ABSTRACT
The Indian Ocean is a region rich in its diversity of political mentalities. The era of Julius Nyerere, Ujamaa or Self-Reliance and African socialism was one such powerful realm of affect during the 1960s postcolonial period. Very little is written by Asian Tanzanian women about this critical period of African decoloniality, an experience fraught with new internationalism, the Bandung spirit and an Afro-Asian sensibility. This essay delves into the process of Africanization and the decolonial process through which new identities and emergent self-hoods appeared in postcolonial Tanzania. How did the Indian Ocean impact East African becoming during the early postcolonial era? What sorts of political imaginings unfolded at the junctures of race, culture, and citizenship during Tanzanian socialism. What did growing up under Ujamaa mean for Tanzanian Asians, and how did the struggle for African citizenship in Tanzania capture some of the deeper currents of the Indian Ocean shaping African futures? The essay is written as a travelogue remapping lost maps, forging new linkages between Cochin and Dar es salaam. It is an essay in somatic excavation addressing uneasy pasts whose political ferments impacted entire communities of immigrants, resulting in the first widely recorded forced migrations of Asians from Africa during the mid-twentieth century. This would be one significant Indian Ocean experience that would mark the dispersal of South Asians from East Africa across the globe.
