Urdu as an African Language

This article provides the first survey of the development of Urdu literature in Africa, with a particular emphasis on East and South Africa. Dealing with the colonial and postcolonial periods, the survey encompasses the early evolution of Indian settler descriptions of Africa before moving on to the range of other genres of African Urdu, including travel writing, hagiography, poetry, and historiography. While in many cases these sources display Islamic cultural and religious concerns, other texts were written by non-Muslim settlers from Punjab. The emergence of these source materials is placed in its historical contexts, particularly colonial South Asian labor and merchant migration and settlement in Africa. Where possible, the Urdu sources are compared to sources in Gujarati and other regional languages. At the present day large numbers of Indian emigrants are passing over to Natal and other African colonies, and it will be interesting to see what linguistic consequences will ensue. —“The Urdu Tongue,” The Literary World (August 30, 1895)