Sidis tighten links with Africa through film and dance

Long before West Africans were working as slave labour in the cotton fields of the American South or on the sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean, East Africans were being hijacked and sold on the Indian sub-continent. They were also taken to what is now Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) and the nearby islands in the Indian Ocean.

Until quite recently, the descendants of those Africans were little known. But gradually, the complex story of the sub-continent’s “Lost Africans” has been uncovered by anthropologists, historians, and journalists like the Citizen TV’s Tom Mboya who recently won the CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Award 2012 for his coverage of the “African Tribe in India.”

Known as the Sidis or Siddis in India, Shidi/Shidee in Pakistan and Kaffir in Sri Lanka, the term ‘tribe’ with reference to the African peoples who were taken to the sub-continent from as long ago as the 12th century, is a misnomer.

In fact, the Sidis are descendants of a myriad of African tribes, kidnapped by Portuguese, Arab and British slave traders between the 12th and 19th centuries. They are said to have come from as far north as Ethiopia and Sudan and as far south as Mozambique.

Not all the Africans came to the region as slaves however. According to recent scholarship, quite a number came as sailors and merchants; others came as soldiers in the 16th century to serve in the Muslim armies of the Nawabs and Sultans, hence their Islamic faith and the relative absence of the Hindu caste system among them.

And contrary to the prevailing view that all Sidis are impoverished and living on the margins of Indian society, a number of these Afro-Asians are professionals, doctors, lawyers, bankers and journalists as well as merchants and peasant farmers.

Scattered in communities in parts of India, Pakistan and assorted Indian Ocean islands, the majority of these Afro-Asian Sidis are said to stay in the state of Gujarat in western India and at the latest count numbered more than 76,000 in that state alone.

Three documentary films on the Sidis of Gujarat will be shown next week, from Monday, September 17 through Wednesday 19 at the Alliance Francaise.

All three, including We are Indian and African and Voices of the Sidis: Tradition of the Fakirs are filled with face-to-face interviews with Sidi people of various class backgrounds and reflect a multifaceted portrait of Sidi life.

Samosa Festival

Their screening will precede the official launch of the Samosa Cultural Festival which runs for a week from September 22 and will be taking place at various venues in the city, including the Kenya National Theatre courtyard and the Nairobi National Museum.

The films will serve as a kind of primer to two live performances by the Sidi Goma dance and musical troupe which will be arriving in Nairobi next week and appearing first at the Alliance Francaise on Saturday, September 22 and Monday, September 24 at the Nairobi National Museum.

The coming of the Sidi Goma to Kenya has been in the works for the last two years, ever since the Awaaz magazine editor, Zahid Rajan, went to Gujarat and found the dance company.

Few of the dozen dancer-musicians speak either Kiswahili or English, but they do reflect a popular trend among the Sidis to identify more fully with their African heritage.

They will be coming with a translator, so audiences will have some time to converse with these members of the African diaspora who, until the last two decades have been relatively invisible and consequently have been called ‘the lost tribe of Africa’.

What makes the Sidi Goma such an important feature of the Samosa Festival is that while most Sidis are both linguistically and culturally Asian, speaking everything from Gujarati and Hindi to dialects of Urdu, the Goma is a long-standing tradition which scholars have traced back to either Tanzania or Zanzibar and possibly even to Kenya.

And while few Sidis know much about Swahili culture, there is an increasing trend among them to learn the language and identify more fully with their African roots.

The videos also reflect another African legacy that many Sidis in Gujarati follow. For while most Sidis are Sunni Muslims (with a small number being Christians and even fewer Hindus), in Gujarat state, the worship of Bava Gor, seen as a saint and founding father of that ancient Sidi community, is widely practised.

The name Gor is not discussed in the films, but the connection to East Africans from the lake region is obvious. What’s more, Gor’s brother Bava Addis is also linguistically related to Ethiopia and Abyssinia.

Scholars also see the musical traditions of the Sidis as derived from Swahili culture, including the rhythms, the ritual dances and even the instruments which are widely understood to be African.

The films and the Sidi Goma will allow Kenyans to get a clearer perspective on the diversity of Sidi people, and even see their own mirror images in Afro-Asians who are just beginning to strengthen their links to their roots in the African continent.