8

Creole and creolization, 1, 13–16, 18, 23, 35, 56, 62, 64, 71–2, 84, 87, 90, 107, 118, 123, 134, 145, 152, 154, 165, 170, 177

diaspora and migrants, 4, 21, 25–7, 29, 33, 35, 62, 73, 116, 123, 132, 179, 183–4

emporia, 3, 6, 25, 68, 70, 117–18, 189, 195

histories, 1, 9–13, 22–3, 27–8, 30, 36, 38, 57, 62, 87, 97, 132, 135, 144, 146, 157

Islamic and Muslim, 73–4, 86, 170, 177

languages, 1, 109, 163, 174Luso-Creole, 117–18, 170, 175–6,

182Lusophone and Portuguese, 11,

14, 31, 33, 36–7, 39, 90, 94, 96, 115–17, 123, 134, 176, 182

Mediterranean and, 2, 60, 84, 155, 159

Mughals and, 171networks, 137, 139, 148–9, 159,

164, 173port and port cities, 1–2, 5, 14,

21, 52, 59–60, 63, 115, 132–3, 151, 176, 188, 208

self and, 12slavery and, 4, 9, 15–16, 19, 23,

30, 62, 123, 150, 155, 187, 191, 195

societies, 21, 35, 56, 58, 108, 151–2

studies, 3, 18, 56, 136Inquisition, 67, 148, 154, 172–4.

See also Auto-da-fé, Catholic, Goa, Orta

Iran. See PersiaIslam and Islamic, 4–5, 60, 67–8,

73, 84, 71, 121, 123, 148, 151, 159–60, 170, 173, 177, 195. See also Muslims

Islands, 3, 6, 13, 15–22, 28, 32, 46, 50, 52, 55, 90, 108, 116, 121–2, 135, 161–1, 180, 189, 195. See also under specific names

Java, 4, 6, 24, 46, 48, 50, 54, 145, 156, 160, 181, 191, 193, 195

Javanese [people], 4–5, 46, 48–50, 54, 161–2, 180, 194

language and literature, 7, 144–5, 163



220 Index

Jews, Jewish, 6, 8, 23, 66–70, 73, 84, 86, 148–9, 152–5, 159, 167, 170, 173, 177, 195

Johor, 139, 164Jones, William, 92, 100

Kachchh, 10, 21Kalimantan [Borneo], 16, 161Kannada, 93, 101, 183Kant, 8, 57–8, 86, 177Karnataka, 69, 183Kerala. See MalabarKeralolpatti, 151, 194, 196. See

also Malabar and ZainuddinKok Nam, 179Kuala Lumpur, 25–6, 28, 35, 128,

179, 182, 187, 189–92, 196

Leyden, John, 140–2, 144–5, 162, 192. See also Sejarah Melayu

Lisbon, Lisboa, lisboeta, 31–3, 35, 75, 91–3, 95, 97, 109, 122, 129, 148, 167, 177, 182, 183, 193

littorals and coasts, 3, 13, 17, 23, 25, 28, 60, 117

Africa, 2, 8society, 11–13, 21, 34–6, 58, 108see also Malabar and Swahili

CoastLourenço Marques. See MaputoLusophone, lusofonia, 11, 18, 31,

33–6, 38–9, 56, 90–1, 96, 100, 102, 114–17. See also Portuguese

luso-tropicalismo, 97

Macau, 31–8, 91–2, 96, 107, 109–11, 113–21, 123–34, 161, 163, 172, 176, 182–91, 193

Creole, 91–2, 110, 113, 126Indians in, 31–2, 34, 179, 183Macanese, 32, 125–6, 128–30,

