South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.

when he next got a ship, and soon they sailed off together on the SS McNeill for Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

      Syed Ali remained on this ship for a long period, plying the route back and forth between Colombo and Cape Town. Eventually paid off at Colombo, the now experienced seaman returned to Calcutta and spent a month visiting his family. He needed to get work again and back in Calcutta was offered a job on the SS Murdoch. But his papers had a ‘black mark’ because of his desertion of his ship on his first voyage, and this was an obstacle to getting employed. He went to see two local men who had connections with the seamen’s union led by the powerful organiser Aftab Ali. These two worthies used their influence to solve the problem. The ship then went to Bombay and on to Cape Town. There, the news came that the war was over. The crew received a bonus and went out celebrating. But Syed Ali was saving his money. The ship was now going to sail for Britain and he intended to stay there. In Manchester, Syed Ali, who spoke no English, equipped with only a few pounds in his pocket and some warm clothes given by a friend, disembarked and headed for London. This was the beginning of a new life for him, for he was to settle in Britain (Choudhury, 1995:94–95).

      Although there has been a vast development of the literature on the Indian Ocean in recent decades, I think it would be fair to say that its most distinguished contributors (Chaudhuri, 1985; McPherson, 1993; Pearson, 1998; Subrahmanyam, 2005) have written primarily on the age of sail, whereas the epoch of steam has been less well served. The aim of this chapter is thus to identify some of the key issues concerning Indian Ocean seafarers of the age of steam navigation. In doing so, Syed Ali’s story is a useful point of departure. His journeys stood at the end of a period of about 70 years in which the sea trade of the world had been dominated by the coal-burning steamships of the British merchant marine. Sailors of African and Asian origin had been present on British ships since the 18th century and had formed a very significant proportion of the merchant and fighting naval forces in the Napoleonic Wars. But their numbers fell very sharply thereafter until the mid-19th century. The introduction of the steamship saw a new reversal of the trend, with African and Asian sailors again becoming a central component of British marine power. This development was met with considerable resistance from British seamen, largely framed in racial terms, for they saw the new workers as a cheap labour force that would undermine their position. It also generated decades of intra-bureaucratic struggle within and between the various ministries of the British state and the viceroy’s government of India over the management of this workforce.

      In the work of those who have paid central attention to the Indian Ocean steamship sailor, there is a strange imbalance. This work seems to have been focussed disproportionately on the history of seafarers in British ports and on the regulation of the lives of these sailors by the British authorities (Dixon, 1980; Visram, 1986; Tabili, 1994; Frost, 1995). Of course, there is a good and valid political reason for this – the concern of historians to examine the history of immigration and official racism in Britain, which became such a central issue in the country’s late 20th-century politics. But Syed Ali’s life reminds us that this was not the whole story. Syed Ali’s maritime experience was chiefly of the ports of the Indian Ocean – Cape Town, Colombo and Calcutta, in his case – and of the shipboard microworld. The life of the maritime cities of the Indian Ocean littoral and their lateral connections across that ocean are surely at least as important to explore as the metropolis–periphery relationship and the social world of Cardiff or South Shields, but they have had less attention. Moreover, Syed Ali’s story is not one simply of subordination to the power of the British imperial authorities, but of circumventing them – he jumped ship in Cape Town, used family connections to find a new job, got his union contacts to fix his papers and settled in Britain without asking anyone’s permission. Rather than effectively containing and policing the sailors, the colonial state leaked like an old rowing boat. For all the attempts to regulate people like Syed Ali, the port was at the limits of the power to control, rather than exemplifying irresistible governmentality. Thus, I want to propose that attention needs to shift to the world of sailors in Indian Ocean ports and on board ships, and to their active role in shaping their futures. In this, I follow the important leads given by the work of Broeze (1997) and his collaborators on coastal cities, Ewald (2000) on the crucial role of African maritime workers in the Indian Ocean, and Balachandran (2003) on the need to move away from a victimological reading of the sailor’s experience.

      Syed Ali also poses a challenge for South African historiography. As in other parts of the world, the many books by South African ship enthusiasts and company historians tell us almost nothing about sailors. But serious South African social historians have done no better. With minor exceptions, almost no work examines the lives of seafarers. Shamil Jeppie’s (2007:8–14) recent call for the study of aspects of civil society in South Africa beyond the range of conventional political narratives is thus both extremely timely and relevant to our present concerns. The maritime world of South African ports and their global shipboard and port extensions should be a significant area for research. The one part of this social world that has been examined to some extent is that of dock workers, especially in relation to the development of black trade unionism since the 1920s (Hemson, 1977; Bradford, 1987; Beinart & Bundy, 1987). Usually, however, the specifically maritime character of this world is seldom addressed. It may be worth asking new questions about the cultural impact of the maritime life within inland South Africa. For example, Isaiah Shembe, the founder of the extraordinarily successful syncretic religious movement based in Natal, was a former dock worker.¹⁰ Could his experience of the Indian Ocean world not have been a factor in the evolution of his thought? Similarly, in his great autobiography, Tell Freedom, Peter Abrahams (1970) writes of growing up in a Johannesburg slum before the Second World War with an ‘Ethiopian’ father who had had adventures in many lands; but as far as I am aware, none of the literary scholars who have written about Abrahams has investigated who this father was. Almost certainly, on the slight evidence that Abrahams gives us, he would have been a sailor from the Horn of Africa, which raises interesting questions about the connections of the ports to the South African interior.

      What sort of analytical framework might help us come to terms with analysing this vanished world? A useful point of departure is provided by Tony Ballantyne’s recent work on the Sikh diaspora. Ballantyne (2006:81) focusses on

      two interwoven, overlapping but occasionally independent sets of webs. The first is composed of the imperial structures largely produced to meet the needs of British merchants, missionaries, and administrators …. The second set of webs was largely constructed by Punjabis themselves, who fashioned them to meet their needs within a world that was being remade by colonialism and migration.

      For Ballantyne (2006:69), the British Empire functioned as

      a system of exchange and mobility where key institutions (such as the military and the police force), communications networks (steamship routes, telegraph cables, and the circulation of newspapers), and markets constituted crucial horizontal connections between colonies as well as linking individuals to the metropole.

      In his terms, this is a metaphor,

      a heuristic tool for conceptualising these networks and the various forms of cultural traffic they enabled within the empire … [and whereas] most imperial historiography reduces the empire to a series of metropole-periphery binaries, the web reinforces the multiple positions that any given colony, city or community might occupy (Ballantyne, 2006:69).

      What I want to do here is to adapt Ballantyne’s model and to think of the world of Indian Ocean sailors as another of these global webs, intersecting with both the webs constituted by other diasporic populations and that constituted by imperial structures. Ballantyne’s approach is helpful in a number of ways. It suggests how colonially created structures may nevertheless have provided the context for seamen’s own manoeuvres in shaping their lives. Thus, it provides a basis for moving beyond a conception of the lives of the colonised as simply shaped by the impositions of colonial or capitalist power onto a subordinate society, restoring a sense of the agency of the seamen in shaping their world. Ballantyne’s angle of vision also suggests the importance of looking closely at the interactions of varying segments of the colonial and colonised populations, and how these shaped particular outcomes. The world of British sailors can also be thought of as constituting another trans-imperial web, in constant interaction with