Dr. Renu Modi and Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke about India-Africa relations
Media records
Abstract
- Abstract
- In this latest episode of the Cluster Conversations, fellow Dr. Renu Modi talks with her host Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke about her recent fellowship with the Cluster of Excellence in Bayreuth. Modi also reflects on three decades of India-Africa relations, highlighting how economic cooperation and cultural exchange have reshaped the landscape of South-South collaboration. From her stay in Bayreuth, she contrasts African Studies in India and Germany, uncovering unique differences in focus – from pragmatic development to rich cultural and religious studies. The fellow-host-duo also talk about textile trade and "counter-archives," where oral histories, attic finds, and Indian Ocean connections reveal untold stories between the continents. A must-listen for anyone curious about global interconnections, hidden histories, and the evolving meaning of solidarity.
People & roles
Origins & context
- Title
- Dr. Renu Modi and Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke about India-Africa relations
- Language
- English
- Podcast series
-
Cluster Conversations
- Date
- July 28, 2025
Rights & access
- Extent
- 27 minutes, 48 seconds
Identifiers & sources
Further details
- Episode number
- 31
Full text
- Transcript
-
[music]
Speaker 1: Cluster Conversations, a podcast by Africa Multiple.
Speaker 1: Welcome to our latest episode of Cluster Conversations. My name is Clarissa Fierke. I am professor of African Language Literatures at the University of Bayreuth and presently still the spokesperson of the research section Arts and Aesthetics. And today it's my great pleasure to be here with Professor Reena Modi from Mumbai. And instead of introducing you, Reena, I think I would ask you to introduce yourself and tell us a bit where you're coming from.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Clarissa. I'm really delighted to be a part of this conversation. To introduce myself very briefly, I have been a professor and director at the Department of African Studies, University of Mumbai. I've been teaching there for the last twenty-six years. And I have taught in other places like Erasmus programs on various scholarship programs in Canada, et cetera. But most of my research has been based on India-Africa relations and in my own university, in my department. And most of the subjects that we research on at the department are actually—it's a wide range of subjects that we cover. For example, food security, migration, diaspora, India-Africa engagements, trading, bilateral trade between countries of India and Africa, development cooperation, South-South cooperation, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Oh, great. I'm always impressed by the whole range of subjects that you've been working on and the impressive kind of engagement with all of these different topics. Now you've been here for how many weeks?
Speaker 2: Eleven weeks now.
Speaker 1: Eleven weeks now. So how is it being here in Bayreuth? And my sort of say very curious question is also comparing African studies from where you come from, India, and comparing African studies here in Bayreuth. What are the differences from your perspective, of course?
Speaker 2: Thank you, Clarissa. I have really enjoyed my stay here. And when I was coming to Bayreuth, people said, oh, it's not Berlin. It's such a small city. You are a Mumbai girl. You might feel out of place. You might get bored. You will have nothing to do. But none of it—that was true. Not for a day did I feel homesick or—I mean, Bayreuth is such a beautiful city and I love nature. So I have loved the parks and lakes around. And I've had such wonderful cluster colleagues. So it was like a small community that we built. And all of you, people at the department and my host Ute and you especially, Professor Yvonne Peace, Professor Christina, it has been a great, great privilege to work with them. So Bayreuth has been really wonderful. And the differences between African studies in India and here, I think in India we are very focused where India is the center of our research. And so we work with African countries or research on African countries which are kind of related to India. For example, India-Africa trade, India-Africa how they are aligning on climate resilient, Indian diasporas in Africa and African diasporas in India, the Indian Ocean connection across India and Africa, the migration, trade routes historically in the contemporary context. So that has food security, the three India-Africa forum summits. So part of it is the government-to-government focus, part of it is the private sector focus of Indian companies in Africa. So slowly initially when I started studying as a young student, a lot of our syllabus revolved around the Non-Aligned Movement, you know, the Bandung Conference, New International Economic Order. But slowly in my own practice, I see that a lot of that has changed from ideological perspectives that India-Africa had. Like we used to study Kaunda's humanism, Nkrumah's Pan-Africanism, Mwalimu Nyerere's Ujamaa socialism. So all that I don't feel is a part of our actively a part of our syllabus. Now we are dealing more with the contemporary economic aspects of South-South development cooperation, technical cooperation, capacity building. So it has become a more practical approach to development studies between India and Africa. And here we find a lot of difference because we are seeing a lot of cultural studies, literary studies, religious Pentecostalism and Islam in Africa. So these are subjects and youth and way too. So these were the concepts which really are not a part of our syllabus. So it was a lot of learning for me here.