183, 185, 188–90Madagascar, 8–9, 15–16, 21

Maharashtra, 101Makassar, 138, 157, 160, 191Malabar [Coast and colonial

district], Kerala, 6–8, 16, 21, 23–4, 30, 38, 52, 64, 68–9, 70–3, 75–7, 79–86, 114, 117, 122, 132, 135–7, 146, 150–2, 169, 176, 179, 181, 183, 185–6, 192, 194, 196

and Muslims, 30, 37, 73–4, 122, 146–8, 150–3, 156, 163, 194

and the Portuguese, 37, 73–4, 132, 146–8, 150–3, 156

Malacca. See MelakaMalagasy, 8–10, 16, 19Malay, Melayu, fleets, 9

language and literature, 26, 29, 38, 56, 93, 109, 118–19, 121, 124, 127, 129–32, 136–8, 140–5, 159, 161–4, 168–9, 186, 192–4, 196

people, personages, and world, 5–6, 25, 30–1, 122–4, 159, 187–8, 192–3, 196

Scriptorium in Bogor, 192–3supremacy, 123see also Sejarah Melayu

Malaya [colonial Peninsular Malaysia], 7, 29

University of, 35, 128, 182, 190–1

Malayalam, 7, 70, 73, 75–7, 79–82, 109, 150, 152–4, 163, 169, 183, 186, 196. See also Chandu Menon, Malabar, Malayalee

Malayalee, 7, 69–70, 77, 136. See also Malabar

Malaysia, Malaysian, 3–4, 6, 10, 20, 23–7, 29, 31, 35, 91, 96, 116, 118, 121, 123–4, 128–30, 132, 136–40, 161, 163–5, 168, 187–96. See also Malay, Melaka

Malpas, Jeff, 36–7, 59–63, 69, 168, 181



Index 221

Mangalore, 69, 101, 111, 183Maputo, 32, 182Marathi, 93, 99–101, 103, 105,

183–4marriage, 53–4, 80, 122, 179, 186

temporary, 22–4Martinique and Guadeloupe, 13,

15–18, 20, 51Mascarenes, 15, 17, 56Mauritius, 15, 17, 90medicinal plants, 194. See also

plants and drugsmedicine (s), doctors, physicians,

32, 66–7, 95, 147, 149–50, 154, 156–7, 182, 194–5. See also Ayurveda

Melaka [Malacca], 3–6, 9–10, 16, 21, 23–5, 28–9, 34–8, 71, 91–2, 96, 109, 112–34, 138–9, 141–2, 144–5, 152, 155–62, 164, 170, 172, 176, 179, 184–91, 194–6

Straits of, 4, 9, 10, 29, 71–2, 122, 131, 135–7

melons, 150, 174Mendonça, André Furtado de, 159Mérleau-Ponty, Maurice, 63, 181Merong Mahawangsa [Kedah

Annals], 193Middle East, 6, 16, 68–9, 137, 148,

155, 167Minang, Minangkabau, 4–5, 30,

179Ming [Empire], 10, 86Mombasa, 7, 21, 23, 71mosques, in Kerala/Malabar, 68

in Macau, 34in Melaka, 5, 145, 170

Mozambique, 9, 21, 30–3, 35, 56, 96, 125, 179, 185

Muslims, 3–6, 8, 11, 21, 29–30, 34, 36, 66–70, 72–4, 77, 84, 86, 121, 146–7, 149–59, 161–3, 165, 170–3. See also Islam

Muziris [Cranganore, Kodungallur, Mahodayapuram], 68, 153. See also Malabar

Myanmar [Burma], 7, 25–9, 179, 190, 196

Nabuco, Joaquim, 44Nagarjuna, 86Nairs, 151, 153. See also MalabarNegeri Sembilan, 4Netherlands, 48, 50, 54–5, 85, 182

Netherlands Antilles (see Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao)

Netherlands Indies [Indonesia], 50–1, 180 (see also Java and Indonesia)

Nizam Shah [of Ahmednagar], 66–7, 147, 149, 155, 167–8, 172, 194–5

Noronha, Afonso de, 195Novas Conquistas [Goa], 101Nusantara, 4, 7–9, 16, 30, 86, 138,

