East Africa

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Migration, memory and the making of home​​

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Everyday Encounters​

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History is often written through exceptional events.​

This archive is equally interested in ordinary encounters.

Beginning with Ned Bertz's work on cinema halls in Dar es Salaam, this entry considers how everyday spaces produced relationships between Black and South Asian communities across East Africa.​​

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“Indian Ocean World Cinema: Viewing the History of Race, Diaspora and Nationalism in Urban Tanzania”
— Ned Berz

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Intimate Histories ​​

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Some histories survive outside the formal archive.

Carissa Chew draws together historical evidence, fiction, oral histories and family memory to recover Black and South Asian relationships across colonial East Africa—asking how intimacy crossed racial boundaries even as anti-Blackness, patriarchy and ideas of honour worked to police them.

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“Remembering Interracial Intimacies: South Asian Perspectives on Black/Brown Sex and Romance in Colonial East Africa”
— Carissa Chew, Gender & History (2026)

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