3 - African Sikhs: Africa and Africans in the Making of African and South Asian Minority Identity

What is the significance of Africa and of Africans in the making of Sikh minoritized subjectivity, consciousness and identity? Although the Sikhs are now approaching 30 million in number globally, they are both a minority and minoritized community in relation to other South Asian religious communities, “visible minorities” within multiple contemporary nation-state projects (especially in post-Partition and postcolonial India), and with respect to knowledge formations and epistemology in numerous fields of research. While many scholars focus on Western diasporic Sikhs and their historical and contemporary negotiations of the Mughal empire, British empire, 20^th and 21^st century Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) and even the US empire, many of these accounts sideline the presence of Sikhs and Sikhism in Africa, and specifically post-independence East Africa, where the Punjabi and Sikh community was central to the making of both “Asian” and “African” minorities. The paper examines three dimensions of the making of African Sikh minority identities: first, the shift from imperial (martial race; Fox 1985) to “Subject Race” (Mamdani 1996) to an anti-colonial and class-based consciousness in the 19^th and 20^th century through examples of trade union activism and the East Africa-based Ghadar Party; second, inter-racial unions between Punjabi Sikh men and African women and the Afro-Sikh communities that negotiated post-independence Asian racial exclusion; and finally, the significance of Sikh religiosity and an infrastructural network of Sikh gurudwaras in East Africa.