145, 149, 156–63, 196

Oman, 22, 30opium, 168, 176, 178Orang Asli, 6, 29, 122–3, 193

orang kecil, 7Orta, Garcia da, 37–8, 66–7, 69–70,

84, 144, 146–64, 167–77, 192–5. See also Goa, Jews

Ottoman [Empire], 22, 159overland routes, 3, 60, 86, 154, 170,

173

Palembang, 145Palestine, 6, 148Papiamentu, 107, 121–2, 127,

185–7Parameswara, 162, 194Parochialism, parochial, 37, 61, 69,

83, 106, 168–9, 175, 177Pasai, 144, 153, 163–4, 192. See

also Hikayat



222 Index

Patuá, 126–30, 188Pearson, Michael, 2–3, 10–12, 22,

24–5, 34, 37, 58–9, 63, 66, 108, 149–50, 154, 163, 173, 185, 191–2, 194

pepper, 148, 160Peranakan, 3–4, 124, 131, 188–9Persia, Persian (s), Persianate, 22,

66, 69, 85, 93, 137, 141, 144, 149, 168, 171, 184, 194

Perso-Arabic [script], 142, 184Perso-Indic, 145

Persian Gulf, 29Philippines, 33, 161, 188. See also

FilipinosPires, Tomé, 157, 195plants and drugs, 17, 67, 136, 157,

174, 176–7Portugal, 22, 31–3, 42, 78, 85, 89,

95–7, 104, 108–9, 117, 120–1, 123–6, 128–33, 138, 148, 158, 168, 185, 190–1, 194. See also Portuguese

Portuguese, colonialism and people, 4–6, 9–10, 26, 31–3, 35, 37, 39, 43, 45, 49, 56, 79, 85, 90, 93, 95–6, 104–6, 108, 116, 138–9, 144, 146, 148, 158–9, 162, 167–8, 170–7, 180, 182–5, 188–90, 196

Creole [language and people], 3, 13, 19, 21, 24, 35–7, 41, 69–70, 89, 91–4, 97, 106–7, 109–36, 150, 157, 163, 183, 185–7, 190–1, 195

creolization and, 14, 116cuisine, 35, 120, 126, 131, 189dance, 131, 189in India, 37, 64, 69, 72–5, 84, 89,

95–6, 101, 139, 146–7, 151–3, 167, 179, 193–4

in the Indian Ocean, 37, 90, 94, 115, 170

Konkani and, 95–8, 100, 103, 182

language and literature, 24, 26, 32, 34–6, 52, 76, 89, 92, 97–9, 103–5, 108, 110, 112–34, 138, 144, 147, 150, 154–7, 160, 162, 164, 169, 182–4, 186–8, 195

nau [carrack], 6Settlement in Melaka [place], 35,

118–21, 123, 128–9, 186–7, 189–91, 195

prostitution, 48, 52–4, 181

Rakhine [state in Myanmar, people], 28, 31. See also Arakan

Recife, 45Réunion Island, 15–20Rio de Janeiro, 43–5, 47–8, 52–3,

127, 179–81, 184. See also Brazil, Barreto, Lima

Rivara, Joaquim Heliodoro da Cunha, 98, 183

Roman, empire and people, 68, 137, 153

law, 92Romance [languages and

linguistics], 76, 91Romanic dialects, 110–11

Romanization [script], 93, 98–100, 103

Rome, Rum, 75, 92, 159, 172

Sadji, Abdoulaye, 47–8, 50–3, 55–6, 169–70, 179–80. See also Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal

Sahel and Sahara, 58, 62–3Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, 3, 24, 47,

51–3, 180. See also SenegambiaSalvador, 75Sanskrit, 90, 124, 144–5, 163–4,

182–4in Goa, 89, 92–4, 113in Kerala/Malabar, 76, 81and Konkani, 99–104



Index 223

São Paulo, 34–5, 126, 183, 190São Tomé and Príncipe, 31–2, 117,

182Schuchardt, Hugo, 90–2, 110Sejarah Melayu [Malay Annals],

137–8, 140–4, 156, 161–2, 164, 168–9, 192–4, 196. See also Abdullah, Malay, and Melaka