Speaker 1: So from where you come from and also what you've seen in these twenty-six years that you have an African studies in India, you see it's a much more hands-on approach that has kind of taken over and much more—is it more economic collaboration?
Speaker 1: compared to previous years would you say?
Speaker 2: Yes definitely definitely the India Africa collaboration in the economic spheres and now I feel increasingly in the defense sphere also but just not economic uh collaboration is also a lot on uh focuses on capacity building initiatives which includes education uh peacebuilding you know and now there are uh conversations around dealing with Islamic radicalism radicalism in Africa and how there are military trainings in the on the maritime uh you know shipping ships and uh defense equipments so all these were not a part of uh India Africa conversations maybe about ten years ago so now uh capacity building in Africa of course economic aspects manufacturing trading mainly such as objects like textiles pharmaceuticals you know so Africa India Africa trade is very very active and it's growing uh rapidly and the reason is also you know it's aligning to what's happening in Africa and what is happening in India as well so as India is growing and becoming an economic powerhouse it's relying a lot on Africa and in other countries for sourcing in the critical minerals hydrocarbons you know that India is uh uh reso it's very low on hydrocarbons we do not have enough hydrocarbons in our own country and therefore we rely on our African partners mainly Nigeria Angola Algeria and of course it's diversified source from Venezuela from Latin America from the Middle East right so this is a kind of a there's a lot of mutual interdependence between the economies of India and Africa and also for example Africa does not have a manufacturing to the amount that it needs so manufacturing has taken off but definitely needs a long way to go so Indian capacity buildings Indian businesses for example in pharmaceuticals are some of the sunshine sectors I would say
Speaker 1: Definitely and is there still I mean from your perspective is the Bandung conference for instance or south south solidarity also something that is being re-evoked at the moment I mean we see this competition now for Africa coming also from the global south particularly I guess the best example is probably China but then of course also other others like Turkey like Oman and so on discovering Africa as this place to take resources from and also to kind of highlight south south solidarity so how does India then should I say fit in compete with the others is probably the better word
Speaker 2: Right so to your question about if is the spirit of Bandung still alive it definitely is alive but it has taken on as I mentioned uh uh evolved form so when it started with the Non-Aligned Movement in the nineteen sixties it was more ideological so there was Nehru and Nkrumah Malenminarere Asuarte you know so it was uh talking about it had a transformative ideology which they kind of manifested through the New International Economic Order but by the nineteen ninety five there has been a kind of an amalgamation of the South South cooperation's uh vocabulary by the OECD countries by the countries of the north so the win-win cooperation mutual cooperation solidarities these were the terms of peaceful coexistence et cetera the Panchsheel uh five principles which were a part of the Bandung alliance uh Bandung uh vocabulary are now seen I mean in every conversation that we see right from including the OECD so the vocabulary of South South cooperation has become dissipated with the others so the and moreover as Africa into the relationships have now become more pragmatic and I feel Africa is like a marketplace you know and it has it has its own agency Africa of today is not what it was of the sixties when the Non-Aligned Movement was spoken about where there was a third worldist vision you know there was a South Centre in Geneva now it's a small office I think mainly funded by China so the third worldist transformative vision that these countries had you know that they had to kind of share each other's development experiences the limited resources that has changed because times have changed right and now they have a more pragmatic approach so South South development cooperation uh solidarity is definitely
