5 - Everyday Dilemmas and Dreams of Freedom: Decolonization from the Margins in the Western Indian Ocean World

This paper will explore the following question: how did decolonization in the western Indian Ocean region restructure people’s everyday lives, in addition to unravelling European imperialism and establishing new nations in East Africa and South Asia?

Early histories of decolonization focused on the transfer of sovereignty in individual states rather than on processes unfolding across larger postimperial geographies. In the scholarly attention on the attainment of freedom, decolonization’s impact on the Indian Ocean as a regional world remains lightly addressed. A focus on marginal connections across maritime worlds has the potential to contribute to the writing decolonized histories of internationalism with a greater emphasis on the humanity and agency of actors located in the Global South.

Drawing on research in India and Tanzania, the paper will narrate a series of quotidian historical episodes that shed light on intertwined themes common to the decolonization of British territories located around the western Indian Ocean: fresh possibilities for reshaped international relations, disrupted diasporic networks, transformed patterns of mobility and exchange, and newly unstable and creative modes of belonging. Shifting the scholarly frame away from high geopolitics enables a reconstruction of people’s everyday dilemmas during decolonization, and a recovery of their dreams of imaginative internationalist futures of freedom.