Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations by Schama Simon

Author:Schama, Simon [Schama, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Science, Health
ISBN: 9781328974839
Amazon: 1328974839
Goodreads: 75313071
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2023-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

vii CALAMITY SNAPS

Little Jacky, ‘A Negro boy’ (as the caption calls him), is dead: one of ten thousand in Bombay who perished from bubonic plague between September 1896 and the spring of 1897 when this photograph was taken. Perhaps eight or nine years old, Jacky is laid out on a small table between a rudimentary shanty of the type in which many of his people, the Sidi, lived, and the freshly dug dirt grave into which he will shortly be interred. White socks cover his feet protruding from the table’s edge. A white pillow cradles his head. His mother is half-mantled in a white cloth. For many Africans, white is the hue of death.

The Sidi, sometimes called ‘Habshi’ (or ‘Abyssinian’ from the Arabic Habash), were descendants of enslaved east Africans in the Swahili-speaking world taken, as early as the fifteenth century, by Omani Arab traffickers across the Indian Ocean to the west coast of India. There they had served Gujarati masters as domestic servants, bodyguards, soldiers and stable grooms. In some isolated enclaves in Gujarat and Konkan, Sidi soldiers and sailors had shaken off servitude to become independent local potentates. One of them had even established a ruling dynasty claiming descent from Ethiopian aristocracy and priesthood. During the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in the late seventeenth century, a Sidi admiral commanded a fleet, while a fortified base on Janjira island held off attacks by the Hindu Maratha princes. In the following century, Janjira became an autonomous Muslim micro-kingdom. Like some medieval Moorish city state, Janjira was governed in the nineteenth century by a Jewish prime minister, the superlatively named Shalom Gapuj Israel Wargharkhan, from the Bene Israel community of Maharashtra. On Janjira, the Muslim Afro-Indians were culturally nourished by a rich store of unorthodox religious and tribal memory. Shrines were built to the Sufi saint Bava Gor, in whose honour a repertoire of drumming, chanting and singing was developed. The drumming-chanting-dancing ritual of the goma was a direct transcription of the Swahili-culture ngoma, performed in east Africa.1

When the British abolished their slave trade in 1807 and mobilised the Royal Navy to enforce abolition, Arab and European traders, operating from Mombasa, on the east coast of Africa, were still permitted to send enslaved people to India. By the time slavery itself in the British empire was ended by act of Parliament in 1833, the East India Company had come to dominate western India and Christian missionaries – often the first footsoldiers in the abolitionist crusade – provided a protected enclave for Sidi runaways at Nasik in northern Maharashtra. But many Sidi either continued to serve as quasi-indentured domestic servants for their Indian, especially Parsi, households, or else found work, often demeaning, within the maddened hive of maritime jobbing that swarmed through harbourside Bombay. By the time that plague struck in 1896, there were Sidi sailors, stokers, dockers, stevedores and porters lodging in chawl tenements close to the docks on the east side of the island city or else drawn deeper into the shadowy criminal underworld quarter of Dongri.

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