Speaker 1: remains, but from the ideological stand, it has become more practical. It has become market oriented and it is more economic in content. So that is how the South-South development cooperation has evolved in terms of the vocabulary as well as the practice and praxis of it on ground. And India, I feel, is a very, very vocal speaker for the global south. And at the recent G20 summit, Africa Union was incorporated as a full-fledged member of the G20. And there were the representatives of the AU which we saw on our televisions in India. And at the recent conference in Nice that I went of the CDRI, the Coalition for Disaster Resilience in Infrastructure, it is an organization of the G20 which has been formed by multiple countries. India, France are some of the countries and of course Africa. Many African countries are members of it. Also at the CDRI in 2025 just ahead of the UN Conference, the Africa Union was incorporated as a full-fledged member. And India has organized three India-Africa Forum Summits in which the African and Indian partners came together. And I remember the first summit meeting of 2008 when President Jakaya Kikwete, the former Tanzanian Prime Minister spoke about how Africa could be converted into the breadbasket for the world with the technical capabilities and help from, not help actually, but engagement and collaboration with companies in India because India was a food insecure country. Now India is a food surplus country. So if India could do that with a population of one point five, one point four billion people, the whole continent of Africa has that population. And therefore Africa is seen as, India is seen as a role model and Indian agricultural technology and how India is becoming a powerhouse, the fourth and you know, so from the Global South, it's one of the leading emerging market economies overtaking many of the countries earlier northern countries. So I think India does not compete with other countries in Africa. This has been stated by our foreign ministers, by our dignitaries from the Ministry of External Affairs and we have seen it for ourselves because Africa is such a huge continent, you know, no one country even China with its largest pockets will be able to meet the infrastructure gap demands, the human resources demands, the capability training demands, you know, for Africa because Africa is at a stage now what India or China were about five decades ago. So if Turkey supports many projects in Africa, so does the Middle East, so does the North. So I think there is enough space for everybody. And Africa as I said of today is different. Africa is choosing its partners today. Africa is a marketplace and they know also what is in their interest. African civil society has a voice as you can see the protests against increased taxes that we are seeing in Kenya. So Africa is choosing its partners. The partners are not choosing Africa anymore.
Speaker 2: Well, that's probably mutual, right?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: Um, now what is quite interesting about India, well, not only but I think India still has a very interesting place as well is of course, and particularly for me because here I am really biased working on East Africa, that the connections are older as well because of Indian Ocean connections that has been a focus in Ute Fendlers and my research, Peter Simate from Moi University, Lee Watkins from Makanda. And you also gave a very interesting presentation and also showed actually the film on the textile trade and the back and forth between Africa and India. So, and what I find interesting here is of course the historical connections as well. And you have a long history of actually engaging also with textiles. So there is probably the contemporary part of the textile industry, but there is also a historical component that you also worked on. But I think I would rather hand over to you. Could you describe a bit the kind of research that you've been doing also here because this is what you presented on with regard to the textile trade?
Speaker 1: So you want me to talk about the film and the book that I did on India-Africa textile trade?
