The History of the Zanzibari Amakhuwa: Uprooting, Registration, and Inventions of Home in a Community of Liberated Africans

The article gives a detailed account of the history of the Durban Zanzibari Amakhuwa community, which developed around the descendants of freed slaves brought to Natal by the Royal Navy as “liberated Africans” in the 1870s. It discusses some of the methodological challenges facing researchers studying diasporas of Makua speakers dispersed across the Indian world through the slave trade and its abolition. These include distortions in the documentary
records as well as in oral traditions of memorialization configured and given voice in response to changing social and political contexts. The article offers a detailed critical analysis of theinformation on the freed slaves and their backgrounds contained in a “Return of Liberated Africans” from 1877. It then discusses how reminiscences of origin have since been creatively reinterpreted in several rounds among descendants of freed slaves and fellow community members between the 1870s and the present, and the ways in which dialectics of inclusion and exclusion have unfolded. The article brings this up to date in an account of the August 2023 celebrations in Durban of the 150th anniversary of the first arrivals of freed slaves. It concludes by debatingthe implications of different dynamics of memorialization for reparations and historical justiceas well as for attempts to establish databases documenting the slave trade in the Western Indian Ocean.