Senegal and Senegalese. See Senegambia

Senegambia, 2–3, 23–4, 43, 51–2, 54–5, 127, 179–80, 188

Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 51, 180Shembe, Isaiah, 2, 12Siam, Siamese [Thailand, Thai],

114, 144–5, 149, 188, 193Signare, 24, 52. See also

SenegambiaSingapore, 10, 92, 112, 141, 161–2,

169, 181, 183, 187, 188, 189–90

Sinhala, 93, 107–8, 184slaves, slavery, 4, 9, 15–16, 19,

23, 30, 41–4, 62, 64–5, 78–9, 122–3, 150, 155, 187, 191, 195

Soeryo, Tirto Adhi, 46Sousa, Martim Afonso de,

146–7, 156, 158–91, 182, 193

South Africa, 1, 9–10, 30. See also Cape Town and Durban

South Asia, 4, 11, 66, 68, 85, 103, 112, 154, 171

Southeast Asia, 27–8, 52, 131–3, 137, 163, 188, 191, 196

space-in-movement [concept], 62–4

Spain, Spanish, 41, 66–7, 121, 148, 157–8, 167, 185, 188, 195

Sri Lanka. See CeylonSulawesi, 138

Sumatra, 4, 6, 131, 139, 143–5, 153, 156, 163–4, 194

Surabaya, 46, 50, 52–3, 180Surat, 178Suriname, 13, 161, 196Swahili coast, 1, 3, 22, 29–30, 71,

72Kiswahili [language], 163people [Waswahili], society, and

histories, 7, 8, 21–2, 23, 24, 29–30, 71

Syria, 6, 137Syrian Christians, 68–9, 75, 152

Tagore, 85Tai [Vietnam], 63Tamil language, 76, 93, 108–9, 144,

159, 163people and connections, 70,

136, 141, 145, 156, 159, 164

Tamil Nadu, 76, 136Tang [Empire, Dynasty], 10, 68, 86Thailand. See SiamTimor, Timorese, 36, 92, 111,

113–14, 125, 132, 161, 183, 185, 189–91

Toer, Pramodoedya Ananta, 46–9, 53–5, 169–70, 180–1

Tommakattanar, 75, 80trade, traders, 3–5, 7, 9–10, 21,

23, 34, 60, 62, 68–70, 108, 137, 139, 148, 154, 156, 160–1, 170, 177, 191

travel, 11–12, 21, 59–60, 62, 75, 85, 153, 177

Trinidad and Tobago, 107, 116Tripoli [Libya], 155Tuhfat al-Mujahideen, 146, 151,

193. See also ZainuddinTulu, Tulunad, 70, 101Turkestan, 145Turkey, 149, 168Turkic, 66



224 Index

Urdu, 184Uzbekistan, 66

Vasconcellos, José Leite de, 97, 109–10, 182

Vergès, Françoise, 12–20, 22, 42–3, 62–3. See also creolization

Veríssimo, José, 44Vezo, 21Vietnam, 63

Winstedt, Richard, 138–9, 141–2, 144, 153, 156, 196. See also Sejarah Melayu

Wolof, 3

Zainuddin, Sheikh, 37, 72–5, 77, 79–80, 146–8, 150–4, 156–9, 169–70, 193–4, 196. See also Kerala, Malabar, Muslim, and Portuguese

Zambezi River, 10Zamorin [Samudri Raja], 73, 147,

149, 152. See also Calicut, Zainuddin

Zanzibar, Zanzibari, 1, 22, 30, 151

Ziguinchor, 127, 188, 207Zimbabwe, 10Zomia, 25–8Zulu, isiZulu, 1–2, 10, 25



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