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: Well, we have worked on several subjects at the department as I mentioned. And so one of our key areas of inquiry of research was India-Africa trading in textiles. Because while I was reading very scholarly books and excellent ones at that written by American scholars from scholars across the world, I realized that one component something was missing because
Speaker 1: I knew that, you know, for example, the archaeological, there was a British Museum exhibition which came to our Chhatrapati Shivaji Museum in Mumbai. It was called, what was it, History in Hundred Years or something like this. I forget. It was a temporary museum where the British Museum exhibits were loaned to the museum in Mumbai. And in that we saw, I mean, I showed you the pictures also on my PPT, that there were remnants of Gujarati textiles which were found at Fustat, off the coast of Egypt, in the Red Sea. And that really sparked my interest. Was it that old? And they were carbon dated to the ninth century, you know. And the pieces of fabrics are, you could see the designs, you know. And what was really of interest to me was that those designs are the ones we even wear today, you know, the Gujarati textiles. And that's what got us started thinking into it. And therefore we just kind of did some research and we found out that there were a textile factory in Jaipur in Gujarat, hardly an overnight journey from Mumbai. And so we made an exploratory visit there and we saw that, you know, it was like a mini African market because there were five six big factories and they allowed us access. And they were producing kanga kitenge, you know, all kinds of kikoy, Maasai suka, everything was being produced there for exports to Africa. And then on the other side, so we decided that how do you document these textile trade in writing? Because it's a visual thing. You have to see it, you know. And therefore we decided to make a documentary film though we had absolutely zero training in making a documentary film, but we kind of pulled it together through technical expert, through some online learning, et cetera. And therefore on the other side, so we started filming this documentary in Jaipur. And we interviewed the people who spoke about the trade which I screened at the film that you saw. And then we decided to go and see the other aspects, sort of the marketplace Africa. And there we went to Mombasa, to Nairobi, to the Biafra streets, two places, and to Tanzania and Zanzibar, East Africa. I mean, if we had the resources and time, we would have loved to do a scoping study of many other countries, but we limited it to these two. And there we found during our research, I mean, it was really not a pre-planned stuff. We just kept discovering things as we moved along. And we realized there was such an old diaspora. For example, in Mombasa, you know, it was a fourth or fifth generation of diasporas who were there trading in textiles. And the same in Nairobi and it was almost the same in Zanzibar. And then when we were kind of trying to see what fabrics they had and we asked one of them in Mombasa that, can you show us what's in your attic? He said, oh, those are old, you know, just, we don't need those. Yeah, we have to clean the attic. There's nothing much types. And then we asked them, you know, okay, can we just have a look and take some pictures if you don't mind? He said, yeah, okay. And then we got down the stuff and it was really a storehouse of information because there were old labels of textiles with Smith Mackenzie and Klein, the British company which had a monopoly of trading in the colonial period. On one side, the instructions were written in English, on the other side they were written in Gujarati. So that kind of was really of interest which we put together not only as a film but also in the book, you know, which so we thought there was so much data. Then we started interviewing people, the older generation. And then they got talking about how, you know, they started designing the jinnah for the kangas and how they were given just the amount of money they were given, you know, for writing a kanga. And then they told us about how the kangas became a source of protest movement, for example, Churchill go back, you know, those kind of slogans were printed. And that one on the other thing got very, very interesting. So the key point there was that we were looking at alternative sources of information, alternative methodologies of interviews, of oral interviews, of, you know, old labels, et cetera, objects that we found in these archival material, photographs of these families. So we, to bring into our research one aspect.
Speaker 1: The Indian agency aspect in India-Africa textile trade which we thought was missing in the ongoing research on textiles. And since the material was so much, we not only produced a film called Common Threads, which is available online and free access, and so we also brought together this book called Common Threads with the same name. And the book is also open access and I would really encourage students and anybody who is interested to watch our film and see our book.
Speaker 2: Well, we've been privileged to to to watch the film actually. So thank you very much as well for sharing it. This morning actually I went through the proofs of a of a book that Ute Fendler and me are editing on transmedial connections in the Indian Ocean where we are kind of arguing that connections of course always need to be transported via media. So be it language but also in particularly also different materials. And and we are thinking about materials as also including architecture for instance or visual arts and taking up the idea that these could probably work as a counter archive. So telling stories that otherwise have probably not been told or that need to be told in a different way actually about the Indian Ocean. Do you think your textiles probably could also work as a counter archive?
Speaker 1: Definitely. That's exac- I mean that was really not the objective. We didn't set out to work like that. We just started on a small cue of the excitement of seeing, wow, so many textiles are produced in India in our backyard. We didn't even know about it. It's like that. But one thing led to the other and we realized that most of the data that you will find in our films and the book is actually sourced from counter archives. People's you know narratives of five generations ago, some pieces of fabric they had, some pieces of labels they had, you know. So I think that is definitely uh incorporation of the counter archives. And you mentioned as architecture as a source of information. Well, uh I've been to Zanzibar several times and I find it really fascinating. So you will find a glimpse of the Gujarati architecture because it was a lot of Gujarati migrants. So if you see the older towns of Gujarat, you find that Zanzibar and they are very similar. So that kind of architecture uh is definitely replicated in Gujarat and even in Tanzania. So all these counter archival sources are very, very important sources which we have not seen in many scholarly work and now. And talking of counter archives, I feel that one of the things which I have noticed in the last years, I mean I'm not a literature person but what I read was what you see is in the last fifteen years, you find autobiographies of Indian entrepreneurs, of descendants of Indian diaspora rewriting history, especially after the nineteen seventy two expulsion of Asians. Uh and this narrative of Asians being as cheats, Asians being exploitative. So they have, I mean there is a dissonance in the memory spaces of the Asian diaspora as well as the African diaspora. So what we are trying to do is incorporate and understand that there is an heteronomy of experiences. One experience of any place is not the whole story or the whole truth. So so far in the discourse you hear time and again that the Asians came exploited, whatever, you know. But now what has happened is the the ancestors, the descendants have started writing their histories which is kind of getting them out of the victimhood because they have never been to India, you know. They look Indian. So they identify themselves as totally Kenyans, Tanzanians and they feel that their side of history and contribution has not been acknowledged. So you will find a plethora of literature of these ancestors who are writing about their histories and kind of correcting what they feel has been the versions that have been wrong. So that I find is also a counter archive.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you know these two three things and uh people-to-people connections are something which really interest us beyond the government-to-government connections or the economic connections that we have been studying anyway.
Speaker 2: I mean there is one part in the film which really kind of struck me where one of the traders, I think it's on on Zanzibar or or probably Dar es Salaam where he actually says, it's all it's all based on trust. Because it's actually it's it's based on credit which means basically there is trust which means they're they're actually building on this long-standing kind of connections which I think is quite of a different quality if you compare it to kind of contemporary large-scale economic investments.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because these trading have, I mean these companies have been there since the nineteen seventies also, not too early. So for the last thirty forty years they say there is a payment issue, there is a change in the rate of naira. So they also trade through the escrow accounts in Dubai, you know. So they are not paying directly because of the fluctuations in the currency. And they are also working through the Dubai escrow accounts and uh
Speaker 1: Yeah, so sometimes they say our payments come three months later, six months later, but we don't stop their supplies because we know the money is going to come. And they say there has been no default either with their Asian partners or with their African partners. So the trade, of course, it's a very longstanding relationship of trading and trust.
Speaker 2: Mhm. So what is next then, Reenu? After all this exciting research, food security, risk, economic collaborations, the trade and textile, now you're free to decide what you want to work on. What are you going to do next?
Speaker 1: Ah, good question. I have actually been thinking about it. And maybe I would like to take forward the research proposal that I submitted to Birod. That is Spaces of Solidarities, Ruptures and Memory Spaces. That kind of brings in together, ties up a lot of my research over the past decades. And now since I have relinquished my responsibilities at the university, I feel I have more time and leeway to do what I would like to do. So let's see. I will keep you updated for sure.
Speaker 2: Great. I think that perfectly speaks to our concern with the counter archives, two new projects in remembering and the focus on relationality. So thank you so much. Thank you so much also for being with us in the cluster, in the research section, and also for being with me today. And wish you a nice, well, there is another week for you in Birod. And all the best for your research also in the future. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Clarissa. To repeat again, it has been a great privilege for me to have got this scholarship. And I love my stay at Birod. And I hope that I can welcome you to Mumbai. All of you are most welcome to Mumbai.
Speaker 2: Pleasure.
Speaker 1: And I hope to stay in touch with all of you. And thank you so much for all the warm hospitality that I got here. Thanks for time.
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